Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  The man aims an intense beam of light at us from a gigantic torch. A moment before I am dazzled, he flashes it over his own face.

  Oh, no. The shape of the man’s face is familiar. He may want revenge, and what can I say? ‘I thought I was a magician exploding a cigar.’

  Another sweep of the torch beam captures the taxi driver’s upturned hair jerking with his tremors. He winces when he hears my door handle click and my camera gear clank as I hop out of the car.

  The driver doesn’t look at me. ‘If I must to left you, I will give the money to the church where lives the Virgin Mary.’

  He’s told me that there’s a chapel in the mountains where a painting of Mary on the wall began shedding tears when the first round of the war began. I suspect drainage issues, or sleight of hand, but people here believe with such force in God’s might, in miracles and in treacherous fate that sometimes even I can be persuaded, during moments when I need hope, that a saint can appear weeping on a wall. We can’t drive away now that a man with a gun is coming towards us. I need to call on the supernatural myself.

  I swing out of the car with my lens at my heart. I hear myself growl at the driver, ‘Don’t leave me here, or I swear if I die before you, I’ll reach out from my grave and make that painting weep tears to haunt you for the rest of your life.’

  I’ve learnt some lessons in Lebanon. One is that the man has a better chance of understanding my brutality than my atheism.

  Abdo’s silly, pretty mouth widens in a smile of recognition above the torch, which makes his face seem like a haunting. My hope that he won’t shoot rises. ‘Hey, Abdo! You’ve arranged a party.’

  He lowers the torch, places his hand on his heart, then holds it out to me, chuckling, while his rifle slides on its tether over his shoulder. ‘Olifer. What you do here? Make picture?’

  ‘Yes. I’m still playing with my camera.’

  ‘Mabrook. Congratulations. Cost too much money, that one.’

  We stand in the field and speak of cameras, as if we’ve bumped into each other on Hamra in peacetime.

  ‘Please, take photos of these little soldiers. I am proud, like I am their father. You know Lebanese love children. You have now a son maybe?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I have three children. All girl. One day, I will have to pay for too many weddings. Next time I say, “Sabine, have a boy.”’

  ‘How … is … she?’ I don’t like him saying her name. I also don’t know if he’s luring me in so he can punish me for letting her eat my lips when she was his fiancée. Or for exploding that bomb on consecrated ground near his village.

  ‘In Canada. Safe, with my daughters. Too sad here.’

  I don’t say: ‘Sad if you’ve got sons because you put guns in their hands.’

  I’m walking through the paddock with the lights. If the driver takes off, I won’t have that eyebrow on my side; I won’t even have wheels. But right now, I only live for and through my photographs.

  Abdo lets the boys pose, lying in the grass with their grenades, as he swaggers behind them. Some refugees wait across the road, ghostly in blankets, our unnerving audience. ‘You tell people what happens to Christians here. We need help, from America, another Christian country. Maybe Australia.’

  There’s a sports carnival atmosphere. Men on the sidelines urge boys on and cheer them when they reach a target shaped like a man’s head. The boys pretend to pull their grenade pins. Abdo won’t pose for me, and he won’t let the boys stand for the camera, in case there’s a sniper in the foothills behind.

  He touches his chest again. ‘Please. They are in my care.’ It gives me another reason to hate him.

  One boy, maybe age ten, cheeky and with teeth as white as Jess’s, lies on his back beneath my glass lens eye and holds his arms out from his sides at ninety degrees, a skinny muscleman with a grenade in one hand and a torch in the other. I ask his name.

  ‘GI Joe.’

  He has a helmet pulled over a carefully cut fringe and an oversized khaki outfit held together at the waist by a thick belt. He’s wearing a man’s shirt, bunched up to fit. His fly is undone and the bow of one shoelace has come loose. His eyes are matt brown and trusting.

  ‘Good shot. Great. Thanks, Joe.’

  ‘Epic!’ He has an American accent.

  ‘Okay, finish now,’ a sad-eyed man who stands lookout whispers. But, relaxing now because it seems Abdo isn’t going to ambush me to seek revenge for pashing Sabine or blowing up his ammo stash, I shoot off another reel. Abdo shakes a woven basket and calls the boys, as if they were puppies. When they wriggle close enough, he tosses each a lolly.

  I give Joe my remaining Chiclets and he chews like a tough guy.

  I don’t want him to die. I have to find a way to stop myself taking pictures. It hurts.

  Abdo saunters over when he sees me leaving. ‘You helped me one day to catch fedayeen.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘At Beit Zizi. He make a bomb. I thank you because my uncle, who drive a taxi, help us to find the name of that son of a prostitute. And we make him pay blood.’

  ‘What did you do to him?’

  He’s the one who arranged Ringo’s shooting. It’s my fault.

  ‘Not yet. We will make him pay blood. One day. After he tell us who ordered him to do it. Mahmoud – he is commander now, like me. He trick you. Now you know he’s not your friend.’

  I whisper the old Arab saying, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ as I head to the taxi. The driver’s still there. I love him. I hand him another hundred Lebanese lira. ‘Give it to the church.’

  ‘Mary give her son. We give our sons so we can keep our home.’ He has wet eyes.

  ‘It should be the children crying and the adults fighting.’

  The driver sobs a laugh. ‘I fight, too.’

  A ship has appeared on the horizon and I shoot the refugees’ silhouettes as they lift their hands, hoping to hitch a ride to Cyprus. I hope – I almost find myself praying – that Babette will agree to go there with me.

  When we reach Damour, the windows of the houses are dark. The throb of the Merc echoes back from their vacant stone walls. Churches hold up their crosses, black against the bare light of the sky.

  The driver turns up towards the hills, where the villas of Paradise Estate are scattered like empty cartons in the fields. ‘No good here. No electric, now.’

  ‘Thank you, my friend, for bringing me all this way in such danger. I am in your debt.’

  The driver is abashed. ‘Welcome, Monsieur Lawrence. Your father is special man, so I help his son … I must go. Palestinians coming soon, making trouble. I must to find my family. Please do not stay. Very dangerous.’

  No amount of baksheesh will persuade him to wait for me to bring Babette. He wants to rescue his family, not us.

  The Merc without headlights soon disappears from view.

  57

  Boat People

  The villa seems sulky, hooded, its porch roof crouched over a dark doorway. I stumble on the woody snags of wild herbs, releasing the sweet, green scent of sage and thyme. They’ve outlived the goats that the driver has said someone shot and ate a few months ago. Babette had sent me a photo of her ‘nannies and one billy’, with the caption: ‘Our goats, attempting to turn our garden into a desert.’

  I ring the doorbell. I can’t see through the glass panels in the door’s honeyed wood fretwork. Babette has hung cloth over them. I worry that she’s been kidnapped.

  If she has, she’ll give the kidnappers hell.

  As I wait, I remember one stinking hot Bondi morning when I walked her to the city bus, wanting an extra ten minutes with her before school. She wore a fluro pink pants suit. Her heels stabbed holes into the melting road tar. She marched on, as other pedestrians melted in the shadows.

  ‘How come you’re not even sweating?’ I asked.

  She shielded her bright eyes, looking for the bus. ‘Ladies don’t sweat. They don’t even perspire, Oliver. They glow.’ Then
she hailed a taxi.

  A finger swishes the cloth away from one glass rectangle. Another torch beam zaps my pupils.

  ‘I’m not a bloody possum!’ I yell.

  ‘Oliver. Wait.’ Babette’s heels tap away. I hang in the warm sea air in the middle of a war zone. Through my zoom lens I see that the Paradise Estates communal pool below is lit, powered by a generator that pulses in the stillness. Green patches of slime stretch across the aqua water and a tipsy artificial palm-tree hangs from the remains of a grassy bank, doubled over. As I squint at it in the sickly light, the palm becomes a winded man leaning at the waist, his hair the forked fronds. He reminds me of all the dead and beaten people I’ve seen. The driver told me that gunmen raided this estate in the months before Babette arrived.

  I ring again. ‘Babette!’

  There is a sound of scraping and huffing. She opens, breathless with her smoker’s lungs after pulling a table away from where she had pushed it against the door. Her face is moist with fresh make-up. Her eyes are still crystal green, but crimson-flecked. The skin beneath them seems smeared with ash, and her hair has a home-cut look – straight at the fringe but chunking, ragged, down her back. It is as yellow and dry as hay stalks. She leans up to kiss me on both cheeks. There’s a waft of sweet acidic perfume, nicotine and gin. ‘You’re a tall drink of water these days,’ she purrs, as if she hasn’t seen me since I was a kid.

  She swings the torchlight around the weeds lapping up the pale stone sides of the house. ‘Finally grew a green thumb. Look.’ I propel her inside, waiting for a bullet in my back.

  She’s tried to fortify the villa by wedging chairs and lounges against the doors. There’s a smell of candlewax. She tells me she’s already been there for a fortnight.

  ‘Why the hell did you leave Paris?’

  ‘Beirut airport was open again and I shot through the window of opportunity.’ She holds up two fingers to mimic a gun. Closes one eye: ‘Pyow, pyow.’

  ‘But why didn’t you stop in Beirut? Come and see me.’

  ‘You would have tried to make me leave. And nagged me about my son. Look what supplies I’ve laid in. Cigarettes, matches and a magnum of duty-free gin … And now I have a man.’

  ‘You don’t need supplies. We have to shoot through. Everyone who can get out is getting out. They know something. The situation has become much worse. It’s not like anything you’ve seen here before.’

  ‘The situation. How tired am I of hearing that? The situation is the reason I haven’t been able to make a plan or live my life for years.’

  ‘You remember Karantina? There’s been a massacre there. It’s more than a situation.’

  ‘It’s not the same for foreigners. We’re not in it. My neighbours told me that. The Shehadies. And the Melhams. Don’t try and make me leave just yet, will you, Oliver?’

  ‘I have to.’

  She shrugs and shows me her suitcase, thrown onto a bed in a room lit by an old kerosene lamp. It’s filled with photos from her dancing days and the diaries with secrets she may still think are hers alone, not knowing how much I’ve read. ‘I’m packed. I can’t go without this. It’s got my life in it. But I’ll get you a drink. You look thirsty.’

  She takes her torch to the kitchen to pour two warm gins. Her diary is lying open on the bed. I hold a page above the lamp.

  ‘Neighbours (Shehadies) angry and say I am being reckless by staying. But where else is home? They took me to see the mayhem left in the Melhams’ villa. Guerrillas broke in and killed all the men. The blood of the father – jovial fellow, used to hear him whistle – and the son – Phalangist warrior, I suppose – soaked a pattern into the Persian rug. The barbarians also shot the butterfly collection off the wall. Glass and butterfly wings shattered together.

  She calls me to the living room, where fitful candles propped in empty booze bottles throw jaundiced puddles of light. She’s turned the peeling louvres of the window shutters tight, but I worry about light seeping through, giving our presence away to malevolent outsiders. I look at Babette, who once loved to kick her legs high in the spotlights. Her lashes have become light. Her eyes remind me of the blind blinking of newborn mice.

  ‘No tomorrow.’ She lifts her glass.

  It makes me fierce with anger. I stand over her, shaking. Then, when I see fear in her face, I turn away and thump my hand on the top of a table shoved against the balcony door. ‘Where are the Shehadies?’

  ‘Athens, I think. They gave me a plucked chicken, but I have nothing to cook it with. No gas, no power. So I chucked it in the garbage bin out back. It’s begun to stink. Last night I woke with my heart beating, thinking I was in a thunderstorm. Then the storm yowled. Cats jumping on the tin garbage lid, trying to get at the rotting carcass.’

  ‘The Melhams?’

  She gags on her gin. Pushes out her lower lip. ‘The Melhams left early on. Paris, I think.’

  Her lie makes me lonely. In this villa on the hill, Babette and I are adrift in a sea of darkness, monsters gathering around, surrounded by the debris of a lost civilisation – the deserted pool, the dead goats’ hooves rotting in the stony fields, the roses Grandad spoke of turned to thorns. And all I have is my camera, my secret present for Babette and a hand of green bananas wrangled from a farmer with match-light in his eyes at a usurious price.

  ‘Dad wants you to leave. The gunmen who came onto the estate once could easily return.’

  ‘Huh. That’s rich. He’s addicted to war. That’s why he holed up in Beirut and why he’s kept flying in and out of that bloody airport with the rockets roaring. I’ve found my home here. Orchards. Pool. Cocktail club. Security. If I go back to Paris, some brute will come in here and trash my things.’

  ‘Let’s leave, after this drink.’ I swallow a slug of gin, to encourage her to finish hers, and feel my head lighten. ‘Who are you writing the diaries for?’

  She waves her cigarette, leaving a grey ash trail on the parquet. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Dad’s given me moolah. We can go down to the coast and pay a fisherman to take us to Cyprus, then hop to Athens. There’s that bar in Piraeus where you danced Zorba with the waiter.’

  She looks at me with suspicion. ‘The night has a thousand eyes. And the day but one. Old Arab saying. We can get a taxi tomorrow. See where it takes us.’

  ‘I’m calling a taxi now.’ The phone receiver echoes with the sound of silence. Babette laughs and relaxes, thinking she has won. She has a basket of oranges from the orchard next door. She squeezes one into her next gin. We eat from the curfew cupboard. Cold frankfurts and cracked Marie biscuits with fig jam. I tell her about Abdo.

  ‘Phew. Close shave. You were spared the jealous husband routine.’

  ‘He told me to leave with you. I don’t know how much he meant it to be a threat. He’s training kids to kill people.’

  ‘Better than being killed themselves.’

  I cannot bear her complacency, this nonchalance she affects.

  She’d rather die than leave behind a bag of words.

  To shake her up, I confess. ‘You know that guy Ringo who I went with up to Beit Zizi the day of the explosion? It was Mahmoud. Souhar’s Mahmoud. He and I let off the bomb together.’

  ‘Ah, so it was Mahmoud all along. You fell into bad company in your own home, under our noses.’

  She snickers at the irony, pours another gin and hands it to me. I take it to the kitchen and pour it down the sink. I sleep in a single bed with no sheets in the maid’s room. I make myself ill with tiredness, lying in the heart of someone else’s war.

  I’ve got the magic trick to perform yet.

  In the morning, she’s still stalling.

  ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ I say.

  She stretches her fingers, cat readying claws. ‘I don’t want to see it.’

  ‘You don’t know what it is.’

  ‘I have my suspicions.’ She narrows her eyes. I leave it, for the moment. I photograph her as she repaints her nails, as she piles her jewelle
ry on the dining room table deciding which to wear and which to take, as she reclines to re-read a dog-eared magazine. It’s impossible to get a candid shot. She will always follow the lens.

  Around lunchtime, through a crack in the window shutter, I see a kid running towards the villa in a blue T-shirt printed with the name ‘Simone’. I open the door. It’s the boy with matt brown eyes. Joe. He has goosebumps on his arms.

  Babette gasps. ‘How’d you get Simone’s T-shirt?’ Joe wraps his arms across the name. ‘My commander, Abdo, says get out quick. Palestinians have gotten here from Syria. They’ve got AK-47s and Katyusha rockets. The Kataeb are in position in Damour and they’ll murder those dogs, but these houses are right in the path.’

  ‘Palestinians. Where?’

  He gestures to the land sloping away behind our villa, runs down the hill and pushes into a car crammed with people, its roof stacked high with belongings bundled in blankets. The car takes off too fast for him to hear my shout: ‘Shookran’. I say a silent thank you to Abdo as well.

  Babette looks shattered, so I try to cheer her. ‘At least Joe’s parents are getting him out. So many kids are being left to fight.’

  She glares at me. ‘Simone lived with the Melhams down the way. Beautiful girl. Just turned fifteen.’

  I’m furious. I hold my arms wide. ‘So she’s safe in Paris, too?’

  Babette sighs. ‘I suppose you’re right; we should go. We’ll get a driver. I’ve kept a gold bar to pay.’

  I don’t tell her it’s too late for drivers. I climb a ladder to the roof and zoom my best lens on a cluster of commandos setting up a battle station in the hills, where gold grass stands soldier-straight in red soil. If these are Palestinians, perhaps Ringo is leading them. I imagine walking up waving a white flag. Ringo recognising me. Calling with joy, ‘Olifer!’

  Yeah, right.