by Mike Bond
“We've all had losses,” Rosa said.
“Losses?” the militiaman snapped back. “This was not losses but annihilation.”
“You're still here –”
The militiaman shook his head, said nothing. The road snaked higher, steeper, through groves of eucalyptus and pine, occasional white farmhouses pinioned to the crests, here and there patches of white sheep among the broom and heather. It seemed to her strange that in the midst of war there should be such disconnected places of peace.
The soil turned to chipped white stones and awkward white boulders like the countless bones of dinosaurs. Sixty million years they lived, she thought; that's almost forever. We'll be lucky to survive another hundred.
There was a barricade ahead and she had to get out and be checked again for weapons, another strange man's hands on her body. “If I wanted to kill Al-Nazir,” she said, “I wouldn't come in here like this.”
“How would you do it, sister?” the militiaman said.
“Why should I tell you? Someday I might need to do it.”
'Karam Al-Nazir isn't going to be killed by some Palestinian woman.”
“Don't tempt me.”
“I thought you were here on a Hezbollah mission,” he smiled, “of peace?”
“Wasn't it Karam Al-Nazir,” she smiled sweetly, “who said that only killing brings peace?”
The Land Rover lunged up the last few hundred yards to Al-Nazir's HQ like a chamois scaling cliffs, halting to wheeze and steam at the top. The HQ lay in a circle of stone walls and machine-gun nests, the black barrels of 155s and 57mm ack-ack guns jutting out of camouflage netting in sandbagged positions, tanks crouching on their treads like fat, bored toads.
Two more guards checked her at the door and one led her down a long hall of polished tiles and into a room with a painting of sunflowers on one white-painted wall. There was a leather couch and coffee table and large bright cushions against the wall facing a window whose glass had been patched with Scotch tape. An older fattish woman came in and took Rosa's hand. “How are you, dear?”
Rosa couldn't help smiling, seeing the woman's kindly round face and feeling her warm hands.
“They're awful,” the woman said, “these guards, feeling you up. But we have to, four times just this month someone's tried to kill Karam. Once the Christians sent a young woman just like you – she had a poisoned knife and tried to jab him.”
“What did she say she was coming for?”
“Said she was a journalist, some Italian paper. Of course it wasn't true. Here, come sit down.” She tugged Rosa's sleeve. “I'm Madame Al-Nazir. My husband will be right in.” She sat plumply on a cushion. “So tell me, what's a Palestinian girl doing with Hezbollah?”
“We have nothing against Hezbollah.”
“Surely you do. They've chased you out of West Beirut –”
“The Israelis chased us out of West Beirut.”
“Yes, but think about Tripoli, how Hezbollah fought you there, how they joined with the Syrians against you in the south...”
“War is war. Mohammed has asked me to speak to you of peace.”
Madame Al-Nazir smiled. “I'm too old to believe in peace.”
“I'm still young.”
“The young grow old.”
“Not in war.”
A boy with a thin moustache brought in tea. Madame Al-Nazir poured two cups and handed one to Rosa, who waited till the older woman had sipped hers before she touched her own. Madame Al-Nazir smiled. “Don't worry, dear, we won't poison you. We want peace as much as you. I thank you for coming.”
“It's Mohammed who asked me to come. He believes if we can unite, we can keep the Christians and Israelis at bay and force the Syrians out.”
“We had no battle with Hezbollah. It was the Israelis who destroyed our land.”
“Because they wanted you to drive us out.”
“When they'd already driven you out of Palestine –”
Steps sounded in the corridor, old and hard. Rosa felt fear cold and sharp in her spine, wondered why. “Well, dear,” Madame Al-Nazir stood. “Here he comes.”
A FIREFIGHT had broken out between two groups of Christians near the Jewish cemetery, salvos screaming among the tombstones, grenades cracking with white-red flashes, a truck with a red cross lying on its side aflame, bodies burning in the middle of the street. André stood at the far corner hoping it would end so he could cross, but more and more men were coming on each side, a cluster of Geagea's men setting up a machine gun to sweep the inside of the walls. With a grimace of annoyance André whistled to the dog and climbed up through the dirty bombarded street to the car, in the hope of finding another way round.
NEILL WAS NAKED in a snowstorm and crawled downhill through deep drifts to the frozen edge of the sea and barefoot out across the cracking ice till he fell into the frigid water and dragged himself out on an ice floe and lay shivering in the wind, but there was only the one blanket and no way he could huddle on the simple board bed that would give him any warmth.
Someone was coming, he could hear the rattle of the engine then realized it was just his teeth chattering. He realized he was waking and tried to stop, unable to move he was shivering so hard, staring up at the blaze of freezing sunlight the flue hole cast down the wall.
“WHAT KIND OF A MAN is this Mohammed,” Al-Nazir said, “sending a woman to do his work?”
“He's sent people to see the Palestinians, the Druze, the Syrians, even the Christians.”
“The Christians? He has no shame, your Mohammed.”
She smiled. “No peacemaker has any shame.”
“And you believe it can end?”
Rosa glanced at the painting of sunflowers, the ack-ack guns in their camouflaged nest beyond the window. “You've lost three sons and two daughters. I shouldn't have to convince you of the need for peace.”
For a long time Al-Nazir seemed to be inspecting the spotted wrinkled backs of his hands. “May their memories be blessed,” he said. He sipped his tea, watched her in silence.
“I meant no harm. I too have had losses. My father, mother. My three brothers.”
“God grant peace on their souls.”
“Hah!” Rosa scoffed.
“If you don't believe in peace, what do you want?”
“For us all to unite. Against the Israelis.”
Al-Nazir's mouth curved down in distaste, revealing black teeth. “Even the Christians?”
Boots echoed in the corridor and Rosa felt again a strange fear, as if she were a prisoner and her executioner neared. A tall dark-faced man came in and scowled at her. He was dressed in dark olive-striped camouflage and wore a knife strapped to one boot. He was slender and tall and his arms under the rolled-up sleeves were very muscled. “This is my son, Suley,” Al-Nazir said.
53
“LET’S GET AWAY from this war,” Anne-Marie said, “go up the coast to Byblos. It's so lovely, the spring flowers.”
Something was wrong with the idea of him and her driving up the coast, the Ford's bad shocks making the rear wild on the curves, the slick brakes making it hard to stop, somebody coming up behind them with a bullet for him, an extra for her. “We'd have trouble getting back across the Green Line.”
“The Museum checkpoint's open, one of the other teachers said. She went through this morning.”
“I had enough trouble coming the other way.”
“So I'm just your woman for here? Not to go anywhere with? You can sleep with me but you can't be seen with me? Is that it?”
He felt like a heel found out. “You're all I think about.”
She caressed round his ear, little finger in and out of the hole. “So take me somewhere –”
To be alive, awash in her hair, her warm length pillowed on top of hi
m, welding skin to skin, heat to heat, juice to juice. God anoints thee with the juices of love, didn't the Psalm say; it's what we're living for – how did I forget? “You already take me somewhere –”
She nibbled his lips, his chin. “You're hard as stone – a huge stone warm from the sun.”
“Sleep on me all the rest of your life –”
She pulled up, looking down on him, breasts light on his chest. “Do you suppose we'll really ever get married, have kids, all that? And you'll come home with bread under your arm, and on weekends we'll go to the country?”
With a curl of her hair he caressed her cheek. “No reason why not.”
“I can't imagine it.”
He curled the lock of hair around her ear. She wrinkled her nose. “Three hours,” he said. “By plane.”
“Another world.”
“We're going to be married in Normandy, in a church built by Richard the Lionheart –”
“He slaughtered eight thousand Muslim prisoners, Saladin's men, not far from here, in one afternoon. I'm not sure I'd want to be married in his church.”
He imagined Yves' quick scorn to hear he was getting married – “some camel-keeper's orphan, some broad he shacked up with in Beirut –” No, Yves, he decided, you're dead.
She was so long atop him, slender and strong. Two bodies one skin. Flesh of my flesh. He raised her up with both hands, their bodies barely touching. “Oh,” she said, “you make me so excited –”
“I HEAR SHE’S CRAZY about killing Christians, this Rosa.”
“She came through their lines and got me, when nobody else would.”
“No one knew where you were –”
“She dared to go looking, that's all.”
“And now she's set up this meeting with Al-Nazir –” Sheikh Khamal plucked an olive from the bowl, chewed it ruminating, spat the pit into his hands and dropped it on the floor beside him. His old blind wrinkled face turned up as if seeking something on the ceiling whose rushes and beams reflected off his black glasses. “We're surrounded by infidels. They support us till they no longer need us, our faith, our brave young men. Then they kill our brave young men, trample our faith, and go back to running the world as they always have.”
Mohammed shook his head. “They who buy this life at the price of the one to come, woe unto them.”
“They've been running the world for oh so long.”
“It's different now.” Mohammed leaned forward. “We're running things. In Beirut –”
“Half of Beirut. Temporarily. A part of Lebanon.”
“We have Iran!” Mohammed realized this was not what he'd meant, that he no longer cared to have Iran.
“How many times have we carved out a little piece before the infidels cut us down? What happens when Iran runs out of oil and we can't buy any more weapons?”
Mohammed cupped his hands and blew into them, the fingers so cold. Is it warm in Heaven? he wondered. Do our old wounds hurt still, after we die?
“You're tense, Mohammed.”
“I was wondering, are we warm in Heaven.”
“Heaven's never a sure thing.”
“Surely you –”
Sheikh Khamal cocked his head, a wide smile on his thick dark lips. How white his beard's grown, Mohammed thought. You, too, so soon gone. “I don't give a fig about Heaven,” the Sheikh said.
“In a sense it's all I ever think about.”
“That way you'll never get there. God wants us to live this life, to do good now, not plan on the next.”
“The question that has come to worry me since I met that doctor, the Christian –”
“I remember what you told me about him. He was a good man.”
“To kill – is that doing good in this life?”
“To God even an infidel's life can be precious. You know well the ancient dispute: be they Jews, Christians, or Sabians, those who believe in God, and the last day, and do right, they shall have their reward with the Lord.”
“But they who follow any religion but mine shall perish, on the last day.”
“We all say that, all religions.” The Sheikh chuckled, felt for the bowl, took another olive. “How little we need to appease our hunger: a few olives, a piece of bread, a little water, figs from the tree of Heaven. Our souls, too, so easily sated … a few lies –”
“I'm trying so hard to understand.”
“This girl, Rosa, obsesses your soul? You who were happy with your lawful wife?”
“Now that I've known Rosa I see I was never happy with Layla. But I try to make Rosa go. My heart aches so.”
“I too, dear boy, have tasted the sweet flesh of young women. In this life there's nothing finer.” He was silent a moment. “Nothing finer,” he repeated. “Don't worry so about temptation. Your heart's good, be loving.”
“And holy war?”
“War's not bad, though many call it so. There's far too many of us on this little earth. Like rats in a box we breed and go mad, kill each other. Men lust after men, women after women. I don't understand why God lets us overfill the earth. Even I, blind because my father married his cousin – like so many in the Bekaa, blind this way.” He seemed to be having another conversation, with his long-dead father, when he'd been a boy eighty years ago in Chmistar, a pauper's blind child stoned and spat on. Is it from that, Mohammed wondered, that he learned grace?
“Is it only by pain,” Mohammed said, “that God teaches?”
Again the Sheikh smiled and Mohammed sensed it was not for his question but for the old man's memories. “He touches us most through love, through joy. Like this young woman whom you can't tear yourself from. God teaches us best by the joys of the flesh. Isn't the most sacred thing we do simply to carry on the seed, generation after generation? The word of life? If we didn't lust so much, we simply wouldn't be.”
“Yet you say war's good –”
“I say I understand it. Now that I near the door from this world to whatever comes next I think about the ancient days, the old prophets, when this was truly the land of milk and honey. The time of tall grass and wild animals everywhere to eat and streams of cold clear water, when you could walk for days and never see another soul under the bright blue sky.”
“You can see it, that blue sky?”
“Very well. Sometimes, too, I can see the ancient times perfectly, which is better than seeing the present. And so seeing, I see we were better off then, that this's the reason for war. We're driven naturally to fight when there isn't enough. The strongest and most evil win.”
Mohammed felt cold again. “I'll meet Al-Nazir.”
“It could bring peace. The peace your Christian doctor spoke of. Just think of all the time you'd have to enjoy this young Rosa then. You might even marry her.”
“I've forgotten what peace is like.”
“War is simply turning the soil, my son. Peace is each new harvest.”
54
AS ANNE-MARIE HAD SAID, there was no trouble getting through the Green Line at the Museum. They circled northern Beirut and Dora, little traffic on the road to Jounié, past the port where it seemed to André years ago that he had stepped off the Larnaca Rose onto the asphalt of the Holy Land. They drove past the casino and north along the coastal hills, the Ford laboring on the upgrades, yellow daisies and red opium poppies bright along the roadsides, the dog sticking his head out the rear window, ears flapping in the wind.
“When I was a girl we'd drive up here for weekends, all pile in the Renault and Father would throw the tent in the trunk and we'd camp on the beach. Back then the road was smaller and there were hardly any houses going down to the sea.”
“How did they die, your parents?”
“Like everyone, a bomb.”
“When?”
“Two years ago.�
� She reached along the back of the Ford's seat, fingers in his hair.
“If you think about it long enough you wear it down. Like my brother. So you don't really give a damn.”
“I won't do that. By numbing ourselves to death we numb ourselves to life. Denigrating death by denigrating life.”
Going north in Christian territory there was no sign of war but for the troop transports grinding south with hopeful young faces clustered along the sides, the checkpoints every two miles, a certain sense of sorrowed emptiness and shame.
Beyond Byblos the road turned in from the coast through magnificent green valleys past a Crusader castle half dismantled, its great stone blocks being crushed to make concrete. They were deep in Christian territory now, with fewer checkpoints. “Where are we going?” André said, but she shrugged and smiled and for an instant he wondered is this it, would she set me up?
He kept looking in the mirror but there was never another car behind. Beyond the bay of Chezka she told him to take the road up into the mountains toward Amioun. “Where to?” he repeated.
The road climbed steeply, the sea soon spread out like a brilliant blue painting far below, the hills unfurling roughly, red-soiled, down to iridescent coastal valleys where greenhouses glinted like diamonds. A burro stood saddled in the shade of a new slab floor in an unfinished house, there were stone houses with red shutters and roadside shrines of the Virgin and water sparkling everywhere, in ditches, sliding across the road, in deep canyons with straight cliff sides a thousand feet deep. There were pines and sage on the hills now, out of the rocky maroon earth, and beyond and above the hills Mount Lebanon’s white walls of ice and snow blocked half the sky.
In the towns the stone houses were overgrown with fuchsia, oleander and wisteria, set in orchards of almond, lemon, lime, apple, pear, and peach trees all in blossom, with porches of grape arbors cantilevered over carved wooden beams. Everywhere water glistened, gleamed, and sparkled through flashing meadows, great waterfalls hung from the crests of the hills that looked down on the emerald sea. In one garden a man in a conical straw hat was planting seeds while long-haired white goats munched reflectively in the pasture below. There were red poppies among white- and purple-blossomed trees, a white cat sleeping in a rusty wheelbarrow in the sun, a great white church dominating a green valley, golden light pouring through the pines. “We could live here,” André said, “and never come down.”
