Holy War

by Mike Bond

  But when you're young you're easily fooled; her family's rejection becomes hers, on both sides. They'd been right: twenty years later he was a drunk American journalist from London and she the Mother of the Revolution, wife to the Lion of God.

  27

  “KILLED HIM, didn't you?” Mohammed gasped, trying to keep up.

  “For the Lion of God you're pretty weak!”

  “I've been shot,” he called, realized it was weak to say it, as if needing excuses. How did this woman keep making him appear a fool? “You'd never make a man's wife, the way you act.”

  She stopped on the trail above him. “I could be yours if I wanted.”

  He stumbled on a root. “I owe you my life. But not that.”

  “I said if I wanted. And your life hasn't been saved yet.”

  The path crossed an open starry ridge. There were no trees, no grass, just the wind wailing down the wide bare shoulder of the mountain. He tried to envision his body shut in a box in the earth.

  They passed a low stone hut, used in the old days to store snow that turned to ice and could be sold in the valley in summer, bringing it down bundled with straw in the donkey cart, leaving a trickle of darkness behind you on the dusty road, and from the cart's bench seat you see between the donkey's ears bobbing right and left, or down at her back hooves coming back, rising up and going forward, coming back, rising up and going forward, her clickety hooves on the sandy gravel, bits of bitter scrub poking up, the summer air of cicadas, lavender and sage.

  The path switched up a steep slippery gully wreathed in mist and he could hear a river's rumble on the far side but they never seemed to cross it. They climbed higher, colder, he took shallow breaths, trying not to stretch his wound, wanting to lean on her, but she was ahead, always moving ahead, accepting no frailty from him, as if he'd fail if he realized how difficult it was.

  The river grew louder, crashing down on the rocks above and to the right, wind buffeting them. They crested to a saddle that the wind roared through, and he saw there was no river, had never been, only the wind howling and gnashing at the peaks, roaring through the pass like the million riders whose souls had made the wind, their armor jingling, arrows rattling in their quivers. For an instant he understood war but could not turn it into words, this ancient milling progress toward death and sorrow. We're just not happy if we're happy, he decided. Why?

  IN AN HOUR the first muezzin of the day would call and still Neill couldn't sleep. Gone only a week but already home seemed an illusion, as if he drifted aimlessly through sheaves of time.

  Yet he missed them. Had to say it. And had to remind himself that life with Beverly would be Hell again three days after he got back. When every word, every kindness, leads to a fight, and each word to make it better only makes it worse.

  They had the kids. And some day the tradition of these years together would be something to look back on. To not grow old alone. But would he be like Uncle Vincent, in his eighties, still snarling at his wife?

  He'd had no need of sexual binges and thoughtless adulteries to betray Bev, he'd betrayed her enough just in the horrors of daily life. Each little dependency and ignorance and slight, each tiny knife into the pleasures of the other's soul. And there was no point thinking that this time when he came back they could begin again, bridge the last nineteen years. The people they had been were dead, and the new ones didn't love each other. Whom did Beverly love? The occasional lawyer or concert violinist or computer jockey who took the time to spend with her and appear sensitive? The world's most disgusting word: sensitive. Reminds you of a slug or a febrile insect or some little skinny-armed downcast kid, beaten and ashamed.

  Why hate him so much, that downcast kid? Because he was you? He's dead, just like the one who married Beverly.

  The first bus of the day rumbled and coughed down Bab Sharqi Street toward the gate, its diesel belch rising to his window. If he was going to change his life he would have to sit down with that skinny little kid. Shy little tyke with the endearing smile, the one Beverly had said she'd loved inside him, who had been him, whom he abused.

  Feet over the side of the bed, soles on the cold floor, he brushed at something with his toes. Goddamn bugs. Ankles aching, he limped to the bathroom. Forgot your goddamn medication. Some day, the doctors said, a blood vessel's going to blow in your brain and you're dead. Hand grenade inside your head. High blood pressure is essential, the doctors said. Meaning they couldn't find a cause. But the cause was obvious: tension, sorrow, frustration, exhaustion, the joys of city life. Not being who you are.

  In the bathroom the light flickered, caught, went out, flicked on. In his toilet kit he found his Innovace and popped one, then the two Paludrine, then two more Klaricid for the soreness under his arm that wouldn't go away. Pretty soon you're all drugs, he said into the mirror, there's nothing left of you.

  No point in starting a new life then dying. No water came out of the shower. Hugging his bare chest he went into the bedroom and dressed. Strange, he'd dreamt all night of Layla and awoken thinking of Beverly.

  FIRST LIGHT stenciled the bare trees atop the ridge. Yew trees, Mohammed saw. That once made the strongest bows. Some day this whole earth would no longer be useful. Like the yew trees, intended for a weapon outgrown.

  He fell on the trail. No further. She can leave me.

  Rosa yanked his ear. “Up!”

  He took a breath. “...have you shot...”

  “That's how you help those who help you?” She was hardly panting, despite the altitude, the climb. “That's Allah's teaching, is it?” She snapped her head back and he thought it was an imperative thrown at him: Get up. But it was just her way of swinging back her hair, mocking her own shamelessness, mocking him. Dizzy with height, he felt split between two worlds, a different one in each eye, one that he'd known and accepted and been happy in, another totally wild and different, which invalidated the first, but which he couldn't deny. One was the way he'd learned to see. And the other he saw was true.

  “Like you did?” he said. “With the doctor?”

  “He didn't help me. I had to.”

  “If you'd told me that, back at the clinic, I'd have shot you.”

  “We should have been an hour beyond here by sunrise. We're going to get caught in the open by some Israeli jet.”

  “We hide when we hear them coming.”

  “Why did I risk my life for you? I had a great dream of you, that's why. But you're not it.”

  THE SHELLS came pirouetting down in yellow, green and white starbursts with trailing flares blooming over the city, spreading down like boughs of a weeping willow, a jasmine's twisting petals of red, silver, gold, the soft rain of anti-personnel bombs that exploded in random bright daisies in the dawn streets. From the Shouf hills came a drumbeat of artillery and rockets under the bursting shells, and for André it was suddenly just music and brightness, nothing more, just the human accomplishment of making death beautiful, evil beautiful. That's why we love it, he realized, because of its beauty, too evil to be tarnished, its sexual incandescences, its seeds spurting into the raped and battered city.

  The Phalange lieutenant shook his arm. “Seen enough?”

  “You go back. If you see that dog that was with me, get him to wait.”

  A 155 came down in the street below, an earthshaking blast then the rumble and crash of buildings. There was silence, then a scream rose up, ancestral, the agony of all the lives lost over many thousand generations, for every burst of pain, animal or man. Over the new falling shells and ragged crump of explosives, over the clatter in the street of the cluster bombs and the rushing hustle of shrapnel overhead, its ping and rattle off the walls, its birdlike cries through the smoky dawn air, the scream grew higher, as though slowly more and more voices had joined in, the voices of all humans of all times, of all the beasts, and he wanted to scream also, add his mea
ger timbre to the wail of time. A rocket came down, spinning and hissing into the building below, its façade surprised and irresolute in sudden phosphorescence. Then it slid like a mask into the street with a great rumble of stone and plaster, baring the soul within, the astonished chairs toppling off the edge, the rooms like a doll's house where you can open the side, burrows. Unreal to think of lives lived there and the great mystery of creation performed in the blue bedroom with the tilting, tumbling bed. Why build them up, he wondered, if you're only going to tear them down?

  28

  FROM THE SINGLE WINDOW of the goat shed Mohammed watched the road below. Many trucks of men went up and down it but none stopped. A wedge of small spindly cypress climbed halfway up the far slope. The road glistened with rain, the hiss of truck tires and the rumble of their engines echoed up the canyon.

  “It's just games between us,” the doctor had said. “These wars. If we were all identical we'd find a freckle on someone's neck and that would set him apart. He'd be the other. So we'd kill him.”

  The doctor had saved Mohammed from the angry Christian but Mohammed had not saved the doctor from Rosa.

  When ye encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads.

  God commandeth you to fight his battles, that he may prove the one of you by the other.

  But what if, as the Hanefi say, this commandment was meant only for the Bedr war, at the beginning of our faith, and not for all time? Now that the doctor's dead, have I like the apostate Walid Ebn al Mogheira hired another to bear my guilt? Who when caught by an arrow refused out of pride to dislodge it from his cloak till it cut the artery of his heel and he died?

  “They don't bother you?” he snapped at Rosa, “those Syrian and Christian trucks together down there? Six months ago Hezbollah fighters were dying to protect their Syrian brothers from the Christians, the same Syrians who now unite the Christians and Israelis against us. Six months ago they were all torturing and castrating each other.”

  “You'd say that Allah does what Allah wills.” She pulled her coat tighter about her, shivering. “And what Allah wills is right.”

  “Why mock me so?” He turned away from the window. “Don't you worry, the way you act, that no man will marry you?”

  “You are backward and ignorant, from the Bekaa, where nothing has happened for two thousand years, ten thousand years.”

  “And you are a wise young woman of the new Palestine, more modern than Beirut and even more corrupt.”

  “You Persian in Arab clothes, you goat farmer, don't you see?” Her teeth flashed at him out of the gloom. “If we don't change, we turn into Nigerians or something, always going backward!”

  He wanted to reach out, strike her. “So you go to bed with Western ways? That's better?”

  “Is Islam only the province of fanatics, or can reason enter also? Why let folly divide us? Who is the Prophet's successor? Who cares? The Prophet was here and his word is quite explicit.”

  He felt weak, looked for a place to sit. “I agree.”

  “Then why don't you live it?”

  “If everything is Islam, then Islam is nothing...” There was just a rock bench, rough, beside the cold fireplace.

  “If everything is Islam then Islam's everything.” She knelt before him, took his hands. “Bend a little, and you have it all. Don't let Israel divide us, as it always does. Please, Lord?”

  His feelings rushed right out of him, wildly, down over her. He touched her shoulder; the act seemed inevitable and wrong, one he'd do no matter what. “What if we made peace?”

  She looked up into his eyes. “If we make peace with Druze and Amal and Syria, we can drive the Israelis out of Lebanon.”

  “I mean peace between us...”

  “We're not at war, Lord. But the Israelis.”

  He pulled back his hand. “You, the Palestinians, you brought the Israelis in.”

  “We were running from them!”

  “What if we made peace with them all? Israelis, Christians, all?”

  “Not without Palestine!”

  “If we got more Palestine with peace?” He felt winded, dizzy; the mountain air was too thin. “As I've said, I'm willing to wait a hundred years, even a thousand.”

  “I don't have a hundred years to live, Lord.”

  “But with luck you might have thirty, fifty more. Don't condemn others to die at eighteen, at twenty-one! At three or four.”

  “We'd rather die than lose Palestine. That's what we've decided. I thought you agreed.”

  His wound was hurting, wearing him down. “If you could go back to ‘75, before Bloody Sunday, the first bad times, wouldn't you want to?”

  “Not without Palestine!”

  “We're all so tired of your goddamned Palestine!” he yelled, hurting his chest. “I don't know a single Lebanese, Shia or Druze, Sunni or Christian who wouldn't prefer things the way they were back then! Before you came to Lebanon! No one will win this war now. No one but the Devil.”

  “We can't stop now.”

  “You're twenty-two, a Palestinian all your life, and you don't yet see how Israel relishes this strife?”

  She stepped round him, glanced out of the window. “In two hours we can go.”

  “If you didn't hate men so much your life would be easier.”

  She turned sneering at him and once more he was shocked by her sudden ferocity, terrified for her, what would happen to her. “Why don't you tell me about your brothers,” he said. “While we have time.”

  Her face was shattered for a second then re-formed with no cracks showing. Once again he expected her fierceness, but her voice was soft, out of focus. “I'm tired, I want to rest.”

  He felt tenderness again for her, then pain again for the doctor, anger that she'd killed him. Her skin was pale as an ostrich egg – what would she be like to possess? What might it bring him, and what could he lose?

  THE RAIN CEASED and low sunlight came under the clouds and fell over the slope as they drove up through gleaming groves of olive and cypress, dates, oranges, and almonds, André in the back beside one bodyguard, another beside the driver in front. The one beside him had a brown suit and a skinny moustache and smelt of nervous garlic and kept glancing back at the cover car. The Mercedes was heavy with armor and wallowed in the curves, its engine gasping to keep up with the lead car on the upgrades.

  Rows of grapes loped northward over the coastal hills, the sea beyond them making him think of Phoenicia, of what had been lost, millennia going hungry for a truth, any truth, and never finding one. He imagined Yves driving north here with some Lebanese girl, doing it with her in the bushes, on the beach, in a quick hotel downtown on the Christian side.

  The house sat back against the hill, a single-story white villa with a tile roof. They went through the metal detector into the house and General Haroun came out of a side room. His camo shirt was dirty and wrinkled and he was unshaven. He kissed André on both cheeks and led him into a low room of bookcases. “How's your dad?”

  “Complaining there’s too many Arabs in France.”

  “I could have told him, ten years ago. Anyway, give him my love.”

  “He sends his, and Mother too. To Francine also.”

  “Where you staying?”

  “In the city.”

  “You could be here. What, you're afraid I have too many enemies?”

  André laughed. “Fuck your enemies.”

  “Some of them, probably. You want some coffee, a drink? You staying for dinner?”

  “Some of them what?”

  “Must be fine young things, worth fucking. Hundreds of them.”

  “Of course I'm staying for dinner.”

  Haroun sat back, a cowboy boot propped up on a low table. He had, André realized, a certain heartiness that comes from frequent killin
g.

  An Arab girl came in with two cups of Turkish coffee on a brass tray. “You're wasting your time, mon cher,” Haroun said when she'd left.

  “What's she doing here?”

  “Nadja? We've known her family for years.”

  “When you get it, that's how it's going to be – some stupid mistake, like her.”

  Haroun nodded his chin at André: be quiet.

  “She's your enemy!”

  “No one's anybody's enemy. We're all friends who kill each other.” Haroun nodded his chin again: pay attention. “You're wasting your time with this Mohammed.”

  “What if he died?”

  “You're thinking then we could split the Druze and Amal and Hezbollah and keep the Syrians at bay? But it won't happen. If I've learned anything from this war it's have no expectations. You shouldn't either.”

  “I'm checking terrain, options. Nothing's decided.”

  “Nothing's even possible.”

  “Wait and let's see.”

  Haroun dipped a sugar cube into his cup, watching the coffee rise up it. “If he could be reached, don't you think we wouldn't have done it by now? You think we're that maladroit?”

  “Your mistake was thinking Arabs would fight for you.”

  “That's water under the bridge. We're clean now, tough. With nowhere else to go.”

  “And fooling yourself if you think you can win. You had all Lebanon and now you've just got half of Beirut and a piece of coast and hills. And they can shove you off that.”

  “That's just talk.”

  “France won't come in, Emil. All the bright boys at Matignon are sucking up to Khomeini these days. He's got more natural gas, apparently, than you.”

  “He's a flaming asshole. I can hardly compete.”

  “That's how it's going to be decided.”

  “Then he'll pull his pecker out from under their noses and they're going to be grabbing at nothing.”

  “History hasn't taught them that yet.”