Читать книгу The Storyteller - Pierre Jarawan - Страница 14

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Meanwhile, history was being made in Lebanon. Beirut, once a dazzling beauty, rubbed its disfigured face and staggered out of the ruins. A city felt for its pulse. In the neighbourhoods, people thumped the dust out of their clothes and wearily raised their heads. The war was over. Militiamen became citizens again, laying down their guns and taking up shovels instead. Bullet holes were filled in, facades painted, burned-out cars removed from the pavements. Rubble was cleared away, the smoke dispersed. The huge sheets hanging in the streets were taken down, as there were no longer any snipers whose view needed to be blocked. Women and children swept debris off balconies and removed boards from windows, while fathers carried mattresses back up to bedrooms from the cellars that had served as bunkers. In short, the Lebanese did what they’ve always done: they carried on.

At night, though, when the moon illuminated the freshly made-up facades and the sea reflected the city’s lights, the clicking of boots reverberated through the streets and alleys. But not just there. In the slums at the city’s edges, in the surrounding villages, in coastal towns, and in the mountains—from Tripoli in the north to Tyre in the south—the sound of clicking could be heard. Lebanon was hosting a ball, and Beirut wanted to be the prettiest one there. But the makeup artists were Syrian soldiers. And when daylight returned, revealing how shoddily makeup and darkness had concealed the wounds, the handiwork of the men in clicking heels was displayed on the sides of every building. In the early hours of the morning, people in the streets stopped to stare up at walls now covered in posters of the Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, who looked back down at them from beneath his neatly parted hair. So there could no longer be any doubt about it. It was undeniable, plain for everyone to see: the Syrians were in charge. And they were going to make sure that people danced to their tune. Parliamentary elections were to be held. The first since the war had ended. The first in twenty years.

Lebanon’s principle of confessional balance means that each religious community has an allotted number of representatives in parliament. It’s a unique system. The country’s many religious groups, who had spent the past fifteen years slaughtering each other, were now expected to fight with words rather than weapons. And the same religious groups who had battled each other in the city’s trenches were now supposed to sit opposite each other in parliament as if nothing had happened. A general amnesty. Time to close the history book and look to the future. But to anyone walking through the streets of Beirut in the feverish weeks leading up to the election, it was clear that chaos still reigned, except that its soundtrack was no longer gunshots and explosions, but the wild shouting and roaring of election campaigners distributing flyers. Armed with paintbrushes and glue, these commandos covered the neighbourhood walls with posters. They stopped cars in heavy traffic and thrust leaflets into the drivers’ hands. From “I’m your man—in good times and in bad” to “This is my son—vote for him,” the leaflets communicated everything but concrete promises. People took the leaflets home. Many threw them in the bin, embittered by the absurd show going on around them. Others put on their finest clothes and solemnly made their way to the ballot boxes, hoping to take a step into the future. During the election campaign, not one candidate presented persuasive arguments or plans for rebuilding the country. What was the point? Damascus had tailored the constituencies to fit certain candidates. The Syrians, who had first entered Lebanon in 1976 as a peacekeeping force and then never left, orchestrated an election in a country where they still kept forty thousand soldiers, a country where over half the population had only ever known the sounds of bomb blasts and gunshots. Hardly anyone believed the Syrians would actually leave Lebanon by the end of the year as promised. The election resulted in a parliament too fond of the Syrians to let that happen.

Beirut put on its best dress and danced. Extravagant weddings were held in the hotels along the Corniche again. The makeup stayed in place. New concrete held the crumbling facades together, making them appear stable. The cameras of the Arab and Western media clicked their shutters and framed the action for their audiences. TV screens in Germany showed a country that was still limping a little but managing to get by without crutches. A country that was perhaps even ready to blossom again, to recover its former beauty. And after the election: lots of hand-shaking and jubilant winners.

But nobody removed the posters from the walls. Hafez al-Assad continued to smile down on Beirut.

“They’re thick as pig shit. Can’t even be subtle about screwing us over,” Hakim grumbled, throwing a peanut at our TV, which for days had been showing the same images of Beirut presented by different newsreaders. He saw my mother glare at him and gesture towards me. Hakim muttered an apology, leaned forward, picked up the peanut, and glumly put it in his mouth. His unkempt hair was standing on end as usual. And he still resembled a meerkat, even when he was getting worked up about politics.

“Some ballot boxes took nine hours to travel a ten-minute distance, and nobody thinks it’s strange? People who never even bothered voting have handed the country to the Syrians on a silver platter. All the Lebanese who packed up and fled the country should have been allowed to vote. We would’ve given those asses their marching orders!”

“Hakim,” Mother warned.

“Sorry.”

“It will work,” Father murmured. He was sitting on the right-hand side of the couch, where he always sat. My sister had fallen asleep on his lap.

“What Lebanon needs right now is a project,” Hakim said. “If these people aren’t given something to do, they’ll start to miss their guns. We need to become a financial centre again so that the sheikhs invest their money with us—in companies, international schools, universities, infrastructure, hotels—rather than keeping it in the Gulf States. Then we’ll be a country the world wants to visit again, a meeting place, a land of conferences and trade fairs …”

“It will work,” Father repeated. “It’s good that Hariri won.”

“He has money, his companies will rebuild the country, and everything will sparkle—the streets, the buildings, the squares. But then the other idiots who also got into parliament will come along and piss all over the beautiful buildings.”

“Hakim,” Mother snapped.

“Sorry,” he said again and turned to me. “Samir, do you want to hear a joke?”

I did.

“A Syrian goes into an electronics shop and asks the salesman, ‘Excuse me, have you got colour televisions?’ And the salesman replies, ‘Yes, we’ve a wide range of colour TVs.’ And the Syrian says, ‘Great! I’ll take a green one.’”

I laughed. Hakim had lots of jokes about Syrians. He liked to tell them again and again, and he was usually the one who laughed hardest. I’d heard this joke at least three times before, though Hakim would always vary the colour in the punchline. I never asked myself why the jokes were always at the Syrians’ expense. The Germans told East Frisian jokes, and the Lebanese told Syrian jokes. It seemed logical to me.

Father didn’t join in the laughter. I wasn’t even sure he’d heard the joke. He just kept staring at the TV, his eyebrows raised as if he were watching a storm approaching. He’d been behaving strangely over the past few days. I didn’t know why and wondered if I’d done something wrong. His mood swings were extreme; it was like waking up on an April morning, looking out the window and seeing sunshine one minute, downpours and lightning the next. And he often seemed completely absent, failing to respond when I spoke to him. Something wasn’t right. His behaviour unsettled me because I’d never seen this side of him before. Sure, he could be grumpy on occasion, and if I got up to mischief, he might get cross and tell me off, but such moods were fleeting shadows compared to his current state of mind. His behaviour now was uncharacteristic, both of the rogue who was always thinking of new ways to enjoy life and of the calm, measured father I’d seen in quiet moments. Mother, who had known him for much longer than me, was bewildered too, which unnerved me even more, as she had obviously never encountered this side of him either. He ignored her, barely replied to her questions, retreated into himself. It was as if the quiet, pensive part of him had mutated into something darker. The events in Lebanon that found their way onto our TV had put him under a spell, like black magic. All I could do was tell myself it was a passing phase, a reaction to the stress of moving, and so, like a dog that’s not sure if it’s done something wrong, I skulked around his legs every now and then, or quietly observed him from a corner. I just hoped his mood didn’t have anything to do with our new home; I was afraid we’d have to move again if he didn’t like our new flat. Being afraid of anything in relation to my father was new. Since my little sister had arrived, we were one big family living in a big flat. But now Father seemed sad.

I’d never seen him really sad before. Usually he was like a captain in whose wake everyone wanted to follow, someone who never had any difficulty striking up a conversation with strangers. He won people over with ease. The fact that he never once forgot a name certainly helped. If we were walking through town and he spotted someone on the other side of the street, even someone he’d met only briefly several weeks earlier, he would smile, raise his hand in greeting, and call the person’s name. How many times did we stop to chat to a Mr al-Qasimi, a Mrs Fedorov, the el-Tayeb or Schmid family, a Bilaal, an Ivana, or an Inge? I never once got the impression these people weren’t just as happy to stop and chat. Small talk was Father’s trump card, because he remembered not just people’s names, but also every other detail about them. He would casually ask, “How are the kids doing?” or “How is the treatment going? Is your back any better?” or “Did you sort out those squeaky brakes?” He would often offer to help: “If your shoulder is still bothering you, we’ll get your groceries for you—just give us a list and Samir will bring you back whatever you need.” Or: “How are you getting on with the house? Is your attic finished? If you need someone to help put in the insulation, give me a ring.” Everyone who spoke to Father soon felt as if they’d known him for years, as if they were friends, even. I was often struck by the warmth with which he greeted people. He’d never shake a stranger’s hand without resting his left hand on their shoulder for a moment. Or else he’d shake the person’s hand with both of his. A cordial gesture, as if they were closing a deal, and indeed I often felt that was how he saw it too: Welcome! You’re part of my world now.

Although he wasn’t particularly tall, to me he seemed like a lighthouse, someone who oriented you, someone you could see from a distance. I’m certain many others saw him that way too. At the market, he would greet the traders, skilfully ask how they were doing, and get such an easy conversation going that they barely noticed when he got down to business. He loved haggling. He was a true Arab in that regard. He was always trying his luck, and not just when he took me to the market. Even in the supermarket, in the aisle where the porridge oats and ready meals were, he might take a bemused shop assistant aside, and, with a conspiratorial expression on his face, whisper, “The cheese … can you do any better on the price?”

And he sang. He was a real Arab in that way too. He would sing on the street, unperturbed by the looks people gave him. “Germans don’t burst into song on the street,” he once said to me as we strolled back from the market hand-in-hand, laden with bags of fresh fruit and vegetables. It was a day made for singing, a day like a summer’s tune: sunshine, awnings, children with chocolate ice cream smeared around their mouths, couples holding hands, a dreadlocked boy in cut-off jeans rattling over the kerb on his skateboard.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because they care too much what other people think. They’re worried people will think they’re crazy if they start singing on the street.”

“Maybe you’re the one who’s crazy?”

“Maybe I am.” He winked at me, reached into a bag for an apple and took a bite out of it before handing it to me. “Or maybe deep down they’d like to sing in public too, but they don’t dare because they think you need a permit.”

He liked to joke about how you need a permit for everything in Germany. I overheard him laughing about it with Mother a few times, so I knew he wasn’t being serious.

And then he sang: “B-hibbak ya lubnan, ya watani b-hibbak, bi-shmalak bi-jnubak bi-sahlak b-hibbak …”

I love you, Lebanon, my country, I love you. Your north, your south, your plains, I love you.

I squeezed his hand tight. I knew the song. I knew the singer. I’d heard her voice many times before; steeped in sadness, longing, and poetry, it was a voice that gently eased over the melody and slipped into the foreground of almost every song. Fairuz, that was her name. I’d seen her on TV once, standing like a sphinx in front of the temple ruins of Baalbek as she sang this same song. In front of thousands of cheering people. A beautiful woman with striking, severe features, aloof, her hair as red as autumn leaves, a gold dress draped over her shoulders. In the spotlight, she looked slightly surreal, like a noblewoman’s portrait come to life, striding across the stage to the microphone. Mother loved her songs too. Everyone loved Fairuz. She was the harp of the Orient, the nightingale of the Middle East, singing about her love of her homeland. Someone—I think it was Hakim—once called her “the mother of all Lebanese people.”

This is how we walked home, with Father singing. I joined in at some point. We weren’t bothered by the funny looks we got. In fact, the more people crossed our path, the louder we sang, and we didn’t care if we barely hit a note. Holding hands, our shopping bags rustling in the wind, we sang in Arabic, because we wouldn’t have been able to express in German how we felt right then.