The Storyteller. Pierre Jarawan
I have often thought back to that day in the late summer of 1992. I know that he wanted to do something to make me happy, and it did indeed make me very happy. Hardly any of our ships sank. Some of them rocked dangerously, but none capsized. We stood there watching until the very last nutshell was no more than a tiny dot, and I remember how proud I was.
But I also remember how his arm felt heavier and heavier on my shoulders. His breathing became deeper and deeper, his gaze more and more trance-like, as if he were no longer looking at the ships but at some point in the distance. The reason I remember it so clearly is that it was one of the last days we spent together.
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3
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