Between Beirut and the Moon Read online

  ‘It upsets my stomach,’ he said, as Mohammad’s mother looked on.

  My mother was the first to pick me up. She stood by the door whilst I put on my raincoat and said goodbye to my friends and thanked Mohammad’s mother for the pizza from Pizza Hut.

  ‘He’s a lovely boy,’ said Mohammad’s mother with one hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘That business with the other Mohammad. The punching and the slapping. I was sorry to hear about it. It was unfortunate,’ said Mohammad’s mother, pulling out a piece of paper from her pocket, ‘we should be sticking together, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ said my mother, squeezing my shoulder.

  ‘I heard your husband had a bit of a confrontation with the principal.’

  ‘You, know. Boys and their pride.’

  ‘My husband was the same before he moved to London for a few years for his studies. He’s a lot more patient these days. Like English men, almost.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said my mother, producing a smile which revealed her lower teeth.

  It was a smile normally reserved for my father. It indicated that she was not happy but that she was not going to give him the satisfaction of knowing this. My father’s response was to raise an eyebrow, scratch his moustache with his index finger and cough.

  ‘I noticed Adam was a bit off with some of the steps during prayer.’

  ‘The steps? Was he?’ asked my mother, looking down at me.

  ‘I could recommend a teacher who would rectify that immediately if you like.’

  ‘I’m not sure that my husband would approve of leaving Adam alone with a stranger.’

  ‘He’s a good friend of the family,’ said Mohammad’s mother as she put the small piece of paper in my coat pocket.

  ‘I think we’ll be fine.’

  As we made our way back home, my mother took the small piece of paper out from my pocket and tore it to smaller pieces.

  ‘The next time that woman makes you pray in her house, you do the steps to the fucking Macarena,’ she said, lighting a cigarette and throwing the torn pieces of paper behind her.

  The folding chair was still resting on the Ottoman roof when my mother and I returned. The house was empty but for my sister, who was standing on the balcony above the remains of the photograph’s broken frame.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ she said, ‘I swear.’

  That night we could hear Saeed shouting, raging, slamming doors shut, breaking glass, cursing God and his son and all the prophets whose names he could recall, and their mothers, and Ninnette. We could hear Ninnette too.

  ‘Are there no men in this building?’ her voice came from the garden.

  My father shifted in his seat. My mother put her hand on his forearm.

  ‘Enough,’ said my mother.

  From that balcony, you could see Ninnette and the folding chair and the jasmine tree. From the other, you could see the White American and a fraction of the Mediterranean Sea. When there was no electricity in Beirut, as was often the case, you could spot the sun set behind a haphazard collection of war-torn buildings and half-baked attempts at invincible skyscrapers, or hear the echoing sound of afternoon prayer or the hoarse voice of the grocer as he pushes his cart down an empty street every Sunday at five: ‘I have carrots, I have zucchini, I have vine leaves, I have zucchini, I have parsley, I have zucchini,’ and once, ‘I have no one, zucchini, no one cares, zucchini, it’s everyman for himself, zucchini.’

  My father never attended a graduation ceremony. When he had completed his courses, he collected his certificate from the secretary’s office. That year the Israeli army made it to the middle of Beirut, on land. He walked home through Hamra Street with his eyes closed and his certificate in his back pocket. He passed Wimpy Café where a Lebanese civilian had stood up, pushed his chair back, pointed his gun at an Israeli general’s head and shot him as he sat there eating his burger. It was Ramadan, the day before Eid. It was hot and my father had not had anything to eat yet. He waited for the sun to set then he sat around the dinner table with his brothers and sisters and his mother, and he ate couscous. Uncle Gamal asked my father whether he would join him for the customary fireworks. My father shrugged. The photograph was my mother’s idea. It was taken a few weeks after my sister was born.

  ‘What’s going to happen to the folding chair?’ asked my sister, as my father walked us to school.

  My father adjusted his newspaper. He produced a Cadbury Fruit and Nut out of his back pocket. It was melted and he had eaten half of it. He split the rest of the chocolate bar between my sister and me.

  ‘What’s going to happen to the chair?’ asked my sister, licking her fingers.

  I spat out the raisins and the nuts. Then my sister spat out the raisins and the nuts.

  ‘You know that jasmine tree in the garden,’ said my father, ‘when you are my age, its branches will extend into the balcony and seal everything else from view.’

  My sister and I returned home later that afternoon to find that the photograph had been restored to its rightful place on the shelf between Emily Nasrallah’s Birds of September and Youssef Saleme’s Yassin Had This to Say, and that Barney had disappeared forever. My father told us the story of how it had been applauded on its way out by all the inhabitants of Sadat Street, including Madame Hafez and the old man in the Ottoman house. My mother maintained that no such thing had happened. Not long after that, Ninnette too disappeared forever. She took her two sons with her, and Saeed started leaving the newspaper on the doorstep, as was the norm before Barney had made its temporary home on Sadat Street. It was years before my father spoke to him again, choosing instead to disregard the Egyptian even as he held the door open for us or offered to carry the groceries or take out the garbage. A few days later, my father spotted Saeed relieving me of my hefty school bag as I nudged open the gate to the building. He strode towards us, slamming the door to the lift shut behind him. My father reached for the school bag, snatching it off Saeed’s shoulder and flinging it back onto mine. Then he barked something about books and burdens and illiterate men, which I can no longer piece together from memory. He did this as Saeed shuffled silently to the side, never once opening his mouth to explain that he was in fact literate, that the weight of books was no problem at all for his muscular back and that he hoped he would be reincarnated into a better man (for surely he was now a converted Druze due to my father and the White American).

  Ninnette, the cat, lingered for a bit, like the smell of the damp literature, where the Oldsmobile had once been.

  THE DON

  Autumn, not spring, is my mother’s favourite season. Quite apart from the fact that the leaves begin to fall or that the clouds take it upon themselves to put the sun in its place, my mother favours autumn because the English word itself contains the initials of all four members of our family including her own. When there was nothing to be done, my sister and I would joke about being reunited with our long-lost brother Usama. In the weeks after my grandmother’s death, I would often find the An-Nahar open to the obituaries page. This I assumed was my mother’s way of coping with her mother’s death.

  Teta’s father was told by a witch doctor that her original name, Samiha, would bring bad luck upon the family. It was changed to ‘Mariam’. Teta’s father died of a heart attack soon after. She kept her new name and her friends at the orphanage referred to her as Mary. Palestine was under British occupation at the time and English names were in vogue.

  Fadia, her mother, once brought stuffed zucchini and vine leaves to the Catholic orphanage in Haifa, for Teta and her sisters. Fadia could not afford to raise her daughters on her own but she could afford to cook them a meal every now and again, which she did in the hope that the warm food would compensate for her absence. The nuns in charge seized the food and said that they would distribute it equally amongst the girls of the entire orphanage. Teta’s response was to start a lawless gang within the orphanage, comprising of her three younger sisters and two othe
r girls. They called themselves the ‘Zucchini Bandits’ and it all lasted for one night. When, next morning, the nuns found the empty pots under the girls’ beds, they chased them through the rooms of several innocent orphan girls who had been looking forward to a hot plate full of zucchini and vine leaves over lunch. Then Teta jumped on one of the beds, leapt through the window and was out of the orphanage. She ran barefoot through the streets of Haifa past a blur of street vendors and olive and cypress trees and shoe-shiners and faces she said she recognised later as those of her children and grandchildren and the familiar sound of bullets and that of waves crashing against the shores of her hometown and steamboats carrying her countrymen from its shores to those of Beirut and she knew that she would not live out her life in that town. She ran until she could no longer stand then she spread her body across the floor next to a church.

  She awoke in her mother’s arms.

  ‘They were delicious,’ said Teta, looking up at her mother.

  Her mother was remarried to an Englishman, named David, who died in bed, also, of a heart attack. Some of the neighbours blamed Teta, because they too had heard the witch doctor’s words, but most of them knew that the Englishman just could not handle Fadia. Teta had nothing to do with it this time.

  To Fadia, there were only ever two countries: Haifa and non-Haifa. And Haifa was the larger of the two. She would live and die there, in the city she knew but could no longer recognise. Teta Mary and my grandfather left everything behind with Fadia. They did not take pictures, only a wooden chest adorned with fragments of seashells which contained some jewellery, official documents and a few items of clothing. It was only going to be for a short while, until things smooth over in Palestine. By the time the steamboat reached the shores of Beirut, they understood that they were never going back.

  After my grandfather passed away, Teta was sent to live in Thirleby Road, in Victoria, London, with my Aunt Sarah and her English husband. They would regularly lose Teta and find her hours later ambling along the South Bank. She would not get very far but she insisted that if she walked long enough, she could smell the sea water. They drove her to Brighton once. My aunt said that was her favourite day. On the way back, my grandmother said that it reminded her of Haifa. My aunt smiled and placed her long and wiry hand in my uncle’s, who smiled back without taking his eyes off the road. Then my aunt heard Teta Mary suppressing sobs. What’s the matter? asked my aunt. That was a lie, said my grandmother. I can’t remember Haifa. I cannot remember anything before that steamboat.

  I mentioned to her over the phone that I did not want to die in Beirut like Monsieur Mermier and that I wanted to travel to London, on my way to the moon. I said I would visit and bring fresh zucchinis. She said that London is cold and rainy, and that I would not like it anyway.

  With both her parents now deceased, and her siblings all living abroad, my mother’s blood ties to Lebanon had been reduced to three.

  ‘I’m an orphan,’ she had said after the funeral and perhaps this preoccupation with the obituaries was her way of making sure that she was not alone in being one.

  Then I realised that my father too was fond of the obituaries section, mainly because plenty of the articles in there were his. Now in his mid-forties, he found himself losing people he had considered to be pillars of his own little piece of society. He wrote one about Sabah, a renowned singer and actress, who with the aid of plastic surgeons and increasingly younger partners, had fought time admirably and lost on a technicality. The song in which she uttered the lines: ‘Where’s Mahmoud? Where’s Maarouf? Where’s Elias? And where’s Hussien?’ was meant to speak to the pluralism of the country but was understood instead as a tribute to her former husbands. There was another article about Ibrahim the vagabond who roamed Hamra Street and never asked for money, even declining to take it when it was offered. He had appeared immediately after the war, but no one, including himself, knew from where. It was said that he was a tortured former captive of the Syrian regime or the Israeli Mossad or Iran. When people asked him who he was, he responded by debating the merits of communism versus those of capitalism. In the end, capitalism always won and he said, ‘it’s the worse of two evils’. Then he would pull at his grey beard, in a calm sort of way, and walk away. Once, a barber called him in from the street and gave him a haircut. For weeks no one knew it was him until a news anchor covered the story: ‘Ibrahim the vaga-Bond’. Ibrahim died in a rain storm on Hamra Street, the first to hit Beirut in many years. Everyone knew it was him.

  I read one about my father’s, and my own, former PE teacher who wore his shorts closer to his nipples than his knees and whose rough beard combined with the absence of hair elsewhere gave the impression of one whose head had been fitted the wrong side up. Don Amin, my father wrote, would offer one ‘well done’ a month and occasionally take it back if the recipient were to let him down in the future. The latter part was not true. I was not sure why my father saw it fit to include this minor deviation from the truth.

  ‘It speaks to the essence of the man, who Don Amin was,’ said my father.

  ‘What about his cedars, and his chewing gum?’ asked my sister.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘He was always chewing gum,’ she added, ‘the only time he wasn’t was when he screamed so hard at a boy in class that his gum fell out and the boy pissed himself.’

  ‘Did he pick it back up?’ asked my father.

  ‘No, he stepped on it to make his point.’

  Don Amin regularly volunteered this piece of advice to his male students: ‘Bouncing a basketball is like masturbating, boys, except it’s a ball not a stick and no one’s watching to see whether you’re doing it right.’ He sounded like gravel on a dry Thursday afternoon.

  The Don scared a number of boys out of puberty for a good few years with that lesson in technique. At the time, I understood it as a thinly veiled criticism of refereeing standards in the game. Then I came to see it as a critique of religious indoctrination. Recently, I’ve decided that neither interpretation speaks to the essence of the man.

  He began teaching in an Italian school, which is where he got the title ‘Don’. He started off as a History teacher who stood on tables and attempted to breathe life into dates and names.

  ‘The borders of Lebanon were drawn by French and British children in crayon on a white piece of cardboard titled the “Middle East”.’

  Then he had a stroke and the doctor said that he had to get out more. He gave up the classroom for a whistle and a pair of trainers. This suited him well. Don Amin would stop other teachers in the hallway, between the lockers, the backpacks and the pimples, to discuss this student’s turn of pace or that one’s ability to read his or her opponent.

  Much of what I knew about Don Amin, I had heard from my father. In his stories, Don Amin was regularly cast as an unwitting master of comedy, a man whose every word or deed was an unintentional attempt at meta-humour. I saw a lot of Don Amin in him and, in the years ahead, I would recall my father with chewing gum in his mouth and a whistle hanging around his neck.

  My mother wasted no time in picking me up from school. She would stand outside the gates in her hooped, bluish-green, sleeveless shirt and loose black pants. She’d swing my backpack onto her shoulders and ask me about my day, my teachers and my grades as we walked home. My father asked about my day too. But he didn’t carry my bag and he often arrived an hour or so late.

  One Thursday afternoon, I watched the playground slowly empty down to the last student. Even Basil, whose parents were much older than mine and who Don Amin referred to as ‘August rain’, had been escorted home by his older brother. Beirut does not know rain in August.

  ‘Is he always this late, your father, Gibran the pimp?’ asked Don Amin, as he sat down on the ground next to me. The Don called my father Gibran after the renowned early twentieth-century Lebanese-American poet and writer, Gibran Khalil Gibran. He called my father pimp because he didn’t like it when people were not on time.

>   ‘No, Don.’

  ‘Don’t cover for him,’ he said, attempting to light his cigarette. ‘He’s a pimp for being late.’

  ‘Yes, Don,’ I said, now looking at my shoes, black leather with an achingly uncomfortable sole and thin laces.

  ‘You need new shoes. Proper gym shoes.’

  ‘My doctor says I have to wear these. For my flat feet.’

  ‘Nonsense. Who’s your podiatrist?’

  ‘Dr. Takkoush.’

  ‘I know him. He was my student. I know his dad too. He was also a doctor. A dick doctor, you know,’ he paused to allow me a giggle, I did and he continued, ‘I went to his clinic several years ago. Couldn’t get it up, you won’t understand now, but remember me when you’re my age. You know what he asked me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He asked me if I had unresolved issues with my mother. I’m a man in his sixties literally standing there with his dick in his hands and he brings up my mother. God rest her soul,’ said Don Amin, now banging his lighter against the wired fence behind us. ‘Do you have a lighter on you?’

  I took out a red lighter which I had hidden away in my Eastpak. My classmates and I had taken to playing with lighters during the break. The game entailed running one’s fingers through the flames without getting them scorched or burnt. It beat getting slapped around by Muslims all over the playground. Basil also used the Don’s to light his own cigarettes.

  On the brick wall opposite the wired fence hung a framed portrait of the incumbent president, in a glass casing. A still fresh-faced, balding, green-eyed, broad-shouldered man, distinguished for his lack of a moustache or any facial hair whatsoever. He was only the second president to hold office after the civil war, and a former general in the army. He started off as a symbol of a functioning democracy. When he was told that he would have to move into the presidential palace, he refused, citing the palace’s distance from the sea as the sole reason. He was an avid swimmer and his love of Beirut was tied in with his love for the sea. Then he moved into the presidential palace, overstayed his welcome and grew a moustache.