“Where’s that, Etienne?” Pascal said.
“Fucking jobless, poor, isolated, weak, and ashamed. But with the best educations, the best libraries, and a couple of good clubs. The biggest waste of human potential while down there it’s just a baby factory for their so-called resistance, their militia, in the slums. Look at us. We are dying. I’m thirty years old.” Another silence fell between them. Give or take a few months, all of them were thirty. “We need to teach them a lesson. Show them Christian strength. Return them to their natural status in the hierarchy. Back to our shoeshiners and domestics.”
There was a small collective groan, mostly Lauren and Emmanuelle and Pascal, and Georges shook his head and breathed out smoke.
“You’re unbelievable,” said Lauren. “You’re such an anachronism. You’re not jobless.”
Leon watched Etienne’s eyes—he wasn’t backing down.
“Fucking Aoun. Fucking appeaser. Traitor. The Hezbollah are just pawns to Iranian religious primitivism. I’m a patriot. I’m a loyalist. We could have sold the Israelis our water,” said Etienne. “We could act like a real country.”
“Lower your voice and strengthen your argument,” Georges muttered. They all laughed; the tension defused a little. “Leon is the one who knows about water anyway.” Leon looked over the street and lit another cigarette as bearded Georges got diplomatic. “He has seen old prewar plans for dams in the Bekaa that would have provided us free power, irrigated the valley and the entire south. And still had excess to sell to Israel. Maybe even got them out of the West Bank. Or to Syria, to Jordan, whoever. And renewably Our water and power bills are triple what they were. It’s absurd. The constant blackouts. Gathering dust there right, in the water ministry? Those plans?”
They all turned to him.
“Yeah,” Leon sighed. “Yes, I’ve seen them. Sensitive dams. They’re pure genius. But they were based on a completely different political and sectarian reality.”
There was a small pause. “Why didn’t you graduate, Leon?” Lauren said. “Just finish the damned degree. How much do you even have left to do? The end of the dissertation? You had a good teacher and that’s rare enough. Why do you just . . . ” She was angry, but not so angry she couldn’t edit herself. “ . . . do . . . what you do?”
A great contempt; an awful-silver feeling.
“Well, they mercury-bombed the anti Lebanon aquifer, and my sister was shot to death,” Leon said.
Lauren exhaled sharply in disbelief. Georges was shaking his head.
“Don’t,” murmured Pascal.
“I just didn’t see the point,” Leon said.
A long, chill silence. Leon almost laughed.
“Exactly,” Etienne said in evident satisfaction, as if they were agreed.
It had been at the American University of Beirut in Ras Beirut that Leon quit his degree. He had arranged a meeting with Henri Fors, his professor through undergraduate and a year of honors, and his abandoned dissertation’s supervisor (as if anyone cares about honors dissertations, anyway, he thought now), and his friend, a friendship he hoped or really felt he’d half-achieved but then had utterly marred.
Henri Fors, though an LU professor based at the southern campus, spent an inordinate amount of time at AUB, where he’d graduated before the war, dealing with a department with way more clout, prestige, history, and, yes, money than his, but in terms of employment remained closed to him like a clam due to a personal thing with the head of department. It had been at AUB one fine spring day that Leon had arranged a meeting with him at a bench in the gardens. The bench sat beneath some trees and overlooked through the gap in the foliage the steep bank down to the tennis courts, the Corniche, and the strip of pure blue Lebanese Mediterranean. There was a plate screwed to the wood of the seat he chose that read ABDALLAH SALAM 1909–1999, WHO LOVED THE VIEW FROM THIS BENCH. It was one of Fors’s favorite places too, he knew, and it was years ago now he’d sat beside him on that bench and told Fors he was quitting.
Henri Fors had survived fifteen years of civil war as a civilian and academic and had witnessed, too, the end of every sensible piece of water management (through graft and cronyism and the zaim system and simple pure corruption) in a country whose wealth and waste of water were legend. Fors had catalogued every piece of failed pollution legislation; recorded throughout the war—a terribly difficult and perilous thing to do—the heavy metal deposits at every river mouth north and south.
It had been during his time under Fors that his professor broke the news, to a deafening lack of response, of the critical state of the Sidon rubbish dump, which had grown so big it qualified as a quarter of the town, high as a four-story building, before it collapsed into the sea. There in Sidon, where destitute fishermen, receiving fixed prices from a consortium of fishmongers, were reduced to destroying their seabeds fishing with dynamite. They often lost their hands and forearms too, in black accidents they could never remember, and had to live out the rest of their days in the coffeehouses watching the backgammon while friends held cigarettes and glasses of tea to their lips as they waited patiently and futilely for prosthetics. What fish they couldn’t catch now strangled in the Sidon supermarket bags. A land still bearing the imprint of its creator. Fors, this man who’d recorded every calamity and every disgrace with resolve and good humor and a basic human optimism either blind or profound. Leon had to let his face tell this amazing man in short that just one dead sister and one ruined aquifer and that was it, another sinkhole of a losing stream, he couldn’t go on, was quitting the program.
“Well, that’s disappointing, but if it’s what you feel you have to do.”
Lunchtime in the great gardens of AUB with Henri Fors three years ago: sitting side by side on the old bench, their feet on the foot-worn and polished stones. The breeze had moved quietly in the trees and he had heard no traffic and nothing but the wind as a muffled shuffle in the leaves and all had seemed for a minute possible, before he said the words: substantial yet weightless: asylum and study, a future, endeavor and peace, as students and teachers strolled behind. He had imagined a man he never was and now would never be, a man engaged with the rock and water of his country, a man who made an imprint on that land, who was a repository of its past, its ills, and its potential, a man excited by the parsing of a problem. And he had been there that day to tell Fors it wasn’t going to happen.
“Well, that’s disappointing.”
It was about money, it was about family, dead rivers and sisters and lost jobs. It was about his mother bent over Keiko’s coffin with her palms upraised. About his father screaming in the bedroom. It was about a ball of lead in his chest he carried through the streets that seemed sometimes to crack and lighten, in places like that, on that bench, looking at that special view in the fluttering light of the trees’ fantasy—but outside in the real world it found its form again. He called it reality. U.S. destroyers and Israeli Sa’ar class warships passed through that gap in the trees, cruising off the cape. As he had told Fors it was over, but not why, the beloved man seemed to be receding from him: Leon no longer, suddenly, could quite make out the features of his face, wrinkles that had once revealed facts to him like Fors’s love of swimming, his long hours, reddened eye rims, and the cigars he loved and gave up. The professor receded and assumed a strange and human, vulnerable form, in mismatched jacket and trousers, a shining brown bald spot that seemed ready for some wound, chunky brogues, five foot tall, standing over there, walking, vanished, gone.
Leon’s film, his only film, a film he made—un film de Leon Elias, produit par, réalisation, musique, son, montage, montage son Leon Elias and avec extras plus Keiko Elias or a photograph of her at least—was made after her death, after he quit Fors and university, with a borrowed camera and an old Compaq laptop and pirated Final Cut and Logic Express learned on the job. He called it In