World Editions Ltd., London
World Editions
New York/London/Amsterdam
Copyright © Piper Verlag GmbH, München/Berlin, 2016
English translation copyright © Sinéad Crowe and Rachel McNicholl, 2019
Cover image © Mohamad Itani / Plainpicture / Hollandse Hoogte
Author’s portrait © Marvin Ruppert
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is available
ISBN Trade paperback 978-1-64286-011-5
ISBN E-book 978-1-64286-030-6
First published as Am Ende bleiben die Zedern in Germany in 2016 by Piper Verlag GmbH
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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For Kathleen
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If you think you understand Lebanon, it’s because someone has not explained it to you properly.
Lebanese saying
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I
How was I to know I’d be haunted by that photo forever?
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Prologue
Bright lights, throbbing sounds. Beirut by night, a sparkling beauty, a twinkling tiara, a breathless trail of flickering lights. As a child, I loved to imagine myself here someday. Now there’s a knife stuck in my ribs, and the pain shooting through my chest is so intense I can’t even scream. But we’re brothers, I want to shout, as they tear the rucksack off my back and kick me till I sink to my knees. The pavement is warm. The wind is coming in from the Corniche; I can hear the sea lapping at the shore and music drifting out of the restaurants along the street. I can smell the salt in the air, and the dust and the heat. I can taste blood, a metallic trickle on my lips. Fear wells up inside me, and rage. I’m no stranger here, I want to shout after them. Their echoing footsteps taunt me. I have roots here, I want to cry out, but all I manage is a gurgle.
I see my father’s face. His silhouette framed in the bedroom door, that last shared moment before my sleepy young eyes closed. I wonder whether time and regret have haunted him.
I remember the verse the old man with the beard had muttered: … then no one responding to a cry would be there for them, nor would they be saved.
Then I remember the rucksack. But it’s not the money or my passport I’m thinking of—they’re gone. It’s the photo in the inside pocket. And his diary. All gone. The pain is so bad I almost pass out.
I am responsible for a man’s death, I think.
Then, as the blood seeps out of my chest: Pull yourself together. It must mean something. A sign.
The men’s footsteps fade and I am alone; all I can hear now is my own heartbeat.
A strange sense of calm comes over me. If I survive this, I think, it will be for a reason. My journey won’t be over yet. I’ll make one last attempt to find him.
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1
1992.
Father was standing on the roof—balancing, rather. I was standing below, shielding my eyes with one hand and squinting up at him, silhouetted like a tightrope walker against the summer sky. My sister sat on the grass, waving a dandelion head and watching the tiny seed parachutes twirl. Her legs were bent at the kind of unnatural angles only little children can achieve.
“Just another little bit,” our father shouted down cheerfully as he was adjusting the satellite dish, his legs spread wide to retain his balance. “How about now?”
On the first floor, Hakim stuck his head out the window and shouted: “No, now there’s Koreans on the TV.”
“Koreans?”
“Yeah, and ping-pong.”
“Ping-pong. How about the commentary? Is that Korean too?”
“No. Russian. Koreans playing ping-pong, and a Russian commentator.”
“We don’t want ping-pong, do we?”
“You might be too far to the right.”
By now my head was also caught up in a game of ping-pong, looking back and forth to follow their conversation. Father pulled a spanner out of his pocket and loosened the nuts on the mounting. Then he produced a compass and skewed the satellite dish a bit more to the left.
“Don’t forget—26 degrees east,” shouted Hakim, before his grey head vanished back into the living room.
Before going up on the roof, Father had given me a detailed explanation. We had been standing on the small strip of grass in front of our building. The ladder was already up against the wall. Sunlight shimmered through the crown of the cherry tree and cast magical shadows on the pavement.
“Space is full of satellites,” he said, “ten thousand of them and more, orbiting the earth. They tell us what the weather will be like, they survey earth as well as other stars and planets, and they relay TV to us. Most of them offer pretty awful TV, but some of them have good programmes. We want the satellite with the best TV, which is just about there.” He looked at the compass in his hand and kept rotating it until the needle lined up with the 26-degree mark on the right-hand side. He pointed at the sky, and my eyes followed his finger.
“Is it always there?”
“Always,” he said, and bent down, stroking my sister’s head before picking up two cherries that lay in the grass. He put one of them in his mouth. He held the other out at our eye level, and, holding the stone of the eaten cherry in the fingertips of his other hand, revolved the stone around the whole cherry. “It travels around the earth at the same speed as the earth spins on its axis.” He drew a slow semicircle in the sky with the stone. “That’s why it’s always in the same position”.
The idea of extra-terrestrial TV appealed to me.
