He doesn’t want to ask reception to call her room, doesn’t like to appear complacent of her arrival or, alternately, stupidly desperate she won’t come. He wants to arrive at her hotel room, watch her open the door slowly with a smile of recognition on her face. He wants to take her in his arms and kiss her, rough and hard, as if there’s nobody in the world but the two of them. Yet it’s shame that keeps him from doing it, shame and fear and disgust at himself. He’s old enough to be her father. She’s never indicated that she has any interest in him other than as a guide, a support, maybe a friend.
He’s been anxious lately and, if he cares to pinpoint it, it’s ever since he met her. Before her arrival he revelled in the voluptuous anonymity of his floating existence in Beirut: no past, no family, no friends other than the men he worked with, drinking companions and nothing more. No morality or the cringing need for guilt. Now with her probing about his Ashkenazi background – his father, mother and brother; his childhood in Tel Aviv and Eilat; his military service in southern Lebanon – he feels shallow and exposed. As if there’s nothing for her to find beneath the tally of dates and names, nothing to redeem him. Or too much.
He hasn’t allowed himself to dwell too much on his military career for years. Or on his dead brother Alon. Anoush’s open curiosity doesn’t allow him to turn away from the memory any longer, like a cavity in a tooth that must be probed. Those summer days and nights of longing and tears, patriotic songs. Shabbat dinners when he and his mother were alone except for the Muslim servants, breaking challah into four pieces, slurping stew, his elder brother’s absence at the head of the table a silent accusation. By then, his father’s early death was a wound long closed over. Television footage of fighter planes over Beirut, his brother, the tragic knight in tinfoil armour. Down, down in flames.
Will Anoush continue to respect him when she finds out where he really comes from? How even as a teenager he idealised a heroic brother and a pointless war? Is he here in Beirut to atone for all of them: his father’s Zionist beliefs, his mother’s passive racism, Alon’s naive sense of entitlement?
He sits on one of the musty chairs in the lobby. But is it really such a pointless war? It’s a war that can never be won, that will only breed more pain, but would he or his mother be alive without it? Driven straight into the sea, where the Arabs want them? Where else could they go? The only home his family has ever known is Israel. And Israel must protect itself – or it will be annihilated. They can’t let that happen again. He’s the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, his friends’ parents, his neighbours, all survivors of a genocide so painful it can hardly be borne. And here he is, helping his friends’ enemies, his parents’ enemies, to destroy his own people. If his mother knew what he was really doing in Lebanon, she would turn her face to the wall and will herself to die. How can he make Anoush understand this?
Julius lies down just outside the swinging doors to the street, head resting on his paws. Chaim’s already hot; he rolls up his sleeves, tries to distract himself by watching the young clerk, Jean-Michel, arrange faded postcards on a stand, fill his ledger. He’s wearing a black bowtie and a dress shirt, ridiculous in this Edwardian squalor. This squalid city. What was it like for Alon, flying over the sea and checking, double-checking the coordinates, readying himself to bomb an already ravaged city? A city so similar to Eilat, the Red Sea resort town of their childhood summers. His brother was university educated, debated the ethics of such a war with his libertarian friends, talked equality and justice, words Chaim couldn’t understand then, or refused to understand. His politics back then were more rigid, more simplistic than Alon’s. In his mind, any means to rid Israel of its enemies were justified by the end. Alon even began attending the protest marches in the last months of his life, and Chaim mocked him. No Palestinian or Lebanese soldier would question the conflict or be so touchingly naive, so academic.
Alon would gather his university friends around him in the evenings, with wine on the table from their fathers’ vineyards, the glow of Chinese lanterns strung on a trellis mingling with the red warmth in Chaim’s belly. On the smudged horizon, silhouettes of oil tankers competed with a perfect sunset. His brother sat in the circle of rosy light and spoke of the need to avoid civilian casualties, of helping the people of Lebanon decide their own future. He spoke of Israel’s ‘purity of arms’, that their army only ever attacked military targets, while the Palestinian fighters embedded themselves among hospitals and schools and homes. He never talked of the crushed bodies he saw, of the impossible rubble he helped create, rooms that once housed women, families, children twisted into terrible shapes.
One evening Chaim stood aside in the shadows watching his brother’s lean, mobile face, so like their dead father’s, waiting for him to beckon to him as he always did, still talking, still trying to convince his friends of the morality in this war. In the next breath he was crying and babbling about the immorality of what he was forced to do. This time, Chaim leaned against his brother’s ribs, the long, hard arm still tight around him, the friends’ faces closing down now, embarrassed, Alon’s sobs distorting the fine words he’d uttered only a moment before. It was the first time Alon had touched him with tenderness since he was a baby.
He sits and waits, remembering the hard skin of his brother’s arms, the smell of red wine and dry heat. He can still feel Alon’s hands on his shoulders, their heft and weight, the fractured sound of his sobbing. He wishes Anoush was here with him, wishes he could explain everything. And then, she is there, and he doesn’t know what to say. As usual, she comes down to the lobby at eight and they conspire in denying this is a planned meeting, a rendezvous, even an assignation. He sometimes takes her elbow when they cross a particularly busy street. She looks down at him in her high heels – she’s bought some now, succumbing to the pressure of strangers’ stares – and tells him each evening that she’ll wear her old, flat sandals tomorrow. He can see her trying not to walk too tall and he laughs to himself.
‘What are you looking at?’
‘Nothing. Really. Okay, I was looking at you. Don’t hunch like that.’
He suspects she’s offended, but he didn’t mean to offend. What he wants to say is how lovely she is, heels or no, how happy he feels to walk alongside her. But at times he can see her tiny ripples of irritation at his customary glibness, like a cat in a foreign room, pawing at the furniture and looking for a way out. He doesn’t allow her to begin, what with his ready charm and laughter. And anyway, what will she rail at him for? For not being what she wants him to be? At least he’s not his brother all over again, drifting between two worlds, unhappy with both.
They always choose one of two places every night, a basement eating house owned by exiled Turks or a waterfront restaurant in one of the few restored Ottoman villas in Beirut. Most often the eating house, as he can see Anoush is watching her spending and he doesn’t always succeed in paying. Although he insists every night, sometimes she stops him and lays her credit card between them on the table.
Tonight they go to the eating house. She paws at her food, and not even the jovial Turkish owner can tempt her with more. Chaim can sense that something is brewing, that she’s unhappy. He eats her leftovers, picks parsley out of his teeth. She drinks instead and he urges her on, though he’s not sure why. He assumes that he wants to break down her defences, get deep inside. Stop that unblinking beam of hers from shining on his innermost thoughts. It’s not so easy. She lets pearly arak slide down her throat, glass after glass, but never changes into something softer for him to lean against and forget himself.
He’s never heard her mention anything much about her parents. Then again, he’s never asked. He knows she’s an only child but isn’t familiar with the circumstances. She does speak of her Armenian grandmothers. It’s always
Lilit said this
or
Siran did that
.
Tonight she shows him some photographs she carries with her: poised old ladies wearing headscarves, a laden pomegranate tree in a slip of garden. And one of her grandmother Lilit as a girl, with an expression he can only classify as terror. It was taken in a place called Der ez Zor, back in 1915 when the Armenians were getting massacred.
Looking at the photograph, he can see the resemblance between grandmother and granddaughter immediately. The effect this has on him doesn’t diminish, looking at it more closely: their twinned faces confuse him as he takes in the solemn woman’s rounded cheeks, restless eyes, rough-cut hair, the blossom mouth, as he looks across at Anoush, who seems anxious now, trying to snatch the photograph away. He hands it back to her without comment. Worlds apart, yet so similar: resigned household slave and defiant granddaughter, traipsing through the city armed with her search for something resembling truth.
Now one grandmother is dead and the other might as well be, here in Beirut in a nursing home. Such orthodox guilt. He can relate to it. He rings his mother – now eighty and still living at home with a new generation of Arab servants – every day. Anoush has told him she sends money now and then to Siran when she can spare it: small change for facial tissues, trinkets, bedsocks, sweets. She makes excuses to him about the old woman not recognising anyone from moment to moment, dribbling and babbling like a child, spraying food everywhere.
‘Let’s go together,’ he offers.
Anoush shakes her head. She shows him another photograph, as if to change the subject. Her grandfather, Minas, and Siran on their wedding day.
‘The only photo ever taken of them both,’ she whispers fondly.
Their faces are broad and stunned, the grandfather looking somewhat doubtful beside the beaming young woman, black curls falling into her brow, across the polished silver coins strung on her forehead.
‘Look at those earrings she wears. Gold and turquoise – his mother’s. He hid them all the way through the forced march in the desert, then in the death camp and to Beirut, before giving them to her. Twenty-five years he kept them. True love.’
She says the last two words in an ironic tone but he can see she’s touched by the fifty-year-old love story.
‘They married late. How old was he?’
She laughs, looks up at him for an instant with a face full of coquetry.
‘Doesn’t matter, does it? You’re not married yet. He was nearly forty. He’d been through a lot.’
‘Like me,’ he laughs.
Her face changes, and she doesn’t join in. ‘What have you been through? Looks like your life has been easy enough, to me.’
‘I was only making a joke.’
‘It’s not funny. Why should you or any other Israeli have anything to complain about?’
‘Whoah! What’s all this about? Were we talking about Israel?’
‘We are now. Surely you can’t still think you’re the victims. With your state-of-the-art weapons and your targeted killings. Who made Israel the great moral arbiter of the world?’
‘Listen, Anoush. I didn’t want to get into this, not now. But I’ll tell you something, and maybe you’ll be smart enough to hear me out. They want to wipe out Israel. Do you get it? They want us all dead. Israel doesn’t want to wipe out anyone. We’re trying to defend ourselves. We’re yoked together with the Palestinians, brother to brother, and can’t see any resolution. And yes, I’m here to make my own amends. I’m not the bad guy, nor is Israel.’
She won’t look at him. As he pays for the meal and they leave the building his frustration is so great he wants to hit her. She’s shut down. He stops, faces her, wills her to look into his eyes.
‘You and I come from the same pain,’ he says. ‘The same struggle. Can’t you see that?’
She doesn’t reply, but halfway home she steps closer, links his fingers in hers. He can feel her body softening against him as they walk. They stop under the blue neon letters spelling Mayflower, and kiss goodnight. The kiss, as always, is not long; he doesn’t linger. She keeps her mouth closed, chaste.
He turns aside and makes his way down the street, whistling for Julius to follow him, wishing she would stop him, drag him into her bed. He wants to get inside her head more than any clear desire for her body, cut through her anger and dreams and unravel all her questions: silent figures of grandmothers and absent fathers, the obscure grandfather that started all this pain. Sometimes Chaim would like to kill her father, or at least annihilate his memory. If he wasn’t already dead. He makes Anoush so distant, half-alive, yet sublime too in her indifference to the present.
O
nce in Beirut, Minas stumbled through narrow lanes and knocked on the doors of porticoed villas, looking for work. Servants opened the door, faces composed and smiling, then looked at him properly, and the smiles immediately faded from their faces. One maid shrieked. Minas ran away.
He began running everywhere, more and more afraid of himself. He ran away from lumbering trams, afraid the roaring beasts were searching for him in order to finish off what the Turks began. He became lost in star-shaped streets, passing the American University and not stopping, intimidated by its neoclassical facade. A new French school beckoned, but it too looked innocent and pristine, and he felt unworthy of its hushed pallor, with his torn feet and now-ragged Bedouin robe. After a few hours, he was too tired to run any more. He lay supine again as he had in Damascus, safe in the shade of white streets softened by flowering trees.
That evening he found his way to the seashore, thinking to learn from the beggars on the Corniche how to cajole and whine. He sat on a low wall near the promenade; painted fishing boats behind him jostled its smooth flank. He watched beggars prostrate themselves before gentlemen in frock coats and cravats out walking their daughters. Girls decked in finery he’d never imagined: lustrous scarves thick as tapestries around their hips, stiff taffeta skirts in sunset colours, square veils so tiny their kohled eyes and rouged cheeks could be seen. One girl looked at him for a moment and he smiled. She screwed up her face at him, satin cap tilted over her forehead, mocking him with its jaunty angle.