“It's people,” she said. “That's what's wrong.”
“I FEARED TERRIBLY for you, my husband.” Layla squeezed his hands, raised them to her brow.
Mohammed snatched them away, wondered will she want to make love? The idea disgusted him. Was it because she'd talked to that Englishman? The one there'd been a rumor about, years ago. “You really love me that much, Layla? After all these years? Or do you just love who I am?”
“They're the same.”
Irritated he turned away. Why was returning such a defeat? When all along he'd looked forward to it? “To others I'm the Lion of God and all that foolishness, and people do what I say not because of who I am but of who they think I am.”
“I don't care what people think.”
“You don't seem to understand, Layla.” He liked having his back to her like this, his words booming back from the walls at her. “This girl who saved me, I'm keeping her with me.”
“As you wish.”
“You don't care?”
“Does it matter? Should I?”
“That's what has always irked me most about you, Layla. Sarcasm. The way you never say what you feel.”
“You've told me many times you don't care what I feel, that it's my problem. I agree.”
“Layla, please understand. I've been hurt and I'm wondering if we can end this war.”
“If you try you'll be killed. Like everyone else who's tried.”
“I'm being told by God, Layla.”
“Then you can't help yourself.” For a moment she said nothing; he picked up his rifle and slid it over his shoulder. “So talk to this English journalist,” she added. “Maybe you can use him.”
41
THE TINK TINK sound of steel on concrete had returned but seemed farther away. “They're back digging!” she cried.
He tried not to talk too much, too thirsty. “When we get out – we'll go up to the Casino. Have dinner. Looking out over the bay –”
“Stop! Don't do this.”
“What would you eat, right now?”
“I would've said lobster, but have you ever seen them, the poor things, thrashing in the pot?”
“If you worry about that, Anne-Marie, you'll starve.”
“People are digging!” She hammered louder, in rhythm, waited; the other skipped a beat, followed the rhythm. “See?” she kept saying. “See?”
André told her the Morse code letters for SOS and she hammered them out and the others repeated them note for note.
“They don't know what it means,” he said.
“They're just repeating,” she stopped knocking, “everything I do.”
“Buried,” André said. “Just like us.”
THE SHELLING HAD DESTROYED all the buildings around the Conservatoire. Neill stood watching the rescue crews and bulldozers digging out the corpses, once a whole family still alive, all crying and holding each other. Over one rubble-filled basement a single column of concrete stairs spiraled up several flights and ended in a half-step over the void. Stairway to Heaven, the words came to him bizarrely.
If they could only see this, all the people letting this happen. If you could only write it well enough, they'd see. What the Hell did they think the world was coming to as they went about their profitable mortal businesses, propagating money, children, carbon dioxide, effluents and hazardous waste?
They? Him too, everyone. The next century was going to be a horror like none in history: warring billions of swarming hordes tearing everything down in their hunger, the technical horrors, the diseases, the weapons of Armageddon. While a few unraveled the riddle of aging, the toxins of death, traveled to new planets, learned to speak with machines, the barbarians were going to be tearing it all down faster than it could be built.
The shelling started again in midafternoon and Neill ran home. He took the Black Label down to the basement and sat at Samantha's typewriter but could think of nothing to say.
He finished the whisky. Finish this article, he promised himself, and you can buy more.
The hardest was the beginning: “I wish you could all be here...”
When the article was done, it was five hundred words that went from a statement of theme to detailed description and out the other side to clear conclusions and a final demand to the reader: make us stop.
Like Icarus falling from the sky while the farmer ploughs his field and we all go about our business, the Lebanese are dying in their cellars barely a quarter mile from me. There is nothing I can do to help them but to write this. If we are the cells of a greater body then each cell must feel, share in, and try to prevent the loss of any other. As Beirut dies, so does our world.
Feeling free of everything but sorrow he went to the window and listened to the shelling. When it seemed to slow he went up Emile Eddé to the Commodore and called the story in. “Wait a min'it!” the girl on the other end in London said, chewing her gum. “Yer talkin' too fast.”
He tried to speak slowly and clearly but the line was very bad and he kept asking her to repeat it and that made her angry but finally she seemed to get it all down. “Can you switch me up to Editorial?” he said.
“Editorial?” She snapped her gum. “This is the typing pool, honey. Those blokes've all gone home.”
“DO YOU THINK there's something after this?”
He was thinner, André realized, could slide a little toward her under the slab. “I'm a Catholic but I don't think there's anything more.”
“I keep wondering, will I see him? My husband. Will I ever see him again?”
“You'll see him, Anne-Marie. If we die, you'll see him soon, but I don't think we're going to die because the shelling's stopped again and soon they'll dig us out.”
I'm starting to believe in them, he thought. On the boat coming from Larnaca it seemed strange that people would build a boat for others to travel on, perfect strangers. And now I'm dreaming that others will dig down into this mountain and find us.
The tick tick was back and he wanted to slap out at it, silence it. What right did they have, wanting to be saved?
Anne-Marie was talking to the two girls in a low throaty Arabic that made it seem impossible this same voice could speak French.
“What did you tell them?” he said.
“One's getting very feverish and we've nowhere to go, we're in our own wet...”
“That's fine. That's who we are. Now we know what it's like to be human.”
“It's not so bad, being human. I want to live, want these girls to live!”
“What was he like, your husband?”
“He was afraid all the time –” She stopped, spoke to the girls. One was arguing back, plaintive. “He was a photographer and had to go out every time there was a street fight, a bombing. He tried not to show it, but at night he'd tremble. All night beside me in bed, trembling.”
“It's all right, Anne-Marie. It's all right.”
“The bombings broke his heart and the fights scared him to death.”
“Why didn't he quit?”
“He felt if people saw