‘Me-ron!’ demands Madame from behind me. ‘Tell Abdul, it’s Syria!’
‘No, it’s not!’ screams Nazia. ‘Meron, tell him it’s Israel.’
‘Meron! Where are you?’ shouts Shafeek.
‘Where’s Al-Jazeera?’ gurgles Abdul.
I am now caught in the hallway between four different people and four televisions, all spouting high emotion. It’s Middle East cross-fire. But who is the enemy? Who are the teams? I would really like to know before the football is booted out of the arena.
And I remember Mum, suddenly mad but supremely confident against Giraffe Tongue and the others. I inhale deeply. One, two, three . . .
‘Medina is asleep!’ I scream from the bottom of my lungs.
Silence. For the briefest of seconds, we have peace in this Lebanese home. It works!
A shrill baby’s yell rings out. It’s Medina! Very much alive.I sprint to Medina’s cot and lift her to my bosom. Ah! Simplicity, purity, humanity! Lebanon’s future alive in my arms. Medina smiles back. This is not a sick baby.
‘Come here, Meron!’ snaps Shafeek.
I rush into Shafeek’s room, Medina now screaming for milk at maximum volume.
‘Go outside with it! I’ve got a headache. Too loud, can’t hear the television . . .’ he orders. The same happens in the other rooms. We’re ejected by the entire grieving family.
Yes! Together, we amble back into the kitchen. Nobody else is hungry: I eat two large portions of fish. Ha! The salty smack of sea meat on my tongue brings tears of joy to my eyes. We’re all crying today!
And then I remember Proverbs 14:13: ‘Even in laughter the heart is sad, and the end of joy is grief.’
‘You stole my Panadol . . . at least ten are gone,’ whinges Shafeek at me, mid-afternoon, in the hallway.
‘Not me, Mister,’ I splutter.
Madame is with us in a flash.
‘Me-ron! I said no pills! What you doing? Is it your period coming . . . is it usual back pain?’
‘I didn’t take the Panadol, Madame . . . my period already came and went, don’t worry.’
I hate talking about this in front of Shafeek.
‘Already? You not tell us? No! Can’t have done . . . date is wrong,’ replies Madame indignantly.
‘Yeah! How did you get better so fast, Meron? Periods don’t just come and go like that . . . we’d have known,’ butts in Shafeek, international lawyer with specialism in the menstrual cycle.
‘Sorry . . .’
‘Sorry?’ Shafeek and Madame seem to say simultaneously.
I grab a broom and sweep hard. Maybe they will disappear. I keep sweeping. I want no part in this conversation. Mum would know what to say to them: she would comprehensively repel them. How, Mum, how?
‘You can’t just steal my tablets! That’s not how we function here, Hammerhead . . . you’ve got to learn!’ rants Shafeek.
‘We getting tired of this,’ continues Madame.
Sweeping, sweeping, sweeping, before the beating comes. Think of Mum again. If you touch me, I’ll laugh so hard into your contorted faces. She always told me angry people age fast: at the current rate, Madame and Shafeek won’t make the next Ramadan.
‘Allah! It was me,’ says Abdul.
You sweet old man, if only I could kiss you plumb on those chapped, chipped lips on that huge wrinkled olive of a head.
‘I gave her the Panadol . . . she was suffering in pain and wanting to work . . . a few cheap pills. So what? Leave her to work! There are bigger things happening today. Hariri’s dead!’
Madame and Shafeek cannot reply. I look at Abdul to smile, but he’s already hobbling off.
I have only ever known two old people, including Abdul. He partially restores my faith in this strange race known as ‘the elderly’, a faith formerly devastated by my grandmother, Mama.
As for Hariri, he will never be old and Shafeek is right: I’m not in a position to care.
Lemma’s Mama
Eighteen months after my father’s death, there was still no decision from the Addis courts on my mother’s pension rights. Disastrously, Tadelle’s kebelle office had failed to locate the necessary divorce certificate. Mum had refused to liaise with Tadelle in any way. But Kebebush had found a letter from her own kebelle in Woliso, stating she had been with Lemma up to his death: apparently, she had nursed him in his final days, as if my mother had not existed. The onus was now on my mother to prove the divorce had taken place. Justice was fading fast: Mum had to act.
There were three witnesses to the divorce: Lemma’s two best friends in Woliso and his mother, Mama, who lived on her Woliso farm. The two friends had no interest in travelling to Addis to support us, and not being acquainted with Mum, why would they? Instead, my mother had to persuade Mama to return to Addis for a court hearing. This was probably the last chance. Without her word as evidence, the pension rights would be passed to Kebebush and the implausible son, unfairly condemning us to a lifetime of poverty.
Mum phoned her mother-in-law countless times. At first, nobody answered. After a few weeks, the line was dead. Only a single option remained.
Dad used to visit Mama every month. The last time I saw her was two years previously just before Dad’s passing. I was remembering those happy days as the bus finally arrived in Woliso, depositing Mum, Nati, Henok and me in the dusty bus lot. Fooling around in the road, a small boy had been caught under the wheels about halfway through the journey: the mortified bus driver was arrested – before the villagers lynched him – and quickly replaced. This was a standard delay.
We set off along the rutted, potholed road towards her farm, all of us in worn shoes that managed to locate every excruciatingly sharp pebble ever exposed to tender foot flesh. Two years earlier, we had scampered bare-footed and carefree around her lush, well-tended yard and across the barley fields. We had climbed the banana trees, milked the cows in the sheds and fattened up on the richest genfo and soft cheese imaginable, all from fresh cows’ milk. Mama had managed the land and her dairy business with the discipline of a ferenji – like the French or British – everything done very correctly and with great skill. I did not recall a single sharp pebble from those days.
This time, hopefully, all would be the same, though our clothing was visibly declining into ragtag garments, not renewed since Dad had gone. I wore my black school shoes out of necessity: one bore an expanding hole in the upper leather, concealed to onlookers by colouring in my bare skin with black ink. We were the same as other street kids now.
‘What’s happened, Mum?’ I asked as we arrived at a gate hanging from its hinges.
‘This doesn’t look good. The road was never like this before. And the gate! Stay close to me, all of you!’
We crept towards the farmhouse. The greenery of the front garden had turned into a barren dirt-yard with not a plant to be seen. One ailing old banana tree remained, barely alive with a decaying brown trunk. It lacked the enormous bunches of ripening bananas, and where were all the handsome broad green leaves that had provided us with natural shelter and doubled as nature’s own disposable plates? All other trees had been unceremoniously hacked down, leaving an ugly profusion of scruffy stumps and pared branches.
‘Where are the ploughed fields full of cereal?’ I asked.
We used to eat handfuls of the soft barley straight from the harvest. Now all we saw were thorn bushes.
‘Where are the cows?’ asked Nati, already nosing around. ‘The sheds are empty, Mum!’
‘I don’t know . . . I don’t know.’
As we approached the front door of Mama’s large dark-timbered farmhouse, we could see the old curtains, ripped and thin, hanging in the stained windows. Peering through, we could see only gloom inside.
‘Hello!’ shouted Mum into the house.
Slowly, we entered. Mum reached for the light switch. Cli
ck, click, click. Nothing. No electric light. Instead, the embers of a fire glowed in the middle of the sitting room. Where we once wrestled with Dad on a lovely thick carpet sat a dying fire with smoke drifting towards discoloured brown walls. Old newspapers had been stuck onto a third of the walls to keep them clean, until someone had run out of newspaper. The smoke made us splutter, but the smell of cow manure quickly overpowered it.
‘It’s horrible in here! And there’s no furniture, Mum,’ I whispered.
Mama used to have a full set of chairs, tables, bookshelves and so on. Now, only a fire with a black pot hanging above it.
‘I expect the fire ate it all,’ replied Mum.
It was a disorderly continuous fire, the type that guzzled burnable objects ad infinitum, never to be put out. Things were added and added, the ash accumulating, the smoke staining, the pot blackening and nothing else to show for it.
The moo of a cow sounded from a side room.
‘Mum . . . the cows . . . we’ve found them!’ declared Nati, running towards Mama’s bedroom.
Four of the scraggy cows were tied up, out of the fifty or so we had seen before. They looked malnourished and glum. Flies buzzed around the dollops of muck on the floor. And Mama, asleep on a bank of earth next to the window, her wooden bed gone the same way as the other furniture, only a tatty pink blanket covering her stirring frame.
‘Mama! It’s us! We’re here!’ we shouted.
‘Oh. Let me kiss these children,’ her pale face said unsmilingly, eyes half-shut, with only the faintest hint of real interest.
As she raised her head to greet us, ripples of wrinkles seemed to cascade from her cheeks. On her hunched bony body, she wore a loose flowery dress and brown plastic shoes. A gnarled, untamed stick sat next to the bed awaiting its duties: it was the type of walking stick picked up from the ground and put into immediate service without refinement. As Mama used it to raise herself into a standing position, we were watching a woman who had been shunted into old age without the fond hands of others to soften the arrival.
‘You bring meat?’ she asked, squinting at Mum.
‘No, Mama . . . how are you?’
‘I don’t eat meat now . . . only kale . . . not since you killed him.’
This was not the conversation anticipated by my mother.
‘What’s happened to this place?’ asked Mum, hoping to avoid difficult topics.
‘Sold the cows, burnt the furniture, neglected the farm . . . I’m waiting to die, Werknesh. I want to die in great pain.’
‘Shall we make the fire and cook some kale? I think the children are hungry. The bus took five hours . . . someone was run down by the bus . . . had to wait for police . . .’ said Mum.
‘We’re all guilty in the death of Lemma . . . you, me, Addis . . . I let him go, you married him and kept him there. In the countryside, he was strong. In Addis, with you, he lost it.’
‘Mama, where can we sleep tonight? We’ll stay one night and go in the morning . . .’ continued Mum.
Mama began to move her body, supported by the stick.
‘Okay. Sleep on the floor, on the old curtains, under the animal skins. Cook what you like, but not meat . . . since he died, I stopped meat.’
‘Yes, you told me. It’s okay . . . we brought bread and coffee and sugar . . .’
‘I eat kale and potatoes.’
Mama was no longer Mama. Not in my eyes.
On the walls were the only remaining features from before: photos of Dad as a young man and boy. Mama had worshipped him religiously and, it seemed, ruinously.
‘Ah!’ cried Mum, seeing the pictures. ‘There’s Lemma! May he rest in peace. May the Lord be with him.’
Mama swivelled towards my mother with a face of spite.
‘Werknesh! Save your scanty little clichés. We can’t rest in peace . . . we need hurting . . . hurt us, Lord, hurt us! Make us suffer for him!’
The cows seemed to moo in agreement. They didn’t have long for this world and they knew it. My mother hustled us out of the intoxicating fly-blown bedroom.
‘Let’s go outside and get some fresh air . . . you can play outside, Nati. Come outside, Mama, with us,’ tried Mum.
‘That won’t save us.’
Ah, relief! In the sunshine and fresh air, we relaxed and drank coffee on Mama’s steps. She sat with her back to us.
‘Mama, what’s wrong? Join us, please . . .’ pleaded Mum.
‘I never look towards Addis . . . when I sleep, I give it my feet . . . it killed my boy.’
‘Mum, I need the toilet,’ whispered Henok.
Mama heard him.
‘If you need a shit, go over there somewhere, and cover it with dust afterwards. We don’t have the enclosure of old . . . burnt it. Go over there where I can’t see you,’ she said, waving into the distance.
It used to be a comfortable cubicle surrounded by banana leaf partitions, the two servants always maintaining the hole in a healthy state and using the dried accumulation as fertiliser on the fields. There was little point in asking about the two servants: they probably scarpered the day Lemma died and Mama’s life turned to ash.
Henok declined the invitation to shit ‘somewhere over there’. One night and we would be back on the bus, grateful for that cramped perilous murderous bus, speeding us once more to the relative luxuries of Addis.
‘Er, Mama . . . I need to ask you a favour . . .’ began Mum.
‘There’s no milk . . . they’ve dried up . . . they’ll be dead in a month.’
‘No, Mama, not milk. It’s about the pension . . . Lemma’s railway pension from the government, which I need for feeding these children.’
‘Lemma?’
The word itself as precious as fresh-cut beef steak: I hoped Mum knew what she was doing with it.
‘What about it?’ demanded Mama.
‘The problem is the divorce certificate . . . you know, the divorce from Kebebush . . . that you witnessed . . . the certificate has disappeared and the court still thinks his inheritance should all go to Kebebush and to the boy who’s supposed to be his son. The only way I can prove I was his legal wife is by bringing the divorce witnesses to the court. Lemma’s old friends won’t come to Addis to help me. That leaves you . . .’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I eat kale, potato and beetroot. Good enough for me. I deserve no more than that.’
‘Will you come to Addis to help me, Mama? I mean, for the children, not for me . . .’
‘Go to Addis? How can I? Addis murdered my son. I can’t even face Addis . . . how would I travel to Addis? Are you mad?’
‘In the name of Lemma, please, Mama!’
No answer. The old lady began to thump her chest repeatedly with her fists, hitting herself as hard as possible. My mother covered her own eyes, and then Henok’s, but the sickening thuds of her blows could not be silenced, until she was too exhausted for more, falling backwards onto the dust at the point of collapse.
It was too late for the last bus back. I didn’t sleep that night. None of us did on that filthy ground underneath insect-teeming animal skins. I wanted to kiss our little house when we returned. I loved Addis. I told myself never to leave Addis again, or I might regret it.
Hot Summer (432 days left)
In Addis, the temperature never exceeds twenty-eight degrees Celsius. When thirty degrees came to Beirut two months ago, I believed my sweat would run dry. Now as we nudge forty degrees in mid-summer, standing, breathing, walking, washing the grapes, grinding the garlic, preparing the olives, squeezing the lemons all require careful concentration, or down I shall clatter like a fatally wounded elephant, unlikely to stand again. Headaches cling to and tear at the inside of my head like cats on quality sofas. My heart pounds like a tribal drum if I blink. This would never happen in Addis. Every heavy second here is a second of regret:
every bead of sweat is moisture grudgingly lost to Beirut.
It’s like Dad’s railway, a single-gauge line, but it’s not Addis to Djibouti. A single-gauge line of thought forges towards a single destination: I see only two letters on the station platform sign: A and C. There’s no B, just AC, as in ‘Air Con’. As in Air Conditioning. I’m headed only in that direction, on a continual circuit, towards the only possible destination in the Beirut summer. I have to get to AC before I derail. AC, AC, AC . . .
‘Don’t touch this, Meron, we not wasting air conditioning on Ethiopia person . . . maybe you have accident and freeze to death . . . this is possible,’ says Madame.
As soon as I believe Shafeek has not forgotten his papers, I kneel in front of the AC unit in Madame’s bedroom until the goosepimply chicken skin arrives and it’s time to snatch twenty minutes of work. Without the AC, nothing can happen. I extinguish the chilled air only minutes before Madame arrives home.
On one of these turgid days, Madame arrives home particularly relieved that her room is already cool. She’s a little pink with heat and short of breath as she falls into her bedside chair with a loud sigh. I notice an expression quite different from anything I have seen before. Madame is affected in some way.
‘Meron, get me cold water now . . . before I boil,’ she slurs. I detect no alcohol on her breath.
‘Yes, Madame. Are you okay?’
‘I need water and . . . get water.’
I return with water. She gulps it down vigorously and pats remaining droplets onto her face.
‘You from Ethiopia. I suppose heat not affecting you?’ she asks, as I wait with her, happy to be in the coolest room in the apartment.
‘I get hot, Madame, in the heat,’ I say. That seems obvious. I’m not even trying to be funny.
‘Yes, Meron, but in other ways. Hot in other ways. I mean . . . urges . . . urges to get physical relief,’ she says.
‘No, Madame, I hardly ever need the toilet when I’m too hot,’ I reply.
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