The bedroom was dark and quiet, except for the desultory sounds of cars passing below and the momentary reflection of their headlights on the window curtain. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. I had smoked a joint and was delightfully numb.
There was a whispery knock on my door, so quiet I wasn’t sure I heard correctly.
“Are you asleep?” A voice asked softly from behind the door.
“Everybody is asleep,” I replied, “but Jardown is awake.”
“Say what?”
I jumped off the bed. I recognized the inquisitor when I opened the door, acne-faced Jake or Jack or John or Jim from three rooms to my right. He said he had noticed the ephemeral yet distinctive smell seeping from under my door. He and his roommate had run out of dope, and they wondered whether I was willing to share. I was invited to their room, to hang, as he called it, and they would return the favor somehow.
Their cramped and cluttered room was lit by a desk lamp only, and they must have run out of dope recently, because the room reeked. The stoned roommates, in identical jeans and T-shirts, sat on one bed, their backs leaning on the wall, against a poster of the three Charlie’s Angels and one of a tall basketball player. Jake or Jack or John or Jim lit the joint I gave him. They were both smiling stupidly, and I probably was as well. We couldn’t start a conversation successfully. Jake’s roommate asked if I wanted to listen to any music. I shook my head and picked up the guitar lying on the second bed. I played “Stairway to Heaven.”
“He’s good,” Jake told his roommate, who took another drag. In the dark, the joint seemed ablaze.
“He plays so well, but it’s cold and distant,” his roommate said, in a voice that seemed to emanate from a haze. “It’s as if the playing is there, but he’s not.”
I sat up. “What was that?” I asked, but I couldn’t get either one of them to repeat what was said. Their eyes were glazed, far away lost. They did not seem to recognize I was there at all.
“I was born in a time when lands had fewer borders,” Uncle Jihad said. “There were many nationalities in Beirut, and boys came to our school from all over the world. The change was almost too much for me, but your father, he took to the school like a gourmet to foie gras. He befriended three other boys, and they became inseparable. They’re still friends to this day. Me? I was lost for a long time. I didn’t make any friends for a few years. You can say I made friends with two trees, two big trees in the middle of the school, a carob and a Kermes oak that couldn’t have been any less than four hundred years old. I spent all my free time up in those trees. Everyone called me Tree Boy for the longest time. I called the carob tree Chacha and the oak Charlemagne. I preferred trees to people. After that I preferred pigeons, but it was trees first.
“My father has his pigeon stories and I have mine, for life, like a good tale, repeats itself. I noticed my first flock of pigeons in the skies of Beirut when I was a boy of thirteen. They were always there, but, like most people, I’d been oblivious. Notice their existence once and you begin to see them everywhere, all the time. I had no idea at the time that my father had been a pigeoneer when he was young, and apparently a terrible one. My father told us very little about his growing up. I guess he was embarrassed about his background, or maybe he was saving his best stories for you. I saw my first flock, and ten minutes later I saw my second, and then my third and fourth, and all of a sudden my skies brimmed with pigeons. One afternoon, atop Charlemagne, while admiring a flock in flight, I began to guess at the presence of magic. I was able to discern the art, as well as the logic, of flight patterns. The realization was both gradual and instantaneous. Magic. And as soon as I had my epiphany, my eyes understood where to look for the locus of the sorcery. Though I couldn’t see him, the wizard himself must have been on the roof of the old three-story building below the school.
“The following afternoon, I ran to the building and asked about the pigeons. The shopkeeper on the ground floor told me to go up to the roof. The pigeon fancier, an aged man, realized I was a smitten boy. He allowed me to walk around and look at his prize collection.
“There were five cages on the roof, each of them bigger than my bedroom. One cage had young pigeons of different breeds, another had only coupled pigeons. One was empty because the birds were being flown. I walked around and fell in love. I wanted to say something clever, so that the pigeoneer would like me and I’d be able to visit again, but my mind was numb. He was obviously a gentleman, but I wondered whether he’d let me come up a second time, or a third. Wouldn’t he quickly tire of a young boy who wanted to spend time with pigeons? I got scared and stuttered, ‘Can I work for you?’
“The pigeoneer looked me up and down. He smiled and shook his head no. He said I was too young and obviously from too good a family to work for him. I went from taciturn to loquacious in less than a second. I told him that I could come every day after classes, he was only a few meters from the school, and I was a fast learner, and would do whatever he asked and never complain, and that I looked like I was from a good family because I was going to a good school, but I was from the mountains, and my family was still up there, and I really wanted to make the pigeons fly, and he should try me out. It became obvious that he was trying his best not to laugh out loud. He said he could only afford one lira a week — which was a fortune, and he knew it. Had I walked away when he told me he wouldn’t hire me, I would have failed the first test of a pigeoneer. He always said he knew the instant I came to the roof that I would end up a pigeoneer, that he saw it in the obsessive twinkle of my eyes.
“The man’s name was Ali Itani. He was a Shiite, and he owned the old building — which had no elevator, I should add. I showed up to work the following afternoon and found him arguing vociferously with Kamal Hourani, a man who looked like his identical twin except he was a Catholic. ‘You brother of a whore wouldn’t know what honor was if it smacked you on the side of the head,’ one would say, and the other would reply, ‘Honor? You lowlife want to talk to me about honor?’ They were both seventy-one at the time, and they wore the exact same clothes, except for the shoes: checkered navy-blue shirts, and tailored pants that were worn and frayed. Ali’s shoes were black moccasins, whereas Kamal’s were burgundy, both pairs comfortably kneaded by years of wear. Though their insults were getting worse and worse, they were standing close to each other in a relaxed posture. My Sherlock Holmes mind reasoned that their arguing was a common occurrence. It turned out that Ali Itani and Kamal Hourani had been best friends since they were six years old. They both swore to me that they had been insulting each other nonstop since 1898. They had lived through schooling, work, marriage, family rearing, widowhood, two occupying powers, one Great War, numerous small wars, religious conflicts, and independence, without ever thinking of ceasing their rude insults. I felt I had entered the Garden.
“That was my first interaction with the great city of Beirut. Of course, I had been living there for over seven years, since I was five, but it seemed that I had only been a tourist. Like all cities, Beirut has many layers, and I had been familiar with one or two. What I was introduced to that day with Ali and Kamal was the Beirut of its people. You take different groups, put them on top of each other, simmer for a thousand years, keep adding more and more strange tribes, simmer for another few thousand years, salt and pepper with religion, and what you get is a delightful mess of a stew that still tastes delectable and exotic, no matter how many times you partake of it. Those men seemed to have been together for eons, and since they’d run out of conversation long ago, all that was left was ribbing and mockery and repeating the great tales to each other.