“And did she send for you?”
“No. I waited and waited but it was no use. Abu Akram is my father’s first cousin. He took me in and is letting me live in this office until my mother sends for me. I wrote her letters, but I received no responses. It seems the Americans don’t like white hair, or she’s forgotten about me. God knows where she is now. I asked to meet the American ambassador in Beirut. I phoned the embassy several times, but they never gave me an appointment, I don’t know why, even though I spoke Classical English to them.”
“There’s no such thing as Classical English,” I said.
“What are you talking about, man? All the languages are the same. There’s colloquial Arabic and Classical Arabic and there’s colloquial English and Classical English, am I right?”
“No,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter.”
“Do you want some shampoo?”
He got up and fetched a black leather case, opened it, and took out a number of bottles.
“I sell shampoo to keep myself busy.”
He went over to the actress and indicated that she should buy some. Catherine took a bottle and seemed embarrassed, not knowing what she should do.
I snatched the bottle from her and gave it back to Salim.
“Forget it. Try it on someone else.”
“Let them make up their own minds, brother. Maybe they would have bought some.”
“Leave it alone, Son. Forget it,” I scolded him in a loud voice.
“Why don’t you buy some, Doctor, and dye your hair,” said Salim.
“What’s he saying,” asked the tall man.
“He’s selling dye,” I answered, and quickly told him the story of Salim’s white hair.
“Don’t tell him,” said Salim. “If you want, I’ll tell him myself. But did you believe my story? I only tell it to sell shampoo.”
I looked at Abu Akram and saw his lips curling in a kind of smile, and his small white teeth — as white as those of a young child — appeared.
“What? What?” asked Catherine.
“Buy the shampoo, and I’ll tell you,” said Salim.
The girl took the bottle of shampoo and asked how much it was.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Salim. “Pay whatever you want.”
Catherine took a hundred-franc note out of her little purse and gave it to Salim. Salim took the note, looked at it for a while, then handed it back to Catherine and turned to me, “No, Brother. I was just joking.”
“Which part was the joke,” I asked him, “the shampoo or the white hair?”
“You guess.”
Salim took the bottle from Catherine, put it back in his leather case, said goodbye, and went off.
Abu Akram then explained that Salim joked around all the time, treating his tragedy as comedy; he is alone in life and needs work.
“What did he study?” I asked him.
“Nothing, my friend,” he said. “We’re all children of the revolution, and what can you study in the revolution?”
“Tell him to come and see me at the hospital. Maybe I can find him some work. But is his story true?”
“Of course, of course,” said Abu Akram. “He’s the only one of his family to have survived.”
“What about his mother?” I asked.
“His mother died, but he insists on saying she picked him up and escaped with him. She didn’t pick him up. They found him under the bodies; they pushed the bodies away and took him to the hospital, and there they discovered that every hair on his head had turned white.”
“And America?”
“What America, Brother? His aunt lives in Detroit, that’s all. Do you think someone like Salim or like us can get a visa for America? Out of the question! He just loves the cinema. He sees Al Pacino’s films dozens of times each and learns the dialogue by heart. He puts the films on the video machine and says the words along with the actors. That’s how he learned English — monkey see, monkey do.”
“And the shampoo?” I asked.
“That’s a different story,” he said. “The shampoo came after the Ekza. Do you know what he was doing for a living last year? He’d go out to al-Fakahani with a bunch of small bottles, stand in the middle of the road and shout, ‘Ekza for pain! Ekza for rheumatism! Ekza for impotence!’ He’d invented a medicine he called Ekza and he’d package it in empty bottles and sell the bottles for three thousand lira each.
“‘Ekza!’ he’d shout, opening a bottle and drinking the contents in front of everyone. ‘Drink and get well! Rub it on where it hurts and the pain will go away!’ And people bought the stuff. Then they arrested him.
“They took him to the police station on the new highway, where he confessed that Ekza was a mixture of water and soya oil, and that it was harmless. The officer smiled and told Salim that he’d overlook it this time on condition that he didn’t do it again. But instead of leaving, Salim took out a bottle and offered it to the officer saying he’d give him a good price and sell him the bottle for two thousand, now he’d become his friend, and that Ekza cured everything, especially constipation.
“The officer lost his temper and ordered him to be beaten and put in jail. They practically beat him to death and left him to rot for more than a month.
“When he returned to the camp, he said they’d released him because they were scared of him and his hair that had turned white overnight.
“After his ordeal in jail, Salim decided not to leave the camp. He stopped making and selling Ekza and started selling shampoo. Yesterday, if you’d seen him, you’d have understood how he works.”
“And is it real shampoo?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Abu Akram, “but he stands in front of the mosque, washes his hair, and people buy.”
“What’s he saying?” asked the tall man.
As I told him the story of the shampoo, I was looking at Catherine, expecting a reaction, when we heard a racket outside the door. The bodyguard Abu Akram had sent to look for Daniel had returned with him. Daniel came in with three children larking around while he handed out chewing gum and chocolates and they argued over them.
“Get the children out of here!” shouted Abu Akram.
“Where were you?” I asked.
“Walking around,” he said. “And, as you can see, I like children.”
The tall man stood up and Catherine got ready to go; it seemed they’d lost interest. They didn’t ask for more information about Salim.
Abu Akram asked if I’d taken them to the mosque-cemetery.
I said no.
“I’ll take them,” he said. “Thank you, Doctor.”
I was on the verge of leaving when Catherine asked me what Abu Akram wanted.
“He’ll take you to the cemetery,” I said.
“But we’ve already seen the cemetery,” said the tall man.
“The one at the mosque,” I said, and explained how we’d turned the mosque into a cemetery during the siege.
“Another cemetery!” exclaimed Catherine, and her lower lip started to tremble. “I don’t want to, I don’t want to. I want to go back to the hotel.”
I told Abu Akram that our friends were tired and it would be better to take them back to the hotel, but Abu Akram insisted and asked me to translate what he said. He started talking about death, and about how we as a people regarded the dead as holy, and that if Shatila hadn’t stood fast during the siege, the Gaza and West Bank intifada* would never have happened.
I interrupted and said I wasn’t going to translate. “Can’t you see, my friend, the woman’s crying and the man’s trying to calm her down, with his pale face and his bald spot shining with sweat? Drop it and let them go.”