Sabra Zoo (2 page)

Without thinking, I addressed the insane-looking bunch, my voice wavering; they looked as if they hadn't had much sleep in the last week. There was a moment's silence as they looked at us, deciding whether to shoot the small foreign doctor and the sweaty kid trying to hide behind her, but then they backed away, standing outside while Asha and the others treated the injured man. Later I was given the unwanted task of telling them that their comrade was in a bad way and was unlikely to survive. The fighters, slumped in their jeep and chain-smoking, told me to apologise to the good Doctora on their behalf, to explain that they were under a lot of pressure. I went back in to the makeshift emergency room to reassure everybody that they weren't about to be shot but was sent straight back out by Asha to ask them to donate blood; I soon learnt that this was a standard request for anyone entering the hospital on their own feet. I went back the next day. I felt useful.

Now, as we finished breakfast in the canteen beneath the Sabra camp hospital, my stomach wasn't coping with my over-boiled egg.

‘Are you coming to my place tonight?' I asked Asha.

‘Of course,' she said. I stood up to go but had to leave without saying goodbye; hospital staff and patients' relatives quickly surrounded her, blocking her from my view.

What Asha didn't know, and I would never tell her, was that I had to get back to Hamra to courier some forged papers. That was why I'd been asked to stay in the city rather than leave on a ship with my parents. I felt for the reason in my back pocket – my Danish passport, which allowed me relatively easy movement around the city. The war was over and I was parent-free for the first time, with my own apartment. I couldn't ask for more.

I made my way down Hamra Street, heading to Samir's café before my rendezvous at the forging house. Hamra Street was the main shopping street of west Beirut and bisected the area of the same name. It was only slightly scarred by shelling compared to the southern reaches of west Beirut, where the refugee camps and the multitude of abandoned
PLO
offices were situated. This was a more affluent west Beirut, where boutiques, cinemas and street cafés occupied the ground floors of large apartment blocks, many empty as the owners had left for Europe or the east of the city. Since the siege had eased, goods were getting in and there were more people on the street, doing more everyday things; I passed a hairdressing salon in which women sat in curlers, and a café where men sat on the pavement outside drinking coffee and smoking narghilehs. Samir's place – consisting of a food counter and a few Formica tables – was next to the cinema where only a few months ago I'd watched
Mad Max
with my schoolmates, unaware of our own impending apocalypse. It was a good place to stop if I thought I was being followed, but it was also a good place to eat. Samir was often found there, supervising the making of his ‘special' falafel mix and blending the secret sauce he served with it himself (he wouldn't trust anyone else with the formula). He had managed to keep the place open even during the worst of the siege. I usually ate there for nothing when Samir was on the premises. He would greet the regulars and swap the latest rumours while casting his eye over any woman that passed the shop front. He had a radar for them.

‘Ivan,' he called from behind the counter, his neatly pressed clothes protected by an apron, ‘the situation must be improving – the women are starting to look like women again.'

I watched Samir fill flat bread with some wilting salad and freshly fried falafel but stopped him dribbling his secret sauce over the top.

‘He's no fool, this one,' said one of the customers, laughing.

‘You won't be laughing when it's being sold in every shop across the Middle East,' Samir said.

This just provoked more laughter and he handed the sandwich to me with a hurt expression. I bit into it hungrily, listening to the banter. It was all about the
PLO
leaving and what would happen now.

‘So,' one of them was asking, ‘you think the Israelis will enter the city?'

‘For sure, they'll want to check for themselves that the
PLO
has left,' someone said.

‘Not with the multinationals here. Not with the Americans at the port,' said another.

‘What, and the multinational force is going to be here for ever? They only came for the evacuation, you idiot.'

And so the discussion went, everyone giving their prediction on when the Western troops would leave. I knew that most of these Lebanese men, Samir among them, had ambivalent feelings about the
PLO
. Although they may have earnt their money working for them (like Samir, claiming he'd driven Arafat himself) they were also relieved that they had gone. The feeling was that the Palestinians had overstayed their welcome in Lebanon since arriving in 1967, turning parts of it into a permanent home from home. My Timex told me I was going to be late if I didn't move.

Five minutes from Samir's place I turned south off Hamra Street onto Rue Descartes, and picking my way past a shoulder-high mountain of rotting garbage entered a 1930s apartment block. An old lady in glasses was checking the mailboxes. She caught sight of me before I got to the stairs.

‘Who are you? You don't live here,' she said.

‘Just visiting, Auntie. Don't worry yourself.'

‘Visiting who?'

I took the stairs three at a time to the third floor. I knocked with a pre-arranged tattoo on the door and grinned at the eye that darkened the security peephole. Najwa let me into the apartment and bolted the door behind me. Her once tight-fitting jeans hung from her hips like a denim skirt.

‘You're late,' she said in Arabic, limping towards the dining-room table where official papers and rubber stamps lay carefully arranged. My mother once told me that Najwa had spent three months in a Syrian prison and had come out with a limp and a streak of white on one side of her jet-black hair.

‘I'm here now,' I said.

‘Spending too much time with those foreign nurses?' she asked, smirking.

I felt my face redden but didn't answer; smirking women were not something I'd yet learnt to deal with. I knew that she didn't want to spend more than an hour in the place, as there was a chance it could be raided. Today wasn't the first time the neighbours had questioned one of us in the lobby. Our story was that we were watering the plants until the owners came back.

She sat back at the table, sticking a passport photo of a young man onto a blank Israeli travel permit. I watched as she impressed the photo with a home-made rubber stamp. It was similar to one of several I had helped to make just a couple of weeks before. They were made from the official stamps on legitimate documents borrowed (or indeed stolen) from sympathetic people who could travel through Israeli lines. The forging operation was originally housed in a windowless basement with a steel door in the south of the city, and was run by another foreign volunteer, a cheery German called Andreas who was rumoured to be an ex-member of the Baader-Meinhof group and who had an artificial left hand. Whatever the truth, in short supply in the fever of a summer war, he'd shown me how to create a rubber stamp from a facsimile and how to remove a signature from a passport using only what could be bought in a stationery shop. Andreas had acquired his rubber-coated left hand after putting together a letter bomb which detonated before it could be posted. Since the
PLO
evacuation a few days ago, which took Andreas with it (keffiyah and large sunglasses conveniently covering his fair head), the operation had been split up into smaller discrete parts, each occupying a different dwelling across the city. This apartment was one of them. It was unoccupied, its owners having left for France, entrusting the keys to Najwa, whose handbag was weighed down with several sets. It was unclear to me how she remembered which keys opened what door or how indeed she explained having so many on her. She must have told people she was watering a lot of plants.

She gave me three complete forged travel permits. I wrapped and taped them in a sheet of paper then taped the package inside the day's newspaper with the headline ‘
INTERNAL SECURITY FORCES DEPLOYED IN SOUTHERN SUBURBS
', and folded the paper in three.

‘Any new volunteers we should know about?' Najwa asked, sitting back in her chair and putting her hands behind her head. My eyes were momentarily drawn to the hair under her armpits, which was a different colour from the mainly jet-black hair on her head. She noticed my gaze and folded her arms. I felt like I'd been caught looking down her blouse.

‘There are a couple of new nurses and a new Belgian doctor,' I replied, studying the criss-cross sticky tape on the windowpanes, designed to stop it shattering into fragments and shredding the occupants in the event of an explosion.

‘Have you got names?' she asked.

I reluctantly muttered their names, which she wrote down. ‘What are you going to do with those, run them through the
PLO
super-computer?' I said. Surprised by my own sarcasm, my face flushed again.

‘This is serious, Ivan, this isn't a game. Those of us who have remained behind are at risk. Not everyone has a foreign passport to fall back on.'

I wanted to say something about her being able to make one for herself but held my tongue. During the summer I'd talked of burning my Danish passport after similar jibes from people, but my mother had told me not to be stupid. Najwa tried to conceal the effort of getting up from the table and started to gather the stamps and passes together, avoiding my eyes. ‘Let's meet again in three days, my place,' she said.

‘What time? I don't want to be late.'

She gave me a look.

I made my way back onto the street, tensing in the September sun, patting my tatty passport still sitting snug in my hip pocket. I walked the four kilometres to the American University Hospital, where people who could pay went to get better. At the reception I asked for a Dr Ramina and was put through to her on the phone.

‘Hello, it's George,' I said, trying to ignore the look of curiosity on the receptionist's face. ‘I've come for my blood test results.' I found myself talking English with a slight Arabic accent, taking on the less than perfect cadence of Dr Ramina. It was something I did when I spoke to Samir in English, or indeed when I spoke English to a Norwegian. Maybe it was a subconscious need to be accepted.

Dr Ramina's office was off one side of a laboratory where technicians sat at benches looking through microscopes. Dr Ramina looked middle-aged or just tired – it was difficult to tell in those post-siege days. She had lipstick on her teeth.

‘So, you've come for your results, George?' she said in an unnaturally loud voice. She pretended to inquire about my parents, whom she'd never met, while she dug out a patient's file from a stack on her desk and made a show of consulting it. I put my newspaper on the desk, next to an identical one, except, I noticed, it wasn't folded in the same way.

‘Everything looks fine, I think the iron tablets are working. Your red cell count is back to normal.'

‘
OK
, good,' I said, standing up. ‘I do feel a lot better.' I picked up her newspaper from the desk and folded it in three as we walked out to the corridor together. We stood waiting for the lift and I wished she would leave; it wasn't normal to be standing out here with me, a healthy person, when she had real patients to see. She leant towards me and spoke in a low voice: ‘To be honest, maybe you should have a blood test, you do look anaemic.'

I stepped into the lift and smiled at her as the doors closed.

Later that night I was in what I now called my apartment. I wasn't sure who it belonged to but it was where my parents had moved after having to evacuate our own apartment earlier in the summer. A group sat round the large coffee table covered in half-empty wine bottles and full ashtrays. It was dark outside but I'd lost track of the time. Samir had brought a couple of Lebanese friends whom I didn't know. They weren't drinking but chain-smoked Marlboros. They both had moustaches and one of them was in the process of growing a beard.

Samir was talking over Don McLean on the turntable. ‘Did anyone see the
US
marines at the port?' he asked. ‘You need to go and see them, they're very short.'

‘They're what?' asked a Swedish woman whose name I couldn't remember. She was easily the oldest person there and spoke the least English. I wasn't sure if we'd been introduced but I thought she was an anaesthetist. She didn't look comfortable, perched on the end of her chair.

‘Short,' Samir said, holding his hand up to indicate. ‘Small, like this.'

I had noticed this when I'd followed the departing convoy of
PLO
fighters to the port, where they'd boarded ships to be dispersed around the Mediterranean. I'd walked alongside them from the municipal stadium where they embarked, saying goodbye to my mother, who was standing in a truck with other wives of cadres along with some trusted comrades to look after them. They'd been dressed in brand-new fatigues and keffiyahs, like everyone else. The fighters triumphantly shot rounds from their
AK
-47
S
into the air. Hot bullet casings had stung the side of my head; later Asha told me that many people had come into hospital with head injuries caused by falling bullet shells. She wasn't pleased at this unnecessary extra work. I'd reached the roadblock at the port, where the
US
marines were stationed, letting through the trucks full of armed
PLO
fighters in battle dress. They did look short and nervous, but maybe that was because everyone else was standing in trucks. That was when I'd unexpectedly spotted my father, incongruously dressed in fatigues and helmet, sporting an
AK
-47 and sitting in the front of a truck, next to the driver. He looked awkward and out of place. I'd jumped up onto the running board and tried to give him a hug, but the weapon and helmet got in the way. I was pulled down and my father disappeared through the roadblock. All through the siege I'd hardly seen him. I felt cheated by our wordless and inept farewell.