Holy War

by Mike Bond

  “A woman's writing strategy now?”

  “You could find your way in here, with a sack of grenades?”

  “I can't act pregnant.”

  No, she certainly did not like this squalid little man, his sharp beard and pointed chin. That was the trouble with militia – the killers ruled, the sordid ran behind. “You'd do just fine, being pregnant,” she sneered, “if you half tried.”

  THE TRAIN TILTED into a curve, naked poplars running along a ditch, pigeons casting away from bare furrows under a wet wind, distant rain slanting against a sky of cotton wool. Geese and sheep huddled in a flooded field, God hanging dead over endless cemeteries, trains of rain-shiny new cars on the sidings, camouflaged hunters afoot in mean, close-cropped fields. There were hedgerows, copses, orchards, yellow and blue snub-nosed Dutch trains, nuclear power plants, empty warehouses with broken windows and rusty galvanized roofs, brown stolid rivers, a yellow derrick with the name “Verhagen” in a grove of soggy, chilled birch. Why, he wondered, do the top leaves always cling the longest?

  That was the best of Islamic teaching, it clung to fundamental decencies, to an ancient branch of life: take care of the poor, the disinherited, alleviate corruption, simplify and purify our souls...

  But the Koran left nothing unanswered, even that which had no answer. The prophet Mohammed received inspirations to questions posed by himself or others; these inspirations, the suras, became a rigid structure of belief learned by repetition, whose challenge was punished by death on earth, eternity in Hell.

  The Crusaders went to the Holy Land to deliver it from this heresy, to slaughter the infidels. Those who came back brought the techniques of cathedral architecture, which led to the Gothic enlightenment and the principles of advanced castle construction, which led to a more advanced rate of slaughter. They also brought rattus rattus, the black rat, which in turn brought the Black Plague: God's way, Neill had always thought, of punishing the Europeans for the sin of Christianity.

  A rusty railroad engine huddled in brush on an abandoned siding. How many lives had it carried back and forth across Europe? What did they come to, each of them?

  Three American men were talking loudly in the seats ahead, trading dirty gay jokes in the mistaken impression no one could understand English, or perhaps not even caring. One was being teased about curling his eyebrows. “You go to Paris to make money,” he said. “Like Tokyo. The catalogues, fashion shows, magazines, even TV. Madrid too – you can make money there, though not as much as in Paris.”

  “Do you really curl your eyebrows?” another said.

  Ubiquitous greenhouses flitting by, amid grimy cities and prim little towns with patches of muddy green between them. “Have to have the clothes,” the first added. “Have to have the clothes.” One made a farting sound with his mouth; they laughed. Rain loud as hail struck the train roof, the window

  ANDRÉ LEFT THE ALPINE on Boulevard des Invalides near the Musée Rodin, and crossed against the light, Napoleon’s gold-domed crypt afire with sun. He turned into the courtyard at 57 bis Rue de Varenne and took the elevator to the third floor, to a bright office with rooms along one side looking down into the courtyard.

  “You don't even speak Arabic,” St. Honoré said.

  “But I know Beirut. And it doesn't matter they've got him surrounded, he'll get away. I know where he'll go.”

  “Where, pray tell?”

  André smiled at St. Honoré's silly envy of a desk man for those who come home with blood on their hands. “It's a waste to tell you; he'll break through one sector, slip round it and get them in the backs.”

  “The Israelis'll bomb him to the stone age.”

  “They've been trying for two years. Look at the result.”

  “Same as yours will be.”

  “I'm one man, Christian! I can weave right into that crowd.”

  “With your blue eyes and fluent Arabic.”

  “I know enough people and you know it.”

  “So how’s Haroun going to help you?” St. Honoré leaned further back in his chair, as if obeying the dictate never to act interested unless you need to. “He's got Palestinians and Hezbollah and Druze and Amal and every other kind of Arab under the sun crawling down his throat. Just because you were with him before isn't going to bring you much.”

  “That's how you decide who to revenge?”

  “The President and the Palestinians, they're hot right now.”

  “Hezbollah's not the Palestinians.”

  “Iran's making overtures. Foreign Affairs is wrapping up that billion-dollar reactor debt. The Iranians are moderate now.”

  “You know they did it, Christian! Everyone knows!”

  “That's the trouble with you military guys, you're hung up on truth. Do you understand the place we're in – la France? We burn over twenty billion francs of natural gas a year. A third of it comes from Russia, another third from Algeria – both unstable. Any day now we could lose two-thirds of our supply. Literally overnight. We have to diversify.”

  “And you think Iran's more sure?”

  “Iran has seventeen trillion cubic meters of natural gas, the world's second largest reserves.”

  André thought of St. Honoré when they'd been little, at Institut Suffren. When St. Honoré’s mother drove up every morning in the big white Porsche and made him lift up his little tablier and piss on the tree outside before he went in to school. Running across the Champs de Mars, skinny knees, tablier caught in the wind. The Fields of War – how long since I've thought of it like that?

  “The Government’s negotiating a pipeline deal with the Iranian National Gas Company,” St. Honoré said, “that could eventually supply one-third of our national need, at two billion francs a year cheaper than the Russians. Against that, André, how much do you think your brother's death should weigh?”

  “Forty-seven French paratroopers died when Hezbollah blew those barracks, not just Yves.”

  “France has always required her young men to lay down their lives – whenever she wants. The Government would argue, in the long run, that even Yves' death was for the good of France. When we're called, we don't get to choose how we might die.”

  Again André thought of St. Honoré's little black tablier sailing in the wind. St. Honoré'd lost something, and he, André, had found it. But he couldn't remember what it was. “When were you ever called, Christian?”

  St. Honoré was listening to traffic on Rue de Varenne. “We go back a long way, mon cher. But I don't ask you to like me. I just ask you to understand that your plan gets no sympathy here. In fact, if you go ahead with it, we're going to get badly in your way.”

  “You'd tell him? Via your bedmates in Tehran?”

  “He's overstepped his bounds, this Mohammed. Other people out there want him. The Russians, maybe, surely the Israelis, the Americans. But not you. We don't want la France mixed up in this.”

  André felt sweaty, as if he'd been driving too fast. “If la France doesn't care about Yves, screw la France.”

  “Unless you drop this idea, we have to do what it takes to stop you.” The phone buzzed; St. Honoré's hand fell on it. “All the way from the top, mon cher, the rule right now is don't piss off Hezbollah.”

  André shrugged, stood. “I didn't come to ask your advice. I came to tell you.” He smiled. “So you don't shoot me by mistake.”

  “If and when we shoot you,” St. Honoré smiled back, “it won't be by mistake.”

  10

  ASYRIAN 240 came over the Green Line, caught people running; a machine gun coughed, tracers darting among the runners. Three bodies lay in the street, one dragging itself backwards till the machine gun coughed again.

  Rosa backed from the window. “Despite being surrounded, you seem to have lots to eat.”

  One of the men crouched round the fire turn
ed, mouth full of bread and lentils. “You've got plump enough yourself, on the outside.”

  A round cracked across the ceiling. Mortars thudded, one, two, three, onto the roof.

  “We're going to break out soon,” one said.

  “He's got a plan,” another answered, chewing. “The people outside, they'll break in.”

  “If you believe that,” Rosa said, “I've got another story for you.”

  “And you think he'll listen to you?”

  She returned to the window, edging her face round the frame, thought of a sniper's bullet hitting her head, how hard it would feel. Darkness had fallen on the Green Line, shrapnel wailing through the streets, sound of a chopper – no, two – beyond the Israeli lines, the metallic plaint of a buoy out to sea. Then she remembered that all the buoys had been sunk, and whatever the sound was it wasn't out there to save lives.

  She heard a rush and patter in the street below. Fearing an attack she glanced down quickly and saw dark shapes, low, fast. She ducked back, against the wall, breathless. Dogs. The ones she'd seen – when? This morning?

  She wanted to glance out again but it was too dangerous now; if there was someone out there with a night scope, next time she looked out he'd get her. That's how bad this situation had become, she realized; even an attack here seemed possible. While Mohammed awaited the word of God.

  AN OLD MAN in a thin djellabah crouched on the cold concrete quay of Duisburg Station, selling cassettes from a packing crate, AC/DC on a black JVC beside him,

  You're only young

  but you're gonna die.

  I won't take no prisoners,

  won't spare no lives.

  “Where do you get them?” Neill said.

  The man glanced up, surprised by the Arabic, the European face. “Wholesale.”

  “They're illegal copies.”

  The man looked up and down the quay, shrugged. “Surely not.”

  “Where you from?”

  The man watched him. “Sidon.”

  '"Poor Saida, so close to Israel, so far from God ..."'

  Despite himself the man smiled. “There are many viewpoints.”

  In a station café Neill ate steak and onions and drank Kaiser Pils till his train was called. A single compartment, first class, the window streaked with rain as the train meandered the bombed medieval memories of Cologne and followed the Rhine canyon south through the soft rolling Rheinisches Schiefergebirge, forests and castles on their crests, steep swathes of grapes below, past Koblenz, the ancient roots of European reason, the Odenwald, and he had again the sense he'd had in Inneka's bedroom, of the generations upon generations who had lived here. Like the sense of all the lives the rusted locomotive had towed across Europe. Here in these German hills, it seemed, was lost the ancient reason for man. Houses flitted by, singular and ephemeral as souls. There was no reason and no rule, no reason for man, falling in space, reaching for anything.

  What was he reaching for, with Bev? With Inneka? They were going to die too, maybe before him. He was contorting his mind with worries about who to love, who to live with, for nothing. So that he didn't have to think about death.

  He closed the window, took up the Arab newspapers he'd brought in Duisburg Station, and began to read them carefully.

  PASTIS IS THE PARAS as much as the bullets themselves, André thought, watching its golden trickles down the inside of his father's glass. The hard friendships, the smoldering anger, the fun. “Michel!” his father roared. “Encore deux!”

  “Got to go, Papa.”

  “One more? Come on, mon fils, it does us good!” His father grinning his broad-jawed silvered teeth, chubby cheeks curling up into his eyes. “Leave these women alone, for God's sake!”

  “Don't cast stones.”

  His father tilted his pastis glass, contemplated it. André thought of the Red Indians, how supposedly they had learned the art of silence. How right his father had been to teach it, a soldier's gift. “I've known Haroun thirty years,” his father said. “Never had a reason not to trust him. But I've never learned who you can trust, for sure, until it's too late.”

  “I don't trust anybody, Papa.”

  “You saw your friend?”

  “He's not my friend.”

  “They're so in love with political solutions, those boys at Matignon.” His father drained the pastis, smacked his lips – it made him seem a huge gregarious bear with a silver crewcut, gray-bristly cheeks and merry little black eyes. “People who've never been to war, you never can tell what they'll do. How they'll decide to prove their courage.” He raised his glass and nodded at Michel. “No matter how many other people’s lives it takes.”

  Michel refilled their glasses and laid a pack of Gauloises on the counter. André's father tore it open and lit one. “Such shit –”

  “Don't smoke them then.”

  “This pastis. Not like the old stuff,” he raised high his glass like a scientist examining a test tube. “The old stuff, it made your veins sing.” He put the glass down. “All those herbs crushed together – the essence of Provence, basil, rosemary, thyme, anise, sage – ah!” He smacked his lips. “This!” He raised the test tube again, downed it, wrinkling his lips. “La merde! Factory-made! La nouvelle France – Arabs, niggers, drug addicts, pederasts, thieves.”

  André glanced down the bar. “See you, Papa.”

  His father laid a fifty franc bill beside the empty yellow glass. “Coming with you.”

  Outside the early darkness was damp and fresh, the pavements filled with people hurrying home with children and handbags and briefcases and bread and bags of vegetables and fruit and cheese and wine. “Nobody on the other side,” his father said, “is going to believe your story, once they tie you to Haroun.”

  “He's just a point de départ.”

  They came to Emile Zola, a taxi splashing through the crosswalk. “Start saving now for your burial expenses,” an electric sign said. “Spare your family.” His father was short of breath, hissing through his nostrils, trying not to show it. “I told your mama if there's one chance in a thousand of losing you, I wouldn't want to take it. And I don't.”

  “It's not Oran, Papa. Not Hanoi. I know Beirut.”

  “I knew Oran. That didn't keep me from losing two hundred men there. Each with a family and dreams. And another twelve hundred wounded. A lot of them ruined for life.”

  André nodded. “And just like Beirut, we took a beating and ran away. When we were the stronger! Killing our own brave men for nothing.”

  “Nobody wins all the time, even the strong. We're lucky to win at all.”

  “You don't believe that.” André embraced him, his father's bristly cheeks against his own.

  His father seemed to be chewing something far back inside his mouth. “Let me know, what happens.” He turned and walked toward the métro entrance, suddenly a bowed-over burly man who hesitated at the stairs, looked back and nodded, a wink perhaps, André couldn't see, and stepped down into the teeming maw as into a freshly turned mass grave.

  11

  “YOU? LEADING MUJIHADEEN?” Mohammed said.

  “You'd be leading them,” Rosa answered. “I just know the way to safety.”

  “I don't care about their safety. Nor do they.”

  “If they're dead, how can they fight?”

  Static rose and fell on the radio, the operator bent over it as if praying, Rosa thought, awaiting the Word. Four mujihadeen were playing cards on a piece of cardboard set on a broken box. Like rodents, Mohammed's fingers burrowed into his gown, joined. “She fears for your safety, Hassan!” he called to the guard at the door.

  Crunching a pistachio shell in his teeth, Hassan looked straight at Rosa, back to Mohammed, spat the shell.

  She curled her lip. “I want to win.”

 
Mohammed's head tilted back, shadowed in the yellow lamplight, his blue eyes seeming to look down his face, his full beard, to hers. “Win?”

  Long and pale-whiskered in his white gown, he looked both taut and empty of everything, as if not really there – only the maroon pillows on which he sat, the torn carpet littered with cartridge casings, the guard picking his teeth with a broken match, a European country scene in a shattered gilded frame hanging sideways on the graffiti-covered wall.

  “We had a picture like that, when I was a girl,” she said. “Of a woman walking a path toward a straw-roofed cottage, with purple hills behind. Made you feel warm, going home.”

  He yawned, covering his mouth. “And?”

  “It was in our farm at Ramalla. Where my mother and father moved in 1950 after we escaped from Beersheba. Then in 1967 we escaped to Nablus, and the mule died, and then to Zababida where we had to live in a tent camp and my father caught tuberculosis. Then they moved us across the Jordan to another camp where both my sisters died, and then to Tiberias where my father dug a farm out of the rocks and boulders, but they took that away and chased us across the Golan and up the Jebel ech Cheikh to Mount Hermon where my father and mother died, in Ain Aata, when the Israelis bombed us. And you ask me what it means to win?”

  “God grant peace to the souls of your family,” Mohammed said mechanically. “What was it like, in Ain Aata?”

  “Everyone made us feel outsiders. Going home from school the boys hit me with rocks.”

  “There were too many of you, coming up from Palestine.”

  “If I have to tell you what winning means ...” She paused, a shell coming like a distant train's whistle, something that could take you somewhere, far from it all. For a very long time it came no nearer, wailing in mid-sky, then dived at them shrieking, seething metal louder than a comet rushing down; she rolled over on her side clutching her head as the building shuddered and heaved in the roar of falling concrete in the next street, plaster crashing down.

  She sat up, head covered, held her breath till the ceiling stopped falling. Bullets cracked along a wall, plaster flying. Another shell was screaming down; her ears were blocked with plaster dust, she couldn't hear; the shell fell a few streets away, the building shuddering anew like a crazed dancer. “You should be ashamed!” she yelled. “To let them shell us like this!”