kings.
If where we lived bothered my father, he didn’t let it show, though I may have been too young to notice. He liked his job in the youth centre, and Mother managed to build up a regular customer base for her dresses. They were content, my parents, but money was always scarce. Father regularly had to send money home to his mother, my grandmother, who had refused to leave the country when they did. He explained this to me many times. The money was mainly for doctor’s bills and medicine. One day when I asked why she hadn’t left with them in the first place, or why she couldn’t at least join us in Germany now, he just smiled and said, “It’s Lebanon. No one wants to leave.”
During our seventh year in that flat, Mother became pregnant for the second time. Now the place was definitely too small, and since we lived on the sixth floor, and the lift broke down almost every day, my parents decided it was time to move. Hakim agreed. Yasmin and I were thrilled. Besides, we had run out of flowers by then.
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5
In that warm late summer of 1992 when we found our new home, I was seven, Yasmin nine. She and Hakim moved into the flat below us, which was similar in layout but a little smaller. On this street, nearly all the satellite dishes pointed 26 degrees east. We were happy. In the schoolyard, we swapped Diddl Mouse characters and sealed friendships with colourful bracelets; Bill Clinton took the presidential oath; and Take That sang “Could It Be Magic.” In Lebanon, the general election was held, and everything seemed to be heading in the right direction. Things were looking good. I felt like I was part of an animal pack calmly awaiting autumn and winter, safe in the knowledge that we had plentiful supplies and a warm and cosy den.
So there we were a few weeks after moving in, watching TV in the living room, the usual images of post-election Beirut. Hakim had told me the Syrian joke and I’d laughed. Father didn’t laugh, though, which reminded me how distracted he’d seemed of late and how rarely he was in good humour. Instead, he’d scratch the back of his neck abstractedly, seeming to stare right through the walls, yet not seeing anything. He spoke very little and withdrew into himself. In the evenings he would sometimes disappear for hours at a time after dinner; out walking, he said. If I started putting on my shoes and jacket in the hall to go with him, he’d be gone before I was ready, the door closed behind him. Sometimes I imagined that his limp was worse when he got back. I didn’t know my father without the limp. It was part of him, as normal as the colour of his eyes. If you didn’t know he had a limp, you’d barely notice it, except when Father exerted himself. He still walked very straight, but his head was bowed and he rarely looked at me. Whenever I managed to catch his eye, he’d give me a smile, but he wouldn’t say much, and he’d usually turn away quickly, as if he felt ill at ease or caught out. It sounded more like he was sighing than breathing then, a strained breath coming from somewhere very deep, as if he’d had to climb a thousand steps. Sometimes, in passing, he would stroke my head with his big hand. His eyes looked red occasionally, as if he’d been crying. But that’s just a guess—I never did see Father cry.
Then there was the other extreme. Times I’d look over at him and find him staring at me, his eyes glued to me as if I had some weird marking on my forehead. Moments when I felt there was a tortured look in his eyes, just for a split second, before he’d catch me watching him and force a little smile. If he gave me a hug when he was in this kind of mood, he’d squeeze me far too tight, wouldn’t want to let go. I’d stick it out, even if it nearly hurt. And if he spoke to me in moments like these, he’d talk really fast, without so much as a pause, as if he was trying to stop me getting up and leaving, to keep me sitting there listening. He’d gesticulate wildly and try to make it all sound very exciting, which worked every time. He did all this with my sister too, though I don’t think she really got it. What worried me most of all about Father’s behaviour was that he didn’t talk to Mother. If she addressed him, he would just lift his head slowly and nod in awkward silence. For some reason, he couldn’t bear to look her in the eye.
Only a few days earlier, we’d been at the lake with our nutshell ships. If I had to pinpoint a time when his behaviour changed, I’d say it was that day. Or rather, that night. After we’d come home from the lake, Father put on a slide show. That evening is burned into my memory. It is the reason why I remember that summer and the following autumn as if in sepia: every scene is tinged with a nostalgic glow and tightly cocooned by my memories.
I didn’t even know it existed, the box Father placed on the living-room table in front of us. It never caught my attention when we were moving. Now Father had taken it from one of the shelves, turned to face us, and carried it over with great ceremony.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“You’ll see in a minute,” he said, smiling mysteriously.
Mother smiled too. She still smiled a lot back then. I don’t have many memories of my parents like that. Standing close together. So conspiratorial, so affectionate. I never saw them like that again after that evening. They had clearly planned it together and were looking forward to letting us in on the secret. I was very excited. I noticed that Mother was wearing her perfume, even though it was just us. I knew where she kept it in the bathroom, the little bottle with Arzet Lebanon written on it, and I imagined her standing at the mirror, dabbing a drop or two on her neck. She smelt divine.
“You smell nice,” I said.
“Thank you, Samir,” she replied, stroking my cheek.
At that very moment, there was a knock on the door.
“Shall I get it?” she asked.
“No, I’ll go,” Father said, planting a quick kiss on her forehead. Another thing I very rarely witnessed.
Hakim and Yasmin were at the door. She was wearing a blue dress with white dots and looked like an almost cloudless blue sky. Hakim had his arms clamped around a large object that I couldn’t identify, as it was covered by a dark cloth. It seemed pretty heavy because Hakim practically staggered the last few metres into the living room, where he carefully deposited the object on the table.
“What’s that?”
“You’ll see in a minute,” he said.
“That’s what Baba said too.”
“It must be true, then.”
When I looked at Yasmin, asking with my eyes what her father had just lugged into our living room, she just shrugged.
Father told us to take a seat. The three grown-ups remained standing. I took my sister on my lap; she showed no interest but was happy to suck her soother. Yasmin sat beside us.
“Hakim,” said Father, raising his index finger, “drumroll, please!”
Hakim started making drumroll noises and beating invisible drumsticks. Father approached the table, grabbed the cloth between thumb and index finger, and swept it off the object underneath, like a magician performing his favourite trick: “Ta-da!”
On the table was something grey that looked a bit like a snouted raccoon or coatimundi. Could it be a coati-robot? It had a rectangular metal base with an oval structure on top from which a longish tube projected like a snout. I hadn’t a clue what it was.
“What is that?”
“A Leitz Prado,” exclaimed Father.
“A what?” said Yasmin, her eyebrows raised.
“A Leitz Prado,” he repeated, still in character, as
