his glass and nodded at Michel. “No matter how many other people’s lives it takes.”
Michel refilled their glasses and laid a pack of Gauloises on the counter. André's father tore it open and lit one. “Such shit –”
“Don't smoke them then.”
“This pastis. Not like the old stuff,” he raised high his glass like a scientist examining a test tube. “The old stuff, it made your veins sing.” He put the glass down. “All those herbs crushed together – the essence of Provence, basil, rosemary, thyme, anise, sage – ah!” He smacked his lips. “This!” He raised the test tube again, downed it, wrinkling his lips. “La merde! Factory-made! La nouvelle France – Arabs, niggers, drug addicts, pederasts, thieves.”
André glanced down the bar. “See you, Papa.”
His father laid a fifty franc bill beside the empty yellow glass. “Coming with you.”
Outside the early darkness was damp and fresh, the pavements filled with people hurrying home with children and handbags and briefcases and bread and bags of vegetables and fruit and cheese and wine. “Nobody on the other side,” his father said, “is going to believe your story, once they tie you to Haroun.”
“He's just a point de départ.”
They came to Emile Zola, a taxi splashing through the crosswalk. “Start saving now for your burial expenses,” an electric sign said. “Spare your family.” His father was short of breath, hissing through his nostrils, trying not to show it. “I told your mama if there's one chance in a thousand of losing you, I wouldn't want to take it. And I don't.”
“It's not Oran, Papa. Not Hanoi. I know Beirut.”
“I knew Oran. That didn't keep me from losing two hundred men there. Each with a family and dreams. And another twelve hundred wounded. A lot of them ruined for life.”
André nodded. “And just like Beirut, we took a beating and ran away. When we were the stronger! Killing our own brave men for nothing.”
“Nobody wins all the time, even the strong. We're lucky to win at all.”
“You don't believe that.” André embraced him, his father's bristly cheeks against his own.
His father seemed to be chewing something far back inside his mouth. “Let me know, what happens.” He turned and walked toward the métro entrance, suddenly a bowed-over burly man who hesitated at the stairs, looked back and nodded, a wink perhaps, André couldn't see, and stepped down into the teeming maw as into a freshly turned mass grave.
11
“YOU? LEADING MUJIHADEEN?” Mohammed said.
“You'd be leading them,” Rosa answered. “I just know the way to safety.”
“I don't care about their safety. Nor do they.”
“If they're dead, how can they fight?”
Static rose and fell on the radio, the operator bent over it as if praying, Rosa thought, awaiting the Word. Four mujihadeen were playing cards on a piece of cardboard set on a broken box. Like rodents, Mohammed's fingers burrowed into his gown, joined. “She fears for your safety, Hassan!” he called to the guard at the door.
Crunching a pistachio shell in his teeth, Hassan looked straight at Rosa, back to Mohammed, spat the shell.
She curled her lip. “I want to win.”
Mohammed's head tilted back, shadowed in the yellow lamplight, his blue eyes seeming to look down his face, his full beard, to hers. “Win?”
Long and pale-whiskered in his white gown, he looked both taut and empty of everything, as if not really there – only the maroon pillows on which he sat, the torn carpet littered with cartridge casings, the guard picking his teeth with a broken match, a European country scene in a shattered gilded frame hanging sideways on the graffiti-covered wall.
“We had a picture like that, when I was a girl,” she said. “Of a woman walking a path toward a straw-roofed cottage, with purple hills behind. Made you feel warm, going home.”
He yawned, covering his mouth. “And?”
“It was in our farm at Ramalla. Where my mother and father moved in 1950 after we escaped from Beersheba. Then in 1967 we escaped to Nablus, and the mule died, and then to Zababida where we had to live in a tent camp and my father caught tuberculosis. Then they moved us across the Jordan to another camp where both my sisters died, and then to Tiberias where my father dug a farm out of the rocks and boulders, but they took that away and chased us across the Golan and up the Jebel ech Cheikh to Mount Hermon where my father and mother died, in Ain Aata, when the Israelis bombed us. And you ask me what it means to win?”
“God grant peace to the souls of your family,” Mohammed said mechanically. “What was it like, in Ain Aata?”
“Everyone made us feel outsiders. Going home from school the boys hit me with rocks.”
“There were too many of you, coming up from Palestine.”
“If I have to tell you what winning means ...” She paused, a shell coming like a distant train's whistle, something that could take you somewhere, far from it all. For a very long time it came no nearer, wailing in mid-sky, then dived at them shrieking, seething metal louder than a comet rushing down; she rolled over on her side clutching her head as the building shuddered and heaved in the roar of falling concrete in the next street, plaster crashing down.
She sat up, head covered, held her breath till the ceiling stopped falling. Bullets cracked along a wall, plaster flying. Another shell was screaming down; her ears were blocked with plaster dust, she couldn't hear; the shell fell a few streets away, the building shuddering anew like a crazed dancer. “You should be ashamed!” she yelled. “To let them shell us like this!”
Mohammed brushed plaster chunks from her shoulders. “That was Amal, from Shatila. A mistake –”
One of the guards relit the lantern, throwing the room into jagged boiling shadows. Somewhere overhead a machine gun fired, then a Kalashnikov, a long, rattling salvo. “Shooting at nothing!” she fumed. Another shell was dropping; they keep coming, she thought, like homeless children, like hunting dogs. “Don't you care?” she screamed. The shell fell like a dying airplane into the next street, knocking her to her knees, new plaster tumbling. He said something she couldn't hear over the waterfall rumble of a building collapsing. It takes so long, she thought, for a building to fall, like a man dying.
Mohammed was brushing plaster from her shoulder again, and she sensed suddenly how much he did care that this was happening, that the way to make him gentle was to hurt him. A bullet sang off the window frame into the room, seeking flesh. “You're going to lose us all,” she said.
“Kill the light!” he called.
“We'll have to move down a floor,” a guard yelled. “The other side.”
“Can't see from there.”
“He's in the Life Building over there, your sniper,” Rosa shouted.
“We can't get him from here!” Hassan snarled. Bullets punched through the wall, fifty caliber, and she dove hitting her head on chunks of plaster. The bullets had crossed right through, in the front walls and out the back; she lay gripping a gun then realized it was a piece of the gilded frame.
She followed them down the dark plaster-piled stairway to the next floor. They were smashing open a door to a back apartment. The wood splintered and gave. An enormous bang knocked her to her knees, the floor wobbling.
“Just a rocket, up there,” Mohammed said calmly, as if he'd found the simple answer to a complex problem. “Lucky we moved.”
The new apartment was well-furnished. Like an archaeological dig, Rosa thought, a tomb not yet looted. “Damn!” Hassan said, lighting the lantern.
More mujihadeen