Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 17

5

AT A CAFÉ by the river Neill bought a 25-guilder bag of Afghani grass and sat smoking on the terrace with a cappuccino. Across the street cars were lined along the canal, parking meters spaced among them like guards among prisoners on a work detail. On the far side of the Amstel rose the stone gingerbread and brick of the Hotel de l’Europe; everywhere cars, bicycles, and trucks were fleeting back and forth as if seeking somewhere to go, people hustling past, the tall slender women with beautiful chiseled faces and red lips set off by their blonde hair; he smiled, imagining their cool long naked skin.

The grass was chunky and sticky and didn't roll easily, the smoke sweet and powerful down into his lungs out into his blood, putting all in perspective, Bev and Freeman and Inneka and the newspaper and the kids and this trip and his forty-two years crowned with no success, no future. It didn't matter, your future, if you could understand this, live fully in this.

Across the street policemen with two trucks were towing away first a gray Toyota then a red Lada. One tall bearded cop had a key that opened the Lada's door instantly. Oh to have a key, Neill thought, that opens everything. A few passersby watched half curiously, a man in a tan beret complaining quietly and rancorously. On the radio a man was whining over some woman's desertion:

And if you leave me now

You'll take away

The very best part of me

A tall slender black man, athletic, passed by with a smaller dark-haired white man – a laughing young-hearted couple. How can I look down on that? Neill thought. Then a blonde girl in a camelhair coat, black high heels, black foam pads on wires over her ears. “You don't have to be alone,” sang the café radio, a husky woman's voice.

Two girls sat at the next table, drinking espressos and smoking hash from a clay pipe. “Hey!” one of them said, and he looked up, but she was calling a young long-haired guy on the pavement who smiled and came over, kissed them and sat down, his hand on one girl's thigh, smoking their hash. I'm the kind of graying soft-faced man, Neill realized, that nobody notices. He caught his reflection in the café's side window: soon an old man, ripe for defeat.

The joint was too resiny and kept going out; he relit it, inhaling the sweet smoke through his nostrils, tasting it. The CIA had shipped Afghani weed like this to Europe to help pay for weapons to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan. Like everyone in Lebanon was selling opium and hash to pay for their weapons.

Through the smoke everything seemed clearer, the blue Jaguar that had parked where the Lada had been towed away, half up on the pavement, the wet leaves on the dirty stones, the rail beyond and the Amstel River gray slate, an orange houseboat chugging up it, the Hotel de l’Europe primly awaiting a change of season, the weary houses, wet streets beneath damp clouds.

For a moment he'd been happy just to let the game of life go on around him.

BY AFTERNOON IT WAS SUNNY and the dew had dried out of the garden. They set the long wooden table on the stone patio, with wine and salad and bread, lamb and potatoes and peas, André's mother not wanting to sit because then there'd be thirteen at table. “Don't be silly,” he said. “You think we'd eat without you?”

She waited till the others, his sisters and their husbands and children, had filed through the kitchen to the patio. “You're going again, aren't you?”

“Just a little while, Mama. Down south.”

“Your father knows but he won't tell me.”

How savage age is, he thought, seeing her lined face, the pallid flesh and dark worry under the faded eyes. “Papa doesn't know anything because there's nothing to know.”

“You've resigned your commission.”

“You know why, Mama. Because they did nothing. After the bombing.”

He saw that the word hurt her and regretted it, took her hand, her skin cold, the flesh bony. When we get old, he thought, the sun doesn't warm us anymore.

“It's because of Yves you're going back,” she said. “But there's nothing you can do, mon cher, cher fils. And instead of losing one of you now I'm going to lose you both.”

“YOU COULD HAVE LEFT me a note,” Inneka said.

“I thought you were gone all afternoon,” Neill answered. “So I –”

“I just went down to Shopi to get you some beer! I get back, wait two more hours before you come. I could have been at work today, for all the good it does!”

“I'm sorry, Inneka.”

“I don't care you're sorry!” She slapped a hairbrush down on the sink. “How do you think I ever want to build a life with you, when I never know where you are?”

Neill followed her into the bedroom, realized what he was doing and stopped, went instead to the window, tucked aside the curtain, watching the umbrellas like black toadstools diagonally cross the street. A gull bobbed on the canal, something white in its beak.

“It's after two,” he said. “In eighteen hours I have to be at the station.”

She came into his arms and they stood there, swaying slightly, silently.

Even when I do think of her, he realized, it's still for me.

ROSA COULD NOT CROSS Rue Madame Curie in the open before dark, and the route she'd planned to take behind the old houses had been hit by Israeli 500-pounders.

A rumble at the far end of Rue Alfred Nobel grew louder through the shelling, the singing inwhistle of Katyushas, the mortars' irregular rattle and thud making the ground pulse like a heart. With a prehistoric roar a Syrian T-34 ground up the hill of ruined houses, its turret gun swinging down Rue Nobel as its treads shuddered and clanked toward the mound where she hid, and all the greatest fears she'd ever had came to one, the great crushing treads, the engine's throaty snarl coming toward her, but if she got up and ran they'd surely shoot her. She had to stay, stay in this hole as it crumbled in the tank's nearing vibration. She had to use the grenades, that would stop them, but the sack wouldn't untie and she should have thought of it earlier. Thrashing the earth the tank passed her by, concrete and steel crunching and writhing under its great steel paws, its sour exhaust in her face. It halted, swung its gun uphill.

They're looking for me, she thought, hearing the rumble of a second tank, a louder higher engine. It swung over the top of the hill and down the flattened street behind her and she darted up and across Rue Madame Curie hoping maybe they wouldn't see her, for a half-fallen building was blocking them. The tank's snout came round the edge of collapsed stones as she leaped into a well, smashing down some kind of stairs that broke the grenades loose when she fell. I'll die now, she thought, scrambling down the stairs after the grenades, they'll explode and me with them. She found the sack and there were three, five, six, seven – they were all there, the thirteen grenades. Holding her breath, she felt for the pins – all there. If they hadn't been it would already have been too late.

Loose stone banged down as the tank neared, shuddering the earth. She scrambled feet first down the stairs into the blackness – it was a courtyard, not a well, this earth above and around her the debris of houses. Fumbling along a wall, she found a window, barred, then a door to smash open and here was an open corridor, chunks of ceiling and something – dishes? – on the floor. Chairs, furniture in the way but she scrambled over them as with a white wham a grenade went off in the courtyard and a wall cascaded down between her and it. The tank overhead ground into gear and rumbled away.

Plaster and rock clattered down around her, the air thick with dust. Her ears roared, deafened. Bent over the grenades, she held her breath as long as possible then tried to breathe through her veil. When the air cleared and things stopped falling she tied the grenades up again under her raincoat and peered round her in the shallow darkness. Along one wall was a buffet with dishes and crystal, along the next a coat rack with a man and a woman's long coats and children's jackets. In the middle of the room was a wooden table, set with six plates, silverware, and glasses, all covered with dust.