man glanced up, surprised by the Arabic, the European face. “Wholesale.”
“They're illegal copies.”
The man looked up and down the quay, shrugged. “Surely not.”
“Where you from?”
The man watched him. “Sidon.”
'"Poor Saida, so close to Israel, so far from God ..."'
Despite himself the man smiled. “There are many viewpoints.”
In a station café Neill ate steak and onions and drank Kaiser Pils till his train was called. A single compartment, first class, the window streaked with rain as the train meandered the bombed medieval memories of Cologne and followed the Rhine canyon south through the soft rolling Rheinisches Schiefergebirge, forests and castles on their crests, steep swathes of grapes below, past Koblenz, the ancient roots of European reason, the Odenwald, and he had again the sense he'd had in Inneka's bedroom, of the generations upon generations who had lived here. Like the sense of all the lives the rusted locomotive had towed across Europe. Here in these German hills, it seemed, was lost the ancient reason for man. Houses flitted by, singular and ephemeral as souls. There was no reason and no rule, no reason for man, falling in space, reaching for anything.
What was he reaching for, with Bev? With Inneka? They were going to die too, maybe before him. He was contorting his mind with worries about who to love, who to live with, for nothing. So that he didn't have to think about death.
He closed the window, took up the Arab newspapers he'd brought in Duisburg Station, and began to read them carefully.
PASTIS IS THE PARAS as much as the bullets themselves, André thought, watching its golden trickles down the inside of his father's glass. The hard friendships, the smoldering anger, the fun. “Michel!” his father roared. “Encore deux!”
“Got to go, Papa.”
“One more? Come on, mon fils, it does us good!” His father grinning his broad-jawed silvered teeth, chubby cheeks curling up into his eyes. “Leave these women alone, for God's sake!”
“Don't cast stones.”
His father tilted his pastis glass, contemplated it. André thought of the Red Indians, how supposedly they had learned the art of silence. How right his father had been to teach it, a soldier's gift. “I've known Haroun thirty years,” his father said. “Never had a reason not to trust him. But I've never learned who you can trust, for sure, until it's too late.”
“I don't trust anybody, Papa.”
“You saw your friend?”
“He's not my friend.”
“They're so in love with political solutions, those boys at Matignon.” His father drained the pastis, smacked his lips – it made him seem a huge gregarious bear with a silver crewcut, gray-bristly cheeks and merry little black eyes. “People who've never been to war, you never can tell what they'll do. How they'll decide to prove their courage.” He raised his glass and nodded at Michel. “No matter how many other people’s lives it takes.”
Michel refilled their glasses and laid a pack of Gauloises on the counter. André's father tore it open and lit one. “Such shit –”
“Don't smoke them then.”
“This pastis. Not like the old stuff,” he raised high his glass like a scientist examining a test tube. “The old stuff, it made your veins sing.” He put the glass down. “All those herbs crushed together – the essence of Provence, basil, rosemary, thyme, anise, sage – ah!” He smacked his lips. “This!” He raised the test tube again, downed it, wrinkling his lips. “La merde! Factory-made! La nouvelle France – Arabs, niggers, drug addicts, pederasts, thieves.”
André glanced down the bar. “See you, Papa.”
His father laid a fifty franc bill beside the empty yellow glass. “Coming with you.”
Outside the early darkness was damp and fresh, the pavements filled with people hurrying home with children and handbags and briefcases and bread and bags of vegetables and fruit and cheese and wine. “Nobody on the other side,” his father said, “is going to believe your story, once they tie you to Haroun.”
“He's just a point de départ.”
They came to Emile Zola, a taxi splashing through the crosswalk. “Start saving now for your burial expenses,” an electric sign said. “Spare your family.” His father was short of breath, hissing through his nostrils, trying not to show it. “I told your mama if there's one chance in a thousand of losing you, I wouldn't want to take it. And I don't.”
“It's not Oran, Papa. Not Hanoi. I know Beirut.”
“I knew Oran. That didn't keep me from losing two hundred men there. Each with a family and dreams. And another twelve hundred wounded. A lot of them ruined for life.”
André nodded. “And just like Beirut, we took a beating and ran away. When we were the stronger! Killing our own brave men for nothing.”
“Nobody wins all the time, even the strong. We're lucky to win at all.”
“You don't believe that.” André embraced him, his father's bristly cheeks against his own.
His father seemed to be chewing something far back inside his mouth. “Let me know, what happens.” He turned and walked toward the métro entrance, suddenly a bowed-over burly man who hesitated at the stairs, looked back and nodded, a wink perhaps, André couldn't see, and stepped down into the teeming maw as into a freshly turned mass grave.
11
“YOU? LEADING MUJIHADEEN?” Mohammed said.
“You'd be leading them,” Rosa answered. “I just know the way to safety.”
“I don't care about their safety. Nor do they.”
“If they're dead, how can they fight?”
Static rose and fell on the radio, the operator bent over it as if praying, Rosa thought, awaiting the Word. Four mujihadeen were playing cards on a piece of cardboard set on a broken box. Like rodents, Mohammed's fingers burrowed into his gown, joined. “She fears for your safety, Hassan!” he called to the guard at the door.
Crunching a pistachio shell in his teeth, Hassan looked straight at Rosa, back to Mohammed, spat the shell.
She curled her lip. “I want to win.”
Mohammed's head tilted back, shadowed in the yellow lamplight, his blue eyes seeming to look down his face, his full beard, to hers. “Win?”
Long and pale-whiskered in his white gown, he looked both taut and empty of everything, as if not really there – only the maroon pillows on which he sat, the torn carpet littered with cartridge casings, the guard picking his teeth with a broken match, a European country scene in a shattered gilded frame hanging sideways on the graffiti-covered wall.
“We had a picture like that, when I was a girl,” she said. “Of a woman walking a path toward
