De Niro's Game

by Rawi Hage

  I opened the hood of the car and blocked the street. I stood behind the open hood, and when I saw the collectors’ car coming, I pulled a stocking over my head. Joseph hid in the ditch.

  The collectors stopped their car and came toward our car, cursing. Joseph ran up behind them with his Kalashnikov.

  Ala alaard ya ikhwat al-sharmuta (on the floor, you brothers of bitches), I shouted as I appeared from behind the hood with two guns in my hands, pointed at their faces. Ala alaard, I repeated.

  Ala alaard, before I empty my guns on you, Joseph echoed from behind me.

  The men lifted their arms in the air and then went down on their bellies. I put my foot on the first one’s neck and pulled out his gun while Joseph frisked the other.

  We tied their hands with tape and left them beside the car with the open hood. Then I drove their car, with the money inside, in reverse. I swung it around and drove it back the way it had come, stopping at an empty factory on the way. We left the car at the factory after pulling out the moneybags. We emptied everything in a delivery van that we had parked there during the day and drove the van away into the mountains.

  Finally, we stopped. I counted the money and split it in half on the spot.

  There is a ship leaving for France tomorrow. I am taking it, I told Joseph. Here, you go see Nabila. You know Nabila, right? De Niro’s aunt?

  Yes.

  Give her my house keys. Tell her to take care of the house. Tell her I will look for the person whose name she gave me. I will keep my promise; tell her that. Now, leave me at the intersection down the hill. I will take a cab; it is better that we go our own ways.

  Joseph and I kissed, and we separated.

  Majnun, I will never forget you. Majnun! he shouted and drove away.

  I took a taxi up the mountain to Fakhra. I stopped in the centre of the village, filled a can with water from the little stream that sang at night under the villagers’ huts, and slipped into the bush and yet farther up the hills. Finally I stopped, poured water on the earth, made a pool of mud, and smeared my face and hands with it. I walked all night through the houses in the village looking for a black BMW with tinted glass. I slipped behind the houses when the dogs barked. Then I passed through the dark alleys between the chalets. I covered the whole village, but I couldn’t find the car. Early in the morning, I sat on top of the hill and watched the passing cars.

  I saw a BMW speeding up the hill. It was driven as if by a drunk, in zigzags, like a donkey climbing uphill.

  I ran after the BMW, through the pine trees, through the moist hills, through the morning dew, pushing away the loose branches. I crossed the stone stairs and waited until the car stopped. A man opened the door and slowly stepped out of it. It was Rambo.

  I walked toward him, and when he heard my steps he looked back and pulled out his gun in slow motion. I stopped. I saw his face, and my heart started to beat with sounds of death and drums. I felt as if I should walk all night again, and crush every mattress that would call me to sleep, and the sweat fell from my forehead and soaked my face in a bucket of cool liquid, and the morning breeze swept past me with jasmine scent. Rushing butterflies flapped their gigantic wings, raising the mountain’s fog from the valleys, and my eyelids fluttered. My hands stretched forward, both of my index fingers squeezed the trigger, and I shot at him. He smiled as I emptied my magazine, and the bullets flew and plunged into his cologne-scented flesh, his whisky’s final sighs, and his nails that gripped the door handle of his car. My gunshots rang through the deep valley with the sound of mourning bells, with the crack of hunters’ rifles in the morning sun. I shot him until he fell to the ground, and the thickening fog passed us by and carried his last breath.

  I searched Rambo for his car keys and found them under his body. I touched his leather jacket, his white silk shirt, now turned brown with a mix of blood and red earth. His eyes watched me for the last time. I saw my image sinking down into his black pupils, and it frightened me.

  I picked up the keys and drove his car down the slopes. Then I pulled over to the edge of the road, stepped out of the car, and vomited over the edge of a cliff. My head was pulled down to the earth, and I was on my knees.

  THE SHIP WAS LEAVING that night. After I returned home, I packed a few of my clothes, picked up my passport and money, and went down the stairs for the last time. The neighbour women were splashing water up and down the marble. The water had come on that day, and there was water on the roofs and coming down the faucets, and the neighbour women had taken their buckets to the roof and carried them down full. Some looked at me, and some did not. I knew what was in their minds; I knew whose two hands and whose bucket were missing. I tiptoed over the little stream of water and soap. I rushed, and I didn’t say a word to the women. I did not greet, I did not thank, I did not scrub, I did not carry. I stepped over the water, seeking the seas.

  I walked down the street. Nothing changes here, I thought. Those windows will last forever. Cars will multiply, park, and grow like plants, like colourful sidewalk trees. I did not look around me, I did not greet anyone or cry. I was just leaving.

  A car passed by me, and then it stopped and came back. It was De Niro. He asked me to hop in.

  I told him that I was fine, that I had to go to work.

  I will drive you. We need to talk, he insisted. His eyes were red. He was either drunk or high, or maybe he couldn’t sleep from the noise of gunshots, the stomping drum of military boots.

  When I asked him to leave me alone, he got out of the car, held me, and kissed my forehead. He told me, You are my brother. He walked me to the other side of the car, sat me in the passenger seat, then walked back to the driver’s side, touching the car on the way with one of his palms — a palm that had been laid on my neck, on my cheek, the same palm that had guided me to his car.

  He drove fast. He did not stop, he did not brake. He looked at me, at times smiling, at times almost crying. He stayed silent until we passed Quarantina, and then he swung the car down to the highway that ended under the bridge, and he drove fast again, shifting gears and jerking the car. He slowed down, and we drove under the bridge, and he parked the car just behind its large concrete foundation. The sewer that carried our collective sins ran beside us.

  We both remained silent, facing a large pile of sand and rocks and unfinished construction. George’s handgun lay beside us on the seat.

  Then George started to laugh. He still could not look me in the eyes. He pulled out two cigarettes, lit them both, and handed me my share.

  There was fresh blood on his military pants; a large black patch of it almost glowed.

  He saw me looking at it. He reached for a bottle of whisky and drank some. When he offered it to me, I declined.

  I killed today, he finally said.

  I nodded without surprise.

  I killed many. Many, he said as he played with his gun.

  I nodded again and kept my silence for a moment longer. Then: I have to go, I said. I was no longer interested in hearing the sounds of the slaughterhouses, the rush of thick heels, the fireworks. I could only hear waves splashing over the bridge, bouncing on the car windshield, moving toward my feet.

  George pulled out a tube, and using a little spoon that fished powder, he sniffed. He passed the back of his palm over his nose, then looked at the nose in the mirror. Turning, he smiled at me and said, Ten thousand. Ten thousand, maybe more, he mumbled. We must have killed ten thousand of them.

  Who? I asked.

  Children, women, we even shot the donkey, he said and laughed.

  What happened, George? I asked, giving in.

  He grabbed the gun and aimed it at the windshield, then looked at it and released a muffled laugh.

  Talk, I said. If that is why you brought us here.

  I will tell it all, he said. I will tell it all . . . We attacked a Palestinian camp and killed by the hundreds, maybe thousands.

  When?

  These last few days.

  How? Why? I ask
ed.

  We camped at the international airport in Lebanon. International, he repeated and laughed again. All week, after the assassination of Al-Rayess, we didn’t sleep. The men screamed for revenge. An Israeli liaison officer, Eitan, came by with Abou-Nahra. He said that there were still a few armed pockets in the Palestinian camps after the surrender. Abou-Nahra said, We have to purify the camps.

  George laughed, and held the gun, and spun its barrel. De Niro’s a fucking good actor; you remember that scene in that movie, Bassam, when De Niro played his best friend? You are my best friend and my brother, you are.

  He tried to hug me, but I pushed him away.

  He continued. Fifteen hundred lions positioned at the airport we were. Nothing would stop us, nothing. We moved like thunder toward the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, along the wide road through Ouzai. We passed the Henri Chehab military compound, and another unit met us from the south army, men from the villages of Damour, Saadiyat, and Nameh. Those men never forgot their burned villages, those men were also lions. One of them, an older fellow, looked me in the eyes and said, We have been waiting a long time for this. So we killed! We killed! People were shot at random, entire families killed at dinner tables. Cadavers in their night-clothes, throats slit, axes used, hands separated from bodies, women cut in half. The Israelis surrounded the camps. And then an Israeli lieutenant named Roly, who was stationed near Bir Hassan, across from the stadium, sent a message to the camp committee to have all our men bring their weapons to the stadium. We told him that we do not take orders from him. We told him that orders came from Abou-Nahra, and that the high Israeli command knew about it. We moved farther in, and Israeli aircraft dropped eighty-one-millimetre illumination flares. The whole area was lit up; it was like being in a Hollywood movie. And I am De Niro in a movie, George said. Drink, he suddenly shouted at me. Drink!

  I waved the bottle away from my face.

  He drank, then spoke again. Everything was fluorescent white; you could see like it was daylight. The sky was glowing as if the Messiah himself had showed up. The units from the south were already inside. At the Akka hospital, some of our men followed the wounded to finish them off. When we arrived, we heard the scream of a woman. Three guys were raping a nurse on a doctor’s table. An Asian doctor had a photo of Arafat in his office; he started to speak in English to me. I said, Terrorist! You are a terrorist, and you have a terrorist photo on the wall. He spoke to me in English again. I beat him up with the handle of my gun.

  De Niro drank some more. Outside, he said, bodies rolled in sand, bloated. Blood turned into dark stains, green flies were feeding, bulldozers dug and shoved cadavers in ground holes. It was all like a movie. All like a movie. Dead people everywhere. Do you still want to hear? Do you want to hear more? More? He shouted at me, Here, drink! He cranked his gun and put it in my face. Drink, I say.

  I took the bottle and sipped.

  What is my father’s name? he asked me.

  I do not know.

  Yes, you do. You are a liar. You talk to Nabila, you visit her when I am not there. I saw you. Do you want to hear more? Here, drink more. Yes, you want to hear, and I want to finish my story. We tied men together with a rope and shot them in the head one by one. Dogs snatched cadaver parts and escaped behind little alleys. A fucking Syrian pushed past with his cart, selling vegetables. I asked him his nationality. It was Syrian! Fucking Syrians! They all come here to take our land! I kicked his vegetable cart. Abou-Haddid did not even waste time; he put a bullet in the Syrian’s stomach. Everyone against the wall, I said. Women started to scream, begging us, telling us that they had already surrendered. Kamil grabbed one of them by the hair, pushed her on the floor, and stepped on her neck. I don’t want to hear a sound here, I shouted to them.

  Everyone to the stadium. On the way, some of those fighters laughed and tossed hand grenades into the middle of the crowd.

  After telling me this, George brooded for a while. He was becoming even more intoxicated. He talked, and then he stared into emptiness. He drank more, and then he mumbled. He mumbled something about his mother, that he had killed her. He began to hallucinate, and looked sad all of a sudden. I thought he was getting tired, so I tried to pull the gun away from his hand, but the moment I touched it, he bounced up and threatened to shoot me. I thought he would.

  I killed my mother, I killed her, he said and burst into tears.

  Your mother died in the hospital from cancer, I said to him.

  For Al-Rayess! he shouted, lifting the bottle and drinking some more.

  I have to go, I said.

  No one is going anywhere, not before I finish talking, he said. Listen to what happened there in that camp. Listen. Kamil had cocaine. We sniffed, and we shouted, For Al-Rayess! We rounded up more men against a wall, women and children against another wall. We shot all the men first. The women and children wailed, and we changed magazines and shot them as well. It was their cries that made me shoot them. I hate kids’ cries. I never cry; have you ever seen me cry? The rest who came after, when they saw the corpses on the floor, they panicked. Some pissed in their pants. I saw three fleeing from the back; we chased them in the narrow alleys. I became separated from the others, and I lost everyone; I was alone. I broke down doors. I entered a house and found a woman on the floor surrounded by her dead daughters. She looked me in the face. I said, You want to join your family, don’t you? She said, You might as well finish what you started, my son.

  My son! My son, George said and laughed. I hit her with the butt of my rifle, many times, many times, like this (and he punched the air with his gun). Blood sprang from her head like a hose; it splashed on my thighs. I wandered through the alleys alone. I saw a woman putting her hand over her children’s mouths . . . They cried. The houses were filled with bodies of slain women in aprons, men stretched next to their wives and their raped daughters. Then I stopped. You wouldn’t believe it, but I heard the cooing of a partridge bird, just like the one we hunted up in the mountains, you and I, Bassam, you and I. I followed it through the narrow walls. It ran, and I ran after it; it hopped above cadavers soaked in streams of cooking water. I saw it flying over the olive trees, above the hills. And then it stopped, and came back, and perched on top of a dead man’s body. I saw the hand of a dead man reaching up to caress its feathers.

  I saw it! George shouted and took another sip. I chased it again, and it entered a hut. I ran inside, and I saw it slip under a bed. I lifted the mattress; two small children were huddled in fear under there. Their dead mother’s body was in the room, staring at them with open eyes. I just wanted to hunt the bird, George said. All I wanted was to hunt.

  Then he was silent, brooding. He pulled out his magnum, opened its barrel, took out two bullets, spun the barrel, and said to me, Three out of five. Game now, here.

  I declined. I tried to pull the gun from his hand, and he called me a coward.

  You are not a man, George said, and that is why your woman was looking for someone who is a man. He pointed the gun at my head. Coward! he taunted me.

  The only coward here is you, I said.

  He looked me in the eye. Then he said, You are leaving. I see your bag. You think you have to go. Your face is all cut. Your eye has a scar.

  It is from your boss, I said. It is his goodbye gift to me. You have killed. I know you have killed. You killed that old man as well. And his wife. You always killed.

  We always killed, Bassam, George replied. He looked me in the eyes again and repeated, We always killed. The man who killed Al-Rayess, that man confessed. He mentioned your name. You gave him the plan for the foundation. You killed Al-Rayess.

  That is why you came? I asked him.

  Yes, I came to take you to the Majalis. They want you back there. You know, a few more bubbles. A few more slaps.

  So, why did you drive in this direction? I asked him. The torture chambers are on the other side.

  No, Bassam, the torture chambers are inside us. But I am fair, and you are my brother.
I will give you a way out, De Niro said. I took Rana from you, he said, and he pointed his gun, and his eyes emitted red like blood, harsh as a stone, veiling lives, and shining in the windshield’s light.

  THREE

  Paris

  15

  I ARRIVED AT THE PORT AND WENT TO FIND THE SHIP. I looked for the Egyptian captain.

  There you are, he said. Do you have the money?

  I paid him, and he led me down to the engine room. This is Moustafa, the mechanic. You stay here with him until the ship leaves the port, then you go up on the deck. We are leaving soon, the captain said. He climbed back upstairs.

  Then the engine roared and chuckled, and the pipes swelled and ticked, and Moustafa smiled at me and said, First time on a ship?

  Yes.

  He laughed. If you feel dizzy, go up and get some fresh air. He smiled again.

  The boat moved slowly into the sea.

  A COUPLE OF HOURS passed, and during all that time I sat very still and made my mind blank. I wanted it to stay blank for a long time.

  Finally, I went up on the deck and watched the little light on the shore fading into the black of the night. A few sailors rushed up and down the stairs and onto the decks. I watched them and held my bag, my money, my gun, and my jacket on my knees.

  The air was still, and the ship sailed quietly from darkness and into darkness, from water into water, from earth into earth. I watched the slow death of the distant twinkles on the land.

  Ten thousand waves passed under the floating tank that moved away from my home.

  Ten thousand fish sang underneath the waves and nibbled on the garbage thrown from the cook’s hand.

  I looked at the sky. It was covered with light signals from faraway planets bursting with gas and the happy bonfires of dead humans singing warriors’ songs in a landscape of burning rocks, and sending Morse code signals to ships steered by alcoholic captains into islands inhabited by sirens who sing in cabarets and offer up their salty sex organs that taste like the marinated fish of Sunday’s family gatherings after the families have endured the moralistic discourse of fat priests who douse congregations with incense spilled from the pendulum motion of their jerking hands, a motion that rocks like the swings in parks that are swamped with baby strollers pushed by Filipino nannies on temporary visas and with small paycheques that are transferred at Christmas to faraway families who live in huts by the sea and receive Morse code signals from those old creatures from astral space. The creatures read oracles and long letters home from nannies who watch the kids of executives pouring sand in plastic buckets and climbing geometrical cubes in red-striped sailor’s shorts, and the creatures can also explain letters home from orderlies dressed in white aprons who cruise the elevators in old folks’ homes, changing the sheets of senile, retired sea captains and society ladies, who are in complete ignorance of the presence of their three-piece-suited sons and oblivious to the repetitive, high-pitch complaints of their daughters-in-law, complaints like those of seagulls that feed on the sea trails of sailors’ food, and rest on the deck, ogling me with xenophobic eyes, sharpening their beaks, and taking off to other planets on mythological wings.