I’d never seen him really sad before. Usually he was like a captain in whose wake everyone wanted to follow, someone who never had any difficulty striking up a conversation with strangers. He won people over with ease. The fact that he never once forgot a name certainly helped. If we were walking through town and he spotted someone on the other side of the street, even someone he’d met only briefly several weeks earlier, he would smile, raise his hand in greeting, and call the person’s name. How many times did we stop to chat to a Mr al-Qasimi, a Mrs Fedorov, the el-Tayeb or Schmid family, a Bilaal, an Ivana, or an Inge? I never once got the impression these people weren’t just as happy to stop and chat. Small talk was Father’s trump card, because he remembered not just people’s names, but also every other detail about them. He would casually ask, “How are the kids doing?” or “How is the treatment going? Is your back any better?” or “Did you sort out those squeaky brakes?” He would often offer to help: “If your shoulder is still bothering you, we’ll get your groceries for you—just give us a list and Samir will bring you back whatever you need.” Or: “How are you getting on with the house? Is your attic finished? If you need someone to help put in the insulation, give me a ring.” Everyone who spoke to Father soon felt as if they’d known him for years, as if they were friends, even. I was often struck by the warmth with which he greeted people. He’d never shake a stranger’s hand without resting his left hand on their shoulder for a moment. Or else he’d shake the person’s hand with both of his. A cordial gesture, as if they were closing a deal, and indeed I often felt that was how he saw it too: Welcome! You’re part of my world now.
Although he wasn’t particularly tall, to me he seemed like a lighthouse, someone who oriented you, someone you could see from a distance. I’m certain many others saw him that way too. At the market, he would greet the traders, skilfully ask how they were doing, and get such an easy conversation going that they barely noticed when he got down to business. He loved haggling. He was a true Arab in that regard. He was always trying his luck, and not just when he took me to the market. Even in the supermarket, in the aisle where the porridge oats and ready meals were, he might take a bemused shop assistant aside, and, with a conspiratorial expression on his face, whisper, “The cheese … can you do any better on the price?”
And he sang. He was a real Arab in that way too. He would sing on the street, unperturbed by the looks people gave him. “Germans don’t burst into song on the street,” he once said to me as we strolled back from the market hand-in-hand, laden with bags of fresh fruit and vegetables. It was a day made for singing, a day like a summer’s tune: sunshine, awnings, children with chocolate ice cream smeared around their mouths, couples holding hands, a dreadlocked boy in cut-off jeans rattling over the kerb on his skateboard.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because they care too much what other people think. They’re worried people will think they’re crazy if they start singing on the street.”
“Maybe you’re the one who’s crazy?”
“Maybe I am.” He winked at me, reached into a bag for an apple and took a bite out of it before handing it to me. “Or maybe deep down they’d like to sing in public too, but they don’t dare because they think you need a permit.”
He liked to joke about how you need a permit for everything in Germany. I overheard him laughing about it with Mother a few times, so I knew he wasn’t being serious.
And then he sang: “B-hibbak ya lubnan, ya watani b-hibbak, bi-shmalak bi-jnubak bi-sahlak b-hibbak …”
I love you, Lebanon, my country, I love you. Your north, your south, your plains, I love you.
I squeezed his hand tight. I knew the song. I knew the singer. I’d heard her voice many times before; steeped in sadness, longing, and poetry, it was a voice that gently eased over the melody and slipped into the foreground of almost every song. Fairuz, that was her name. I’d seen her on TV once, standing like a sphinx in front of the temple ruins of Baalbek as she sang this same song. In front of thousands of cheering people. A beautiful woman with striking, severe features, aloof, her hair as red as autumn leaves, a gold dress draped over her shoulders. In the spotlight, she looked slightly surreal, like a noblewoman’s portrait come to life, striding across the stage to the microphone. Mother loved her songs too. Everyone loved Fairuz. She was the harp of the Orient, the nightingale of the Middle East, singing about her love of her homeland. Someone—I think it was Hakim—once called her “the mother of all Lebanese people.”
This is how we walked home, with Father singing. I joined in at some point. We weren’t bothered by the funny looks we got. In fact, the more people crossed our path, the louder we sang, and we didn’t care if we barely hit a note. Holding hands, our shopping bags rustling in the wind, we sang in Arabic, because we wouldn’t have been able to express in German how we felt right then.
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4
Father was quick to realise how important it was to learn German. After fleeing burning Beirut in spring of 1983, the first refuge my parents found in Germany was the secondary school’s sports hall in our town. The school had been shut down the previous year when routine inspections during the summer holidays had revealed excessive levels of asbestos in the air. But there were no other options, so the sports hall ended up as a refugee reception centre. Father soon managed to get hold of books so that he could teach himself this foreign language. At night, while others around him slept wrapped in blankets on the floor, he clicked on a pocket torch and studied German. By day, he could sometimes be seen standing in a corner, eyes closed, repeating vocabulary to himself. He learned fast. Soon he was the one the aid workers sought out be their interpreter. Then he’d stand, a circle of others around him, and explain to the aid workers in broken German which medicine people needed or what it said on the certificates and documents they held out to him. My father was no intellectual. He’d never been to university. I don’t even know whether he was smarter than average. But he was a master of the art of survival and he knew that it would be to his advantage if he could make himself indispensable.
The atmosphere in the sports hall was often strained. People who had arrived here with no possessions, nothing but hope for a new life, were now condemned to wait for their fate to unfold. The air was stuffy, the space cramped. A constant hum of voices hovered beneath the ceiling; there was never complete silence. At night, you’d hear children crying or mothers weeping, and the snoring, scratching, and coughing of the refugees. If one got a cold, many were sick a few days later. The aid workers did their best, but there were shortages of everything: medicine, toiletries, food, not to mention toys for the kids, or ways for the grown-ups to keep themselves busy.
Losing their homeland was a fate everyone shared; they were all refugees. But a residence permit was also at stake, and not everyone would be allowed to stay; they knew this too. Everyone had witnessed scenes in which screaming mothers clung to the poles holding up the basket-ball hoops as they resisted being carried out of the hall along with their children. Here, one person could be the reason why another didn’t get to stay. That made fighting a serious problem. But settling fights was another thing Father was good at. He’d talk calmly and persuasively to the irate parties, stressing how important