Mao II

IN BEIRUT

Her driver tells her three stories. First one, people are burning tires. In the midst of car bombs and street skirmishes and the smash of long-range field guns and buildings coming down and whole areas lost in smoke, people are burning tires to drive away mosquitoes and flies.

Second, a pair of local militias are firing at portraits of each other's leader. These are large photographs pasted to walls or hanging from awning poles in the vegetable souks and they are shot up and ripped apart, some pictures large enough to swing from a wire strung over the street, and they are shot up and quickly replaced and then ripped apart again. There is a new exuberance in these particular streets, based on this latest form of fighting.

Last, they are making bombs that contain flooring nails and roofing nails. The police are finding quantities of common nails, nails sprayed and dashed and driven into the bodies of victims of random blasts.

Brita waits for the point of story number three. Isn't there supposed to be an irony, some grim humor, some sense of the peculiar human insistence on seeing past the larger madness into small and skewed practicalities, into off-shaded moments that help us consider a narrow hope? This business about the nails doesn't do a thing for her. And she's not so crazy about the other stones either. She has come here already tired of these stories, including the ones she has never heard. They're all the same and all true and it is sad that they are necessary. And they almost always exasperate her, especially the stories about terror groups that issue press credentials.

They are driving past the rubble of the racetrack's arched facade. Then they are going the wrong way down a one-way street but it doesn't matter. All the streets are right and wrong. She sees cars burnt skinless, water flying gloriously from broken mains. Street life as well, vendors, wooden carts, a man selling radios and shoes from the hood of his car. There are balconies dangling vertically from shelled buildings. Then they are going into the slums near the refugee camps. Cars wrapped in posters of Khomeini, whole cars postered except for a space on the driver's side of the windshield. Sandbagged shops and mounds of un-collected garbage. She sees a street vendor's little homemade city of Marlboro cartons, the neat stacks of cigarettes a wistful urban grid of order and deployment.

Brita is on assignment for a German magazine, here to photograph a local leader named Abu Rashid. He is hidden somewhere deep in these shot-up streets where weeds and wild hibiscus crowd out of alleyways and the women wear headscarves and stand on line, long lines everywhere for food, drinking water, bedding, clothing.

Her driver is a man about sixty who pronounces the second b in bomb. He has used the word about eleven times and she waits for it now, softly repeating it after him. The bomb. The bombing. People in Lebanon must talk about nothing but Lebanon and in Beirut it is clearly all Beirut.

A beggar approaches the car, chanting, one eye shut, chicken feathers stapled to his shirt. The driver blows the horn at a guy who carries a bayonet in an alligator scabbard and the horn plays the opening bars of "California Here I Come."

The streets run with images. They cover walls and clothing-pictures of martyrs, clerics, fighting men, holidays in Tahiti. There is a human skull nailed to a stucco wall and then there are pictures of skulls, there is skull writing, there are boys wearing T-shirts with illustrated skulls, serial grids of blue skulls. The driver translates the wall writing and it is about the Father of Skulls, the Blood Skulls of Hollywood U.S.A., Arafat Go Home, the Skull Maker Was Here. The Arabic script is gorgeous even in hasty spray paint. It is about Suicide Sam the Car Bomb Man. It says Ali 21. It says Here I Am Again Courtesy Ali 21. The car moves slowly through narrow streets and up into dirt alleys and Brita thinks this place is a millennial image mill. There are movie posters everywhere but no sign of anything resembling a theater. Posters of bare-chested men with oversized weapons, grenades lashed to their belts and cities burning in the background. She looks through shell holes in a building wall and sees another ruined building with an exposed room containing three stoned men sitting on a brand-new sofa. There are boys tattooed with skulls who work the checkpoints wearing pieces of Syrian, American, Lebanese, French and Israeli uniforms and toting automatic rifles with banana clips.

The driver shows Brita's press card and the boys look in at her. One of them says something in German and she has to resist the totally stupid impulse to offer him money for his cap. He wears a great-looking cap with a bent blue peak that she would love to give to a friend in New York.

The car moves on.

She does not photograph writers anymore. It stopped making sense. She takes assignments now, does the interesting things, barely watched wars, children running in the dust. Writers stopped one day. She doesn't know how it happened but they came to a quiet end. They stopped being the project she would follow forever.

Now there are signs for a new soft drink, Coke II, signs slapped on cement-block walls, and she has the crazy idea that these advertising placards herald the presence of the Maoist group. Because the lettering is so intensely red. The placards get bigger as the car moves into deeply cramped spaces, into many offending smells, open sewers, rubber burning, a dog all ribs and tongue and lying still and gleaming with green flies, and the signs are clustered now, covering almost all the wall space, with added graffiti that are hard to make out, overlapping swirls, a rage in crayon and paint, and Brita gets another crazy idea, that these are like the big character posters of the Cultural Revolution in China-warnings and threats, calls for self-correction. Because there is a certain physical resemblance. The placards are stacked ten high in some places, up past the second storey, and they crowd each other, they edge over and proclaim, thousands of Arabic words weaving between the letters and Roman numerals of the Coke II logo.

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 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.

She sees his eyes decide, the little flash of letting go, and he attacks her now. She protects the camera, turning a shoulder toward the boy, and she thinks it is only seconds before the interpreter will step between them. The boy hits her hard in the forearm and reaches in for the camera and she throws an elbow that misses and then slaps him across the face.

There is a pause while everyone reflects on what has happened. They see it again. Brita feels it beating in her chest, happening again.

She waits for the boy to look at his father for an explanation. But he stares at her evenly with new contempt, new indulgence in his hatred, and she sees him get ready to come at her once more.

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 herself to be alert. It is nearly four a.m. and she has a sense of some heavy presence, a grinding in the earth. She leans over the rail and sees a tank come chugging around the corner into her cratered street. Mounted cannon bobbing. She feels the beat of adrenaline but stays where she is and waits. She thinks it's an old Soviet T-34, some scarred and cruddy ancient, sold and stolen two dozen times, changing sides and systems and religions. The only markings are graffiti, many years of spritzed paint. The tank moves up the street and she hears voices, sees people walking behind it. Civilians talking and laughing and well dressed, twenty adults and half as many children, mostly girls in pretty dresses and white knee-stockings and patent-leather shoes. And here is the stunning thing that takes her a moment to understand, that this is a wedding party going by. The bride and groom carry champagne glasses and some of the girls hold sparklers that send off showers of excited light. A guest in a pastel tuxedo smokes a long cigar and does a dance around a shell hole, delighting the kids. The bride's gown is beautiful, with lacy appliqué at the bodice, and she looks surpassingly alive, they all look transcendent, free of limits and unsurprised to be here. They make it seem only natural that a wedding might advance its resplendence with a free-lance tank as escort. Sparklers going. Other children holding roses tissued in fern. Brita is gripping the rail. She wants to dance or laugh or jump off the balcony. It seems completely possible that she will land softly among them and walk along in her pajama shirt and panties all the way to heaven. The tank is passing right below her, turret covered in crude drawings, and she hurries inside and pours another glass of melon liqueur and comes out to toast the newlyweds, calling down, "Bonne chance" and "Bonheur" and "Good luck" and "Salám" and "Skal," and the gun turret begins to rotate and the cannon eases slowly around like a smutty honeymoon joke and everyone is laughing. The bridegroom raises his glass to the half-dressed foreigner on the top-floor balcony and then they pass into the night, followed by a jeep with a recoilless rifle mounted at the rear.

It is over too soon. She stays outside, listening to the last small rustle of their voices falling. It is still dark and she feels a chill in the smoky air. The city is quiet for the first time since she arrived. She examines the silence. She looks out past the rooftops, westward. There is a flash out there in the dark near a major checkpoint. Then another in the same spot, several more, intense and white. She waits for the reciprocating flash, the return fire, but all the bursts are in one spot and there is no sound. What could it be then if it's not the start of the day's first exchange of automatic-weapons fire? Only one thing of course. Someone is out there with a camera and a flash unit. Brita stays on the balcony for another minute, watching the magnesium pulse that brings an image to a strip of film. She crosses her arms over her body against the chill and counts off the bursts of relentless light. The dead city photographed one more time.