De Niro's Game

by Rawi Hage

  George should have known him, I said.

  Yes. Yes, he should have known us all, she replied quickly. Does George have a girlfriend?

  No, I said.

  What do you think he is doing now?

  Now?

  Yes, at this moment.

  He is away, I said.

  He is away. We know that, she giggled. Let’s go and eat. You must be hungry by now. We’ll take a cab.

  She stepped to the edge of the street, lifted her hand in the air, stood on her toes, and spun like a ballerina, waving her palm like lovers do on a train station platform. In the cab, we sat as far as possible from each other, each next to a window. I watched Paris go by through a glass drenched by the steady rain that made everything look blurred and unknown; but Rhea, who knew the city and its people, contemplated the sopping glass and the rain droplets rushing down like tears from eyes.

  IN THE AFTERNOON, Rhea asked me if I wanted to come to her place for tea.

  We walked through Arras Street under an umbrella that hid the tops of the high churches, the little angel statues in the eaves of buildings, the leaves of trees that bowed under the weight of the falling rain, the high, triumphant monuments, and the smoke from the ever-burning Bastille.

  We left the umbrella in Rhea’s hallway, dripping water, and entered her place. It was smaller than her mother’s and had fewer objects. I sat and waited while she disappeared into the kitchen and then into her room. She came out wearing new, dry clothes, put on some Indian music, lit some incense, and went back into her room. After a minute she reappeared and told me to go into the kitchen and help myself to a cup of coffee. I heard a dryer blowing inside her room; outside, a storm of wind and rain rose louder, and the trees shook.

  I sipped my coffee and walked over to the bookshelves in the living room. On one, I saw a photo of Rhea with a man who, I thought, must be Mr. Mani. It had been taken in the Orient somewhere. A Buddhist temple filled most of the photo. It had obviously been taken from a distance, as it showed both of them in full.

  Mr. Mani did not look like George, except maybe for his large smile. I remembered how rare George’s smiles were, how once in a while he surprised you with them, for no reason but to acknowledge your presence. Mr. Mani looked Slavic, with pale skin. George had looked like his olive-skinned mother, Jamal.

  That was our trip to Thailand. This is my dad, Rhea said as she approached me. She touched one side of the frame. I turned my head toward her and I kissed her on the cheek, and as I pressed my face against her warm skin, slowly she turned her head, and we kissed on the lips.

  You have to take off your clothes. You are wet, Rhea murmured. Come to my room. I will give you a towel.

  I STAYED WITH Rhea for the next couple of days. We took long walks every day. We hopped from one café to another. We entered museums and galleries, and she showed me her favourite paintings. We skipped through wings filled with massive gold portraits of governors, aristocratic ladies, and white Roman statues. We went straight to her favourite pieces, and when she saw them, she rejoiced as if she had just found a lost childhood friend. She would shine a big, enthusiastic smile on me, and tell me about the painter’s life, the era he had lived in, the techniques he had used, and the symbolism in his work. One day we went to a photography exhibit, and she walked calmly in front of every frame, posing in front of each photo. Photography is about death, she said to me. It preserves the illusion of a past moment that can never be re-enacted.

  At night, I slept in her bed and we made love. Before going to bed, she would light a candle. I like it dark enough to see only shapes, and not too many details, she told me.

  Could you describe George to me? Rhea asked one night. In detail? I asked.

  She smiled. I said, He has your green eyes and your father’s smile. He is dark-skinned, more like my colour. We are almost the same height. He has straight black hair that always fell on his face. He never wore glasses. He has a hooked nose like tante Jamal, his mother. He is kind of skinny, but his arms have strength. You can tell by the veins that are always prominent in his arms.

  Does he smoke?

  Yes, he does.

  What kind of cigarettes?

  Marlboros.

  What else does he do?

  He rode a motorcycle. We went hunting together.

  What did you hunt?

  Birds, mostly birds.

  That night, Rhea slept, but I stayed awake. I lay on my back for a while, then I walked to the window and from there to the back balcony. I smoked and looked at the few stars, and searched for the celestial bonfires, for Morse code signals from space.

  AFTER WE MADE LOVE, Rhea’s questions would intensify. She wanted me to describe things, and she insisted on this like a neglected child. Is Beirut a big city? How do people dress? What was your mother like? Did you like your father?

  Over dinner one evening, she opened wine and played French love songs. She invited me to sit on the floor next to her, and then she pulled out a photo album. Let’s look at photos, she said. Slowly, she turned the pages. I looked at photos of a young infant crawling the floors, Genevieve in 1970s dresses and pointy shoes and dark sunglasses, and Rhea in her father’s arms, with Africa in the background. This is my nanny, said Rhea, and that is me in Singapore. And this is at the kibbutz in Israel.

  When were you there? I interrupted.

  Not long ago, she said.

  When I told her that George had gone there for military training, of course Rhea wanted to know all about it.

  When was he there? Why was he in Israel? And how did he manage to go from Lebanon?

  I told her that George had gone on a secret mission, that he had gone to be trained.

  Oh, mon Dieu, maybe we were there at the same time! Was he there in August, September, November? What year?

  Last year.

  Do you know where he was, what region?

  No, it was supposed to be a secret training operation, I said.

  Did he know that our father was Jewish? she asked.

  I don’t know, I said.

  Do you think his mother ever discussed it? George must have asked her about his father, she added and lifted her hair from her face.

  I am not sure, I replied.

  The candle melted under the licks of its own flames and the flame burned over a pool of water. I stared at the fire, and my mind wandered back to the wooden benches where George and I had knelt in white robes with mumbling lips, and chewed the son of man’s body, and cheerfully sipped His blood, and knew He always loved us, cannibals, petty bandits, hormonal misfits, candle thieves, and masturbators that we were.

  THE NEXT MORNING, when I went back to my hotel, I took a shower and lay on my bed, looking at the ceiling, filling the room with the fog of burning cigarettes. I folded the clothes I had left strewn about and hid them in the room’s small drawers. I had no plans, and I realized that I could not think of any. Other than Rhea, no one in Paris knew me, no one was expecting me for dinner, nor to walk in a funeral procession, nor to work, eat, carry the wounded, speed around on motorcycles. I could wander Paris again, I thought. Then I remembered the story of my grandmother — who in her youth was enslaved by the Turks, who in her womanhood ironed French soldiers’ shirts for a few tin coins — and the story of her brother, who during the Second World War joined the six thousand Lebanese who formed the Kanasa troop, under the command of the Force Française de la Libération. I remembered my grandmother telling me of their heroic fight in the Bir Hakim battle. I remembered her telling me of her brother who perished in the desert, thirsty for his home up in the high mountains, for the chain of trees, the tolling bells, and the munching goats.

  So I lit my Gitane and walked the Parisian streets looking for my ancestors’ names on marble plaques, on arches of triumph. I walked like a spy in disguise, with a hat on my head, a baguette under my arm, and when I saw the Gestapo and the Vichy men rounding up thousands of people who looked like me, with the same nose and the same skin, I turned
and entered the sewers. I feared being captured, I feared being cramped in trains, I feared cold nights without food, I feared being stripped of my hat, stripped of my watch, my baguette and my violin, my loved ones . . . and I also feared for the price I would pay in one way or another, in the present or in the future. I feared for the olive groves, the refugees in tents holding keys to houses they would never see again, holding photographs of the land that one day would be stolen by Slovaks in sandals with holy scripts to justify it all. I crawled the sewers until I reached the catacombs of Rome, where I rested amid the thousands of skulls lit by a small, flickering torch. Or was it the tip of my cigarette that glowed in my eyes?

  THE NEXT DAY, Rhea came by to see me in the afternoon. She kissed me on the cheek, and as if we both knew what to do, we walked.

  I asked her if she knew how her father had met George’s mother.

  My father, Rhea said, was a diplomat in Egypt at the time, but he left because of the Israeli-Arab War. On his way back to France, he went to Beirut to finish some business. At that time, George’s mother worked as a secretary at the French consulate. My father, who was still single, young, and handsome, said he liked her accent. She must have had the same accent as you, Rhea said, smiling. George’s mother was taught by nuns, but she told my father that later on she rebelled against them. I guess, after we discovered my father had cancer, he must have decided to tell me all about his life. He told me that George’s mother was abused by the nuns, but nevertheless they gave her a solid education, which enabled her to land a job at the consulate. My father asked her out many times before she agreed to go out with him. Beirut . . . My father always talked about Beirut with a certain nostalgic sadness. After my father left the city, he and George’s mother wrote to each other for a few weeks. Then, my father said to me, all of a sudden she stopped writing. She must have discovered that she was pregnant. For years, my father never knew of his son’s existence. George’s mother never told him, nor did my father suspect anything. It was only after many years that he was travelling in Rome and met a Lebanese businessman who happened to know the family, and this man told my father that George’s mother had become pregnant by a French man who had left the country, and that she had decided to keep the baby in spite of all the social taboos, the hardship she had to face, the church’s excommunication threats, and the isolation she faced from her family and society. I asked my father why he never went back to Beirut to see George and his mother. He said that after the war started, Beirut became dangerous for people like him.

  Rhea looked me again in the eye. George’s mother was defiant, wasn’t she?

  She was also generous, I said, and she loved us both.

  How did she die?

  From the same disease as your father.

  And maybe at the same time, Rhea added.

  18

  FOR TWO DAYS AFTER OUR CONVERSATION ABOUT HER father and George’s mother, Rhea did not call and did not show up at the hotel. On the second night, I walked to her place. I stood across from her building at the intersection of two streets, under the traffic signal. I inhaled at the yellow light and released white fumes on the green. When the light turned red, I stood among the gathered pedestrians and observed their colourful clothes.

  I saw a well-dressed older man waiting at the entrance to Rhea’s building. I watched the streetlight projecting beams on his face, and saw that he changed colours like a chameleon. Then I saw Rhea come down. I retreated from the corner and stood in the shadows. Rhea kissed the older man, and they walked together down the street. He was skinny, and delicate-looking, with a baby face. I followed them, keeping to the shadows; when they looked behind them, I froze like prey in the presence of a predator.

  Rhea and the man entered a bar. He opened the door for her. On the way to the bar she had done all the talking; he just nodded and leaned his head toward her.

  I waited outside the bar. I smoked all my cigarettes, and still I stood, watching through the windows. The waitresses walked back and forth, blocking the central light that was suspended in the middle of the window frame like an extraterrestrial ship. At times, the waitresses’ movements made the light flicker in my eyes. I thought of these flickers as Morse code signals instructing me not to lose my subjects, to follow their tracks, to take note of every laugh and every conversation, no matter how trivial, to watch their body gestures, to detect any exchange of paper, cigarette boxes, glances, smiles, tender voices.

  I waited for hours on end. I craved another cigarette, and I also craved the burning candles above Rhea’s bed. I craved her photos, her endless questions.

  When Rhea and the man finally left the bar, I froze. I did not blink. The man stopped onto the sidewalk and pulled out a box of cigarettes and an old lighter. Then he lit a smoke, puffed, and walked beside Rhea. I followed them as they traced back their route to Rhea’s home. The man walked her to the door, she kissed him, and he left on foot. I waited until he passed me, and then I followed him down to the metro. I stood on the platform, not too far from him. I watched him closely. The suspended neon light gave him disturbing shadows that were at odds with his blue eyes, his silk tie, and his well-combed hair.

  I got on and off at every station he did; I followed him everywhere, and I did not care whether he noticed it or not.

  When he got off at the last station and began to walk away, I ran after him. In a little ruelle, I asked him for a cigarette. He answered rudely, saying that he did not have any.

  I know you have one! I replied.

  He brushed past me with an air of arrogance and told me to scram.

  I pulled out my gun and rushed in front of him. Either the cigarette, or I will use the gun. Which would you prefer?

  He pulled the box from the side pocket of his jacket and gave it to me.

  The lighter too, I said.

  He frisked his clothes, pulled the lighter from a pants pocket, and gave it to me slowly, still looking at me with fearless eyes. I took it and walked away in the opposite direction. I decided not to take the metro in case the man called the police; they would surely keep an eye on the stations.

  I walked fast through deserted streets, and I felt my hunger. I had not eaten all day because I had been waiting for Rhea to call, waiting to share food with her, to look at her looking at me straight in the eyes like no one ever looked at you in this city, to smell her hair.

  When I finally arrived on a busy street, I stood behind a young tree and lit a cigarette. I felt the weight of the lighter and examined its gold colour. It had some initials that I decided to examine later under better light. I opened and closed it; when it closed, it snapped and gave a sound that echoed like a jail door, like the clang of a torture chamber, like lovers quarrelling in cars and parking lots, like my father’s exits from our home at night and his exits from gambling joints in the morning. I was thirsty, but the thought of water brought back the memory of Rambo’s hand on my neck, drowning me, and the thought cut the air from my chest, which made me inhale my cigarettes longer and walk faster, and the faster I walked the more like a stranger I felt. I longed for my lengthy walks under falling bombs. Bombs are not only for killing, I thought; bombs are like Morse code signals filled with messages, with words. But Paris has no falling bombs; Paris is a mute city.

  THE NEXT DAY, Rhea phoned from the lobby of my hotel.

  She said that she was coming up to my room. When she entered, she slammed the door (like the slam of an expensive gold lighter).

  You followed me last night, she accused me.

  I kept quiet.

  Yes, you did. I saw you. I saw you waiting outside the bar, across the street. I recognized your posture, your bag, your cigarettes. You stood there for hours, like a stalker. I recognized you from the way you smoked and the way you looked sideways from under your hat and coat collar. Yes, you stood under the dim light, thinking no one could recognize you, but I always recognize people by their shapes. I prolonged my stay in the bar because I did not want to leave before you, but
stubborn as you are, you stood there as if someone had paid you. You stood there, and the look of your stiff, sad body, like a standing corpse, terrified me. What right do you have? What right do you have to follow me? I saw you following Roland after he left me. I saw you! she shouted. Why did you follow him? What right?

  Her eyes looked straight at me again, but this time it was a new look that I had never seen before, a kind of a squint like that of a marksman shooting against the sun, the squint of a lost sailor, the squint of a person looking through smoke from a cigarette or burning hay.

  Why, why? Now, tell me why you followed me. Why? she shouted.

  To protect you, I mumbled.

  What? To protect me? From what, from whom? Who asked you to? Who? You have no claim on me, do you understand? I took pity on you, and just because I felt sorry for you and slept with you, you do not own me. Understood? Now, do not ever follow me again! She raised her finger to my face and said, And do not bother Roland, because he is not as soft and fragile as you think.

  She turned and slammed the door (yes, it sounded like a prison door). From my window, I watched her crossing the street, stepping over the white interrupted traffic line, and disappearing behind white stone walls.

  I PACED MY ROOM between the window and the bathroom, looking for something new, something to examine. I was missing soap and needed a new towel. I went downstairs to the lobby.

  The receptionist, an Algerian man with thick glasses and curly hair, was reading a book. Slowly, he lifted his head. When I asked for a new towel and soap, he told me that I would have to wait until the next cleaning. I asked him if he had a book I could borrow.

  He leaned under the desk and pulled out a few books. Here, he said. People forget books in their rooms and we keep them. Like a juggler, he held a wobbling pile of books in his hand and put them all in front of me. Choose. We expect you to bring them back when you finish them or before you leave.