Anti Lebanon. Carl Shuker
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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 late feeding their two children and Leon felt foolish with the beer and cigarettes in a dangling plastic bag. He kissed the orange-bearded Georges, holding the baby in his arms, and touched the crown of the head of little blonde pigtailed Hind who shrank under him. He turned to Lauren and kissed her too.
“Hello, Lauren. How is the baby?”
“Fine, fine. Is everything okay?” Lauren said, and her upraised eyes passed over him without purchase to the new person in the doorway.
“Yeah, fine, this is Frederick, a friend. Frederick: Georges, Lauren, that was Etienne. . . . ” and he thought of what she might like and said, “and this is the most beautiful Hind, who is now . . . what are you, um, what you must be by now, is .. . five years old?”
Hind grinned madly up at the roof, and Georges said, “Oh!” one armful of the new baby, his other hand with a spoonful of refused soup in midair before the little girl. Lauren leaned to her and said, “Oh, my, goodness.”
“I’m . . . not five yet,” said Hind deliberately. She considered a correction, had too many conflicting options for response, and accidentally accepted the spoonful of soup instead.
“How are you, Frederick?” Lauren said in English and smiled softly, slightly, and indicated the table. She was tired and wired, and Leon could see deep violet bruises of fatigue above her cheekbones. “Please, eat.”
“Hello,” said Georges, and Leon watched him frankly assess this new person, the two bearded men grinning naturally at one another. Leon saw Georges’s charisma again, as always revealed by someone new, just like Keiko. And he thought, When did we become bearded men?
“How are you,” said Zakarian, and he paused awkwardly, deleting his own first name and other inappropriate details. “Hello.”
A sort of silence fell. Hind bounced three times in her chair, looking for what had gone wrong. Leon thought how he might handle this.
“Frederick’s a DJ and ... he has a card from the old military hospital. It’s really interesting.”
Leon turned to Zakarian, away from Lauren who was now giving him that look, that slightly disbelieving look somewhere ambiguous between appalled and quizzical, that always seemed to ask, and only of him, really, what kind of person are you Leon? What qualities are yours? He put the beer in the old fridge.
Zakarian fumbled for the card, held it to Georges who had no free hands, and Lauren took it, quickly read, and said, “Oh that is very interesting.”
“What?” said Georges, and she held it up for him to read as Hind, abruptly bored, decided to bend slowly almost double, her face approaching her soup. Georges looked up from the card and smiled.
“Oh, I see. So do you like Cary Grant movies, Frederick?”
Zakarian smiled too and shrugged easily. Georges had this effect.
“We’re having a Frank Capra session. Subtitled.”
“Subtitled,” Zakarian said, still smiling. “Okay!”
And they all smiled then and Hind sat up with a pastiche of pumpkin soup and peppered cream upon the very tip of her nose and they all laughed. Leon laughed too and went, then, his face changing in the doorway, darkening, to the living room, looking for the others, and for another drink, and hopefully some hash. Somewhere that he could hear and monitor the gunfire; adrenaline moving softly, silverly in him, obscurely or predictably, he never could tell.
There was a new poster in the living room, and nuts and fruit, pitifully little, laid out on the coffee table, curtains drawn. Pascal and Etienne squatted by the old laptop on a chair. They were trying to mirror the