Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  He turned to see if I was following, then said something to Ringo, who hung behind and signalled me to stop. Laughing, Ringo got me to bend my head and, while the skateboard wobbled, slung the rifle around my neck, then pushed me so that the wheels whirled and clattered. I had passed the test. I was a commando of the Corniche, accelerating towards bliss, Choco-top in one hand, Kalashnikov in the other. Pedestrians peeled away from my path in waves, and I realised that I enjoyed the alarm in their eyes. What a cack!

  Then the skateboard flipped over, landing on its back like a turtle. I slammed flat on my back on the concrete Corniche, blue sky in my eyes and screeches in my ears as the rifle landed with a clatter, away from me. I squeezed my eyes closed, waiting for the blast, but the gun didn’t go off. I lay still, unable to comprehend how the earth had skidded out from under me. Abu Iyad came running, grabbed the gun and swore at Ringo. The Choco-top lay not far from my nose, melting on the pavement. People continued to veer away to avoid us.

  Breath, when it returned, was beautiful, but the way people were regarding me – mouths open, dark with disgust – shocked me. These afternoon promenaders in their tailored clothes hated the fedayeen. And they thought I was one.

  Ringo was smirking, the bastard, but Abu Iyad picked me up and beat the dust off my clothes with his hands. I felt the care in them. He had vanilla ice-cream on his breath. He had kind eyes, spirals of green and brown fanning out around his pupils. He made Ringo take the gun. ‘Don’t carry a gun on the street. Even though you are foreigner, the police will take you like they take our children. Maybe beat you. I cannot help you then.’

  But he told Ringo to give me the gun, didn’t he?

  Abu Iyad got me another Choco-top and paid this time. I didn’t really want it because I was smarting at the way he implied I was a child. He handed it to me with such a flourish that I had to accept. My back felt broken, but I couldn’t let the others know that, so I walked beside Ringo like a man with a broom up his bum, licking the ice-cream on its stick.

  ‘That was a rush,’ I said, made feverish by the fedayeen’s smiles as we parted the pedestrians just like God parted the Red Sea in the old Bible.

  20

  A Real Bomb

  As soon as Dad was off flying and Souhar was busy cleaning our apartment, I headed to the refugee camp, lugging my camera past the empty soccer field. This was a guerrilla training ground now, football kicked aside.

  I found Ringo folded over in a funk on an armchair in the lonely lounge room. Within only a few weeks, his shoulders had widened and he seemed to have grown taller, leaving me behind. Maybe it was all the marching up and down, training with rifles. He looked at me with a kind of longing, and I sensed how free and easy I must have appeared, loping in with my camera lenses swinging. He tensed his shoulders forward, as if he was protecting an eggshell around his heart. His face was grey. Something had happened, in his war in the south.

  To smoke away the sadness, I presented him with two cigars. Dad liked to chew on a cigar, slumped in his den, three sheets to the wind. One night, I’d sneaked through the radiating soundwaves of his snores and borrowed a handful of Havanas.

  Ringo shoved one into his mouth and gave a wan smile. ‘Your family is very rich.’

  This made me feel awkward, so instead of waiting to surprise him with my secret plan, I blurted it. ‘Got a great idea for a trick. I want to make an exploding cigar. Stick it in my mouche, light it and then – kapow!’ Ringo’s brow furrowed. ‘Got the cigars. I need gunpowder to make it work.’

  ‘You want to make a bomb?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, a cigar bomb.’

  He grinned. ‘Who you gonna kill?’

  ‘Myself, probably.’

  ‘Why?’ His shirt sleeve slid back. The inside of his wrist was crisscrossed with rough-cut scars. Someone had hacked at him, or he had done it himself. Girls used to do that behind the school toilets in Bondi, jabbing at their tendons with broken glass so they would bleed, sometimes carving their boyfriend’s initials into their skin. They covered the cuts with elaborate bandages that everyone could see. They knew they might die, accidentally on purpose. Ringo’s slash marks made me sad, but I kept grinning.

  He needs cheering up.

  ‘It’d be a gag. Abu Ali, famous magician, with an exploding cigar. Magic.’

  He followed my lips with his eyes, as if he was some kind of dumbo and would understand by concentrating harder. Then he gave a laugh, but not the type I was after. The sound choked inside his chest. He gritted his teeth; he thought I was a fool. I yearned to prove him wrong, but then burbled, ‘What’s that written on your wrist?’

  He pulled the sleeve over his arm to hide the wounds. ‘Do you ever think about making a bomb? Not cigar bomb. Real one?’

  I wanted to tell him what I’d seen, but I’d had months of forgetting.

  One afternoon the air had exploded above the paddock at the top of our laneway. People waiting above the quarry for sunset had fluttered down the hill, a flock of wailing seabirds. I’d waited for courage to rise in me, telling myself I had to go out with my camera, to be as brave as Ringo tearing to the border, knowing he may never come back. I needed to see what a real bomb did.

  Jess was horrified. ‘You should wait, because if there are more explosions they might get you.’

  ‘Nah, I won’t be anywhere near. Using the zoom.’

  My legs wobbled reluctantly across the paddock in the crimson half-light. My teeth chattered when I saw that the shop selling chicren but no booza, where I’d pressed a buttercup into Yasmin’s hand, was now a gaping hole of mangled metal. The building was like a mouth without a tongue, a socket without an eye. Shattered window glass glinted on the street; chicken fat splattered walls; shredded kebab clung to windscreens. The blackened skeleton of a smoking car released a stink of toxic plastic, searing my lungs with a chemical burn. I became a spaceman in a bubble, breath and heartbeat too loud in my helmet.

  Yasmin’s father was sprawled in a wooden chair, rasping and gasping, blood dribbling down his forehead. His hairy stomach bellowed out, but the rest of him had shrunk. His head lolled back. Behind her curtain of hair, Yasmin bowed her head and held his arm, whining like a dog. While I watched, the rasping stopped and Yasmin’s father’s eyes changed, freezing in a hollow stare.

  Please blink, Mr No-Booza man. I don’t want you to be dead.

  The minutes grew long and would not end. Then Yasmin started wailing, keening from another place, one I never wanted to visit. I fell back to earth then, and ran.

  The memory didn’t lodge in my brain, floating around like flotsam in a spaceship. But it came back, whole now, as Ringo waited for me to answer him. I couldn’t tell him what I’d seen and felt, because I could barely tell myself. The person I’d thought about most – when I’d seen Yasmin and her father – was me. I’d wanted him not to die so I’d be saved from seeing a corpse.

  ‘You think about making bomb?’ Ringo repeated.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hah. I want to explode a bomb, to see how it look. Like you did in Australia. When we fight, we have no bomb. Gun, grenade, rocket. But I want to try, like you. Not for spilling blood. Only to enjoy.’ The grey was flushed out of his face.

  I grunted. ‘No lawns around here.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Abu Iyad ask, can you show me? He says you are clever.’

  I tried to assume my most cool face. ‘You need some sort of open space. You can’t do it around buildings. You might hurt someone.’

  ‘We have trees and forest.’ He gestured towards some part of Lebanon, far away.

  ‘A cigar bomb would make the best joke. It wouldn’t be big and fancy, but it’d be fun. Do you know anyone who makes firecrackers? They’d have gunpowder.’

  ‘Maybe I can get.’ He squeezed my arm and a wild wish rushed at me that we could be together in an adventure as breathtaking as that skateboard sweep along the Corniche, only bigger.

  I took Ringo’s photo on the football traini
ng ground. He planted his feet apart, twisted his keffiyeh around his head, splayed the fingers of his left hand on his hip and cradled his Kalashnikov in the fingers of his right hand, as if he were Jimi on a guitar. He tipped the gun barrel up at a forty-five degree angle, away from his body, making his neck long, his face firm and his eyes proud. The gun became a part of him. As I shot, exhilarated, camp kids clustered behind Ringo, thrusting themselves into the photo. One gawped in awe at me and another raised his fingers in a peace sign. A small boy mirrored Ringo’s stance.

  He’s a hero here.

  My heart flipped. I imagined taking a bomb, bigger than any cigar, and exploding it in some high-mountain clearing, away from chicken shops, away from everybody, just me and Ringo with a camera and a detonator. Doing it properly this time, then sending a picture to Sharkie and Claude, with ‘ha ha’ written on the back. And maybe another one to that little rat, Samir, who’d spat in my mouth. Ringo would know I was for real. Not just another kid to gawp at him.

  I wasn’t a fighter like him, but if we rattled out our brains with a giant blast, we may kick out the sadness that made Ringo hack his wrists and threaded my night with ghosts. We would have the power I had seen in the men with the gellie in the bush that day. The men with important faces.

  21

  Skeleton

  Back home, a note in jerky, angled writing lurked beside the phone like a crocodile.

  Mme Lawrence – M Foot from school call say plis to phon him about Oliver

  A M O E B A

  Souhar

  I screwed it up and threw it down the garbage chute. The phone rang. I grabbed it.

  ‘Hello, London on the line …’ I laid the receiver on the floor, where it waggled and spat. ‘Hello, hello.’ That would cost The Slave some money.

  I loped up to Hamra, into the Pinball Palais and entered that kaleidoscopic land of bright sloped fields and silver balls, which I controlled with my wizard fingers – blink, ting – my hips moving in and out to the machine like she was a lady. Electric Ladyland. I could probably have made a ball swing from flipper to bumper to bell, lights flashing, bells ringing, for the rest of my life, if Dad hadn’t spotted me blazing away as he prowled Hamra. He hauled the Caddie onto the pavement so that it hung at an angle, two wheels in the gutter. Grabbed me by the scruff of the neck as if I was a pup – and I mewled like one, too, because my first thought was that he was Abdo, come to get me for thinking the thoughts I did about Sabine.

  ‘You know how much I pay for that school?’ Dad had my back over the machine as the silver ball gurgled into the gutter and the Palais regulars with hip T-shirts and big sideburns shimmied away. ‘You bloody idiot. If you were old enough, I’d ship you back to Australia, pronto, to be drafted to Vietnam.’

  He accelerated through the Beirut traffic, one hand pinning me to the car seat beside him. His silence and the sinew popping out of his neck scared me.

  He’s going to let his belt buckle do the talking.

  But Babette was home and he couldn’t whack me. Instead, I was in for another talk. He’d found my pile of forged school absence notes in my stash-hole.

  He sighed, as if I was a burden to him. ‘I saw an execution in Iraq once. Couldn’t avoid it. In the street below my hotel, to teach the public a lesson. The audience seemed eager … The man had to bend over for the executioner, who hacked though his neck with a scimitar.’ The rims around Dad’s eyes were red as cherry juice. ‘His body leant forward and his hands tried to catch the head.’

  I tried only to blink and breathe, to let him know I was miles away, even though his story made my gizzards shiver. He waited for me to say something, but I held his gaze with an expression that I hoped would convey that he couldn’t get to me.

  ‘And when I saw you in that shady dive today, I realised that you’re just like that bloke who reached out too late for his head.’

  ‘Eh?’ I sounded wounded, despite myself.

  ‘You work out the consequences too late, Oliver. You’re a deadhead. You’re also so grounded you’ve lost the privilege of returning to Australia for your summer holidays. So think about that. As you wave your brother goodbye in July.’

  The tears banked up in my eyes, but I didn’t let them out. I concentrated on remembering how a grey curve of sandstone rock near Grandad’s place, a daytime bed, held the sun in its crystals and heated my belly when I lay on it. I craved the hug of that rock now.

  Dad made an arrangement that Mr Foot would phone if I didn’t get off the bus every day. I got a reprieve from school, anyway, when it was attacked. The playground was covered in a layer of shattered glass, and its brick walls were smeared with the loops and long, lean lines of Arabic. Globules of paint, still wet, left red and green smears on my fingertips.

  ‘Behead American imperialists,’ Samir translated. ‘Push Israeli dogs into the sea.’

  Some boys began howling, too small to realise when fate was good to them. Someone phoned and threatened to bomb the school. We were all to be loaded up with homework and sent home.

  ‘That’s a bit over the top as a strategy for extricating yourself from school, Lawrence,’ Mr Stickler said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Learning to write Arabic, then sneaking in and daubing the walls with slogans you picked up from the Palestinian camps.’

  For a moment I thought he knew about me and Ringo, me and Abu Iyad. Then I registered his fox-mouth grin. ‘Oh, yeah. Please don’t turn me in, sir.’

  Mr Stickler asked me to take the mice home until school reopened. ‘You’re one of the few boys who don’t have palpitations around rodents. Guess it’s because you Aussies are used to wildlife.’ He bent an eyebrow towards me. I nodded.

  The skeleton in the science room had been toppled, its vertebrae skewed at weird angles.

  ‘Hey, look how the model-makers put the holes in the plastic to make the bones look real,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not plastic, Oliver. That’s some poor Indian who gave his body to science.’

  I crouched down and touched the hard sponginess of a vertebra. The Indian’s face rose up in my mind, his popping eyes hovering over the thin smile of starvation. ‘Oh, it’s like we’re made of glass.’ I thought of a light fizzling out when a filament broke.

  ‘Yes, he wasn’t much older than you when he died, Oliver. His bones don’t speak of disease. Maybe he died in war.’ Mr Stickler’s knees clicked as he squatted beside me. ‘And then someone sold his bones.’

  The part of me that is not brave made me shudder. We lay the skeleton in a straight line and put his vertebrae back in place.

  Someone might do this for me one day. Someone lucky enough to still be living.

  I was sad that the man was so far from his home. Maybe Mr Stickler had the same thoughts. We were both quiet for a long time after we had lifted the skeleton onto its frame.

  Mr Stickler sighed. ‘We can patch this guy up now he’s dead. Don’t know if anyone can do the same for poor old Lebanon.’

  We enjoyed the silence as we cleaned out the mice cages together. The small animal hearts must have nearly burst out of their bodies when the invaders broke in. But it seemed that Mr Stickler’s heart had slowed to a sad waltz.

  He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘You know I’m Jewish, Oliver?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I feel threatened and sad that it’s becoming so hard to live here. My wife’s family is from Beirut. Would you like to hear something she wrote last night, when she heard about the school being attacked?’ I nodded again. He cleared his throat and read the note in his hand.

  ‘Here, people are woven like the threads in a prayer rug into their fate. Their first names are not their own, but those of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, prophets and saints, and their surnames tell of village of origin or tribe, so they are fixed into their place in history and they know where they and others stand in war and in belief. Or, they think they know. They could be shot for having a Druze name, or a Palestinian fa
ce, or the accent of the Shi’ites of the south.

  ‘It’s all about belonging. Seagulls flock with other seagulls and become birds of prey around doves and softer creatures.’

  We both fell silent again.

  ‘Did she write anything else?’

  He smirked. ‘Are you hoping for a happy ending? Or a solution?’

  ‘It’s not just about Lebanon. This school’s American.’

  ‘Ah, yes, good point. We Yanks didn’t exactly wander in here without a compass. We are seen as a threat.’

  Dad had already told me that, one day when he showed me an American Naval ship hovering on the horizon near Cyprus. Dad had given a grim laugh. ‘Yeah, Yankees to the west, Israelis to the south and Syrians to the north. It’s hard to get lonely in Lebanon.’ But I didn’t tell Mr Stickler about that. I wondered why Dad had sent us to an American school.

  Mr Stickler sighed. ‘I’d love to help you understand. It’s hard enough for me, for anyone, to comprehend. With the Russians so entrenched in Egypt, Lebanon is a domino in the United States’ global strategy, and American politicians must cater to the strong pro-Israel lobby at home. So here in the mountains of Lebanon, someone – maybe Palestinian, maybe Nasserite – pushes over the skeleton of poor Mr Patel. And you get to take the mice home.’

  ‘You’re not leaving, are you, sir?’

  He grimaced. ‘I hope not, Oliver.’

  It was so nice to have felt sad with him about the skeleton and about Lebanon. And to have a man talk to me, on the level.

  22