finished.” He was local, a strongish Armenian accent. “I’m finished.”
“Things are a bit frisky. Do you live around here? Bourj Hammoud?”
“You live around here? Bourj Hammoud, yes,” he said. “But I work here.”
“So you can get home?”
“You can get home?” Zakarian thought about this and then laughed. “You? Can?”
“Yeah, I can. I’m in Achrafieh. Leon. Leon Elias.”
“Leaning, a lie is. I’m Frederick.”
There was a long pause between the repeat of what Leon had said and his replies. As Zakarian spoke he seemed to be thinking hard about something else.
“So you make a living off this? Are you famous?”
“No, I have a job.”
“What’s your job?”
“Your job,” he said. “I am a jeweler.”
Leon noticed he wasn’t wearing any jewelry.
“You make your own? Like a designer?”
“I make your own like a designer, no . . . I’m . . . ” He looked slightly pained as if this was always difficult to explain. “I work on pieces in a workshop down here in Gemmayzeh. In the Demolished Quarter. No one knows it’s there.”
“Wow. Expensive?”
“Wow, expensive, yes, some pieces for some wealthy people.”
Leon could feel himself getting elevated with the alcohol, so he let the silence last a little. Zakarian began to smile. He’d decided to talk about himself.
“It’s very frustrating because ... we work on these pieces now, a set, necklace, earrings, cuff links. . . . It’s incredible, very challenging work. A million-dollar set. They are finished now, just yesterday, and we cannot get them out. The buyers are from Iran and aren’t in Lebanon and can’t get in to see them. You know the airport’s closed tonight? And the road north is closed, and the Beirut–Damascus highway is closed too. The pieces are stuck here.”
“The Damascus road is closed?”
“The Damascus road is closed. So we won’t get paid. For weeks. And these gigs don’t pay. And it’s going to get worse.” He was grinning, excitable now. “This set is named after a figure in Persian mythology called the Peri. A supernatural being descended from fallen angels. She is excluded from Paradise until a penance is accomplished, the story says. She is a beautiful and graceful girl.”
“You should steal her. Sell her.” Leon smirked, then stopped himself. “Sorry.”
“You should steal her.” Zakarian watched Leon’s face as he repeated his words as if he were speaking a foreign language, and he laughed far too late. Then he said, “My boss says the feeling is like you’ve built a Ferrari but you can’t drive it.”
“I don’t know anything about jewelry.”
“Anything about jewelry? Well, for this piece we have some exceptional super-ideal Ugandan stones with incredible depth and color sourced by the buyers. They’ve got really fine taste. We are doing a hearts and arrows pattern that’s extremely intricate and involved. We’ve been working on the set for six months or more.”
“Heart-shaped diamonds?” Leon was trying to keep his replies short. He could hear the preformulated, received patterns in Zakarian’s speech. There was something about his vulnerability and Leon’s mood that made Leon want to be cruel. He resisted it. Zakarian was starting to speak faster.
“Heart-shaped diamonds.” He seemed to like that and smiled as he shook his head. “Heart-shaped diamonds, no, the facets are cut so that there’s an appearance of alternating hearts and arrows, with a very fine and radical depth to the pavilion that’s not been done much before except maybe in Japan where they pioneered a machine called an icescope—”
Leon signaled to the barman for two more beers, and offered Zakarian a cigarette that he took without looking up. The Armenian kept talking, confident now, borrowing someone else’s words, someone else’s conviction.
“—physics and the purity, and it’s taken a long time and now the Hezbollah control the airport and the airport road. And you know what my boss says? I don’t know anything about jewelry—”
The little repetitions could occur at any time, as Zakarian pieced together the things he wanted or thought he ought to say.
“—the Shi’a get proportional representation and Iran gets a vilayet on the Mediterranean he says all this is all gone, this is all gone,” he waved generally at the club, “the bars, the music, the jewelry, the surgery, the clothes, broadband, kiss it all good-bye, he says.”
“And the Damascus road is closed? That’s unbelievable.”
“The—the Damascus road that’s unbelievable. No, no—”
Leon was half-enjoying, half-dreading what would come as he watched the autistic Armenian getting drunk too fast and quickly, visibly losing inhibition. Zakarian was shaking his head as he talked quicker, not even noticing Leon’s reaction.
“—that is the . . . the Future supporters—they say they’re stopping any fighters coming in from Syria to help Hezbollah in the Bekaa Valley .. . but they say they’re totally disorganized over there and what they’re doing is just burning flags and shooting at trucks and lobbing mortars onto the highway, surgery, the clothes.”
“Oh man, yalla.”
“Oh man, I know. And they say it is going to get worse. They say we are next. East Beirut. That it is a coup tour. That we are too isolated, too weak, too few. We have no money, no arms, no future.”
“The Christians will never let it happen. We’re strong enough. That is what you mean right? The Hezbollah will go after the Druze and then the east and the Mountain will be next? It will never happen. It’s as my father says: They have gun; we have gun. It will never happen. Just another impasse.”
Zakarian looked up at this, smiled, bloody-eyed. There was a long, dramatic, drunken pause.
“East Beirut. It will never happen? Do you really believe that?”
“Yes,” said Leon. “I think so.”
“So. I’ve got something to show you.”
There’s a thing they do in East Beirut to the unpopular, the competitor, to those they assassinate. To the billboards of political contenders despised or car-bombed mid-campaign, to portraits of murdered MPs and corrupt candidates, and to the memorial posters after. They do it with black spray paint and immense restraint. A spray can is held well back from the image of the face of the rival and the dead; the surety and simplicity carries all the weight. A gentle press and a fine cloud of black no larger than that face or rather no larger than the features of that face, and the face disappears; all that’s left is a name, a slogan, and a dark mist, a gray blur on the poster in a border of ears and skin and hair.
