Holy War

by Mike Bond

  The shelling started again in midafternoon and Neill ran home. He took the Black Label down to the basement and sat at Samantha's typewriter but could think of nothing to say.

  He finished the whisky. Finish this article, he promised himself, and you can buy more.

  The hardest was the beginning: “I wish you could all be here...”

  When the article was done, it was five hundred words that went from a statement of theme to detailed description and out the other side to clear conclusions and a final demand to the reader: make us stop.

  Like Icarus falling from the sky while the farmer ploughs his field and we all go about our business, the Lebanese are dying in their cellars barely a quarter mile from me. There is nothing I can do to help them but to write this. If we are the cells of a greater body then each cell must feel, share in, and try to prevent the loss of any other. As Beirut dies, so does our world.

  Feeling free of everything but sorrow he went to the window and listened to the shelling. When it seemed to slow he went up Emile Eddé to the Commodore and called the story in. “Wait a min'it!” the girl on the other end in London said, chewing her gum. “Yer talkin' too fast.”

  He tried to speak slowly and clearly but the line was very bad and he kept asking her to repeat it and that made her angry but finally she seemed to get it all down. “Can you switch me up to Editorial?” he said.

  “Editorial?” She snapped her gum. “This is the typing pool, honey. Those blokes've all gone home.”

  “DO YOU THINK there's something after this?”

  He was thinner, André realized, could slide a little toward her under the slab. “I'm a Catholic but I don't think there's anything more.”

  “I keep wondering, will I see him? My husband. Will I ever see him again?”

  “You'll see him, Anne-Marie. If we die, you'll see him soon, but I don't think we're going to die because the shelling's stopped again and soon they'll dig us out.”

  I'm starting to believe in them, he thought. On the boat coming from Larnaca it seemed strange that people would build a boat for others to travel on, perfect strangers. And now I'm dreaming that others will dig down into this mountain and find us.

  The tick tick was back and he wanted to slap out at it, silence it. What right did they have, wanting to be saved?

  Anne-Marie was talking to the two girls in a low throaty Arabic that made it seem impossible this same voice could speak French.

  “What did you tell them?” he said.

  “One's getting very feverish and we've nowhere to go, we're in our own wet...”

  “That's fine. That's who we are. Now we know what it's like to be human.”

  “It's not so bad, being human. I want to live, want these girls to live!”

  “What was he like, your husband?”

  “He was afraid all the time –” She stopped, spoke to the girls. One was arguing back, plaintive. “He was a photographer and had to go out every time there was a street fight, a bombing. He tried not to show it, but at night he'd tremble. All night beside me in bed, trembling.”

  “It's all right, Anne-Marie. It's all right.”

  “The bombings broke his heart and the fights scared him to death.”

  “Why didn't he quit?”

  “He felt if people saw his pictures of how awful the war is maybe they'd want to stop it.”

  You don't learn about war in the newspapers, he started to say, but there was no point. The newspapers only printed the nice shots. The bodies under blankets, trailing a little blood. Not the heads on bayonets, the women slit from jaw to crotch, the disjointed limbs of children. “I wish I'd known him.”

  “You don't need to say that.”

  “I don't have any friends like that. I wish I'd known him. I wish you had him still.”

  “If he was here, he'd dig right down, get us out.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “A car crash. In the rain. Hit by a truck. Going up to Dora for some meeting.”

  One of the girls was weeping almost silently; the other joined in. “Don't let them,” he said.

  “Why not? Why can't they feel what they feel? It's such an awful death.” She too started to cry. “It's such an awful death...”

  “After we go to the Casino we'll drive up the coast –”

  She halted through her tears. “It's bad luck, saying that.”

  “It's good luck. Showing God we want to live.”

  “Have you ever been to Byblos?”

  “When I was a boy. I remember ruins and cliffs going down to the sea.”

  “With the golden Phoenician city and the Crusader castle and wild poppies and the water so warm and sweet in the bay … André, it's the loveliest place on earth. If we ever get out, I swear it, we'll go there.”

  “And we'll make love in the tall grass going down to the sea, Anne-Marie. I swear that too.”

  “You shouldn't say that.” For a moment she was silent. “Yes, maybe you should.”

  “I promise you, Anne-Marie. I promise God. If we get out, we'll do that.”

  “What are you like?” she said. “Are you tall?”

  “Two meters. Almost.”

  “I'm one eighty. I was two centimeters taller than my husband, even in flat shoes.”

  42

  THEY CAME QUICKLY when they came – bulldozers shaking the earth, the concrete slab creaking over him. She kept hammering the wall and stopping and hammering and stopping, and someone hammered back.

  A shovel or pick, clanking the earth. Every time they stopped, she hammered. Every time they started again they were closer.

  “Tell them,” André called, “not to shake this slab.”

  There was the rat-tat-tat of a jackhammer and the nearer clank of shovels, then something crashed down on the slab making him yell out and the air was full of dust and he realized he could see. Gray grainy light making him blink.

  “André?”

  “Can you see?”

  She was calling out in Arabic, the same word, over and over. The noise stopped. A voice, a man's voice, coming down a tunnel from far above.

  “Please!” André couldn't help himself. “Please get us out.”

  “They're coming!” she called. “I've told them not to shake the slab. They're going to dig in from next door.”

  MOHAMMED’S MUJIHADEEN came to Nicolas and Samantha's back door and took Neill, sleepy and cold with a black hood over his head, to another car, not a Mercedes but a smaller, jolting sedan with an importunate whining engine. They drove across early morning Beirut, the streets already loud with trucks, car horns, boys hawking papers –”Jumblatt declares truce!” Strange how it goes on, he thought, in the middle of the war. Like new cells growing while you die of cancer. The farmer plowing his field. A jet went over, low, he couldn't tell which kind. Never, he realized, have I felt so bad. It's going to kill me, Beirut. Breaking my heart.

  They walked him up fifty-nine stairs and down a long corridor that turned twice. They stopped and knocked. “Who's that?” a man beyond the door said.

  “Your grandmother, dinkhead!”

  The door opened and they shoved him into a room with a carpet and the smell of coffee. There was a short-wave radio receiving in the background but he couldn't understand it. Someone snatched off the hood. The lights were bright. He rubbed his eyes. There were a lot of mujihadeen with Uzis. They led him down a corridor to another room where a lean, balding man with a full beard, dressed in a white robe, sat on cushions in the corner. The two mujihadeen who were with him got up and left. “Sorry to wake you so early,” he said. “Can we get you coffee or tea? Some bread?”

  “Coffee and bread. Might as well be sleepy with a full stomach.”

  “Sir down. We have half an hour.”

&
nbsp; “You're?”

  “The one you've come all this way to see.”

  “You don't look like your picture.”

  “They're all mistaken, the intelligence agencies. Even yours.”

  “I don't deal with MI6, the CIA –”

  “I hear from Michael Szay in Bratislava that perhaps you do. He warned me to avoid you.”

  “I asked him to find you because I hope to tell your side to the West. Michael doesn't want that.”

  “Why not?”

  “He likes selling you guns. He likes the war the way it's going.”

  “Everybody uses Lebanon to get something for himself. Britain, France, you...” Mohammed tried to settle himself on the sofa. “So tell me. Where do you think this war's going?”

  THE RESCUERS BROKE through the next basement and jacked up one side of the concrete slab an inch so André could slide out. He tried to stand and fell down. “Get her.”

  “We're fine,” she called. “Don't worry.”

  They tried to jack the floor up higher but it was pinned by debris above. Someone wrapped him in a blanket and gave him hot sugared tea and bread. They dug a trench out of the floor with the jackhammer but could go no further because the hose wasn't long enough. André crawled back under the slab, past the place he had been pinned, but could not reach her. The concrete was rough like sandpaper and cold as the bottom of the sea. He was sure it was going to fall on him.

  “Anne-Marie!” he called. She did not answer. Someone came in with another length of hose and a short skinny crippled man dragged the jackhammer further under the slab.

  “He's going to shake it down on us,” André said. The others were shoving pieces of plank on top of each other to hold up the slab.

  The jackhammer chattered, the hoses hissing, the generator in the street outside revving and dying down. The jackhammer noise stopped, the slab shivered, slid lower. Voices echoed under the slab, hers, the jackhammer man's. They grew louder, Anne-Marie's voice coming toward him, and he took her hands as she crawled out from under the slab, a tall, pretty, short-haired woman squinting in the generator lights, two little girls behind her.

  A camera flashed. “That's forty-two today!” someone said in French, slapped André's shoulder. The jackhammer man came sliding out, dragging his tool and hose.

  “Thank you,” André said to him. “Thank you, God!” He knelt and Anne-Marie with him. Hugging each other and the two little girls, they wept and prayed in French and Arabic to God and Allah for their salvation.

  “YOU DENY bombing the American Marines?” Neill said.

  Mohammed's eyes turned on him. Exactly like a hawk's, Neill decided. A blue-eyed Shiite hawk. Something else for Freeman to chew on.

  “A month before the American and French barracks were bombed,” Mohammed said, “do you remember what happened?”

  “Let's see, that was October eighty-three. In September?”

  “In September, as you would count it. When Ronald Reagan ordered the USS New Jersey, the John Rogers, and the Virginia to shell the Muslim and Druze villages in the Shouf. Have you seen what they did?”

  “I'm American. I don't dare go to the Shouf.”

  “They killed five thousand people, nearly all women and children. They killed my brother and his wife and their seven children and her parents, and half the people in their village. My brother and his wife were cooking dinner for their family when the shell from the New Jersey hit their house. And while my cousins were digging through the ruins, trying to find their children, French planes killed them with phosphorous bombs.” Mohammed looked away, and Neill had a moment of pity for him, realized he was trying not to weep. “You Westerners think because we are Arab we do not feel?” Mohammed said. “You think that the death of an American child is more important than that of my four-year-old nephew?”

  “I left America after Vietnam,” Neill said. “It hasn't changed. I'll never move back.”

  “Have you ever seen what a phosphorous bomb does to someone? Or a high-explosive shell the size of a car? If you had, you would understand why Hussein Musawi said that if America kills our people then we must kill Americans.”

  Neill reached out, his hand on Mohammed's wrist. “I'm not your enemy.”

  “You're a journalist. What I don't understand is why your newspapers won't tell the truth.”

  “American newspapers will never print the truth about what caused this war.”

  “But you are here representing a British paper.”

  “In Britain most of the newspapers are owned by very rich conservatives and staffed by people with little experience and lots of opinions.”

  “But yours is supposed to be the best, liberal –”

  “Liberal in England means seeing things through a cloud of preconceptions. Having a lot of ideas you've never tested because you went from university to a nice desk somewhere and you've never seen much of the real world.”

  “So you see why we've taken prisoners – hostages you would call them. We have no faith in your ability to police yourselves, to say the truth and act upon it. Knowing you are very sentimental and will raise a fuss about one person in a Hezbollah prison while you help to kill thousands of innocents in Lebanon, even let thousands of your own innocents die on your roadways, we've decided to act on your sentimentality by taking an occasional prisoner.”

  “So who bombed the Marines, the French paratroopers, the US Embassy?”

  “If you knew, would you print it?”

  “I'd try. But before I left London my editor told me he couldn't be even sure he'd print this interview.”

  “What would make him decide?”

  “If he felt the story had a UK draw. Said he's tired of hearing about Beirut.”

  “You mean he's tired of hearing about Arabs.”

  “My editor, like much of Anglo-Saxon England, scorns Arabs.”

  “And you?”

  “I scorn the human race.”

  “Seven years I've fought the Christians. I've fought the Syrians and the Druzes and the Israelis and Amal. I've killed people from across the sea and people from my own village. I've killed people whose faces I've never seen, and I've killed the friend who shared his goat cheese and bread with me at school every noon. I shot him in the face...”

  “I'm learning war and religion are the same thing. It's best to be what we want, not what we’re told.”

  “If you asked the Druze what are their terms for peace, what would they say?”

  “As we've said – their hegemony and punishment of Christian war crimes.”

  “No, I mean with us.”

  “They'd want you back where you were. Out of their hills.”

  “They would compromise a bit?”

  “Surely.”

  “What if you got a good compromise and came to us and we said yes?”

  “What have I got to do with this?”

  “You're one of the few journalists here right now who has any credibility with us.”

  “I don't have a whole lot, right now, with the other side.”

  “Why? You're certainly not pro-Arab.”

  “Westerners have a complete inability to understand this place. Anyway, nobody wants to hear the truth if it's inconvenient.”

  “Once somebody has said something to the papers it's harder to back out.”

  Neill shook his head. “You don't know the human race.”

  Mohammed smiled. “Talk to the Druze – Walid Jumblatt. He says he wants peace.”

  43

  THEY WERE CHUBBY, DUSTY LITTLE GIRLS with wan faces and long chestnut braids. “We're all soaked and filthy,” Anne-Marie said. “Didn't want you to see me like this.”

  “We're human, Anne-Marie. We're alive.”

  “Everyone else in the
building is dead.”

  “The ones who were knocking, they're still down there –”

  “I told the rescue team. They're looking.”

  Behind them the street swarmed with diggers in the maw of each gutted building, one building completely gone, only the stairway sticking up into bright morning. “Let's get the girls home,” she said. “Their parents will think they're dead. My building has a generator. If there's water we can heat some.”

  A Mercedes had stopped out on Basta. Palestinians, one a young woman with a camouflage T-shirt and tanned muscular arms, a black scarf over raven hair, silver earrings, a silver bracelet, a Kalashnikov. Two other cars were with them and they all got out and came down the street toward the flattened buildings. The Palestinian girl with the AK47 was familiar, he couldn't stop looking.

  You. No, that had been Christian East Beirut and this was Muslim West, and that girl had been Christian – the Lebanese Red Cross. He'd hot-wired her Land Rover...

  She walked past, glanced at him quickly, glanced away.

  “What's the matter?” Anne-Marie said.

  “Seeing spirits.” He looked into her eyes and there was no hiding there, just hers looking strongly into his. I could live with someone twenty years, he realized, and never know her as well as I know you.

  “CAN YOU REACH WALID, see if he'll meet me? Tell him I want his thoughts on peace. What he'd give for it.”

  “You're wasting our time, Neill. There's been a hundred peace attempts. A thousand.”

  “I don't give a shit about peace, Khalil. I'm doing my job.”

  “You've got this agenda always, ever since I know you.” Khalil Hussein's thick glasses twinkled, making him seem merry. He patted Neill's hand. “The betterment of man.”

  “Just like you, Khalil. That's why I came to you.”

  Khalil Hussein shrugged. “I can't help you. Nobody can. This is Beirut.”

  Almaza Pilsner, the bottle on the café table said. Produced in Lebanon with the assistance of Amstel breweries in Holland. Just a few days ago, Neill realized, I was drinking Amstel by the Amstel. Why did I come here?

  “I'll talk to anybody high up in PSP. Doesn't need to be Jumblatt,” Neill said.