Cancer

War creeps up on you like a cancer.

At first it’s nothing. An irritation, a nagging pain, a minor inconvenience. It’ll be gone in an hour or two, in a couple of days. It’s something you think you can ignore, but wishful thinking doesn’t make it go away. When the symptoms get worse, you begin to worry. So off you go to get advice and treatment, and for a while the medicine seems to work. But you’ve only stabilised the condition, not cured it. That little black malignancy lingers just beneath the skin, tainting cells, infecting organs, poisoning hope, building a malevolent army of decay, ready for the signal to go on the march.

War was coming as we gathered at Lawrence’s apartment back in Beirut that evening. The talk was of our ambush, questions. John was an old hand in Lebanon, a Brit working with CBS: he would have the answers.

– What was it all about?

– They thought we were up there to spy on them.

– On what?

– Probably their headquarters or something.

– Whose headquarters?

– One of the armies. They were Christians.

John’s father-in-law had been sizzling, and finally came to the boil.

– Christians, you call them? Damned brigands, I should say!

Dany tried to turn down the heat.

– No, Mr Hamilton-Oakes, you see it’s difficult to understand unless you are living here. In Lebanon we have many problems. You see, there are many political groups and now there is a battle for the power. The Christians, we have the power, but in the last years the Muslims are stronger and more, and now they want the power too.

– That doesn’t explain why those thugs had to attack us.

– There are many armies, for all the big politicians, and there are many secrets.

– But we’re British.

Lawrence was quick to respond.

– As a spokesman for one of your lapsed colonies, I’d like to deny that.

– But dammit, it was plain to see we weren’t up to any mischief.

– They were just making sure.

– I agree with you, Mr Hamilton-Oakes, they were very impolite. Sometimes I am ashamed to be an Arab.

– Bullshit Monique, you’re proud of it.

Mrs Hamilton-Oakes had a view.

– Surely they didn’t have to spoil the food.

In the Christian suburb of Ain al-Rummaneh a bomb exploded in an empty neighbourhood store. Three children were playing outside. One was killed, one lost a leg, and one was blinded by flying glass.

War was coming as we sat drinking, Lawrence and Monique, Dave, Claire and myself, Jason asleep on my knee, when the others had left. The meticulous carelessness and oriental comfort at Lawrence’s seemed to have upset the visiting parents almost as much as the barbarian attack. Mr Hamilton-Oakes – not even John was on first-name terms with his father-in-law – had refused to sit down and stood glaring at the walls, trying to avoid the unavoidable nude there. After his rage at our attackers had cooled, he spoke only once:

– Chap goes native, I s’pose.

Mrs Hamilton-Oakes perched herself on the edge of a divan, holding herself there as delicately as she might have held a tea-cup. She told us unceasingly what a wonderful holiday they’d just had in Italy, and how civilised the people were there – until John, with an almost imperceptible raising of the eyebrows to Lawrence, decided they ought to be going. Dany and his friend left with them. As we were saying goodbye, I finally learnt the friend’s name. George: another Christian then.

Lawrence uncorked a bottle.

– You must be parched – I am. I’d have offered before, but John warned me to keep the booze out of sight or we’d never have got the old man out of the house. Thank you all for staying.

– He’s a real English bore, isn’t he?

– It’s good to hear that, Richard, coming from a Brit.

– Did you see how he couldn’t bring himself to look at your nude? He kept closing his eyes.

– That’s one of my Anderson tests. Tests the mettle of a man. I blew it up as large as I could and put it in the most obvious place I could find. You learn a lot from people’s reactions – what kind of coward they are.

I found myself studying the photograph.

– Same with the bathroom door. I had a special lock made so when you turn the key, nothing happens. I just love to stand outside and listen to people trying to make themselves secure in there. It’s weird – even in a friend’s house, people are scared to take a shit unless they’re sure no-one can get in at them … and talking of bathrooms, we could probably all use a shower after this afternoon’s exertions. Anyone care to share one with Monique and me?

Lawrence hadn’t asked Monique first, but it didn’t seem to bother her. He looked from one to the other of us.

– Dave?

Dave gave him one of his sardonic smiles.

– Come on. It’s not every day I’d invite you.

Dave shook his head.

– OK. You can all get washed up afterwards if you really want to miss all the fun. There are plenty of towels. Help yourself to booze. We won’t be long.

In the Muslim suburb of Chiyah, three separate families driving home from their Sunday excursions were stopped in a temporary road-block. The drivers were frog-marched into three unmarked cars and taken off. Three new drivers took control of the wives and children in their cars. They were driven a few blocks to deserted back-streets, one to an empty building-site. The three strangers ordered the families out, then set fire to the cars.

War was coming as we listened to Lawrence’s authoritative account of Lebanese politics.

First he’d gone through the cassette catalogue, turning the pages one by one and muttering to himself, whistling snatches of tunes. Finally he found what he wanted.

– Yma Sumac. You never heard of her? No, course you haven’t. Incredible woman. Range of four octaves. Peruvian, I believe.

Even if she wasn’t Peruvian, she should have been, for the voice drew its inspiration from the mountain peaks of the Andes, soaring into spaces higher than oxygen, as pure as ice, then rasping down to peasant level on the plateaux far below. Music with no pattern, no meaning, and, to my ear, no beauty, yet as eccentric, dramatic and improbable as Lawrence himself. I wondered if this was another Anderson test and hoped Lawrence wasn’t going to ask me what I thought of it. He didn’t. Instead he poured more wine, turned down the volume, folded himself into a cushion, and started his history lesson.

– People used to say it seemed like the perfect political system, the Lebanese. Do you know the UN was proposing the same system of government to fix your little Irish problem a few months ago? Perfect for places like Northern Ireland and Lebanon where your political views are pretty much determined by your religion. You start by estimating your largest religious group. Here they are, say, the Maronite Christians, so you give them the most important post in government – the Presidency. Next biggest group? The Sunni Muslims, so let one of them be Prime Minister. Then so on down the scale: the Shia Muslims, the Greek Orthodox, the Druze. All the factions are guaranteed to get a piece of the action in government, according to their size. A nice, cosy solution. Fair, you might say. Democratic, you might even argue. Perfect – if you could somehow keep the nasty politicians and their families out.

   But there’s the rub. A six-year term as President never seems quite long enough – oh no. Once you have that kind of power, why would you want to give it up? Why shouldn’t you actually be a king and breed lots of little princes? Keep it in the family, just like the Mafia do. In fact there’s a lot our guys back at home could learn from the Lebanese.

   So back in the fifties old Camille Chamoun wants to hang on to the Presidency just a little longer – say a second term, till his boys get a little older and ready to take over. Uh-uh, say his Christian brethren – that’s not in the rules. So they do a little fighting until we send in the Marines to sort them out. Yes, our US Marines, making their long-awaited debut on the Middle East stage. Yankee doodle dandy.

   Same with the Franjiehs now – our esteemed president Suleiman is trying to line up his boy Tony for the job. There’s a piece of work, that Suleiman Franjieh. Did you hear how he got elected back in ’70? No? Well, no-one gave him the time of day. You see, he’d been a bad boy a few years back. The Franjieh power base was in Zghorta – it’s a town up in the north – but there was another family coming on strong so Suleiman, as head of the Franjieh clan, had to do something about it. So he decides to do it the simple way. He waits for a beautiful sunny Sunday morning when everyone in the other family goes off to church, then he gets his boys together and bursts in right in the middle of the Our Father, machine-guns blazing. No more family, no more rivals.

   But that’s the sort of thing people here are sensitive about, so when he stands for president against a good solid banking type, Elias Sarkis, not many of us are putting our money on him.

   So everyone meets in Parliament for the vote. Great excitement, high noon. The vote comes to a dead-heat – fifty to fifty. Now just hang on there a moment, someone says, I thought we only had ninety-nine deputies. Not any more, obviously. So they take a recount. Suleiman remembers former glories, rounds up all his boys again, and places them all around the parliament building – protection, you get the idea? Well, you can guess the rest. The votes get counted, and there you have him, the new President of the Lebanese Republic, Suleiman Franjieh.

   Naturally the Slur and the rest of the free Lebanese press don’t carry the real story. Too political, they say. 

   But you were here then, weren’t you, Dave?

– Got here a couple of months before.

– Must have been about the time you were getting it on with Monique.

Neither Dave nor Monique reacted. Dave was sprawled out across the cushions, concentrating on Lawrence, waiting for him to continue; Monique wrapped in a towel knotted at the chest, took another sip of wine.

Lawrence addressed his next revelation to me, almost confidentially.

– She was his student.

– Were you at the school, Monique?

It was the least of the questions I wanted to ask.

– Yes. For a year.

– Dave was the first great love of her life.

Lawrence took up his analysis again, but now I had no ears for him. So that was how Dave knew them. Of course Monique must have had other boyfriends before Lawrence, but it was difficult for me to imagine her with anyone else. Least of all with Dave. Somehow it seemed immoral. I wondered how long it had lasted, who had ended it.

– … anyway, the easy answer to that was not to have another census. They had one in 1948 and the Maronites came out on top then, the largest religious group, so why go to all that trouble again? What did it matter if the Christians had been popping too many pills – good Catholic Maronites as they are – while the Muslims had been breeding like rabbits? The Christians had the power and the glory, and the money, and they weren’t about to let go of it. They had another good argument too. Even if the Muslims outnumbered them in Lebanon, there was still a whole bunch of good Lebanese Christians living outside – in the States, in Australia, in the other Arab states. How could you possibly have another census when fifty per cent of the people you wanted to count weren’t even here?

   So everything was just fine and dandy … or it was until the Palestinians got themselves thrown out of Jordan and sent here five years ago. The Cairo Agreement. That added another couple of hundred thousand Muslims to the population – armed Muslims at that – the Agreement gave them the right to bear arms in their camps. Just the same rights as us Americans really.

   That’s what began to put the squeeze on our Christian friends, and that’s where dear old Pierre Gemayel comes in with his little bid for power. He’s been around for years, building a right-wing political party, the Kataeb – the Phalangists – since the thirties. He has a militia too, several thousand men, well-drilled, well-armed, a model army. But somehow he’s never quite made it to the top.

   So now he’s trying to get there by whipping up the Christians’ fears about the Muslims. But he’s no fool. He’s not saying there are more Muslims than Christians. No, what he says is that all the dirty Palestinians shouldn’t be living here, they should have their guns taken away from them, that Israel keeps attacking us because they’re here, that they should be driven out into the sea or anywhere else they won’t be a nuisance.

   And you have to admit it, he has a point, hasn’t he? All these scruffy foreigners hanging around the streets, armed to the teeth, living like parasites off the state, threatening innocent women and children …

Monique’s eyes flashed, and she finally reacted. She put down her glass, turned, and slapped Lawrence full in the face.

In Ain al-Rummaneh, masked men and women were holding the three kidnapped men down, naked and trussed, on a large table in a bare office. Curtains were drawn and the door locked. A brazier was burning in the corner, the kind used for roasting peanuts on the street.

The captors drew three metal rods out of the coals, Glowing on the tips were three red crosses, the size of a hand. Face down on the table, the prisoners couldn’t see the torture instruments, but they knew what was coming – their screams for mercy said so. No questions were asked.

One at a time the crosses were planted in the centre of their backs. The flesh sizzled and curled and stank. The third man died of a heart seizure before they reached him. When they were rolled over, three pairs of eyes were popping from the skulls, but only two pairs could see the irons. Two backs quivered and tried to arch above the table. The rods were rammed into the testicles.

One man was still screaming.

The bodies were heaped into large sacks, tied at the top, and driven off in a pick-up to be dumped in an alley.

War was coming as Claire and I stood in our balcony room, looking down over the railings, at home. Evenings at Lawrence’s seemed to have a habit of coming to a sudden end.

When we left with Dave, Lawrence was unrepentant.

– Do you really have to go? Hey, there are still another two bottles of this excellent wine to finish. No? Well, perhaps tomorrow. Watch out for those nasty Palestinians.

Monique had disappeared into the bedroom. She didn’t come to the door.

Dave got into his car without a word, not even goodbye.

We drove back on the now-familiar route. It was getting late. The streets were almost deserted.

Or they were until we reached our street and our apartment block.

There must have been a hundred people gathered there, most of them male. Many of them wore the chequered keffiyeh, the Arab headscarf, wrapped around their necks or their waists, gleaming black and white in the streetlight and the floodlights from the building site.

Two of them approached the car as I drove slowly up, and motioned me to roll down the window. They leaned in, scanning Jason in the back seat, then the two of us in the front.

– Al ingleezi. OK. OK.

Their thumbs beckoned us into the parking space at the bottom of our building. I stationed the VW in the tight space between the pillars usually reserved for me, and we got out.

Two more men were shining torches on us as we lifted Jason out. We walked around the building to the front entrance, lit by its naked bulbs – nobody had ever bothered to add the final touches that make a place habitable. Down the street two or three men were shouting and there were a few guns. I spotted the wizened old concierge for our building among the crowd, and he waved to us cheerily.

We put Jason to bed, then went to stand in our balcony-room in the darkness, to find out what was happening. Across the street, we saw the silhouettes of several neighbours on their balconies too. A cigarette point glowed there, and there a light flashed on, then quickly off again.

Claire snuggled up against me. The night was cool.

– Now what’s happening?

– I don’t know.

– What an extraordinary day. It’s scary, Rick, don’t you think?

– Looks like something big.

A truck came up the street, blaring out something in Arabic from a loudspeaker. The angry words bounced off walls and windows and echoed up the street toward us. There was no mistaking the incandescent rage, the crescendo of hatred which, I was beginning to understand, Arabic expresses so well.

The truck slowed as it approached our rabble and there were hands stretched down from the windows for shaking, fists beaten against the bodywork. The lines of a big gun mounted at the back glinted in the light. A shot was fired, not near, and we jerked back from the railing.

– Richard!

– Don’t worry.

– But I’m frightened. What’s happening?

– I don’t know, darling.

– I wish we had a phone.

There was a phone, next door at the bottom of the building site, on a rough trestle table where our concierge played cards and drank tea all day. The receiver was locked in place and we would have to get the key from him.

– I could call Lawrence from downstairs.

– No Rick. You’re not going back down there.

– No, I don’t really want to.

The rhetoric was rapidly fading down the street, heading for the Bourj, the old city centre where the markets mingled with the money-houses and where the victims of Lebanon’s struggle for independence were remembered. Old ghosts in the Place des Martyres, who had also screamed for war. Below us there were no more shots but a steady murmur of excitement and movement. A voice was calling instructions, and there was a regular thud as something dead hit the ground.

– Richard, please don’t look out.

But I had to see what was happening. Almost everyone now was milling around the entrance to our building. The orders came from inside, yes, from our parking area or from among the rubble of building materials and workers’ mattresses next door. Another thud. Part of the crowd shifted and seemed to flow under the building. I saw two men struggling to carry a large sagging white sack, then dump it next to several others.

– They’re dumping a load of sandbags in the street.

As Claire joined me, another bag was hauled out, and a wide semi-circle began to take shape in front of the site. More arrived, and a second row was started, on top of the first.

– Looks like they’re expecting trouble.

– D’you think there’ll be fighting here, Richard?

– I don’t know.

– I think we should go somewhere else.

– I don’t think we should go anywhere tonight.

– No. Oh Richard, what’s happening?

Claire’s hand found mine. I remembered the balcony in Sioufi, just before we met Lawrence and Monique. I wondered if Claire realised how much our relationship had changed since then, only six weeks ago. Rain began to fall in large drops.

– Well, there’s not much we can do, is there?

– No.

She shivered.

– I’m going to bed.

– OK.

– Are you coming?

– Not yet.

The rain fell heavier, then heavy. There were new shouts below, and people running across the street, into buildings, into shelter. One last sandbag was lugged into place, then the last three men scampered out of sight. The wall was three bags high, about six yards in diameter, jutting out into the road. It would hold about ten men in firing positions.

Rain was pelting down, hissing on the road. A few weeks back, it had rained so hard that Hamra was flooded in five minutes. We’d seen people walking on car bumpers in the traffic-jam to get across the street. The city had no drains – or none that worked.

These beautiful, hopeless people. 

From this ledge before, I’d seen delivery boys cycling down the hill with loaves of flat Arab bread balanced on a pannier, piled high above the handlebars. Once a boy lost his balance and the loaves tumbled off and rolled all across the road. He scurried around picking them up, reloaded, and set off again. Ever since then, every time I bought bread, one of the pieces seemed to have a tyre-mark across it.

The water ran in rivulets down the street.

Once, after a storm, I’d come out of the school to see the mad caretaker, Abdul Haleem, dashing around on the pavement with a broom in his hand, roaring. He was chasing a rat. The fat brown creature made a run for it, or rather, a waddle. But Abdul Haleem’s club crashed down, smashing it into a puddle. As it lay there dead, the old man danced around it, whooping in triumph, hitting it again and again. Then he picked up the bloody, wet carcass and hurled it into the road. Students were leaving the school too, girls pretty and elegant and eighteen. They clapped and cheered Abdul Haleem’s victory.

Monique a student at our school! I couldn’t believe it, didn’t want to. Students were students, having an existence only behind desks, speaking broken English, being tiresome or dull or bright. Monique didn’t belong in any of these categories.

She was in Dave’s class. So many of the girls at school fell in love with him. He was tall, dark, very English with his longish straight hair, a cynical mouth that refused to find anything funny, only faintly ridiculous, beneath his contempt. Monique had an affair with him! Did they sleep together? Was she ever in Dave’s bed?

I’d been to his place once, and it was dingy: a kitchen and one room with clothes and sheets strewn all over the floor. We’d drunk coffee, and I remembered the stain around the rim of the cup and the sugar caked on the teaspoon.

No, not Dave and Monique. She could have sex with Lawrence, that was normal and expected. But not with Dave.

Had she? Yes, of course she had. Suddenly she repulsed me.

– Richard, come to bed. It’s late.

There was no easing of the rain. At least it seemed to have quietened things down for the night.

Far across the city, in Ain al-Rummaneh, Chiyah and Dekwaneh, it was anything but quiet. Families huddled together in their apartments, comforting themselves against the rattle of machine-guns in the hollow streets, the shudder and the splintering of another shell gashing through a building. Frightened excited children trembled and wept while parents told them of the multitude of devils coming – Muslims, Christians, Palestinians, Leftists, Rightists, Druze … the legions of Death. Outside, grim-faced fathers and eager sons hunted in packs together, nervous vigilantes who would shoot at the shadows of their own ghosts.

Four men were shot on the streets that night, two of them accidentally by their own neighbours. More than ten times that number lost their lives in the safety of their own homes. The reports didn’t mention the wounded.

All over Beirut the barricades went up. Sandbags, wire, tyres, stones blocked off roads and quarters as if the city, with one mind, had decided to redraw its own map.