Holy War

by Mike Bond

  Haroun laughed raspily. “History doesn't teach a goddamn thing.”

  29

  FOR TWO HUNDRED dollars the Syrian would drive Neill from Damascus at least across the border to Masnaa. Perhaps even to Sofar, only thirty kilometers from Beirut. Depending on the Syrians and Israelis, maybe all the way to Hazmiye – “only an hour's walk from the Green Line”.

  The road climbed from Damascus through the barren brown ramparts of the anti-Lebanon past rows of dusty mud and concrete villages with plastic bags stuck everywhere on brush and fences, dead dogs and rusty cars on both sides of the road. There were only Syrian soldiers at the border and for fifty dollars they let him pass.

  Down into the Bekaa's broad incandescent green the road slunk like a tan snake. There were Syrian tanks in the wheat fields, artillery dug into the orchards, the smell of death, a burnt armored personnel carrier on its side in a ditch. Up from the Bekaa into the foothills of Mount Lebanon whole villages lay in ruins, shell-blasted, uprooted orchards, toppled trees and pylons, ramshackle shattered houses with gaping roofs and shocked black-eyed windows.

  Like heroin or sex, did violence intensify with social contact? Is it a disease, he wondered, whose carriers increase faster than they die till finally, like all plagues it flowers and fades, slowly gathering its forces to rise again?

  The road swung round a curve and dipped to the right past a smashed villa in a grove of burnt cypresses by a bullet-stitched wall. Flames soared black and orange from a bus lying on its side, bodies spread like petals round it, a woman running toward him, her head on fire.

  The taxi driver braked hard. “Far as I go.”

  Neill leaped out of the taxi tearing off his jacket and threw it over the woman's head but she fought it, punching him, screaming. He yelled with pain and yanked back his hand where something had melted and burned on it and would not go out when he held it against himself. He fell to the ground trying to smother it and the woman, screaming, fell over him and more of her fire got on him. It's gasoline, he thought, and ran for the taxi. He pulled a blanket off the back seat and threw it over her but she kept burning, smoke and flames shooting up through the blanket.

  “No!” the driver screamed. “My blanket!”

  The fire on Neill's hand had gone out but the pain was impossible. The woman was trying to crawl, wailing. “They're not all dead,” someone yelled, running by.

  “Look out, mines!” another called.

  “Help!” Neill pleaded. “Help me with this woman!” A great slam of thunder knocked him down. He lay holding his head then slowly stood, before him the skeleton of the bus writhed in red heat. Something else had blown, a bomb maybe, a gas tank. He couldn't find the woman and stumbled from the heat.

  Someone was shaking him. “Two hundred dollars!” It was the taxi driver. “Two hundred dollars!”

  Neill sat on the ground and tried to find his wallet. It was in the pocket of the jacket he'd put on the woman. He stood but couldn't see her. The driver threw his suitcase at him. “I told you no good!” he screamed in English. “Too far!”

  Here was his jacket. Charred down the back and collar. He found the wallet and gave the driver four fifties. More fifties fell out but he stuffed them back. “No extra?” the man shrilled. “For this danger?”

  Underbrush was on fire, crackling, thick white smoke contorting in the still air with the black-orange clouds from the bus's burning tires and diesel. People were dragging bodies along the ground and laying them side by side. If that bus hadn't gone through, Neill thought, it would have been us hit that mine. He felt off balance and realized he was carrying the suitcase, put it down, remembered it was his, and picked it up again. “Don't know where...” he said to a man running by who kept going, didn't even look at him.

  A fire truck came screaming and winking its red light. Men ran with a hose but nothing came out. People were gathering round others sitting on the ground. A woman passed Neill, her hands upraised.

  “We were just going to Aley, my wife and me,” a man was weeping.

  Neill walked through the bullet-splintered cypresses and climbed the bullet-spattered wall and over the shoulder of the hill. Beirut spread out below in a jumble of filth and smoke, a vast human excretion aside a crystalline sea. There were brass cartridge casings in the tall grass. You'll step on a mine, he thought, watching the ground.

  “I’LL DO IT his way,” André said. “I'll blow him up.”

  “You'd die for it?” Haroun popped an olive in his mouth. “Like that kid who blew up your brother?”

  “It was Mohammed who blew up my brother.”

  “Ever wonder what happens to the ones who drive those trucks?” Haroun spat the olive pit into his hand and put it on the table. “Atoms. That's the trouble being Christians: we love life too much to be martyrs.” A Phalange lieutenant came in and Haroun left with him for a minute. The Arab girl came and lit candles at two ends of the plank table.

  “Too bad there's no electricity,” Haroun said, coming back. “I'd play you the new Pavarotti, Lucia di Lammermoor. Only heard it twice since Francine got it for me.” He spat another pit, drained his Suze and set his black holster belt into his hips. “Anyway, you jokers hear that kind of shit all the time, up in Paris.”

  “I never go to the opera.”

  “Story of a girl in love with this guy, but her parents make her marry another one, some lord. So on their wedding night she kills him, goes mad.”

  “That's why I never go to the opera.”

  “Speaking of opera, Paris is pissed.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They want you out. Head or feet first. Just thought I'd tell you.”

  “Did you tell them I was here?”

  “You crazy? But somebody will.”

  André got up. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the girl moving in the kitchen, flash of chestnut hair, the aura of lamb and spices. “I never should have told them I was coming. See what I get for being straight?”

  “You should get out of it, mon brave. Like Paris wants.”

  “That's what they told me. Can't you see? They're just establishing distance?”

  “Ex-commando runs amok – is that the message?”

  “I have a line to these scramblers Mohammed could use.”

  “He's got no money. Anyway, he's lying low for some reason. Hasn't been seen for a week.”

  “I'll find a way to reach him. But then I'll need matériel. I can't just walk in on him with a little Jericho from Larnaca.”

  “Nice gun, that. But you won't need matériel. Because you're never going to reach him.”

  “I'm losing faith, Emil, in your desire to kill Mohammed.”

  Haroun glanced up at him and André had a sense of being caught in mirrors, through a swing door. “I'm beginning to think you need Mohammed alive,” André added. “As if he's the only guy dirty enough to make you look good.”

  “We're the brains of this country. All that keeps it from being just another filthy overpopulated dysfunctional Muslim nation.”

  “All that hash you're selling in France – are you getting it through him? Out of the Bekaa?”

  “How would you have us pay for weapons?” One foot over a knee, Haroun ran a fingertip down a stitch in his boot. “Of course Mohammed's good to have. But he draws too many people. When we don't squeeze him it makes us look weak and ineffective.”

  “You've been trying to look like that ever since Sabra and Shatila. That's where you lost this war.”

  “We did that as a favor.”

  'Kill two thousand old people, women and children? It lost you the war.”

  “It'll never end, this war. No one ever wins or loses, everybody's getting too much out of it.”

  “Except the ones who die.”

  “So far, they haven't c
ounted.” Haroun tucked his stomach tighter into his Wyoming belt. “We Christians,” he leaned forward, “we have two, maybe three kids, care for them. Send them to the best schools, all that. Muslims, they have ten, twenty kids, throw them out on the streets to sell Chiclets, then say it's not fair, you Christians have all the advantages.”

  The girl passed in the background, from the kitchen down a hall, tall and willowy, and André wondered if Haroun was screwing her, his big hairy pungent chest in her face. Would he be sweet, affectionate? Not like when he killed the four teenagers caught with Uzis, shooting three in the face, stopping to ask the last, “Why aren't you afraid?”

  “Because I have no need of substance,” the boy had said.

  But the boy's corpse had been hard to kill, kept jerking up its knees. And André had gone with Haroun and the Phalange back into the fight for the Shouf hills, crossing the Nahr Barouk in darkness, its chill rattling over the stones and sparkling with stars, the smell of high explosives and burnt earth, and André had knelt to drink from the river, wondering what the boy had meant, to have no need to be.

  “You'll never get Mohammed,” André said, “unless you let me do it.”

  Haroun swung down his foot, leaned forward, a man getting down to business. “Let you?”

  “The only way is a vehicle. To take out his building. At least a thousand pounds.”

  “We don't have a Tehran connection.”

  “You can find plastique anywhere. I could buy C-4 in Paris but I couldn't get it down here.”

  Haroun spat another pit. “He's the one with all the high explosives. Buy it from him.”

  30

  MOHAMMED stood in the door, blocking the night. “Snow's coming.”

  “It's better,” she said. “They can't see us.”

  “We can walk right into them. Or they can follow our tracks.”

  “The snow will hide our tracks.”

  “Until it stops. Then we've got an arrow pointing at us.”

  “Next thing you're going to tell me,” she snapped, “is Mektoub: it is written!”

  “I didn't say that.”

  “But you think it! You say I have no faith but see how you waste yours. The Koran was never so precise. Those are your fears, your strictures.”

  Outside there were no stars, just the cold blanket of clouds hugging the earth. She closed the door behind them: I'll be who I will.

  Another truck came grinding up the road, gearing down nastily, spitting noise and fire. How easy, Mohammed thought, to throw a grenade down on those forms huddled in the back. War's not hard at all; killing's easy, it's getting along that's hard. Rosa brushed past him down the hill and he sensed her litheness beneath the coat and nurse's uniform, her smooth, scented body. We're out here in the dark, he thought, with no path.

  Each time he slipped and fell going down the gravelly damp slope it drove wild pain through his chest. She floated below, never slipping, never looking back. His hands were gloved in rime. Up the canyon the wind came full of ice.

  The road was slick with freezing mist. If trucks came up now, he thought, it would be so easy to hit them. She went down the far side of the road into a ditch of broken rock and then up through the sparse cypress and already he was panting and his chest felt as if someone was twisting an arrow in it. The land was so steep he had to grab roots and outcrops to pull himself up. How she hates me, he thought, hating her.

  The snow came down in soft fat flakes that made her scarf glisten, got in his mouth and eyes, slicked the lichened rocks. He followed her up out of the cypress, where the slope eased to a flat high ridge and the snow thickened. His arms and head were light and his legs felt disconnected.

  The slope flattened to the broad belly of a ridge of chipped stone and boulders that vanished and reappeared in the driving snow. Her shape flitted before him like an angel's – the Arabs had thought angels were daughters of God, till the Prophet called them infidel.

  Face down, he bumped into her. “From here on,” she said, “stay in my path. My line of travel exactly.”

  The stones were like broken walls of a bombed-out city; once a night bird flew squawking away, rocks and pebbles clattered in the wind that ate through his gown and bandages and into the hole the bullet had made in his side, deep into him, cold against his heart.

  She turned back, facing him, gun at her waist as if she would shoot him, and he had an instant of fear, only half seeing her through the blowing snow. I don't know you, he thought. But you saved me. Why is that?

  “Wrong way,” she said. “I'm getting lost in this snow.”

  He was shivering, terribly cold. “Got to go down.”

  “It's all mined. Both sides. Damn this snow. I never thought...”

  He felt fury, wanted to shoot her. “What did you think coming up here would bring you?”

  “I do what I do for Palestine. Not for you!” She shook snow from her shoulders. “Wait.” She slipped into the snowstorm, and he called but she didn't answer. Snow scurried round his ankles, wind carved his shins.

  She came out of the blizzard. “Follow ten steps after me.” She moved to one side among the rocks, holding her hand above her as a signal, but he couldn't see it, got lost, and she came back for him. “Can't you do better?”

  “Shut up and leave me.”

  “These rocks are full of caves.”

  He followed her tracks; crumbling and snatched by the wind, the fleeting white filled and erased them. “Where are you!” he yelled, glancing round, wind and snow in his face, at his back, knocking him down, coating his face, like death, he thought, like death.

  “Found one!” She grabbed his arm.

  It was body length deep, the front open to the wind, snow building against one side. “Go in first!” she yelled.

  He squirmed in till his feet bumped the end. The ground seemed like ice but was only frozen earth. She squeezed in beside him. “We must wrap up together in both coats.”

  The wind rose, grinding rock on rock, sucking the snow from the earth, fleeting veils across the night, raging white banners with cold razor edges. The whole world will be like this someday, he thought. He imagined his dust blown by the blizzard across the naked, frozen earth.

  The snow built up against the far side of their hole, blocking the wind. The cold earth warmed to their bodies; inside the coat his hands were warm, touched hers. “Tomorrow, in the snow,” she said, “it'll be hard to know the way. To not step on mines.”

  Something sharp bit into his back – a rock. Her breath was warm against his neck. He thought of the Christian doctor, his tired gentle hands, his kind and hopeless eyes. She moved her feet and he felt how cold they were, held them between his ankles. What if everything I've believed is false? he wondered. And only this is true?

  THE ARMORED MERCEDES took André back down the mountain, now only one guard car ahead and none behind. A squall had come off the sea, wetting the windows, the headlights sparkling on the white-painted stones alongside the road. Rain here meant snow up in the mountains – good skiing, in the old days.

  He wondered if the dog would be waiting when he got back. It hung around all the time now, tail between its legs at every sound of guns but getting fatter, some good food easing its worried mind. Leaping on the bed in the mornings to lick him awake – got him mad at first but then he realized it was good to be getting up so early.

  The Arab girl kept flitting before his eyes. She moved on bare feet as if out of the past somehow, something he remembered. And Haroun screwing her only made it worse – like one small part of her was saved for Haroun and the rest was bared and hungry.

  No, she'd have a guy somewhere, some skinny Arab with wild eyes, in a keffiyeh, all muscle and hate, a worn-out Kalashnikov and a dirty little knife. Fun to fuck her though. No one since Larnaca, the night he'd found the Jericho. A
bad idea having the Jericho up front with the guard, but that was the drill. They'd give it back when they dropped him off. Naked without it. If Haroun wanted to deliver him to the French now would be the time. Then he'd never get to screw that girl. Not that he would anyway, she was Haroun's. What a name, Nadja. Makes you want to screw her just thinking of it. Just saying it.

  I’m fearing the French, he realized, my own country. As if they're enemies when they're la France, for whom you've sworn to fight and die. But la France is all of us, Yves and all those other guys in the Beirut barracks who gave their lives for perfectly nothing. Every man who has died for France would agree: pay Mohammed back.

  France is what we do. We are la France.

  The rain had stiffened, pummeling the road and bouncing up wildly in the headlights. Going to be a nasty storm in the hills. He remembered Haroun and the others in the fight for Jabal Sannine, the great flank of Mount Lebanon in swirling drifts, fear and bullets, bright blood on the new snow.

  31

  FIRES GLOWERED in Shatila where Christian and Israeli shells were landing. Bright low comets of jet afterburners crossed from south to north, their thunder racing behind them. “They're not shelling Ras Beirut,” Saddam said. “We can go all the way.”

  Neill leaned out of the VW's window. “Where are they hitting?”

  “Can't see over the hill. Down by Martyres maybe. Along the Line.”

  The back seat full of oranges rumbled and rattled as Saddam swung right into El Rachidine toward Rue de Rome. “Which side of the gardens are you on?”

  “Drop me anywhere. I'll walk it.”

  “I'll take you. Which side?”

  “Arts et Metiers.”

  A building had fallen, blocking the street, the red lights of fire trucks sliding through the rain and the steam and smoke and skidding off the buildings on both sides, people gathering and fedayeen holding them back, a bulldozer and more fedayeen burrowing at the ruins. “They don't care who they hit,” Saddam said, backing up. He braked, oranges rumbling backward. “Hey!” he called to a boy on the pavement. “Whose was it?”