“This village you asked me about. It surrounds a church. Actually, the homes are so close to the church you can hear the confessions from within it,” he laughs more at the Catholic ritual of confessing your sins. I can tell his father finds the practice weak in this young boy’s Muslim voice. Although, not weak enough to send his son to a Catholic school.
“Why are they so close?” I ask.
“The church protects them from the inside. The cedar trees and the mountains protect the village from the outside.”
“From what?”
“From storms, earthquakes, us.”
Mohammed laughs again. His skin is dark, oily and pimple ridden, like the rest of the kids. Unlike them, his attitude is very condescending. Even to his fourth period English teacher from last year.
“The village protects itself against conversion?” I ask.
He nods.
“Are you planning on moving there, sir?”
His jokes are as garlicy as his breath.
“No, I’m deporting you there, Mohammed.”
“You won’t find me dead there, sir.”
His roots show.
“Isn’t that the point?” I joke and he finds it funny until another bite.
I call my wife after lunch duty but she doesn’t respond. She is supposed to contact her doctor and arrange a mammogram. I shirk at the horrible possibilities of what such a test may find. And I think of my cousin who passed the year before. My age, and much more brilliant with his hands. But also, four kids.
After school, I get on my phone and research this tiny village. Bsharri. The pictures preach escapism. Apparently it roots the only remaining Original Cedars of Lebanon. Tall, multi-trunked cedar trees whose exposed roots cling to mountain cliffs like arms climbing them. The peak of the church attempts to rise from the valley and is gratefully shielded by the green. Historically, Bsharri in Phoenician translation means ‘The House of Ishtar,’ which alludes to the worship of a pagan goddess. And yet, Maronite Christians sought refuge in the mountainous terrain when they were persecuted in the 7TH Century. Characterized by its courageous and tribal resistance, the people of Bsharri are very hospitable but violently patriotic, which may explain why Kashif, the man who will receive the message, hides there. He hides in a land renowned for its resistance against Palestinian and Syrian invasions. A beautiful northern landscape of mountains and valleys, with a church nestled expertly in the valley.
The Messenger has these pictures on his phone as well. He glances at them periodically to imagine Kashif, the man unaware of the message he is about to receive. The Messenger is more invested in his dying scene, or, rather, where he imagines himself to be murdered. It excites him. The thought of finally dying and not by his own failed hand. He considers it justified now. His intentions have always dictated this fate with mind body spirit communication breakdowns preventing the proper execution of this desire. The Messenger trusts my Man. He trusts the voice that reassured him he would die on the mountain, his last vision of the sky in the pictures.
The Messenger reverts to these pictures the hotter it gets on the bus he is travelling on. He is in Syria and the roads are pothole ridden and sink hole cavernous at times. The bus rocks to the point of keeling over. Instinctively, passengers leap from their seats to the other side to balance it. It is plain and evident that assembled families are fleeing with the hope of gaining access to the border, although The Messenger can read other designs in their dust dried eyes. Making a run for it in the opposite direction, for instance.
The Messenger must find a way to cross the border. He has no passport. If he did, it would only serve to stall his entrance. Or prevent him entirely with a detention. He must smuggle his way across the border and he carries enough bribe money in his pocket to do so. He is also not afraid to kill anyone in his way since he is not afraid to die by retaliation. But he is also a man of promise. One who values a vow. He never sought another woman after his wife died. He never considered moving on to another life. And when his own child died, he felt no inclination to start anew. Instead, every second thought about them hollowed him further, like a butcher carving meat from his bones without the need to skin him first. His bones rattle when their images race through his hollow, cavernous tunnels, leaving only empty echoes in the darkness of forgetting.
He walks up to the bus driver and asks him to open the door. It is practically parked in a line of beeping lorries. The Messenger would prefer to walk across the border on foot. Once on the other side, he could always hitchhike his way to the village of Bsharri or find another bus. Crossing the line is the challenge. Green Beret-clad men with shouldered machine artillery pace lines and point the tips of guns into windows to incite facial recognition. A few of them catch him walking towards them with his hands up. As he does so, he finds interested eyes in the eldest of the group, the leader. The Messenger adjusts the direction of his path to meet with this general.
“What do you think you are doing?” the official asks. His accent is silky Persian.
“Crossing the border.”
The Messenger is fluent in sixty-four languages. He once worked as a translator for the United Nations before his promotion to diplomatic peace missions. He learned negotiation skills and the art of reading a lying face in this capacity. He found the right man to bribe at the border. He communicates this mutual understanding by lowering his hands and becoming a close talker. Not necessarily a pleasurable tactic, it communicates trust and secrecy to the official with body language. The official with a beret seemingly stapled to his head by metal pins and symbols is equally as tall. His stomach protrudes to the brink of his shirt buttons, while his gun holster disappears below the rounded belly. He is a man of appetite, The Messenger deduces.
He points his gun into The Messenger’s chest to protect his space. It indents The Messenger’s chest like the point of a knife.
“Turn around.”
The Messenger does as he is told. The point of the gun finds the imaginary passage of the bullet on The Messenger’s back, if he would have pulled the trigger.
“Walk.”
All of the subservient officials glance over to the scene briefly. They are too afraid to stare. The Messenger finds himself in a closet inside the customs building. In the dark again. He hates the dark for making his memories come to life like a projector film. The Messenger squints his eyes hard in an attempt to create white stars and flashes, maybe even a headache. These are physical distractions he has devised, psychological horse shutters.
He can’t prevent the smell of cleanliness, bleach from the mop bucket, to spur on a back door entrance to a memory.
His baby son is floating in the kitchen sink. Tiny, small enough to fit in, like a dish or a fragile glass. His wife is pulling her hair back and he sees her freckled neck in this memory. It is youthful and the skin is taut on her throat. She is laughing and his son is splashing. There is water on the ceramic tile of the floor. He had just returned from a trip in Egypt to make the birth a few days prior. Although his baby is blind and his eyes haven’t come into focus, his first born is gripping his arm instinctively as if holding onto a safety bar. He is insecure in his own bath water, in the warmth of his mother’s singing, so he has reached out for a lifeline. The Messenger never wants to leave his home again. There is too much to lose now.
The official arrives having changed out of his uniform. He looks like a father himself in civilian khaki slacks and a Hawaiian patterned shirt.
“Come with me.”
The Messenger follows the official who appears to have finished his shift. The official leads him to a dressing room. He walks in to make sure the institutional shower area is vacated. He then proceeds to pull a uniform from a locker.
“Change.”
The Messenger does as he is told, removing the envelope of money from his pocket to remind the official of his payment.
The thickness of the envelope indicates more danger, which makes the official too honest to steal it outright. He seems to understand there are other powers at work greater than his sphere of influence. He waits until The Messenger has fully dressed.
“You, my soldier, will drive me home.”
The official throws The Messenger the keys.
“I always have a soldier drive me home.”
The Messenger is curious to know why, yet he doesn’t ask. The official explains anyway.
“To protect the money I take.”
This confession confuses The Messenger.
“To each his share.”
The Messenger feels like he has met a man whose name should be The Collector. A man with an understanding of a role. A man devoted to one destiny, like his own.
“I will leave you on the side of the road somewhere.”
Of course, thinks The Messenger. He didn’t expect a ride anywhere to begin with. This needs to be a pilgrimage, at the end of which exists the story of a tragedy or a visitation. When he starts the car his heart beats at the possibility of a car bomb about to detonate. And for some reason, he is disappointed when he sees the fuel gauge at full and ready to roll.
I decide not to conclude this chapter because I hear my wife entering upstairs. The kids are asleep and the baby monitor downstairs sounds like one long raspy breath. When I hear the heaviness of the steel door seal the fumes of the minivan inside the garage, I join her at the island in the kitchen. She is already drinking a glass of water. I don’t ask her how the appointment went because I can see the signed requisition for a test sticking to the countertop. She stares at me through the clear glass as she drinks. I can tell she is worried. I can hear it in her hard swallows, how thirsty she is.
“Are you ready to go to bed?” I ask.
She nods and I follow her up the stairs.
DAY 3
It doesn’t take long for the border official to discard The Messenger. As soon as they cross the border into the village of Kaa in the Bekaa Valley, he removes a gun hidden under his belly and places it flat on his knee.
“Stop the car here.”
The Messenger sees poverty outside in the mountain refracted sunset. A collection of homes, mosques, churches, and damaged settlements scatter themselves on a rock embedded plain. Treed thicket areas are strafed into thinned out withering sticks. This place is polluted by its own history.
The official extends his other hand to shake good-bye.
“Thank you.”
The Messenger didn’t expect the entire exchange to be so polite, so absent of conflict. He supposes the bribe made his illegal crossing friendly to the man. In an obvious attempt to give The Messenger more for his money, the official assumes a tour guide’s voice.
“This is Kaa. You will find everything you need here. Catholics, Shiites, Melkites, hard faced extremists. Ask the right questions to the wrong people and they will help.”
Upon opening the car door, The Messenger breathes in sulphur instead of air. He closes the door and asks one more question through an open window.
“Bsharri?”
“You are close. This is the ground of martyrs. Respect the soil.”
The Messenger finds it difficult to understand the official’s code language. It resembles a dialect mutated from a foreign time.
The official drives off into the dust and disappears into another winding valley. Sensing the coolness of night, The Messenger walks into a town-like collection of stone buildings. He sees dark men smoking outside. They regard him with little interest. He considers venturing into a place of worship, changes his direction and settles instead for a tiny Inn. On his way there, he witnesses a heated exchange between two men. One man, the shorter one, ends the conversation by shooting the other. After he does so, he waves his family in from a parked car. A woman fully veiled rushes a blanketed newborn into the building. Two other boys remove shovels from the trunk. They deliver one to their father. The two boys dig into the rocky ground and the scrape of the shovel scratches the sky’s silence. The surviving man stares at The Messenger long enough to convince him he didn’t see a thing. The woman turns on the light and The Messenger can already smell olive oil burning from a pan.
At the Inn, The Messenger pays the lady wearing a niqab for a room. The Messenger makes his way there with a decoratively rusted key on a ring. A knock on the door sounds a minute later. He assumes it is someone with towels or clean sheets, both absent in the room. It is the man who shot the other. He holds a bottle without a label in his hands. Two plastic glasses rest in between his fingers and above his knuckles.
He raises them first for fear The Messenger speaks another language. The Messenger nods yes and reveals he speaks Arabic. The man smiles warmly. He wears a thin moustache, as if pinned to his face, and his black hair is youthful on his wrinkly forehead.
“It is strong.”
The Messenger nods to go on and pour.
“Bsharri?”
“You are close.”
The man toasts him.
“May Allah be with you.”
The Messenger nods again.
“There is no police in Kaa.”
The Messenger hadn’t asked, but the murdering man must have felt the need to explain his crime.
“Kaa is the woman we rape when we need to. I am a lucky man. I have a new home now.”
He toasts again. The Messenger reciprocates the same. The liquor tastes of black licorice.
“We are better than the Syrians, that is for sure. I would have killed you too if you resembled one.”
“It took us almost thirty years to push them away. And then they came back a few years ago. They flooded the fields and then burned them down. We killed too many, almost all of them. Some days we still think they are here, rising from their graves in the rock ground.”
He gets up and walks over to the window. He points to little white sheds in the distance.
“That is Ersal, a Sunni village. We call it the ‘Kaa projects.’ It made the Christians fly away.”
He forces a laugh which ends in a violent cough. When he stops talking, The Messenger can hear the scrape of shovels conversing into the night.
“Now it is all Al-Nusra and Hezbollah. They keep order. If only they can stop the rocket bombs from the other side.”
This detail explains the sporadic presence of life in Kaa. One house alone, as if in the middle of a road. Two others launched from their foundation to another area. So many rocks above ground. Granite boulders. The omniscient scent of burning flesh permeates the air like an ongoing holocaust.
“Exile is a beautiful word in Kaa,” the man continues to narrate into his glass.
The man returns to his seat and they listen to the music of the shovels.
“At least I did him the courtesy of a burial,” are his last words. The Messenger automatically understands how lucky he was to find a man with a heart in Kaa.
The next morning this murdering man offers the murdered man’s car for The Messenger to reach Bsharri. It won’t take long to reach his destination, he assures The Messenger. The Messenger receives the favour gratefully, although the man treats it as payment for forgetting what he witnessed the night before.
The young boys digging the grave had cleaned the vehicle for him. The Messenger appreciates their obedience to their father’s wishes.
DAY 4
My wife finds me surrounded by papers. She creeps up on me late in the night. It’s the only time I reserve the quiet to write. Otherwise, I am sharper in the morning. She doesn’t say a word to me. She side steps the papers on the floor like mines and curls up on the loveseat in my office, below our framed university degrees. The glow on the walls is softened blue from the computer screen.
“What are you researching?”
She breaks the circle of paper open by
pulling an article onto her lap.
“A village in Lebanon.”
“Where your former wife lived?”
“My former wife never lived in Lebanon.”
I can tell she isn’t interested in the story. I sense instead she may be sparring for a war. After the rejection of my last two literary novels, she finally spoke her mind. She practically commanded me to write ‘easier’ stories to read. She likes thrillers, series led by feminist detectives, or those marked for every letter in the alphabet. A for About to Murder, B for Before Murder. You know, the stuff that sells. The books with colourful covers and wealthier authors in professional shots on the back. She supports me but not really. The recent pressure of upcoming physical tests may have made her point more difficult to suppress politely, that point being ‘make some fucking money with these books.’
“Your former wife is Lebanese.”
“Yes. You know she is.”
She rolls her eyes and pretends to sift through the article.
“Why don’t you write something about your family, at least?”
The ‘at least’ is the hint, of course. If you won’t write what will surely make us money, then ‘at least’ write about something you know, like the back of your hand, or the colour of your eyes.
She is wearing her glasses, which means she couldn’t sleep either. She doesn’t like when I leave the warmth of the bed to find a cold leather seat in the office. She curls herself up some more, her knees at her chin.
“So why are you writing about your ex-wife again?”
She prods. I giggle it away.
“This isn’t her story.”
“Whose is it then?”
“Someone else’s.”
“So you stole this story?”
“Kind of. It was offered up to me, willingly, but I took it without her knowing.”
“Her?”
I slipped. This could be the trigger point for the argument we haven’t had yet since discovering the lump in her breast. The girl I’ve never spoken about to anyone.
Chameleon (Days) Page 2