Samuel Shimon: The Road to Hollywood | Reading

I went immediately to the service taxi station and took a seat in a taxi heading to East Beirut, which is a little over an hour from Damascus. When we arrived, I was the last passenger left in the vehicle. So the driver asked, ‘Where do you want to get out, buddy?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘Fine,’ he said, ‘if you don’t know, we are now in the Ashrafi eh neighbourhood in East Beirut, and the journey ends here.’ After wandering around the area for a short while, I went to a nearby hotel, the Hotel Alexandre, where the clerk asked for my passport and fi fty-fi ve Lebanese pounds. I paid for a room I would never sleep in and went out for a walk. I passed by the Church of the Virgin Mary and found a stationery shop where I bought a notebook and pen. After an hour of walking, I noticed I was A shared-ride in a narrow lane leading to the sea. Suddenly I heard rockets exploding. When I looked at the city in the distance, I could see rockets destroying buildings. I decided to return to the hotel. On the way back, a military jeep approached me and I saw a fist aiming for my face. When I regained consciousness, I was lying in a darkened room and could hear the loud roar of the sea as though I was in a boat. I put my hand on my stomach, feeling intensely hungry. After some moments I tried to calm myself by telling myself I’d been grabbed by Phalangists. They’re a Christian militia. I’ll tell them I’m an Assyrian and have come to East Beirut wanting to emigrate to America through one of the Christian aid societies, and then they’ll set me free.’ Hours later, a bald man arrived and asked irritably, ‘Did you see the rockets of the Palestinians and Syrians? They hit their targets exactly. Do you know why? 

It’s because there are spies who feed them information.’ ‘They are vile people,’ I commented. He looked at me, smiling, ‘Who are vile people?’ ‘The spies,’ I replied. He struck me violently, ‘Son of a bitch,’ he said, ‘if spies are vile people, why do you work for them?’ He then went at me, pummelling me with blows as I repeated, ‘You’ve got it wrong, I’m an Assyrian and want to go to America.’ The man was frenzied and hysterical in the way he punched and kicked and swore at me. And somehow, all the while, I was thinking how strange, how funny they seemed to me, these swear words in Lebanese dialect that I was hearing for the fi rst time. ‘You all come here with different stories,’ the man said. Minutes later, another person arrived and asked, ‘Pierre, do you need any help?’ And this man began to hit me with a heavy club. His blows hurt terribly, and I began to weep and curse them with the worst words I knew. On the same day, a third person arrived. He was handsome and well-dressed, and very much like the heroes of the Lebanese television series we used to see on Iraqi TV. He began asking me about my stay in Damascus, so I told him that I had been tortured there. He laughed and said, ‘You were subjected to torture . . . or was it training?’ He then lit up a cigarette that had a very unpleasant smell and that I later learned was called Gitanes. I told him the story of my coming to East Beirut in order to travel on to America. He said, ‘Those Christian societies that you thought would help you were closed in 1976, a year after the beginning of the civil war.’ He advised me to tell the truth because otherwise he could not guarantee what would happen to me. Then a boy about fourteen years old came in and brought me a bottle of water and a sandwich, which, despite my hunger, I ate with diffi culty due to my injuries. I later learned that this was a popular type of sandwich among the Lebanese and the Palestinians, and that it was called a zaatar manaqish. In East Beirut it didn’t take long to realise how naïve I had been, as the Christian Phalangist militiamen, who – I thought – would treat me kindly, made me feel that, compared with their treatment, my arrest in Damascus had been a comedy. The Phalangists vented their intense hatred for their enemies, the Syrians and Palestinians, on me. On the third day, a young man came to me and said calmly, ‘Get up, son of a bitch, and come with me.’ He was about twenty-fi ve years old and wore jeans and a white shirt, the same thing I was wearing. We walked along a narrow alley. The bald man passed us by and said, as he rushed to get into a military car, ‘Tony, don’t waste much time on him.’ ‘Do we have time to waste?’ the young man answered, before turning to me and jeering, ‘Did you hear him, mister? Do you know what he means? He’s my superior and he is telling me to throw you into the sea.’ So I repeated my story to him, pleading, ‘May God bless you, Tony. Believe me, I’m innocent and know nothing about the war or Lebanon.’ He kicked me in the backside, ordering me, ‘Walk in front of me, you disgusting man. You’ve ruined our country.’ At the end of the narrow alley, we stopped at a wide concrete wall next to the sea. Fondling his gun as he looked out at the sea, Tony said, ‘I’ll give you one last chance. If you tell me why you’ve come here, I promise I’ll intervene in your favour and release you. Think hard. You have fi ve minutes.’ He sat on the sea wall, took out his blue packet of Gitanes and began to smoke. ‘You have to tell me everything,’ he added, ‘before I finish smoking my cigarette.’ Understanding the severe gravity of the situation, I said calmly, ‘Please listen to me carefully, Tony. I’m from a poor Assyrian family and I’ve always dreamed of travelling to America in order to work in fi lm. Believe me, Tony, I don’t work with any political or non-political organisation. I’m telling the truth, Tony.’ He threw his cigarette into the sea and put his gun to my temple. ‘If you kill me, Tony,’ I said innocently, ‘many people will be sad.’ ‘Nobody will be sad at the death of a lousy bum working as a professional spy.’ ‘I want to make movies. I’m not a spy!’ ‘You terrorist bastard! You know what “movies” means? You’re not here to put a bomb in a church or a children’s school? What do you know about “movies”, you son of a bitch?’ ‘I know everything. I’m not like you and your friends, killing and smoking Gitanes.’ I felt his gun touching my temple. I closed   my eyes and could hear my heart thumping. After several moments of silence, Tony said, ‘Do you know Godard? Do you know someone called Jean-Luc Godard?’ I wanted to shake my head to tell him no, but I didn’t dare in case it made his gun go off and fi re a bullet into my head, so I said it in a low voice. He asked again, ‘Haven’t you heard of the Nouvelle Vague?’ ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he shouted, ‘how do you want me to believe that you dream of working in fi lm when you don’t even know Jean-Luc Godard and haven’t heard of the Nouvelle Vague? Huh? I’ve given you another chance and you’ve failed again.’ At that moment, I shouted out, ‘I know everything about John Ford, about John Wayne, about Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Maureen O’Hara. I know Katherine Hepburn, I know Roy Rogers, the King of Cowboys, I know Victor Mature, Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck, Alan Ladd, Vera Miles, Randolph Scott, Clark Gable, D. W. Griffi th. I know everything about Marlon Brando, I know Marilyn Monroe, Olivia de Havilland, I know Richard Widmark, Jane Russell, Robert Mitchum, Audrey Hepburn. I know Rock Hudson, James Dean, I know Gene Tierney, I know Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, I know Rod Taylor, I know Lee Marvin, Humphrey Bogart, Bob Hope, Errol Flynn, Joan Crawford, I know Dean Martin, I know everything about Norman Wisdom, everything about Charlie Chaplin, everything about Montgomery Clift, I even know King Kong and Frankenstein. When I stopped, I heard Tony laughing. I opened my eyes to see he had returned his handgun to its place under his belt. ‘Listen, Cowboy!’ he said. ‘Let it be known that Hollywood cinema is weak compared with the fi lms of the Nouvelle Vague.’ Unabl e to believe what was happening, I went along with him, ‘Maybe.’ At that moment, I remembered Kiryakos, who, ever since I was a kid, had taught me all I knew about movies. He had asked me once, ‘If someone asked you, “Who is the best scriptwriter in the world?” what would you answer?’ ‘OK, let me think a little,’ I had replied then. Kiryakos had laughed and commented, ‘This doesn’t need any thinking about. It is God. Yes, God is the greatest scriptwriter. He created this movie in which we all live.’ In the taxi from East Beirut back to Damascus, I was sitting in the back enjoying the beautiful scenery when I looked up at the sky and whispered, ‘And Kiryakos never told me He liked happy endings in the Hollywood style.