Rawi Hage: De Niro's Game

My accomplice was the dirty moon. He shone, and I watched.

When George came, we drove to Surssok, an old bourgeois neighbourhood with maids who served rich housewives wearing chic French dresses and possessing walk-in closets filled with leather shoes. They had apartments in Paris, and husbands who imported cigarettes, containers, and car parts, who coughed in Swiss banks at wooden mahogany desks occupied by nephews of chocolate factory owners, grandsons of landlords of African cocoa fields dotted with workers with bruised fingers, who worked under many suns, who worked on Sundays and Fridays. Those husbands ate in velvet restaurants and stayed in expensive hotels with large beds, Portuguese cleaning ladies, and thick towels. They puffed thick Cuban cigars, consulted their round, golden watches, spat filthy words like “shipments” and “invoices” over cognac and elevator music, words that bounced off mirrors and bald bartenders with multilingual prostitutes who drooled long, silver earrings on executive suits while looking bored and bitter.

American cars have no locks on the gas tanks, I said to George. They are the good ones to empty.

We stopped next to a white Buick. I pulled the hose from around my waist. I spun it in the air; it whistled. George laughed, and I spun it some more, and it whistled again. I opened the gas tank cover; George laid his motorbike on its side. I drove the hose inside the gas tank; it slipped gently in, like a snake into a ground hole. I lay my lips on its tail, sucked in, inhaled a flow of gas. It rushed toward my teeth. I directed the stream toward our gas tank. We filled the tank, and then we crawled, escaped and evaporated through a night of mist and dew. The smell of gas in my throat made me nauseous. We stopped at a store and got a can of milk. I drank it and vomited bread and poison between two rusty cars.

THURSDAY MORNING, I passed by George’s work again. I handed him some money, installed myself on a stool facing a poker machine, and played. On the screen I saw my credit increasing. There was an old, unshaven man sitting two machines down from me. A cigarette burned on his lip and made his wrinkled eyelid twitch. He was hitting the buttons almost blindly, without looking.

I tried to imitate his speed, his nonchalant attitude, his familiarity with fate and chance, his indifference to loss, his silence, his equanimity. He hung off his stool as if ropes from above held his defeated body, lifted his arms, and dropped them in suicidal freefalls on round plastic buttons.

THAT EVENING, I MET George at his place. He lived alone, down beside the French stairs, in an old stone house with little furniture, a photo of his dead mother under a high ceiling, and emptiness. He never mentioned his father. The word was that his father was a Frenchman who had come to our land, planted a seed in his mother’s young womb, and flown back north like a migrating bird.

I pulled out the money I’d made that morning, counted half and gave it to him.

We sat in George’s living room on an old couch between echoing walls. We whispered conspiracies, exchanged money, drank beer, rolled hash in soft, white paper, and I praised Roma.

Roma? George said. Go to America. Roma, there is no future. Yeah, it is pretty, but America is better.

How about you? I said. Are you going or staying?

I am staying. I like it here.

He put some music on. We sang with it, and drank.

I need to fix the motorbike; the exhaust needs to be changed, George told me. Pass by the casino on Tuesday morning and you can play again. Some more money won’t hurt us. And take your time, you looked like you were watching your back last time. Don’t worry if Abou-Nahra or someone from the militia comes in. If something’s wrong, I will bring you a whisky with no ice. That is the cue for you to leave. Capice , Roma man?

We were both high, sleepy, and feeling rich.

That night I slept on George’s sofa; he slept on his moth-er’s bed.

I woke up when dawn sprung its shine over my brown eyes, pulled on my eyelid, and asked me to walk.

George was still asleep. His gun was on the table, and the cash was crushed under its weight. No wind will ever move it, I thought. When I walked out, the city was calm. The streets were laden with morning dust and parked cars, and everything was closed except the early baker, Saffy. I brought a man’oushe from the baker and ate it. Taxis were not hustling yet, stores had not rolled up their metal doors, women were not boiling their coffee, vegetables were not loaded onto pushing carts, the horses were not running and the gamblers were not betting, fighters were not cleaning their guns. Everyone was asleep. Beirut, the city, was safe for now.

TEN THOUSAND BOMBS HAD FALLEN AND I WAS WAITING for death to come and scoop its daily share from a bowl of limbs and blood. I walked down the street under the falling bombs. The streets were empty. I walked above humans hidden in shelters like colonies of rats beneath the soil. I walked past photos of dead young men posted on wooden electric poles, on entrances of buildings, framed in little shrines.

Beirut was the calmest city ever in a war.

I walked in the middle of the street as if I owned it. I walked through the calmest city, an empty city that I liked; all cities should be emptied of men and given to dogs.

A bomb fell not far from me. I looked for the smoke, waited for the moaning and screams, but there were none. Maybe the bomb had hit me. Maybe I was dead in the backseat of a car, my blood pouring out little happy fountains and mopped up by a stranger’s clothes. My blood drunk by a warlord or some God whose thirst could never be quenched, a petty tribal God, a jealous God celebrating his tribe’s carnage and gore, a God who chooses one servant over the other, a lonely, lunatic, imaginary God, poisoned by lead and silver bowls, distracted by divine orgies and arranged marriages, mixing wine and water and sharpening his sword and handing it down to his many goatskin prophets, his castrated saints, and his conspirator eunuchs.

On an old lady’s balcony I saw a bird in a cage, a cat crouched beneath it on the ground, and a hungry dog looking for cadavers to sink his purebred teeth into, looking to snatch a soft arm or a tender leg. Human flesh is not forbidden us dogs, those laws apply only to humans, the unshaven poodle said to me. I nodded and agreed, and walked on some more. I heard rifles and more bombs. This time the bombs were heading toward the Muslim side, to inflict wounds and to make more little girls’ blood flow. Bombs that leave are louder than the ones that land.

I stood in the middle of the street and rolled a cigarette. I inhaled, exhaled, and the fumes from my mouth grew like a shield. The bombs that came my way ricocheted off it, and bounded and skipped along the sky to faraway planets.

NIGHT CAME, as it always does. George and I decided to go to the mountains. We drove up to Broumana, a high village that had been turned into an expensive refuge for the wealthy. Bars and cafés were everywhere, with round tables and fast waiters. Half-naked, painted women walked the narrow village streets, and militiamen drove past them in their Mercedes with crosses hanging off the mirrors. Loud dancing music flowed out of restaurants. We entered a club, sat at a table, and watched couples dancing, people drinking and not talking. No one has anything to say; don’t you know that war spreads silence, cuts tongues, and flattens stones? the drink said to me. George and I both smelled of deodorant, silk shirts, fake watches, and foam shaving cream. George pointed at a woman in a blue dress. That one I want, he said. I ordered two glasses of whisky while he smiled at the woman. She turned her face to her girlfriend, then they both looked back our way and giggled. Let’s go, George said to me. He stood up and walked toward the women. While he talked to the woman in the blue dress, I stayed at the table. I paid for the drinks and sipped my whisky and watched everyone. George was moving his hands, and leaning his chest against the woman’s shoulders. On the dance floor, women were shaking their hips to Arabic songs. A man with a thick moustache put his hand on my shoulder and said, There is nothing in this world, my friend. Nothing is worth it; enjoy yourself. Tomorrow we might all die. Here, yallah, cheers. We banged our glasses, and he entered the dance floor waving his arms in the air, an empty glass in his hand, a cigarette on his lower lip.