Mao II - Don Delillo [93]
A man is standing in a devastated square. The car comes to a stop and Brita slings her equipment bag over a shoulder and gets out. The driver hands her the press credentials. It is clear she is supposed to follow the other man. He is older than the driver and she notes that he is missing half his right ear. He wears slippers and carries a plastic water bottle. There are people living in the ruins among powdery hills of gypsum. Where there are cars at all, parked snug to walls, they either have no plates or are cleanly stripped, going brown in the sun like fruit rinds. She sees a family living in a vehicle that is a cross between a wagon and a pickup but without wheels, sunk to the axle in dust. Her guide carries the water bottle tucked up near his armpit and leads her without a word directly into a collapsed building. She lowers her head and follows in the dimness over fallen masonry. Wires dangle everywhere and the dust smells sour. They exit through the remains of a butcher shop and cross an alley to the next building, which may have been a small factory once. It seems intact except for shell scars and broken windows and they enter through a large steel door complete with cross-bracing.
There are two hooded boys standing watch on the stairs with photographs of a gray-haired man pinned to their shirts. On the second floor the guide stands at a door and waits for Brita to enter. Inside, two men are eating spaghetti with pita bread and diet cola. The guide slips away and one of the eating men gets up and says he is the interpreter. Brita looks at the other man, who is easily in his sixties and wears clean khakis with shirtsleeves rolled neatly to the elbows. He has gray hair and a slightly darker mustache and his flesh is a ruddy desert bronze. He is bony-handed, maybe slightly infirm, and has gold-rimmed glasses and a couple of gold fillings.
Brita starts setting up. She doesn’t think it is necessary to ease into this with small talk. The interpreter moves some furniture, then sits down to finish eating. The men sit there and eat in silence.
She looks out the window into a schoolyard. The school building at the far end is a near ruin. In the yard there are thirty or forty boys seated on the ground, arms crossed over their raised knees, and a man in a khaki outfit is speaking to them.
Rashid says something to the interpreter.
“He is saying you are completely welcome to join us.”
“This is very nice but I don’t want to cause inconvenience or delay. I’m sure he is busy.”
She aims the camera out the window, sighting on the boys in the yard.
Rashid says something.
“Not allowed,” the interpreter says, half rising. “No pictures except in this room.”
She shrugs and says, “I didn’t know you were placing restrictions.” She sits down, goes through her bag for something. “I was under the impression the reporter does his story and I do my pictures. Nobody said anything to me about avoiding certain subjects. ”
Rashid doesn’t lift his head from the plate. He says to her, “Don’t bring your problems to Beirut.”
“He is saying we have all the problems we can handle so if you have communications difficulty in Munich or Frankfurt we don’t want to hear about it.”
Brita lights up a cigarette.
Rashid says something, this time in Arabic, which goes untranslated.
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