Selim was driven back to east Beirut at dawn through a hail of hard rice and rosewater. Lebanese Christians welcoming the Israeli troops, heralding the end of seven years of war. Or so they thought. As he walked from his car to the Phalange HQ, women blew kisses to him as well, festooning the dour building with ropes of ribbon and hothouse flowers. He wasn’t as flattered as he would have liked to be. He didn’t think it was that easy. One young woman with crooked lipstick came close to him, simpering and mispronouncing shalom. He shouted at her.
‘I’m not Israeli, all right? I’m Lebanese, like you.’
He felt a little guilty for not saying he was Armenian, after everything his people had suffered. Some of them had died rather than renounce who they were. But his guilt didn’t last long. He walked home after a couple of hours spent shuffling paper and making telephone calls. People embraced in the streets. They made love in destroyed parks. They danced with Israeli soldiers, dragging the heavy-booted youths into whirls of movement and laughter.
At home he opened the fridge and drank four glasses of French champagne for breakfast.
‘Here’s to Lebanon,’ he toasted himself.
When he was sufficiently drunk, he decided to ring Sanaya. After two unsuccessful attempts to connect to west Beirut he heard her exhale on the line before she said, ‘Sa’ laam.’
‘Be ready, chérie. My driver will come and get you. We’re going on a picnic.’
In the hills above the east of the city, the Israeli-troop compound was filled with the sounds of improvised music from hastily assembled instruments. Sunni families watched in awe of the officers’ antics, wanting to see for themselves what liberation looked like. Selim hoped this would be peace only for the deserving. These Muslims had no place here. He strode through the mess of children playing on blankets and mothers in deckchairs, to the knot of leaping, yelping, off-duty soldiers. They noted his cedar insignia and offered him a glass of something bubbly and pink, not worthy of being called champagne. He took a sip then emptied the contents behind his back.
Sanaya stayed in the car – she didn’t like to be seen in public with Selim. So much for the fabled picnic. She could smell cheese and bread and cured meat on the back seat. His driver must have bought them quickly, without thought. Maybe they could drive somewhere secluded, up into the mountains; maybe Selim would lie down on the grass, his head in her lap.
She laid her head back and closed her eyes. She let herself imagine a future with Selim: the wedding in Cyprus, the simple cream dress. A spray of roses, lone drinks after the ceremony. A life together, away from the danger and filth. But what would they have left to talk about? Her mouth hung open; she dozed. The sun made red patterns behind her eyelids. She heard a tap on the window, sat stiffly upright, wound it down. An Israeli airforce officer leaned in.
‘I’ve been watching you, Mademoiselle. You look sad.’
His Arabic was classical, affected, yet he was almost boyish, with frank eyes full of confidence. He seemed too young to be so high up in the ranks. Sanaya was taken aback.
‘Not really. Just tired. Too many late nights.’
‘Your name?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I’m just making conversation.’
‘Okay, it’s Sanaya.’
‘Mine’s Alon.’
She shook his outstretched hand. As she sat, uncertain, neither pulling her arm away nor offering any warmth, Selim sauntered over to them and put out his hand. The Israeli released Sanaya and clasped Selim with feeling.
‘Hey, I’ve seen you around. You’ve done some good work. Pakradounian, isn’t it?’
‘Selim Pakradounian.’
‘Pleasure. Alon Herzberg.’
He smiled, and Sanaya could see his blind hope for the country, his beatitude. It dazzled her for a moment.
‘Should all be over soon,’ he said.
Selim leaned over and lit his cigarette for him. Sanaya was surprised at herself for despising the gesture, so deferent, so mercenary, a subject king bowing down before an emperor.
‘You think so?’ Selim asked.
‘I know so. The PLO will be running out of here in days with their tails between their legs.’
Sanaya wondered how the Israeli soldiers could be so young, so touchingly naive, so arrogant. Their ignorance coupled with civility was unnerving. She watched Selim take a long puff of his cigarette, considering.
‘What about all the rest of the troublemakers? Hezbollah, Amal, all the Shias. Push them back into Iran, I say.’
‘They’ll pipe down. Once they realise we’re not leaving until Bashir Gemayel’s firmly in power.’
‘And then?’
Both men looked surprised. Neither of them expected Sanaya to volunteer an opinion. They turned around and stared at her, not answering. She repeated her question.
‘Well? What then?’
Selim grew red in the face, threw down the butt of his cigarette.
‘What do you mean, what then? What more do you want?’
‘What’s going to stop us all killing each other again as soon as the Israelis leave?’
Alon put his hand up between them.
‘If you allow me, I think we will put enough structures in place to stop that happening.’
‘Like what? Mossad agents? Shin Bet? More secret police? Suspension of civil liberties?’
Selim tried to light another cigarette, burnt his fingers, swore.
‘Enough, Sanaya,’ he said. ‘What are you trying to get at?’
Sanaya shook her head, tears starting in her eyes. Alon looked from one to the other, with puzzlement and sympathy in his face. Sanaya waved him and Selim away with a flick of her hand. She stumbled out of the car, slamming the door. Before she walked two paces, she viciously ground the butt of Selim’s cigarette into the ground under her heel.
The Israeli bombardments continued, increasing in duration and force. Sanaya was surprised Issa spent so much time at home, finding food and water, sitting on the divan smoking shisha, spouting rhetoric about a holy war. Then why wasn’t he out there fighting it?
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘In the corridor. It’s safer there.’
‘But—’
She took one last look through the intact glass from her window. Crimson fire from Israeli planes burnt the seafront in successive washes, bleeding out, fading, only to return again.
‘It’s safer there,’ Issa repeated. ‘I know. When the bombing gets really bad, there’s no choice.’
As Sanaya followed Issa into thicker darkness, she heard her chandeliers breaking one by one with the force of each blast. Lamps of Persian coloured glass and gold filigree, shaped like Hadiya’s tulip tumblers. Smash. Shards against her face. She ducked. A fragment in her hair. Issa plucked it out.
‘It’s okay. You’ll live.’
She let herself smile at him, knowing he could hardly see her face in the dark. Downstairs in the courtyard, she could hear the canary trilling with desperation, an all-is-lost-so-there’s-nothing-to-lose bravado. She felt the same herself tonight. Nothing to lose now. So why not enjoy? As if sensing her thoughts, Issa grasped her arm above the elbow. She pulled it away with involuntary petulance, suddenly realising just how much she resented the familiarity he’d assumed in the past few weeks. For a fundamentalist Muslim, his gesture was tantamount to ownership. In that instant he felt her rebuke and there was a moment of awkward silence until he covered it over by shouting in her ear.
‘He’s just like me, that little bird.’
They sat huddled together in the gloom: the old concierge and his wife, the Druze family from downstairs, refugees who had come to camp in the garden when their apartment block was reduced to rubble. They had three daughters, mouths open, dribble at the corners, deeply asleep. A baby boy sucking frantically at his mother’s breast. The stone stairs were cold. Rouba lay on one of the shallow steps, bedroom pillows piled about her, Hadiya curled so close she seemed an extension of her mother’s body. The explosions coming ever closer reverberated in Sanaya’s heart, drowning out its trip-trip beat. She held Hadiya’s hand where it lay, illuminated, each time there was a flash of white. The sound thudded in her lungs and throat and in her very marrow. Each time a bomb exploded, she felt that this time she should be used to it, that next time she wouldn’t shudder in its impact. She cried out, an involuntary sound. Issa smiled, as if excited by her fear. Another explosion, closer this time. The ringing in her ears drowned out every other sound for minutes, so many long minutes she was afraid she’d be deaf forever.
The Druze man had a radio that worked.
‘President Reagan has appealed to Menachem Begin earlier today to call an immediate ceasefire,’ the BBC newsreader announced.
Sanaya cringed at another loud blast, cutting through the transmission. Israeli warships fired rockets into the Corniche. Shells fell in Hamra. This was Begin’s reply.
After four hours of continuous bombing, the concierge produced a bottle of Scotch.
‘I don’t drink,’ Issa said. ‘It’s against the will of Allah.’
Sanaya drank her own glass down, looking at him over the rim.
When the bombardment ended they walked out into the heat of a morning tinged with the smell of burnt hair, ash, cordite.
‘That was the longest we’ve had,’ Issa said.
‘We’re helpless,’ Sanaya murmured.
‘What did you say?’
‘There’s no use fighting, Issa. They’re too powerful for us.’
‘Take those words back. It’s a sin.’
‘I don’t see you out there with your fellow fighters.’
‘Part of my duty is to protect my dead brother’s wife and daughter. And you, if you want it.’
She strode ahead of him as if she hadn’t heard, opening the tall iron gates with some difficulty and walking out into the street.
‘Hey, you can’t go out there! It’s not safe.’
‘There’s nothing you can do, Issa. You might as well not be here.’
He ran out after her, grasping and pulling on her hand. This time she surrendered to him but let her hand lie limp in his. He was babbling like a child in the effort to convince her of his importance.
‘I find food for you, I bring clean water, I fix the generator when it breaks down. I kill the rats in your kitchen, the cockroaches that come into your bed—’
She still let him hold her hand but remained firm against him, pushing forward all the while. They walked down the street – he let her lead him. The destruction of their neighbourhood was far greater than she had imagined. This celebrated district of seaside hotels and restaurants had become, overnight, a graveyard of twisted steel, slabs of concrete scattered like the ruins of Roman columns. She felt a hard bullet form in her throat; she wouldn’t cry. Wouldn’t give the Israelis that satisfaction. She looked around for familiar landmarks: the corner shop where she sometimes bought chewing gum and toilet paper, gone. The flower seller who swore at her whenever she brushed against any of his arrangements, pulverised. Nothing left. No, she would not cry. The debris of people’s lives everywhere on the ground: a charred exercise book with no covers, broken pieces of crockery – some still with bits of food clinging to them – a nylon negligee draped over the bonnet of a car. Dust coated their faces and eyes and they both walked blind, holding each other close and then closer, coughing at intervals to expel the black particles from their throats.
‘We should go back,’ Issa said.
‘No. One more block.’
She wanted to see the Khalidi hospital, to see for herself if it had been bombed. He clutched her hand tighter, anticipating the worst. It had been three days since Israeli troops had cut off water, food and electricity in west Beirut. As they passed open doorways, the sounds of children crying and women wailing for the dead were interspersed with more familiar, comforting sounds: slosh of reservoir water poured from jug into glass, the tinny French of the Phalangist Voice of Lebanon radio station, sizzle of potatoes dropped into a pan, the papery thin rustle of L’Orient Le Jour being opened to read news of last night’s blasts.
They neared the hospital, Sanaya stony, white-faced. Gunmen from rival Muslim militias shouted at them to leave, ‘Fucking leave, leave now’, firing their automatics in the air for emphasis. They too were coated in grey dust, comic-book ghosts. As Issa and Sanaya turned the corner, a high red smell caught them unawares. Flies settled on their lips and eyes and the smell intensified until it became too sweet, suspending speech or coherent judgement.
The dead were lined up in messy rows with heads against feet all the way to the entrance of the hospital. A woman nearby lay on her back with one leg crumpled beneath her, tan stockings pulled halfway down her calves by the force of the explosion. An old man next to her had the top half of his face scooped out, his mouth intact and twisted into an incredulous smile. The hospital facade was gone, all that remained was the basement, where open-air surgeries were being performed. No electricity; Sanaya could discern the hum of generators beneath the screams of old people and young women. Relatives of the wounded, even of the dead, shrieking at doctors to save their loved ones, grasping at them, pushing them away from someone else and to their own people. Scuffles broke out. Guns fired. Babies and children in hysterics, their open mouths black with horror. A thin little boy with a halo of chestnut hair was having his leg amputated. Two blood-spattered nurses hovered above him like anxious angels.
‘Let’s go,’ Issa said. ‘I can’t.’
Sanaya stood staring at the tableau. The doctors and nurses were so tired they looked as if they were about to cry. This couldn’t be happening to her city, her neighbourhood. She could hear the doctors talking among themselves as they made their rounds of the wounded, their voices growing louder and more irritable. The hospital had no clean water, no painkillers, no anaesthetic. The syringes they were using were recycled. There was no gauze for bandages, only ripped-up clothes and underwear donated by the relatives of the wounded. Thick cloth stuck to open sores. The wounded lay on the ground, sweating and moaning in the sun. The hospital was running out of body bags for the dead.
Half the people who had lived here were Christian, more than half hated the PLO, aping the West for generations in their politics and lifestyle. They took holidays in New York and Paris, sent their children to German schools, their daughters to Switzerland. They consumed and went on consuming just like good Americans. They had done nothing to deserve this, except perhaps by being too shallow, or trusting. Sanaya made to go. Issa tugged at her arm. She stopped and he bent over and vomited. She held his forehead, murmuring to him as if he were a child. He pushed her hand away.