Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel

by Karim Dimechkie

  “Sorry?”

  “Yes. She will come here to meet you. God willing.”

  Relief filled his lungs. His mother was alive. “Okay. Wow, unbelievable. So, she’ll actually be there.”

  “I am sure.”

  “Where will she be flying in from?”

  “She will be here tomorrow.”

  “Excellent. Yeah. But could you tell me where she lives now?”

  “Yes, she is on her way. The way to meet her is to come here. To Paris. Okay?”

  “But where is she now?”

  She sighed and waited a while before admitting, “Not sure.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No, we don’t know. But she will fly here tomorrow.”

  Max noticed a pain in his jaw. He’d been grinding his teeth since he hung up the phone. Again, things had only become more mysterious. Really? Fly over and meet your mom? She’ll be here waiting, but we don’t know where she lives? Don’t know where she’s been, or why we haven’t seen her in fifteen years?

  The maid brought him a towel and led him to the bathroom. He was to wash and change before their early dinner. Max asked if she could show him where they kept the vodka to top off his drink. She speed-walked away and returned a few minutes later with a martini and a sword of olives. He sipped on it while in the triple-headed shower, big enough for five people.

  Refreshed, he meandered the apartment alone while Anika stayed on the phone in that colonial smoke room. He tried to listen in on her conversation by standing by the door, but it was all in Arabic. Ambling up to the roof deck, one of the highest outlooks in Ras Beirut, he discovered the swimming pool. The maid lay on her stomach at the pool’s edge, reaching for a dead pigeon floating a few centimeters out of her reach. A Siamese cat perched on the balcony’s handrail eyed the dead bird. Behind the cat stood Beirut on crutches—half-built gray and brown buildings, construction cranes, cinder-block homes studding the mountains like mushroom stalks, water tanks, holes—all set before a belt of smogged blue sky. The maid noticed him, and became self-conscious, as if she’d been caught breaking a rule. She said, “Sir?”

  He looked around the roof deck: the table and umbrella, the pool, and the pool shed not much bigger than his tree house. In Rasheed’s version, this space had been turned into a brothel. He pictured half-naked men and women pouring bottles of whiskey down their chins, and Kalashnikov rifles resting up against the wooden chaise longues.

  Dinner was almost ready, and Anika waited for him at the head of the table on the lower terrace. “If you knew how much you looked like your father.” She said it less aggressively this time, but still, he was taken aback. If I knew, he thought, then what? What if I knew? And why does she assume I don’t know in the first place? But in truth he didn’t know he looked like his father because no one had said so before. There wasn’t much physical resemblance between them other than the size of their noses, though the shapes weren’t similar at all: Rasheed’s like a butter knife, and Max’s like a spoon.

  “I was hoping you could tell me some things about my mother,” he said.

  She stood up. “Let me introduce you to Beirut before the food arrives.” She led him to the balcony’s railing and pointed out buildings and places in a bored tone, as though someone had told her this task was part of her burden as hostess. He listened attentively, awaiting the relevance of these sites to his mother, and despite himself, to his father too. She pointed out AUB, which looked like an airbrushed photo of an American university that had been cut and pasted into this beaten-down view. The flashy new buildings had this same out-of-place effect, making the older architecture look like beautiful tombstones from another era. The Holiday Inn was the tallest building around, and hideous. It looked like an enormous abandoned building firemen use for training, all scorched around the windows, and with huge chunks of cement that had long been rocketed out.

  He didn’t care about Beirut now. He asked her what his mother was doing in 1985. She acted as if she didn’t hear him and continued describing sites in her jaded way—the Grand Serail, the Mohammad al-Amin mosque, an all-women’s swimming resort. She did an expert job at pretending not to notice him staring at her profile. Max was sure she was running out of steam; that she couldn’t maintain this description of everything her eyes landed on for much longer.

  She surprised him when she said, earnestly, that she never stopped missing this city. Apparently she was only back here on business and lived in Qatar most of the year. Max didn’t see what one could miss about Beirut. It was a striking place, sure, but it was also run-down and war-shadowed. Was its value thanks to its continually being on the brink of total destruction? Was that what made it so precious? Was that what made it feel more like real life than Clarence?

  With her first semblance of a natural smile, she asked how many drinks he’d had. He told her two, and she found this funny. In this unguarded moment, showing teeth, she was pretty. She ordered herself a drink and kept describing the scenery. As she spoke, Max watched fisherman starting their workday at sunset, swaying on top of the sea. The water twinkled hysterically under a sinking orange sun. His mind wandered over to Nadine and the smell of her lips and sweat and head. He imagined her fear and regret at his having vanished, and how they’d left things. His heart warmed at the thought of her worrying about him.

  Anika did tire out. She interrupted his thoughts by asking if Rasheed still went to mosque. He couldn’t tell if she was making a dry joke. He said no, but then again he knew very little about the man. She gave the strenuous grin that only cynicism can pull across one’s lips, then quickly finished her first drink and ordered the maid to bring them each a fresh one. A good sign. The alcohol loosened her up.

  He tried again. “Why haven’t you seen my mom since 1985?”

  “For many reasons. We were never close. Also,” she said into her new drink, “our father disowned her.”

  “Why?”

  She looked surprised. “Because of what she brought on to Rasheed’s family.”

  “Which was what?”

  “Do you know any of this story, Hakeem?”

  He told her he’d only learned his name was Hakeem a few days ago. Then he ran her through the version of his mother’s story he’d lived with for the past five years.

  She said, “It’s very close to the truth,” as if it should suffice. She scanned the cityscape from left to right, probably looking for something else to describe.

  After she’d lit and nearly finished her cigarette, Max said, “He kept my mother from me.”

  She shrugged, seeming to say, Sure, I can see why you’d be upset about something like that.

  “What did she bring on to Rasheed’s family?” he asked.

  “Your mother will tell you about all of these things. I know too little, Hakeem. I may mislead you if I tell you my version of things.”

  “I want to hear your version.” He was resolved to keep pushing. His insistence would either break Anika open or cause an irretrievable rift that blocked further discussion. But she’d invited him here. Surely she knew he’d have questions. Did she really hope to avoid the topic altogether? Again: “What did she bring on to Rasheed’s family?”

  “She brought death to his family. “

  Max kept his face still, wanting her to think him impervious, simply collecting facts. He asked, “How did Rasheed and Samira meet?”

  “The Boulos family”—she cleared her throat and sighed—“lived always just below us. Samira and Rasheed played together as children. And then, of course, there was Ali, the third friend. Ali was a Palestinian boy from a refugee camp in Beirut called Shatila. The camp is famous because of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.”

  “I saw something about it in a documentary once.” He couldn’t have said more on the subject, having just a vague recollection of bodies and those names, Sabra and Shatila. He wanted to keep her going. “So they went to school with Ali?”

  She encircled her mouth with her thumbnail, scraping
clean any potential smudges of lipstick. She was one of those elegant people who are impossible to imagine naked. “No. Ali was the son of a very poor worker who fixed things in our home. The problem was, Ali grew up to be handsome, and he liked Samira too much. My father wanted Samira to marry Rasheed. Somehow he’d gotten it in his head that Rasheed would calm her down.” She laughed at this. “Ali and Samira got into trouble, sneaking off to protests when they were ten or eleven years old only. Protesting things that had nothing to do with them even, like increases of tuition at the university.” She shook her head and sucked on a new cigarette, caving in her cheeks. “They protested just to protest, because it excited them.”

  The maid came and quickly filled the long table with enough dishes for five people: char-grilled eggplant on triangular plates, cumin-powdered chickpeas in emerald and eucalyptus-green bowls, skewers of grilled meats and vegetables, a salad of toasted pita bread, cucumbers, tomatoes, chickweed, and mint in a wooden salad bowl, fried cauliflower, flat cakes of minced meat and spices, stuffed zucchini, some kind of lentil concoction, cheese balls, falafel, and baba ghanoush. They sat down. He didn’t want to enjoy the food as much as he suspected he would. Worried and stressed people were supposed to lose their appetites. But feeling physically well again, he was ravenous. He asked Anika if the maid ate with them. “No,” she said, “she eats her own food. Food from her country that she likes better.” Anika told him to stop thinking of the maid as a slave. Everyone in Lebanon had at least one maid. Given all the different kinds of people he’d seen on the streets today, Max had trouble believing that. “This one here,” Anika said, “Nadifa, sends a lot of money back to her family in Eritrea. She is paying her children’s way through college. She is lucky to be here.”

  “So,” Max said. “Ali and Samira’s friendship.”

  She picked up a falafel ball with a pair of silver tongs and dropped it on her plate. “Yes. Let me back up.” She took in a deep breath and exhaled the way people do when they are about to explain something from the beginning. “My father loved how Samira argued when she was a young girl, but later, when she was still just as stubborn and the issues were very sensitive, real tensions came between them.”

  “About what? What did they disagree about?”

  “In short, they ended up on opposite sides of the war. My father wanted the West’s presence in the region because it was an oil services company during the French mandate that gave us this fortunate life. And Samira, following the Arab nationalist movement, believed that the West’s involvement was bad for Arabs.”

  Max repeated Arab nationalist, Arab nationalist, Arab nationalist in his head. He’d have to look up what that meant later.

  “Do you know about Arab nationalism?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “It’s people who believe the Arab world should be united as one, and that we are separate countries only because of borders drawn arbitrarily by colonial powers from the West.” She stared at him long enough to make him swallow. He didn’t know why she stared like that. When she said, “Like in Africa,” he understood that she didn’t trust him to follow what she was talking about.

  “Yeah.”

  “Your mother’s main obsession was the Palestinian cause. Our father believed it was unfair that what happened to the Palestinians should be our problem. He thought it was unfortunate the way Israel was created, but that we shouldn’t be responsible for cleaning up a mess that is not ours. As things got more and more tenuous in this country, her Arab nationalism and sentiments about the Palestinians and Israelis strengthened, and so did his pro-West positions, which were of course indirectly in support of Israel. He was so serious about being pro-West that he even stopped—would you believe—speaking to us in Arabic.” She had a perplexed smile, remembering her past with detached fascination. Again, Max noticed her prettiness.

  “I was about seventeen, and Samira fifteen, when he came home one day to announce that from now on we would only speak French and English. Samira refused. For the rest of their relationship, he talked to her in English and French, and she responded in Arabic.”

  Anika looked amused by her own story, and he was entertained too, as though it had nothing to do with him. The alcohol sloshed around his head. He experienced a growing self-satisfaction for having come all this way on his own; as if he’d done enough, already succeeded, and could stop here with a pat on the back and plenty of rest. He swallowed his food, hardly chewing. “So, when did she marry Rasheed?”

  She smoked awhile. “They married in Samira’s third year at AUB. As a sort of joke.”

  “A joke?”

  “They had an arrangement: They’d live together as best friends, make the families happy enough to leave them alone, and continue to indulge in their secret lives.”

  “What kinds of secret lives?”

  She seemed to carefully organize her thoughts, nervous about saying the wrong things. “That’s not an important part of the story.”

  She hadn’t touched her falafel. Scooping up some baba gha-noush with a wedge of pita, she took a minuscule bite, chewing slowly. Max had almost finished his plate. “The story is the whole picture, right? What secret lives?”

  “Samira and Ali were in love.”

  “My father knew this?”

  “Rasheed? Yes, of course, Rasheed knew this. Rasheed had different, well, different preferences. His own private lifestyle, in certain—clubs.” She narrowed her eyes at the lonely falafel ball, waiting to see if she’d said too much.

  He kept cool as the wind took itself out of him. She’s telling me my dad is gay. Whatever fluffiness he’d felt about the food and drinks and storytelling blew away. He had a flash of Rasheed standing in jean shorts and a white tank top at one of his basketball games, and zoomed in on the girlishly quick and small way he applauded when someone scored. Max had attributed all such details of his father’s comportment to foreignness. But had it been obvious to everyone else in those basketball stands that Rasheed was a gay man? Then he thought of Coach Tim and how conflicts with him started the moment Kelly showed up. And how much time Rasheed spent over there before and after Kelly. Was Max the only one hidden away in the dark? Paranoia and betrayal and humiliation set in deeper. But hadn’t Kelly and his father shared a bed? Or was even that part of the illusion? Had they just been sleeping side by side as partners in this charade? Where could his father have gotten these twisted ideas of what defined a normal, healthy childhood? On what standards did he base all his complicated lying? Why would he think Max too weak to handle the truth? Max had spent the better part of his life trusting and being close to only his father, giving him the entirety of his love and attention, and he’d never been trusted in return. He’d been deemed nothing more than a feeble little boy.

  Anika explained that while her parents were still in Beirut, Samira and Rasheed lived in the small pool shed upstairs. Ali could come and go easily through a separate entrance without being seen. The parents avoided the shed, either out of respect for the newlyweds’ privacy or out of fear of the truth.

  “And they were all still in school?”

  “Ali didn’t go to school. He was a bricklayer on the black market.”

  “Why on the black market?”

  “Refugees aren’t allowed to work most jobs legally here.”

  “How are they supposed to survive?”

  “They have to find ways. Anyway, Samira was in school, and Rasheed had finished with his schooling a year earlier. He helped his father with his dentistry in the apartment.”

  She took her time putting a spoonful of tzatziki next to the one falafel, letting her spoon clank loudly a few times against the white porcelain of her plate, and talked about how Samira spent her time in cafés where members of one of the PLO factions conferred. She also went to local civil groups led by academics from AUB, but was frustrated by the ineffectiveness of peaceful protest in a country that had no government whatsoever and was at war with itself. She joined another leftist g
roup that did not believe in strict nonviolence. Ali joined too. Rasheed told Anika that Samira and Ali were getting mixed up with people who would endanger them. Anika said, “What can I do? If she won’t listen to you, she of course will not care what I think.” Also, at this time, Samira was pregnant.

  Max asked what kinds of things his mother did with this new group.

  Anika had only heard little pieces, rumors, about how Samira delivered packages for some militia or another, probably documents and maybe sometimes weapons and plans, who knew? Rasheed tried to cover for her absences but could only invent so many excuses. She became too extreme for her old friends from high school and at AUB. No one was involved enough in the resistance for her taste. After the doctors delivered Max in 1984, Samira took him everywhere with her: to school, to group meetings, and whatever else she did.

  “She was even more insufferable,” Anika remembered. “Politics and social justice was all she could talk about. She made everything you said sound silly in light of the suffering of others. There are few things that are more annoying than conversing with someone who is always putting things into perspective.”

  Anika continued to summarize liberally, and maybe therapeutically. He wondered if he’d ever actually meet this woman, his mother. The more he heard, the more unimaginable the idea of facing her seemed.

  Samira had made the newspapers after getting expelled from AUB for being involved with an armed group in a campus protest. The group didn’t use any violence, but the mere presence of armed men surrounding the campus and Samira standing with them was enough for her to get kicked out. She went from doing sit-ins to carrying a pistol and sleeping in abandoned buildings, shooting and maybe even bombing. It had long become too much to manage all of this with a baby in her arms, so she left Max with Rasheed. She was never around. Samira’s father pretended not to notice for as long as possible, telling people she was just spending a lot of time at school and with friends, and that of course the rumors were not true.

  The war got uglier, and people stopped believing it would ever end. Anika, her husband and children, and her parents left for France in 1985—much later than they should have, having waited that long because Samira refused to go—abandoning the apartment to hooligans and prostitutes and militiamen until 1990. The Bouloses were the last tenants crazy enough to keep living in the building.