de facto if not de jure. The Kuwaitis’ apartment complex that his father guarded six nights a week looked emptily back over the Green Line toward the block comprising the Roman ruins, the Hariri mosque, the Orthodox cathedral, the Maronite cathedral, and the Virgin megastore. Hariri’s monument to Lebanese solidarity past and present and future, now utterly empty. The sensitive Kuwaitis had all left Lebanon a day ago when Aoun declared the general strike. Everyone knew it was trouble. As Leon cut across, down to his left at the intersection of Haddad and Avenue Charles Helou, there were more figures than usual outside the headquarters of the Christian Maronite Phalange party, a large tan building archer-windowed like a citadel, beflagged with the Phalange cedar, presiding over the port. Leon could see thickset Phalangist men on the rooftops watching for developments, watching him cross the square and the Green Line too.
At the intersection by the Phalange HQ was a Lebanese Army APC with, pointedly, no AA gun. There was a jeep beside it and twenty men at least watching the Phalangists back—in the dim and the scattered streetlights it was hard to tell, but they were probably police not army. As if the army would or could, without falling apart, stop the Phalange or the Lebanese Forces anyway, if they came out in anger. In the old days the officers were all Christians trained at Saint-Cyr and the military écoles of France; the soldiers were Sunni, Shi’a, Druze. When fighting goes sectarian, uniforms come off and soldiers go home to their tribes. Everyone knows it’s this way and it works. Farther up George Haddad was another APC and jeep, glowing orange-green under the streetlights like pollution or strange sweets, by the Paul Café on the rue Gouraud corner.
As he got closer he walked slower. He held his empty hands out from his sides so they would know he was unarmed. He could see the silhouette of Abu Keiko under the trees with a fat sergeant and some soldiers, laughing. Behind his father in the light sat one single plastic chair. Beside it was a paper bag and in it Leon knew was the fruit his mother packed for them both today, those black little bananas.
He crossed the road and approached the apartment terrace as the gunfire rose again back behind him. Another flurry of ellipses in the rolling stillness over the cape of Beirut, like bad memories in sleep, pockets of panic.
The fat sergeant was watching him. “All quiet?” the sergeant asked and didn’t offer him his hand or cheek. Abu Keiko didn’t speak, smile, or frown—his gray face was composed and still. As if preparing for a task that required all his faculties, a task not done in a while, and missed.
“All quiet,” Leon said. The sergeant nodded and half-turned back to Leon’s father. Three young soldiers, ten years younger than Leon at least, sat on the terrace’s lower step, with the butts of their American M16s between their feet, watching him.
“All quiet,” Abu Keiko finally spoke, without any tone of recognition or of intimacy, and with all the soldiers around him Leon realized what the expression on his face was like. It was the same as when he’d watched Keiko at rallies or talked politics in the kitchen with her in front of guests. It was pride, being with the soldiers again. He felt good with them.
“Go home and take care of your mother,” Abu Keiko said, and there was a hint of a private look, then quickly gone.
The sergeant said, “The fighting’s along the Corniche Mazraa. The airport road is still blocked.”
Leon looked at the sergeant and after he spoke he didn’t look at his father.
“Well there’s nothing to do and nowhere to do it. I think I’ll go and get a drink.”
The sergeant laughed and one of the soldiers smirked.
“Have one for us then.”
As Leon headed up the hill to rue Gouraud it was strange. There’s a feeling, they say, of eyes upon you, but there’s another feeling too, for which there is no cliché.
Leon could sense without seeing his father turn away from him, this night of all nights, and away over the waiting soldiers down George Haddad to the port, where out at sea there was maybe a storm coming. At the Luna Park, Leon had watched the clouds pile atop and rise in mauve and rotten apricot towers before the setting of the sun.
Rue Gouraud was dead. Of more than fifty bars honeycombing either side of the street he could see none were open. African waiters were outside Sinners hosing down the empty plastic chairs, and on a street jammed every night with Hummers and Audis and Lamborghini Diablos there was not a single vehicle moving.
Leon walked six or seven blocks to the fork at rue Pasteur near the Electricité du Liban. There the gunfire was distant, and the echoes were fractured and blunted by the buildings. Warmed by the walk, he took off his work smock. There was a cromp and a long high rumbling, and this last, he realized, was actually thunder following the RPG. A whispering bleak night of ghosts and soldiers and white-haired fathers, no one to talk with. He turned back to check the side streets—there was someone he’d seen leaning on a car and maybe he was a valet, so maybe there was something open.
At rue Youssef el Hani he saw him again: a young man, thickset, a black T-shirt, too big for a valet; he’d crossed the street. Leon approached him, walking openly in the middle of the road under the lights.
“Hey habibi, do you have a weapon?” was all the man said.
“No.”
Leon raised his arms and the bouncer frisked him fast and firmly. Then he opened an unmarked door to a staircase.
“What’s the cover?”
But the bouncer grinned skeptically and shut the door on him.
At the foot of the stairs the walls were papered in leaflets. A boy behind a school desk greeted him in French and waved him inside. In the tiny underground club, not counting the barman or Leon, there were only five people: two couples, a dark ponytailed businessman with a Filipina prostitute a foot taller than him, and a Chinese boy and girl, and at the end of the club was a DJ at a laptop and two decks playing something clicking and hissing.
Leon ordered the cheapest beer, local Almaza, and sat on a stool away from the bar, watching the DJ. Maybe he was good; what did he know. Was this one local or was he even famous and on tour, stuck in Beirut playing to him and a barman while the Hezbollah turned their guns on Lebanese in the streets a kilometer away? Leon had already decided to get fucked up. He finished the beer fast, waved for another, lit a cigarette. The DJ was his age, tall and bearded and intelligent looking, completely absorbed, watching the decks and levels on his laptop, not glancing up, shifting his headphones, not even nodding.
Leon had finished four beers when the DJ finished his set and left a track on repeat and went to the bar where the barman gave him a beer. The prostitute said something to the DJ and she laughed and he smiled and shrugged kindly, sipped his beer, looked around. Leon nodded to him.
“Good set,” Leon said.
The DJ looked at him, then in a practiced gesture opened his wallet and placed an old and creased card on the table. It had a letterhead from the military hospital destroyed ten years ago. In Arabic, French, and English it read:
My name is Frederick Zakarian and I have a form of speaking disability called echolalia where I may repeat your turn-final lexical items as a form of conversational repair. But I understand you and we can talk normally. Please be understanding.
Zakarian smiled and said, “Good set. But not a very big crowd tonight.”
“Bad timing, I guess, habibi,” said Leon.
“Timing,
