happened, he lost concentration over the loud braying voice.
Yes, Mortimer, a girl whispered sadly. No, Mortimer, a girl whispered sadly. The music changed, he opened his eyes slightly. On the screen read: From here in you’re on your own, and there was a toll of a bell and a shot of a cemetery.
Leon looked up at the poster, and then he got up and walked out onto the balcony. The soft orange of the streetlights lit the high apartments opposite to an anti-twilight that was cast over a two-story portrait of the Christ hung from frayed ropes. Above that the Jtaoui hill fell away to a scree, a spangled dust of lights from the coast to the crests of the Mountain all along the Jounieh bay and to Byblos. He smoked and watched. A taste of salt and exhaust. There was a constellation of lights moving on the sea—a U.S. or Israeli warship out there; the USS Cole someone had said. It was very quiet, and then a few, far-off, near-comical pops of gunfire that seemed to come from east of the city as they echoed off the hills. He felt clear, empty, strong. He felt warm. It was strange because he felt, for perhaps the first time since he quit his degree, almost violent: viscid, lucid. The door opened behind him, gently closed again. He stared into the eyes of the icon.
“I know it’s bad,” Lauren said without looking at him. She moved up to the balcony rail beside him. He smiled, confused, and grunted. “Just one cigarette?” she said and then grinned up at him. “I know I’m bad.”
“Oh.” He gave her the cigarette and lit it for her and she didn’t inhale deeply enough; a little crescent glowed and died. He lit it again. She exhaled and looked at the smoke, not the view.
“Is Hind asleep now?” Leon said.
“Finally, I think so. She was just lying in there singing to herself. She doesn’t understand but then she will say strange things. She will ask Georges questions that don’t make sense. ‘Why don’t we die?’ she asked him tonight. And, ‘What is under the floor?’”
“They’re good questions.”
They smoked. Then after a few minutes Etienne came outside too, and Lauren’s brief softening changed. Something had been going on before Leon had arrived, some argument, some tension in them all beyond the obvious. Things like this usually brought them together, brought up the gentle, the quiet, the kind. But Etienne lit his cigarette and walked to the end of the balcony and leaned around to see the next apartment, then he strode back behind them, and looked down over the street.
“It’s just dead,” he muttered savagely.
“You should see Phalange HQ,” Leon said. “Lots of blacked-out RVs moving very purposefully. Very far from dead.”
“Doesn’t it . . . doesn’t it anger you? You don’t get angry?” He stared at Leon, bloodshot-eyed, then, purse-mouthed, with a contemptuous pah, blew smoke over the neighborhood. “This . . . ? This?” He waved his cigarette at the silent and empty streets.
Pascal and Georges and Emmanuelle came out too then, the film abandoned, and it seemed like everyone was smoking tonight.
There was a sort of silence, then Georges said, “In Tripoli a funeral was fired upon. Three killed.”
“Oh no,” Emmanuelle said softly.
“So you’re going up to the house in the Mountain?” Lauren said to Pascal, and everyone listened.
Pascal’s uncle and aunt had a holiday house up in Mzaar, and, though they were Aounists, as Leon’s father and sister, but as none of them were here, Pascal was going. It was a complicated and loaded thing. Hiding from the Hezbollah in the holiday house of Christians who, since Aoun propagated and signed the Memorandum of Understanding, in effect supported them. Pascal looked sort of blank, and there was a silence. Then he said, “Yes, we’re just going up there for a day or two. They’re family. Just until things calm down. Until they elect a president.”
“A year or two then?” said Etienne. “A decade?”
“Why will they not let the army get involved?” Emmanuelle said. “Just stop it?”
Lauren scoffed outright, and Etienne laughed. Georges looked down and said, for her benefit, gently, “I hear they are, the Hezb, I mean, quite surgically and carefully taking over Future positions and then handing them over to the army. The government trying to control them is what has set this off.”
“You’ve heard about these students getting attacked with sticks and chains at the LU buildings?” said Etienne.
Leon said, “That’s just a total provocation and it should be ignored.”
Georges said, “This is the beginning of Hezb ultimately making the complete transition from armed resistance to traditional political party proper.”
Zakarian emerged from the living room to join the smoking crowd, an Almaza in his hand.
Etienne said, “By shooting Lebanese! It’s that typical limp-wristed, willfully blind, defeatist, relativist bullshit that’s got us where we are now.” He waved his hand over the rooftops.
“Where’s that, Etienne?” Pascal said.
“Fucking jobless, poor, isolated, weak, and ashamed. But with the best educations, the best libraries, and a couple of good clubs. The biggest waste of human potential while down there it’s just a baby factory for their so-called resistance, their militia, in the slums. Look at us. We are dying. I’m thirty years old.” Another silence fell between them. Give or take a few months, all of them were thirty. “We need to teach them a lesson. Show them Christian strength. Return them to their natural status in the hierarchy. Back to our shoeshiners and domestics.”
There was a small collective groan, mostly Lauren and Emmanuelle and Pascal, and Georges shook his head and breathed out smoke.
“You’re unbelievable,” said Lauren. “You’re such an anachronism. You’re not jobless.”
Leon watched Etienne’s eyes—he wasn’t backing down.
“Fucking Aoun. Fucking appeaser. Traitor. The Hezbollah are just pawns to Iranian religious primitivism. I’m a patriot. I’m a loyalist. We could have sold the Israelis our water,” said Etienne. “We could act like a real country.”
“Lower your voice and strengthen your argument,” Georges muttered. They all laughed; the tension defused a little. “Leon is the one who knows about water anyway.” Leon looked over the street and lit another cigarette as bearded Georges got diplomatic. “He has seen old prewar plans for dams in the Bekaa that would have provided us free power, irrigated the valley and the entire south. And still had excess to sell to Israel. Maybe even got them out of the West Bank. Or to Syria, to Jordan, whoever. And renewably Our water and power bills are triple what they were. It’s absurd. The constant blackouts. Gathering dust there right, in the water ministry? Those plans?”
They all turned to him.
“Yeah,” Leon sighed. “Yes, I’ve seen them. Sensitive dams. They’re pure genius. But they were based on a completely different political and sectarian reality.”
There was a small pause. “Why didn’t you graduate, Leon?” Lauren said. “Just finish the damned degree. How much do you even have left to do? The end of the dissertation? You had a good teacher and that’s rare enough. Why do you
