The Only Café

by Linden MacIntyre

  It had been the longest day of his life—a day of nearly ninety hours. Ninety hours that would eclipse every other hour that he had lived or would live.

  It was a Saturday. By eight thirty that morning he knew the day was almost over. It had actually started on the fourteenth, Tuesday afternoon, just after four. Elias in his doorway: There has been a bomb. In Achrafieh. Let’s go. He hadn’t slept since then. Not real sleep. Maybe brief restless moments of unconsciousness, in his clothing, sitting upright. Elias, who had gone to school somewhere in Canada, had an English phrase for the state they were in: Wired but not tired.

  Perhaps it was that first scene on Tuesday afternoon that prepared him for the final scene on Saturday. Elias drove both times. To Achrafieh, to Shatila. They are saying Sheikh Bashir was in the building. In his memory, that was when the chill began. And by the Saturday he felt neither chill nor heat.

  It seems that he was only semi-conscious when the Israelis stopped them at the entrance to the camp. You must turn back. Nobody can go in. The Israeli major spoke perfect Arabic. Pierre had replied quietly: Move. We have orders to go in to make sure that all our men are out of the camps. The Israeli studied their papers, shrugged and signalled to his men who slouched away from the front of the jeep.

  The difference between Saturday morning and Tuesday afternoon, besides the overwhelming presence of Israeli power in West Beirut, was the silence. On Tuesday, the noise was overwhelming. And the smoke and dust billowing down the streets of Achrafieh were confirmation of catastrophe even before they saw the rubble. The building, all three levels pancaked—pipes and reinforcing rods protruding from the broken concrete; broken furniture and fabric smouldering; scraps of clothing that revealed the presence of a human form or body part. Noise. The shouting, honking, screaming sirens; wailing; the clatter of a helicopter just overhead.

  Nobody survived this. We must get back.

  A weeping stranger seized Elias by the arm. Sheikh Bashir is in that helicopter, on his way to a hospital in Israel.

  No. The sheikh is dead. Everything is changed.

  Who did this?

  Terrorists.

  Whose terrorists?

  Elias didn’t answer.

  Now Saturday, weaving through another place of carnage, there is only silence accentuated by the hum of insects. The dead are everywhere, individuals and groups; families; young men sprawled along a wall where they were executed; old men, throats cut; children, their heads cleaved by blows from axes; the silent curiosity of lifeless faces; small bodies; large bodies; bodies blackened by long hours in the sun; blackened by the swarms of flies; some still bleeding from a recent knife or axe or bullet; babies; women; dogs; horses. Pierre will ask himself repeatedly, sometimes in astonishment: horses? But he remembered horses. Mostly he remembered his indifference, the self-preserving numbness that sets in after normal senses have shut down.

  Elias mutters: Justice. Justice for the sheikh.

  Hobeika seemed unsteady when he gave the orders, wearily. He’d not slept since Monday night. Make sure that everyone is out of there. The Israelis had been adamant, the tone aggressive and contemptuous: everybody out by five on Saturday morning. They were getting questions. There were rumours of a massacre. The media were swarming. The American ambassador was aggressively demanding information. But at seven the Phalangists were still there in the camps, still killing. Make sure there is no living person left there.

  Elias knew the camp, its narrow streets and alleyways; its breeze-block hovels, many flattened now by dynamite and the bulldozers that have shoved the wreckage, the garbage, corpses, severed body parts, into mounds that only partly hide the savagery. Elias had been there Thursday night, all night, and all day Friday. Pierre sat two hundred metres away, peering through binoculars, from the top of a five-storey building, when Elias called Hobeika.

  I have fifty civilians here. I don’t know what to do with them.

  What do you mean?

  They are women and children. What do I do?

  This is the last time you’re going to ask me a question like that. You know exactly what to do.

  Saturday morning. The Phalangists and Israelis were still watching—watching them for they were the only people moving. Shatila camp. A slaughterhouse with a gallery for spectators. Pierre is mercifully unmoved, even now, even a quarter of a century removed from the reality.

  He heard it happening. From that observation post he heard the shooting, the shouts and screams; saw the flight, pursuit and murder in the light of flares suspended in the sky, turning night to day. Thursday night to Friday when it escalated in the daylight.

  He and Elias drove slowly on that Saturday morning, weaving through the debris. Human debris. What had been, on Tuesday, living, worrying, laughing, weeping, striving, hungry, thirsty, horny. Indolent. Ambitious. Hopeful and despairing. People. Now indistinguishable from broken concrete, litter, the clothing they wore. Crushed water bottles. Rotting garbage from the food that once sustained the bodies that are now bulging, broken, blackened. Inert. Everything inert.

  There isn’t anybody here alive.

  Okay. Wait.

  They were sitting in the jeep, listening. “Come,” Elias said. “I want to show you something.” Pierre felt a flutter in his chest. When your time comes, it will be Elias. He stared straight ahead, lest his eyes reveal distrust. “Come,” Elias repeated. They exited the jeep, stood listening.

  “What was that?” Elias asked, cranking the AK-47. Clack-clack, metal upon metal.

  Pierre heard only the sound of the Kalashnikov being readied, allowed his hand to slide closer to the Browning on his hip. Then he too heard a sound. A door closing behind a garden wall. Elias was already at the gate, Pierre close behind, their weapons ready.

  The woman at the clothesline turned, startled. One arm was cradling a basket full of clothes. On her face, an expression of surprise fast dissolving into fear. Pierre felt an unfamiliar movement in his chest—a response to this evidence of life returning in the middle of an abattoir. She was young, still pretty. She seemed to be unaware of what had been happening just outside her tiny yard, or in denial. Emotion surged in him, something close to passion. He raised a hand. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to pick her up, hold her, carry her away, but he stepped back, intimidated by her fear. He reached toward her, reassuring with his eyes. She cringed. The gunshot startled him. There was a look of sudden shock on her face as she spun away, reaching for the clothesline as if to prevent falling.

  Elias was frozen in position, a tight smile twitching at the corners of his mouth, AK extended forward casually, a wisp of blue smoke drifting. It seemed as if she was falling slowly, clothes basket tumbling in front of her, clothes and clothespins suspended in the air, then settling around her head. There was no immediate evidence of injury and for a moment Pierre was able to imagine that she had fainted, that she would stir and he would help her to her feet, take her out of there, preserve her, this beauty, this assertion of survival in the aftermath of Armageddon. It was what prevented him from killing Elias then and there, this fantasy. Until he saw the blood oozing slowly, pooling.

  Elias struck him hard, brought him out from the inner place where he’d been caught in a feeling of revulsion not at what he’d witnessed, but at what he now could see and feel within himself.

  Get out of here.

  Driving past the checkpoint he could feel the loathing of the soldiers lounging on their tanks and sandbags; the civilized Israelis, cultured, educated citizen-soldiers repelled by Arab savagery. He stared straight ahead as they accelerated past the waving, shouting officer. Waving them to continue? Demanding that they stop and explain the single gunshot? No matter. They will not dare to go inside and look, and he has had enough of their disdain. He had been listening to it since Tuesday night. Wednesday in Bikfaya. All night Thursday in their command post. Friday, as they pretended to discover what had been happening.

  Later they will claim they didn’t know. How could they not know?
He marvelled at the studied innocence of their inquiries, the patronizing indignation of their warnings. Even Sharon himself, the mastermind. Your men must not be allowed to run amok. Run amok? What is that, run amok? They were laughing at fat-ass Sharon on Wednesday when he was there, handing out the orders. Too fat to climb the five flights of stairs to the command post. Deniability through disability. It was funny, almost, the Israeli insistence that they didn’t know. Begin, Sharon, Eitan. Even the soldiers and their spies, the Mossad agents. They all knew. They were everywhere. They were the occupiers. As of Wednesday they owned Beirut, West as well as East. Their tanks and half-tracks crunching through the Hamra, officers lounging in the lobby of the Commodore Hotel, infantry patrolling the Corniche. Do the Jews not have ears and eyes like other people? Were they not there throughout it all, on the roof of that five-storey building two hundred metres away, illuminating everything with flares? And yet they acted as if they couldn’t see and hear for themselves. What is going on down there? We’ve heard a report, three hundred dead. You must exercise control. Discipline. Protect civilians.

  What civilians? He was there when the Mossad spies and HK concurred that there were two thousand terrorists holed up in the camps, that they had a secret arsenal.

  He was there Tuesday night when Eitan and Drori gave the orders at Phalangist headquarters: mobilize your Lebanese Forces. Unleash the Kata’ib.

  He was there, in the Israeli forward command post when Eitan laid out the rules of engagement—the elimination of the terrorists would be undertaken by the Phalange.

  And then the Israeli high command sat back and watched. And listened. But heard nothing, saw nothing. Until Saturday, when all the world saw.

  Pierre didn’t recognize the man who was having coffee with HK when they returned to the stadium. He could tell that he was Israeli; he knew by the composure, by the absence of identifying insignia on his uniform, that he was from the dark side of their operations. There was no disdain in him, no sign of judgment. Perhaps that’s why Pierre remembered him. He guessed that the Israeli was an officer, for it was apparent that he was a leader. He was battle weary, tired and unshaven. But the handshake was firm, the gaze respectful.

  Elias briefed the Israeli and HK: no member of the Phalangist forces left in or near the camp. Perimeter still secured by the IDF. All clear as promised. Earthmovers in place for a final cleanup before the regular Lebanese army would arrive in the afternoon to occupy the crime scene. There were no living witnesses. No mention of the woman at the clothesline—the final terrorist to die.

  Then Pierre noticed the two men squatting near a wall, hooded, hands tied.

  Yes. Them. Take them back to the camp.

  There’s an IDF checkpoint…

  The Israeli officer removed a notepad from his shirt pocket. Scrawled something, tore off a page and handed it to Pierre. It was in Hebrew.

  This will get you through.

  Elias frowned in the direction of the two prisoners. What are we to do with them?

  You know exactly what to do with them. Don’t ask again.

  They drove in silence, one of the prisoners in front beside Elias, the other in the back beside Pierre. When the jeep rounded a corner, or bounced through a crater in the road he could feel the prisoner’s body bumping him or leaning into his, which made it almost impossible to remain unaware of him. He repeated to himself: It is war; they are the enemy. But then he remembered the expression on the face of the man he killed in Zghorta, the last man that he had killed. Four years ago. The look of surprise, of utter vulnerability. The expression on the face of the woman at the clothesline.

  He told himself: You must get control; you must refill your heart with the hatred that sustained you, that justified the things you’ve done, the horrors you’ve witnessed. Remember January 1976.

  The remembering was easy. The seafront; the chilling mist that evening. His father wondering what they would eat when they got home. The Fedayeen patrol. The horrifying sound of gunfire behind him, around him. The smell of shit on his hand that he couldn’t wash away for days. And his mother. And Miriam. The last smile, the gay farewell as they drove off toward Damour.

  But now it wasn’t anger in his heart. It wasn’t hatred. It was despair. He gripped the rifle on his lap, squeezed hard to keep his hands from shaking and was glad the prisoner was blinded by the hood.

  They were stopped again at the entrance to Shatila by another officer, a captain who demanded that they hand over the prisoners. Pierre was privately relieved but he pretended to resist, sitting there in the back seat. He lifted the rifle from his lap, held it upright, butt resting on his thigh. Elias turned to him. Show him the paper. And he remembered: the note from the Israeli officer in his shirt pocket. He presented it.

  The captain didn’t look at it, kept shouting. Hand over the terrorists. And then another officer appeared. This one took the note and read it.

  How do you know him?

  Pierre shrugged. He is at the stadium. Go there and ask him.

  The major handed back the note, shouted something at the captain. They both stepped back. Elias put the jeep in gear, accelerated. They bounced forward.

  The jeep stopped suddenly. Elias pointed down an alleyway. Down there.

  Pierre remembered that there were the bodies of young men there, lying among their weapons, blood, congealed brain matter. Bursting out of uniforms, bodies greasy. Four or five of them. They had died quickly Thursday night trying to defend the camp. He thought: two more dead terrorists will hardly matter.

  His prisoner stumbled attempting to leave the back seat of the jeep and Pierre caught his arm. He tripped again on some debris and, again, Pierre steadied him. From underneath the hood Pierre could hear a nervous laugh. Please take it off.

  Pierre ignored him as they stumbled down the shadowed alleyway, his hand on the prisoner’s elbow, steering him.

  I want to see where I am going.

  No. It is better if you don’t see.

  The stench was overwhelming. The other prisoner gagged and there was vomit from beneath his hood, down his shirt. Elias grabbed the hood, lifted it off, revealed the face of a man who seemed to be in his thirties. He stood blinking, spitting, looking around in desperation, disbelief. Elias pushed him away until he was standing near the dead. Then he grabbed Pierre’s prisoner by the arm and roughly dragged him over to where the other one was standing. He snatched the second prisoner’s hood and dropped it on the ground.

  He seemed young, maybe younger than Pierre. He looked around and he looked upward. He squinted in the blaze of sunshine.

  You will do it.

  Elias repeated, his voice mercifully low: You will do it. Two shots. Use the Browning. Quickly.

  Yes.

  He removed the Browning from its holster and walked toward the prisoners. The older one stepped back, stumbled on a corpse and Pierre grabbed him quickly, held him upright, could feel him trembling. First the young one. He turned, aimed between the eyes. His mind was blank, hand steady. Damour. Damour. The prisoner was facing him but, at the same time, staring elsewhere. Pierre was momentarily distracted. What’s he looking at?

  And then he realized: I have seen those eyes before, that wall-eyed face.

  Saida. You were there when they killed my father. He was speaking softly. You were there, six years ago.

  The prisoner shrugged. Perhaps.

  Elias was shouting now. What are you waiting for. Do it…

  And suddenly Elias was beside Pierre and with a single shot from his Kalashnikov he felled the older prisoner who stumbled and landed writhing on his back among the dead. Wheeled then to face the younger one but Pierre was faster. He swiftly raised the Browning and shot Elias through the ear.

  The surviving prisoner was shaking but his voice was firm. Quickly. Untie me. Grab that hood. Give me your helmet.

  Pierre was paralyzed.

  Wake up. We must go.

  Pierre removed his helmet, stooped and grabbed the hood where it w
as lying on the ground, handed them to the prisoner who was already walking away, back down the alleyway. Left Elias now indistinguishably dead among the terrorists. Justice, Pierre repeated silently.

  The prisoner was driving when they left the camp. He didn’t even slow down for the checkpoint, just raised his right hand in salute, middle finger pointed skyward. The Israelis watched them grimly.

  Winding up the mountain road, Pierre looked back to see Beirut sprawled below, almost lost in haze. The thought occurred to him that this might be the last time he’d gaze upon the city that he’d fought for, almost died for. Six long, miserable years. Now his fight was ended.

  The Mediterranean twinkled, flecks of gold on the azure swells, and there were foreign warships and Israeli gunboats lurking like watchdogs in the distance.

  Near Bhamdoun the jeep came to a skidding stop on the roadside.

  I am Walid.

  Where are we going?

  My village. Kfar Matta. In the Chouf.

  You are Druze?

  I am Druze. The other man was my cousin, Kamal. We were at the Sabra hospital.

  You were taken at the Sabra hospital? By the IDF?

  Yes. IDF? Kata’ib? What difference?

  He removed the helmet, tossed it in the ditch.

  Your name is what?

  Pierre.

  You must trust me now, Pierre. You will let me have your gun, please. And you will wear this hood.

  Pierre’s hesitation lasted only for a second, maybe two. Beneath the hood the darkness was almost comforting.

  30.

  And now the sun is twinkling on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, gateway to North America. He realized that he’d been praying. It wasn’t the kneel-down-at-the-lap-of-God prayerfulness that he remembered from his childhood, but a rare harmony between his senses and emotions.

  He recalled a word that Father Cyril often used: reconciliation. For a moment he had an insight that might have been considered blasphemous: he’d been praying to the spirit of his friend, the priest, a substitute for the God that he was unable to imagine, unable to believe in. But maybe it wasn’t blasphemy at all. He thought about their first meeting, in May 1978, and the enigma we call destiny. A saintly priest from Canada, trying to find his roots, to absorb something of his heritage.