Zone

by Mathias Enard

  XIII

  Now Marwan is dead, his body turning black in the Beirut sun near the airport, barely a hundred kilometers away from where he was born.

  Ahmad. Ahmad’s presence beside Marwan disturbs Intissar. Ahmad the cruel. Ahmad the coward. What were they doing together? Ever since the incident they were linked solely because of a shared cause and a cold hatred. The first time she saw Ahmad, though, something in her trembled. It was on the front line, a year earlier, when some fighters were returning from the South. Ahmad was almost carried high in triumph. He was handsome, with an aura of victory. A group of Fedayeen had gotten into the security zone, confronted a unit of the Israeli army, and destroyed a vehicle. Even Marwan admired their courage. Intissar had shaken Ahmad’s hand and congratulated him. Men change. Weapons transform them. Weapons and the illusion they create. The false power they give. What you think you can get because you have them.

  What use could the weapon lying on her lap like a newborn possibly be? What is she going to get because of it, three olive trees and four stones? A kilo of Jaffa oranges? Revenge. She is going to win peace of soul. Avenge the man she loves. Then defeat will be consummate, the city will collapse into the sea, and everything will disappear.

  •

  “Hello, boys.”

  “Ahleeeeeen ya Ahmad,” the card-players reply.

  Ahmad has one arm in a sling, he is smiling. He hasn’t seen Intissar. Habib congratulates him on his discharge from the hospital and, with a move of his head, draws his attention to the young woman sitting on the floor.

  She feels her throat go tight.

  Ahmad goes over to her. She gets up. He looks her sadly in the eyes.

  “Intissar . . .”

  He puts on an appropriate look, a look of mourning. He lays down his weapon to express his condolences to the widow.

  “Intissar, there was nothing to be done . . .”

  She feels a flood of tears rising but she tries to control them. She’s a fighter. Fighters do not cry in public.

  “We were on reconnaissance, just before. One of their tanks was hidden behind a wall, with its engine switched off, dawn was just breaking, they got us in their sights with the machine gun, Marwan fell, I was hit by a ricochet. A scratch, thank God. Him, he was . . . he was in the line of fire, you understand? Impossible to pull him away.”

  She remains impassive.

  “And now? And now? You think it’s possible to go look for him?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know, they probably moved the tank right after, but . . .”

  “Tonight?”

  “You . . . You want to see him?”

  “How?”

  “Maybe we can get a glimpse of him, from up there. Habib, you think I can let her climb up onto the roof? It’s quiet, isn’t it?”

  Habib gives a slight, strained smile, and says: “Yes, if you want, but be careful, if they spot you they’ll think you’re snipers and bomb us for sure. Watch out for reflections off weapons and binoculars, OK?”

  She feels her stomach churn. Hunger. Or the prospect of seeing the body in the afternoon sun. She wonders if Habib knew that Marwan might be visible from the roof of the building. Probably. That’s defeat. You don’t go looking for the dead anymore. You don’t want to see them anymore. Ahmad has hung a pair of binoculars around his neck. She lets him go first, because she knows he has a tendency to stare at her buttocks in her canvas pants at the slightest opportunity. He tries to see through them. That made Marwan furious, that Ahmad can’t peel his eyes away from her ass. The climb is complicated. To reach the second floor, you have to go out of the building and go in again through a rocket hole by the staircase, a staircase that no longer exists, replaced by a pile of rubble and debris where a rickety ladder has been set up. Ahmad climbs, she grabs the ladder in her turn, he holds out his hand to help her, she pretends she hasn’t seen him and, athletic, jumps up onto the landing. The first five or six steps are missing from the stairway to the third floor; you have to hoist yourself up with your arms. Once again, Ahmad offers his help. She doesn’t want to touch him. She jumps, then drags her hip up onto the step. She is in good shape. She begins sweating in her canvas but doesn’t want to wear just a T-shirt, even though underneath it she’s wearing, chaste carapace, a thick bra, almost a bustier. She confines herself to unbuttoning two buttons of her jacket. The floors in between are easier to reach, but the top two are mostly destroyed, most of the roof has collapsed, you have to climb onto tilted slabs of concrete, keeping clear of the iron bars sticking out. The sun is relentless. The dust, effort, and heat make her terribly thirsty. Her throat is totally dry; she can’t manage to utter a word. They crawl through a passage on the terrace cluttered with rubble and cartridge cases. The sun pins them to the cement. Around her, Beirut lies in haze. To the right the mercury of the sea and the immense wasteland of the airport; to the left, the sports arena and the Shatila camp. In front, the grid of ruined little streets, cut into four by two large streets strewn with burnt cars, trash, and the dark spots, like puddles of oil, of asphalt melted by phosphorus. So that’s what’s left of the city. Ramshackle remains, rubble, stardust. And in the middle Marwan’s body.

  Ahmad has gotten as close as possible to the corner of the roof and gotten out the binoculars from their case. He is scrutinizing the battlefield to the south. Intissar has gone over to him, almost touching him, despite her disgust. Ahmad has frozen. He whispers: “Look, over there, the Israeli positions. Their tanks are hidden in those streets over there. At the corner of the big street you can see Marwan.”

  She feels herself trembling. She needs to urinate, all of a sudden. She doesn’t know if she should take the binoculars Ahmad is handing her. The sun is a little behind them, they’re backlit, the Israelis can’t notice their presence. She looks. With her eyes blurred by tears or sweat, she sees nothing. She wipes them off with her sleeve. An indistinct, vague, rapid image, a concrete wall, a twisted streetlight. She gets her bearings. She is afraid of the instant the corpse will appear in close-up on a sidewalk. With her eyes, she follows the street Ahmad pointed out. She sees it. She goes past it. She comes back to it. She has a taste of bile in her mouth. A feeling of nausea. It’s Marwan. You can only see his arms outstretched, his head turned to the other side, his hair, his blackened back. His blackened back. The big dark stain on his jacket. The flies buzzing around him. She removes the binoculars to cry. It is really him, and he is really dead. She doesn’t cry. She picks up the binoculars again. She looks one more time, then, mentally, makes note of landmarks, to be able to reach him. That street, there, then right, then left and straight ahead, she should end up right at the corner where he’s outstretched. She checks the route with her naked eyes, almost 300 meters. The twisted streetlight like a tree to orient herself. It’s nothing, 300 meters. Ahmad is carefully wiping the lenses with a sketchy rag. She turns back and returns to the shelter of the roof at a crawl. Ahmad follows her. He watches her legs and buttocks sway. One thigh moves away from the other, her pants are stained with sweat. Intissar has only Marwan in mind. It is four o’clock. He was killed more or less twelve hours ago. She rifles through her horrible memories, imagines what a corpse that has been abandoned in the sun for twelve hours looks like. Flies on coagulated blood, in the mouth if it’s open, on the eyes if they’re open. Rigor mortis that might not yet have begun to pass off. And it must be sheltered a little by the shadow of the wall. She weeps hot tears. She suddenly wants to shout Marwan, Marwan, Marwan, she goes back down as fast as she can, she scratches her wrist on a rod in the concrete, almost sprains her ankle leaping onto the debris. Ahmad follows her with difficulty, in silence. After reaching the ground floor she goes back to the card-players and collapses in a corner. She is hot. She is thirsty. She is shivering with pain. Marwan the last dead man of the defeat. Marwan the corpse of the falling city.

  •

  A few days before, in the bedroom of the requisitioned apartment they were occupying in Hamra, Marwan was still s
aying: In 1975, all hopes were possible. The Movement was strong and unified, the Lebanese on the left were staunchly on our side, even Syria, we thought, the only traitors were the Jordanians, and maybe the Egyptians; the occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem was recent, not irreversible, the October war had shown that Israel was not invincible, the world was beginning to hear about the Palestinians, Beirut was beautiful, full of Marxist intellectuals and poets, and leftist Europeans who wore the keffiyeh and got drunk in the bars in Hamra, there were glorious actions in the South, money, Soviet weapons and Fedayeen who were training in armed combat. Can you believe we thought we could liberate the country? From our point of view, our thousands of soldiers seemed colossal. They were. They were for the Palestinians in the camps and for the Lebanese on our side. Our internal struggles, our disputes were shelved. We were stronger than ever. Look at us today, surrounded, betrayed, our last city reduced to nothing. The Lebanese are conking out on us. The Arabic world is going to root us out like a cyst, throw us back into the sea to who knows where. If we leave now we’ll never come back, Intissar, believe me. If Beirut falls, Palestine will be an Israeli garden, and we, if we’re lucky, will be their farmyard animals. We have to fight. Here you can see Galilee, smell it. It is there. Our people are there. I’d rather die for Beirut than rot slowly on a rock in the Mediterranean.

  Marwan is rotting now at a crossroads. Marwan did not marry her. Intissar didn’t need to ask him why. He said to her: You want me to make children who will live in wretched camps getting shelled by the Phalangists? She saw hope in children. For him hope was in fighting. The struggle. Defeat has welded Marwan to the ground of Beirut. He has fallen. She loves Marwan’s generous nobility. They fought alongside for two years. Thanks to him she became a combatant. Everyone knows her, respects her. She holds her head in her hands. She is crying. Habib brings her a bottle of water, in silence. She drinks. Her canvas pants are soaked with sweat and tears. She’ll never see Marwan again. She must see him again. Yesterday he left in the afternoon for the outpost. The bombardments had fallen silent. No planes. He kissed her gently on the lips. She had wanted him. To hold him. To have him inside her. She caressed him. He laughed, he kissed her a second time and left.

  Intissar gets up. Ahmad is watching Habib and the others play cards, discussing the negotiations. Rumors. Possible destinations. Where will they go to play cards, and for how long? Intissar suddenly wonders if she’ll go with them. Without Marwan. For an unknown destination. To fight for what? There will always be time to think about it. Now, courage. She has to convince them to go look for the body.

  She goes over to the group of cardplayers.

  Ahmad is staring at her. She doesn’t know if she should see compassion in his gaze or lust. Or both at once, maybe.

  “I . . . I want to go look for him,” she says.

  Habib sighs. Ahmad opens his eyes wide. The others drop their cards.

  “Intissar, wait. You can’t go there alone. We’ll go tonight.”

  Habib looks as if he has resigned himself to accompanying her. He didn’t even try to refuse or mention the danger of the expedition.

  Suddenly, a low-flying plane rips through the sky. Then another. The players get up.

  “It’s started up again,” says Ahmad.

  At over 400 meters a second you can cross Palestine and Lebanon in so little time. The Israeli aircraft need only a few minutes to reach their bases in the Negev or in Tel Aviv. A bomb explodes, far behind them. The phosphorus burns on contact with the air for hours. The wounds it causes are terrible, they don’t stop burning.

  They are too close to the Israeli lines to risk anything. Without a doubt it’s civilians who are burning. She remembers the first bombings at the beginning of the invasion. Dozens of victims in the hospital in Gaza, so many children. Horribly burned. The doctors couldn’t believe their eyes—for phosphorus, they consulted the manuals to learn how to treat the wounds, you needed copper sulfate; they didn’t have any, so they watched the hands or feet melt until they disappeared. Then the hospital itself was bombed. Then the neighborhood was reduced to ashes. Then there was the battle for Khalde, then the battle for the airport, then a ceasefire, then the siege, then sporadic battles, and now Marwan is dead.

  Which doesn’t stop the Israelis from continuing to drop a few bombs on the crumbling city now and then. A candle wavering. From Mazraa to Hamra passing through Raouche, West Beirut is an immense refugee camp, a giant field hospital. Those who fled from the South have joined the displaced from Fakhani, from Shatila, from Burj al Barajinah, from Ouzay where the houses are in ruins. No more water, no more electricity, no more gas for the generators, no more medicine, no more food. The only respite is at night, when the relative coolness of the sea air coincides with the pause in the bombings. Until the early morning. In the bedroom in that apartment in Hamra, in the last days, that was when they made love, in silence so as not to disturb anyone, with the window open to take advantage of the breeze. Four days? Four quiet days during the negotiations between Arafat and the Americans. A respite, an idle period before the inevitable fall.

  “It’s begun again,” Ahmad says.

  The second bomb sounds closer, they can hear the shrill cry of the plane moving away from the anti-aircraft fire. She wonders what the pilots can see, from so high up. They must see as far as Damascus, beyond the mountain. Apparently, when Leila Khaled hijacked the TWA plane, she forced the pilot to fly over Haifa, to see Galilee from above. Marwan told her that. He will never see Palestine. Does it still exist, even? She does not believe that there is a city in Palestine as beautiful as Beirut, in winter, when you can see snow on Mount Sannine from the Corniche. A city plunging into the sea like Beirut in Raouche or in Ramlet el Bayda. A city with a lighthouse, hills, luxury hotels, shops, cafés, restaurants, fishermen, lovers by the water’s edge, more nightclubs, brothels, universities, politicians, and journalists than you know what to do with. Dead people, too, so many you don’t know where to put them. What will she do with Marwan’s body? She’ll undress it. She’ll wash it herself. She’ll bury it. If it weren’t forbidden by religion, she’d build a big bonfire and burn it. On the beach. Like a beacon. She’d watch Marwan go up in smoke into the summer sky and rejoin Palestine through the air, with the Israeli planes. No, she’ll bury him in Lebanese soil. In an improvised, temporary cemetery full of Palestinian graves. To whom does the land belong, anyway? To farmers and to the dead.