Sabra Zoo (7 page)

‘From Beirut,' said Samir, smiling.

‘East or west?' came back the question unsmilingly.

I felt for my passport, made eyes at Bob.

‘There is no more east or west, my friend,' said Samir.

I wondered where he got his cool. The man looked back at his friends.

‘We need to make tracks,' I said quietly to Bob, hoping that this was an American expression. Another man had detached himself from the group; now they were all staring over at our table. Barrel-chested and with a shaved head, he was putting on dark glasses as he approached us.

Bob took a swig of beer and stood up, picking up the camera.

‘You good-looking guys want to be on
TV
?' he said to the men. They both grinned and Bob winked at me. ‘It works every time,' he said.

Back through the Green Line, I started to breathe again.

‘When did you last go to east Beirut?' Bob asked when Samir stopped to drop me off.

‘Never,' I told him.

It was getting dark on Najwa's balcony. I sucked in cigarette smoke like it had life-enhancing properties.

‘Turns out Nabil is an Israeli informer,' Najwa said.

‘Nabil?'

‘The guy you exchanged envelopes with at the university.'

‘Shit.' I inhaled more smoke, looking out at the lights in east Beirut; west Beirut was in darkness. I imagined Nabil over there, laughing at us over here suckered into a summer of solidarity with him. He was probably eating fish in the very restaurant I'd lunched at that day, giving my description to a Mossad officer. ‘Are you telling us, Nabil dear friend, that this is the best you can come up with?' Of course they'd probably taken photographs.

‘Does he know where you live?' asked Najwa, gulping red wine like it was iced water.

‘No, we only met at the university.'

We both looked questioningly at each other, thinking back to any contacts we had had with Nabil. It occurred to me that Nabil might know where Najwa lived, but surely we wouldn't have been sitting in her apartment if that was the case. I kept a nervous eye on the front door anyway.

‘In that case we might have to use your apartment. If it isn't compromised, that is. We'll give it a few days to make sure.'

‘Use it for what?' I asked, thinking maybe they needed to store things in it, documents or forging equipment.

‘Nabil knew where one of our cadres was staying. He moved as soon as we realised what had happened but he can't stay where he is for long. Your place isn't known to anyone.'

I nodded, not wanting to speak in case I betrayed my reluctance. It meant the end of waking up to Eli in my bed. I wished I'd been conscious to see her get into it.

‘Are you going to be alright with this, Ivan?'

‘Yes. Yes of course.'

‘What about Samir, do you still see him?'

‘I bump into him occasionally. He's harmless.'

She didn't look convinced. ‘
OK
. Listen. There's going to be a meeting of cadres in a few days. I need you to watch the place where the meeting happens. Look out for anything suspicious.' Najwa refilled my glass then her own.

‘Is a meeting a good idea? I mean, getting all those people together in one place,' I asked. Maybe I was just fearful about being in close proximity to such a gathering given the news about Lazy Eye, or maybe I was just curious, but judging by the look Najwa gave me I seemed to have forgotten my place.

‘Just come back in a couple of days, Ivan.'

I was surprised to find my apartment full of people, but then I remembered I'd given Eli a key that morning. Asha, John, Eli, Faris, Samir and Liv were there, as well as some others I didn't know. Joan Baez was on the turntable. The smell of hashish came from the living room, the smell of frying garlic from the kitchen. I followed the garlic. Asha, shaking a frying pan over a flame, gave me a one-armed hug and a professional once-over.

‘I heard about your petit mal,' she said. Chicken joints lay on the side; Samir was finely chopping a huge bunch of parsley to go into his salad.

‘This recipe has been handed down from generation to generation in my family,' he told Eli, winking at me.

We sat around the coffee table in the living room after dinner. Asha passed a joint from Samir to Liv without it touching her lips.

John, exclaiming that he'd nearly forgotten, handed me a plastic bag. Inside were little square bars, each in a white cellophane wrapping. John took one out and held it up between his fingers.

‘Red Cross survival bars: one of these a day will satisfy all your daily nutrient requirements,' he said in a cheesy American voice, like in a
TV
advert. The joint came back to him. ‘Wherever there is war, famine or disease, all you need is one of these to forget your woes. Poverty doesn't matter any more with the Red Cross nutrient bar, designed to counter even the most deprived diet. Unable to prepare a meal due to bombing and shelling? Then the Red Cross nutrient bar is the answer.' He recovered his normal voice, ‘Anyway laddie, make sure you have one of these for breakfast every day.'

Samir was constructing a new joint by rolling the tobacco out of a Marlboro without breaking the paper, mixing it with hashish and funnelling it back into the empty casing.

‘How long have you known Samir?' Eli asked me. She was sitting back in the sofa, her legs tucked beneath her.

‘A few months,' I told her. ‘He saved me from a wild dog.'

Samir laughed more loudly than usual. ‘A wild dog on a football pitch,' he said in a constricted voice, trying to keep the smoke in his lungs.

‘A football pitch full of cars,' I said, giggling – I wasn't sure how I could be smoking the joint at the same time as Samir.

‘It was the middle of the night,' said Samir, starting to giggle as well.

‘
OK
. I'm curious,' said Liv.

I competed with Samir to see who could stop giggling first. John put Nina Simone on. I was deciding how to tell the story without giving too much away; a part of my brain still retained some caution.

‘Well, to cut a long story short – I was on the football pitch in Fakhani, this was some time in July. It was the middle of the night but there was a full moon.' I took a drink of Stolichnaya, now mixed with long-life orange juice for health reasons. ‘A lot of people had parked their cars on the pitch. They thought it was safer than leaving them in the streets under the apartment blocks, you know, to stop the rubble falling on them. Anyway, most people seemed to have left them there when they moved to safer areas.'

‘But what were you doing there?' asked Liv.

‘Siphoning petrol from the parked cars. Generators were the only source of electricity and we'd run out of fuel.' The Lebanese Gold and Stolichnaya had weakened my inhibition and I struggled to avoid telling them why we needed to run generators in Fakhani in the middle of the war. A part of me wanted to tell them everything, to be completely open. Najwa would have killed me.

‘Anyway, a pack of abandoned dogs was roaming around the stadium, maybe ten of them, you know, looking for scraps to eat. I could see them circling as I tried to suck petrol from the tanks. Then the shelling starts. One of the shells falls quite close, on the pitch, and I can hear the dogs howling, like they're scared.' I sipped my drink, passed the joint to Eli.

‘I see one of the dogs approaching. It's limping. It's lost one of its legs in the explosion so it's confused and in pain. It thinks I caused its injury so it starts barking at me, baring its teeth, frothing at the mouth. But I can't go anywhere because of the shelling. I'm pinned against the cars.' I paused and Samir took up the story.

‘I was working in Fakhani, waiting in my car on the street.' Probably waiting for my father, I thought. ‘When the bombs came down I went inside to the pitch, because I thought it would be safer in there, I don't like to be inside a building in case it falls down on your head. I saw Ivan hiding by a car with a can of petrol and the dog with three legs coming towards him. It looked crazy, this dog.'

‘What did you do?' asked Eli.

He took sight down an imaginary rifle. ‘I shot it.' There were a few seconds' silence.

‘The start of a beautiful friendship,' said John.

Samir and I started giggling again but I saw that no one else was laughing except Faris, who was just smiling to himself. I tried to stop. I caught Eli giving me a look. She put a hand on my arm, as if to calm me down.

In truth I knew little about Samir. We'd met when he started driving my father around just before the invasion and had continued throughout the siege. He was a friend forged from adversity. We were very different. Samir was uneducated and, apart from running his little café, drove for a living. He had moved around the different factions of the
PLO
and Lebanese Left depending on which one he got on with or paid better. I, on the other hand, had gone with my father's organisation, done the training, and joined Signals without giving much thought to the politics or whether I agreed with them. In a sense I was no better than my old schoolmates Bedrosian and Mustapha, joining their fathers' import-export businesses, except that they would probably make good businessmen, whereas I knew that I would never be the politician my father was.

Samir took another drag on his re-engineered Marlboro then examined the end.

‘This was grown here in Lebanon,' he said to nobody in particular.

‘Probably the best export Lebanon has to offer,' said John.

Later in bed I struggled with my disappointment at Eli not staying the night, although I hadn't dared ask her in front of the others. Instead I was stuck with Samir in the other bedroom and John on the sofa. I told myself that she was too old for me, that she had a child not much younger than Youssef, that she had a partner waiting in Norway. I told myself these things but they didn't help me sleep. I replaced them with thoughts of waking up beside her and her goodbye kiss before she went to work, her hands on my shoulders. Except the way I remembered it she hadn't got dressed and was pulling me back to bed.

Donkey Man was up and walking on crutches, visiting all the patients on his floor as part of what he was calling his ‘daily routine', even though it was only day one. Eli said it was excellent physiotherapy. He'd also been discovered by distant relatives, who came across him while visiting someone in the same ward. Eli and I were now sitting in their two-room breeze-block home as they'd insisted she come for tea. I hadn't been invited but Eli had asked me along to translate and chaperone. But I was happy to be here, pretending we were a couple. Sweet, strong tea was served in small glasses. We were offered food: cakes and sweets, their syrupy glaze glistening in what little light filtered through the single window. Eli ate out of politeness; I'd told her it was rude to decline these offerings. I nibbled at a sweet pastry, embarrassed at how much effort they'd gone to, given their circumstances. An elderly woman showed Eli her embroidery: intricate, colourful needlework covering every inch of a shawl. I was translating for her, explaining to Eli that the patterns differed according to which area you came from back home. Back home was Palestine, which the woman hadn't seen for thirty-odd years, not since the Naqba, which I translated as ‘the catastrophe'. Her pride in her work reminded me of my Danish grandmother's complex Hedebo embroidery. I could picture both women exchanging stitching tips. Neighbours arrived to have a look at Eli, and I was starting to tire from the introductions and from having to say my name at least twice to every person.

I thought, not for the first time, how something as simple as a name could set you apart, particularly in Lebanon. To have a name clearly defining one side or the other, though making life easier in some respects, could have been worse, as it would have pigeonholed me, and the truth was I didn't feel one thing or the other. Maybe, I thought, sucking half-dissolved sugar from the bottom of my glass, I had the perfect name. Maybe it wasn't my problem at all, but everybody else's. I was interrupted by Eli tugging at my sleeve, telling me she had to get back to work.

At the hospital the English film crew was on the kids' ward filming the photogenic girl having her prosthetic refitted. There were more medics around the bed than the girl had ever seen, even when she came in with her leg dangling by cartilage several weeks before. Youssef was heckling in English from his bed.

‘Have my picture! I can speak the English. I love England. I love Manchester United.' He sniggered as the girl tried to walk with the prosthetic.

I told him to shut up, asked him whether he was going to try walking himself rather than just mocking others.

‘I have nowhere to go,' he said. ‘Anyway, I prefer the wheelchair.' He'd discovered that he could shoot around in a wheelchair, terrorising those who couldn't move as quickly.

‘You need to exercise your legs. Eli will be angry with you,' I said.

The cameraman rearranged people around the girl's bed.

‘Eli is going home soon. Anyway, she doesn't get angry.' Youssef started to throw roasted nuts at the gathering around the girl's bed, making bomb-falling noises to accompany their flight. One landed on the producer's head.

‘What do you mean?' I asked, taking the bag of nuts from him.

‘She's never angry, she's too soft.'

‘No, not that – what do you mean she's leaving soon?'

Youssef's face lit up. ‘You don't know that your girlfriend is leaving,' he said in an annoying sing-song voice.

I could feel my ears get hot. ‘She's not my girlfriend,' I said, loud enough for the soundman to look round angrily and ask for yet another take.

I found Eli with Samir in the lobby. She was laughing at some joke of his a little too enthusiastically.

‘You want a lift back to town?' Samir asked me. I told him I'd meet him outside but he stayed where he was.