Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

Then, I discovered something that made me feel as bitterly alone as he was. Babette and Dad were out, blasting their brains with booze, and I found 1964 at last, bundled up in a mink jacket. Blank pages. Just one entry, whose words made me cold as I read them on the marble floor.

  I burrowed my face into Phillip’s chest. My tears flooded across his pyjama top. My nose was streaming. My breasts hurt – they were bursting.

  He understood why I was crying. He put his mouth over first one breast, then the other, draining out the useless milk, then gagging in the bathroom. Maybe he thought he would draw out the pain but, although I got physical relief, it was still there. I sensed a contraction. A shrinking womb. I was filled with emptiness …

  I peered at the pale sky. I could smell the milk, the honey scent of baby. I’d once licked a drop of Mum’s milk as she fed Jess. It was sweet and thin. No wonder Dad’s forehead crease had deepened as he struggled to keep Babette.

  She’ll always be in love with someone else.

  The pair returned in the evening, smelling of whiskey and smoke. I could tell by the shadow in her eyes that they’d been fighting. He was already three-quarters through the whiskey bottle labelled ‘Lawrence’, which he’d carried home from the Mayflower. He sloshed out more whiskey. ‘Five fingers. None of this two-finger bar crap.’ I could see he was planning to skol the rest of the bottle, so I went to bed. The shouts filtered through Mum’s shadow-ghost, which had slipped into my room.

  ‘I was not flaunting myself. I need more than cockpit talk.’

  ‘You’re a madwoman. Look at you. Brazen. Why’d you have to ruin everything?’

  If he wanted to hit Babette, I couldn’t stop him. They moved off the subject of whatever Babette was doing at the bar. Their quarrel was punctuated with my name: ‘Oliver … Oliver.’

  If I go away forever, they might stop.

  I couldn’t change one thing in this whole world. I was all wrung out. I looked in the mirror. There it was, trouble worn into my forehead in a savage line – like Dad’s – and in the skin pulled taut across my cheeks. I had finally got my adult face.

  The flies at Ringo’s camp weren’t worried about the rain. They clung to his back as he led me through the narrow-gutted lanes with sharp stones and squelching mud. I followed the rise and fall of the travelling insects until we reached a faded blue door with a keyhole stuffed with screwed-up paper. Ringo gave a high whistle, sticking his tongue beneath the gap of his top teeth, his moustache hanging over his rosy lip. The dwarfish man who opened the door hugged Ringo as gently as a lover and, when he turned, revealed a face with one eye, the other a sunken socket. His right eye was the good one. The Hamra pusher had lost his left eye. I imagined them walking down Hamra together, freaking out the tourists.

  We were in a tall room with a shaft of light from a high window spotlighting uneven rows of boxes on shelves. Above a plain metal chair, a gallery of pictures was sticky-taped to the wall: a beach with a thin palm trunk leaning over the sand; the face of a girl with a chin dimple and ringlets; a weaving showing a map of Palestine.

  The photo of a plane on a tarmac, under a headline: HIJACKED

  The man held his hand behind his back, under his jacket. I stayed behind Ringo, thinking there might be a gun in it. The man spoke in a whisper, as though his voice box had been shot out. He trained his one eye on me. I had the urge to wink, to see whether his eye would wink in reply, but he was all business, so I made my face serious. The words ‘Australia’ and ‘Fedayi’ kept repeating in the ribbon of Arabic sentences. Ringo’s and the man’s hands almost touched as they whirled around. The two made their own circle. I hung outside it.

  The man offered me a basket of lollies the colour of jewels in transparent wrappers. I took one and became part of the circle.

  ‘He says he must to go back to his house to smoke, because he cannot smoke here, so all day he chews these,’ Ringo said. ‘They make him strong so he can work.’

  The man grinned. His teeth were thin yellow pegs with lime-green roots.

  ‘Why can’t he smoke?’

  Ringo gestured towards a rusty door. ‘They make the things we need for the south in there.’

  The things we need for the south. I’d never imagined that Ringo would bring me to an arms factory. I felt ignorant and flattered, all at once. And then a thrilling zing of fear flashed through my bowels.

  This is the kind of secret people are killed to keep.

  The man reached up to a lopsided shelf with his left hand, which had no thumb. He slid it under a dented green suitcase and grabbed the other side with his good hand, easing it down as if it held a thousand eggs. It was a Hawaiian shirt of a suitcase, ready to go on holidays, covered in yellow stickers and threaded with worms of Arabic script. Ringo took it and set it down on a bench with shaky hands.

  ‘It’s a very big suitcase for a bit of explosive to shove into a cigar.’ I wasn’t sure that I wanted it, especially because Ringo was standing back, looking intimidated.

  The man’s eye bulged as he observed us. I could see his thoughts in that one eye. He wanted to be rid of us. ‘I give you bargain. You want a little bomb. I give you a big one. Same price.’ I handed him my five hundred Lebanese pounds, as we had agreed. He slapped me on the back. ‘I give you this because Abu Iyad tell me. You take it. Don’t tell me what you gonna do now. Just do it.’ He waved his hand at Ringo: ‘Yallah.’ As we left the room, I heard a half-guffaw.

  Outside, Ringo offered the case to me. I imagined I saw a quiver in his heavy eyelids, but that couldn’t be right because he was a commando, accustomed to the strain of carrying weapons. ‘I can’t take this home. You know my mama. She will look inside, then she will yell and hit me.’

  Ringo leant towards me in the muddy laneway. I took a step back. The door to the factory was shut; just another door acting as a door should. It wasn’t going to change anything. I wished I could unfurl a hanky from my pocket and make myself disappear. I tried to conjure what Mr Cool, Dom, would say. Something like, ‘This is too heavy for me, man.’ But I couldn’t speak. The significance of this moment, which could now cascade into other, heavier moments, was both scary and magnetic.

  I followed Ringo with a resigned step as he walked me and the case to the camp’s edge. Dad said that the Lebanese were fatalists. I belonged now. Ringo hailed a taxi, and gave the driver my address.

  ‘Take it. Be quick,’ he said. ‘I am afraid of trouble now. You sleep good. I call you.’

  I sat rigidly, the suitcase across my knees, hoping that the vibrations from my heart wouldn’t explode whatever was inside. ‘Don’t shake it,’ Ringo had said. Later, I’d wonder if he’d hypnotised me. Magicians do that. They get audience members to bark like dogs and sniff people’s bottoms and remember nothing later.

  The taxi’s rear-view mirror showed my eyelids stretched wide. So that was what fear looked like on my face. I’d felt it, but I’d never seen it.

  I couldn’t trust the shuddering lift, so I carried the case upstairs, holding it level over my head. I got it inside without anyone seeing and sat it on my bed. It had a presence. I imagined it was ticking, but when I shifted my ear closer, I realised that the clicks were in my eardrums. I lay the case flat and lowered a pillow over it, followed by a blanket.

  Even Al Orentz had had to do things he didn’t want to. He’d lived on green date and camel sinew. He’d shot one of his followers in the chest to prevent a feud. The man had still been crying out, when Lawrence had broken his wrist with another bullet, then got him in the neck. Next day, Al Orentz had had to be lifted onto his camel. Some might say he was weak, but he did what hurt him most, because he had to.

  39

  Zombies

  I left the suitcase on the bed and got no sleep on a rug I’d spread on the floor, as far from the bomb as possible. By morning, when it had stayed mute and inactive, I crept to it, uncovered it and admired it with grit-filled eyes. I pushed two rusted metal buttons until the locks sprung open with a quiver that rippled
through me.

  The gelignite nested in its brown wrapper beside a boxy battery, the silent clock’s circuit of wires looped to the detonator. The whole contraption was a metal bud waiting to flower – innocent, neat, rich with promise. I would be the one to make it blow, high in the mountains. The thought made me shiver.

  A door hinge creaked down the hallway. I shut the case and lifted it, as I’d seen the one-eyed man do, with a hand on either side. My hands shook. I manoeuvred it into the wardrobe, just before Dad walked in, imposing in his uniform, zipping his fly, wearing a time-to-be-a-responsible-father expression.

  ‘You’re for the sin bin this time, matey,’ he said. ‘There’s a trail of evidence.’ I fell back on the bed. My knees were stuffed with wadding, unable to hold my trembling thighs. ‘You could act like most self-respecting teenagers and smoke around the corner. But it smells like someone’s been burning off rubbish in the bath. Dead giveaway.’

  I hadn’t known I was holding my breath until it rushed out in a loud, ‘Oh!’

  ‘Yes … oh!’

  ‘It was Jess,’ I whispered. He was the one crying out to get caught, smoking in the bathroom. And Gauloises, the idiot – the stinkiest cigarette. ‘I always cop the flak.’

  ‘All right, maybe it was Boy Wonder this time.’ Dad crinkled his eyes. ‘What a class-A twerp.’

  He must have seen the way my face felt; cold, as if blood couldn’t reach that far from my heart. He sat down beside me. ‘You look unwell.’

  I thought about telling him. But how? ‘There’s a bomb in the wardrobe. I thought I was buying an exploding cigar. Instead, I got a suitcase packed with gellie.’

  The silence, the not-saying, brought something strange to my lips. ‘Do you think Grandad will ever find Mum?’

  The rims of Dad’s eyelids reddened. ‘Best not to think about her.’ He gave my hand a gentle squeeze. Normally, he never touched me, except to hurt, maybe because he believed I was of the same cursed flesh as Mum.

  He knows something. He knows she’s dead.

  But his quavering reply shocked me. ‘I did love that woman.’

  I was too frozen with sadness to speak. In the silence that followed, he left. I hung about the apartment all day, eager for Ringo’s call, but the phone was as silent as the suitcase.

  Dad arrived home long after dark. ‘Lights out. You don’t know where Babette is, do you?’ I didn’t. The night felt hollow. When I lay down, I imagined a tick tick tick in the room.

  My eyes apparently closed and I fell into a deep sleep, because in the snail-grey gloom of dawn I had to find the energy to pry them open and let in the daylight. I’d swung around again to wishing that the suitcase was imaginary. But it was still there.

  Dad woke with a crumpled face and blew noisy bubbles under the shower, until the phone rang and he thumped in wet feet down the hallway, cursing Jess and me for not answering.

  ‘Ops has rung in a panic. I’ve got to do an overnighter to the Gulf.’ He handed me a roll of Lebanese lira. ‘Look after your little brother, will you? Babette’s sleeping off a big one.’

  Hmmm. Jess was a complication. I’d just have to take him, if Ringo called. I knocked on his door using our secret code for brother seeking entry. He had a new door sign:

  ZOMBIES EAT BRAINS

  SO YOU’RE SAFE

  ‘Come.’ He was sitting cross-legged on his bed, reading The Famous Five.

  ‘Wanna go for a cardboard burn up at Beit Zizi?’

  ‘You mean that cool slope near Madame Khoury’s joint? Yeah! Best sliding.’

  Ringo called, said we should meet downstairs at nine. I carefully pulled the bomb out of the cupboard. My camera bag clanking against my side, I carried the scary suitcase down the entranceway stairs, where I met Jess with his pile of cardboard slides. I yanked a dark curtain over the thought that if I got hurt, so would Jess.

  He was such a stickybeak. ‘Why’ve you got that case? You running away from home?’

  ‘Nah, that’d be a stick and hanky job. It’s Ringo’s.’

  ‘Why’s he coming?’

  ‘Just to hang out.’

  Jess narrowed his eyes until they became Dad’s. That sealed my conviction that I couldn’t tell him about the bomb. He loved an opportunity to snitch. Especially now, since I’d dobbed him in for toking the Gauloises.

  Ringo appeared out of nowhere, like a spy from the shadows, and I handed him the suitcase. He pointed at my camera. ‘You take picture?’

  I indicated the pesky small brother’s presence with my eyebrows. ‘Yeah. Gotta. This is gonna be awesome fun. You’ll want a photo as a souvenir.’

  Ringo shrugged and hailed a taxi. He slid into the front, balancing the suitcase over his thighs, as if it held crystal.

  The driver was nosy, looking from Ringo to me to Jess and back again. ‘Where you from?’

  ‘Australia,’ Jess squeaked.

  ‘Australia,’ Ringo echoed.

  The driver gave him a dubious look. ‘Palestinian?’

  ‘No.’ Ringo looked away. ‘Tourist. We take picture. Beit Zizi, min fadlak.’

  The driver spun to me. ‘What for you go there? I know people in this village. Where you stay?’

  I hoped he wouldn’t hear when I mumbled, ‘Madame Khoury.’

  ‘I know her. She is family to me. By marriage.’

  I sighed. ‘Just like everyone in friggin’ Lebanon, eh, Jess?’ But Jess just looked ahead expectantly with his sweet-boy face.

  Ringo shouted an Arabic instruction at the driver.

  ‘Cool it, man,’ I whispered urgently. ‘Don’t want no vibrations.’ I hoped that was code enough so the driver couldn’t understand.

  The driver twisted to me again. ‘You happy to share this taxi with this man?’

  ‘Yes. I’m happy. I’m delirious.’ I knew he wouldn’t understand that word. My mouth grew sour with bile and lies. There was a singer on the radio, and I focused on her deep warbling, wishing that I was being rocked on a fishing boat on the Mediterranean, shiny blue in my eyes and a bright day ahead.

  Ringo jiggled his knees to the music. ‘Fairouz.’

  The driver smiled, maybe forgiving Ringo for seeming Palestinian. ‘Best singer in world. From Egypt.’

  If Ringo keeps moving his knees, Fairouz will kill us.

  The driver handed around Chiclets. Then, as Ringo gazed at the countryside rushing past, the man tossed us meaningful looks in his rear-view mirror, asking if Jess and I needed help. I looked away. And so we kept spiralling upwards, overtaking everyone else, only slowing at hairpin bends. The suitcase slid across Ringo’s knees. I grew dizzy, my shoulders locked in a hunch. I beat back that image sliding into my mind, of Yasmin’s father’s useless, dead belly.

  ‘Shouay, shouay.’ Jess chewed the gum with chattering teeth. ‘S-s-s-slow down.’

  The driver dropped to a crawl. ‘You pay many American dollars, I drive you any way you want. You want me to go over this cliff, I go – no, no, just kidding.’

  Ringo ignored all of us. He either possessed total confidence, or so much fear that he was paralysed. Normal Lebanese life rolled by. A river glugged past. Orange restaurant awnings clapped in the wind. A shepherd leant on his crook to limp across a parched paddock. A soldier reached up to a truck window to take baksheesh with a lazy hand.

  Finally, Madame Khoury’s ornate gates seemed such old friends that, for a moment, I enjoyed a sense of safe arrival. We could have gone in, down the hall and past the saints to drink her lemonade, pretending all was normal.

  But we drove past. The house was shuttered and still. The driver shook his head. ‘You know someone shot at her fruit? Imagine that.’

  We stopped near the forest. I winced as Ringo swung the suitcase onto the stony road. He handed the driver the hundred American dollars that I’d borrowed from Dad’s den drawer. The driver didn’t offer any change, and Ringo didn’t ask.

  Then, suddenly, it felt fantastic to be out in the rippling breeze, breathing crispness. I p
ulled the cardboard from the boot. The taxi tyres crunched away across the gravel, loud in the cold mountain air. On the grassy sliding slope near the forest, I set Jess up with the flattened pieces of cardboard.

  ‘We’ve got a secret magic trick we’re going to practise. It might be loud.’

  ‘Aw, what’s in the suitcase? Can’t I come? Just wait for me while I do a few slides.’

  ‘No. It’s dangerous. If you hear really loud bangs, stay down the bottom of the slope till I come and get you.’

  ‘Yeah, I know about the cigar bomb. Waste of good tobacco.’ Jess trundled away, throwing me the sort of look I used to give Mum when she went into her room to shoot up and I knew there was nothing I could do to stop her.

  40

  The Bird-killing Forest

  Ringo seemed changed. I trotted beside his stiff military step and puffed chest to the forest clearing where I’d photographed the family picnic. Shredded orange shotgun shells lay scattered in the dust, bright as party poppers. Dead birds’ feathers clustered in the dry leaves beside them.

  ‘Not this place.’ Ringo’s eyes flicked and refocused on the scenery around us, like the bodyguards I’d seen checking out the Corniche before the American Ambassador’s limo paraded along the road. Ringo’s black ringlets trembled against his shiny olive skin, but even if these were signs of fear, he was not my Ringo, the one who pretended a Kalashnikov was a guitar. He was Mahmoud, commando. And suddenly, we weren’t having fun. My body was seized with a tremor that wouldn’t stop, and I turned for a moment to watch Jess’s back disappearing over the grassy slope. I yearned to be him, to be with him. I took a step backwards.

  ‘Olifer. I need you.’ Ringo’s brown eyes had a wounded look. He put the suitcase down and strode into the forest, leaving me as bomb-minder and lookout, with the birds around me twittering that all was well with the world. I couldn’t desert him, even though he was treading on ground where Walid’s father had his grave.