The Complete Short Stories

‘I’ve no idea. As it happens, I’ve never spoken to her.’

‘Well, dear, I think you should ask her. She might lose something of her elegant composure.’

‘Only for a few seconds. She’s very regal.’

‘It only takes a few seconds to conceive a child. Or is she so special that she won’t even spare you those few seconds?’

‘She is very special.’

‘Who’s this?’ Aunt Vera hung their combat jackets over the balcony, gazing at them with almost maternal pride. ‘Are you talking about me, Ryan, or your sister?’

‘Someone far more special,’ Louisa rejoined. ‘His dream woman.’

‘You two are my dream women.’

This was literally the truth. The possibility that anything might happen to them appalled Ryan. In the street below the balcony a night-commando patrol had lined up and were checking their equipment — machine-pistols, grenades, packs loaded with booby-traps and detonators. They would crawl into the darkness of West Beirut, each a killing machine out to murder some aunt or sister on a balcony.

A UN medical orderly moved down the line, issuing morphine ampoules. For all the lives they saved, Ryan sometimes resented the blue helmets. They nursed the wounded, gave cash and comfort to the bereaved, arranged foster-parents for the orphans, but they were too nervous of taking sides. They ringed the city, preventing anyone from entering or leaving, and in a sense controlled everything that went on in Beirut. They could virtually bring the war to a halt, but Dr Edwards repeatedly told Ryan that any attempt by the peacekeeping force to live up to its name would lead the world’s powers to intervene militarily, for fear of destabilising the whole Middle East. So the fighting went on.

The night-commandos moved away, six soldiers on either side of the street, heading towards the intermittent clatter of gunfire.

‘They’re off now,’ Aunt Vera said. ‘Wish them luck.’

‘Why?’ Ryan asked quietly. ‘What for?’

‘What do you mean? You’re always trying to shock us, Ryan. Don’t you want them to come back?’

‘Of course. But why leave in the first place? They could stay here.’

‘That’s crazy talk.’ His sister placed a hand on Ryan’s forehead, feeling for a temperature. ‘You had a hard time in the Hilton, Arkady told me. Remember what we’re fighting for.’

‘I’m trying. Today I helped to kill Angel Porrua. What was he fighting for?’

‘Are you serious? We’re fighting for what we believe.’

‘But nobody believes anything! Think about it, Louisa. The Royalists don’t want the king, the Nationalists secretly hope for partition, the Republicans want to do a deal with the Crown Prince of Monaco, the Christians are mostly atheists, and the Fundamentalists can’t agree on a single fundamental. We’re fighting and dying for nothing.’

‘So?’ Louisa pointed with her brush to the UN observers by their post. ‘That just leaves them. What do they believe in?’

‘Peace. World harmony. An end to fighting everywhere.’

‘Then maybe you should join them.’

‘Yes… ‘ Ryan pushed aside his combat jacket and stared through the balcony railings. Each of the blue helmets was a pale lantern in the dusk. ‘Maybe we should all join the UN. Yes, Louisa, everyone should wear the blue helmet.’

And so a dream was born.

During the next days Ryan began to explore this simple but revolutionary idea. Though gripped by the notion, he knew that it was difficult to put into practice. His sister was sceptical, and the fellow-members of his platoon were merely baffled by the concept.

‘I see what you’re getting at,’ Arkady admitted as they shared a cigarette in the Green Line command bunker. ‘But if everyone joins the UN who will be left to do the fighting?’

‘Arkady, that’s the whole point…’ Ryan was tempted to give up. ‘Just think of it. Everything will be neat and clean again. There’ll be no more patrols, no parades or weapons drills. We’ll lie around in the McDonald’s eating hamburgers; there’ll be discos every night. People will be walking around the streets, going into stores, sitting in cafs..

‘That sounds really weird,’ Arkady commented.

‘It isn’t weird. Life will start again. It’s how it used to be, like it is now in other places around the world.’

‘Where?’

‘Well…’ This was a difficult one. Like the other fighters in Beirut, Ryan knew next to nothing about the outside world. No newspapers came in, and foreign TV and radio broadcasts were jammed by the signals teams of the rival groups to prevent any foreign connivance in a military coup. Ryan had spent a few years in the UN school in East Beirut, but his main source of information about the larger world was the forty-year-old news magazines that he found in abandoned buildings. These presented a picture of a world at strife, of bitter fighting in Vietnam, Angola and Iran. Presumably these vast conflicts, greater versions of the fighting in Beirut, were still going on.