De Niro's Game (3 page)

MONDAY MORNING, I WALKED TO GEORGE'S WORK. NO ONE
was there but him. I paid; while I played, he injected credit into the poker machine. Success! I collected and left.

I met George that evening, on the stairs of the church.

Let's wait and see if they notice, I told him. Maybe they have a way of finding out. It is not too big an amount. If they find out, we could pass it off as a mistake.

I gave him half of the money, and we separated.

On my way home, I went by Nabila's place. There was no light on at her house. The city was dark. No
TV
was on, no water was cold; ice cream melted in cube-shaped fridges and the old men drank whiskies with no ice. I saw Rana, our neigh-bour, and hardly recognized her at first. She said,
Bonsoir
, and I replied,
Bonsoirayn
for you, and where are you going in the dark with a silk shawl on your shoulders?

To the store to buy candles.

With a face like yours, who needs candles? I said.

Rana laughed and told me to go home and to be careful not to trip on the stairs. It is dark, she said.

There is a moon close by, I said.

It is still dark.

We can light a candle, I said.

Where? she asked. Your mother's place or mine? And she put her hands on her curved hips. Her hair fell onto her shoulders, and her wide black eyes waited for my response.

In Roma, I said.

What?

I did not answer and crossed to the other side of the street.

SAAD, OUR NEIGHBOUR
, got a visa to Sweden.

He threw a party the night before his departure. He knocked at our door and invited me to the goodbye celebration.

Stockholm, he said. Yeah, Stockholm, and shook his head.

At seven that night, I showed up at his place, hungry. His mother had prepared a
mazah
. I broke the bread and dipped my fingers in small, round brown plates. The electricity was still cut off, but there were candles and a lantern lit up. Some flies had travelled over from the butcher store, and they hovered around the lanterns then burned. Saad's brother Chahker — a pompous idiot, if you ask me — was there. So were his cousin Miriam and his mother and father and a few of his relatives and friends. George was there, too, drinking and smoking quietly.

I looked at George and he smiled at me.

Jokes were made about Sweden and Swedish women, blondes and the cold weather. A man with thick villager's
hands and a rough neck and a mountain accent started to sing. Saad's family joined in. They sang songs that were foreign to me, villagers' songs that I had never heard before, hymns of goodbye and return and marriage, warnings not to marry foreign women: Our women are the best in the world, they do not dishonour you, and our land is the greenest. Go make money and come back . . . She will wait for you.

But those who leave never come back, I sang in my heart.

George drank heavily. He laughed and flirted with Saad's cousin. It made Chahker nervous and jealous. Chahker had asked for the hand of Saad's cousin, but she had refused. She was young, with red cheeks and long legs. She was caught between her villager's norms and trying hard to show off her newly acquired urban manners. Saad and his family were refugees from a small town; they had fled when a gang of armed forces attacked and massacred a great number of villagers and farmers.

By late that evening, George was very drunk. I pulled him down to the street and he threw up on the curb.

He reached for his motorbike, but I stopped him, and he swung punches at me. I held his hands, talked to him, trying to calm him down, asking him not to shout. Then I dragged him to his aunt's place. I left him lying at the bottom of the stairs, ran up and knocked at Nabila's door. She opened the door, frantic. Who? she said. Is Gargourty okay? Who? Oh, Virgin Mary, help us. Who?

No one, I said. Everyone is alive. George is just drunk and sick.

Where is he?

Downstairs.

Nabila ran down the stairs, her hand barely touching the ramp, half-naked and filled with fear; she caressed George's cheeks and kissed the tips of his fingers.

Together, we picked him up and carried him upstairs. Nabila cleaned him, took off his shirt, his shoes, and his pants, and gave him her own bed and covered him with an old blanket. Then she sat on the sofa and wept.

I worry about him, you know? When a phone rings late at night I often think that someone is dead. He has a gun. Why does he carry a gun?

It is his work. He needs it, I said.

He should go to school. I will pay for his studies. Let him go back to school.

She offered me coffee, and I accepted. She tiptoed to the kitchen and poured water in a
rakwah
, grabbed a small spoon, the coffee, the sugar. She boiled the coffee thrice, brought it on a tin tray, and let it rest like a gracious wine before pouring it for me in a small cup.

I drank. Nabila watched.

Is it sweet enough for you? she asked.

Yes.

I read George's cup the other day. It was dark, so dark. Let me read yours.

I do not believe, I whispered.

She held my cup and looked inside. She saw waves, a distant land, a woman, and three signs.

The usual superstitious beliefs, I said.

No! I see it. Come over here, see? This is the road, this is the sea, and this is the woman. You see?

No, but . . .

She smelled like the night. I slipped my hand onto her knee.

Nabila held my hand, pressed it, and moved it toward my chest. No, Bassam, go home. She kissed my hand as if I were her own child. Take care of George, tell him to go back to school. You should go back to school too. You are a smart kid, you like to read. As a child you recited poems with your uncle.

Goodnight, I said.

You take care of Gargourty, Nabila said, and followed me to the door.

I went home to my bed. When I woke up, Saad had gone to Sweden.

BOMBS FELL,
warriors fought, people ate, and the garbage piled up on the corners of our streets. Cats and dogs were feasting and getting fatter. The rich were leaving for France and letting their dogs roam loose on the streets: orphan dogs, expensive dogs, potty-trained dogs, dogs with French names and red bowties, fluffy dogs, well-bred dogs, china dogs, genetically modified dogs, and incestuous dogs that clung to one another in packs, covered the streets in tens, and gathered under the command of a charismatic three-legged mutt. The most expensive pack of wild dogs roamed Beirut and the earth, and howled to the big moon, and ate from mountains of garbage on the corners of our streets.

I walked past hills of garbage. The smell of bones, the sight of all that is rotten and refused, made me rush down, aimless, toward the gas station, where I saw long lines of cars waiting to fill their tanks. I saw Khalil, George's friend, in a militia jeep with no roof and no windows. He drove straight into a
crowded gas station. He stopped his machine, came down, took his rifle, and shot in the air. He shouted, waved his hands, and ordered cars to go back, forward, and to the side. Then he fired more shots. The cars dispersed. Khalil drove his jeep close to the pumping station, filled his gas tank, and drove away.

THAT NIGHT, I
WENT
up to the roof. There were no bombs exploding like colliding stars. I gazed at the calm, obscure sky that settled above me like a murky swamp, hanging upside down. All seemed about to fall, to spread darkness and drown. On the roof was a large water barrel that I usually hid things under. I pulled out a piece of hose, wrapped it around my waist, and waited for George to show up. The moon was round and hovering above my city. We, the moon and I, watched lit candles flickering quietly in young virgins' rooms while they were getting dressed for the night, climbing into their single beds, throwing their combed hair on goose-feather pillows stuffed by grandmothers with names like Jamileh and Georgette, veiling their pubic hair in cotton and silk sheets, dreaming of hairless white men in sports cars and provincial suits telling them fairy tales, in a foreign language, in secret, to make their little toes curl under the covers, away from their mothers' eyes.

My accomplice was the dirty moon. He shone, and I watched.

When George came, we drove to Surssok, an old bourgeois neighbourhood with maids who served rich housewives wearing chic French dresses and possessing walk-in closets filled with leather shoes. They had apartments in Paris, and husbands who imported cigarettes, containers, and car parts, who
coughed in Swiss banks at wooden mahogany desks occupied by nephews of chocolate factory owners, grandsons of landlords of African cocoa fields dotted with workers with bruised fingers, who worked under many suns, who worked on Sundays and Fridays. Those husbands ate in velvet restaurants and stayed in expensive hotels with large beds, Portuguese cleaning ladies, and thick towels. They puffed thick Cuban cigars, consulted their round, golden watches, spat filthy words like “shipments” and “invoices” over cognac and elevator music, words that bounced off mirrors and bald bartenders with multilingual prostitutes who drooled long, silver earrings on executive suits while looking bored and bitter.

American cars have no locks on the gas tanks, I said to George. They are the good ones to empty.

We stopped next to a white Buick. I pulled the hose from around my waist. I spun it in the air; it whistled. George laughed, and I spun it some more, and it whistled again. I opened the gas tank cover; George laid his motorbike on its side. I drove the hose inside the gas tank; it slipped gently in, like a snake into a ground hole. I lay my lips on its tail, sucked in, inhaled a flow of gas. It rushed toward my teeth. I directed the stream toward our gas tank. We filled the tank, and then we crawled, escaped and evaporated through a night of mist and dew. The smell of gas in my throat made me nauseous. We stopped at a store and got a can of milk. I drank it and vomited bread and poison between two rusty cars.

THURSDAY MORNING, I
passed by George's work again. I handed him some money, installed myself on a stool facing a poker machine, and played. On the screen I saw my credit increasing.
There was an old, unshaven man sitting two machines down from me. A cigarette burned on his lip and made his wrinkled eyelid twitch. He was hitting the buttons almost blindly, without looking.

I tried to imitate his speed, his nonchalant attitude, his familiarity with fate and chance, his indifference to loss, his silence, his equanimity. He hung off his stool as if ropes from above held his defeated body, lifted his arms, and dropped them in suicidal freefalls on round plastic buttons.

THAT EVENING, I MET
George at his place. He lived alone, down beside the French stairs, in an old stone house with little furniture, a photo of his dead mother under a high ceiling, and emptiness. He never mentioned his father. The word was that his father was a Frenchman who had come to our land, planted a seed in his mother's young womb, and flown back north like a migrating bird.

I pulled out the money I'd made that morning, counted half and gave it to him.

We sat in George's living room on an old couch between echoing walls. We whispered conspiracies, exchanged money, drank beer, rolled hash in soft, white paper, and I praised Roma.

Roma? George said. Go to America. Roma, there is no future. Yeah, it is pretty, but America is better.

How about you? I said. Are you going or staying?

I am staying. I like it here.

He put some music on. We sang with it, and drank.

I need to fix the motorbike; the exhaust needs to be changed, George told me. Pass by the casino on Tuesday
morning and you can play again. Some more money won't hurt us. And take your time, you looked like you were watching your back last time. Don't worry if Abou-Nahra or someone from the militia comes in. If something's wrong, I will bring you a whisky with no ice. That is the cue for you to leave.
Capice
, Roma man?

We were both high, sleepy, and feeling rich.

That night I slept on George's sofa; he slept on his moth-er's bed.

I woke up when dawn sprung its shine over my brown eyes, pulled on my eyelid, and asked me to walk.

George was still asleep. His gun was on the table, and the cash was crushed under its weight. No wind will ever move it, I thought. When I walked out, the city was calm. The streets were laden with morning dust and parked cars, and everything was closed except the early baker, Saffy. I brought a
man'oushe
from the baker and ate it. Taxis were not hustling yet, stores had not rolled up their metal doors, women were not boiling their coffee, vegetables were not loaded onto pushing carts, the horses were not running and the gamblers were not betting, fighters were not cleaning their guns. Everyone was asleep. Beirut, the city, was safe for now.

TEN THOUSAND BOMBS HAD FALLEN AND I WAS WAITING
for death to come and scoop its daily share from a bowl of limbs and blood. I walked down the street under the falling bombs. The streets were empty. I walked above humans hidden in shelters like colonies of rats beneath the soil. I walked past photos of dead young men posted on wooden electric poles, on entrances of buildings, framed in little shrines.

Beirut was the calmest city ever in a war.

I walked in the middle of the street as if I owned it. I walked through the calmest city, an empty city that I liked; all cities should be emptied of men and given to dogs.

A bomb fell not far from me. I looked for the smoke, waited for the moaning and screams, but there were none. Maybe the bomb had hit me. Maybe I was dead in the backseat of a car, my blood pouring out little happy fountains and mopped up by a stranger's clothes. My blood drunk by a warlord or some God whose thirst could never be quenched, a petty tribal God, a jealous God celebrating his
tribe's carnage and gore, a God who chooses one servant over the other, a lonely, lunatic, imaginary God, poisoned by lead and silver bowls, distracted by divine orgies and arranged marriages, mixing wine and water and sharpening his sword and handing it down to his many goatskin prophets, his castrated saints, and his conspirator eunuchs.