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 I’d never seen this side of him before. Sure, he could be grumpy on occasion, and if I got up to mischief, he might get cross and tell me off, but such moods were fleeting shadows compared to his current state of mind. His behaviour now was uncharacteristic, both of the rogue who was always thinking of new ways to enjoy life and of the calm, measured father I’d seen in quiet moments. Mother, who had known him for much longer than me, was bewildered too, which unnerved me even more, as she had obviously never encountered this side of him either. He ignored her, barely replied to her questions, retreated into himself. It was as if the quiet, pensive part of him had mutated into something darker. The events in Lebanon that found their way onto our TV had put him under a spell, like black magic. All I could do was tell myself it was a passing phase, a reaction to the stress of moving, and so, like a dog that’s not sure if it’s done something wrong, I skulked around his legs every now and then, or quietly observed him from a corner. I just hoped his mood didn’t have anything to do with our new home; I was afraid we’d have to move again if he didn’t like our new flat. Being afraid of anything in relation to my father was new. Since my little sister had arrived, we were one big family living in a big flat. But now Father seemed sad.
I’d never seen him really sad before. Usually he was like a captain in whose wake everyone wanted to follow, someone who never had any difficulty striking up a conversation with strangers. He won people over with ease. The fact that he never once forgot a name certainly helped. If we were walking through town and he spotted someone on the other side of the street, even someone he’d met only briefly several weeks earlier, he would smile, raise his hand in greeting, and call the person’s name. How many times did we stop to chat to a Mr al-Qasimi, a Mrs Fedorov, the el-Tayeb or Schmid family, a Bilaal, an Ivana, or an Inge? I never once got the impression these people weren’t just as happy to stop and chat. Small talk was Father’s trump card, because he remembered not just people’s names, but also every other detail about them. He would casually ask, “How are the kids doing?” or “How is the treatment going? Is your back any better?” or “Did you sort out those squeaky brakes?” He would often offer to help: “If your shoulder is still bothering you, we’ll get your groceries for you—just give us a list and Samir will bring you back whatever you need.” Or: “How are you getting on with the house? Is your attic finished? If you need someone to help put in the insulation, give me a ring.” Everyone who spoke to Father soon felt as if they’d known him for years, as if they were friends, even. I was often struck by the warmth with which he greeted people. He’d never shake a stranger’s hand without resting his left hand on their shoulder for a moment. Or else he’d shake the person’s hand with both of his. A cordial gesture, as if they were closing a deal, and indeed I often felt that was how he saw it too: Welcome! You’re part of my world now.
Although he wasn’t particularly tall, to me he seemed like a lighthouse, someone who oriented you, someone you could see from a distance. I’m certain many others saw him that way too. At the market, he would greet the traders, skilfully ask how they were doing, and get such an easy conversation going that they barely noticed when he got down to business. He loved haggling. He was a true Arab in that regard. He was always trying his luck, and not just when he took me to the market. Even in the supermarket, in the aisle where the porridge oats and ready meals were, he might take a bemused shop assistant aside, and, with a conspiratorial expression on his face, whisper, “The cheese … can you do any better on the price?”
And he sang. He was a real Arab in that way too. He would sing on the street, unperturbed by the looks people gave him. “Germans don’t burst into song on the street,” he once said to me as we strolled back from the market hand-in-hand, laden with bags of fresh fruit and vegetables. It was a day made for singing, a day like a summer’s tune: sunshine, awnings, children with chocolate ice cream smeared around their mouths, couples holding hands, a dreadlocked boy in cut-off jeans rattling over the kerb on his skateboard.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because they care too much what other people think. They’re worried people will think they’re crazy if they start
