On the Balcony

It hangs, as it always has, from a rope attached to the railing – red, the rusty shade so popular in Beirut’s seventies.

Out of the balcony, swaying gently over a quiet, side street; a rustic, well-worn, circular basket made of hand-woven reeds.

Empty, for now, it lets the breeze carry it at its whim left, then right, like a pendulum above the neighbour’s colourful drying laundry. On Saturdays, it used to hang over the old lady’s flowered bedsheets. On Tuesdays: her whites. On Thursdays, my favourite, her risqué lace lingerie.

When I was a child, lowering the basket was my favourite chore, every day after school, at three thirty, just before we sat down for lunch. Mamy would have a handwritten list ready – “onions, a few tomatoes, bread” – and a few bills laid out on the wobbly kitchen table. I, the eldest and luckiest, had the illustrious task of getting them.

Into the basket, the list and the money. Down, slowly, one floor, two, three, the rope sliding through my small fingers – I did not mind the splinters.

At street level and the end of the rope, which I held with fierce concentration, the basket and I would wait. A few minutes. Never more. A slight tug, then peaking over the edge of the balcony, I would confirm what I knew: the basket was magically empty.

Hocus pocus. My mother’s list would have vanished with the money and, a tug later, been replaced with tomatoes, onions, bread, sometimes change, and invariably, candy. The latter, whatever it was on that day, would always be sent in twos: two chewy chocolate bonbons,

On Saturdays, if there had been enough change generated over the week – we always prayed there would be on Fridays – and if we had studied well, made our beds, and brushed our teeth and hair consistently, my sister and I were conferred the grand prize of asking the Wizard for anything we desired.

The highlight of those weekends in my memory was that blissful indecision: which reward to choose? A bag of chips? A box of Smarties? Cream wafers? Which, chocolate or vanilla?

We were each allowed only one treat per week; decisions had to be strategic. On our better, collaborative days, we picked and shared both items together. On the more frequent days when we bickered, we made choices we regretted. One week, impulsively, I wrote “Paprika” on the paper and forgot to add the operative “chips.” In the basket I pulled back up was a sad bag of orange spices.

How my sister laughed, until she saw me wipe my tears, then she stopped. Wordlessly, she split her chocolate bar in half. I think she gave me the bigger one.

For years, we thought the basket was magic, and the wizard’s identity a mystery we would never solve. Then Monsieur George, the old man with the limp we would greet every morning as we ran out of the building to the school bus, died on a Sunday last spring.

After the funeral, Mamy stopped asking us to lower the basket from the balcony. I stopped eating candy shortly after that too. Eventually, I left the country.

Apparently, Monsieur George’s family had left it too, years ago, during the war when bombs were being dropped, not baskets. His wife and brother had died and his children now led lives abroad too detached and grown up for the whimsical one he had created in his small corner store.

So Chez George was cleaned out. I was not there for it, but my sister said it was like watching Ali Baba’s cave emptied of its treasures. Boxes of canned food and dried beans and bags of rice, produce gone brown since his death, and the bags of chips, the Chiclets, the Kinder eggs he had made us dream with.

My sister said that, at the very end, the store had looked comically small. And, less comically, bare and dirty.

How had it held all he had sold? How could it be gone, and with it, the innocence of the belief that if you just put your wish in a handwoven basket and waited, it would come true?

Now the store is locked up. I heard someone bought it. I heard it will soon reopen. I do not know when or as what or if that is true. I do not live in Beirut anymore.

I visit my parents on the third floor of the building in that side street every Christmas, sometimes during the summer. It has been years since I wished for anything.

On days when I am tired, I think of the basket, which still hangs on the balcony. The neighbour still hangs her racy lingerie to dry on Thursdays, underneath.

To the reader:

“Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality.”

- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Take us to a time and place in your childhood in which magic was real.