come here now, David, when things are in such a mess?’ I ask him as we sit in my office one day.
‘Life in the West is not always what it might seem,’ he replies. ‘I just wanted to get away, to experience something new and different.’
He is in the armchair by the open window and for a moment a passing breeze ruffles his fair, smooth hair.
‘And is it different enough for you?’
David shifts in his seat and looks at me.
‘So you were only looking for something exotic and you plan to leave eventually, is that it?’ I continue, surprised at the sharpness in my voice. ‘Once you’ve had enough of new and different, I mean.’
‘Have I said something to upset you?’
I suddenly feel ashamed of myself.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Layla, are you alright?’
He stands up and walks towards me.
‘I’m fine,’ I reply. ‘Just fine. Why don’t we go get something to eat?’
Soon after this conversation, David left Lebanon to return to America, just as I had suspected he would. I am here to stay, I say out loud alone in my bed at night, and nothing will happen to change that.
On days when Margo seems particularly frail, her small body shaking more than usual, her speech more deliberate, she is more inclined to talk about herself if I ask her a question about her life and wait for her to begin at some undefined point in her past, to unravel stories like tangled twine.
We go for a walk through the university campus and sit on a wooden bench surrounded by the trees and plants Margo so loves.
‘My mother adored flowers and our house was always full of them,’ she begins. ‘It’s no wonder really that I grew up dreaming of being a gardener, although father was horrified at the thought.’
When she turned sixteen and her parents discovered that Margo had fallen in love with the gardener, they hurriedly shipped her off to finishing school in Switzerland. And although the young man was soon forgotten, she never quite lost her love for growing things. Now, in place of a garden of her own, Margo tends the plants in the pots at her doorstep.
‘What happened after they sent you away?’ I ask.
‘My parents were hopeful I would change and there was a part of me that wanted to please them but I still managed to disgrace myself at finishing school doing things that were bound to infuriate everyone, like smoking and drinking and getting up to all sorts of mischief with the boys.’
She sighs, takes a cigarette and lighter out of her pocket and lights up.
‘I was eventually sent back home, of course. I think that’s when I realized that I was never going to get my parents’ approval so I might as well stop trying. Still, when the war began and the time finally came for me to go, it was difficult to leave them.’
There is a sudden kind of croak in her voice now, age and years and years of smoking, I suppose, that makes me jump every time I hear it. I don’t know if she uses it for dramatic effect or if she really does not know how startling it can be.
‘Ah!’ Margo opens her mouth wide.
Then she shakes her head and smiles.
‘I told them I wanted to go to London to study English and they agreed even though I don’t think they believed that was what I really intended to do. I suppose they didn’t object because they didn’t know what else to do with me. I packed my bags and made my farewells and when I looked back to wave goodbye, they seemed already to be fading from sight. Mama, papa and Emily standing on the balcony of our flat in Prague, looking silently down at me as I got into the taxi that took me to the train station.’
‘Don’t you mean Paris?’ I ask, puzzled.
But Margo does not reply.
‘I never saw my parents again,’ she says after a long pause.
I clear my throat.
‘What happened?’
‘The war went on and on until some of us thought it would never end and when I returned they were no longer there.’
I remember in Adelaide once talking to the grandfather of a friend of mine who kept referring to ‘the war’ during our conversation. It was a while before I realized that he was not talking about the civil conflict in Lebanon that had so affected my own life but about the Second World War which, for his generation, had defined the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of their existence, the single event that had changed them and their world forever.
‘Everything changed once the Americans came in, of course,’ Margo continues. ‘It would have gone on a lot longer if they hadn’t.’
She watches two students walking past. They are absorbed in their conversation and do not notice us.
‘I went with them into the camps in Poland and Germany later on.’
‘The American troops?’
She nods.
‘I served as a translator during the liberation.’
‘You went into the concentration camps?’ I ask, my fascination with Margo’s tale turning into horror.
She looks at me with concern.
‘It’s OK, Margo,’ I say, recovering my composure. ‘Please go on.’
Perhaps it is something she needs to talk about, I think to myself. But Margo only shakes her head.
‘After the war, I returned to France to find my sister Emily,’ she eventually continues. ‘My parents were already lost by then and she and her husband were living in Paris.’
‘She must have been very relieved to see you.’
Margo gives me a sidelong glance and a wry smile that lasts only seconds.
‘She wanted nothing to do with me, accused me of running away during the war just when the family needed me most and said I had been selfish and ungrateful. I couldn’t really argue with that. Still, I was shocked that she should feel that way about me. We were very different, she and I, but I always thought of us as close.’
‘Didn’t she know you had been working with the Resistance?’ I ask, feeling indignant for Margo’s sake. ‘She should have been proud of what you had done.’
She shrugs and blows smoke through her nostrils.
‘That wasn’t the way things worked out. Afterwards, I realized I would have to make my home somewhere else.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘I moved to London and eventually settled down. It was easier that way.’
She pauses.
‘I thought so much about going home after the war had ended that it took a bit of getting used to at first, being alone and in England. In the end I managed to find a way of life that worked for me and I was happy there for a while.’
‘But how did you end up coming to Beirut?’
‘Some time later, Fouad and his wife came to London for a visit and they invited me to return here with them for a holiday. I liked it so much that I didn’t really need them to persuade me to stay.’
I feel emboldened to talk about something I had been puzzling over since we first met.
‘It seems a strange place for you to end up in, though,’ I say quietly. ‘I mean, given your background and all the things that had happened to you. It’s not as though you had any connection to Lebanon.’
‘I had nothing to keep me here, no one to keep me here, that’s true. But that’s why I wanted to stay, I think.