been taken off the job since the strike,” Pascal said, and smiled back at him. “Too young, silly, and educated.”
“Starting yesterday they said they are only using the senior guys and liaising with the army,” Etienne said. “Because if something really does happen that close they will probably just have to leave and anyway they don’t want anyone ... or want some intellectual with a . . . college degree trying to fight . . . for the . . . ”
He trailed off, concentrating his disgust on the laptop.
“We are redundant,” Pascal said.
“So you’ve no work?” said Georges.
“No work,” said Etienne.
“No work,” Pascal said kindly, and smiled again, and shrugged. Lauren and Hind passed by the doorway. The little girl was brushing her teeth and peering up at Zakarian and into the living room. Georges noticed Zakarian then and there was a brief awkward moment as he turned and tried to let the Armenian in the doorway, but there wasn’t room with the baby in his arms, and Lauren stopped too, Hind between them all, and at the small domestic impasse Leon felt a great tiredness come upon him, falling from his shoulders and rising though his neck like heavy water, an immense heaviness and futility. And he thought of waking to darkness, running along the Corniche, the silence and the sea, his ghost and the volume of rock displaced for the unfinished marina of the new Beirut that his friends were no longer security for, and he turned away from that. Where was he now? The prospect of watching a Cary Grant film with this going on was like another sentence of absurdity and noise, everyone sick and scared, like being security for an empty amusement park with no power. All the impotence. Take a deep breath and hold it, they say when you cross what’s left of the Beirut River near the Karantina abattoir. Take a deep breath and hold it.
We will always be here.
Leon slept. As the shooting in West Beirut began to quiet for the night, as the storm prepared to break. Piles of tires, to be “set ablaze,” as the hacks would write in twenty-four hours, were gathered and heaped in the middle of streets as close to the Christian East as Marina Towers and St. George’s. A memorial poster there to the Christian martyr Basil Fleihan, killed with Hariri in the assassination, was defaced, and Leon slept. The earth revetments on the airport road were doubled in thickness by Hezbollah flunkies and piously piled, and the strategy meetings of the three parties primarily concerned as the rout of the Sunni continued. Future Movement’s Saad Hariri sat in conference isolated in his palace at Koreitem, his middle-class chino-clad base home, sipping tea and counting U.S. currency and deploring all this, as his pseudo militia, Secure Plus, abandoned the southernmost of their offices and fled through the empty streets. Hezbollah moved lithe and free along the Corniche Mazraa. Guerrillas trucked in over the Mountain from Baalbek were debriefed, and they communicated freely too, planning the operation via the contested private telephone lines whose attempted suppression by the government was the purported cause or excuse for all this. The Druze in the foothills watched closely the Sunni capitulation, having had reports of those trucks of Hezbollah, and reports of three guerrillas in Hezbollah tigerstripe walking the perimeter of a Druze village in the lower Chuf. Knowing their leader Jumblatt was besieged in Clemenceau in Beirut, they knew they would be next. And last of all: The bloodied old men of the Christian Phalange, backlit by flashes of the thunderstorm coming down the Mediterranean, strolled the roof of their east Place des Martyrs HQ with their big bellies, their secrets, and their basements, and stared west across the civil war wasteland and the Roman ruins, watching very, very closely.
| 3 | Let your face talk |
Leon woke. The movie had started. Coming up in the gentleness and dim to smiling faces turned to him. Emmanuelle had arrived, sitting beside him, so tall, so lean, and the others, all there, attentively round, and Etienne held out to him a little crumpled joint of hash. He took it in the spirit in which it was offered and had a gentle hit. The displays were mirrored, and on the TV black-and-white images, cartoons, of witches and a city, an arched-back cat and a fat watchful owl, wine and a jack-o’-lantern, and then a message in English and in French underneath.
This is a Hallowe’en tale of Brooklyn, where anything can happen—and usually does.
“Hell-oooo, Leon,” whispered Emmanuelle gently and smiled—she looked different, her short hair shaved even closer.
Lauren and Georges faced the TV, Pascal and Etienne were lying on the floor. Etienne said, “He’s a madman,” as Leon took the hit, and then, “We have mirrored displays. . . . You were snoring, habibi. . . .”
Zakarian sat alone on the single armchair beside him and Leon passed him the joint. Zakarian seemed strange now, too tall, Herman Munsterish, foreign amongst his friends in this room. Directed by Frank Capra, the caption read, over bats pouring from a cathedral. Black and white flickered over the faces of his friends and this stranger and they seemed to move with the images on the TV.
“I need a drink,” he said huskily, and Etienne lifted an Almaza from the floor and pushed it to him across the coffee table without looking. He drank deep and Emmanuelle smiled and past her Lauren stared hard at the TV as if to scold him. In the dim and changeable light on the poster the little dog leered and in the room behind it he saw green eyes now, and how the mirror was divided into vertical panels too, over that room. So there were several layers to this picture, a print of a painting of a mirror within which nested three or more realities.
The film changed, a close-up of a face, a baseball game, unsubtitled, a man barking out at them, total absurdity as they all calmly watched and even as he felt this he felt the mediocrity of it, the stupid film, the garish music, the calm watchers of a barking American man and then a frenzied crowd of black-and-white Americans from 1940-something while a kilometer away in the border neighborhoods a part-time guerrilla with an AK-47 poured fire from a corner and a poor Sunni woman separated from her son crouched behind a retaining wall and slapped her thigh with her hand again and again in a muscle spasm of panic and horror at the sound, and screamed at her little boy to stay down.
He rolled over sideways in the corner of the couch, listened, a fight starting onscreen between two baseball teams and then everyone joining in, and Emmanuelle’s hip was touching his. The hash’s effects rolled sluggishly in, his eyes swelled, he squinted up at the poster.
“Leon doesn’t like old movies,” someone said. And then the music went soft.
Boy, I could sure use a drink, said a voice in English.
Looks like the same suckers get married every day. The soft laughter of the watchers came late, by a few seconds. They didn’t speak English as well as he.
What’s he hiding from?
Two by two, they come they go, hip-hip hi-yay!
Elaine Harper.
Mortimer Brewster.
Speak up, sonny, there’s nothing to be afraid of.
I want to keep this undercover.
Love her? Of course you love her, you’re gonna marry her, ain’t ya? More soft laughter seconds after.
No, you don’t understand. I don’t want this to get out for a while. I’m Mortimer Brewster.
