An Accidental American: A Novel (10 page)

It was well past dark when I finally made my way back to the Pensão Rosa. There was a light rain falling, a fine Atlantic drizzle gently settling on the city’s red roofs and stained cobbles. In the Bairro Alto, the old gas lanterns were lit, their sooty flames shadow-dancing off the cracked plaster facades of the old town houses. Along the rua da Rosa, the first stirrings of nightlife could be heard. The click of glass-ware and billiard balls, a snippet of fado.

Quanto sou desgraçada

Quanto finjo alegria

Quanto choro a cantar…

Up the hill, the Rosa’s front door opened and a couple stepped out into the street, walking arm in arm. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a figure move in the doorway opposite, shoulders and head ducking out and back again, eyes and teeth winking in the darkness. A man, his movements familiar, I thought, even in the guttering flame of the old lanterns.

I stopped, then stepped toward the dark doorway. “Rahim?” I called quietly.

Something rustled in response. Fabric moving against fabric, what could have been shoes on wet stone. Then, except for the nighttime respiration of the Bairro Alto and the chatter of rain, all was quiet.

“Rahim?” I called again. But there was no one in the doorway’s dark rectangle, just a narrow passageway burrowing backward. At the end of the passage was a dimly lit courtyard and a bare and crooked olive tree.

T
HIRTY-FIVE NOW, THIRTY-SIX, RAHIM THOUGHT
,
ducking farther into the shadows.

He did a quick backward calculation in his mind, remembering just how young Nicole had been before, how young they’d both been.

Her hair was still the same dark brown, though shorter than he remembered, cut back to show the slope of her powerful shoulders. Her face was just a shade narrower, a trick of memory or age or both, and her dark eyes were set back into the pale oval. But there was something about the way she carried herself that was fundamentally changed.

What prison will do to a person, he heard his brother say. Six years in the Maison des Baumettes. Six years that had hardened her, and that was saying a lot. She’d always been tough as nails, with the guarded independence of a stray cat, even in bed. It was a kind of aloofness that offended him in other women, this eternal holding back. But there was a depth to Nicole’s reserve that had made him want her more.

She’d always been good at her craft, and Rahim had been surprised when he’d first heard about the mess in Marseille, surprised to find that Nicole had thrown herself back in with Ed in the first place. Even among people who lied for a living, Ed Blake had a bad reputation. He was the kind of hustler who would have cheated his own mother. Or, in this case, his own daughter.

Rahim didn’t know the details, only what he’d heard through the grapevine. Something about a car scam, reselling rentals with phony pedigrees. It was just the sort of thing Ed would have cooked up, crude and old-fashioned. Somehow he’d talked Nicole into doing all the paperwork, the
cartes grises
and the credit cards and licenses they’d used to lease the cars in the first place.

The way Rahim had heard it, Ed had cut and run at the first sign of trouble, leaving Nicole to pick up the pieces. And when the French police, alerted by a string of bad credit cards, finally caught up with him in Val d’Isère, he’d offered Nicole up, talking his way into a nice neat six-month sentence.

But Nicole had done her time, every last day of it, as Rahim would have expected her to. Not someone who would sell others out to save herself, Rahim thought. And the last Rahim had heard, she’d taken a consulting job with some document security firm. Out of the life, and who could blame her?

Out of the life, and yet she’d come back after all these years. Come back and was asking about him. Rahim couldn’t help but wonder why.

At first it’s just a feeling, nothing more, the internal knowledge that something has changed. Two weeks later, I know for sure. Rahim has gone out, and I’m standing in our chilly bathroom, bare feet on the cold tiles. In the silvered mirror above the sink, my own face stares back at me. On the rim of the sink, balanced carefully on the curve of white porcelain, is a slender finger of plastic.

Outside, on the rua da Moeda, the Bica funicular groans up the hill. Ninety-nine, ninety-eight…I start a long count backward from one hundred, listening to the car fade slowly into the distance, teeth grinding at the worn rails.

Eighteen, I count, seventeen…On the sink, in the tiny window, a thin blue bar has appeared. No question, no doubt, except for the choice that is now waiting to be made.

The front door opens, much earlier than I had expected it would, and I hear two voices in the living room, the guttural reverberations of Arabic. Rahim and one of his Moroccan friends. I take a deep breath and gather myself. Out in the living room, the radio comes on, Europe 1, from France. I will have to tell him, I think. If he hasn’t guessed already, he will.

I tuck the plastic stick in my pocket, open the door, and start down the hall. Rahim is in the kitchen making tea. He nods silently at me, spooning dried mint into the ornate pot Driss brought with him as a gift from Morocco. Rahim’s friend Mustapha shouts something from the living room, and Rahim answers back, his tone angry.

This is their nightly ritual now. Mint tea and the news and, later in the evening, a bottle of cheap port. The long slow countdown to January 15, the deadline given to the Iraqis by the Americans for withdrawal from Kuwait. The long final breath before war. By now we all know Saddam Hussein will never back down.

In the other room, Mustapha lights a cigarette, one of his shaggy roll-your-owns, and the smell of the tobacco makes me gag.

Yes, I think, I will have to tell him, but not now. Not like this.

“
Je sort,
” I say. I’m going out.

Even with the hindsight of history, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact date on which the Lebanese civil war began. Aftershocks from the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, in the form of a massive influx of Palestinian refugees, had shaken the foundations of Lebanon’s delicate political balance for some time. In the ensuing struggle for power, violent confrontation became more and more common, as the Lebanese army and the Christian Phalange Party, led by the Gemayel family, pitted themselves against the Palestinians and the militias of Kamal Jumblatt’s left-wing Lebanese National Movement.

The gradual buildup of hostilities continued until the spring of 1975, when three of Pierre Gemayel’s bodyguards were shot in Ain al-Rummaneh and the Phalangist militia ambushed a bus of Palestinians in retaliation. The incident sparked a wave of revenge killings and anarchy, and within a month Lebanon had descended into the bloody war from which it would not fully emerge for almost twenty years.

Two decades, an entire generation of violence, and yet there were periods of calm, beats like the stalled pulses of a failing heart during which people could begin to imagine that the worst might be over. Days or even months, and sometimes just long enough for a quiet meal. A hundred and fifty short-lived cease-fires in the first eight years of the war alone.

It was during one of the first and longest of these lulls, the summer of 1977, that my mother took a job teaching violin at the American University of Beirut, and we moved back to my grandparents’ house in Achrafiye. My mother had heard enough of the war and had decided it would be better to witness the reality than to imagine the worst from afar. The Syrians had come by then, and after the crushing horrors of the previous two years, most people were convinced that the peace would last. In August, the St. Georges yacht club hosted international waterskiing and water-polo competitions. Julio Iglesias even stopped in Beirut on his world tour.

I was seven when we returned to Lebanon, too young to understand the war or what my mother’s choice meant, how hard it must have been for her to watch from a distance while the city she loved destroyed itself. But I remember my first glimpses of Beirut from the deck of the cargo ship on which my grandfather had arranged our passage, and the short drive from the port, the faceless houses along the rue Georges Haddad, their interiors exposed like those of a doll’s house, rooms half intact, beds and sofas listing toward collapse.

When we finally pulled up in front of my grandparents’ house, my mother climbed out of the car and went to her father. “No one can stay angry forever,” she said.

She was a woman who was right about many things. Even as a child, I understood this. But standing there outside the apartment in Achrafiye, with war’s carnage fresh in my mind, even I had to wonder whether she would be wrong this time.

I
WOKE THAT NIGHT IN MY ROOM
at the Rosa, my sleep interrupted by desperate howls. The alarm clock by the bed read 2:09. Down in the air shaft, two cats were mating, their cries like those of an abandoned child. Rolling out of bed, I made my way across the dark room, pulled the curtains back, and slid the window open. From the floor below me came a string of curses in an unfamiliar language. Swedish, maybe. And then, in the darkness, a third window shushed open and a voice yelled in Portuguese. Something was thrown and landed with a rustling thump. The cats let out their last yowl, then ran off together through the weeds, offended, licking one another’s wounds.

I closed my window, then climbed back in bed and shut my eyes, imagining the growing pile of discarded missiles at the bottom of the air shaft. Spare sandals and half-smoked packs of cigarettes, coat hangers and ashtrays. Whatever was handy in the wee hours of the morning.

Out in the corridor, someone moved. A latecomer from the bars, feet stopping just outside my room. My neighbor across the hall, I thought, a pale, middle-aged English woman with a dog-eared
Lonely Planet;
I’d encountered her when I first arrived, though I hardly would have pegged her as a night owl. The door was so thin that I could hear her coat rustle.

I rolled over and waited for the sound of her key in the lock, but it never came. There was something else, something closer. More rustling, paper on the floor. In my room now, I was sure of it. I threw the covers back and stood. In the thin bar of light that crept in beneath the doorjamb, I could see a white square, an envelope. There was a knock and then the footsteps receded, louder and faster than they had come.