Skirmishes

Red … Amber … Green … Amber …

Stop … Caution … Go … Caution …

Stop in Lebanon wasn’t Stop. It was Go. Drive slowly with your hand on the horn to warn people you were coming.

Amber wasn’t Caution. It was Go. With your hand on the horn in case the lights turned red.

Green wasn’t Go. It was Go Faster. With your hand on the horn to warn anyone who’d forgotten these basic rules of etiquette.

I had a headache. I always woke up with a headache, and I didn’t need to look far for the reason. Just down to the bent and battered traffic lights at the street corner below. Every morning the Beirut dawn chorus: the beep of the Buick, the parp of the Peugeot, and not least, the toot of the Toyota – a true cacophony of car-horns.

That wasn’t all. By Beirut standards the rent we paid for our brand new flat was low. As a punishment for our penny-pinching, the apartment block owner, he of the unpronounceable name, had commissioned builders to make life miserable for us: they were putting up a second identical block alongside ours. At precisely seven each morning, concrete mixers began to mix, drills began to drill, hammers began to hammer, and labourers swarmed like an army of termites across the rotting timber that formed the skeleton of the building, yelling – I suppose – greetings, orders and curses at one another.

I hated them. I hated everyone involved in this plot to drive me to early insanity.

I tried to bury my head in the pillow and reached across for Claire. I reached further and came to the edge of the bed. I levered my eyes open. No Claire.

I managed to lift my head a few inches. Jason was gone from his cot too.

As sleep receded, my waking personality began to re-emerge. For a few more seconds it was shrouded in a morning mist, so I could hardly recognise it. But then the haze cleared and I was face to face with my ego, craggy and frowning, essentially unaltered from the night before. It was Monday, and there had been a dramatic change in my relationship with Claire. Was that why she wasn’t lying next to me in bed?

The alarm-clock clattered into life. Optimistically we always set it for ten-past-seven, even though we knew by then it would be unnecessary. But the bell was the sign to actually get out of bed.

I wrapped a dressing-gown around myself. No point in delay. I had to confront her. Confront – now there was a nice ambiguity. Either I could go into the other room, face her, and get on with the routine morning transactions of our marriage, regardless of what had happened; or I could confront her with the truth – that I had been unfaithful to her. Not in deed, which might have been a single excusable lapse, but in thought, a crime altogether more pervasive and enduring. 

I knew as I opened the bedroom door that the choice would be hers, not mine.

– Morning.

– You’re up early today.

– Mm, I got up ages ago. Couldn’t sleep.

Danger! Don’t ask why.

– Oh.

– Aren’t you going to say good morning to Jason?

– Good morning, Jason.

For all Jason cared I might as well have stayed in bed. He was much too busy smearing food across his face to concern himself with social niceties.

– Jason, here’s Daddy. Aren’t you going to say hello to Daddy?

Jason squinted at me, then flew into a tantrum, throwing spoon and glutinous food to the floor. Only then did I get a radiant smile and a gurgling approximation to Daddy.

– Jason, that’s naughty! Oh, Richard, he’s so bad with food.

– Can’t say I blame him with that muck he has to put up with. It looks like sparrow’s vomit.

– That’s disgusting!

– Well, look at it. Anyway, what’s the plan for today?

– Well, first of all it’s breakfast. And what you’re getting this morning, Mr Devine, is exactly what’s in front of Jason.

My son chortled with malicious delight.

– If that’s the case, then I think I’ll be taking my custom elsewhere, thank you very much. Are you going to need the car this morning?

– No, not today. I’ve got that woman coming over. Sylvie, the one from the party. The one who just went on and on, remember? Well she said she’d come round this morning with her little daughter.

– Oh a playmate for Jason, eh? Well, little Jay, you’re in for a delightful morning of gabbing and gossip if she’s anything like her mother.

– Richard, don’t be so nasty. What’s got into you this morning?

– You said it first. And anyway, I’ve got a headache.

But now the crisis was past. And the headache was beginning to wear off.

* * *

– Good morning, Mr Richard. Good morning to you. And how do you do this morning?

– I’m fine thanks. How …

– Good, good, alhamdulillah. And how are your wife and son today?

– They’re fine.

– Yes, good. Isn’t it a beautiful day? Are you enjoying Lebanon?

The same greeting every day. Mr Abu Taleb, an institution at the school, the old man who came down from the mountains to give O-level classes in maths and general science. Wrinkled, polite, and apparently deaf. More than that I never discovered, since our conversations were strictly limited to the standard Arabic greeting phrases, skilfully rendered in English.

– Have you visited Broummana yet? It is very beautiful.

– We went there …

– No? You must go there before you leave Lebanon. Yes, yes. You will enjoy. Now in the Spring, the mountains are beautiful, yes? Are you happy in your house?

– It’s not bad. We’re …

– Yes, yes, yes. It is very difficult to find a good house in Beirut today. The prices – oh! But your wife, she is happy, yes?

– Yes.

– Yes, with a wife and children it is sometimes difficult. I understand, yes. You must come to visit my wife in the mountain. My children are grown now, but my wife, she will be happy to see you, yes, yes.

– Thank you.

– Oh, not at all, not at all. We always welcome our visitors. Yes, it is our duty. Well, now it is almost half-past eight. I must go to meet my students. No, don’t mention it, don’t mention it. We will speak again afterwards.

And he shuffled out of the Teachers’ Room with hundreds of exercise books in his arms.

Dave was sitting in his corner, smirking. Dave had been four years at the school, longer than any of the expatriate staff, and this entitled him to smirk. It was his long service that made the mutilated old chair in the corner indisputably his; nobody else ever sat there.

– Nice old guy, isn’t he?

– He drones on, if that’s what you mean. I don’t know why you bother. I mean, it’s the same old rigmarole, morning after morning.

– Is he a good teacher?

– How should I know?

Yes, how should Dave know. Here in Beirut the last thing teachers were interested in was teaching. What difference did standards make when the majority of our students were coming not to learn English but to improve their social standing? Wealthy parents paid the fees so that their sons and daughters could finish their education.

They’d certainly finished education for me, I thought, as the clamour from the classroom greeted me. Three months ago, in London, I would never have dreamt of walking into a lesson unprepared.

– Morning.

– GOOD-MOR-NING-MEES-TER-REESH-AR

The response was deafening, for the class had apparently learnt – if they knew nothing else – that a foreigner cannot understand unless you shout, even when you’re using his language. Where did they find the energy at this time in the morning? And when had these seventeen-year-old girls found the time to paint and preen themselves so, and to dress with such careful, careless taste? Already perfume was hanging in the air and the room smelt like a brothel.

There it was again – a seamy reminder of last night. The image had never occurred to me before.

The school was in fashionable Hamra Street but there was nothing fashionable about the classroom. An anonymous grubby box with two enormous ceiling fans designed to keep the chalk-dust in circulation, and barely enough space to cram in twenty desks, let alone twenty boisterous students. There was the usual segregation: the girls toward the back and the boys at the front. Except for Huda, the eager, dull, ugly Palestinian girl directly in front of me. I despised her – and so did the rest of the class. The troublemakers sitting together.

– Clovis, I told you yesterday. I don’t want you next to Ibrahim. Change places with Toufiq.

– Leysh, stes? Why?

– Never mind leysh. Just move. NOW!

I hated shouting at the kids. As Clovis grinned inanely to his classmates, then at me, and shuffled shrugging to the other side of the room, we both knew he’d won the first victory of the morning. Oh, I got my way – that was allowed, I was the teacher – but on his terms, at the cost of my self-respect. 

It had come as a shock to me, this continual negotiation between teacher and students. At home, teaching self-motivated adults, there had been no question about it – I was master of my classroom. If I wanted students to speak, they spoke; to listen, they listened; to write, they wrote. Sometimes we asked them to sing, to act, to play games, to make fools of themselves … grown adults – bankers and lawyers and doctors and soldiers – and they never questioned why. When I had power like that, it was easy to be agreeable.

But children, especially the children of Lebanon, knew different. A teacher was only a teacher, invested with no extraordinary powers. If they wanted to learn, they learnt; if they wanted to chatter, they chattered; if they wanted me to shout, they made me shout. They were preparing themselves for life in the real Lebanese world, and so every single lesson, every two hours in that room which I had come to dread, we teetered on the brink of chaos. And yet they liked me, so they always let me win a little, even when I was losing more. And in an odd sort of way I liked them, especially Clovis, who made my life so miserable. He was a bright kid.

– Open your books at page eighty-four.

– Stes, we do that page yesterday.

– Yes, and we’re doing it again today. Elias, where’s your book? And you Maha. And Therese. And Ibrahim.

As I said the names I was reminded how easy it was to distinguish between Christian and Muslim. Christians had Christian or Western-sounding names; the Muslims didn’t. So you were marked Christian or Muslim from birth. I wondered what Clovis was. Probably Christian – it didn’t sound like an Arab name. But Palestinian or Lebanese? That was more difficult now I knew there were Christian Palestinians as well as Muslims. How did people know you were a Palestinian? Was there some distinguishing mark or something? Or did people just know? I would have to ask Monique sometime. Monique!

I was drawing a crude picture on the blackboard. A hippie. An exaggerated version of myself.

– You, stes.

– No, it’s not me, it’s Tom. Now Tom wants a job. Do you think he’ll get a good job looking like this?

– Yes, stes.

– No, look at him. His hair’s too long, isn’t it? And it’s dirty, yes? What else? Ibrahim?

– His shoe dirty.

– Yes, his shoes are dirty. Mohammed?

– He have big bird.

– What? A big bird? Where?

– Yes teacher. Here big bird.

– Oh there. A long beard, you mean.

– Yes teacher. Long bird.

– Beard.

– Bird

– Beard. And what must he do?

– Shave, shave, shave, teacher.

– Yes, good. He must shave his beard.

– Why, teacher?

– Because he wants a job.

– Yes, but teacher, bird is nice. You are teacher and you have bird.

Mohammed, taller than me, stood up, came to the front and began to stroke my beard. The class collapsed in laughter. Mohammed blew a kiss at me.

– Bird nice, ustes, yes.

– Yes it’s very nice, Mohammed. Now sit down.

– Why must cut bird?

– SIT DOWN, MOHAMMED!

Again the wide grin and the slow shuffle back to the desk.

– Now look, Tom wants a good job, and you’re his friend, so you must tell him what to do. You say – listen – You’d better cut your hair. Listen – You’d better cut your hair. You-had-better-cut-your-hair. You’d better cut your hair. Everybody!

– YOU BETTER CUT YOUR HAIR.

– Again.

– YOU BETTER CUT YOUR HAIR.

– Again

– YOU BETTER CUT YOUR HAIR.

But now everyone was losing interest, and only about five of them were repeating the sentence.

– Mona?

– You better cut your hair.

– You’d. You’d. You had. You’d. Huda?

– You-you-you betterr … er … you betterr … er … to cut the hairs.

– Good. You’d better cut your hair. Clovis?

– Why he’d better cut his hair?

– Never mind why. Say it.

– He’d better cut his hair. Stes, look, Elias, he’d better cut his hair.

To demonstrate, he grabbed a cluster of Elias’s carefully groomed curls and yanked them – hard. War was inevitable. Elias immediately jumped to his feet, snarled (not in English), and almost lifted Clovis out of his seat by his not so well-groomed locks. Clovis screamed, the class yelled encouragement, I shouted …

– STOP IT, OR THE CLASS IS FINISHED!

Clovis had Elias by the ear.

– I’M WARNING YOU!

Elias scored with the opposite ear. The two of them just stood there in an earlock, their faces twisted with pain.

– I’M LEAVING!

Clovis reached for the nose.

I left.

* * *

– I’m sorry, teacher.

It was break and the class, mercifully, was over. Of course the interruption hadn’t lasted long. Straight away my conscience remonstrated with me for leaving and gave me a string of sound reasons for going directly back in, but my pride was equally insistent: I should wait for five minutes. 

I timed my absence carefully. As the second-hand on my watch stuttered to the mark, I flung open the door, slammed it shut – rattling the frosted glass in its frame – and stalked to my position next to the blackboard, like a ham actor making his entrance. I knew the performance was worthy of applause or catcalls, but the class remained respectfully silent. Only a single half-stifled snort escaped. I glared at each individual in turn until I came to Clovis: his face was buried in his hands and his whole body was quivering. But what was the point of saying anything?

The lesson had continued, edgily at first, everyone careful to do well, anxious to please me. But the truce could only ever be temporary. For a few minutes they could all be serious, but not seriously. After all, English was only a game. In a way, that was the view we English teachers encouraged, with our lessons about hippies looking for jobs, about impossibly wealthy businessmen and their lazy wives, about spies and thieves, and babies who could miraculously boast they were taller/fatter/prettier/stronger than their neighbour in the next pram. Anyone who could take all that seriously, as I had before I came to Lebanon, had to be suffering from dangerous delusions about life.

So after a few minutes of calm, it all began again. A mistake, a joke, a moment of buffoonery, and then the inevitable descent into pandemonium. Perhaps a more experienced teacher could have stopped it. Not me.

And yet they were always sorry afterwards. Clovis stood at the door of the Teachers’ Room with a phalanx of five classmates behind him.

– I am naughty.

– Yes you are, Clovis.

– But first, Mohammed, he was naughty.

When it wasn’t vacuous, Clovis’s smile was disarming.

– But that’s no excuse for you, Clovis. I don’t understand you. You’re good at English. If you tried, you could be very good, but you’re always making trouble.

A voice came from behind.

– Yes teacher. We want learn. You good teacher, but Clovis he always naughty and we no learn.

Clovis turned on Huda and a furious Arabic argument broke out like a summer storm. There seemed to be no reason, and no reasoning. First Clovis to Huda, a torrent of words, his finger jabbing repeatedly at her face. Then Huda, swaying back from the finger, the whites of her eyes popping with each new jibe, holding her breath, until she burst and thundered into attack. Then Clovis again, then both of them together. Huda spat out the words, her throaty masculine voice breaking with anger. Clovis shrieked his insults. Now they were toe to toe, face to face, their features contorted with rage and spite. Hands were gesticulating wildly at me and at each other. True verbal combat, and they seemed to be daring one another to land the first actual blow.

But in the Teachers’ Room, thank God, I didn’t have to deal with the problem alone.

– Hey, you two, that’s enough!

Still the tongues lashed out.

– I SAID THAT’S ENOUGH!

And Dave grabbed them and physically threw them apart. Obviously his height helped. They were hardly going to fight him so they could carry on with one another. As quickly as the storm started, it was over. Now they were separated, the words dried up, though the eyes still flashed with white hatred.

– Go and do your shouting somewhere else.

Dave closed the door on them, firmly but quietly. I expected to hear the fight flaring up again outside, but it didn’t.

– Having a bit of trouble?

– I don’t know. I don’t know what it was all about.

– Wasn’t about anything.

Dave settled back into his corner, curiously unperturbed. After four years there, he was bound to understand better than I did.

– It must have been about something.

– No. It’s normal.

– What do you do when they start like that?

– Ignore it, unless it bothers me. If it does I just sort them out.

– How?

– Sometimes, I clock them one.

Of course I didn’t believe him – it was a joke. Teachers – language teachers anyway – didn’t go in for that sort of thing any more. Any form of punishment was a sign the teacher had failed, and corporal punishment – well, that would be like professional self-abuse. I would never even touch one of my students. These were young adults with sensibilities … but on the other hand, I’d just watched Dave push, actually push, Clovis and Huda apart. Perhaps he wasn’t joking. There was no reaction from the other teachers in the room. They were going about their normal business, chatting, boiling the kettle, reading the newspaper. And I had to admit Dave’s method had worked.

– You don’t suppose it could have been something to do with all the trouble yesterday – you know with the Palestinians.

– I told you it’s normal. They like fighting.

– Yes but Huda’s a Palestinian and Clovis is a Christian, isn’t he?

Dave’s smile was half sympathy, half sarcasm. I felt like a beginner.