Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  I finally read what T. E. Lawrence had to say about himself. ‘I’ve been and am absurdly overestimated. There are no supermen …’

  I stopped thinking of him as Al Orentz. The movie had made out he was a loveable larrikin, but he’d been a British officer on a mission. And maybe Walid was right – he’d manipulated the Arabs. I began to wonder how it would have been for me to carry a camera on a camel beside him as he galloped into Aqaba. Would he have seemed a superman if I’d shown the world pictures of the bloody bodies he’d left in his path?

  Fleur didn’t laugh at me when I mumbled what I really wanted to do after school. ‘Newspapers, love? If you want to get into that world, it’s all about who you know.’

  The only one I knew was Phillip. My gratefulness towards him had grown with each day that no snoop appeared to accuse me of being Bomb Boy. He’d kept my secret. Babette’s, too.

  Dear Phillip,

  Babette says to say thank you for putting up with me. So I am. No, really, it was good.

  Also, do you think I could get a job as a press photographer when I finish school next year? How?

  Oliver

  Fleur said it wasn’t very gracious, but it would do, with a ‘please’ added. Phillip replied with a postcard showing a palace guard at his sentry post.

  Hey,

  Ken’s stardom has gone global. My pic, natch.

  Well, Gawd-luv-a-duck. You want to turn pro.

  I’ll see what strings I can pull for you. If anyone remembers me back in Oz.

  Love,

  The Slave xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

  That was the end of our small exchange of words.

  At the end of the year, Jess came to stay for the summer holidays. He and I shook hands, shy of each other for the first time. His eyes were scrunched with worry, but I wasn’t mad at him anymore over dobbing about the bomb. He was just a kid and I’d dropped him into danger. He didn’t even care that I could have blown him up. He didn’t care whether I believed in the root of minus one, or in a cinematic superman who turned out to be as bad as everyone else. I blinked hard when I thought of my brother’s trust in me.

  ‘Here’s my boy-o.’ Pop ruffled Jess’s hair when Jess declared, ‘I haven’t done my one really bad thing yet.’ Every adult grew as tame around Jess as a chicken thrown on its back. Jess had a pimple. Maybe his own rogue gonad had woken up. I didn’t want it to run away with him like mine had. I never wanted him to thrash in the night, frightened that he’d been instrumental in killing a friend.

  I gave him Papillon. ‘Read this. It might help you break out of jail.’

  He smiled. ‘School? It’s all right. Only too far from the surf.’

  He gave me a letter that Babette had sent him months before.

  Dear Oliver and Jess,

  We two refugees have moved to the country, like you two! Renting a stone house on the slopes near Damour. From the balcony where I write this, I can see banana trees and tepees of beans hiding below their leaves. There’s a ribbon of blue sea beyond all that. I can almost hear the wash of the waves at night, above the crickets – and the occasional clatter of gunfire. Our refugee camp has a bar and pool!

  The family next door has a vegetable garden. They are going to give us eggplant and zucchini in winter, cucumbers and tomatoes in summer. Your father has already stained his face purple with mulberries from our tree, and there is a citrus orchard next door. I feel safe here, out of the Beirut rat-hole, but your father has to brave the airport road. Militiamen kidnap people at roundabouts. Some are shot because of their politics or religion.

  Your father says it’s like a kangaroo cull at Bogan. The strapping bucks with attitude are picked off.

  The neighbour’s cat has come in. It’s a beautiful chestnut, the colour of your hair, Oliver. I hope one day you can terrorise the locals again. Bring your surfboard. You could hang five off Damour.

  Love and misses,

  Babette

  I shouted at the letter, ‘But what about Ringo? What about Sabine? What about me?’

  Babette won’t be coming to see me. She won’t even go to London for her own kid.

  P’s cut-glass eyes would reproach me when I gazed into the photo Phillip had given me. I couldn’t help thinking that he was one of us, abandoned by Babette, who never dared to look behind her. In the photo, P was fixed in time. He was half-turned in surprise towards the lens – caught in what Phillip said was the ‘startle reflex’ – in a heavy school uniform that was too big for him. He seemed thin under the weight of his padded shoulders and thick, fair hair; his face small above his high collar and fat tie. He was making the same face as Babette’s when she was caught without make-up: astounded, a keeper of some guilty secret. Naked and caught out.

  I wanted to make her see us. Even P.

  You’re not looking into the lens.

  47

  Killer Pitcher

  In those last two years at school, neither Babette nor Dad came back to Australia. I almost began to forget the sound of their voices. But not of Jimi’s. He was still there with me, reminding me that he was living his life the way he wanted to, until he wasn’t:

  ROCK STAR DIES

  IN LONDON

  OF DRUG OVERDOSE.

  Nooooooooooooooo. Keep riding with the wind.

  Jimi was just twenty-seven when he died. I’d have just over ten more years on Earth if I lived as long as him. Soon after his song ended, I got another letter from Babette.

  Dear Oliver and Jess,

  There was almost a gunfight in the Lebanese Parliament! They held elections for the President in the chamber and even though one man got 50 votes out of 99, the Speaker ruled that 50 was not more than half of 99.

  The man who won the vote pulled out his gun and one of his supporters tried to hit the Speaker, whose bodyguard then pulled out his own gun.

  Carnage was averted when the Speaker agreed that 50 was a majority.

  You’re not the only one to have struggled with maths, Oliver. If only we could speak Arabic! Your father has to rely on intelligence from the airline and local villagers to work out whether the airport road is safe.

  Hugs,

  Babette xxxxxxx

  I’d begun to train for my return to Beirut. Oliver of the Levant. War paparazzo. I got a weekend job taking pictures of farmers with their prize rams for The Wadi Wadi Argus. The editor, Archie McGuire, and I quarrelled because he tried to tell me what pictures to take.

  ‘I’m not the slave appointed to run words around your pitchers,’ he’d say. But he was; he just didn’t understand it.

  I loved the phrase ‘available light’. I’d get up before dawn with Grandad and we’d drink heavy, dark tea, while the sun sniffed at the door cracks, sneaky and silent as an old sheepdog. There is a kind of radiation in the air at that time of day. A waiting. I’d hover with the birds and insects, waiting for the crack in the sky to open that would let rosy rays fall on the shaky newborn lambs. Later, I’d catch the unshorn men at first smoko outside the shearing sheds; the wrinkled farmers sneezing in rainbow clouds of chemical spray; the kids making locusts hop as they ran for the school bus; the tractors trailing pink dust tails below an evening moon. I fell from a cherry picker, ran from a bull and, as my feet slid under floodwaters, held onto a tree with one hand. I never let go of my camera, not after Beit Zizi. Mr McGuire said I took too many risks. Then I heard him ringing his metro mates and bragging about ‘the kid’.

  Phillip wrote me a note to say there might be a job in the city, ‘working with one of the best in the business, Roddy the Rat.’

  At the interview, Roddy asked, ‘What madness have you got in you that makes you want to be a news photographer?’

  ‘I’m planning to cover the war in Lebanon.’

  He looked me up and down. ‘You’ll have to grow up a bit first. Are you able to listen to your elders?’

  ‘What?’

  He said I could come with him out on the road, see and experience what it was like to cover something
really big. That weekend I was struggling beside Roddy along the city’s main drag, working hard in my heavy Afghan coat at balancing his extra cameras, when an air-raid siren whined down the canyon between sandstone buildings, twirling around the griffins’ curves, bouncing off shop awnings. In the crush of demonstrators in duffle coats, through the funk of homegrown marijuana and Indonesian clove cigarettes, I dodged between fists and elbows to bag images. I caught police in a uniform line of set jaws, then ducked behind them for a close-up of one copper’s fingers crossed against his back, for luck. I captured a shot of a bewildered woman with a clear pleated rain hat tied over her perm. She clattered her shopping trolley to the edge of the melee, saying, ‘Help – how do I get across the road?’

  Through my lens, the wallopers lined the street, arms linked to hold protesters back from the footpaths. The tide of people on the street swelled into them, pressing onlookers against shop-window glass. The protesters narrowed their eyes as they took up the chant: ‘One, two, three, four! We don’t want your fucken war!’

  With Roddy tailing me, I shoved towards Parliament House past fists flying banners, through the messy uproar of piccolos, bugles and drums. Sprays of spittle landed on my coat as I burrowed through the fiercest, loudest protesters, in black berets. ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. Dare to struggle. Dare to win.’

  I captured a close-up of clenched hands trying to shake the upended black spears that fenced in the Parliament. Women were dancing, smeared in fake blood. Men with manes of hair lounged with stone lions on a giant plinth. Then the police horses were wheeling around me, rounding up protesters. I spun, clicking and hoping to be able to frame a shot. It had grown dark in there. I activated the flash. A horse reared with wild eyes, tossing froth from its bit, and a woman thudded onto the stone road at my feet. I knelt down beside her and heard the ring of steel on rock. I looked up into worn silver horseshoes, seeing with great clarity each nail holding them to the two flailing hooves above me. A police baton whipped down towards my hand on the lens. I sidestepped. A heavy officer crashed to the ground, still holding his horse’s reins. I staggered and lifted my lens. The policeman pushed his hand out to fend me away. But I stole a shot.

  I pivoted to help the fallen woman, my cameras swinging wildly from their shoulder straps. The policeman had now collapsed onto his back, and his colleagues swirled around on their horses, protecting him and pushing protesters away.

  I pulled out my notebook. The woman had eyes shiny with tears, frizzed hair and a giant pumpkin bum under her long rainbow skirt. Her face reminded me of the church choirgirl I’d mooned after when I was twelve.

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘Fuck the war and bring our brothers home, you pig dog collaborator.’

  ‘I’m not police. Press. Could you spell your name for me?’

  ‘Effoff.’

  I saw the ‘startle reflex’ in her eyes and swung around. A mounted policeman was bearing down on us. I waved my hands and his horse shied away. He turned back and banged his heels into its ribs, urging the horse to barrel into us. It skidded so close; I smelt its warm chaff breath. Then the rider pulled away.

  The men in black berets bowled marbles under the hooves, making the horses dance on the cobbles, their hooves clacking like firecrackers as they jibbed and whinnied and wheeled, all confused.

  ‘Get out quick.’ Roddy the Rat was pulling me, yelling above the chant of ‘Stop the War’ that resounded through the crowd. ‘That cop reckons your flash scared his horse. He’s got it in for ya. We gotta get back. Clock’s tickin’, Gunga Din.’

  I wrestled out of his clutch to snap a lady in a lilac coat, her high heels clacking along the pavement in time to her shouts of ‘pigs, pigs, pigs’ as a policeman dragged her to a paddy wagon.

  The mothers are fighting for their sons.

  I joined in the chant – ‘One, two, three, four! We don’t want your fucken war!’ – and now I was in it, marching beneath posters of crying Vietnamese babies. I swelled with a sense that I belonged amid the warmth of these strangers, that we were making something, becoming something bigger than all of our parts put together.

  Roddy grabbed me and laughed. ‘Media, mate. Gotta be above it. No use to us if you’re arrested.’

  ‘Troops out now! Troops out now!’ I was still shouting with the crowd.

  Roddy grabbed my camera. ‘What’s in here is the most important thing. Not what’s in this stupid noggin.’ And he tapped me on the head. ‘Besides, look who’s coming.’

  Behind a teenage girl waving an Australian flag with a peace sign sewn over the Union Jack, the policeman whose photo I had taken as he smashed onto the ground was back. His horse tossed its ears in agitation when he urged it towards us.

  ‘Holy moly,’ I said under my breath. We pushed through the police lines and ran along the footpath.

  ‘You’ve got a killer pitcher in there, mate.’ In the tangerine glow of the darkroom, Roddy helped me locate it. Together, we watched the chemicals conjure up the image of a stricken Effoff, her body bowed away in terror from the breast of the panicked horse, which, through my lens, had become a long-toothed demon. The cop’s pale, strained knuckles brandished a thick baton over Effoff’s angelic face. His teeth were bared in a scowl. Above it all, one of the protestors on the plinth with the lions held a metal peace sign aloft, shining as it if were the sun itself.

  Roddy’s tan face folded into laugh lines. ‘The cop’s turned into Jack the Ripper. What a brute. Ya happy?’

  I went with Roddy to the pub to celebrate, but I didn’t hear much of what anyone said. I’d found some place inside myself that day that I’d thought I had lost in Beirut. I understood the upwelling that took over each person there and made the schoolgirls shove their elbows into marshmallow police bellies; the soft faces of mothers screw up like crushed balls of newspapers as they shook ‘Save Our Sons’ posters.

  It was the same torrent of yearning and hope that had made those men cry out ‘Abdel Nasser’ on the Corniche. Only this was about peace.

  One, two, three, four! We don’t want your fucken war!

  The chant stayed inside me as a hum. It was with me when I finished school and all through the three years of my photographic cadetship with Roddy. All that time, I wondered if there were people who had the same hum inside them in Lebanon.

  48

  The Cold Lick

  It was 1975. Lebanon was officially at war with itself.

  Oliver and Jess,

  Had to hide on car floor today as Mohammed roared through a mini gun battle. He’s our driver now. Said I would be safe. They wouldn’t touch him. Not so sure myself. Saw my first bodies ever. Avoided that for six years. Now it’s unavoidable. They’re killing children. Glad you’re not here. Trucks zooming everywhere with troops and commandos. Israeli jets bombing the camps.

  Love,

  Babette

  I could hear her breathlessness in the spaces between the sentences, and I could tell that the war had grabbed her, holding her attention in a way her son never had. It made me desperate to go back. I still had a craving for something I’d left in Lebanon five years before, even though I wasn’t sure what it was.

  Oliver and Jess,

  Remember how the war was not called the war, at first? It was round one, round two, round three … and the combatants were called ‘unidentified gunmen’. Now, no-one’s pretending. In Beirut, the streets aren’t safe, but a brave radio reporter gives special Lebanese-style traffic reports on the location of snipers shooting from rooftops and checkpoints set up by militias.

  Kisses and hugs,

  Babette

  I hunted out the newsroom library file of photos from Vietnam, trying to pin down that feeling of being inside the furnace of war. I lifted out the print of the fragile nude girl covered in napalm, the petrified boy, fleeing along a road, smoke and flame towering in the sky behind. The light picking out the children’s thin limbs made them seem as breakable as china.

  And what was I? Bomb Boy. I’d
paid five hundred Lebanese pounds for the bomb. I’d known it wasn’t gunpowder for a cigar. I sat with the photo of the terrified children in my sweating hands and felt the cold lick of shame in my gizzards.

  I can’t criticise Babette, when I ignored the thing inside me that I didn’t want to know.

  I let a memory push its way to the surface. Yasmin, in the ruins of the chicken shop, keening over her father.

  Because of a bomb.

  I’d seen Yasmin’s anguish, but I’d drowned the memory and agreed with Ringo to explode a bomb.

  Even though I knew the devastation it could cause.

  It must have been an addled Oliver who went with Ringo into the forest that day. A naïve Oliver. Another Oliver.

  Later that night, a thought wrenched me out of sleep and I sat bolt upright. That morning, in a city milk bar, I’d peered over a woman’s shoulder at a newspaper photo from Beirut. In the picture, a mother lifted her fingers to her mouth, pleading with a gunman as he waved a Kalashnikov at her child. On a newspaper freckled with breakfast crumbs in Australia, the image made the woman seeing it press her hand to her mouth in horror.

  One, two, three, four! We don’t want … I can take photos like that.

  49

  Explosives