Free An Accidental American: A Novel by Alex Carr Page B

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