the chamber of deputies. Car bomb, twenty posters in a row, nice suit, salt-and-pepper hair, his face a hole, taken from him twenty times. Mikael Hawi, a Christian militia boy, only 1990–2008. A snowboarding picture on the posters and he’s young in a bright red parka against the white but his face is not there, WE WILL NEVER FORGET YOU, it says in English. They let the phrase remain although the boy is gone. Walking poster to poster they erase them with a gentle press of an index finger—one eye, one eye, one mouth. Leon’s certain it’s done with some pitiful pious satisfied smile. Salman Nakano, car bomb, a leftist journalist for An Nahar. Nakano’s friend, a writer, was first on the scene, ran down from their Hamra offices and into the smoking street. He thought Salman was alive because he could see his head and shoulders through the unbroken car window. But that was all that was left of him, roasted to the headrest. Later that week they grayed out his memorial posters and took his face from him too. William Habbab met with Damascene secret services and political oblivion. Michel Salama, the anti-war folk singer, who opened for a band that played a gig once in Tel Aviv. Concert posters from six months prior in Beirut Downtown, they fullstopped his face above the acoustic guitar.
Years ago, walking through Jtaoui with Pascal to a film, Leon passed three posters of his sister, Keiko, in uniform, pitch-black shaven hair, faceless; permanent twilight where her skin shone like sun, her pale blue eyes, WE WILL REMAIN HERE! the Aounist slogan under which she campaigned for one bright summer was allowed to stay beneath. The restraint is what weakens him. He couldn’t tear the posters down because the glue had fixed them to posters of other dead, despised, and discredited beneath, and the glue-soaked paper was hard as plastic, hard as wood, and went up under his fingernails like splinters till they bled as he tore away at this freak, implacable monument of blank gray faces, Pascal looking away down the street for anyone watching. Years ago, back when they were twenty-seven.
Zakarian and Leon walked down to the Demolished Quarter (not accomplished but slated until Hariri’s death when all the reconstruction stopped). The ruined empty Ottoman and Mandate-era buildings were eerie in the orange streetlights. Crumpled garage doors were jammed in hundred-year-old arches on the lower floors. Tiled stairwells filled with trash and rubber hosepipe and useless lumber. The lower sills of all the upper windows were slatted over with boards. This was because the walls beneath the windows were dissolved with bullet holes, where the gunmen on the street had fired wildly, aiming for the snipers’ bodies, missing, knowing, or just hoping the old sandstone could be penetrated. There was a Lebanese Army tank parked silently back among the box trees in a vacant lot, sickly green in the orange light. Soldiers playing cards on an upturned milk crate paused and watched silently while they passed. Street after empty street, stinking of piss, feral kittens, the last ATM blinking with no more funds. No traffic sounds as they came near to Avenue Charles Helou just over the wasteland not far from his father’s post. Leon had come around in a rough circle.
“It’s over here,” Zakarian said. He was walking unsteadily but the excitement, his glad dread, hadn’t abated.
The vacant lot was opposite the Place des Martyrs. A missing building framed a view of the huge Hariri mosque. The four giant minarets were elaborately lit bright terra-cotta orange, and it towered utterly over the Orthodox and Maronite cathedrals. The lot was walled by two and a half buildings, and there was a scum-filled crater in the center. Frederick went to the wall that faced west, the wall that greeted those who entered Gemmayzeh and the Christian East, and he lit a match.
There was a great angel painted on a wall on the border of East Beirut. Some Shi’a kid had tried to paint and travesty a Christian icon. The angel was a death angel. It was frocked and winged and it had devil horns and folded arms of patriarchal patience. It was painted with the same black spray paint and terrible restraint; it looked ancient and brand new. There was a second smaller figure to its right, to Leon’s left as he stood and watched it flickering in the light of the match. It was a creature of black flames and feathers; a familiar the size of a fist. The death angel dwarfed it. It was the size of a man, floating over the Quarter. The angel’s face was made of three linked gray blurs in a greater blur; two suggestions of eyes and an open, speaking, cursing mouth. It had a confidence and knowledge though a crude attempt at Christian iconography. It was a warning to those who entered here. A curse, or a promise, rudely done in a kind of pidgin designed to speak to Christian ears, saying: Something bad is coming.
Zakarian was looking back at him as the match burned down. His face was a black blur, like the angel’s, like the assassinated.
“See?” he said. “See?”
| 2 | Take a deep breath and hold it |
They walked through streets deserted, east. At the horizon lightning cracked a monumental wall of stone cloud with a filament of gold. They passed out of the Demolished Quarter and around the fringes of Gemmayzeh and then deeper east into the silent Christian Quarter where it was still safe to walk on a night like this.
The sounds of the Hezbollah and Future firefight dulled.
The two men looked up at a sudden bang—but it was followed by a long rumble of thunder, and they walked on in silence on the back streets of Mar Mikhael.
Up the hill into Jtaoui, on the way to Georges and Lauren’s apartment, Leon stopped for more beer and cigarettes at Smuggler. The liquor store owner’s son and his friends were playing cards around a plastic crate at the end of the counter and they smiled and sneered at Leon. The Elias family was far from rich but in the past it had been richer than some, and Abu Keiko and Keiko had once had a status Leon did not live up to. He took a certain amount of scorn and spite and casual hatred for his father’s fall and for the decisions he’d made in his own life: the passive pacifism in a once-powerful family, for one. He typically took it with carefully measured rejoinders he’d calibrate slightly lower than the initial attack. He wanted peace.
In the past he might have framed the uncertainty like this: Was he evading violence through carefully showing just the right amount of weakness, or was he just the right amount of weak to evade his violence due?
But not this night.
Georges and Lauren’s small place was a French-style apartment on the seventh floor. You reached it by an old shaking cage elevator with accordion doors and a broken latch. There were two bedrooms, a separate kitchen, a large living room, and a balcony off it that faced northeast over the rooftops up the coast to Christian Jounieh and along the million lights of the Mountain. When they knocked, the door opened a few inches and stayed that way. Etienne peeked out, unshaven, lazy-eyed, crazed, and languid, and he immediately did his Yasser Arafat impression in his awful English, making fun of the chairman he detested not from any memory but because his father did so much: sneering, angry, haggard, doomed:
“What’s the meaning of their tanks . .. some meters far of here? Thirty meters—” His r’s were rolled and husky, thahrh dee-meetehrrs, and he turned inside to his imagined aide, asking for the word, enacting a scene from an old TV interview, surrounded in his Ramallah compound in the second intifada, and back, a sneer and a snarl, sarcastic in their shared disgust with the language and the situation. “Ahp-hroximedly.”
“Hello Etienne,” Leon said and pushed at the door. Etienne braced himself and held it shut and snarled again, then saw Zakarian, the stranger. Etienne stared at him, clucked three times, opened the door, turned his back, and retreated to the living room without another word.
“Don’t worry,” Leon said. “Ignore him. Come in.”
Georges and Lauren were in the kitchen, eating peppered pumpkin soup with sour cream and up far too
