Sabra Zoo (11 page)

There was a sudden scramble for a small piece of high ground to get the best shot of the last marine getting on the last amphibious transporter. I ended up entangled with a baseball-capped photographer who kicked me in the shins to beat me to a better sight-line.

‘Fuck this,' said Bob, putting the camera down. ‘There must be a more interesting story to be had in this place.'

I said goodbye to Stacy, who was staying to do more interviews, and we headed back to the Commodore. I asked Bob's regular driver Mahmoud to drop me off near Najwa's road but we got stuck in a traffic jam near the old prison, emptied during the siege. I told Bob that, in the chaos of the Civil War, a rumour went round that all the prisoners were going to be freed on a particular date. On the allotted day relatives started to arrive at the gates to pick up their imprisoned loved ones and, sure enough, the prisoners started to trickle out. The thing was, I told Bob, that the living victims as well as the relatives of the dead victims of those incarcerated had also heard the rumour about prisoners being freed and had also turned up outside the prison. Rather than coming with flowers, they came with guns. Gunfights broke out at the prison gates between those greeting prisoners and those there to settle scores. Some of the prisoners never made it beyond the pavement outside the prison, either being shot down or bundled into a car. It turned out that some of the prisoners refused to leave, deciding that it was safer to stay inside. Bob started chuckling, so I translated it for Mahmoud the driver so he knew what Bob was laughing at. He nodded in recognition.

‘Yes yes! That is Lebanon,' he said. They were both still chortling when they dropped me off.

I was surprised to see Najwa's superior, Abu Hisham, open the door to her flat. The last time I'd seen him was in Fakhani, just before the
PLO
withdrawal, burning documents in sawn-off oil drums. There had been a rushed, round-the-clock attempt to microfilm as many of them as possible before they were destroyed. I assumed the microfilms left during the evacuation. Abu Hisham was the one who convinced me that staying behind in Beirut would be good for me, that I would be useful. At the time it had seemed like a good idea, an opportunity to prove that I could do something worthwhile and be self-reliant for the first time. My mother hadn't been so keen on my staying but the truth was I saw it as a way of escaping my parents and the haunting of Karam's ghost. I could hear Najwa clattering plates behind the closed kitchen door.

‘I didn't know you'd stayed behind,' I said, after we'd exchanged greetings.

‘I'm just visiting. Wanted to see you before I went back.'

I could see that he was keen on a heart-to-heart in the way he sat opposite me, leaning forward, smiling but appraising. His kindly disposition didn't fool me. I looked out onto the veranda and lit one of Najwa's Kents, offering him the packet.

‘Does your mother know you smoke?' he asked disapprovingly.

I smiled and shook my head. He pulled a stick from the packet.

‘Have you seen my parents?'

‘No. We've been dispersed to the four corners of the Mediterranean. We're still trying to get the infrastructure working again. These are difficult times,' he continued, adopting a more formal tone, dragging on his cigarette and examining it for something to explain its appeal. ‘We're all under a lot of pressure, living in these politically and militarily uncertain times, and we are all having to make sacrifices. Now that the multinationals have gone, who knows what's going to happen.'

My mind coasted as he went on about political responsibilities. I was thinking about seeing Eli again that night. I hadn't arranged anything with her in the morning; I'd been asleep when she'd left for her shift, but she'd left a note with the question ‘Tonight?' written over a small heart. I felt the need to buy her flowers or something, to make the event special. I wondered where I could get Belgian chocolates in a city that had just come out of a siege. A change in Abu Hisham's tone of voice brought me back to Najwa's sitting room. He was looking at me expectantly, like someone waiting for the answer to a question. I started to feel hot.

‘Well, I'm not sure …' I said, trying to gauge his reaction.

‘Have you been listening to anything I've said?' he asked.

‘Of course I have.' I knew I sounded defensive.

He raised his hands in exasperation and laughed. ‘This is precisely your problem, Ivan, you are always daydreaming.'

I shook my head. ‘No …'

‘It's normal at your age to be focused on women and alcohol. But you need to look at the bigger picture, how you can contribute to the wider struggle.' I looked out over east Beirut. ‘Don't look so down-hearted, Ivan. You did a good job in Fakhani. Everyone remembers your steadfastness over Black Thursday, don't lose what you have gained because of superficial things.'

I thought back to Black Thursday, manning the radios alone in the Signals basement in Fakhani, the rolling barrage so intense that at its peak I could count an explosion every second. It had started out as a routine night shift with a routine air raid that began towards dawn, but it didn't stop. Six hours of uninterrupted shelling later and the senior cadre on duty in Fakhani had rung through to say he was leaving his post to go somewhere safer and gave me a number to ring in case of an emergency. I wasn't sure what would qualify as an emergency, given the attempted re-creation of the Allied bombing of Dresden, but he'd hung up before I could recover the power of speech. I'd stayed another six hours, alone with the silent Racals and Motorolas. The fighters, who usually radioed in every hour on the hour, had to maintain radio silence in case they gave away their positions to the screaming
F
-16
S
above. At one point, with my head between my knees and plaster dust raining down on me, I was convinced that I was going to be buried alive, had even thought about praying to God, until it struck me that if he existed he would be the same God that was making this happen. I looked up to see cockroaches being shaken from the cracks in the wall by the shuddering of the foundations. They scuttled about in confusion, with nowhere to run to.

The bombing had stopped with a sudden and ear-ringing silence. By the time I'd checked with all the hand-helds that everyone was alive I was relieved by the next shift, eighteen hours late due to the viciousness of the bombing. I'd been driven home, had wept with exhaustion and slept for ten hours. The next day the
BBC
World Service informed me that I'd lived through one of the most ferocious bombing raids since World War Two, stopped only by a telephone call from Reagan to Begin. Now, according to Abu Hisham, I had been mentioned in dispatches for this involuntary episode.

Najwa brought salad, cheese and bread into the room. The grey streak in her hair had disappeared and it was curlier than before, more styled. It was sensible to make herself less conspicuous, I thought. Abu Hisham jumped up to take the food from her. I saw Najwa give him a smile I'd not seen her use before, coupled with something in the eyes.

‘Tonight we will be moving a cadre to your home,' she said, handing out plates.

‘Tonight?' I asked incredulously.

Abu Hisham nodded, his mouth full of salad. I tried to hide my dismay by stuffing bread into my mouth.

‘We discussed this, Ivan,' Najwa said, exchanging a see-what-I-have-to-deal-with look with Abu Hisham.

‘Of course we did,' I said, my voice whiny, ‘but I didn't know it was tonight.'

‘What's so special about tonight?' Najwa asked.

There was no longer anything special about that night as I sat in my living room, having made up the spare room for my clandestine lodger, replacing the sheets used by Liv and Faris. It was several hours since I'd left Najwa's and I'd since done a stint in John's clinic at the hospital. Eli had come looking for me (usually it was the other way round) and, much to John's disgust, I'd left mid-consultation to speak to her. She'd asked me what time she should come round but I had to come up with an excuse as to why I couldn't see her. Looking back, it must have sounded lame, something about having to visit the family home we'd left during the siege to make sure everything was
OK
. It was the type of lie that was truth-tinged enough to seem acceptable to the liar; I had promised my parents that I would check on the place. Why I'd prefer to do that than have sex for the first time would have been difficult to explain had she asked. The disappointment followed by bafflement on her face was such that I was tempted to come clean, perhaps by touching on the heroic nature of my deeds; the last scene in
Casablanca
had come to mind. Najwa's face had loomed, however, and I just apologised some more.

‘She trying to get you into her knickers then?' John had asked when I'd escaped back into the consulting room. My surprise at his sneering tone must have shown on my face. He told me that she'd asked for help with contraception.

‘I told her I wouldn't do it,' he said, ‘that it was against my religion.'

I snorted sceptically at this and he added, ‘I didn't want to encourage her – besides, why can't she go to a pharmacy like everyone else?' He washed his hands before the next patient, talking to me over his shoulder. ‘You know you'd be better off with someone more your own age. There's no shortage of nurses willing to put out for a good-looking guy like you.'

Before I could react he'd called in the next patient and we were dealing with projectile vomit.

My sex life, or lack of it, was public property. Not just that, but people were forming judgements about who I should be seeing. I bet Samir and Faris didn't have this problem. I lit the candle in my Chianti bottle and looked into the flame for insight. Half a candle later and the pre-arranged knock came at the door.

I woke just before five in the morning to the sound of screaming jets. But it was just a dream, all was quiet except for the snoring of my secret lodger. I was covered in sweat, and my mood wasn't helped by the fact that I'd had trouble getting to sleep the previous night. Several years ago there'd been a spate of killings, assassinations the Israelis called them, of senior Palestinian officials in Beirut. Often the families had been dispatched along with the targets and for months I'd spent every night tensing whenever I heard the lift coming to life in our apartment block. We kept an
AK
-47 in a cupboard in the hall (my father didn't qualify for his own bodyguards) and, lying in bed, I would run through a scenario in my head where, at the first sound of crack troops breaking down the door, I would rush for the weapon to defend the family from attack. I'd manage to fight them off and be proclaimed a hero. But then I read that Che Guevara decried heroism as a concept, and so I'd adapted my fantasy so that my actions were acknowledged more subtly, with admiring glances and knowing slaps on the back. At the time I had just returned from two weeks of basic military training, but I knew deep down that my perceived ability exceeded the actual skill and experience needed to rebuff such a professional attack. The fact that my father probably wasn't senior enough to warrant the attention of these secret assassins didn't lessen my fear, and I'd spent many restless nights too much on edge to sleep. Having the cadre in the place had reawakened these fears, except I had no
AK
-47 here, only an old Tokarev.

My lodger was sleeping off the whisky I'd had to go and buy him after his arrival. I was to be his only contact with the outside world. The whisky was just one item on a list comprising 200 Marlboro, a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, a bottle of Courvoisier brandy, aspirin, tinned ravioli, Turkish delight, digestive biscuits and shaving cream. I also delivered a handwritten letter to Najwa, making sure I wasn't followed, which meant taking a half-hour route instead of the ten minutes it would normally have taken. I'd confused the notes (written consecutively on the same pad) and given Najwa the shopping list rather than the communiqué. But luckily she'd read it before I left and I handed over the right one. It didn't do much for my reputation as a revolutionary.

I washed the sweat off with a cold shower – though I couldn't shake the bad feeling from my dream – and dressed, deciding to leave the house early before I was given any more errands to do. I left a note saying I'd be back at lunchtime.

It took me an hour and a half to reach the hospital on foot. Donkey Man and Youssef were the only ones up, patrolling recently disinfected wards. I wasn't sure whether I preferred this smell to the usual sickly stench. Donkey Man had graduated to a walking stick and had managed to shave and get hold of a fresh jallabiyah. He was beginning to look human again. He and Youssef were helping to distribute breakfast to still waking patients, as well as an old man with a stick and a boy on crutches could. The orderly distributing the hard-boiled eggs, bread and tea was more hindered than helped and the whole process was taking twice as long. I exchanged good-hearted insults with Youssef and pulled myself up the stairs to the top floor, where the hospital accommodation, such as it was, was situated. During the siege no one wanted to be on the top floor for obvious reasons and the corridors were strewn with old mattresses (stained with bodily fluids) and out-of-date pharmaceuticals donated by well-meaning but stupid organisations that believed people in crisis would be pleased with whatever they got.

One of the wards had been turned into a dormitory. The administration originally thought that volunteers would be happy to live there but didn't reckon on the European need for privacy and access to restaurants and bars, so the dorm was only used by the needy, desperate or those on call during the night. I knew that Samir sometimes crashed there, sharing the bed of a nurse privileged with the key to the dorm. He omitted to tell them the consequences of being caught with a local in their bed at work. The scandal alone would make coming to the hospital difficult but for some their transient nature in Beirut meant little allowance was made for local sensitivities. In fact many foreigners left common sense at home. I knocked on the door of the dorm and heard shuffling feet before it was opened a crack by Fiona, the Irish nurse I'd met with Samir in the basement canteen. She saw it was me and opened the door a bit wider, looking out to see if I was alone. Her hair was dishevelled and she had a sheet wrapped round her shoulders.