The Divergent Thinking Memory
By Vartan Koumrouyan
There was not a before and an after, a physical separation that changed the course of events, or changed me to become another person. It was a continuation of the same wonder that I didn’t understand then as I still don’t understand now. The war served as a balm ointment whereby it made me stop asking myself difficult questions. I blamed my failure on the war, and I only identify the prewar period of those childhood moments as belonging to the purest forms of my experience in life, that specific environment, or that’s how it looked to me.
If I came to look at the current geopolitical condition within its historic reach, I might as well mention Gilgamesh who travelled to the mountains of Lebanon to kill the ogre and avail himself of the Cedar timber to build his temples and dams on the Euphrates. But I refer to the recent war that I have not forgotten and I don’t pretend it didn’t happen. I look at it remotely and remember only the flare in the sky when the bombs exploded in Beirut, the checkpoints or the nights when we slept in the shelter and Monsieur Selim listened to Oum Kalsoum whispering on the radio in the most melancholic way, “Anta Omri”, ‘You’re my Life’, as the shelling happened outside.
Today, they talked about a nuclear showdown on tv. Armageddon and the end of times akin to Fukuyama’s End of History. So easy for them to tell, where it starts and where it stops.
Aircraft carriers and destroyers are sent to the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. Political analysts explain geopolitical tensions. Revolutionary Guard. Regime change. Sanctions, oil embargo, Hormuz strait, market crash. On this the Jalisco cartel boss ambushed in Mexico. Cars, buses are on fire. Live gunfire on the runway. Smoke of fire on buildings. Stranded tourists by the pool on YouTube shorts advise other backpackers to remain indoors.
Warhol’s fifteen minutes fame technology made into a ’breaking news’ live coverage.
It’s a skirmish, I’ve seen better.
I remember the time when I listened to a song that had the line “get your kick on Route 66”. Those were the early days and I was just a boy, beginning to learn how to think freely, as I watched the Karantina Camp burn from the balcony. We had heard that the refugee camp being shelled and in the morning a thick black smoke hung all over Beirut and a plume had drifted over the sea tapering away into the thin dawn dust, for a lack of a breeze, visible all the way from our balcony on summer nights.
I don’t remember which song it was. It doesn’t capture my imagination as it once did. I’ve lost interest.
I was reading the biography of Jack Kerouac at that time. Neil Cassidy and Jack’s 18 hours drive to visit Bill Burroughs on his farm. That was before he wrote the Naked Lunch in Tangiers and Jack lived for a few days on Rue Des Hirondelles in the Latin Quarter in Paris. I was so taken that I went looking for that cul-de-sac one night when I was drunk, looking at the top of the buildings, guessing which one it was, half expecting him to call me up.
Now, a walk along the riverside is enough. We have moved to Paris since. My father’s business was bankrupt and we lost all the family’s fortune. Sold the house and lost that money as well. Bankruptcy narrowed my exuberance. In the realm of discovering the world, I’ve seen enough of Route 66.
A walk along the riverside is enough of an anticlimactic experience of the free world in Paris, and the overflowing river is the proof. Now I have to walk on empty back streets with nothing to look at. It’s been raining for a week. It’s just a drizzle, but a drizzle multiplied with miles of depressing low skies will certainly bring this gush of a turbulent current, pushing dead wood and muddy froth in an eddy near the retaining basin funnelling through the sluice. It will wash all the dog piss under the bridge. The water had a quality I didn’t recognise before when the flow was smooth and tame. It amplifies the noise of the traffic on the street above when I reach the bridge and the promenade is already flooded. It will need another week for the mud to dry, if the rain stops. Just a skirmish.
The doomsday nuclear showdown will start later. Even so, I’ve seen better, when I was a boy, and the war was a game the grown up played, and it didn’t change. So the big boys now are sending more ordinance to Mesopotamia. That’s the real “kick” the liberal world wants to see.
It was under the qualification of the “ongoingness” that I think the war never ended insofar as it stayed in my memory. I was not guilty of it but maybe a victim, convincing myself that it’s not my fault and my wasted life was the only outcome, attached to its coattail like an addendum, a post-it afterthought to the general pessimism I was feeling that was beyond my will that I was unable to quell. I remember with fondness certain moments when I joined my grandfather’s bed under the window with the pine trees adumbrate on the curtain to listen to the stories of his exile during the first world war, that I began to feel the wonder of words and how they expanded my imagination when he talked about horses, the Anatolian caves where he slept on his way to exile because he was then shipped to the island of Corfu, with the rest of the surviving children of his age during the genocide of 1914.
We saw the humiliating troops withdrawal “kick” from Afghanistan. Freedom liberation kicked in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya as well. The year the Karantina Camp burned coincided with Bob Dylan’s Blood of the Tracks album, which I later bought. The songs on that record were a new version of a freedom I believed in then.
And of course my love of music was not hinged on the continuation of the war nor the fate of the warlords. I only was in a negation phase that developed into a lifelong nihilistic tendency, acquired from the little I learned later from Schopenhauer. The Bastille Revolution of course represented some hope, but that was an old tale. It slowly accrued on me a dislike of authority in all its forms or intentions. Not a frontal discord per se to engage a conflict head on, but a methodical aversion of any of its pretensions. It was an intellectual negation of the existing order par excellence that I keep sous cape until now.
I began collecting folk movement records at that time. The Appalachian Mountains hill billy songs. The Carter Family and Johnny Cash period, the Basement Tapes, that sort of stuff. I followed the trajectory that was a beacon all over the world, shining all the way across the oceans to where I lived near Beirut.
The gulf of Jounieh was like an amplifier of the exploding fireworks, very much like the sound of water flowing under the bridge. Sometimes they were deep thuds reverberating across the sea, echoes skipping on the surface, the water being immiscible to sound, the air sucking the echo to to its trajectory until it reached a hard surface, like a stone you throw in a well and the echo comesupwards to you.
I followed the trajectory of the music from its inception. I ordered books from London, Mystery Train, and Fifty Shades of Pale about the anatomy of Bob Dylan songs. Many other books. There was hope if you had an acoustic guitar. That was before Bob Dylan went electric and shouted “Judas” in the Albert Royal Hall concert in the sixties and I was a toddler. I’ve read about it later when I became enamoured with these songs and begun buying these books.
The ethnic separation from the western world as opposed to the Middle East was not a source of confusion because I believed in every song from Sinatra, to Elvis to Bob. I searched for those songs late at night on the short wave of the radio transistor my father had, when I was not big enough to buy the records yet. Voice of America broadcast from Cyprus before I knew of the BBC World Service. At night the reception was clearer in summer, and I had a sound reception without interference, free of the thunder storms in winter, when the voice blinked for a second and I imagined the lightning splitting the wave bands in the middle of the Mediterranean sea.
That was what later became known to me as “the soft power” of the empire.
It was not obvious with films like Easy Rider or Apocalypse Now, when Brando reads The Hollow Man in a cave to show how the poem stood against the bullies. It was entertainment.
There was this big stone house at the end of a footpath facing the water basin near the mulberry tree in our garden, on the other side of the road, with a huge pine tree reaching the tiled roof covering almost all its length. A huge pine parasol with thick branches the size of the almond trees in blossom at the beginning of spring, the odour of the dew on the soft needles that the birds nevertheless heard when we walked along the stone wall with our slingshots and they were frightened and scattered away. Small birds with black feathers capping their beaks and the goldfinch that their migration coincided with the ripeness of the loquat, mulberry and fig fruits in the surrounding gardens.
Another oak tree stood by the stonewall of the neglected part of the land where we looked for snails, with a big carob tree at the end of the path, that at some point was widened and gravel was spread on it to let Monsieur Philippe park his truck beside the almond trees forming a hedge. Behind, there was the clump of tall slender reeds, thistle shrubs and thorny brambles bearing ripe berries no one dared pick up because we thought a snake lived in the fallen stones of the water basin. It was the only shaded spot that remained green all through the summer as the soil under the stones was damp, and a little further down, the land bore a shortcut traversing it to the slope of the pine hill towards the Adonis valley.
Because of the circumference of its trunk, the pine tree was no doubt planted when the house was constructed a century ago, under the Ottoman rule, with a frontage to an open veranda on its length and a “maskbeh”, a narrow potting area to limit the veranda with roses, jasmine, mint and basil, fragrant traditional herbs of the Levant, with a trellis for the climbing vine that supplied its shade in the summer, to welcome the natural beauty into the household with a fresh breeze.
The whole plot of the land belonged to a family who migrated to Brazil at the turn of the century, and the old man who still lived in the house was a distant relative. He was very rarely seen, but on a Sunday going to church. He lived like a recluse who wore a sarouel and we suspected he waited for us behind one of the windows to shoo us away when we went to pick his green almonds and hunt the birds that we seldom succeeded in hitting with the slingshots.
The songs were a beacon in the tunnel and there was hope in The Hollow Man. There was hope in the Love you make and the Love you take, as in the Beatles song. People believed in these things. We would exchange furtive bits of paper, love chits I call them, on which the day to meet was scribbled, and ‘I love you’ at the end, with a small heart in a different coloured ball pen, at the sortie of the school.
The Simonian School of Commerce was situated on the first floor of the building with a large balcony giving to a dusty field above the harbour, with a few cars parked on the sides where the boys played football during a ceasefire.
It was the method school kids used to convey a feeling in a written form instead of saying it in spoken words because they were shy. But for us, after the first encounter, we were not shy anymore, and we didn’t have to explain and talk about things. It was like we knew each other and it was natural that we finally met, especially when I played the songs Harry recorded on a cassette, driving to Espace 2000 or Le Castel in Kaslik to drink tequila, songs like Wild Horses or the Led Zeppelin heavy metal riffs.
I liked the way she walked, I liked the way she shied away from contact with the other boys, and she liked the way I wore my denim jacket and came to school late to give the impression that I didn’t care. We were both different and we felt like we were going to be together forever, a happy ending like in a Hollywood movie, listening to the Beach Boys, a sunset, the pine trees in the garden and the purple dices of the bougainvillea in the hedge, my grandfather collected to take to church on Easter Sunday.
A wholesale surrender, longing, and in the end, losing. The poetry of Bob Dylan gave this relationship a remarkable gravity, especially Visions of Johanna and Girl from the North Country, which was in effect dissimilar to the muggy Mediterranean atmosphere of the mezzanine where we met, her dark eyebrows adumbrate in the dim light seeping from the window trap into the Saturday afternoon love bubble.
My friend Oscar showed me his father’s hunting gun one day. Not the muzzle loading flint antique rifle but a new double barrelled gun, I remember he said it was a “Beretta” with its smooth polished butt, serrated small inscriptions on the side plates, the way it clicked shut promptly with mechanical precision. A gun gave strength to the household, even when it was idle in the wardrobe, and the men liked to go on hunting expeditions in the mountains and the Syrian border before the war. I would wake up to the sound of gunshots at dawn during the migration of birds coming up from the African coast to cross inland to the Bekaa valley. Distant shots popped when the sky dawned over the hills at the end of April and the beginning of May, when the weather changed the luminosity of the sky and made it look whiter and visibly bigger as it gained a depth when the night faded and the temperature suddenly lost its chilly snap of the morning, and we begun to wear shorts and sandals without socks.
With the war, people purchased automatic weapons. Many boys my age took the habit of toting handguns and joined the political party. My best friend Pierre showed me his father’s Smith & Wesson 45 like the one Clint Eastwood used in Dirty Harry, just to show off in the neighbourhood with its big bullet the size of a forefinger, but I doubt if he ever fired a single shot, not even one. We suddenly knew about the existence of these weapons when men from the upper parts of the neighbourhood mounted roadblocks to check the identities of passengers in the cars, on the corner of Librairie Samir and the Playboy Amusement Centre, when the pinball machine were suddenly imported into the country and were in vogue like the firearms, when armed men came to this amusement centre to gamble for money, quarrel and laugh and sometimes shoot in the air, copying the ‘cowboy saloon mentality.’
You don’t understand what a war is when you’re ten years old, nor its implications. To us it was just a play as we had so many areas to scout in the neighbourhood towards the almond orchard and the pine trees on the hill overlooking Adonis. It was our first understanding of the world and the excitement we felt to aim at the birds, to puncture the dewy cobweb, to throw stones at toads in the water basin on the hill.
There was a big water basin full of tadpoles and a deep well in the valley with its rusted water pipes supplementing it that was perhaps a government program of irrigation. It was in disuse, the canal going down the slope clogged and broken, empty but for a sheet of water hardly covering the stones we threw in it every time we scouted that area.
The grown ups had their ways to entertain themselves. The older men liked to keep their hands and minds busy, when after talking about the situation on the front line that divided Beirut in two parts, they would sit down to play cards or backgammon almost every night, either on our patio, or on the veranda of Monsieur Selim, the barber. Monsieur Joseph, a teacher of Arabic literature in Ecole Saint Antoine, was there every night, as was Monsieur Philippe, the truck driver who delivered merchandise to the Arab countries and was absent for weeks sometimes and who smoked the ‘narguilé”, the hookah, and I had to prepare the charcoal every time. Monsieur Fouad and his brown ‘More’ cigarette green pack, ‘Menthol-tawil’ he used to stress, long, menthol that lasted longer, just to make fun. Monsieur Chéfik also would be present. He worked in the water company and had a white Peugeot 404 parked under a huge eucalyptus tree near his house. My father would tell me “call Monsieur Chéfik”, and I would run up the road to knock on the kitchen door and tell his wife that my father was waiting for him.
The women, our mothers, served them lemonade, coffee, watermelon and pastries and then sat in a corner of the patio or on the balcony to leave them deal the cards silently like in the old western movies they watched in Empire or Byblos movie theatre in the Martyre Square. Monsieur Joseph and Monsieur Selim never uttered bad words, but giggled when they won the hand to spite the other team. But my father used bad words to show he’s angry at the dice. Monsieur Chéfic and Monsieur Mounir smoked constantly and couldn’t tolerate the noise and shouted at us to “play somewhere else.” The cards never seemed to give them a win, and sometimes when they parted, they spoke in low voices about the war near the mulberry tree and smoked one last cigarette before going home.
They would leave the cards with the ashtray on the table and a piece of paper with the score, a line and a set of numbers on each side of it, and my father would tell me to turn the lights off, and I would unplug the electric line extended from the window, tied to a branch of the mulberry tree of the patio and suddenly it was bedtime and the starry night of dreams at the end of another fantastic day.
It was like an unconscious tale of adventure and it coincided with the injured dog we found one day in the garage where my father parked his Mercedes near the shelter, a dog who begun to follow us when he recovered from his injury, probably hit by a car because he had a broken hind leg that my grandfather fed and named Jolly Jack. I wonder where he picked the name from. Perhaps from his old book translation that he kept with his glasses tucked under the pillow of his bed. He read in the garden or in the shade of the vine trellis near his bee hives, and he would call me again and again to show me the words he was reading and I would notice tears in his eyes and think these words were the source of his melancholy and joy, and of his happiness, I guess..
The Divergent Thinking Memory
With the second hand buffet Papa acquired, there was the Grundig radio and a new copy of The Great Expectation of Dickens, its page still crisp except for the very few at the beginning that I tried to read using a dictionary I found with it. I was perhaps 13 years old and I remember how the difficult words were underlined on the first pages that the previous reader had the intention to search but gave up after the page of ten or eleven.
The words were simple, but at that age and knowing practically no words in English except good morning and good night, their meaning, when I began to use the dictionary, opened up slowly many perspectives into my imagination from different angles, explaining the words that seemed to be sheathed into layers of different meanings of what there was for me to slowly understand of the surrounding world and beyond, that I could identify dialectically with the corresponding shapes and colours, a world I had no inkling about and was born in ‘a posteriori’ , a toddler learning step by step how to walk, like entering a movie theatre when the film had already begun and you had to catch up with the plot. But I could easily identify with Pip because in the book Pip was my age, and reacted to sounds and sights of the world and what it was telling him of its harsh realities on the marches with the convict hiding in the cemetery where his parents were buried.
I was intrigued at how Dickens came about to write in the passage of Mr. Wopsel when he said : “… was to turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair, and give us Mark Antony’s oration over the body of Caesar…” , and who was Caesar, I thought. Julius Caesar, slain on 15 March 44 BC by a group of senators at the Curia of Pompey, and identified Brutus, one of his closest allies, among the assassins. William Shakespeare attributed the line “Et Tu, Brutus ?” in his play to Julius Caesar, but there’s no reference to it in Mark Antony’s oration over the dead body of Caesar, but non the less it is a classic line of betrayal that traversed two millennia, similar perhaps a betrayal of Hannibal Barca by Scipio Africanus the Elder in the battle of Zama, nowadays Tunis, in 202 bce, should one look closely back two thousand years ago to find a similar case that had not been recorded or mentioned in a play, during the Punic wars between Carthage and Rome, fought for the dominance of the Mediterranean Sea, when Hannibal brought with him thirty elephants up the Spanish coast and crossed the Alps to surprise the Roman from the rear, but didn’t succeed.
That time was related in an oblique way to the period when I was a child, then a boy, then a teenager going to Louaizé school. I have this vague memory of things loosely connected to each other in strange ways and circumstances where I found myself alone and at a remove from the present time, thinking about the things that were beyond my understanding.
I had a kind of a romantic relationship to my surroundings, with nature, with the cold nights, with my family, with my boyhood friends of the neighbourhood, with the place I was born in Nahr el Kalb. That’s where my family lived before transferring to the house my grandpa was building in Zouk Mikhael, with the city of Jounieh a little further down on the bay, its coastal town with its narrow street lined with the old Ottoman houses built on the beach like the caravanserai of previous centuries, or to our new house where we lived, the garden, the rooftop, the pigeons my grandpa raised, the beehives under the vine trellis, the long balcony, the fruit trees, the pomegranate, the almond, citrus and even the radish he brought to the kitchen at noon with a handful of basil and parsley he washed in the rain water collected from the roof in a metal drum by the pillar.
The name Zouk Mikhael itself in its Arabic translation means the Bazaar of Mikhäel, Zouk coming from a derivative of ‘souk’, which means bazaar, from what I remember of its cobbled and narrow streets of the old village up the hill on the way to Antoura where there was a convent with long green shutters on its walls.
The village had an artisanal silk production and mulberry trees on which the silkworm fed to produce its cocoon, with small arcade shops of stone slab floors and stone houses when the trade of silk was common during the Ottoman occupation of the Levant. Perhaps the name itself derived from the Bible or even further back in its epistemology to the tales of Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia, because to reprieve the valuable cedar wood of Mount Lebanon, ” Gilgamesh had to slay the ogre who protected the forest and its trees ” and take the timber back to Babylon.
I have fold memories of Nahr el Kalb, the River of the Dog, the river bank along the promontory jutting into the sea that formed a cul de sac to earlier invaders such as Alexander the Great or the Phoenicians who lived on this coast and who had left the mark of their passage on the rock still visible in some places where it had been chiselled and other calligraphy carvings dating back to the origin of Christianity.
This was the last romantic time in the history of the Levant as one might discover in De Nerval, Lamartine, Chateaubriand or even Aziyadé by Pierre Loti, thought to have fallen in love with an Armenian slave in Constantinople and for whom he wrote the book, when he came back to her only to find out that she died of ‘chagrin”.
This period of time was before the start of the 1975 war in Beirut. A time when us kids were the unruly urchins who hunted small birds and lizards and snails with slingshots in the undergrowth by the stone wall of an ancient almond grove. A time when we were free, camping in the pine hill to make tea in an old kettle and smoke cigarettes in secret. We were the buccaneers when we raided the vegetable plantation in the Adonis valley of a local peasant when he chased us running in his sarouel and we threw firecrackers to frighten him.
My memory of those innocent days were always at the beginning of spring because I remember the beads of dew glinting on the grass when I knelt on the creek to drink. I remember the sing song of birds and the finicky butterflies, the lily flowers, red poppies, the bees and the sound of the frogs at night in the overgrowth on a fallen stone wall where the rain formed a pool under thistles and brambles, under a huge Carob tree, a hundred years old or more where I always imagined big birds nested.
We lived from day to day with the ”Grace of God”, as it was the custom to say, that whatever happened, it was the will of God. That the son of God was the shepherd who will lead us in life to the good.
A cornucopia of a world, in pristine colours, taste, family values, when we always left the door of the house unlocked at night, at home, in the pine forest, in school, or whenever we went to the beach. Whatever God wished to happen, will happen. People used to say “mektoub”, it’s “written”, and no matter what one did or planned, it won’t change the will of the Almighty. That was the belief in the Orient.
People were superstitious and believed in miracles. They attributed to the unknown the power it didn’t have, and thought it was the will of God. They believed in some kind of faith that destiny will be good if one lived naturally, learned a trade, acquired the experience of life step by step, followed a tradition, in an artisan way of life, in a sylvan fashion, following the seasons.
They made charcoal, laboured the fields with a spade and by hand, planted vegetables and went to hunt when the migration of the birds began, when large flocks of birds such as storks crossed the continent from North Africa to Asia Minor over Lebanon. They went to the hills of Zouk Mosbeh to gain height and get the chance to aim at the birds at a closer range.
I would wake up to the faint shooting echo at dawn from such a distance because there were no buildings that hampered the view and the crest of the mountain was still visible from my bedroom window, with the rising daylight behind from the east that seemed to shorten the distance to my arm’s reach, and I would know by the faint colour of the dawning sky and hot air of the morning, when my mother replaced the blankets with summer bed sheets and gave us shorts to wear, that it’s summer already.
My mother came from Istanbul to marry my father, in diaspora, in Beirut. I didn’t know Istanbul was Constantinople until much later, thanks to Monsieur Saliba, who taught us Arabic literature, history and arts in my class.
Women sold wild thyme, spring onions and sour tasting lettuce they picked in the fields. The shepherds came down from the mountains to the coast to pitch their tents near an abandoned stone house along the Autostrade, and my grandpa, one day, bought a lamb from them and an earthen jar full of fresh milk and yogurt, perhaps on Easter because I didn’t go to school that day. I must have been six or seven years old. I remember walking with him towards the orange and almond grove to meet the “bedouins” near their tents.
“Naouar” people used to call them, the peregrinating tribes from the Bekaa Valley who had no fixed houses and followed the pastures along the coast coming from Tripoli up north, a long detour because the access to the coastal towns was impracticable through the Sannine mountain chain, to guide the flock of hundreds of sheep by our house with the tinkling bells, barking dogs and the shepherds in their rugged clothes following the mules as if it was a biblical procession, along almond and olive trees on an arid landscape, creeping vines, reeds and taller bamboos by an irrigation canal by a fallen stone wall.
In another abandoned stone house where we played hide and seek, Monsieur Selim had gymnastic utensils of weight lifts he contrived in empty Nido milk cans filled in cement, and smaller size dumbbells with a torn iron bar to hold. They looked heavy but were filled with gravel and stones but the cement didn’t fill the crevices inside and gave it a hollow sound when we dropped it on the ground.
He had many sepia pictures, as they had the cachet of Studio Columbus on the bottom right corner, plastered on the white washed walls inside when he was young, wearing a swimsuit, taking a pose like a pugilist, bare fists in mid air at the ready, in an eternal frozen posture.
He later opened a barber salon near the Centrale Electrique by the water irrigation canal. His brother Monsieur Philippe was a truck driver. Monsieur Fouad, their younger brother, was a painter of old houses and churches who carried the long wooden ladder on his Volkswagen beetle car he himself painted orange with a brush. He smoked Bafra cigarettes and offered us Crush and Miranda soda drinks when we helped him remove the heavy ladder up and down the garage.
Our childhood was a world of joy and play. No one told us to study well or at all. It was the Mediterranean style of upbringing, as opposed to the disciplined western model. We went to school because all the kids went to school. Success or failure didn’t exist in its actual connotation, as if the purpose of life was to make money only. You didn’t go to school to become a formatted somebody. You just were yourself. The notion of the contradiction didn’t exist in those days. We went to school to learn to read and write only, or that’s what it implied.
The old Middle East was at every corner, in every ruin, in every old stone house and pavements in the old harbour of Beirut where the real difference between East and West was evident around the lively Martyr Square, with its cinemas and restaurants and buses that plied the distant towns of Baalbek, Byblos Sidon and Tyre.
The Eastern tradition was not preoccupied to graduate to a higher position to control and subdue. It was just frozen in ancient times, waiting for General Gouraud to speak to the tomb of Saladin in Damascus in 1917, “Saladin, wake up, here we’ve come again”, 8 centuries after Saladin conquered the last crusade in Jerusalem in 1187.
Monsieur Saliba one day, brought a figurine of a man in a black cassock made of clay to the classroom, a monk, perhaps of Joseph in the Nativity cave, with two sheep, a goat and a donkey on the classroom table and told us to draw and paint them.
I projected myself on the snowy Sannine mountains and how the cold froze my feet. I had the ability to think in a visual way, in sound and sights. I needed the dynamic, the organic, not the mechanic curriculum. I figured out the smell of the hay, the baby crib, the oriental mystery of the Mage, imagining the summer sparrows through the window above the almond trees in the hot afternoon dust, and Monsieur Saliba gave me the best grade of 13 for painting the monk in dry, blue paint with a palette knife, instead of throwing the dry tube, sign that he appreciated my bold attempt, to give the statue an aura of old.
Monsieur Saliba, no doubt a converso, from Beirut, always wore a three piece suite, with a gousset watch on a silver chain in his breast pocket he consulted frequently, his auburn hair and lively blue eyes, who, at that time, was in his seventies and was born during the last days of the Ottoman empire.
I faintly remember him talking about the overthrow of the Umayyad caliphate in Damascus 661-750 that weakened the Moors in the Al Andalous and led to the defeat of Abd al-Rahman al Ghafiqi against Charles Martel in the battle of Tour in October 732, pointing the last broken phalange of his crooked forefinger to the window and the Mediterranean sea towards Spain, then in the opposite direction towards the Sannine Mountains, to the East and Syria beyond.
In my entourage, no one could have uttered such historic names, it was only Monsieur Saliba whom I remember hearing mentioning the names of Ibn Sina – Avicenna -, and Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, – Maimonides -, in the reign of Al Hakam II when diplomatic relations with Byzantine Empire in Constantinople peaked and many manuscript of old Greek enluminures were translated and assembled in the Cordoba Library to usher Europe to its Modern Early Period, with the fall of Constantinople in 1432.
Black Birds
I’ve never been attentive to the people I crossed on the street on my way to the TomTip café on the corner, or the customers at the bakery or the baker himself, ”Abdalla”, literally meaning “Slave of God” , which, in the Middle East is a common name. He always smiles when he sees me, for the fact that I speak Arabic with him, because I speak many languages, and I have the choice to shift in one sentences between four dialects.
Or the other people in the bar who meet at the counter every morning. They talk for long moments about whatever they have in common. One of them is the owner of the garage down the street where broken cars are parked under the trees The others are his mechanics or maybe just his neighbours.
The garbage collectors also come in, wearing fluorescent yellow clothes. They drink coffee, eat croissants and talk in loud voices and wait in turn to use the toilet before they resume their work.
I did not care about life and the expression it took in this city. I never thought I belonged. I knew from the start that I didn’t want to be responsible or have any affection for the Parisian myth and what it represented for earlier writers who lived here. It’s not the same epoch.
I was aware from the beginning of the repetition of things, every day, noon and night, every week, month and year, as if one was in a rut. It has no purpose. It doesn’t contain any artistic expression, beauty, appeal or finesse. This is the new world order, as they advertise it, with its shortcomings. A men’s world. It used to be different from what I have read.
It occurred to me they, the people I saw every morning, all of them, repeated by rote what they had learned to do and what was bequeathed to them by the new culture, negating any imaginary purpose that might add a colour to the mundane to make it less of a burden.
I was only interested in the things I saw that captured my interest, en passant, on my way to take my son, Voskian, to school.
The static things, the leftovers, the dirty plastic garbage on a corner. The empty bottle.
The squashed cigarette stubs. The dawning sky quarter to eight.
“Look at the sky, I’d say to Voskian. There’s a subtle new luminosity. The days are getting longer, there’s a white ivory tint, a spring morning, coming from the east, like a bowl in the sky, where soon birds begin to migrate.”
“Wait here and look at the birds”, I’d tell him. The crows I was feeding behind the bus stop, the way they smudged the skeleton of the trees like spots of black ink on the slender twigs denuded of its leaves.
The way these birds acknowledged my presence as soon as I walked onto the paved recess near the back door of the sports hall of the school.
I found in the combination of these inanimate things and the wild birds something akin to freedom, a change, a transition from one state to another to stymie stagnation.
Feeding the birds to give them the freedom they craved that I didn’t have, as I watched how they fly atop the tall building in the windy current up the Seine river, how they drew abstract lines in the cold wind, naturally happy and light hearted.
I’d cut in half a plastic bottle with the knife to make a container of it where I’d ladle the remaining of the rice, of bread, of crumbs and spaghetti tomatoes sauce with all the butter broth my mother had prepared, the leftover, to let it soak and take next morning to the crows as I accompany my son to school.
Wait at the bus stop to see how they would let themselves drop from the branches, spread their wings at the last instant in a choreography sweep to suddenly dip onto the feed I emptied at the trunk of a sapling, in a sort of a haiku movement.
I have counted on this tree between the wall and the garbage containers fifteen birds.
There are more, certainly, a whole bunch of them I see everywhere on the trees along the street because there’s a sandwich snack, the “Maxin Chicken” where sometimes customers throw French fries or chicken wing bones on purpose, excited to observe this element of wild life blend in the routine of the suburbs, the way they swoop between their feet and the passing cars.
These nonconformities attracted me more than the traffic of the buses or the kids going to school, in the dark and cold and wet sidewalk.
The gloom of the night still lingered until eight and the rush hour moment. There’s nothing to lend some colour to these insipid warehouse walls. Only the crows shatter the woeful routine and all the effort people expand towards one end, one outcome.
“Study well” I tell my boy when we part ways after the bus stop.
“I’ll wait here until I see you cross the street”. He nods and I stand in the traffic to look as he slowly walks away. A whole life ahead of him, uncertain of what awaits, alone with many questions in his mind.
How to explain the prose-poem of those cold morning walks to school? The sky, the snow, the dawn and the change happening at each stage. The Chinese call it “sekki”, the 24 seasonal divisions, I learned later.
How will he remember and what will it make of him?
He turns around and tells me “Papa, give the woman some money” and nods towards the crouched woman at the door of the grocery, begging.
“I’ve already given her last week”
“Give her again” he says.
I will try to explain.
“You’re not Christian” he tells me in an accusatory tone.
Turn the other cheek. Nietzsche didn’t agree with this, I think to myself. His God was Dionysus, and he thought Christ made men weak. Perhaps he didn’t know about the religious wars in Europe, the Conquistadors and the Inquisitions.
How to make Voskian notice a presence, the cold draft breeze, the crows falling from the trees like spilled ink in the orb of the light to squabble and bicker to satisfy their hunger, to notice their shining beaks and feathers, to take his mind off this oppressive culture of efficiency towards which he walks.
“I’m going to the other café, I’ll pick you up at noon”. He just nods, and I nod back as a sign of acknowledgement that we agreed and I walk towards Le Bergerac, owned by a Cambodian family, for my coffee. It’s still early. Later the horse race will start and the gamblers will sit in the lobby and give their attention to the screen on the wall.
I walk into the reality of the morning step by step. It takes three minutes to reach the bistro. The pavements are so hard, they send back reverberations off the ground as if it was frozen. It’s 8.05 am.
Against the white dawning sky, festooned Xmas lights along the bay window of the Bergerac café, electric blue freckles wink in succession like snow floes slipping on the smudged glass pane.
The frequent visitors stand outside and with every pull at the stub a plume of exhaled smoke wafts in the draft of passing cars. The interior smells a little more polite since they have banned smoking. No stale beer on sawdust on the floor. In old bistros I knew on Saint André Des Arts in the Latin Quarter of Paris, it always smelled red wine soaked sawdust along the counter, especially when it rained. Janot the waiter didn’t sweep out the floor when the bar closed and left it to fester all night, which gave the bar its peculiar identification.
These are the gamblers who assemble here every morning as soon as the bar opens at 7. They have no where else to go. There’s another bar down the street, Le Barbu, but that one is for all night card games. The men here are anchored in reality, they understand the horses better than number combinations. They want to see the horses, the effort, the crowd shouting on the last furlong. I have been watching them and I blend in this anti-social mood perfectly. No one cares when I scribble some words, they think I’m a gambler too.
It gets a bit noisy on market days, when Egyptian vegetable sellers come for their morning coffee. They shout the bartender girl “Jumbo” for some reason across the hall, a bit too loud for her five foot stature, “un café-crème, Jumbo” and sit down to roll a joint. She replies in a feisty voice, and shouts meaninglessly in her native language interspersed with some French words, gesticulating her arms above the counter, white skin, drained of the sun and the glossy perspiration of the Pacific humidity.
They sit in the lobby as pupils in a classroom. Some study the numbers and the pedigree of the horses in the papers, as they wait for the races to start. Some just stare blankly outside, for want of a better vista, to daydream. Some young African boys read the odds directly on their phone apps and by the same medium place their bets without physically going to the automatic machine to press the numbers on the touch screen.
On a pillar separating the sala from the counter, there is a small knee level platform dedicated to Asian deity, a sitting Buddha statue with his fat belly on his knees, between two standing Shivas with one hand raised on either side, and a year’s worth of incense sticks squeezed in a jam jar, four thimble full offered to the God and Goddess, two of alcohol, two of coffee, two saucers of fruits, apples and oranges, and two red paper lanterns, the size of cherries hanging on the miniature pagoda entrance, a cosy nook a world apart from the deafening noise when the race starts and the TV volume is hitched up a notch.
Vartan Koumrouyan is a writer living in Paris.