Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  ‘Down near Place des Martyrs. But baksheesh took care of that.’

  ‘Tell him about the airport blackout.’ She wiggled her shoulders, as if she was a girl in a boy’s book of adventures.

  Dad was a good few whiskeys down now. He turned shining eyes on me. ‘We lost all the lights. Runway, terminal, Ops. So at take-off, the airplane I was driving was a sitting duck for snipers, soon to become a flying duck. I ordered all exterior and interior lights out. We lifted off.’

  ‘Imagine.’ Babette mimed a shudder. ‘Waiting for the shot.’

  ‘When you’re in darkness, the biggest sensation becomes the plane’s vibration, as if it’s trembling as badly as its passengers … A posse shot rockets at us from the sandhills. Howling up towards us. There I was, in a lump of metal, charged with the care of eighty souls who’d become a target. I’ve never been so glad to hear the steady whine of those dependable engines, bearing us away. When we had gained enough altitude to be out of range, I switched on the lights and waggled the wings over Cyprus, to celebrate.’

  Babette cackled with strange lights in her eyes. ‘The passengers applauded.’

  ‘Yeah, but I wasn’t planning an encore.’

  Babette’s laughter died into silence.

  ‘Dad, have you seen Abdo?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably out there somewhere, making some poor bastard’s life a misery.’ He pointed his thumb behind him. ‘As he once threatened to do to you, Bomb Boy.’

  He said that very loudly, making Babette wince in fear. She tossed her head towards the bar. ‘Lachlan, tone it down.’

  The barmen polishing drink glasses didn’t raise their eyes. They’d already kept hundreds of Dad’s secrets, spilled over the bar.

  But this is the most dangerous secret of all.

  Dad lifted two fingers up to his chops and made an exaggerated shhhh: ‘Ah, the true point of your question is to discover the whereabouts of Sabine. Sweet love of your life.’ He floated a wayward hand over his heart.

  ‘Lachlan, you’re shouting.’

  Babette walked him to the lift, stroking the back of his neck. She propelled him inside, waved to him as the doors closed and watched the lighted numbers rise until she knew he’d got out at the right floor.

  I’ve got her to myself.

  She ordered another G&T. ‘Single, this time. Pacing myself.’ She leant her hand into my knee. ‘I came back from Paris because he was going a bit mad on the booze without me.’ I’d never noticed the dark ring around her iris before. Was it a brand burnt by war, the things she’d seen? ‘But on to important matters. I know Sabine’s your first love, but plenty more fish, et cetera. Any luck in that department?’

  ‘A bit.’ I blushed. ‘Where’s Mahmoud? Still in the camp?’

  ‘Who knows? I haven’t seen Souhar for a month. She couldn’t get down to Damour, so I had to get a local in to clean. And that wasn’t easy. Mahmoud seemed to disappear long ago.’

  ‘I’ll phone Souhar.’

  ‘Ho, ho. Good luck. When the phones do work, most people hang up these days. Too many have been lured to a meeting and then shot. We’ve become accustomed to unexplained disappearances. All we expats have taken to hoping that the missing ones will pop up in Paris.’

  Ringo’s not going to pop up in Paris.

  ‘So you think people have forgotten about the bomb at Beit Zizi?’

  Babette traced the paisley pattern on the couch beside me with her nail, then gave an easy, conspiratorial smile that made me glad I’d come. Once I had desperately wanted her love. Now, I saw how she craved love, as she battled wrinkles and demanding men like my father. She had a goodness in her, which I remembered and liked, now that I didn’t need her so badly.

  Babette leaned towards me. ‘I was just remembering how your voice used to squeak. It’s even now. A nice voice, Oliver. We haven’t forgotten, but it’s possible that just about everyone else has. It’s got so torrid here now, your prank pales …’ She was treating me like an adult.

  ‘Why are you staying here?’

  She swizzled the ice and lemon slice in her drink. ‘Nowhere else to go.’

  Maybe if she leaves, Dad will follow and they’ll both be safe.

  ‘I can show you something that would give you a reason to go to London.’ Babette stopped tracing the paisley pattern and my chest filled with a fatal emptiness, as if a bomb timer had stopped ticking. ‘Would you meet your son, if I told you where?’

  Now her finger followed the outline of the baby elephants carved in the sliver of tusk holding her burning cigarette. ‘I don’t feel like a mother. I’m not a real one. A baby passed through me, and that was that.’ She pointed at her glass for the barman. When she spoke again, she didn’t look at me. The baby elephants were as high as her gaze could lift. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve told anyone the story, Oliver.’ She sighed. ‘I took a ship to London when I was twenty-one. I thought Phillip was an old man – he was twenty-three. We had a plan: Babette the famous model; Phillip, celebrated photographer. He had a portfolio, mainly of girls in half-light with broody faces. Just the right modicum of misery.’ She pulled a hank of hair over one eye, becoming a moody teenager again.

  ‘Phillip’s a fairy, as you know, darling, but we were close, like lovers are. We could see into each other. By London, I’d already be right there, performing for his eye screwed up in the lens. I understood the image he was trying to form. He’s a sculptor, using human flesh. Phillip showed me how to make people want to hold their gaze on me, because that’s what I had to sell. I used chilli on my lips for a good pout, a teasing comb for a lion’s mane. I was a pale face with crushed charcoal eyes. We were working on a look. Phillip said I should be “approachable and unknowable, all at the same time.”

  ‘We could only afford a bedsit with a three-quarter mattress in Earls Court. Errgh, the smell of fried Spam. Our breaths made ice that crazed on the window glass. Heating? Huh! That was for the rich … We’d pause when we got to parties and check out who could be useful to us. Then we’d squeeze our way through the crowd towards them. Phillip could shake a hand, clutch a drink and flick out a business card with seamless symmetry. I’d flirt with our target.’ She pouted. ‘If it was a camp bloke that needed schmoozing, Phillip was the man.’

  I laughed.

  The barman brought Babette another drink. She laid a twenty-lira note in his palm and closed her fingers over his hand. He pulled away. She shrugged. ‘They used to go jelly-kneed once.’

  She looked down again. ‘In London, I started to hear people talking about some creature called Babette. My blurb said she projected “a kind of insouciant indolence”. She didn’t seem to be me. She was booked to do shoots with photographers other than Phillip. They pushed her around. “Do this, do that”, trying to get under her skin to her precious core, which she was not prepared to surrender.

  ‘Phillip told me to give more to the lens. I didn’t want to give. I was tired of the taking. Floodlights, windowless studios, bullying men … I grew afraid of being stripped so bare I’d be nothing but dry bones.’ She went back to picking at the paisley.

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

  ‘Gin saved me. If I had a snifter before a shoot, I could bear it. But then it grabbed me by the leg. Over time, I found that if I didn’t drink enough I shook with anxiety. The lens – which I was supposed to love – became a source of terror. It never looked away.’

  She pushed her gin glass around. ‘They began to say I was an out-of-control lush.’ She sipped her drink. ‘I was.’

  ‘Then … there was a man I met. A politician.’

  Babette went quiet and I waited.

  Tschk tschk tschk tschk tschk.

  ‘I was at a county cricket match, bored to sobs, pinning my hopes for a good time on the leaden sky. If it rained hard enough, the players would give up. I closed my eyes and remembered how banana leaves waved and ginger flowers nodded in a warm wind. We’d wangled passes into t
he VIP area. The politician beside me bumped me every time he jumped up to roar for his side. I kept peeking. Brown suit, purple tie, short peppery hair. He was full of polite “Pardon me-s”. So I told him I was Babette Summerland. He bowed. “May autumn never return.”

  ‘To me, that was the height of sophistication. I was your age. I know you think it’s the age that you’re finally an adult, but it’s really so young. He decided to educate me, but he didn’t patronise me. He told me that it was a “six” when the batsman hit the ball past an ancient lime tree at the oval’s edge … I began to enjoy watching the bowlers rubbing the balls on their thighs, leaving a red mark. Mmmmmm. I’d never thought of cricket as sensual before.’ She ran her finger around the glass rim.

  ‘He was bloody rude, though. When the sun came out for a moment, he shielded his eyes and said, “Glary, but I suppose you Colonials have grown some sort of third lid to cope.” I ignored him after that. When the match was over, he turned to me and made a face, as if he was bereft. Said he was sorry. Could he make amends at the Bat and Ball pub? And could I “lose” Phillip?

  ‘That was it, we had an affair … It went on for a couple of years. The British government used him as some kind of advisor in the Middle East. He would bring me gold from the Beirut souks. He’d been in Palestine as a young man, way back when some Jews living there were fighting the British because they wanted them out. They were trying to create the state of Israel … I didn’t know much about that, then. I’ve read about it since. I was enthralled by him, the same way you were by Lawrence of Arabia … None of it seems that exotic now.’

  ‘Was this Lord Lowch?’

  Babette giggled. ‘Lord Louche, honey. That’s what the gossip pages called him. I’m not telling you any more. You’re a reptile of the press now.’

  ‘Is that who you had the baby with?’

  She hugged her stomach and breathed hard. ‘Phillip first saw the signs that I was pregnant through his lens. My jawline puffed up. I wouldn’t believe it. So, I didn’t do anything. I have a big vat in my head that I can pour unpleasant things into, and that’s where this went. I got to five months’ pregnant, and then it was too late for an abortion. I didn’t have the money to look after a kid. I’d had it, blown it having a grand time, and the work dried up when word shot around that I was a lush. Well, I didn’t have the inclination, either, to give my life over to a creature I’d never seen. I was still hoping to make it really big. The politician sent me to a mansion in Kent to wait it out. He organised the adoption. Made his bloody wife the mother – they hadn’t been able to have any themselves. I changed my mind at the last minute, but a nurse took the baby away, anyway …’ She turned her face into her hands. ‘I couldn’t fight. I headed straight for Paris.’

  ‘Phillip said after you had the baby you were a spent firework.’

  ‘He’s a bitch.’

  I rubbed her shoulder. ‘But you can see your son now. I know how to find him.’

  ‘Too late.’ She stiffened and shrugged my hand away.

  ‘I’ve got something in my room I want to show you.’

  She gritted her teeth. ‘Don’t.’ She ran out of the bar, leaving me with her baby Jumbos and the bill. She may as well have slapped me. My real mother wanted to rip off my hand. Babette wouldn’t take anything from me. It hurt that she thought I wanted to take something from her.

  ‘Put it all on my father’s room tab,’ I told the waiter. I lay on the bar couch and drowned in sleep, recovering hope that I could still make Babette see P’s face, now that I was here.

  52

  Breathing

  Grandad wasn’t the only one disappointed the next day when Dad said that Babette had ‘hopped it to Paris’, missing the Australian Embassy ceremony to honour the Diggers. ‘Unnecessary. All she had to do was tell me I had bad breath and I wouldn’t ’ave tried to kiss ’er when Lachie had his back turned. I dunno why I’m such a turn-off to women these days.’

  Is she ashamed of what she told me? Or frightened of what I want to show her?

  I began to bite into the edge of my hand but decided to lose myself in my lens instead. She’d shunned me and the kid-who-looks-like-me. She could damn well flee to the elsewhere where she always wanted to be.

  Dad chauffeured the Diggers in the old Caddie – polished and decked with Australian flags. He drank enough cocktails to cry when the Ambassador said, ‘They built a railway, for which the Lebanese are ever grateful. They forced the Vichy French, those Nazi collaborators who controlled Lebanon, to surrender after executing a brilliant pincer movement that cut off the enemy. The Vichy made Damour their capital but, at the mighty Aussie advance, they surrendered. These men brought peace to this land.’

  Dad was swaying as he left the reception.

  I jumped in front of him. ‘I’ll drive.’

  ‘Get in the back.’

  ‘Give me the keys.’

  ‘Walk home if you don’t want me to take you.’

  The Diggers had already piled in. I squeezed into the back seat with my cameras, grumbling, while Dad griped: ‘They get into their twenties and think they rule the world!’

  ‘Well, he’s got a reputation as a terrorist to live up to,’ Grandad said, having told the others about my bomb. He kept no security secrets, except his own.

  We shouldn’t be here. Grandad could die.

  No-one else saw, as I did, the men with jumpy faces at a roadblock, where grey sandbags sagged around a lone palm. Grandad was too busy reminiscing about his war. ‘There were roses all over the hills of Damour in them days. When we Aussies took over a village, the people sprinkled us with petals, like it was a weddin’ and we were all brides.’

  Clarrie was sorry they couldn’t visit Damour. ‘I swapped a tin of bully beef with a bloke who give me a couple of beers he’d dangled in his well to make ’em cold.’

  Morrie talked over him. ‘Some blokes learnt to ski during the big freeze. Me first sight of snow.’

  But Grandad was louder. ‘The coldest year they ever seen ’ere. Thought me gun would ice up.’

  ‘Plenty of guns here.’ I pointed to the roundabout checkpoint, where the flare from a lighter illuminated a gun barrel and then died into the red bead of a cigarette.

  ‘You’re right and I’m sick of these galahs.’ Dad slammed his foot on the accelerator. The car sat back on its haunches and took off with a growl.

  ‘Duck!’ I yanked Grandad’s arm and sunk down low, cowering away from the rear window, jaw clenched, waiting for the zing of bullets.

  They haven’t shot us. We’re safe, for now.

  ‘Shit, Captain, ya made me spill me beer.’ Grandad wiped his arm with drunken dignity.

  ‘Dad nearly killed us,’ I choked.

  Grandad raised his can. ‘Well, he didn’t. There’s a cause for celebration.’ He and Morrie and Clarrie skolled.

  Their heads are still in the old war. They’re not fit for this one.

  I was, though. I went into it the following morning. Downtown in the August heat, buildings gaped, exposing twisted metal guts, their arches smashed and windows blown out. The air smelt of ash and mould. Police turned me back from the Place des Martyrs as it filled with belching smoke. Click click. The Corniche was deserted, except for one man in a keffiyeh, limping on crutches. Click click.

  The Diggers were gagging on a breakfast of Scotch eggs and Turkish coffee in the bar when I returned to catch the BBC radio news. The newsreader sounded calm and snug in London: ‘The Israelis have raided a village in the Bekaa Valley and killed thirteen people. Another thirty-seven were injured. The situation is tense.’

  The Australian Ambassador came to the Mayflower Hotel to personally request that Grandad’s group leave and Dad agreed. ‘He doesn’t want dead war heroes on his conscience. There’s a fire down in the souks. It’s a little close for my liking, with you blokes here. I’ll personally fly you fellas out.’

  Grandad was philosophical. ‘Nothin’ much has changed in Lebanon. The two main occup
ations are partyin’ and dyin’. Love the first. Tryin’ to fend off the second for as long as possible.’

  We said goodbye in the hotel foyer. ‘You sad about not seeing Damour, Grandad?’

  The pinpoints in his eyes grew sharp. ‘Never. Woke up breathing. That makes me happy.’

  I ignored the Ambassador’s warnings of impending peril. I had begun to hope that, armed only with a camera, I could make amends for what I’d done up at Beit Zizi. I rang the agency and struck a deal to file my pics whenever I could get film out. Roddy said he’d take some, too.

  I’ll send my images of war from a place where the sun has just risen to another where it has already set.

  That afternoon I prowled again with my camera in Beirut’s desolate, echoing streets, stalked by a shadow I soon saw as my own fear. I had never felt so lonely.

  53

  My War

  September. The airport was closed. Dad was living in a bar somewhere, unable to return.

  Barricades appeared all over Beirut. I hired Berge, an Armenian minder, who treated war as a business. He had crossed eyes, wore a shiny suit and liked to flick his keys over his long-nailed fingers. He showed no friendliness towards me. He drove me to the trouble spots, talking his way through barricades that appeared like the savage mouths of beasts with sandbags for gums and bristling guns for teeth. He’d rescue me, if ‘the situation’ got hairy while I clicked away.

  I found my images in the places where dust and smoke filled the air. After a round of fighting, people came out of hiding, stepping gingerly. I made pictures of the husband with his hand tucked inside his wife’s elbow, and the toothless granny leaning on a gnarled stick, complaining to the street. The women hanging washing in the windows, smiling at the sun, were reborn as creatures of the earth, like birds emerging from a storm, hungry and chirping, surprised to find themselves alive. I tried to leave people with dignity, but sometimes the dead in my photos spoke more loudly to the world than the living.