Alice believed that things had a lasting flavor. She couldn’t forget that things have a taste that stays in your mouth, even after they’re gone.
When the Egyptian said to her that Beirut is like cardboard, her eyes smiled.
“You don’t know anything, my friend. What do you mean, cardboard? The whole world is cardboard, but Beirut never slept, even now it doesn’t sleep. Who can sleep in a place where there is no sleep? You’re all sleepy because you’re afraid, I’m not afraid, I don’t sleep and I’m not afraid.”
Zaylaa would look at her, trying to scare her, and Alice wasn’t scared. She told him the real bullies were dead, and he, with his short hair like the American soldiers, didn’t scare her.
“The bullies are gone, Ibn Zaylaa, you son of a bitch.”
Ibn Zaylaa would let her get away with it, not because he was a son of a bitch, but because she was a poor soul.
What did this woman know about bullies? Before Zaylaa killed his sister by strangling her with his bare hands, he’d killed many others. Zaylaa was a soldier in the Lebanese army, then the war started and he became just like everyone else.
“When the war comes we fight,” he said to Lieutenant Ahmad al-Hasan. “Sir, we need to live, we need to buy televisions, we need money, we need war.”
Zaylaa went to war. The day he saw Captain Salah Aamer crying like a baby, he understood that the war would go on without those who philosophized and discussed the war of the people and the masses, those would die, and the war would go on without them. Zaylaa left these organizations and went where he should go. There wasn’t one organization or group he didn’t work for. He trafficked hashish and traded weapons and wound up in charge of the Montana Bar.
“I protect the bar. Without me, what would’ve happened to all of you?” he said to Alice.
“You’re right, Zaylaa, without you we’d have become prostitutes, now we’re respectable ladies, without you, someone else would’ve come along.”
“I’m better than some, Madam.”
“You’re just like the others, you’re not special, you are the others, ask me, I’ll tell you, but you don’t know how to talk and you don’t know how to listen.”
“Shut up! If you don’t like it, leave.”
“I don’t like it, but I’ll shut up. I’ll shut up because the conversation is over, when the conversation is over I’m no longer the Alice whom …”
“I know, I know,” Zaylaa said. “Please, don’t tell us about “The Leader” and Abd al-Karim Qasim and all that bullshit.”
“What’s there to tell?” Alice said to Gandhi.
Gandhi liked Hasan Zaylaa. “If it weren’t for him, they’d have killed me,” he said to her. Gandhi said they wanted to kill him because he lived in the cellar of Burj al-Salam. The cellar was empty when Gandhi fled from Nabaa and came to live in it. Some armed men came and told him to get out. And if it hadn’t been for Zaylaa, he would’ve been killed.
“Zaylaa is a good man, but he’s temperamental. He gets drunk and says whatever come to his mind, but he has a good heart.”
“Right,” Alice said, and decided to be quiet.
One of those mornings, Gandhi was sitting alone in front of his box. He had placed the metal shoe trees on the ground, waiting for some shoes. He saw Dr. John Davis coming in the distance. The American professor was walking, his dog next to him, a big dusty-colored German shepherd that growled and barked. Gandhi asked God for refuge from seeing him so early in the morning. Dr. Davis stopped in front of the shoe-shine box, holding the rope tied to the dog’s neck, and the dog moved left and right, sniffing and putting his mouth on the shoe trees. The American pulled his dog back. And the dog would go close to the shoe trees and head in Gandhi’s direction, sniff at the sitting man’s feet, and Gandhi would try to get away from the dog, move his feet away, pretend to be busy with the shoe trees and shoes, and wipe his face with his long black sleeve. Dr. Davis asked how things were going, while the dog roamed about, with his master holding the rope. Then the dog got away from Davis’s hand. The dog ran off, and Davis called him—“Fox! Fox!”—and the dog ran as if he’d found something. Dr. Davis left Gandhi and chased after his dog. A woman came and placed three pairs of men’s black shoes in front of the box. Gandhi put them up on the shoe tree and started working. Gandhi didn’t like to dye shoes until he’d stretched the leather out on the shoe tree. The original way of doing it, he believed, was to dye the shoes without taking them off the person’s foot. The foot gave the shoe its form and stretched it out, and so the color would spread equally over the entire shoe. But when the shoe is without a foot, the leather gets wrinkled, and it becomes difficult to dye it, because the transformation to mirror becomes impossible.
Gandhi had finished mounting the shoes on the shoe trees when he saw Dr. Davis coming back with his dog. That day, John Davis made the suggestion that would make Gandhi leave his profession for the first time. He would leave it for the second and last time, based on a suggestion made by Hasan Zaylaa, when he would become responsible for keeping the quarter clean.
Mr. Davis stopped and asked him if he would help him feed his dog.
“I don’t have anything, just shoes,” Gandhi said.
Gandhi agreed to Mr. Davis’s idea without ever imagining it would lead him to leave his trade.
Gandhi went into the American University cafeteria with a big burlap bag in his hand. Davis told him he’d made an arrangement with the kitchen manager and the American director of the kitchen to allow Gandhi to take the leftovers every day, take them to his house near Bakhaazi Hospital as food for Fox, who seemed he could never get enough to eat. He agreed with Gandhi to pay him one lira a day, and at that time a shoe shine was a quarterlira. In other words, filling the bag was as good as shining four pairs of shoes.
When Gandhi entered the kitchen, he was shocked by the amount of food. The cook, who was wearing a white shirt and a long white cap on his head, led him through the inner rooms of the kitchen and pointed to the plates. Gandhi would empty everything from his bag. He’d fill the bag, and there would still be a lot of food left that was to be thrown away.
He took the bag to Mr. Davis’s house, and that day he decided.
On the second day, he came with two bags — one for the dog and one for himself.
In the first bag he put the leftovers, and in the second one, which was stuffed with empty sardine tins he’d picked up the night before and had his wife wash out, he tried to sort out the food and place it in the little tin cans. Then he put them carefully into the bag.
On the third day, he brought, in addition to the two bags and the empty sardine tins, an empty bottle and tried to fill it with oil left in the plates of labneh.
On the fourth day, Fawziyya came with him, and she did the sorting and organizing of the food before it was placed into the tin cans.
On the fifth day, the routine was regulated, and he agreed with the kitchen manager to pay him six liras a day, after he’d refused Gandhi’s offer to share the food.
On the sixth day, he opened a restaurant.
And on the seventh day, the day the American University cafeteria is closed, Gandhi rested in his house, and didn’t go to work. That was the first time in his life he didn’t go to work on a Sunday.
Gandhi placed some small chairs and handmade straw trays in front of his house in Nabaa and turned the stone bench into a restaurant.
“Those were the days,” Gandhi would say. “In those days there was a lot of prosperity. We all ate, we and the dog. The dog had enough, and we had enough, and everyone ate …” The Houranis started coming, Houranis, Kurds, all kinds of people, cement workers, port laborers, you name it, they’d come every day and buy. A plate of labneh, ten piasters, a plate of hummus, twenty-five, a plate of kefta, fifty, things just worked out. Muhammad al-Hariri, God rest his soul, started coming regularly. He’d come and bring a bottle of arak with him, and he’d pour some for himself and the other customers. I refused, I said no way, nothing sacrilegious in my restaurant, but how can you fight sacrilege when it’s everywhere? So I drank, I had tons of money. Those were the days, I even forgot all about shoe shining — no, I didn’t forget, I stopped sitting there all day, breaking my back behind the shoe-shine box. I worked a little on the side, for special customers. I’d take the box and sit beneath Madame Lillian Sabbagha’s staircase, and enjoy seeing the beautiful Russian woman in the morning. I’d shine her shoes, the Reverend Amin’s, Davis’s, the Assyrian’s, al-Munla’s, and very few others. The real work, however, was in the restaurant.”