Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

Grandad said that war was like cancer. ‘If you’ve got it inside you, eventually you’ll find someone else who’s had it there, too.’ He had something he’d been meaning to tell me for a long time. ‘I haven’t been entirely straight with you.’

  He stooped to open a chipped honey-gold box with a tiny rusty key and pulled out an exercise book with a black ink camel on the front, above the words D. Jagjivandas & Co., Wholesale stationers & paper merchants, 177 Abdul Rehman Street, Bombay, 3.

  ‘I’ve set off explosives in Lebanon, too, matey.’

  ‘I didn’t –’

  Grandad held up his hand. ‘I know you’ll have your own story about what you did. No apologies needed. You merely continued the family tradition.’ He opened the exercise book, which shook in his hands as if it was as excited as him. He traced his nicotine-orange finger down a list of placenames, alongside dates. His nail, hard and cracked as animal horn, stopped at July 1941. He tapped the page. ‘Battle of Damour. I was there.’

  He coughed up some phlegm, swallowed it, rootled around in the box and plucked out a photo of a soldier in a khaki cap, the sadness in one eye captured in late-afternoon light, the other in shadow. An Australian Army rising sun insignia nestled on his collar. Oriental columns and palms in pots filled the rest of the frame. ‘Yer old Grandad when he wasn’t so old.’

  My heart contracted with warm pleasure as he shared more of his treasures with me. He handed me some limp Lebanese banknotes. One was coloured plum, peach and turquoise; an intricate drawing of a cedar tree was surrounded by roses, grapes, sheaves of cereal and flanked by two horned deer. ‘Banque de Syrie et du Liban’ ribboned in print above them, ‘Une Livre’ below.

  ‘Oon lever,’ Grandad said. ‘That’s one Lebanese pound.’ He jingled coins stamped with cedars, Phoenician boats and lions; someone’s dream of Lebanon.

  ‘What happened there, Grandad? What did you do?’

  He swigged his beer and wagged his head. ‘You tell me what you did, Ollie.’

  ‘A schoolboy prank with a suitcase. You go first, Grandad, then I’ll tell you.’

  ‘Nah, I know what you’re up to. No dice.’

  We sat and said nothing.

  ‘You’re as stubborn as your mother,’ Grandad said after some time. ‘It’ll stand her in good stead in the Big House. Your mother’s a bit of a miracle. Junkies don’t usually grow to that grand age.’

  ‘Will she ever get out of jail?’

  He turned his face away to indicate that he wasn’t going to tell me any more. He could disappear before my eyes, just like she did. He saw me staring at him. ‘Tell ya one thing about exploding a device. You get angry after the event. It’s taken me half my life to calm down about it. Despite that, I want to go back and see that funny little country.’

  I felt the smooth floppiness of a plain green 50-piastre banknote marked ‘Beyrouth le 1er Août 1942’. Saw the palm trees on the Corniche. Suddenly, I was burning to go back, to know what had happened to Abdo, to Ringo. And to see Babette. She was my real mother. Not Keziah the convict.

  I felt obliged to tell Grandad a secret for telling me one himself. So I showed him the photo of P. ‘This is the real reason Dad and Babette are still playing cool with me. It’s bigger than the bomb …’ He leant forward. ‘I told Dad that Babette had a kid. This is his picture.’

  Grandad held the delicate face in his leathery hands, studying the serious haircut, the grey serge uniform, the pixie chin. ‘By my age, nothing is a surprise. So Babette has a son? Probably why she put up with you and Jess when she married your father. You and this kid look alike, in a way … Both rabbits caught in headlights. Astonished eyes.’

  In the mirror, I saw that Grandad was right. My beady browns were fixed in the startle reflex. That gave me an idea. I wrote to Phillip and asked him to send me all the negs from the day he’d papped Babette’s son.

  A few months later, I found out that Mum wasn’t in the Big House. I was with Effoff, the girl from the demonstration, who had sung in a church but who wasn’t the angel of my twelfth year. She was the angel of my twenty-first year. A few years after I’d photographed her being monstered by a copper, I saw her hair standing out from her fine-boned face like a frizzy sunset cloud. Her walk was a stomp, and she picked fights with people who stared. I liked the way she held my fingertips and I kissed her the way Sabine had taught me, hoping for an eventual expansion into further territories of soft flesh.

  We were passing a grotty back lane in the Cross, on our way to a meeting about refugees, when a voice croaked, ‘Got a dollar? Lost my fare home.’ My mother sat in a doorway, thin as a praying mantis, one insect leg over the other, bum-bones jammed onto a milk crate. She had the cunning, lined face of an old junkie. Her cheeks were hollow from sucking on cigarette butts. I was so shocked that I went on automatic and pulled twenty dollars from my pocket – almost half my week’s pay. She raked it into her palm with her left hand. Her right was wrapped in a filthy flesh-pink bandage that was unravelling.

  Her eyes brightened a little inside the eggwhite film the junk had laid across them. Her voice was husky. ‘Oliver. Thanks for that.’

  I shuffled and coughed, couldn’t think of anything to say. I wanted to give her more, but I’d already given everything I had. This is how I’d always felt, that I could give her whatever she asked for until her restlessness was all filled up and she wouldn’t want to inject the sleeping sickness anymore. But she did what she always did. She extended her left hand. The twenty bucks wasn’t enough. Nothing would ever be enough.

  ‘Give me your hand.’ Hope flooded in. I offered her my fingers. I didn’t want to get too close, yet. She grabbed my wrist and pulled it, caressing my hand with greedy eyes, and I remembered how much I loved her.

  ‘I need this. Mine doesn’t work anymore.’ I jerked my arm away.

  She wants to take my right hand. Tear my flesh.

  She saw her error and began to mewl: ‘Just kidding. God, you’re so straight.’

  A red steam filled my head and I ran past the blinking daytime lights, yodelling strip-joint spruikers, throbbing cars cruising by street-walkers; through the come-on music thumping from tinny speakers and the occasional vomit splat in the gutter, until I stood panting in a park. I collapsed, breathing so deeply the balmy smell of wet earth that I could have inhaled an earthworm.

  Effoff found me and we took a train out to a bush cave near Grandad’s, and with her body, I rocked away the pain.

  This is the explosion I’ve been waiting for, after all. Why are there wars when there is this?

  50

  War Art

  I’d worked my way into a bitter anger about Dad, who never wrote, never rang, and who let Babette be the bearer of the Beirut news. I’d decided that Dad believed taking Jess and me to Beirut was a failed experiment that he’d rather forget, just as I would rather not recall my mouse-breeding program.

  Then there was a note in my work pigeon-hole.

  Captain Lawrence called. Meet Hilton bar, 5pm, Sat.

  I grew dizzy with the fear of what we would say to each other. I wanted to yell at him for his neglect, but he might still think I deserved a good thumping as Bomb Boy. I also wanted to know how he and Babette could live inside a war. I hoped that he would help me get back to Beirut. I also wanted to give him a magical illusion I’d created for Babette using a pile of negatives that Phillip had sent me from London. So I bit the inside of my cheek hard as a reminder not to fight him.

  When I saw his stalk neck curved above a triple whiskey on a barstool, I wanted to hug him. He seemed both too strong and too fragile to touch, so we didn’t even shake hands. He pretended to cuff me around the head.

  ‘Nice kit.’ He pointed to my camera, slung over my shoulder as always. We talked F-stops and lenses, and then he offered to buy me a drink.

  ‘Sarsaparilla.’

  He stuck out his tongue and huffed disapproval. ‘Are you a tenderfoot or a real cowboy? Me, I’ve got to unwind with a charge. Been travelling
thirty-six hours. Stopover in Kuwait. They opened the glass terminal doors and all the sands of the Sahara blew in. Never even got a chance to get out of this clobber, and the bastards lost my luggage.’

  He took off his captain’s jacket, displaying two circles of soot seared into his white uniform shirt. They hung over his belt, smudged into the cloth either side of his backbone.

  ‘What are those?’

  ‘War art,’ he growled.

  ‘Huh?’

  Dad was no great admirer of art. Everything was concrete with him; the world had to be made logical, with proofs of cause and effect. He loved a good diagram with numbers. ‘Bloke that did it was with a pack of gunmen on the Damour road. These so-called militias are just crims. This galah shoved his gun butt into my kidneys. They may have suffered a lifetime of abuse, but I’m fond of those kidneys …’

  He’s being superman.

  ‘Anyway, he gets my passport, sees my nationality and says, “I have uncle in Brisbane. Maybe you know him?” And you know what? For the purposes of that exercise, I bloody did. Lovely fella. Runs a great restaurant.’

  ‘What is that black stuff?’

  ‘Carbon residue. The shooter’d just used his gun to wipe out a farmer hauling a tractor-load of bananas. All I could see of the farmer was a few fingers reaching out from a ditch towards his tractor. The war artist and his mates had simply rolled the guy’s body into a hole. That was the poor sap’s funeral. Then they stood around me, shoving bananas into their gobs. The wake.’

  Dad dropped his bloodhound eyes for a minute’s silence, but he didn’t fool me.

  He’s fallen in love with fear and sorrow. What he’s really afraid of is mundane life.

  ‘The fella who’d shot the farmer was jumpy. When he hauled me out of the car, I could feel his hands shaking through the gun barrel in my kidneys … but …’ Dad tipped his glass up. ‘He spared me … Thought it was funny when I asked if I could have a banana.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘Somewhere in the mountains, there are militiamen, handing out bananas to their kids and grandmothers. Heroes. Sheesh!’

  ‘Kebab.’ I was glad that I’d made him smile ruefully into his drink. ‘What’s happened to Abdo? And Sabine?’

  ‘Ah, first love.’ Dad shrugged. ‘How would I know? I would never, without having studied life as it is lived in Lebanon now, have understood the savagery of which humans are capable. A few brave-hearts are trying to stop it. Some have scrubbed out their religion on their ID cards, trying to end the confessional system. But you can’t erase the vain children who sweep through the streets with bazookas mounted on utes, or the gangs who’ve looted the banks, or the cigarette sellers the snipers have whacked from rooftops. They say smoking kills. Huh.’

  ‘Souhar? Mahmoud?’

  ‘Souhar still cleans for us in Damour. After all those trips down south to monster the Israelis, d’you know what happened to Mahmoud? Picked off by a sniper’s bullet as he sat on a friend’s balcony in Beirut.’ Dad gave a harsh laugh.

  It was a punch to my heart. ‘Is he … alive?’

  ‘Alive but crippled. Limps badly. We paid his hospital bills.’

  I could feel a loosening of my skin as I sighed in relief that Ringo didn’t die because of me, but I couldn’t picture him without the stride of a commando. My legs shook. After all that anguish over him, he suddenly seemed no more than an acquaintance because he’d gone into another life beyond, getting shot while I was taking pictures of sheep and businessmen. I was angry with myself now. How had I ever imagined that I could know him?

  I crept up to the next subject. ‘Was he in trouble because of that bomb … up at Beit Zizi?’

  Dad waved his hand in dismissal. ‘Given all that’s happened in this war, your adventure with Mahmoud was a mosquito bite on a crocodile. Just as bloody well. It took an entire civil war to make what you did seem small beer.’

  I seized the moment. ‘So I can come back now.’

  ‘Hmm. Abdo may not have forgiven you, but I’m going to thank you – Bomb Boy has been the making of Babette. She’s told me all about the baby. Talked and talked, then put it behind her. I’ve got her the house in the country and she feels safe there. Happy as Larry.’

  I didn’t believe him. He thought he could tidy up her life, straighten the photos and then leave town.

  She’s not going to forget P. And she’s in danger.

  He took a sip of his drink. ‘You did us a favour. We used to fight about you a lot. But once you were gone, the equation changed.’

  I had to leave for Babette to stay?

  I saw that Dad had no idea that his words sucked the air from my chest. He paid for the drinks and left, saying he had to change his clothes. We finished with an awkward hug. I forgot to give him the magic illusion for Babette. He flew back to Beirut without making any further contact. But he could still surprise – Grandad told me he’d paid for Mum to go into rehab.

  Money’s his only way of showing love.

  51

  Lord Lowch

  Grandad rang. ‘Hey, Sarsaparilla Kid. There’s a truce in Lebanon and a few of the old Diggers from my battalion want to see the place before they die. You want in?’

  ‘It’s still dangerous there.’

  ‘It was more than perilous last time we were there. We’re goin’, Ollie. We’re curious.’

  How many questions does a war plant in a person?

  ‘Packing my Sarsaparilla now, Grandad.’

  I invited Jess to take weekend leave from boarding school so he could crash out in a spare beanbag at my share house in Bondi. His rogue gonad was definitely in operation. He got drunk, tried to kiss Effoff, then climbed out of my bedroom window after I’d conked out at midnight. He bashed on the front door at 7 am and fell face-first into the hallway when Effoff opened up. He stayed there for the morning as my housemates tiptoed around him, then downed a ginger beer for breakfast and slept on the beach all day, where he contracted sunstroke.

  On Sunday he sat, drank water, trembled and let Effoff lay sliced tomatoes over his burnt bits.

  ‘Hey, Ollie. You know that movie Blow-up, about the photographer? That’d be the perfect name for you if you opened a photo agency.’

  ‘Ha ha. Just as well you’re not coming to Beirut. You need to be locked up until you’ve got a bit of sense knocked into your head.’

  I sound like my father. Trouble is, I believe it.

  I lined up work through an agency as a stringer for my metro rag and a few others in the UK and Canada, with Roddy’s help. Dad got me a free air ticket and the Mayflower offered me a room. I had my cameras slung about my body and the magic illusion for Babette in my suitcase when Dad picked us up from Beirut airport in the Caddie.

  ‘Where’s Babette?’

  ‘At the pub, getting her beauty sleep. She’s the sole rep of the airline wives now. I’m hauling full loads of folk fleeing Beirut. Only a handful are flying in. Nutcases like me and you and your grandad.’

  He took us straightaway on a tour of the war zone’s greatest attractions, as if he were a circus-master. The apartment blocks around Hamra were pecked with holes. Click.

  ‘Few weeks back, I saw women carrying trays loaded with flatbread and hummus and tiny cups of coffee for the fighters hidden behind the doorways.’

  Grandad scoffed. ‘Aw, no-one did that for us.’

  On Hamra, Dad stopped the Caddie and threw a handful of lira at a man pushing a wooden cart. The man wore a velvet fez and had a gun slung over the square shoulder pad of his tailored coat. The lemons on his tray-top rolled and thudded as he pulled the squeaking cart to a stop. Dad got him to scoop up every lemon. ‘These are the new gold in Beirut. Babette’s gonna love me for this. I’ll get the barmen to stash them away for her G&Ts. Hey, nice coat!’

  ‘New.’ The man fingered his collar. Lift lens. Click.

  ‘Bet he got it from a dead man,’ Dad whispered. I pushed his bag of lemons away from me.

  ‘Geez, an old Digger could die of thirst, Lac
hie,’ Grandad complained. But once in the Mayflower bar, he and his mates faded fast. They put themselves to bed at midday.

  Dad gave me a tired smile, but he still didn’t ask about me or Jess. The war had filled his head. ‘Whole suburbs have been strafed with machine-guns and bazookas. People have been shot in churches, in their baths, catching buses.’ His long body settled into his favourite barstool. ‘Don’t know if you remember Khaled, used to be a barman here. He’s pissed off now, but he brought a sniper’s mask to my room one day to show off. Black cloth with two holes for the eyes and one for the mouth. So the gunman can smoke while he’s shooting, he told me. All the better to concentrate on blasting the bejesus out of some passer-by. Well, it didn’t take much to guess that the sniper was Khaled.’ Dad laughed. ‘He’ll probably be the death of me.’

  I shivered. He used to say that about me.

  ‘Ah, you know you’re alive when you’re here, of all places.’ Dad clinked his slopping whiskey glass against my 7-Up bottle and then against my long lens. ‘No tomorrow!’

  ‘I hope there is because I’ve come to shoot pictures. Old Diggers do Damour.’

  ‘There won’t be any Damour. Road’s blocked.’

  But he hadn’t had time to tell me why when Babette shimmered into the bar, her hair pulled back tight from her face so that her skin seemed stretched. She kissed me on both cheeks, French style. With her raccoon eyes and lips glistening over a cigarette holder, she felt foreign to me, all bustling and actor-ly, as if the more scary Lebanon had become, the more she had to act as if nothing had ever changed.

  ‘Mwah. Mwah. Do you like my ivory ciggie holder? It’s carved with baby elephants. Your father brought it back from Africa.’

  ‘Don’t elephants need their tusks?’

  ‘Not when they’ve carked it.’

  She ordered more drinks, jiggling her chest at the barman while joggling her bum at Dad. She persuaded us to plonk onto a lounge. ‘Oliver needs to uncurl after his flight. I know how it is, darling.’ She smooched Dad for snaffling the lemons. ‘No roadblocks today?’