Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 32

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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 to 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?”