Читать книгу Anti Lebanon - Carl Shuker - Страница 12

3	Let your face talk

Leon woke. The movie had started. Coming up in the gentleness and dim to smiling faces turned to him. Emmanuelle had arrived, sitting beside him, so tall, so lean, and the others, all there, attentively round, and Etienne held out to him a little crumpled joint of hash. He took it in the spirit in which it was offered and had a gentle hit. The displays were mirrored, and on the TV black-and-white images, cartoons, of witches and a city, an arched-back cat and a fat watchful owl, wine and a jack-o’-lantern, and then a message in English and in French underneath.

This is a Hallowe’en tale of Brooklyn, where anything can happen—and usually does.

“Hell-oooo, Leon,” whispered Emmanuelle gently and smiled—she looked different, her short hair shaved even closer.

Lauren and Georges faced the TV, Pascal and Etienne were lying on the floor. Etienne said, “He’s a madman,” as Leon took the hit, and then, “We have mirrored displays. . . . You were snoring, habibi. . . .”

Zakarian sat alone on the single armchair beside him and Leon passed him the joint. Zakarian seemed strange now, too tall, Herman Munsterish, foreign amongst his friends in this room. Directed by Frank Capra, the caption read, over bats pouring from a cathedral. Black and white flickered over the faces of his friends and this stranger and they seemed to move with the images on the TV.

“I need a drink,” he said huskily, and Etienne lifted an Almaza from the floor and pushed it to him across the coffee table without looking. He drank deep and Emmanuelle smiled and past her Lauren stared hard at the TV as if to scold him. In the dim and changeable light on the poster the little dog leered and in the room behind it he saw green eyes now, and how the mirror was divided into vertical panels too, over that room. So there were several layers to this picture, a print of a painting of a mirror within which nested three or more realities.

The film changed, a close-up of a face, a baseball game, unsubtitled, a man barking out at them, total absurdity as they all calmly watched and even as he felt this he felt the mediocrity of it, the stupid film, the garish music, the calm watchers of a barking American man and then a frenzied crowd of black-and-white Americans from 1940-something while a kilometer away in the border neighborhoods a part-time guerrilla with an AK-47 poured fire from a corner and a poor Sunni woman separated from her son crouched behind a retaining wall and slapped her thigh with her hand again and again in a muscle spasm of panic and horror at the sound, and screamed at her little boy to stay down.

He rolled over sideways in the corner of the couch, listened, a fight starting onscreen between two baseball teams and then everyone joining in, and Emmanuelle’s hip was touching his. The hash’s effects rolled sluggishly in, his eyes swelled, he squinted up at the poster.

“Leon doesn’t like old movies,” someone said. And then the music went soft.

Boy, I could sure use a drink, said a voice in English.

Looks like the same suckers get married every day. The soft laughter of the watchers came late, by a few seconds. They didn’t speak English as well as he.

What’s he hiding from?

Two by two, they come they go, hip-hip hi-yay!

Elaine Harper.

Mortimer Brewster.

Speak up, sonny, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

I want to keep this undercover.

Love her? Of course you love her, you’re gonna marry her, ain’t ya? More soft laughter seconds after.

No, you don’t understand. I don’t want this to get out for a while. I’m Mortimer Brewster.

You’re who?

Mortimer. . . !

Laughter, clatter. Some things happened, he lost concentration over the loud braying voice.

Yes, Mortimer, a girl whispered sadly. No, Mortimer, a girl whispered sadly. The music changed, he opened his eyes slightly. On the screen read: From here in you’re on your own, and there was a toll of a bell and a shot of a cemetery.

Leon looked up at the poster, and then he got up and walked out onto the balcony. The soft orange of the streetlights lit the high apartments opposite to an anti-twilight that was cast over a two-story portrait of the Christ hung from frayed ropes. Above that the Jtaoui hill fell away to a scree, a spangled dust of lights from the coast to the crests of the Mountain all along the Jounieh bay and to Byblos. He smoked and watched. A taste of salt and exhaust. There was a constellation of lights moving on the sea—a U.S. or Israeli warship out there; the USS Cole someone had said. It was very quiet, and then a few, far-off, near-comical pops of gunfire that seemed to come from east of the city as they echoed off the hills. He felt clear, empty, strong. He felt warm. It was strange because he felt, for perhaps the first time since he quit his degree, almost violent: viscid, lucid. The door opened behind him, gently closed again. He stared into the eyes of the icon.

“I know it’s bad,” Lauren said without looking at him. She moved up to the balcony rail beside him. He smiled, confused, and grunted. “Just one cigarette?” she said and then grinned up at him. “I know I’m bad.”

“Oh.” He gave her the cigarette and lit it for her and she didn’t inhale deeply enough; a little crescent glowed and died. He lit it again. She exhaled and looked at the smoke, not the view.

“Is Hind asleep now?” Leon said.

“Finally, I think so. She was just lying in there singing to herself. She doesn’t understand but then she will say strange things. She will ask Georges questions that don’t make sense. ‘Why don’t we die?’ she asked him tonight. And, ‘What is under the floor?’”

“They’re good questions.”

They smoked. Then after a few minutes Etienne came outside too, and Lauren’s brief softening changed. Something had been going on before Leon had arrived, some argument, some tension in them all beyond the obvious. Things like this usually brought them together, brought up the gentle, the quiet, the kind. But Etienne lit his cigarette and walked to the end of the balcony and leaned around to see the next apartment, then he strode back behind them, and looked down over the street.

“It’s just dead,” he muttered savagely.

“You should see Phalange HQ,” Leon said. “Lots of blacked-out RVs moving very purposefully. Very far from dead.”

“Doesn’t it . . . doesn’t it anger you? You don’t get angry?” He stared at Leon, bloodshot-eyed, then, purse-mouthed, with a contemptuous pah, blew smoke over the neighborhood. “This . . . ? This?” He waved his cigarette at the silent and empty streets.

Pascal and Georges and Emmanuelle came out too then, the film abandoned, and it seemed like everyone was smoking tonight.

There was a sort of silence, then Georges said, “In Tripoli a funeral was fired upon. Three killed.”

“Oh no,” Emmanuelle said softly.

“So you’re going up to the house in the Mountain?” Lauren said to Pascal, and everyone listened.

Pascal’s uncle and aunt had a holiday house up in Mzaar, and, though they were Aounists, as Leon’s father and sister, but as none of them were here, Pascal was going. It was a complicated and loaded thing. Hiding from the Hezbollah in the holiday house of Christians who, since Aoun propagated and signed the Memorandum of Understanding, in effect supported them. Pascal looked sort of blank, and there was a silence. Then he said, “Yes, we’re just going up there for a day or two. They’re family. Just until things calm down. Until they elect a president.”

“A year or two then?” said Etienne. “A decade?”

“Why will they not let the army get involved?” Emmanuelle said. “Just stop it?”

Lauren scoffed outright, and Etienne laughed. Georges looked down and said, for her benefit, gently, “I hear they are, the Hezb, I mean, quite surgically and carefully taking over Future positions and then handing them over to the army. The government trying to control them is what has set this off.”

“You’ve heard about these students getting attacked with sticks and chains at the LU buildings?” said Etienne.

Leon said, “That’s just a total provocation and it should be ignored.”

Georges said, “This is the beginning of Hezb ultimately making the complete transition from armed resistance to traditional political party proper.”

Zakarian emerged from the living room to join the smoking crowd, an Almaza in his hand.

Etienne said, “By shooting Lebanese! It’s that typical limp-wristed, willfully blind, defeatist, relativist bullshit that’s got us where we are now.” He waved his hand over the rooftops.

“Where’s that, Etienne?” Pascal said.

“Fucking jobless, poor, isolated, weak, and ashamed. But with the best educations, the best libraries, and a couple of good clubs. The biggest waste of human potential while down there it’s just a baby factory for their so-called resistance, their militia, in the slums. Look at us. We are dying. I’m thirty years old.” Another silence fell between them. Give or take a few months, all of them were thirty. “We need to teach them a lesson. Show them Christian strength. Return them to their natural status in the hierarchy. Back to our shoeshiners and domestics.”

There was a small collective groan, mostly Lauren and Emmanuelle and Pascal, and Georges shook his head and breathed out smoke.

“You’re unbelievable,” said Lauren. “You’re such an anachronism. You’re not jobless.”

Leon watched Etienne’s eyes—he wasn’t backing down.

“Fucking Aoun. Fucking appeaser. Traitor. The Hezbollah are just pawns to Iranian religious primitivism. I’m a patriot. I’m a loyalist. We could have sold the Israelis our water,” said Etienne. “We could act like a real country.”

“Lower your voice and strengthen your argument,” Georges muttered. They all laughed; the tension defused a little. “Leon is the one who knows about water anyway.” Leon looked over the street and lit another cigarette as bearded Georges got diplomatic. “He has seen old prewar plans for dams in the Bekaa that would have provided us free power, irrigated the valley and the entire south. And still had excess to sell to Israel. Maybe even got them out of the West Bank. Or to Syria, to Jordan, whoever. And renewably Our water and power bills are triple what they were. It’s absurd. The constant blackouts. Gathering dust there right, in the water ministry? Those plans?”

They all turned to him.

“Yeah,” Leon sighed. “Yes, I’ve seen them. Sensitive dams. They’re pure genius. But they were based on a completely different political and sectarian reality.”

There was a small pause. “Why didn’t you graduate, Leon?” Lauren said. “Just finish the damned degree. How much do you even have left to do? The end of the dissertation? You had a good teacher and that’s rare enough. Why do you just . . . ” She was angry, but not so angry she couldn’t edit herself. “ . . . do . . . what you do?”

A great contempt; an awful-silver feeling.

“Well, they mercury-bombed the anti Lebanon aquifer, and my sister was shot to death,” Leon said.

Lauren exhaled sharply in disbelief. Georges was shaking his head.

“Don’t,” murmured Pascal.

“I just didn’t see the point,” Leon said.

A long, chill silence. Leon almost laughed.

“Exactly,” Etienne said in evident satisfaction, as if they were agreed.

It had been at the American University of Beirut in Ras Beirut that Leon quit his degree. He had arranged a meeting with Henri Fors, his professor through undergraduate and a year of honors, and his abandoned dissertation’s supervisor (as if anyone cares about honors dissertations, anyway, he thought now), and his friend, a friendship he hoped or really felt he’d half-achieved but then had utterly marred.

Henri Fors, though an LU professor based at the southern campus, spent an inordinate amount of time at AUB, where he’d graduated before the war, dealing with a department with way more clout, prestige, history, and, yes, money than his, but in terms of employment remained closed to him like a clam due to a personal thing with the head of department. It had been at AUB one fine spring day that Leon had arranged a meeting with him at a bench in the gardens. The bench sat beneath some trees and overlooked through the gap in the foliage the steep bank down to the tennis courts, the Corniche, and the strip of pure blue Lebanese Mediterranean. There was a plate screwed to the wood of the seat he chose that read ABDALLAH SALAM 1909–1999, WHO LOVED THE VIEW FROM THIS BENCH. It was one of Fors’s favorite places too, he knew, and it was years ago now he’d sat beside him on that bench and told Fors he was quitting.

Henri Fors had survived fifteen years of civil war as a civilian and academic and had witnessed, too, the end of every sensible piece of water management (through graft and cronyism and the zaim system and simple pure corruption) in a country whose wealth and waste of water were legend. Fors had catalogued every piece of failed pollution legislation; recorded throughout the war—a terribly difficult and perilous thing to do—the heavy metal deposits at every river mouth north and south.

It had been during his time under Fors that his professor broke the news, to a deafening lack of response, of the critical state of the Sidon rubbish dump, which had grown so big it qualified as a quarter of the town, high as a four-story building, before it collapsed into the sea. There in Sidon, where destitute fishermen, receiving fixed prices from a consortium of fishmongers, were reduced to destroying their seabeds fishing with dynamite. They often lost their hands and forearms too, in black accidents they could never remember, and had to live out the rest of their days in the coffeehouses watching the backgammon while friends held cigarettes and glasses of tea to their lips as they waited patiently and futilely for prosthetics. What fish they couldn’t catch now strangled in the Sidon supermarket bags. A land still bearing the imprint of its creator. Fors, this man who’d recorded every calamity and every disgrace with resolve and good humor and a basic human optimism either blind or profound. Leon had to let his face tell this amazing man in short that just one dead sister and one ruined aquifer and that was it, another sinkhole of a losing stream, he couldn’t go on, was quitting the program.

“Well, that’s disappointing, but if it’s what you feel you have to do.”

Lunchtime in the great gardens of AUB with Henri Fors three years ago: sitting side by side on the old bench, their feet on the foot-worn and polished stones. The breeze had moved quietly in the trees and he had heard no traffic and nothing but the wind as a muffled shuffle in the leaves and all had seemed for a minute possible, before he said the words: substantial yet weightless: asylum and study, a future, endeavor and peace, as students and teachers strolled behind. He had imagined a man he never was and now would never be, a man engaged with the rock and water of his country, a man who made an imprint on that land, who was a repository of its past, its ills, and its potential, a man excited by the parsing of a problem. And he had been there that day to tell Fors it wasn’t going to happen.

“Well, that’s disappointing.”

It was about money, it was about family, dead rivers and sisters and lost jobs. It was about his mother bent over Keiko’s coffin with her palms upraised. About his father screaming in the bedroom. It was about a ball of lead in his chest he carried through the streets that seemed sometimes to crack and lighten, in places like that, on that bench, looking at that special view in the fluttering light of the trees’ fantasy—but outside in the real world it found its form again. He called it reality. U.S. destroyers and Israeli Sa’ar class warships passed through that gap in the trees, cruising off the cape. As he had told Fors it was over, but not why, the beloved man seemed to be receding from him: Leon no longer, suddenly, could quite make out the features of his face, wrinkles that had once revealed facts to him like Fors’s love of swimming, his long hours, reddened eye rims, and the cigars he loved and gave up. The professor receded and assumed a strange and human, vulnerable form, in mismatched jacket and trousers, a shining brown bald spot that seemed ready for some wound, chunky brogues, five foot tall, standing over there, walking, vanished, gone.

Leon’s film, his only film, a film he made—un film de Leon Elias, produit par, réalisation, musique, son, montage, montage son Leon Elias and avec extras plus Keiko Elias or a photograph of her at least—was made after her death, after he quit Fors and university, with a borrowed camera and an old Compaq laptop and pirated Final Cut and Logic Express learned on the job. He called it In the anti Lebanon and subtitled it, after a poem by an Italian suicide named Cesare Pavese, Death Will Come and It Will Have Your Eyes.

His film was about his family and his sister and their history though he hadn’t really intended it to be. He hadn’t intended it to be well-received either: to secure, as it did six months ago, a berth in the short experimental section of the Festival du Film Libanais known as “Né à Beyrouth”—born in Beirut.

Cut loose from his degree, from Fors, life had gone quite silent. Leon had stayed home in the bedroom of his house of mourning and collaged: magazine photos and old TIME/LIFE photo hardbacks cut up and pasted on card over which he scrawled song lyrics (“those midwives to history put on their bloody robes”) and taped or glued or sewed stones, cement, and tree branches. But the results weren’t satisfying; he was blank in doing it and bored after and only later, finding the sheets of card beneath his bed, realized that he had been making sketchbooks for his film. He borrowed the camera from Pascal; from Pascal too he’d inherited the third-hand Compaq laptop (ca. five years old) and he learned to gently massage it into abnormally extended life: to use only ever one app at a time, to on a weekly basis faithfully defrag the disk and decant raw video to leave large tracts of the hard drive spare, like it was a sick old cow from which he’d get his milk or starve.

And what to do with a completed but hopelessly experimental short film? With a kind of contempt he submitted it to the Heritage section of the sixth film festival, which had been postponed from the year prior and its July War. The Empire Sofil Theater, the usual venue, had instead been used during the day for the children of southern refugees to make their own collages on trestle tables in the foyer, and Cannes Critics’ Week films were screened for their pale insomniac parents at night.

He was informed by email that In the anti Lebanon was selected from only 190 submissions, and bumped from the Heritage slate. This was a selection premised on nostalgia and lament—it was dedicated to edited selections of dozens of old pre– and civil-war era 8mm family films rescued from the Sunday markets, implying to those who might have the imagination the varied scenarios of forced emigration and abrupt flight and washing of hands of Lebanon. In the anti Lebanon was bumped to a bushel of twenty-five short experimental works to be shown over three days in the graveyard morning slots of the festival. So, being now un auteur, Leon was awarded an AAA pass to all of the small festival’s films and talks and seminars and lectures. After the screenings, serious, kindly Goethe-Institut and NGO staff and fest-associated friends and well-wishers—mostly, it seemed, impossibly chic and passionate women—congratulated the filmmakers and distributed information packs on film labs and script workshops, master classes and fellowships and readerships and all kinds of other ships to ports here and there: London, Amsterdam, New York. All the cultural sympathy votes and NGO goodwill hopelessly, steadfastly ranged against airburst, cluster bomb, flechette.

“There are, I think,” the president of the festival had said in his speech, “very few films that capture a sense of Lebanon when there was no other war or catastrophe.” When something happens, we all pick up a camera, he was saying. Leon felt his chances out there in this new world, where Lebanon meant only war and baffling religious complexity, were more or less nonexistent. Who would want a Lebanese filmmaker whose film tried to refuse coherence, let alone cognizance of what it was really about? He filled out the fellowship forms anyhow. He avoided most of the Heritage screenings and walked out of three short narrative films—at least in the experimentals he could tune out and be blank and think and be alone.

But atavistically, he wanted to hear something true. Reduced and desperate, he wanted to hear someone say something sensible, something frank, sane, and clear; to give him information. Really, he wanted to know how to live, to learn. In grief, believing no one and nothing and given this strange new opportunity he went looking—his guts boiling, chain-smoking and shy, blank-faced and angry, staring people down—for something to believe. In the stack of literature, the talks and titles were listed:

I Have No Scar, I Remember No Wound.

Towards a Foreign Likeness Bent.

Real Bombs in Imaginary Ruins.

He chose to go to a lecture in the west, held at the West Hall at AUB in Ras Beirut, and he chose it for two reasons. The first was the winning name: Witness Whores Collective presents Amr Saffari: Since I Died Before Dying in the Interim Between this Death and the Last, and the second was because he’d not been back to AUB since that awful day he quit, and as he would realize when Saffari said it, in his talk, aloud, the criminal and the victim alike return to the scene of the crime.

It turned out that the Saffari lecture at AUB had been a sort of analogical semifictional thing about vampires and violence, and he’d dreamed his way through it in a kind of agony (the criminal and the victim alike return to the scene of the crime) and he had left that early too, tripping on the stairs, to sit out under the trees on that selfsame bench, to feel the weightlessness, the shame, maybe to cry, to remember.

His film then, had originally been intended as anti-Lebanon; a twist on the antiwar: anti-recovery, anti-lament. The films of which he’d read and that he’d watched made by other young directors, especially do-gooding foreigners and second-generation émigrés, and the Lebanon they created—reproducing the failure of war-art; the volcano dormant or erupting; cycles of de- and reconstruction; ruined olive orchards reprised against; talking heads telling horror stories; tiny but “telling” details of trauma, judgment, and limping deliverance—he’d wanted none of it. If your Lebanese work was not about the war it was ignored outside Lebanon.

He’d made a film that wanted to be ignored, was defiant, that turned its head away. He’d sat above Rafic Hariri International Airport, with the West Beirut cape and the oil-fringed sea beyond filling the frame with mauve haze, and shot planes landing and taking off for hours. He’d shot flowers for hours and shot a photo of his sister. He’d composed a meandering story about the Japanese in Lebanon, told in voice-over from photo captions in his father’s Times Atlas of World History, and from U.S. news reports from CBS and ABC in the ’70s and ’80s with their whitewashes, skews, and vicious Israeli torque. When asked what his film was about, he replied in an unanswerable non sequitur: “beauty in italics.” He’d wanted it to be anti-everything obvious in grief, but somewhere, inevitably, it had slipped from his control and entered meaning. He had thought he wanted to be ignored; he got noticed. He had recorded his friends’ and family’s conversations and stole aphorisms he cut into his monologue:

“With Christians, reach always exceeds grasp,” someone says breathlessly at one point.

Abu Keiko intones, an attempt at humor at their dinner table, with some faux-drama, “We traded in shrouds; people stopped dying.” An awful silence follows.

With venom Lauren mutters, about Aoun, “Tell him to wake up from his dream so we can wake up from our nightmare.”

The large opening sequence of the twenty-minute film cut between the airport, the flowers, and the photo of Keiko Elias at twenty-eight. No uniform was shown, just her high, proud eyes hazel-brown, her fine eyebrows finely cut, expressionless, her dark hair shaved close and military. Neither beautiful nor unbeautiful—she was only a presence, completely calm; she was forceful; she seemed to see the photographer and his reasons, not his camera. Defiance would imply or connote some form of defense, some defensiveness. But she was an icon; impossible to imagine in motion.

Over her photograph, over planes rising and descending, Leon narrated selections from the books and TV shows, on the Japanese influence in the Lebanon. On the arrival of militant Japanese Red Army cadres in the early ’70s, back when they were still sexy and exotic, before their utter fall from the small grace they’d gained, before the riots went bad, the murders and purgings in Japan. On the escapist middle-class beatnik hipness of the Palestinian cause to Japanese youth, and then the so-called “Second Wave,” when hundreds of young Japanese descended on the Lebanon. Who were unlike those first pioneers who sought out the PLO and PFLP and trained and fought and organized and killed and died, however absurdly and futilely—as in the Lod Airport Massacre in 1972, the last successful terrorist act at Ben Gurion. Improbably, committed by Japanese—their victims: More than half of the twenty-six dead were a group of Puerto Rican Christians on pilgrimage. Leon recorded his mother telling him the massacre at Lod was lied about—that the Israeli airport security shot more than the three Japanese ever did. She said it with a little shame, though, as if it were slightly dubious or doomed, something to be looked away from. The second wave of Japanese riding in on this sudden infamy were instead revolutionary tourists—hippies—and largely assimilated as if baffled by the complexity, the changing times, sucked into the everyday, and gave up their Japanese identity, married, converted, contributed another twist to the plait of Lebanese beauty.

Leon and Keiko’s mother, Junko, was a full-blooded Japanese and no-longer practicing Sunni Muslim married (in a civil ceremony in Cyprus) to an Orthodox three-time jujitsu champion of Lebanon and ex-militiaman. She’d come to Lebanon in support of Palestinians; she’d fallen in love and stayed as the wife of a Christian soldier in disgrace. The voice-over Leon chose stuck to the dry historical stuff, and dangerous pro-Israeli U.S. broadcast stuff, and over it played the soundtrack, just running water and the creak of the door of Keiko’s ever-empty bedroom, opening and closing, which had sounded exactly like Star Wars’ Chewbacca growling and had been a good joke between them as children for a long time, but that he’d treated and manipulated, sped up and down, so it didn’t, and it wasn’t, anymore.

So the first part of In the anti Lebanon was oblique, ironic, a hopelessly student film, coded for Leon alone, shot and edited in a bitter, extended blankness, a period he can barely remember, and almost bereft of any signification to anyone other than him. It was the part he most liked, for the blankness it enacted: somehow frightening to him, for all the unfrightening things it seemed to say.

Part two was what made the film popular with students, what got him some compliments at the festival, what spoke more readily in recognizable terms: Leon’s satire of the local art films he hated. A car bomb near the ABC shopping mall in Achrafieh had led to the closing of Dolce & Gabbana. When they had gone, some students discovered shirts and dresses and suits and scarves left abandoned in the dumpsters behind the mall, and they donated them to the fashion school. Leon approached several patients in the serious burns unit of the Orthodox Hospital and asked them to model the clothes in waiting rooms of the day surgery unit. To his surprise, several said yes.

The third part of In the anti Lebanon was Leon’s farewell to his degree and to a large extent a farewell to his ideals, the culmination of this, his tripartite farewell to the future. He took a bus over the Mountain and up the Bekaa then a taxi to the bombed aquifer, subject of his abandoned dissertation, origin of the mathematically beautiful losing streams of the anti Lebanon. He filmed the shining earth, the rising river’s rime of quicksilver, the lobes of mercury rippling at the bottom of the poisoned cataracts, reflecting the refractions in the ruined streams above in their own slowed, dead, and deadly imitation, pulsing in a bitter sarcastic sympathy with what they lay within. It was all silver or was it all blue. Was this part of the film exactly about himself? Anyway, it ran in silence.

“Exactly,” Etienne said. As if they were agreed. He dragged on his cigarette as if something had been won.

“No-oh,” said Emmanuelle, smiling beautifully as if appalled, and shaking her shaven head, “that’s not what he ... ” She stopped speaking. And then she turned and stared and smiled at Etienne as though her case was made.

“You’re not the same, Etienne,” said Lauren, and her voice was flat and angry.

“You’re not saying the same thing,” said Georges, and Leon saw him again as he was. Georges protected others from themselves; he did this now by keeping Lauren from speaking the truth.

Emmanuelle then abruptly stepped forward and hugged Leon; in her height her soft cheek directly against his. “Oh poor Leon,” she whispered. “That was . . . so sad. . . . ”

A long trail of gunfire echoed back off the Mountain. He could feel her short fine hair against his ear.

“Don’t,” he said very quietly. The hug was held too long—there was an awkward silence around them. They separated. Leon felt messy and hot. There was another spiral of gunfire, and they stared out east. Roughly, Leon said, “What some people think is that when your guard dog becomes too powerful you need to think about putting it to sleep.”

“Yes. No,” Etienne said, thinking, balancing the terms of the statement with his passion. “Yes.”

Georges laughed loudly and Lauren looked out over the balcony disgusted.

“Speaking of guard dogs, Bashir is working for a Phalange MP down the hill,” Pascal said. “He’s gotten huge.” Bashir was a Maronite from their neighborhood in Achrafieh they all knew as a kid; a bodybuilder now a bodyguard.

“See there—that’s gainful employment, he’s got a job that’s just right for him,” Emmanuelle said.

She was being completely sincere.

For a moment then, Leon let himself go, and he thought of being with her, of just trusting in her basic good-heartedness, her simplicity, her desire for children, a married life, a kitchen somewhere and a sink and a bassinet and services on Sundays (she was Orthodox too). He thought of forgiving the gentle shakes of her head and her exaggerated concentration during the TV speeches: the nodding, the way she hummed, the strange and infuriating laxity, as he saw it, and her willingness to understand, to be understanding, even when she was made fun of. He thought of not seeing people smiling kindly behind her in semi-disbelief when a chance remark like this showed just how much she didn’t get it. He thought of wondering why he felt he had to forgive her.

And because she was long and tall and quite beautiful, and because he was angry, it was easy for him again to suddenly imagine sleeping with Emmanuelle, being with Emmanuelle. He’d for so long fantasized about her and he was instantaneously disgusted and bored with himself. Suddenly the end of years of low-grade sexual tension was there. He thought of her as a passive person, a compliant, an open and a steady person in the body and the face, right now in her youth, of a six-foot beauty, and she half-loved him or seemed to, and it had always seemed easy, picturing sex with her and her long thighs and the sensuality of her feet, as large as his own. He saw now how pitiful it was: just easy, just a relief, a lie, easier than really getting to know her, her family, convincing her to marry him, convincing them to let her, getting a life, settling down, settling.

Until payday he had about US$150. Marry him? A trap avoided or another door closed; it amounted to the same thing.

“Bashir,” Georges said, and shook his head.

“I hate that man,” said Lauren. “That awful big man.”

Etienne stared at her.

“Let’s get drunk,” said Leon, “and hear what the new boy has to tell us.”

So they laughed and they went inside and the movie was restarted but the light was left on and they drank and they talked. Something had been dispelled in that tense moment on the balcony, and then some fantasy had taken its place: a fantasy of friends discussing politics in a buzzy fug of beer and smoke, while outside didn’t really matter; what you did or thought didn’t really ultimately matter.

Leon let his face talk.

IN MEMORY OF BASIL the poster had read. There had been a poem to the left. Do not stand at my grave and weep, it began: the ubiquitous bereavement poem, selflessly secular here, and it was in English. The photograph of the martyr Basil Fleihan was from the waist up and to the right of the poem. The whole thing was screen-printed on a large canvas taut within a metal frame. It was mounted on the barrier by St. George’s Marina opposite the Beirut Four Seasons, 100 meters from where Basil Fleihan was killed with Hariri and twenty others in the bomb blast that left the grand and ancient St. George’s Hotel cordoned-off, hunched and drooping and hollowed out, an exhibit frozen and waiting, waiting for the UN Special Tribunal to rule, and in a peculiarly bitter further coincidence, waiting for Hariri’s reconstruction company Solidere’s claim on their equally ancient marina to work itself out and let them trade again. Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there; I do not sleep. Basil Fleihan was a Christian, and his face was Western. The next stanzas of the poem are lost, because the Hezbollah who that night came so far east, and built the barricades, burned the tires and slashed the poster, had followed Fleihan’s hairline and torso with his knife, leaving just one arm, then dragged the blade left and hacked through the middle of the poem and grabbed a fistful of the poster and ripped it out. This left only those two opening lines and, beneath, a dangling fold of torn white canvas like revealed flesh, the blankness behind the dead man, and half the last two lines, Do not stand . . . I am not there. . . .

He isn’t—beyond, through the hole, is the half-empty marina, the pleasure boats bobbing gently.