But my father didn’t die. He came out of the bombing alive. No one had expected him or any of the people who lived in the building or who happened to be in the bar at the time to survive. He was the only one, saved by the gramophone, which was crushed of course. He told me later that just before the building collapsed some of the customers were gathered around him, examining the gramophone and listening to the faint sound it made. Before they met their doom, they were drinking beer and making jokes about my father and his gramophone.
The people in the bar died faster than they might have done, because there were no chairs in the place. Another unusual feature of Abu Elia’s bar was that five of the eight brands of beer it served were sometimes of dubious authenticity. When I reached the building, I didn’t know my father was still alive. There were four or five ambulance men there. They were volunteers. One of them asked me, ‘Can you identify your father’s body?’ ‘Definitely,’ I replied, without thinking. ‘Then make your way through the rubble and when you find it, point it out to me,’ he said. I walked in. There was a smell of dead people mixed with beer, and the bodies were soaked. Even the rats hadn’t survived. They had suffocated too and their eyes were bloodshot. The beer froth was still fresh and was seeping between the blocks of stone. These were not the best kind of dead people as far as those ambulance men were concerned. They were people who had died while drinking alcohol and it was not going to be fun digging them out.
I recognized my father’s body from the arm I used to massage. The fingers were still clenched around the small handle of the gramophone. That made me smile. My father was as obstinate as a mule, although he was usually good-natured. I pointed out my father to the ambulance man and we pulled his body out together. It was easy to free it, despite the massive amount of rubble. The ambulance man, who was wearing a white mask, said, ‘Boy, you’re lucky. We won’t be able to recover some of the bodies until the bulldozers arrive this evening.’ I left my father’s body in the ambulance. The ambulance man refused to let me take the gramophone handle. My father’s arms were completely caked in blood and were like punctured tubes. I went to tell my mother. I was sixteen years old.
On the way home I swallowed my own vomit twice and when I arrived I had wrenching pains in my guts. I went into the bathroom and vomited. The vomit tasted very acidic and the acidity seemed to have damaged my throat or my oesophagus, because some blood came out too. That made me think of the pain my father must have felt when his arms lost all that blood I had seen.
In the hospital we were told that my father hadn’t died, but he had lost both his arms. He was in bed, with those broad shoulders of his, rather like a robot superhero whose arms had been cut off after a brutal battle with villains. But as soon as he came around from the anaesthetic he asked me in a frail voice, ‘Where’s the gramophone?’
‘It got smashed, papa. There’s nothing left of it,’ I said.
He looked at his amputated arms, as if the loss of the gramophone had reminded him that disaster had also struck his own body. ‘So I don’t need my arms anyway,’ he joked.
While my mother was wiping away her tears, I was summoned to the hospital reception desk, where I was given the gramophone handle and signed my name on a piece of paper. That was all that was left of the old machine. But my father changed shortly after he came back home. He had suffered some psychological damage. I hid the gramophone handle from him and didn’t mention it to him. He just stared at my arms and my mother’s arms, without looking at our eyes or faces. He spoke to us only through our arms. He focused his gaze on them so much that you felt that your hand was smeared with shit or that there was something wrong with it, and you had to put your hands in your pockets immediately, or hide your arms completely inside your sweater, leaving the sleeves hanging empty, like when we played at being beggars on the stairs as kids.
He would sometimes ask us questions such as: ‘How do you feel when you look at me? Tell me honestly. How do you feel? Isn’t it a privilege to have two arms? And your mother? She must feel the same way, mustn’t she?’ Sometimes he would ask me to move my arms in a particular way. ‘Lift your arm up high, and then drop it down as if it’s dead,’ he would say. And I would reply, ‘Stop that, Dad.’ Or he would ask me to stand behind him and let my arms hang down so that my arms looked like they were his arms. Standing like this, we would move together to the mirror and he would take a long look at his own reflection, which now had my arms. ‘Your arms fit my body perfectly, don’t they? No wonder we’re father and son,’ he would say. This was painful to me. I had to obey him, as if I were still a child. My father started to become very irritable. As for my mother, she felt she was being punished, because my father had stopped sleeping with her but she couldn’t abandon him. ‘People would start talking, gossiping. They would see me as a bad woman,’ she said.
My father also made a point of shitting and pissing in bed, so my mother started buying nappies for him and making him wear them. She washed his balls and ass, and shaved his beard with an electric razor because he didn’t trust her with a razor blade in her hand. My attempts to convince him that he should trust her didn’t succeed. ‘Your mother used to have a lover when I worked in the bar,’ he said. ‘You don’t know anything.’
In the end my father and I fell out, and since then we haven’t exchanged a single word. My father had seen a medical programme on television about limb transplants, for arms and hands, for example. He called me into his room, which he never left. When I came in, he said meekly, ‘I’m going to make a request that no father has ever asked of his son. If you agree, you’ll gain everyone’s respect – relatives, your friends and the neighbours. Everyone in the neighbourhood will respect you if you do this for me.’
‘Of course, Dad,’ I replied. ‘You know I’d be willing to do anything.’
I had left school after my father had the accident and I’d worked as a carpenter’s apprentice. Now I was a partner with two friends in a furniture factory, and I was ready to do everything in my power to fulfil my father’s wishes.
‘I want you to donate one of your arms to me,’ he said. ‘They said on television that it’s medically possible.’
I couldn’t believe that my father was asking me for an arm. I said nothing. I was thinking of that vacuum bomb and the gramophone. I wished I had lost my arms instead of him, and at that very moment, as if he could read my thoughts, my father said, ‘If you had lost your arms, I would donate one of my arms to you without hesitation. What’s an arm worth compared to me seeing you happy, or you seeing me happy?’
‘I agree with you that this is a request no father has ever asked of his son,’ I said. ‘It’s totally original,’ I added, pronouncing the last word in the French style in a tone that was both sarcastic and sad. I tried to convince him that it was impossible: ‘What if the operation was a failure? Then I would have lost my arm.’
He exploded with rage in my face. He said I was selfish and that even if the worst came to the worst, I would still have one arm. ‘One arm is better than absolutely nothing,’ he said.
I left the room and thought it over. I felt sad for my father. I didn’t feel angry or disappointed. I was just sad and I told my mother. I was about to accept, because I no longer needed to use my arms in the furniture factory. I only supervised the designs and sometimes suggested some modifications. I could even employ an assistant. My partners wouldn’t object. But my mother implored me, ‘Don’t listen to him. Please don’t listen to him. I’m willing to spend the rest of my life putting nappies on him, cleaning up his shit, shaving him and putting up with every indignity from him, but I will not see you losing one of your arms.’