Stagelight | Teen Ink

Stagelight

September 1, 2018
By SeaSpree BRONZE, Palos Verdes Estates, California
SeaSpree BRONZE, Palos Verdes Estates, California
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

A fly is buzzing near the broken ceiling fan. A multitude of hairline cracks decorates the concrete ceiling above me. Dimly, I wonder if the crumbling ceiling was a contributor to the constant dust that layered the house. Outside, the sky is still dark.

“Up Assi!” My father calls from somewhere in the apartment. I track the fly for a few more seconds before rolling out of bed with a small groan. I’ve been used to getting up this early in the morning myself for a few years now, but there’s nothing quite like a groan of protest.

By the time I’d washed up, the sky outside is tinted a pinkish-blue. Dawn. Salat al-Fahr takes a few minutes, and when I make my way out of my room, Father has already finished his prayers and has breakfast set out.

He and I both murmur a prayer to Allah before wolfing down breads and pastries. The clock reads 6:40.

“I’ll see you tonight,” my father tells me before I exit our apartment in my school uniform, bookbag over my shoulder. He’s a construction worker, and his shifts ends well after I return home.

My school is only a few blocks away, about fifteen minutes from home. The streets are crowded with cars, bikes, and pedestrians. Street vendors call out to buy their fresh pita bread. There’s slow cooking already, I can tell from the lazy plumes of smoke that rise from either side

of the narrow street, despite it being early morning. It seems like everyone’s out these days with the joy of summer.

Jabr, my friend of many years, meets me at an intersection a block away from my house, like he always does. His school uniform is new and immaculate, so unlike mine that my father purchased off of another family, third-handed. Jabr’s family had, surprisingly, chosen the same secondary education school that I was at, despite having more than enough to afford one of the many excellent private schools in the city, or even to send him abroad to England.

“Assi!” He calls out in greeting. He has his bookbag slung over his shoulder. We banter good-naturedly everyday on the way to school. Although with it being summer, it wasn’t so much school as much as it was extended classes that’ll help us get ahead when the school year starts.

We’re only a block away when Jabr starts chattering excitedly about the Baalbeck International Festival in a few days. I knew this was going to come up—it’s all anyone really talks about these days. Even my father has been working his shifts in the Beqaa Valley, helping with last minute details to get the event ready in time. The festival’s been part of Lebanese culture for over sixty years. It’s one of the internationally famous events in the country. Despite having lived in Lebanon all my life, I’ve never gone to any of my country’s acclaimed celebrations, although I’ve wanted to since for as long as I can remember. Not that I can go—the tickets are much too expensive, and most of my father’s salary is already going towards my education. I doubt I’d ever want to spend so much money on a concert night. That’s what I tell myself anyway.

“I’m not all that excited about it,” I say, shrugging when Jabr asks me what part of the festival I want to see the most. I push the lists of orchestras that have performed every year out of my mind, trying to remain uninterested. Jabr isn’t fooled though, he’s known me since primary

after all. He smirks and pulls me to a small alleyway, where we’re no longer jostled around by the crowds. “What are—”

Jabr pulls something from the back pockets of his khakis and waves them in front of my face. They’re really colorful, all red and blue and purple, although I can’t tell what they say.

“Jabr, don’t tell me you stole my chemistry note cards again,” I say and sigh in exasperation because I color-code all my science notes, and Jabr is unbelievably talented at taking them from under my nose. I still remember when he took a small set of them and accidentally burned them into crisp. But he keeps smirking, wagging those papers in front of my face.

“Can’t you tell what they are?” He asks, teasing, and I shake my head no, I can’t, can I please have my chemistry note cards back? Jabr rolls his eyes.

“You and chemistry. What makes you think they’re school-related?” He stops moving the papers, finally, and holds it out clear in front of my face so I can see. He’s holding six slips of fancy-looking paper, three sets of duplicates. They say, 2017 Baalbeck International Festival. And then in smaller print, Lebanese National Symphony Orchestra. They’re RED tickets, tickets for seats in the middle-back of the crowd, directly in front of the stage, with one ticket boldly declaring seat H12 and the other H13. There’s two other sets of tickets, one to the performances by the Caracalla Dance Theatre, a dance company in the city, and the other to The Royal Ballet, the world-renowned ballet company based in London.

I blink. Blink again. The words on the little slips of paper don’t register in my mind. It takes a few seconds, but I finally wet my lips and say, “Are you taking your sister?” His sister,

Foziah, is seventeen and married. Jabr tells me her husband rarely lets her see the rest of her family, but I pretend to have forgotten.

The reminder of his older sister doesn’t seem to dim Jabr’s mood. He starts waving the tickets again. “By Allah, you can’t be serious.” He shoves three of the tickets in my hands, and it

isn’t until he wraps my hand, tight, around the thin slips of papers and says what I’d been hoping for all these years that it finally registers in my mind. “You and me, Assi. We’re going to the Baalbeck International Festival in a few days.” He flashes a grin before I can protest, dragging me back out onto the street to continue on our walk to school.

“How can I ever repay you?” I ask, because as much as I want to shove the expensive tickets gripped tight in my hand back to Jabr, they’ll probably end up being stolen here on the crowded streets of Beirut. Jabr laughs, the sound mingling with the chorus on the streets.

“Not that we actually have one or anything, but consider this your coming of age present.” He smiles cheekily. “Allah would approve, I’m sure.”


There’s a certain hubbub with Lebanon’s festivals that can’t quite be replicated anywhere else. Jabr would laugh if he heard me say that out loud because I’ve never been outside the country, much less outside the city in the Beqaa Valley, nearly two hours drive from home. But there’s something deep within me that tells me that I was born to be enjoying the pride in my home.

Jabr and I are already in our seats—the Lebanese orchestra is up first and it would be a lie if I said I wasn’t excited. I don’t play an instrument, my father doesn’t have enough money to pay for one, much less pay for lessons, but I’d always enjoyed listening to it.

Jabr and I had already performed the salat al-maghrib, on the truck here no less, and in accordance with the large Muslim population here, there’ll be an extended intermission during the middle of the performance for us to perform the salat al-’isha. I’m pleased by the news when Jabr told me, and I’m sure my father would be pleased to learn of such as well. We take our prayers very seriously, and I’ve taken to praying as much as possible the past few days, in part

for Jabr, who went out of his way with the tickets for the festival I had always so desperately wanted to see, and in part for Allah, who I imagine is looking over the celebration right now.

The music starts with the national anthem before delving into oriental Arabic music and folklore music. The sound moves and rises and falls, and there’s a part of me that’s moving and rising and falling with it.

There’s some white people nearby—Jabr called them ‘Americans’, although I reminded him for all we knew they could be Australians or the British or anyone of European origin—who had gone from texting on their phones to listening, enraptured, to the music. The people behind us—Jabr swore they were speaking Portuguese—that had chattered through the opening ceremony and the introductions were now silent. The couple sitting next to us on Jabr’s side, they said they were from Egypt. The woman next to me, I understood her French when she was calling. And in front of us, if I wasn’t mistaken by the black hair and light skin… Asian. There’s a world of people, and they’re all surrounding me. It’s almost like we’re representatives from a map, like the one pinned up on the wall in my classroom in secondary, the one that showed how small Lebanon, how small Beirut, was compared to the rest of the world. But here, in this small part of the world, we’re sharing our culture and pride to everyone else. We’re small, yet we’re making an impact. People around the world, they had chosen to come here and to notice. To learn and appreciate this music that was a part of me and Jabr and all the Lebanese, even those that couldn’t be here.

I’m not down there. I’m not playing with the orchestra, and by Allah, I probably couldn’t figure out the intricacies of playing the violin even if someone paid me, but there’s a part of me that feels like I’m down there, in the orchestra, helping to spread the joy and history of my country.

I grip Jabr’s right arm tight as the orchestra crescendos. I feel him tense from the sudden pressure, but physical contact isn’t something I do often, and he knows that, so he waits. It takes me a few seconds, or was it minutes? I don’t speak until the orchestra calms, moving into a slower, more soothing section of the music.

“Thank you,” I say, just loud enough to be heard over the vibrato of the strings. I don’t want to disrupt the sound any more than I need to. “I don’t think anyone’s ever given me a better gift.” And because Jabr is dense when it comes to heartfelt messages and gifts, like me, I add on, “And I’m not talking about the money.”

Jabr doesn’t say anything, but he shoots me a small smile, a soft grin, an expression completely different from his usual smirks and taunts. I think... I think he understands, too. That in this wide, wide world we may as well be compared to flies. Here today, gone the next. Flitting in and out of the international scene. Never able to catch attention for too long. But the thing about flies… when they do catch attention, attention shines on them like a stagelight.

And that’s us. We’re Lebanon. We’re flitting, flying, in and out. But the rest of the world is our stage light.


The author's comments:

This is a cultural piece I did for a cultural unit in English class.


Similar Articles

JOIN THE DISCUSSION

This article has 0 comments.