Anti Lebanon. Carl Shuker
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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. Jean Wound, forty years old, educated at ENS in Paris and the Sorbonne, candidate for 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