by Mike Bond
“Until they go there'll be no peace.”
“It was the French who put them over us. It'll never happen again.”
“For two thousand years – more, if you count the Romans – they've plagued us.”
“When we weren't plaguing each other.”
“And you hoped blowing up their embassy and barracks would scare them away? They have no memories, keep stepping in the same hole. Stepping on us. Even if they do leave they'll be right back, under the next politician, the next pope.”
A 155 was coming over and Mohammed waited for it to hit. “We didn't blow the American barracks. Nor the French ones, as people say.”
Her eyes seemed the pale green now of a snow river, the one coming out of the mountain at Yammouné, chunks of green ice crashing inside it. “Anyway, you wouldn't say...”
“Some day maybe I can.”
She moved closer, her smile's warmth making him shiver. “Tell me now.”
“It takes time.” He let his head drop forward, rubbing the back of his neck. “We've all spent another sleepless night.”
She bit her lip. “I can do that for you.”
“Sleep for me?”
“Don't be silly! Rub your neck. If you like. I always did it for my father. He'd follow the mule all day, pushing the plough, reins round his neck...”
Mohammed let his head rotate back, against his hand. “That was where?”
“Tiberias, the Golan, Mount Hermon – like I said.” She came behind him, making him fear for an instant. “Bend forward, let down your shoulders.”
“You crossed Beirut tonight and destroyed our enemy.” He rolled his shoulders, let them go; her fingers digging round the bone for the hurt muscle and worn tired tendons were like paradise. “Someone should be rubbing your shoulders.”
She leaned round, looking at him from the side, kneading the hard muscle at the top of his shoulder blades. “Someday maybe you can.” She unbuttoned his shirt from behind, breasts at his back, arms and wrists against his ribs, pulled it up out of his belt and slid it down his back, her hard strong fingers moving up and down the flat muscles on both sides of his spine, neck and shoulder, under the shoulder blades and up the stiff sore neck.
“I forget,” he gasped, “how heavy our heads are.”
“What a strong back you have – these muscles all across here, down here. You've done a lot of work.”
“In the hills I was a shepherd. But when I came to Beirut I worked in construction, carrying concrete.”
“Like the Palestinians do now.”
“You shovel the trough full of wet concrete and lift it up on your shoulders and carry it up to the top floor and pour it onto the slab. You start at the first floor and then on to the second, building it all the way up, the fifth, the tenth … And then you're going up twenty stories with a trough of concrete on your back, and this whole building has gone up in the sky on your back and the backs of your friends.” He stretched, pulling his shoulders forward. “Good for your back, your legs. For a while, it's even good for your head. And you can look at the building and know how it's built, and how you can take it apart.”
“What's it feel like, walking back down?”
“You can't take much time because they're paying you by the load and so you run down the steps, trying to fill your lungs and stretch your back and see the city far below down there.”
His muscles were so thick she could almost separate them, like ropes. Almost hard enough to stop a bullet.
“You have strong hands,” he murmured. “You have wonderful hands.”
His body loosened, relaxed, she had a sudden fear of losing him, but he had just drifted off to sleep in mid-sentence, and it made her want to soften her touch, stroke his brow. It was so easy, caring for a man, to make him a slave. He already had a wife, the famous Layla, Mother of the Revolution. But what man is ever satisfied with a famous wife?
NEILL STOOD in the middle of Staromestska Street, two fast lanes of cars whizzing past his back, two lanes in front, just the yellow line between his feet to keep him alive, with no cover and no way back. Cars sucked at the air as they rushed by inches from his skin, big and little, red and black and white, two-ton chunks of hurtling steel; he saw himself hit and knocked into an oncoming lane. There'd been a newspaper story somewhere, a kid's brain blown right out of his skull when he was hit by a semi.
The light turned red and the last traffic hissed through. He finished crossing as more cars roared out of the side streets like hounds wild to run him down. He jumped up on the pavement and stood in a shop doorway as the lines of cars and trucks screamed past. The shop was closed, tourist pictures of Turkey pasted on its window – crystalline blue bays, the blanched and barren hills, columns spiring toward the sun. There were personal ads for household help and selling a motorcycle and getting laid, for the bridge club of Bratislava, for underground films and lectures.
Before him was a torn poster of a great beast's skull, a man-rat staring down on a city aflame, that he had cloven in two with his huge sword. “Friday 13 March,” the poster said. “The Most Terrifying Night In Your Life. Don't Be Late.” The rest of the poster had been ripped off, and he glanced down at the dirty tile floor of the shop entryway but the torn part wasn't there. The lights had changed again and the traffic was roaring up and down Staromestska.
Why was the poster in English? Had it been? He went back to check. Yes.
Snow began to fall in lacy cool flakes; one went down the back of his neck making him shiver. You could have died, he told himself. Because you didn't pay attention. You got caught in the middle of the street because you didn't watch the light.
His hands were cold. He went into a café and ordered a grog and held it but his hands wouldn't warm. The insides of his fingers were hot from the cup but when he held the tops to his cheek they felt like ice. Guys your age, he told himself, are dropping all the time now. Cardiac arrest, stroke; half vegetables wondering who their wives are screwing. Too much booze, no sleep, booze and weed, mostly booze, twenty years of wine and beer and whisky. They were painkillers, really, but what was the pain?
If you didn't have your painkiller, you might have to feel.
He wondered if this was true. If it was, if he'd been drinking all these years so he wouldn't have to feel, then he hadn't felt. The man without feelings? God that couldn't be true. Jesus if I felt any more pain I'd crack. I'd just crack.
The café smelt companionably of steamed milk and caffeine and pastries and cigarettes and slivovitz and the perfume of young women in black stockings and black leather boots. His fingers would not warm up. What, he wondered, if you could just face the pain? Feel it?
He walked up Staromestska against the morning stream of shoppers in long fur coats, bags in their hands, a red chill on their cheeks, past an unshaven man smelling of cigarettes and plum brandy. At Number 41 he took the stairs to the top floor.
Michael Szay was so tall he had to stoop in his own office. “You're wasting your time going to Beirut,” he said. “Mohammed won't talk to you.”
“This could help him, build credibility.”
“Since when do you care about his credibility?”
“I hate this war. So does everyone, except you.”
Szay sat back, watching Neill, chewing an edge of fingernail. “Meaning?”
“As long as you're making money selling weapons, God forbid it should stop.”
“Who says I'm selling to him?”
“Aren't you?”
“He's got stuff coming in from Iran, Riyadh. He takes some from the Israelis, Christians.”
“He's getting assault rifles and ammo from you –”
Szay scanned his fingertips, began chewing another nail. “Who says?”
“I've played fair with you, Michael. All along. Whatever you say goe
s no further. I just need a way in, someone to go through.”
Szay tipped forward, stared at Neill across his disheveled desk. “And what do I get?”
“He's your client. If he goes under, you lose. He's getting terrible copy – nobody knows what he's doing or why. All the papers blame him.”
Szay's ironic little eyes were like badgers in their holes. “He's ducking bullets, that's what he's doing. He doesn't give a shit what some London newspaper thinks.”
“I won't write about you, Michael. I never have, not even about Ethiopia, your friends in the Sudan...”
Szay cocked his head, peered down at his nails, selected a finger and began to chew along the quick. “Write what you want. Nobody reads it.”
“If you have any messages, I can pass them.”
“Won't do you any good to have messages.” Szay spat a piece of fingernail. “Since you won't get in.”
Beyond the small leaded panes of Szay's windows the rooftops of Bratislava were an immense haphazard junkyard of tiles, damp in new rain. “I'll get in,” Neill said. “I always do.”
Szay's little badger eyes rose to Neill's. “Thanks to your friends.”
“They could be yours, too –”
Szay hissed irritably. “I wouldn't have them.”
Neill stood. “You don't have any friends, Michael. I'm the closest you get. And I don't even like you.”
Szay smiled, crunching a bit of fingernail between his front teeth. “Take the Damascus road. If the Christians or Israelis cut it you're screwed. If the Syrians cut it you're dead.”
“Just give me a lead, Michael. That's all I ask.”
“You're going to end up dead on a curb somewhere. That's all the lead I'm going to give you. Or in some Hezbollah stinkhole. And your friends won't even care.”
16
EVEN IN LATE MORNING the Paris métro was crowded. On the seat before André a black girl was checking her face in a cracked pocket mirror. Beside him an old unshaven Arab held the pole with both hands. On top of his bare skull were brown patches and old scabs. André checked the other faces in the car – less than half were white.
The train stopped at Chatelet and the old Arab staggered across the quai and vomited behind a bench. A girl in a Carrefour ad had lovely long legs with graffiti all over them. There was graffiti on every ad, all down the quai.
A thin black man in a yellow uniform was sweeping butts along the quai. He's come up here, André thought, to make a better life for his family. What if he had to leave France? To go back to what? Was that why Africa was failing? Because the best kept leaving?
France could take ten million Africans and it would make no difference at all to the billions in Africa. But it would ruin France. As soon as you take some away they just make more. You have to admit that's the truth. And France has never sent its people starving to another's door.
Africa's thousand children dying daily in the desert with an outstretched hand. He thought of his little brother Yves ahead on the path, sunny hair and freckles, crossing into the sumacs and down over the stream past the oaks where the young couple slept one night and we didn't know why. Yves carrying his gun up the slope of beeches in the dawn-bright dead leaves, toward the knoll where we'd tracked the boar, the ground splashed with his blood, the dog bounding back and forth, shivering, waiting for the charge.
Motorcycles and symphonies, Yves. Let neither side win. Loving to hunt but hating to kill. Under your calm kindness even you couldn't resolve that. You who always went for what you wanted like a magnet. For what you felt was right.
The only honor I have left, Yves, is in not daring to live without it. No, that's not true. Not completely.
A beautiful girl stood beside him in a long green wool coat. Fair skin and light lipstick, full chestnut hair. Oh if I could make love to you. Oh please if I could. Except I have to leave and you already have someone and you wouldn't want to anyway. If you'd make love to me and be my wife I'd stay here, he promised, wouldn't go to Lebanon.
Beneath her green coat, the dark suit, the white silk blouse, her underclothes and skin, he could feel her lovely body all along him. At the Louvre someone left a seat and the girl sat down and took a leaflet from her purse. He read it over the top of her head, a French consular form.
When she got out of the train at Concorde he started to follow her, but turned round and leaped back in the train, took it all the way to Etoile, to pick up the bus for Charles de Gaulle and the afternoon Cyprus Airways flight to Larnaca.
IN THE COMMAND BUILDING all the apartments had been pillaged, so Rosa waited till the shells slowed and ran across the courtyard to the building at the back. It too had been emptied, the furniture burned in cooking fires, one apartment used as a toilet. Shelling had started again, but on the other side. Someone was firing single shots, even spaced, in celebration. He's shot someone, she realized, that's what he's celebrating. Been waiting for hours and finally got his target. She ducked along the pavement to the next building but the stairway had been blown out and there was no way up to the apartments.
Two buildings further she found an apartment with some rice and dried chickpeas under the sink. There was no furniture, on one wall photos of an old stern man and smiling heavy woman, a new color blow-up of a young man and woman with three children and a picnic basket on a rug, behind them the nose of a blue Fiat and the stiff ridges of Mount Lebanon.
In the dirt on one side of the front steps a daisy flamed yellow in the setting sun. She thought of picking it for Mohammed. No, she decided, it's so lovely; let it live.
EACH DAY with a beginning, middle, and end. That's all I remember. No matter how different they seem they're all the same. You're in a train or a plane and you get to a new place and then you see it's the place you just left, the one you're going to next.
Neill brushed the crumbs from his sandwich off the table and into his palm, emptied them on the floor. What if I'm not an alcoholic? If all along I've been thinking I was but I'm not? What if I just love the taste? Beer came before bread, they say that now.
A couple at the next table were clasping hands, legs enwrapped. What was this crazy craving to be inside another, or have them inside you? They were staring through their cigarette smoke into each other's eyes. Thinking they're Bacall and Bogart, sucking on the tit of death.
The waiter brought another half-liter of Pilsner in a tall glass, a thick head with a tang of barley malt and the brightness of the sun. A short chubby-faced man in a red scarf came through the door and glanced around, saw Neill wave and came over. He had a pixie smile and a scar to the left of his mouth. He took off his raincoat and draped it and the scarf over the back of a chair.
“So how are you?” Neill said.
“Could be better. These are not good times.”
“When have they ever been?”
“There were times, you know, when things seemed to go well.”
“The operative word is "seemed", Tomás. We're always fucked, it's just that sometimes we don't realize.”
Tomás grinned; there seemed more black holes between his teeth than last time. “I was so pleased you were coming.”
“I was just realizing that since I last saw you I've done absolutely nothing. The more I try to fill my life, the faster it empties.”
“You've done nothing? What about that series on Camp David, on the Paris bombings? Even here at the end of the world, we saw those.”
“I'm talking about me.”
“You mean you and Beverly? Since when has that gone right?”
Neill glanced down at his glass. “Maybe never. No, that's not true.” He raised his head. “Anyway, we're each seeing other people – just sticking it out for the kids.”
“You think they don't know?”
“It's the best we can do.”
“Maybe that's no
t true. Maybe more important than us,” Tomás raised his shoulders in a shrug, “is our kids. Like we would die for them, step in front of a car for them, that kind of thing.”
Neill had a sharp tremor of this morning's memory, caught between speeding lanes on Staromestska. “Everybody would –”
“It's the same, then, not to leave them, not to split up. A commitment to life: you bring it into the world, you nurture it.” He raised his shoulders. “Far more important than what we journalists do, or governments, laws, analyses.”
“I sleep through all that, these days.”
“Yet you're the one who told us if society's truly an organism then we have to be its neurons.”
Neill motioned at the waiter, at Tomás. “What you having?”
“Pilsner. It's very fashionable, forty-five year old men having a values crisis.”
“Don't exaggerate. I'm forty-two.”
“Yeah, but you're precocious. Just keep doing the same fine work you've always done, and the rest'll go away.”
“Society's not an organism, it's a maelstrom. A horror show.”
“You think people don’t know that?”
“Not enough.”
“That's always been your passion – uncovering the worst.”
“You want to let it fester?”
“Or heal?” Tomás lit a papirosi and the fragrant smoke went up in a circular column. He called out something in Slovak and a woman at another table smiled and turned away. “It's only when people like you are content to see the worst that we can get better. No, that's silly. We'll never get any better. But your seeing us as we are may keep us from getting worse.”
“Nullities. Bloody idealism.”
“When you came here to teach that course, I couldn't understand why you'd bother. Do you remember – I even asked you?”
“No.”
“You said journalists can't be just a mirror of their times, but have to be a guide also. That you'd come to share what you'd learned and to learn from us.” Tomás grinned. “I always wonder what you learned from us.”
