Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  ‘Wish I could have done that with those Russian jets that came at me above Cairo the other day.’ Dad puffed away pridefully at his cigar.

  I couldn’t help being interested. Ever since I’d learnt how to hot-wire a car back in Bondi, I’d had a vague urge to feel what it was like to open up the throttle on a speedway. Dad and I had something in common. But I wasn’t in on his party. Once he was into a drinking session, he’d grip the bottle as if it was a dancing partner and pour until there was none left.

  He got into the swing, while Jess lay tipsy under the table. ‘Walid converted me from four wheels to two wings. He was with me when I felt that first thrust of the engines as a plane took off. That moment of lift, when speed on wheels shifts into something altogether different; the pull of the earth to the buoyancy of the air. It’s an act of faith initially. You have to believe. But once you learn about it, you know that when people first climbed into the sky, they did it with such a clever manoeuvring – of wing flaps and engines – that they outsmarted gravity, which is literally the earth force. It’s a marvel, people finding a balancing act between solid matter and air.’

  Jess lay, stupid, beside the chirruping chicken cage, which he’d pulled under the table.

  ‘Humanity’s finest achievement,’ Walid said, fetching another photo album and a camera. When he pointed the lens at Babette, her face grew haughty and she pouted a professional smile. While Dad hunted out another red from the cellar, Walid couldn’t stop shooting her. He gave up when the maid brought sweets. Babette breathed a sigh of relief, as if she’d been working.

  ‘Oliver’s into photography. Look at this, the photo that changed my life.’ Dad thumped the album. I peered over his shoulder. A tiny seaplane was winging past Big Ben, about to land on the Thames. Dark throngs of pedestrians crowded along London Bridge, some tossing their hats into the air. Everyone was peering upward. Even a horse looked fascinated.

  In another shot, the pilot stepped in his double-breasted suit from the plane onto a boat. The caption said that he’d landed on the river opposite the House of Commons after flying from London to Australia and back. He’d lost his engineer to a Bedouin bullet over Iraq.

  Dad only had eyes for the machine. ‘That plane was a sexy little thing and caused a sensation.’

  Usually, Babette would say, ‘Oh, Lachlan.’ But she wasn’t listening. She was sitting, meek as a poodle, letting Walid drop biscuit morsels into her mouth. ‘Oh, I love that softness with a soupçon of crunch.’ She stole a sly look at Dad and blinked again at Walid.

  He purred. ‘Maamoul. Semolina shortbread, with orange blossom water, stuffed with dates. Our special Easter dish. Sublime.’

  Didn’t he know that Babette belonged to us?

  The lady is spoken for.

  She was our family, our tribe. People killed over that here, didn’t they?

  14

  Abdel Nasser

  Dad took to hanging over the radio for hours, waiting for the BBC news on Lebanon.

  One day, after a long blast of blather from London, he said, ‘This government’s in real trouble. They can’t control these fedayeen. Time for the army to do something.’ But he still flew off into the world, leaving a vapour trail, as he always had. He was like Cyprus, solid and real when he was present, but then lost in cloud.

  Souhar also wore a grave face and told Babette, ‘Madame, time now to be careful. Palestinian boys will come here. They carry guns. When they get angry with someone, they paint a red cross on their house. Maybe make trouble for them. You give them money, then you okay.’

  ‘How much?’ Babette’s mouth was gaping.

  ‘You choose.’

  Dad said, ‘Trick or treat, Lebanese style. Don’t listen to Souhar. Don’t open the door to anyone you don’t know.’

  Not long after, deep into a spring night, I struggled to free myself from a dream that hundreds of warlords were marching towards me, whips in hand, and I had only my bare knuckles to fight back.

  ‘Abdel Nasser. Abdel Nasser,’ the warlords were crying, as if they’d been hurt. I opened my eyes to a pattern of twirling fireflies on the ceiling, shifting in rhythm with the chant. I pressed my nose to the cool window and saw that the sound and light show was real. Dark, purposeful heads filled the roadway, where men marched in shimmering rows, waving firesticks. Jess, Babette and Dad were craning through the living-room windows, dazed by the flame flicker. I slipped past them onto the balcony and into the great booming theatre of an angry mass. The leaders of the march strode along the Corniche, breasting banners scrawled with Arabic. Tyres burnt all along the median strip, in a chain of flame circles that leapt at the palm tree trunks above. I hung over the balcony rail and wheezed in the rubbery, acrid smoke, greedy for every sensation – the fists flung high, the loud bang of tracer bullets arcing pink beams, the roar of the two-tone hymn: ‘Abdel Nasser.’

  I leant across the iron lace and yelled back: ‘Abdel Nasser.’ Fingers pointed up at me in the firelight. A moment later, pain stabbed my elbow and I yelped. Dad jammed his twisted face into mine. ‘Inside, you idiot. You’ll catch a bullet.’

  I rubbed my arm. ‘You’re the one hurting me.’ But I let him wrench me indoors.

  ‘This is not our country. You know nothing about it. A protest like this is an excuse for anarchy.’

  I was encouraged that he wasn’t wearing his belt; just a soft, drooping pyjama cord, allowing me the slack to protest myself. ‘It’s just a demo. One, two, three, four, we don’t want your beep-beep war.’

  Jess responded with the chant I’d learnt from the TV news and taught him: ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh.’ I joined in, until he stopped chanting with an excited yell, in the American accent he’d begun to affect, ‘Hey, they’ve set fire to that huge trash can beside the Caddie. It’s gonna go up.’

  Flames were spinning in the reflection of the Caddie’s maroon polish. The paint seemed to bubble and blister, but I couldn’t tell if what I was seeing was real. The air was as magic with mirages as the sea, and Luna Park’s ferris wheel arched above it all, a skeleton hanging over a painting of hell come alive. A thrill coursed through my beating heart – the same one that rippled through every vein when I listened to Hendrix singing ‘Stone Free’, about how no-one could tie him down and he had to move on, get free of everything that held him down.

  Babette’s fingers gripped the windowsill. ‘What if the car blows up?’

  The sea surged ginger, then black, then ginger before I could say what sprang into my mind then. ‘What about Sabine?’

  Jess’s voice was high. ‘Why did you bring us to such a dangerous place?’

  Dad’s face was grim. ‘Joseph will have Sabine locked well away … But protecting that car’s another matter.’

  ‘We should move it.’ I could drive, thanks to some older guys back in Bondi who knew how to wire ignitions and let me hang around with them for a while after I’d brought them some of Mum’s stash of grass a few times. But Dad didn’t know that yet.

  ‘Only a fool would go down there. A big juicy Westerner might get eaten.’ He used his captain’s voice. ‘The Nasserites aren’t fond of us foreigners. Nasser himself ended English rule in Egypt. But it’s even more tangled than that. I reckon this has got something to do with the funeral of that Palestinian fighter today. Oh, Lord, please don’t let them touch that car.’

  ‘Is Mahmoud all right?’

  Dad knitted his eyebrows at me. ‘Who’s Mahmoud?’

  ‘Souhar’s son.’

  Dad sighed. ‘He’s probably down there, among that rabble.’

  ‘But he’s not the Palestinian guy who got killed.’

  ‘No.’ Dad guffawed. ‘We would have heard the wailing from here to Hamra, knowing Souhar.’

  We stood in silence, watching the body of the beast with a thousand legs shuffle along the boulevard. ‘They’re ruining the street. The smoke –’ Babette began coughing. Dad cradled her face in his chest.

  Some people get all the love.

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nbsp; ‘Jess is right. What are we doing here, Lachlan?’ Dad said nothing. The crowds paraded past Pigeon Rocks, their flares daubing the hilltop with a kind of distant bushfire glow, which slowly dimmed. They had passed, like a wave of anger. I still felt their emotion inside me.

  ‘Beddy-byes. There’s absolutely nothing we can do.’ Everyone obeyed Dad, except me. The car, crouched by the roadway, seemed an old friend, deserted now, left to fate. A man straggling at the tail end of the march rattled its doors then trailed away with slumped shoulders.

  I wondered if Sabine was watching out her window, too. Dad himself said that the Lebanese didn’t let street trouble stop their lives. As soon as they reckoned it was safe, they’d head out. Dad was too chicken to do anything. It was up to me. I pulled on jeans, a sweater and sneakers and tiptoed downstairs on wobbly feet. The ramrod steel back I’d imagined for myself buckled a little when the rubbery smoke stench smacked me in the face. I made myself straighten out, giddy with hope that Sabine could see me. The smoke hurt my throat and I was afraid that the tail-end protesters could hear my heart, but I squatted behind the Caddie’s rear wheel beside the quarry, where no-one could see me from the Corniche. I found the pinhole through which the tyre was inflated and shoved a stick into it. Phhhht. When the rear tyre had collapsed, I deflated the front tyre until the Caddie leant to one side, crippled, useless to thieves.

  As I crept back through the foyer, Joseph ambushed me. ‘Hey, what you do to your father car?’

  Maybe Sabine was watching.

  ‘Nothing, Joseph,’ I said, standing tall, lord to servant. He didn’t catch on, trying to block me with his bulk. I pushed him and raced up the stairs.

  I lay for hours, too thrilled to sleep, the chill of the chant ‘Abdel Nasser’ lingering in my ears.

  I’d heard on the radio that Mr Nasser, who ran Egypt, was worried about the fighting between the Palestinians and the Lebanese Army. Even though I didn’t know anything else about him, I was pretty impressed. From wherever he lived, somewhere near the pyramids, he’d made flames, voices and tempers flare in the night in Beirut.

  The march had vibrated with a meaning I strained to understand. It was the first time I’d felt what it could be like to believe in the same thing as a whole lot of other people. Just by walking and yelling with others, to be an insider, not an outsider. I loved the way the marchers had made one voice. They’d filled me with their own feeling. Next time I felt that way, I was going to join in, just to feel what it was like to be engulfed. And Sabine would see that I was like those protesters in Paris she’d had kittens over.

  The city was under curfew the following day. I slept past noon, until Joseph the ratfink dobbed. Dad woke me and hauled me out of bed by my T-shirt. ‘You want excitement, I’ll give it to you,’ he breathed through gritted teeth. He kicked me in the bum to propel me into his den. My stomach turned sour when he backed me up against the hard edge of the bar, his belt wrapped around his fist, which was poised in the air a foot from my face. Fear and fury jolted me out of the cloudiness of sleep. I pushed my arms up to fend him off.

  ‘You don’t go your father,’ he wheezed, as if I was attacking him.

  ‘What’d I do?’

  ‘Reckoned you wouldn’t be sprung, using that street demo as cover? Sheer vandalism.’

  He lifted his fist back, flicked the belt end and had a go at whipping and punching me at the same time. The buckle bit into my wrist. Blood flecked his cheek. Despair rolled in, fogging my eyes. I was crying out, ‘No, Dad, no,’ when Babette shoved the door in, gin glass gripped tightly beneath her red nails, her eyes hooded emerald chips.

  ‘He’s not a dog,’ she screeched. Dad stopped hitting me. As his mouth fell open, I tried to disappear into a nook behind the open door, my fists at my face, wishing I could pummel him. I would do it. I would, as soon as I grew as big as him.

  He pointed the glinting shark-tooth buckle at me and shouted through spittle, ‘Don’t go. I’m not finished with you. You could’ve been killed out there.’

  ‘It’d be better than living with you.’

  ‘Go on, Oliver, hop out,’ Babette’s voice was strangled.

  ‘He’s … my son.’

  ‘Lachie, he was trying to save the mechanical love of your life.’ She was purring.

  She never calls him Lachie.

  I peeked around the door. Dad’s eyebrows rose to sharp points as he reeled back from Babette. ‘Joseph tells me he hangs about the streets like a larrikin. That’s your job – your … only … job. To look after these boys.’ He swore at her in Arabic.

  She flinched and put down her drink. Her voice turned to a hiss. ‘I understood that word, sharamoota. It means prostitute.’ She covered her face with her fingers. ‘You only brought me here to use me.’

  Dad dropped the belt with a clank. ‘I didn’t mean you. It’s just a swearword. Jesus, Babette, look at yourself. You’re hysterical.’

  She lowered her hands very deliberately and held them at her sides, her nails biting into the soft skin at the edge of her palms. ‘I’d leave now if it wasn’t for the boys.’

  ‘You won’t do that.’ He grabbed her wrist, flicked his eyes up and saw me. He signalled with a rough hand for me to go away. Instead, I took a step forward, looking into his eyes so that he would know I was a witness to anything he did to Babette.

  I’d rather he hit me than her.

  He saw what I was thinking and moved towards me.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Babette shouted.

  He towered over her. ‘Last week, full on gin, you were going to bring the Chiclets boys home to live in the maid’s room. What is this? Come over all Mother Earth on me?’

  Babette unlocked his fingers from her wrist, picked up her gin glass and planted herself beside me, and for a moment all I could hear was the loud wheeze of her fear. She took a swig of gin and, despite her terror, watched Dad with a set jaw as he advanced. I cringed as he hovered above us, shaking, both fists raised. Then the anger washed out of his face. For a second, I thought he sobbed.

  He sniffed at Babette. ‘You’ve got an advantage over me. You’ve got a drink in your hand.’ He stomped out of the room. The freezer door opened in the kitchen. Babette put her arm around my back which, because she was being nice to me, started jumping with wild whimpers that wouldn’t stop. She closed the door, which was the right thing to do because I didn’t want Jess to see me like this.

  ‘Lift your hand up, like this.’ Her breath was moist as she swivelled my left hand around until the fleshy part was against my teeth.

  ‘Now bite.’ My palm was wet and salty with the blood running from the gash on my wrist. But the harder I bit, the better I felt. She smiled as I gave out a massive, blubbery sigh. Her perfume reminded me of the mulberry leaves I used to give Jess’s silkworms. I wanted to be a silkworm now; nothing to do but eat and weave gold thread out of my soft body, with Babette feeding me leaves from Grandad’s mulberry tree.

  ‘Fathers don’t always feel what’s going on inside their kids.’ She pushed my hair back over one ear. ‘They’re not like mothers, who live with all those heartbeats inside them, waiting for the baby to come into the world … And then see that tiny creature grow into a man.’

  I’d never heard Babette say anything like that, her voice all caught up with sorrow. Pain was thin and sharp, a skewer in the guts. Sorrow was rich and round. It felt permanent, like one of those rock pools gouged by surf over thousands of years. Dad and Jess seemed to have no space for it. But Babette had been pounded out by a whole ocean of sorrow.

  I put my arm around her and she lifted her gin, clear as a glassful of tears, to her lips. She sipped and sighed, then pushed me away and told me to stay out of sight of Dad.

  I went to bed without dinner and woke in the night, thinking the warlords were shouting on the Corniche again. But it was Dad and Babette.

  I opened my door. Babette’s voice was shredded. ‘Betrayed? Which pretty little thing will you hit on next flight, Mr Captain?
’

  It was good she was jealous. It meant she loved him. I didn’t want her to go away.

  15

  A Blast

  At last, Souhar made a date for me to visit Mahmoud. I reckoned she could see that I needed to be busted out of prison. Dad had paid Joseph to find ‘a boy’ to reinflate the Caddie tyres. I was grounded, he said, ‘for as long as it takes’. I’d had to watch from my window as Abdo, hands on hips, directed two kids to pump the Cadillac upright. It was unfair that Abdo should have got Dad’s money because of something I did, but I hoped that Sabine knew that I was the hero who’d saved the car.

  I was so glad to see Souhar when she came back to our apartment that I yearned to give her a bear hug and never let go of her boniness. She must have seen it in my eyes. ‘Ay, Oliver, where your friends? Why nobody visit?’ I shrugged and hoped no-one else could see into me as she did. ‘You come to my house and speak to my son Mahmoud.’

  ‘Dad won’t let me.’

  Babette piped up. ‘What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.’ A sorrowful defiance flickered in her eyes, even though she and Dad had made up the day after their big fight. Neither had got up in the morning, but I’d caught her in the afternoon, flitting to the bathroom with lips set in a thin, contented line, then hurrying back to bed without wanting to speak.

  Souhar usually wore a cheerful working face, but this day she groaned, stiff as a rusty hinge, slopping water onto our marble floors as if she were pouring away sadness. She had a choking fit while she rubbed the crystal ashtrays. It was more than ash that caused it; her face was long and wet with tears, which she wiped away quickly. But Babette probably wouldn’t have noticed, anyway. She was making herself busy, spraying the pot plants with Evian water.

  I could tell that Souhar wanted Babette to get out of her way. Everything felt close in the living room. A rotten sweetness drifted from a vase of white lilies, stiff with engorged pink veins. Babette was smoking menthol cigarettes as a treatment for her cold. It turned out that she’d been hanging about to ask a question. ‘Souhar, did you see those people marching about the streets as if they owned Beirut?’ She rubbed her fingers, which had brushed the lily pollen, staining them tawny bronze.