Bride of a Bygone War (Beriut Trilogy 2)

by Fleming, Preston

  No sooner had the elevator door slid shut than panic held his chest in a vise grip. He thought he would know how to react if she were too shocked to speak, or sullenly resentful, or even actively hostile. But what if she were truly happy to see him after his five-year absence? He reminded himself that his purpose in returning to her was to regain his freedom, not necessarily to renew old obligations. But now he felt confused again. He went over his planned speech one more time, wondering what he would do if she refused to believe it.

  The elevator door opened with a hollow thud. He stepped out onto a narrow corridor of unpolished stone tiles and went forward until he came to apartment 8D.

  He scarcely had time to take in a deep breath after ringing the bell before he heard her footsteps approach and then stop. The door opened a few inches and Muna Khalifé looked at him, her eyes opened wide in shock. Her hands flew up to cover her mouth and she remained motionless for an endless moment before Lukash saw tears welling in her eyes. Without a word she opened the door wider and a trace of a smile formed at the corners of her mouth.

  “William?” Muna whispered, as if he were an apparition likely to disappear the moment she invoked his name.

  Without waiting for an answer, she stepped forward and threw her arms around his neck and held him with desperate strength. Lukash stood immobile before her, no longer able to think what to do next. For all the time spent anticipating how she might react to his return, he had spent scarcely any anticipating his own feelings toward her when they at last came face-to-face. Before she could sense his indecision, he picked her up in a joyful bear hug, lifting her feet off the ground and burying his face in the soft hollow between her shoulder and neck. Her hair was as soft and fragrant as it had been five years before, and the fullness of her breasts against his chest aroused him as Lorraine’s boyish flatness never had.

  Muna responded by holding Lukash even more tightly, her arms frozen as if in some involuntary spasm. At long last she released him and stepped back to take another look at the face she had not seen for so many months and years. She kept him at arm’s length, seizing his left hand, then his right, as though by releasing her grip for even for a moment he might drift off again and be lost. Lukash used his free hand to close the door and to gently lead her back into the foyer.

  Muna Khalifé’s outward appearance seemed to have changed remarkably little in five years. She still wore her chestnut hair tied behind her head with a silk scarf and, unlike most of her countrywomen, resisted the urge to wear makeup other than lipstick and a touch of eye shadow. Her figure, a bit too angular for his taste five years before, had been much improved by the addition of a kilo or two at the hips and bust line.

  But the most striking change in her, he thought, was her eyes, which now carried a look of placid dignity, as if she had relinquished the illusions of her youth and was resigned to what would take their place. But no sooner had he sensed this change in her than the old sparkle seemed to return to her eyes and she was once again the twenty-three-year-old girl he had met in 1975. To his surprise, he could not recall ever having felt as close to her as he did now.

  “William, tell me it is you!” she said in Arabic, interrupting his thoughts. Then she caught herself and switched to English. “Say anything, habibi, but I must hear your voice before I can believe that this is not a dream.” She raised a hand to his face and stroked the softness of his stubbly beard.

  “It’s no dream, Muna.”

  Muna giggled softly as she slipped her arms around his waist and held her cheek against his chest. “If it is not a dream, it is something impossible to believe. One week ago I was prepared to abandon any hope that you would return. After five years of waiting, I could no longer remember your smile or the sound of your whisper in my ear or the feel of your arms around me. I thought that this must be how they said it would feel when at last I would be ready to turn my back on the past. I thought that perhaps now my life would move forward. Perhaps I would leave Beirut, maybe even…remarry.” She giggled again, with greater abandon than before.

  So this is my wonderful sense of timing, Lukash thought. After five years Muna had finally found her freedom, and in five minutes he had managed to steal it back. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have come,” he said. “Maybe it was wrong of me to intrude on you like this after so long.”

  She let out a shrill laugh that was in stark contrast with her easy confidence a moment earlier. “Intrude?” she asked. “Do you see anything here that could suffer from your intrusion?”

  “You said you were about to move forward. I don’t want to stand in the way, Muna.”

  Muna gave him a searching look. “Did you think that I can forget your face one day and call for a priest the next? I have thought of marriage to another man only because of the emptiness these last years—and because others expected it of me. William, do you remember the boy I used to tease you about just to make you jealous, the boy my father wanted me to marry since I was a schoolgirl?”

  Lukash’s face went blank.

  “No, you never met him, because he was studying in France in those days,” she continued. “Well, after all this time, Elie has asked me to marry him.” She gave the same forced laugh again. “I think my father must have urged him to propose to me, because Elie could not have had any reason to believe that I would accept. Imagine, William—my father, a man who hated Phalangists even more than he hated the Syrians, encouraging his only daughter to marry a Phalangist officer!”

  Lukash said nothing and Muna went on. “But Father insisted that Elie was different from the others,” she said bitterly. “On the very morning they murdered him, he assured me that Elie was not a Phalangist in his heart, because he had first been with Father in the Ahrar.”

  “I heard about your father’s death, Muna. I’m very sorry,” Lukash said. “But it’s not fair to blame Elie. I’m sure he could not be responsible for what happened at the Libramarine Club.”

  She shook her head. “No, Elie is no commando. But it is all the same. If one Phalangist has killed your father, every one of them has had his hand on the gun.”

  “Come, let’s sit down, Muna,” Lukash offered, changing the subject. “It’s been so long, I don’t know where to begin.”

  He put his arm around her shoulder and led her into the living room, where a luminous shaft of morning sunlight streaming through the open French doors pointed the way to the sofa. He waited for her to sit, then he took his place beside her.

  “Do you still work for that advertising agency in Jall ed Dib, the one owned by that ridiculous Parisian with the handlebar mustache?”

  Muna smiled. “Antoine left at the beginning of 1976, during the cease-fire when the Phalange lifted the siege of Tel al-Zaatar. The poor man was taken from his car on his way to work one morning and was held for two days by Palestinian fighters. He left not long after.”

  “It’s odd, but Antoine was one of the few Europeans I was certain would still be here,” Lukash remarked. “He loved Beirut so much, I didn’t think anything could shake him loose.”

  “There were many like Antoine in those days,” Muna observed sadly. “They vowed they would never return to the clouds and rain of Paris or Brussels or Amsterdam. When the fighting started, they said it was a passing incident and that we shouldn’t be worried. Then when their friends were captured at roadblocks or injured in the shellings or killed by snipers, one by one they departed. Antoine never returned to the office even to wish us farewell.”

  Their eyes met, then Muna looked away quickly, a faint flush visible on her cheeks. “Jean Malouf bought the agency from him. Jean is the fellow you liked so much—from Jezzine—the one who gave us the set of Jezzine knives with the carved handles at our wedding.”

  “Oh, yes. I do remember Jean. So Jean is your boss now...” Lukash felt like the engineer of a train that has derailed inexplicably on a straight and clear stretch of track. Why was it so difficult to say what he had come to tell her?

  She nodded. “Jean an
d I and Anaïs and the two account managers are the only ones left from before the Events.”

  A gap of silence followed, and Lukash moved quickly to fill it. “You used to talk about working for your uncle’s ad agency in Cairo. Did you ever go there after the fighting started?”

  “I might have, but when the Muslims set fire to Father’s warehouse, there was no longer any money. We had to sell everything to pay our suppliers for the inventory that we lost. The chalet at Farayya was sold first. Later my grandmother’s house in Beït Meri. Then when Mother was killed, I could no longer think of leaving Father alone.”

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated, unable to think of anything else. “When did it happen?”

  “She died two years ago this June,” Muna answered. Then, interrupting her own train of thought, she said, “Would you like some coffee? Tea?”

  Lukash shifted his weight around to face her. “We have a great deal to talk about, Muna. I don’t even know where to begin.”

  Now she sat facing him with her knees nearly touching his and gazed with longing into his eyes. He began to speak again, but she held two fingers to his lips. “There will be plenty of time for talking. Let it wait.”

  She ran her fingertips across his lips, over his temples and bearded cheeks, and then through his uncombed hair, where gray had lately begun to infiltrate. Then she let her hands slip level with his chest and pressed her palms softly against his pectoral muscles, and from there down his abdomen to the line where his shirt met his belt. She grasped the shirt with both hands and tugged sharply, pulling the shirttails out from his trousers while her lips sought the flesh of his belly. Lukash leaned back and let her climb astride him as she worked her way, button by button, up toward his throat.

  “I said I forgot how it felt to touch you,” she whispered. “I was mistaken. I remember everything now.”

  She pulled one sleeve free, then the other, and tossed his shirt to the floor. Lukash felt his hardness grow and could not wait any longer. He reached under her dress and jersey and pulled them over her head.

  “Do you remember this?” she demanded.

  He unhooked her brassiere and took a nipple in his mouth, then he ran his tongue in concentric circles around its edges until it was erect and did the same for the other breast. She stiffened for a moment and then grabbed his face with both hands, pushing him gently onto his back.

  “Slowly now. It has been so long,” she said.

  * * *

  A cloud blocked the sun, and Lukash suddenly felt a chill on his naked body. He glanced at Muna lying beside him with her head on his chest and wondered whether they had lain there for an hour or only for a few minutes. He had scheduled a meeting with Elie at eleven to make a final inspection of the electronic equipment they would be taking into the mountains. He felt a twinge of guilt when he thought about Elie’s feelings toward Muna and then a superstitious unease: would his face somehow betray what he and Muna had done?

  Suddenly it occurred to him that his BMW was still parked across the street almost directly in front of the block of flats. He reached for the scattered clothes on the floor in the hope of finding his watch. He found his shirt, a shoe, panties, a leather belt, but no watch. Then he remembered that his watch was in his trouser pocket, and that the trousers were somewhere beneath them. He took Muna’s hand from his chest, laid it softly beside her, and slowly slid out from under her. The trousers were beneath Muna’s leg and impossible to pull free without waking her.

  A quick survey of the room showed no sign of a clock, so he set off toward the bedrooms in search of one. The first bedroom off the central corridor was clearly Muna’s. Lukash recalled seeing the same 1930s art deco travel posters of Switzerland at her grandmother’s house in Beït Meri. He approached her bedside table and began to look for an alarm clock among the thicket of framed photographs. There was a color photo of César and Muna, another of Muna and her mother, and a large black-and-white photo of Muna with her aunt Claudette and uncle Victor at the Sea Castle in Sidon.

  Then a small color photo of a child caught his eye. The little girl could not have been more than a year old, but the shape of her face and the intense curiosity of her brown eyes bore an odd resemblance to his own. He scanned the other photos on the table quickly and turned to leave, but then another cluster of photos atop Muna’s chest of drawers caught his eye. As he approached, he could see that all of the photos showed the same little girl, either as an infant or as a toddler. The largest of the photos was in a clear plastic frame and showed a two-year-old with loose ringlets of mahogany hair clinging tightly to her forehead. The resemblance to his own baby pictures was unmistakable.

  But how could it be? Muna had been fitted with a diaphragm long before their honeymoon and, as far as he knew, she had never missed a period.

  He looked at the photo again and then carried it back to compare it with the one in the silver frame. It was the same child. He turned the plastic frame over and looked for a date stamp on the reverse side. “Studio Manoukian/5–17–77” was printed along the bottom edge.

  He heard the soft padding of feet behind him and looked over his shoulder. Muna was standing in the doorway.

  “From the day I brought her home, everyone said she favored you. See the eyes and the shape of the chin?”

  Lukash put the photo back on the table and turned around slowly to face Muna. “I had no idea...” His voice sounded foreign to him, as if it had been recorded and were being played back at a much slower speed.

  “You have seen all that I have of her. One morning two years ago, while I was at work, my mother took her shopping. They were at a bakery not far from here when a car bomb exploded in the street outside. My mother and Marie-Claire and three others were killed.”

  “Dear God,” Lukash whispered.

  “I do not remember much else that happened at that time. They would not show us the bodies at first, so it was difficult for us to believe there had not been some mistake. Finally, Elie arranged through a colleague of his to take my father and a cousin of mine who is a physician to the place where the Civil Defense Office kept the bodies until their investigation was complete.

  “The first thing I remember after that was the mass for the victims at the Eglise Mar Maroun. I was in such shock that I found it hard to believe my mother and daughter were gone. At some moments I blamed myself, and at others I felt a terrible rage against the Syrians and Palestinians and the Muslims in West Beirut who would not let us Christians live in peace. I remember hearing the priest speaking time after time about how God’s vengeance would fall upon those who had sent the shells and rockets from West Beirut, and I looked across the aisle.

  “Sitting in the row behind us was a group of five or six Phalangists whom I had known as boys in school. Among them was Elie’s friend Fadi, the one who had arranged for my father and cousin to identify my mother’s and Marie-Claire’s remains. I turned around for some reason, and I could see written on their faces their intention to take God’s work of vengeance upon themselves. Somehow I knew that the next day or the day after or perhaps the following week, some mother like me or some husband like my own father would take their places in a mosque in Bab Idriss or Zarif or Moussaitbé to mourn those killed in revenge by the Phalange. I felt a heaviness in my heart and a tightening in my throat, and I felt I would suffocate if I did not leave that very instant.

  “As soon as I pushed open the heavy wooden door of the church and breathed the fresh night air, I felt in my soul that if I ever allowed myself to desire revenge for what happened to my child and my mother, I would be no different from those who murdered Marie-Claire—in fact, from that time forward I would share responsibility for her death. I remembered that Jesus taught forgiveness, but it seemed that our Maronite Church had allowed itself to be persuaded by the politicians that forgiveness no longer applied between Christians and Muslims. So I vowed to forgive those who killed Marie-Claire and to beg God’s mercy for them.

  “Almost at once my mind c
leared, and I was able to accept what had happened. I went home and slept until the evening of the following day. When I awoke, I felt as if I had climbed the last in a series of mountain ranges and, for the first time, could view the valley on the other side. Only then did I realize that I still had not yet forgiven you for leaving me.

  “Until that day, I had never doubted that you were alive. Somehow I imagined that you had struck your head or contracted some disease that made you forget me and our life together. I was certain that you had never intended to leave me as you did. But as much as I tried to imagine what had happened to you and where you had gone, I could not do it. But then after the mass at Mar Maroun, I was free from worrying about what had happened the day you went to the airport—all that mattered to me afterward was that you should return.

  “And now that you are here, what has happened before no longer matters to me. What is important is only that you are here. I do not expect you to stay forever, William—only long enough so that I can remember your face if I should ever lose you again.”

  “Muna, I don’t know what to...”

  She held up an outstretched palm. “Don’t speak. Just hold me.”

  Chapter 16

  Conrad Prosser reached over his shoulder and pulled a can of diet cola from the nylon ring of a six-pack sitting atop a stack of eight or nine cases in the corner of the communications center. The station chief, having recovered from a peptic ulcer on his previous tour of duty, had sworn off coffee and now kept a sixty-day supply of caffeinated soft drinks on hand at all times in case the commissary ran out. Although U.S.-made diet cola was available in supermarkets throughout Beirut, the local price was nearly double the price charged by the heavily subsidized military commissary system.

  Prosser pulled off the ring top and tossed it back into the half-filled cardboard flat. Three stacks of classified cables lay in front of him. The first consisted of outgoing messages from Beirut Station since close of business on the previous day. The second was incoming top-secret signals intelligence material, mostly summaries prepared at Headquarters, but also a few raw intercepts obtained locally against the Syrians and the PLO. The third stack contained incoming messages from Headquarters and other CIA field stations, sorted in order of precedence, from “Immediate” through “Priority” and “Routine” to “Telepouch.”