Sabra Zoo (5 page)

I wasn't about to explain that I'd spent most of the summer working military radios in a basement in the Fakhani district, a no-go area for these people, who probably celebrated the
PLO
evacuation with champagne and canapés. Nor would I tell them that my parents had left dressed in military fatigues and that I myself had stayed on to help those left secretly behind. They'd known nothing about me before the summer; they were just one part of a compartmentalised life. I shrugged, rescued by the passing of a well-endowed girl in a tight top. I listened as they exchanged ideas about what they would like to do to her. I checked my watch.

‘So what courses are you guys doing?' I said, although I could have guessed.

‘Medicine,' said Emile.

‘Business studies,' said Mustapha.

‘Yeah, business studies,' said Bedrosian.

Outside the cafeteria, I looked for my contact, the one-time driver of a senior
PLO
official I'd met once over the summer. We'd had a run-in when I, operating the radios in my Signals basement, had asked him to maintain radio silence due to an impending air raid. The guy had turned up in the radio room twenty minutes later feeling that he'd been humiliated in front of his cadre who had been in the back seat of his car at the time. We'd squared up to each other, cadre's driver and cadre's son. Luckily for me, who you were related to beat who you worked for every time. His parting shot at the time was that being in Signals was an easy option for the relatives of cadres or those who couldn't do anything more useful. He was probably right, judging by everyone else who worked there, although towards the end of the summer it was one of the last
PLO
offices left in Fakhani. He wasn't difficult to spot, with his lazy right eye, pot belly and greying hair. They couldn't have chosen anyone less able to blend in as a student. I caught his good eye and he sneered at me. I wandered away from the crowd beginning to congregate for lunch. I found a bench off the main thoroughfare that overlooked the Mediterranean and lit a cigarette. Lazy Eye sat next to me and we gazed out at an Israeli gunboat in the distance. I could smell the sweat on him, although it could have been mine.

‘May I see your newspaper?' I asked, almost adding ‘comrade' at the end. He handed me the Arabic paper whose headline read ‘
MULTINATIONAL FORCE TO LEAVE BY 14 SEPTEMBER
'. I opened it up and pulled out the envelope inside, placing it in my inside pocket and replacing it with the one I was carrying. All this was done with the newspaper open in front of me. I pretended to read the paper for another thirty seconds or so and then folded it and handed it back with a ‘thanks'. We sat there for a few seconds while I waited for him to leave.

‘So who are you still in contact with?' he asked.

I stood up without looking at him, walking away. I walked for a while, enjoying the trees and the sea in the distance, almost forgetting the rubble, the dust, the refugee camp, the smell of the hospital.

On my way out I saw a sign for the admissions office and stepped inside where I picked up an application form from the woman behind the desk. If nothing else, I thought, it gave the impression that I was here for a reason.

After dropping the envelope off at Najwa's I walked to the Commodore Hotel to follow the lead Samir had given me. This was another discrete compartment of my life, something I hadn't told Najwa about. The Commodore was where journalists stayed, some never leaving the confines of the hotel and its surroundings. Many of the news agencies were housed in the immediate vicinity, which meant that it was possible to string together a story based on interviews held in the bar and then wire news through without having to go anywhere too dangerous. Checking the business card Samir had given me, I found the entrance of TeleNews, situated next to the hotel. Inside I asked for Bob. I was directed into the editing room, where banks of small monitors lined a wall. A tall bearded bear of a man with dirty glasses and a ponytail was fast-forwarding video footage using a large dial on the editing desk. People walked in silent-film mode on the screen, jerking and jabbering in high-pitched voices to camera. A press of the dial froze an old man in a dirty keffiyah talking to the camera. Bob stood up to shake my hand and introduce himself. His American accent was mellow and smooth, unlike some I'd heard. His hair and beard were mostly grey and he had deep grooves in his face.

‘Thanks for doing this, by the way,' he said, digging a cold beer from a small cooler under the editing desk. ‘Samir said you may be able to help us out. Our usual interpreter has disappeared.'

‘It's the latest craze,' I said, taking a swig from the beer and ignoring Bob's quizzical look. The immediate effect of the alcohol reminded me that I hadn't eaten all day. I translated footage for a while, helping Bob to put together a story on how people were surviving day to day post-
PLO
departure. He'd included some footage of the camp hospital, doing a ward round with Asha.

‘She's quite a lady.' Bob nodded at the screen as Asha explained the cause of yet another mutilation. I nodded, thinking of her crying in my room. A glaring, angry Youssef replaced her on the small screen. I was surprised when Bob kept the shot of him in his piece.

In return for my help Bob offered to buy me lunch at the Commodore. His girlfriend Stacy, a freelance reporter with the same ponytail and laid-back twang as Bob, joined us. I'd never seen anyone more beautiful. She looked like a Hollywood star.

‘Did you have a good siege?' she asked with a beam that created dimples in her cheeks. Her voice was gravelly and she smelt of menthol cigarettes. I couldn't stop looking at her; she had a smile you wanted to keep seeing, which she flashed at me throughout lunch whenever she caught me gawping. Her T-shirt read ‘I Survived the Siege of Beirut – 1982'. I felt relaxed in their company, even confessing my half-imagined plans to go to university.

Three bottles of beer and a hotel beefburger later I was promising Bob to go out filming with him and act as interpreter. The beer distorted my reality; I daydreamt of spending time working with Bob and Stacy. Then it was just Stacy.

‘You can do the sound at the same time, there's nothing to it,' Bob was saying as we stood up. ‘Earn yourself a few tax-free dollars too.' We all laughed and shook hands.

Outside in the lobby I was putting my cigarettes away when I found the application form from the university folded up in my inside pocket. I sat down and scanned through it, coming to the section on fees. The first question alone, ‘Please indicate how you will fund the course', was enough to burst my bubble. I tossed it in a rubbish bin on the way out.

I was sitting with Youssef on the cool floor of the corridor outside the children's ward. His unused crutches were by his side. Eli was standing at the other end of the corridor, our view of her occasionally blocked by passing patients and staff.

‘There's a camera crew that maybe wants to do a story about you. Maybe take you to England for treatment,' I said to Youssef in Arabic. A glance at his face showed that he was having trouble understanding what I was saying. ‘Do you want to do it?' My behind provided no cushion against the hard floor. He was busy picking his nose, fished something out and flicked it away.

‘Will you come too?' he asked.

I wasn't expecting this question; the idea hadn't crossed my mind.

‘I don't think they will pay for me to go,' I said, but my head was now full of pictures of Youssef, Eli and I spending time in London together. I saw Youssef recuperating in hospital after surgery, Eli and I going to the cinema, a restaurant, then back to the shared hotel room. My daydream was broken by its leading lady standing above me.

‘I can't wait all afternoon, you know,' she said, affecting an annoyed look, her hands on her hips.

I stood up. ‘
OK
, come on Youssef, how many times do we have to do this?' I was eager for progress with this, with something, anything.

Youssef scrunched his face angrily. ‘Fuck you, you think I'm going to do this just so you can impress your girlfriend? Fuck her, and fuck your mother,' he said.

‘Shut up,' I said. I picked up the crutches in one hand and tried to lift Youssef up with the other. ‘Come on, try and walk.'

Eli was protesting, telling me to go easy.

‘You want him to walk or not?' I said, looking her in the eye. She pulled her face back from mine. Not waiting for an answer, I forced the crutches under Youssef's arms. Youssef was muttering crude profanities just loud enough for me to hear, cataloguing the genital attributes of the females in my family, starting with my paternal grandmother and moving down the generations.

‘I don't have a sister,' I said when he had finished.

‘Get your hands off me,' he shouted with sudden force, his eyes shining. I looked up to see that people were becoming curious as I tried to manhandle Youssef into walking. The last thing I wanted was the daunting presence of the hospital administrator.

‘I can do it alone,' Youssef hissed, trying to shrug me off with his bony shoulders.

I let go and watched him stand upright on the crutches. Eli was beside him, showing him how to take the weight on one crutch while moving the opposite leg. She stood close to him as he took a first tentative step before collapsing to the floor, his face twisted in agony, hamming it up. Eli was trying to help him up but he wouldn't let her. He looked at me, grabbing his bad leg for good measure. Eli looked at me, palms up, shrugging. If she hadn't been there maybe I would have walked right past the little bastard. As it was, I felt something for him that I couldn't explain. None of this was his fault. I lifted him from the floor and he put his skeletal arm round my neck. I carried him back to his bed, ignoring his triumphant smile.

‘I'm not sure I approve of this method of physiotherapy,' Eli said later, holding my gaze.

I was the first to break eye contact. ‘I'm sorry, I just got impatient.'

‘Maybe you should get impatient more often.' She smiled and dug my ribs with her elbow.

‘Would you like to go for a walk this evening on the seafront?' I said quickly, heart pounding and face heating up. ‘I mean with me, obviously, but meet at my house …'

‘Yes, I'd like that.' Her eyes widened and she smiled. ‘That would be nice.'

I bumped into Asha on the way down to the lobby. She touched my arm to stop me. It was the first time I'd seen her since that afternoon in my bedroom. She looked better now.

‘I've been looking for you, are you free?'

‘What do you need?' I said.

‘I need your help in Intensive Care.'

As we were about to enter the unit she stopped me, saying, ‘It's a burns case.'

My heart sank. I could stomach most things, but not burns. After my first time in a burns unit I'd thought about not coming back to the hospital. Traumatic amputations, disembowelments, brain-exposing head injuries, uncontrollable bleeding, facial mutilations, exposed bone and internal organs, all these I'd come to expect as the downside of living in Beirut. What I had trouble stomaching were serious burns that turned the victims into something inhuman, into writhing black and red slabs of meat. Phosphorus was the flammable material of choice that summer, the napalm of the eighties. The stuff just could not be extinguished. The burns victim would often smoke for hours. It made short work of flesh and had to be scraped off with the skin to prevent further damage. Asha knew of this weakness of mine and, after the results of my first experience, we had an unspoken agreement that I wouldn't be asked to deal with these cases. Not many serious burns victims were in a state to communicate anyway, and relatives could be talked to outside the ward, where the patient couldn't hear the bad news. I felt she should be cutting me some slack after what had happened between us. But as I followed her onto the unit I knew that nothing would get in the way of her work – not her feelings, not mine. Maybe it was a Christian thing, not that she talked of her faith, despite coming here as part of a Christian charity. As we approached the bed I kept repeating to myself, ‘You're not the one who's burnt, you're not the one who's burnt,' hoping this mantra would get me beyond my revulsion. Asha pulled back a makeshift curtain: the patient was connected to a hissing respirator and thankfully covered in yellowed gauze. What must have been his extended family was around him, occupying the beds either side. Asha greeted them each by name. A young woman was dabbing the blackened forehead on the pillow with a damp cloth.

‘Sharif has been kept alive on the respirator for two weeks now,' Asha said, pausing for me to translate. ‘Without the respirator he cannot breathe and tests show that he will not recover.' Another pause. ‘We want to ask your permission to switch off the respirator, so that Sharif can die peacefully.'

I picked my words carefully, bracing myself for an emotional response. But there was silence. The young woman turned away from me, her tears dripping onto Sharif's face. An elderly woman, whom I took to be Sharif's mother, clenched her hands together and slowly started to beat her chest, swaying back and forth. I watched as she added a slow side-to-side head movement to this assembly.

‘They don't need to give us an answer now,' Asha said to me softly. ‘We'll come and see them in a couple of days.'

Later that evening I was walking with Eli along the Corniche, a wide and popular promenade that had recovered its pre-war crowd. We weren't alone. John, Samir, Liv the Trotskyist and a Palestinian friend of Samir called Faris were also there. Faris was quiet, bony and tall. He had long lashes and big dark eyes, the kind that Western women always seemed to look into with tilted heads and soft faces. They'd all turned up at the same time at my flat. Samir had made much of the small spread of delicatessen goodies I'd arranged neatly on the coffee table, and had noticed that the flat had been cleaned.