Anti Lebanon. Carl Shuker

and seemed to, and he brought the SIG Sauer for his father to conduct his reprisal. Abu Keiko slowly shook his bent white head.

      Keiko in militia fatigues sitting in the road outside Makhlouf’s, the same age Leon is now, dragging herself backward on the heels of her palms away from the puddle and rags that was her foot, screaming at it. Neither his uncle nor his father looked at Leon; they knew, he knew, they all knew. What would or could Leon do? Leon wouldn’t, Leon couldn’t. But old ex-militia man Abu Keiko said there would be no reprisal. We are Christian, he said, and here in my heart is love.

      Across the road from Abu Keiko’s security post at the rich Kuwaitis’ apartments opposite the Place des Martyrs, Leon has watched his father talk about her to the Lebanese Army soldiers who all “know” him and “knew” her and gather and sit and smoke in the glow of his charisma, bored on the overnight details. His papa always has his nunchaku tucked in his belt (three-times jujitsu champion of Lebanon during the civil war; when? who remembers; who knows now) and he never sits down unless alone (like he’s protecting the soldiers). He makes the arms-akimbo gesture when Leon knows he’s saying, “She was stro-ong.” The soldiers nod soberly and look at Abu Keiko’s knees. Leon’s father’s post is only two blocks from Makhlouf’s where she was killed. The soldiers love him like a mad old grandfather; they know him, as Abu Keiko is fond of saying, and he knows them.

      But they don’t see his coldness or his true oldness, they don’t hear his screams at Leon’s mother at night or feel his steel; although they might know what in the past he was capable of, what he has done. The balaclavaed assassin walked directly down the middle of the street as Keiko tried to drag herself away and he fired the weapon down at her barely looking and continued walking to his car and did not slow nor slacken his pace. The final shot that killed her was defined in the inquest as “a direct penetrating injury to the heart.” Ja’ja’ called for it in that terrible year because, like Abu Keiko had been back in 1989, she was with his rival, the Christian general Aoun, newly returned to Lebanon from his fifteen years of Parisian exile, and his Free Patriotic Movement party, the FPM. A lieutenant in the Lebanese Army, she had been favored and rising and her influence had been growing in the neighborhood. Ja’ja’ had perhaps tried to recruit her and been refused.

      Leon’s father makes US$400 a month as a security guard. Ja’ja’s men came to Abu Keiko two years after Ja’ja’ had his daughter murdered and offered him that much a week to work for him. Abu Keiko had told Leon that Ja’ja’ asked and that he’d turned him down. Leon didn’t believe his father for a long time, that Ja’ja’ would make that offer, but now it seems so ridiculous, so coarse and cruel, of course it must be true.

      Ja’ja’ funds surgeon’s training in heart bypasses at the Orthodox hospital. Hezbollah provide heart pills and blood. Of the Hezbollah, Leon’s father likes to say, “They are for the people and I love them.” But he has a bypass, and has Ja’ja’s money in or near his heart, even so.

      Between their two massifs Leon is what is known as a losing stream. What you see is what is left of him. In the words of his hydrogeology text: Secretive, irregular, branching. Perched in the epikarst; lost in the swallow holes. Coursing through the karst aquifers of the anti Lebanon, I deplete as I run.

      Up in Hamra, but that far east already was impossible, surely?—so close, maybe farther, with the echoes it was too hard for him to tell—he could hear the automatic gunfire thickening, clotting, periods without pause..... .. .. .. . . . ...... ... ...............

      Tout Beirut may have been calling, but not him with only two U.S. dollars’ credit on his cell phone and only a few thousand utterly deflated Lebanese pounds in his pocket. The newly restored Downtown was empty. There were only the Lebanese Army APCs and soldiers reinforced at all the spokes of the wheel of new streets and unfinished alleys leading to the pristine Place d’Etoile and the Serail, the wheel’s diameter a ring of rolled-out razor wire.

      He slowed to a walk and greeted the first soldier he saw.

      “What’s up? It’s Hezbollah? Amal?” Leon said as he came near.

      The soldier stared at his face for a little too long. Then he shrugged amiably, hitched his M16 and boredly made two fists, sparring with one another.

      Leon nodded as if a little skeptical or just cool, and walked past him. The U.S.-made Vietnam-era APC was mounted with a massive but ancient Russian antiaircraft gun and parked sideways forming a gate in the middle of the street’s razor wire barrier. The three soldiers sitting around the big weapon looked down on him silently.

      The empty boulevard ahead gently dipped and rose. The concrete barriers were pitted and paint streaked with old fights and accidents. They had been moved from the sidewalks to the parking bays, narrowing the road to a single lane. There was the fundamental-sounding clump of an RPG, which told him that what was happening had spread, and was in more than one neighborhood, stretching west-east but back in the city. The further he got from the sea the closer the sounds became. At the Place des Martyrs, the Green Line of wasteland-crumbled concrete began, the blocks of dead yellow grass littered with rubble and trash up to the car parks. The Green Line known thus not for any UN ruling, but for the quiet explosion of growth in the streets in the war. A hundred meters wide and nine kilometers long dividing the promontory between east and west, sniper deadly no man’s land: a silent forest forming around the skeletal buildings. Under Hariri the remains—the old theaters, the machine gun nests, the tunnels and shops and blood-soaked stone and canvas—were bulldozed into the sea at the terminus of the Green Line to form the foundation of the new marina-corniche. No man’s land reclaimed now lying doubly deserted in the aftermath of Hariri’s death, and diffidently guarded by Leon’s friends, with their law degrees, their marketing diplomas.

      The gunfire shifted emphasis and pitch. Either the open areas were amplifying the sounds or the fighting was genuinely closer. It was less cracking than popping now, and there were no cars anywhere. No movement and little light, and above him the low poison-green clouds came in softly in strips like ragged sand dunes in a desertified sky over the wasteland to Mount Lebanon.

      Leon felt a sick sort of relief approaching the Christian East and rue George Haddad; its unacknowledged and unspoken border, still in conflict de facto if not de jure. The Kuwaitis’ apartment complex that his father guarded six nights a week looked emptily back over the Green Line toward the block comprising the Roman ruins, the Hariri mosque, the Orthodox cathedral, the Maronite cathedral, and the Virgin megastore. Hariri’s monument to Lebanese solidarity past and present and future, now utterly empty. The sensitive Kuwaitis had all left Lebanon a day ago when Aoun declared the general strike. Everyone knew it was trouble. As Leon cut across, down to his left at the intersection of Haddad and Avenue Charles Helou, there were more figures than usual outside the headquarters of the Christian Maronite Phalange party, a large tan building archer-windowed like a citadel, beflagged with the Phalange cedar, presiding over the port. Leon could see thickset Phalangist men on the rooftops watching for developments, watching him cross the square and the Green Line too.

      At the intersection by the Phalange HQ was a Lebanese Army APC with, pointedly, no AA gun. There was a jeep beside it and twenty men at least watching the Phalangists back—in the dim and the scattered streetlights it was hard to tell, but they were probably police not army. As if the army would or could, without falling apart, stop the Phalange or the Lebanese Forces anyway, if they came out in anger. In the old days the officers were all Christians trained at Saint-Cyr and the military écoles of France; the soldiers were Sunni, Shi’a, Druze. When fighting goes sectarian, uniforms come off and soldiers go home to their tribes. Everyone knows it’s this way and it works. Farther up George Haddad was another APC and jeep, glowing orange-green under the streetlights like pollution or strange sweets, by the Paul Café on the rue Gouraud corner.

      As he got closer he walked slower. He held his empty hands out from his sides so they would know he was unarmed. He could see the silhouette of Abu Keiko under the trees with a fat sergeant and some soldiers, laughing. Behind his father in the light sat one single plastic chair. Beside it was a paper bag