Anti Lebanon. Carl Shuker

did. She said it with a little shame, though, as if it were slightly dubious or doomed, something to be looked away from. The second wave of Japanese riding in on this sudden infamy were instead revolutionary tourists—hippies—and largely assimilated as if baffled by the complexity, the changing times, sucked into the everyday, and gave up their Japanese identity, married, converted, contributed another twist to the plait of Lebanese beauty.

      Leon and Keiko’s mother, Junko, was a full-blooded Japanese and no-longer practicing Sunni Muslim married (in a civil ceremony in Cyprus) to an Orthodox three-time jujitsu champion of Lebanon and ex-militiaman. She’d come to Lebanon in support of Palestinians; she’d fallen in love and stayed as the wife of a Christian soldier in disgrace. The voice-over Leon chose stuck to the dry historical stuff, and dangerous pro-Israeli U.S. broadcast stuff, and over it played the soundtrack, just running water and the creak of the door of Keiko’s ever-empty bedroom, opening and closing, which had sounded exactly like Star Wars’ Chewbacca growling and had been a good joke between them as children for a long time, but that he’d treated and manipulated, sped up and down, so it didn’t, and it wasn’t, anymore.

      So the first part of In the anti Lebanon was oblique, ironic, a hopelessly student film, coded for Leon alone, shot and edited in a bitter, extended blankness, a period he can barely remember, and almost bereft of any signification to anyone other than him. It was the part he most liked, for the blankness it enacted: somehow frightening to him, for all the unfrightening things it seemed to say.

      Part two was what made the film popular with students, what got him some compliments at the festival, what spoke more readily in recognizable terms: Leon’s satire of the local art films he hated. A car bomb near the ABC shopping mall in Achrafieh had led to the closing of Dolce & Gabbana. When they had gone, some students discovered shirts and dresses and suits and scarves left abandoned in the dumpsters behind the mall, and they donated them to the fashion school. Leon approached several patients in the serious burns unit of the Orthodox Hospital and asked them to model the clothes in waiting rooms of the day surgery unit. To his surprise, several said yes.

      The third part of In the anti Lebanon was Leon’s farewell to his degree and to a large extent a farewell to his ideals, the culmination of this, his tripartite farewell to the future. He took a bus over the Mountain and up the Bekaa then a taxi to the bombed aquifer, subject of his abandoned dissertation, origin of the mathematically beautiful losing streams of the anti Lebanon. He filmed the shining earth, the rising river’s rime of quicksilver, the lobes of mercury rippling at the bottom of the poisoned cataracts, reflecting the refractions in the ruined streams above in their own slowed, dead, and deadly imitation, pulsing in a bitter sarcastic sympathy with what they lay within. It was all silver or was it all blue. Was this part of the film exactly about himself? Anyway, it ran in silence.

      “Exactly,” Etienne said. As if they were agreed. He dragged on his cigarette as if something had been won.

      “No-oh,” said Emmanuelle, smiling beautifully as if appalled, and shaking her shaven head, “that’s not what he ... ” She stopped speaking. And then she turned and stared and smiled at Etienne as though her case was made.

      “You’re not the same, Etienne,” said Lauren, and her voice was flat and angry.

      “You’re not saying the same thing,” said Georges, and Leon saw him again as he was. Georges protected others from themselves; he did this now by keeping Lauren from speaking the truth.

      Emmanuelle then abruptly stepped forward and hugged Leon; in her height her soft cheek directly against his. “Oh poor Leon,” she whispered. “That was . . . so sad. . . . ”

      A long trail of gunfire echoed back off the Mountain. He could feel her short fine hair against his ear.

      “Don’t,” he said very quietly. The hug was held too long—there was an awkward silence around them. They separated. Leon felt messy and hot. There was another spiral of gunfire, and they stared out east. Roughly, Leon said, “What some people think is that when your guard dog becomes too powerful you need to think about putting it to sleep.”

      “Yes. No,” Etienne said, thinking, balancing the terms of the statement with his passion. “Yes.”

      Georges laughed loudly and Lauren looked out over the balcony disgusted.

      “Speaking of guard dogs, Bashir is working for a Phalange MP down the hill,” Pascal said. “He’s gotten huge.” Bashir was a Maronite from their neighborhood in Achrafieh they all knew as a kid; a bodybuilder now a bodyguard.

      “See there—that’s gainful employment, he’s got a job that’s just right for him,” Emmanuelle said.

      She was being completely sincere.

      For a moment then, Leon let himself go, and he thought of being with her, of just trusting in her basic good-heartedness, her simplicity, her desire for children, a married life, a kitchen somewhere and a sink and a bassinet and services on Sundays (she was Orthodox too). He thought of forgiving the gentle shakes of her head and her exaggerated concentration during the TV speeches: the nodding, the way she hummed, the strange and infuriating laxity, as he saw it, and her willingness to understand, to be understanding, even when she was made fun of. He thought of not seeing people smiling kindly behind her in semi-disbelief when a chance remark like this showed just how much she didn’t get it. He thought of wondering why he felt he had to forgive her.

      And because she was long and tall and quite beautiful, and because he was angry, it was easy for him again to suddenly imagine sleeping with Emmanuelle, being with Emmanuelle. He’d for so long fantasized about her and he was instantaneously disgusted and bored with himself. Suddenly the end of years of low-grade sexual tension was there. He thought of her as a passive person, a compliant, an open and a steady person in the body and the face, right now in her youth, of a six-foot beauty, and she half-loved him or seemed to, and it had always seemed easy, picturing sex with her and her long thighs and the sensuality of her feet, as large as his own. He saw now how pitiful it was: just easy, just a relief, a lie, easier than really getting to know her, her family, convincing her to marry him, convincing them to let her, getting a life, settling down, settling.

      Until payday he had about US$150. Marry him? A trap avoided or another door closed; it amounted to the same thing.

      “Bashir,” Georges said, and shook his head.

      “I hate that man,” said Lauren. “That awful big man.”

      Etienne stared at her.

      “Let’s get drunk,” said Leon, “and hear what the new boy has to tell us.”

      So they laughed and they went inside and the movie was restarted but the light was left on and they drank and they talked. Something had been dispelled in that tense moment on the balcony, and then some fantasy had taken its place: a fantasy of friends discussing politics in a buzzy fug of beer and smoke, while outside didn’t really matter; what you did or thought didn’t really ultimately matter.

      Leon let his face talk.

      IN MEMORY OF BASIL the poster had read. There had been a poem to the left. Do not stand at my grave and weep, it began: the ubiquitous bereavement poem, selflessly secular here, and it was in English. The photograph of the martyr Basil Fleihan was from the waist up and to the right of the poem. The whole thing was screen-printed on a large canvas taut within a metal frame. It was mounted on the barrier by St. George’s Marina opposite the Beirut Four Seasons, 100 meters from where Basil Fleihan was killed with Hariri and twenty others in the bomb blast that left the grand and ancient St. George’s Hotel cordoned-off, hunched and drooping and hollowed out, an exhibit frozen and waiting, waiting for the UN Special Tribunal to rule, and in a peculiarly bitter further coincidence, waiting for Hariri’s reconstruction company Solidere’s claim on their equally ancient marina to work itself out and let them trade again. Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there; I do not sleep. Basil Fleihan was a Christian, and his face was Western. The next stanzas of the poem are lost, because the Hezbollah who that night came so far east, and built the barricades, burned the tires and slashed the poster, had followed