The Days of Miracles and Wonders
An Epic of the New World Disorder.
Somerville House, Toronto, Canada; Canongate, Edinburgh, U.K. 1997
Canongate paperback 1998. Interlink Books USA, 1999 (paperback).
Red, glistening on a ruined carpet. A skiing holiday
at Becharre... The smile on a face. Tender hands...
"Begin at the beginning, Angelopoulos! None of these shaggy dog stories..."
"I was born into an immigrant family in Queens. My life was like being in
a big, jovial bearpit. There were a thousand relatives, who refused to leave.
My mother had been an acrobat, in the Yugoslav Circus. My father was the last
Greek Trotskyist to come down from the mountains after the Greek Civil War. He
crossed the border, after Stalin betrayed the guerrillas to the British and abandoned
them to their fate. He bummed about Yugoslavia, and was taken on as a rigger
in a Serbian circus. My mother was living with the strong man at the time, a
man named Popov. My father challenged him to a fist fight, to win my mother's
heart. He was beaten to a pulp seventeen times. In the end, to save him from
annihila-tion, my mother ran off with him to Italy, where they were married in
Milan. She had relatives there, who also had relatives in the United States.
She travelled pregnant, in steerage, across the Atlantic, holding me in for three
extra weeks so she could give birth to an American baby. Then, in America, she
began eating, and became immensely fat. My father, who had sustained abdominal
damage from his encounters with the strong man Popov, developed various ailments
and I had to visit him constantly in hospital. I became fascinated by the doctors,
who could do nothing for my father except relieve his pains and prescribe pills.
I wandered about the corridors and wards, numbed by the mysteries of illness
and pain, watching the chaos of the emergency rooms where poor people waited
in endless patience to be paid attention to. Most were hispanics and blacks.
I made friends with some of the interns, who showed me textbooks and charts.
Then my father died, and I was enraged that nothing could be done to save his
life. My mother became withdrawn and ate even more voraciously, living on pastries,
cakes and memories. But in between his illnesses my father had made contacts
with various radicals around the city, socialists, Trotskyists, of all ethnic
groups. I became involved with a group of Puerto Rican militants. They taught
me the life of the streets. I became the only Greek Puerto Rican. But the city
jungle didn't appeal to me. My uncle, a clever man, who dealt in automobile scrap,
offered to pay my way through medical school. He swept me off the streets. But
I still kept up an interest in politics. The third world, Latin America, Africa,
Asia, the Middle East."
"Fuck the Middle East! Tell us about New York women."
"No, give us another Japanese menu. The different kinds of sushi - "
"Ike, Ogake, Ikenaki, Idami, Tatami, Ikebaku, Okedi..."
"He's making it all up..."
"Otaki, Mitsudami, Hokaiddo, Giderah, Zakebani..."
The silence outside is deafening. Sometimes the Amal mortarmen let us get through
the night. Sometimes not. The Syrians prefer a nine-to-five bombardment, with
three meal breaks. Evenings their officers sit and play shesh-besh and dream
about the whores out of reach in the East Beirut brothels. There is some action
in the western sector, by the ruins of the big hotels, but those girls risk the
dangers of interruption by the zealots of one or other of the Hizballah groups
which has not been paid sufficient hush money to cancel out the Wrath of Allah.
Even masturbation is an offence against God, of course. Oh, how much defiance
of the Almighty takes place in the stealthy, slow small hours! Myself, fatigue
has practically drained me of lustful thoughts, let alone practice... Whatever
memory has not already dulled. Though Angelopoulos thrives, on the complicated
schemes and stratagems he devises to navigate Norwegian Anneka's fiords. We may
be, after all, in our absurd statelet, a normal taboo ridden Arab country, but
we have learned to turn blind eyes and ears to the loud moaning of our senior
medical personnel on their inspection tours of blind alleys, temporarily vacated
rooms and cellars and even roofs, braving the lethal metal ejaculations of the
enemy's war machine. We even managed to stop the admiring cries of Jamil the
kebab vendor, who used to thrust his huge head from his bunker every time that
husky breath ensued from some hidden corner, yelling out: "Allahu akbar!
Bismillah el rahim!"
Human foibles. The young men and women of our Lilliputian entity have found a
different solution to their needs. Amazingly, in all this carnage, we perform
marriages, at least two or three times a week. We lost our kadi, early in the
siege, to a stray bullet, and never had a priest, so Angelopoulos, as the senior
figure of authority, performs the ceremonies and records the deeds, not to speak
of burying the dead. (He has convinced the devout that circumcisions can be put
off for the duration. Everyone knows that the barber, Hakim, is available, though
the poor man's trembling shell shocked hands keep even the unshaved away from
his door.) More often than not, the young man dashes off, before he can even
kiss the bride, let alone carry out his obligations, to confront the latest shelling,
only to be brought back to the clinic an hour later, bleeding from a dozen places
or minus a hand or a leg. We have invented new, terrifying conjunctions. A wedding
and burial of the same person in one day. The manufacture of instant widows.
And other innovative social forms.
Night dread. Eventually fatigue takes over, dropping us where we sit like rag
dolls. The morning waking us, occasionally, to an eery silence. We crawl out
warily to examine the latest town planning carried out by the enemy's firepower.
Ruined houses reduced by another few feet, a new arrangement of iron girder latticework
framing the dull hazy sky. An alley, passable yesterday, rubble choked today.
The corrugated iron barricades, dented and twisted by shells and bullets into
a kind of modern artwork, screaming against the ills of war. The electric wires,
rigged and rerigged every day to hook over the main cables to steal the city's
electricity, were down, and Jamil Kebab already clambering dangerously on a shattered
rooftop, with rubber gloves, to rehook the live wires. A Beirut custom antedating
the siege, one of the city's favourite forms of Russian Roulette. Cursing, the
huge man, with his pot belly and massive, sweating arms, lifts up the fallen
wires and begins throwing them over the mains. From below, Abu Daoud, the Fatah
commander, waves and shouts at him: "Get down, you fucking lunatic!" But
the kebab vendor just spits, spraying saliva towards the enemy, shouting back: "Let
them shoot! I'll skewer their balls!"
Abu Daoud, a scarred, white haired man with one eye, one a half ears, eight toes
and, amazingly, nine fingers, shrugs and gives up, limping agilely over the rubble
towards the front line, followed by his entourage of armed teenagers. People's
heads warily pop out from window spaces, cracks in walls, holes in the ground.
From behind a heap of rubble old Umm Mahmud comes into view, wielding an old
broomstick to sweep the mess away. Stones, gravel, pulverised concrete, metal
shards, spent shells, splinters of wood and lumps of asphalt, driven across Abu
Daoud's path. He restrains her gently. Umm Mahmud suffers from senile dementia,
and she performs this task come rain of bullets or calm, untill dragged physically
to safety, in the belief that she is keeping order in the courtyard of her Jaffa
home, in 1946, or 1935, or 1926, whatever. Her dead parents, her absent or missing
or dead brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, sons, daughters and grandchildren,
nephews and nieces have all merged into a salad of interchangeable personalities,
surrounding her as she labours on, an endless jabber of memories trickling from
her toothless mouth. And then suddenly she might freeze, like a bent stick, lifting
a bony hand at the sky, screeching vitriolic curses at the Turks, the British,
the French, the Americans and the Jews.
"God strike them blind! Cut off their legs! Shrivel their penises! Burn
the seed in their wombs! God strike down Winston Churchill!" In her most
coherent moments she imagined it was the British who were besieging the camp.
Field Marshall "Ukhinlek" was orchestrating the shelling from the top
of the stadium. Umm Mahmud's first husband had been hanged by the British in
Acre prison in 1937, for his part in ambushing and wiping out a British patrol
in the Arab Revolt. Later she became a member of the Women's Committee of the
Trade Unions of Palestine. She spoke at forums, agitated, went to prison, travelled
all over the Arab world. Now, ashrivelled hulk, she shouted abuse at the sky.
In his eyrie, General "Ukhinlek" looked down, unpityingly, at the fruits
of his enterprise, and winked.
"God strike them blind!"
"Benjamin!" The Israeli hostage came forward to relieve Abu Daoud of
the old woman, coaxing her back down to safety in the cellars. For some reason
she is calmed by his soft voice in Hebrew. She jabbers at him about the Jews,
he sings her lullabies in German. They are a sight to see, he, Mad Latif and
the old woman, scavenging together in the alleys for scrap to fill the sandbag
barricades.
The morning lull cannot last long. A burst of machinegun fire, from the forward
positions. Mortars, plopping from the stadium. That terrible incoming whistle.
The fighters crouch behind the piles of stones and crumbled walls. I hold tight
to my own M16 carbine, well bought from a mercenary Phalange source, crawl over
debris and detritus to reach Abu Daoud's side.
"Another day, another dollar." He shouts wryly in the pandemonium.
He once ran a falafel store, in New York. Then one day two skullcapped youths
from the Jewish Defence League, assuming he was someone else, brought a poster
calling for the expulsion of all Arabs from "the Land of Israel" and
asked him if they could put it up on his wall. He pulled out a gun and asked
if they wanted to expel one right now. They told him coolly that he didn't bother
them, as he had already expelled himself. The next day he sold his store to an
Armenian colleague and bought a one way ticket to Amman. This was back in '69.
And much blood flowed under the dry wadi bridges from then, and in the running
rivers, and the streets...
"Ah! They're playing our tune!"
A hit, on the building behind us, showered dust and fragments onto our hair.
We had, at Angelopoulos's suggestion, constructed a multi-layered system of barriers,
rooms within rooms, divided by iron sheets. Even armour piercing shells would
eventually slow down and be stopped short of the inhabited inner layers. We spread
metal sheets and nets over the alleyways, so the bombs would spring off and ricochet
harmlessly into the neutral zones. This provided defence for the families, but
in the front lines it was luck, or fate. A boy on Abu Daoud's right scrambled
boldly up the parapet of stones, hefting his Kalashnikov AK47, which was twice
his size. Tiny Ali, the carpenter's son. He let fly, emptying his magazine at
nothing. Abu Daoud's deputy, Abu Salim, scrabbled forward to pull the boy down.
But the replying burst struck them both, tearing out a piece of the boy's shoulder
and clipping Abu Salim's head. They fell at our feet. "Casualty!" I
cried out. A group of four women appeared from nowhere, spreading out two big
white sheets. We laid Tiny Ali on one, Abu Salim on the other. Running, kicking
stones out of the way, leaping from wall to wall, bursting through to the inner
sanctum of the clinic and the emergency room, where Anneka and Klaus are gowned
and ready, to deal with Tiny Ali and prepare Abu Salim for Doctor Angel's operating
table. The harsh breath, the gasping oxygen machines, the shining spotlights
of the battery driven lights, the drips, the clamps, the gloved hands. The kingdom
of the healing knives.
Love is splattered with blood and viscera, razoredged, cutting deep.
"Its a craniotomy, my friends."
The first head case of the day...
 |
| |
|
|
|
