Читать книгу Anti Lebanon - Carl Shuker - Страница 11

2	Take a deep breath and hold it

They walked through streets deserted, east. At the horizon lightning cracked a monumental wall of stone cloud with a filament of gold. They passed out of the Demolished Quarter and around the fringes of Gemmayzeh and then deeper east into the silent Christian Quarter where it was still safe to walk on a night like this.

The sounds of the Hezbollah and Future firefight dulled.

The two men looked up at a sudden bang—but it was followed by a long rumble of thunder, and they walked on in silence on the back streets of Mar Mikhael.

Up the hill into Jtaoui, on the way to Georges and Lauren’s apartment, Leon stopped for more beer and cigarettes at Smuggler. The liquor store owner’s son and his friends were playing cards around a plastic crate at the end of the counter and they smiled and sneered at Leon. The Elias family was far from rich but in the past it had been richer than some, and Abu Keiko and Keiko had once had a status Leon did not live up to. He took a certain amount of scorn and spite and casual hatred for his father’s fall and for the decisions he’d made in his own life: the passive pacifism in a once-powerful family, for one. He typically took it with carefully measured rejoinders he’d calibrate slightly lower than the initial attack. He wanted peace.

In the past he might have framed the uncertainty like this: Was he evading violence through carefully showing just the right amount of weakness, or was he just the right amount of weak to evade his violence due?

But not this night.

Georges and Lauren’s small place was a French-style apartment on the seventh floor. You reached it by an old shaking cage elevator with accordion doors and a broken latch. There were two bedrooms, a separate kitchen, a large living room, and a balcony off it that faced northeast over the rooftops up the coast to Christian Jounieh and along the million lights of the Mountain. When they knocked, the door opened a few inches and stayed that way. Etienne peeked out, unshaven, lazy-eyed, crazed, and languid, and he immediately did his Yasser Arafat impression in his awful English, making fun of the chairman he detested not from any memory but because his father did so much: sneering, angry, haggard, doomed:

“What’s the meaning of their tanks . .. some meters far of here? Thirty meters—” His r’s were rolled and husky, thahrh dee-meetehrrs, and he turned inside to his imagined aide, asking for the word, enacting a scene from an old TV interview, surrounded in his Ramallah compound in the second intifada, and back, a sneer and a snarl, sarcastic in their shared disgust with the language and the situation. “Ahp-hroximedly.”

“Hello Etienne,” Leon said and pushed at the door. Etienne braced himself and held it shut and snarled again, then saw Zakarian, the stranger. Etienne stared at him, clucked three times, opened the door, turned his back, and retreated to the living room without another word.

“Don’t worry,” Leon said. “Ignore him. Come in.”

Georges and Lauren were in the kitchen, eating peppered pumpkin soup with sour cream and up far too late feeding their two children and Leon felt foolish with the beer and cigarettes in a dangling plastic bag. He kissed the orange-bearded Georges, holding the baby in his arms, and touched the crown of the head of little blonde pigtailed Hind who shrank under him. He turned to Lauren and kissed her too.

“Hello, Lauren. How is the baby?”

“Fine, fine. Is everything okay?” Lauren said, and her upraised eyes passed over him without purchase to the new person in the doorway.

“Yeah, fine, this is Frederick, a friend. Frederick: Georges, Lauren, that was Etienne. . . . ” and he thought of what she might like and said, “and this is the most beautiful Hind, who is now . . . what are you, um, what you must be by now, is .. . five years old?”

Hind grinned madly up at the roof, and Georges said, “Oh!” one armful of the new baby, his other hand with a spoonful of refused soup in midair before the little girl. Lauren leaned to her and said, “Oh, my, goodness.”

“I’m . . . not five yet,” said Hind deliberately. She considered a correction, had too many conflicting options for response, and accidentally accepted the spoonful of soup instead.

“How are you, Frederick?” Lauren said in English and smiled softly, slightly, and indicated the table. She was tired and wired, and Leon could see deep violet bruises of fatigue above her cheekbones. “Please, eat.”

“Hello,” said Georges, and Leon watched him frankly assess this new person, the two bearded men grinning naturally at one another. Leon saw Georges’s charisma again, as always revealed by someone new, just like Keiko. And he thought, When did we become bearded men?

“How are you,” said Zakarian, and he paused awkwardly, deleting his own first name and other inappropriate details. “Hello.”

A sort of silence fell. Hind bounced three times in her chair, looking for what had gone wrong. Leon thought how he might handle this.

“Frederick’s a DJ and ... he has a card from the old military hospital. It’s really interesting.”

Leon turned to Zakarian, away from Lauren who was now giving him that look, that slightly disbelieving look somewhere ambiguous between appalled and quizzical, that always seemed to ask, and only of him, really, what kind of person are you Leon? What qualities are yours? He put the beer in the old fridge.

Zakarian fumbled for the card, held it to Georges who had no free hands, and Lauren took it, quickly read, and said, “Oh that is very interesting.”

“What?” said Georges, and she held it up for him to read as Hind, abruptly bored, decided to bend slowly almost double, her face approaching her soup. Georges looked up from the card and smiled.

“Oh, I see. So do you like Cary Grant movies, Frederick?”

Zakarian smiled too and shrugged easily. Georges had this effect.

“We’re having a Frank Capra session. Subtitled.”

“Subtitled,” Zakarian said, still smiling. “Okay!”

And they all smiled then and Hind sat up with a pastiche of pumpkin soup and peppered cream upon the very tip of her nose and they all laughed. Leon laughed too and went, then, his face changing in the doorway, darkening, to the living room, looking for the others, and for another drink, and hopefully some hash. Somewhere that he could hear and monitor the gunfire; adrenaline moving softly, silverly in him, obscurely or predictably, he never could tell.

There was a new poster in the living room, and nuts and fruit, pitifully little, laid out on the coffee table, curtains drawn. Pascal and Etienne squatted by the old laptop on a chair. They were trying to mirror the display on the TV.

“Hi Leon,” said Pascal without turning.

“Hello, hello, hello, hash?” said Leon and half-lay on the sofa.

Etienne patted his jeans pocket. “We’ll wait till the children go to bed. They can’t sleep for the fighting or what? You can’t hear it in here. Let those fuckers kill each other and be silent.”

Pascal said, “It’s probably the tension in the air. Children can feel it.”

“The Secure Plus resistance has caved and they’re moving on all their enemies now,” said Etienne. “I heard they are besieging Hariri in Koreitem, and that they are already all over Ras Beirut.”

Pascal hunched over the laptop. “Hind’s bedroom faces west. Maybe she can hear it.”

“She has a few questions even Georges can’t answer.”

Pascal said, “You see there is an option here to turn our laptop’s display off, but it doesn’t explicitly say it will send the mirror image to the other display by doing so. And though it seems like the obvious option and there aren’t any apparent others, it asks you twice to confirm, so I would say probably—”

“Fatal,” said Etienne. “If you turn it off you’ll never get it on again. Pay attention to those warnings.”

“Get a Mac,” murmured Leon. Above the two men and above the television on the low credenza, where there was a carved wooden Saint Sharbel and rosaries draped around a Maronite cross, there was this new poster. It was a print of a painting of the frame of a mirror on a wall. The frame was elaborately gilded gold ivy, vines, birds, and angels, forming a triptych. The outer panels were narrower than the inner panel, and at the bottom the frame formed a small semicircular table extending out into a world outside the mirror, upon which sat a little dog.

Leon stared at it, slumped on the sofa, crashing. It was the sort of poster found in French head shops with old Tolkien and Paranoid King posters. There was something wrong with the optical illusion but it was impossible to say what was so eerie and unsettling and, yes, beautiful about it. It was only almost kitsch. The dog’s back was reflected behind it, casting the viewer always to the left, and beyond that reflection was a room and not this room.

But there were strange darknesses on the middle ground of the implied reflection and wrong shadows and were there eyes? And figures of tall, ghostly men and women from a third reflection? And over it there was ivy, not from the reflected room and not upon the mirror, and strange stains too as if on the print itself and inside that the mottle and metallic pucker of an old mirror. The little dog itself had a superior, alien face, deformed or damaged—was it supposed to be real or supposed to be a figurine? It was laughing, looking up and left at the watcher, looking at Leon: a creature of this world and that. From Leon’s angle the living room light caught it too, and the real reflection to the real world would have been northeast, the Christian Quarter, Beirut River or what’s left of it, Jounieh, the Mountain, away.

“How’s the Luna Park?” said Etienne.

“Oh, really busy,” Leon said. “Full of Hezbollah boy scouts doing chin-ups.”

“Mahdi scouts. Those little shits,” Etienne said. “Pious brainwashed little shits. They have twenty thousand of them in the South. Beavering away. Growing up. Getting stronger. Always getting stronger.”

“Is someone paying enough attention to that fact, I often wonder,” said Georges from the doorway quietly. He bobbed the baby in his arms. Zakarian was in the hallway behind. “Is it working?”

“Not yet,” said Pascal.

“The TV is only four inches bigger than the laptop,” Georges said. “You realize that?”

“How is Falcon?” said Leon.

“We’ve been taken off the job since the strike,” Pascal said, and smiled back at him. “Too young, silly, and educated.”

“Starting yesterday they said they are only using the senior guys and liaising with the army,” Etienne said. “Because if something really does happen that close they will probably just have to leave and anyway they don’t want anyone ... or want some intellectual with a . . . college degree trying to fight . . . for the . . . ”

He trailed off, concentrating his disgust on the laptop.

“We are redundant,” Pascal said.

“So you’ve no work?” said Georges.

“No work,” said Etienne.

“No work,” Pascal said kindly, and smiled again, and shrugged. Lauren and Hind passed by the doorway. The little girl was brushing her teeth and peering up at Zakarian and into the living room. Georges noticed Zakarian then and there was a brief awkward moment as he turned and tried to let the Armenian in the doorway, but there wasn’t room with the baby in his arms, and Lauren stopped too, Hind between them all, and at the small domestic impasse Leon felt a great tiredness come upon him, falling from his shoulders and rising though his neck like heavy water, an immense heaviness and futility. And he thought of waking to darkness, running along the Corniche, the silence and the sea, his ghost and the volume of rock displaced for the unfinished marina of the new Beirut that his friends were no longer security for, and he turned away from that. Where was he now? The prospect of watching a Cary Grant film with this going on was like another sentence of absurdity and noise, everyone sick and scared, like being security for an empty amusement park with no power. All the impotence. Take a deep breath and hold it, they say when you cross what’s left of the Beirut River near the Karantina abattoir. Take a deep breath and hold it.

We will always be here.

Leon slept. As the shooting in West Beirut began to quiet for the night, as the storm prepared to break. Piles of tires, to be “set ablaze,” as the hacks would write in twenty-four hours, were gathered and heaped in the middle of streets as close to the Christian East as Marina Towers and St. George’s. A memorial poster there to the Christian martyr Basil Fleihan, killed with Hariri in the assassination, was defaced, and Leon slept. The earth revetments on the airport road were doubled in thickness by Hezbollah flunkies and piously piled, and the strategy meetings of the three parties primarily concerned as the rout of the Sunni continued. Future Movement’s Saad Hariri sat in conference isolated in his palace at Koreitem, his middle-class chino-clad base home, sipping tea and counting U.S. currency and deploring all this, as his pseudo militia, Secure Plus, abandoned the southernmost of their offices and fled through the empty streets. Hezbollah moved lithe and free along the Corniche Mazraa. Guerrillas trucked in over the Mountain from Baalbek were debriefed, and they communicated freely too, planning the operation via the contested private telephone lines whose attempted suppression by the government was the purported cause or excuse for all this. The Druze in the foothills watched closely the Sunni capitulation, having had reports of those trucks of Hezbollah, and reports of three guerrillas in Hezbollah tigerstripe walking the perimeter of a Druze village in the lower Chuf. Knowing their leader Jumblatt was besieged in Clemenceau in Beirut, they knew they would be next. And last of all: The bloodied old men of the Christian Phalange, backlit by flashes of the thunderstorm coming down the Mediterranean, strolled the roof of their east Place des Martyrs HQ with their big bellies, their secrets, and their basements, and stared west across the civil war wasteland and the Roman ruins, watching very, very closely.