by Mike Bond
“There's no war here. Unless you have a husband or a son.”
“I have neither. Neither do you.”
Her hand lay on the inside of his thigh. “But I want to. I want to have you.”
In Hasaoun, a lovely stone-paved village of twisting alleys and rock-walled orchards that reminded him of Briançon, perched on the edge of the grand canyon of the Abu Ali River, a man was selling vegetables from a loudspeaker van. Rubbish and wrecked cars clogged the flashing streams, a bullet-perforated VW bus lay at the side of the road. “We're closer to Hezbollah country now,” she said.
Still the road twisted and climbed, the icy crests of the mountain never nearer. The trees thinned, vanished. Higher and higher the road twisted past villages of flat stone houses with old people at their windows, farmers tilling terraced fields behind mules, the sea spread out below the hills like a dream, something remembered but never true, and he wondered, were we ever down there, were we ever in Beirut, in a hole under tons of concrete? If you could heal that, he thought, this would be the way.
Tall trees clustered in a crotch in the hills, the mountain wall far above. “The cedars,” she said. “These are nearly all that's left.” He parked the Ford by the side of the road and she led him over hardened waist-deep snow to a stone church set in the shadow of the cedars. Dry goat dung lay scattered over the stone floor; on the wall a plaque announced the visit of General Weygand, “Haut Commissaire de la République Française en Syrie et au Grand Liban”, on 26 September 1923. On a table gnawed by goats a book lay open, and someone had written “Little Jesus pray for us.”
Sun slanted through the mosaic of the cedar branches in the song of the wind; new grass surged up through patches of sun-warmed earth; needles, boughs, and cones littered the snow. The air was cold and thin. The dog scampered and rolled in the snow, barking with delight.
A wide-trunked cedar towered over a snowy ravine. “See!” She pointed to a rusty sign that said Lamartine and his daughter Julia had cut their names in the cedar's bark when they had come here in 1832. “They call them the cedars of God,” she added, breathless from the height, her cheeks flushed with cold. “Lamartine said the cedars of Lebanon know the history of the earth more than history itself … Imagine what it was like, up these miles and miles of mountain on horseback.”
He thought of the big old tree, in its thousands of years, humans living and dying round it like mosquitoes. A part of it had fallen, its reddish-chestnut bark the color of her hair, its sweet eternal odor of incense and myrrh on the sharp wind. Not knowing why, he took a piece of its broken wood and put it in his pocket. As if for luck.
The Ford coasted easily down the hills it had agonized up. “The Bible,” she said, “tells how the Pharaohs of Egypt sent to Lebanon for the cedar to build their ships and pyramids. For five thousand years we've supplied all the Middle East, North Africa, and part of Europe with wood. And now there's just these few, along the crest – little ones. Just think how big they once must have been!”
The cold had revived something in her he hadn't seen before, a girlish spontaneity, making him wonder what she'd have been like without so much grieving, for parents and a husband dead. “I love you so,” he said. “I'd give you up if that would bring your husband back. If that was what you wanted.”
She didn't answer, her hand on his leg as they drove down out of the cold to the pines and reddish umber soil of the lower hills. I wish I'd learn to shut up, he thought, the caves in the cliffs across the Abu Ali River reminding him that man has never been safe from man. Through radio static an old song was playing – Oh baby, baby, it's a wild world. He saw his brother Yves before he'd left for Beirut for the last time, pulling his big black Honda up on the sidewalk of Boulevard Montparnasse. Yves shut off the bike and stood stretching, unbuckled and pulled off his helmet. He came into La Rotonde and put the scraped black helmet on an empty chair. “We've waited half an hour!” Sylvie seethed.
Yves leaned over the table and kissed her, hugged André and sat, took a drag of her cigarette. “They're going to completely screw us, these emmerdeurs.”
“You're talking about our country's finest minds,” André said.
Yves drained Sylvie's demi and waved at the waiter. He looked hard at André from under his thick golden brows. “They're going to send us in there to hold hands with people who want to kill us. When we can't shoot back.” Yves waved again at the waiter. “What kind of world is this, when you can't shoot back?”
55
BACK IN BLYBLOS they took the street from the highway down past houses, shops, gas stations, and warehouses, on one side a line of huge sun-whitened Roman columns towering over the entrance to a garage, the hood of a truck leaning against one column while a man hammered it straight. There was a wall of great stone blocks half-covered with a torn poster of a woman taking down her stockings, wind-torn orange groves with apartment buildings half-finished and deserted rising among them.
“Turn here,” Anne-Marie said. It was an alley lined with yellow walls, the blocky heights of a Crusader castle visible beyond the rooftops. A cobblestone path led up wide eroded stone steps into the castle's grave calm, amid the distant hiss of the sea, the scent of oranges, sea grass, lavender, and moldering stone, with broken walls and stairways emptying on sky.
From a battlement westward spread the turquoise sea, rumpled with foam; before it lay walls of carious stone and toppled columns, purple geraniums, daisies, yellow buttercups, and blood poppies pulsing with warm sea wind. Between the walls paths wandered, the soil littered with chunks of terra cotta. He picked one up; it was shaped like an arrowhead, a heart. “They used them as fill between the stone walls,” she said. “It's a piece of roof tile, that.” She turned it over in his hand. “See those lines – for drainage.”
Warmed by the sun, it lay red and compact in his hand, still sharp along the edges. “How old is it?”
She glanced at the zigzag wall from which it had come. “This is the early Phoenician part. About five thousand years.”
Stunned he stared at the little chunk of earth that human hands had mixed with water and baked. His arm stung suddenly and he looked down, saw a mosquito and smacked it, leaving a bloody spot. Time seemed disjointed; he imagined himself the last man, in a capsule in outer space, doomed to live alone forever, alone but for a single mosquito in the capsule and if he killed it he would be always alone, so instead he feeds it with his blood and it makes more mosquitoes and he feeds some of them also and so, from generation to generation, is never alone. Is that love? he wondered. Does it feed on you?
“Imagine,” she said, “Beirut is only an hour away.”
He felt it stab him, thinking of the short sword, the gladius, of Roman soldiers. For close work. Why am I here? For you, Anne-Marie. For you.
Thinking of the Romans who had lived here two thousand years ago, in a city then three thousand years older, he imagined a centurion walking these walls, trying to understand the past, like himself a warrior in battles not his own, fighting to aggrandize the possessions of others at the risk of his life, the loss of all that love had made worthwhile. He imagined the centurion in love, thinking I was nothing before.
Hand in her hand, he bent to pick up an old coin in the dirt but it was the back of a machine-gun cartridge. They followed a path down to the bluffs overlooking the sea rippling over mossy seaweeded rocks and strings of kelp rising from the depths. The bluffs were eroding into the sea, baring Phoenician walls, and in them chunks of pottery and tile used as filler; he picked up the neck and handle of an amphora that lay on the sand, trying to imagine the person whose hands had formed it. Could they, he wondered, ever have envisioned this? He felt suddenly helpless before the mystery of time, thought what Anne-Marie had said: by dismissing what we don't understand or fear don't we numb ourselves to life?
There was no one on the beach, no one to see except a few fisher
men in their little blue and red boats far out on the swell; he and she took off their clothes and and swam through the translucent water that clung salty to their skin, seeing chips of tile and pottery caught in tendrils of swaying seaweed deep below. They made love on the warm sand, and afterwards as they dressed he noticed a shepherd boy playing a flute on the bluff. Nothing else was visible from the beach except the wind-rippled grass and ancient battlements, the fierce blue sky and the sea turning molten as the sun fell down upon it. We've gone back, he thought, thousands of years.
The hotel was nearly empty, the restaurant quietly echoing footsteps and the lap of the waves. How strange to sit at a table and eat fresh lamb and string beans, the way most people live, with so little fear. Through the restaurant windows they could see the fishing boats at anchor in the cove and the southward curve of the coast beyond, a distant smudge that might have been Beirut. He thought of Haroun's two suitcases of trimethylene trinitramine in the basement of the auto parts shop; it was like an unpaid debt.
Barracks, maneuvers. Drinking, laughing, fighting with the best soldiers in the world – he and Yves had done it because there'd been nothing in their lives.
The sun went down in splendor across the sea, and he thought of the moon rising before the bow of the Larnaca Rose as it brought him to Beirut, how little he'd known then, how much he'd learned. It's the only teacher, love, he thought, taking her hand. How sad she'd been, he could see it now, in her eyes, her face, like the remnant of an old tan, the darkness under the eyes, the stiff skin. Her worn hands. It'll all come back, darling, he promised. The happiness.
The wine sat untouched in her glass, like blood.
“HE’LL SPEAK TO YOU,” Rosa said. “I'm just a woman.”
There was a crackle of small-arms fire in the next street; Mohammed brushed at it as if at a fly. “How does he look?”
“Older than I thought. Lame. His teeth don't fit. He hates you.”
Mohammed nodded sagely, hands inside his cloak. Wrath rose inside her.
“That's to be expected,” he said.
“You think you can just infect everyone with this dream of peace?” She could not keep it down, the anger. “Al-Nazir, the Druze, Amal – they'll destroy you!”
“Have you really understood this war, Rosa? How it destroys us all?” He caressed the lapel of her gown between his thumb and fingers – like a child, she thought, sucking its thumb. “I think of you,” he said. “All the time.”
“You shouldn't!”
Even in pain his glance was mild, without fire. “Because you don't feel the same?”
“I don't feel. I've told you that.”
“Palestine has to be more than an idea, Rosa. Live it with your body, with your heart.”
“My heart's in Palestine. Not here with you.”
“Your heart's in the ground. Already dead.”
“Think what you will. You have me, what more do you want?”
“For you to want me.”
“Why should I want anyone?” She thought of Suley Al-Nazir.
His hand scurried from his cloak, caught hers. “Dear Rosa.”
Her teeth ached to tear his face, her nails to rip his eyes.
“Dear Rosa,” he repeated, “we've so little time.”
The firing died down; there was a distant thump of shells. “But when you die, dear Mohammed, don't you get automatic entry into Paradise? When I die, can't you drag me along with you? Just like Mary, the Prophet's servant girl?” She let her eyes sink into his; his were shallow, tremulous, furtive. “Or have you been fighting, dear Mohammed, under false pretenses? Not believing in Paradise?” She smiled, watching him shiver. “Have you been tricking God?”
His hand burrowed into her clothes, seeking her breast. She let it wander, annoyed to feel the nipple harden. Mohammed stretched along her, a cold hand timidly up the inside of her thigh, and she drifted back to Suley the son of Karam Al-Nazir, his hard muscular body, imagining his upraised angry prick.
ANDRÉ LAY WITH HIS LEFT ARM under her head, the sheet and blanket rising and falling with their breathing, the dog snoring at the foot of the bed. He could hear the whisper of the waves from the breakwater and a hiss now and then of lonely tires in a distant street, once the cry of a gull, startled, out of the night. Far away a radio sang, a cheap Arab dance swallowed and spat out by the wind.
The candle glistened in the windowpane but he couldn't see out, just the darkness beyond the glass, though it seemed he could look straight into Heaven, to the bottom of space, the utter blackness. He was startled again to realize how meaningless humans were there, the cold grave of love. It doesn't matter, he thought. Doesn't even matter that it doesn't matter.
Tomorrow after he dropped Anne-Marie off in West Beirut maybe he'd cross back over the Green Line and see Haroun, tell him it was no go, he could keep his plastique. Yves was dead; André couldn't bring him back. If anyone had killed Yves it was la France.
La France, that never turns against its own. Never deserts its own.
56
THEY HAD NO TROUBLE crossing back through the Green Line. André left Anne-Marie at her place and drove back along Rue Basta till he came to the street where they had been buried in the cave. He left the Ford on Basta and walked to it, but when he got to the building it had been bulldozed in and the one beside it also, there was no going back. He stood for a long time looking down, wondering who was still buried there, remembering what it had been like under the slab.
A dying sun crimsoned the ruined city. He thought of all the high explosives it had taken to destroy Beirut, of the people buried in so many cellars. When Anne-Marie’s father was a boy, she’d said, there had been a field of cows behind his convent school above Emile Eddé, and when the nun opened the windows the smell of cow dung came into the classroom. Now for miles beyond Emile Eddé were buildings and streets, some ruined, some waiting to be ruined. The field of cows would never come again.
He walked back up the street; a woman was coming down, carrying a rifle. He thought about ducking into a building but there were no buildings left. He stopped in the middle of the street. “You!”
She smiled; it warmed his face like sun. “My little Frenchman! What are you doing here?”
He glanced at her Kalashnikov, the silver bracelet on her right wrist, her breasts beneath the camo shirt, the lithe compactness of her. The dog backed away growling, the fur on his back raised. Will she kill me? he wondered. Does she know? “I could ask you the same.”
Again she smiled. “War makes strange bedfellows.”
It was there already, the invitation. She could kill me, he thought. He wondered without reason was she the one who shot at me? Why would she? “How's your Land Rover?”
“I never found the keys.”
I should tell Haroun, he thought: this is the one who killed the doctor. But it didn't matter, somehow; she was no less right than Haroun, the others. Why take sides against her? Even if I do kill Mohammed, that's personal; after that I'm getting out of this, it isn't my fight. “I got buried here.” He pointed behind him. “We'd just been rescued when I saw you, the second time.”
“And now you're back for more?”
He was silent, not wanting to tell her of Anne-Marie.
“You can get shot,” she said, “just being here. What brought you to Beirut?”
What side, he wondered, is she on? “I was looking for Hezbollah.”
“That especially can get you shot.”
“Do you know where the command post is?”
“Why?”
“I might have business with Mohammed.”
“He doesn't speak French.”
“Are you with them?”
“Nobody's with anybody in this war, as you've seen. Are you a spy?”
“I thought I might have somethi
ng he could need.”
Two Mirages went over, the noise making him flinch. She smiled good-naturedly, adjusting the rifle on her shoulder. “You're a virgin – couldn't you tell they were headed elsewhere?”
“Anybody can kill anybody here – there's never any reason.”
“So you're a weapons dealer, wandering from one side to the other?”
“No. Can you help me find Mohammed?”
“Not unless you tell me why.”
More planes were coming over, the ground shaking with their roar. “They're hitting the port again,” he said. He looked at the Kalashnikov. “Why don't you empty it at them?”
“Maybe I'm here just like you – on a pretext.” She shrugged; her every move was sexual. Why, he wondered, fresh from making love with Anne-Marie, does she excite me so?
“There were East Germans training mujihadeen in this street.” She looked up at the battered buildings, the sky through their gaping rooftops. “Are you part of them?”
“I'm not part of anything.” Shells were coming down in the port, Israeli, maybe – no, he decided, for some were falling short. “We should get out of this before one hits us.”
Once more she smiled, and now he saw something behind it, like the skull under the skin. “My place,” she said, “or yours?”
“My place is way across the Line.”
A shell landed, closer, the ground shaking, roof tiles clattering into the street. “Come!” she yelled, running for a doorway. Another shell came screaming down. He expected her to go down to the cellar but she ran up the stairs; all the apartments were empty, smashed, till she found a closed door on the third floor and kicked it in. It was a bright little apartment with a kitchen, then a hallway, living room, and bedroom. The dog crouched in the kitchen, quivering. She dismounted the clip of the Kalashnikov and slid it into her pocket.