Holy War

by Mike Bond

  The boy shrugged, looked up. “It just came down.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Saroulla.”

  'Get in. I'll drop you at Hamra.”

  Neill put his suitcase up on his knees and squeezed against Saddam as the boy wedged in beside him, twisting sideways to shut the door. Neill had to bend his leg aside so Saddam could shift into second. “Let me out in a couple of blocks,” he said.

  “You're brave enough to come here, try to tell the world what's happening, to help us, speak our language like you do – I take you anywhere you wanna go.”

  “It won't help,” the boy said. “You just make it worse.”

  “Probably I do,” Neill said.

  “No!” Saddam shook his fists. “What we need is people knowing about this. What if the whole world,” he threw up his hands, making Neill want to grab the wheel, “worked together? And any time war started we stamp it out, like fire in the forest?”

  “In my country,” the boy said, “for a century we had no forest fires because we put them out, but then when a big one came it was so hot it even burned away the soil.”

  “See?” Neill said. “Now you'll have no more fires.”

  Saddam stopped in the middle of Arts et Metiers, the garden on the right. The boy got out and then Neill; the boy got back in. Neill took four fifties from his wallet. “No, no!” Saddam waved them away.

  A rocket sizzled over and Neill dropped to the street. It hit with an awful clatter to the east, by the Museum. Neill stood and handed the four fifties into the car, hunching his shoulders as the next rocket started in.

  “No, I really don't want to,” Saddam insisted, shoving into first gear.

  “You deserve it. Anyway, I get it back.” Neill dropped the notes on the dashboard and dived to the ground as the rocket seared over but hit further down. The VW's one tail light blinked and wobbled down Arts et Metiers and turned left into Emile Eddé, the brake light glinting as Saddam halted at the barricade.

  Neill settled his suitcase on the pavement and put away his wallet, thinking that he shouldn't have forced the money on Saddam. He'd refused the gift of love and given the poison of money. Reimbursed money. In his own little way he'd contributed to war.

  There were nicks in the wrought-iron fencing of the Jardin Public and pieces torn out of the palm trees by bullets. The façades along Arts et Metiers looked beaten up, black eyes and scarred stucco, shutters hanging disconsolately, the smoky night bright through splintered eaves.

  But the Harad house was still standing; through the leaded diagonal holes of the living room windows there was candlelight down the edges of the curtains. The black wrought-iron gate was gone but the fence stood, bent in places by machine-gun bullets. Bullet scars marred the front; one corner of the second floor was gone and the lovely French colonial balcony over the front door had collapsed into the patio. The front door was gone and boards were nailed across the hole. “Nicolas!” Neill called. “Samantha!”

  The candle went out. “Nicolas!” he called. “It's Neill. Neill Dickson.”

  There was no answer and he felt frightened and backed across the pavement. There were no lights on the street. How could you run, he wondered, with all these burnt cars to bump into that you can't even see? It's like Hell, he thought, just like Hell.

  “Neill!” Nicolas called. His voice came from the side of the building, the garden. “Quick! Over here!”

  Neill went through the empty front gate and cut across the garden, the soft soil making him nervous for mines. “What the Hell are you doing here?” Nicolas whispered, reaching out.

  Neill broke away. “Christ, I've missed you. How's everybody?”

  “OK. Just fine.” Nicolas squeezed his arm. “Sammy will be ecstatic.”

  “How’s her folks?”

  “They're fine too. Went to Kuwait. Hurry, let's get inside. The front door's nailed up – we go round here.”

  Neill followed him into the greater darkness between the buildings. “Can I stay with you tonight, till I sort things out?”

  “Tonight? You can just stay. Nothing would make us happier.” Nicolas guided him down the back stairs. “You have to excuse us, no water or gas or electricity and most of the time we stay in the basement.”

  “Nice guy,” Neill laughed. “Telling me to come back down and then I do and you shut off the fucking lights and water. Nice guy.”

  They went into a black passage that Neill remembered had once been the back stairway up to the maids' rooms. There was a door into the kitchen and then another corridor smelling of wax leading into the wide dining room with the long table and a candle and two plates at one end. Sammy stood with one hand on her chair, as if not sure whether to run or hide, till she saw it was Neill. She put the revolver on the table and ran forward to hug him. “How are you, dear?” he laughed, swinging her around.

  “Oh Neill, Neill, how lovely to see you!” She leaned back to see him clearer. “What? Why?”

  “Doing a piece on the war. I'll explain later. Thank God you're fine.”

  “Blessed be Allah we are fine. Blessed be Allah you are here. For us, but not for you.”

  “GOD TELLS SOME PEOPLE to do wrong, then sends them to Hell?”

  Mohammed folded back their coats and crawled forward to check the snow falling faster and faster beyond the cave. “You know the answer to that.”

  “To punish them for doing what He says? Like me. You think I'm going to Hell for the way I act, don't you?”

  “I'm not always right.”

  She rolled to her knees. “When are you wrong, then?”

  “God's the one who does no wrong.”

  “How comforting to those in Israeli jails. And everywhere else.”

  “Most of them understand.”

  She crawled forward, beside him. “What if they don't? What if they're tired of understanding? What if they're tired of God and just want Palestine?”

  “That's why they don't have it. God’s the one who's tired of human lies. That's who God is.” Mohammed squirmed backwards into the cave, shivering. “I've never known it so cold.”

  “Get used to it. You're going to be dead an awfully long time.”

  “You don't believe that.”

  “Do you actually believe in some kind of paradise?”

  He watched the snow coming down, each flake alighting like a bird. “Always. In every way.” He felt a pain in his guts, shifted his hips.

  “That's a shame. You need to see through men's illusions to lead them.”

  “I never asked for war!”

  “You just wanted it more than other things, that's all.”

  He shivered. Easy to die out here tonight. Why let her get under his skin? Why let her turn things upside down with her questions? Didn't she know that questions are just for those who have no answers?

  If the snow stopped now they couldn't move for fear of tracks. He'd be stuck with her. He was a fool to be so open, suggestible. She just took advantage, lost respect. He stared again out of the cave, hands trembling. How could she make him so angry?

  The snow had risen halfway up the cave mouth. Soon their breath would make a hole – a hole someone could see. He checked his watch, 11:12, promised himself he wouldn't look at it again for half an hour, at least till after 11:30.

  After 6:30 there'd be light to see, they could travel in the snowstorm, and maybe nobody would see them. If it didn't wane.

  She'd got him this far when nobody else would. Of course they would. It was easier for her, as a woman, that was all. “That doctor you killed –”

  “It was him or you. Take your choice.”

  “I take him. That I should die.”

  “No wonder Palestine's enslaved, with people like you to defend it.”

  “That
doctor, knowing I was Shiite, saved me from another Christian who was choking me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we'd shot his brother.”

  “War's like syphilis. It just goes round and round.”

  “You're truly shameful.”

  She eased up next to him, shoulder to shoulder. “The question is, what made the doctor save you?”

  “That's what I'm trying to understand.”

  “See?” She nudged him. “You're softer than me.”

  He was lost in her change of mood. “How did they die, your brothers?”

  “That's another story.” Out of the darkness she took his hand. “For another night.”

  32

  NEILL KEPT HIS HAND in a pan of water but the pain didn't ease. Samantha coated it with fat and wrapped it in an undershirt but that only made it worse. The pain was alive, throbbing and burning and stinging and shooting up his arm like electricity with every pulse. “Can you imagine,” he kept saying, “what she felt?”

  The shelling stopped and by flashlight Nicolas led him through dark streets and up stairs, knocking at each door till someone opened and sent them to the third floor right.

  The doctor was a small woman with gold-framed glasses and silver hair, in a pink puffy bathrobe. “Come into the light,” she said.

  There was a lantern on a mantel and a fire of rubbish and brush in the fireplace. “Yes,” she said, holding his hand to the lantern, “you've really burned it.”

  “What could have been on her face, the poor woman, to have burned like that?”

  “Skin. It was her face melting, and it fell on you.”

  As they went home shells started drifting down from the Shouf, cracking randomly in the streets. They ran, Nicolas leading and shining the light behind. Once inside, Neill had to hold the wall, dizzy and afraid. The malaria, that was it. He had to take his goddamn Paludrine.

  A shell came in short and hammered the next street. “Motherfuckers!” Nicolas screamed. Neill ran after him into the cellar, skidding feet first down the steep stone stairs, wrenching his ankle. He hobbled toward a twitching candle where Samantha sat knitting and a man and woman crouched on the floor over a little boy, more people behind them.

  “They're from next door,” Samantha told Neill. “This cellar's deeper.” Another shell was coming in louder and louder and louder, right down on top of their heads. This is it, Neill thought, diving. How crazy to come all this way just for this.

  There was perfect silence.

  WHAM.

  Roar and crash, thundering walls, clattering stones, wailing glass inside his brain and blowing out to the end of the universe. I've been killed, he thought, astonished. The heat shook and slammed him down, a wall of shelves toppling on him, cans of food. The dirt floor stopped shaking. With a wrenching groan of iron beams bending, holding, then easing, the concrete floors of a building in the next block cascaded one by one into the street.

  Then another crunch, not so near, new dust tumbling before the candle, the little boy's eyes upraised in frozen terror to the ceiling.

  “Who is this?” Neill yelled. “Why the Hell are they shelling us?”

  “Anybody.” It was a man with a Turkish moustache, a fat wife and two children behind, then an old lady in a black shawl, her arm round a boy in a baseball cap. “It could be anybody. Who'd stop them?”

  ANDRÉ WOKE from a dream that had made him warm and happy. The dog was growling softly in its throat, its nose at the window. What had he been dreaming? Why the dog growling? He slid the Jericho from its holster, ducked to the window, reached up one-handed and popped it open. The dog leaned out, paws on the sill, the fur on its neck raised, teeth bared, a snarl in its throat.

  He crouched far back into the dark room and stood carefully, looked down in the street and saw dogs trotting away, their pelts glistening in the rain.

  He sat back down, cradling the Jericho in his lap. Get an idea stuck in your mind and straightaway it poisons you. The idea la France is hunting you. Because Haroun said. Haroun with his little Arab pussy, warning you.

  If they’re after you it's just to show some distance. Or do they really want you? For planning to kill Mohammed? For breaking the ultimate rule: always do what they say.

  He sat cross-legged, hearing the pulse in his temples, the steady shelling, now in West Beirut. What if the purpose of life is for God to test your virtues: how good are you?

  How badly could they want you?

  THE SNOW STOPPED before dawn. Under the last stars Mohammed could see a bleak snow-clad hill and the rough flank of a higher ridge to the right, straight ahead a sharp sky and the far pale crests of Mount Lebanon. “We'll never get back,” he said.

  “Not if we leave now,” she said. “We must wait till tonight. Unless it snows again.”

  “I have to go outside.”

  “We can't. Any low-flying plane will see the tracks.”

  “Just round the corner of this –”

  “No. Do it at the back of the cave. We have to. Cover it and wait till tonight. I'll go first if you're shy. Face out the front and cover your ears.”

  He did as she said, uncovering his ears to hear her urinate at the back of the cave. She came back, laid down beside him. “That's better.”

  It had always horrified him, the idea of women excreting. Why did God put it there, her paradise place, between two places for excreting? It was truly unholy to touch a woman. Yet the Prophet said respect women, who have borne you, for Allah watches over you. It made no sense.

  You're not supposed to question, he reminded himself. Was he some infidel, running always to questions like a kid to its mother's teats? Man had pre-eminence because of the advantages God gave him over women. Man the seed of life, woman the dirt it is planted in. She is unclean but must be taken as such.

  With a handful of snow he performed his ablutions, knelt toward the rising sun. Muslim means he who submits, he repeated to himself. Muslim is he who submits.

  NEILL SAT ON THE BED in his room, banging his ears to clear them, could barely hear.

  “I'm sorry,” Samantha said, sweeping the floor. “To get shelled your first night. It's not like this every night.”

  “I'd like to kill them,” he said, cocking his head against the roar in his ears, his words seeming to rise from the bottom of the sea.

  “They did us no harm, thank the Lord. Just this glass.”

  In the cracked mirror he saw he had a sharp cut across one cheek, like an African initiation scar, from a piece of flying window. He'd got it in the street, coming back with Nicolas, hadn't even known it. More than twenty years a journalist and never been hurt. Now twice in one day. Here in Beirut when everybody said stay out. Except Freeman with his little transmitter under your arm.

  Where were they now, these invisible beings who watched over his transmitter? A chip in a satellite, two ragged Arabs on some hill with a little radio, who? Now, in all this danger, why? What use to them? When London didn't give a damn what happened to him.

  “Nobody's shelling now.” Samantha swept the shattered glass into a dustpan and tossed it out the gaping window. “Nicolas has gone to the office. There's talk of a new ceasefire and if they get together he'll try to film them for the news. Let's go out and try to find some food. Maybe there'll be carrots – or some salve for your hand.”

  In the next street a building had fallen, crushing three cars. A fat man was digging in the ruins, glancing up at the loose concrete. A child's broken plastic gun lay in a smashed doorway. At the corner they went into a shop where the man with the Turkish moustache stood behind the counter, stacking packets of Marlboros.

  “That's all anybody does here,” Neill said. “Smoke.”

  “It calms the nerves,” the man said, a pen clenched in his teeth. He took the pen out and put it be
hind an ear, glanced at Samantha. “How's your place?”

  “New broken windows. How's yours?”

  “The windows were already gone.” He came round the counter and set a table and three chairs out on the pavement and brought out pitchers of thick strong coffee and hot condensed milk. “Just like the Sixteenth,” he smiled. “A café on the Bois.”

  “The Bois are full of junkie hookers now.”

  The man shrugged. “See, I was right to come back. If we make it, we can look back, say we were here.”

  “If it ever ends,” Samantha said.

  “Look at it this way: we're investing in peace. If we can fight long enough, kill off everybody who wants to fight, maybe we can have peace for a while, build back up.”

  “To tear it down again.”

  “Every fifty years a war. For five thousand years. Ten thousand, maybe. Since there was man. What are you going to change? You just get in the rhythm. Ten years of war, fifty of peace.”

  IT WAS A BLUE 1957 FORD with high tail fins, a fat American car. The paint faded but clean, a few nicks, one long dent down the right side. The trunk was big, with more space if he needed it under the back seat and in the doors. The oil in the crankcase wasn't too dirty and the engine didn't run too rough and there was hardly any smoke out the exhaust. The tires were bare but not too uneven. A sun-faded green cardboard cedar of Lebanon hung from the mirror.

  “It's a nice car,” André said. “Why you selling it?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Where you going?”

  “Perhaps France. Or London. I'm a jeweler. If I can get a job –”

  “Just you?”

  “My wife and four kids and then my mother-in-law and father-in-law and maybe others.”

  “You'll have to sell a lot of cars.”

  “Everyone says the best way is Larnaca to Athens which will let us in on a tourist visa, then from Yugoslavia to Trieste. Do you think so? Those hills between Yugoslavia and Italy, do you know them?”

  “Mountains. In the north, near Austria.”

  “Excuse me for asking, but do you know anyone who'd write us a letter?”