To take where?
Something to sell, he said. We did not know that you are militiamen.
Where did you get your weapons?
We took them from a dead Syrian soldier.
How old are you? I demanded.
Fourteen.
What’s your name?
Hassan, he said.
Fucking Muslims in our district, Joseph shouted and pulled out his gun. Let me finish this dirt!
I held Joseph’s arm and pushed him into the van.
When I looked back I saw the kid escaping, limping through the bombed city’s walls.
Back in the van, Joseph laughed and called me Majnun.
We are going to call you Al-Majnun, he said. You could have killed us all with that Russian grenade. It is the worst kind you can choose to open, because it is the most unpredictable; it might take a second or it might take three minutes to explode, and both ways we would have been finished. Majnun. He started to laugh louder. . Majnun.
WHEN WE ARRIVED at our drop-off, Ali and his boys were waiting for us. While the boys emptied the van, Ali walked toward me and offered me a cigarette.
How are things on the other side? I asked.
Once it was all one side, but now we call it the other side, Ali said and shook his head. Have you ever been to the other side? he asked me.
Long time ago, when I was young. I have a relative on the other side.
Oh yes?
Yes, a communist uncle.
What is his name?
Naeem Al-Abyad.
I know your uncle, said Ali, surprised. We fought together. He is a high commander in the communist party now. Do you two ever communicate?
No, not for a long time.
I saw Joseph approaching us. I winked to Ali, and we changed subjects.
When the boys finished moving the whisky, I told Joseph that I needed to take a piss. I walked behind a wall and called to Ali.
Can you find a way to tell my uncle that my mother is dead? I asked him.
Allah yirhamha (may she rest in peace), he said and lowered his head. I will get in touch with your uncle.
10
I WOKE TO THE SOUND OF KNOCKING IN THE MIDDLE OF the night. When I opened my apartment door, I saw Monsieur Laurent standing in the hallway with a candle in his hands. I invited him in.
I am looking for George, he said.
Did you check his house?
Yes, and he is not there.
Maybe he is on duty, I suggested.
Where? It is urgent.
Check the sakanah (army barricade). Or maybe he went on a mission. He mentioned something about it last week at his party.
We need another fix for Bébé. She is shivering.
I cannot help you, Monsieur Laurent.
It is urgent.
Why don’t you take her to a rehab place?
Yes, I am waiting for a vacancy at the clinic in France. . A blood change. They do blood changes.
Monsieur Laurent, why do you do this?
Why do I give Bébé everything?
Why do you let her do anything she wants?
Can I have a cigarette?
Yes. Do you want some coffee?
No. But let me answer your question. You see, once, we Lebanese ruled Africa. We were the middlemen. We extracted commissions left and right. We built that place. When I left my native village and took a boat to meet my French uncle in Africa, neither you nor Bébé were even born yet. And all I wanted was to save money, work with my uncle for a while, and come back to the village, to that hill, and build a house and get married to a decent local girl.
But the community got rich. We worked in slums and jungles selling textiles. We became the middlemen for the French, and the Portuguese, and whoever else came. We brought cars and electric fridges to the place, we bribed the policemen, the mayors, the army generals, and we all lived in penthouses. Do you know that all the Lebanese in Africa lived in penthouses?
We threw parties in our private clubs. As a young man I worked hard and learned how to buy and sell. I travelled with suitcases filled with bills that smelled of African soil and humid mattresses. We swallowed stones in African bathrooms and walked into Swiss hotels and defecated diamonds. We had mulatto women under our feet, dancing on our tables to Arabic songs that made us decadent and nostalgic. You see, the Lebanese ruled these places without guns, without an army, without slaves.
But then the time passed. And that little hill where I left a virgin bride kneeling in a church pew until her thighs wrinkled and her knees turned to soap — all those years, that little hill stayed on my mind. You see, I, too, lost and gained, and took private planes, and bet on blackjack tables until the gamblers’ nails tore the green table’s lawn. . We worked those corrupt generals, we had them in the palms of our hands.
We sucked the locals’ wealth, and offered their daughters as gifts. You see, no one liked us, but they all needed us. And then it happened, that day when the poor walked barefoot into the city, with guns and machetes in their hands, and chased us out of our penthouses. They stumbled over our long chairs, defecated in our mosaic pools, snapped our argilahs (pipes) in half, camped in our marbled saloons with large windows that looked over their primitive villages, their shanty towns that we never noticed, their running sewage that we never smelled, their chocolate-skinned sisters whose bellies we used as pillows, whose pale palms we used as towels for our Semitic semen, for our sweating foreheads behind circled walls and guardian dogs.
So I escaped, leaving behind my resorts that once shone with Europeans’ and Afrikaners’ red-burned skins. I left the cars, the soap factory, my mixed-race, illegitimate descendants. I ran and came back here, looking for that virgin, looking for that childhood hill.
I am an old man now, so forgive my sentimentality. When I met Bébé she was alone. I met Bébé on the top of a hill, and I took it as a good omen. I bought her everything she needed, everything she asked for. Why? you ask. I am afraid I have nothing else to offer her, and now she is a home, a daughter, and a wife. Forgive my tears, but I am afraid that she might ask me if we can leave this place. And all I am trying to do is to spend my last days close to that hill.
Now, could you seek George for me? S’il vous plait.
THE NEXT DAY, I walked through the neighbourhood. I entered a grocery store.
We have fresh green almonds, the grocer, Julia, said to me. Good for a kass! Do you want a kilo?
No, I’m not drinking much these days.
Do you have any empty bottles to return? I will send my daughter Souad to get them.
I am not sure. I will look in my mother’s kitchen.
Allah yirhamha, your mother was a lady. May God cut their hands. .
I bought some bread and labnah, thanked Julia, and left.
On the way back, I came across a jeep driving the wrong way. It was packed with young militiamen in green suits, and with bands wrapped around their foreheads, who pointed their rifles toward balconies and the French abat-jours. The jeep pulled up next to me, and George got out of it. He looked tired and dirty.
We just got back, Bassam, he said. Ten days without a shower. We ate canned food, and my boots are cutting the back of my ankle. Akram Seiff, you know him? We call him Alnasek, the brother of Jean Seiff.
Yes, he lives above Antoun’s Laundromat, I said.
He got hit under the arm, and he bled to death. There are fucking black Somalis fighting with those Palestinians. Did you know that? The whole ‘ummah is here fighting us.