Brita smokes and waits.
The interpreter swabs the gravy with his flat bread.
Brita says, "Look, I know that everybody who comes to Lebanon wants to get in on the fun but they all end up confused and disgraced and maimed, so I would just like to take a few pictures and leave, thank you very much."
Rashid says, "You must be a student of history."
His head is still down near the plate.
"He is saying this is a statement that covers a thousand years of bloodshed."
Brita raises the camera, seated about fifteen feet from the men.
"I want to ask him a question. Then I'll shut up and do my work."
She has Rashid in the viewfinder.
"I saw the boys outside with your picture on their shirts. Why is this? What does this accomplish?"
Rashid drinks and wipes his mouth. But it is the interpreter who speaks.
"What does this accomplish? It gives them a vision they will accept and obey. These children need an identity outside the narrow function of who they are and where they come from. Something completely outside the helpless forgotten lives of their parents and grandparents."
She takes Rashid's picture.
"The boys in the schoolyard," she says. "What are they learning?"
"We teach them identity, sense of purpose. They are all children of Abu Rashid. All men one man. Every militia in Beirut is filled with hopeless boys taking drugs and drinking and stealing. Car thieves. The shelling ends and they run out to steal car parts. We teach that our children belong to something strong and self-reliant. They are not an invention of Europe. They are not making a race to go to God. We don't train them for paradise. No martyrs here. The image of Rashid is their identity."
She puts out the cigarette and moves her chair forward, shooting more quickly now.
Rashid is eating a peach.
He looks into the camera and says, "Tell me, do you think I'm a madman living in this hellish slum and I talk to these people about world revolution?"
"You wouldn't be the first who started this way."
"Just so. This is exactly just so."
He seems genuinely gratified, confirmed in his mission.
A boy comes in with mail and newspapers. Brita is surprised to see mail. She thought all mail ended at the city limits. The boy wears a long hood, a pale cloth with holes cut for the eyes and with the upper corners flopping over. He remains near the door watching Brita work. She thought the concept of mail was a memory here.
"Okay, one more question," she says. "What is the point of the hood?"
She turns the chair around so she can straddle it, facing the men with her arms resting on the chair back, shooting pictures.
The interpreter says, "The boys who work near Abu Rashid have no face or speech. Their features are identical. They are his features. They don't need their own features or voices. They are surrendering these things to something powerful and great."
"As far as I'm concerned, listen, you do what you want. But these boys have weapons training. They're an active militia as I understand it. I've heard killings of foreign diplomats have been traced to this group."
Rashid says, "Women carry babies, men carry arms. Weapons are man's beauty."
"Take away their faces and voices, give them guns and bombs. Tell me, does it work?" she says.
Rashid waves a hand. "Don't bring your problems to Beirut."
She reloads quickly.
"He is saying the atrocity has already befallen us. The force of nature runs through Beirut unhindered. The atrocity is visible in every street. It is out in the open, he is saying, and it must be allowed to complete itself. It cannot be opposed, so it must be accelerated."
She listens to the interpreter and photographs Rashid.
"You're dropping your chin," she says.
He drinks and wipes his mouth with a napkin.
He says, "The boy who stands there is my son. Rashid. I am lucky at this age to have a son who is young, able to learn. I call myself father of Rashid. I had two older sons dead now. I had a wife I loved killed by the Phalange. I look at him and see everything that could not be. But here it is. The nation starts here. Tell me if you think I'm mad. Be completely honest."
She moves the chair up against the dinner table and tilts it slightly and leans forward with her elbows on the table, snapping pictures.
"What about the hostage?" she says. "About a year ago. Wasn't there a story about a man being held?"
Rashid looks into the camera. He says, "I will tell you why we put Westerners in locked rooms. So we don't have to look at them. They remind us of the way we tried to mimic the West. The way we put up the pretense, the terrible veneer. Which you now see exploded all around you."
"He is saying as long as there is Western presence it is a threat to self-respect, to identity."
"And you reply with terror."
"He is saying terror is what we use to give our people their place in the world. What used to be achieved through work, we gain through terror. Terror makes the new future possible. All men one man. Men live in history as never before. He is saying we make and change history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch."
She reloads and shoots.
"What happened to the hostage?"
She waits, her thumb on the shutter release. She lowers the camera and looks at the interpreter.
He says, "We have no foreign sponsors. Sometimes we do business the old way. You sell this, you trade that. Always there are deals in the works. So with hostages. Like drugs, like weapons, like jewelry, like a Rolex or a BMW. We sold him to the fundamentalists."
Brita thinks about this.
"And they are keeping him," she says.
"They are doing whatever they are doing."
Rashid raises his glass to drink. She sees his right hand is shaky. She repositions the camera and resumes shooting.
He puts down the glass and looks into the camera.
He says, "Mao believed in the process of thought reform. It is possible to make history by changing the basic nature of a people. When did he realize this? Was it at the height of his power? Or when he was a guerrilla leader, at the beginning, with a small army of vagrants and outcasts, concealed in the mountains? You must tell me if you think I'm totally mad."
She leans across the table and takes his picture.
He says, "Mao regarded armed struggle as the final and greatest action of human consciousness. It is the final drama and the final test. And if many thousands die in the struggle? Mao said death can be light as a feather or heavy as a mountain. You die for the people and the nation, your death is massive and intense. Die for the oppressors, die working for the exploiters and manipulators, die selfish and vain and you float away like a feather of the smallest bird."
She moves toward the end of the roll.
He looks into the camera and says, "Be completely honest. I want to hear you say it, so I'll finally know. Living in this filth and stink. Talking to these children every day, all the time, over and over. But I believe every word, you know. This room is the first minute of the new nation. Now tell me what you think."
The interpreter drinks and wipes his mouth with a napkin.
"He is saying very simple. There is a longing for Mao that will sweep the world."
Eloquent macho bullshit. But she says nothing because what can she say. She runs through the roll, leaving a single exposure. On an impulse she walks over to the boy at the door and removes his hood. Lifts it off his head and drops it on the floor. Doesn't lift it very gently either. She is smiling all the time. And takes two steps back and snaps his picture.
She does this because it seems important.
It takes the boy a moment to react. He gives her a look of slow and intelligent contempt. He wants her to see every muscle moving in his face. He is very dark, wearing the picture of his father safety-pinned to his shirt, and his eyes are slightly murderous, this is the only word, but also calm and completely aware. He knows her. He wants her to think she is someone he has thought about and decided to hate. His hair is matted and sweaty from the hood and he hates her not because she has humiliated him but because he knows who she is, there is pleasure in his knowing, a violence in the eye that shows how hate and rage repair the soul.