by Colin Smith
'Didn't it worry you, what you were doing in Vietnam? I mean' - Dove searched for the right words - 'now you're part of the world revolutionary movement and all that?'
'Look, man. Don't give me any of this world revolutionary movement shit. I'm a Palestinian. I fight for Palestine. If the Russians were occupying my land I'd fight them.' Dove blushed. 'Sorry, I mean ...'
'Sure, I regret it now, but I was twenty years old when I got to Nam, I was just a dumb fucking kid. I'd been brought up on John Wayne movies. I really wanted to prove I was as good an American as the next guy. Get my quota of gooks. Shit, I volunteered, remember. I wasn't drafted or anything.'
'And did you get them?'
'Get what?'
'Your quota. Your quota of gooks?'
'Sure, I got some. I greased a lot of Charlie. I was a mean bastard. Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for I'm the meanest bastard in the valley. Lot of guys had that tattooed on them. Crazy fuckers. Course, now I'm not so happy about what I did because Charlie was our brother. It was just that I was such a goddamn dumb asshole then I couldn't see it. When I got back to the States, back to what we called The World, I began to realise a few things; began to think maybe I should have fragged a few fucking gung-ho officers instead of setting fire to people's hooches and wasting farmers fighting for their country. I did a year at Berkeley then the Jordanians started butchering our people in Amman, Black September Seventy, so I quit and came out here.'
'You've never been back?'
'Once. A few years ago - to see my folks.'
'How do they feel about what you're doing?'
'Shit, man. You ask the dumbest questions. How do you think? They're proud that their son is fighting for their country instead of guzzling Budweiser and chasing tail.'
'But aren't they worried?'
'No. They know if I die it couldn't be for a better cause. I'd be a martyr.'
'Don't you miss America?'
'Sure, I miss it. Like a hole in the head. Ever been there?'
'No.'
'Well, I haven't been to England either so I don't know, but the States is the most racist fucking society in the world. At least the South Africans are honest about it, which is more than you can say for those motherfuckers. Do you know what they called me in the Marines? Do you know what those comrades-in-arms called me? I'll tell you - they called me Sandy. Know what that's short for? It's short for Sand Nigger. Bastards. Ever since I was big enough to talk I've had to explain who and what I was to a bunch of dumbfucks who don't know whether to wind their ass or scratch their watch. I almost got lynched by a bunch of red necks in a bar in Southern California once because they thought I was a Chicano.'
'A what?'
'Chicano, Wetback - Mexican. Man. Don't you know anything?'
'We don't have them in England,' said Dove rather primly. 'Oh, I say, we don't hev them,' said George in a travesty of an English accent. 'What do you hev? I know you hev the Queen. Tell me about the Queen.'
'Let's leave her out of it.'
'Why? What are you motherfuckers doing anyway. Isn't it a bit goddamn backward to have a Queen in the second half of the twentieth century? Why don't you shoot her?'
'Look,' said Dove, knowing as he did so that he was about to sound ridiculously pompous, 'I would rather we didn't discuss this.'
'Rather we didn't discuss it! Jesus Christ! You're a fucking limey royalist.'
'No, I'm not. I'm nothing. It's just - it would be rather like me criticizing Palestine. We can criticize her, but you can't.'
'How can you compare a whole country with a fucking Queen?'
'I suppose it's something to do with patriotism,' said Dove, in a faintly surprised tone because he had only just identified the force behind his growing anger. 'You and the bloody Irish don't have a monopoly on it, you know.'
'Jesus Christ. Rule Britannia,' said George. But after that he dropped the subject.
On another occasion they talked about Koller. 'What's he like?' asked Dove. 'Have you ever met him?'
'Heard about him,' said George evasively. 'What sort of things?'
'He's a meeeeen son-of-a-bitch, that motherfucker.'
Dove was getting a little weary of George's monotonous soldierly obscenities. 'What exactly is that supposed to mean?'
'Like I said. He's a real mean dude. Cool. You're gonna have to be good for him.' The Palestinian suddenly seemed to recall that it was not his role to discourage Dove. 'You'll be all right, man,' he said weakly. 'You can take him.' He sounded like a trainer with a fading boxer on his hands.
But the schoolteacher was insistent. 'What makes him so special?'
George sighed. Perhaps the Englishman ought to know what he was up against. 'He's got nerve. Of course, a lot of guys got nerve, but he's in a league of his own. Listen, I'll tell you a story. Once in Germany someplace, Koller was cornered by the cops in an apartment block. I think he'd just stuck up a bank or something and got separated from the others when they split. Anyway, the pigs had this block surrounded and it looked like he was either going to come out with his hands up or feet first. So what happened? Suddenly this character comes running down the stairs into the lobby wearing an old overcoat, his face streaming with blood, screaming, "There's a crazy bastard upstairs with a gun. He punched me." The pigs all gathered round. "Where? Where?" they say. '"Third floor, apartment five," he said. Most of the pigs all rush upstairs. This character says, "I'm going to see my wife - she's at a friend's around the corner. No, I don't need a doctor - I need a drink."
'Before anybody can say anything he's out of the door and away. A few seconds later the cops come tearing down from apartment five. Koller had been there all right. Just long enough to stick up the tenant, take his overcoat, smear his own face with tomato ketchup and tell the tenant that if he as much as poked his head out of the goddamn door he was liable to get it blown off - which, incidentally, almost happened when the pigs came storming in.
'You see, what Koller was betting on was that hardly any of the cops charging around there would have any real idea of what he looked like. Sure, they'd all seen his mug-shot on the wanted sheet from time to time - so who looks like their passport picture? There aren't many dudes around who would think that fast, have the nerve to walk straight into the cops. Most guys would have gone for grabbing a hostage and trying to bullshit their way out. Koller has class.'
'His sort of class belongs in the gutter,' said Dove in one of his rare displays of emotion. 'He's a murdering bastard.'
'OK. So he killed your old lady. But it was an accident. Why do you want him so badly? If she'd been wasted in some automobile smash with a drunk driver would you want to kill that guy too?'
'Yes, for a while,' said Dove, 'then I suppose the feeling would subside because society would probably punish the driver and anyway, however irresponsible he was, he hadn't come to the conclusion that he had the right to kill.
'But Koller's different. I want to kill him for all the little people who don't matter to people like him, the eggs sacrificed for his rotten little egotistical revolutionary omelette. For all the happy, decent people with so much to offer who get killed because they happen to be in the wrong place when some clumsy, righteous bastard decides that he's got the G - given right to kill someone. And if I get the chance, before he dies, before I put a bullet in him with the excellent pistol you've given me, I'm going to tell him who's killing him and why. I'm going to tell him just for the pleasure of seeing the surprise on the bastard's face. The surprise when he realises that one of those little people whose life he blundered into was so ruined, so shattered, that when he had picked up the fragments of himself and glued them back, more or less, in working order the only thing he had left to live for was tracking him down like a wild animal.'
'Jesus Christ,' said George, 'by the time you finish telling Koller that he'll have barbecued your ass and served it with three kinds of mustard. Go and show me what you'd do to Koller on one of th
ose targets over there.'
Dove took out the Walther and approached three life-size cardboard silhouettes of charging figures with sub-machineguns, presumably the Zionist horde, which George had planted before an earth bank. He got to within about thirty metres and using a double-handed grip, discharged all eight rounds in the magazine. He hit one figure in his cardboard knee.
'That's what happens when you're mad,' said George.
'You've gotta be cool. Keep the madness buried deep inside.' He banged his heart with his right hand and smiled. Suddenly Dove realised George wasn't all bad.
Dove didn't know how long the course was going to last. 'As long as it takes,' George said when he asked him.
'You mean until you find Koller for me.'
'Maybe.'
'How will you find him?'
'I don't know, man. Not my scene.'
By about the fifth day Dove was enjoying his training. The stiffness had gone when he crawled out of his sleeping-bag at daybreak before the flies reveilled. His stomach was becoming accustomed to the diet, and he was acquiring a grimy tan. He told himself he was hardening up; even his beer paunch was deflating. This new sense of well-being persuaded him to join the fedayeen in their daily regimen of jogging and exercises. Even so, he was in nothing like as good physical shape as the others; several times he was halted by the need to cough up bloody phlegm or was doubled up by an agonizing stitch that left him feeling nauseous and very cross with himself. Surely he couldn't be that unfit? He still played rugby.
Otherwise, he earned a certain admiration from the fedayeen because of the speed with which he acquired new skills. He had learned how to take the pin out of a grenade and could throw one further than any of them. He found it helped to imagine slowbowling them down a sticky wicket. He would never be an Olympic pistol-shot, but at fifty metres he could now put an average of six or seven rounds in a six-inch group across a cardboard chest.
George also taught him a little about street-fighting. He took him to the ruins of a lonely villa which he said had been wrecked in an Israeli air raid - only the grey ferro-concrete walls had survived. Here he showed him how you flattened yourself to the side of a door - they had to imagine the door - immediately after knocking, because no modern door could stop anything heavier than a pea-shooter and you could be shot through it while you were wondering if anybody was at home. He told him things over and over again until the schoolteacher could never remember a time when he didn't know them. He told him never to enter a darkened room with the light behind him; he told him if you had to enter a room where you were expected, you charged in and threw yourself down immediately, to the left or right, but you must keep looking because you had to know where your adversary was before he had time to squeeze off his second bullet. If you could afford the noise and you had one with you it was better, of course, to roll a grenade in first.
And he told him about the trick called 'ballooning', designed to put off a sniper attempting a head-shot. You imagined your head was a balloon on a string bobbing about in a gentle breeze and kept it moving like that on a swaying neck so that a sniper was rarely given the chance to settle his sights on your cranium. 'Remember, for the guy with the rifle six hundred yards away, three inches of movement can be as wide as three miles.'
'But how long are you supposed to keep it up for?'
'Until you can get behind a foot of concrete, dummy!'
One afternoon George took Dove down the valley to the nearest village 'for the groceries'. They went there in the pick-up with one of the young fedayeen in a flat leather cap hanging onto the Dushka on the back in the upright manner that had caused the Beirut wits to call these machine-gunners 'the water-skiers'. It was a crisp, clear day. Behind him Dove could see the snowcovered peak of Mount Hermon and then the grey slopes of the foothills of the Chuf range, lightly furred with stunted trees like the hairs on a man's chest.
The village they went to was not occupied by Palestinian refugees, but a tobacco-farming community of Lebanese Shia Moslems. Dove saw that they lived in substantial, flat-roofed, concrete houses with open-sided ground-floor storerooms made of breeze block in which they stored tobacco leaf. Most homes had a car or tractor parked outside.
George bought bread, cheese, yogurt, radishes, cucumbers, tomatoes and meat - some of it ready diced for kebabs - eggs, coffee, and a couple of live chickens. The Shi'ites seemed cordial enough and in all the houses they visited they were offered coffee and cigarettes and, in the less devout households, glasses of arak, which ignited the throat. On seven occasions payment was refused which, to Dove's amazement, annoyed the Palestinian. 'Basically, the dumb shits don't like us,' he explained as they trudged away from their latest hand-out. 'They want to be able to say we extorted the food from them.'
'Why don't they like you?'
'Because the cocksuckers blame us for the Israeli air raids. They don't want to understand that Palestine is every Arab's fight. They're like the goddamn Swiss. They just want to be left to their pastures and their farming. Sometimes I don't think they'd give a shit if the goddamn Israelis walked right in here just as long as the sun came up and went down at the right time and they could sell their lousy tobacco. It doesn't matter to them that my people are starving and living in camps. They're just fuckin' peasants. They don't care what happens to other people as long as they make money. Motherfuckers.'
After this outburst Dove was surprised when, at their next call, an elderly farmer in pin-stripe trousers and a black rollneck sweater gave the long-haired Palestinian what appeared to be a particularly warm welcome. He soon saw why. They were drinking their third Turkish coffee of the afternoon when into the house came a little girl aged about eight or nine. She was quite classically pretty, her face framed in straight, jet-black hair, and dominated by huge, sensitive brown eyes which seemed to light up when they registered George.
She ran over to him and he bent down and picked her up, kissed her on both cheeks, threw her up in the air, caught her, kissed her again, and then fished in the top pocket of his fatigues until he came out with a new packet of coloured pencils in a plastic wallet. Throughout it all the little girl, although obviously ecstatic, was strangely silent. 'She's dumb,' the Palestinian explained. 'Hysterical dumbness. Her parents were blown away by an Israeli bomb and she was standing right next to them. Miracle she survived. I was the first to find her. The old guy is her grandfather.'
George's new role as the concerned warrior suddenly reminded Dove of the generous, gum-chewing Yanks around his home town as a boy, battling the Cold War ennui by thumping teddyboys and generally much admired by himself and his small friends.
The little girl ran off and returned holding a picture which she presented to George and then stood solemnly by while he examined it with great seriousness. 'It's always the same one,' he said, passing it to Dove.
The picture showed two planes, children's planes with impossible vertical wings, dropping a stick of bombs on two houses. The bombs were not landing on the houses, but were marked in vivid red and yellow 'V's' as landing all around. In the foreground, surrounded by these 'V's', two figures with matchstick limbs were lying on the ground. To the left of the picture was a tree underneath which stood a little girl - a triangle with a ball on top sprouting black string hair - shedding torrents of tears marked in much the same way as the falling bombs. Left again of the tree, at the edge of the picture, was the figure of a man in a keffiyeh, holding what was obviously supposed to be a Kalashnikov because the child had equipped his rifle with the distinctive banana-shaped magazine. The rifle was spitting red fire at one of the planes, but unlike most children's war pictures he wasn't hitting it. The red dashes merely went hopelessly on, between the two planes, until they left the picture. There was something else peculiar about it. Dove looked again. The sun was crying.
'The dude doing the shooting is new,' said George. 'I think it's supposed to be me. Obviously she doesn't think I can hit a barn door.'
The Palestinian carefully roll
ed the picture up and tucked it into his shirt. 'I've tried to get her to do something else, but she's a stubborn little monkey. This is all she wants to draw. At least I get a walk-on part this week.'
When they had to depart there was a repeat performance of the Palestinian's arrival. But this time the child knocked his hair aside, revealing the shrivelled, stunted cartilage that was all that remained of his right ear. 'Hey! Leave my wound alone, young lady,' he ordered, but the girl continued to pull at the gristle until he gently removed her hand. Dove found it difficult to take his eyes off it.
Afterwards, in the pick-up, George told the schoolteacher how it happened. 'I was captured by some assholes during the civil war. They sliced it off to prove to my team that they had me. Had to pay a lot of bread for old Abu George, but we got it all back.'
'Who were they? Christians?'
'Shit, no. They would have killed me unless we had one of their top honchos and they wanted to trade. No, these were real banditos. Kurds.'
'How did you get the money back?'
'How do you think? The street scene is small in West Beirut. It took us twenty-four hours to find out who and where they were. Then we went in and zapped them. I got the bastard who did the slicing myself. He was a very surprised guy.'
'Why surprised?'
'He was on the john.'
'Christ!'
'Scared the shit outta him,' laughed George. 'Gave him another asshole.' At intervals he laughed about this most of the way back to the camp.
The training came to an end quite suddenly on the ninth day. It started with a swooshing sound, similar to the noise a fast express might make, that startled Dove and made him duck as if he had come under fire. He had just begun to straighten himself up when it happened again, to be rapidly followed by two more. Every time it happened he crouched a little lower as if he was being beaten into the ground by an invisible mallet.
He looked up to find George grinning at him, cradling his Kalashnikov. 'Grads,' he said.