Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 28

16

EVEN IN LATE MORNING the Paris métro was crowded. On the seat before André a black girl was checking her face in a cracked pocket mirror. Beside him an old unshaven Arab held the pole with both hands. On top of his bare skull were brown patches and old scabs. André checked the other faces in the car – less than half were white.

The train stopped at Chatelet and the old Arab staggered across the quai and vomited behind a bench. A girl in a Carrefour ad had lovely long legs with graffiti all over them. There was graffiti on every ad, all down the quai.

A thin black man in a yellow uniform was sweeping butts along the quai. He's come up here, André thought, to make a better life for his family. What if he had to leave France? To go back to what? Was that why Africa was failing? Because the best kept leaving?

France could take ten million Africans and it would make no difference at all to the billions in Africa. But it would ruin France. As soon as you take some away they just make more. You have to admit that's the truth. And France has never sent its people starving to another's door.

Africa's thousand children dying daily in the desert with an outstretched hand. He thought of his little brother Yves ahead on the path, sunny hair and freckles, crossing into the sumacs and down over the stream past the oaks where the young couple slept one night and we didn't know why. Yves carrying his gun up the slope of beeches in the dawn-bright dead leaves, toward the knoll where we'd tracked the boar, the ground splashed with his blood, the dog bounding back and forth, shivering, waiting for the charge.

Motorcycles and symphonies, Yves. Let neither side win. Loving to hunt but hating to kill. Under your calm kindness even you couldn't resolve that. You who always went for what you wanted like a magnet. For what you felt was right.

The only honor I have left, Yves, is in not daring to live without it. No, that's not true. Not completely.

A beautiful girl stood beside him in a long green wool coat. Fair skin and light lipstick, full chestnut hair. Oh if I could make love to you. Oh please if I could. Except I have to leave and you already have someone and you wouldn't want to anyway. If you'd make love to me and be my wife I'd stay here, he promised, wouldn't go to Lebanon.

Beneath her green coat, the dark suit, the white silk blouse, her underclothes and skin, he could feel her lovely body all along him. At the Louvre someone left a seat and the girl sat down and took a leaflet from her purse. He read it over the top of her head, a French consular form.

When she got out of the train at Concorde he started to follow her, but turned round and leaped back in the train, took it all the way to Etoile, to pick up the bus for Charles de Gaulle and the afternoon Cyprus Airways flight to Larnaca.

IN THE COMMAND BUILDING all the apartments had been pillaged, so Rosa waited till the shells slowed and ran across the courtyard to the building at the back. It too had been emptied, the furniture burned in cooking fires, one apartment used as a toilet. Shelling had started again, but on the other side. Someone was firing single shots, even spaced, in celebration. He's shot someone, she realized, that's what he's celebrating. Been waiting for hours and finally got his target. She ducked along the pavement to the next building but the stairway had been blown out and there was no way up to the apartments.

Two buildings further she found an apartment with some rice and dried chickpeas under the sink. There was no furniture, on one wall photos of an old stern man and smiling heavy woman, a new color blow-up of a young man and woman with three children and a picnic basket on a rug, behind them the nose of a blue Fiat and the stiff ridges of Mount Lebanon.

In the dirt on one side of the front steps a daisy flamed yellow in the setting sun. She thought of picking it for Mohammed. No, she decided, it's so lovely; let it live.

EACH DAY with a beginning, middle, and end. That's all I remember. No matter how different they seem they're all the same. You're in a train or a plane and you get to a new place and then you see it's the place you just left, the one you're going to next.

Neill brushed the crumbs from his sandwich off the table and into his palm, emptied them on the floor. What if I'm not an alcoholic? If all along I've been thinking I was but I'm not? What if I just love the taste? Beer came before bread, they say that now.

A couple at the next table were clasping hands, legs enwrapped. What was this crazy craving to be inside another, or have them inside you? They were staring through their cigarette smoke into each other's eyes. Thinking they're Bacall and Bogart, sucking on the tit of death.

The waiter brought another half-liter of Pilsner in a tall glass, a thick head with a tang of barley malt and the brightness of the sun. A short chubby-faced man in a red scarf came through the door and glanced around, saw Neill wave and came over. He had a pixie smile and a scar to the left of his mouth. He took off his raincoat and draped it and the scarf over the back of a chair.

“So how are you?” Neill said.

“Could be better. These are not good times.”

“When have they ever been?”

“There were times, you know, when things seemed to go well.”

“The operative word is "seemed", Tomás. We're always fucked, it's just that sometimes we don't realize.”

Tomás grinned; there seemed more black holes between his teeth than last time. “I was so pleased you were coming.”

“I was just realizing that since I last saw you I've done absolutely nothing. The more I try to fill my life, the faster it empties.”

“You've done nothing? What about that series on Camp David, on the Paris bombings? Even here at the end of the world, we saw those.”

“I'm talking about me.”

“You mean you and Beverly? Since when has that gone right?”

Neill glanced down at his glass. “Maybe never. No, that's not true.” He raised his head. “Anyway, we're each seeing other people – just sticking it out for the kids.”

“You think they don't know?”

“It's the best we can do.”

“Maybe that's not true. Maybe more important than us,” Tomás raised his shoulders in a shrug, “is our kids. Like we would die for them, step in front of a car for them, that kind of thing.”

Neill had a sharp tremor of this morning's memory, caught between speeding lanes on Staromestska. “Everybody would –”

“It's the same, then, not to leave them, not to split up. A commitment to life: you bring it into the world, you nurture it.” He raised his shoulders. “Far more important than what we journalists do, or governments, laws, analyses.”

“I sleep through all that, these days.”

“Yet you're the one who told us if society's truly an organism then we have to be its neurons.”

Neill motioned at the waiter, at Tomás. “What you having?”

“Pilsner. It's very fashionable, forty-five year old men having a values crisis.”

“Don't exaggerate. I'm forty-two.”

“Yeah, but you're precocious. Just keep doing the same fine work you've always done, and the rest'll go away.”

“Society's not an organism, it's a maelstrom. A horror show.”

“You think people don’t know that?”

“Not enough.”

“That's always been your passion – uncovering the worst.”

“You want to let it fester?”

“Or heal?” Tomás lit a papirosi and the fragrant smoke went up in a circular column. He called out something in Slovak and a woman at another table smiled and turned away. “It's only when people like you are content to see the worst that we can get better. No, that's silly. We'll never get any better. But your seeing us as we are may keep us from getting worse.”

“Nullities. Bloody idealism.”

“When you came here to teach that course, I couldn't understand why you'd bother. Do you remember – I even asked you?”

“No.”

“You said journalists can't be just a mirror of their times, but have to be a guide also. That you'd come to share what you'd learned and to learn from us.” Tomás grinned. “I always wonder what you learned from us.”

Neill scanned the animated crowd, the smoky misted windows. “Maybe that freedom of the press isn't all it's cocked up to be. There was political control over you but we have commercial control over us – and, finally, there isn't too much difference. You ever see our Tory press during an election?”

“You were the best teacher we had. When we started to build something new, what we learned from you helped us get beyond who we were, to the event itself, how to tell it.”

You can like someone, Neill realized, without hoping they understand you. “So tell me, about Beirut. When'd you get back?”

“What's today – Thursday?”

“Friday.”

“Three weeks ago.”

“And?”

Tomás splayed spindly fingers round his glass, craned his neck. Why are all Slovaks bald, Neill wondered. He looked around at nearby tables, decided this wasn't true. “I went through Damascus,” Tomás said. “Got stopped at the border then went further north and got through on a Syrian Army truck headed for Baalbek. It's all Hezbollah now, up there.”

“I always thought of it as Heliopolis, City of the Sun. And now it's just another military outpost.”

“That's what it's been, most of the last three thousand, five thousand years. Guarding the most fertile valley in the Middle East.”

“So how'd you reach Beirut?”

'Got this crazy man to drive me down to Zahlé in his old Mercedes. The whole way I wanted to lie on the floor, duck the bullets, but I couldn't, with him driving. Wouldn't have been fair. We never got hit.”

Neill drained his stein, caught the waiter's eye. “I don't want to put up with any of that. Too much of a coward.”

“Then go home. It's not the time, Beirut.”

“As I said on the telephone, if I can talk to Mohammed, get his position out in the open...”

Tomás reached across, took Neill's hand. “No matter how bad the war makes you feel, you can't change it.”

Neill waited till the waiter left. “I tried Michael Szay today.”

“That bastard.”

“He's given me good leads, in the past.”

“What's he say?”

“Told me to get lost. That I'll never reach Mohammed.”

Tomás fiddled with his glass, scratched his skull. “Why don't you ask Layla?”

It stung like a dentist's probe on a dead tooth – the reminder of past pain. How could it, after all these years? “I probably couldn't even find her. If she's with Mohammed I'd have to locate him first. If she's still with her family, down in Saida, they're behind Israeli lines and I can't get in.”

“Go see her brother.”

“Hamid? He's the one who did us in, way back then.”

“He's still in Beirut. Has an office on Mahatma Gandhi. Number 21.”

“He's a goddamn snake.”

Tomás was silent a moment. “Crazy, what happened to her. To you both.”

Neill shrugged. “So what's the latest?”

“Damascus says they're going to stay and the Christians are begging for arms. The Israelis will fight the Syrians on the Green Line and that will be the final solution for Lebanon.”

“How do you read Mohammed?”

Tomás lit another cigarette, dropped his lighter, and fished for it under the table, and Neill could see down the back of his neck, under the brown wool collar, the long thin black hairs. “He's about forty,” Tomás said. “Very driven, very cold. Yet strangely open-minded, in a way – wants an Islamic Lebanon but isn't too doctrinaire. Some people say he's in it for the power, others say he actually cares.”

“Should I try getting through Damascus?”

“The Syrians may let you go as far as Masnaa, somewhere like that. After that you'll have to deal with field units and they may shoot you first and then ask you where you're going. After that you have to deal with Hezbollah. And they aren't going to let you anywhere near Mohammed. They don't even admit he exists.”

“Maybe with the Syrians I can go down the coast.”

“One way or the other you'll have to pass through Hezbollah. And now, if he's cut off like they say, you've got to pass through the Christians and Hezbollah to get to Mohammed, and by then the Syrians and Israelis will have shot you.” Tomás smiled, bringing down his empty glass. “You'll be able to excise a lot of guilt.”

“Guilt, the gift that keeps on giving –”

“That's the virtue of religion and patriotism: they allow us to do evil without guilt.”

“So where do you stand on all this, these days?”

“It never changes. The Israelis have no choice, they have to fight. In all my years in the Middle East I’ve never met a Moslem who agrees with Israel’s right to exist. Not one.”

“Me neither,” Neill said. “We will drown the Israelis and their children in the sea seems to be the general approach.”

“And the Holocaust taught them not to rely on anyone but themselves, that at any time the whole world can turn against them.”

“As it always does. The last time even America and Britain sent them in their ships back to die. We wouldn’t bomb the rail lines, stop the camps…”

“And I'm tired of the Palestinians fussing over what they never wanted till they lost it. I'm tired of people with long memories, people with ‘love for the land’. Even back ten thousand years, the forest tribes of central Europe – we'll never stop fighting over territory. I'd like to live on the moon for a while, the dark side of the moon, so I wouldn't have to look down on this.” Tomás switched back to English. “Like Arafat once told me, ‘There'll never be peace in the Middle East as long as there's Israel. And there'll never be peace in the Middle East even if there is no Israel.’”

“Shit, that unshaven little fucker. The people in the camps, Gaza, the Territories, barefoot in human muck holding up his photo!”

“The smart ones all got out, became camera merchants in New York or rug sellers in London or leaders of international guerrilla movements.”

“Everybody's has to have a pope. If we could all just have the same one.”

“When was the first Muslim schism? Within days of the Prophet's death! Even his own family couldn't agree.”

“Most wars begin in the family.” Neill tried to see through the bar's steamy windows, couldn't tell if it was raining. “Tell me what to say,” he drained his glass, dropped a hundred koruna note on the table, “so they let me see him.”

“Just like you said: tell them he's getting a bad deal in the press. That it doesn't help the cause of Allah to have so many people unfairly turned against him.”

“He wants them all to die, the unbelievers: O prophet, stir up the faithful to war –”

“And that on the international level it could impede his arms shipments and cause him trouble consolidating his gains.”

Neill shuddered, a premonition somehow. “Suppose it’s true, what Arafat said?”

“What, that there’ll never be peace in the Middle East even without Israel?” Tomás shrugged: it’s obvious.

The bar had filled; to leave they had to squeeze past women in tight leather skirts and men in dark suits, two men in motorcycle jackets, Neill holding his breath against the smoke. A cold wet wind was coming down the sidewalk; looking up he could see an early star.