“You want to let it fester?”
“Or heal?” Tomás lit a papirosi and the fragrant smoke went up in a circular column. He called out something in Slovak and a woman at another table smiled and turned away. “It's only when people like you are content to see the worst that we can get better. No, that's silly. We'll never get any better. But your seeing us as we are may keep us from getting worse.”
“Nullities. Bloody idealism.”
“When you came here to teach that course, I couldn't understand why you'd bother. Do you remember – I even asked you?”
“No.”
“You said journalists can't be just a mirror of their times, but have to be a guide also. That you'd come to share what you'd learned and to learn from us.” Tomás grinned. “I always wonder what you learned from us.”
Neill scanned the animated crowd, the smoky misted windows. “Maybe that freedom of the press isn't all it's cocked up to be. There was political control over you but we have commercial control over us – and, finally, there isn't too much difference. You ever see our Tory press during an election?”
“You were the best teacher we had. When we started to build something new, what we learned from you helped us get beyond who we were, to the event itself, how to tell it.”
You can like someone, Neill realized, without hoping they understand you. “So tell me, about Beirut. When'd you get back?”
“What's today – Thursday?”
“Friday.”
“Three weeks ago.”
“And?”
Tomás splayed spindly fingers round his glass, craned his neck. Why are all Slovaks bald, Neill wondered. He looked around at nearby tables, decided this wasn't true. “I went through Damascus,” Tomás said. “Got stopped at the border then went further north and got through on a Syrian Army truck headed for Baalbek. It's all Hezbollah now, up there.”
“I always thought of it as Heliopolis, City of the Sun. And now it's just another military outpost.”
“That's what it's been, most of the last three thousand, five thousand years. Guarding the most fertile valley in the Middle East.”
“So how'd you reach Beirut?”
'Got this crazy man to drive me down to Zahlé in his old Mercedes. The whole way I wanted to lie on the floor, duck the bullets, but I couldn't, with him driving. Wouldn't have been fair. We never got hit.”
Neill drained his stein, caught the waiter's eye. “I don't want to put up with any of that. Too much of a coward.”
“Then go home. It's not the time, Beirut.”
“As I said on the telephone, if I can talk to Mohammed, get his position out in the open...”
Tomás reached across, took Neill's hand. “No matter how bad the war makes you feel, you can't change it.”
Neill waited till the waiter left. “I tried Michael Szay today.”
“That bastard.”
“He's given me good leads, in the past.”
“What's he say?”
“Told me to get lost. That I'll never reach Mohammed.”
Tomás fiddled with his glass, scratched his skull. “Why don't you ask Layla?”
It stung like a dentist's probe on a dead tooth – the reminder of past pain. How could it, after all these years? “I probably couldn't even find her. If she's with Mohammed I'd have to locate him first. If she's still with her family, down in Saida, they're behind Israeli lines and I can't get in.”
“Go see her brother.”
“Hamid? He's the one who did us in, way back then.”
“He's still in Beirut. Has an office on Mahatma Gandhi. Number 21.”
“He's a goddamn snake.”
Tomás was silent a moment. “Crazy, what happened to her. To you both.”
Neill shrugged. “So what's the latest?”
“Damascus says they're going to stay and the Christians are begging for arms. The Israelis will fight the Syrians on the Green Line and that will be the final solution for Lebanon.”
“How do you read Mohammed?”
Tomás lit another cigarette, dropped his lighter, and fished for it under the table, and Neill could see down the back of his neck, under the brown wool collar, the long thin black hairs. “He's about forty,” Tomás said. “Very driven, very cold. Yet strangely open-minded, in a way – wants an Islamic Lebanon but isn't too doctrinaire. Some people say he's in it for the power, others say he actually cares.”
“Should I try getting through Damascus?”
“The Syrians may let you go as far as Masnaa, somewhere like that. After that you'll have to deal with field units and they may shoot you first and then ask you where you're going. After that you have to deal with Hezbollah. And they aren't going to let you anywhere near Mohammed. They don't even admit he exists.”
“Maybe with the Syrians I can go down the coast.”
“One way or the other you'll have to pass through Hezbollah. And now, if he's cut off like they say, you've got to pass through the Christians and Hezbollah to get to Mohammed, and by then the Syrians and Israelis will have shot you.” Tomás smiled, bringing down his empty glass. “You'll be able to excise a lot of guilt.”
“Guilt, the gift that keeps on giving –”
“That's the virtue of religion and patriotism: they allow us to do evil without guilt.”
“So where do you stand on all this, these days?”
“It never changes. The Israelis have no choice, they have to fight. In all my years in the Middle East I’ve never met a Moslem who agrees with Israel’s right to exist. Not one.”
“Me neither,” Neill said. “We will drown the Israelis and their children in the sea seems to be the general approach.”
“And the Holocaust taught them not to rely on anyone but themselves, that at any time the whole world can turn against them.”
“As it always does. The last time even America and Britain sent them in their ships back to die. We wouldn’t bomb the rail lines, stop the camps…”
“And I'm tired of the Palestinians fussing over what they never wanted till they lost it. I'm tired of people with long memories, people with ‘love for the land’. Even back ten thousand years, the forest tribes of central Europe – we'll never stop fighting over territory. I'd like to live on the moon for a while, the dark side of the moon, so I wouldn't have to look down on this.” Tomás switched back to English. “Like Arafat once told me, ‘There'll never be peace in the Middle East as long as there's Israel. And there'll never be peace in the Middle East even if there is no Israel.’”
“Shit, that unshaven little fucker. The people in the camps, Gaza, the Territories, barefoot in human muck holding up his photo!”
“The smart ones all got out, became camera merchants in New York or rug sellers in London or leaders of international guerrilla movements.”
“Everybody's has to have a pope. If we could all just have the same one.”
“When was the first Muslim schism? Within days of the Prophet's death! Even his own family couldn't agree.”
“Most wars begin in the family.” Neill tried to see through the bar's steamy windows, couldn't tell if it was raining. “Tell me what to say,” he drained his glass, dropped