timeless men build a country in the name of Allah? Will we allow them to forbid music, theater, literature, and even ancient monuments? As they say they want to do? Do we prefer that to the ungodliness of communism? Into whose hands are we placing the fate of this world?
It’s a powerful experience, to exact your revenge. Few are that privileged. So many wrongs for which no one is held accountable. There is so much we are forced to accept. And yet I only barely remember it. Just the feverish intensity of the day before. Just the instructions to the technician, an old, half-deaf veteran from some elite unit with lots of experience and a bag of tricks, flown in especially for this. Just his grumbling and fiddling with cables and gray plastic explosives in a bombed-out house in a deserted suburb. How we shook hands, and how, suddenly, I was lying on a roof, in stark sunlight with binoculars pressed so hard against my eye sockets that I had bruises for two weeks afterward.
I remember a face in the binoculars. A face like any other. Eyes like any others. Anonymous features I had memorized from the last page of Susan’s report. I remember the resistance of the button on the remote switch. Remember how smooth it felt in my sweaty hands, in the scorching sun.
Of the explosion, I remember nothing. Nothing at all. All I remember is smoke and sirens, distant screams. Everything was so impersonal, so completely a part of Beirut’s very essence. I remember that I closed my eyes. That I thought, it’s over. I have done what I could do. I remember the emptiness. Stone was placed on stone. Guilt on guilt.
My next memory is clearer. Three sleepless nights later, I hear Annie’s crackling, alien voice coming through the strictly encrypted satellite phone into our little fort of an embassy in Beirut.
‘It’s still too early, we shouldn’t get our hopes up,’ she said.
But her voice was so full of hope that I had to sit down and bury my face in my hands.
‘Are you still there?’ she asked, her voice filtered through stardust, metallic, static.
‘I’m here,’ I said.
‘Can you believe we’re going to be parents?’
In the background I heard the evening open with shell bursts, the sky illuminated by traces of fire and searchlights.
‘The ground is shaking here,’ I said.
‘Here too, honey. Here too.’
And then, if only for a moment, it actually let up. For a second I stopped punishing myself for your death, for my betrayal, for my revenge. Not because I deserved it, but because the unborn child deserved two parents. It was impossible to understand the enormity of a second chance, a second child. Maybe it was possible. Perhaps there was some compromise in me after all. Just Beirut, then I would never leave Washington’s Beltway again. We already had the house, loans, new cars every other year. All we needed was the baby and me.
I came home from Beirut two weeks later, one evening in late August when the smell of freshly cut grass from the local soccer fields filled the air, when the hacking of sprinklers mingled with the hypnotic growl of the highway. I saw Annie sitting alone on the stairs to our bungalow, our suburban dream, as the real estate agent with bleached teeth and tragically provincial Wall Street dreams had called it. I saw Annie’s eyes in the twilight. And I knew. Like I always know.
‘Don’t say anything,’ I said as I held her in that terribly inadequate way that is all I know.
‘The baby,’ Annie said. ‘I tried to reach you.’
‘Shh, don’t talk. I know, I know.’
I held her on the stairs until the darkness was solid and the sprinklers had gone to sleep. Until the highway had diminished to a whisper.
Later, at the kitchen table, with Annie finally asleep in our bed in the room facing the garden, I was back where I started. No sorrow. Nothing except the desire to move away, move out, move on. Nothing except the realization that a lie may be false, but truth is the real enemy.
They
It’s a powerful experience, to exact your revenge. Few are that privileged. So many wrongs for which no one is held accountable. There is so much we are forced to accept. And yet I only barely remember it. Just the feverish intensity of the day before. Just the instructions to the technician, an old, half-deaf veteran from some elite unit with lots of experience and a bag of tricks, flown in especially for this. Just his grumbling and fiddling with cables and gray plastic explosives in a bombed-out house in a deserted suburb. How we shook hands, and how, suddenly, I was lying on a roof, in stark sunlight with binoculars pressed so hard against my eye sockets that I had bruises for two weeks afterward.
I remember a face in the binoculars. A face like any other. Eyes like any others. Anonymous features I had memorized from the last page of Susan’s report. I remember the resistance of the button on the remote switch. Remember how smooth it felt in my sweaty hands, in the scorching sun.
Of the explosion, I remember nothing. Nothing at all. All I remember is smoke and sirens, distant screams. Everything was so impersonal, so completely a part of Beirut’s very essence. I remember that I closed my eyes. That I thought, it’s over. I have done what I could do. I remember the emptiness. Stone was placed on stone. Guilt on guilt.
My next memory is clearer. Three sleepless nights later, I hear Annie’s crackling, alien voice coming through the strictly encrypted satellite phone into our little fort of an embassy in Beirut.
‘It’s still too early, we shouldn’t get our hopes up,’ she said.
But her voice was so full of hope that I had to sit down and bury my face in my hands.
‘Are you still there?’ she asked, her voice filtered through stardust, metallic, static.
‘I’m here,’ I said.
‘Can you believe we’re going to be parents?’
In the background I heard the evening open with shell bursts, the sky illuminated by traces of fire and searchlights.
‘The ground is shaking here,’ I said.
‘Here too, honey. Here too.’
And then, if only for a moment, it actually let up. For a second I stopped punishing myself for your death, for my betrayal, for my revenge. Not because I deserved it, but because the unborn child deserved two parents. It was impossible to understand the enormity of a second chance, a second child. Maybe it was possible. Perhaps there was some compromise in me after all. Just Beirut, then I would never leave Washington’s Beltway again. We already had the house, loans, new cars every other year. All we needed was the baby and me.
I came home from Beirut two weeks later, one evening in late August when the smell of freshly cut grass from the local soccer fields filled the air, when the hacking of sprinklers mingled with the hypnotic growl of the highway. I saw Annie sitting alone on the stairs to our bungalow, our suburban dream, as the real estate agent with bleached teeth and tragically provincial Wall Street dreams had called it. I saw Annie’s eyes in the twilight. And I knew. Like I always know.
‘Don’t say anything,’ I said as I held her in that terribly inadequate way that is all I know.
‘The baby,’ Annie said. ‘I tried to reach you.’
‘Shh, don’t talk. I know, I know.’
I held her on the stairs until the darkness was solid and the sprinklers had gone to sleep. Until the highway had diminished to a whisper.
Later, at the kitchen table, with Annie finally asleep in our bed in the room facing the garden, I was back where I started. No sorrow. Nothing except the desire to move away, move out, move on. Nothing except the realization that a lie may be false, but truth is the real enemy.
They
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