My first lesson in “Canadian Culture 101” was taught to me that first week in my Toronto high school. One of my classmates was a blond boy called Pete who told me he was from Czechoslovakia. He was actually the friendliest in the whole classroom. Our desks were next to each other in math hour. You see, in Beirut we, the students, stayed in the same classroom all day and the different teachers came to us to give lessons, while in Toronto as soon as the bell rang, we rushed to the different teachers who had their own classrooms. We used to laugh a lot with Pete even though my English was poor. And one day, as we were having fun during a lesson break, I gave him a friendly slap on his back. I don’t know what happened but he gave me the shock of my life. He stood up suddenly and shouted in my face, “don’t touch me! I don’t like being touched!” Everyone looked at me as if I were a criminal. I felt very embarrassed. And that was it...end of our friendship. That first lesson stayed with me throughout the decades I spent in Canada. I kept my physical distance all the time. Canadians did not like to be touched! While we had been friends, I had told Pete one day that I knew about his country and its hero Dubček. He was not impressed, as if he did not even know who I was talking about.
Dubček, Dubček... a name that I will never forget. All throughout that summer of 68, I must have heard that name at least twenty times a day. “Dubček will show those dogs...”, “Don’t worry for Dubček, he knows his people are behind him...”, “ By God, Dubček has no fear...”, Dubček this, Dubček that, etc...I was eleven years old and was working in that Beirut Summer for Mukhtar Kevork. He was the brother-in-law of my close friend Hratch at Yepremian Varjaran and had a small grocery store. Hratch’s family was my mother’s friends from the old days in Lice, Diyarbekir. That summer, my mother had arranged for me to work at the grocery store. I liked the job, even though I would have preferred to spend a lazy summer at home. The store was very busy, not so much with customers buying but with people coming for documents, complaints, advice and the mukhtar’s signature for their bureaucratic matters. There were also a lot of regular friends of the mukhtar who visited daily.
Every morning two or three friends would come with their Aztag or Ayk newspapers and start discussing the latest in news about Dubček, the Soviets and Czechoslovakia. I did not understand much of what they were saying because I knew nothing about what was happening in that country. But you could see that they were all anti-Soviet and championed Dubček. One of them always pretended to know better. While the others commended Dubček for being a symbol of hope, this friend of the mukhtar always reminded them that the Soviets were powerful, strict and very smart in controlling the empire. They knew their business and who was a little man like Dubček anyways? He was always skeptical and cynical. I did not like him at all. When the final crunch came, and the Soviets invaded the country, everyone except that man, felt the big shock. He alone kept saying, “I told you so! I told you so!!”
My tasks were cleaning, selling and looking after the store whenever the mukhtar went somewhere. I liked it when I was left alone. I would sit on a low wicker chair with the duster in my hand at the store front and wait for the odd customer. It was not such a busy store. I enjoyed weighing the dry goods and vegetables on the old fashioned scale that was in the store. Since a very young age I had always had a fixation for the weights. Especially the lighter weights like the fifty grams or the twenties and tens. It was the way they were shaped in heavy iron with the gram weights written in Arabic on top. They were beautiful objects that I had always wanted to play with. I never stole money from the till. It never even occurred to me that I could easily steal some of the cash. But I was a young boy and craved sweets...you cannot blame me for it. From time to time when I was alone, I would go to the back of the store, take a chocolate wafer, open the wrapping and gobble it in two quick bites. Then I would crunch the wrapping into a ball and throw it behind the big heavy sacks of beans and rice which were sitting against the back wall. Nobody would ever look there, I believed. More than fifty years have passed and the mukhtar, I heard, got killed with sniper fire during the last days of the Lebanese civil war. Bless his soul! He had already closed down his store for many years, they told me. Sometimes I wonder what mukhtar Kevork thought when, as he was emptying his store, he discovered tons of wafer wrappings when moving some of those sacks. I did not know better, but I still feel guilty.
