Sabra Zoo (4 page)

I smiled to myself; I'd turned down the opportunity to interpret on the film the British crew were making about the hospital. Now I had to pay the price.

We approached the bedside; I needed a drink of water.

‘Sir, can you hear me?' I asked the man in Arabic. The bandaged head turned towards me. ‘I'm with the doctor.' I realised that I didn't know the doctor's name. ‘I'm with the doctor who operated on you.'

The man nodded in recognition. ‘Dr Boulos,' he said, the Arabic for ‘Paul'. Dr Paul placed his hand on the man's forearm.

‘Dr Boulos operated on your eyes but there is a problem, I mean it was difficult, the eyes are delicate and …' I paused, trying to think of the right words to tell him. The bandages turned towards me again. The doctor's hand was clenched round the man's wrist. ‘How does one say?' I said to myself.

‘You have already said it,' the man said.

‘I'm sorry.' I was apologising for my own ineptitude rather than the fact that the man was blind. ‘Do you have questions for the doctor?'

‘Thank him for me,' the man said. He sounded very tired.

Going down the stairs to the lobby I heard shouting and was surprised to see that it was Asha. She was addressing a white male doctor who was with a group of new medics, gesturing at the families of refugees camped in the lobby, whose number had been growing daily since the
PLO
evacuation.

‘These people have every right to be here,' she was saying. ‘This is their hospital, not yours, it doesn't belong to the doctors and it isn't for you to tell them they shouldn't be here.' The medics exchanged raised eyebrows. ‘You're not lording it over the natives here, nor do you have the same dubious status you may have back in London.'

The hospital administrator bustled into the lobby – a fearsome woman who disapproved of my presence in her hospital. I was only tolerated on site because of John and Asha's insistence that I was useful.

Asha continued in forced moderation, her voice quieter. ‘The infrastructure has collapsed … Imagine if one day you woke up and the government had packed up and left. That's what's happened here.' She pulled a young refugee girl to her, who looked scared, which wasn't surprising since Doctora Asha's interest in people usually involved pain. ‘This girl's father has left, been forced out, and these people are worried, they are no longer protected. They don't feel safe.' Asha stopped, letting her shoulders droop. The administrator was leading the group of puzzled-looking medics away, saying something about it having been a difficult summer in which they'd been short-staffed.

Welcome to Sabra, I thought. Asha was left standing in the lobby holding the girl's hand. The girl was trying to work herself free. Asha looked at her in surprise, apologised and let her go. She spotted me and came towards me. Her eyes were filling with tears.

‘I can't be seen like this,' she said, her voice low and cracking. I walked with her out onto the street. I could see Samir laughing with the official interpreter and the
BBC TV
film crew. Having asked Asha to wait at the entrance, I walked up to him, pulling on his sleeve.

‘I need you to drive Asha home,' I said in Arabic so the others couldn't understand.

‘Now?' he said, frowning at the interruption. A group of kids had gathered round the cameraman shouting, ‘We show you bomb, you photo bomb!'

‘Listen, these people are from the
BBC
. They want to do a story about one of the kids in the hospital. I told them about that boy Youssef you mentioned,' Samir said.

‘This is not the time,' I said, pointing at Asha. The kids tugged at the cameraman's sleeve and trousers.

‘The thing is,' said an English woman to me, as if I'd been part of the conversation all along, ‘that we want to try and get one of the kids flown to the
UK
for treatment, make a story of it, something the British public can identify with.' She was wearing a safari jacket with lots of pockets; I assumed she must be the producer or director.

‘You'd need to ask Youssef and his aunt,' I said. I pulled again at Samir's sleeve, muttering in Arabic, ‘We need to take Asha back.' The cameraman was trying to swat the kids away. They were now asking five lira to show him their bomb. They may have been the same boys who suckered another journalist into filming a Coke can they'd painted yellow, claiming it was a cluster bomb.

‘The thing is,' continued the producer, exchanging a fleeting look with the official interpreter, ‘I understand this Youssef boy might be ah … a bit difficult and may not come across well on
TV
but that the girl with the prosthetic might be more suitable ah … from a visual point of view.' The girl in question was one the official interpreter looked after, fair-haired, green-eyed and practically mute. Youssef was dark-haired, dark-eyed and said ‘fickety fick'.

‘We have to go,' I said to Samir in an urgent whisper, ignoring the producer who turned to talk to the official interpreter.

Samir looked at Asha waiting at the entrance. ‘Why didn't you say something?' he said, pulling out his keys.

Soon we were riding in what Samir told me was a 1979 Series 7
BMW
used to ferry top
PLO
cadres around the city. He looked at Asha in the mirror.

‘The old man used to sit there,' he said.

‘The old man?' she asked, her first words since getting into the car.

I turned round. She looked small on the large leather seat.

‘He means Yasser Arafat.'

Asha didn't want to go back to her hotel in case she had to speak to anyone so Samir dropped us outside my place. He leant from the driver's window and held out a business card. ‘Listen, this guy works for a
TV
news company, I do some driving for him sometimes. He's looking for an interpreter. They pay in dollars.'

I pocketed the card without looking at it.

‘You need to sleep,' I told Asha, once we were inside. I tried to find clean linen for my bed. She followed me into the bedroom.

‘Who has slept in this bed?' she asked.

‘Only me.'

‘Then don't worry about changing the sheets.'

She started to get undressed and I left the room, closing the door.

‘Don't go,' she said. Something had happened to her voice. I went back in, saw her standing in a slip, her small frame illuminated by slats of light from the closed shutters. Her tears came freely and it seemed right that I go to her. I held her to my chest, felt the wetness through my T-shirt, the racking of her little body. Eventually the sobs subsided but I was still stroking her long wiry hair. She lifted her head back and looked at me smiling, her face wet but happy.

‘I couldn't have done that in front of anyone else here,' she said, placing her hands on my face. I could feel an erection growing. Mortified, I moved my groin back so she couldn't feel it against her. What was wrong with me? She kissed me quickly on the lips. My heart was trying to jump out of my chest, like someone had injected adrenalin directly into it. She got into bed and I went to leave the room but she called my name again. I stopped at the door to look back at her looking at me from under the sheet. I waited, heart thumping.

‘Thanks again, Ivan,' she said.

I waited outside for a couple of minutes until the sound of snoring, incompatible with someone her size, came through the door. She was clearly exhausted. Thirty minutes later I was sitting on the sofa, my Tokarev on the coffee table. I lit the candle in my Chianti bottle, watching the wax flow down the neck, wondering if it was cheating to light it during the day. I started to strip my gun, carefully cleaning each part. I wasn't sure why I had done that – waited outside the door. I began to polish individual bullets before loading them back into the cartridge. I reassembled the museum piece, making sure the safety was on, and wrapped it in its greasy cloth before putting it back in its hiding place, praying that she hadn't noticed my erection.

I sat on Najwa's balcony smoking a Marlboro while she made Turkish or Arabic coffee – I could never remember what the difference was, something to do with how many times you brought it to the boil. Her apartment had good views of the city but faced east Beirut, which meant it was vulnerable to shells launched from there. She'd been lucky though. Over the summer destruction had come from all directions – the sky, the sea and the cedar-covered mountains overlooking the city – but her apartment had remained unscathed. Najwa brought out the small cups of coffee and sat beside me. She took one of my cigarettes.

‘You smoke too much,' she said, taking her first drag and blowing blue smoke up into blue sky. I was trying to think of a way I could arrange to have lunch or dinner with Eli alone. Najwa's voice interrupted my thoughts.

‘Unfortunately a couple of our people have disappeared and we've had to move cadres into new safe houses.'

I pulled on my cigarette. ‘What do you mean, disappeared?' I asked, trying not to sound too nervous.

‘One of them we know has deserted for Syria to join his family. The other … Well, we think he was picked up at a flying roadblock,' she said.

‘Phalangists?'

‘Yes, they've started to venture over from the east.'

I sipped the bitter coffee. The war was obviously not over but had just shifted its emphasis. It seemed that staying behind in Beirut might not be the comfortable choice I had hoped it would be.

‘What I am trying to say', said Najwa, ‘is that we need to courier messages between cadres and … Well, you can travel around without a problem.'

Unless I was caught with incriminating papers, I thought. Najwa handed me an envelope: I was to meet someone outside the main cafeteria of the American University with whom I was to exchange envelopes. I finished my coffee and headed for the street.

In the doorway of Najwa's building I lit another cigarette. According to Najwa, the Phalangists were making lightning raids into west Beirut to mount roadblocks and search buildings, presumably looking for known activists, Palestinians or Lebanese, anyone who had the gall to put up any resistance to the siege. The militiamen would stop a car and sometimes a hooded informer (I imagined he was on a commission) would look inside and point to anyone he vaguely recognised. I'd once seen photographs at a macabre exhibition of people after they'd fallen into the hands of Christian militias; their faces were pulp, their eyes swollen shut. I checked for my passport and started out, thinking at least it was safer on foot.

Over the years my anxiety had moved through a spectrum of fears. A spate of car bombs meant walking the streets took on a new twist: scanning parked cars for extra aerials and crossing the road to avoid being decapitated by a flying piece of metal. With rockets I had learnt (during the Civil War) to recognise the particular pre-impact whine of different calibre shells. It was said that if you could hear it coming then it had passed over and you were
OK
, as long as you hit the ground, keeping your chest raised to avoid being winded by the blast. Being buried alive under rubble was a new worry, thanks to the size of the bombs being dropped during the summer siege, some big enough to bring down a six-storey building. Rumours also circulated of a new vacuum bomb, which made buildings implode, turning them into neat piles of debris. Consequently, taking shelter in the basement, the place to be during a raid, became as much of a risk as staying on the top floor; in other words you chose your own odds. The list of things to be afraid of went on: snipers that made certain crossings more interesting, armed flare-ups at minor traffic incidents, guns going off by accident, and so on.

Through the gate into the American University of Beirut, or
AUB
as it was naturally known, was another world lined with palm trees. People my own age wandered around with books, chatting and laughing, even holding hands with the opposite sex – same-sex friends holding hands was not an uncommon sight in Beirut. I found the cafeteria but was early so I decided to go inside. It was an hour before lunch but already a hubbub came from the crowded tables, filling the vaulted ceiling. I was filled with an air of expectancy, as if I could have been a part of all this. But the feeling soon passed and I rose to leave, not wanting to be reminded that this was what I should have been doing, sitting with my peers discussing which modules I was going to take and which girl I was going to ask out. I heard someone call my name and looked over to see three of my former classmates sitting at one of the tables. I walked over feeling self-conscious, the envelope in my inside pocket digging into my ribs.

‘We'd wondered what had become of you,' said Emile, standing up to shake my hand rather formally. Curly haired, green-eyed and good-looking, Emile had been the school heart-throb. I sat down and shook hands with Mustapha and Bedrosian, two stocky guys who could have been in their forties, already wearing their fathers' jackets and moustaches, being groomed to take over the import-export businesses, their mothers feeding them to develop their father's paunches.

‘What course are you doing?' asked Bedrosian, stroking his moustache in a practised way. It wasn't a question I was ready for.

‘I'm not decided,' I said, but a buried memory of a pre-invasion schoolroom discussion surfaced. ‘Probably physics.'

‘You'll need to get a move on, the deadline for applications is the end of the week,' said Mustapha, looking at me as if I was moronic.

‘Where did you go this summer?' Bedrosian asked. ‘We've just returned from Paris.'

‘Nowhere, we stayed here.'

There were noises of disbelief.

‘You mean you were here all through the siege?' This from Emile, studying me carefully with his green eyes. ‘Why, for God's sake? Didn't you even go to east Beirut?'