A Night on The Riverbank
By: Khalifa Abo Khraisse
Tags: Quarantine, War, Fake News, Libya, Italy

A Night on The Riverbank

The lockdown is over, and Italy has begun a slow, trembling march to another unknown territory. The first real thing that signaled to me the end of the state of mandatory inactivity was a dinner invitation from a friend. Apart from that, not too many attempted to call me. I understood, everyone has piles of matters to tend to, and stepping out to the world means also inviting the world in, with its usual daily problems resurrected: deadlines and commitments, bills and delayed projects, and the horrifying news from around the globe.

I think that it was easier for me to step into the hibernation state than out of it. Unlike the first phase, the second one didn’t come with a detailed instructional booklet but a basic general guideline. It was easier to shut down the world, limit your contact with others and keep a distance — to go out only for necessary supplies, wear masks and gloves, and clean, clean, clean, and more cleaning — but now you don’t know what you are supposed to do precisely.

However, I was more worried about Tripoli’s disturbing news: the shelling attack intensified and got closer to my family. A big part of my day was spent following the news of the war in Libya.

The worst was when I’d only see a video or photo of a street being hit, people running and screaming, and the fire and smoke filling the background. The problem is all the streets of Tripoli are similar when shot from certain angles without a reference point. The longer I examined the footage, the more worried I would get. That alarming sensation of dread would slowly come alive and take over, distorting my proud sense of observation, and although my mind knows it is not my street, my heart says otherwise and insists that I call my friends and family. Due to the long power-cuts in Tripoli, sometimes they’d answer me late, and by the time I receive an answer, I would be reduced to a pile of anxiety.

One day I saw a couple of pictures of shelled areas in Tripoli, and I couldn’t mistake where they were taken. I know that street, I know the site, and I know the people who live there. It was very close to my family. The second footage was of a park in Tripoli. I can’t even count the nights I spend there with my friends. We used to escape to it to breathe a bit, to leave the darkness and hot temperatures in our houses during the long power cuts. Sometimes we played the guitars. You could see families having picnics and their children playing around. In certain hidden spots, lovers secretly met away from the eyes of the unforgiving society. The park was the target for another attack. There was a picture of a ten-year-old boy who had been playing football at the park. He was injured and lost his leg.

I called my family and waited for an answer. Once I knew finally that they were fine, I sighed in relief, but the devastated tone of my sister was the trigger for me to lose it. I took a long walk, but even the sunlight failed to pierce the thick cloud around me. My girlfriend read on my face what my words fall short of expressing, as it was beyond my vocabulary’s capability to articulate in a sentence. She decided to take me out that night, away from the news, away from the tensions, to spend a tranquil night in Rome. She was right; after all, it has been a while since we last did that. I suggested taking the dog with us — I was already tired, and I didn’t want to take him out again once we returned, especially not with the elevator that decided to stop working days after the lockdown was left off, exactly when we were about to use it more.

It was a serene June night, fresh and cool with the right amount of Roman gentle breeze. In the restaurant, there was sheer happiness and a non-breaking panoramic sound sequence: merely sitting there and listening to the ambiance was satisfying: the clink of forks and spoons, a clatter about everywhere; babbling, twaddle, conversations and debates, short giggles here and loud peals of laughter there. All these tiny bits fused in one fabric that wrapped my ear like an invisible blanket, which — surprisingly — created a sense of relief. I realized how much I missed all these human noises. The act of sitting in a bar or restaurant by its very nature was a fundamentally precious social activity whose importance I had underestimated — that I didn’t know how much I had missed until I had it again.

Strolling hand in hand, we decided to go to the Tiber island, of all the places in Rome. We arrived at the bridge and went down the stairs; as soon as we touched the ground, our dog Pepe sprinted toward the edge of the riverbank. He was very excited and determined to make what looked like a suicidal free-dive into the dark, cold water. We ran and dragged him away from the edge just in time. We thought, okay, now that he has looked into the abyss, he won’t try it again. We only took a few other steps before he went back in an even more determined attempt. This time I had to fasten the leash on his harness. While I was still at his eye level, I told the small white ball of excitement: “You need to understand, the freedom to walk free in the street is not a right; it is a privilege, and you lost it tonight.”

My girlfriend ignored my statement. Either she has learned how to distinguish between my serious statements and my dark, twisted sarcastic jokes, or she has finally given up on trying to. But I guess she has come to accept me as the creature that I am, the same way we both accept the small suicidal egoistic creature who hides under the bed and shakes during thunderstorms yet would eagerly jump into the river. After all, who knows what is going on inside the minds of men and dogs; I am one of the two species, and I don’t claim to have an answer.

Other than a strolling couples passing us by every few minutes, there was only us, the sound of the river, and the small creature who relentlessly cornered himself between us like a tiny chaperone determined to remind us all the time that only he is worthy of love and affection. We were sitting and talking about the history of the river. History in general, and Rome’s in particular, is one of her passions. But then, we glimpsed up on the street at the other side of the river flashing lights of a police car, then two, three, and after the fourth, we knew that something abnormal was happening.

We stood and marched to the edge to see what was going on. On the other side of the riverbank, we started to recognize movement and people wearing what looked like reflective jackets. Police officers and civil defense workers were standing in a semi-circle, while others marched up and down the stairs. We heard a girl screaming, but it wasn’t clear what she was saying. The numbers of people kept increasing — I started counting and lost count and the crowd of people who leaned from the street to watch.

We stayed and kept watching until a boat with the same flashing lights arrived and docked in front of the police gathering. More people, more uniforms, and upon the street, there were more flashing lights coming. At that point, it was too much for me to resist — I had to go closer to see what was going on!

In an attempt to mask my curiosity, I said that we ought to investigate the situation as journalists. She laughed at my apparent attempt and remarked that she knows it’s just my nature. I partly blame my Libyan genes. We tend to act the opposite of all other countries: when there is an accident, we go directly to the events center. It's partly because Libyans can’t and won’t rely on the police or the ambulances or the fire department. Libyan police and ambulance arrive late — if they arrived at all — just like the police officers in films, always coming after all the action is over. It has been up to Libyan citizens for ages to rush to accidents to save the people by themselves.

We walked to the steps; a group of teenage boys was coming down as we were climbing up. We asked them, “What is going on over there?“

One of the boys replied in evident excitement, “I don’t know, but it seems as if there is a big fight happening and someone was knocked down, and now the police are there to collect them.”

We took the stone steps up and crossed the bridge to the other side. At the end of the bridge, a garbage truck was parked on the side of the road. The driver door was partly open, and a middle-aged man stood near it, smoking a cigarette and observing the scene. We asked him if he knew what was going on. He replied calmly with a half-smile on his face, “There are a bunch of drunken kids fighting, and someone probably was hurt.”Then he shrugged as if to say nothing new; it is what it is.

We thanked him and proceeded to the hot spot. We took the right turn after the bridge and kept walking. More uniforms, many police cars, two fire trucks, one big ambulance, and a small one. We took our positions right on the top of the event's stage, next to the crowd of people who seemed to enjoy the show, commenting, laughing, and recording with their mobiles. We asked a person in his mid-thirties whose mask failed to hide his wide smile, and he said:

“Well, a girl was standing to watch the river, that guy(he pointed to another bald person, down on the river banks) he thought she was about to kill herself, so he called every police officer and every department in Rome. He called everybody what an effort.”

I looked to the guy down who was moving fast from one officer to another and talking to them. He looked a bit hyped. The girl started to shout — as much as I leaned, I couldn’t see her — and soon, she was in the custody of emergency workers. “I was only standing and watching the river,” she screamed.

She kept repeating it loudly and angrily with many curses for punctuation: “What do you want from me? I was only standing to look to the river.”

Then it seemed she was resisting being injected with a sedative, as she screamed: “No, no, don’t inject me, don’t inject me. I was only here to watch the river.”

At that point, a smartly-dressed young police officer arrived, pointing a flashlight toward the audience — including us — and said something like: There is nothing to see, please move along. I left the stage, but the screaming girl wouldn’t leave my head.

The first thing I did the next day was the same thing I do every day: make coffee, take it to the balcony, light a cigarette, and read the news. Only this time, I was searching for a particular topic: What had happened last night? After a quick round, I found no mention of it on any news websites I read every day. I ran a more in-depth search, and I found two articles — if you can call them that — on two websites that I have never heard of before. The cheesy language they used and the big flashy titles reminded me of the newspapers that film noir male protagonists always read.

One article said that a fight between two lovers almost cost the boy his life. The girl “had reacted immediately to the boyfriend’s screams and pushed him violently, which made him fall into the Tiber.” They went on thanking the police and the firefighters’ divers who launched a search and managed to “find and rescue the young man before he reached the mouth of the river and the current took him too far to be saved.”

What impressed me the most was the level of imagination and dedication to the details: “The boy was taken to dry land, warmed with a blanket and taken to the hospital for examination. The girlfriend, who pushed him into the river, risking killing him, was taken to the police station for interrogation. “

The other article was more or less the same: a violent quarrel between a young couple, the girl pushed the boy, the boy fell into the river and disappeared, the police saved the boy.

We started to discuss that maybe this is what happened. Maybe Pepe wasn’t trying to kill himself after all: instead, perhaps he was trying to save the boy. When he heard his name, he crawled from under the bed to the hands of my girlfriend, shamelessly claiming the credit for his rescue attempt and demanding to be petted.

In the evening, another article said that after the fight between the two lovers, the girl tried to jump into the Tiber, but the police officers' intervention saved her life.

That night on the Tiber River, several people were there when the incident was still happening, yet each had a different story. Still, some news websites came up with yet a whole different one. It was as if everyone wasn’t watching what was happening as much as they were projecting their own biases and theories on it, re-writing it in their minds. But what was sure that night was that dinner succeeded in taking my mind away from Tripoli, even for one night.