Elie looks over the young recruits he’s been assigned. They’re just boys from the mountains, lost in the city. Abu Antoine, the group’s commander, passes by. He whispers to the men that the order has come from the top—no boys over the age of twelve are to be spared. For the young, unmarried women, three short words are given—“Make them brides.” Elie shakes his head. He pulls together his squad.
“Listen. You will forget that order. If one of you touches a woman, I will put a bullet in your head!”
“And the men?”
“Did they spare our men in Damour?”
“No.”
“Do what is in your hearts, but leave the young ones unless they are carrying weapons.”
Another officer walks up to Elie’s men. Over his shoulder is a duffel bag of ski masks.
“Abu Antoine says everyone is to wear them. The assault will begin at dawn. Tell your men to get some sleep.”
As Abu Antoine’s man leaves. Elie kicks the masks aside and spits on the ground. He has no intention to lead faceless killers into the coming battle.
“Please, Abdullah, get Marc out of there,” Hoda pleads.
“It’s impossible. He’ll have to take his chances with the other evacuees.”
“No, when they find out who he is, they will kill him.”
Hoda turns to Marwan. “Can you do something?”
He looks back at her. It will be risky, but there is a chance. It’s hard to say no to Hoda. Since Marc has been stuck in Tel al-Zaatar, she has confided more and more in him. He’d like that to continue. He suddenly feels ashamed of his feelings for Hoda—a man’s life is at stake.
“I know a priest,” Marwan says.
“You know a what?”
“A priest, a Maronite priest. He can travel anywhere in East Beirut. And the Phalangists and other Maronite militias show restraint whenever he’s present.”
“Because he is a priest?”
“Yes, but also because he’s related to Shaykh Pierre and enjoys his personal protection.”
“Why would this priest help us?”
“He is Selima’s cousin on her mother’s side.”
“He’ll do it if Selima asks him to.”
“And will she ask him?”
“If you ask her, she will. She adores you.”
“What exactly do you want this priest to do?”
“To accompany me into Tel al-Zaatar so I can find Marc before Maroun El Khoury’s men and their allies overrun the camp. As long as the priest is with me, I won’t have anything to worry about and neither will Marc when we find him.”
Suddenly, it all makes sense. Even Abdullah agrees that it’s worth a shot. He’ll radio a message to the camp defenders asking them not to fire on the priest.
Elie leads his men out from the crumbling building. They have cleaned it. The sight of the priest accompanied by a civilian surprises them. The priest walks toward him. Father Tobias from Bikfaya. He must distract the priest from entering the building and witnessing what they’ve just done. He whispers to two of his men: “Hide the bodies.” Then he walks out to meet this man of God.
“Father, you shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe.”
“I came to supervise the evacuation of the children.”
“There’ll be no evacuation. We’ve been ordered to take the camp.”
Father Tobias pauses. He knows only too well what this will mean for the children. He braces himself. He knows that as long as he’s with the militiamen, they won’t kill the innocent. He regroups and says: “I am also looking for a French journalist. Have you seen him?”
“No. You should leave!”
“No. And I insist that you hand over any children you capture to me. Do you understand?”
Elie is frustrated. What is he to do with this stubborn priest? He shrugs his shoulders. Priest or no priest, there is more cleaning to do. They’ll take their chances with the children, and pray that those they spare will not shoot them in the back. For the adult civilians, none will be overlooked. Let the priest complain to Shaykh Pierre if he wants. The old man knows exactly what’s going on today.
“Then follow us, but stay close to the walls. Watch out for the snipers. And don’t interfere with our work!”
“The children?”
“Yes, yes. You can have any who are not carrying guns.”
“The journalist?”
“If we stumble across him, you can have him too, but I’m not putting my men’s lives at risk to search for him. Is that clear?”
Father Tobias realizes that this is the best he can get from the tough young fighter. He turns to Marwan.
“Stay by my side. They don’t know you.”
The young fighters bow their heads as they pass in front of the priest. Two even kiss his ring. Father Tobias, in turn, blesses them with the sign of the cross. He knows that he’ll prevent their excesses today, and prays that God too will forgive them for those they’ve already committed.
Marwan watches the priest fall in line with the fighters. As they move forward, he can see inside some homes with bodies of men, women and children strewn across the floor. He wonders what other depravities he might witness this day.
Marc has a clear view of the assault. Waves of leather-jacketed gunmen dart in and out of the warren of concrete homes inside the camp. The Palestinian defences are crumbling under the sheer weight of the invaders. He can see handfuls of defenders, many young teens, even children, huddling behind the broken concrete of bombed buildings. The clinic he visited yesterday is now debris. A woman’s hand pokes out from the rubble. A militiaman walks over and tries to pull off the wedding ring. It is stuck. His commander tells him to hurry up. He pulls out a knife and slices the finger off.
Marc can see a group of eight men approach his building. They have to be Maronites. But something is odd. It can’t be. A priest? He curses Gemayel. Is the old man now sending in priests to bless the massacres he condones from the safety of his mansion in Bikfaya? Close behind the priest is a man without a gun. A civilian? Marc puts the telephoto lens on his camera to get a better view of the approaching group. He focuses in on the man in the rear. Marwan Kanaan! What the hell is going on?!
The group occasionally takes cover to return fire at the remaining camp defenders. It doesn’t last long. The defenders quickly run out of ammunition and retreat under the barrage of superior gunfire. Marc refocuses the camera’s lens on the group’s leader. A face he knows, but from where? He needs to decide. He could surrender to this group. Would they dare to kill him in front of a priest? Or he could attempt to join the remaining defenders and die with them. He could hide and hope for the best. That wouldn’t work. He knows that the militiamen will search every building in the camp and dynamite most of them.
Marc starts down the stairs. He’s still frail and nauseated from slow starvation. He stumbles down the last flight, falling flat on his face. Lifting himself up from the dusty floor, he staggers along the corridor toward the entrance. And then he sees it. A small body lying face down just inside the front door, clutching a Kalashnikov. Najib had stayed after all to protect him. He stoops down to check the boy’s pulse. Not a beat. He turns him over. A large hole in his chest reveals a bloody pulp of flesh, lungs, and fragments of a mortar shell. Marc looks around for a cloth to cover the body. Nothing. He takes off his shirt and places it on the boy’s face. Marc pries the gun from the boy’s fingers and stands it in a corner. He summons all his strength to pull Najib inside a firstfloor apartment and put him down on a mattress that had once served as a family sofa and bed. He searches the boy’s clothes for something to take back to his grandmother. All the boy has on him is an UNRWA ration card: Najib Safdawi. Born 1963, Beirut, Lebanon. Status: Refugee.
The hot muzzle of a recently fired gun pushes against the back of Marc’s skull. One shot will scatter his brains across the room. It’s a quick way to die. Resigned, he closes his eyes and thinks of Hoda. The softness of her body pressed against him.
Feet begin to shuffle b
ehind him. The gun is pulled back from his head. The footsteps of a second man. Marc keeps looking down at the floor. Two well-polished boots appear.
“Marc Taragon, le journaliste?”
He nods his head, still waiting for the bullet.
“We found him!” The shout goes out.
Marc feels four hands pull him up. Blood rushes to his head. A familiar voice. Jumbled words. Marwan’s smile. He leans back. Father Tobias steps in just in time to catch him from crashing to the ground.
Chapter
27
Beirut – September 1976
HODA TYPES UP MARC’S NOTES and sends them with his photos to Le Nouvel Observateur. Marwan translates the notes into English for Riley, who files a separate story for the Irish Post, adding Marc’s name to his on the byline. The story is syndicated throughout the English-speaking world. Offers of employment flood in, but both stay true to their publishers. Over the next year, the two journalists become inseparable and travel across Lebanon in search of the latest escalation in the conflict.
The Syrian Army is entrenched in West Beirut, but it has left all of South Lebanon to the PLO. Israel is also building a buffer state with the Maronites in the villages just inside the Lebanese side of the border. With Israel’s encouragement, a Christian officer, Major Saad Haddad, deserts the army to set up a new paramilitary force dubbed the Free Lebanon Army. Israel quickly begins to provide arms and cash to enable Haddad’s forces to stop fedayeen attacks on northern Israel. But the Palestinians soon find ways to bypass Haddad’s men, and their cross-border attacks grow bolder.
The Syrians take their share of Lebanon. By 1977, they’ve increased their troop presence in Lebanon to forty thousand. Damascus has two goals. It wants to prevent the rise in Lebanon of a Sunni state, which could give refuge to opponents of its Alawite-dominated regime. For this, it needs Lebanon’s Christians to be a counterweight to growing Sunni power. Under the guise of restoring peace, President Assad deploys his soldiers to form a protective ring around the Maronite mini-state in East Beirut and the Metn.
Damascus’s second objective is to prevent the Israelis from flanking the Syrian defences in the Golan Heights and making a direct run on Syria through the Beka’a Valley. Syria’s control of Lebanon becomes an obsession for President Assad. The Druze leader of the Lebanese National Movement, Kemal Jumblatt, allies himself with the PLO to resist Syrian domination. The Syrian Socialist National Party splits between a pro-Damascus wing, allied to local Baathists, and a pro-Jumblatt wing. Hoda and Marwan Kanaan put their faith in the Druze leader.
Marwan and Hoda alternate in travelling to the Shouf to provide Jumblatt with the intelligence he needs to counter Syrian moves against him. They don’t see Jumblatt himself. This would compromise them and him. Instead, they meet in Deir al-Qamar with Professor Abu Walid and occasionally with Nadia. The Shouf is still a patchwork of control by different factions, but Deir al-Qamar stands out as a relative haven for all and is only a half-hour drive from Mukhtara.
They meet their Druze friends in the inner courtyard of the long disused synagogue in Deir al-Qamar. On Saturdays, Hoda hands over copies of the international press photos developed by Marwan in his studio. On Wednesdays, it’s Marwan’s turn. Occasionally, they bribe local employees in the press offices to photocopy for them some of the correspondents’ notes before the stories are written. Increasingly, the photos that interest Jumblatt the most are of Syrian army positions. Marc, a prolific photographer, has taken many of them.
Abu Walid asks Hoda to convince Marc to take even more photos of the Syrian presence in the city and along the highway near Aley where their troops are in close proximity to the Druze militia.
“No, I won’t do it!”
“Why?”
“It’d put Marc at risk.”
“How?”
“Local Baathists have been visiting Marwan’s studio. They may be putting two and two together, although even that much math is a challenge for Assad’s friends.”
“Move the developing of the special photos to another location.”
“We could, but there’s more. The Syrians are detaining me longer at checkpoints. More than once they’ve asked if they’ve seen me before. This morning one guard wrote down my name and ID number.”
“And?”
“If they find a few photos from various journalists on me, they’ll assume that I have stolen them to sell to local papers. They might detain me for a while to get a bribe and then let me continue on my way. But if they find dozens of photos with the same markings, they’ll want to know who the photographer is.”
“I see. Well, things are getting complicated on the ground, and we need to know where Assad’s troops are. Jumblatt has only five thousand men, and he needs to concentrate them where they’ll provide the most protection for his people.”
“This is what I can do. I’m working on a map with all the locations of the checkpoints. I can share that with you if Fouad Saadeh agrees.”
“Good, but how are you getting the information?”
“Fouad’s drivers are logging where the flying checkpoints are and the main routes taken by Syrian convoys. They do it to avoid getting stuck in the traffic. I also talk to the drivers of journalists who are Marc’s friends. We’re getting a much better understanding of Damascus’s deployments inside the city and the routes used to move the troops around.”
“Excellent! Well, when will the map be ready?”
“In about two weeks.”
New banners with the face of the Lebanese Shia cleric Musa al-Sadr hang off the balconies of the modest apartment buildings as Evan turns onto Army Street and then into the Jewish quarter of Wadi Abu Jamil. There aren’t many Jews left. Most have moved to Jounieh or emigrated to Canada. Shia refugees from the South have begun to move into the empty buildings.
Taragon still rents a room in Riley’s apartment in one of the more prestigious buildings in the Wadi. The rent is low, and the apartment is vast by Beirut standards. The landlord has left behind some priceless pieces of Levantine art and some beautiful mother-of-pearl furniture. Having international journalists living in his home is the best insurance against looting.
Evan climbs the twisted metal staircase to the second storey. He didn’t phone ahead. Riley comes to the door in a bathrobe.
“Hey, Evan. Nice to see you. A little early, isn’t it?”
Evan looks inside. The table is full of half-empty whiskey glasses. A woman’s scarf is draped over one of the chairs.
“Is Marc in?”
“He left this morning to see a Shia leader in Sidon. Come in and have a drink!”
Evan walks into the flat. To the landlord’s elegant furniture, Riley has added memorabilia from throughout the Middle East. Jambiah daggers from Yemen, Bedouin carpets from Jordan, and an extensive collection of Palestinian embroidery. He’s been almost ten years in the region, starting with coverage of the ‘67 war. He’s a sought-after journalist, but he has burnt his bridges with a couple of major papers because of his strong views on Palestinian rights. He now plans for a long stay in Beirut as the Irish Post correspondent, provided he can convince his young Swedish wife to join him. But his philandering isn’t helping his case. Gossip is reaching her, even in Stockholm.
“What’s your poison?”
“Have you got any single malt scotch?”
“Only the finest. I’ll fetch some clean glasses.”
“It looks like you had quite the party last night.”
“Just entertaining some of our Italian colleagues.”
Evan smiles as he inspects the silk scarf with the letters S.G. embroidered in the corner. Sabrina Giametti, La Stampa’s Beirut correspondent. Half the city’s press corps has been chasing after her. Evan himself has on more than one occasion tried to talk her up. How this cantankerous Irishman has bedded her is beyond him.
“Mate, you have a great flat here.”
“Thanks, Evan. It’s not quite the luxury lodgings the embassies provide yo
u folks, but it will do.”
“The Americans and French yes, but Canberra is not quite that generous with us. So, are you working on any big stories?”
“We’re keeping our eyes on the Israelis. We’re not sure how much longer they’ll put up with the cross-border raids.”
“Yes, I hear that the Israelis are losing patience, but they should think twice about getting bogged down in Lebanon. Ever been to Mukhtara?”
“No.”
“You should go. It’s quite beautiful.”
“I’m not sure many taxi drivers are going through the Shouf these days. Tensions are high between the Druze and Maronites there.”
“I’m driving up later today if you’re interested.”
“Are you going to see Jumblatt?”
“No, but I will be seeing one of his advisers, Abu Walid. He was my Arabic teacher up to a few months ago.”
“Really? Let me give it some thought.”
Riley pulls out some notes that he was working on for a story on Jumblatt’s criticism of Damascus. There it is. Jamal Seifeddine, known as Abu Walid, new Jumblatt adviser, ties to the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. Sister Nadia, American citizen, vice-chairperson of the Progressive Women’s Union.
“Have you ever met Jumblatt, Riley?”
“Yes, on several occasions.”
“What’s he like?”
“An oddball. Far more of a Buddhist than a Druze. At times, he seems completely un-Lebanese, just a philosopher uninterested in local politics. But when things get tough, he changes and starts to micro-manage every political move and counter-move on the local scene. A lot of Western journalists underestimate him, writing him off as a local warlord.”
“So what is he then?”
“Well, first he’s highly intelligent. There’s no doubt about that. If anything, he’s driven by a deep passion for bringing Lebanon out of its petty sectarianism so it can find its place in the world.”
“Sounds lofty, but the fellow is truly pissing off Damascus. Canberra asked me to get a word through to him.”
“Really. Aren’t you a little junior to be talking to Jumblatt?”
Quill of the Dove Page 15