That was the day before you left town, when you sat my ring in the palm of my hand and folded my fingers over it. You had been edgy since we’d met, and I knew something bad was coming, but I didn’t believe it involved the returning of a promise, a dream.
Market day, fifteen years ago. Almost.
I think how you are slim as ever, your hair is now auburn, your eyes the same colour and shape as my ex-wife’s. I think how it is you are dressed so stylishly – it is easy to notice that you have done well for yourself. I am sure my dress down of blue T-shirt and faded jeans tells you as much about my status. And yes, I also caught the glance of your eyes on my paunch, the rinse of your eyes over my thinning and greying fair hair.
I wonder why you’ve come back. There is no one and nothing here for you, except a cemetery that holds your parents, and perhaps that is why you’re here, an anniversary? It isn’t just me – is it?
I don’t like to ask. You were never one to explain yourself. At least not fully.
You ask if I’m married, and I nod, but don’t tell you it’s been over for a while and that I have no idea why the ring is still on my finger. Why is it you asked, I think, for you had seen the band of gold?
Children, you venture.
One, I say, and no more, because when I think on him even for an instant a lump races from my heart and blocks my throat and my eyes fill. You’ve a daughter, I say. This throws you. I say I heard from a cousin of yours who had been home on holiday. She saw me in Tesco and remembered that you and I had been, as she put it, an item.
Yeah … yeah, you say, I’m divorced and have a daughter. Beautiful. She’s staying with her father in Tucson for a while. She didn’t want to come to Ireland.
A shrug tells me her decision had nothing to do with the destination. There is a fleeting expression of regret in your features, like you have mislaid something of importance and cannot for the life of you remember what it is.
What do you work at, Terry? you say.
When I tell you that I’m working in a bank, it doesn’t surprise you. I’d like to refrain from asking you what you do, because I know it’s something much better and exciting, because it’s part of the reason why you folded my fingers over my ring. You wanted more than was in me to give.
When I ask, you tilt your head to one side as though deciding which success of yours is the best to push forward. In the end you can’t decide, and you say you’re a microbiologist and have written a stage play, which is, as we speak, being decided upon. You live in Manhattan. Something surrenders in your eyes when you see that your achievements fail to impress me.
You sip at your cappuccino and ask me for my son’s name. I tell you and you sound interested, and so I give you a little about him. You seem reluctant to speak about your daughter, and the lines fall deep about the corners of your eyes when you say that she’s a daddy’s girl – your ex-husband. You say he’s a businessman, and owns a string of hotels and a couple of racehorses, and you say this like these achievements are small. You say it because you realise your roots and whose company you’re in, and you know such talk in a small town makes us speak ill of high-achievers who lose sight of their origins. Such talk is reserved for your class of society, where each can relate to the other about the things they have or intend to have. You say it because, in your eyes, he has greatly diminished.
You smile.
I ask if you’re happy, and you sigh and look at your hands and stretch your lips and shake your head and say you haven’t been for a long time. You made wrong choices in your life, you say.
And this throws me. The words, but also the meaning in your eyes, their grip on mine.
Are you happy, you ask. No, I say. I thought as much, you say. My marriage broke up, I say. This does not elicit sympathy from you but a shrug, as though to suggest this is no great surprise.
What went wrong, you ask.
As if this can be discussed at length in a café full of people in town for the Thursday Market.
A summary, you ask, firing high an immaculately groomed eyebrow.
I’m not ready to talk about it, I say.
So the break-up wasn’t amicable, Terry.
We’re friends.
Yeah, you say disbelievingly, I can relate to all that.
Well, I say … failing to think of anything to add.
Well, you smile.
You look at me then, and in that look I see the years melt away. You are you when all you ever wanted in life was me. Your eyes – the last time I saw them up close was at your mother’s funeral some years ago, and I shook your hand, and you were busy with grief and didn’t know it was me through your tears. I called up to see you two days later, but you weren’t at home. It was a flying visit by you. We had no time to catch up on what was fast passing us by. I wonder if we could, you say, stopping dead.
If we could? I prompt.
You sweep in a breath of air and exhale.
What? I say.
Begin slowly at first, of course? you say … pick up the threads.
You go on to say, Terry, you were never far from my thoughts.
This is so brave of you, I think.
I lean back in my chair and say this.
You shake your head and force a smile and apologise for being so naïve. And I’ve often thought of you, I say, I spent a lot of time getting over you. And I don’t think I ever quite succeeded in doing that.
So, we? you ask, a flutter of something like hope and excitement in your voice.
I shake my head, and this response doesn’t annoy or upset you. Because what you see in me is a man who will not give himself a choice.
Your son? you say.
Yeah.
You sip at your cappuccino though you don’t want it.
Kids, you say, don’t stay kids forever. What then, Terry?
This one, he’s special. We have coffee every Thursday morning. Right now he’s up rooting around in the market. He lives for it. You should see the stuff he buys.
Rubbish, you smile.
Sometimes, I say.
You’d have loved America, you say, quietly.
I’ve no doubt, I say.
When he arrives at our table, he lowers his head and looks sidelong at you and then at me. In his thick fingers there’s a bag of market delights that he is anxious to talk about, but not to disclose to a stranger.
You are gracious, if condescending, when you speak to him. He talks to you as he does to most people, without agenda, and with a naïvety that gives me joy and often concern.
It’s time I was going, you say.
We shake hands and you leave, adjusting the strap of your handbag on your shoulder. You don’t even offer to pay the bill, and this is not you, for you were never mean with money. In a hurry, you see – because you had walked away from someone like my son. I’d heard about your special needs daughter and how you had small patience with her.
Yesterday I learned of your death, and in this café of returned dreams on market day I speak to you in my head, the things I would have said if life had presented the opportunity.
I would have especially liked to say this to you: what is yours you’ll always run full circle toward. That day with your ring burning my palm I went after you, to ask you to keep in touch – to tell you that it didn’t have to be all or nothing. Though you were within hailing distance, I remained silent.
The last I saw of you was at the edge of the market, disappearing into the maze, past a woman selling imitation Victorian jewellery.
Café Phoenicia
We’re only passing through, he often liked to say, meaning life. He’d said it moments ago, into a silence that Chibli thought had not wanted to be broken. But for some people silence is a torture. Chibli Mahmoud told the old man not to be going on so, it was
irritating. He knew too, though, that Salih was leading up to breaking some news. Taking to a bad bend in the road leaving the village, north-east and downhill to the coastal road, he went through the gears on his German imported Mercedes.
The stars had yet to drift from the sky, the June air cool, still. Along the route lay two French UN checkpoints, and perhaps another set up by the Amal militia (sometimes the militia had none), before they could breathe easily and be assured of reaching their destination. The Amal, Hope, controlled the city, and had checkpoints operated by children masquerading as soldiers, standing beside red-and-white painted oil barrels and rudimentary sentinel huts. Always begging, Chibli thought, if not with their mouths then with their eyes. Their superiors were men not much older. They trained the boy soldiers in the old Roman Hippodrome and the adjoining Byzantine City of the Dead, quartered under the spectator rostrums. Orphans all, Chibli had heard, parents lost to Israeli shells, indiscriminate roadside bombs, internecine feuds. War and anarchy, his mother used to say, afforded an opportunity for people to settle old scores with neighbours, to seize and redistribute wealth as disproportionately as it had been before, as always.
Traffic was light in both directions; there was no Amal checkpoint, and the French soldiers did not delay them beyond a cursory look at the back seats and the boot. Chibli always carried a few pastries from the café in a cardboard box in the boot – a sweetener of a bribe, accompanied by his business card and an invitation to join him for coffee whenever they were on leave. These, it appeared, would grow another day old.
There was more meat to be seen on a used toothpick than on Salih, his old companion, his assistant baker. Chibli did not know any other skinny bakers. They, like him, were all at least overweight, but in most cases obese. Salih no longer wanted to travel the eighteen kilometres to and from work, or to worry about the likely hazards they might encounter – people had been attacked by so-called bandits, dragged from their cars and shot dead, remains left on the side of the road or kicked into a wadi. Or, if the carjacked were lucky, merely beaten and robbed. Who was to protect them? The country was in tatters – the gendarmerie powerless to prevent the outrages, the army fragmented, with many of its soldiers ‘twinning’ their military role with the Amal.
‘We are only passing through,’ Salih said, over the song playing on the radio.
‘Stop saying that.’
‘Chibli, I need to retire. I must. I want to live out my remaining time in the village with one of my women, to lie in on the mornings … I am so very tired of it all.’
‘You always say that and then you change your mind. You are worse than a woman for changing your plans.’
‘I’m not well.’
‘You have been dying since I first met you thirty years ago. There was nothing wrong with you back then, except fear of old age, and now that you’re old you …’.
‘Ah, Chibli, you can be so cruel. Not a bit like your father, Allah smile on him.’
Chibli glanced at the old man and then put his eyes back to the road. Daylight was beginning to wash away the night. He could smell the sea, still hidden in darkness, a sea that almost encircled the city. A ruin of a place: Israeli gunboats had only a week ago fired a barrage of shells at the houses on the north port in the Maronite district. Their warplanes had dropped leaflets telling people to evacuate their homes or go to the beaches or the archaeological sites, for they were going to shell the city unless the militia stopped their rocket attacks on Israel. The Amal had commandeered the historical sites and converted them into military bases. In addition to the hippodrome, no citizen was allowed enter the south side of the port with its Greek and Roman ruins, a beautiful colonnaded walk to the sea, the amphitheatre, the mosaic-patterned pedestrian way … it was the business to be in, too: stealing artefacts and selling them on the international black market, or to local UN personnel. A more lucrative business than trying to keep a café solvent, and now the night-time curfews were further undermining his efforts. Perhaps it was high time, he asked himself. Tempting as it was, he could not imagine himself pilfering his country’s heritage … though the idea was one that revisited him every so often.
‘I have six months to live,’ Salih said as they turned right, passing a camera shop, a few garages, the army barracks with corner towers.
‘Ah, Salih, the doctors gave you that long ten years ago.’
‘It’s true this time.’
‘If you stay at home, those wives of yours will slice off your penis. They all get in such a mood. They get broody at the same time, too. Why did you marry such moody women?’
‘It’s a risk I’ll have to take. They will mother me to the grave.’
‘Hmm.’
‘And you, Chibli, it’s time for you to look at your life, yes? Our country … the mess is getting worse. It’s 1985. Do you remember your Papa saying that everything would be fine by now? Look at us. Things are getting worse. Even my bones smell trouble.’
Chibli had been married, and was now divorced. He could not give her a child: she wore the blame for it willingly so as to allow him keep face in the village. She remarried, and last year had her first baby, and was now pregnant again. While her tongue had remained silent, the rest of her had not, and although she’d moved with her new husband to the next village, fifteen kilometres away, everyone knew his seed was useless. He had heard whispers and loud laughter behind his back, and women who had showed him a flicker of interest now showed him none.
They slowed at a roundabout entering the city; already there were men gathered in the hope of finding employment for the day from one of the outlying farmers who often had a temporary need to hire labour.
‘When do you want to begin your retirement?’ Chibli asked, bringing a hand to his shaven head. He was 32, and had lived in Cyprus for some years, returning three years ago to take over the business bequeathed to him by his father. His two younger brothers had no interest in helping him, preferring to live in Paris. He lived alone in the family home in Tayr Zibna, a spacious and comfortable apartment, the biting loneliness as much a part of its features as the antique furniture. There were too many memories; tastes not his, but that he had not the heart to change.
He lost the cakes at the final checkpoint 200 yards from the café to a boy who’d asked him cheekily but not menacingly if he had anything to eat. He was starving, he said. Café Phoenicia was situated at the corner of Rue Abu Dib, facing the Roman Hippodrome, its gate guarded by the militia. Some years ago, his father had moved premises to this location as he saw potential in being within spitting distance of the ruins where Charlton Heston had raced his chariot to glory in Ben Hur. Photographs of the star, signed by Heston himself, featured on a wall, along with the signatures of some of the film’s lesser-known stars. Sepia photographs of Tyre were arrayed opposite, against a backdrop of a yellow-and-peach mural of ancient jugs and traditional coffee pots. But few tourists visited. Everyone had banked on the civil war petering out, but it had turned into a festering sore.
Chibli opened the front door, and switched on the lights then the radio to see off the silence. Salih said he needed to piss before putting the chairs, tables and sun umbrellas under the awning. To leave these in place overnight was to invite the militia to sit on or to steal them. Chibli set to making coffee and putting fresh pastries on the shelves, and called in next door for fresh pitta bread. Rarely these days did he make his own, whereas Salih liked to keep his hand in.
Early morning customers included old men who smoked and nursed the same Lebanese coffee for an hour, played backgammon, discussed politics (depending on who else was present), perhaps a couple of UN soldiers stationed in the Lebanese army barracks, a couple of the senior men in the hippodrome, hefty and bearded officers who strolled from the rostrums to the café, pistols on their hips, smoking, always in deep conversation with each other, likely discussing how their young charges were or weren’t sha
ping up. Nothing, Chibli had overheard them say, makes for a better war dog than an orphan. New Zealand nurses, too, Rachel and Ann, from the Palestinian refugee camp, six kilometres south of the city, called in on Thursdays about 9.00 a.m., or late afternoon when the heat had gone off the sun. He liked Rachel, and had once picked up the courage to ask if she would like him to show her around the city. She smiled and said she’d already seen all there was to see, but thanks. Salih had seen him blush and try to pass off his invitation as not being a romantic proposal by bringing the women fresh chi and borma; they licked their fingers free of the shredded pastry and pine nuts, and laughed like some women do after receiving an unexpected and not entirely welcome invitation. Chibli did not know which was worse: the polite rejection, or Salih’s noticing it, and his overzealousness to show that no offence had been taken. Indeed, he had felt none, just a pinch of hurt and shame at having mistaken her natural friendliness for interest.
This morning was different than others. The old men who usually came to talk and drink coffee did not arrive. Salih called in to him in the kitchen to say he had seen them coming this way, but they had walked on by, and he felt sure it might have had something to do with the two men who were waiting outside to be served.
‘And also, they want to speak with you,’ Salih said. ‘Maybe the tax is going up again.’
‘Who are they?’
‘They came from the direction of the hippodrome, but they are not our regular patrons.’
Deadly Confederacies Page 8