Читать книгу Anti Lebanon - Carl Shuker - Страница 10

1	In or near ruin

He came awake to a dead and freakish still.

The total absence of car horns or the squeals of tires on the cheap Syrian concrete with which they replaced the civil war roads. No voices, no music, no laughter, just the hush hush hush of the sea.

Then it was there, what had woken him, echoing through the sky vaults. The banal, far-off dot dot dot dot dot. The old taxi drivers onomatopoeicize it for the tourists as the pah pah pah. Ellipses in the silence; the ... ..... ...

He climbed back over the fence into the Luna Park. The Ferris wheel lights were down completely. The office was closed up. Samir had gone home. He could see the main gates to the amusement park were chained and through them no one down the length of the Corniche.

Another flurry of automatic gunfire came then. This time it was answered, in a different, deeper note, bigger caliber, and not stopping. The whole clip spent wild and wrong, rolling away over the sea:

... ... . . . .

... . ... ............... .....

It was time to wake up.

Leon Elias—thirty years old, East Beiruti Greek Orthodox—is what’s known as a losing stream. Despite the country’s wealth in water, an undergraduate degree in hydrogeology doesn’t take you very far in the Lebanon. Leon Elias’s had taken him to an under-the-table security job at the Luna Park in Ras Beirut, an amusement park with 180-degree-plus views of the sea, but no roller coaster and little else—the largest ride they had was the Ferris wheel and it was dead. The night the Hezbollah comprehensively took over West Beirut Leon had no idea what was going on. Leon’s closest friends, Etienne and Pascal, who had, respectively, a marketing diploma and a law degree, had found better work in the last few months, the only work available, at a security company called Falcon Group Limited. They now had real blue uniforms, milita-resque insignia, a pay scale starting at US$300 a month, and they had a gig together in Minet el-Hosn for a stalled Solidere project, watching over the wasteland of the unfinished marina near the Hariri memorial. Pascal had a MacBook, a scooter, and a full $20 tank of benzene and Etienne had a richish family and a little apartment in Jtaoui and he was engaged to a good Maronite girl.

Leon Elias had no girlfriend, no company, a smock from a supermarket with the logo ripped off. He had his childhood room in his parents’ old house in Achrafieh, and a mostly useless bus pass—no direct route—so a two-hour walk home, past where his father, Abu Keiko, did real security opposite the Place des Martyrs. The Davidoff billboard across the Corniche read: LUXURY STARTS HERE, but its beautiful Arab girl’s hazel-brown eyes stared intensely away from here, over the amusement park and out to sea. The billboard was high above the empty tourist café where Leon still, even now with prices down out of season, could not afford the coffee.

Leon worked security for a Luna Park that was in bad shape. The bumper cars, some damaged since the car bomb and benzene-hungry, sat weird, scattered and silent, covered in canvas. Bars of neon on the Ferris wheel were missing or dead so even in stasis it seemed sometimes as if it were moving, or attempting the illusion of motion in deceleration, an optical trick: that reversed wheel-within-a-wheel. A rearguard action of which they all were guilty: putting on a cheerful face.

Welcome to Lebanon, we say, and smile our beautiful smiles.

They are often at their leisure when they die, these assassinated men. Men like the Phalangist Elie Hobeika, lady-killer, Palestinian-killer, whose fiancée was shot by the PLO at Damour in 1976, and who led the Christian militiamen into Sabra and Shatila in 1982 in long-displaced revenge, and went on to become minister for the displaced after the civil war in another kind of revenge, this one ironic. Hobeika was on his way to scuba dive, his car-bombed car full of wet suits and masks, oxygen tanks adding to the blast.

The car bomb that killed the Future Movement MP Walid Eido was before Leon’s time at the Luna Park. It went off in an alley beside the park, behind the beach club where the MP came to swim. The explosion killed Eido, his son, two bodyguards, two members of the Nejmeh football team practicing on the pitch nearby, four other civilians, and as well as damaging several of the Luna Park’s rides it destroyed its haunted house.

So many months later, there are no more ghosts there. All that is left is the scrap scattered in the haunted house’s concrete footprint. A shrapnel-pocked wooden ghoul peeking halfway out a barrel from which it will not rise again. A glowing plastic corpse whose light inside is dead, propped crooked in a coffin up against the wall. Their purpose and function now obscure, about them all in piles lie fragments of dusty engine, masks and pulleys, capes and curtains. Samir, Leon’s coworker in the evenings, a silent African ticket puncher and handyman, had his leg broken in three places by the blast and was on crutches for a year. No one minds that he stays inside the office. Many of the Luna Park’s rides were originally built in Italy fifty years ago and they are endlessly repaired: throughout the war, throughout everything. There is the Ballerina, a great torso of a woman twenty feet high whose fiberglass arms are outflung as if lifting her neck and breast into the brisk, warm Mediterranean winds. Her bright fiberglass skirts hold not secrets but little cubicles with seats and they spin and pleat to reveal not thighs nor petticoats but the greasy machinery within.

The original owner of the Luna Park built the non-Italian rides—actually built them, Frankensteined with scavenged parts, like the swinging ship, el-Safina, and the Russian Mountain, a miniature roller coaster of little cars on a gently undulating track inside a gaudy metal man-made maze. He built the full-size and silenced Ferris wheel too—an uncanny idealist, a dreamer, an entrepreneur and engineer, who made and maintained this tawdry, beautiful place for longer than anyone remembers. After the Eido bomb, he semiretired and brought in a new manager (a Christian who brought in Leon, in turn, as a favor to his father) and without him things began to slip, faster and faster.

What a trash, what trash . . . There are twenty-year-old punching balls with coin mechanisms that predate the hyperinflation. A spar would cost as much as dust. The stitching on the balls is burst, the stuffing leaks out, and the leather is so weathered they hurt to hit. Patchy Astroturf carpets the areas under the children’s rides, as dirty and manged as the grass it might have replaced. The last properly maintained and functional ride left uncovered at night in May before the season starts is right in the middle of the Luna Park, surrounded by ribboned-off attractions that aren’t attractive anymore. It is a child’s carousel, a small, undecorated roundabout with five flaking horses and only ever turned on when requested, because of the price of benzene.

“Security,” for this, in the off-season, in Beirut, is a joke. When the new manager finishes his half-day at half past four, it is left to Leon and Samir to watch over the park as the sun goes down and the clouds go pink and purple and mauve, till darkness, till midnight, for that possible visit of three hopeful children a night. Leon is supposed to “walk the perimeter” for half an hour. Watching the scooters heading up to the Raouche. Watching for rich girls walking to their dates. The rich men coming to train at the sporting club. Watching bankers’ wives with bandaged noses walk their little dogs and get some exercise—in the rush on plastic surgery in conflict when there’s no society. That night, as any other working night when it was warm enough, he climbed the fence and went down to the rocks and smoked and ate his chicken sandwich from Makhlouf’s. He drank his thermos coffee and listened to music as the sun set down the Mediterranean, like the last man in the last job, security for a dead Luna Park in a city about to fall.

At the Luna Park it was a guilty, wordless arrangement Samir and Leon had after the boss left: to keep out of sight as much as they could after half past four (as everything is kept shut down unless requested, for the benzene, anyway), and not invite too many random requests for visits by suggesting the Luna Park was much manned or secure. Morale was bad. They work together in silence, getting away with it, leaving on only the lights or what was left of them. Samir smokes in the corner of the office invisible from the street, his bad leg propped upon a stool, and ashes his full strength Marlboros in the corner of a cardboard box with a meditative caress, wiping off the butt’s protruding waste on the rim like a skim of paint from a brush. Leon had left him there thinking, feeling the aches, filling his box of ash, and went out on the rocks to look west, watch the sea.

It was May so he could stay out there later and later. He didn’t know anything much, really, about Samir. If Samir knew about him, or his sister, how she died, he didn’t say, so, for a time, maybe four or five months, this thing they had: Samir’s injury, Leon’s languor: It had been okay. Summer was coming, meaning more Arab and Euro tourists despite the tensions. Pale Samir was okay, and so was their silence and their arrangement, but it was this situation that started Leon’s real troubles. Out there alone, among all the cigarette butts and plastic bags and pistachio shells, huddled in a Leon-shaped hollow in the rocks, he had listened to his iPod on loop and fallen asleep. It only took a couple of hours. Asleep, he missed his phone, and missed the greater silence falling all around.

And then the shooting had started.

A fat-bladed helicopter roared down the coast, an old Lebanese Army Iroquois by the sound. He jogged home from the Luna Park down the middle of the empty lanes of the Corniche in the dark. The sea whispering to hush, love in the mossy lava rock beside him. The palms rustling above. The gunfire echoing up in the city. Whole floors of the apartments and the hotels around him in darkness. The salt-stench of the effluent pouring into the sea from the buried river in Ain al Mreisseh where the fishermen gather for pickings rich.

Leon was good at running quietly. He saw and skipped the patches of gravel, leaped scars on the road that would audibly reveal his footfalls. Scared, knowing that running, as well as standing still, made him a target for a chancer on a moped with a handgun making the most of the conflict. Along the waterfront he ran east, past the Hard Rock Café to St. George’s, past the Hariri assassination rubble and holes, the cordoned-off hotel, then Downtown, to the Place des Martyrs and to the Christian East, and to his father.

Leon Elias’s sister was killed in front of him because, his father would later say ad nauseam, she was too good, she was too strong, she had too much potential, the sun was white as her skin, the sea her eyes, and so forth, and everyone knew her and Leon knew his father felt, she was just like me.

She was killed by three Christian assassins in the street outside Makhlouf’s, while inside Leon crouched behind a plastic chair pathetic, holding her chicken shawarma. Killed for her strength. Abu Keiko’s hair went white overnight and now around his mouth the fringes of his beard and moustache are yellow with nicotine. He repeats himself, tells people, almost gleefully, his hair went white “in one second.” But Leon was there; it took the terrible day and a night. Leon was also there when his uncle Joseph came to the old house, saying he knew the men who had done it. They were from the newly released Bcharrean Christian warlord Ja’ja’, were hired by him or loyal to him. Leon’s uncle knew who the men were, or said he did and seemed to, and he brought the SIG Sauer for his father to conduct his reprisal. Abu Keiko slowly shook his bent white head.

Keiko in militia fatigues sitting in the road outside Makhlouf’s, the same age Leon is now, dragging herself backward on the heels of her palms away from the puddle and rags that was her foot, screaming at it. Neither his uncle nor his father looked at Leon; they knew, he knew, they all knew. What would or could Leon do? Leon wouldn’t, Leon couldn’t. But old ex-militia man Abu Keiko said there would be no reprisal. We are Christian, he said, and here in my heart is love.

Across the road from Abu Keiko’s security post at the rich Kuwaitis’ apartments opposite the Place des Martyrs, Leon has watched his father talk about her to the Lebanese Army soldiers who all “know” him and “knew” her and gather and sit and smoke in the glow of his charisma, bored on the overnight details. His papa always has his nunchaku tucked in his belt (three-times jujitsu champion of Lebanon during the civil war; when? who remembers; who knows now) and he never sits down unless alone (like he’s protecting the soldiers). He makes the arms-akimbo gesture when Leon knows he’s saying, “She was stro-ong.” The soldiers nod soberly and look at Abu Keiko’s knees. Leon’s father’s post is only two blocks from Makhlouf’s where she was killed. The soldiers love him like a mad old grandfather; they know him, as Abu Keiko is fond of saying, and he knows them.

But they don’t see his coldness or his true oldness, they don’t hear his screams at Leon’s mother at night or feel his steel; although they might know what in the past he was capable of, what he has done. The balaclavaed assassin walked directly down the middle of the street as Keiko tried to drag herself away and he fired the weapon down at her barely looking and continued walking to his car and did not slow nor slacken his pace. The final shot that killed her was defined in the inquest as “a direct penetrating injury to the heart.” Ja’ja’ called for it in that terrible year because, like Abu Keiko had been back in 1989, she was with his rival, the Christian general Aoun, newly returned to Lebanon from his fifteen years of Parisian exile, and his Free Patriotic Movement party, the FPM. A lieutenant in the Lebanese Army, she had been favored and rising and her influence had been growing in the neighborhood. Ja’ja’ had perhaps tried to recruit her and been refused.

Leon’s father makes US$400 a month as a security guard. Ja’ja’s men came to Abu Keiko two years after Ja’ja’ had his daughter murdered and offered him that much a week to work for him. Abu Keiko had told Leon that Ja’ja’ asked and that he’d turned him down. Leon didn’t believe his father for a long time, that Ja’ja’ would make that offer, but now it seems so ridiculous, so coarse and cruel, of course it must be true.

Ja’ja’ funds surgeon’s training in heart bypasses at the Orthodox hospital. Hezbollah provide heart pills and blood. Of the Hezbollah, Leon’s father likes to say, “They are for the people and I love them.” But he has a bypass, and has Ja’ja’s money in or near his heart, even so.

Between their two massifs Leon is what is known as a losing stream. What you see is what is left of him. In the words of his hydrogeology text: Secretive, irregular, branching. Perched in the epikarst; lost in the swallow holes. Coursing through the karst aquifers of the anti Lebanon, I deplete as I run.

Up in Hamra, but that far east already was impossible, surely?—so close, maybe farther, with the echoes it was too hard for him to tell—he could hear the automatic gunfire thickening, clotting, periods without pause..... .. .. .. . . . ...... ... ...............

Tout Beirut may have been calling, but not him with only two U.S. dollars’ credit on his cell phone and only a few thousand utterly deflated Lebanese pounds in his pocket. The newly restored Downtown was empty. There were only the Lebanese Army APCs and soldiers reinforced at all the spokes of the wheel of new streets and unfinished alleys leading to the pristine Place d’Etoile and the Serail, the wheel’s diameter a ring of rolled-out razor wire.

He slowed to a walk and greeted the first soldier he saw.

“What’s up? It’s Hezbollah? Amal?” Leon said as he came near.

The soldier stared at his face for a little too long. Then he shrugged amiably, hitched his M16 and boredly made two fists, sparring with one another.

Leon nodded as if a little skeptical or just cool, and walked past him. The U.S.-made Vietnam-era APC was mounted with a massive but ancient Russian antiaircraft gun and parked sideways forming a gate in the middle of the street’s razor wire barrier. The three soldiers sitting around the big weapon looked down on him silently.

The empty boulevard ahead gently dipped and rose. The concrete barriers were pitted and paint streaked with old fights and accidents. They had been moved from the sidewalks to the parking bays, narrowing the road to a single lane. There was the fundamental-sounding clump of an RPG, which told him that what was happening had spread, and was in more than one neighborhood, stretching west-east but back in the city. The further he got from the sea the closer the sounds became. At the Place des Martyrs, the Green Line of wasteland-crumbled concrete began, the blocks of dead yellow grass littered with rubble and trash up to the car parks. The Green Line known thus not for any UN ruling, but for the quiet explosion of growth in the streets in the war. A hundred meters wide and nine kilometers long dividing the promontory between east and west, sniper deadly no man’s land: a silent forest forming around the skeletal buildings. Under Hariri the remains—the old theaters, the machine gun nests, the tunnels and shops and blood-soaked stone and canvas—were bulldozed into the sea at the terminus of the Green Line to form the foundation of the new marina-corniche. No man’s land reclaimed now lying doubly deserted in the aftermath of Hariri’s death, and diffidently guarded by Leon’s friends, with their law degrees, their marketing diplomas.

The gunfire shifted emphasis and pitch. Either the open areas were amplifying the sounds or the fighting was genuinely closer. It was less cracking than popping now, and there were no cars anywhere. No movement and little light, and above him the low poison-green clouds came in softly in strips like ragged sand dunes in a desertified sky over the wasteland to Mount Lebanon.

Leon felt a sick sort of relief approaching the Christian East and rue George Haddad; its unacknowledged and unspoken border, still in conflict de facto if not de jure. The Kuwaitis’ apartment complex that his father guarded six nights a week looked emptily back over the Green Line toward the block comprising the Roman ruins, the Hariri mosque, the Orthodox cathedral, the Maronite cathedral, and the Virgin megastore. Hariri’s monument to Lebanese solidarity past and present and future, now utterly empty. The sensitive Kuwaitis had all left Lebanon a day ago when Aoun declared the general strike. Everyone knew it was trouble. As Leon cut across, down to his left at the intersection of Haddad and Avenue Charles Helou, there were more figures than usual outside the headquarters of the Christian Maronite Phalange party, a large tan building archer-windowed like a citadel, beflagged with the Phalange cedar, presiding over the port. Leon could see thickset Phalangist men on the rooftops watching for developments, watching him cross the square and the Green Line too.

At the intersection by the Phalange HQ was a Lebanese Army APC with, pointedly, no AA gun. There was a jeep beside it and twenty men at least watching the Phalangists back—in the dim and the scattered streetlights it was hard to tell, but they were probably police not army. As if the army would or could, without falling apart, stop the Phalange or the Lebanese Forces anyway, if they came out in anger. In the old days the officers were all Christians trained at Saint-Cyr and the military écoles of France; the soldiers were Sunni, Shi’a, Druze. When fighting goes sectarian, uniforms come off and soldiers go home to their tribes. Everyone knows it’s this way and it works. Farther up George Haddad was another APC and jeep, glowing orange-green under the streetlights like pollution or strange sweets, by the Paul Café on the rue Gouraud corner.

As he got closer he walked slower. He held his empty hands out from his sides so they would know he was unarmed. He could see the silhouette of Abu Keiko under the trees with a fat sergeant and some soldiers, laughing. Behind his father in the light sat one single plastic chair. Beside it was a paper bag and in it Leon knew was the fruit his mother packed for them both today, those black little bananas.

He crossed the road and approached the apartment terrace as the gunfire rose again back behind him. Another flurry of ellipses in the rolling stillness over the cape of Beirut, like bad memories in sleep, pockets of panic.

The fat sergeant was watching him. “All quiet?” the sergeant asked and didn’t offer him his hand or cheek. Abu Keiko didn’t speak, smile, or frown—his gray face was composed and still. As if preparing for a task that required all his faculties, a task not done in a while, and missed.

“All quiet,” Leon said. The sergeant nodded and half-turned back to Leon’s father. Three young soldiers, ten years younger than Leon at least, sat on the terrace’s lower step, with the butts of their American M16s between their feet, watching him.

“All quiet,” Abu Keiko finally spoke, without any tone of recognition or of intimacy, and with all the soldiers around him Leon realized what the expression on his face was like. It was the same as when he’d watched Keiko at rallies or talked politics in the kitchen with her in front of guests. It was pride, being with the soldiers again. He felt good with them.

“Go home and take care of your mother,” Abu Keiko said, and there was a hint of a private look, then quickly gone.

The sergeant said, “The fighting’s along the Corniche Mazraa. The airport road is still blocked.”

Leon looked at the sergeant and after he spoke he didn’t look at his father.

“Well there’s nothing to do and nowhere to do it. I think I’ll go and get a drink.”

The sergeant laughed and one of the soldiers smirked.

“Have one for us then.”

As Leon headed up the hill to rue Gouraud it was strange. There’s a feeling, they say, of eyes upon you, but there’s another feeling too, for which there is no cliché.

Leon could sense without seeing his father turn away from him, this night of all nights, and away over the waiting soldiers down George Haddad to the port, where out at sea there was maybe a storm coming. At the Luna Park, Leon had watched the clouds pile atop and rise in mauve and rotten apricot towers before the setting of the sun.

Rue Gouraud was dead. Of more than fifty bars honeycombing either side of the street he could see none were open. African waiters were outside Sinners hosing down the empty plastic chairs, and on a street jammed every night with Hummers and Audis and Lamborghini Diablos there was not a single vehicle moving.

Leon walked six or seven blocks to the fork at rue Pasteur near the Electricité du Liban. There the gunfire was distant, and the echoes were fractured and blunted by the buildings. Warmed by the walk, he took off his work smock. There was a cromp and a long high rumbling, and this last, he realized, was actually thunder following the RPG. A whispering bleak night of ghosts and soldiers and white-haired fathers, no one to talk with. He turned back to check the side streets—there was someone he’d seen leaning on a car and maybe he was a valet, so maybe there was something open.

At rue Youssef el Hani he saw him again: a young man, thickset, a black T-shirt, too big for a valet; he’d crossed the street. Leon approached him, walking openly in the middle of the road under the lights.

“Hey habibi, do you have a weapon?” was all the man said.

“No.”

Leon raised his arms and the bouncer frisked him fast and firmly. Then he opened an unmarked door to a staircase.

“What’s the cover?”

But the bouncer grinned skeptically and shut the door on him.

At the foot of the stairs the walls were papered in leaflets. A boy behind a school desk greeted him in French and waved him inside. In the tiny underground club, not counting the barman or Leon, there were only five people: two couples, a dark ponytailed businessman with a Filipina prostitute a foot taller than him, and a Chinese boy and girl, and at the end of the club was a DJ at a laptop and two decks playing something clicking and hissing.

Leon ordered the cheapest beer, local Almaza, and sat on a stool away from the bar, watching the DJ. Maybe he was good; what did he know. Was this one local or was he even famous and on tour, stuck in Beirut playing to him and a barman while the Hezbollah turned their guns on Lebanese in the streets a kilometer away? Leon had already decided to get fucked up. He finished the beer fast, waved for another, lit a cigarette. The DJ was his age, tall and bearded and intelligent looking, completely absorbed, watching the decks and levels on his laptop, not glancing up, shifting his headphones, not even nodding.

Leon had finished four beers when the DJ finished his set and left a track on repeat and went to the bar where the barman gave him a beer. The prostitute said something to the DJ and she laughed and he smiled and shrugged kindly, sipped his beer, looked around. Leon nodded to him.

“Good set,” Leon said.

The DJ looked at him, then in a practiced gesture opened his wallet and placed an old and creased card on the table. It had a letterhead from the military hospital destroyed ten years ago. In Arabic, French, and English it read:

My name is Frederick Zakarian and I have a form of speaking disability called echolalia where I may repeat your turn-final lexical items as a form of conversational repair. But I understand you and we can talk normally. Please be understanding.

Zakarian smiled and said, “Good set. But not a very big crowd tonight.”

“Bad timing, I guess, habibi,” said Leon.

“Timing, I guess, habibi,” Zakarian said and smiled again and checked Leon’s lips. “So what are you doing here then?”

“I got off work and this was the only thing going. You’re finished?”

“You’re finished.” He was local, a strongish Armenian accent. “I’m finished.”

“Things are a bit frisky. Do you live around here? Bourj Hammoud?”

“You live around here? Bourj Hammoud, yes,” he said. “But I work here.”

“So you can get home?”

“You can get home?” Zakarian thought about this and then laughed. “You? Can?”

“Yeah, I can. I’m in Achrafieh. Leon. Leon Elias.”

“Leaning, a lie is. I’m Frederick.”

There was a long pause between the repeat of what Leon had said and his replies. As Zakarian spoke he seemed to be thinking hard about something else.

“So you make a living off this? Are you famous?”

“No, I have a job.”

“What’s your job?”

“Your job,” he said. “I am a jeweler.”

Leon noticed he wasn’t wearing any jewelry.

“You make your own? Like a designer?”

“I make your own like a designer, no . . . I’m . . . ” He looked slightly pained as if this was always difficult to explain. “I work on pieces in a workshop down here in Gemmayzeh. In the Demolished Quarter. No one knows it’s there.”

“Wow. Expensive?”

“Wow, expensive, yes, some pieces for some wealthy people.”

Leon could feel himself getting elevated with the alcohol, so he let the silence last a little. Zakarian began to smile. He’d decided to talk about himself.

“It’s very frustrating because ... we work on these pieces now, a set, necklace, earrings, cuff links. . . . It’s incredible, very challenging work. A million-dollar set. They are finished now, just yesterday, and we cannot get them out. The buyers are from Iran and aren’t in Lebanon and can’t get in to see them. You know the airport’s closed tonight? And the road north is closed, and the Beirut–Damascus highway is closed too. The pieces are stuck here.”

“The Damascus road is closed?”

“The Damascus road is closed. So we won’t get paid. For weeks. And these gigs don’t pay. And it’s going to get worse.” He was grinning, excitable now. “This set is named after a figure in Persian mythology called the Peri. A supernatural being descended from fallen angels. She is excluded from Paradise until a penance is accomplished, the story says. She is a beautiful and graceful girl.”

“You should steal her. Sell her.” Leon smirked, then stopped himself. “Sorry.”

“You should steal her.” Zakarian watched Leon’s face as he repeated his words as if he were speaking a foreign language, and he laughed far too late. Then he said, “My boss says the feeling is like you’ve built a Ferrari but you can’t drive it.”

“I don’t know anything about jewelry.”

“Anything about jewelry? Well, for this piece we have some exceptional super-ideal Ugandan stones with incredible depth and color sourced by the buyers. They’ve got really fine taste. We are doing a hearts and arrows pattern that’s extremely intricate and involved. We’ve been working on the set for six months or more.”

“Heart-shaped diamonds?” Leon was trying to keep his replies short. He could hear the preformulated, received patterns in Zakarian’s speech. There was something about his vulnerability and Leon’s mood that made Leon want to be cruel. He resisted it. Zakarian was starting to speak faster.

“Heart-shaped diamonds.” He seemed to like that and smiled as he shook his head. “Heart-shaped diamonds, no, the facets are cut so that there’s an appearance of alternating hearts and arrows, with a very fine and radical depth to the pavilion that’s not been done much before except maybe in Japan where they pioneered a machine called an icescope—”

Leon signaled to the barman for two more beers, and offered Zakarian a cigarette that he took without looking up. The Armenian kept talking, confident now, borrowing someone else’s words, someone else’s conviction.

“—physics and the purity, and it’s taken a long time and now the Hezbollah control the airport and the airport road. And you know what my boss says? I don’t know anything about jewelry—”

The little repetitions could occur at any time, as Zakarian pieced together the things he wanted or thought he ought to say.

“—the Shi’a get proportional representation and Iran gets a vilayet on the Mediterranean he says all this is all gone, this is all gone,” he waved generally at the club, “the bars, the music, the jewelry, the surgery, the clothes, broadband, kiss it all good-bye, he says.”

“And the Damascus road is closed? That’s unbelievable.”

“The—the Damascus road that’s unbelievable. No, no—”

Leon was half-enjoying, half-dreading what would come as he watched the autistic Armenian getting drunk too fast and quickly, visibly losing inhibition. Zakarian was shaking his head as he talked quicker, not even noticing Leon’s reaction.

“—that is the . . . the Future supporters—they say they’re stopping any fighters coming in from Syria to help Hezbollah in the Bekaa Valley .. . but they say they’re totally disorganized over there and what they’re doing is just burning flags and shooting at trucks and lobbing mortars onto the highway, surgery, the clothes.”

“Oh man, yalla.”

“Oh man, I know. And they say it is going to get worse. They say we are next. East Beirut. That it is a coup tour. That we are too isolated, too weak, too few. We have no money, no arms, no future.”

“The Christians will never let it happen. We’re strong enough. That is what you mean right? The Hezbollah will go after the Druze and then the east and the Mountain will be next? It will never happen. It’s as my father says: They have gun; we have gun. It will never happen. Just another impasse.”

Zakarian looked up at this, smiled, bloody-eyed. There was a long, dramatic, drunken pause.

“East Beirut. It will never happen? Do you really believe that?”

“Yes,” said Leon. “I think so.”

“So. I’ve got something to show you.”

There’s a thing they do in East Beirut to the unpopular, the competitor, to those they assassinate. To the billboards of political contenders despised or car-bombed mid-campaign, to portraits of murdered MPs and corrupt candidates, and to the memorial posters after. They do it with black spray paint and immense restraint. A spray can is held well back from the image of the face of the rival and the dead; the surety and simplicity carries all the weight. A gentle press and a fine cloud of black no larger than that face or rather no larger than the features of that face, and the face disappears; all that’s left is a name, a slogan, and a dark mist, a gray blur on the poster in a border of ears and skin and hair. Jean Wound, forty years old, educated at ENS in Paris and the Sorbonne, candidate for the chamber of deputies. Car bomb, twenty posters in a row, nice suit, salt-and-pepper hair, his face a hole, taken from him twenty times. Mikael Hawi, a Christian militia boy, only 1990–2008. A snowboarding picture on the posters and he’s young in a bright red parka against the white but his face is not there, WE WILL NEVER FORGET YOU, it says in English. They let the phrase remain although the boy is gone. Walking poster to poster they erase them with a gentle press of an index finger—one eye, one eye, one mouth. Leon’s certain it’s done with some pitiful pious satisfied smile. Salman Nakano, car bomb, a leftist journalist for An Nahar. Nakano’s friend, a writer, was first on the scene, ran down from their Hamra offices and into the smoking street. He thought Salman was alive because he could see his head and shoulders through the unbroken car window. But that was all that was left of him, roasted to the headrest. Later that week they grayed out his memorial posters and took his face from him too. William Habbab met with Damascene secret services and political oblivion. Michel Salama, the anti-war folk singer, who opened for a band that played a gig once in Tel Aviv. Concert posters from six months prior in Beirut Downtown, they fullstopped his face above the acoustic guitar.

Years ago, walking through Jtaoui with Pascal to a film, Leon passed three posters of his sister, Keiko, in uniform, pitch-black shaven hair, faceless; permanent twilight where her skin shone like sun, her pale blue eyes, WE WILL REMAIN HERE! the Aounist slogan under which she campaigned for one bright summer was allowed to stay beneath. The restraint is what weakens him. He couldn’t tear the posters down because the glue had fixed them to posters of other dead, despised, and discredited beneath, and the glue-soaked paper was hard as plastic, hard as wood, and went up under his fingernails like splinters till they bled as he tore away at this freak, implacable monument of blank gray faces, Pascal looking away down the street for anyone watching. Years ago, back when they were twenty-seven.

Zakarian and Leon walked down to the Demolished Quarter (not accomplished but slated until Hariri’s death when all the reconstruction stopped). The ruined empty Ottoman and Mandate-era buildings were eerie in the orange streetlights. Crumpled garage doors were jammed in hundred-year-old arches on the lower floors. Tiled stairwells filled with trash and rubber hosepipe and useless lumber. The lower sills of all the upper windows were slatted over with boards. This was because the walls beneath the windows were dissolved with bullet holes, where the gunmen on the street had fired wildly, aiming for the snipers’ bodies, missing, knowing, or just hoping the old sandstone could be penetrated. There was a Lebanese Army tank parked silently back among the box trees in a vacant lot, sickly green in the orange light. Soldiers playing cards on an upturned milk crate paused and watched silently while they passed. Street after empty street, stinking of piss, feral kittens, the last ATM blinking with no more funds. No traffic sounds as they came near to Avenue Charles Helou just over the wasteland not far from his father’s post. Leon had come around in a rough circle.

“It’s over here,” Zakarian said. He was walking unsteadily but the excitement, his glad dread, hadn’t abated.

The vacant lot was opposite the Place des Martyrs. A missing building framed a view of the huge Hariri mosque. The four giant minarets were elaborately lit bright terra-cotta orange, and it towered utterly over the Orthodox and Maronite cathedrals. The lot was walled by two and a half buildings, and there was a scum-filled crater in the center. Frederick went to the wall that faced west, the wall that greeted those who entered Gemmayzeh and the Christian East, and he lit a match.

There was a great angel painted on a wall on the border of East Beirut. Some Shi’a kid had tried to paint and travesty a Christian icon. The angel was a death angel. It was frocked and winged and it had devil horns and folded arms of patriarchal patience. It was painted with the same black spray paint and terrible restraint; it looked ancient and brand new. There was a second smaller figure to its right, to Leon’s left as he stood and watched it flickering in the light of the match. It was a creature of black flames and feathers; a familiar the size of a fist. The death angel dwarfed it. It was the size of a man, floating over the Quarter. The angel’s face was made of three linked gray blurs in a greater blur; two suggestions of eyes and an open, speaking, cursing mouth. It had a confidence and knowledge though a crude attempt at Christian iconography. It was a warning to those who entered here. A curse, or a promise, rudely done in a kind of pidgin designed to speak to Christian ears, saying: Something bad is coming.

Zakarian was looking back at him as the match burned down. His face was a black blur, like the angel’s, like the assassinated.

“See?” he said. “See?”