Mao II (28 page)

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.