Like all people, Nazmi had two rows of teeth. But when he closed his mouth they didn’t line up on top of each other evenly. I used to always see a space between them. For that reason Nazmi was unable to pronounce some letters: tha’, jeem, dhal, zay, seen, and sahd. All of these letters used to come out of his mouth the same, like a combination of the sounds for sheen and sahd. Once on the roof of the building I tried to teach him correct pronunciation. But he started to cry, and I asked him why he was crying, acting like I was angry, trying to stop myself from bursting into tears like him. But he didn’t tell me why he was crying. He didn’t tell me anything. He calmed down and asked me not to try to teach him pronunciation again. He had to hear himself pronounce the names of things wrong, but knowing at the same time that he couldn’t correct them. He wanted these things, which belonged to life, to be disturbed when hearing their names pronounced by people incorrectly.
“No doubt, everything in the world has gotten used to hearing its name like this for a long time now,” he would say.
I used to answer him, “I believe that. In class, the teacher said that sky, sun, clouds, pebble, purple, evil, box, rainbow, star, and others are things that didn’t change their names for hundreds and hundreds of years.”
Then he asked, “But these things, have their forms not dwindled since this time called ‘hundreds and hundreds of years ago’? Is it possible that some form fades away but its name stays the same?”
I didn’t answer these complex questions of his but I felt that they’d sprouted up in his mind because of the shape of his two big hands.
The roof of the building wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t clean. Rusted, broken antennas, the rubble of rocks, a broken clothesline, and water tanks were strewn around on it. But from atop we used to be able to see Beirut’s lighthouse. It was a column, standing on a hill, shining at night. The lighthouse might have seemed very tall to someone looking at it but it wasn’t. It was short and thick. What was actually raised up was the hill underneath it. We also used to see the water. The entire sea, right to its very end. At the end of the sea there was a horizontal blue line that had a starting point and an ending point. These two points seemed sturdy, as if nothing could move them, and the mainland shrunk with every dot as if a clamp was holding it fixed in place. We used to see a lot of swimming pools. Three or perhaps four. One of them used to stay lit at night because it was for the soldiers and secret police. There were always elderly divers swimming extremely slowly and carrying fishing nets on their shoulders. We used to distinguish them by the gleam of the flashlight that they carried in their hands. Then on the back side we used to be able to look out over the al-Aoud family’s big garden in which many kinds of trees grew, like pomegranates, guava, and bitter oranges, where both distant and nearby birds used to come and sometimes chirp at night. But that didn’t concern us. Similarly, we used to look over two tennis courts at the sports club called “Escape” in English. Then there was, in a distant area far from the sea, a football stadium for some professional team. Nazmi and I concluded that this stadium was miles longer and wider than the corridor of our building. There was a Ferris wheel in Beirut’s amusement park which never stopped turning; in the winter the wind would come to the sea to play with it and make it turn around to the left and right.
From atop the roof, the wooden boxes were thrown up with the greatest possible force. I threw them. Before he closed his eyes, Nazmi was looking at me, repeating that same question he always did: “Can I throw just one box? Just one? I want to throw one box to the stars.”
“No, you’re not ready for this yet.”
“But I’m older than you. I asked my sister and she said that I’m older than you.”
I didn’t want to risk it though. For fear that his big hands, powerful like his questions, would crush one of them. The most important thing for me was that he keep his eyes closed while I threw them in the air.
“Be careful not to open your eye, even a little crack. If the boxes know that you’re looking at them, they will change course and come back to us. After that we won’t be able to send any other boxes up.”
Then he took my hand and put it over his eyes. His face was large and his bones very prominent. Because of this I preferred not to touch his face. “Squeeze your hand over both my eyes. Or on the eye you think I will open. Throw all the boxes, except one, let me throw one box. Just one box.” But I kept refusing. I always refused. I refused and was afraid. I was afraid that he’d get angry. That I’d get angry. That he’d come down to the building entrance and bash his head against the wall.
The small wooden boxes would sometimes settle on the balcony of one of the building’s apartments after I sent it up. One time, Nazmi and I were listening to the sound of them colliding before opening our eyes and he asked, “What’s that sound?”
“Perhaps it’s the box we threw colliding with a distant star,” I answered.
“But the sound is very close. Does the sound of the stars resemble the sound of the banisters?”
“Exactly, especially if it’s colliding with a small wooden box. That’s because of its shape.”
“Its shape? What’s the shape of a star? Is it like a cube of white cheese?”
“Exactly. Bulgarian cheese with anise. Intensely white. You can see it in my geography book. But stars don’t have sharp corners, all of their edges are curved and smooth.”
“How can you ensure that the box will reach the star that you want it to? What if another one lured it?”
“It’s possible. The sun can lure a box or birds or even clouds. Once I threw a box but some white birds grabbed it at a great height and put a bird who’d died of fatigue during flight inside it. Then they set it free. Afterward, the box smashed into the glass protecting the cockpit of a giant boat somewhere else. That cracked the box. But the crack went from here to there. And also to all the other boxes that I had already prepared. Because of this I realized what had struck that box. I spent the night sealing up the cracks with tape. I wasn’t angry and I didn’t feel too stressed. Sometimes, Nazmi, the box doesn’t reach the star that we want, so we have to keep throwing boxes into space every evening. We have to throw them from the same place, with our eyes shut tight. Every evening.”
Originally written in Arabic.
Rupture
by Bachir Hilal
Tallet al-Khayyat
I won’t sign this report.
I am George, son of Abbas al-Majrouh the builder, nicknamed “The Boss” for the skill he claims he has in sculpting and building with stone, unmatched by anyone in Beirut, as he used to say and still does, all the more so when he’s been drinking a lot: “I should be awarded a higher degree in engineering. God will never forgive my parents for not sending me to university; their own ignorance and helplessness meant they couldn’t see my potential.”