ANTI LEBANON
ANTI LEBANON
Carl Shuker
COUNTERPOINT
BERKELEY
Copyright © 2013 by Carl Shuker
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shuker, Carl, 1974–
Anti Lebanon / Carl Shuker.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-61902-199-0
1. Arab Spring, 2010—Fiction. 2. International relations—Fiction. 3. Middle East—Fiction. 4. Political fiction. 5. Suspense fiction. I. Title.
PR9639.4.S56A84 2013
823'.92—dc232012040545
Cover design by John Yates
Interior design by VJBScribe
COUNTERPOINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my father
Contents
in the anti Lebanon
1 In or near ruin
2 Take a deep breath and hold it
3 Let your face talk
4 Une seule vie
5 Under the promenade
6 At AUB
7 A simple demonstration of power
8 Monsters are among us
9 Labyrinth
10 Emmanuelle
11 Une seule fin
12 Pyr
in the borderlands
13 10,452
14 The Old City
15 The Jordan
16 At Allenby
in Japan
17 United Nations
18 In Kim’s room
19 The saltwater river
20 in Beirut
that was the river, this is the sea
isolar
I wish to acknowledge the Japan Foundation and the JENESYS Programme, and all the staff and fellow artists at the Tokyo Wonder Site. My thanks to David Cross and to Arts Council England for their support.
My deepest thanks to James Byrne and Sandeep Parmar, Ryan Skelton, Carl Patton, Bill Manhire, Jack Shoemaker, Glenn Schaeffer, Imogen Prickett, Nicolas Tillon and Mathilde, Harrison Mitchell and Fiona Lindsay, Tom Cunningham, Bruce and Barbara Smaill, John Hilton, Lucy Banham, Kim Ngoc, and my mother Dawn and my sisters Janine and Kathryn. Thank you to Jalal Toufic, whose (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film was a constant inspiration, and wherein he writes, “not only the murderer but also the victim return to the crime scene.” To Gerry Judah, whose work adorns the cover. To Abu Michel, wherever he may be. And to my daughter Lotte, and always, always to Anna.
The mechanism of Lebanon’s amnesia was offered up in August 1991, when the government passed Law Number 84, granting a general amnesty for all crimes before March 28, 1991, according to specific conditions.
WALID HARB
Popular memory has no mercy.
WALID JUMBLATT
For the dead travel fast.
BRAM STOKER’S Dracula
| 1 | In or near ruin |
He came awake to a dead and freakish still.
The total absence of car horns or the squeals of tires on the cheap Syrian concrete with which they replaced the civil war roads. No voices, no music, no laughter, just the hush hush hush of the sea.
Then it was there, what had woken him, echoing through the sky vaults. The banal, far-off dot dot dot dot dot. The old taxi drivers onomatopoeicize it for the tourists as the pah pah pah. Ellipses in the silence; the ... ..... ...
He climbed back over the fence into the Luna Park. The Ferris wheel lights were down completely. The office was closed up. Samir had gone home. He could see the main gates to the amusement park were chained and through them no one down the length of the Corniche.
Another flurry of automatic gunfire came then. This time it was answered, in a different, deeper note, bigger caliber, and not stopping. The whole clip spent wild and wrong, rolling away over the sea:
... ... . . . .
... . ... ............... .....
It was time to wake up.
Leon Elias—thirty years old, East Beiruti Greek Orthodox—is what’s known as a losing stream. Despite the country’s wealth in water, an undergraduate degree in hydrogeology doesn’t take you very far in the Lebanon. Leon Elias’s had taken him to an under-the-table security job at the Luna Park in Ras Beirut, an amusement park with 180-degree-plus views of the sea, but no roller coaster and little else—the largest ride they had was the Ferris wheel and it was dead. The night the Hezbollah comprehensively took over West Beirut Leon had no idea what was going on. Leon’s closest friends, Etienne and Pascal, who had, respectively, a marketing diploma and a law degree, had found better work in the last few months, the only work available, at a security company called Falcon Group Limited. They now had real blue uniforms, milita-resque insignia, a pay scale starting at US$300 a month, and they had a gig together in Minet el-Hosn for a stalled Solidere project, watching over the wasteland of the unfinished marina near the Hariri memorial. Pascal had a MacBook, a scooter, and a full $20 tank of benzene and Etienne had a richish family and a little apartment in Jtaoui and he was engaged to a good Maronite girl.
Leon Elias had no girlfriend, no company, a smock from a supermarket with the logo ripped off. He had his childhood room in his parents’ old house in Achrafieh, and a mostly useless bus pass—no direct route—so a two-hour walk home, past where his father,