A Good Land. Nada Jarrar Awar

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      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. Besides, where else would I have gone after leaving London?’

      There is a note of cynicism in her voice that surprises me. I sit back in my seat and look up at the leaves of a tree whose branches arch gently above the bench we are sitting on. They are a dark, polished green in places and have a soft silvery sheen about them in others. I am suddenly struck by the symmetry of their irregular shapes and the beauty in their contrasting colours.

      I begin to wonder if Margo might now regret her decision to remain in Lebanon, especially given the political instability we are now experiencing.

      ‘So where do you feel you belong, Margo?’ I finally ask.

      She drops her cigarette to the ground, puts it out with her shoe and pulls herself up with her stick.

      ‘Wherever I happen to be, sweetheart, whoever I happen to be with,’ she says. ‘With you here, now, and somewhere else later on. It’s all the same, after all, don’t you think?’

      I laugh loudly.

      ‘You know that’s not how I feel, Margo,’ I protest, gesturing at the view before us. ‘This country is everything to me, this city. It’s where I grew up, where I became who I am.’

      ‘Mmm. But perhaps one day that feeling too will change in you.’

      My uncle and his wife still live in the old neighbourhood by the American University, though they moved some years ago into a larger apartment that has a partial view of the Corniche and the sea beyond it. Every once in a while I visit and when the weather is fine, we relax on the balcony in the shade of a large beach umbrella and chat while the hum of traffic and people goes on below.

      My cousins left home years ago, but my uncle and aunt remain a surprisingly forward-looking couple, unwilling to hark back to the miseries of the civil war and enjoying the here and now of Beirut days.

      This city, my uncle insists every time I see him, is still the best place to be. It has everything and everyone I could ever need in it and more, he says.

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