Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  This war wasn’t like my grandfather’s. There was no declaration. No lines of troops pushing on fronts, one against the other. It was more like a bushfire, devouring one patch of earth, until a burning ember flew to inflame another. The country accommodated, as if it had always had war. There were ceasefires, the barricades came down, and then, after further killings, they went up again. Rubbish heaped in piles of rotting meat and cinders. The rats grew big enough to beat the cats.

  I connived to shoot images from behind the gunmen, to capture the terror in the eyes of the threatened. I hid to record a jeep full of soldiers hauling a scarecrow on wheels – a decoy to draw out gunfire so that they could double back and kill the hidden sniper. A militiaman in a feather boa posed for me, jeering and brandishing his gun, while dead children lay at his feet.

  I could not save the people who waved white flags at the dangerous edge between their home and the street.

  Please, help us.

  I could only shrug sorry and hope someone else would care enough to stop it all. ‘Here, Berge, get these rolls out pronto.’

  Berge used nefarious means to smuggle my film to the photo agency. The white-flag wavers would stay here in Lebanon, to live, or die, or bleed. But I would make their images fly to another land where, maybe, someone would see.

  Please help them find refuge.

  To survive, I engineered a professional lens for my brain more intricate than the glass prisms I carried for my cameras. I saw the physical body rather than the spirit of the people I photographed. Through the camera lenses with severe German brand names, I saw the blood surging through the veins. I saw the brain coiled in delicate, silvery-red threads. Each eye of each person sat in its orbit, a beautiful planet. I saw the nerves that controlled the fine movement of the hands. I saw the swallowing at the throat, the pumping at the heart, the ribcage filling with air. I saw what a sniper saw in those still moments before he shot someone. Life. I grew a hard shell over my heart to be able to capture the images of human treachery.

  Woke up breathing. That makes me happy.

  Babette was gone. Dad had become a flying swagman, living in hotels because his airline decided it was safer to keep flight crew offshore.

  As I worked in the heart of the war, I forgave him for abandoning me. So many people did not want to fight. And I realised what Dad was giving by continuing to fly. Before, I’d only seen what he’d taken away.

  One night, as we sat under the stag’s head in the Mayflower bar, I realised that he’d forgiven me for frightening him. Maybe he saw himself in my actions.

  He toasted me. ‘To Bomb Boy.’

  I clinked his glass. ‘Always to be forgotten,’ I replied.

  And I began to believe that my return had gone unnoticed.

  The sun withdrew its warmth as the fighting tumbled on to the Corniche, and I was afraid for Sabine. One day, when the clouds and the latest curfew had lifted, my steps bent towards Paramount Apartments, which reared into the unfeeling cheeriness of the blue sky. The dates that the maidens carried in the courtyard carvings were sooty. In glass-door reflections, I was an alien come to earth with my lenses protruding from either side of my body, long and thin in green camouflage, except for my mess of orange hair.

  I stood outside the concierge’s apartment door and listened to my breath, finding courage. The knock of my knuckles resounded within the empty walls. I took the still-protesting lift up to the seventh floor, where we used to live. I caught a wild-haired woman in black, with large moles on cherry-coloured cheeks, wrestling a Persian rug out of our old apartment. She held her palms out to me, afraid that I’d come to kill her.

  ‘Min fadlak, madame, wain Sabine? Where is Sabine, please?’

  ‘I no speak English.’ She dropped the rug, jumped inside and fastened the door-chain. It was our rug.

  Dad treated the news with coolness because he and Babette had left it behind when they’d shifted to Damour. ‘Our old joint never got rented. Squatters have moved in. I don’t have a clue where Sabine is … People just go missing. If Babette ever gets back from Paris, she might have some intelligence.’

  ‘Why did she leave so fast, as soon as I arrived?’ I was on the edge of blubbering. The abandonment of the rug made me forlorn. I hated that Babette had avoided me, but I wanted her to stay safe. I wanted to leave. I wanted to stay. I was a bird with a trap around its foot. Dad didn’t answer.

  After a long silence I recovered enough to get to practicalities: ‘The rug’s got mice poop on it.’

  He spluttered and choked. ‘Ooh, that makes me feel all warm and furry. Revenge on the interlopers.’

  54

  Sniper

  Berge wouldn’t take me to Souhar’s camp: ‘Wrong place for me.’

  So I took a service taxi, like the old days. The eyes in the windows of the shanties along Souhar’s laneway watched me with suspicion. I didn’t even get to her apartment building. Two armed men hustled out of the room where Ringo and I had picked up our bomb. One wore a keffiyeh and the other a tartan golf cap. They may have been among the boys I’d seen playing football when I first came to the camp. They raised their rifles.

  ‘Yallah imshee. Get away,’ one said.

  The bones in my limbs became soft and traitorous as I pretended to stride confidently towards the airport road, with no-one to save me, knowing their sights were trained on my back.

  At Christmas, Berge left Lebanon after a bullet landed in the pillow beside him as he slept. I couldn’t find another minder. By the New Year, I had begun to take adversity personally, as if there was some plan to make my life more difficult.

  A few weeks later, the Caddie broke down on the Corniche. Eyes peeped from windows, but there was no-one to ask for help. I walked up the hill past the silent mosque to deserted Hamra Street, heading back to the Mayflower on foot, thinking of how Babette had cried over the beggar’s baby.

  She didn’t let herself know how much she cared, but it came out anyway.

  No taxi drivers lounged behind their Mercedes’ half-open doors today. The Al Hamra cinema slept, its doors blackened eyes. The narrow falafel store had disappeared. The fashion shops had been boarded up, and the boards had been shot up. The pavement chairs had been taken from the Horseshoe and Modca cafés, their tin shutters closed tight.

  I took in the full vista of Hamra Street, cold without its people. Then I heard the rising notes of excited voices. It was a wave of memory. Nothing more. There wasn’t a sound. Not even the click of worry beads. A frigid breeze played silently with the rubbish in the gutter. I knew that these few blocks around Hamra had been overrun by a succession of militias. Like ancient Tyre. Like Byblos, long ago. A Muslim leftist group had held Hamra yesterday, but I couldn’t know whether they were still in charge today.

  As I crept along, taking pictures of the street, my shoes tapped out the only sound. I slipped them off and leant my back against a shuttered shopfront. There was a cackle from above. I craned my neck and spotted a gun resting over the edge of the roof. I jumped back, making the café shutters ripple – tin tin tin. Looked up again. The gun muzzle edged over the roof and rested at the point where it could blast my abandoned sneakers apart. I left them and ran in my socks, bullets pinging around me. I reached a laneway and tore down it, the socks muffling my footfall, my jagged breath rasping loudly.

  I stopped when I saw a knot of gunmen in the back of a ute at the next intersection. Abdo, Cupid’s bow lips moving and his dull-gold hair fluttering in the breeze, hefted a rocket launcher and turned towards me. I sprinted into the next alley, almost crashing into building corners as I wound through narrow streets to the Mayflower. I felt as if a dizzying wind had followed me into the hotel foyer and that it presaged the arrival of Abdo, the warlord who wanted revenge. I stood bent over at the bar, waiting for the wheezing to end. My heart was falling in my chest. The barman was endlessly rotating a tea towel inside a glass.

  ‘Just saw a truckload of Phalangists up near Hamra. Who’s the commander ar
ound here now?’

  ‘Kataeb control this area.’

  ‘Who’s their commander?’

  ‘Abdo Abu Salim. A good man. Strong. He makes this place better for us now. Quiet. Like Australia, your home. You are lucky. You can go to your own peaceful country.’

  ‘It’s not quiet yet. There’s a sniper on Hamra.’

  ‘Inshallah, he will be dead soon.’

  Inshallah, he’s not your colleague. I’ve heard about a sniper who killed his own brother because he didn’t recognise him in the street.

  I kept my face straight, rode the lift to my suite, made it to my bathroom and hurled until there was only yellow bile left to spit.

  Time to get out.

  But Dad clung to the bar, greeting me with worried eyes. ‘Babette’s back. She’s been in Lebanon a week. She persuaded one of the Mayflower drivers to take her home to Damour. I followed her, but the road was blocked. Rang her. Can’t winkle her out of there. She’s camped in the villa with her fags and gin. Diaries, photos, furs piled up. Her bunker. She dismisses every logical argument I mount with a scoff.’

  ‘She’d go if you quit the country for good.’

  Dad grimaced. ‘Can’t, mate. I’ve got to fly the poor trapped bastards out. Can’t do it by remote control. Most of them didn’t make this war. They fell into it. Besides, Cedar Air won’t let me out of my contract. But anyway, it seems like it’s you she’s running away from. So maybe if you could get down there she’d leave. Beirut’s precarious, but it’s still okay down south.’

  He flew out, to rescue everyone except his own wife, and I watched the jet trails in the sky, knowing that I shouldn’t rely on him – or anyone else but myself in this fierce life.

  55

  A Boy

  So I went to work, too, leaving Babette to her fate. I carried my camera into Karantina camp, where she had tossed money at the mothers. Phalangist fighters had slayed hundreds of people there. They’d shelled it, stormed it with guns and knives, and then burnt the houses and corpses.

  But they’d left the body of a boy curled in the dust, a smudge on his face like chocolate cake mix. Behind him, a militiaman in a grinning plastic clown facemask dropped froth from a champagne bottle onto the boy’s cheek. The man posed for me, the dead boy in the foreground.

  I would caption my photo: The two Beiruts; partying and waging war have come together.

  I wiped the champagne from the boy’s warm face with a lens cloth. Then I fell onto the ground, guts on fire.

  I’m fooling myself thinking so much power lies in a mere lens, when there are always bullets.

  Packing at the Mayflower, I caught the tail end of a BBC radio bulletin: ‘Observers fear that the Palestinians and their allies want revenge for the Karantina killings. Trouble is likely to spread to Lebanon’s south. Frightened Christians have asked the Phalangist militias for protection. Thousands are trying to flee.’

  The phone at the villa miraculously worked. ‘Nahm. Hello.’ The language was Arabic, but the voice was Babette’s.

  I coughed out a sob. ‘Babette! Are you safe? No-one’s got you or anything?’

  ‘A teensy bit bored with my own company, but not about to pop out.’

  ‘Babette, I can help you get out. I’ve lined up a taxi to bring me to Damour. I’ll pick you up. The driver can drop us at the village and we’ll go from there.’

  ‘Not ready for that, Oliver. Can you get me a couple of things?’

  ‘Everyone who’s not fighting is leaving. It’s about to explode around there.’

  ‘I need ice. And hand cream. That French one.’ I didn’t answer.

  Her cult of forgetting has become madness.

  56

  The Field

  Everything that has gone before is in me as I zoom along the highway to Damour. But everything I have ever done is play compared to this. Even the bomb. It’s January and already the new year feels old. The children are fighting now. I sense them before I can see them. At first they appear as glimmers in the corner of my left eye, tracing arcs like fireflies. Then they become humped shapes wriggling in a twinkling field. Shafts of lemony light tunnel through the spikes of hard, dry grass. It’s deep night.

  Maybe I’m in a mirage.

  ‘Bas. Stop.’ Hearing my shout, the driver lifts his lead foot off the accelerator, swivelling his head to see what the war has brought now. An enchanted land. One where small, busy creatures have brought the stars to earth and made them nod and wink.

  He’s agitated. ‘Shou haida? What is it?’

  I am very tired. It’s the fear. The endless fear of the world outside, and also of the one inside, the part of myself that makes me reckless.

  The lines of light in the stiff straw tussocks swirl into focus. Child soldiers are belly-crawling through a sharp unmown paddock, clutching grenades and torches, which wobble with each forward thrust of their elbows. They’re being trained to kill.

  Beside the road, a man in silhouette leans casually on the fence, watching them. He holds a fat rifle, a movie mobster’s Tommy gun, its muzzle pointed at the sky.

  The driver accelerates and I yell, ‘Bas!’ He becomes confused, panics and stalls the car, cursing, as the gunman swings his head towards us.

  ‘Your mother is a prostitute,’ the driver tells the car, but he really means it for me. It’s one of those overused Arab insults and it barely touches me.

  My mother probably is a prostitute, for all I know.

  The driver and I have been tetchy with each other all the way from Beirut. He stammers in bad English. I pluck my pidgin Arabic from some deep fold in my brain. We’ve skated down the highway in his dented Mercedes, and I’ve coaxed him with cash to keep rolling through the thickening crowds of cars, trucks and pedestrians carting bags, babies and goats, all heading for the city we’ve left behind. I’ve pulled a grey woollen beanie over my red hair to avert kidnap.

  I’m a foreigner, even to myself.

  ‘More dangerous for me take you,’ the driver had said in Beirut, eyeing my camera and khaki photographer’s vest drooping with flashes, lenses, batteries and film canisters. That’s when I gave him my first hundred lira of baksheesh. We’ve bribed our way through roadblocks at every roundabout and crossroads in between. Sometimes, we’ve got through on the arch of the driver’s eyebrow, with help from his dashboard Jesus, whose green-lit eyes switch to red when the taxi brakes.

  The Maronites still reign over this coastal highway, and our identity papers record our Christian names, proving to our inquisitors that we are unlikely to be enemies. But there could be misidentification, or a jumpy hand on a gun. There might be someone who takes exception to the work of photographers, or who recognises me and knows what I did up near Beit Zizi.

  The driver’s not a proper minder but one of the Mayflower cabbies, who’s only agreed to bring me because he can take my money and then use the opportunity to taxi relatives to safety from Damour. And because he admires airmen like my father who still fly out of Beirut in ghostly unlit planes, ferrying whole families away from danger. Dad’s been in and out over the past few months, but now the airport is closed and he’s stuck in Rome. I’m on the road where his kidneys were daubed with gunpowder.

  The taxi smells of burnt shoe polish and horseshit. I’ve known that smell since I began my lone crusade against Jess’s smoking. The stench of Gitanes.

  Why not just stick your gob over a factory chimney and inhale?

  The driver steals nervous puffs, lifting both hands from the wheel to shield the smouldering fag end, hoping militiamen won’t spot it. His curled fingers are pocked by burns. The road beyond the shaggy outline of his skull seems an unknown threat.

  I’ve already made him slow down once, when I noticed people huddled on the roadside. Under the weak moon, they had the same chalky aura I had seen around limestone rock formations soaring from the sea. They were waiting to cross the railway line to the cobbled beach.

  ‘They pray a ship come,’ the driver says.


  Each bay we pass is a wide, watery pathway to elsewhere. Cyprus hovers, invisible, just over the horizon. That’s where I’ll take Babette, if I can convince her to leave. If she’ll allow me to rescue her from herself.

  Seven years ago, when I was a kid, I hoped she would rescue me.

  The driver turns off his headlights when he has decided that no other vehicle is coming at us from the opposite direction, and I’ve dug my hands into the torn leather of the rear seat, expecting a screech and the smash of metal.

  ‘Shouay shouay. Careful.’ Other drivers do the same, creeping up on us in darkness whenever clouds cover the moon. The first we know of their presence is the whoosh of air as they zoom past. ‘Save petrol. Cost too much now.’

  I don’t tell him that it’s ridiculous to believe that dousing headlights saves fuel. He’s also doing it as a precaution against snipers. The war has made us all afraid of light. Now the driver is suspicious of what the glowing in the paddock may mean.

  I point my lens through the window and whisper a cough as dizzying puffs of diesel exhaust are carried in on the sea wind. I’m reminded once more of how difficult it is to take in the sweep of the world through a lens. The frame is too small to express the way I see the secretive war games the men have tricked the children into. The driver is also nervous about the clatter of the shutter, its mechanical click slow enough to drink in the low, syrupy light. It would be too dangerous to use a flash. He turns the fingers of one hand in the air to question my sanity once more.

  ‘Not a safe place here for faroun, Monsieur Lawrence.’ He means foreigners.

  I mimic my father’s most imperious captain’s voice. ‘Just a moment. I have to take this photo.’ My hands are shivering. It’s back – that force inside me that carries me above fear, just as a bomb planted in soil lifts the earth.

  The gunman leaning on the fence stops being a still silhouette and strides towards the car. I lower the camera onto the car seat and grab a white T-shirt from my duffel bag to wave at him. My surrender flag is emblazoned with a loud American anti-Vietnam war slogan: DRAFT BEER, NOT BOYS. My heart is not surrendering. It rattles its rib-cage bars.