My friend Raff and I were killed in the Year of our Lord 1982, a year which by my reckoning will come 1,470 years after this writing, or rather a year that now will never come at all, or at least when it comes won’t be numbered 1982 and won’t be the year of anyone’s lord.
We spent our last hours in a place that had nothing to do with either of us, in the temple of a god who started out as a mortal, a temple abandoned for seventeen centuries. It stood in a protecting curve of sandstone and shale at the foot of the Lebanon Mountains, which are in Lebanon, ancient Phoenicia. I had recovered it inch by inch from the tired, timeworn earth, shovelful by shovelful, starting from the tops of the tawny marble columns and working down.
Roman archaeology was my field, but the Middle East was not my turf, despite the abundance of Roman ruins in Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. I always chose resort areas in which to do my researches: a series of mosaic floors in the South of France, a temple of Jupiter in Madrid, the colonnades and warehouses of the Roman towns along the beaches of North Africa. I loved my work, but not enough to drink stale water out of canteens and defecate into holes in the ground. I’d had enough of that during my student years.
So, I had been disinclined to leave Rome where I taught at the American Academy and head up a dig in Lebanon, where the servants of the One True God were shedding each other’s blood indiscriminately. But sly old Dr. Burkhalter plied me with Greek brandy and pastries so sweet they made my teeth roll up like window shades, and I acquiesced. And it was a potentially important find, and site management was what I did best, and my teaching sinecure did involve far more traveling and digging than it did classroom lectures.
The change of scene also served to extricate me from the final complexities of a relationship with one of my students that had reached it’s end with only one of us, me, knowing that it had. She was the coal-eyed, carnivorous daughter of a Spanish industrialist and she could take any unpleasant truth that confronted her and lock it in a box in her head marked DISREGARD. The fact that I had flatly ceased to desire her had never registered.
Her unswerving insistence that I would come back to her bewildered me, for in truth it had not been such a wonderful affair and I was sure she hadn’t enjoyed it any more than I had. The tenacity of her commitment came not so much from any abiding devotion to me as it did from an unwillingness to be dumped. I felt relief as my plane took off from Fiumicino and the emotional ties by which she sought to bind me stretched with the growing distance between us and finally snapped. The moment at which they were broken, whatever that certain number of kilometers was, I sagged into my chair as if released finally from a body cast and I summoned the flight attendant to bring me a gin and tonic, the first of many gins and tonics.
The temple stood off the main road leading up into the mountains from the Lebanese city of Sur, old Tyre, which lay some five miles to the west on the Mediterranean coast. The main road, which was of asphalt over gravel, had been a main road for thousands of years, since the contours of the mountains limited any road builder’s options to that one path; in laying down the foundations of the modern highway, an old Roman road had been found ten meters below the surface.
Our temple had been happened upon by a municipal road crew, this one financed by a coalition of local towns. In clearing away an ancient thicket of bramble and acacia, a bulldozer’s blade had clanged against an elegant capital carved of fine travertine in the Corinthian Composite style favored throughout Rome’s centuries of empire.
The road crew, like my own digging crew, was composed mostly of Shiite Muslims, poor, badly-educated country folk whose pious distaste for pagan artifacts was amplified by their superstitious dread of ruins and the ghosts that haunted such places. They dutifully, and very correctly, reported their find to their superiors in Sur who in turn reported it to the Roman antiquities Division of the National Archaeological Museum who in turn notified the proper authorities in Beirut.
Normally such a site would have remained underground for years while the baroque bureaucracy of the Lebanese government—really a volatile amalgam of warring factions purporting to be a single entity—fought over the disposition of every pick and spade. But the excessive elegance of the one exposed capital indicated a site of quite possibly dazzling richness, offering the Beirut autocrats a kind of positive photo opportunity that their poor, destroyed city could certainly have used.
And so, the dig was hastily organized and, considering the fiscal condition of the country, well-financed. The leader of the dig was Yusuf Higazzi, an archaeologist of some note. The excavation went along nicely under his administration for the first few weeks, until he was killed in a barroom brawl in Sur.
Higazzi was a Maronite, which was a sort of exotic, Middle Eastern version of a Roman Catholic. While relaxing over coffee at the end of his work week, he was drawn into an argument with a Sunni Muslim representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, for whom Sur was a major stronghold. Apparently the other people in the restaurant chose up sides (no one knows exactly what happened) and Higazzi was killed—stabbed, actually—in the ensuing battle.
This left the site without a boss. Several candidates were considered, but the death of the previous administrator, a Maronite, at the hands of a Sunni brought a religious element into the candidacy process, and in Beirut, as everyone in the world knows, religion ruins everything. The selection process became hopelessly stalled as the different factions fell out along religious lines. The project seemed doomed to remain only half completed.
Then, some cool-headed individual suggested bringing in a neutral party—which is to say a non-Lebanese atheist foreigner—to head up the site. And there I was.
I had three months to live.
It was a productive three months. My crew were mostly mountain folk, provincial in their thinking and superstitious. They were pleased to be making money within the wrecked Lebanese economy, but the old temple, which seemed to slowly rise on its own power out of the dry, brown earth, obviously made them uneasy. They resumed work on the site with sullen resignation bordering on mutiny. But as time passed, and no gibbering demons burst through the ground to drag them down to jahannam, they began to relax and their fear of djinns and shayatiyn subsided.
They all spoke only Arabic, a language I know well enough to ask the location of the men’s room. But my foreman, a thin, hard-boned boy in his early twenties named Abubaker, spoke excellent French, and so I passed my orders on through him in that language.
On the last day of my life, Abubaker poked his head into my trailer. I was sitting at the tiny desk next to the tiny kitchen sink going over the pieces of pottery and bits of iron tools that had been unearthed as we had made our way down to the temple floor. Abubaker pulled open the oblong steel door and leaned in, his head appearing just above the threshold because the trailer was propped up on blocks.
“Eh, boss,” he said, stone-faced, “Voiture.” And he was gone.
Voiture means “car”: someone was driving up the highway towards us. I felt a faint sensation of queasy fear. This was not a time or place wherein surprise visitors were a happy event. The country was falling apart from the internecine fighting between religious factions: the Christians vs. the Muslims and factions within the factions vs. each other: Sunnis, Shiites, Druzes, Maronites, Tiger Militiamen, Phalangists, PLO guerrillas. And to the South, the menace of the Israelis—whom the Arabs regarded as alien interlopers in the region—grew stronger and more frightening every day, as Israel acquired more and more elegant, deadly American military hardware.
I put on my sunglasses and went out into the bright summer afternoon.
It was June 6, 1982.
I hopped down to the ground, my knees caterwauling from the early arthritis that afflicts all middle-aged archaeologists. I walked out to the roadway. Standing in the center of the asphalt, I had a clear view of the plain of rocks and scrub grass that fell away from the base of the mountains. A car, some kind of jeep (one of my greatest failures as a man was that I couldn’t identify vehicles by make and model, though I could name all the architectural elements in a Roman basilica), was speeding up the decaying highway, spewing yellow dust from its back tires. I sighed with relief when I saw that there was only one person in it.
Abubaker stood fifty feet behind me at the entrance to the site. “Ce n’est pas rien, eh, boss?”
“Na’am,” I said, “Pas de probleme.”
We stared apprehensively into each other’s eyes. He turned and walked back around the stone outcropping. I heard him shout commands in Arabic and the short, hissing sound of shovels entering the dirt followed moments later. The crew had been standing out of sight in silence, waiting to see if they needed to flee into the safety of the mountains.
I watched the jeep grow larger as it approached us. “Pas de probleme,” I said under my breath.
I walked back to my trailer, an unconscious wish for a safe haven, I suppose, and squinted. The vehicle pulled up right in front, engine rattling and brakes squealing (the summer dust and sand destroyed any automobile in a matter of weeks). The driver stood up and leaned over the encrusted windshield. His red hair stuck out in all directions and his carefully groomed red beard was full of grit. As he pulled off his tinted goggles, his face broke into a colossal grin of almost preternatural whiteness, dazzling even in the glare of the Lebanese sun.
“Well, lad,” he said with an opulent Irish brogue, “can you tell me the way to Barcelona?”
“Raff!” I shouted, my heart pounding with relief. He jumped down to the ground and we threw our arms around each other.
“But, sir,” I laughed, “this is Barcelona!”
Raff!
We looked each other over without letting go of each other, an uncharacteristic kind of physical contact for me. I generally avoided affectionate displays with other men. It was especially ironic that Raff was the only man with whom I could be comfortable that way, since he was cheerfully and defiantly homosexual, a fact which would have kept me at two arm’s length with anyone else. Can you tell me the way to Barcelona? was a private joke between us, it being the line he used to try and pick me up the night we first met—in Barcelona.
That day, in his pressed denim jacket, Ralph Lauren corduroy slacks and designer sneakers—a casual look ruined by too much artifice—he seemed thinner than I remembered him, not so tireless, carefree but with watchful eyes.
He stepped back and surveyed my battered mobile home. “Well, now. A Lebanese Winnebago.” His accent made it seem hopelessly ridiculous. When-ee-BAY-goo.
“I made it a requirement for my participation,” I said, regarding the great hulk appraisingly, as if I’d built it with my own hands. “I wasn’t spending my summer in a sleeping bag.”
“Hot and cold running water?”
“Only cold. They bring it in from Sur every week for the reservoir.”
“And your boys sleep in the open air, I suppose?”
“Of course.”
“Oh, they must think the world of you. B’Wana Mackland in your portable house.”
I shrugged. “I really don’t think living in a tent would make them like me any the more. Nothing would.”
“Well, these are dark days for them, and worse ahead,” he said less pleasantly. “It’s hard to be friendly with bullets whizzing past your ears and your stomach growling.” He spoke as if he were thinking suddenly of something else. In the brief pause after his statement, I noticed the distant sound of jet engines and wondered if he might be listening to them.
I frowned. “Are you not just here for a visit?”
“Oh, time enough to tell you my business,” he said, smiling again. “Come on, now, show me your heathen ruins.”
“Uh, okay.” We put our arms around each other’s shoulders and walked towards the site.
“I’ll be damned,” he said, pointing at the tops of the columns visible above the stone barrier. “Look at them!”
“Tip of the iceberg.”
“Roman Corinthian, is it?”
“A Semitic version.”
“So, late empire?”
I smiled. “So we believe.” I was always pleased and surprised by Raff’s historical acumen, though I’d had eleven years to get used to it. His two hobbies were classical history and good-looking young Arabs.
“How is your work going?’ I asked him.
“Oh, the usual laugh riot, Mackie. Might as well negotiate a truce between a deer and an oncoming car. We’re not up there arguing about law and government and economic policy, you know. We’re talking about which faction is responsible for which drive-by shooting and who bombed whose offices first. Fookin’ gangsters.”
A cool mountain breeze shifted the powdered earth across the asphalt, telling me that the heat of the afternoon was passing into night. “You’d think it would be a fairly simple matter to get people to agree to stop shooting each other.”
“Ah, that’s because you’ve no religious sense, Mackland. You never have. This isn’t about politics, it’s about Allah and Jesus and…” He stopped in his tracks. “Holy Mother o’ God!”
We had come around the stone outcropping and were standing where the whole site could be seen at once. And, however unimportant the find might prove to be archaeologically, even I had to admit that the old temple was an impressive thing to behold.
First off, it was big. The cleft in the mountainside in which it stood was 30, 000 square feet, the size perhaps of a supermarket if you included the parking lot. The columns were eighteen feet high, which meant—calculating the formula for Corinthian architectural dimensions as best I could—that the roof, when there had been a roof, peaked at about forty feet.
No trace of the roof had been found. It was my assumption that it had fallen down in the remote past, probably as the result of an earthquake in this geologically very active region, and the pieces had been carted off by country people for use in their homes and public buildings. It had been supported by fifty-six truly splendid columns of tawny travertine marble. Of the columns, thirty three were still standing. The capitals, as I said before, were particularly beautiful, with the branches of the cedar tree carved into the traditional Roman design.
The altar itself, made of what had been polished sandstone, was carved with a series of bas-reliefs that told the story of the god. In the waning afternoon sunlight, in the shadow of the mountain, with the slender Arab boys digging in the parched, hard earth, the place evoked a feeling of terrible sadness and fallen dignity.
“My god! It’s spectacular!”
‘Well….” I said, about to qualify his description. But he was off, bounding into the middle of the dig with a heavy footed carelessness that would have made any other archaeologist tear his own hair out. The young Arab crewmen stopped digging for a moment, stared at him blankly, and then went back to work. Crazy Westerner.
“It’s fantastic, Mackie!” He gazed around him, his head full of imagined pagan rites and ghosts in togas and sandals. “Who’s the god? Whose is it?”
I came up behind him and put my hand on his shoulder. “Rafferty,” I said. “It’s merely okay.”
He looked at me goggled eyed. “You’re not serious! It’s wonderful! Aren’t you excited to be part of this!”
I shrugged. “It’s not exactly Tut’s tomb.”
“Not Tut’s tomb,” he said, hands on hips.
“Eh, boss!” Abubaker shouted from across the way. He was standing with two of the other boys, looking down into a shallow hole they had dug. “Ta’ala! Shuf!”
I shook my head. “Parlais Français, Abu!”
“He says ‘Come look,” Raff said, and he ran over ahead of me.
I joined them. “Que tu vois?”
“Voila.” Abubaker pointed at the stone head of a god with olive vines entwined in his marble curls that poked up out of the dirt.
“What is it, Mack?”
“Looks to be part of the frieze. Some of the roof must still be here.”
Raff turned to the boys and translated what I’d said into Arabic.
“Sorry,” I said, remembering my manners. “This is Abubaker Sharifi, my foreman. Abubaker, permettez moi de vous presentez mon ami Raff.”
Abubaker turned his head to one side. “Rahf?”
Raff extended his hand. “Eamon De Valera Rafferty,” he said in a tone of voice I’d come to recognize too well. Abubaker smiled and they shook hands, exchanging a secretive look. Abubaker turned and said something to the other two young men and they giggled. Raff started to converse with them in Arabic, but I grabbed him by the arm.
“Raff, let me show you something over here.”
They made their goodbyes as I dragged him across the site to the altar. He turned and let himself be led.
“Ah, Arab boys,” he sighed.
“Raff, not with my employees, okay?”
“Oh, just a little friendly banter, ye right wing fascist.”
“How do they spot you, anyway? No, don’t tell me about it, don’t tell me about it.” Raff’s legion of young Arab tricks was the scandal of the Diplomatic Corps.
The statue, about eleven feet tall, now stood where it had stood in ancient times. The head, which had broken off centuries ago, sat on the altar. I positioned him in front of the god’s severed stone noggin. “Now, look.”
He looked. “Yes? This is the god of the temple?”
“Don’t you know him? That’s a very famous face. Look here.” We squatted down in front of the gallery of stone pictures that girdled the base of the altar. “What do you see?”
“Hm. Well, here’s the harvest. And here’s the descent into the underworld. And this guy’s got a tree in his band, so he’s a vegetation god, like Osiris or Attis.”
“Right. But not just vegetation. This is a god who overcame mortality, who offers hope of eternal life.” I pointed at the image of a bearded man in Roman armor. He stood protectively over the image of a younger man, beardless, with thick curly hair.
“Hey!” Raff said. “Now, that’s the Emperor Hadrian!” He looked up at the statue’s head. “Antinuous! It’s a temple of Antinuous!”
“Actually,” I said, “Antinuous and Adonis.”
“Well, they should get on fine! I’ll be damned.” He stood and looked around at the few remaining columns, the encircling ramparts of stone. In the distance, I could again hear the sound of airplanes. And this time I was sure he was listening to them.
“We didn’t find the altar and statue until a few days ago.”
“Antinuous and Adonis,” he said. “Why Adonis? I didn’t think he was a god.”
“Oh, in Phoenicia he was. A very important fertility god. Hadrian often promoted the cult of Antinuous by pairing him up with a long-established deity.”
Antinuous had been the homosexual lover of the Emperor Hadrian, hence Raff’s special interest in him. Probably the most famous gay love affair in history, it ended when Antinuous drowned in the Nile, possibly a suicide. Hadrian—who went into mourning for the rest of his life—declared Antinuous to be a god. Temples to him had been found all around the Mediterranean.
“Antinuous was a legitimate god in his own right, you know,” Raff said, obviously miffed at my suggestion that Antinuous had ridden the coattails of more reputable deities. He stared down at the battered stone head. “He was a god of growth and healing. He was a god of immortality who lead the spirits of the dead to the Underworld. He was a savior of those in distress.”
“Yes, Raff. No disrespect to your patron saint.”
“That’s being the ultimate kept boy, isn’t it?” he said. “Not only does Daddy buy you anything your heart desires, but you get promoted to godhood at the end.”
“A nice present, if you don’t mind dying to get it. What are you doing here?”
He paused, eyes averted. I saw him mentally run through several alternative answers. Then, he made a wry face and leaned against the altar, palms down, “What I was doing here was rescuing your silly ass. What I am doing now is holing up with you and hoping they leave us alone.”
In the sky to the east came again the sound of aircraft. “You’re scaring me, so cut it out.”
He glared. “Oh, now he’s scared! Back in Rome, before you took this fookin’ job, that would have been the time to get scared!”
“Scared of what!”
A trio of low flying jets roared by overhead. They seemed to burst out of nowhere, and the terrible noise reverberated painfully within our enclosure of stone walls. The shock was so extreme I almost lost control of my bladder.
“Jesus, Raff!” I shouted. “Are they Soviet!” Armageddon scenarios played in my head. The final conflict. The world in flames. The crew boys were shrieking at each other in Arabic and pointed at the sky.
“Soviets,” Raff sneered. “What the fuck would the Soviets want with Lebanon, Mackland?” Two more planes made another deafening run over the site, drowning out his next words. The boys had turned heel and were escaping as a group up the highway. Their collective instinct must have been to run home to their mountain villages.
“‘What!” I shouted. “What!”
“I said, they’re from Israel!” Raff shouted back.
Screams from the fleeing boys turned us around in time to see three armored vehicles come down out of the mountains. They careened abruptly around the bend in the highway where it disappeared behind the low sandstone cliffs, and cut off the crew’s path of escape. The boys turned in unison and ran back towards us.
A metal trap door opened up in the top of one of the vehicles and a uniformed soldier popped up. In his hands was some kind of automatic weapon—I know less about guns than about cars—with which he opened fire on the backs of the running crowd. The boys in the rear fell, arms flailing.
“Get down!” Raff shouted, and suddenly I was crashing to the ground on the other side of the altar. I think Raff actually picked me up and threw me. He came down on top of me as dozens of bullets ricocheted against the base of it. Ridiculously, my first thought was outrage that an artifact was being vandalized.
“Stay down!” Raff said. He was shaking violently. So was I.
Several more bursts of gunfire erupted and the boys screamed. Then came the sound of squealing brakes, metal doors opening, deep Arab voices calling orders, booted footsteps. Raff shouted something in Arabic. He repeated the same phrase over and over and, as he reached into his pocket and unfolded his UN identification papers, I realized he was telling them he was a diplomat.
A soldier appeared around the side of the altar and leveled his weapon at us. Raff continued to shout the same sequence of words in the same placating tone, waving his papers in front of us like a flag of truce. He kept his body between me and the soldier.
“Oh, shit,” I whispered, staring at the barrel of the gun. “Oh, shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit….”
The soldier, a young man not much older than Abubaker and the others, narrowed his eyes at the tattered scrap of paper. He shouted something in Arabic to someone outside my line of sight. An older soldier, apparently the commanding officer, appeared next to him. The older man snatched the document out of Raff’s hand and examined it solemnly. He said something to the younger soldier who then pulled Raff roughly to his feet. Raff kept up his steady stream of Arabic babble. “Get up,” he said to me in the midst of it. “Slow. Hands up.”
As he went on talking to the silent pair, I stood. My legs were trembling badly, but I willed them to hold me up; I was afraid any sudden, incongruous act, even falling over, might get me shot.
The ranking officer asked Raff a curt question. Raff answered him frantically, obviously saying more than he needed to, in order to distract them from the idea of killing us. The young soldier had the nozzle of his gun pressed into Raff’s solar plexus. Just that would have turned me to mush. But Raff kept eye contact with them and did his best to maintain a reasonable tone of voice. He was doing the fastest talking he’d ever done in his life.
I looked out across the site, and my stomach twisted. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” I whispered. The bodies of eight of my crew lay face down on the asphalt with red blotches staining the backs of their shirts. The others had been herded into a corner of the temple and were being held at gunpoint by more than a dozen stern faced soldiers. The boys were silent and staring, obviously terrified. A few were crying.
One of those sobbing was Abubaker. A soldier barked a command at him, probably telling him to stop crying. He made some pitiful, choking reply. The soldier shouted angrily.
He grabbed Abubaker’s arm and another soldier took the other. Abubaker’s eyes went wide with terror as they dragged him into the center of the temple. He shrieked imploringly in Arabic. As they forced him down on his knees, he wet himself. The soldier who had shouted put his rifle to the back of Abubaker’s head and fired.
“What are you doing!” I screamed. Abubaker’s body fell forward on its ruined face.
“Mack! Shutup!”
“My God, they’re children!”
The soldiers who had killed Abubaker looked up at me. I took one stumbling step towards them.
“Mack! Freeze! Freeze!”
I stopped. Raff’s Arabic chattering increased in intensity. The two soldiers came forward and grabbed my arms. They pulled me over next to Abubaker’s corpse. They pushed me down on my knees, facing away from them.
I had been trying to contain my quaking, but now I lost all control and shook all over. My guts churned. All I could see was the row of columns outlining the perimeter of the temple, and the packed dirt covering the old Roman floor. Behind me, Raff talked and talked.
This is the last thing I’ll ever see, I said to myself. This is the last thing I’ll ever see.
I heard the rifle’s safety click open.
The commanding officer shouted. One syllable: Qif!
Halt.
Raff fell silent.
I heard boots scuffling in the dirt, weapons clicking.
I risked a look. As I turned my head, the officer in charge walked over to his men and issued commands. They lowered their rifles. He barked at the prisoners. When the boys all stared at him stuperously, he repeated the same command, this time waving one arm. Go away. Run. Get lost. They timidly crept backwards away from him, cautiously eyeing the soldiers. Then, they turned as one and ran up the highway into the mountains.
The commander turned and looked at us one more time, scowling. He threw Raff’s identification papers on the ground and shouted orders to the men. They returned to their vehicles. One of the soldiers who had pushed me to the ground turned and glared at me. I did not look him in the eye. The engines revved. Still watching me, he climbed up onto the last vehicle in line and sat in the roof door, rifle ready. As the convoy drove away, our eyes locked, his head turning as the van departed. A moment later, the sound of automatic gunfire and shattering glass told me that they had shot up my mobile home and Raff’s jeep.
Then, the sound of their engines faded into the dusk.
A few hundred yards away, one of the crew boys, whose name was Beyazid, was kneeling in the highway next to the body of his older brother Mohammed. He pulled on the corpse’s arm and spoke pleadingly to it in Arabic. Raff ran over to him and spoke to him in a harsh tone, barely audible to me at that distance. The boy became more frantic, his voice rising. Raff slapped him. Beyazid stared in astonishment and, in the moment of silence, Raff shouted at him, pointing up the highway in the direction the others had fled. The boy took one last look at his brother and ran away.
Raff stood in the road and looked at the bodies strewn around him. They included the two friends of Abubaker with whom he had been flirting a few minutes before. He walked back to where I sat in the dust, his steps unsteady. He knelt down next to me. He hugged himself and stared at the ground in front of him.
“All dead?” I asked him quietly.
“Well, for Christ’s sake, Mackland, of course they’re dead.” His face collapsed in on itself and he wept.
“Now you’re going to cry,” I said. I put my arms around him. “You get me thinking you’re the gay John Wayne, and then you burst into tears.”
“Fuck you,” he sobbed into my shoulder. “Fuck you, fuck you….
I hugged him. “Rafferty,” I said, “you are something else.”
I held him while he cried, until I began to cry, and then we held each other.
“And no radio,” I said, holding up the blasted remains of my tiny short wave. The side of my mobile home had a neat row of golf ball sized holes in its metal hull. The bullet