sahlan,” they said. Welcome.
A man tapped me on the shoulder.
“What’s your name, young man?”
“Samir.”
“Let me carry that for you, Samir,” he said, smiling and taking the salad bowl from me.
All of a sudden we heard Arabic music coming from our living-room window. A few seconds later, Hakim’s face appeared, bright red.
“It’s working!”
“Are you sure it’s not tennis?” Father shouted from the roof.
“It’s music!” shouted Hakim. “Rotana TV!”
“Music!” shouted another man, jumping up. And before I knew it, this stranger grabbed me by the hands and had me dancing in circles, hopping from one leg to the other and twirling like a merry-go-round.
“Louder, Hakim!” Father called down. Hakim disappeared from the window. Moments later, Arabic music was reverberating from our living-room window out onto the street. Drums, tambourines, zithers, fiddles, and flutes blended into a thousand and one notes, followed by a woman’s voice. People began to dance, clapping to the rhythm. The children twirled in unsteady circles. The men picked them up and spun them around while the women cheered and trilled with excitement. Then everyone lined up, arms across each other’s shoulders, to dance and stomp the dabke. It was crazy. It was magical! At this moment, there was nothing that would have indicated we were living in Germany. This could have been a side street in Zahle, the city where Father was born at the foot of the Lebanon Mountains. Zahle, city of wine and poetry, city of writers and poets. Around us, nothing but Lebanese people, talking and eating and partying in Lebanese fashion.
Then Father came out of the house. He was limping a little, as he always did if he’d been exerting himself. But he was smiling and dancing in quick little steps, whistling to the music, with Hakim and young Khalil in tow. The other dancers created a path for him, slapped him on the back, hugged him, and welcomed him too with an “Ahlan wa sahlan”.
I looked over at my sister, who was clinging in wonder to our mother’s leg, her big round eyes taking in all these people who greeted us like old friends, like a family they knew well, a family that had been living here for ages.
I lay in bed some time later, satiated, sleepy, and exhausted. The music and the babble of voices still rang in my ears. Snapshots of the day kept flashing through my mind—the dishes of vine leaves, olives, hummus, and fattoush; the barbecued meat, olives, pies, and flatbread; star anise, sesame, saffron. I saw all the different families. The women wiping the mouths of children wriggling on their laps. The men stroking their moustaches while they smoked shisha, laughing and chatting as if this street was a world of its own, a world that belonged only to them. Hakim telling them his jokes. Yasmin, two years older than me, sitting to one side with pencil and paper, her unruly black locks falling into her face as she drew. Every now and again she would brush them across her forehead with the back of her hand, or blow the strands of hair out of her eyes, giving me a wave whenever I looked over at her. And Mother, smiling that private smile of hers. The happy feeling of having arrived. This was our place, our home. Here people helped each other. Here no one needed a compass. All the satellite dishes on our street pointed 26 degrees east.
And in the thick of it all, Father, who loved a party and limped in circles around all his new friends, like a satellite in orbit.
-
2
A few days later, the two of us were relaxing by the lake. The mountain range on the other side etched a restless cardiogram on the sky, spiking into the clouds. We were at rest, though. Father-and-son time. A day to ourselves. At the water’s edge, the densely cloaked fir trees seemed so firmly rooted that nothing could topple them. The two of us on the grass, each holding a sharp stone, with a couple of dozen walnuts on the grass in front of us.
“Careful—try not to damage the shell too much,” Father had said. “Ideally, we want both halves to stay intact.”
I didn’t know what he was planning to do, but it didn’t matter. I was just happy to be here, with him. The days had flown; now the packing boxes were all folded up in the basement, everything had been put away in the cupboards, and the smell of fresh paint had faded. Now the living room smelled of fresh laundry. And if there was no laundry on the line, the living room smelled of my parents, since they spent a lot of time in it. The kitchen smelled of washing-up, or of spices, or of the flour Mother sprinkled on the rolled-out dough when she was making flatbread. The bathroom smelled of soap, lemon-scented cleaner, or shampoo, often with the smell of damp towels mixed in. It all smelled of home. The halls smelled of shoes, but that didn’t matter; it showed that someone lived here, someone who was always going in and out, who came back here, took off their shoes, and walked around the apartment, absorbing the smells of this family. And all around us: more families. Whenever I left the house, someone would nod or give a friendly wave; moustachioed men in berets would be sitting at folding tables near the edge of the pavement, playing backgammon or cards, eating pistachios and blowing rings of shisha smoke around our neighbourhood. I felt at home.
We cracked the walnuts open with our sharp stones, doing our best not to damage the shells. It was a warm afternoon in late summer. Scattered clouds created strange, fanciful shapes in the sky; a gentle breeze whispered secrets across the water. Two dragon flies circled above us. Father noticed that I kept looking over at the fir trees on the water’s edge.
“Shame they’re not cedars.”
Cedars. Even the sound of the word set me dreaming.
“But you like them all the same?”
“Mhmm.”
“Then you would love cedars. They’re the most beautiful trees of all.”
“I know,” I whispered. Not that I’d ever seen any—a fact that bothered me. I desperately wanted to be able to join in the conversation when the men sat around together, wallowing in memories.
“Do you know why the cedar is on our flag?”
“Because it’s the most beautiful tree of all?”
Father laughed.
“Because it is the strongest tree of all. The cedar is the queen of all plants.”
“Why?”
“That’s what the Phoenicians called it.” As always when he spoke of Lebanon, his voice was charged with secret longing and imbued with the undertones of someone speaking about a lover they missed very deeply. “They built ships out of cedar. It made them very powerful traders. The Egyptians used our cedar to embalm their dead, and King Solomon built his temple in Jerusalem out of it. Imagine—our cedars on Mount Zion, and in the pyramids of the Valley of the Kings …”
I conjured up images of everything Father described, as vividly and colourfully as any seven-year-old does when their father tells a story with passion and conviction.
Father often spoke of Lebanon’s magnificent cedar groves. In his childhood and youth he must have spent a lot of time in the Chouf Mountains. He would sit in the shade of the giant, centuries-old trees and inhale the reassuring, resiny smell of a secure future. In the shelter of the conifers, beneath a dense needle canopy, he would sit with his back against a cedar trunk, his gaze wandering across sparsely populated mountain valleys
