4
Aunt Amalia and the Great Crisis
Beirut, summer 1970
After the strains of surviving in the underground, evading arrest, and being pursued by the secret service and its informers, Salman's first few days in Beirut were a welcome relief. He had felt like a hunted animal, every captured friend, every betrayed bit of information shaking the ground beneath his feet and tightening a noose around his neck.
In the winter of 1969, his rebel group was crushed in a fierce battle south of Aleppo. Its leaders foolishly had thrown strategy and tactics overboard and provoked a direct confrontation with a giant army. The few surviving fighters fled in all directions. From then on, his cell of two women and three men wandered cross-country. But in an olive grove near Homs, they were drawn into an ambush and surrounded. Although wounded, Salman somehow got away. The two brave women died in a storm of gunfire, one partisan was captured and executed, another wounded and beaten to death in the vehicle on the way back to Damascus.
Salman wandered about aimlessly, lack of food tormenting him more than the wound in his right shoulder. Hunger clawed its way into his innards like a wild cat, scratching and screaming for bread. He dug for roots in the barren landscape, but whatever he found was inedible. He drank from streams to quiet the beast in his stomach and dragged himself on. One day he found a lone wild apple tree and, in great pain from his infected shoulder, picked and devoured a few apples. Then he sat down in the shade and thought about the disaster that had befallen his group. Why had they failed? He had no answers. He picked a few more apples and set off again, with a single thought—to shoot himself if he was threatened with capture. He started running until, exhausted and weakened from loss of blood, he collapsed.
When he came to, he was in a dark room, his shoulder heavily bandaged. A farmer had dug the bullet out and hidden him, risking the death penalty for saving a “terrorist's” life. Salman asked him why he had rescued him. The farmer answered that he had lost his wife because nobody was there to help her. While he was out working in the fields, his wife had fallen off a ladder while cleaning the windows and cut herself on a broken window pane. Alone, she had bled to death. “When I came home in the evening, she was gone,” he said. He had found Salman lying on the dirt path, bleeding, just like his wife that time in the kitchen. Salman had been lucky; the bullet hadn't gone in deeply, and he had been able to dig it out easily.
Salman's stay at the farmer's passed quickly. His only memory was the strong fragrance of thyme all around. Once he recovered, Salman gave the farmer his Kalashnikov rifle, his pistol, and his expensive compass. Three weeks later, Samad, the farmer, took him via various back roads to his brother, who was a printer in Damascus. But unlike Samad, his brother was both bold and mercenary. In exchange for a gold chain and an expensive Swiss watch that Salman had been given by his parents for his graduation, the printer got him a forged passport and handed him two hundred dollars as pocket money, as well as a few hundred Syrian lira for travel expenses. The watch alone was worth more than five thousand dollars, but Salman had no choice because he had to leave the country quickly. Being stingy or petty could cost him his life.
~
Staying at Aunt Amalia's allowed him to get his strength back. Embodying Arab hospitality, Amalia refrained from bothering her nephew with any questions for the first three days. But she spoiled him, and he made it easy for her with his gratitude and his charming, humorous, self-deprecating way of talking with her about his failures, catastrophes, and other painful experiences. Always outspoken, she pointed out that he owed his witty and brave personality to his mother. His father—her brother Yusuf—never demonstrated even the slightest inkling of humor as a child, teenager, or adult, and had snuck through life in the shadow of others. He was a tortured soul who could neither find, nor spread, peace. As his sister, she knew that firsthand.
Her apartment on the third floor was quiet and roomy, with a balcony from which Salman could look out at the harbor and the open sea. He never met the neighbors because he spent as little time as possible on the stairs, as a safety measure. Day after day, all he heard was Aunt Amalia's voice and her laughter. She laughed loud, long, and often, which was completely at odds with her widow's attire. He also found her accent strange because, although she had been born and raised in Damascus, she spoke with a Beiruti dialect. When Salman asked her why, she told him, “I want nothing to do with the Damascene dialect. It reminds me of my family, but the Beiruti dialect is connected with my love for Said and my escape from the clan.”
Amalia looked like an Arab woman from North Africa. Unlike his father or his uncle Anton who had straight hair and light skin, a small nose, and thin lips, Amalia had a lion's mane of thick, grizzled, frizzy hair on her powerful head. Her large eyes, full lips, and dark skin gave her an alluring beauty. “I'm sure I'm the result of a secret love affair my mother had with an African,” she was fond of saying, laughing aloud as if to proclaim her pride in her African relations.
Salman had hardly known his aunt, but her warmhearted openness soon broke the ice. It didn't take long for him to trust her, and although he had not planned to, he began to confide in her. Eager for details, she praised his courage, his ideals and readiness to risk his life for them, and the fact that he had given up the security of an academic career to fight for freedom. But she also told him bluntly that his underground activities reminded her of children playing cowboys and Indians. Only this time lives were at stake, which made it all the more stupid. Forty years later, Salman still remembered how shocked he had been at her words.
At around three in the afternoon, Aunt Amalia woke him gently out of his siesta. The smell of cardamom and mocha filled the air. They sat on the balcony and drank the strong coffee. Amalia wished to be candid with him. Looking out to the sea, she said that if she had a son, she would talk to him in exactly the same way, not holding anything back but also without any obligation for him to accept what she said. She lit a cigarette, exhaled, and watched the blue smoke disappear into the equally blue distance. “A completely different force is needed to overthrow the regime in Damascus.” She grieved for all the young men and women who stood up so naively to face the cold-blooded killers of the Syrian special forces and secret services, and sacrificed their lives. Her best Lebanese friend had lost her only son in the fighting in the mountains. He had taken the name of Ali Che—in honor of Che Guevara—and, like his idol, had been captured and executed in cold blood.
Salman stroked her hand as a faint smile flitted across her face, followed by tears. “All these young people like you and Ali,” she said sadly. “They all want a revolution so that we can live like human beings, in freedom and dignity. But they all die young, maybe as favorites of the gods, before a revolution led by a new gang of professional criminals can defeat the old, worn out ones. It was ever so—and so it shall remain.” She looked into his eyes. “Listen carefully, son, nothing will ever change as long as rebellion is meant only to achieve social or political change. Your naïve fighters level mountains with tremendous self-sacrifice and pave wide roads with the tears of hope, only for criminals to drive up and enter the capital amid flags and fanfare, soon to be so intoxicated by the cheering, foolish crowds as to believe themselves to be gods.
“No change will ever come to Arab countries until the very structure of the clan that enslaves us, body and soul, has been destroyed. The clan is built on obedience and loyalty, and couldn't care less about democracy, freedom, or human dignity. It permeates and rots everything, like a fungus. Stick and carrot, a bit of security traded for a bit of dignity, and we suddenly find ourselves on a slippery slope looking merely for happiness and a way to satisfy our instincts. There is no dignity left at the bottom of the slide. We are just satisfied slaves of our clan leaders, priding ourselves on the fact that we haven't been arrested yet. But tell me what you think of all this..."
“How can I explain it?” Salman replied, searching for where to start. “I was shocked that we had given up on the world long before the army even came on the scene... There were just a few of us, close friends, and we felt like we'd been going round in circles for years, only to come back to where we started, like a mule moving a millstone. Revolutionaries weren't rebels anymore. They'd become just like the society they wanted to destroy… And all our dead have died in vain,” he said, and quietly began to cry. Amalia kissed his eyes and hugged him. He took a deep breath. She smelled of almond blossom.
“That's the nature of revolution,” Amalia said. “Since Nicholas Copernicus, the word revolution has meant the unchanging orbit of a planet in a closed circle. It can never mean a new beginning.”
For two hours, she told him stories of intrigue and revolution that might have come straight out of a detective novel, and Salman realized that none of his years with the underground or his training could match the widow's tales. Like a palace made of ice, his faith in revolution melted away under Amalia's burning words.
Salman felt that, after this conversation, something inside him had irretrievably broken into pieces. Afterward, he couldn't sleep, so he snuck into the kitchen and returned to his room with a glass of red wine. In the corridor, he paused briefly and smiled when he heard Aunt Amalia snoring in her bedroom.
The next morning, Salman felt like he was paralyzed. He didn't have the energy or slightest desire to get up or do anything.
Why had he joined the armed resistance? Was he reacting to the 1967 defeat of the Arab states by Israel, as many of his friends claimed? Clearly not. Then what was the reason? Slogans like “liberation of the fatherland” or “socialist justice” weren't enough. How many of these had he repeated without knowing what they meant? What did socialism even look like? The realities of socialism seemed dreadful. His rebel group rejected both Moscow and Beijing, and their client states, and although members praised the Cuban way, none of them had ever been to Cuba themselves.
And how did the cause of emancipating workers and poor peasants championed by his rebel faction relate in any way to his reality? A memory came back to him, strong and painful, the kind best buried once and for all. Because of his powers of persuasion, he had been sent for three months to Aleppo, the metropolis of the North. His assignment was to win over left-wing students to fight in the mountains and to build up an urban network of radical groups, as well as Kurdish fighters. Under a false identity and passing himself off as a student, he stayed at the house of a widow who was in her fifties. She had no children and worked in a textile factory. Every morning she got up at four, left the house at five, and returned at around seven in the evening, pale and exhausted after a twelve-hour day working and a one-hour return trip. The only light she ever saw was the artificial light inside the factory. Salman seldom crossed paths with her. She always seemed to be in a bad mood and unapproachable, and she never tried to get to know him. At the beginning of the month, without any comment, he would leave the rent on the kitchen table and spend his time debating the emancipation of the workers and peasants with others in his radical group.
“I'm moving out at the end of the month,” he told her after about three months.
“Right,” she said, and went to her room. Later he remembered that he had sometimes heard her crying, and he would have liked to comfort her, but his orders were to avoid all close personal contact.
It was only now, in Beirut, that he realized how detached from reality his life had been. The workers who lived in poverty alongside him could not be the reason for his fight. Only here, in Beirut, did he find the answer to why their group had failed. The rebels had suffered their bitter defeat without a single poor peasant standing by them. They looked on as if watching a savage war movie, frightened to death yet uninvolved. All the fighters, men and women, were heroic and self-sacrificing, but that was not enough. They knew a few of the writings of Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, Mao, and Guevara, but they didn't know the peasants and so remained out of place in the country.
But if not to defend the peasants, why had he fought? The answer alarmed him. It was because of a dangerous mixture of romantic notions about heroic liberation and Christian ideas about self-sacrifice, equality, and martyrdom, combined with the Christian minority's eternal longing to play a decisive part in a Muslim society. It was no accident that the Christians were always the first members—if not the founders—of the nationalist and socialist parties in Arab countries. Like the Jews in Europe, the Christians living in Arab countries did not want merely to establish their position—they wanted to show the majority that they, too, belonged. All these ingredients had combined into a lethal formula that had clouded Salman's brain and turned him into a useful idiot, ready to wage battle.
Salman now felt bitter and ashamed to have slandered the members of his group who had laid down their weapons and wanted nothing more to do with politics. They had been more honest and clear-headed than he had. When he got up at around noon, Amalia was out. As always when she left the apartment, she had left him a note. He didn't want to eat, or to drink coffee, so he got dressed and went out and headed toward the sea. Fresh air for his lungs and wide vistas for his eyes—that was what he needed.
His thoughts raced. He felt cheated by the movement's leaders. The dream of a free and just society had made every sacrifice easy for him. Utopias were an effective drug on sensitive people, he thought on his way to the beach. Utopia is a blindfold, and he realized that he'd willingly put on that blindfold, searching for the way with outstretched arms. Now he had a bird's-eye view and could see how that leadership had laughed at and pushed him around. Up until now, all he had seen in his leaders was the fire of their pure hearts and their desire to fight and win an honorable life for all Syrians. But he had been too naïve to understand that revolutions also attract the dregs of society, like a magnet attracts iron filings. They came to settle personal scores and didn't give a damn about any values—stealing, killing, and raping.
Although Salman mocked and criticized clannishness in his own circle of friends within the ranks of his rebel group, he never risked an open confrontation. The people were intimidated by the regime, but so were followers by their revolutionary leaders, and they too held their tongues. The same fighters who bravely risked their lives for the revolution showed cowardice in concealing their uneasiness and their criticism of leaders.
It had never occurred to Salman and his fellow fighters that they had been given a single task—to put a new regime in place, with new big shots to rule over their subjects.
Amalia was right... it never had dawned on him so clearly.
On the beach in Beirut, he shook his head at himself. He had been a complete fool to fight as a guerrilla in the northern Syrian mountains with his Kalashnikov and his old Beretta, manufactured in 1955. In despair he shouted out at the sea, until a cool breeze slowly calmed him down. During the night he ran a fever and vomited several times. Amalia discovered him lying on the bathroom floor.
For three days, he had shivering fits and pains in his limbs. He kept vomiting, but only a yellow, slimy, bitter liquid came up from his empty stomach. He could hardly stand. Aunt Amalia looked after him around the clock. On the third day, his temperature hadn't come down, despite all kinds of herbal teas and cold poultices, so she called Alia, a young doctor who lived in the house next door. Salman experienced her visit through a daze but answered her questions and followed her instructions as best he could. Later, all he could remember of those days was the pale face of his aunt and the lemon-blossom fragrance that came with the doctor and remained in the room long after she had gone. Years later, his aunt wrote to him in Germany and told him that she had never been so worried about him in her whole life. She attributed his symptoms to the poisons of injustice and cruelty he had swallowed for so long. The same thing had happened to her after she decided to break with her family.
The doctor gave him an injection and several tablets, and he fell asleep. When he woke up, it was quiet in the apartment. He got up, washed his face with cold water, rubbed it with a rough towel, and peered into the mirror. He looked miserable and worn out.
Whenever he woke from his feverish dreams, the past washed over him like a lament. He was haunted, in particular, by the memory of a policeman he had seriously wounded.
The policeman had been a friendly, simple man. Together with his four colleagues, he had been unlucky to find himself assigned to a mountain police station, not far from Aleppo, at the wrong time. The secret service had captured five experienced opposition fighters in a massive surprise attack. One of them had been Salman's closest comrade in arms, Hani Khoury. Hani came from a Christian Damascene family. Although he lived not far from Salman's family home, they had only met in the mountains. Hani was a quiet, modest compatriot. He was the group's radio technician and explosives expert. Salman and he had vowed never to abandon each other.
On their way to the police station, the prisoners had been handcuffed and beaten like animals. Salman's heart nearly shattered at the sight of Hani. The leader of the secret service group called Aleppo, demanding reinforcements and a vehicle for the prisoners. Then he left the police station to hunt for the other freedom fighters in the nearby woods.
Neither the secret service nor the five policemen suspected that a rebel commando unit led by Salman had moved into position in the abandoned building opposite the police station. When the three white Land Rovers with the men from the secret service sped off in a cloud of dust, the commandos attacked the police station. The five policemen were poorly armed, elderly officers. Salman burst in first. Despite his experience, he was nervous because he expected at least one seasoned man from the secret service to have stayed behind. Scared to death, four of the policemen raised their hands to surrender, but the fifth moved his hand in a way that alarmed Salman. He fired at the man, hitting him in the stomach and gravely wounding him. The other four policemen shouted and begged for mercy. The wounded man looked up at Salman with pleading eyes, a look that would haunt him for years.
He had the four policemen handcuffed, called an ambulance, gave the name of the police station, and said that they should send a helicopter quickly, with an experienced doctor for a seriously wounded general. The injured policeman nodded gratefully and tried to smile. Salman then cut the telephone line to the police station and hurried out last behind his freed compatriots. Before the commando group left the village, a helicopter landed in the village square.
Salman never found out whether the policeman had survived his wound. He also lost touch with his friend Hani when the Syrian army sent a huge detachment to comb the mountains northwest of Aleppo, set fire to villages, and mercilessly hunt down the guerrillas. His rebel group disintegrated into small factions that scattered over the entire country and continued to fight. Salman and his companions became the target of an intensive manhunt.
Between bouts of fever, the details of those events came back to him, but he mentioned them to no one. Alia, the doctor, visited him every day, and slowly he recovered.
~
Salman was not the only one to notice that Alia was falling in love with him. So did Aunt Amalia. Alia was married and she had two children, both at boarding school since their parents had hardly any time for them. At the time, Salman had not gotten over his breakup with his last girlfriend, Lamia.
Lamia was a peaceful woman who would rather listen to music and look after the flowers in her parents' garden than talk about Vietnam, Cuba, or Palestine. She was in love with Salman and wanted a simple, happy life with him at her side. That was why she kept urging him not to associate with those “losers,” as she called revolutionaries. When Salman went to the training camp in South Lebanon, Lamia turned her back on him for good. She wrote him a bitter farewell letter, cursing him for breaking her heart and calling him a brainless terrorist. She would soon marry, and he would lose sight of her forever. From that time on—three years prior to his escape to Beirut—he only related to women as political comrades or casual erotic partners. And that is how he became involved with Alia, without feeling anything for her.
Years later, the smell of lemon blossom would still conjure up the memory of the first time he had made love with Alia. She was sitting at his bedside on that day. She was witty. He lay in bed in his white summer pajamas, and she bent over him and kissed him on the lips. She stood up, drew the curtains, and undressed very slowly, almost as if in a dance. She looked different in the dimly lit room, with her sensual lips, large eyes, and seductive body. As if in slow motion, she took off her panties and went naked to him. Her scent bewitched his senses and he noticed that he was too aroused. He tried to put off the decisive moment by distracting himself and thinking of a complex chess gambit. Her breath felt scorching on his skin. He straightened up to distance himself from her but she pressed his shoulder down on the bed. She licked his mouth and when his lips parted, she sucked his tongue. Her mouth tasted sweet and smelled of licorice.
She undressed him, her lips slid over his throat and chest, and when she licked his navel he almost burst with arousal. He grabbed her shoulders and turned her on her back, she looked at him with a new expression in her eyes.
“Come,” she whispered, pulling him over her. That had been the end of him. He felt ashamed, and she comforted him by making love with him again.
~
In Beirut he started to read again as a way to collect himself and understand what had happened. And in Beirut he could get books both in French and in Arabic. He read Manes Sperber's Like a Tear in the Ocean, and felt as if he was the brother of its hero, Dojno Faber. George Orwell's novels, 1984 and Animal Farm, confirmed everything that Amalia had told him. He was shattered. So many million people had died to help a troubled dictator come to power.
As for Amalia, she never again spoke with him about his past. She led a very active life, had many girlfriends, and whenever she was at home for a while, she would read English detective novels. Even after Salman's recovery, Alia continued visiting him every day. Whenever she turned up, Amalia seemed to have urgent business in town. Salman enjoyed his time with Alia... she was his first sexual mentor, and with her he explored the vast expanse of erotic fantasies. He learned that foreplay is an invention born of one's mind, not one's instincts. “A goat like my husband knows nothing about this,” she said. “He mounts me as if I was a she-goat. The smell of his sweat is disgusting. He jumps off and soon he's snoring in his bedroom. But even though I take a shower, the stink of him lingers with me.”
She was also the first woman who taught him how words are an important part of lovemaking. Usually he either remained silent or else parroted phrases like, “You're beautiful… I like you… you please me.” Alia, however, adorned even the smallest stirring or softest touch with spontaneous, delicate poetry that was neither contrived nor vulgar. Salman had never experienced anything like that before.
At the time, Alia's husband was the director of the Beirut airport. That was all Salman knew about him, and he himself didn't breathe a word to Alia about his real identity or his past. She was curious and asked many questions, but it only made him all the more uncommunicative.
Alia talked openly about herself. Her greatest mistake, she said, had been to let herself be beguiled by outward appearances. As a medical student, she had been fascinated by her future husband's sports car and luxurious lifestyle. But now it felt as if she was living with her bags packed all the time. “If it wasn't for the children, I'd be long gone,” she said.
~
The city throbbed with noises and smells, and early summer peeled away layers of winter clothing from people. Lively and colorful, they strolled along the streets, sat in cafés and bars, danced and laughed, sang and drank. Hippies were unknown in Arab countries, but the Lebanese took all that color and created elegance out of it. Hippies had nothing to teach them about a relaxed lifestyle, for they had been masters of it for centuries.
All that noisy life streamed past Salman like a long film. For the first time in his entire life, he had no inhibitions about questioning any of his past. Occasionally he would feel giddy when a rock of truth or a bottomless chasm of lies loomed up.
Each day he would spend long stretches sitting by the sea and talking to himself, silently or aloud, before returning home exhausted. It was during this time that he began to understand not life but himself better, and his first discovery was that he was no politician. Not that he was apolitical, but he simply was not cut out for political action. Every night before going to sleep, he wrote down what he had learned in a sort of diary.
It was only weeks later that he started to take part in the lively night life around him. It was on one of these nighttime strolls that he saw Alia with her husband. They were coming out of a bar in the nearby Gemmayzeh district. Alia's husband wasn't at all bad-looking. They were behaving like two lovers and they kissed in the middle of the street. Shortly afterward, they drove off in his Porsche.
When Alia visited him the following day and changed his dressing while badmouthing her husband, he felt a deep disdain for her, which he was able to conceal. He had never fallen for a woman so completely, so erotically, so fiercely as this time. He was quite unable to explain how it was that he felt such intense physical pleasure, while his emotions were stifled by disdain. Later on, it would be even more of a mystery to him how he would never again be able to remember Alia's face, try as he might.
He stayed in Beirut for three months, until his parents were able to secure a Syrian passport for him through bribery. Armed with this passport and his high-school diploma, he was able to apply for entry to a university in Europe. America was too far away, and too final. He wanted to be sure that he could return to Syria as soon as the dictatorship had been toppled. Salman was certain that the regime would not even last four years. Later on in Rome, he claimed that he had miscalculated by a zero.
He sent out countless applications, from Finland to Spain. His French was perfect, and so he hoped to be admitted to one of the many French universities in Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, Lille, Avignon, or Bordeaux. But the French rejected him. Though the official at the French embassy in Beirut admired his French and his high-school grades, he eyed him suspiciously and asked, just before he left, almost as an afterthought, “Why don't you apply directly from Damascus? No problems there, I hope?” Salman understood perfectly the diplomatically concealed question—“What have you been up to there?” He came up with a labored, untrue answer, but the official was not convinced. He smiled faintly and gave Salman a weak, sweaty handshake goodbye.
But then Salman received two acceptances almost at once—one to study biology in Stockholm and one to study philosophy in Heidelberg. While he liked philosophy, the actual subject of study was of secondary importance to him. He opted for the romantic German city on the Neckar because it was more southerly and closer to France.
That year, July gave him a scorching taste of Hell. The sky burned and water fled, seeking shelter in the depths of the earth. At night, people filled pots and pans, bowls and buckets with water because the supply failed repeatedly during the day. If you opened the taps, all you heard was whistling, gurgling, and whispers from afar.
On a sticky morning in mid-July, Salman got his German visa without a problem. He went straight down to the seaside from the German embassy and sat in a café for a while, enjoying this latest stage in his victory over death. Then he treated himself to some delicious fish in a nearby restaurant, accompanied by some cold white wine, and he tipped the polite waiter so generously that the waiter mistook him for a rich Saudi. It was only later that afternoon that he sauntered slightly unsteadily back to Aunt Amalia's. There he found a note waiting for him. On impulse, Aunt Amalia had decided to ride the ferry to Cyprus with some girlfriends. She wanted to take a week's holiday and get to know the island. She had generously stuffed the fridge with all manner of treats, as if Salman was forever holding eating orgies.
Alia came over every day since her children were away on vacation at their grandparents' house in the mountains. They cooked together and would often spend all day in bed. Alia was his teacher in the kitchen as well. Not only was she an excellent cook, she was also a very good instructor.
There were tears when Salman told her that he would soon be leaving. She told him that he was her first true love. She had suffered a lot with her husband and had not known tenderness before she had met Salman. That was when he told her that he had been accepted to study medicine in Paris. There was a glint of joy in Alia's eyes. “In that case, I can visit you now and then because I'm in Paris at least once a year,” she said, and he let her continue to believe that.
Years later, he still wondered just why he had lied to her so cold-bloodedly. He probably wanted to calm her down and still the flood of tears that would otherwise have spoiled their remaining time together. More likely, however, he wanted to make a clean break with the lie. The contempt that he felt for her whenever he thought of the lovebirds' scene between her and her husband flared up time and again.
~
Two weeks before his flight to Germany, he decided together with Aunt Amalia that his mother should not come to Beirut to see him off, although she would have loved to. Thanks to the newspapers, it was common knowledge that the Syrian secret service, which came in and out of Lebanon at will, dogged relatives' footsteps to lead them to where the fugitives were hiding. Amalia sent Salman's mother an envelope, with no return address, containing newspaper cuttings about three victims of the Syrian regime. Sophia understood and stayed in Damascus. Salman never learned that his father had read the same newspaper articles long ago and had advised his wife not to travel to Beirut. However, she would never have heeded his advice alone. His father arranged for Salman to receive eight hundred deutschmarks a month through a Lebanese bank—a lot of money at the beginning of the 1970s.
~
Salman liked the pubs by the harbor. They were simply decorated and their customers were dockers and fishermen. Tourists seldom wandered in. In one of these packed pubs, Salman spotted an empty chair at a little table. An old fisherman with worn, patched clothes was sitting there on his own, and when Salman asked him if the chair was free, the man laughed. “Empty yes, but the price for parking yourself is one arak,” he said slyly. Salman sat down and ordered two araks, and another two, and then two more. When the old fisherman learned that Salman would be leaving the country in a week, he advised him that anyone emigrating needed a sharp pair of scissors to really cut through all the ties binding him to the old country. And then he said something that Salman would only understand forty years later. “When you go, don't come back, because you take your space with you. People won't like you because you come from their past, and many will see you as an uninvited witness for the prosecution.” The old man was nothing but skin and bones, and the skin had been thoroughly tanned from a lifetime of sunshine, as if death had forgotten him.
~
The day before his flight was due to depart, Salman wanted to say goodbye to Beirut, but also to the life he had led up until then. So, that afternoon, he sat down on the ground with a bottle of red wine beside the sea where he had so recently screamed in desperation against the thundering of the waves. He drank slowly, savoring every drop. The sea played coquettishly with her blue gown while the waves caressed the soft sand.
Salman felt a sense of solemnity overcome his heart. He spoke softly to himself as if he was standing before an altar. Many of the couples that strolled past looked at him pityingly, as if they saw somebody who had been left by his wife, or who had just been fired from his job. “The man's drunk," a young blond girl said, pressing her mother's hand fearfully.
~
He found it hard to say goodbye to Aunt Amalia. She clung to him as if to her own son. He promised to write regularly and asked her not to reveal his address in Germany to anyone. Amalia smiled with tears in her eyes, “Above all I won't tell Alia. I'll say you've forgotten us. Yes, forgetfulness is the lot of the emigrant, but God forgive you if you forget me." She laughed and tugged him gently by the ear.
Salman raised his right hand and solemnly swore he would never forget his ‘guardian angel Amalia,' and he kept his word. He wrote her very open and sometimes passionate letters right up until the time she died.
~
Amalia held back her tears at the airport until Salman began to cry. “You are my second mother," he said. “And what you told me in a half hour about revolution changed me more than books, parents, church, and school all put together. Aunt Amalia, I will always be grateful to you.”
“You do that, but don't call me ‘aunt' anymore. You know, in these three months with you, I learned for the first time that I can love children without them having to be mine, as Khalil Gibran advised. That was a great gift, and I do thank you. From now on I am your Amalia.” She slipped a small package into his hand. “Wait until you're on the plane before you open that,” she said, kissing him and stroking his face in farewell. She stayed where she was as Salman moved toward passport control at the entrance with the other Lufthansa passengers. He turned around again and waved. Aunt Amalia had gone.
Onboard the plane, he opened the little box and was shocked. It contained five thousand dollars and a note. “Reserve for use in case your father is stingy. Women love a generous man!” That was all it said, nothing more.
Salman's time in Lebanon had been the most intense and difficult of his life. Although it lasted only a few months, it spread out and took up more room in his memory than all his forty years in Europe. Later, another experience—a fatefully similar painful scenario—would also extend into an eternity and remain with him until his very last breath.