GOD, YOU ARE BEAU, Rosa thought, watching the Frenchman in the mirror as she accelerated toward Independence. She leaned down and pulled the seat one notch forward and unbelted her raincoat as she drove east down Independence past the Lazarist Mission toward the Christian suburbs.
Was she doomed forever to crave this terrified elation of being hunted? This hunger to run?
Through the Land Rover's windows she watched the street jolt past, the shell-caved walls, charred woodwork, shattered shutters listless on bullet-chewed walls, the collapsed balconies making her think of Romeo and Juliet, the faded splintered shop signs like confessions of defeat – El Ibrahim – Your Best Tailor, Vision Camera, Parfumerie de Paris. Everywhere graffiti and the xeroxed photographs of missing young men glued to pockmarked walls and twisted lampposts, a pavement sprayed with paint dark as old blood – or is that really blood, she wondered, a tag of music, “Your love's the hangman of my heart', from an open store. What, early in life, had made her so hungry to run?
She'd told Mohammed the truth. Always, when you can, tell the truth. Her father and brothers had been killed. Her mother and sisters too. On that account we're all sisters. But lots of people lost their families and didn't end up like this.
The virtue of war is that there's no time for anyone to have a past. You are for the moment only what you seem. Even brave, if need be.
God he was beau, the Frenchman who hot-wired the Land Rover. She realized she was thinking in his language. Some day I'd love to have him.
“THERE’S NO BATHROOM,” warned the woman at the Hotel des Cèdres. “You have to use the hole in the garden like everybody else. And usually there's no lights or water. But it's a nice room. I keep my rooms clean.” She squinted up at him. “You a journalist, somebody like that?” She folded his two fifties into an empty purse and buttoned it in her pocket. “You're too late. Lebanon's gone. Back when you could have said something, you never did.”
“I'm no journalist.”
“Nobody comes to Beirut now but journalists and gun runners. And since Tripoli refinery is n’t working, sometimes traders come, selling gasoline. Have you ever been to Lebanon?”
“Not before now.”
“Now? Lebanon's gone, I told you. If you'd ever known Lebanon, how it would make you weep, this!” She glared at him, her mouth pinched, as if he too had had a hand in the death of Lebanon. Which we all have, he thought, taking the key from her outstretched finger and locking the door she slammed behind her.
A pernicious little room stinking of dried sewers and mould. Skinny bed cringing against one wall, crippled table under the window half-shuttered on a sloping rocky garden of three junipers. A curtain in the corner round the toilet that was stuffed with newspapers in a failed attempt to block the sewer smell.
As a base camp it couldn't be better. Situated in the Christian stronghold of steep streets between the Convent of Our Lady of Nazareth and the Franco-Arab High School. And only three blocks from the Green Line. It had taken no shell damage – nobody's target. It might even be safe.
He opened the cracked, taped window, spiders racing for the corners. There were two bullet holes in the aluminum frame. The garden was surrounded by a stone wall; against its far side was a rubbish heap smelling of cinders, wet cardboard, rotten chrysanthemums, and jasmine, over which flies slowly circled.
IT SOUNDED like a Land Rover, crunching and grinding closer uphill, its engine rattle loudening through cracks in the ceiling. Mohammed climbed the ladder but couldn't push the hatch open to see. There was the hard uneven idle of the engine, the crunch of feet on gravel, a woman's trenchant voice, the doctor answering.
There was no way out and nowhere to hide. Breath sharp with pain, he suddenly saw himself clearly, as if from above, the Warrior of God with his silly half-bald pate, downsloping shoulders and pointed toes, scurrying like a rat in a trap, a fool in a farce. To die is nothing; why be afraid?
He sat on the bed. The legless man watched him, chewing his lip. The girl was praying, still facing away from Mecca. Even though she was a Christian and was simply hunched up in agony, Mohammed felt furious with her, her crinkled red-splotched soles and writhing toes.
The trap door squealed open and a woman in a white gown came backwards down the ladder, then the doctor. They went to the girl and the woman tried to speak to her.
The woman's haughty East Beirut accent made him hate her, before she turned to face the legless man and Mohammed saw it was Rosa.
“This is our mujihadeen,” the doctor said. “The one they mentioned in Faraiya. Tomorrow he goes down to the camp.”
She put a cool hand to his forehead. She wore a Lebanese Red Cross uniform and smelled of soap. She folded down his blanket and checked his bandages. “Can you turn over?” she said, and Mohammed did, her fingertips flitting like spiders over his back. She bent closer, whispered, “Tonight.” She turned to the doctor: “It's very good, what you did, bringing him in. I'll note it in my report.”
“Please don't. People misunderstand.”
“How so?”
He shrugged. “Saving Muslims, all that.”
She shook her head. “This war.”
“How bad is it hitting you?” he said in French.
“I'm OK, most of the time. You?”
“Going a little crazy. I can see it but can't seem to stop.”
“Like the Jews say, if it didn't make us crazy we would be.”
“Be what?”
“Crazy.”
“Right.” He smiled at the wall of dirt, the Christ. “That is a consolation.”
26
THE DOG backed away from the garbage pile, licking its chops, half hopeful, half afraid, watching for a gun. A skinny dark male, Belgian shepherd maybe. When it decided André had no gun, it stood waiting for him to pass. He whistled softly, patted his thigh; it wagged its tail low but wouldn't approach. He moved closer and it backed up and knocked over a rubbish bin and ran toward the Green Line.
At the foot of the hill a little restaurant was open, and empty. He asked for wine.
“Ah,” the man said. “Before the troubles I had a good cellar, monsieur. Good Bordeaux and a few fine Burgundies – that's not easy, getting a good Burgundy to survive all the way down here. There was Beaujolais, good rosés – do you know the rosé des sables?”
“I like it best. That and the pinot noir.”
“That's not truly a rosé. Not like the rosés of Provence. The rosé des sables, I served it chilled with fresh crevettes from the Bay of Saint Georges, in a bed of lettuce from my gardens, new olives...” The sound of jets was getting louder and he waited for them to pass; the earth shook and the roar of bombs quivered the windows. “Just Israelis,” he said, “hitting the port.”
André went outside but the Mirages were gone, their thunder streaking southward over the sea. A cloud of dust and smoke was twisting and rolling up from the port.
“You want it bloody, your meat?”
“Bloody.” On the wallpaper a shepherdess was leading her flock uphill toward a grove of olive trees. In their shade a man sat playing a flute. All along the wall the same girl kept climbing the same hill toward the same man, frame after frame, the paper darkening