JOSEPH sat across from the others. He was a stocky man whose every movement
seemed sudden and whose nickname, Abu Victor, with Victor pronounced in the
French way, had come to him when his son was born 25 years ago just as, 50 years
ago, his own father had become Abu Joseph when Joseph, himself, came into this
world. It was common.
The four men sat around the patio table. It was late afternoon and sunlight
sliced a line through the wedding cake, cutting a diagonal shadow from the its
decorative roses to its perimeter, reminding Abu Victor of a sundial. The deck
creaked, the whole patio had been declared structurally unsound but the owner
was too poor to fix it. Finally, last year, the owner had sold the whole
building to a developer. Abu Victor and his wife, Nadia, would be moving at the
end of month to a smaller apartment in a different neighbourhood. The timing was
right. Unlike their neighbours, they were not fighting the eviction.
But what about the cake? Abu Victor had wondered, waking suddenly two nights
ago. Nadia had been away, visiting her sister in Vancouver and in her absence,
their bed had felt wide and uneven, it had seemed to tilt and slide him onto the
floor. He had gotten up. The room was a furnace. In a daze, Abu Victor went to
fridge and opened the freezer door. How long he stood there, he couldn't say.
Chilly air washed against his surface. At last, he removed the cake, which was
encased in plastic wrap and had been in the freezer since 2011. He set it on the
counter.
He waited until 5 am to call his best friend, George.
“Catastrophe,” was all Abu Victor could say at first. He feared that
different words might pull the imaginary knife out of his gut, cause him to
bleed imaginary blood, and die an imaginary death. “Catastrophe.”
“What happened?”
“We can't move the cake into the new apartment. But we can't throw it out
either.”
“What does your wife say?”
“She doesn't say anything. Nadia says nothing.” He was crying now and he
hoped George couldn't tell. “She won't be back until the weekend.”
His friend had proposed a solution. On Friday, George would bring Tony and
Elias to Abu Victor's house, and together they would eat the wedding cake.
The cake somehow looked both shellacked and softening, it was probably
inedible.
Abu Victor withdrew his right foot from its leather slipper and scratched his
left ankle. He had not set out any plates because now, in the clear light of
Friday afternoon, he wasn't sure that eating it was such a good idea.
In Beirut, before the war, the four of them had been merely kids. Tony,
rocket-shaped, was the leader. George, blinded in an accident, used a cane.
Elias was a snob who spoke French at home and one day pronounced himself Le
Colonel. And finally there was Joseph, who excelled at sports. From birth, they
had lived in the same building, their mothers drank coffee together and their
fathers repeated the same jokes.
Decades later, the four had arrived in Canada via separate trajectories, and
now they lived in different neighbourhoods of the same city; Montreal had pulled
so many of their friends and neighbours across the seas. There had been a war
after all, and how could any family be expected to live beneath bombs and
snipers for fifteen years? Still, it was odd, Abu Victor often thought, how many
of his fellow Lebanese had left in 1990, just as the war was winding down, after
having seen everything and lived enough.
It was in 1990, in fact, that Abu Victor had glimpsed Tony crossing the
street in downtown Montreal. Tony had grown to over six feet tall, he was still
rocket-shaped, still wild in the eyes. Abu Victor would know him anywhere. He
had shouted his friend's name, they had hugged, cried, slapped each other's
backs, gotten deliriously drunk, talked about everything and nothing as one
does. Tony had been in contact with Le Colonel, and Joseph was close to George,
and so a few nights later, the four found themselves in a restaurant, 25 years
old all of a sudden, with nothing between them except food, four bleeding
steaks, and drink, three hefty pints of beer and Le Colonel's bulbous glass of
Chateau Margaux.
What kind of life was this, Joseph had wondered then. How miraculous.
The waitresses loved George, they were fascinated by his dark glasses and
watchful face, by the white cane he wielded as confidently as a weapon.
Drifting in nostalgia, Joseph had mentioned the narrow crevice in their
shared building where, as kids, they used to hide, one at a time, until it
became too dangerous, when they grew too tall, too thick, when they risked
getting stuck in the wall.
“Just think!” Tony had said. “These days, even one of my thighs wouldn't
fit.”
Le Colonel had made a joke about something else that wouldn't fit.
Of the four, only Joseph was married and had a child. His friends had raised
their glasses and christened him the Proud Father of Victor, Abu Victor.
Joseph had glanced up at a clock on the restaurant wall, and found himself
inexplicably breathing the clean, mysteriously perfumed scent of his wife's
skin. Nadia, Nadia, Nadia. Victor, Victor, Victor.
Around the patio table, Le Colonel was laughing over some joke that George
had told. George had collected jokes ever since he was a kid. He and his small
white cane used to wander all over the neighbourhood to beg, borrow or steal
one-liners from the old men idling forever in cafés. Later, George had collected
jokes in the bomb shelters. Plenty of jokes then. His grand dream had been to
write his own joke book but as Abu Victor always said, What the hell kind of
dream is that?
Now the sun was three-quarters down. On the opposite balcony, university
students were being obnoxious; their rowdy laughter ran rough-shod down the
alleyway, scattering wave after wave of birds.
Le Colonel glared at the students, “God in heaven, I want to poke their eyes
out!” He taught at the Université de Montréal and was a specialist of the
Peripatetic School, Aristotle, Strato, people like that. “In this country, when
they’re serious, they whisper! But when they’re frivolous, they shout! They only
want you to hear their stupidities!”
George began, “It's just like that joke, when Abu Abed goes into the
restaurant in Bourj Hammoud and the owner says to him — “
“The cake looks okay,” said Tony.
“Wedding cakes are for decoration only.” Le Colonel's voice was reedy and
aggravating. “Not to be insensitive, Abu Victor, ya akhy, but you've had it in
the fridge for three years.”
Abu Victor leaned back in his chair. They all did, and for a moment he felt
as if could he pull each and every one of them on a string, that he could reel
them in or push them back, that everything they did was, unbeknownst to them,
compelled by some action of his. They were all trying to shelter him like leaves
along a branch. If he leaped from the patio, would they follow him? But when had
their faces grown so heavy, their hips rotund, their feet so flat? When had they
all started looking like their grandfathers? He knew his friends wanted to help
him, maybe some part of them even wanted to make light of the catastrophe
because, all through the war, hadn't they made light of the catastrophes of
others? To joke was heroic, it proved one's indifference. It was these kinds of
emotions – not weeping, not tearing your hair, not thoughts of suicide – that
showed you had survived intact.
George tapped his cane firmly on the ground. “I think, Abu Victor, you might
bring the cake to the new apartment. There's no reason to do anything with it
until you're ready.”
“Yes, George. When will I be ready?”
“But why eat it at all, habibi?” Le Colonel asked.
The question was reasonable but Abu Victor felt a surge of irritation. He
imagined sculpting a perfect likeness of a chocolate éclair and serving it to Le
Colonel on a plate. That would break his precious teeth.
Tony said, “Maybe we should set it on fire. Taoists do this, don't they? Make
burnt offerings.”
That Tony should know anything about Taoists was so surprising, they could
say nothing.
Finally, George spoke up. “But what is this cake made of? It might burn for
seven days and seven nights.”
“Why don't you donate it to the homeless?”
Abu Victor ignored Le Colonel's question and gazed across the alleyway. He
had lived in this apartment with his wife and son for almost twenty years, while
Victor was growing up. It was rent-controlled and, in consequence, nearly
falling down. There were cracks in the plaster, lines emerged from the walls as
if the building was writing them a message. Meanwhile, the neighbour on the
second floor despised him. She complained that, when he walked, bits of plaster
fell from her ceiling. Can’t you at least take off your shoes?
Abu Victor had told her, sadly, No. I can’t. You want to see the eczema on my
feet? He didn’t have eczema, but his deceased grandfather had suffered from the
ailment. Cracked soles, so painful, there were times when poor Jidi could barely
walk. I have to keep vaseline on my feet 24 hours a day. If I don’t wear these
special slippers, I might slip and break my neck. Those slippers are as
important to me as a white cane is to a blind man. Our relations are not
perfect, but even you wouldn’t wish disaster upon me. Would you?
The neighbour was too polite, and perhaps pitied him too much, to call him a
liar to his face.
Not his wife though. Nadia had called him a liar everyday of their life
together, sometimes teasingly, but lately only in despair. Was it really
everyday? Well. Even if he was exaggerating, didn’t he have the right? The grief
inside this house would soon kill them both. He couldn't breathe.
The wedding cake had come from, of all places, a Japanese bakery in Montreal.
Yuki and Hank, wedding cake makers. It looked like four ladies’ hats of
diminishing sizes resting one on top of the other. Abu-Victor's son, Victor, had
chosen the cake with his fiancee, Mi-yung. It was not common to see a young
Lebanese man with a young Korean woman. The two had been together for six years
and had planned a small wedding with no more than 60 guests.
The cake glinted in the sun like a giant tooth. He imagined Victor in a suit
with a cake knife in his hand, a smile upon his lips. Imagining his son made Abu
Victor want to tear his heart out. What could he ask of his friends? Would a
friend hold him underwater? What friend could help him die, save his marriage,
take his life and rip it up and begin again?
Tony swivelled his chair away from the patio table. He looked out at the
alleyway and told them: One afternoon in the spring of 1987, he walked into a
cafe in Montreal. He sat down and ordered an espresso and a baba au rhum to
celebrate the end of the Lebanese civil war. He'd thought, But what if it's all
lies? What if it's all in jest? Maybe the war is not really over. But I no
longer care! Every single time they say it might be over, I’m going to buy
myself something that I like. He’d put on ten pounds, maybe fifteen before he
finally realized his plan was faulty. He told himself, These militia pigs are
making me fat. What should I do to stay lean? I’ll have to fall in love. That’s
what he did.
“You fell in love?” Le Colonel asked.
“Didn't I look good then?”
George said, “It's a city of beautiful women.”
“That's why we stayed, isn't it?”
Le Colonel said, “Speak for yourself.”
Tony didn't say that he'd fallen in love with Nadia. Beautiful, teasing Nadia
with her long, piano-playing fingers and her scented, heavy hair. With
Abu-Victor's wife, Tony had felt himself becoming another kind of man. He'd
tried to steal her but he had failed. That was a long time ago, ancient history.
But why had he said so much, and why now of all times? When Tony started telling
the story, he'd forgotten the ending. He'd forgotten there had been an ending at
all. He stared at the cake, struck silent by his own confusion.
The sobriety around the patio table was unnerving. Abu Victor brooded, turing
his wine glass round and round in his hand. George could hear a music crackling
from another balcony. His French was only passable, but he thought the singer
was shouting, Take off! Take off! Take off your shirt! George wiped his nose.
His dark glasses were slipping, it was very hot. When he was a child, the
neighbours used to whisper: Poor George, with his white cane and his dark
glasses, he already looks like a little old man. He smiled. The neighbours had
no idea that women were drawn to his blindness like stars to the night sky.
George slid his left hand across the table, and someone, probably Abu-Victor,
pushed a glass up to his fingers.
“Water, George?” It was Tony. “The evening is still so hot.”
“I’d prefer wine. You know what Abu Abed says, If you’re going to steal
something, make sure it’s a camel.” The water was lifted away. The stem of a
wineglass was fitted between his fingers. “Thanks.”
One of them leaped suddenly from his chair. Abu Victor, no doubt. He never
did anything slowly.
George heard steps, the screen door opening and slamming shut. Opening again.
Abu-Victor came back with plates and utensils. Probably forks. The sun was
making a red veinous pattern, like the back of a leaf, against his eyelids. It
was very bright out.
The morning they unwrapped the bandages from George's eyes, he had felt so
devastated, he had asked his parents for a new name. They had thought he was
only joking, so he had remained George. Because he had been ten years old when
the accident happened, he had experienced plenty of colours already and so
colours in his mind never went away. Colours were visited upon him in streaks
and textures, in tessellations that bandaged the world. Doctors, nurses, adults,
and priests told him all sorts of things: how lucky he was to have survived the
explosion, how fortunate he was to have the chance to experience God's earth in
a different way. God, they said, had surely been looking out for him! George
observed the spidery lines breathing behind his eyelids: they made the forms of
animals, the meter of languages, the stomping of colours. They were lines
attached to wires that exploded but left no victims. 1975, the year the war
began, he, Joseph, Tony and Le Colonel, were all ten years old. They liked to
tease him, waving their hands in front of his eyes, their movements distorting
the colours he saw and making a breeze against his skin. The three boys would
pick up his hands and run it over the surfaces of things, the shell of a bullet,
a stolen negligee, a rock in the shape of Napoleon, a cat named Foufou. He
remembered, most of all, how Joseph, Tony, and Le Colonel would run him down to
the bomb shelter at the bottom of their building, all their hands on his body –
holding his wrists, elbows, back, head – as they spirited him down the
staircase, the racket of their feet so small against the deafening explosions.
Just the sound made you feel as if you'd died. He'd had the sensation that they
were the bomb falling, rushing headlong down the stairs. Or more precisely, he
was the bomb carried in the belly of their hands, about to be tossed into the
shelter, to take everyone, loved ones and enemies, family and strangers, away
with him. Joseph, Joseph, he would cry, and the other boy would shout George,
and the sound of his own voice seemed to call a different George out of George's
chest, and this boy, too, would pull him along. To where? Not to safety. Only
the next step, the next hiding place, the next onrush of feeling.
But now, as he sat beside Joseph, he did not know what to wish his friend
except numbness. The death of feeling. Joseph's son, Victor, had always had a
soft voice. The soft voice is always drowned out.
“Might as well give me some wine, too, eh Tony?”
Le Colonel's voice reminded George of seagulls.
Tony said, “The wine is very sweet, habibi.”
“Eat the cake,” George said quietly, “and the wine won’t seem so sweet.”
“Abu Victor,” Le Colonel said. “Is that a new sculpture?”
“New? New from three years ago.”
“How can that be? Have I not visited you in so long?”
Silence.
“The last time I saw you,” Le Colonel continued, “there was also a war.”
“A different war.”
“Same fucking war,” Tony said.
Le Colonel wanted to bring up something from the past, from when they were
kids. If he said the right thing, he was sure the four of them would just relax.
The present was minefield. Peace was such a tricky thing. And how could they be
expected to help Abu Victor? Nothing could replace Victor, who even at 22 had
still possessed the sweetness of a child.
Tony said, “George, old man. You want cake?”
“Why not?”
“Yes,” Abu Victor said. “Why not?”
Abu Victor held the knife and dish in his hand. He put the dish down and,
with both hands, positioned the blade on the highest tier of the cake.
“I would start from the bottom,” Tony said.
“You would, would you?”
“Shall I do it for you?” Tony asked.
“No, my friend. You've done enough.”
Le Colonel laughed. The laughter felt odd. Abu Victor felt as if the sky
itself was staring at them and passing judgment, and that he was disappointing
not only his three friends, not only Nadia, but the sky itself.
“Who’s the oldest now?” Le Colonel asked, even though he knew.
“Tony. He’s the first to turn fifty-one.”
“I stopped getting old a long time ago, George. Are you fucking blind?”
“Your girlfriend, what’s-her-name,” George hummed. “I saw her very well. Oh
La La.”
“Remember Miss Oh La La!” Le Colonel said. “The little breasts of Miss
Papineau. The shapely legs of Mme Le Normand!”
“One day,” George said, “a Parisian, an American, an Iranian and Abu Abed met
at a conference. In the middle of their conversation, they – ”
“No more jokes,” Abu Victor begged.
Tony knocked over his glass of wine. No more jokes. The wine spilled on
George whose body didn’t react at all. The pitch-black lenses of his glasses
turned away from the cake and in the direction of the sun. His white cane,
disturbed by a twitch of his knee, clattered to the floor.
Downstairs, the neighbour shouted in frustration, “Mais, non! Non!” but
perhaps it wasn't meant for them to hear.
Tony leaped up, ran inside looking for a cloth and returned with a handful of
paper towels.
“Was it red wine?” George asked.
“Yes.”
“I see.”
They cleaned up and settled down again.
“Cut the cake, Abu Victor,” George said.
“Yes,” he answered. Father of Victor, Father of Victor. “Thank you. I
will.”
The cake melted slowly in Abu Victor's mouth. It surprised him, the sugar
tunnelling through his body. Maybe a person didn’t have to know all the things
he or she did. Abu Victor felt so sick of knowing, he thought he might be
drowning in knowing. And today, more bombs had fallen on those poor, accursed
people. What could anyone do? There was no justice. He was tired of knowing.
The fighting in Lebanon had ended slowly. That had been Abu Victor's
experience. Actually, for 20 years, one didn’t know if it was really alright to
turn around and go home to Beirut. One didn’t know if peace was just an
interregnum, a little pause-café, a short afternoon nap before killing, which
had its own relentless schedule, resumed. Also you didn’t know when you would
open a door and have the past rush towards you with its hysterical weeping and
outstretched arms. In truth, he preferred the past to the present. Mi-yung had
told Victor of a Korean saying, “To thrive in calamity but perish in soft
living.” Mi-yung's parents had lived through the Korean War, they'd been
children back then. “You'll feel at home with them,” Victor had predicted, and
he had been right.
Abu Victor understood Beirut, but he believed there was something ill and
volatile about Montreal. Was it the air, the water, the hard ice of winter?
What made people go mad, even momentarily?
Why did the sun seem so frivolous here?
His son had grown up in Canada. If, in different circumstances, Victor had
ever needed someone to help him, he could easily have come to his father, to
Tony, to Le Colonel, even to George! (A blind man could kill a person by
accident. This had been their joke when they were kids: George could
accidentally shoot any number of people.) Survival was that easy. As teenagers,
they thought everything they touched turned, if not to gold, to life itself. The
act of living was nothing more than taking matters into one's own hands.
Mi-yung, who should have been his daughter-in-law, didn't need this cake. A
year ago she had met someone else. Despite their attachment her, Abu Victor and
Nadia had decided not to attend Mi-yung's wedding. It would have felt too much
like giving away their own daughter. Mi-yung's parents were fortunate; they had
three children, but they had only their one beloved, their son, Victor.
Now Abu Victor remembered an earlier incident. He started to tell Tony, Le
Colonel and George about it. Abu Victor and his son had been in the car. Victor
had just gotten his license, so he would have been 17 years old. They had been
driving through the intersection of St-Laurent and Mont-Royal when a cyclist ran
the light, swerving so close that Victor came within inches of, accidentally,
running him down. The cyclist was an idiot. Completely oblivious to the fact
that he’d cheated death. In shock, Victor had rolled down the window. He'd
shouted, “What's wrong with you? Don't you see I nearly killed you?”
The cyclist laughed. In French, he said, “Where are you from, you piece of
shit?”
Abu Victor had felt as if the entire street, the whole city, maybe even the
entire country, had turned to stare at them. Silence covered him like a
cloth.
Victor broke the silence. “I’m from here,” the boy had shouted. He'd shouted
in French, then English, then Arabic. “From here! From here, you asshole. And
I’m not going anywhere! You hear me, you racist shit? We're here and we're not
going anywhere.”
Were they from here? Abu Victor asked his friends now. The car had driven on
and Victor had repeated only two words: That bastard, that bastard. Victor had
always been soft-spoken, his temper non-existent, and Abu Victor had been
inordinately proud of him for standing his ground. He'd said it aloud: “Victor,
you really showed that ghabi! Did you see the look on his face? I'm proud of
you.”
Around the patio table, no one answered him. Their discomfort and sadness
felt like smoke inside his lungs.
Abu Victor drank his wine and took another bite of cake.
His son's name, Victor, belonged to this place – to Montreal, to Paris, to
Beirut – and the name had also belonged to Joseph's own father. All was
belonging. But had a name ever been enough to bind a person to a piece of land?
People don’t belong to other people, Nadia had told him only last week. Mi-yung
doesn't belong to Victor, our son doesn't belong to you, you don't belong to me.
And none of us, none of us, belong here. None of us.
“If not here,” he had said, wanting to take her in his arms, but knowing deep
in his heart she did not want him, “then where?”
“I don't know, Joseph.” Her tears had scalded him. “Why don't we have any
answers?”
Now he said to the air, to Tony, Le Colonel and George, “If you bleed into
the ground, as Victor did, don't you have the right to call the land your
own?”
“Abu Victor,” George said. “It was an accident.”
“What is accident, George, and what is catastrophe?”
Le Colonel said, “I agree with you, Abu Victor. But maybe all of it,
everything, is accident. Not the will of God, just the unending motion and
weight of accident.”
Abu Victor shook his head. “Is that all this is?”
“But you misunderstand. That is not a small thing.”
Victor had been on his way to work downtown. It had been very early in the
morning. A stranger had been causing a disturbance, he was having some kind of
breakdown, waving a knife around. The police said the man was making too much
noise, he was ripping up bags. Victor, approaching from the opposite direction,
heard the confrontation. Had he entered the alleyway on purpose? He spoke three
languages, maybe he thought he could speak any language. He'd graduated in
Engineering and was working towards his professional license, he knew about
crumbling cities where things fall down, brought low by shoddy construction, or
bombs, or hate. Like his father, Victor always woke early, by 5 am at the
latest. Victor had opened his eyes in the bed of the apartment he shared with
Mi-yung. He was very precise with time, it was like he had a clock ticking away
inside him. He bicycled to work at exactly 6:30 am. He and his bicycle had
turned onto the scene. Had his presence caused someone to flinch? The police,
when they shot dead the man with the knife, accidentally shot Victor as well. A
bullet had ricocheted off a wall and struck Victor in the chest. The police
tried to help him. No one would tell Abu Victor if his son had said anything as
he lay in the alleyway. In the ambulance, Victor had still been breathing. But
neither he nor Nadia, nor Mi-yung, had reached the hospital in time. At the
moment his son died, Abu Victor had been awake as usual. He had been sitting in
this very chair, looking up at the changing light over the rooftops. Afterwards,
the police gave Abu Victor his son's clothes, his bicycle helmet, and his
bicycle. The knife brandished by the homeless man turned out to be only a butter
knife. The shooting was in the news, there was an outcry, the police apologized,
the ensuing inquest called it a tragedy, and then it was over. Everything was
gone. All this had happened three years ago, at 6:40 am.
How can it be, Abu Victor wondered, that am I still the father of someone?
Would it not be better if I became nameless? Abu. Father of.
He cut the cake cleanly, from the bottom tier, and served a second helping to
Le Colonel, who said, “It's surprisingly soft inside.”
“I broke all the bones already.”
Le Colonel laughed but looked nauseated.
So it's true, Abu Victor thought. A joke is a knife. A joke can spill
blood.
Tony accepted the piece that was given to him. All through the apartment,
Tony saw reminders of Nadia. Photographs of Nadia and Victor, Victor and Nadia.
Nadia and Mi-yung, Victor and Mi-yung. Nadia had wrapped the wedding cake in
plastic wrap and put it in the freezer. Why had she done that? What would she do
when she came home and found it gone? He had not seen Nadia in such a long time.
She was a good and upright person. Abu Victor might have lost his son, but he
still had a home and someone who loved him. Shouldn't that count for
something?
“Yuki and Hank made this cake,” Abu Victor said drunkenly. “We should send
them a letter of gratitude. We should tell them their cake has lasting
quality.”
George's cane had the lightness of a cat’s paw against his knee. He thought
the cake was ten storeys high and wreathed with pink roses. He had seen a cake
like this when he was a boy, at a wedding in Harissa, a village in the
mountains, in the region where his mother was born.
Le Colonel: “Remember that night in Cyprus when we met the princesses . .
.”
“I don’t remember a fucking thing,” Tony said.
They laughed.
Tony again: “I've loved the formality of wedding cakes ever since I was a
child.”
George pushed his plate across for a third helping. “Tony, what does
formality taste like? Do you know the one about Abu Abed going to a wedding in
Jounieh . . .”
My son in a suit. My son in a suit of clothes. My father in a suit. Father
and son, Victor and Victor. “I really don’t know either.”
Tony: “Are you drunk, Abu Victor?”
“I would pay a lot of money to be drunk.”
“Do they eat this kind of cake in Japan?” Le Colonel asked.
Abu Victor wanted to laugh and laugh. “Every single bloody day.”
The cake was surprisingly delicious. Le Colonel found himself listing the
things they had once picked up from the streets. All the sweets he, Joseph, Tony
and George had eaten after trading bullet casings, cigarette packages, marbles,
anything, with other bands of brothers in the neighbourhood. He remembered all
the older boys who had sauntered by with beautiful girls on their arms.
Ever-changing girls in ever-changing dresses and ever-changing shoes. Of course
they weren’t really changing, material goods had been in short supply . . . But
the streets of Beirut had once been kaleidoscopic, alive and more alive with
each rotation of the hours. The war had lasted a long time and eventually they
had all left Lebanon. Le Colonel, himself, had been the first to go. He had
fallen in love with a French girl, and he had followed her; Le Colonel had told
his parents he wished to study philosophy, and they had happily paid the bills.
In France, he'd fallen in love with a Lebanese man who never experienced the
war. Now they had a home together in Hampstead, a wealthy Montreal enclave that
had its own Public Security Department. But he couldn’t recall the order of the
others' departures. Was it Abu-Victor in 1984, then George in ’86? Had Tony
really stayed all the way to 1990? He couldn’t remember. It was a nothing place,
Beirut. He refused to go back. Le Colonel was not that child anymore, a boy who
could be satisfied with sweets, with watching the world go by. The philosopher
Strato observed that water pouring from a spout separates into individual
droplets, Strato imagined that everything in this universe was produced by
weight and motion. Old Strato thought he could free God himself, make it so that
God was no longer responsible for creation: all that was required for life to
continue was weight, was motion.
Freed from the idea of God, Strato believed, we would finally be free of
fear.
Le Colonel had been introduced to the ideas of Strato when he fled Beirut for
Paris, but from the beginning he had carried a seed of doubt. Le Colonel did not
fear God. God barely made any claims these days, it was people who thought they
were responsible for all of creation. Society was bloated with ego. When he
thought of men, Le Colonel felt an almost incapacitating terror. In his entire
lifetime, there had been not a single minute in which war did not exist. Peace,
therefore, was the grand illusion. And those who lived in peace lived in a dream
about to vanish. Le Colonel had been awake in Beirut, but he had fallen asleep
in Paris. He slept still, he slept and chose sleep rather than the terrible
sadness of waking.
Softly, George was telling a joke about Abu Abed taking a class on the
environment. George was a master of comic timing. The other three men leaned
forward as one to hear the punchline. The joke was absolutely filthy. Le Colonel
could barely breathe, he was laughing so hard. His nose ran and tears dripped
from his eyes.
Afterwards, Tony said, “I think I'll leave Montreal. When this cake is
finished, I'm going to go home and pack my bags.” He had not been back to Beirut
since 1987. He ate a pink rose made of sugar, and found that it was still frozen
in the middle.
George took a fourth helping. In their mother tongue, blindness is used as a
curse. Al'ama. But they didn't know. His friends couldn't see all these colours
and all this sun. All they could see was this cake. He said, “Good for you,
Tony. Send us a letter now and then.”
Victor was riding his bicycle down Avenue du Parc, and the world was quiet.
He was trying not to think about the wedding. Instead he watched as a pale,
liquid light slid over the towers of downtown Montreal. His bicycle was
whistling down the hill. He passed the city's centrepiece, Mont-Royal, a
hillock, really, compared to the mountains of Lebanon. There was an immense
statue, a woman balanced on the ball of one foot, arms uplifted, asking for
justice. Victor did not know what to ask for. He was worried about Mi-yung, who
was worried about her grandmother in Seoul. They would go to Korea, they would
take care of things. That's what he most wished for, to be able to take care of
things for her. To set their world, just their small part of this city, in
order. One day, he would engineer a transparent building. Imagine that. He flew
down the hill, he savoured the breeze against his skin, and imagined himself as
an object falling down into the world.
George dropped his fork.
“What is it?” Abu Victor said.
George's voice was almost lost behind the laughing clamour of the young
students on the opposite balcony. “Nothing,” he said. “I was thinking about the
staircase of our old building in Beirut. I thought I saw something that wasn't
there.” George fell silent. But he saw it still, a weight and a motion, falling
past them. A bird on an electric pole was chirping in an even ticking, like a
clock measuring time, and then it stopped.
Abu Victor heard the front door opening. It could be Nadia coming home. She
would come out onto the patio. She would see Tony. She would see him. Why did
you do this, Joseph? Don't you understand? I saved it. I saved it.
He wanted to ask her, What can any human being put into such a cake? If this
is all that God, the universe, nature, Buddha, I-don't-know-who, gives us, what
is there for us to add? Let me take it into my own hands or else how can I
continue? Tell me, Nadia, please, how I can remove your sorrow. Your sorrow, our
sorrow, is killing us.
