Rawi Hage - De Niro's Game

That day, as I remember, there was a ceasefire and few clouds.

THE NEXT DAY I borrowed George’s motorcycle. I met Rana on the outskirts of the neighbourhood, at the corner of a building filled with people who had never seen our faces before. She mounted the motorcycle behind me and we drove straight to the mountains. She clasped both her arms around my waist. I drove on gravel roads and into the belly of the hills. When we stopped, I handed her the gun, wrapped my arms around her shoulders, put my hands over hers, and we both extended our arms and took aim at rusty cans. She fired, and laughed. Then she liberated herself from my arms, pushed me back and took the gun by herself, aimed and shot. She smiled and walked toward me, swinging her hips, waving the gun in the air. She pointed it at my chest. Flipping her long lashes playfully, she said: Now that I have a gun, I will follow you to Roma and shoot you down if you leave without me.

From afar Beirut looked like a stretch of little cement hills, crowded buildings with no roads, no lampposts, no humans.

There, that is the Muslim side, she pointed. I have never met a Muslim. No, wait, there were a couple of Muslim girls in school, but they fled when the war started. Faten, one of their names was, Faten; the other, I can’t remember. . Can’t remember.

I held Rana and kissed her neck. The soft, cool breeze made her nipples erect under her thin white cotton shirt. I slipped my hand onto her chest, molested her breasts, and sucked her round, red nipples.

She was anxious, looking around, watching for stray visitors, nature lovers and bird hunters, and when I pushed my hand inside her tight jeans, she said: Bassam, stop. Not here. Bassam, stop!

I did not stop. I was breathing like a hound and I forced myself on her; Rana froze, then gripped my hand and pushed me away. She pointed the gun at me.

When I say stop, you stop! You stop, she shouted in anger.

I walked toward her. I grabbed her wrist, pointed the gun again at my chest, and said, Pull it!

You are hurting my wrist, she said.

I took the gun back, and we both kept our silence, breathing heavily.

Then we drove farther up into the hills. We stopped and looked at the city again. A long, mushroom-shaped cloud sprang from the earth in West Beirut.

A bomb, Rana said to me. Look, a bomb just landed.

More like an explosion, I said.

As we drove back down the hill, Rana’s hands caressed my chest. She drove her nail into my flesh and said, I could have shot you here.

MY MOTHER CAME shuffling up the stairs with bags in her hand: vegetables, meat, bread.

She called me into the kitchen. What is going on between you and Rana? This morning over coffee her mother asked me about you two.

What did she ask?

About your job, and if you are interested in visiting their house with me. She said Rana is at the age to be engaged.

We are just friends, I said.

Don’t lie to me, Bassam. Rana is like a daughter to me, and she is not that kind of girl. If you are not serious, do not ruin her future. People talk here. People talk.

I walked away. She shouted at my back, Yeah, just like your father. He always left, and he kept on leaving. A good-for-nothing, he was a good-for-nothing.

I heard the kitchen door slam behind me.

MORE THAN TEN thousand bombs had landed, and I was stranded between two walls facing my trembling mother. She had refused to go down to the shelter unless I came with her. And I refused to hide underground. I, descended from a long line of mighty warriors, would die only in the open air above an earth of muddy soils and whistling winds!

My mother jumped at every explosion. She called upon one female saint after another but none of them, busy virgins, ever answered her back.

Petra, the little neighbour girl, crawled up the dirty marble stairs and knocked on our door; she looked suspiciously at my glittering sword and warrior face, then covered her lips and whispered a secret in my mother’s ear. My mother stood up and walked straight to the bathroom. She came back with a box of Kotex and said, It is empty, habibti , but do not worry; come with me.

The little menstruating body stood up, her face a deep, bashful red. She dashed inside, to my mother’s bedroom.

I walked down the stairs, out of the building, and across the deserted street toward Abou-Dolly, the grocer. The store was closed, but Abou-Dolly lived with his family in the back. I knocked. The grocer opened the door a crack. He saw me and frowned and asked me what I needed. Kotex, I said. We are closed now, he answered in a dry tone.

It is urgent! I said.

Come in.

I entered the house. It smelled of villagers’ soap, ground coffee, and rotting vegetables that had fallen under the loud fridge, and two cats that fed on brown mice, and the grocer’s daughter, Dolly, who was breastfeeding her newborn from her round white breast that made me thirsty. When I stepped in, Dolly covered her baby and her breast in a pink wool quilt. Um-Dolly, the grocer’s wife, was there knitting in the corner; his son-in-law, Elias, was wearing suspenders and gazing at the wall and smoking. They were all gathered around two pitiful candles that flickered in a wild, diabolic motion, projecting everyone’s shadow on Hades and its burning walls.

Abou-Dolly, a middle-aged man who had never had a son, and whose nickname referred to his older daughter, handed me two packs of Kotex. Which kind do you want? he asked me.

I held both cases close to the candle and smelled them, which made his wife shiver and puff and murmur in objection. What are you smelling them for? Abou-Dolly rushed at me and snatched the boxes. Get out, get out. He started to push me; I shoved him back. His son-in-law picked up a long broomstick and threatened me with it. I snatched back one of the boxes from Abou-Dolly’s hand, slipped my other hand behind my waist, and pulled out my gun. I let it hang off my fingers, pointing toward the floor. Um-Dolly shouted, He has a gun! He has a gun! Dolly cut off the jet of warm milk to her baby’s lips, which made the baby cry, and rushed into another room.

Clutching the box, I stepped outside the door into the fresh air and walked away. In the background I heard Abou-Dolly shouting, I knew your father, I knew your father, he was a friend of mine, and he would be ashamed to see what his son turned out to be. A thug! Shame on you, insulting me in my own house, in front of my family. A thug! That is what you are, my son, a thug. And he spat on the floor and cursed my generation and my kind.

The thug walked between the buildings, avoiding the falling bombs. The thug crossed streams of sewage that dripped from broken pipes. He walked with a gun in one hand and a box of tender cotton in the other.

THE NEXT DAY, George came by to pick up his motorcycle.

It was parked, tilted toward the earth, over a round pool of dried oil, in the shade in front of the vegetable store, facing the hospital, its back to the church.

I gave George the keys; he dangled the ring from his longest finger and said, Let’s go talk.

He drove, and I held on to his waist. We drove down to Quarantina, to the old train tracks where the Kurdish shanty-town had been conquered and demolished by the Christians. Now the earth was flat here, the tin roofs, the little alleys, the pools of sewage all evaporated, vanquished and levelled to the ground. The fighters had been massacred in cold blood. Their women had fled in little boats bouncing on Mediterranean waves, barefoot kids with dripping noses in their arms. It was here that Abou-Nahra and his men had stormed the camp, killed the men and pulled out their golden teeth; it was here that he had gained his reputation as a ruthless commander. His victorious men had pierced the heads of the defeated on bayonets and paraded the streets. Cadavers had been tied to the backs of jeeps, bounced on asphalt roads and hurtled down the little alleys.