Everything that she’d said about Yusuf is still true. Even though he knew the story of how she fell silent after my brother Baha’’s murder, he was not surprised at her words. But her words surprised me, like summer rain. They revived me and helped me recover from the wearying journey that lasted more than two days. I didn’t care what she’d said about my uncle Yusuf, my only concern was that she had spoken after her long silence. In the car on the way to the house, my uncle hugged her and she cried while my father looked out of the car window at people, buildings and streets. His face was red. Sweat ran down both sides of his head and neck as though he was in a sauna. He was still wearing the woolen sweater that he’d worn to travel in from Lebanon. He insisted that it was winter and wouldn’t take it off even though it was so hot in Adelaide. At that moment he seemed weak and yielding, with no power or might. He stuck his head out of the car window, turning it every which way to look at buildings and people walking by as though watching a film that was whizzing past him. He kept repeating, like a broken record, “Ism Allah, Ism Allah, keep the Evil Eye far away.”
My uncle hadn’t changed, that’s what my mother said. But he had really started to belong to his new country over there — from a Syrian Nationalist to an Australian no different from the Anglo-Saxons. This didn’t prevent him from also being an active and influential member of the Druze association that’s had many different names throughout the different stages of the life of the Druze in Australia. It was first established as the Syrian Druze Association, then after Lebanese independence it became the Lebanese-Australian Association for the Druze. After the emigration of a large number of the Druze to Australia in the 1960s, before the civil war in Lebanon, the name changed three more times. It finally became and remained the Australian Druze Association and Yusuf is now in charge of it.
We stayed in my uncle’s house for a few months before we found a house to move into. We rented a house nearby, in an area with few buildings other than a number of nearly identical houses all lined up next to each other on one side of the street. We left my uncle’s house carrying many things that we’d accumulated. But we’d lost some of my mother’s complicity with my uncle, a complicity that had always felt alive and burning to us, all those years that we were far away from him.
We were not the only Lebanese in the neighborhood; there were many Lebanese families, especially Christians and Druze. Five Lebanese families lived on our same street. Others lived on the streets that branched off ours and it didn’t take us long to meet them. Their gardens revealed that the same people had lived here for a long time. These Lebanese families cared for their gardens and grew trees that reminded them of their villages and perhaps even their homes in the Lebanese mountains.
Adelaide is a city of churches. In the neighborhood where we lived there were at least four small churches that the Christian Lebanese attended every Sunday. These people had had to immigrate again after they were first displaced from their villages in the Lebanese mountains. In the nearby neighborhoods, some of the Protestant churches where only a few people prayed had transformed into banks and coffee shops and real-estate offices and houses for people who were hippies in the sixties.
Perhaps the thing that made my father the happiest about our new house was that it was located near a Lebanese bakery that had opened just one year before we arrived in Adelaide. He would go by himself to the Awaziz Bakery on Victoria Street, which branched off our street, to buy Lebanese bread and manaqeesh covered in olive oil and zaatar. The bakery sold not just bread and manaqeesh but also various pickles, zaatar and sumac, which my mother Nadia bought to put in fattoush. After a while, we started to see other things on the bakery’s shelves, like cinnamon, coffee beans and apple-scented tobacco. Sometimes, in addition to these things, the owner of the bakery stocked small Lebanese flags, made in China, to respond to his customers’ longing for Lebanon.
Why’d you come back to Lebanon? Why’d you return? What can you possibly expect from this country?
Olga repeats these same questions from the moment of my return to Beirut as though she doesn’t know the answer.
Is it true that her incurable illness is what made me come back to Beirut? Or was it the news from the Ministry of the Displaced about reclaiming our house? Or did I come to settle old scores with a war that broke up my family, destroyed our dreams and every kind of permanence? Did I return to search for my friend Georges, who never made it to Australia? I waited for him to join me and he disappeared. They said that he left Lebanon from the port at Jounieh, but he never arrived. Perhaps he was kidnapped. Perhaps he never left and remained in Lebanon — imprisoned, lost or murdered, his corpse buried somewhere that no one in his family can find. He never reached his destination, just like so many people who left their own places for others and never arrived. On the ship that I boarded that day for Larnaca, they said that his name was recorded in the log but that no one had seen him. They said that he bade his family farewell at home and left for the port long before the ship put to sea.
What’d you come back for? Olga repeats, and then when I don’t answer, she draws me to her and hugs me, scattering kisses all over my hair, face, mouth and neck. Angry? she asks me, then repeats her question: What’d you come back for?
Olga’s question takes me back to an earlier fear, one that began long before my trip from Beirut, after my brother Baha’’s death, which was followed soon after by Georges’ disappearance. In my first letter to Olga from Adelaide I wrote, “To kill fear, it isn’t enough to move to another country and live in a new house. It’s already taken root inside of us and so in order to kill it we first have to kill something inside ourselves. Perhaps we have to cut off one of our limbs. I’ve often thought of this as a little suicide. It’s as if we are looking fearlessly right into the eyes of a wild beast, looking at it and trying to kill it. We don’t know at that moment that we are killing most of what’s inside ourselves. But what remains after that? What remains after we’ve killed the fear? Does memory remain, for example? Or does it become like a blank page? And what should we fill it with?”
Olga never wrote to me much, she preferred the telephone. She would call every Thursday. She chose the day and it became our tradition. She used to call me every Thursday and I would write to her every weekend. There was a continual conversation going on between us, each one of us participating in her own way — I through letters and she through words. Our phone conversation would stretch on too long every time; I would laugh when she’d repeat news she’d already told me, protesting that I hadn’t paid enough attention the week before. She’d finish by saying, “Don’t forget to answer my questions in your letter.” Sometimes a week or more would pass without a phone call from her and when she would speak to me she’d tell me that the phone lines were cut, that Lebanon had become a country where people are maimed, victimized, murdered, slaughtered. She’d tell me that things there were shitty and that for her things were shitty beyond shitty.