Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  Mohammed spat an exasperated sigh. ‘This talk of Phoenicians is Phalangist talk and it will make war. You can’t choose one ancestor. I can say I come from Marmaluke or Ottoman, or many peoples. So many have lived here.’

  A cigarette billboard flashed by:

  GITANES

  EXPAND YOUR MIND

  ‘Ignore him, Oliver. I speak of fun and tolerance and love, and he speaks of war.’

  But I wasn’t ignoring him. I was greedy for any morsel about the Phalangist fighters because my enemy, Abdo, was one of them.

  Walid wanted to give me the lesson I was skipping at school. ‘Mohammed thinks the French brought grief to Lebanon. I say the grief comes from people who don’t understand that this is our country. The Christians have been here since Christ.’

  ‘If He existed.’ I said each word evenly, imitating his lecturing tone.

  Mohammed banged the wheel with his hand and goggled at me. ‘God hear everything you say.’

  ‘If there was a God, that would probably be right.’

  ‘You cannot say there is no God.’ He was scandalised.

  Babette tried to soothe him, by bagging me. ‘Oliver’s a little untamed.’

  ‘Everybody believes in God.’ Mohammed cut the air with his hand to indicate that the subject was over.

  ‘Babette doesn’t,’ I said. ‘She looks like an angel with a halo, but she doesn’t believe. Ask her.’

  So then Walid turned on me, too. ‘Seems like you’ve a bit of the devil in you today, Oliver.’

  Tyre was a city that had become creepy without its ancient people; a great windy ruin of arches leaning into wobbly, cobbled roads. Inside the small roofless rooms there were carpets of flowers, which, close-up, became sharp weeds stinking of tourists’ piss. Mohammed swept his arms in the air, telling us in his chopped-up English about the ancient Greeks, Romans, Turks and Crusaders who’d lived here when it was a city. ‘Archaeologists have tried to bring it to life, using little clues.’

  It seemed a hopeless project to me. The wind in the fractured wreckage of the past told me that the people had gone into the parallel universe. The millions of footprints they had made had been swallowed. Their carved stone coffins rested above ground.

  I had only thought of death as something sudden and passing, like news. But it hung in the air here, because the news of those lives lost long ago could only be read in the stones. I sat with the ghosts on the hippodrome’s highest spectator seats, mucking about with Walid’s newest Nikon camera. Through the lens, I made patterns of the columns that pushed stairways into clouds and arches that hung together like celebrating footballers with their arms around each other’s shoulders. Through the lens, I also caught Walid lifting a giant umbrella over Babette. A ragged black curtain of cloud had been hanging its hem into the sea. It now drifted across and burst over us. Walid jumped beneath the umbrella behind Babette, his hand pressed against her back. Mohammed and I took cover under the triumphal arch, where stones – not cement – held a curved ceiling together, strong and hard against the pressure of the iron-grey sky.

  ‘You see? Those people were smarter than us. Can you make a stone arch like that, Oliver?’

  I chewed my nails and ignored him. I had to keep my eyes on Walid and Babette, huddled close. When the shower had passed, Walid folded the umbrella and put his hand on her back again. I handed him his camera, forcing him to get his paws off her. We walked to the sea edge, where Walid got back onto his favourite subject. ‘The Phoenicians took purple dye from the murex snail, which still lives here along the shore. It was a tiny creature that helped to make people seem royal, giving its life so they could cloak their shoulders with purple cloth.’

  I threw myself onto the wet dirt, playing a creature sticking a knife into its own guts. ‘Take my purple. I give it to the world.’ Mohammed laughed.

  ‘Oh, get up, Oliver, you’ll cover us all in mud.’ Babette turned away to reorganise her hair in the wind. I gave Walid a filthy look. Mohammed lifted his chin and I thought he smiled in approval.

  Walid had some payback for me. ‘Oliver, you want to be a man who does something substantial. Do you know what Lawrence of Arabia really did?’

  ‘United the Arabs.’ I lifted my own chin.

  ‘He represented and manipulated British interests against those of the Arabs. He acquired the costume and a grasp of the language so his own nation could exercise power in the Middle East. Schemed over Palestine, the results of which you see before you as the tension rises. Not an admirable chap at all.’

  His speech hurt me – still they criticised Al Orentz! ‘Did you see the movie?’

  Walid just shook his head. On the way back to Beirut, he insisted that we stop for a late seafood lunch at a restaurant suspended over the sea on stilts near Damour.

  ‘Heavens, there’s real life in the countryside, just as Lachlan said.’ Dad had given Babette glossy brochures of villas for rent around Damour, to get away from the rat-a-tat of Beirut’s gunfire. I never thought she’d move here, so far from the Phoenicia, St Georges and Vendôme hotels.

  Mohammed, who’d whispered to me that the restaurant people were Phalangists, waited outside, fingering his worry beads. I’d asked him if it was safe.

  ‘For you, yes. For me, makes me too angry so I cannot eat. Yehudi fish.’

  Babette pushed on her sunglasses as a rainbow became sunshine on the marine blue heaving outside the window. ‘Sea looks like smashed glass. Makes me nervy.’

  I wanted to endear myself to her again. ‘Mohammed said the fish are Jewish.’

  Walid scoffed. ‘Jewish fish! I doubt they’ve converted, even though they are from Israel. Around here it’s all fished out, so the fishermen buy out at sea from our friends down south. They don’t worry about the trade boycott. All the same sea, they reckon.’

  A waiter palmed a platter of fried fish to the table. ‘Chin-chin.’ Walid and Babette clinked glasses. Babette picked at a battered tiddler, her pinkie fingers making inverted commas on either side of the flimsy fish. Walid grabbed a cooked fish and gnashed his teeth along its length, turned it over and stripped the other side bare, then tossed the skeleton on the plate. Its eye looked outraged.

  ‘That’s done me in.’ Babette sat with her eyes on the horizon, bending her elbow high to blow clouds from the corner of her mouth, away from the table, her idea of polite smoking.

  Walid tried to coax her. ‘Surely you could, just for today, break that iron resolve and have more than one mouthful. Two?’

  Babette touched her ribcage. ‘I’ve had an elegant sufficiency, thank you.’ She threw her cigarette butt through the window into the sea. ‘Though I will have a glass of wine.’

  Youssef, the restaurant owner, a thick-haired redhead who was related to Walid, joined us. His belly burst over his belt and he wore a half-smile, as if life was always pleasing. ‘Hey, Oliver. You are one of us.’ Youssef pulled a strand of his hair. ‘All my family, all have red hair. Where from?’

  ‘Phoenicians?’ I was getting the hang of this journey, where a fish or the colour of a person’s hair could be political.

  ‘The Crusaders.’ Youssef tapped his nose and roared with laughter. A car on the highway backfired and he flinched. ‘Maybe we need the Crusades again. The Arab world leaves it to us to give Palestinians a home. We cannot. They will take our children’s jobs. They will take our peace.’

  I thought of the lady who couldn’t put myrtle on her mother’s grave. ‘They haven’t got anywhere else to go.’

  Walid sighed. ‘Lebanon is like a spider’s web. Once the threads are broken, we will not be able to repair them.’

  I saw Mohammed’s anxious head through the glass and felt bad. They wouldn’t speak like this in front of him. He wasn’t a Palestinian, but he was a Muslim, and they’d fought the Crusaders. I felt I was part of some treachery. I wished I could see Ringo. Souhar had fretted that he’d been made carsick, travelling under a blanket on a truck’s flat-top, heading back from the Israeli borde
r. I watched the zoom of the highway traffic through the restaurant’s front windows, imagining him in one of the clattering lorries, sick with fear.

  When we came outside, Mohammed slipped a gun he’d tucked into his belt under his car seat. He had stood guard over us, as we ate.

  I was still angry with Walid for arguing with Mohammed and disparaging Al Orentz. I shoved past him and plumped down on the back seat beside Babette. ‘Felt carsick in the front.’

  Babette closed her eyes. ‘No more chatter. Oh, that wine.’

  The car filled with afternoon torpor. As I dropped off, the bunch of evil eyes hanging from Mohammed’s mirror danced like purple shadows inside my closed eyelids, jogging memories.

  I’ve never seen the 1964 diary.

  30

  Mouse, Lizard

  Babette put a kybosh on my plans to find the 1964 diary by hanging around the apartment, moping and shooing me away whenever I came near her. Her enthusiasm for Beirut had faded. She said it wasn’t the way she thought it would be when she was in New York. Jess hurtled out the front door every school day, eager to jump onto that bus, and on weekends, he finagled trips to restaurants, ski fields and even palaces with his mates and their doting parents.

  Dad came home, haggard from flying every day. His jaw tightened when he saw Babette lazing with a book on the cheese longue.

  ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘Nothing much.’ Her voice was disinterested.

  ‘We went to Tyre,’ I blurted, hoping to brighten the mood.

  ‘School expedition?’ I held my breath, regretting the heaviness in the room.

  ‘We had an outing with Walid.’ Babette’s voice was quiet as Dad’s breathing grew loud, his ear-tips turning red.

  But a mouse interfered in their marriage. Casanova, or his look-alike – I couldn’t be sure, because there were ever-new generations of mice – scuttled over the captain’s shoes. Dad spun around and stamped on its nose.

  ‘Lachlan!’ Babette shrieked. The mouse lay twitching; blood pooled around its whiskers. Dad kicked it across the floor. I ran over, pulled off my T-shirt and wrapped the mouse inside, where it expired. Koompf – the front door slammed. Dad had stormed out.

  He still hadn’t come home by night-time. Babette had gone through half a bottle of gin. She was in the living room, vomiting out sobs, which pierced through the mushrabiyah: aha-yah, aha-yah. I lay frozen in my room, confounded, mortified that a small moment had grown so big.

  The phone rang. Babette got to it before me, so The Slave had her. I couldn’t do much except hang at the mushrabiya, shifting from foot to foot. Babette leaned into the phone, as if she’d finally found a well she could pour her secrets into. ‘Phillip, it’s awful. I thought that getting married, coming here, would make everything different. Life would seem fresh again. I felt forgiven. But it’s all falling apart.’

  The Slave went, ‘Burble.’

  ‘Even when we’re not fighting, I know he disapproves. He pretends in public that everything’s all right. Keeps up appearances. When I ask what’s wrong, he says, “Don’t go making trouble out of nothing.” But there’s a blankness to his eyes. It scares me because it makes me think that I have a nothingness there, too, in my eyes. And that’s what you saw, when you said I wasn’t giving. To the lens.’

  Gabbling at the other end.

  ‘Well, I have got a male friend, but that’s all it is. Friendship.’

  I could hear the guffaw from London. Babette huffed. ‘It is possible to be platonic friends. Remember? You and me, for instance.’ She listened, tapping a front tooth with her nail. ‘You know I can’t come back. They’ll hound me.’ She curled up into a ball on a lounge chair. ‘Have you been anywhere near the house in Chelsea?’

  Phillip got in a bit of a burst then.

  ‘I told you. I don’t want the bloody photo. I … can’t … see … him. It’s best to just forget.’

  I couldn’t agree more. I hoped now that The Slave would stop his calls. And that I could get into her diaries so I could decipher her code. When Dad eventually came home, it ended as it usually did, with her bitter cries, his murmuring and then the long wolf howls and moans I wasn’t supposed to hear.

  The next day I expected Dad to remember that I’d jigged school again for the Tyre expedition, but he was all cheery, wearing nothing but a towel tied around his waist. His hair was wet. He shoved a bundle of Lebanese pounds at me. ‘Look after your brother. Souhar will help. I’ve got to spend more time with Babette. She’s been doing it tough and I’ve neglected her.’

  He used his holidays to fly away with her. She left, wrapped in a purple coat with orange feathers around the neck, bright as a jungle bird. ‘We’re going to gad about Europe,’ she’d told someone on the phone.

  Into their bedroom. Into the trunk. Still no trace of 1964. I suddenly lost the wish to spy. I wanted my own friend. I felt I’d been left on a darkening hillside without the sun, my feet sliding on damp leaf litter, about to fall. No-one to catch me.

  The wet street was deserted for the afternoon siesta, but through my window I saw the dog that I’d fed smoked salmon, lolloping down our laneway, her musk-stick tongue hanging from her liquorice head. Someone had tied a rope around her neck.

  She sat sedately when I picked up the rope, leaning lopsided on the slope of the hill so that one ludicrous hind leg jutted between her two front paws. She bathed in the heat of the sun, which had deserted us for days during the winter storms. Her scalp under my hand was hot. Her trim eyelashes drifted over her eyes. I leant against the stone fence and burrowed into the hush of an afternoon drowse. I was tired of thinking.

  Suddenly, there was a pull on my arm. The dog began leaping from side to side, snuffling her nose into the angle where stone wall met cracked footpath. She lunged forward, then leapt back, pulling my arm. A small lizard glistened silver in the sun, its arms still beside its slinky sides.

  The dog settled. The lizard froze. I waited. The dog gave in first, lunging. I was inclined to barrack for the lizard, yet I wanted the creatures to play out their fates within the animal kingdom. So I let her go. She became a monster, clumsily surrounding the lizard with her big black paws, then pinning it to the pavement. I waited for the lizard to act. It did nothing. The dog leapt back and watched.

  Its little hands waved a bit. The dog plunged in, hit her nose on the wall, yipped and turned the lizard over. It moved slightly. She put a paw on the tail, which fell off, wiggling like a miniature snake. This raised my hopes for the lizard. I wanted it to win now. What machinery in its body or brain made it drop its tail?

  I admired the lizard’s sureness and neatness as it played dead, with only its eyes curving away from the straight line of its body. Its arms and legs jutted out like an afterthought. Now the dog grabbed the tail and began playing with it. There was something so true and right about this. No-one else knew or cared about this struggle. For the lizard, it was one of life and death. But it had survived through a clever magic trick.

  I swung my eyes down to the Corniche, where the car horns began to lock in madness once more. The sleepers were waking. When I looked back, the tail-less lizard had crept away on those tiny feet.

  Everyone should have a tail.

  31

  I Make an X

  Dad and Babette were still away when Ringo and Abu Iyad returned. Ringo’s hand was warm as he held my arm. I went down to the Corniche with them – no skateboard, no guns. We just milled with the sunset crowds, glad for a break from the rain. People usually stared at me, the alien, whenever I was out on the streets, but they didn’t dare when I was with the commandos.

  The streets were reported to be dangerous again. The Palestinians and Maronites were at each other’s throats somewhere in the city, but out in the salt breeze, with music blasting from trannies and the sweet smell of roasting nuts warming the air, there was no sign of that. Seaweed still slurped against the seawalls alongside the Corniche. The big fat sun still showed off every afternoon, s
tabbing the city with its soft, dying rays.

  Abu Iyad bought me salty pistachio nuts in a twist of paper. ‘Australia make good men. I have cousin there. He build house. He send much money to Lebanon to help family. One day, when we go back to Falesteen, my cousin will build house for my family there. You can visit, Oliver. My home is your home.’

  He had soft eyes, with a question in them. I told him about Grandad fighting in the Second World War in Lebanon and Palestine. Abu Iyad’s eyes sharpened with attention, and I had an urge to tell him things, as if he’d tapped an oil well inside me. A torrent of words spewed black-gold into the sunlight. I told him about Mum.

  When she floated past, thin and limp in an ice-blue nightie, she mumbled my name. ‘What, Mum, what?’ She swooned back into silence. The ambulance men carried her away in a rhythmic sway, as if she were a Pharaoh.

  I left out her love of the needle.

  ‘Sorry she is sick lady. Send her my best wish.’

  I told him about Dad. How a sheikh had tipped him with a gold Rolex, and he’d waggled a Boeing’s wings in thanks. I didn’t tell him about Babette.

  ‘You know a man, Mr Abdo? He paint buildings.’

  Although I was in gushing mode, the casual way he put his question made me cautious. ‘I told you I did. He visits our building. But he’s not here that much. He goes to Beit Zizi all the time.’ Abu Iyad left a long silence. I couldn’t bear the emptiness of it, even though within it lay Abu Iyad’s waiting for me to fill the air with sound. ‘I go to Beit Zizi a bit. Not to see Abdo. I visit Madame Khoury, with my family.’

  He smiled and put his arm around my shoulder. ‘I know Beit Zizi. Please, where is Madame Khoury house?’

  He pulled a piece of pink paper and a leaky blue pen from his briefcase, which he leaned against Ringo’s bent-over back as a makeshift desk. I could feel myself doing something I shouldn’t. Abu Iyad drew the Beit Zizi village square and made boxes to indicate houses along the road to the forest, which he marked as a clump of Christmas trees.