Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (23 page)

“About what? What did they disagree about?”

“In short, they ended up on opposite sides of the war. My father wanted the West’s presence in the region because it was an oil services company during the French mandate that gave us this fortunate life. And Samira, following the Arab nationalist movement, believed that the West’s involvement was bad for Arabs.”

Max repeated
Arab nationalist, Arab nationalist, Arab nationalist
in his head. He’d have to look up what that meant later.

“Do you know about Arab nationalism?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure.”

“It’s people who believe the Arab world should be united as one, and that we are separate countries only because of borders drawn arbitrarily by colonial powers from the West.” She stared at him long enough to make him swallow. He didn’t know why she stared like that. When she said, “Like in Africa,” he understood that she didn’t trust him to follow what she was talking about.

“Yeah.”

“Your mother’s main obsession was the Palestinian cause. Our father believed it was unfair that what happened to the Palestinians should be our problem. He thought it was unfortunate the way Israel was created, but that we shouldn’t be responsible for cleaning up a mess that is not ours. As things got more and more tenuous in this country, her Arab nationalism and sentiments about the Palestinians and Israelis strengthened, and so did his pro-West positions, which were of course indirectly in support of Israel. He was so serious about being pro-West that he even stopped—would you believe—speaking to us in Arabic.” She had a perplexed smile, remembering her past with detached fascination. Again, Max noticed her prettiness.

“I was about seventeen, and Samira fifteen, when he came home one day to announce that from now on we would only speak French and English. Samira refused. For the rest of their relationship, he talked to her in English and French, and she responded in Arabic.”

Anika looked amused by her own story, and he was entertained too, as though it had nothing to do with him. The alcohol sloshed around his head. He experienced a growing self-satisfaction for having come all this way on his own; as if he’d done enough, already succeeded, and could stop here with a pat on the back and plenty of rest. He swallowed his food, hardly chewing. “So, when did she marry Rasheed?”

She smoked awhile. “They married in Samira’s third year at AUB. As a sort of joke.”

“A joke?”

“They had an arrangement: They’d live together as best friends, make the families happy enough to leave them alone, and continue to indulge in their secret lives.”

“What kinds of secret lives?”

She seemed to carefully organize her thoughts, nervous about saying the wrong things. “That’s not an important part of the story.”

She hadn’t touched her falafel. Scooping up some baba gha-noush with a wedge of pita, she took a minuscule bite, chewing slowly. Max had almost finished his plate. “The story is the whole picture, right? What secret lives?”

“Samira and Ali were in love.”

“My father knew this?”

“Rasheed? Yes, of course, Rasheed knew this. Rasheed had different, well, different preferences. His own private lifestyle, in certain—clubs.” She narrowed her eyes at the lonely falafel ball, waiting to see if she’d said too much.

He kept cool as the wind took itself out of him.
She’s telling me my dad is gay.
Whatever fluffiness he’d felt about the food and drinks and storytelling blew away. He had a flash of Rasheed standing in jean shorts and a white tank top at one of his basketball games, and zoomed in on the girlishly quick and small way he applauded when someone scored. Max had attributed all such details of his father’s comportment to foreignness. But had it been obvious to everyone else in those basketball stands that Rasheed was a gay man? Then he thought of Coach Tim and how conflicts with him started the moment Kelly showed up. And how much time Rasheed spent over there before and after Kelly. Was Max the only one hidden away in the dark? Paranoia and betrayal and humiliation set in deeper.
But hadn’t Kelly and his father shared a bed? Or was even that part of the illusion? Had they just been sleeping side by side as partners in this charade? Where could his father have gotten these twisted ideas of what defined a normal, healthy childhood? On what standards did he base all his complicated lying? Why would he think Max too weak to handle the truth? Max had spent the better part of his life trusting and being close to only his father, giving him the entirety of his love and attention, and he’d never been trusted in return. He’d been deemed nothing more than a feeble little boy.

Anika explained that while her parents were still in Beirut, Samira and Rasheed lived in the small pool shed upstairs. Ali could come and go easily through a separate entrance without being seen. The parents avoided the shed, either out of respect for the newlyweds’ privacy or out of fear of the truth.

“And they were all still in school?”

“Ali didn’t go to school. He was a bricklayer on the black market.”

“Why on the black market?”

“Refugees aren’t allowed to work most jobs legally here.”

“How are they supposed to survive?”

“They have to find ways. Anyway, Samira was in school, and Rasheed had finished with his schooling a year earlier. He helped his father with his dentistry in the apartment.”

She took her time putting a spoonful of
tzatziki
next to the one falafel, letting her spoon clank loudly a few times against the white porcelain of her plate, and talked about how Samira spent her time in cafés where members of one of the PLO factions conferred. She also went to local civil groups led by academics from AUB, but was frustrated by the ineffectiveness of peaceful protest in a country that had no government whatsoever and was at war with itself. She joined another leftist group that did not believe in strict nonviolence. Ali joined too.
Rasheed told Anika that Samira and Ali were getting mixed up with people who would endanger them. Anika said, “What can I do? If she won’t listen to you, she of course will not care what I think.” Also, at this time, Samira was pregnant.

Max asked what kinds of things his mother did with this new group.

Anika had only heard little pieces, rumors, about how Samira delivered packages for some militia or another, probably documents and maybe sometimes weapons and plans, who knew? Rasheed tried to cover for her absences but could only invent so many excuses. She became too extreme for her old friends from high school and at AUB. No one was involved enough in the resistance for her taste. After the doctors delivered Max in 1984, Samira took him everywhere with her: to school, to group meetings, and whatever else she did.

“She was even more insufferable,” Anika remembered. “Politics and social justice was all she could talk about. She made everything you said sound silly in light of the suffering of others. There are few things that are more annoying than conversing with someone who is always putting things into perspective.”

Anika continued to summarize liberally, and maybe therapeutically. He wondered if he’d ever actually meet this woman, his mother. The more he heard, the more unimaginable the idea of facing her seemed.

Samira had made the newspapers after getting expelled from AUB for being involved with an armed group in a campus protest. The group didn’t use any violence, but the mere presence of armed men surrounding the campus and Samira standing with them was enough for her to get kicked out. She went from doing sit-ins to carrying a pistol and sleeping in abandoned buildings, shooting and maybe even bombing. It had long become too much to manage all of this with a baby in her
arms, so she left Max with Rasheed. She was never around. Samira’s father pretended not to notice for as long as possible, telling people she was just spending a lot of time at school and with friends, and that of course the rumors were not true.

The war got uglier, and people stopped believing it would ever end. Anika, her husband and children, and her parents left for France in 1985—much later than they should have, having waited that long because Samira refused to go—abandoning the apartment to hooligans and prostitutes and militiamen until 1990. The Bouloses were the last tenants crazy enough to keep living in the building.

Samira stayed behind under the pretense that she needed to be with her husband’s family, but she only really holed up with the Bouloses after Ali was assassinated. She lay in their bathtub for days, refusing food or water. She believed they killed Ali because of a traitor in their group, a man named Fuad who she claimed was a spy for the Israelis. One day Fuad strolled in to get his teeth cleaned.

Max asked, “He didn’t know she was staying there?”

“There was always a lot of bad information going around. People died all of the time because of misinformation. Yes, maybe he didn’t know Samira was in the apartment. Or maybe he wasn’t a traitor at all and had no reason to fear going there. But when Fuad laid his back in the dentist chair, Samira emerged from the bathroom and pressed her pistol to the crown of his head. Everyone screamed for her not to shoot, but she squeezed the trigger. She had to go into hiding after that. She didn’t even stay to help clean up the mess, and it was very complicated for the others to know what to do with this body. As far as I know, that was the last time Samira saw Rasheed or you. Fuad’s brothers came for revenge, and it fell on the Bouloses and their friends. Twelve people in all. You and Rasheed happened to have gone on a walk in the stairwell, and when the shooting
began, he ran up with you in his arms and listened to everything from the corridor.”

After Max’s chills smoothed out, he asked if she thought any of the story about the two young rightist Christians holding them hostage, waiting for that militia leader’s appointment for a root canal, was possibly true. She couldn’t be sure, but had trouble imagining why Rasheed would have left that part out when he and Max arrived in Paris, as he seemed to fill the Jabbirs in on every other major event. And up until the massacre, the Bouloses had been in steady contact with the Jabbirs. They called as frequently as they could with updates, and despite hearing a lot of incredible anecdotes and horror stories, Anika didn’t remember anything about two young rightist Christians. And no, she didn’t hear anything about her sister wearing a pot on her head either. She found that detail harder to believe than any other. However, yes, the bit about a rocket going through the window and over the dentist chair was true.

Max almost had to admire Rasheed’s ingenuity. Had he plotted all the fictionalized elements of the story before climbing into the tree house, or was it all off the cuff? It was the perfect amount of specificity; he’d given Max just enough for him to feel he was getting a complete story while also managing to keep the most important person, Max’s mother, a purely symbolic character. If Rasheed had told of her being a fighter or getting depressed about Ali’s death or any psychological complexities about her at all, he’d have risked spurring more of Max’s curiosity, but as long as Samira stayed that generic, simple, loving mother with a pot on her head, she remained only a representation of Mother, a nonperson—a cartoon. And what additional information did Max ever demand of cartoons?

Anika moved the food on her plate around for a short while. “I am not shocked that Rasheed tries to forget about her.” She
snubbed out her cigarette and slowly pulled out another, taking her time to light it.

“Maybe, but he can’t choose whether I forget her or not.” He disliked the whininess he heard in his voice. He sounded like a child.

When Rasheed and Max flew to Anika and Samira’s parents’ home in Paris, their father had learned the story and said he never wanted to hear her name again. He didn’t want to see Rasheed again either, but promised to help out financially until Max turned eighteen, as long as they went far away to start a new life.

Max remembered the accounts with deposits from Ziad Jabbir from all those years ago. “So your father is Ziad Jabbir.”

“That’s right. Your grandfather.”

Gunshots popped off in the distance, and Max jumped. With a sardonic smirk that Max was getting used to, Anika said not to worry, people in the mountains shoot in the air to celebrate what some political or religious leader says on television.

Max asked, “How did you know your mom was still in contact with her?”

“My mother slips sometimes. She speaks, forgetting that someone is listening.”

“So my mother was put in prison for what happened with Fuad?”

“No. This prison, which was run by the SLA, in the Israeli-occupied south of Lebanon, didn’t care about such things. They were happy to see us killing each other.”

“So what was she charged with?”

“Charged with? It didn’t work like this. They removed you. Someone informed on you, or they suspected something and kept you for as long as they wanted, or until you betrayed enough of your friends, that is all.”

“Torture?”

She nodded yes. “I also found a letter to my mother from Samira that dated from 1998.”

“What did it say?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t read it.”

“Why not? You weren’t interested at all?”

“Not interested enough to risk having her anywhere near me or my family. If I read it, I’d know where she lived, and my curiosity might get the better of me. Listen, the truth is, over the years, I have come to share my sister’s political views, but I want nothing to do with her lifestyle.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, there are some people who don’t read the newspapers because they feel helpless and it depresses them. Then there are other people, like me, who read the paper cover to cover every morning and complain for hours about the Israeli occupation and give a little money here and there to charities and NGOs. And then there are people like Samira who read the newspaper in the morning, pick up a gun in the afternoon, and by evening are fighting with all their life. I love this kind of character in books and so on, but don’t want someone like that near my children.”

Max imagined Anika’s children for the first time, his cousins. He saw them as stuck-up, apathetic-looking boys with their hair parted hard to one side.