Holy War

by Mike Bond

  “Why up here?” he asked, breathless.

  “Better blown to bits than crushed – no?”

  “That day I saw you, I'd been two days pinned in that basement.”

  She turned and came into his arms and she was like a sister, a second flesh, no way he could prevent her. His body felt on fire. “I've got someone,” he stammered, feeling foolish.

  “Don't we all?” She reached up on tiptoe to kiss him, breasts hard against his chest, her mound shoved against his prick. She kissed him, beneath the softness of her lips the hardness of her gums and teeth, her mouth sucking him in, tasting like rose water, what her other mouth might taste like, her raw desire like high voltage searing into him, welding them, their bodies rigid together, hot together. I've got to stop, he thought helplessly as she tore apart his shirt, buttons pinging across the floor, another shell dropping in the street. Under her camo shirt and jeans no bra, no underpants, just her beautiful brushy cunt and lithe strong breasts with dark round nipples reminding him of bullet holes in the window frame of Anne-Marie's apartment. She backed up, naked, pulled him down on the bed. The building shuddered as another shell hit the street; she yanked down his trousers and took his prick into her mouth, licked it with the side of her tongue, and pulled him down on top of her. “Hurry!” she cried. “Goddamn it, hurry! Before we die!”

  THERE WERE MORE AND more sparrows. Even in this dark tomb of a room you knew it was spring. Even the mice knew, mating and battling frenziedly in the walls. If the mice had dug through the walls, Neill wondered, why couldn't he? If the swallows could come and go, chattering and disputing over food and nests, the little voices of their young peeping out, couldn't he? If spring was coming?

  As soon as he stopped shivering he'd crawl to the foot of the bed and stand holding the wall and try to smell the warm scent of spring through the flue hole. That'd be better. To know it was there. If he could climb out into that sun, lie on the sun-hot earth in the sun's bright heat, wrapped in many blankets – if there were only blankets – then he wouldn't be so cold. But no, you couldn't kill this malarial cold, it started in the bones and worked its way out; his soul was absolute zero and everything it touched turned to ice.

  He was going to die here. No blankets but this one thin rug. A bed of ice with a blanket of ice in a freezer where the breath froze in his lungs, and exhausted as he was he couldn't stop shivering and it made him even colder.

  Nice sun. Get out in the nice sun. Lie in the warm sun. Rise from this frame of wood and ice and slip down the long funnel toward the white-orange heat that was so bright and did not burn. Huxley's last words dying, “God is the sun”, and didn't Bev say that woman in the car wreck had gone out of her body and could look down and see herself but didn't want to die, and turned back from the light?

  He tried to imagine himself from above, an old sweating white-skinned man with his beard growing out gray, gray to the roots of his hair, his skin like pale cheese, cold and pallid. The old man sighed and his ribs puffed out and he took a shallow breath and sighed again. Neill noticed he wasn't shivering, but that was natural – the last phase before death.

  The last phase before death, when the body has given up fighting; the body knows what's best, the body wants to go up to the sun.

  Lying on his side the old man drew his arms up against his chest, hands folded under his chin. Then he was bones in a half-open grave, radius and ulna against the ribs, splintery little finger bones up under the jawbone that hangs open, teeth missing, in that last shocked grin of death. Then he was just dust windblown across the Lebanon hills that were not Lebanon any more, or anywhere, for those who named them named no more.

  And the earth drifted through glacial dust storms toward the reddened sun, fell into it like a windblown flake of sand into the sea. The great cold universe hunched its shoulders and lurched on, stars and constellations were born and died, swept away, till that which could come forth came forth no more.

  Yet he did not feel alone. This is what it is, he realized, to die. He had died, the earth, the sun. The universe had darkened into other forms and times, yet he did not feel alone. Did not feel without. Maybe nothing ends, he thought.

  How silly then to kill ourselves. Like a drowning man whose life passes before him he saw why he had come to Beirut – it had been the pain, the every day knowing Beirut was happening and doing nothing to stop it. Knowing Layla was here, the agony of being without her when she was in danger. Thinking somehow he might help, when they were all fine people and it was so sad they should kill each other. When pain for one hurt just as badly as pain for another. With every hand you raise against your brother you wound yourself. And because he had not been doing anything to help, he had been raising his hand too against his brother. To not help is to hurt.

  He’d come to Beirut telling himself it was to find out who had bombed the Marines, when all along he’d known. We all did. And saying it was to get away from Bev, to see Inneka on the way, and make more money from Freeman to support two wives, two lives and all the booze he consumed per week, per year, when that too was only to stop the pain. The pain of Layla, of seeing the photos of so many bodies on so many streets of the only town that had ever been his home.

  Layla who had stayed inside him since the last night in the little room up over La Croissant de Paris, with the souk smells and sounds and sun and moonlight through the damasked window, the little room that was gone forever now. Layla whose absence poisoned all else: Desire assassinates me, said her broken-hearted lover, Qays. What good does my heart do to love, not being loved? But was not Layla also his love for life, and her absence its death? But if we lived forever, dear Qays, we'd never love at all.

  The Layla who had moaned naked beneath him, thrusting her body up to his each time she came – she’d died long before the room in which they’d made this love had crashed in fire and dust. But she’d stayed like a diamond in the core of his heart, slicing it with every beat.

  Now in this little cold room with the blue wall and the stain of sun down the flue hole, both she and the boy he had been had died for good, like the room in the top floor of the souk, vanished under bombs and time, just another story.

  If the diamond was gone, if the past had died, could he now live? He woke and realized he was no longer shivering. He lay in warm light, unthinking, then realized there was no light, but he was warm, that the fever had passed.

  57

  “THE ISRAELIS ARE CREAMING YOU with these French laser-guided bombs...” André waited for Rosa to translate.

  “How would you know?” Mohammed's answer came back.

  “I've been creamed too.” André glanced at Rosa. “She can tell you – I spent three days buried in a cellar.”

  “I told him,” Rosa said. “Otherwise he wouldn't see you.”

  Mohammed spoke angrily. “He asks,” she said, “why are you here, when you all think we blew up your barracks.”

  “They weren't mine,” André answered. “France is always willing to put her soldiers' lives on the line. For nearly nothing.”

  Mohammed seemed all sharp angles and pain. André wondered what had made him so. Is that what war is – exorcising old pain? Thus making new? “I can deliver the scramblers in two weeks.” He sat back, watching Rosa from the corner of his eye. “Maybe sooner –”

  Again Mohammed spoke. “He still doesn't understand why,” she said.

  “I told him, I've got a score to settle on another side. You give me a hundred kilos of plastique, you get the scramblers.” He stood; settled his leather jacket on his shoulders. “I'll come back tomorrow; just send word down to the Museum to let me through.”

  Mohammed cocked his head strangely, pursed his thin lips into a narrow smile. Has he seen through me? André wondered. “He wants to know,” Rosa said scornfully, “what you think of the chances of peace.”

  “Peace?” André sm
iled back, following her lead. “Peace sucks.”

  BEFORE, THERE WAS NEVER enough time; he’d always hated to see it pass. Now, finally, there was time enough.

  Time to do his sit-ups and push-ups and one-arm push-ups and knee bends and running in place and isometrics against the blue wall. Ahmed, the boy who brought his single meal each day, with his cheery smile on his long dark-haired sunny face, would ask him “how's it going?” in his ruddy Bekaa accent, glancing back at the guard with the Uzi, and Neill knew Ahmed wanted to stay longer but didn’t dare, feared the Uzi.

  There was time to think about the little boy inside him, the one his father had beaten when he was drunk and ignored when he was sober. It was so easy, Neill saw, to turn out like your own father; true, he'd hardly ever hit Edgar and never Katerina, but when had he done much more than ignore them? Caught up in his own dear dramas, as Beverly had said, of love and death.

  When the little boy inside you grows up alone, he realized, there's no way you ever excise the pain, you just learn to recognize it, try to keep it under control. Like a man with only one leg, you accept what's missing and try to live without.

  There was time to think about Bev and what had gone wrong, kept going wrong, time to realize that with Inneka the only thing that kept them together was being apart, time to realize that with Layla he had been trying to ease the little boy's pain. But that you can never get deep enough inside another to fill the hole inside yourself.

  When – or if, he reminded himself – he ever got out of here, what next? Could he go back to the newspaper, seeing it now for what it was: like all news media an amalgam of useless preoccupations cleverly yet ignorantly proposed, a comic sheet for intellectual cripples who hunger to follow some simple story from day to day – which PM was screwing whom in one sense or another, the folly of importance, the illusions of politics and fame. When a society is well ordered it is only because each person down deep inside faces the sad child awaiting death, the mystery, the truth.

  Now, for the first time, without booze, without sex, he had accepted, he thought, who he might be. It was only justice that he was in prison: he'd been a fool, had taken Freeman's word against his own intuition, had craved more than he had.

  There was almost all the time in the world to think what might come next. But it was better just to live, in the song of the sparrows, the scents of spring down the flue, with the footsteps of his guard like the memory of death beyond the door.

  “MY FATHER AND I talked it over with the others,” Suley Al-Nazir said. “We agree only to a meeting, us and Mohammed.”

  “That's all he wants,” Rosa answered.

  “A neutral place.”

  “The problem is safety for both sides.”

  “He comes with ten people, so do we. No weapons.”

  With fascination she watched the corded muscles of his arms, the abrupt hard way he checked his watch, moved to stand. He was truly frightening, this one, no ass-kisser of peace like Mohammed. “What do you think about Palestine?” she said, her voice quavery, annoying her.

  He swung on her, as if somehow she'd insulted him. “You should know better –”

  “Obviously I don't.”

  “There'll be no peace till Palestine's reborn.” He yanked a cigarette from his pocket, lit it. “Any fool knows that – even the Israelis.”

  “And them?”

  He seemed more and more irritated by her questions. “There'll be no Palestine till Israel's gone.” His men kept coming in and going; she'd have no time with him, a pity. “Can you do anything beside ask questions?”

  “I can fight, when I get half a chance.”

  “Hah!”

  “You heard about the Life Building, behind the Byblos Cinema? Forty-two Christians...”

  He watched her, saying nothing, spitting smoke.

  “I was the one,” she said. “Alone.”

  His eyebrows raised. “You?”

  “Ask Mohammed.”

  “Allah!” He smiled. “With a few more like you we might win.”

  “We can!”

  “So why come round peddling peace?”

  “That's Mohammed. I have no need of peace.”

  “Is this some silly trap?”

  “No.” She stood, making ready to leave. “But it could be. If there were someone so hungry for peace it got in his way, he couldn't see clearly. It might be time to pass him by, move on to others with less divided minds.”

  “People who care more about Palestine than peace?”

  “People not afraid to win.”

  He snuffed his cigarette on the side of his boot heel, sat back down. A messenger came in and he glanced at the note quickly, waved the man away. “Or it might be time to entice me with such words into a trap of your own.”

  She imagined his thick lips rasping over her breasts, down into her belly. His jaw was like a blade, the muscles of his neck standing out like ropes. Is there any part of him, she wondered, that isn't hard? “Whatever I do,” she said, “I do for Palestine. Take that how you will.”

  58

  “THE MINUTE Mohammed's dead, I want Anne-Marie out of here.”

  Haroun turned angrily, bent over a map. “Just because she's a fucking Christian.”

  “Find a way. You want Mohammed gone, you make sure she leaves.”

  Haroun returned to the map, his back to André. “This isn't some military régime. You know the drill. She's not even on the Christian side of Beirut.”

  “I told you where she lives. Send some people, tell her you need her in Paris. Tell her it's for peace. A peace offensive.”

  Haroun was sketching in where he wanted the shells to hit, deep beyond the souk, near the Phoenicia. “You can reach that?” he asked the artilleryman.

  'Goddamn right,” the artilleryman said.

  “You send him up to Heaven,” Haroun told André, “and I'll see she goes to France.”

  “Let me do it,” the artilleryman said.

  “You've been trying for weeks!” Haroun snapped. “The Israelis, or the Americans – somebody – actually caught the fucker in an ambush two weeks ago and –” Haroun waited for the sound of departing shells to diminish – “even they didn't get him.”

  “I'm going,” André said.

  “Romeo!” Haroun called. Another artilleryman with a scarf round his head came in from the next room. He unwrapped one side of the scarf and André saw it held rubber buffers over his ears. “André's ready,” Haroun said. “Tamp that stuff in well, where nobody can see it.”

  Romeo switched the toothpick in his mouth from one side to the other. He had on a dirty T-shirt and jeans with torn knees. He looked like the kind of kid, André decided, who plays a guitar for coins on the métro. “This is serious,” André said.

  “So's Romeo,” Haroun answered.

  They went outside; the roar of artillery was too loud to speak, to think, to breathe; André ran for the Ford with Romeo behind him. They got in and André rolled up the windows. “I hate fucking explosives,” André yelled over the roar of more departing shells.

  “So do I!” Romeo answered.

  The dog was quivering on the floor and trying to cover its long pointed ears with its paws. “Don't worry, mon cher!” André yelled. “It'll soon be over.”

  “No, it won't,” Romeo answered. “Anyway, I'm not worried.”

  “I was talking to the dog.” André drove down out of the Christian hills into East Beirut, feeling uprooted and alone, vaguely aware of something out of place. He turned along the waterfront and stopped at the wrecked auto parts shop.

  “Give me an hour,” Romeo said.

  “My ears. They're all screwed up.”

  “You should wear plugs. Like me.”

  The dog ranging ahead, André climbed the hill to A
shrafiyeh and his hotel. He watched it for a few minutes but there was no one unusual around, and no way they would have waited this long for him to return. With the Jericho ready, and letting the dog go before him, he silently climbed the stairs, packed his few belongings into his rucksack, locked the door and walked back down to the waterfront.

  “I'll go with you as far as the Museum,” Romeo said.

  “No need.”

  “I'm headed that way. And just to show you there's no worry.”

  “Where is the shit?”

  “In the door panels and under the back seat.” He handed André the keys. “You drive.”

  “Damn shame.” André ran his hand over the Ford's chrome strip above the door, along the faded blue roof in which the dawn sky was palely reflected. Suddenly this car seemed more important, tangible, than man. He got in and cautiously turned the key, expecting it to blow. As if unwilling to participate, the car wouldn't start.

  “Hey!” Romeo called to two Phalange guarding the front of the auto parts shop. “Give us a shove.”

  Hesitantly they pushed the Ford and the engine caught at once. Stomach full of butterflies, André turned the Ford around and headed uphill. “I don't like driving it. Like this.”

  “Don't hit the brakes hard. Keep a steady slow speed. Watch for holes in the road. Don't pull up on the curb.”

  “Jesus! Is there anything I fucking can do?” Nervousness was making him swear, André realized.

  “Just blow the son of a bitch to Hell.”

  “Damn shame,” André repeated.

  “Don't let anybody ride in the back.”

  “I goddamn well don't even want to ride in the front!” André realized he was starting to sound cowardly and resolved to shut up.

  “Just you, mon cher,” Romeo said. “No one else to do it.”