Few years after, the Rat joined the militias, and walked with a gun, a green military suit and a cigarette above his right ear.

During the war weapons were worn on the young's arms and around their waists. Militiamen drove the tiny little streets in haste, looked at the woman with greed, cleaned their guns in public and never paid for their food.

The rat went to battles and became the leader of a pack. Ten men under his command, and a woman who waited for him at home.

Whenever he passed me by, I put my hand on my riffle, looked him in the eyes and never turned my back.

Tales of his trips through the city sewers to the enemy side and back earned him his nickname, the Rat.

Downtown stores were looted by one side or the other, windows were shattered, broken glass on the ground, open walls, broken locks, empty desks, dangled telephone wires, except for us men, and a few wandering hungry dogs, there was not a soul in the city.

My men held the eastern front of the green line; the Rat and his man were on the western front; between us there was a long wide road, on the other side, facing us, was the enemy. The wide road was once a fancy strip filled with fashionable stores and tourists, now it is under a sniper's range, empty, only plants sprang from beneath the sidewalks' cracks and lived below the old arches, shone in front of the looted stores, grew from the bellies of decaying sand bags, and dwelt in occupied deserted government buildings that longed for the old days when lazy bureaucrats strolled in long hallways, snoozed on metal desks, dipped their moustaches in thick coffee, paraded their thin ties on hairy, conceited chests, waved their long hands that expelled flies and welcomed bribes and sealed endless deals of forged wills, illegal roves, birth and rebirth certificates, religious divorces, contaminated water pipes, underage driver's licenses, expired bank notes, crumbling constructions, derelict sewers, stained travel documents, and clandestine harvests of hallucinatory plants that grew in the Bekaa valley on the steps of Heliopolis, where Fairuz, that whining singer, sang at night under that same twinkling stars that guided three Babylonians west and south and into a stable with ruminating cows, a donkey, and a glowing child who extracted milk, with his lucid lips, in grand appetite, from a Virgin's round black nipples.

For days our battle was with a faceless sniper who toyed with us. The men threw empty cans to the middle of the road, and the sniper would shoot it, with an impressive speed and precision. Our objective was to take over the road and link the two sides and close a half circle. In truth the fight was over the intact stores still filled with merchandise. And the biggest battle was to be fought yet around the jewelry district. These stores were yet to be blown up and cleaned from the jewels still kept in its safes.

Talks of dynamite and blowing safes were whispered beneath the sand bags by men who defecated in cold somber hallways, by filthy lips and greedy thieves with riffles and crosses around their necks, society rejects, idealist fools, pious executioners, narcissist, Napoleonic megalomaniacs, coke heads, professional hash rollers, butchers with thick moustaches, illiterate villagers who reminisced on green meadows and goat milk, few bourgeois kids playing heroes to vex their domineering eccentric mothers, and a notorious pedophile who was first on my list to execute.

I was after the diamond. My final battle was with the Rat, we both knew it.

When it was quiet, the men lay around and called each other profane names. They lied and boasted about women conquests; chain-smoked and cranked their riffles.

Here is the plan, I said to my men:

We bring a container from the port, push it to the edge of the street. While pushing it from our side I will ask the Rat and his men to make cover with massive fire in the enemy's direction.

I sent a message to the Rat and asked him to meet me. He crossed the street under the sniper's fire. A show-off fool, I thought. Soon, few of the men were crossing the wide road as well to prove one thing or another. Show off fouls!

I told him about the plan. He agreed.

The next day I was up to the second floor. I held my riffle and gazed at the sky. I smoked and looked down the window to the empty street. I saw the rat giggling and talking to the pedophile. They were pushing each other and acting like kids. Then the rat walked toward the sniper's street, I instantly knew he was ready to cross. I aimed my riffle trough a hole in the wall. I shot him in the leg. He fell on his back in the middle of the street. His men started to shoot in the sniper direction, in a massive show fire without a clear target.

The sniper laid one bullet after the other on the Rat's flesh. He sadistically and slowly killed him.

The Rat was dead. I killed him.

I planned a massive operation that involved heavy artillery and more men.

After few weeks we gained control of the diamond district.

With few of my men I surrounded the largest diamond store, that was once owned by an Armenian merchant. We blew up the store's metal door, went straight to the safe and blasted it with dynamite.

When it was open I stepped out of the store, opened a hand grenade and tossed it inside. The dust and smoke fell on the jewels and the dead bodies of my men. I walked inside and collected the diamonds. I run through the city sewers, shot every rat and human in site. I sold the diamonds, and fled the country and its wars.

Rawi Hage is a writer and a visual artist, born in Beirut, Lebanon. After having experienced nine years of the Lebanese civil war, in 1984 he left Beirut to New York City where he held various jobs in restaurants, warehouses and stores. In 1992 he crossed the border to Montreal and he's been living in the city ever since.