by Mike Bond
If God hadn't taught us to kill, what good would we be?
THE GIRL WAS PRETENDING to come, jerking her head back and forth, moaning. “Stop it!” André snarled, shoving harder, bunching her up and driving deeper. Maybe she wasn't faking it, this long coming slowly and her teeth in his shoulder and now this wild angry look through the sweaty hair and on her lips a taste of blood – whose? Not yet he wouldn't come, not yet; the girl stretched out beneath him like a ballerina, now hunching up, a ball of clenching flesh, her legs sliding down his, she writhed out straight again, squeezing herself tight, squeezing it out of him.
He pulled himself away, sat up, trying not to gasp. Sweat and semen glistened in the moonlight on his belly, down into the squat hairs.
She slipped into her clothes. Moonlight was like smoke spilled on the floor. In it he could see dust between cracked tiles. “You want me come back?” she said. “Some time?”
“I'm leaving.”
She shut the door softly as she went. Slowly, like a well-trained army, the moonlight moved across the floor, from under the window to the foot of the bed, toward the empty fireplace on the far wall. He went to the window, looking over the tile roofs of many houses and many dreams, to the yellow minaret of Hala Sultan mosque and the silvery sea beyond, and there seemed to descend over it all an almost holy blessing.
He pulled his bag from the cupboard and sat naked on the floor in the moonlight, dismantling and reassembling the Jericho, first eyes open, then closed, till by fingertip he knew instantly the touch of every part, the way each joined the others, until each bullet slipped by itself into the clip and the clip into the gun. Until it came together by itself.
Like this trip, which was disjointed and haphazard at the start and now was beginning to come together by itself. The closer it got, the stranger it was. That he should do this. Or that he should have waited so long. Wrong, what they said. Vengeance should be right away, not cold. Unless you make him live in fear. Unless he knows you're coming but doesn't know how or when.
But this guy doesn't know.
André had waited too long, got too cold, let his anger die. The hatred and pain. No, the pain was still there. But now it was a decision, not a response. A cold decision.
Here, now, was part of the process, talking himself into coming this far. Knowing that once he'd got this far he'd talk himself into going further. Until finally, the whole thing united before him, almost happened by itself.
On his hand were the smells of gun oil and the girl's vagina: out of this we come, he thought, and into it.
He put the gun away and stood at the window watching the moon's phosphorescence on the waves, the mosque with its minaret draped in green lights, the grim black fort, the play of cloud shadows on the gray-green sea, the mast lights of three ships lying at anchor outside the port. Beyond the bay were the refinery lights, then the city trailing into darkness eastward toward Famagusta, the famous Famagusta the Turks had taken in '74 and still held. Cyprus like Beirut was cut in half, east and west, people hungry to kill on both sides of the line.
“Yes,” the surf sighed, falling on the sand, “yes,” sliding back to rise and fall again. “Yes...”
The moon slid down the west, yellowed, reddened, and sank among the houses. Slowly, slowly its light faded up the wall, seeming to take him with it when it narrowed to nothing and slipped into the night.
20
HIS FATHER looked so frail and white-bearded on his pallet that Mohammed thought he was already dead. But his father turned his head and smiled. “What a nice surprise!”
“How are you, Papa?”
“I'm glad Kamil found you. That you came.”
“I have to start back before dawn, to miss the Christian patrols.” He leaned down to embrace his father's chilled thin bundle of bones. The room smelled of an old man's infected sleep, and of smoke from the lemon boughs in the coals. Beyond the wall a lamb was bleating.
“How did you come?”
“We could drive past Aley. Cut through the Christian lines and came up along the mountain.”
“I might have seen you. I've been half way to Heaven, tonight. Looked down on the mountain from high in the sky.”
Mohammed sat himself closer to the edge of the bed. “How was that?”
“An angel or a jinni or something took me right out of this bed, pulled me up in the air so I hung there looking down on myself, as if I was dead, yet I weighed nothing, went up through the roof and could look down on the house and goat pens and the stone wall all round, then the open pasture beyond, the trail to the lake, as if the moonlight was water pouring down the mountains into the lake.”
“You thirsty or something, Papa?” Mohammed looked round for the water jug, saw a teapot on the hearth. “You want some tea?”
“I kept getting further away and seeing more and more and finally this whole world was like a big boulder I could see over one edge of. Then it was just a little stone.”
Mohammed shivered. “It's cold in here, Papa.”
“I saw this war, how it's killing us all.”
“No it won't, Papa. It's almost over.”
His father's hand rose from the blanket and wavered toward him, settled on his forearm. “Don't lie! This is my last time ever. To be with you.”
Mohammed felt a tremor of shame down his back. “I'm sorry.”
Pulling on Mohammed's arm, the old man raised himself up, caught his breath. “I'm going to die soon. And I understand why this war happened. And how to end it.”
“We may not want to end it. You know that. Till we get what we want.”
“You're all blind drunks. Can't even see, any of you, that you've already lost everything there is to lose...” His father's voice, Mohammed noticed, had grown thin and hoarse. “...It's going to kill you all.”
“Then we've lost all these men for nothing.”
“Anyone who dies dies for nothing. It takes a leader to make peace.”
“If it's schism between us then it's schism forever. Until they're all dead.”
“You know that can never happen. Praise God.”
“Because we don't believe in it enough. If we did, Allah would see it done.”
His father lay back down, drawing up the blanket. “To learn the suras is to be informed by Allah every moment of your life. Awake and in dreams. Especially in dreams.” A lemon branch flared, the bark peeling away, and for a moment the old man listened to it. “But it's no good, unless you listen to what the Prophet is saying.”
“You always have.”
“Remember the one, No soul can believe but by the permission of God: and he shall pour out his indignation on those who will not understand. What do you suppose that means?”
“Many things. None of them merciful.”
“But if Allah decides who shall believe, why does he then punish those who don't?”
“I don't slay the soul which God has forbidden me to slay, unless for just cause.”
“But think, my son: Do not revenge thy friend's blood on any other than the person who killed him. Some man you kill, he may be a shopkeeper, and never have killed a soul.”
“He whom God shall direct, shall have none to mislead him.”
“When I was seven, as I've told you many times, leading the goats at dawn down to where the river comes out of the mountain, then up the mountain as the sun rose – I could be there now, the juniper needles on the path, strawberries between the sharp stones –”
“The junipers are all gone. Eaten by goats.”
“In all my long life, including my love for your mother, that was my favorite time. The river...”
Mohammed went to the fire and laid some twigs on the coals, poured water into a black kettle and set it on two rocks above them. “Three times now the Christians have hinted peace. If I have to, I'll agree t
o a truce, until we can destroy them.”
“How did they offer this peace?”
“A truce – they lift the siege and we all return to our old sides. Under the UN. But that still leaves Amal, the Druze.”
“When I was a boy, we all slept in that other room.”
“I remember. You've told me.”
“Next door, where the Sillals are now, were the al-Sherifs. Hosseini people. In bed at night I'd hear their voices chattering, laughing and singing, through the mud wall, and I remember thinking that if that wall had been a body's width to the east, I'd be their son and Abdul my brother.”
“God did not want that.”
“God didn't care, my son.”
“How can you say that?”
“There are no just causes. That's what, after half a century of thinking about God, I'm saying.”
“You've outgrown the Prophet?”
“If a mud wall separated me from the other side, then Muslim, Christian, Sunni, Shiite – these are not enough to kill for. Not enough to turn Lebanon from Heaven into Hell.”
“Hell's what Heaven used to be. We keep looking in the wrong place.”
“Remember the imam who was caught in a flood, and he goes up to his minaret to wait for God to save him? The water's rising. A boat comes by, offers to take him. “No!” he calls. “God will save me!” Another boat comes by, he tells them the same thing, “God will save me.”
“You must rest, Papa.”
“And then the third boat comes and he tells them the same. The water rises and the imam's drowned. In Heaven he reproaches God: “Why didn't you save me?”
Mohammed, checking the teapot, turned his back. “And what does God say?”
“Fool,” God answers, “I sent you three boats.”
Mohammed poured a cup, mixed in cool water and a chunk of sugar, held up his father’s head so the old man could sip.
“Are you going to cling to your minaret?” his father said. “You don't remember that the Muslim means He who submits?”
21
THE OLD MAN slept. The woman who had been watching over him returned. Mohammed went into the next room, where sixty years ago his father had lain in bed hearing the Hosseini family beyond the wall. He woke his three sleeping mujihadeen and went back to his father. “Papa!” he whispered, but the old man didn't budge. In his blanched face, for an instant, Mohammed saw his own.
“We should stay another night,” one of the mujihadeen said, yawning and rubbing his face.
Mohammed swung round, checked his anger. “What about Beirut?”
“Beirut's quiet now. You should take this time.”
“We could leave tomorrow at midnight,” another said. “It'd be safer.”
“You let me decide!” He realized his voice was too harsh, tried to soften it. “Hurry!” He went back to his father. The old man's tousled hair stuck up like a white flag of surrender. “Papa!” he said, but again his father did not answer.
“Let him sleep,” the woman said. “Wait a few hours.”
“Wait?” Why did these peasants never understand? Stuck in their slow peasant ways, the world eating them alive. He nodded sharply to his men and led them out, with one last glance back at the thin white head crowned in white. He turned his face toward the mountain, walked the street of tilting houses toward the lake and along its edge, ducks quacking nervously and swimming their young away from shore.
Here was the place in the swamp at the edge where he'd found the little porcelain vase the French archaeologist had said was Roman, that a woman two thousand years ago had used to store her tears. How, he'd wondered at the time, could anyone weep so much?
They circled the end of the lake and followed the river up the mountain, tree roots like black snakes across the trail. They passed by the shepherd's hut and the trail became steep, the river crashing and booming down its bed. In the moonlight the rocks gleamed with frost. The branches were bare and black, splinters of paler black sky between them.
They stopped for breath where the river came churning out of the mountain into a deep pool then cast itself over the edge. Mohammed walked out on the edge and knelt down to the great white stone that was the section of a Roman temple, one that had been built here to honor the river's coming forth from the mountain, the Frenchman had said, a long piece of carved stone that had been placed above columns.
Mohammed knelt and as he had done so many times traced with his fingers the deep lines someone had carved so long ago in the stone. How, he wondered, had they brought up these huge chunks? For there was no white stone like this on the mountain.
It was hard to imagine those people, so diligent and hard-working, leaving their traces everywhere. And others before them, the Frenchman had said: Greeks, Phoenicians, many others. Where were they now? Against them all, how did you weigh one old man's death? He with his thin white hair like a flag of surrender?
Above the thundering river were the dark mouths of caves where he'd played as a boy, the grass slope his goats had climbed each morning to pastures in the sun. Where was he now, that boy?
The lake below was just like his father had said, a pool of moonlight that had flowed and echoed down the mountains all around.
They reached the first crests before dawn. Early sparrows scattered from goat dung on the path; Mohammed pitied their numb hunger, their scratching at dirt and stone. He tossed the Kalashnikov to the other hand, swinging his legs effortlessly into a sudden climb through basalt slabs with gnawed bitter scrub in their corners. He liked stretching his legs out like this, the feeling he could go on forever, never tire.
Here, where they'd beaten the Christians, a bullet-riddled white statue of their Virgin loomed headless over a vast vertical lunar valley of thorn trees and splintered stones.
Beyond the Christians now. His stomach was empty but that felt good too. You could go on almost nothing, really. Cleared your mind for what you had to do. How to trap them with this peace. Make them beg for their own death.
Death like this crystal morning whose blue air stung his nostrils. He must not die before he could trap them. Like the girl said, that girl Rosa, he'd been losing sight of the goal, liberation of the Holy Land. He'd become too caught up in this war of schisms: another Muslim is at least better than an infidel – there his father was wrong.
On the right there were remnants of a stone wall between two boulders. Long-ago separation of the sheep. The liberation of Palestine, the Holy City: first we need Beirut as a base. That's what you must tell Rosa. We cannot move until they're completely encircled. When we have Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, then Egypt will abrogate Sadat's peace and Israel will be driven under.
Stone walls of a house, the sky its roof, the earth its floor. Beside it a ruined sheepcote, the bouldered, barren earth. He hungered to be back with the first people who had come over these hills of sharp basalt and balsamy scrub and down into the valley below, when it had been grass-thick in the meadows, cedars like soldiers up the ridges, the river like a woman's silver necklace down between them. How many lives in those rock walls, how many young women disrobing for their husbands, how many generations of counting up and never having enough?
He'd be foolish to think the liberation of Palestine would change that. His father taking the goats down to the lake, the Hosseini family beyond the wall, their voices in the night.
He looked back to see his men strung out behind him. To the left, up in the rocks, a quick glimmer of a rifle. He yelled, waved his men down but it was too late; from everywhere rifles fired, shattering the cold clear morning, his men twisting and falling on the path. As he fired at the flash and sound of guns, something punched him hard in the back and knocked him face into the ground.
22
NEILL WANTED TO FIND HELL in daylight but there was no point: the woman was untraceable. And what goo
d would it do to find her?
It was wrong, what they'd done. Scaring him like that. He wasn't theirs. He was doing them a favor. If Freeman wasn't such a snide little shit he'd have realized long ago. They didn't care if he lived or died, just wanted him to find Mohammed.
If he did, it wouldn't be how they thought. They'd said they wouldn't follow him, but look what they'd done.
He wasn't doing them any more favors. Like Freeman had said, he'd drop them when he wanted. But not like they thought.
But then, MI6 could have him kicked out of Britain any time they wanted. Freeman had said that too. Just pray, Neill, he had said, that we never turn against you. Maybe that was what he needed: go back to the States, start over.
He was too old to start over. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and hobbled to the bathroom. Anyway, if he tried to find her he'd miss his plane. He sat on the toilet, fell asleep and hit his head on the radiator, stood in the shower, put in the plug and let the tub fill round his ankles. Seven fifteen, and already no hot water.
“I’M SORRY YOUR FRIENDS WERE KILLED. You were very lucky to be just wounded.” With his index finger the doctor pushed his bifocals up the bridge of his nose and peered down through them, wrinkled his nose as if his moustache tickled. “And just a little wound at that.”
“It's sore,” Mohammed said, “to be so little –”
“It missed the lungs – just muscle and soft tissue. A quick in and out beneath your shoulder blade. You have very thick muscles.”
“In Ainata I am a mason.”
“Soon they'll come to ask you about all that.”
“All that?”
“Who you are and where you were going.”
“I didn't want to go. But they came to Ainata, the tall one and the one with the scarred cheek. His name's Ahmed. They said we had to send two young men, to fight in Beirut. I have no work now so the village decided to send me.”
“Who was the other?”
“He was not really from Ainata but from a farm up on the mountain. Just a kid. He has no family, that's why they sent him.”