As THE CUP WAS PASSED AROUND I FELT SOMETHING RISE IN MY STOMACH, SOMETHING UNCOMFORTABLY ALIVE. IT WAS NOT A TIGHTENING IN ANTICIPATION OF THE WINE BUT A FEELING ARISING, A LENGTH OF XENOPHOBIC GUT EXCRETING QUEASY QUESTIONS ABOUT A WESTERNER PULLING A TRIGGER FOR THE PLO. was what I was told, sweet and thick; by evening it had grown stronger but was still very smooth. Never bottled, always changing, good only for the day it was drawn. As the cup was passed around I felt something rise in my stomach, something uncomfortably alive. It was not a tightening in anticipation of the wine but a feeling arising, a length of xenophobic gut excreting queasy questions about a Westerner pulling a trigger for the PLO. A young professor at the University of Munich gravely told me last year, “When you mention the work ‘nationalism’ to a German it means something completely different to him than it does to you.” It took no imagination to see the weight of recent history in the gaunt bones of Helmut’s face. I was afraid now that certain questions were about to spill out. I noticed he was not drinking. The cup mercifully came just then and I drank the twilight wine, sweet-gone-tart, and held the taste like a primal, elemental moment. A deep-rooted aspiration satisfied, to hold in my hands and my mouth a moment of birth and death. Iwas creating my own religious rite and now relied upon no one else. My very presence here was symptomatic of both this moment and this world’s undoing: “ Bertrand says you are a Moslem. How is i t y o u c o n v e r t e d , f r o m — Lutheranism?” Helmut’s head turned slowly toward me and I felt as though in some unaccountable way I had, as if stepping out of a crowd, signalled my own destruction. “Why did you become Moslem?” I asked again, suddenly passing the cup to Bertrand. “ Discipline and pride are good things for a people, don’t you think?” he said slowly in English. I wished he had not answered. Now I felt compelled to go on, because the thought had leapt into being and now must be uttered. Still, I phrased things carefully. “And you are with the PLO now?” No response as the palm fronds flickered into embers and our faces died into shadows. “Tell me,” I said, taking another tack. “ Do you think the PLO has a chance? They can only win in the media, can’t they, not against the Israeli Army?” I felt Bertrand staring.at me and then his gaze shifting slowly to Helmut. “The Palestinian people will win in the arena of world opinion because the Zionists will be defeated both morally and psychologically.” At that point my courage mercifully failed me. Given the fact that he was German the next question seemed overwhelming, but I confess I feared any answer I might receive. It took nothing at all, the image clamoring up unbidden, to strip him of the white and put him in the black of an SS uniform of not so very long ago. I sensed there was no danger; we were in some neutral emotional territory. I was still an abstract enemy, an American in name only, and not a symbol of oppression. I was momentarily returned to that pristine, almost mythic state of being “ innocent.” Such practical distinctions, of course, disappeared with the horror of Guernica, Dresden and H iroshima, though we still protest and pretend it isn’t so. If I were to see him six months hence in the gray, despairing light of an airport, standing in the line for my plane, would I acknowledge him, greet him? Did I really believe that one recognizable face would make any difference in what he might be about to do? Would I notify authorities? Would I change my flight? The day I left Tunis to fly to Jerusalem via Athens, I made the acquaintance of a Lebanese couple. We shared coffee in the echoing fligh t lounge. He was tall, trim, solid, a policeman from Beirut dressed in a blue blazer. In a city where the gun and not the power of the uniform held sway, he was a dashing illusion of exhausted authority. In fact, he looked remarkably like Yves Montand circa 1968; that same rakish jawline and smoky, seductive eyes, a casual and world-weary Marlboro ever dangling from his lips. I asked him for a light. His wife was terminally bourgeois, a bleached-blonde vamp plumped up in a fake leopardskin coat and gold-lame heels. She told me she was a nightclub performer on Tunisian television, commuting from Beirut. She pulled out snapshots—here she was on a stage; and another before the cameras, singing and dancing and heavily made-up. An air of genteel desperation hovered about them both, db if they knew they were doomed. “And your name is?” “ Don.” “ Dan! Tha t’s my husband’s name, Dan, Daniel!” clapping her hands and squeaking, TV teeth flashing. “We are on our honeymoon.” She seemed maniacally happy, relentlessly breathless, as if the romance was just beginning. When Daniel sat down, she showed me more snaps—this time of life in Beirut. Inside their apartment it looked like life anywhere—primping in a slip before a vanity; a stray shot of him, shirt off, every-present cigarette, surprised coming out of the bathroom; grilling lamb on a brazier with friends on their shell-shot balcony. There were no pictures of them outside, anywhere. Only in the far background, in the street below the balcony, could I see the scars of destruction. In their photos their existence was insular, hermetically-sealed, and now, mask-to- mask, they attempted to maintain that illusion of the indoors in their internal lives. They had no choice. Smiling, nuzzling one another like any other lovers, they put away the photos. “Will you go to Beirut?” they asked me. “ I’ve considered it, but it might be too dangerous for an American,” I said cautiously. “ Nonsense! Beirut is a beautiful city!” I bid them goodbye as my plane was called and I thought about them for weeks afterward. Was their apartment still there when they returned? Were they even alive anymore? Was her final appearance in the bomb-wrecked streets of Beirut on Lebanese TV? They had about them such a sad, exhausted sense of end-of-the-world revelry. I thought about them long after I stopped looking for Helmut on airport escalators and seaside bus trips up the Israeli coast to Haifa. Writer Timothy Ryan lives in Seattle. This story is dedicated to his “writing and cartooning collaborator of many years,” Will Jungkuntz, who died one year ago. Artist Barbara Sekerka lives in Portland. Holiday Stationery Choose from our se lec tion , or use our copy creation fac ilities to make your own . For Holiday cards that are truly a personal exp ress ion , i t s K inko’s. kinko's Great copies. Great people. SELF-SERVICE 1002 SW Jefferson Open 24 Hours 223-2056 The Big Blue Victorian A Charming Inn, in the Bed & Breakfast Tradition Private Baths Color T.V. 208 N. 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