De Niro's Game

by Rawi Hage

  The bathroom had golden faucets; the water ran in abundance. I spread the foam of perfumed soap on my skin, and silky soft shampoo on my curly hair. The maid knocked, giggled, and handed me a razor. As I shaved, I let the water run in a vengeful act of waste. Then the maid knocked again and handed me pants, a shirt, and socks. The sleeves of the shirt were a little big and covered the back of my hands; I folded them up, put on the socks, and walked out.

  I heard two women’s voices conversing in the living room. I entered, and they both stopped and smiled at me. A young woman stood up, approached me, and kissed me on the cheeks. She had long fair hair and George’s eyes.

  I am Rhea, she smiled. George’s sister.

  I recognized you, I said.

  Really? Do I look like George?

  Your eyes, I said.

  She smiled, and held my arm, and said, Let us eat.

  We sat, and Genevieve poured wine to fill our glasses. We ate in silence for a while, and then Rhea spoke. Her words cut through the clang of heavy silver spoons that dived to the bottom of gold-rimmed plates and the sound of wine pouring into towering crystal glasses.

  My mother told me that you came by boat, she said.

  I nodded.

  Why did you leave? she asked.

  The war, I said.

  And is George happy there?

  He never wanted to leave.

  My father tried to bring him here, you know, but George’s mother resisted, and when the war broke out we never knew what happened to them. My father tried to send messages through the embassy, but it seemed as if George’s mother never wanted to have anything to do with us.

  I kept quiet.

  Monsieur Bassam is a man of small words, Genevieve teased me.

  Ask and I will answer, I said.

  Ah, bon! she shouted and laughed.

  So what does George do? asked Rhea.

  He does security.

  Quoi? Mother and daughter looked at each other in surprise.

  Do you mean he is a bodyguard?

  Sort of.

  C’est dangereux, ça, non? Genevieve murmured from inside her tilted, suspended, swinging wineglass. A burgundy wave waited on the coast of her lips for the word to leave.

  Do you have a photo of him?

  No.

  Is he tall?

  A bit taller than me.

  So, were you two together in the security business?

  No, we were childhood friends.

  In school?

  Yes, and our mothers were best friends.

  You speak French very well. I guess you both learned French at school.

  Yes.

  So you came here to meet us?

  Well, I promised Nabila, George’s aunt, that I would come.

  And George did not send anything? He never asked you anything about us?

  No. Not really. George was always preoccupied with his job.

  Does he know anything about us? Does he know about his father’s death?

  I never discussed his family with him, I said. Some things are better left alone. In our society, these are sensitive things to talk about.

  You mean, having no legitimate father.

  Yes.

  But you knew about it, Rhea said.

  It was Nabila who asked me to come here, I said, and stopped. I chewed my food slowly, delicately.

  So you came to see us, with no message, Rhea insisted.

  Nabila wanted Monsieur Mani to send George a French passport, I said.

  Well, now, that makes a little more sense, Genevieve said. So George wants to come here?

  No, it was Nabila who wanted George to come to France, I said.

  But George does not want to come? Rhea asked.

  I shook my head and drove the fork into my mouth. I was famished. I tried to eat slowly and with graceful manners, to use gestures that would complement the rich surroundings. But the questioning made me uncomfortable. And my laconic answers seemed to make my hosts frustrated. They hardly ate, but both sipped their wine, constantly caressing their glasses, lifting the liquid without drinking.

  Suddenly, both women started to speak loud and fast and in unison.

  I continued eating, and watched the maid take the plates from beneath our noses. Rhea had a feisty presence that I liked. She was assertive, and when she talked she waved her hands or tapped them on the table. She also lifted her hair with her finger, delicately, to reveal her fair skin, her small eyes, her pointy nose. She held her fork and knife with ease, separated the vegetables from the meat, and cut them all into small pieces without piercing them with the fork. As she talked, she did not look at her mother. When they engaged in fast and sporadic conversation, like two competing monologues, the maid and I seemed irrelevant.

  My eyes wandered again around the room. There was always something new to discover: framed old maps with compasses indicating north; a trace of a trip to an exotic land; African masks; a small statue of an Egyptian god; and bookshelves, coffee tables, books.

  Finally, the women turned their attention back to me, and Genevieve asked me if I was planning to stay in Paris.

  I am not sure.

  Are you lost? she laughed.

  I just got here, I said.

  Rhea snapped at her mother and told her to leave me alone. Laisse-le, putin, laisse-le!

  Now they quarrelled, and while the maid cleared the rest of the table, I stood up and walked to the window.

  I looked again at the long street and could not recall if anything had changed from the last time I had looked; through the window, everything seemed like a photo on a postcard.

  Over coffee, Genevieve said that she would ask the family lawyer, Maurice, about whether they could do anything to help George. Again I felt a pang of guilt for not telling them everything I knew, but the words would not come to me.

  Genevieve turned to Rhea and asked her to follow up with Maurice; she herself was leaving the next day to spend some time at their house in the south of France.

  Rhea argued with her mother, calling her irresponsible.

  Franchement, Genevieve said, mais franchement.

  The women offered me cake, but I declined, thanked them, and took my leave. Rhea followed me down the stairs.

  Will you come back? she asked, and her voice faintly echoed in the large void of those high walls and marble stairs.

  I don’t know. I am looking for a place to stay, I said.

  Do you need money?

  No, but I do not have the right papers to rent a room.

  Well, we can take care of that, she said. Wait here. She rushed back into the apartment, picked up her bag, then followed me down the stairs and into the street. For several blocks, she held my elbow and guided me. We entered a small hotel. She booked a room under her name and paid for it. Two weeks, she told the receptionist, and turned and looked at me with a mischievous, triumphant smile.

  She walked with me up the stairs to my room and stood at the door. Voilà, she said and kissed me on both cheeks. Then she bounced toward the stairs. On her way down, she paused and turned, smiled again, swung her hair, and said to me, You look good in my father’s clothes.

  I TOOK OFF THE clothes and laid them on the back of a chair that was tucked under a small desk. It looked like a traveller’s desk, and I half-expected to see a Frenchman’s hand holding a single feather and dipping the feather in a small jar of ink to carry a few drops and transform them into a flow of graceful words on elaborate yellow paper, words starting with Ma Chère.

  I glanced at the clothes resting on the chair and wondered if there was any significance in filling one dead man’s clothes with another.

  I scrutinized the things in the room that seemed foreign to me: the handle that lifted the abat-jour, the small economical space that made the window look bigger. I lay down in the single bed next to the off-white, massive telephone that had no numbers to dial, nor rotary holes to jab your finger into. Then my curiosity took me to the bathroom, with its bidet, and tiny soa
p, and worn towels folded under a polite sign from the management. I stood above the toilet, undid my belt buckle, and slowly, urgently, I let the metamorphosed red wine burst and flow in the curve of a single yellow rainbow. Numbness took over my hands and my eyes and spread to my feet.

  I looked out of the window and could not decide whether to go back into the streets or to lie on the bed. I opened my bag and pulled out the gun, some underwear that needed to be washed, and the wool pullover that my mother had woven for me. Every day for weeks, I remembered, she would ask me to turn my back to her, and she would paste the wool across my shoulders and run her hand along my spine, stretching the rag, ogling it from behind her myopic glasses. And she wove until she became the talk of every attic spider, every fisherman; she wove, and the wool flew to her from underneath shepherds’ noses, and landed in her lap. When my pullover was done, she wove canisters, tablecloths, TV covers. She wove until she covered our whole house and surrounded me with suffocating webs.

  I GRABBED THE KEYS and my bag and decided to walk around the city. As I walked, I tried to remember how to find my way back to the hotel. I noticed that the streets were wider than those in Beirut, the building facades cleaner, and the cars almost never honked. I arrived at the bank of a canal and watched the drifting boats. I sat and compared what I saw to what I had imagined from the stories about Paris my history teacher, Mr. Davidian, had told us — stories of conquests, and orders, and rolling heads from the free-falling guillotine, and the short Corsican commander who rode magnificent horses and swept through countries, escaping in a small boat from the treacherous Englishmen and their austere queens.

  I walked on, and lost myself in the crowds sitting in small cafés perched on the edge of the pavement. I walked for hours, and no one looked me in the eye, though I looked directly at every single person who crossed me. I even defied some of them with my fierce look; I challenged them to the slap of a white glove on the face, hoping for a duel with the weapon of my choice. I felt secure with the weight of my gun in my bag. If I had to, I could swing the gun in any alley, through all the glimmering light, in between the tiny cars.

  Now that I wore the sweater my mother had woven for me, and had left my underwear soaking in the sink, I knew I could find my gun in a second. Now I could defend this city that looked so different from the old photographs in the history books. Now I could kill Nelson, the British admiral, and become a soldier in the emperor’s army. I would be the fastest shooter on a horse. I would slay priests, and hang aristocrats on trees filled with dangling biscuits. I imagined the operatic howling when I reached the palaces, imagined red-painted cheeks and fat asses under pumpkin-shaped dresses, imagined aristocrats sliding in horror and fear across endless marble floors. I listened, and contemplated the harpsichord sound of rushing sabres, the sound that would fill any revolutionary’s eyes with tears of triumph.

  And so I drifted for hours, trying and failing to reconcile Paris with the phantasm of my youth, with the books I had read, with my teacher’s stories. And somehow, as if I had lived here once before, I traced my steps back from the sacked castles and through the glorious sites of rolling heads and falling wigs; I, a victorious soldier, returned to my small room with its small desk and scenic window view. I pulled my soaked underwear out of the sink and strangled it, and spread its wetness on the chair, over the desk, on the edge of the bed.

  I did not wave a white cloth out of the window.

  I slept.

  17

  WHEN I WOKE UP, I FELT STABLE, AS IF THE SEA HAD EVAPOrated and the rocking had ceased.

  From my window I could see the balconies on the other side of the street, smudged by fog and made wet by the Parisian rain.

  I searched for a cigarette, but found that my box had been emptied last night by the aristocrats I had executed, many of whom had requested one last cigarette.

  I splashed water in my eyes, freed the last few drops of wine from my belly, took a shower, brushed my teeth, and rushed down the dark stairs. I walked toward the store, and bought a Gitane Mais that had no filter. I smoked while my soldiers pulled all the jewels from the corpses, wore the aristocrats’ wigs, mocked their feminine manners, frisked them for coins, bowed in front of their ladies’ cadavers, swooned under their hands, and pulled off their precious rings. Before the smell of rotting powdered cheeks rose, I ordered my soldiers to burn the corpses, and when the fire roared, I walked toward the flames and lit another cigarette.

  MID-MORNING, the phone rang. It was Rhea. She asked me to come to the front desk.

  I put on her father’s clothes and went down to meet her. When she saw me, she ran to me and kissed me for the third time since we had met. Let’s go, she said.

  I followed where she led. Women are part of the revolution, I thought, and one has to take what they offer.

  We walked and the rain drizzled; we took shelter in a small café. Inside, I was not the only one puffing revolutionary cigarettes. We made our way through a fog of clients with newspapers that flapped like wings, rustling, toward a small, round table in the back. I ordered a coffee and croissant, which tasted of thick milk and butter. Rhea smiled at me the whole time. She looked me in the eyes like no one else had dared to.

  So, can I start asking you questions? She leaned toward me in a playful manner.

  Sure you can.

  Tell me about George.

  But before I had the chance to open my mouth, she continued, You know, I am very excited at the idea of finding my brother. I always felt alone. My father travelled all the time, and my mother was always busy with her parties and her social engagements. He is more than a security guard, isn’t he? Is he really a fighter?

  Yes.

  Who is he fighting for?

  He joined the Christian militia in East Beirut.

  Tell me more.

  I hesitated, not knowing where to start, or how to end. I decided to tell her stories about our school days: how George and I had always played together, about his house that was not too far from mine, about the day we crawled in the school garbage dump looking for copies of the French exam, and the day we broke into the church to steal the donation box, and the time we stole my father’s car keys and drove away. I told her about the days when we began to smoke in little alleys, and how, when the war started when we were still kids, we collected empty bullets and cannon shells that we polished with lime and exchanged for cigarettes.

  Rhea smiled, and when I stopped, she became like a kid at bedtime, wanting me to repeat things, to never stop. I told her that George and I had worked together, and that he decided to join the militia because he needed the money. I skipped many things about George, and when I saw how happy she was, I changed names, I planted trees, I painted the concrete houses in our old neighbourhood in tropical colours, I made people dance and laugh, even under the falling bombs.

  Does he know about me? Rhea asked.

  He never mentioned you, I said.

  Did he ever ask about his father?

  No, but when the kids at school teased him and called him “the bastard,” he fought them no matter how big they were, he fought them until no one dared to say a word.

  Was he ashamed of not having a father?

  If he was, he never showed it. We never talked about it. But everyone called him George Al-Faransawi (George the French).

  You called him that too?

  No. He used his mother’s family name.

  What is it? Rhea tapped her cigarette.

  Machrouky.

  Machrouky, she repeated after me. George Machrouky. It must have hurt him to be teased like that. Kids are cruel, humans are cruel, life is cruel. She quickly drank her tea. Then she held my hand, stood up, and pulled me up with her.

  Let’s go. I want to show you Paris.

  Rhea and I walked some more, and ended up in the Jardin du Luxembourg. The stretches of green under the many naked statues, the pigeons, and the pawns took me back to my room back home. The house must be empty now, I thought, and I w
ondered if Nabila had gotten the keys, if she had covered everything with drapes, if the smell of a closed, deserted home was filling the rooms, if spiders and ghosts were resting together. And I wondered if my parents, as ghosts, still had legal rights over the place, and I wondered what they would do if they came back to haunt it and discovered that I had finally succeeded in leaving and had entered those posters with the happy fountains and the pigeons, like this place here, leaving the fridge unhooked, the garbage uncollected, without a goodbye note.

  On the grass I saw a partridge acting crazy with a pigeon, fighting for little breadcrumbs from under an old lady’s feet. I am hungry, the partridge said, and there is nothing here for me but crumbs from a destitute hand.

  We walked on, and I watched Rhea strolling next to me, telling me about the architecture, the Germans who had invaded, the little brass plates engraved with the names of French resistance fighters who had died while fighting to liberate their country. We stopped at a place that sold used books on the shore of the river, a place that I had passed the night before. Out of respect for Rhea, I ordered my soldiers to clean up the war scene and to cease all fire, theft, and disturbance. I ordered them to go underground and fight the invading fascists. My soldiers rejoiced.

  After browsing in the bookstore, Rhea and I sat on a bench, watching the water slowly precipitating under the arched bridges. The stone monsters on the tops of the churches kept an eye on the enemies while my soldiers ate and rested.

  What do you do, Bassam? Rhea asked me.

  I won’t tell her of my revolutionary tendencies, nor of my crucial role in the revolution, nor of my support for the French resistance, I thought to myself and caressed my white horse. I worked at the port, I said.

  And what did you do there? she asked with round, open eyes.

  I drove a winch.

  Your parents are still there?

  They are both dead and buried underground, not too far from the undertaker’s house.

  When my father died, I cried for days, Rhea said. We had a distant relationship, my father and I. He was always formal, even with me, always elegant and well dressed, and he spoke like an aristocrat. (I would spare his life because he is Rhea and George’s father, I thought.) He was well mannered, as all diplomats are. But he would leave us for weeks and months. At first we travelled with him, but then my mother decided to stay in Paris. She found a lover. And my father started to travel more.