I was in the car with my father, a traditional man from Alkidwa, a rural area some forty kilometers from Tripoli. He’d led a tough life but had become a physician, although he told me he’d always wanted to be a pilot. He used to turn to me whenever he saw a plane in the sky and say, “Look at that plane. See her? Isn’t she gorgeous?”
I remember the shape of his narrow black eyes and the dark pockets beneath them. I only understood that state later on, when I experienced the same emotions he had been feeling. A shattered dream and the beginning of a nightmare had appeared, only slightly before the end.
During my teenage years, I used to spend many hours sitting in Gazelle Park with my friends. We played guitar and sang songs we wouldn’t understand until we were much older. My voice was bad, but they lied to me and said it was beautiful. The park was next to and named after the statue of Belle and Gazelle; a gathering spot for whores, drug addicts, and the homeless—human scum, so they said then and still say today.
But scum can fall in love too, and that was what they didn’t understand. I kissed my first girlfriend in that park; I touched her breasts for the first time in that park. She once sang with me, her voice stunning and soft. My friends said she was a whore, but I didn’t care.
“Your body is like Belle and your soul like Gazelle,” I once told her. When I think of my words these days, I laugh; they were so clichéd and vulgar. She chuckled, a faint blush making her cheeks look like unripe plums. Her eyes were tinted with the color of fallen autumn leaves and shone with ecstasy. Her fully grown breasts were like a virgin making love to a fiery shooting star, hurtling its way toward Earth.
I don’t know why, but, every time I remember her these days, I remember my father and the statue of Belle and Gazelle.
One day, he and I drove by it. He was supposed to let me off in front of the Dawa Mosque in Algiers Square, just a few minutes’ walk from the park. Before I got out, though, he told me a story—one I still remember to this day. “One day, at the first light of dawn, a man dressed the naked statue in his wife’s red brassiere and ran away. The red bra stayed on the statue till noon; no one dared take it away. You should’ve seen the faces of people passing by.”
Then my father started laughing, and I still remember its specific resounding quality. It wasn’t weak, and, despite his pallid face, tight eyes, and tobacco-stained lips, he looked handsome, like one of Michelangelo’s statues, or a heroic pilot.
The statue of Belle and Gazelle was stolen almost a year ago. At first, a group of fundamentalist terrorists shot at it; months later, a local militia stole it. The park became just like any other in Tripoli—a space without flowers or the scattered, happy memories of us scum who’d spent time there.
My first girlfriend and her family became refugees after the revolution. Her father had committed heinous crimes as part of the former regime. It was the last I ever heard of her, and that was years ago. But on the day the statue was taken, when my father returned home grouchy and miserable, I recalled once again her laughing aloud at how I used to cuddle her, mumbling those clichéd and vulgar words. I imagined her crying about her current situation. Then I remembered how I’d walked beside the statue of Belle and Gazelle on my way to her. I was scum, but good scum, able to at least smile when meeting beauty.
