Holy War

by Mike Bond

  The car slowed, swung left, climbed a little hill, sliding Neill and the spare tire and jack first to the right then backwards. The grinding loudened; the car stopped, eased forward, swung left again, down a steep slope and halted. The motor died. The doors opened, shut.

  He waited. After a while when nothing happened he began to count his heartbeats to tell the time. After several thousand heartbeats he gave up. What if the car had a bomb and they were going to blow him up? Frantic, he shoved up on his knees, back bending the trunk lid. It creaked but wouldn't give. He caught a foot on a tail light wire, hearing it ping, feared what they'd do. They'd done this before, put people in cars, left them in a building to blow up, and they get torn to pieces and then the building falls in on them and no one ever bothers to look.

  The saint buried alive – who was he? Never canonized because when they opened his coffin they found him doubled up inside it, horribly contorted, the coffin lid slashed by fingernails. He'd been buried alive, they'd decided, and his anguished position showed he hadn't accepted God's will, had fought it. And therefore was no saint.

  Neill imagined the saint wakened by the clods of earth thunking down on his coffin, the hard airless box with no room to move, screaming and yelling as the dirt rained down and nobody heard. With the gag on, Neill couldn't even scream; if he was doomed he was doomed, nothing to do about it.

  They wouldn't just leave him like this. He was too valuable to them to die. He tried to slow his breathing, conserve some air, but there wasn't enough. He saw the kid with the ugly freckled face and the wall-eyed squint, his spindly frame hunched against the January wind. Where's your father, kid? I hate you, kid. See what you've grown up to be?

  50

  HAROUN’S ARAB GIRL went to get André a coffee but didn't come back. There was the sound of doors closing and a jeep snarled away in the night; Haroun came in, tugged up the black holster on his Wyoming belt, sat and poured a calvados. “Know what they did, those fuckers?” He downed the calva, poured another and one for André, swung his cowboy boots up on a hassock, dropped them back down. “A friend of mine, a doctor –”

  “I still think,” André said, “that girl is dangerous.”

  “They killed him for no reason. He saved their man's life, and when they came to get their man they cut the throat of the doctor who saved him! How are you ever going to make peace with animals like that?”

  André rubbed the soft fur behind the dog's ears. “Animals aren't like that.”

  “First we thought, like they said, he was just some shepherd from the Bekaa. But then we wondered why would Hezbollah send this chick all dressed up like Lebanese Red Cross for him? Then we learn.” Haroun leaned forward, poked André's knee. “It was your goddamn Mohammed.”

  “He's not mine.” André shrugged. “It's your war.”

  Shrugging, Haroun mocked him. “It was yours too.”

  “That was France. Not me.”

  Haroun shook his cigarette impatiently; the ash fell to the floor. The world's nothing but a cigarette ash on its way to the floor, one of André's superiors had once said, a man brokenhearted by the memory of Algeria: what France in ignorance and temerity had abandoned.

  “So now you've got some hot new pussy,” Haroun said, “you forget all about Yves. Why is it that soon as a guy's prick gets hard his will goes soft?”

  “Maybe it was being in the cave. Seeing what it's like. Maybe I'm just pissed at being shot at. On your turf.”

  “Everybody gets bombed, shot at. Don't take it personal.”

  “Maybe when I have someone I see life differently. I care. Worry about her.”

  “She's a widow, right? Best thing for her's a good fuck.” Haroun put a record on the turntable. “Goddamn Callas. I hear this goddamn Carmen ten thousand times and she still brings tears to my eyes.”

  “Only thing'd bring tears to your eyes is a kick in the balls.”

  “You're like my own kid, you know? And your dad, dear to me as my own brother.”

  “I remember when you and the Syrians were brothers –”

  “They knifed us in the back.” Haroun spat into the garden, tugging up his holster and scanning the Shouf hills, whence cometh, André thought, our salvation. In the form of Druze 130s.

  “I've been thinking, Emil. About vengeance.”

  “The Syrians have killed every Lebanese nationalist they could. They don't want us independent –”

  “Today's friends are tomorrow's enemies. Is that worth dying for?”

  “I'll find you matériel. You just get Mohammed.”

  “You've got a thousand guys with a better chance.”

  “My guys aren't French. You've got entrée – those scramblers would give them a real advantage against the Israelis.”

  “I don't really have the scramblers. And maybe I'd just make things worse.”

  “Killing Muslims never makes things worse.”

  “First day here I saw a Red Cross girl. Lovely, makes your prick sting just to see her. Helped her start her Land Rover –”

  Haroun rubbed his craggy big-nosed, thick-browed blunt face. “Where was this?”

  “Then the day we got out of the cave I thought I saw her again...”

  BOOTS THUDDED toward the car; the trunk lid sprang open, hands yanked Neill out and propelled him across the floor and down what seemed a corridor. A door screamed open.

  “Do it!” someone hissed.

  A hand snatched off his hood. A knife came at his throat, cut through the gag and it fell to the floor. His mouth felt unhinged, wouldn't close; the light blinded him. They cut the ropes round his wrists and fire spread down his hands into his fingers.

  It was a little room with a sink on one blue-painted wall and an empty flue hole high up another wall with a spear of light down it.

  “Be sure to let us know,” one mujihadeen said in English, “anything you need –”

  “I need to piss,” Neill said in Arabic.

  The man's knee crunched into his groin and he fell doubled over on the floor, gasping, trying not to scream. “That'll make it better,” the mujihadeen said.

  HEARING THE CALLAS Haroun had never played, André let the Ford float slowly down the foggy hills, moths battering the lights. A bottle glinted on the shoulder; he stopped and stood it on top of a white concrete post in the car's lights, backed twenty steps and fired, the Jericho punching his palm, the bullet sailing off a rock into the valley beyond, the acrid taste of flash-suppressed powder and primer floating in the mist.

  He brought the Jericho down carefully on his left palm, tried to imagine the concrete post was the Palestinian girl. He squeezed again, the post convulsed and the bottle sailed into the bush.

  His footsteps sounded loud as he crossed the road to the post. The bullet had taken a six-inch chunk out of the middle. He knelt beside it; the world grew so silent he could hear the dew coming down like smoky rain against the ground, the far tolling of a ewe's bell.

  NOTHING BETTER than the absence of pain. He could stand, hunched over, his jaw half numb unless he moved it, tried to open his mouth. Teeth broken but he couldn't tell which. Just breathe, he told himself. Slowly. In and out.

  Maybe now they'd leave him. He could be happy here, just in the absence of pain. The sink to piss in, urine laced with blood staining the flat porcelain. The tap dry, but a water jug on the shelf, water with flecks of rust and dirt and tasting of stagnant warmth. The room's wall of scaling blue paint and the flue hole filled with the songs of sparrows, larks, and doves, the crushing perfumes of lavender and pine. A cock crowing amid a distant crying of children, hush of wind in pine needles.

  Out here in the middle of nowhere: had to be the Bekaa. Twenty miles, maybe, from the border. Mayebe they’d send him back to Syria, let him go free. People like him, you didn't just drop them off the end of th
e earth.

  This peaceful bed, if the pain would go, these boards on a steel frame, a Palestinian shawl for a pillow, a worn rug for a blanket, too short so his ankles stuck out at one end or his neck and shoulders at the other. He wanted to hunch up but couldn't for the agony in his crotch. It'll go away, he promised himself. Everything goes away.

  Free. For an instant he didn't understand then realized: alone, at peace, nowhere he could go and nothing he could do, no money to earn, no roles to play, nothing expected, nothing possible. For the first time in his life. If he could get over this pain, if no more came, he could be free.

  In a way he'd stopped caring about his body; it wasn't his any more, wasn't anybody's. He was free of it too, not any body; it didn't matter what happened to it, he was going to leave it soon. He saw his body after death, the rot starting in his eyes, the rubbery skin, bile from the mouth, how the swelling body grunts and farts as the gut digests itself and the juices of death spread their sweet perfume. This body I've tended with so much care and abuse, as if life were just practice for what comes after. Instead of an end in itself.

  51

  HAROUN TOOK ANDRÉ to a street near the port smelling of sea wind and burnt buildings. There was a string of small shops and industrial warehouses on the landward side; in front of one several Phalange were loitering. They stood at slow attention when Haroun's armored car arrived; he got out and strode ahead of André into a half-ruined building that had once been a shop of some kind, car parts maybe.

  There was a counter along one side and across the back and a trapdoor to a stairway behind it. One Phalange pulled up the trapdoor and led them down the slippery stone stairs to a low room smelling of cordite and oil. There were boxes of machine-gun belts along one side and rifles stacked on shelves along the back. The Phalange went to a pair of suitcases on the opposite shelf and opened one.

  It's like money, André thought, or heroin – the brick-sized bundles wrapped in white plastic, and like money or heroin it can do such harm. He wondered what Anne-Marie would think, of how he and she had lain for three days under thousands of tons of concrete, and now with these little white packages someone else was destined, perhaps, to be caught under a collapsed building.

  Haroun picked his nose and wiped it on the shelf. “I hate this shit. Scared stiff of it.”

  “It's our stock in trade, Emil.”

  “Lies there and then one day it blows. And you're gone.”

  “Where'd you get it?”

  “Four Hezbollah brought it into Jounié in a flower van. They hit three places before we got them. This is what was left.”

  “They were trying to say it with flowers.”

  Haroun carefully shut the suitcase, pushed André ahead of him up the stairs. “It's yours now. To do what you came for.”

  They went out of the ruined shop into the light. Far up a pair of Kfirs were pirouetting in bright morning sun, playful and innocent, the sound of their reactors distant as rain over the sea. André thought of Anne-Marie in her half-empty classroom, the shattered windows and strips of ceiling hanging down, the blackboard on which with a piece of ceiling plaster she declined “to have” and “to be”, the two interchangeable verbs of Christian thought, for a frightened assemblage of little Muslim children who might never grow up. This weekend we'll drive up the coast, he thought, where those planes don't go – if I can get across the Green Line. And if she and I can then get back through it together. It'll give me a chance to think about the plastique. About what I'm going to do.

  “Goddamn Israelis,” Haroun said, nodding up at the Kfirs. “Stay way up there and let us do the nasty shit, the house-to-house.”

  “They came in low enough when they dropped that building on my head.”

  Haroun opened the door of the armored car, tipped the seat forward for André and the dog to climb into the back. “Yeah, but if they hadn't you'd have never met this babe you're so hot about.”

  I never thought of that, André realized. Are we always so dumb about our fates? “You're pissing me off, talking like that.”

  “I'm trying to. Get you back on target.”

  “This deal isn't easy.”

  “You're so lucky, with those scramblers you're going to try to sell him.”

  “Give me some time to think.”

  “Think fast.”

  “I've got to change my base, everything, because of that guy who shot at me. Is there somebody around your place who turned Hezbollah on to me?”

  The armored car lurched into gear, snapping André's head back. “That,” Haroun said, “is one fucking stupid question.”

  A FINE LITTLE ROOM, really, with the sounds and smells of spring down the flue hole, its blue walls and sink, the mice that came out at night to rattle and squeak, mating and fighting and raising their young to mate and fight and raise their young. To the mice, he thought, their own battles and loves are all that count, not the blinding thundering wars we wage around them.

  Best were the sparrows chittering and screeing in the eaves, building their springtime nests, fighting over love; sometimes one would land on the edge of his flue hole, fluffing its feathers and cocking its head to peer down curiously, a stalk of grass in its beak.

  When there was food he'd step on the foot of the bed and stretch up to spread a few lentils or flakes of bread at the top of the flue hole. Sometimes the sparrows ate them, almost out of kindness, he thought.

  At least the sparrows lived off the world, not each other. None was trying to suck the maximum out of his fellows, none was selling useless things at prices heightened by advertising, creating false hungers, so that those who bought them had to work harder and were even more driven and unfree in the hideous circle of debt and work. None was destroying resources to drive prices higher, none murdered his fellows or hunted for the pleasure of killing...

  It's we, he thought ruefully, sitting on his cot, wrapped in his rug, who work too hard, constantly defeated, worn to death trying to make ends meet. For eleven years he and Bev had been paying their mortgage, their “pledge of death” on that three-bedroom stone and brick pile with the bare yard that the dog dug up and used as a toilet and the gray skies glooming over, the litter and dog turds on the pavement and the stinking dirty hedge bitten by winter winds.

  And because of that fine invention of Anglo-Saxon usurers known as compound interest they still owed the same amount as when they'd bought it. While the bank made a nice profit for the directors with Daimlers and top shareholders with weekend places in Kent and summer estates in Scotland, ready to lend it out anew to other young couples aching for “their” first house, begging to jump on the same treadmill. While life leaked out between their fingers like the warmth sneaking out between their walls and windows, and the only time you get caught up enough to enjoy it is when it’s time to die.

  Even worse, after how many more years – seventeen? – the house would revert to some “aristocrat” because two centuries ago a farmer's eleven-year-old daughter was sold to his illiterate ancestor with five hundred acres of strawberry fields. So that the “Duke' and others like him, who had never known a moment of honest work or worry could sneer down their slender noses at us, we who sweat and fear and worry and try to make ends meet, and die in the wars they wage for profit. Even the Muslims, crazed as they were by silly God-rapture and their terror of women, at least they'd outlawed usury: they who live by usury shall not arise from the dead.

  And here he was in a Muslim prison. Why? Because he too had loved money enough to do what he had known was wrong.

  Missing Layla. After all these years. Condemned like poor Qays to wander the desert.

  And poor Layla. Everything that had gone wrong in Islam could be discerned in her sad fate. We humans stupid enough to take anything for happiness. Like me, elated when there's a scrap of goat sinew in my lentils and old bread. Willing to call
so little life. Willing to forget what life can be. And when you're in chains you think all that matters is to be free.

  Had it been real or was he imagining it? Had he for years fantasized a glory that hadn't been there? Layla's eyes, the turn of her head toward him, of her soul toward his, as if it would go on eternally, her smooth firm hand in his, her smooth young body under his?

  Hot Beirut afternoons in his little room at the top of four flights over La Croissant de Paris, the afternoon sun's lemony brightness and the chatter of shopkeepers in the narrow cobbled street below coming through the wide damasked window, the far hush of the sea and the scents of the hills, all destroyed by madmen and buried in rubble, and now only he and she remembered them, he with sorrow, she in hatred and shame.

  Strange that imprisoned in this little room with the blue wall and sink and mice and songs of sparrows down the flue hole, he could see the world so clearly, what had gone right and what wrong, what doomed you and what didn't, how easy it was to grow old without ever understanding, and die blind. Funny, he thought, here I am in prison learning how to be free.

  52

  RIDING IN A LAND ROVER into the Shouf hills reminded Rosa of another trip just weeks ago in the white Land Rover of the Lebanese Red Cross to bring Mohammed over the mountain to freedom, making her feel disgust, and then irritation for feeling it. The driver had wide moustaches sticking out from the sides of his face and this irritated her too, that he could be so caught up in his own image with a war going on. The Land Rover was old and rattled too much, the canvas rear seat had broken and she had to keep shifting her weight on the curves to keep from tipping, making her feel nervous and out of place.

  They passed through one demolished village after another, the militiaman in the front passenger seat reproachfully announcing who had destroyed each one, as if somehow, indirectly, she were responsible. “This was Israeli planes,” he said, as they crossed a battered hamlet where one huge tree trunk stood branchless and charred at a crossroads of broken, upjutting walls. “This one the Americans got,” he said two miles further, where the Land Rover circled the jumbled ruins of perhaps fifty homes and farms. “It got so hot the road caught fire.”