Last month, a United Nations report on hunger described a catastrophic situation in Gaza, where more than ninety per cent of 1982, Beirut, Lebanon. I am fourteen. School, some friends, a nice house facing the sea.
My father is visiting from Dammam, Saudi Arabia, where he has been working since the mid-seventies. He visits two or three times a year. I am happy. When he is home, almost nothing can go wrong. Even war seems to pause. He is old, a good kind of old, the kind you believe will outlive you.
This trip, Father is set on replacing our old car with another used one. It’s the first time he’s shared his plans with me, or maybe just the first time I’ve noticed. The first car that won’t simply appear in my life, already ours. Unlike the red Toyota my brother used to pick me up from school. That one seemed to exist only in those moments, suddenly there when my brother arrived, with no trace in my memory beyond that. Or the beige Plymouth, which appeared only when we were vacationing in Souk El Gharb, a village in the mountains. Even the green Volvo in the garage—one day it was just there, as if it had always been.
It is Saturday. A good Saturday. All Saturdays are good Saturdays. I come home on Friday evening and return to boarding school on Sunday night. Saturday is the only all-day-home day.
I wake to the sound of loud chatter. It’s always a crowded house when Father is home—friends and family drifting in, handymen moving through the rooms, construction workers hammering or tearing things down, other men trying to sell him something or impress him with an idea.
I see my father talking to Issa, our driver, in the living room. He notices me approaching. A big smile spreads across his face. They walk over together, and my father hugs me. “Get ready,” he says. “We’re going to look at some options for our next car.” He’s been eyeing a Mercedes or a BMW.
Issa says the Mercedes dealership is in Dora, in East Beirut, and that getting there would take the better part of a day—the checkpoints that separate the two sides of the city have long lines, are unpredictable, and can shut without warning. He’s not sure where the official BMW dealership is, but insists he knows a reputable place in West Beirut that sells used BMWs and Mercedes.
Issa has been with us for a couple of years. Young, somewhere in his early twenties, with a teenage mustache. Shy, always wearing an uncomfortable smile. He stays with Father, even travels with him to Saudi Arabia. I don’t know what he does there. My father already has a driver in Saudi. A cook, too.
Issa drives us deep into Beirut, into areas I don’t remember ever seeing before. Electrical wires burst out of small boxes hung on posts, crisscrossing from building to building, fighting for space with banners of one leader or another—and another. The walls are thick with posters of dead men’s faces, layered one on top of the other. Some are torn to make space for new ones, leaving only part of a face or a piece of a name. Each reads Al-Shahid al-Batal (The Heroic Martyr), with a name underneath. I read a few names and stop. There are too many.
Click here for full essay on the Bellingham Review website
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Zeid Omran has lived through war, loss, exile, Bach and Rilke. His work explores identity shaped by displacement and the tension of belonging to both Western and non-Western worlds, yet fully to neither. An economist by training, he co-founded a research organization supporting Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. He now lives in Southern California.