Sabra Zoo (3 page)

We drank some more and I made a toast to the short marines, before stopping someone from picking at the deposited wax on an empty Chianti bottle that had been used as a candleholder. I'd been nurturing it all summer, even bringing it with me when we moved to this apartment from our previous home.

‘What about the Italians?' someone else said. ‘Have you seen their hats?' It was true that the Italian contingent had worn ridiculous headgear; tall and feathered, they looked like they'd just come from being on parade in front of the Vatican. The war-hardened kids in the camps couldn't believe it – these guys had come to protect them? Only the French paratroopers looked like a real fighting force. Big, tough-looking men with shaved heads, people wished they'd been there during the siege. Another toast to the Italians was followed by one to the paratroopers. Samir and his teetotal friends started talking about the pros and cons of the different weapons the multinational forces carried.

Bored, I went to the kitchen where Eli and Asha were making something to eat. John, the paediatrician from Scotland, was there. He was popular with the camp inhabitants but some of his colleagues were ambivalent about his presence, even questioning the time I spent interpreting for him in his clinic. I thought it must have something to do with him coming to Beirut on his own rather than through a charity. Najwa had been particularly interested in John when I told her about him. You couldn't tell who had entered the city, she said; it was more difficult to check people out since the
PLO
apparatus had been dismantled. Having seen him in his clinic it was difficult to imagine that he was anything other than a doctor but people were always wary of someone they couldn't easily pigeonhole. He was making a tomato sauce to go with the spaghetti on the stove.

‘Ivan, Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy?' he asked, as if offering a choice of fruit.

I pretended to mull it over. ‘Dostoyevsky, I think.' I'd never read Tolstoy.

He nodded and his glasses steamed up under his curly hair. He made Asha laugh, saying, ‘You're making me hot, baby.' It was funny because no one else would dare say that to her. I was sick of spaghetti; it was all we had eaten over the summer, along with rice, lentils, tinned tuna and sardines. All the lights went out and a collective groan came from the living room. In the kitchen, lit only by the blue flame on the stove, there was a practised scramble to light candles. I was standing close to Eli.

‘I need your help with the boy, Youssef, the one with the foot injury,' she said to me. Her eyes flickered in the candlelight. Her braid was undone and her brown hair held back with a band.

‘Of course,' I said. Helping with Youssef would be a good excuse to spend time with her, although I thought the boy could do with some extra support. ‘I can come down to the hospital tomorrow.' We swapped smiles.

‘So this is your apartment?' she asked.

‘It is, since my parents left, although it's not theirs either, the owners are in London. We only came here in the summer because it was safer during the bombing.'

‘Ivan's bachelor pad. Better watch yourself, lassie,' John said.

‘Where are they, your parents?' she asked.

‘They've gone … on a … um, cruise.'

‘A cruise?'

‘Yes. They thought it was time they saw the Mediterranean.'

She couldn't tell whether her leg was being pulled. Smiling, I headed back to the living room.

The mood was quieter. Don McLean had been silenced by the power cut.

‘Where is your husband?' one of Samir's friends asked the anaesthetist, lighting a Marlboro from one already going.

‘He's with my daughter, at home in Sweden,' she answered, cradling a glass of wine to her chest.

‘Mother should be with daughter,' he said smiling, but his lips had thinned.

‘She's almost a woman now and I will be back with her soon.' She smiled as if visualising the moment.

‘Haven't you heard of women's lib?' laughed Liv, a black-haired Norwegian who called herself a Trotskyist. I wasn't sure what that was beyond a love of Trotsky, but the label suited her for some reason. I knew (through listening to my father) that Leninists hated Trotsky but I wasn't sure why.

‘Why you are coming here?' asked the man, louder than before. His question was aimed at the wider group but the anaesthetist was taken aback. Her mouth twitched nervously. She and Liv exchanged a look. I hoped Samir would intervene, but he'd disappeared onto the balcony with someone.

‘They've come to help us,' I said, immediately thinking how feeble this sounded.

‘We don't want their help,' Marlboro Man said, gesturing to the now silent gathering with his burning cigarette. ‘Foreigners have created the problems here, more of them will not make it better. We Arabs can solve our own problems.'

‘I don't remember', Samir said in Arabic, as he stepped in from the balcony, ‘seeing any Arabs here when we needed their help. Where were your fucking Arabs when we were being bombed by
F
-16
S
and shelled by gunboats?'

Marlboro Man's companion, the one trying to grow the beard, addressed Samir in Arabic. ‘You are trying to be Western, Samir, listening to this shit,' pointing at the records, ‘drinking alcohol, spending time with decadent Western women. You are a blasphemer. You should be a true Muslim.'

I started to laugh, but saw that the man's hands were shaking and that neither he nor his companion was laughing. Samir, though, was smiling at this outburst. I picked up someone's packet of Kent from the table but didn't think I could light one without making a hash of it. This wasn't how I'd envisaged the evening.

‘Maybe your friends should leave', I said to Samir in Arabic, not looking at the men, ‘if they don't feel comfortable with our guests.'

‘They are just going, I think,' Samir said, still smiling, moving towards them. Asha entered the room carrying a pan of spaghetti, trailing steam. As the two men stood up I saw a flash of candle-lit blue steel under Marlboro Man's jacket. I glanced at the housing for the rolling shutter above the balcony door, where I'd hidden my own ancient Soviet-made Tokarev 9mm automatic on the last day of the
PLO
evacuation.

Asha put the pan on the table and was followed into the room by Eli and John, carrying plates and cutlery. The two men pushed by them into the hall, followed by Samir.

‘Let's eat,' said Asha, as Eli handed out plates, looking quizzically at me.

I shrugged, just glad they were leaving.

‘Let's drink,' John said, raising a glass of wine he'd chosen from a selection on the table.

The front door closed and Samir came back into the room smiling and stroking his moustache.

‘Who were they?' Liv asked. ‘They seem so – what's the word – serious.'

‘They used to be fun guys,' Samir said, ‘but they discovered God during the summer.'

‘And I thought God had died during the summer,' said John, draining his glass.

I stood outside the camp hospital with the official interpreter, smoking and swapping funny patient stories. We watched an old man push a cart past, stacked precariously with cages of chickens. She stood very close to me when she spoke, touching me on the arm with blood-red fingernails, the polish chipped at the tips. She smelt of jasmine, and a small tuft of blonde hair had escaped from her ponytail at the base of the neck. I could see the dark roots coming through at her scalp. I could also see a small gold cross resting deep in her cleavage. My reverie was broken by John's voice.

‘Hey Ivan – hey, lover boy,' he shouted from the entrance, ‘I need you in the clinic.'

Because the war was now supposed to be over, children had started reclaiming their usual illnesses.

The clinic was full of women with kids crying, laughing or just being quietly pale. It was these silent ones, the lacklustre, curled up on their mothers' laps, who John asked the Palestinian nurse to triage first. This system encouraged more noise outside the examination room as worried mothers tried to be seen first, holding up crying babies as proof of priority. I had a flashback to a few days before: women holding up babies and toddlers to armed men in trucks, telling them, ‘Kiss your father goodbye.' I wondered how many families in the camp were now without their menfolk. John got me to speak directly to the children, bypassing their mothers' unsolicited lists of symptoms and diagnoses.

‘If she already knows what's wrong, ask her why she's here,' he would say to me in a Scottish accent strong enough to need internal deciphering. I didn't translate these pointed comments, sticking instead to the purely clinical. John was at ease in the refugee camp, claiming that it was no more horrendous than some of the Glaswegian tenements in which he cut his teeth as a general practitioner, adding that they probably ate better here, even during the siege.

‘Mothers are the same everywhere,' he would say. ‘They just want what's best for their children.'

We worked through a string of minor infections, wounds that wouldn't heal and diarrhoea from dirty water. Then the nurse brought in a boy, a young teenager who had come alone. He had a painful and bloated stomach. He was reluctant to answer questions and was eventually coaxed into having a rectal examination after some painful prodding of his swollen belly. John probed with a latexed finger, looking into the middle distance in concentration.

‘I think we'll need to get him onto the ward,' he said, snapping rubber into a bin.

I translated and the boy started to cry.

‘It'll be
OK
,' John said to him gently, patting his head.

Later, in the children's ward, John was pulling pistachio nut after pistachio nut from the boy's rectum. I didn't understand what had happened to him. The stench was unbearable and I withdrew to the corridor, listening to the other bedridden kids in the ward complaining about the smell.

‘Ivan, some abuses are the same the world over; these things must have been up here several days – it's like opening the bloody floodgates,' John shouted from behind the curtains.

I made for the orthopaedic ward, his mad laugh receding. I found Eli at Youssef's bedside.

‘Hello Youssef, remember me?' I asked, standing on the opposite side of the bed to Eli. Youssef looked away. He seemed frail and helpless, his bare chest sunken.

‘He won't cooperate,' she said, holding up crutches. ‘He needs to start getting about on his own.'

So far Youssef had been carried everywhere as there was no wheelchair small enough for him.

‘What's the plan?' I asked Eli, noticing freckles in the V-neck of her white top.

I carried Youssef into the corridor, taking him to the end furthest from the ward, as instructed by Eli. He was worryingly light and bony; it was like carrying a large bird. I set him down on his good foot and he collapsed onto his backside. With his back against the wall, he stuck his bandaged football of a foot out along the floor. Eli tried to hand him the crutches.

‘No!' he shouted in English.

‘Tell him he needs to try to walk to me,' she said, laying the crutches on the floor next to him.

I sat down next to Youssef, stretching out my legs. I was thirsty. The smell of week-old excrement sought us out. The marble floor was cool to the touch. We watched Eli walk to the other end of the corridor.

‘You like her, yes?' Youssef said in English, his eyes still on Eli as she stood to face us, gesturing for Youssef to come to her.

‘Yes, of course I do, don't you?' I said, knowing what was coming.

‘No, I mean you love her.' He giggled. ‘You want to fickety fick her?'

I felt my ears grow hot. Was I that obvious? ‘Shame on you,' I said. ‘She's married, with a son as old as you.' The marriage bit was no longer true, according to Samir, who'd heard it from Liv, but I wasn't getting into that with Youssef.

‘I can't walk all that way,' he said, switching to Arabic and pointing down the hall at Eli.

‘Try to go just half way then,' I said.

‘Not even half way.' He folded his arms and set his mouth hard. I shook my head at Eli and picked Youssef up, carrying him back to the ward and placing him in his bed.

‘We'll try again tomorrow,' Eli said, smiling at Youssef.

I took Eli aside. ‘I'm not sure how useful I can be, I'm just an interpreter,' I said.

‘And I'm just a physiotherapist,' she said. ‘Anyway, he'll do better with a male influence.'

‘If you think so.'

She smiled. ‘Yes, I do.'

I wanted to ask whether I was going to see her that night but Youssef was grinning and winking at me and I left before he said something embarrassing.

On my way out an English surgeon in sweat-stained scrubs collared me. He wasn't one of my usual charges. He was tall with fair stubble and eyes bloodshot with tiredness or alcohol. I nodded, looking at my watch. I had to do a fake
ID
run in a couple of hours. We entered the post-op area and stopped at the end of the bed of a beefy man with bandaged eyes and hands. He was propped up, his face and chest peppered with small fresh wounds. There was dried blood on his pillow and no one by his bedside.

‘This man is a cluster bomb victim, picked the fucking thing up to get rid of it and it exploded in his face.' The doctor took a deep breath. ‘We operated on his eyes but we haven't got a decent eye man here.'

I looked at the doctor for a moment and felt my armpits prickle with sweat.

‘Are you telling me he's blind?' I asked.

‘Yes, and he doesn't know yet.'

‘Where's his family? I usually give bad news to the family, I don't usually do it straight to the patient.'

‘You'll be fine, the other interpreter, the girl, would be here but she prefers the glamour of working with a
TV
film crew.'