Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  36

  Pluck

  We’d been in Beirut almost a year. I was turning sixteen. Walid said I’d be a man on that day, and we’d celebrate with a mezze banquet at a restaurant near Byblos. Dad’s flight was cancelled and so, at the last minute, he came to watch me become a man, too. The two had a pretend wrestle, and Dad raved about the Syrians having rushed troops into Lebanon to rescue a fighter pilot shot down in the mountains by Israelis. ‘Makes you feel all’s right with the world when a nation will invade another for the sake of one pilot.’

  ‘And his aircraft. They towed that back, too.’ Walid beamed.

  Maroon fez on my head, I wedged myself on the floor cushions between Babette and Walid. The waiter brought out, one by one, the forty-five dishes of the mezze. The adults slid into an aniseed haze, their hands around milky glasses of arak. Jess sneaked a few sips of Babette’s.

  ‘I’ve made a special birthday order, Oliver.’ Walid winked. ‘Food for men.’

  A Bedouin drumbeat thudded through speakers, fingers on animal skin. First came the boiled brains. Jess and I groaned. Walid tucked in. Dad followed with less enthusiasm. Then came the raw lamb liver. Babette ate one cube, after Walid had wrapped it in mint leaves for her.

  ‘You don’t have to, darling.’ Dad made a display of downing some himself. Then another bowl of animal guts appeared, nestled in coriander. ‘They call it pluck – liver and heart, cooked with a nice piece of sheep tail fat.’ Babette reeled out onto the footpath and paced, smoking, under the green, cedar-shaped neon light that was having an epileptic fit above the restaurant’s huge plate glass window.

  Walid grinned. ‘Here, Lachlan. Your favourite – amourettes.’

  I fell for being the straight guy. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Spine marrow. In French it also means a little affair, a fling.’

  Dad stopped smiling. ‘Give me the heart or kidney. You can have the spineless stuff.’

  Walid lifted onto his knees, leant across the table and punched Dad in the face so fast his arm was a blur – thwack! Bone on skin drum. Dad’s cheek reddened in four finger-wide streaks, marking Walid’s fist. He rolled back against the wall, momentarily stunned, before rearing up and lurching across the pluck and guts at Walid, who reeled back into a waiter when the blow landed on his jaw. My birthday cake, with sixteen candles and a wiggling toy belly dancer on top, went flying. Dad fell face-first into the spine marrow dish and groaned as he felt his smashed nose, which was now seeping blood. Babette, luminous green in the cedar light, saw everything through the window. She stamped her feet and screamed. Walid ran out the door and grabbed Babette’s hand, trying to haul her into his Audi, but she pulled away. The car took off. The waiter was left tutting over the remains of my cake.

  ‘I was going to get this meal anyway,’ Dad said through blood. No-one blinked. He usually paid for everything.

  That’s what he’s here for.

  I suddenly felt sorry for him. The story of his life with women could be the lyrics of a blues song. Mum fell in love with a chemical compound. He kept on paying, all day long. Found out she was with another man. Switched her for Babette. Lit on her, as a seagull does on a waterside lamppost. And neither Dad nor I knew how far she’d gone with Walid.

  All the way?

  I wanted to weep with gratitude that she hadn’t got into the Audi, even though she now sat slightly apart from us, sipping arak and staring at the neon light’s spasms. She turned to me with her thumbtack-hard eyes. ‘That’s how it is to be a man.’

  The awful aftertaste of Dad and Walid’s untamed rage stayed with me. Walid stopped taking me away on photographic jobs at the weekend. Babette spent weeks in a funk. Then one day she asked me to escort her to a ‘surprise’ destination.

  She dabbed rouge on her cheekbones with a harsh, angry hand, brushed on white eye shadow as if she was trying to rub something out, then pressed two brown arches with pencil into her brows. Her hands trembled as she painted dark lines across her eyelids. She looked like Cleopatra.

  ‘Hope it’s not some daggy fashion show,’ I said. I’d rather have been bored to death at home.

  ‘Couldn’t be more different.’ The mystery deepened when she ordered a taxi driver to take us to Karantina, a refugee camp near the Port of Beirut. She dully observed the blue-green blown-glass bubbles suspended in fish nets under restaurant awnings and the yachts beneath the St Georges Hotel, tethered so the wind couldn’t take off with them. She sighed. ‘I’ve worn the same bright expression over one thousand feelings.’ Her words were like something out of her diary.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m glad you can’t, Oliver. It would mean you would know how sad life can be.’

  ‘I do know.’

  ‘Too beautiful,’ the driver said, waving at the ocean whipped into whitecaps. Babette said nothing. Her face held a paralysed expression I’d never seen before; a mixture of grief and urgency. We came to a jumble of houses that didn’t look sure of themselves. Their tin roofs, beneath stone anchors and tangled powerlines, shook with the breeze. It made me think of Ringo and his home, and I wished I could see him again, instead of being trapped in some weird mission with this surly new Babette.

  ‘Here,’ she commanded. ‘Bas.’

  Since when did she speak Arabic?

  ‘This really where you want?’ The driver stared, unbelieving.

  Babette pulled a plump wallet from her handbag and paid him.

  ‘Madame, careful this.’ He pointed to her purse. ‘Here, many poor who want your money.’

  Babette pressed her bag to her chest and headed down an alley. ‘I’d only ever seen this as a blur heading on my way to the casino, until I stopped one day. Walid said that those wires are used to steal electricity from the street supply, because the people can’t afford it otherwise. The buildings look tipsy, don’t they?’

  I couldn’t think of anything to say except, ‘The walls are thin.’ I could hear hard Arabic, or maybe Kurdish voices through the broken brick and tin. Walid had told me about this place, too. He’d said that refugees from all over the Middle East lived here.

  We came to an open area where a tree was struggling to hold rope clotheslines, heavy with washing, strung on poles and hooks from perilous balconies.

  ‘I thought at first the washing on the lines were people dancing.’ Babette had a chatty voice that I’d barely ever heard before. A lady in a flowery dress squatted beside a slow-dripping tap, trying to will water from the spout. Hearing us, she looked up. Across the muddy clearing, a tiny boy who had been stuffed into a jumper too small for him tooted a tune on a tin pipe. A skinny dog with a bald back filched a banana from a baby girl. Babette ran at the dog, which snarled then cowered away. The squatting woman stared, the deep lines in her face unmoving. She had spooky, pale eyes. The baby girl cried, frightened. Babette rustled around in her handbag. ‘Got it somewhere.’ She flourished a wad of Lebanese notes.

  ‘What the hell you doing pulling that out here?’

  ‘Two hundred lira. That’s all I’ve got. But you know what Walid told me? That’s a Hamra Street shop assistant’s pay for a month.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what he paid me, when I had a job.’

  Babette ignored my complaint and handed the money to the woman.

  ‘Hey! Whatcha doing?’ Babette said. The woman clicked her tongue and looked puzzled. ‘She means no. She wants us to buzz off.’ A crowd had formed behind us. Babette clutched her handbag and I spread my arms to shield her.

  A girl with a brown face and honey-coloured hair tumbling over a dirt-streaked forehead stepped forward. She was younger than me but had an adult seriousness. ‘My aunt does not want to sell her baby.’

  Babette gasped. ‘I want to give her money. I don’t want –’

  ‘She’s not trying to buy a baby,’ I said.

  Babette threw the notes on the ground. I tried to scoop them up, but the wind caught the whole pile and made them leap into the air. People chased af
ter the runaway notes with loud whoops.

  ‘She’s giving money for the refugees?’ The girl inclined her head.

  ‘Yes.’

  The girl grabbed the few notes I’d picked up and stepped back, hiding them in her dress. The woman sitting at the tap jumped up, pulled Babette’s jaw towards her and kissed both cheeks. ‘Helou. Shookran. Beautiful. Thank you.’

  Around the corner, Babette wiped her face. Then we reeled away through the maze of small streets, breathing in wood smoke, exhaust fumes and rice steam.

  ‘I’m so stupid, thinking I could put any of it right,’ she said.

  ‘Put what right? Have you done something to these people?’

  ‘It wasn’t that woman’s loss; it was mine I was trying to fill.’

  ‘What’ve you lost?’ I looked back along the alleyway, thinking she had dropped something.

  ‘It’s too complicated to tell you.’ She refused to give any further explanation as she cursed along the treacherous footpath. With no money for a taxi, we had to walk home. Babette wouldn’t say one word. She just kept marching, getting her high heels caught in cracks and drain-holes; we had to keep stopping for me to pull her from the earth’s hold.

  ‘This is karma. I deserve to suffer.’

  I wanted the Babette back who would throw down a fag and light a bushfire. And just laugh.

  37

  Wedding

  There was a valley wider than the Bekaa inside me, the day of Sabine’s wedding. The more crowded the entryway to Paramount Apartments became, the emptier I felt. Eyes shone and the jostle of well-wishers gave off a chemical stink of dry-cleaning and hairspray as they wrestled to be near the bride. Walid, whose hair was a slick of grease, wrangled photos alone. After he’d thumped Dad, he hadn’t even bothered to tell me I was no longer his assistant. Why hadn’t I seen before that he was always inside the enemy camp?

  Even though the mountains were still laced with snow, the stench of rotting peel and burnt plastic swirled up from the quarry. I grabbed the old Nikon camera Walid had given me when we were still friends and pushed past the jingling earrings and people shouting things not meant for my ears. I climbed to the quarry top and sat in the dust, using the zoom to capture the painful scene. I couldn’t help it. I had to gouge one more memory.

  A procession of cars honked along the Corniche, then made smoking wheelies around the laneway corner. As the waiting crowds whistled, the cars, dressed for the wedding in a sea of pompoms, bows and dolls, bunched up the hill. Men in black berets surged around a limo with mirrored windows and a roof covered in a flower sculpture in the shape of the Lebanese cedar tree. Sharks in a shoal of daisies. Abdo pranced out in a shimmering sharkskin suit.

  I kept shooting, making the whole world mine in my lens, in competition with Walid, whose camera flashes jumped through the narrow windows of Sabine’s flat. Above the giggles, there was sudden, urgent movement in the lane. Abdo’s sharks raced down the hill, guns raised, towards a lurking van. My heart vibrated as one of the black berets pointed up at me. He relaxed when I lifted my camera and waved. He pushed the van door open and a surge of laughter rose up to where I was sitting. It was an ambush – by dancers and musicians in bright head-scarves. They poured from the van in red, gold and purple harem pants and ran into the courtyard. Two men beat animal hide drums. Others wove snakes of sound in the air with their flared pipes, while the women shimmied their arms and shook their heads over their backs.

  Sabine stood between her father and Abdo, at the spot where I’d first seen her, and looked up. She was Sabine, but not Sabine, in a snowy dress folded down her curves like pillows of cake icing. Through the zoom I could see that her cheeks and lips had been painted the colour of cherries and her eyebrows drawn as black as crow’s wings. Already, in her marriage mask, she looked older, far gone from me. She lifted her hem and moved down the stairs.

  She’s leaving him and coming to me.

  She began running towards me.

  What’ll I do with her?

  Shut up, heart! I’d only lost her for a moment in the lens. She was in the courtyard, watching the dancers. One had handed her a sword. She held it with both hands above her head and waggled her hips. Then she passed it to a friend, who shoved it into the air and took up the dance. I dropped the camera into the dust. Sabine didn’t look like any girl I could ever have.

  A shadow crept over the quarry, turning my skin cold, and I felt all love drop away. I tasted the bile of my hatred for Abdo. With each blaze of joy from Sabine, I writhed lower into the dust. The guests joined hands, formed into curved lines and began a slow, rocking dance called the dabke. I’d learnt it while shooting weddings with Walid. Step a leg forward, lift the other high, drop it down and then move forward again, all to a tune snaking from a flared pipe. I closed my eyes to hear if I still had a heartbeat.

  When I opened them, I could see Walid’s pointed chin lifted as he hopped in rhythm with the line of men, his arrow-shaped eyebrows raised, as if they were part of the flute’s musical score. I took his picture.

  Just like Babette and the pain I read in her diaries. Each click hurt.

  Abdo’s bodyguards held their rifles across their chests, lifting their feet in the dabke line, their eyes panning the street for danger. One had a Virgin Mary painted on his gun’s stock. With each leap, I felt further away.

  Unbelonging.

  Above Sabine’s dancing shoulders, I could almost see bubbles fizzing, as if she was a glass of champagne. She must have lied when she said she didn’t want to marry him. Or maybe he had won her heart because he was a man who used a gun. When the music stopped, she walked along a pathway to the Mercedes, lifting her frothy dress and crying. It was the last time I would ever see her.

  The women pulsated their tongues like cicadas in a Sydney summer. And then everyone had left for the church, while I sat with the vibration of their car horns in my head.

  ‘Some people hurt me, I fight,’ Ringo had said. I yearned to see him. He was my only friend in the world. The only time I’d ever felt like I belonged here was when I’d clattered down the Corniche with him on the skateboard.

  The drone of a blowfly hung in my head all night. I got no sleep. Early in the morning I took a taxi to Ringo’s camp. His apartment was clogged with sleeping bodies. I waited with my heart swelling, hopeful. Some men, groggy with sleep, prayed towards Mecca on their roll-up mats. I hadn’t seen Ringo for about a month and, as he limped into Souhar’s lounge room like an old man, I saw that he had changed again. His arm was in a sling, and his hair and sideburns had grown long and frizzy. He said he’d broken his elbow running through a village in the south as Israeli shells fell.

  ‘And these, my family, our friends. From the south. No homes now. They are afraid.’ He’d grown pudgy in a way that didn’t seem soldier-like. ‘My mother make me eat. She think she can make a pillow around me. Then nobody can hurt me.’ He smiled.

  Ringo’s room smelt of sweat, mothballs and used air; it was crammed with children, mostly asleep. Kid city. Ringo pushed aside a few of the lumps beneath the covers and whispered in a kind of code that thrilled me but left me unclear about his plan.

  ‘You know that thing we make?’ he said. ‘We need money to buy from a man.’

  ‘I’ve got money.’

  ‘You know a good place in the country, far from Beirut, where we can take her?

  ‘Her?’

  ‘Heem.’

  ‘You mean the thing like the thing that I put in the man’s garden in Sydney?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘The Bekaa valley? It’s big.’

  ‘No, too many criminals in the Bekaa. Hashish.’

  Mr Stickler had told me that the farmers there grew hash, even though aid agencies paid them to plant other crops. They made so much from Lebanese gold that they put sunflowers around the paddock edges and filled the rest with Mary Jane. Genius!

  ‘You know somewhere else?’

  I thought I knew what Ringo wanted me to say. ‘
The forest near Beit Zizi.’

  ‘Abu Iyad says forest is good.’

  I suspected that Abu Iyad wanted me to say Beit Zizi, too, but I still asked, ‘Is he cool with us doing this?’

  Ringo nodded. ‘Good place, Inshallah. Thank you, Olifer.’

  His approval made me feel warm and real. I gave him the photo of himself with the gun. He held it out with both hands, as if it were a holy book, and carried it to Souhar, who left off stirring her steaming stew and replaced a faded family portrait in a frame on a table with it.

  ‘Shookran, Olifer.’ She pinched my cheeks and I could see a beautiful rose colour in hers.

  I wish this was my family.

  ‘Maybe one day Mahmoud will not be here and I will have only this photo.’

  Ringo lowered his eyes. ‘Ach, nobody can kill me, Mama.’ That was the first moment that I really believed someone could.

  38

  Milk and Honey

  Jess and I slouched together on the couch after school and let TV flicker and babble wash over us. He wore a worried face.

  ‘Are you ever homesick, Ollie?’

  I shrugged. ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like a nice meat pie, dripping with tomato sauce?’

  I sat up, remembering the way the gravy burnt your tongue once it busted through the pastry. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Back home, they make them with mice tails. We’ve got the ingredients.’

  I turned at him and lifted my hands towards his neck. ‘You’d make good mincemeat.’ He laughed and ran into his room, and I saw that he had continued to be a mere kid while I had grown up.

  It was early March before I could escape to Ringo’s camp with my money. Some days, the thought of the slashes in his wrists made me baulk at going. I loved his tragic frown, the sense of adventure that took him into the creepy southern night. But I didn’t want those gouges, ever, in my arms.