“For what?”
“We have to move. Let’s go. Vijay.”
“I’m ready. Brian, give me my flask. We’ll crowd into your Jeep, Jay. We head a kilometer up this road. Then left, and you’ll feel the land rise, and we’ll meet guides to take us the rest of the way. Such a journey we are embarking upon.”
“Cut the British affectation. Give me some American.”
“Let’s roll.”
Headlights off. I wrestle with the steering wheel through jerks and bumps on a donkey road. A MUP fire glows in the distance. It’s cold. The night makes the landscape a mystery of whispers and goblins. There are no stars; it is snowing, the first flakes I have seen in a year. They soften the sky in broken gray-white gauze. They spin and squall. I love the snow. Unlike the Leopard, I have my freedom, and I seek less honorable counterpoints to death. One is snow. Isn’t that ridiculous? I am young when it snows. I am a boy waiting for school to let out early and to be the first to run across the cloaked sidewalk and leave my footprints on uncharted territory. That is special. I could claim a world until the snow accumulated and covered my tracks and a new boy would come and discover something that was once briefly and beautifully mine. Why am I thinking this? Contemplating childhood weather while crammed in a Jeep with a man with a gun, and, beyond the windshield and perhaps beyond the snow, war, patient as an aloof lover, waits in the mountains. Only God is bigger than the mountains. They survive snow and men; they are baritone voices rolling through time.
A light flickers through the snow.
“Stop, stop.”
I roll down the window. Snow brushes my face and melts into me.
“Our guides.”
“Do we get out?”
“No, we can go farther. This is four-wheel drive, right?”
“Yes.”
“Open the back and let them hop in.”
“Be careful of the sat phone, Jay,” says Brian.
The guides are raw-faced and wet. They climb in, and we move.
“Vijay, why so quiet?”
“Don’t you know? A man is allotted so many words a day. I have used all mine.”
“I didn’t think that possible of you.”
“I have my contemplative side.”
“I like that side,” says Leopard with a laugh.
“It’s very appealing,” says Alija.
“Ahhh, I am the butt of humor.”
“A kind humor.”
“If you persist, I feel I will have to borrow some words from tomorrow’s allotment and tell you a long story.”
“We are done with humor tonight.”
“Good. I will drink my brandy in silence.”
“How much brandy is in that little flask?”
“I have two flasks.”
“Well, give me a sip then.”
“I have never tasted alcohol,” says the Leopard. “My father was a strict Muslim.”
“Have a swig, then.”
“No. Why forsake my dead father now?”
One of the guides in the back says something.
“Turn here.”
The road worsens, but after a while it smoothes a bit as we switchback our way up the mountain. Snow blows hard and with each turn falls farther into the valley We are grounded yet flying, soaring through ink flecked with white. The snow illuminates a short distance beyond the hood. The Leopard tells me not to turn on the lights. I keep waiting for the tires to lose their grip on the ice, or for something, I don’t know what, to come howling through the blackness and send us over the edge and into the ravine. I can hear Vijay sip. The guides in the back shuffle their boots. The melted snow in their hair is dripping; I see wisps of their winter breath in the rearview. The windows are fogging. My fingertips are stiff, and my feet are cold and tight. I hate it when the feet go. Alija sits between Brian and Vijay. Her eyes are closed, and her head sways. She seems to be dancing, her body given over to the bumps and dips of the road. It is erotic. Strangely, it is erotic.
The Leopard stares through the windshield, studying snowflakes as if they are equations or squiggles to be solved or interpreted. Maybe he’s waiting for a bullet; the click-boom of a landmine. He should have a drink. A touch of brandy, warming his tongue and spreading through his bones, would do him good. But he won’t drink. Look how pressed and clean his fatigues are. His fingernails are clipped and pure. His father taught him well. The Jeep slides around another bend. A man steps out of the brush. Then another and another and another; so many faces peeking through the falling snow. Hard, smiling, strange, scared, bemused, lonely, angry, uncertain, lost, and bitter faces, they hover before us, an odd family portrait of men. They are young and old, and many are in between. The snow keeps falling, and they stand in it because there’s no place else to go. No campfires. Campfires betray. Only the earth will hide you. Know its grooves and patterns. It is indifferent, but it shields. The men have guns, mostly Kalashnikovs, but I see sniper rifles and RPGs. They part as we drive through, peeking into our windows, pressing their faces against us. I will write about a few of them, or those like them. They’ll die and be buried in forests and meadows. Their guns will be taken and given to new men, their bullets will be counted and divvied. Their boots will be unlaced and pulled off, and a meticulous man, one with a rifle slung over his own shoulder, will record their deaths in a book whose pages over time will rip and scatter until only memory will be able to retrieve their existence. That is what will happen, but they don’t know this now In the snow, in the mountains, they think they will last forever.
“Welcome to the revolution.”
Vijay laughs, and the scents of brandy and wet steel fill the Jeep.
“This is what we control,” says the Leopard.
“How many are up here?”
“Thousands in camps across the ridges.”
“Where do we go now?” asks Brian.
“We walk.” The Leopard opens his door and slides out.
“Where do we sleep?”
“There’s a barn and a few caves up a ways.”
I don’t ask how long we can stay, and the Leopard offers no hint. Vijay disappears with some of the men. He’s dipping into tomorrow’s word bank. Brian, Alija, and I follow the Leopard up a narrow, crunchy path. The snow has slowed, but the mountain cold grips me.
“Could have been in Fiji, Jay. Snorkeling and drinking in the sun. We’re going to have to rig something for the sat phone and computers. I don’t see any electricity up here.”
“We can charge them off the Jeep engine.”
“My little industrious Jay.”
“Cold, Alija?”
“Freezing.”
“Where are the commanders?”
“Farther up,” says the Leopard. “You’ll meet some of them tomorrow.”
“Will we meet the man with the dates?”
“Don’t ask about him. I don’t know if it’s been decided.”
“Have the MUP ever come up here?”
“They sent a recon team once, but so far no attacks.”
“Planes? Helicopters?” I ask.
“Nothing. I don’t think they’ve decided what they want to do.”
“Everyone should wait until spring,” says Brian. “Fighting’s miserable enough without doing it while shivering your ass off.”
“What if your George Washington had said that?”
“It was always cold back then.”
The Leopard stops at an old sheep shed with broken windows.
“You’ll stay here tonight. I’m sorry, Alija. It will be very cold.”
“I’m numb already. Our sleeping bags should protect us enough.”
“What’s the name of this fine hotel?” says Brian. “I need to rack up some travel points.”
“Alija, what’s your brother’s name? I’ll check to see if he’s with us.”
“Ardian. He’s barely eighteen.”
The Leopard turns and leaves.
“I’ll send Vijay up.”
“Only if he’s quiet.”
“He will talk you to sleep.”
“What do you think, Jay? Would the Jeep be warmer?”
“I don’t know. These are mud walls and there’s a roof.”
“But holes for windows.”
“There’s no wind. Let’s try it.”
We slide into our sleeping bags like unfinished butterflies. They are the kind of bags that pull up over your head with a slit for breathing. We’re lying next to one another. I think of Ellen. She’s zipped in a different bag. Maybe she’s back in Philadelphia by now, the dirt fresh around her. How many days has it been? I don’t know. I count days by stories filed, and I haven’t filed in a while. That is changing.
I close my eyes and see the thing I sometimes see, a woman with a camera, my brief wife, smiling years ago in another forgotten laundry list of gunfire and death. Beirut is nearly rebuilt now. They’re grinding bombed buildings into sand to widen the beach near the corniche. Isn’t that something? All the ghosts, bullets, and flesh, all the metal, stone, and mortar crushed into fine particles; tons and tons of it, the color of eggshell and chalk, widening and pushing back the shore. Man can be splendid in his audacity. We were out of college and married two years. I, a writer; she, a photographer. We escaped the municipal meetings and car crashes that pad small-town American dailies and packed a couple of duffle bags, scrounged for airfare, and landed in a fifteen-faction-sided civil war between Muslims and Christians and zealots and wackos and the not-so-invisible hand of Israel. We were freelancers in a storm, we didn’t understand, and we were happy. We made love between battles, and we argued and fought over words and images, so many hours spent on meaning and precision. She liked the words configuration and pigment. She was a better photographer than I was a writer, and I’d study her pictures, complete quiet narratives of space, dimension, and time, and faces, so many faces hovering on spools and shards of amber-black film. I used her pictures to train my eye. I’d hang them on walls and give myself thirty seconds to describe each one in detail. It was a game. I became a collector of colors and a diarist to the shadowed and bright alchemy of death, birth, and fear, not the overblown and the obvious on the front lines but the barely heard, the ones behind the ones the others followed. My stories began to matter, and one night she said we needed to celebrate, and we found a shack of a restaurant in the sand and ate fish and watched smoke roll over the sea, drinking smuggled wine until we slept. The city fought behind us. The next day she was photographing a battle on a street whose name I no longer remember. The lens narrowed her periphery. One bullet in the neck. She fell in the sunlight near a burning car. I dragged her around a corner. Hands are useless for stopping blood. It trickles through fingers. I tied my shirt around her neck. She didn’t cry or seem to have pain. She held on to her camera with both hands. A man helped me carry her through alley smoke and into a house. We laid her on a table. A woman and boy sat in a corner. The woman was dressed for the market, waiting for the midday lull in the fighting. Another man looking like a lunatic but also like a doctor entered. His stethoscope had only one ear piece. He breathed heavily through his nose, loosening my shirt from her neck, tracing the bullet hole with his finger. He closed her eyes. He left the room and returned with a bowl of soapy water. He washed her face and her neck. He called the boy over, and the boy took the camera from her hands and washed her hands and returned the camera, lacing her clean, still fingers around it. We carried her to a taxi, and I held her in the backseat, and we drove to a place where bodies were collected and identified. She went into a bag, like Ellen. But I like to think that some of her is mixed in with the new coastline. That she’s a speck in the grand design, a voice in a chorus near the sea. I have little left of her, no letters, no pictures, no scrawl, no line in a book. I carry only her last roll of film. It’s too old to be developed. I don’t want to see the pictures, anyway. I like the way it feels though, a knot, a bump in my pocket, and sometimes I think I’ve lost it but it reappears in the bottom of a bag, stuffed into a sock, hidden amid the wires and cables of the sat phone. Her name was Linda. She was her own universe. I’ve condensed her story down to that. I’ve edited, but I’ve stayed true to who she was and what that time was, at least that’s what I think, yet I know that editors believe they make stories better, but they only make them different. I open my eyes. Snow blows through the cracked windows but not enough to matter. Is anyone else moving unseen through this frigid night? Rolo, my spook? Milan, my sniper? Ardian? They follow their own maps and knife points. All of us infrared blurs in a scope. The door opens.
“Guys, you awake?”
“What do you think, Vijay?”
“I can’t seem to get into my bag. The zipper’s jammed.”
“Do you have any brandy left?” asks Brian.
“A swallow.”
“That swallow’s mine if I fix your zipper.”
“Brian, you’re a hard man. A true opportunist. Done.”
“Hey, Vijay, how many guys going to the Kennedy School next year are trying to get into a sleeping bag on a mountain before a war?”
“This is why I am unique, Jay.”
The night stays still. Morning is a rough affair. My body feels like a fist that’s been clenched for days. The sky is a miserable blue, and there’s an orange sheen across the snow. I stand in the broken window and face the sun. I’m glad there’s no mirror. Alija shimmies out of her bag and stands beside me. We hear the clink of metal and the murmur of men below.
“Maybe you’ll find out about your brother today.”
“I didn’t sleep all night.”
“Be calm. It may take a few days to find him, even if he’s up here. There’s a lot of mountain he could be in.”
“When we were kids my father brought us to this mountain. Not this high up, though. This was our summer mountain. Villagers would come to cool in the heat, and you’d hear all these voices along the streams and the sound of splashing water. It was one of the few places you could go and not see the MUP. My father said it was heaven.”
“Did your brother like it?”
“He would run through the stream until he was soaking, and I’d follow. I’d jump on him, and his clothes and his skin were so cool. Our father would build a fire on the bank, and we’d sit until dark and sometimes through the night until morning. My father knew a lot of stories back then. He told them slowly. The flame stayed on his face. Ardian’s favorite was one about a mountain lion and a shepherd. The lion sneaked down every night and ate one of the shepherd’s sheep. The shepherd tried everything to stop the lion. To trick. To kill him. Nothing worked. Then one night there was only one sheep left. When the lion came, the shepherd hid in the dark. He pleaded with the lion, ‘Stop eating my sheep.’ The lion said, ‘I cannot. I am a lion.’ The lion circled and lunged toward the sheep. But the sheep did something very unsheeplike. He spun like a dancer and dodged the lion, who went flying over a cliff and died on the rocks below. The shepherd said to the sheep, ‘How did you do that?’ The sheep answered: ‘I am a sheep, but I watched that lion for many nights. He always pounced the same way. So tonight I stood near the cliff. In thinking only about his hunger, the lion never considered where he might land.’”
Alija pulls tight her coat and leans on me, the sun rising in pieces through the broken window, warming us.
“Ardian speaks English as well as you, right?”
“Better. He had, and I don’t know where he got it, a movie almanac. Written in English. He’d walk around blurting out condensed bubbles of English, like the way those little passages are written in the comics. He knows the plot, director, and actors in every movie through 1980. That’s the year the almanac stopped. We’d sit around for hours testing him. No one could trip him up.”
“What’s his favorite movie?”
She doesn’t answer.
“I can’t believe he might be out here, Jay. With a gun in his hands and a knife in his boot.”
“Isn’t that what you’d want, though? For him to be part
of this?”
“Maybe. But what does he know? He’s a pretty boy with a silver cigarette case, a student.”
“The Leopard says this war has room for everyone.”
“I suppose it does. But I remember the boy in a summer stream.” She steps to the broken window and rubs a circle of frost away. “They pushed us into this, Jay. They pushed all those boys in summer streams into war. I hate them for that.”
There’s a rustle behind us.
“Damn, this is awful. Shit.”
“Morning, Brian.”
“I’m sleeping in the Jeep tonight, Jay. Look, there’s frost on my eyebrows.”
We eat bananas, and some men with guns and groggy smiles come and build us a fire in the snow. We make tea. Vijay roams out of the sheep shed like a small, lost bear. He is quiet and sits beside me with his tea, his sleeping bag draped over his shoulders. The sun crests the ridge. Warm and cold struggle around me. The heat from the tea in my hands makes me feel rich. Brian is jittery and wants to file. I have to write, too. We go to the Jeep and pull out our laptops. Alija sits in the sun.
“Write till the battery runs down, then we’ll turn on the Jeep and recharge.”
“Fiji, Jay. Fiji.”
I sit in the front, Brian in the back. Brian’s fingers are not supple. He’s a keyboard attacker, every stroke a discordant note.
“I guess we write sort of a scene setter, huh? Somewhere in the mountains with the band of rebels type of thing. Nine hundred words, slightly poetic, understated. The coming of war.”
“You sound like a movie trailer. You going to talk or write?”
“Just brainstorming.”
“We gotta write atmospherics. We haven’t interviewed anyone.”
“We talked to a lot of guerrillas.”
“I mean commanders, strategy.”
“Yeah, we need that. Although, Jay, I don’t think we’re gonna get a Pentagon-type Power Point with smart-bomb strikes and unfathomable euphemisms.”
“Did you cover the Gulf War?”
“I did.”
“Did you ever hear so many twisted euphemisms in your life?”
“Yeah, I never knew blowing things up could be so pastoral.”
Promised Virgins Page 11
