cafés, as if shoulder to shoulder. Nobody knew for sure why they cried or mourned. They just did. And waited for a Messiah, a prophet, a revolutionary, a rebel, an ideologue to explain their subjective pain, and give it objective coherence.
In the midst of all of this, we Palestinian children tried to make a living. Going to school was still a dream, a precious thought, like first love.
Ibrahim Adel became my friend almost the first day we arrived in Beirut. His family’s tent was next to ours. We took to working the streets together. He shined shoes. Some of his customers called him Baldy. In fact, most Palestinian children were called Baldy in the streets. When our parents sent us to a barber (usually to one from Palestine who now made a living with a chair and a small table with the tools of his trade on it, propped up against a mud wall somewhere down the end of a dirt track in our refugee camp), we had all our hair shaved off. That way, because we needed a haircut only every three months or so, our fathers could save a lot of money. We often held that against our fathers. Ibrahim did not. He worshiped his father.
Abu Ibrahim* was revered by everyone at the camp because he had been a guerrilla in the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine and two of his brothers had fallen in battle. He was also a “people’s poet,” an activist who composed poetry orally and recited it to the masses, often political poetry about the land and struggle and freedom and life and death in the cause of Palestine. When people in the camp, sitting in the evening around the kerosene lamps in sidestreet cafés sipping their tea and smoking their waterpipes, came across a metaphysical question to which they were hard put for an answer, they murmured the common Palestinian phrase: “Surely the answer, brothers, lies only in the heart of the poet.” And if Abu Ibrahim happened to be there, they all turned silently to him. He would pull gently on his thick moustache, sheepishly looking down the bridge of his nose, and begin: “Brothers, as the Prophet Mohammed revealed … and the poet confirmed …”
Ibrahim would always be there, looking up at his father, hanging on his every word.
In the streets, Ibrahim never learned to hustle, to fend for himself. We called him Maktabi (the library) because he was always reading books and because we were awed by his ability to write the English alphabet. He did not know any English yet, but he could transliterate any word in Arabic into English letters. All of which was never an asset in the streets.
One day Ibrahim and I are downtown working a street together. He with his shoeshine gear slung over his shoulder and I with my supply of chewing gum. On formidably hot days like this one the heat takes your breath away. If you walk for more than a block, you feel you are about to choke, your lungs struggling for air. On such days we worked the cafés, where it was cool inside, and even cool outside because the waiters would splash buckets of water every now and again on the pavement in front of the tables. Ibrahim and I have not eaten. We are both anxious to make some money, enough money to buy a falafel—a vegetable patty—or better still a shawarmeh, a chopped meat sandwich.
Usually when there was no food around the house because the UNRWA rations were gone and we had to leave without breakfast, the kids from Awlad Falasteen could be seen around the Beirut port, picking up oranges, apples, tomatoes, and the like that had fallen from the vegetable and fruit crates being shipped to the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. Sometimes Ibrahim and I would go to the American University of Beirut campus, sneak into the architecture department, where students would have their lunch bags ready for them before they went on their regular outings to study city buildings, and simply walk off with four of five of the bags. We were never caught.
Today it is too hot to go anywhere. Ibrahim walks around the Mashrek Café, near the Corniche, desperately soliciting business. He looks even to me, so little, so trusting, so vulnerable, as he maneuvers his way around the tables offering to shine shoes.
When he stops by Abu Majid’s table, I know there is going to be trouble. Abu Majid is a neighborhood zaim—in the Lebanese tradition of the 1950s a huckster who lived, and earned his living, by the code of the bully. Like other neighborhood zaims, Abu Majid is known to have extensive holdings in business and politics—established politics being, in those days, as authentic a source of income as any other. His friends, like him, are thugs who prey on the poor and the helpless in the neighborhood.
In addition to this, Abu Majid hates Palestinians. Sitting at his table at the Mashrek Café surrounded by his friends, he is often heard mimicking our accent and talking, between giggles, about how he had just picked up his food rations at the UNRWA depot.
I stand in a corner of the café watching Ibrahim. The damp penetrating heat I feel is the heat of hatred. I hate this man and his friends. And his world. And ours. When a child hates, it is the voice of reason traveling home over lost roads, with the sound of blood rushing to the ears. One does not “learn” to hate. A child hates because it has been robbed of conditions of love. Standing in a corner of the Mashrek Café that day, I hate this man and his universe.
“Do you want your shoes shined, zaim?” Ibrahim asks Abu Majid.
“Well, son of the camps, son of Palestine! We love Palestinians here,” he says, turning to his friends with a knowing smile. “Right brothers?”
They all mumble their agreement. I know immediately that this repulsive creature, made inhuman by his calling as a zaim, is about to play a practical joke on Ibrahim, to humiliate him, because that is how people like Abu Majid and his friends derive their enjoyment.
“I will shine your shoes for a quarter of a lira,” Ibrahim says.
“I will give you half a lira,” the zaim replies, again looking knowingly at his cronies.
Ibrahim’s face lights up and he proceeds to put down his shoeshine pack.
“Before I give you the money, you have to do one thing.”
My friend looks up as if nothing unusual is about to happen. “Sure, what would you like done?”
“First, you have to kiss my foot.”
Ibrahim remains squatting behind his gear, staring at the man. The request has taken the will out of his muscles, his ability to respond.
Around the café, no one seems to notice. Busboys are running around with burning coals for the customers’ waterpipes. Waiters are shouting to other waiters to bring a new deck of cards to a table whose occupants, in turn, are shouting greetings to people sitting at other tables. Outside there are beggars and lottery-ticket sellers and vendors and veiled women. And children in rags, with no hands to hold theirs. And people haggling over prices of food and soap and rosewater and a respite from pain.
“You want me to kiss your foot?” asks Ibrahim incredulously.
“For that you get half a lira.”
I can see Ibrahim is getting flustered at the strange proposition. I cringe with mortification as I see my friend prepare to kiss the zaim’s foot, looking abjectly at the gathering. I am consumed by hate. I am hating Ibrahim with all my might because I know he is going to do it. I am furious at him. I am furious at everything around me.
“Kiss my foot, boy, kiss my foot, son of the camps,” the man is saying, almost shouting with delight. His companions are roaring with laughter and anticipation of the result of their practical joke.
Ibrahim squats there in front of the man and waits for the excitement and laughter to die down. And I am thinking of that day, about a year before we left Palestine, when my uncle had brought home a hand grenade and I was allowed to hold it for a moment. I remember feeling the cool of the metal on my skin, contemplating the web of lines on its surface and being fascinated by the magic it transmuted to me. The terror of knowing how such a small object could wreak devastation on an enemy. Now, as I stand in the café, I am holding the same grenade, shouting “die, die, die, you mob of two-bit Lebanese sons of whores. Die.” I am throwing the hand grenade into the crowd of people as they contentedly drink their glasses of tea and torment us. Because we have less than they do. Because we are hungry. Because we are Palestinians. But when it explodes, it explodes only in my head and my soul. It is only my sense of worth