After that my father refused to speak to me. He was resentful, but he continued to hope, very arrogantly, that one day I would change my mind, burst into his room and say, ‘OK, Dad. I agree. Off we go to France together to have the operation.’
By now I was travelling to Paris often to visit my girlfriend. My visits were brief but relaxing, because I was far from home, where the atmosphere was poisoned by my father’s deteriorating state of mind and the sadness of my mother, who was now prey to diabetes, high blood pressure and an irregular heartbeat.
Once my girlfriend gave me a music box with a little crank handle. When you turned it with two fingers it played ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’ by Edith Piaf. I still had the gramophone handle in Beirut and when I came home from my trip, it occurred to me to connect the handle to the crank of the little music box. That’s what I did. I thought of giving my father the music box with the handle of the gramophone player as a birthday present, in the hope that he might forgive me. But I changed my mind. It would probably irritate him. But my father found the music box and managed to take it into his room. Somehow he put it on the bedside table among the packets of pills that he took. He didn’t say anything. He just put the music box with the gramophone handle on the bedside table. Of course he couldn’t operate it and he didn’t ask my mother to operate it for him. Maybe he was only interested in the handle, and maybe he kept the box and the handle together because he couldn’t disconnect the handle from the box.
The whole thing was embarrassing. For the first time I felt guilty. Firstly, for keeping the handle for the twenty-three years since the accident without telling him, and then for deciding to connect the handle to the music box from France, the country where my father had long wanted to have one of my arms transplanted. I think it hurt him. My father didn’t eat for days and fell into a decline. He was seventy-two years old by then. I went into his room. He had turned quite yellow. We called a doctor, who examined him quickly and told us his pulse was weak and he only had hours to live. He put him on a drip and said, ‘It’s for the best. Who knows what might happen?’ Then he left.
There was nothing I could do. I sat next to him on the edge of the bed and picked up the music box with the gramophone handle, which was the last thing my father’s hand had touched before his arm was cut off. I started to turn it. I wanted him to hear the music in the box before he passed away. I saw his lips move to make a feeble smile.
But he didn’t revive. He just smiled. As he did so, I had the impression that his arms were growing slowly from their stumps, like mushrooms, their stalks pushing up from the ground after a heavy weight, such as a hat full of padlocks, has been removed. That encouraged me and I started turning the handle faster and faster. My heart was pounding. I wanted his arms to grow, to be fully grown, as if the vacuum bomb had never fallen and my mother had not spent her whole life putting nappies on him, and he was no longer lying beside this little music box, waiting for something to happen, something unique.
Cinema
IT ALL HAPPENED ON THE FIFTH DAY AFTER WE took shelter in the cinema. The food had almost run out and we were reduced to eating yellow triangles of processed cheese. At one o’clock in the afternoon Mother would take a wedge of cheese out of our teddy bear’s tummy and divide it in half. I would eat one half and my sister would eat the other half, our heads hidden under the velvet cinema seats so that the other children, who were just as hungry as us, wouldn’t see us. We didn’t tell anyone there were seven wedges of cheese in the teddy bear’s tummy.
At eight in the evening Mother would take another wedge of cheese out of the bear’s tummy, and my sister and I would eat it in the same way and then go to sleep. Dozens of families had taken shelter in the cinema because it was three floors below ground level.
On the first day the families spread themselves out over all the seats but the shelling grew more intense every day and every now and then people would move a little further down, away from the higher seats towards the lower ones. When one of the occupying army’s tanks shelled the projection room at the top end of the auditorium, most of the families gathered on the stage and hid behind the curtain. The dividing line between us and the outside world was then the small wall that separated the projection room from the auditorium. The children could see daylight through the rectangular opening through which the film was usually projected.
Sometimes we would see Crazy Kimo go past outside. Kimo never took refuge anywhere throughout the war. He wasn’t welcome in any of the shelters. It was said that he’d gone mad because he still had a piece of shrapnel in his body – no one knew exactly where. From the stage in the cinema you could see the empty street. If you stood at the edge of the curtain, a very small piece of the big wheel at the fairground was visible. The bottom corner of the curtain was the favourite place for children and they hung out there all day long.
On the fifth day a shell fell on the cinema, among the seats. I don’t remember all the details. The blast threw me off the stage onto one of the seats in the auditorium. When I opened my eyes, I couldn’t move and the seat was back to front, facing the road instead of the screen. The other strange thing was that the wall between the projection room and the auditorium had not been knocked down. When I tried to see where the shell that landed in the cinema had come from, I couldn’t work it out. There wasn’t a hole anywhere. My sister’s teddy bear was now in my arms, but my sister was nowhere to be seen. Nor was my mother, nor any of the other children or their families. The teddy bear was full of pieces of yellow cheese, but now there were also pieces of cheese of another brand that I had never seen before.
I called out for my sister: ‘Sister, come on, let’s share a wedge of cheese, or let’s have two – a whole one for you and a whole one for me, because Mum’s not here.’ But she didn’t appear. I didn’t get up from the seat. I didn’t have any reason to get up. The cinema seat was nice and warm. It smelt as if it was stuffed with millions of grains of soft sand, all connected to each other by threads. Very fine threads. I even thought about taking the seat with me to the grave and, instead of being buried lying down, being buried sitting in the cinema seat. I don’t know why this idea occurred to me. I felt very much at ease. There was peace and quiet in the cinema.
On the morning of the next day I saw the cow. I was still sitting in the seat and the cow walked through the projection room. It stopped for a few moments. It lowered its head and looked at me through the rectangular hole and then continued on its way. The cow was big and beautiful. I looked around for my sister or one of the other children so that I could draw their attention to the cow, but the cinema was empty. I tried to get up from the seat but I couldn’t. The teddy bear was weighing on my stomach and I couldn’t budge it. It was heavy. I wondered whether that was because of the triangles of yellow cheese in its belly. I unzipped the teddy bear and took out a piece of cheese. I divided it in half. I ate one half in a single bite and held the other half in the air. I was hoping my sister would see it and would emerge from her hiding place and come over to me. She might be sitting in one of the seats behind me, and she might be hungry like me. My sister didn’t appear, so I ate the other half of the piece of cheese. It didn’t fill me up. I took another wedge out of the teddy bear’s tummy and ate it, then a third and a fourth. I couldn’t stop eating. I was hungry and the pieces of cheese were really delicious, even the kind I had never tasted before. I ate several triangles all in one go but I still wasn’t full.