Between Beirut and the Moon Read online

  When we got home my parents sent me straight to my room to think about what I’d done. A few minutes later my father opened my bedroom door, walked in, and locked it behind him.

  ‘Your mother and I agreed that the only way to punish you is this,’ he said, holding his black leather belt in his right hand.

  ‘But I didn’t,’ I began to object and stopped as soon as I saw my father’s index finger being placed firmly on his lips.

  ‘Jump and scream,’ he whispered, deliberately missing me and landing hard lashes on the bedsheets.

  ‘Never be afraid to fight for what you believe in, or defend those with less courage or intellect than yourself,’ my father said, lashing furiously at the bed, ‘but always stop short of breaking your opponent’s nose. You know you’ve gone astray – scream – when there’s blood involved.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, bouncing as high as I could and screaming over his words.

  ‘Stop that’s enough, stop,’ my mother implored, banging on the bedroom door.

  ‘Do not hesitate to blaspheme if religion happens to stand in the way of truth or knowledge, but do not do so intentionally to provoke others,’ he continued, inciting me to shout louder with his left hand, ‘apologise – louder – to those whom you have wronged, but never wait long enough to be told to do it by others. It takes the gloss off of the apology.’

  ‘Open this door right now or so help me God, I will burst through it,’ my mother shouted.

  For a moment, my father stood before me panting and trying to catch his breath; then he unlocked the door, swung it open, and walked past my mother without saying another word.

  ALJAHIZ AND MONSIEUR MERMIER

  Not too many men are fond of the time their father almost ended their life. It would be a sad tale to tell had my life actually ended, and I, in all likelihood, would not be the one to tell it.

  Once, I asked my father if he could give me his copy of The Miserly, a book by the Arab philosopher Aljahiz, which was probably collecting dust somewhere around the house. He gave me a ten thousand lira note instead and told me to go buy my own version before hiding his head behind the An-Nahar Daily. He was looking to see if they had published the article he’d sent in the week before. Such was the chaos which engulfed the house that when my father declared a book lost, no one bothered to look for it.

  All I knew about Aljahiz was that his tragic and untimely death had come about when an entire library of his own books fell on top of him one night and crushed him to death. It was how we’d all imagined my father would go, looking for a book to read and then suddenly being overwhelmed by a number of them launching themselves at him.

  Many visitors who passed by our home on occasion, would take one glance at the piles of books stacked haphazardly around the house and put them down to my father’s insatiable thirst for knowledge. It was not, however, my father’s insatiable thirst for knowledge which cost us valuable house space, it was his insatiable thirst for books. I use the word ‘house’ loosely. Ours was not a house; it was a small apartment on the sixth floor of an old building in Ras Beirut, just off Hamra Street. The location was ideal, but the apartment itself was designed to fit one or two people at most. Certainly, not four people and an entire library.

  When Monsieur Mermier, a Frenchman working for the UN, moved into the apartment facing our own on the sixth floor, my father jumped at the opportunity to invite him to our home. The Frenchman, he told me, is the pinnacle of cultured and intellectual men. Of course, he might have said the same thing about Englishmen, were we living next door to an Englishman.

  ‘Your home is a sanctuary for literature, Monsieur Najjar,’ said Monsieur Mermier, taking a sip of his Turkish coffee.

  ‘And a dumpster for everyone else,’ my mother added, offering Monsieur Mermier a tray of Arabic sweets and wiping the smile off my father’s face.

  Monsieur Mermier suggested that my father should open a publishing house, since he seemed to love nothing more, on this evidence, than the sight of books stacked on top of one another. My father dismissed this without deliberation.

  After my mother went to sleep, my father took out a bottle of Arak, a slightly stronger version of vodka diluted with water to be just as strong, and offered Monsieur Mermier a few shots. They drank to health and Lebanon and success and new friends and peace and old friends and peace and France and Lebanon and Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Chirac and my great-grandfather and good health and Zidane’s footballing skills and success and Barthez’s bald head and Voltaire and Monsieur Mermier’s mother and my grandmother and Lebanon.

  Not long into their drinking binge, my father confessed that it was his lifelong dream to run a successful publishing house. And not long after that, it was Monsieur Mermier’s turn to confess that it was his lifelong dream to invest in a publishing house. Neither of which ever materialised.

  Despite him getting along well with my father, I was always mildly suspicious of Monsieur Mermier. For instance, he would regularly sit with one thigh resting completely over the other; it was a manner in which I had never seen a man sit before. Most men I knew, including my father, would place one ankle over their knee and sometimes hold it there with their hands. His unusual seating disposition led me to one of two conclusions: either Frenchmen do not have genitals or, more likely, evolution has exclusively granted them the ability to suck their genitals inward, whenever they so choose. Also, he called me ‘le petit prince’ which I did not like.

  By the time I was five, I had grown accustomed to leaping over piles of books to get from one room to the other. Later, I stopped leaping and simply walked over the books as if they were part of the floor, infinite little rectangular tiles each with its own design forming some random grand pattern which made sense only to my father. During my adolescent years, I developed the much more pronounced technique of kicking through the books and landing them halfway across the apartment.

  Two large ‘towering blocks of literature’, as my father often referred to them inspired by Mr Mermier’s comments, stood on either side of the apartment door as you walked in. Occasionally, I would stack the books on the floor over one another in such a way as to emulate a spaceship and pretend I was on my way to the moon. My sister would join in by spreading her little body across the floor and pretending to be a star, with ponytails.

  ‘Grow up,’ my father would say every time he passed by my spaceship, which is why I never got to the moon before bed.

  Beside the kitchen, there was an entire room which no one apart from the members of my family had ever seen. It consisted of nothing but layer upon layer of old books, which presumably my father had once read. It was locked for most of the time anyway and my father carried the key around in his pocket. Whenever my father wished to find a book which he suspected was inside the room, he would hand my five-or-six-year-old sister a flashlight and toss her inside. For the most part, she enjoyed the task until she came across a dead cockroach, or worse, a living one, at which point she would begin to scream and my watchful father would reach across, grab my sister by the shirt and place her on the floor between his legs.

  ‘They’re harmless, Fara. They’re even smaller than you are,’ my father would say, before taking out a can of Bygone and emptying it inside the room.

  I pushed the door open one Tuesday afternoon, having just returned from school, and found my father attempting to slowly pull a single book out from underneath one of his two ‘towering blocks of literature’. The house was unusually empty as my mother and sister were not yet home. He ordered me to stand beneath one of them and support its weight while he made an attempt to withdraw the book. The moment he tugged forcefully at the book, perhaps out of frustration, both columns came tumbling over my head. Though we lived in a small apartment, the ceiling was undoubtedly high, and had one of the heavier hardcover volumes of Encyclopedia Americana fallen on my head, some serious injury might have resulted to my skull. None of them did. I would later survive two full-fledged wars and one tiny
one which would last four whole days, but I consider this incident to be the most life-threatening, near-death experience I’ve ever been involved in.

  I leaped and screamed and swore and cursed and was excused for all I’d done when my father saw that the books had landed on the floor and not on my head. He clutched my shoulder with one hand and kissed the top of my head twice.

  ‘Not a word of this to your mother,’ he said, as we picked the books up and began to stack them into two perfectly aligned columns.

  THE OLDSMOBILE

  Ours was an aging, white, second-hand American-made car called Barney. The night my father bought it from Payless Car Rental, he took me by the arm and told me all about how he intended to take us for a ride around Beirut in the morning. The next day, he gathered us around him, rubbed his hands together and presented us with the keys to the 1988 Oldsmobile.

  My mother muttered something, put out her cigarette and left the room.

  The car had been christened Barney by my sister who, having not yet seen the car, decided that it deserved a name.

  My father’s choice of cars had been notoriously unpopular. His tendency to buy used cars and, in this instance, overused cars resulted not only in regular visits to the overjoyed mechanic but also the occasional car accident and the increasingly frequent exchange of sharp words between my mother and father. For the most part, they pretended that we could not hear them in the back and, for the most part, we were glad to pretend that we could not. My sister, who at five was not as keen an observer of our silent agreement with our parents, would now and then stick her head in between the front seats in order to adjust the air conditioning or the radio, at which point my parents would briefly fall silent. They would resume only after the last of my sister’s ponytail had withdrawn itself.

  The neighbours did not like our car because it was too big and it took up too much parking space. My mother did not like it because it was white and would get dirty far too easily, and because my father had bought it without first discussing the matter with her. My sister did not like it because it was infested with little cockroaches that would, frequently, climb up her own little legs, and because it seemed to trigger an argument between my mother and father every time they set foot inside. My grandfather did not like it because the only thing worse than an American-made car is a second-hand American-made car and because he had explicitly advised my father not to buy this second-hand American-made car. My father, and the mechanic, were very fond of it.

  Whenever my father was asked what he’d seen in this overgrown excuse for a car, he would inevitably ramble on about luxury.

  ‘It’s like driving a limousine,’ my father would say, until my grandfather informed him that driving your own limousine was very much missing the point of owning one.

  It was not long before my father came to view the car as an extension to our home. Soon my sister and I found ourselves sharing the back seat with all manner of paperback and hardcover books each seemingly intent on making it their own with little regard for leg space. The greyish cloth which had served to cover the inner ceiling of the car did so only half-heartedly, creating something of an air pocket between itself and the ceiling, and now hung low enough to scrape the head of almost anyone insisting upon sitting fully upright. The remaining side-view mirror was soon knocked off by a speeding motorcyclist and the rear-view mirror by my father’s angry swipe at it. Driving Barney, as a result, involved an active effort on my sister’s part, who would sit on top of a stack of books, with her back to my father, and inform him of oncoming cars when the occasion called for it. During the months of the winter, water from the rain would find its way through the cracks and seep into the seats. The smell of wet, crumpled old newspapers, which we often placed between ourselves and the damp seats, coupled with that of the seats themselves, and the equally damp books, became a constant over the brief but full life of Barney the car.

  Every Sunday my father would pack us all, my mother, my sister, myself and the damp literature, into the car and drive us to his father’s house. On the way there, to distract us from the challenges of the car ride, my father would tell us stories about Bilyasho, which is Italian for ‘clown’ and is spelt: pagliaccio. Bilyasho was a character who also featured heavily in the bedtime stories my father used to tell us. Bilyasho would get himself into all sorts of trouble, and then get himself out of it by some happenstance. He never meant anyone any harm, but he always brought it upon those closest to him. All the other characters admonished Bilyasho at the end of each story but then they forgave him and laughed about his latest misdemeanour.

  My grandmother would welcome us with a smile and open arms. My grandfather with a nod. He had lost most of his hair and teeth. What little hair he did have, he would make sure to dye brown which he, to my grandmother’s amusement, insisted was his original hair colour; a habit which my father picked up in his later years. His remaining teeth too were brown. His penchant for smoking over more years than he cared to count ensured that they would remain so. My grandfather’s smiles were as sparse as his teeth and neither was a sight which I ever got used to seeing.

  According to my father, the only time my grandfather is supposed to have smiled, prior to that Sunday, was when he won the lottery. My grandmother neither affirms nor denies this; nor does she claim to have seen him smile on their wedding day or on the birth of any of his ten children, especially the last one. Whenever I asked my father where all the lottery money had gone, he would shrug his shoulders and tell me to ask my grandfather. I never did.

  My grandfather tells the story of how he woke up one morning with his old license plate number ingrained in his mind, how he wrote it down so as not to forget it, how he went around Beirut looking for the ticket with that same number, how he couldn’t find it, how he could not find it, how he wished he could, how he sat down at Wimpy Café on Hamra Street for a cup of lemonade with mint, how he settled for a ticket with a single digit off, how he called on Abou Talal to help carry the briefcase full of cash across Ras Beirut, how Abou Talal had advised him against withdrawing the money all at once, how he ignored him, how hot it was that day, how you could tell because of the large sweat stain across Abou Talal’s shirt, how humid, how like Beirut in the summer.

  My father tells the story of how his father took him, the eldest, by the arm and told him all about the lottery ticket and his plan to return with a briefcase full of cash, and Abou Talal, how he was instructed not to tell anyone, how he ignored his father’s instructions at the earliest opportunity and assembled all three of his brothers and all four of his sisters and his mother, how his father opened the door to find them all awaiting his arrival, how Abou Talal wiped his forehead and how my grandfather smiled.

  ‘Where did all the lottery money go?’ asked my sister one Sunday, looking up at my grandfather, as my parents and I made our way past the odd collection of twenty or so assorted relatives standing up to greet us.

  My grandfather smiled. My father did too. Everyone else let out a nervous laugh, or pretended not to have heard.

  When he first won the lottery, An-Nahar supposedly ran an article calling him ‘the man who won whilst the nation lost’. It was the early seventies and Lebanon was on the verge of a civil war that would last for fifteen years. In that time period, my grandfather Adam travelled the world, sometimes disappearing for weeks and months on end but always returning home to his war-torn country, his faithful wife and his steadily increasing number of children. Once, after a particularly long absence, my father asked him why he’d taken so long to come back.

  ‘Traffic,’ answered Grandfather Adam, then he threw my young father the keys to his new Mercedes-Benz. He had driven it all the way from Frankfurt.

  In the years after the war, when Grandfather Adam’s lottery money had almost run out, he arranged to go on the holy Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, referred to as Hajj. He had, thus far, not been particularly renowned for his religiosity; his casual approach to alcohol, bacon and extramarital
sex being some of several reasons why he was not. Grandfather Adam never divulged his motives behind that trip, or any other. My father mused, years later at the funeral, that it was a result of some misplaced urge to express gratitude to someone for those fifteen or so years of joy. It was not lost on my father that gambling too, of which the lottery is a variation, is forbidden in Islam.

  Upon returning from Hajj with a black eye, my grandfather is said to have serenaded everyone who had come to congratulate him on a successful pilgrimage with the tale of how he had been involved in a fight at the Stoning of the Devil ritual. A man had stoned him instead of the devil and he had stoned back. It was one of those rare occasions in which he had opened up about his travels at all.

  ‘Where?’ my sister asked again, still staring at him.

  ‘Everywhere,’ my grandfather said, leaning over to the sound of a much quieter room.

  He placed both his hands on my sister’s shoulders and told her – for what must have been the ninety-second time – the story of how he woke up one morning with his old license plate number ingrained in his mind, how he wrote it down so as not to forget it, how he went around Beirut looking for the ticket with that same number, how he couldn’t find it, how he wished he could, how he could not find it, how he wished he could, how he sat down at Wimpy Café on Hamra Street for a cup of lemonade with mint, how he settled for a ticket with a single digit off, how he called on Abou Talal to help carry the briefcase full of cash across Ras Beirut, how Abou Talal had advised him against withdrawing the money all at once, how he ignored him, how hot it was that day, how he could tell because of the large sweat stain across Abou Talal’s shirt, how humid, how like Beirut in the summer.