Holy War

by Mike Bond

  SULEY TOUCHED ROSA’S CHEEK. His rough hard hand sent shivers down her spine; a warm flush radiated from her belly. She blushed, backed away. “I'm going to give you a radio frequency,” he said. “When Mohammed chooses his site, I want you to call us at once. There will always be someone there to take your message.”

  “You expect me to betray people just like that?”

  He smiled; again she felt the tremor down her spine. “You know it's not a question of betrayal. I'm asking you because I trust you, and not Mohammed. I want to make sure he doesn't surround us, betray us –”

  “I may not know. I may not be with them then. I'm not Hezbollah.”

  “I know that. Nor am I – we have something in common.”

  “And your father?”

  “He may not come either. He's getting old; it's between me and Mohammed.”

  “What is?”

  “Who holds West Beirut. Who is willing to deal with the Christians in order to gather our forces for the Israelis.”

  “And you will do that?”

  Again he reached out, roughed her cheek. She felt a little girl, protected and enticed. “My father would do that,” she said.

  “Where is he now?”

  “Killed by the Israelis.”

  “Perhaps we can average him for you.”

  “He and all my brothers.”

  “Yes,” Suley said. “And all mine too.”

  TWENTY-ONE DAYS Neill had marked on the blue wall, under the sink where no one would see it, each day scratching one new line with the handle of his spoon as soon as he'd finished his meal. That way there was no chance he would become confused and make two marks in the same day, as he may have done the first few days.

  Like a monk he had divided his day into distinct parts. Awakened by the sparrows' calls as first light began to sink down the flue, he would sit cross-legged on his bed and try to recall his dreams. As he recalled each new dream it led him to recall the others, hoping this way not to lose them, although he nearly always did, or they became indistinct and ran together, or only the most striking remained. For a while then he would bow his head and give thanks for life, not sarcastically nor with remorse, but simple thanks for another night passed, another day begun. He would fold his blanket and begin his stretches, first the legs, then the back, then the arms and shoulders, the neck which was always stiff.

  When his stretches were done, he would take deep breaths, trying not to think, though the thoughts always came sliding in, or overwhelmed him like a waterfall. Then he would stand, stretch once more, and begin his walk.

  To vary his walk he would switch from clockwise to counterclockwise, sometimes changing direction each hundred circuits, often walking randomly, a few times one way then some the other. Each morning he would try to do five miles. It was seven steps round his tiny room if he did not take big steps; each circuit of seven steps made about three yards, each hundred and fifty circuits a quarter of a mile. There were six hundred circuits to a mile, three thousand circuits to five miles, but he could only do a hundred or so at a time; they made him dizzy, no matter how often he changed direction. In two hours, though, he reckoned he could walk five miles.

  Exhausted, disoriented, and sweaty, he would sit on the bed and rest. He refused to lie down at this point because if he did he would fall back asleep and wake depressed. Depression was a constant and resilient enemy; each tactic that he used against it turned back on him; like a guerrilla army, he told himself, and he battled it with a combination of constantly changing tactics and total resolution.

  After he had rested from his walk, he would do his poetry lesson. This was simply attempting to remember all the poetry he could, first in English then in Arabic and German, scraps of French and Spanish. At first there was little he recalled, not even a full Shakespeare sonnet but only pieces:

  Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

  ...rough winds shall shake the darling buds of May...

  But soon they were coming back in bigger and bigger pieces; like the dreams, the more he remembered the more he could remember. Not only Shakespeare but Donne, Herbert, Housman, Gray, Shelley, Wordsworth, Eliot; and not only the English but Ben al Yayyab, Ziryab, the great poets of the Moorish enlightenment, and Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Baudelaire, Verlaine. By midmorning he’d finished his poetry lesson and locked both new and old away in his mind, and began his swim, which involved lying across the end of his bed and doing the breast stroke with his arms and a kick with his feet. This was very exhausting; after a short while he would be forced to lie on the floor and rest.

  After the noon muezzin's call, he began his religious instruction, first remembering as many suras of the Koran as he could and trying to see the meaning of each, its connection with the rest. This was difficult as he remembered so few; even Ahmed, when he asked him, would not enlighten him, glancing nervously toward the door where a guard waited stolidly with an Uzi.

  After the Koran he tried to remember the books of the Bible and anything he could of each; the Old Testament was much like the Koran, he found, and the New more confusing because the tale was told from so many sides.

  Religious instruction ended with a period of what, refusing to call prayer, he termed simple meditation: going beyond what he had remembered of the Koran and the Bible, he sat still and tried to fall back inside himself down the long corridor of time to a wider sense of life, the world, trying to see things in the whole, as a god might. As in his early morning meditation, he tried not to think, go beyond the flesh, the self, and as in the morning, he kept cycling right back to himself, an ant across his knee, a fly around his head, a clatter of sparrows above the flue.

  At the muezzin's fourth call he would go, as he termed it, out for a run, which involved a simple jog in place, at first a thousand steps, then two thousand, till by now he had reached ten thousand steps.

  Then came the time he loved best. Sitting on the edge of his bed, though never lying down, he would continue the recall of his life. First he had tried to remember every birthday, for they were the easiest, then other important days, his marriage, the birth of his children, changes of jobs, meeting every woman he’d loved, every friend. He tried to remember his happiest days and saddest, and what had made each so, every great meal, every marvelous night in bed with a new woman, the most beautiful landscapes, the loveliest songs.

  Punctually after the muezzin's last call Ahmed would bring him dinner. This he lingered over long as he could, sometimes tasting each grain of rice separately, each flake of bread. No matter how scant the meal he always set a bit aside to put up inside the flue early the next morning; no matter how hungry he was, and there was never enough, he kept this link with others, with the sparrows, his key to life.

  After dinner was free time; he lay on his cot and thought about his past, what had gone wrong and why, what if he lived he might improve. You can't amend old wrongs, he realized, the ones you've already done. But you can watch out for new ones.

  He thought constantly of Bev and the children, knew he was missing them horribly but refused to give in to it. He had accomplished, he now understood, the most important thing in life, creating a family, but he had failed utterly because he had not given them a stable loving life. What if, he often wondered, he and Bev like the poor Lebanese had all these years just been fighting their own unnecessary holy war?

  Despite the rhythm and determination, there were days when nothing worked; despair crushed him, he lay on his cot and tried not to think, not to live, barely caring to rise when he had to urinate in the sink or defecate in the bucket Ahmed emptied so faithfully each evening.

  Today he’d been thinking of the night club, Hell, in Bratislava. He’d gone there because the poster of the rat-man skull cleaving the flaming city in half had reminded him of Beirut. He had gone to Hell for the same reason he had come to Beirut, to try to heal h
is own divided past, much as he had hoped that by talking to Mohammed he could aid the Lebanese reconciliation. But his own divided commitments, not only to the paper but also, secretly, to Freeman, had condemned this act before it had been undertaken. If we are going to tread a mean, he realized, we must do it openly, have nothing hidden.

  He had worked secretly for Freeman because he thought he needed money but the money had been only to maintain his own divided life. He was married and had children with Beverly; what right or purpose had he in creating a life with Inneka as well? She like everyone wanted a deep love in her life, and her relationship with him ruined this possibility.

  Like Beirut, his own life had been cleaved apart; by ending up in what someone had called a Hezbollah hellhole he had despite himself been unified.

  Maybe Beirut and Lebanon might also someday be reunited. Or was the need to war genetic? The self-reinforcing heredity of the killer as survivor?

  He had finished his long-distance run; it was hotter than usual and he had only done six thousand four hundred and eighty-seven steps when there was a rumble of a car and the rattle of gravel; doors slammed, there was silence then the sound of a heavy sack being dragged down the corridor.

  Ahmed opened the door. Two mujihadeen dragged the sack into the room, forcing Neill back on his bed. It was not a sack but a sandy-haired man covered in half-dried blood. One of the mujihadeen pointed his AK47 at Neill and pulled the trigger; it made a loud click as the hammer came down on an empty chamber. “Soon,” he said, “you'll know what a real bullet feels like.”

  61

  AFTER THE MUJIHADEEN had gone Neill pulled the sandy-haired man up on the bed, unwrapped the barbed wire tying his wrists, washed the blood from his face and hair, took off his shirt and washed the blood from his chest and back. He had been punched and kicked many times; his front teeth were snapped off, bloody stumps, his ribs broken, one of them poking through the skin. He was French but spoke good English, better than Neill's French; when Neill asked him what had happened he just turned away, wrapped his head in his battered arms and stared at the wall.

  Ahmed brought supper early but the Frenchman did not eat. Neill made him drink water, tried to clean the infection round the rib hole in his chest and the bruises on his face and body. The pain of his broken teeth must have been enormous but the Frenchman did not say. To Neill's questions he would only answer that he had murdered someone and deserved to die.

  That night Neill spent on the floor, beetles and mice scuttling over him. The Frenchman did not seem to be sleeping but made no sound except an occasional sigh. At one point he seemed to be weeping but when Neill went to him he was silent, did not answer.

  In the morning, surprisingly, Ahmed brought a cup of coffee and several chunks of bread. Neill soaked the bread in the coffee and fed it to the Frenchman one piece at a time, while the Frenchman in a flat listless voice began to tell his story. The air was already thick; it was going to be a hot day. With two of them in the tiny room there was barely air to breathe.

  By the third day the Frenchman began to sit up, tried to move around in the tiny room. He was too big and too hurt; there was no way Neill could stay out of his way. “I thought I could have vengeance,” the Frenchman whispered, “and love too. But the more love I had, the less I cared for vengeance. I did it because that's what I came for, I thought. But really all along I came because I had no love. When you have no love you'll do anything. Nothing matters.”

  “You were just caught up in what you felt you had to do.” Now that he, Neill, had found a core in his own life, it seemed impossible that he could not help another poor soul seeking his.

  “She got punished because I wouldn't learn.” Tears were running down the Frenchman's face, around the scabs and bruises. “She must have gone back to her apartment for lunch, hoping I'd be there,” he said after a while. “She must have picked up the two girls on her way back to school, from their parents. On top of killing Anne-Marie, I killed the two little girls who lived through that hell with us, in the cellar.” His hands reached out in supplication. “Why? Why kill them now, after they've been through so much, after they survived?”

  “If God should punish men for their iniquity He would not leave on earth a single living thing.”

  “What's that?”

  “The Koran. That's the local view. Life is full of horror.” Neill sensed he was sounding sanctimonious. “We have to live with whatever we get.”

  André stared at him. “What if you lost the one you loved? What if you killed her?”

  “In a sense I did, once. In a sense, several times.”

  “In a sense!” André mocked.

  Neill nodded. “You're right. I'm a fool. The trouble with pain is that nothing alleviates it. Except time.”

  André swung his feet over the side of the bed, grimaced and stood. “And death.”

  THE PHONES WERE DOWN in West Beirut and Rosa finally ran all the way down Hamra and up to the Commodore and used the radio. As Suley had promised, someone was waiting, and answered on the first ring. “It's to be on the first floor of the offices across from the old British base east of the US Marine post at Lima,” she said. “That's where Mohammed wants to have it. His CP is going to radio Suley when we get there. There'll be ten of us, as agreed, in two cars.”

  “When?”

  “In three hours.”

  “Is he bringing weapons?”

  “Just in the cars. Not inside the building.”

  “We'll be waiting for his call.”

  The line went dead. I too, she felt suddenly, I too will end like that, the sudden numb buzz. Long before Palestine is won. She remembered a diary she'd written as a girl; after the Israeli attack on Mount Hermon she had buried it in an empty shell casing in the field where she had buried her parents. “I'm going to die soon,” she had written in an angry schoolgirl scrawl. “You who find this diary remember me, and that I died for Palestine.”

  They left West Beirut in two Mercedes, Rosa and Mohammed in the second. Something was going to happen, she could sense it. Each time a new phase had begun in her life she'd had the same feeling. I'm through with you, she said silently to Mohammed, who rode peacefully, not intervening in the others' conversations, his hands tucked inside his gown. Suley won't kill him, she thought, he has too much spiritual following. The Al-Nazirs, who are more committed than he, will just use him to their ends. And I will help them. He may be married to the Mother of the Revolution but she does nothing for Palestine; her revolution is based on the development of the individual, she says, but she's too dumb to realize an individual can't develop with a boot heel on his throat.

  62

  THEY DROVE SOUTH PAST THE RUINS of Shatila where the Christians had slaughtered the Palestinian women and children after the men had agreed to leave and the Americans had promised they would protect their families. When other Palestinians had joined those who remained, their Muslim brothers the Shia Amal had attacked the camps, bombing and shelling till the starving survivors begged their holy men for the right to eat their dead.

  Why, Rosa wondered, should we be the dispossessed and outcast of the earth? When we were, as this craven Mohammed once said, little more than thieves and camel stealers, one tribe among hundreds sharing the same roots? Where, how far back, were we divided, and why? Or are all humans divided, and tribes only an excuse for killing, as the Catholics brought their holy war, For the Cross – “Croisade”, to the Holy Land, teaching us the meaning of jihad?

  There was no purpose in such questions; unlike vengeance they led nowhere except to further questions. If I don't die, she thought, will I someday have a husband and children? It is incomprehensible; I do not even like the idea, there's something sad in it, defeated.

  The road leveled among a line of blasted façades; the driver slowed where the British Army base had been and parked before a small tw
o-story building. The men in the first Mercedes went into the building and came out moments later. “It's clean,” one said.

  Mohammed got out and strode up the steps. “Call them,” he said to the driver of the first car. “And tell them where we are.”

  He led them into the echoing empty room. He could not calm his rippling stomach, forced a heartiness to his voice, a calmness to his manner. It's nothing, he reminded himself, but a simple confidence trick. No matter how careful you are, there's always a way to trick you; if the Al-Nazirs did not want to talk peace, they would try to murder him here. If you want peace, he had told himself again and again, you have to risk death.

  It had been his father's dying wish to speak to him of peace that had brought him back to Yammouné, that had then led him up the mountain into the Christian ambush, that had caused the deaths of his three men and brought him to the Christian doctor who had first saved his life from the wound then saved it again by protecting him from the man whose brother had been killed. And in return for saving his life, Mohammed through the hand of Rosa had brought down death upon the doctor. He glanced back at Rosa, hard and beautiful as ever, and recently more so, more willing to cut him down, hating his dream of peace. Again he thought of the doctor, as if he could speak directly to him across the wall of death: you saved my life; now help me spread the vision you taught me.

  There was a long narrow table in the center of the room; one end of it was charred, although the rest of the room was untouched. This is a good place for peace, he reassured himself, trying to keep his fingers from clutching each other in the shelter of his gown. He saw his father as he had seen him the last time in Yammouné: his tousled white hair like an upraised flag of surrender.

  In fifteen minutes Suley Al-Nazir and nine of his men came, Suley striding in first as if he had no worries in the world, scorned all fear. He's like me, Mohammed thought, the way I used to be. Suley wore Israeli combat boots and camo, the ever-present knife on his calf, irritating Mohammed, for this too was a weapon, but then again, it was the kind of thing he would have done, five years ago, at Suley's age. He took Suley's hands in his and kissed him on both cheeks, feeling Rosa's eyes like knives between his shoulder blades. “Here we are, my brother.” He looked into Suley's hard black eyes. “It is time to talk of peace.”