Mao II - Don Delillo [96]
Abu Rashid says something. There’s another pause. The interpreter repeats the remark and then the boy picks up his hood and leaves the room.
Brita takes her time putting things back in the equipment bag. She hears the boys in the yard reciting a lesson together. Feeling detached, almost out-of-body, she walks over to Rashid and shakes his hand, actually introduces herself, pronouncing her name slowly.
Downstairs the guide with half an ear is standing with the water bottle cradled to his chest.
Brita is staying in East Beirut in a flat that belongs to a friend of a friend. The hotels are crushed or ransacked or occupied by squatters and the flat has been empty for over a year, so here she is, back out on the balcony again. It’s late and she has eaten and taken a bath and read a magazine piece about Beirut because what else can you read or think or talk about in a place like this. She doesn’t especially want to sleep. Not that sleep would be easy in any case. All night intermittent bursts of machine-gun fire and many dark rumbles to the immediate east that sound like mountains ringing. And the odd round fired now and then, some despond of the heart or a drug deal gone slightly sour, and she doesn’t like being in bed when the shooters are about. Even in the periodic stillness she finds herself scrutinizing the silence, waiting uneasily for the boxy clatter to begin again. So out she comes one more time, half dressed, wanting to stand within it, feel the cordite wash of the city against her skin.
She sees streaky lights bolting from the coast and making long bodiless arcs over the roofscape and down through scuds of dark smoke that roll across the low sky. A black van goes by right below and there’s a curly-haired guy sticking out of the sunroof wearing an iridescent track suit and shouldering a rocket-propelled grenade launcher that’s about seven feet long. He is the Phallic Master of the Levant, at least for now. A radio plays voices calling in, several radios perched on balconies, people talking about Beirut because there’s no other subject.
She wants to stand inside it. It is wrapped all around her like some computerized wall of enhanced sensation.
She goes inside and finds a bottle of Midori melon liqueur. She can hardly believe there is such a thing. She has seen it advertised at airports and convention centers, the walk-through places of the world, but never thought it was more than a gesture, a billboard that rides the skyline in streaming light. And now she finds an actual bottle of the stuff in someone’s abandoned flat. Where else but here? Everybody’s nowhere. She pours some into a glass and takes it out to the balcony. Sirens going in the distance. On a wall across the street there are layers of graffiti, deep deposits of names and dates and slogans, and she sees in the dim light that Ali 21 has made his way into the Christian sector. He is here in French and English, newly and crudely sprayed.
Ali 21 Against the World.
A silver flare sails briefly over the streets, bits of incandescence trailing away. Radio voices calling all around her. Beirut, Beirut. They crowd in toward her, pressing with a mournful force. People calling from basement shelters, faces in shadow, clothing going dark with heavy sweat, sleeping children curled around their war toys. All the hostages, pray for them stashed in their closets and toilets. All the babies, pray for them lying in rag hammocks. All the refugees, pray for their dead and wait for the shelling to subside. The war is so fucking simple. It is the lunar part of us that dreams of wasted terrain. She hears their voices calling across the leveled city. Our only language is Beirut.
She drinks the scummy green liqueur and goes inside to get some sleep. She has to be up before seven and on her way out of here.
About an hour later something wakes her. She comes out on the balcony again, telling