DAY 3

It doesn’t take long for the border official to discard The Messenger. As soon as they cross the border into the village of Kaa in the Bekaa Valley, he removes a gun hidden under his belly and places it flat on his knee.

“Stop the car here.”

The Messenger sees poverty outside in the mountain refracted sunset. A collection of homes, mosques, churches, and ­damaged settlements scatter themselves on a rock embedded plain. Treed thicket areas are strafed into thinned out withering sticks. This place is polluted by its own history.

The official extends his other hand to shake good-bye.

“Thank you.”

The Messenger didn’t expect the entire exchange to be so polite, so absent of conflict. He supposes the bribe made his illegal crossing friendly to the man. In an obvious attempt to give The Messenger more for his money, the official assumes a tour guide’s voice.

“This is Kaa. You will find everything you need here. Catholics, Shiites, Melkites, hard faced extremists. Ask the right questions to the wrong people and they will help.”

Upon opening the car door, The Messenger breathes in sulphur instead of air. He closes the door and asks one more ­question through an open window.

“Bsharri?”

“You are close. This is the ground of martyrs. Respect the soil.”

The Messenger finds it difficult to understand the official’s code language. It resembles a dialect mutated from a foreign time.

The official drives off into the dust and disappears into another winding valley. Sensing the coolness of night, The Messenger walks into a town-like collection of stone buildings. He sees dark men smoking outside. They regard him with little interest. He considers venturing into a place of worship, changes his direction and settles instead for a tiny Inn. On his way there, he witnesses a heated exchange between two men. One man, the shorter one, ends the conversation by shooting the other. After he does so, he waves his family in from a parked car. A woman fully veiled rushes a blanketed newborn into the building. Two other boys remove shovels from the trunk. They deliver one to their father. The two boys dig into the rocky ground and the scrape of the shovel scratches the sky’s silence. The surviving man stares at The Messenger long enough to convince him he didn’t see a thing. The woman turns on the light and The Messenger can already smell olive oil burning from a pan.

At the Inn, The Messenger pays the lady wearing a niqab for a room. The Messenger makes his way there with a decoratively rusted key on a ring. A knock on the door sounds a minute later. He assumes it is someone with towels or clean sheets, both absent in the room. It is the man who shot the other. He holds a bottle without a label in his hands. Two plastic glasses rest in between his fingers and above his knuckles.

He raises them first for fear The Messenger speaks another language. The Messenger nods yes and reveals he speaks Arabic. The man smiles warmly. He wears a thin moustache, as if pinned to his face, and his black hair is youthful on his wrinkly forehead.

“It is strong.”

The Messenger nods to go on and pour.

“Bsharri?”

“You are close.”

The man toasts him.

“May Allah be with you.”

The Messenger nods again.

“There is no police in Kaa.”

The Messenger hadn’t asked, but the murdering man must have felt the need to explain his crime.

“Kaa is the woman we rape when we need to. I am a lucky man. I have a new home now.”

He toasts again. The Messenger reciprocates the same. The liquor tastes of black licorice.

“We are better than the Syrians, that is for sure. I would have killed you too if you resembled one.”

“It took us almost thirty years to push them away. And then they came back a few years ago. They flooded the fields and then burned them down. We killed too many, almost all of them. Some days we still think they are here, rising from their graves in the rock ground.”

He gets up and walks over to the window. He points to little white sheds in the distance.

“That is Ersal, a Sunni village. We call it the ‘Kaa projects.’ It made the Christians fly away.”

He forces a laugh which ends in a violent cough. When he stops talking, The Messenger can hear the scrape of shovels conversing into the night.

“Now it is all Al-Nusra and Hezbollah. They keep order. If only they can stop the rocket bombs from the other side.”

This detail explains the sporadic presence of life in Kaa. One house alone, as if in the middle of a road. Two others launched from their foundation to another area. So many rocks above ground. Granite boulders. The omniscient scent of burning flesh permeates the air like an ongoing holocaust.

“Exile is a beautiful word in Kaa,” the man continues to narrate into his glass.

The man returns to his seat and they listen to the music of the shovels.

“At least I did him the courtesy of a burial,” are his last words. The Messenger automatically understands how lucky he was to find a man with a heart in Kaa.

The next morning this murdering man offers the murdered man’s car for The Messenger to reach Bsharri. It won’t take long to reach his destination, he assures The Messenger. The Messenger receives the favour gratefully, although the man treats it as payment for forgetting what he witnessed the night before.

The young boys digging the grave had cleaned the vehicle for him. The Messenger appreciates their obedience to their father’s wishes.