Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  ‘Ah, Madame.’ Souhar thwacked her wet rag across the marble where Babette had spilt pollen, onto a floor she had already polished into a milky mirror. She pointed at the rusty blotches. ‘If I read your coffee cup and see this, I say it looks like blood. It’s a very bad time. People go into the street and make fires so that everyone will see the pain. The army killed a Feda’i, one of our fighters. We Palestinians cannot live like other people. We are refugees. No home. Lebanon should help us. But the soldiers shoot us. Haram. We are people, like you.’

  ‘They were yelling out about Nasser.’

  ‘Yes, because we hope that Abdel Nasser be a good leader. Bring all Arab countries together and they help us. He say-ed that Palestinians can go home.’

  Babette’s brow wrinkled and the skin on her face suddenly seemed paper thin. ‘Would you get rid of those lilies? I hate them.’

  When she’d disappeared to breathe bathwater steam and menthol cigarette smoke, Souhar pinched my cheek. ‘You good for my son. You teach him English, and maybe one day he go to live in a peaceful land.’

  A few days later, Babette made out that we were visiting the refugee camp out of charity. She was on a mission to cheer up lost souls, in her shiny lime-green shoes and a purple dress that stuck to her thin curves like cling wrap.

  ‘They don’t have a home, poor people, so we’ll take whatever we can to brighten things up,’ she said, acting like we were visiting someone in hospital. She tutted when the pollen from the yellow flowers she pushed into our arms made us splutter. ‘I’m not listening to complaints from children who sleep on thick mattresses under duck-down doonas.’

  Jess snorted. ‘What do refugees sleep on?’

  ‘Camp beds.’ Babette spoke with an air of authority. She told us to wear our second-best clothes so we wouldn’t ruin our best. She packed two bulging bags of cognac chocolates, but I didn’t think Souhar would eat them. Souhar had told me devout Muslims didn’t touch alcohol.

  Babette’s eyes grew puzzled as we wove through the camp’s laneways, past dusty-walled concrete buildings. ‘Oh, they’ve got apartment blocks. I thought they’d be in tents.’

  Electric wires darted along the walls, through uneven holes, into drains, snaking out beside our feet or stretching above our heads. Their hanging strands vibrated whenever there was a wind gust. The wind carried boys’ yells, which grew loud as we reached a dirt field where a scattering of boys played soccer between lopsided goal posts. They were an assortment of shapes – beanpoles and muscle-men, squirts and blimps – all frowning and tensing their shoulders, maybe crazed by the sun and wind. They ditched the game when they saw us. Some blew raspberries at Babette, who just kept gliding along the dirt road with that mannequin walk, stirring up the wolf cubs, which now began to howl.

  There was a bolt from above. ‘Khalas! Stop!’ Souhar commanded in her own captain’s voice from a wonky wooden balcony. The bovver boys dropped back and shut up, as if she was down there in the dust, shoving them with her broom.

  ‘Ahlan wa sahlan. Welcome. Sorry these stupid sons of donkeys are rude.’ She had another good shout at them.

  Inside the cool concrete stairwell, twirls of red and black graffiti followed us up three flights; cartoon guns burst through hearts beside slogans in English – Free Palestin and No Etnic Cleaning.

  ‘Sit, Madame Lawrence.’ Souhar rubbed the shine back into Babette’s lime shoes with a cloth. ‘Too dirty, this place. And when it rain, the mud. Aye Yi Yi Yi.’ She breathed so deeply into our bouquets that I thought she was going to inhale the petals. Then she sneezed. ‘You bring me the magic of nature.’

  I was disappointed that Mahmoud wasn’t waiting in the mellow light of the lounge room, where smells of bleach, garlic and coffee clung in the air, refusing to be bullied away by Souhar’s strong arms. Instead, we had to be introduced, one by one, to a row of burbling, black-gowned ladies, lined along their perches with their hands clasped and their bottoms wedged into couches. Square frames holding silver and gold extracts from the Koran hovered on the gloomy walls like giant thought bubbles above their heads. Each lady shook Babette’s fingers and put a hand over her heart to greet me. Babette held their hands with coolness, a queen at a line-up of fawning subjects. A few planted kisses on Jess. He didn’t duck, but instead responded with, ‘What a beautiful home.’ He’d already learnt how to be smarmy, but he’d perfected the art in Beirut. The ladies beamed at him.

  Souhar spread her arms. ‘Ahlan wa sahlan. My home is your home.’

  Jess slipped out to the balcony to watch the football game, but there was no escape for me. Babette had already patted the couch beside her and commanded, ‘Sit, Oliver.’ Because her hand was trembling, I did.

  ‘Helou. Helou. Beautiful.’ The women pointed from Babette to me. No-one had called me beautiful before. I flushed with pleasure, but Souhar told them that she was a second wife and I was not her son.

  The ladies’ eyes bugged. ‘Oh.’

  A fat woman patted her own belly and leant towards Babette. ‘No babies?’

  ‘No.’ Babette lowered her lids.

  ‘Haram.’ The women sighed and moved their eyebrows.

  The fat lady made a long speech. ‘We say the orphan loves the mother most,’ Souhar translated for Babette. She pointed at me. ‘And here you have a boy, brought to you by God.’

  Souhar thinks my real mother is dead.

  The fat lady said something that made the others silent and sad.

  ‘She says God takes our boys now to fight war, so we can live in Palestine,’ Souhar translated.

  I heard Babette’s breathing change. ‘You have a home here. Windows. Doors. Strong walls. Why would you want to go to Israel?’

  Souhar sighed, as if she had been waiting for the question all her life. ‘Ah, Madame, I want a home like you have in your country. Safe, where I can live and my children can go to school and college, and we have passports, and there are no guns. Somewhere nobody can take our children from us.’

  I could feel Babette’s breathing quicken beside me. ‘Take your children?’

  ‘There are men who live for fighting, but they do not want to do it themselves. Our own men – Palestinian men – they take our children and fill them with anger. They dress them in the clothes of the soldier. Then they give them guns. They take them when it is very quiet in the night, away, away … and the children come back with nightmares.’

  She translated for the other women, who nodded. A couple started crying. ‘They come back with marks on their heads, because the Lebanese military and the Israh-ell-ee spies know who they are. They come back to scream in the night, because they see such bad things. And then, later, their hearts are sealed and they do not know what is bad and what is good anymore.’

  ‘Marks on their heads?’ I asked.

  ‘Not real.’

  I rubbed my hands. ‘Invisible.’

  ‘Yes, invisible. But dangerous.’

  Babette stiffened. ‘Can’t you take your children somewhere else?’

  ‘Where? And how can we stop them? They live in a time of war.’ She gestured towards one of the crying women. ‘This poor lady, her mother is buried in Falesteen. She wants to take a special plant, a myrtle, at Eid, our holy festival, to put on her mother’s grave, but she cannot. Once, before, everybody live together – Jews, Muslims, Christians. We all begin with Adam and Eve. But now, it is finished. Tribe here, tribe there. Everybody fighting.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Babette dug her orange nails into a cushion with a picture of a lion in a palm grove woven into it. The lion looked hungry.

  Jess whooped on the balcony as the roar of a scored goal rose from below. I stood to join him and, at last, Souhar remembered why I was there. ‘Come on, I take you to Mahmoud. He must be finished sleep now.’ Oh, boy. I felt like a dove released from a magician’s handkerchief.

  Souhar banged on a door at the back of the apartment. ‘Mahmoud. Mahmoud.’ Silence. Her face grew purple with anger. ‘He can be a soldier at night
, but in the day, he is my son.’ She got me to help her shove in the door, then she bashed at the lump on the bed, covered by a rough grey blanket. A wild man jumped up and lunged at me.

  Pain. What happened? The world is ending. I can’t breathe.

  I’d always thought that if I died for lack of air it would be under a wave, but the end was rushing at me in this dark room. My breath wouldn’t come. I couldn’t speak or move my hands. Mahmoud was pressing hard into the collapsing bones of my windpipe, his chest against mine.

  This is it. The moment we all wait for.

  Souhar grabbed at the thumb he’d shoved into my throat and forced it backward. Mahmoud yelped and leapt off me. Then he shoved his head into his mother’s chest, spurting tears, leaving me wheezing air into my windless windpipe.

  ‘Stay, Oliver. I don’t want Madame to feel disturbed.’ Souhar had suddenly godless eyes that made me obey. I sat on the bed beside her; Mahmoud knelt, his head on her chest, sobbing, as she held him with her sinewy arms. My throat was still tight with horror.

  I’d never realised how easy it would be to lose my breath forever.

  But here was Souhar, whose hollow face was tilted to comfort Mahmoud, instead of me. ‘His father is a mule. His uncles are donkeys. They take him at night to teach him to be a mujahideen. Mahmoud is like me. Good brains. One day, he will go to university. My family stop me, but I will not let anyone stop Mahmoud.’

  He considered me with a sideways look. He wiped his eyes, and suddenly there was a smile in them. ‘I am sorry for trying to hurt you. I train to kill now. If somebody stops my sleep, I train to kill him.’

  ‘He’ll kill his mother one day.’ Now Souhar turned to feel my neck with fingers as hard and scaled as a blue-tongue lizard’s pelt. ‘Are you all right?’ My throat throbbed, but I wanted to hide that from Mahmoud, so he wouldn’t think I was some sissy. I pushed Souhar’s hand away hard. ‘Stop it. I’m okay.’

  She grinned and smacked my ear. ‘You can shout, so you breathe good now.’

  She left, returning to unperturbed Madame, who sang out, ‘What’s got Oliver’s goat?’

  I was glad I’d glimpsed that Mahmoud’s toughness was as thin as my own. His voice was still sleepy-growly with a hint of something fractured after nightmares. ‘My mother hates my father, hates my uncle, hates me.’

  ‘Your mother doesn’t hate you.’ My voice sounded dumb.

  ‘If you are not here, my mom smacks me in the face.’

  ‘Me, same thing, my father …’

  But his surly eyes were down. He wouldn’t care about Dad’s belt. ‘My mother takes away the voice from her own child.’

  ‘My mother takes heroin.’

  Now he considered me, his irises dark as coffee beans, with red webs threading the white gel around them. You could buy fake eyes like that in magic shops, to scare people.

  Eye-webs are the cracks inside the mind, bursting through to the outside.

  ‘My father sits in cafés. Deaf. Blind. He cannot hear or see his son.’

  ‘He’s blind?’

  ‘Clack clack clack. You see the men playing tric trac in the coffee shop? For them, nothing else live. Blind like that.’

  I nodded as if I’d seen his father. And maybe I had. I knew how the men sat huddled on their wooden stools in the mauve café darkness, like trees growing out of stumps, unmoving except for the outer branches. They pushed the clacking tric trac tiles around, nursing tiny cups of coffee, the café their entire world. Like my mother, huddled on her bed, her chin banging on her chest while I massaged her spine under her nylon nightie, which crackled with electricity in the dry air. The inside of her nodding head her whole world.

  I understood. Mahmoud was not an orphan, but he felt like one. We shared a silence filled with the tragedy of being born to our own parents. I noticed a rifle butt sticking out of a cupboard, coated in cartoon stickers. A rabbit, a fleeing coyote, a duck … Mahmoud followed my gaze.

  ‘You wanna look at my gun?’ I grinned. I’d never held one. He cradled it as effortlessly as kids back home gripped cricket bats. ‘Kalashnikov.’ He made the word sound like something nice – caramel, chocolate, a cocktail. ‘They call me Ringo. You can also.’

  He lifted his long fingers around the barrel, held it across his chest and made like it was a guitar, strumming the butt with his other hand, fingering the trigger. I couldn’t help it; I flinched.

  He laughed. ‘No ammunition.’ He threw the gun onto the bed. The barrel pointed at me. I turned it away and then, hoping he couldn’t see how much it spooked me, picked up the gun.

  ‘But soon, I will go again with my uncles to fight for my country. We will shoot this.’

  He reminded me of Jimi Hendrix, who had always had his guitar somewhere near his fingers. And the cool guys back home, who stuck it to the teacher, grabbed the waves with the tip of their surfboards and didn’t care, just did whatever they wanted to. This guy had cried real tears, right in front of me. He was sensitive. He had sorrow. But he was cool. Cooler than those smug Bondi jerks whose mothers were always making chocolate milk for them. He must have read these thoughts in my face.

  ‘I show you something.’

  He left the room. I stroked the gun as if it was a wild horse only recently broken in. I was nowhere near cool, but I could try to be. I could study Ringo and find a way to be like him. There was no mirror in his room, but I practised the expressions. Troubled. Aloof. It felt right.

  Mahmoud came back with a photo, but I rushed right in and told him about the gellie bomb. I’d never had anyone else to tell except Jess, who didn’t believe me, and it just gushed out, my heart and breath pulsing as if they’d been flooded with the torrent of words. I told him how Sharkie, Claude and I had followed the sewer pipe men through the bush, hoping to discover how they linked their explosives to their detonator. He hung off my words. I felt that he understood the feelings in them.

  ‘It was easier for me. The other boys lived in the town and had mothers to answer to.’

  I didn’t tell Mahmoud everything, because his English was a bit crook. But memories billowed in my brain; of the way I came to love the rituals of the men in orange, as they created chaos out of precision. There was that wonderful moment of anticipation, the quick shift of their eyes and then the explosion, which set my heart clanging. Every time I watched a blast, something tight inside me released. I learnt that there was a good kind of fear, which could leave me tingling and wanting more. It wasn’t the same as that acidic dread that sometimes crept in, burning by stealth until I felt eaten away by an unfathomable horror.

  Late one afternoon, Grandad got me to sit with him under the skyscraper gums. ‘I haven’t been entirely straight with you,’ he said. ‘I did go to Lebanon, once.’ I leant forward, but right then the lady next door flounced at the fence in filmy sky-blue pyjamas. I’d only ever glimpsed her before, as she flicked her two long, grey plaits like twitched horse-tails. But now, her hair was brushed and fluffy. Her mouth made an ‘Oh’ when she saw me, and she ran back inside on her toes, a little girl caught out.

  Grandad stood so quickly his chair fell over. ‘We’ll talk later.’ He hobbled after her, hand around his can, grunted as he lifted chicken wire away from a hole in the fence and shuffled through. I slunk after him, unnoticed. My heart was kicking like an animal thrown into a cage; I crept around the house, listening beneath the windowsills.

  ‘Aaargh.’ Grandad’s strangled cry brought my attention to one window. He was sprawled, puffing in an armchair with his khaki shorts pulled down. The lady’s silvery hair flowed over his spread thighs as her head dipped and lifted. When he turned his eyes up towards mine, they were pools of jelly. He knew I’d seen, but he didn’t stop the lady’s rhythmic nodding, which reminded me of the metronome Jess used for violin practice.

  Just like Mum shooting up, bent over with the face of a defiant kid. They’re the same. When they want something badly, I become invisible to them.

  I ran back to the bus and
grabbed the car battery from Grandad’s junk pile. It took me an hour to get to Sharkie’s. He opened his door with questioning eyebrows.

  ‘Here’s the battery to power the detonator. We’ve got to do it tomorrow. See ya then.’ I ran, not wanting to answer the eyebrows. I hung around in the bush, which felt lemony and clean. The trees were continuing to be their tree-ish selves – unmoved, un-shocked.

  That night, Grandad and I pretended that the lady had never unplaited her hair.

  ‘Lebanon.’ He slapped his knees. He acted as if he was the keeper of some precious knowledge, which he could only let out in bursts, to the inside of his can. He spoke into the little hole. ‘Beautiful country.’ Three mossie bites later: ‘Dangerous, but.’ Slurp of beer. ‘A lot of banana trees.’ Blew his nose. ‘Beer is available, if you know who to ask.’

  I wanted to kick him. After he’d turned out the light later, I heard, ‘Damour nearly did me in.’ Then snores. He did not wake Mabel up from the dead that night.

  The following day, the boys and I checked out Sharkie’s dad’s lawn, mown so smooth that in the lowering sun the green hurt my eyes.

  ‘Dad loves that lawn. Mum reckons more than her.’ I wondered why his father would let us blow it up, but that was Sharkie’s problem. We nearly killed each other quarrelling about the best way to put the bomb together. Sharkie won, because it was his backyard. He hitched all the bits together and stood by to activate the battery, while Claude and I crouched beside a wall, planning to peek over at the mayhem. My toes were tingling.

  ‘Phut.’ A bucketload of dirt sprayed out of the lawn, scattered over the grass and settled.

  Claude scoffed. ‘Ya didn’t stick the wire on the battery right. Ya didn’t make it go off!’

  ‘Did. It’s a fizzer.’ Sharkie grimaced and smashed the air with his fist.