laughed. ‘Not for ever, my love. Not even till Chrismas.’
We followed him into the living room, where he told stories about life in Beirut. The sniping had got worse on the Green Line, he said. The young ones were bored and sat in shelled buildings looking out onto the other side and practising their shooting. He told the story of an old woman who had come out to buy bread; one of the soldiers took aim, then hesitated. His friend encouraged him but, with his finger on the trigger, the other couldn't shoot.
‘Why not?’ asked Naji.
‘Because she reminded him of his grandmother.’
The Rose Man whistled softly. The taste of the cordial was sickly in my mouth, and I saw Teta picking her way through narrow streets between shelled buildings carrying a bag of bread. Did the old woman who wasn't shot make delicious sandwiches like Teta, or sling her carpets over the balcony railings and thump them with a beater of plaited willow till the dust jumped out?
‘Now, if you're a Christian and die in West Beirut,’ said the Rose Man, ‘or a Muslim who dies in the East, they have to convert you before you can be buried. Imagine, you spend your whole life fighting for your religion, and the moment you die they convert you.’
‘I don't like you living down there,’ said Papi. ‘Not any more.’
But Uncle brushed it off, settled back on the sofa and began another story. ‘I had to cross Beirut for business the other week. But let's make this clear, my friends, I wasn't going to go in my car. They'd have stopped me for sure, and if they had … well … I took a taxi.’
He leant back, resting his arms along the top of the sofa so that he looked like a lilac-winged bird. His black hair gleamed and the heavy-lidded eyes glanced between Papi and the Rose Man.
‘But, you know, each one of those old brown Mercedes taxis is packed with a whole tribe: a man, his wife, the wife's cousin, the cousin's great-uncle, a nephew twice removed, his goat and the goat's fleas. The back bumpers are kissing the ground, the roof-rack's balancing a tower of luggage, and the boot has to be tied shut with a rope. These are the taxis of Beirut.’
He pinched my cheek and continued. On his way back, a checkpoint had sprung up where there had been none that morning, with Muslim militia guards checking cars. Everyone knew it was safer to travel by taxi – the guards know the taxi drivers and the taxi drivers know the militia – so Uncle's taxi was full, with two other men, a woman and her child.
He rubbed his hands round each other as if he were soaping them. ‘So there we are, sitting targets, and nothing we can do. And the queue moves on by millimetres, the checkpoint draws nearer, and there's nothing to do but sit and smell the stink of humanity. When we draw up, the Kalashnikovs start waving in our faces and, of course, the soldier wants to see our cards.’
I waited to see what Uncle would do, how he would defeat them all. The Rose Man crossed and uncrossed his legs, and Naji cracked his knuckles. Only Papi, eyes fixed on Uncle, didn't move. His dull trousers and flecked grey jumper gave the impression of a boulder overgrown with moss. Fine tendrils and knotted vines of muscle climbed up his neck beneath the skin and vanished, twisting, beneath the too-long hair.
‘What's on an identification card?’ asked Naji.
‘They take a man's life and reduce it to a couple of inches of paper,’ scoffed Papi. ‘It tells them not only that you're Christian or Muslim, but whether you're Maronite, Greek Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Sunni, Shi'a or Druze.’
‘So this guard starts to check the cards, his rifle hanging into the car. He checks the man in front, but the woman's fumbling and taking her time – God knows where in that handbag she's got it – and the child's getting in her way, so the soldier moves on to the second man. After him there's only me and, I tell you, I'm squashed in there, my back stuck to the seat I'm so scared. I sit in the back of that car knowing that when he gets to me, maybe that'll be it. When he sees I'm a Maronite …’
Naji had cracked all his knuckles and they wouldn't crack again.
‘The man beside me produces his card, and the guard nods. Now there's only me. And what am I to do? I'm fiddling about with my wallet to buy time, and just when I can't delay any longer, the woman finds her card and puts it into the guard's hands. Then he leans in with his eyes fixed on me. And I swear it's by the grace of Allah, by the grace of God Himself, that her child hears the gun tapping against the car. And, ohhhh, how he starts to cry – not just a mewling, but screaming at the top of his voice the way only a child can. That sound – unbearable! So the guard stood up, waved us on, and that was the end of the story.’
Everybody in the room softened and relaxed.
Soon the Rose Man left, and Papi fetched two bottles of beer. Thunder rumbled far off as he poured them. ‘You didn't get it sorted out?’ he asked Uncle Wadih.
‘No. They tell me he might have lost everything: the whole business. I'll bet that was why his heart stopped beating.’
Papi took a gulp of beer. ‘They buried him two days before you came.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘We saw his funeral,’ I piped up, but they weren't interested.
‘And your shares?’ Papi asked.
‘Gone. That's what I get for trusting the man. Blight his life, he probably ate his way through my profits.’
‘Never mind, my brother, never mind. You're still working and the money's still coming in.’
‘You're right, that's business. You put money into a company and you may end up rich or you may never see it again. But work's bad in Beirut. No honest man has much money. Except the coffin-makers – they're the only ones who make an excellent living nowadays.’
Naji jumped onto the sofa beside Uncle. ‘What did you do all morning?’
Uncle brightened as he put an arm round Naji's shoulder. ‘You know what I did? I was near some woods where there were some big birds flying over – a hundred, maybe.’
I squeezed onto the sofa too. ‘What kind?’
‘Flamingos, they call them. They're big and bright pink – pink as your bum!’ His face relaxed into an easy smile.
‘Did you see them, Uncle?’ I asked. ‘Pink birds?’
‘Of course I did! There were some fellows in the woods hunting and—’
‘Not hunting the birds!’ I'd seen men come out of the forest at the bottom of the hill sometimes with long gleaming rifles, strings of shiny bullets slung round their shoulders and limp bundles of small birds hanging from their belts, feathery brown bouquets that dangled as they walked.
‘Of course hunting the flamingos,’ Uncle replied, tugging my hair. ‘What else? It's the migration season, and young men like that sort of thing.’ He turned to Papi. ‘Michel's boys. They were heading off as I left, so I went down with them for a while.’
He poured the rest of his beer. ‘It's like the neck of a bottle,’ he explained to Naji. ‘There are narrow straits through the mountain ranges here, and the birds get channelled through them. There's no other way.’
‘Did the men shoot any?’ asked Naji, eagerly. ‘Did they? Did they kill any?’
‘They did.’
There was a distant crackle of lightning.
‘Didn't you shoot too?’ Naji wanted to know. ‘You got some as well, didn't you?’
Uncle's body throbbed with laughter. ‘It's been years since I went hunting, but they insisted so I had a go.’
Naji whooped, but I felt suddenly squashed tight between Uncle and the sofa arm.
By evening the thunder had passed. It hadn't rained and the clouds had cleared, leaving a clean sky dotted with the first stars. I wanted Mami to sit on my bed until I felt sleepy, and searched the house