“Do something for someone else, some time. Anyway, you're out of the fighting now. Think about staying out.”
“If we all did that you'd win.”
“We've all already lost. There'll never again be a Lebanon worth having. A Beirut. We've destroyed them. You and I and our friends. Our separate Gods.”
“Beirut will come back. Better than before. Cleaner than before.”
“Cleaner is dead. That's what antiseptic means: to clean something you kill everything on it.” The doctor replaced Mohammed's transparent glucose bag, flicking the valve with a fingernail to make little bubbles rise inside it.
23
“I WANT to visit the Great Mosque,” Neill said. “The Archaeological Museum, maybe go to Amman, up to Palmyra.”
“Maybe?”
“Depends how long I stay.”
“You've got three weeks. No going north. The road's closed to Aleppo.”
“You mean the road through Hama? Where Hama was?”
The Syrian Customs man zipped open Neill's bag, spilled it on the counter, a vial of pills clattering. Damn, Neill thought, I forgot about them. No wonder I’m feeling dizzy. “They're for malaria.”
“There's no malaria here.”
Malaria wouldn't hit so soon, Neill realized, make me this dizzy already. “I may go up the Nile.”
The man raised the vial and shook it against the light. “You didn't say Egypt.”
“I said maybe.”
“The pages in your passport with the Israeli visas – did you take them out?”
“I don't do Israel. Just this side.”
“Why don't you tell the truth? How do you expect readers to believe you when you lie? If you lie about going up the Nile, who's to believe what you write about Palestine?”
“And you?” Neill said, thinking of Hama.
“Learn to speak the truth.” The man shoved Neill's things back into the bag and zipped it shut. “Or don't come here anymore.”
Neill's stitches tugged when he swung the bag over his shoulder. “Let me know,” he grunted, “when you figure out the truth.”
“You speak Arabic – you must know the sacred Koran: the ungodly shall suffer fearful punishment. That is the truth.”
“You can play anything by the book.”
“The ungodly and unbelievers,” the man stamped his visa, folded his passport and gave it to him, “God shall render unto Hell. You know that too.”
FEET CLATTERED DOWN the ladder. Three Christians and the doctor. They went to the wounded one who had never made a sound, whose blanket was now up over his face. They pulled back the blanket and one fell down on his knees and began to cry, hands clasped over the body on the bed.
He lurched to his feet, a great bearded bear of a man, his upthrust hands smacking the ceiling, plaster falling down. “Who did this?” he screamed.
“Muslims.” The legless man nodded at Mohammed. “Like this one.”
“What! You have them here? In the place where my brother died?”
“He didn't hurt your brother,” the doctor said, blocking him. “He's just a poor mason, from some village in the Bekaa.”
“I'll strangle him!”
Mohammed tried to protect his neck but the man's hands were too strong, clamping down, crushing. “No!” the doctor shouted, yanking the man's wrists. “He's going to the camps – they're coming to get him!”
The man backed away. Mohammed pulled himself up, trying to breathe but his throat felt crushed.
“When he gets out of the camps he's going home.” The doctor was rubbing an injured hand. “Never bother us again.”
“And never bear arms against us!” the bearded man screamed into Mohammed's face.
Mohammed massaged his throat. “I never have.”
The bearded man stared down at him then twisted away, knelt to lie his head sideways on his dead brother's chest, as if listening for the heart.
“Take the body home,” the doctor said. “It must be buried.”
“Home?” He raised his face smeared with his brother's blood. “He was the last one.” He lifted up the body and carried it up the ladder in his arms.
Mohammed's throat felt burned inside as if a hangman's noose was tight round it. He could hear his heartbeat, irregular as a stone skipping down a mountain.
In a few minutes the doctor came back down. “You shouldn't have said that,” he said to the legless man. “He's done you no harm, this Muslim.”
“Every Muslim is an offence against God.”
“No,” the doctor answered. “Every human is an offence against God.”
“Or maybe it's God who's an offence against man.”
THE HARSH HYPNOTIC smell of roasting coffee filled the narrow Damascus street of tilting stone houses, the stone steps worn down their middle like a stream bed, strange spices wafting out of strange windows, women's eyes behind black slits.
Twice Neill doubled back but no one followed. There'd been no one since the airport. He crossed the Spice Market and ducked under a Roman gate where water ran in an open trench, down more stone-block steps between granite walls, children jostling him and calling like swallows, men shoving up the steps with beef shoulders on their backs, sacks of rice and charcoal, bundled saplings, a beam with a jug of water on each end, two men with a tin full of braziers trailing momentary warmth, a woman's voice loud down a dark passage, another answering.
At a well in the middle of the street a woman had cranked up a bucket and was giving water to a donkey. Neill stopped at a wooden door with black arrowhead studs. He pulled the bell; it rang far back, beyond walls. No one came. He backed up to the well and looked up. The windows were all closed and shuttered.
He went back to the Great Mosque, its immense and supernaturally beautiful dome spiring above the consecrated ground of thousands of years from barbarian campfires to Greek agoras, now a hymn to the glory of Allah: this has always been hallowed ground. He took off his shoes and tucked them in his jacket. There was no light in the entry. When he followed the others streaming into the mosque it was as if the sky had exploded, the domes so far above they seemed to have no limits, really were the darkening sky crossed with bolts of sunset through the great hanging flags and banners inscribed with the suras of the Prophet.
Many men were praying and Neill stood out of the way, gazing across the undulating sea of their backs to the far great wall of stone rising up into fading daylight. “Excuse me, brother,” he said to a man he bumped standing by a pillar. He felt part of them, he realized, part of this. Coming into the mosque had washed away his Western way of viewing things, he could see, feel, the wondrous aspiration and failure of Islam, that what it tried most to do was what it most failed. But had at least tried.
And he, a journalist who'd done well enough to see the greater lie inherent in truth, the mockery of explanation? Or was that just another reason?
His legs were tired and he knelt, wanting to sit. A flock of pigeons crossed under the dome, wings clattering. If you're exhausted and cynical all the time, doesn't that say something about your life? That something inside you is screaming to get out? If you did what you want, would you be free? Would you still be disillusioned and sour then?
What if your nauseous opinions on the state of the world, like those of most journalists – which you always thought