- Longing, we say
**
This is the core of what I remember. Each time I tell it, it changes. I am playing with my friends. Tala is laughing but they are both chasing me, both her and Bassem. I’m not sure why, but I smell something burnt. What is that? I’m trying to figure it out. Maybe someone left a stove on. I trip and fall. Bassem catches up to me, kicks my feet and asks me to get up. I do, and then Tala yells. His face, his face, she says, over and over again. His face, his face.
I put my hand over my eye and feel the trickling. It’s wet, like the sap of a tree.
**
“Pussy,” Tala said.
“What?” I asked.
Tala shrugged. She’d learned it from one of the English teachers at school. Tala liked this English teacher. He was young, good looking, white, from Belgium. He had curly hair and a sharp nose. We liked him more than the others. He spoke bad Arabic in a borderline Flemish accent, but at least he spoke some.
“You from where?” he’d ask each student. I’d glare at the students laughing at his Arabic. “I at Belgium. Belgium. She know Belgium? Europe. You know Europe? Europe.”
He’d memorised our names by the second class, something the other teachers usually didn’t even bother doing. One of the British teachers once joked she couldn’t tell a Maryam from a Mahmoud, all the Arabic names blended together to her.
All the same, ass-alam malay-kum, he’d say, butchering the pronunciation with a somehow American twang. We usually skipped class but for him we showed up.
“Turn over,” Tala said.
I did, making a muffled sound.
“You’re getting better at this.”
I made another sound, trying on indignance. She traced the edges of my ass cheeks.
“Your eyes are always closed when you come.”
“Are they?”
“Eat at mine today. She still thinks of you as a little boy, she’ll never think we’re dating.”
“I’m not sure if I want to cosplay your childhood best friend.”
“Longing, we say,” she said in English, “because desire is full of endless distances.”
I snorted. “That’s why you’re Tomas’ favourite student.”
“And you’re jealous?” she said.
I didn’t reply.
She turned me back over. Her hair framed my face.
She repeated the quote in English. Then in Arabic, she said, “Boys never try, that’s why we’re so much better at school.”
“On this land we have something worth living,” I said back to her.
“Don’t even start with Darwish,” she said.
“Because he’s Arab?”
I bit the question out like a swear word.
Tala got up and went to her jeans, draped over a chair. She lifted hers off of mine, started fishing around in my pockets.
“What are you doing?”
“I never want to hurt you.”
She came over with my knife. I regarded her tiredly. What did she want now?
“What if we did it right now,” she said. “Just carved that line in or something.”
“Can’t we just get tattoos like normal people?”
“You could carve your name onto mine too,” she said.
“You’re insane.”
“You don’t want something permanent from me.”
“No, I do not,” I said agreeably.
A light flicked in Tala’s eyes. “Motherfucker,” she said. Then, in English, “Pussy.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“You’ll never be a real man. You should have said you don’t like…me.”
“I never said that.”
“People like me.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked over and over.
Tala was crying.
As my voice rose, Tala came over, leaned and pressed my face into her neck.
“And you think you’re gonna be what,” I said, prising her off, “running around—”
“—oh that’s where we’re—"
“—fucking not your husband—”
“—not my husband indeed—”
“—on a weekday afternoon?”
I flicked her forehead. She rapped my head with her knuckles, twice. Suddenly we were children again.
**
Growing up, the sound of planes was always in the background. They weren’t warplanes. We were near the airport. That wasn’t something I thought about until Tomas said so, one of the Saturdays he came over. Contrary to expectations he’d stayed more than the usual month and a half. He stayed for years.
Once Tala and I broke up it became clear that we would, despite my best attempts, have to remain friends; further she had set her sights on the handsome English teacher from Belgium, and he didn’t stand a chance. We finished up at school after too many years. Tala’s English got very good from all the genuine after-school tutoring.
She went to university where I couldn’t. Our grandparents had fled to Beirut in 1948. There were so many things we couldn’t do: teach, practice law, be citizens. It wasn’t as bad as it was for the Syrians, who could only do one of three jobs, like farming or roadsweeping. This didn’t matter to me. I was bad at school. I didn’t see the point. I became a mechanic, apprenticing under a Maronite called Michael. Tala started tutoring Christian kids in English, the ones whose middle class families couldn’t afford to hire white people, the Georges and Chloés and Peters. Every day I took the bus to work but he paid me a bit extra for it. Sometimes I resented my mother for not marrying Lebanese, which would have widened possibilities. But it was like choosing between bad things—however the pieces fall, it is what it is.
Tomas started coming over for dinners while we were still at school. Tala and my families were neighbours, and Tala orchestrated it so that she would invite him as a guest and, in the way of such things, he became part of the family.
The first time, Tomas came over with a kilogram of figs. Tala had told him the men loved figs, so he brought figs. But we weren’t prepared for the sheer volume.
“You shouldn’t have,” my mother said.
“The least I could do.”
“Nonsense, we can’t accept this,” my mother said, taking the bags from him. “Why can’t my son be as nice as you?”
My mother cooked up a huge pot of maqlouba and left it over the coal fire; we only got about 6 hours of electricity, it was all the generator guy gave us for what we paid. She made more baklava than in recent memory. The water it took left the tank in need of refilling. We left the dishes soaking in the storeroom till we could wash them so that the bottom crust wouldn’t harden.
Witnessing this, I felt a prick of jealousy. My mom cuffed the back of my head. She asked me to get Tomas tea and water.
“Idiot,” she said.
“I didn’t know you knew the word idiot.”
I could hear Tala giggling in the living room, and Tomas’s low voice.
“Wallah, my son will be the death of me.”
In the living room, my uncles were teaching Tomas swear words. Sharmouta, sharmouta, sharmouta, he was happily repeating.
“I’ll get the tea.”
“Get the good one, you always save it for yourself. Ya’allah, the only children worth having are daughters.”
It soon became a tradition for Tomas to come over every Saturday, to hang out and smoke argileh and play with mine and Tala’s cousins. I was happy, because this meant good food was on the cards on Saturday nights. Tomas was a nice guy. His Arabic became passable; something clicked for him one day. For a long time he’d try to speak it, but it wouldn’t go through. When he reached a base level of blundering around, he could form broken sentences, understand some things, and then the learning curve accelerated.
Of all of us, my mother was most proud of him.
It became a common sight to see Tala hanging out her door watching Tomas duck under the telco wires hanging over the street, buffeted by groups of boys running past. Later we scoffed that Westerners coming into Bourj al-Barajneh were always so dramatic. They acted like they’d never seen these things before. Then again, he lived in Hamra. The Lebanese in Hamra had never seen these things before either.
Maybe it wasn’t meant to last, or maybe it was cut short. Tomas came bearing gifts. Tala wanted to marry him but didn’t want to be easy. She separated the fuckable from the husbandry. I think by the end she was properly in love with Tomas. I suppose one can never really be sure about these things. She doesn’t say that much about those times. I don’t really know.
**
“Is that you Bassem?” I said.
Bassem grinned and came over to greet me. He was been leaning on a motorbike, one of many. I eyed him coming up the street. He was one of the Shatila drug boys.
When he turned, I could see the bulge at the back of his jeans, coming into his t-shirt where his gun was sheathed.
“I haven’t seen you for so long,” I said. “When did you move?”
Bassem rubbed his head ruefully. He had a buzzcut and it suited him well. He was stacked. “Soon after the accident?”
I pointed at the line running down my right cheek.
“Looks like you’re over it,” he said.
“What’s there to be over?”
“Good to know you’re not gay anymore.” He punched me in the shoulder. “I remember how hard you cried back then.”
I grinned, but my heart pumped uncomfortably. I shoved him back. “Fuck off.”
We talked about what we’d been up to, where we’d gone. He said his parents had moved them to Shatila with the rest of their family, because his granddad was ill. He spent most of his teenage years cleaning his granddad’s shit and listening to him rail about Israelis—Israel sharmouta—and how the Holocaust wasn’t real. His granddad had fled to the south of Lebanon after the Nakba, a little kid, and then he’d fled the South as an old man, the home he’d built bombed to nothing. In the end he spent so much on having to get a new house, he didn’t even have enough for the hospitals.
“What are you going to do? Life is cheap.”
“Fuck them,” I nodded my agreement. “Having you guys wasn’t nothing, and—”
“Fuck you,” he laughed, slapping my chest. “That’s some girl shit, anjad. Who taught you to talk like that?”
“Tala? Bro I don’t know, you hang out with girls too much and then you start saying this kind of thing.”
Bassem hadn’t changed much at core. There was the same glint in his eye when he assured me, seeing me look around from time to time, that none of the Shatila boys would bother me if I was with him. Or when he told me how much he was making. It was all hustle, that’s what it was. I spent all day lying under cars and he skulked around motorbikes with half a hand in his back pocket.
“They won’t fuck with you because they won’t fuck with me,” he said.
“That’s reassuring,” I said, and it seemed like the sarcasm had flown over his head because his chest popped out.
“Come to my place for dinner, I have things to show you,” he said.
“You live around here?”
“Yeah,” he said. I saw something come into his face. “You still at Bourj al-Barajneh?”
“I’m a mechanic. What do you want me to do?”
**
Another one of my cousins once said to me, I’ve never seen a swimming pool, or the ocean. He lived in Jenin, where I heard that he was never home after dark. Israeli soldiers came in and arrested rounds of young men all the time. There was never a trial or a lawyer. They would just be there, and then not.
It was a strange voice message. There was no context. I barely spoke to him, but I’d just asked how he was, because my mom had asked me to. She asked us to do this for all our cousins still in the land, especially those in the Gaza strip. It was hard to keep up with them. The voice message was a good example of this: I listened to his rough accent, the sound of motorbikes in the background. I was looking up at the sky. It was a sunset, but there was the view was co-constituted by the intrusion of telephone wires. In a place with less generator dust there might have been stars. Or maybe there were, somewhere further out where I’d never been, only heard of. Faraya. Jezzine. My cousin sounded delusional, almost scary. We were born into this, isn’t that wrong? He sounded like glass breaking.
“Every night, his mom has to worry about him,” my mom said. “Whether he’ll come back or not.”
“How are you even talking to her?”
“You think your mom is an idiot? I know how to use Whatsapp too. Look at this sticker.” She showed me a GIF of an IDF soldier stepping on the head of a little Arab boy.
“Astaghfirullah. Our land is ours.”
“God have mercy on all Palestinian mothers. My son is an idiot.”
“Don’t swear in front of your son.”
“Don’t tell your mother what to do.”
“Land you won’t fight for—”
“You can’t beat Israel,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me. “Remember when you almost died from shrapnel?” She said this the way Arabic speakers did, Is-ra-el. Sometimes watching Western news presenters on the issue, back when I was trying to improve my English, I would observe the way they rolled the vowel sounds together, the white presenters. Is-rael. Is-rail.
“He should get a job,” she continued.
“They don’t let him get a job.”
“He should stop worrying his poor mother.”
“His mother should stop being worried.”
“Fight wars after you know how to mop a floor, or cook a meal.”
“I know how to mop,” I protested. “I help you—”
“Every family is unhappy in its own way. Every son is ungrateful, and every mother suffers. God bless Palestinian sons. May they be liberated from dirtying their mother’s floors. I gave birth to you. What have you ever done with your little life?”
“I fix cars.”
**
I swung my leg over the back, made sure to leave some space between Bassem’s body and mine. I leaned away and texted, cinching my legs to balance as he weaved in and out of traffic.
“You ride bikes?” Bassem yelled.
“I’m a mechanic,” I yelled back.
“I just never figured you’d have the motor skills. You ride much?” Bassem made a sharp right turn, almost knocking into a jaywalker. They shouted at each other as the guy stalked off.
“No, I don’t have a bike.”
“What?”
Bassem was turning his head, straining to hear me over the onrushing wind.
“I don’t have a bike,” I yelled.
“I thought you said you ride.”
“I do, but I don’t have a bike.”
We wended down the highway, into a tunnel that was pitch-black, emerging out the other side. I let my body follow the slinking torso of our bike as we tore down the road. I watched the baby hairs growing up the back of Bassem’s neck, the fuzzy sides of his buzzcut. He was due a trip to the barber’s.
“Get one,” Bassem yelled.
“What?”
“Get one.”
“What? Bro, speak up,” Bassem yelled.
“CAN’T. AFFORD. IT.”
Bassem nodded and turned his head back to the road. We were climbing, then we were all up, parallel with the coast, streaming down the Corniche. I saw the famous rock-teeth, the grain siloes.
Bassem parked by the side and got off. He brushed up against me as he disembarked, his shoulder blade briefly pressed against my collarbone.
“Sorry.”
“Why are you always saying sorry?”
We walked along the road. The sun was setting. Everything was bathed in orange, so that the people I could see swimming—diving off rocks, kissing in the water—seemed like offerings in pools of light. Old men sat on deck chairs playing backgammon, a cigarette wisping in their hands.
“The work we do is simple, you know,” Bassem said. “Most of it is just civil service work.”
“Do you sell drugs?”
“I do that because I volunteered. I work security too. How much do you make now?”
“Hundred and twenty,” I admitted. Some colour rushed my cheeks.
“A month?” he said. He was trying to be nice, I could tell.
“No, a week. Obviously a month.”
“Fuck off, work for us and you’ll get two-fifty easily. Just for the mechanic job, and if you go do other thing... Fighters get six hundred easy. And you won’t have to work for Christians.”
We tossed most of our clothes onto the side of the road, so we were down to our boxers. We lowered ourselves into the water from a ladder leading from the road, and then swam out to the rocks.
“He won’t do anything to me.”
Bassem stopped, treading water. “He won’t do anything till he does.”
“How do I trust you? More than him?”
“You can work hospitals, or schools in Dahieh, in the Beqaa. Run the front desk or do the numbers. You can take a cut.”
“What if someone turns up at my door?”
“They won’t. You’ll make money.”
“You still live in Shatila,” I pointed out.
“Well,” he said, “my place is huge.”
Bassem started climbing one of the rocks, finding footholds and using his fingers. I followed suit. Water from his trunks trickled down and onto me. When he wasn’t looking down, I stuck my tongue out and tasted a drop. It was musky, full of salt. My stomach dropped out from under me.
A group of young guys smoked argileh on the rocks. “Kifkun,” they said.
We dapped each other up.
“Wait, I know you,” one of them said, recognizing Bassem. Bassem’s eyes shot up and his hand instinctively reached for his back pocket. I stepped back, my hind foot going to the edge of the rock.
“I’m also—” the guy said.
“—okay, okay,” Bassem said. His hand grasped at nothing before he let it settle on the waistband of his trunks.
The guy laughed, introduced himself. He and Bassem caught up, all smiles, and they realized they worked the same area. They offered to share their argileh with us, and one of them started rolling a joint, lighting it up and passing it around.
“It’s the benefits of the job,” Bassem said, taking a huge hit. I looked at the smoke curling around his face, his closed eyes. When we were young, there were always these guys in the neighbourhood, and we would know who they were. We were told to stay out of trouble around them, not to get in their way. They had big smiles and worked normal jobs, like the post office or the local manoushe shop. Now Bassem was one of them. And I could be too.
“If they’re on your side,” I said, remembering my step backwards.
“They always are,” Bassem said, passing me the joint.
“What happened to your face?” one of the guys asked.
I looked at Bassem and there was a memory, something ghostly between us.
“An old accident,” Bassem said, “between friends.”
One of the guys took a running leap off the rock and into the water, landing not too far from a small fishing boat. He twisted and turned in the air. For a moment he’d looked like a dolphin arcing back towards the water. The bright blue of the Mediterranean, the yachts of Zaituna Bay.
**
The year Tala made her move was the year Tomas became Muslim. They decided to get married. Rather, Tala incepted the idea and Tomas, trusting and, truthfully, probably in possession of the idea himself, acquired a copy of the Quran and set about finding out more about becoming Muslim would entail. In one of our last conversations, Tomas told me he’d started to really become inspired by the life of the Prophet. So much virtue comes from obligational charity, he said, far above and beyond what a Judeo-Christian culture advocates for. Who is my neighbour? he asked. And how may I lift him to where I am?
In the last weeks, his Arabic had gotten so good he’d started to read Khalil Gibran in the original. He still often came toting copies of Rusted Radishes, the periodical issued by the American University of Beirut. And there he would sit at our cramped living room table, marking up his copy of The Prophet, in Arabic, while next to him Tala marked up the latest Rusted Radishes issue, in English. He’d plug in a pair of earphones and pass one side to Tala, their feet drumming on the floor.
These pieces of domestic bliss were irritating. What would the neighbours say? It got worse. My mom would play Ziad Rahbani after dessert, like a Westerner’s fantasy, and everyone would get up and dance. By then Tomas could dance because Tala had taught him. He even knew dabke.
I suppose the truth was my mom knew we could operate under cover of the visiting foreigner. This is how they are, people’d say, to host them is to accept their ways.
A few weeks before their planned wedding, Tomas was walking along Husseinaya street looking for food . Family friends were coming over to see Tala’s white boy so Tomas had been sent to get more food to help my furious, incandescent mother.
In the afternoon, two suicide bombers attacked the street . They were Islamic State taking revenge for support rendered to Assad in the Syrian civil war. A passer-by jumped on the second suicide bomber, saving many people. A third suicide bomber was killed by the first detonation.
Thirty-seven people were killed. One of them was Tomas. When we found him in the morgue his legs were torn off and his right arm gone. Half his face was burnt off and his shattered skull was showing. A shard hung by a thread.
When I told Bassem I would join them, he replied that he’d come by to pass me my pager.
Every day when I went to work, the thing I looked forward to the most was the pain of honest labour. It was the feel of gravel underneath the back, car exhaust and oil and the slick-if-lucky, rusted-if-not feel of my tools in my hand. “Ça va?” Michael would ask, and I would grunt. It was one of the few French phrases I picked up to lubricate our conversations. The hours went by like this, pleasurable because of honest work. Sweat was good, sweat was proof that I was still here; grief was good, grief was proof that we loved each other.
It was what it was. Tala didn’t even go to the morgue.
