by Mike Bond
Could he dive aside? Lose his legs only? If it were timed, wouldn't it have blown by now? Under his instep the crumbly soil was sifting, the mine sinking. He kept pushing down harder on it, but that could make it blow too, trying not to lose his balance in the wind and to keep his foot steady under the snow on the mine. He waved her away but she came right up as if it was nothing and he wondered, how can she be like this? She just doesn't care about her life, that's all. Why would anyone do this, bury this hard piece of agony and death for people they've never met?
She knelt. “Keep your foot still!”
“Get back! I order you!”
“Hold still!” She dug snow and dirt from round his foot, then deeper. “The little metal ridge, on the side – it's American.”
“The one that jumps up?”
“It has a ten-minute back-up fuse.”
“How long has it been?”
“Five minutes, maybe. Seven.” She leaped up and ran, and he lurched to call her, didn't want to die, wanted her, wishing she'd said goodbye, waiting each thousandth of a second for the mine to blow, his whole body shriveling away from it, seeing his whole life not in little pieces but as God would, all at once. So this is how they judge you, he thought.
It was easy, viewing it all at once, to see where he'd gone wrong: the pride, the stupidity so viciously defended, most ruthlessly against those he loved; how he'd failed them absolutely except in the most superficial ways. If there's no holiness with your family, none of that deep happy love, then you have none at all. He thought of his father dying alone.
Rosa came dashing back with an armload of rocks and built them up round his foot and ankle. “Go!” he screamed. She ran away, coat sailing in the wind. The wind was trying to push him off the mine. If he could soar now, like a bird. Now it explodes. Now. Ten minutes now. He tried to remember back to when he had stepped on the mine but it was very long ago. So much and nothing. Now it explodes. Chunks of his body and blood spraying through a hail of white metal. Who would make a thing like this, to do this?
She ran back, built the wall of rocks further up his shin, shoving away snow, three rocks deep. Maybe I could live, he began to hope. Just lose a leg? He'd take that deal now, any deal with God, promise to change the life he could see in this vast diorama, the little it added up to. He saw the faces of the men he'd sent to death and how ill it suited them, had hurt them, how many he'd pained, and for so little. It came in a flash so strong he could not argue it down. I will make peace. Spare me, God, and I'll find a way to make peace. A good peace. Do You want peace, God?
“Just leap straight back.” Rosa placed the last rock on top of the others. The wall was two feet high, six to ten rocks deep. “Now!”
“Get away!” When she'd run back about thirty feet, he dove sideways over the wall, hit the ground and rolled up and ran through the snow, Rosa safe ahead, no blast.
He caught her and they stood gasping, half crying, knee-deep in snow under the implacable stars. “Dud!” she kept saying. “Dud!”
Her body was life, his life. “Reborn...” He couldn't speak.
Welded to him, she looked up into his eyes. “For what?”
THE DOG trotted, sometimes ahead sometimes behind, stopping to piss on corners and lampposts, down Nabaat, the cemetery gloomy on both sides. West Beirut was beginning to get hit, rockets dropping from the hills, Syrian, Christian, or Israeli. They made André want to turn back but now's the time to find a way in there, he rebuked himself, when nobody's watching. You can always get out when it turns hot.
The dog bounded ahead, nose to the ground. The street dipped and narrowed toward the stadium; two men came out from doorways on each side, Phalange, and warned him to go round by the Lycée, there were snipers in the stadium.
“Palestinians?”
“Geagea's men. Crazy Christians.”
There was no point getting caught in some battle between Christian militias over a drug shipment. He went back uphill and swung round by the Lycée, down the hill by the Hotel Dieu. “You're crazy to cross over,” said the Phalange captain at the Museum barricade.
“My wife's parents live by the Conservatoire.”
The captain handed back his passport. “Everybody coming through here says they're going to see family. With all these blood ties you wonder why we're fighting.”
“Lots of stuff coming over tonight?”
“From us?” The captain shrugged. “Don't stay out late.”
André stepped into the wide empty half-lit bowl of the Museum intersection feeling the rifles trained on his chest, the dog romping unawares beside him making him fear it would step on a mine. Or did it know where not to step? The Amal barricade loomed closer and he felt they were waiting till they could have his body before they cut him down. This is foolish, he told himself, people cross here every day.
The Amal fighters on the other side were like skinny kids compared to the Christians. They didn't speak, glanced at his passport and laughed, waved him through.
He took Rue Basta uphill toward the Conservatoire. More shells were coming over, heading downtown, and there was the rumble of Israeli offshore fire, hitting near the port. A 155 hissed down and smacked into the next street. He started running, the dog loping beside him; things were falling, metal and glass, in a choking cordite stink. Up a side street something was burning – two cars, a truck, people yelling. A man waved at him – help. You shouldn't do this, he thought, running toward him.
There was a distended flaming Mercedes with its doors and trunk gone, its roof peeled up, a red truck squeezed flat, a collapsed building. The man was yelling in Arabic but when André spoke French he just yelled more, pointing to a hole where two other men had jammed a steel bar under a fallen slab; they waved, flames flickering on their faces. André followed the man down into the hole – a cellar stairs. There were children crying beyond the slab. Together, the four of them pushed the slab aside enough for people to squirm and drag themselves out and scramble up the stairs.
The people from the cellar stood in the middle of the street in the light of the burning Merceds, counting each other and crying and staring up at the remains of their building. Another 155 was coming in and they ran against the wall. It hit somewhere near in a scream of steel. Yet another was coming and there was nowhere to run, all these people crushing against the next building. Luckily it hit a roof with a whip snap crack and a great white silence trying to suck them up, and another was coming.
He ran after them toward the stairway of the next building, not liking it because it was old and made of sandstone. He tried to call them back, the rocket's scream louder and louder down over his head. I'm fucked anyway, he thought, diving down the stairs, and the son of a bitch hit somewhere else with an awful thud, shaking loose bricks and floorboards, the stairs shuddering, and another one was coming down, you could hear it over this one's roar, a sharp dying scream – it knows it's dying, wants to kill us too, why are they doing this? Jesus, where the Hell's the dog? And it crashed like a jet plane, the earth lurching, new bricks and boards tumbling down. This, he thought, is where you buy it.
“THEY’RE HITTING over by the Conservatoire.” Nicolas closed the window, pulled the curtain.
Samantha relit the candle. “And the Israelis are shelling the port.”
“Amal's got some Hezbollah cornered there,” Neill said. “Wants IDF to finish them off. That's the easiest way.”
“It's always bothered me to sit drinking wine while a few blocks away people are being hunted to death with high explosives.”
“Does no good to cry.” Nicolas shrugged. “Besides, it's lousy wine.” He drained his glass and poured another. “In a crossfire today between pro- and anti-Arafat Palestinians, this eleven-year-old kid gets hit and is lying wounded in the middle of the street. His parents keep getting shot at when they try to get him till finally the fa
ther dashes out waving a white shirt and they wait till he picks up the kid then they blow him away with a fifty caliber. Right in front of my secretary's eyes – she was pinned down too. So anyway, the militias pull back and the wife gets her husband and son, and others drag away the dead before they start to stink. And my secretary apologizes because she's twenty minutes late.”
“Sooner or later,” Samantha said, “we'll bring people together. But first we have to stop fighting.”
“It'll only stop when it's imposed from above,” Neill said. “That's what I learned talking to Layla. They'll never stop.”
“They've got the least to lose.”
“They've always had that – the least.”
“I agree, that's part of the problem.” Nicolas was rubbing his eyes, flexed his arms behind his head. “So what else did she have to say?”
“You'll never win them over to a negotiated settlement. Not till they lose a lot more people. Or if they lose Mohammed.”
“You suggesting this?”
“He may represent valid and serious concern for people who've never had a voice. It's easier to integrate him than hunt him down. If you do, you're going to get burned.”
Nicolas raised his hand, listening to planes coming in from the southeast, louder, closer. Neill wanted to get down on the floor but Nicolas and Samantha sat there as calmly as if it were a noise on the radio, of what it sounds like to get strafed. The jets swerved to the south then north. Mirages. You could hear them deepen and settle into their runs like a snake striking and there was a sharp snap and the sky lit up like lightning in a total white silence and awful bang.
“Allah!” Nicolas said. “How they are getting it!”
“Who?” Neill wanted to yell Aren't you afraid?
“The Palestinians down by the Conservatoire. Getting their poor ignorant brains blown out. That was a vacuum bomb.”
38
THEY CAME DOWN from the mountains to a narrow saddle between two peaks. Lower down the snow thinned then was gone, the soil damp and rocky, here and there bits of goat-gnawed grass. To the right a trail dropped down Jabal Nakiba toward the Christian side; to the left another path descended Dahr el Kadib toward the Muslim side. Distantly to the east Mohammed recognized the shapes of the mountains on the far side of Yammouné valley. “I was here,” he turned to her, “right here at this crossroads – less than a week ago.”
She tugged his sleeve. “Let's go.”
The path dropped steeply eastwards into Yammouné valley. They were in Hezbollah territory now and there were no more mines and no patrols. They came down past where the river comes pouring from a hole in the side of the mountain and down over the pieces of Roman temple, where he had knelt just a few days ago, before he'd known. They followed the goat trail down into sleeping Yammouné at midnight, the town silent but for a single lamb calling for its ewe and the soft cool chuckle of the stream and the smell of banked fires, oak charcoal, and fresh dung, of dry earth and straw.
His father's house was locked and dark. He knocked softly on the neighbors' door. “Yeah!” one whispered, down from the eaves.
“It's me.” Mohammed stepped back into the street, for them to see.
“You're too late. He's dead and buried, bless his soul.”
He didn't expect how badly it would hurt, nor the guilty sense of freedom. “When?”
“It's been two nights.”
“Where's the key?”
“Mother Zazid's.”
“Where's that?” Mohammed felt guilty not knowing where she lived, the woman who'd cared for his own dying father.
“Across the lake.”
Hens began to cluck. “Do you have food? For two days we haven't eaten.”
A woman answered. “We'll bring you something.”
Mohammed tried to climb to his father's sloping roof but his bullet wound was too sore so Rosa did it, tiptoed along the ridgepole and down through the hayloft. He heard her bare feet cross the tile floor; the lock squeaked open. “Welcome home.”
“Don't joke.” He stepped past her into the darkness smelling of cold ashes, dried tea leaves and old bread.
A teenage boy he barely recognized came in sleepily without knocking, with a candle, a basket of cucumbers, cheese, and bread, and a bucket of cold tea. “It's what we have.”
“May Allah bless you, bless his name,” Rosa said.
“You don't believe that!” Mohammed said when the boy left.
“Neither do you. Let's eat.”
It was gone too soon, leaving them hungrier. Beyond the wall the lamb had found its ewe, the hens stopped clucking. They undressed and crawled under blankets on the straw mattress where his father had died.
“To sleep in a bed,” she sighed. “Such luxury!” She slid her hand up his ribs. “I'm sorry about your father.”
“At least I had a chance to see him, one last time.”
“What did he want to tell you?”
“He wanted to make peace. The doctor wanted me to make peace. God wants me to make peace.”
“No one knows what God wants.”
“If I'd never come to see my father I'd never have been wounded and you would never have found me. I'd never have known...”
She tickled his ribs. “Known what?”
“How much I owe you.”
She snuggled closer. “Nonsense.”
He kissed her temple, the skin so soft, the hair so soft, the hair so fine. This is the flesh, he thought, that saved me. By which I am reborn.
THEY HAD BEEN SHELLING so long André could not remember, could not think. There was no air in this sweaty fearful cave where somebody had vomited and the sewer main was broken in the wall, and there comes a point, he realized, when you just no longer care, when the next shell comes down straight for you. It was coming now, loud and angry, won't miss this time, you already know how it'll feel, how it will blow you apart or knock the building in on you, squashing you an inch flat between concrete floors. Is that what happened to you, Yves? Is that why they'd never tell us?
In between the falling shells and the searing jet runs with their awful crunch of buildings and crackle of anti-personnel bombs you could hear the screams of people trapped in a building somewhere, more and more frantic, till either they got out, André decided, or the fire overcame them. Shells were coming down in tandem now, several batteries, shells hitting two and three a second, their constant, uneven wham-wham wham making the ground shake crazily. Things kept falling but still the building hadn't been hit. Maybe it's good luck, he thought, to hide under a place that's sure to come down.
“It's them again,” wailed an old woman in the dark in front of him.
“Quiet!” someone hissed in French. “Grandma hears something.”
But everyone could hear it now, the double-thrusting jets, the fiery air screaming over diamond wings, another Mirage on the same run, low over Christian East Beirut and up the hill into the West. “It's the big one!” someone yelled, and for two or three seconds there was just the jet's departing roar then everything crashed in, crushed in his head, sucked out his mind, into the white.
AFTER MIDNIGHT the shelling died off and Neill stood at his paneless window watching the last of the bright Israeli afterburners streak up into the southwest sky. Behind their roar was the constant crunching of flames; the Israeli Army had shut off the water into Beirut and now the city was burning, so hot the stones themselves were catching fire.
“Where are you, Layla?” he said to the night, remembering layl means night, that she was out there, somewhere, nearer than she'd been in years, almost within reach. Any night now she could be among the new ones entombed under some building, shot down in some street. When he was so close. What if, he thought, I could take her from Mohammed?
The sky was full of smoke, pink on its un
dersides from the fires up by the Conservatoire. Up there people are trapped and burning alive, Neill thought, and here I stand helpless by my window. That's what I've been all my life – outside the pale. Depersonalized, not able to give, not able to take. He thought of Nicolas and Sammy sleeping in the basement, wondered, does it screw up your sex life, all this bombing?
Come close to me, oh beloved of my soul; the fire is cooling and fleeing under the ashes.
Where are you, Layla?
39
THE AIR WAS AFIRE, impossible to breathe. Huge heavy concrete was crushing André's chest into the floor. Chunks of concrete jabbed up into his back. When he realized where he was, the terror made him thrash and beat at the concrete but he could not move it. You're down here forever, he realized. Entombed.
“Don't fight,” a woman whispered. “Uses air.”
“What?” He could barely speak, he was shaking so crazily with fear of this concrete slab on his chest.
“Calm down,” she said. “They'll find us.”
He took deep breaths, trying to calm. “Where are you?”
“Over here in the corner. The floor – or something. It's bent down on us. Where are you?”
“On the floor. There's a floor on my chest. Who's with you?”
“Two kids.”
“The others?”
“The building fell in. I think they're all dead.”
“How are the kids?”
“They're fine. I've told them exactly what's happened and that we must be quiet and save energy for when the rescuers come.”
THE LAND FAR BELOW was tanned and crinkled under the blue light, speckled with the shadows of small white clouds, the air sharp, cold and very thin. Mohammed could see the wide curving earth and every path and house upon it. He dived and rose on canyons and peaks of wind and cloud, perfectly alive.
The cry came again and he realized it was a lamb in the stables. He wasn't free, couldn't fly. The lamb was calling its mother and should be suckling – what did it fear? He took the Makarov, slipped from bed, opened the door and went naked down the corridor and stood in the darkness watching out through the window to the garden.