Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  I flapped my arms to scare the birds away; I didn’t want them to be blown up. They flustered together, as if they’d read my mind, then resettled on the branches that rose towards their claws like gesticulating hands. The fields around the forest were full of scarecrows. Perhaps the birds had become immune to human tricks.

  I used the time to set up my camera, fitting the long lens, testing the forest light.

  Ringo returned, panting. ‘Found it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What I look for.’

  He lifted the suitcase and I followed him. He set it down in a clearing, next to a cave with old wooden planks crisscrossed over the entrance, held together by bent, rusty nails. The forest was so thick that trees leant across the clumsy doorway.

  ‘I start clock. Then, we must run for five minutes. Tayeeb?’ The wind shook shadows across his face.

  ‘Okay.’ My fingers were purple with cold, but they slid, slick with sweat, over my long camera lens.

  Ringo took off his coat and squatted over the suitcase, his back to me, his khaki bum hanging over the worn-out soles of his commando boots. The gun on his hip, which had been hidden by his coat, rubbed the heel of one boot. Who did he think he was going to shoot? He flipped open each lock with his thumbs and began the delicate work of attaching the batteries to the rest of the device.

  We held our breaths; the only thing I could hear was the swish of my blood.

  The camera shutter speed had to be slow because of the muddiness of the light, so I didn’t start shooting until he lifted his hands out of the suitcase.

  Ringo heard the shutter click and he jumped up, reeling, his hands fluttering, separate from the rest of him. He shuffled backwards through the dead leaves. ‘Kasachta.’ He swore and whacked me across the head. I lifted my camera lens but he pushed it down. We stood and watched the suitcase for possibly a second, maybe a minute. The wind dropped enough to hear a faint tschk tschk tschk tschk. I wanted it to stop. But it wouldn’t.

  The bomb was already blowing up my life while it ticked under the trees.

  Then we ran, Ringo hauling me by the elbow as I kicked my goofy non-runner’s legs behind me. No part of me belonged to myself. As the trees raced by in staccato light, I could not believe that I was propelling myself forward. The trees never seemed to change. I pushed my legs as hard as I could, but the backdrop was the same: jangly flashes of wood, light and shadow. The frigid mountain air gushed into the heat of my lungs.

  I overtook Ringo, reached the slope top and saw that Jess was flying down on his cardboard slide, elbows held high. The sky flashed. I turned. Flames surged high, drowning the fir trees deep in the forest. The boom knocked me over. A needle of air pushed into my right ear, piercing through it. Radiant heat roiled out of the forest in a wave, chasing the sound. I fell face first into gravel, unable to breathe, my lungs flattened. Explosions kept coming, and I could taste the burning rawness of wood.

  I glimpsed Jess at the bottom. Crossing my hands over my chest, I rolled down the hill with a magic bubble of air cushioning me against snags and rocks.

  When I reached the bottom, I may have passed through the slit in the universe. Jess was standing above me. He was yelling, scared, his mouth a black cave. When he saw me, he stopped and his tongue hung out. I thought of a hank of intestine I’d seen looped over a hook at the meat market.

  ‘Oliver!’

  I pulled up onto my elbows, but the thunderclaps in my ears unbalanced me and I had to lie down again onto the sharp earth, a stick in my ribs, a rock shoving into a shoulder blade. I felt jointed, like a butchered lamb, but I stood up.

  I can’t get caught. This is so big. Too big.

  There was something I had to remember.

  Jess’s panic became my pain.

  ‘Are you hurt, Jess?’

  ‘No, but you, Oliver, you have blood – there!’

  I touched my face. I was screaming, but without making a noise.

  There was something I had to remember. The spaces between objects and between seconds seemed to have lengthened.

  Jess became my guide in my new world. He picked up my camera, which had crashed down the slope. He pointed out a path around Madame Khoury’s house, away from the crack of the forest fire.

  We skittered across her hillside, leaning into it as if it was a comfortable bosom. We climbed through the lemon grove, crept into the shadows of Madame Khoury’s house and rested our backs against its solid stone walls. Jess brought the spewing mouth of a garden hose to me, making me want to cry with gratitude. I guzzled and gulped, but the taste of smoke and despair wouldn’t wash away.

  Urgent figures flitted past the tall hedge fence out front. A siren spiralled above the yelling, beyond the explosions still resonating in my head. A fire engine’s red light shivered along the corrugated metal of the fence opposite. Smoke poured like liquid across the thin grey sky edged with a poisoned, fluorescent-lime glow.

  The light cleared my memory. ‘Did you see Ringo?’

  ‘He fell down the slope and then disappeared down there.’ Jess pointed past the lemon grove. I remembered then: Ringo–Mahmoud was a trained soldier on a mission.

  I’m a kid who knows nothing. Did we do that? Did we really do that?

  A bird on fire flew across the ashen sky. I heard a sob burst out of my chest. I had never planned to hurt a bird.

  41

  Pomegranate Cordial

  The crisp air snapped and swirled with smoke eddies. Branches crackled, giving themselves up to the fire. Hoses pumped and hissed.

  ‘Your eyes are spinning like frisbees.’ Jess was bug-eyed himself.

  Walid appeared and hovered, a shadow against the torrid sky above us. He squatted and his face, pressed close to mine, revealed a new thinness, sharpening his chin. His eyes smarted with the smoke.

  Jess grabbed him in a hug, shaking tears over him. ‘Oliver was nearly killed and we don’t know where Ringo is.’

  ‘Who’s Ringo?’

  ‘A Beatle,’ I said.

  ‘Oliver, you look like you just came back from the dead. Were you boys in that forest? There’s been an explosion. I can’t understand –’

  ‘I was sliding.’

  ‘We were sliding,’ Jess chimed in.

  ‘You’re not hurt?’

  I shook my head, but in Lebanese that means I don’t know. He frowned, running his fingers through the dark sprouts of his short, tangled hair. He grabbed the garden hose with quick, jerky movements, unravelling its loops. ‘I’ve got to get water on to the other side of the house. Don’t you boys come any closer! Your face is covered in soot, Oliver.’

  I wiped ash from my jaw. Walid grabbed the fizzing nozzle and ran around the corner of the house in his scarlet slippers.

  I bared my teeth at Jess. ‘Don’t dob on Ringo and don’t dob on me. And never, ever, tell anyone about the bomb.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was a bomb. I thought you were exploding a cigar.’

  He gaped at the orange-less orange trees. Tears so big they seemed to well from deep inside dripped down his face. ‘They’re gonna kill Ringo.’ He choked and burrowed one wet eye into my sleeve. I let his chest shake against my arm; it felt good because I had my own scared child within me. ‘We should run now. We’re gonna get into trouble.’

  ‘We’re not in trouble,’ I said. ‘We didn’t do anything.’

  ‘They’ll know Ringo put the bomb there. They’ll know he’s fedayeen. And then they’ll kill us for bringing him here.’

  ‘They won’t find out we brought him if you don’t dob.’

  ‘The taxi driver will tell them.’

  ‘Stop it, Jess.’

  I thought of Ringo, scrambling down the hillside, across the fields, hiding behind mean bushes with scrawny leaves. A small horror play unfolded in my head. I saw a farmer with a wrinkled brown face shooting him, then turning him over to Phalangist militiamen, who tied him up with wire and dragged him behind a car on a rocky road until they were sure he was d
ead.

  Ringo had to get all the way back to Beirut. I looked for some sign of him below Madame Khoury’s orange trees. Everything was still and distant, as if the world had fallen into a coma. I was a miniature ornament on the shelf of the great Lebanon range. From where I crouched on the green grass; the orchard dropped down to nubbly olive-tinged farmlands. In the fields, the tops of pink roofs spread over people leading their private indoor lives. I could see the Lebanese coast and ships out on the hazy sea, faraway dinky toys. Beirut was further still, beyond a brown fog.

  ‘Maybe Ringo’s just down there. We could find him, help him home.’ I wanted to stand up but found it difficult even to lift an arm. My mind flashed to the metal sculpture in the Place des Martyrs in Beirut – a man lying on his side, pointing one finger to the sky, trying to tell the world something.

  Jess curled up on the ground; twigs he’d picked up hill-surfing were woven through his grey jumper. ‘Ringo just used us to get here. He’s a sponge.’

  ‘Aw, why’d I bring you? You’re the sponge.’ But I felt a blast of love for Jess, bigger than the bomb. I touched his arm.

  He pulled away. ‘You are so busted, Oliver.’

  The knot in my chest tightened. He was probably right.

  Walid returned, his slippers soaked, chin covered in charcoal. I wished Babette could see him like that, his smooth charm blown away, worse than when Dad punched him. He grabbed Jess’s shoulders. ‘Come on. You have to get away from here. The fire’s heading towards the house.’

  That made my legs work. ‘Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.’

  Walid crossed himself. ‘So this is what it takes to make you believe.’

  We ran up the road, the heat from the fire toasting us, a sudden summer under the weakling sun. Behind us, a babbling mob cheered the firefighters.

  ‘I’m sending you home in a taxi,’ Walid said.

  Jess wailed that he was thirsty, so Walid ordered pomegranate cordial in an empty village café, where games of tric trac had been abandoned on the tables. As we drank, another fire engine hurried past, men clinging on with cowboy hankies around their mouths.

  Walid massaged his drooping cheeks. ‘Do you know anything about this fire?’

  ‘No-ooo.’ Jess’s eyes were innocent round discs.

  ‘I’m at the top of the slope, and suddenly I’m down the bottom.’ I was telling the truth, sort of. I held my palms up to indicate it was a mystery.

  Walid seemed to believe us. His eyebrows arched. ‘We think the Palestinians have blown up the weapons that Abdo’s militia kept in the forest.’

  Jess grimaced. ‘Did you catch them?’

  ‘No.’

  The memory of Abdo’s swagger and the way he fondled his gun as it sat on his belt hit me. I began to shake.

  Madame Khoury’s house might burn down.

  I began the brainwork needed to be a good liar. I was the photographer, not the bomber, I reminded myself. And then I remembered.

  There are images of Ringo setting the bomb in my camera.

  ‘Jess! My camera. I thought you had it.’

  ‘Dropped it so I could run faster. I’ll get it.’

  Walid yelled for Jess to stop, but he’d already dashed away. Walid followed. I hung on the road, watching as they left on their mission, my teeth tap-dancing now that I’d completed my own. In all the commotion I’d forgotten that Sabine lived here now. I gazed across the square to her squat villa, but there was no sign of life.

  Jess came back with the camera, brushing grass stalks from it. ‘Left it not too far from the house.’

  I kissed the lens and hugged it to my chest. Walid returned, puffing, and slapped Jess across the back of the head. ‘Ow.’ He flashed Walid a defiant look.

  ‘The camera’s not that valuable. Nor is any photo.’ Walid fixed his eyes on mine. There was a fondness in them, and I realised that he had given me something precious. I began to feel ashamed that we’d blown up the land where his father was buried.

  The taxi driver only spoke Arabic. I tied my peace headband around Jess’s mouth to shut him up, but he ripped it off and slumped into his seat, grey light flitting in his eyes as he fixed his gaze on the smoky sky. I was cut up for him, but he was also my danger zone. If he blabbed, I was busted.

  I tugged his arm but he refused to look at me. ‘Jess, tell the driver we’ve got to go down there, to those farms. We’ve got to find Ringo.’

  He scowled. Suddenly, he had the power because he could speak passable Arabic. But he obeyed. I scoured the scenery, hoping to catch sight of Ringo loping like a wolf, dodging any posse like a real commando. I remembered him showing me a photo of a dead fedayeen and saying, ‘Do you think I look like him?’ Ringo’s eager face had not looked like the man’s at all. The man’s teeth had stuck out in a death howl.

  But he might look like him now.

  As we squeezed through the narrow streets of limestone villages, with a crucified Jesus swinging on the taxi’s rear-view mirror, I felt each lump in my spine pressed against the back seat. There was an oddness to being alive.

  Halfway down the mountain the sea showed itself again, but a cloud covered Cyprus. A ute approached, blinking headlights. It drew alongside us; a flock of panicked goats surged around our taxi and the ute. Fighters in black T-shirts and jeans, bristling with weapons, were jammed into the tray, standing, sitting, swaying, eyes popping, skin taut with tension. A teenager with the same wine-barrel shape as Sabine swayed on her toes. Curls the colour of claret dropped down to her fingers, where the face of the Virgin Mary peeped from her gun’s stock. The Virgin held her wistful face to one side, making her halo lopsided. She would have to stay like that, saintly and sorry, even when the gun killed someone – maybe Ringo.

  ‘Kataeb.’ The taxi-driver pointed. ‘Phalange. Kwais. Good.’

  ‘We can’t go looking for Ringo with him.’ Jess was right.

  The fighters are headed to Beit Zizi. They want Ringo.

  My eyes hunted all over the ute for Abdo. But he wasn’t there.

  They would want me, too, if they knew what I’d done.

  42

  Anthem

  We arrived home to an echoing, lonely apartment. I dialled Ringo’s number. A child picked up the phone and answered my garbled question with, ‘Mahmoud, mish hone.’ Click. Ringo wasn’t there.

  I hung under the steaming shower, trying to scour myself clean of the fire, the smoke, the exploding bird and Ringo’s flickering silhouette as he ran, abandoning me. When I tried to sleep the explosions hung in my head.

  In the deep part of the night, the part that I thought of as a valley, I realised that Walid would phone Babette and Dad to tell them about the explosion and the fire, and to ask what Jess and I were up to at Beit Zizi. But for now, the only commotion came from the mice scrabbling in their holes. Babette and Dad were out. I crept through the swordplay of moonbeams in the hallway to yank out the phone plugs in the living room and kitchen. I lifted my face to the moon, which was reflecting my old mate, the sun, back to me. I felt as if I was lost in the moon’s dimmest patch, where the Ocean of Storms lay.

  Babette’ll save me from Dad. She always does.

  I sank back into nightmares. My palm held the back of Ringo’s skull and his body arched beside me. I stood chest-deep in a pool, sparks of phosphorescence swirling over the aqua water. Ringo’s khaki commando uniform billowed around him, floating just below the surface.

  ‘Wahad, tnain, tlaytee. Flip.’ I was teaching him to perform backwards somersaults. Above, an old biplane fell towards us, roaring flames and trailing a shimmering jet stream. As it crashed into the pool, I recognised Walid as the pilot. That woke me up.

  The caustic daylight burnt away this awful dream. I was grateful to be here, in the day. But this was not like other times, waking from other dreams. The memories of the bomb didn’t disintegrate. They hung on, solid as tiles, hard and bright, but without pattern. The thud, the flash, the air lifting me and thumping me down.

>   Who am I to have done such a thing?

  Ringo, running so fast that his toes barely touched the knotty weed-grass. Jess, gliding down, hair thrust high. Disappearing. That thought sent me helter-skelter into Jess’s bedroom. I sighed with relief.

  He’s really here.

  He lay twisted in his sheets, mumbling and thrashing. Babette’s shawl, shoes and stockings trailed from the front door, and Dad’s zonked-out snores vibrated through their bedroom door.

  It might be the last time they sleep so snugly, not knowing who they’ve harboured.

  A key grated in the door lock, followed by Souhar’s piercing cough. High-voltage fear coursed through my veins. Oh, God, had she heard from Ringo? If I asked, would she speak about Beit Zizi? Did she know that Ringo had gone there?

  I waited until she’d started working. I couldn’t breathe as I walked towards the familiar sounds of swishing taps, gargling drains and thrashed rugs – thwack thwack thwack. With every blow, she walloped me.

  I took Ringo right up to the Phalangists’ arms stash. He knew.

  ‘Hi, Souhar.’

  ‘Hello, Olifer. Are you okay? Look sick.’

  ‘Beirut belly.’

  She started to say something sympathetic, but my body was quaking and I cut her off. ‘I want to see Mahmoud. Is he home now?

  ‘No good you go out like this.’

  ‘But is he home?’

  ‘No … Always now he is away with his uncle.’ She cast her eyes down.

  The girl with the claret hair has shot him with her Virgin Mary gun.

  I could feel my mouth moving and my eyes bulging with tears.

  The phone rang.

  Souhar must have plugged it back in.

  She hobbled down the hallway, complaining about her knees. ‘Madame Lawrence, Mr Walid want to speak with you. He say it very important.’

  Maybe Dad and Babette will beg her for cold packs and aspirin and send her away.

  ‘I’ll take the call in the living room, Souhar.’ Babette didn’t sound trashed at all.

  I’m a dead duck.

  For once, I didn’t listen. I lay with my pillow over my head. The bomb had left the sound of the sea in my left ear. I was beneath the surf, drowning.