Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  Babette is in the garden courtyard, stabbing at the hard red earth with a spoon, jewellery puddled beside the small hole she has made to hide it. She keeps sipping her drink, as if it will oil her immobilised limbs. I see now the depths of her fear.

  Bang. Swishhhh – it’s as if a metal chain curtain is swinging high over us. Thud. A rocket. I’ve heard the sounds before. But I’ve never lain in their path. We both scream, but Babette recovers before me. Inside, she points to a small hallway where the ceiling supports a water heater. ‘That’s the bunker. Your father told me that it’s encased in concrete and that’s the best place to shelter if anyone tries to bomb us.’

  Or it may crumble and deliver us into a bone-crushing flood.

  I carry her suitcase into the bunker. She piles up cigarettes and matches. ‘Provisions.’ She mocks herself with a smile. Catches my eye-roll. ‘I know there’s a war, Oliver. I’ve been living it.’

  We raid the curfew cupboard and stack its contents beside a bag of oranges. I fill three of Dad’s empty whiskey bottles with water. She brings her gin magnum and two glasses.

  I rest my cameras, like babies, on pillows and hide a steak knife, for protection. I import a narrow table as a shield for fending off metal and concrete if a rocket hits. I’m thinking of the man I once saw lifting a chair over his head when a bomb exploded in a Hamra cafe. We lie end to end, on our backs, head to head in the clean smell of new concrete, which has never left the villa despite the parties and the fights, and the drunks who I imagine have bounced from wall to wall.

  And all goes quiet. Babette has querulous eyes, but she’s drunk so much gin, she falls asleep. I wait, with a horror of the sun deserting us, until the day is exhausted and the amber light of evening lolls in the living room.

  Bang. Whoosh. Thud.

  Babette shrieks and turns onto her stomach. I do the same. We look into the fear in each other’s eyes. Our cold, entwined fingers grip and become claws. More rockets arc over us. With each thump of a distant bomb landing, Babette screws up her eyes and wails, releasing her fingers from mine. The rockets come from below and above us. The militias are trading missiles. I think of Ringo in the hills with his hurt eyes, Abdo in the village, commanding with hands on hips. I’ll never know if either of them is really there, but if not Ringo, if not Abdo, then others like them.

  I’ve had practice. For years I’ve had some kind of night war inside. Whole armies of soldiers, each one myself, fighting each other while I sleep. I could sometimes catch the wispy memory of them in the morning, not knowing where they came from, where they went. I could never run from the hostilities inside.

  But we have to run from this. It’s like the root of minus one. You don’t have to understand it. You just have to use it. The wisest thing is to resist war. I had thought Al Orentz was noble, racing to war on a camel. But more honourable are the refugees hailing a ship in moonlight, carrying what they can of their lives, spreading the seeds of peace by craving it.

  We must go. I have to get that film out. My lens will be more powerful than their lead.

  I begin to count aloud as each rocket hisses overhead, up to thirteen. Babette turns on her back with a hard sigh. ‘There’s a reason for worry beads. You count quietly.’

  ‘The reason for worry beads is to stop smokers polluting everyone else’s air.’

  ‘Cigarettes were invented to give people something to do with their mouths. You can shut me up by passing me one.’

  I’d like to smack the wall with my fist, but I light her a cigarette. All that distress over Babette and the son she hasn’t seen. Will never see. If we’re going to die, I want to know why the thought of him seems to drive her mad.

  I pull out my magic trick, a book I’ve made of photos Phillip took recently of P, grown almost to teenage-hood, with his mother’s long, thin legs. He’s walking outside the Chelsea Physic Garden, ahead of a heavy man and woman with black eyebrows in a shared fug of unhappiness.

  I hold it above Babette’s face. At first she ducks away, shielding her eyes, but the breeze I make when I flip the pages, creating a movie of her son moving through a London street, persuades her to look.

  Phillip has captured him – click click click – as he flicks back his hair, just the way Babette does. He has the same jutting cheekbones, delicate chin and fine nose. He’s wearing sunglasses the same shape as those lying folded beside his mother now.

  ‘Shove a Dunhill in his mouth and they’ll think it’s you.’

  ‘Peter.’ Her voice is strangled. She grabs the book, to study it.

  ‘Have you ever missed him?’

  ‘Didn’t I say that I did?’

  ‘No. You told me the nurse took away your baby and then you fled to Paris.’

  ‘Straightaway, I wanted him back … I can’t abide the smell of Dettol or lilies because that was what I woke to, in the hospital room, after someone had knocked me out with an injection.’ Her voice trembles. ‘I thought I’d imagined my baby. I only knew him, when he was born, through his absence. I missed the outline of his fist curving across my stretched belly skin. I knew there was someone with a will there. I wanted to know that will. I had the beginning of knowing it when I heard his voice. In my very lonely, disinfected room, that’s all I had left: the memory of his first cry.’

  Crack. Swish. Thump.

  ‘When I gave birth, two nurses held up a sheet so I wouldn’t see him. But I saw. His head fitted into the midwife’s stretched palm. My blood and the white froth from his scalp smeared her wedding ring. His tiny ribs puffed in and out where his whole body lay between her palm and elbow. I saw his hair between her spread fingers. Copper. The colour of yours when it’s wet. The number of times I’ve looked at you and thought of him …’

  That made me reel.

  I knew when I first saw his picture that this kid and I were joined together.

  ‘I asked the midwife if I could hold him, but she said, “Best not to, dear.” Someone stabbed a blackout needle into my arm and, as I fought the dizziness, I saw his little skull being transported away in that hand. His cries trailed away … Sorry.’ Her sobs dredged up my own pain. ‘When I woke up, I thought, if he came back I would trim his tiny finger nails with my teeth, as I’d seen mothers do. But he didn’t. I tried to imagine where he was in relation to where I lay – the direction and distance. I wonder all the time. Where is he exactly? How far away? And did I make him happy, with that decision? Although, it wasn’t mine. His father got to choose, because of who he was. Because his wife couldn’t have children and he wanted a son.’

  Another rocket cracks, hisses and crumps. Glass shatters. The earth shakes. Babette grabs my arm and turns her head into it. ‘We’re going to die here.’ Her voice is tremulous.

  I don’t want my smashed bones to lie in Lebanon.

  ‘What else have you got in the way of magic, Oliver? You always have magic.’

  The air falls silent. Plonk. Plonk. Plink. Water is dripping into the tank above us. After a while, she gives one of those sad smiles that come after tears. ‘That was good, whatever you did. Can you make the war go away altogether now, please?’

  ‘We have to leave it.’ I find it ridiculous that I have to spell this out.

  ‘I forgot that I’d brought something for you from Walid in Paris. It’s a silly thing, but maybe you don’t think so.’

  She hands me a plastic bag, which rustles as I dig inside. My fingers touch my lucky rock. It’s shedding sandstone crystals, as usual. I pull it out and run my fingertip over the line an artist made so long ago. I peer into the valleys where lichen clumps used to cling like tiny trees. Now they have dried out and fallen away. But I remember them. I close my eyes and smell clean moss from the eucalypt bushland of my memory. I doze with my face pressed into my camera lens and dream that I’m inside a curved corridor of bush filled with birdsong, Effoff and I heading towards a gaping canyon.

  Effoff splashes into it first and disappears. My throat clots. I hear a muted scream and a splash. I
follow, plunging into the blood-earth smell of a natural well. The spring water in my mouth tastes clear and sweet. I breathe deeply and dive down through the tepid, churning water, probing with my fingertips until I find a passage in the rock at the bottom. I pull myself along a narrow shaft, fluttering my feet like flippers.

  I’m stuck. Wonder why I have chosen this way to die. The natural world is so indifferent. I flap my shoulders in toward my chest. I’m released. My breath is exploding as I burst through the jagged tunnel edge, into a cave, gulping, goggling at the tiny star-points tucked into the cave ceiling. Glow worms, winking. Effoff giggles and slides slippery fingers over my grazed skin. The rock has opened me up. And she opens to me. The star-points explode, but nothing like a bomb.

  There it is, inside me. Peace. I can wake up.

  The rockets have fallen silent. The old sun is heaving itself up one more time over the blood in the fields of Lebanon. It’s my twenty-second birthday. My life is still on its orbit, one which belongs to no-one else.

  ‘Babette, grab your sneakers and whatever you can carry.’

  ‘What sneakers? Is it safe outside?’ Babette clicks her heels into the marble.

  ‘Not necessarily. Are you ready?’

  ‘Yes, Oliver. Pack the gin. I’ll bring the cigarettes. And your magic trick. I’m ready, My Man Friday.’

  I hide Babette’s suitcase full of scribbled secrets in the ceiling cavity beside the water heater. She blows a goodbye kiss to the villa and totters towards the village, leaving me to cart her bag full of clothes, my cameras and food for our journey.

  Down at the beach, women dawdle on the rocks, hoping to leave with their children, shouting at a man as he pulls a plain wooden rowboat up to the shore. I give them oranges. The oarsman won’t take them because he wants more money than they have. I give him Dad’s cash and he ushers Babette and I on. We sit like royalty, waiting to follow the path of the sun towards the ship that will take us to Cyprus.

  The boatman lifts the oars as if they were wings. A baby cries on the shore. ‘No!’ The man drops the oars and grabs at the gold bar Babette holds out. She beckons to the women and pushes her case of belongings over the side.

  Two grim men haggle with the boatman, making him promise to get us all the way to Cyprus for the price of the gold bar. They show him their guns. The boatman frowns, offended. Murmuring, the women cram in with their children, who they’ve fattened with all the clothes they can wear. The boatman curses Babette, but she sweetens him with a few packs of cigarettes.

  As the two grim men push the boat away and watch it waddle into the small waves, the women twist their faces back to study every fading fold and contour of their homeland. I grab an oar, but the boatman is so much stronger than me that we turn in circles and he takes the oar back. Maleish. Who cares? Lift lens. I can shoot the faint creep of hopefulness in the children’s strained faces now. Out at sea, the wind brings the smell of the children’s bittersweet orange peels, which they dash into the water, to float into shore on the night tide.

  Babette peels cellophane from a box of cigarettes and drops it into the whirling peels. She settles behind the curtain of her dark glasses. ‘When I’ve finished this pack, we’ll be in Cyprus.’

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks, first of all, to my parents, both committed artists, who imbued their children with a love of story and who have continued, well into old age, to crack people up with their wit, despite a now wobbly grasp of words.

  Thanks to friends and fellow writers whose inspirational words often waft by and only gel in my brain when I am either luxuriating in the shower or walking the Jackoodle. I have always enjoyed huge encouragement as a writer from my dear friend Adele Horin. I’m grateful to my steadfast readers of various drafts: Liz Jurman, Mariza O’Keeffe, Rowena Helston and Georgina Crawford.

  I’m appreciative that Susan Wyndham suggested I attend the first Faber Academy course to be held in Australia – as she did. I’ve returned often to notes I made while word wizards imparted the secrets of writing a novel. They included Malcolm Knox, Margo Lanagan, David Malouf, Michael Robotham, Charlotte Wood and Sue Woolfe. Most said it’s messy, which is a relief.

  My Faber Academy tutors James Bradley and Kathryn Heyman acted as true mentors, providing inspiration and helping me to purge some of the clunkiness from the first draft.

  At a crucial point, Clara Finlay made important recommendations about structure, while Linda Aronson’s insights during a workshop and in her published work rescued me when I felt I was drowning. Thanks to my agent, Gaby Naher, for giving further valued advice on this, too.

  Random House publisher Meredith Curnow and editor Brandon VanOver helped make Oliver’s story more fit for life in the world outside my head. They also laughed, for which I am grateful (as long as it was in the right places).

  That wonder woman of Sydney, my friend Nazha Saad, helped clarify my thoughts about how children fared in war and generously advised on matters Lebanese. If I got anything wrong, though, it’s not her fault.

  While I drew on numerous sources for Lebanon’s civil war history, two were bulwarks. Death of a Country: The Civil War in Lebanon by the London Daily Telegraph’s former Beirut correspondent John Bulloch (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977) catalogued events, blow by blow. Days of Tragedy, Lebanon ’75–’76, a clever, repellent pictorial critique of the horrors war inflicts – on children, in particular – by Joseph G. Chami and Gérard Castoriades (self-published), drove me to keep writing.

  Finally, thanks, Tony, for being so understanding whenever I’ve withdrawn to the loft to play with my imaginary friends.

  About the Author

  Debra Jopson completed the first draft of Oliver of the Levant while participating in the first Faber Academy novel writing course held in Australia in 2011. Born in Sydney, she spent part of her childhood in Beirut and continued to visit her family there during the first rounds of the 1970s Lebanese civil war. She has worked as a journalist for major media outlets over four decades, most recently at The Sydney Morning Herald, where she specialised in Aboriginal affairs and major investigations, winning a Walkley Award and numerous Human Rights Commission honours.

  Over the past three years she has devoted herself to writing fiction and long-form journalism, contributing to The Global Mail, The Saturday Paper, Good Weekend, ABCTV’s Four Corners and SBS. In 2014, she became the Walkley Awards Freelance Journalist of the Year.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Penguin Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Oliver of the Levant

  ePub ISBN – 9780857988300

  First published by Vintage in 2016

  Copyright © Debra Jopson, 2016

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Every effort has been made to acknowledge and contact the copyright holders for permission to reproduce material contained in this book. Any copyright holders who have been inadvertently omitted from acknowledgements and credits should contact the publisher and omissions will be rectified in subsequent editions.

  A Vintage book

  Published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd

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  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Jopson,
Debra, 1952– author

  Oliver of the Levant/Debra Jopson

  ISBN 978 0 85798 830 0 (ebook)

  Australians – Lebanon – Beirut – Fiction

  Beirut (Lebanon) – Fiction

  Lebanon – History – Civil War, 1975–1990 – Fiction

  A823.4

  Cover image: boy © Arcangel Images; Beirut skyline © Dreamstime.com

  Cover design by Nada Backovic