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12

THE MAP WAS BLOODY and torn across Shatila, Rosa noticed. Where they'd slaughtered so many. For an instant war seemed insane, like facing a mirror and smashing your image till you bleed to death. Here at Rue Weygand the map was worn by many fingers having moved across it, fingers seeking ways out, ambushes, corners, dead ends, ways to get caught and ways not to, the brutal business of death. How far can that rocket reach? How long can he breathe with a 7.62 through his lungs?

“It's a firestorm,” the boy was saying. He was dirty and thin, a tail of keffiyeh over long curly blond hair, a Christian cross chained to his neck in case of capture. He couldn't stop his lips from shaking; he kept pinching them with his fingers, and the tears were streaking his cheeks, making him seem even younger. Every time he started to talk his lips would shiver and the tears ran.

“You don't have to go back,” Mohammed said.

A rocket came down clattering over by the Serail, only half blew. “Send us more men.”

“There aren't any.”

“Here?” The boy glanced round. Bullets drummed into the front wall; upstairs someone fired back.

“I have ten men for a command that should have fifty,” Mohammed said. “Every man I take from here risks losing a hundred elsewhere.”

“I understand.”

Mohammed hugged him across the shoulders, pulling him close, touched his forehead to the boy's temple. “Go quickly and carefully.” He stood back. “Look at me!” When the boy glanced up, Mohammed looked straight into his eyes. “I order you not to die.”

The boy glanced down as if contrite.

“And tell Abou Hamid,” Mohammed said, “to pull back to Riad Solh, except for the one building that makes the L at the corner. Tell him no matter what don't lose it. Retreat to it if you have to, but don't lose it.”

“If we do, we can't get across –”

A bullet snapped overhead but Mohammed did not duck. “Keep the three buildings around it – you'll see, there's three in a box. They're all stone with small windows. If you keep the upper stories you can sweep the streets and nobody's going to come in, and until they get the Israelis or the Americans on you you're OK. Keep the M60 on the top floor of the building on the right and one Katyusha the next floor down in the middle. Two riflemen at least in the place on the left, one top, one middle.”

A man with a bandaged head came in, winded from the climb. He hugged Mohammed and the boy, one guard.

'Go on,” Mohammed told the boy. “Tell them no rock 'n roll.”

“Full automatic? We don't have the ammo.”

“Do you want to speak to Al-Safa?” the radio man called.

Mohammed took the phone. “Allah!” He turned to the boy. “I'll be there at midnight.”

“Don't come –”

“Tell them to pull back,” Mohammed said into the phone.

“We lost the fifty caliber,” the bandaged man said.

“You what?” Mohammed put down the phone.

“A mortar. We don't know whose. Three more men gone; we're down to two magazines each.”

“Like I told Emmaus, no full automatic.”

The man snorted. “You really think those poor kids are going to be into a paradise of solid pussy, where you're sending them?”

A rocket screamed into the floor upstairs and after the explosion there was a long roaring sound like oil catching fire and with a great shrug the floor above them fell outwards. “You heard me,” Mohammed said. “I told them to pull back.”

“To that building that makes the L,” the man said. “And where the hell are they going to pull back to from there?”

Another rocket blew out the ceiling and people were leaning out of the windows to escape from the fumes but the Christians in the Life Building saw them and raked the windows just as Rosa ran screaming at them. “Get down! Get down!” And now there was another to add to the pile of thin young men who lay in the corner uncomplaining, dressed in their own blood.

“Get that sniper!” Rosa screamed.

“More sandbags!” someone was yelling down the stairs. “Bring up more sandbags!”

It was the radio operator who'd been hit, half his head taken off, like a biology textbook, she thought, “Look inside your brain”. But now they couldn't send messages and Hassan ran downstairs to get the girl off the machine gun in the street who knew the signals.

Skidding on blood, Rosa ran into a bedroom. There was a canopied double bed and two dressers with a crucifix high between them. She tore the spread off the bed and swept the snapshots off the dressers into it, some clothes from the drawers, silk scarves, an alarm clock, a pair of heels, tied it all up tight. Bullets were hitting the front of the building like rain, singing up and down the stairway like lost birds. She took down the crucifix, broke it in two, shoved half in the bag and half in her gown.

Back in the living room people were stacking sandbags against the front wall. An AK47 stood against a wall beside a stack of 30-round magazines. Its stock was split and had been wrapped carefully with black tape. Rosa set it to single and crossed halfway to the sandbagged window, aimed across the smoky darkness at a shred of window in the hulk of the Life Building, fired a shot, thought she saw a spark ten feet high, to the left. She backed away and stood rubbing her shoulder where the splintered stock had punched it.

She took one extra magazine. Mohammed was talking into the radio, gave her a surprised look as she left. She went down the seven sets of stairs to the front hallway and stopped ten feet from the door. The hallway was a vaulted dark tunnel to the shallow darkness of the street; something lay on the floor – rubble maybe, or a person. No, just sandbags, two of them, broken.

She crept nearer the door. A chunk of glowing metal fell into the street, writhing and twisting. In its light she saw a burnt car on bare rims, behind it a tall façade with sky through its windows. A rocket hammered overhead, stone crashing and crunching into the street.

Her hands were shaking, her thighs shivering, the rifle kept sliding off her shoulder. She felt as if she'd throw up any moment. She started back up the stairs but forced herself to turn round, go down to the door, look out. Men were running down the street, one with a rocket on his shoulder – fedayeen. She ducked into the hallway, waited till they passed, and edged forward to the door.

More footsteps – a fast shuffle, uneven. Dogs, she worried. No, a single man, bent over, leaving a black trail on the street. Bearded, dirty, head uncovered, unseeing, stumbling, clenching his stomach. Shia? Amal or Hezbollah? Palestinian? Just another refugee?

If she followed him he’d attract snipers before she did. Head down, she stepped into the street holding the bedspread of trinkets loosely over the AK47. The man wobbled and weaved down the hill between the narrow burning buildings, his trail of blood glinting. The way it was spurting and slacking, it had to be an artery, an artery in his gut.

He fell over a pram lying sideways in the street and writhed, shrieking. She ducked into a doorway. If anyone was going to shoot him, they'd wait now, let him suffer. Watching him grovel sideways, in a circle, she was suddenly shocked by this idea of suffering: we like to make others suffer. That was war. That was its purpose.

But why do we like to make others suffer?

He'd risen to his knees. A few rounds whined down the street, twanged off a façade. In a collapsed building somewhere someone was screaming. With a faraway whoosh a Mirage was climbing after a bombing run. The man stood, clenching his gut, stumbled bent over in a circle, looking for his way. He fell, got up and continued down Rue Weygand toward the Green Line.

At the end of the street the glowing carcass of a tank lit up the dark stumps of buildings on Place des Martyres. Tracers were trading tiny yellow and red fires, like electrons, Rosa thought, back and forth. A shell hit a building, a red-white flash and contorted black smoke boiling up. The man staggered boldly out into Martyres, stumbled over something, straightened, and fell down.

He lay flat and unmoving in the red glare of the tank; she couldn't tell if he'd been shot or had just died. Maybe he was resting. Anyway she couldn't chance it.

She backtracked to the first row of standing buildings and turned south. She'd go down Rue Basta and cross at the Museum, hide the gun before she went across and get another on the Christian side. From a corner she glanced back but could not see Mohammed's outpost. Rockets were still coming over, a big recoilless rifle hitting near, 155s in Martyres now. Even if she reached the Life Building it might be too late, and she'd lose him. No, she decided, Mohammed would never be so stupid as to let the Christians kill him.