Stray Dogs Read online

  ALSO BY RAWI HAGE

  De Niro’s Game (2006)

  Cockroach (2008)

  Carnival (2012)

  Beirut Hellfire Society (2018)

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2022 Rawi Hage

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2022 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Excerpts from “Incantation,” “On Angels,” “At a Certain Age”

  from New and Collected Poems by Czeslaw Milosz.

  Copyright © 1988, 1991, 1995, 2001 by Czeslaw Milosz Royalties, Inc.

  Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts

  for a grant providing assistance during the writing of this book.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Stray dogs : stories / Rawi Hage.

  Names: Hage, Rawi, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210258004 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210258012 | ISBN 9780735273627 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735273641 (EPUB)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories.

  Classification: LCC PS8615.A355 S77 2022 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Book design by Lisa Jager, adapted for ebook

  a_prh_6.0_139326550_c1_r0

  For Aya.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Rawi Hage

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Iconoclast

  Bird Nation

  Stray Dogs

  Mother, Mother, Mother

  The Whistle

  The Fate of the Son of the Man on the Horse

  Instructions for the Dance

  The Veil

  The Duplicates

  The Wave

  The Colour of Trees

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  IN 2011, I WAS OFFERED a writing residency in Berlin. I was given an apartment in Kreuzberg. I worked on a novel in the mornings and smoked outside on the balcony in the afternoons. Whenever I leaned on the edge of the balcony, I would see below me a street, a lamp and a garden. One day when I was out there, a woman standing in the garden waved at me. A moment later, her husband joined in. I waved back and nodded.

  During the day, I spent a great deal of time alone, writing and reading. In the evening, it became my custom to join the couple in their garden for a beer or two.

  Lukas was an erstwhile photographer. Hannah held a clerical job.

  We talked about our lives, politics, books. We exchanged anecdotes and political opinions. Photography was Lukas’s profession, but he also had a long history of “involvement with syndicates,” and in his youth had been a member of a German anarchist group.

  One night, Hannah confided that Lukas had lost hope in the world. He had lost his belief in humanity. He talks about his causes, Hannah told me, but their defeat has been too much to bear. The radical in him has diminished, and he’s retreating into himself.

  A garden is every warrior’s final objective, I said.

  I wish he would go back to photography, Hannah said. He was happier back then.

  Well, I quipped, every hero is a being without talent. I was quoting the Romanian-French philosopher Cioran, but as soon as I realized my insult, I excused myself and rushed back up to my apartment.

  Another night, at a party at Hannah and Lukas’s home, a man who looked like Marx—long beard, round face, broad shoulders and belly—approached and asked me what I was writing about. He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and patted it on his forehead, then on his cheeks, and finally inflated it loudly with his nostrils.

  I said, joking, I am writing about the German soul.

  He chuckled, tucked his piece of cloth in his front pocket this time and asked me to explain.

  I said, Germans have a distant and cautious approach to strangers, which I prefer to the overly familiar approach to others in French colonial history.

  So, presuming the strangeness of others is right in your opinion? he asked.

  It allows for curiosity and the possibility of a future dialogue, I replied.

  So long as we are curious, he replied, we tend to tolerate.

  Indeed, I said. Familiarity breeds contempt, to quote the French novelist Stendhal.

  You studied French literature?

  I nodded and volunteered that my work dealt with how photographic images appear in literature. The man nodded too and took a sip from his beer. You know, he said. He paused before continuing: This is a tight group. So I was not curious about you, I must admit. I was not interested. If anything, I have some hostility towards your type. I am opposed to the money that our government squanders on foreign artists like you, on getting them to come and live here and spend time on their inconsequential bourgeois projects. This money should go to social programmes. You certainly fit the type they go for. Let me guess: you are French-educated, wealthy—and yet here is our government, sprinkling cash on developing-world, privileged sorts like you. I feel that the money spent on you could easily be put to better use. Because of you and the likes of you, our neighbourhoods now are gentrified, and our Berlin is changing. You are either naive or you’re complicit with neoliberal capitalism masquerading as a cultural contribution to the world.

  I think you’re partially right about who I am, I conceded. But what does our host Lukas think?

  The same, he said. We all think the same here about your kind.

  I felt like leaving at that moment, but Hannah, who was watching from across the room, came over and led me by the hand into the kitchen. Let’s have a photo of the three of us, she said, and she pulled Lukas over.

  You looked upset, and I wanted to save you, she said in a low voice. Santa over there can be offensive. Don’t listen to him.

  Soon after, I left quietly.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, after my afternoon nap and feeling satisfied with the progress of my writing, I went down to the garden for my customary beer with Hannah and Lukas. I sat down and handed Lukas a bottle. We didn’t talk about the night before. Over time, I had learned that the strength of a close-knit social group lies in its ability to compartmentalize.

  Lukas asked me what I was up to.

  I leave tomorrow for Beirut for a conference on photography, I said. You should come and visit my city sometime.

  He nodded and replied, I will.

  The conference was to be held at the American University of Beirut. I didn’t expect many people to attend my lecture, as my subject was not directly related to anything overtly political—the Arab world, the Palestinian cause or any such stressful subjects. Instead, my presentation would be on the final passage in James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” and I knew that exploring the topic of the spatial in the work of James Joyce would be seen as an indulgence, a luxury.

  In the last scene of the story, the protagonist Gabriel gazes at a window and describes his memories in a gradual visual movement, evoking a series of photographs that simultaneously detail the spatial and the p
sychological. We see the window, a lamp, the River Shannon and, at the centre of the montage, the burial site of the young Michael Furey, Gabriel’s wife’s once-upon-a-time lover.

  In reviewing this passage, I would emphasize the personal, local and national context of the objects and places we observe, expanding on the mention of the river in this text and in Joyce’s work generally, and simultaneously exploring the idea of the photograph as a subject suspended between life and death. I would allude to Barthes’s aphorism in Camera Lucida that every photograph is an image of what has passed, and I would even dare to say that photography functions as a prophecy of death—overtly linking these observations to the title of Joyce’s story, “The Dead.”

  The more I thought about the presentation of my paper, the more I felt that I was ultimately describing a particular suspended existence—my own. And now I felt the temptation to introduce another metaphor: my own identity as a person perpetually suspended between cultures, religions and geographies. But a part of me also hated that narcissism and opportunism, so prevalent in academia.

  After reflecting on this for a while, I concluded that while my work was indeed about ephemerality, it was not about the ephemerality of the self. Rather, it examined the ephemerality of the image of the self. Every hybrid was a partial death, an incomplete acquisition of the original.

  The day after the party at Lukas and Hannah’s—the day before I left for the conference—I strongly felt my state of suspension. All I could think about were the characters in “The Dead,” the woman who had lost her first lover for the incomplete acquisition of another, and the inevitability that she would lose them both.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, as I was leaving for the airport, Lukas came out into the garden and said, I booked a ticket to your city. Hannah thought that I should go, since you offered.

  Ah! I said. When will you visit?

  Wednesday of this week, he said. I want to do some photography in your country.

  I’ll find you a place to stay, I offered.

  Perhaps I can stay at your house?

  I am staying with my brother and his family, I explained. But I’ll find you another place. A lively neighbourhood, I promised.

  Lukas smiled.

  My worry was not so much about settling on a suitable place for Lukas to stay but finding the time to exercise the hospitality expected of a local host. Between my family obligations and the presentation of my paper at the American University, I feared he’d be left without a guide. But through my contacts in Beirut, I quickly arranged for Lukas to lodge in a room in a shared house with an acquaintance of mine near Rue Hamra. The two hit it off, and soon they were hanging out at cafés and bars. After a short while, they could be found in the same bar every day. Then Lukas’s roommate left on a trip, and he was left alone in the house.

  My neighbourhood was on the east side of the city, some distance from where Lukas was staying, but I made time to join him in the afternoon for a drink and to check up on him regularly. He did well on his own, having quickly made friends at the bar. Al-Almaneh, the German, everyone called him. Soon enough, he did not seem to need my help. He was content with the local hospitality.

  One afternoon, Lukas admitted to me that Beirut was not what he’d expected in terms of the photographs he’d hoped to take. It was too modern, he said.

  I asked if he’d expected to see camels.

  He laughed. Then, two days later, he called me on the phone and said someone at the bar had told him he should take photographs in the populous neighbourhood of Dahieh.

  I advised against it. I told him that an Islamist militia ran the enclave, that it was the headquarters for this group and was considered a military zone. The moment he pointed a camera, he would be held, interrogated, and his equipment confiscated.

  But Lukas was drunk, and he ranted about his love for the oppressed and for those who keep the struggle alive. He declared he was fed up with sitting in the Western bubble of the neighbourhood where he was staying.

  I urged him again not to go, but he was stubborn and incoherent and hung up on me.

  In the middle of that night, I woke up in a panic.

  The idiot, I thought. He will get us in trouble.

  I remembered that Lukas had given my name and my brother’s address at the airport as references. Once he was stopped and interrogated, as would inevitably happen, the militia would trace him to our home, to my brother’s house.

  I put on my clothes and called a cab to Hamra. I climbed the stairs to Lukas’s apartment and banged at the door. When he opened it, I entered without waiting to be invited.

  A Lebanese woman emerged from the kitchen, leaned against the edge of the door and watched me trying to convince Lukas not to go. I gestured and screamed at him, and the woman smiled. She took one step towards me and said, He’ll be with me, nothing will happen to him there.

  I said, Then he’s your responsibility from now on. You deal with it and make sure to tell the militia that my family and I have nothing to do with him.

  Yeah, she said. You go back to your beautiful neighbourhood.

  And what neighbourhood would that be? I said.

  You know, your neighbourhood, she said with sarcasm.

  Everywhere is my neighbourhood, I shot back.

  Then, what are you people always so afraid of?

  Who are “you people”? I asked.

  Bourgeois people, Lukas answered, and he and the woman laughed.

  Not long after this, my work there done, I left Beirut and went back to Berlin.

  A week later, Lukas returned home as well.

  I tried to avoid him, but it was awkward because I had to pass in front of his garden every day. And I liked Hannah, who was always welcoming to me. So after a little while, we picked up our customary beer, although less frequently than before. We avoided talk of Beirut.

  Then, two days before the end of my residency and my return to Lebanon, we had a curious conversation.

  I asked Lukas about the photos he’d taken in Lebanon.

  Lukas said that he was quitting photography. The image is the root of all evil, he declared. He launched into a tirade about advertisements and propaganda and oppression, saying that every image we were shown was a form of deceit. And the source of all visual propaganda lay in the Church, he said.

  Iconoclasm, I said.

  He told me then that he was going back to Beirut. The people he’d met there, he declared, were real, hospitable, genuine.

  I wished him luck. I’m sure you’ll be in good hands this time, I said.

  * * *

  —

  A year later, my book was published, and I was invited back to Germany for a book tour.

  From my Berlin hotel, I took the U-Bahn to Kreuzberg to visit Lukas and Hannah.

  I found Hannah at home. Her dog growled at me, then came closer and wagged his tail.

  The garden, I noticed, seemed neglected. But Hannah greeted me with her beautiful smile.

  Where is the man of the house? I asked.

  He left, she said. He no longer lives here.

  You two are no longer together?

  No. Lukas met a woman from your country and brought her here. They both stayed with me for a while; then it all became too complicated. She has family in Germany, and they were visiting us daily. Her family would come here and stay forever and cook. Her sister and her husband started to sleep here sometimes. The house turned into a commune. Then, one day, I asked everyone to leave.

  They went back to Beirut? I asked.

  No, they live in Sonnenallee, Arabische Strasse, with the rest of their Arabic friends. Lukas tore all his photographs and burned his archive and his collection of photography books. He changed.

  We all change, I said.

  No, he changed his religion, she said.

  Converted? I asked.

  Ye
s.

  Because of her?

  No, she had nothing to do with it. If anything, she was surprised by his new zealot self. I don’t think she cares about religion. You know what? I even liked her. We did get along; she’s young and beautiful, smart, educated and caring.

  When I asked Lukas about his conversion, she continued, he launched into a rant about class, imperialism and the role of the image in world culture. He rifled through a shoebox where I kept my family photos and tore them all up. I thought it was his way of breaking with the past. I guess, when people change their lives, old images carry ghosts and haunt them. It’s a strange thought. He tore up every single photograph…Except the one of the three of us, you and me and Lukas, the one we took that night at the party.

  I handed that photo to him and said, You might as well finish the job. But he yelled, NO! I asked him why, but he wouldn’t answer. When I pressed him for an answer, he said something strange. He said that you are not one thing. I asked him what he meant. Did he mean that you, the Academic—as we secretly called you—was not one thing? He didn’t answer directly, only said he was against what was monolithic, visible. And Islam, I asked, is that not all about unification? At that, he stood up and left. It leads me to think that he may still be searching for that “one thing”—and that neither he nor I know what that is.

  Do you think he’ll come back? I asked.

  No, I can’t provide him with what he has now—community, family and a nice girl.

  What now? I said, after a pause. What’s next for you, Hannah?

  Oh, I am moving back to Hamburg. My father is dying. I must take care of him. I have to see my father’s image once more. He won’t deprive me of that. And I guess I’ll get a job and eventually inherit the family home.

  And the garden here? I asked.

  Everything in nature lives and dies. Just like all religions and beliefs, she said.

  I nodded and took my leave. I walked out of the gate and onto the street.