“The minefield.”
“You know the way across it. We have their tracks.”
“I've been worried those soldiers we saw were laying mines.”
He hesitated. “I hadn't thought of that.”
“Two of them had shovels.”
“I didn't see them.”
“Your mind was elsewhere.”
“It still is. You have completely befuddled me.”
“I thought I'd hate you. But you're still a boy.”
“Every conversation I start with you goes somewhere else.” The small of her back was so thin he could hold half in one hand, her fingers up his spine electric, her arm so soft and strong under his, round him. His penis tingled with delight. This had to be right, to be so good.
35
THE CAFÉ DE PARIS was open but there was no coffee. Neill sat on the terrace with a Pernod. Few people came by and there were no girls and no one he knew. A cold wind licked his ankles. He had been thinking about a line so difficult to translate in the ancient Arab poem of Qays, a young man who loves the beautiful Layla. She is stolen away by her parents and ceases to love Qays, and he becomes Majnun the Mad, wandering the desert, spurning God and man in his thirst for his beloved:
I dream a lovely maiden of pure light
Tall and slender, her limbs of fiery passion –
No, that wasn't it. The poet meant “fiery passion” but he didn't say it. Damn Arabic so complicated, more full of meanings than English. How do you say she plants love in my heart, waters it with the desire pooled in her great eyes? Any way you try it in English sounds silly.
Crazy to be thinking of poetry while Beirut tore itself apart. Hadn't he like Qays been wandering a desert of his own, rejecting life because love had rejected him? Becoming Majnun the Mad, forgetting that love once it's lost is nothing but a poetic device?
A waste to think such things. A waste of time. He saw Freeman's prim displeased mouth. Freeman wanted results. The stuffy self-worth of a man who has never bet all he had and lost. But have you? Neill asked himself.
He tucked two dollars under his glass and crossed Rue Hamra, thinking of the traffic in Bratislava that had nearly killed him on Staromestska Street. Here there was no traffic, only danger, yet despite the war little damage but for broken windows, the refuse piled on the pavements spilling into the streets, the smell of charred rubber. He took Rue de Caire, each step deeper into danger but kept going, alongside the silent American Hospital and up Clemenceau past the closed-up Orly Theatre to the University gate. Over its wide golden stone arch the words carved in Arabic and English:
THAT THEY MAY HAVE LIFE
AND HAVE IT MORE ABUNDANTLY
Barbed wire and machine guns blocked the gate. Beyond them the yellow stone edifice of College Hall, where in a seminar on classical poets he had met Layla, was no longer there at all – just a black hole as if it had never been, nor they.
He went down the boulevard with the trim yellow stone church behind the wall and took Rue John Kennedy toward the beach, down the stairs thick with rubbish and broken boughs where once in the overarching shade of tall trees she had kissed him for the first time, and the taste of her mouth had been the opening of a whole new world, one from which even at the time he'd sensed he could never return. There was a body in the grass, swollen and stinking; around it clouds of flies buzzing angrily at his approach. Some day, he thought, you won't wait till we die before you eat us.
There was an exploded car in Van Dyck and a bludgeoned building before it, then on the seashore boulevard the two-winged American Embassy with its middle crushed in, the concrete floors hanging down like veils, children kicking a soccer ball across the rubble where people still lay buried – typists with three children at home, an old lady with mops and brooms reflectively chewing her gums, young foreign affairs majors on the way up. The cooking fires of Shiite squatters twinkled on the shattered balconies where bright clothes and bed sheets hung.
The sun was sinking like a flame into the sea. Once they'd stood hand in hand before it, stunned at the magnificence of life. Where are you, Layla? Without you I can't sleep, can't ever rest. He followed the smashed empty seaside boulevard where they'd walked so many times, felt her hand in his and remembered the strolling Sunday families, their children holding ice creams, the minty breeze off the sea and the smoke of broiling meat, old men playing backgammon on the concrete wall along the rocks, boys slapping cards down on upended boxes, the fruit and balloon sellers, girls lying bare-breasted on the golden rocks, the fishing boats rocking on the crest, the red, green, and white sailboats beyond. What is it about Paradise that condemns us to destroy it?
He was letting this obsess him. Layla. Keeping him up nights. Had to stop.
Behind one of the concrete pillars in the ruined hollows of the Artisanat, several fedayeen were taking turns with a woman. There was the stink of urine drying on the pillars, of piles of feces on the concrete floor, a burnt and bullet-riddled Volkswagen van. He kicked a cartridge case and it pinged across the floor, making him fear the fedayeen but they didn't notice.
A Palestinian in a red keffiyeh was driving a red BMW madly up and down the boulevard, spinning in circles, the tires shredding, smoking. The last red speck of the sun sank in the horizon and a wind came up quickly, cold on his neck. You shouldn't be here, he thought.
Ahead, the blunt ruins of the Hotel Saint George on its rocky point were like the stocky remnant of an old chateau, the bare burnt walls where once had been verandas and jalousies and red awnings tasseled in gold, the hideously scarred rooms where lust had been a constant visitor and every illusion about love must have come to dust. Where twenty years ago they'd sit out on the terrace under the stars, after he'd finished waiting tables at 2.15 a.m., hearing the lap of the sea and the soft solace of buoys, talking about the future and how good it was going to be.
Where were they, the other students who'd also worked the short hot summer nights, eight hours straight, four tables each? Sleeping from dawn to noon, then afternoons on the hot beaches, the hash and sun and the hot sweat of making love in the sand, long sultry days and wild nights, never sleeping, never wanting to, never getting enough of girls' hot sweaty slippery bodies, the taste of them, their cunts, their hungry cries.
It was getting dark and he was crazy to be here. Turning up his collar he hurried past the shell of the Holiday Inn with a rocket hole under “Holiday”, the Christian cemetery where the near buildings had been bulldozed, the cypresses and gravestones buried under rubble where children played at war, making him think of the archaeologists some day who'd find this perfect example of a late twentieth-century Christian cemetery crushed under whole flattened buildings, and think how primitive and vicious they were, back then.
The souk was gone.
Acres and acres of crushed buildings and vanished streets that once had been an ancient bazaar of shops, tenements, whorehouses, jewelry stores, ateliers, bars, hashish and opium dens, French bakeries, locksmiths and lawyers' offices, goldsmiths and smugglers, with its Phoenician walls and Roman streets and Crusader alleys sticky underfoot with centuries of blood.
There was no street where he once had lived on the top floor over La Croissant de Paris, in the little room with the worn silk bedspread over the mattress on the pine floor, with the French window letting in the night, Layla young and tanned in his arms.
But where did they go? If even where they'd been was gone, where were they?
He felt nauseous and wanted to sit down and throw up or weep, it was the same thing. Three men were coming downhill through the rubble; instead of turning aside he walked straight past them and they did not stop him.
There was a firefight somewhere, to the south, the salvos tailing off and erupting again.