Anti Lebanon. Carl Shuker

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СКАЧАТЬ of little blonde pigtailed Hind who shrank under him. He turned to Lauren and kissed her too.

      “Hello, Lauren. How is the baby?”

      “Fine, fine. Is everything okay?” Lauren said, and her upraised eyes passed over him without purchase to the new person in the doorway.

      “Yeah, fine, this is Frederick, a friend. Frederick: Georges, Lauren, that was Etienne. . . . ” and he thought of what she might like and said, “and this is the most beautiful Hind, who is now . . . what are you, um, what you must be by now, is .. . five years old?”

      Hind grinned madly up at the roof, and Georges said, “Oh!” one armful of the new baby, his other hand with a spoonful of refused soup in midair before the little girl. Lauren leaned to her and said, “Oh, my, goodness.”

      “I’m . . . not five yet,” said Hind deliberately. She considered a correction, had too many conflicting options for response, and accidentally accepted the spoonful of soup instead.

      “How are you, Frederick?” Lauren said in English and smiled softly, slightly, and indicated the table. She was tired and wired, and Leon could see deep violet bruises of fatigue above her cheekbones. “Please, eat.”

      “Hello,” said Georges, and Leon watched him frankly assess this new person, the two bearded men grinning naturally at one another. Leon saw Georges’s charisma again, as always revealed by someone new, just like Keiko. And he thought, When did we become bearded men?

      “How are you,” said Zakarian, and he paused awkwardly, deleting his own first name and other inappropriate details. “Hello.”

      A sort of silence fell. Hind bounced three times in her chair, looking for what had gone wrong. Leon thought how he might handle this.

      “Frederick’s a DJ and ... he has a card from the old military hospital. It’s really interesting.”

      Leon turned to Zakarian, away from Lauren who was now giving him that look, that slightly disbelieving look somewhere ambiguous between appalled and quizzical, that always seemed to ask, and only of him, really, what kind of person are you Leon? What qualities are yours? He put the beer in the old fridge.

      Zakarian fumbled for the card, held it to Georges who had no free hands, and Lauren took it, quickly read, and said, “Oh that is very interesting.”

      “What?” said Georges, and she held it up for him to read as Hind, abruptly bored, decided to bend slowly almost double, her face approaching her soup. Georges looked up from the card and smiled.

      “Oh, I see. So do you like Cary Grant movies, Frederick?”

      Zakarian smiled too and shrugged easily. Georges had this effect.

      “We’re having a Frank Capra session. Subtitled.”

      “Subtitled,” Zakarian said, still smiling. “Okay!”

      And they all smiled then and Hind sat up with a pastiche of pumpkin soup and peppered cream upon the very tip of her nose and they all laughed. Leon laughed too and went, then, his face changing in the doorway, darkening, to the living room, looking for the others, and for another drink, and hopefully some hash. Somewhere that he could hear and monitor the gunfire; adrenaline moving softly, silverly in him, obscurely or predictably, he never could tell.

      There was a new poster in the living room, and nuts and fruit, pitifully little, laid out on the coffee table, curtains drawn. Pascal and Etienne squatted by the old laptop on a chair. They were trying to mirror the display on the TV.

      “Hi Leon,” said Pascal without turning.

      “Hello, hello, hello, hash?” said Leon and half-lay on the sofa.

      Etienne patted his jeans pocket. “We’ll wait till the children go to bed. They can’t sleep for the fighting or what? You can’t hear it in here. Let those fuckers kill each other and be silent.”

      Pascal said, “It’s probably the tension in the air. Children can feel it.”

      “The Secure Plus resistance has caved and they’re moving on all their enemies now,” said Etienne. “I heard they are besieging Hariri in Koreitem, and that they are already all over Ras Beirut.”

      Pascal hunched over the laptop. “Hind’s bedroom faces west. Maybe she can hear it.”

      “She has a few questions even Georges can’t answer.”

      Pascal said, “You see there is an option here to turn our laptop’s display off, but it doesn’t explicitly say it will send the mirror image to the other display by doing so. And though it seems like the obvious option and there aren’t any apparent others, it asks you twice to confirm, so I would say probably—”

      “Fatal,” said Etienne. “If you turn it off you’ll never get it on again. Pay attention to those warnings.”

      “Get a Mac,” murmured Leon. Above the two men and above the television on the low credenza, where there was a carved wooden Saint Sharbel and rosaries draped around a Maronite cross, there was this new poster. It was a print of a painting of the frame of a mirror on a wall. The frame was elaborately gilded gold ivy, vines, birds, and angels, forming a triptych. The outer panels were narrower than the inner panel, and at the bottom the frame formed a small semicircular table extending out into a world outside the mirror, upon which sat a little dog.

      Leon stared at it, slumped on the sofa, crashing. It was the sort of poster found in French head shops with old Tolkien and Paranoid King posters. There was something wrong with the optical illusion but it was impossible to say what was so eerie and unsettling and, yes, beautiful about it. It was only almost kitsch. The dog’s back was reflected behind it, casting the viewer always to the left, and beyond that reflection was a room and not this room.

      But there were strange darknesses on the middle ground of the implied reflection and wrong shadows and were there eyes? And figures of tall, ghostly men and women from a third reflection? And over it there was ivy, not from the reflected room and not upon the mirror, and strange stains too as if on the print itself and inside that the mottle and metallic pucker of an old mirror. The little dog itself had a superior, alien face, deformed or damaged—was it supposed to be real or supposed to be a figurine? It was laughing, looking up and left at the watcher, looking at Leon: a creature of this world and that. From Leon’s angle the living room light caught it too, and the real reflection to the real world would have been northeast, the Christian Quarter, Beirut River or what’s left of it, Jounieh, the Mountain, away.

      “How’s the Luna Park?” said Etienne.

      “Oh, really busy,” Leon said. “Full of Hezbollah boy scouts doing chin-ups.”

      “Mahdi scouts. Those little shits,” Etienne said. “Pious brainwashed little shits. They have twenty thousand of them in the South. Beavering away. Growing up. Getting stronger. Always getting stronger.”

      “Is someone paying enough attention to that fact, I often wonder,” said Georges from the doorway quietly. He bobbed the baby in his arms. Zakarian was in the hallway behind. “Is it working?”

      “Not yet,” said Pascal.

      “The TV is only four inches bigger than the laptop,” Georges said. “You realize that?”

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