Deadly Confederacies, Page 22

  ‘Monica, come on.’

  Alan is up within the hour. Monica is her old self by then. She says she sometimes goes for a walk in her sleep. I don’t correct her. Neither does Alan. He just sighs hard upon understanding why she’d hinted at one of his boys to stay with her.

  ‘I’d like some breakfast,’ she says with surprising and demanding clarity.

  The woman is hard work.

  ‘Of course,’ I say.

  Alan nods. He has an idea now where all this is going for her.

  At that moment, a steam train approaches, passing the spot where my father had drawn his last breath. There is the clickety-clack, the ringing of a bell, the blowing of a whistle, and yet, curiously, there is a silence deep within the noise – the sense of a soul at rest amid the clamour. When the train has lost itself in the distance, Alan says, as we turn to look at Monica returning to her caboose, ‘She won’t have any memory of this in a while.’

  He puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes hard.

  I don’t have any words in me. I get a tight feeling in my throat. So tight it hurts. But there is probably nothing to say. It is simply a frame of time in which a brother becomes a brother and an aunt begins to lose her way, and my father says goodbye in the faint whistle of a distancing train.

  Mingi Street

  The one-sided street meanders snake-like, fracturing in three places: at its northern tail, beyond the French Wadi-Gate – a checkpoint by a dried riverbed – where the road slims to meet a tight bend before the port; midway, when the road shoots up a long, broad and twisting way to the hilltop village; and at its southern outreaches, where the bulk of the shops squat, leaving behind the disused whorehouse, a half-built hotel, and a dump smoking its own filth.

  The pock-marked asphalt yawns to Roshaniqra Border Crossing, where the Star of David flies above custom offices, pulled taut by sea winds that sweep into the caves underneath, and turning about make their way up the chalk cliffs, past bent railway tracks, through the electric fences, finding nowhere to go, and no choice but to slip out to sea, rippling the waters, before returning on the backs of the waves, newly born.

  Khalil Abbas awakened to the call of the muezzin crier, and turned over on the mattress in the back room of his shop, not wanting to disturb the phlegm that slept quietly on his lungs, and yet needing to answer his throat’s whisper for thick coffee and his bladder’s cry for relief.

  The wind howled. It moved along the tin roof, pulling at its edges, pushed against the door, came trembling through a fissure in the window, stirring curtains he never drew against the night. He landed here twenty years ago, fleeing Beirut, cleaning out his electrical shop and heading south with his family, staying first in Sidon, near the crusader sea castle. Finding they weren’t safe from Israeli warplanes, or the different militias who fought like jackals over bones, he moved on, skipping Tyre, and crossing over the unofficial border the Israelis manufactured to keep their northern territories safe from guerrilla attack. Building a home-cum-shop of tin and wood to join others sprouting up to service the needs of UN troops who lived beyond the giant T-walls paralleling the length of the fledgling shanty town.

  A dissonance of foreign voices: Irish, Dutch, Fijian, Polish, Nepalese, Finns, Ghanaians and Norwegians, the street alive at night, the restaurants full, and songs and arguments fading as curfew fell at eleven, and the soldiers melted away behind the walls, and the gates shut with a clanging noise that sounded Khalil’s own bedtime.

  He got up, went outside, and pissed against the rippled walls of his house, the stench rising to meet his nostrils a solution of medications intended to break up the phlegm and assist with his breathing.

  The medications give him hope. If he had no hope, he would die. A lack of hope would kill him more quickly than the disease he knew thrived within, breaking him down, pulling his flesh inwards, giving him a cadaverous look, his complexion an unhealthy, yellowish pallor, and marking his eyes with black rings that saluted his illness for others to take in and look away.

  The heart attack three years ago started it, the slide. The searing pain, the time spent in Marajoun Hospital, thinking how quickly a few days can change a man’s life. An energetic, bustling trader reduced to a mass of quivering fear and a dread of getting another attack, more alive to his own mortality than ever before, rubbing his father’s prayer beads between pads of thumb and forefinger till the beads had a shine that outshone his father’s.

  He dipped his hands in a basin with its rim broken in places, and took in the cracked mirror, the lines about his eyes like curtain pleats, and the yellow in the whites of them signifying the poison that swam through his veins. He’d hooded eyes and a beak of a nose he touched without thought.

  He shaved slowly, dipping the blade in water after each swipe, removing the soap and dabs of foam flecked with grey stubble. The wind had not let up, and he knew of old that it would blow for another day at least. Early spring, and he still felt the chill of a bad winter in his bones.

  He made coffee in a small pot, and poured it thick and brown, rich in coffee grits, into a miniature cup. He nibbled at pitta bread because he felt hungry, but the hunger gave way to the nausea he expected but had prayed against happening – his appetite played tricks all the time, but he tried to eat, because he knew one needed to eat in order to live, one went with the other. If his body rejected food, it was telling him something, something he didn’t want to hear and tried to shut out, but his body screamed. It screamed at him in the smell of his piss, the belly cramps, the invisible hunger, the bile it threw into his mouth, which left a sour taste to suppress the one of mouthwash.

  Inshallah, he would say, to his customers and to himself. What else could he do? Nothing but wait, and enjoy as much as possible whatever time he had left. Basima would be here tomorrow, back from Beirut, from seeing a specialist about the angry veins in the back of her legs, from seeing Adiva, their only daughter, married to a pig gendarme, who whistled at traffic from under his mushroom shelter, and later returned home to beat his wife. She would also carry the results of his latest tests, tests he’d reluctantly undergone, tests by specialists in a private hospital who were so skilful they could add ten years to a man’s life, or so Basima believed, and tried to have him believe, too.

  Opening up his shop, he went out and stood under the awning, taking in the cancerous-looking morning, a yellow air of dust and wind. He squinted, holding a face towel to the small cyst by his right eye, and walked with a slow, emphatic landing of feet to the shop next door, where he bought bread, exchanged a small pleasantry with Fatima, the mukhtar’s wife, neither of whom he liked for the way they forced their son into joining the Israeli militia, and for how they revealed no guilt over his death, the way the boy turned his own rifle on himself.

  He saw them sometimes, making their way into the UN Camp, to the cemetery near the sea, burning mint leaves for their boy, who should be alive with his life in front of him, a wife and children. They have cheated themselves of so much, and their son of his life, and know but deny it. Fatima talks of bully NCOs in the militia, and of sights her boy saw in the compounds, when they came under attack from the Hizbollah; it is true when people say someone was blown out of his boots, and that human flesh in a bombed car smelt like pork being roasted. It is easy for Fatima to say these things, because surely such scenes would drive anyone mad – look what happened to her son.

  Back in the shop, he pumped the heater with kerosene and set a lighter to its wick. Khalil heard the globe’s wires creak as they reddened. Basima preferred to fill the small brazier with some barbecue coals and sit around it at night with him, warming pieces of pitta bread for milliseconds on the smoking coals before eating them.

  Usually, she stayed in their house on the hill, and lately she was trying to persuade him to do likewise.

  ‘You are sixty-three, Khalil, not a young man any more.’ She s
poke with a dialect he loved, one from the Bekaa Valley, and Baalbeck, the town she came from, with its acres of Roman ruins lying under a view of the snowy Lebanon mountains, where the scent of the last cedars mingled with swatches of mountain flowers.

  She was bending with the years, her features thickly lined about the eyes and lips. She didn’t like living on Mingi Street, and the house he built had, at the time, unburdened her of much. Basima hated the noise of the Israeli half-tracks as they roared along the street, the cars driven by young people who had little choice of road to travel as they raced up and down the one out front. She told him the shop wasn’t doing the business it used to, failing to realise that that wasn’t the reason he continued to keep the shop open. What would he do with himself in the village? Sit out and watch the dogs shade themselves from the sun, he said, one evening, as they drank black sugary tea and she started about him retiring.

  No doubt the business had fallen away. It showed in the boarded-up shacks that ran from his shop to the UN gate manned by French soldiers. The soldiers spend their money on gold, and on dining out. Mostly, they travelled to Tyre or Beirut to shop. During the Civil War it was different, travel was restricted, and they bought in shops like his. The UN had cut the size of its force, too, by as many as two thousand since its inception. It’s a lot of pockets for shopkeepers to lose.

  He competed by offering credit terms and becoming extra friendly with the troops, talking at length with them, offering teas and colas with the knowledge that they would, at some point, check out his stock, and perhaps buy something. In the old days he did a lot of business with the Irish, but they bought little from him nowadays, knowing where to buy better much cheaper. Those he dealt with he could barter with, knowing at the end they would give in and buy from him, but the Ghanaians and Nepalese didn’t know when to quit. They would haggle him beyond his profit margin, and he would beat his chest, shake his head and say, ‘I cannot sell you this. For me no money. I buy from the man that price and I sell you this price … you see what I make? Three dollars, no more, I swear to you the truth. You don’t believe me, check my books, come check my books.’ But they never did.

  The Irish named the shanty town Mingi Street (Ming ee). A man called Dawson said it was a word the Irish learned in the Congo, meaning a cheap present of dubious quality, and the seller of such was known as a Mingi Man. Fake Lacoste, fake Levi’s, fake just about everything. It was true, and there was no real problem with that; the problems started when the fake cost as much if not more than the genuine, and soldiers found out they’d been cheated. These days, reflected Khalil, like so much else in the world, it was hard to tell which was real and which wasn’t, who lied and who didn’t.

  Dawson lost his smile when Khalil asked if he thought he was a poor-quality man. ‘Isn’t that what Mingi means? You’ve just told me. Believe me, my friend, I am not.’ Then he smiled. He always smiled. You can lace poison with a smile to make it taste good.

  He turned on the portable TV, but still his eyes wouldn’t be drawn from the perspex windows, behind which he kept shelves of watches, chains, lighters, knives, small diversifications from his range of electrical goods. He considered covering them to protect them from the yellow dust, but decided not to bother, as the dust of time was on them anyway.

  He felt the cold, and didn’t like the wind, the way it spoke in howls, moans and whispers. An atavistic chill inched along his spine, filling the pit of his belly with an iciness, as if a freezer bag had burst in his gut. A deep cloud crossed his mind and sat there, raining on his thoughts.

  In time, his house would be like the others, boarded up with thick planks, tumbleweed snagged against the door, the shelves empty, the smell of kerosene and charcoal long dissipated, the vapour of his breath no more. He would be in the cemetery by the sea, with mint leaves smoking over him, and tears moistening the scarlet anemones Basima would place in vases above his head.

  He put on his jacket and a blue scarf Adiva bought him for his birthday, but he couldn’t shake off the chill. Netanyahu was on TV, saying Israel would respond in due course to the Katyusha rocket attacks on Qiryat Shemona last night. He sighed, rubbed his eyes, drank some cola to moisten a dry tongue. Outside, the wind played up and down the street.

  He knew them all on the street, their petty jealousies, the ones who had come, and gone, the ones who had died, and like him were dying. Ata the gay hairstylist ordered out of Sidon by the Hizbollah, who didn’t take to his pink string vests and claret short shorts, Jesse the commando who sold booze to the messes and turned dollars into shekels and back again, Sammy the coffee man, Porno Joe, Willie Whitevan, Tom Cruise, one-armed Monsour the tailor, Chicken George, Pablo’s Bar, Ali Strawballs, he knew them all, not by their true names but the ones accorded them by the UN troops. He had alliances with them all at the beginning, when each helped the other, at a time before they realised they were eating from the same cake, and small and large rivalries didn’t exist. It all changed. One watched what the other got, and did. The more successful you became, the less popular you were among the other traders. He was always middle-of-the-road popular.

  He closed shop early, and drew the drapes so no one passing would espy him through the shop windows. The yellow dust storm had lasted all day, and as night fell, and it fell quickly, he heard the distant rumble of thunder, and knew it was on the march, heading this way, from the sea, where once he’d seen Israeli patrol boats battered about by a mini tornado. There would be little sleep tonight.

  Opening the back door, he spat outside into the night, on to a muddy patch lit up by flash lightning. He emptied his lungs of phlegm, knowing that before he lay on the bed his lungs would refill, and the spittoon by his side would not remain idle. He felt cold. He moved in the heater, and filled Basima’s hot-water bottle. After taking his medication, he slipped under the duvets and lay on his back, looking at the red globe, the lightning when it flashed silvery on the concrete floor, listening to the tip tap of rain falling hard on the tin roof, the soft drip of water coming from a spot where it always leaked, landing in the basin, in which he put a towel to deaden the noise.

  The storm lasted most of the night, and sleep didn’t come till after the call to prayer spread from the minaret in the village, and the thunder had rolled across to distant hills and wadis. He slept then, and didn’t waken until he heard the loud knock on the back door. He opened his eyes, bleary for moments in the morning light.

  ‘Khalil?’

  Basima. Her tone contained fear and a heightened premonition that something had happened.

  ‘I’m coming,’ he said, the words growling over the phlegm in his throat.

  Opening the door, he stood aside to let her pass. He took in the scent of her perfume, the red-painted lips, the rouge on her cheeks – things she only wore on her visits to Beirut, or on some major shopping expedition.

  ‘Such a time of it,’ she said. ‘The traffic in Beirut is terrible.’

  He nodded, felt his stubble, wishing he had woken early and cleaned himself up. She spoke of the weather in Beirut, the cold, the wet and muddy streets, the buildings coming down, the ones going up, and of Adiva, who was at home in the village.

  After she said this, she waited for his response.

  ‘For a visit?’ he said, the seeds of her words taking root.

  ‘For longer, yes, much longer than a visit.’

  He said nothing. He supposed that Adiva could help in the shop. He lit the stove, and put on a pot of water to make coffee. Basima warmed herself in front of the heater.

  ‘Your legs?’ he asked.

  ‘I need an operation on the veins.’

  ‘Adiva … that pig of hers?’

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t mind her staying. I told him she was needed to run the shop. He put a face on him, you know his face,’ she lifted her nostrils with her thumb, ‘but smiled when I said Adiva would be paid for her troubles.�
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  ‘Run the shop,’ he said quietly.

  Two birds with one stone. Her daughter away from a man who beat her, and a husband home to die. Basima was a clever woman. He nodded, turned his back to her, and stepped onto the shop floor. He killed the tears in his eyes with a blink.

  Basima put her hand on his shoulder and he rested his on top, his palm pressing down on her ring. Her voice cooed in his ear, her words gentle, but telling, ‘It’s time.’

  The Stand House

  His cleaner, Iris, visits three times a week. She washes and irons his clothes. She is Nigerian, and seems a good soul. He hired her through an agency, and likes her for her hearty laugh. He pays her a little over the going rate, and is decent with a bonus at Christmas. Something is never spoken of between them, for it needs no mentioning: she is also his ‘check-in’ lady – he has a fear of dying and not being found for days. A bit like a man fearful of wakening up blind, who keeps a torch on his bedside locker. Neither matter, he supposes: being dead to the dead; a blind man having a torch within hand’s reach.

  He is less than a week out of hospital.

  Next of kin … he had erupted in tears when a nurse had asked him that simple question for her admission form. The tear storm caught them both by surprise. He has no next of kin. No one for someone to tell someone else that he is in hospital or at the morgue. The chilling reply to her question formed in his head and spilled as tears. If himself, or close to it, he would have dredged a smile and said, ‘No, no one, love.’ Then he thought to mention his solicitor, and surrendered her name quietly, almost embarrassingly. Chirpily, the nurse said, ‘See, everyone’s got a next of kin.’

  He no longer eats at home, preferring to dine at a little Greek restaurant down a back street that prepares a variety of vegetarian meals. He hasn’t eaten red meat since the beef crisis back in the eighties. Doesn’t believe in the so-called experts who are wheeled on and off TV to say that beef is safe to eat. Trust is another issue similar to truth. Not everyone can be trusted to be trustworthy all of the time.