Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 36

24

“YOU’D JUST LEAVE HIM?” Rosa said. “Till somebody recognizes him, if they haven't already? You're going to carry that to Allah some day? On your life?”

“They'll take him to the camps.” The mujihadeen captain with the sharp beard bent forward to tug at a loose shoelace. “It's easier to rescue him once he’s there, or even maybe trade for him.”

“Hah!”

“It's not your place, Rosa, to be disgusted.”

“Warriors of God!”

The shoelace broke. The captain swore and took off his shoe, fished the broken lace through. “He's in the middle of the Christian sector. We can't just walk in there.”

“Without him we have to start all over again! There's no time!”

He spliced the lace and put the shoe back on. “You're a foolish woman. Excuse me, that's redundant. It would take two hundred men to get Mohammed out of there.”

“I'll show you, then. That one foolish woman is worth two hundred men.”

MOHAMMED SLID his body to the side of the pallet and pushed himself up, taking deep breaths to stretch his chest muscles and ease the pain in his back. In the next bed the legless man slept; from a crack in the ceiling daylight blazed down.

The man who had whimpered “Halima!” had been carried feet first up the ladder like the bearded man's brother. On his bed a shell-shocked girl, eleven maybe, crouched face down as if praying, hands clenched to her head, but facing the wrong way, away from Mecca.

He had missed prayers. Three days and nights he'd been here, the doctor had said. But how do you pray in a Christian place? A jet went over, low. Israeli. He waited for the crump of its bombs shaking the earth, but it did not come, the jet's reactor fading through the hills like a stone skipped over water. As each prayer, each life, is skipped across the waters of death, to drown in the great sea of souls. But that was the problem: what is a soul? Even the Prophet admitted to the Jews he had no knowledge of the origin of the soul.

Mohammed thought of skipping stones as a boy on the lake at Yammouné, their ripples merging long after they sank. Like his father before him, and his father's father, stepping from the ember-warmth of the house out into the great star-spangled night, cold earth stinging his soles, his lungs afire with sharp air. Clench-toed, bare-legged, across the stony dung-littered courtyard to lift and slide back the wooden gate that was heavy and cold-slippery, making him fear it would fall on his toes as the goats came butting and shoving out of the pen into the courtyard where for a moment they'd stand wary, ears forward, tails high, defecating and calling to each other. He climbed over the next gate, brushing a hot lump of dung from between his toes, unbolted and swung it aside and the goats scampered out, bawling and mewling, their small hard hoofs thudding the ground, the smell of juniper and sage bushes as the goats snatched at them, the kids dashing nervously in circles on the trail down to the lake, he throwing stones to keep them in line, whistling the strange high birdlike whistle that had come down through the centuries like the land and the house from countless ancestors.

The goats stood drinking ankle-deep along the shore, their ripples merging toward the center of the lake and glinting like knife blades in the starlight. While the goats grazed the bare lakeside, he would skip stones one by one across the water toward the light growing in the east.

His chest was hurting too much so he lay back down. The only excuse for missing prayers was that he'd been unconscious with pain. Did Allah demand prayers then? Was he, Mohammed, taking refuge in pain?

He moved to a less difficult position. Miraculous and life-giving Lord, I am here. I thank You for this life and regret I've not loved You better.

He felt Allah's warm strong hands in his and despite the pain raised them to his forehead. Allah the all-forgiving.

MICK WAITED till the waiter placed the rakis and coffees on the table and left. “I recommend you don't.”

“It's not that bad. I can't afford for it to be that bad.”

Mick brought his chair forward, elbows on the table. Neill raised his cup to keep it from spilling. “I wouldn't chance it,” Mick said. “And I'm not carrying your baggage.”

“The reason you buggers don't get anything done here is you never take chances. This place is built on luck.”

Mick pulled a Lucky from the pack in his pocket and lit it with a Zippo, puffing the smoke up. “Luck shifts, mate.”

“Anyone who smokes a pack of cigarettes a day knows nothing about luck. You ever see those pictures? Turns your bloody lungs to tar.”

“I'm safer smoking two packs a day than you going back to the Root.”

“Two weeks. I'm in, I'm out.”

Mick blew out a horizontal stream. “She won't speak to you.”

Neill shrugged. His stomach was queasy and the malaria symptoms persisted. Nearly every day he'd taken his Paludrine; what the Hell more did they want? “Maybe she will. I've wondered, lately, what it would have been like...”

“What? Her and you? Total Hell.”

“I'm going to see her brother, that ugly beast Hamid. Or maybe I can get in through Amal.”

“Amal? If you're talking to Hezbollah, Amal will shoot you. So will the Israelis, the Christians ... He's a popular guy.”

“Like I keep saying, he's not that bad.”

“Nobody could be. Anyway, he's gone missing.”

“Since?”

“Few days. Done it before, apparently. Some new woman, some meeting.”

“While I'm there I want you guys to know where I am, and I'm going to tell her you know.”

“She couldn't give a shit.” Mick slapped the table.

“Shit!” Neill raised his arm, wiped coffee off his sleeve.

“If you'd stuck with her, mate, look where you'd be now. In the thick of it.”

“Maybe I still am. Maybe because we couldn't finish it, or live it, whichever, we never got unhooked. In Bratislava I was thinking,” Neill brought his chair forward, “that maybe losing her, us both losing each other, broke my heart for good.”

“Nah. Hearts are far too resilient.”

“I've been seeing this other woman, in Amsterdam. Inneka. She's a little younger than Bev, divorced – we fit really well together.”

“What are you going to say to the kids?”

“They don't care, Mick. You don't understand.”

“I never lived with my kids. They're just out there, somewhere.”

“That's no kind of life.”

“I've got a wonderful life. I've got married women and unmarried women and girls and a forty-two-year-old cabinet minister's wife who fucks like a cat. You ever see cats fuck? They leap on each other and yowl and claw for three minutes and it's over. Then she wants to get dressed and go home. Her driver waits outside – poor guy, doesn't even have time for a smoke.” Mick flicked ash. “I've got all the illicit substances I want, wine, women, song.”

“So?”

Mick looked at Neill, smiled. “Remember Daisy?”

“Daisy...”

“When you came down to Rome and threw up in the Trevi Fountain.”

“Not the Trevi – the one that runs down beside the Spanish Steps. It was my twentieth birthday or something.”

“Daisy was the girl we ended up with that night. In some incredibly cold little room up six floors somewhere – Jesus, it was cold!”

“Not my fault I was born in January.”

Mick rubbed his crossed arms. “We got in the one bed, with her in the middle, remember? You and I both wanted to fuck her and each kept waiting for the other to go to sleep.”

“This I don’t remember.”

“And finally I heard you snoring so I reached for her. She starts playing with my hand, starts squeezing it, hard, and I'm thinking Jesus, she is hot. Her fingers are playing with mine, you know, and I'm thinking this is it, I'm going to fuck this superb blonde – and then I felt up her wrist and there was all this thick hair and I realized, holy Jesus, it was you! And all the time we each thought the other was her, she was lying there snoring.”

“You're making this up.”

“You were drunk.”

“When weren't you?”

“Later she told me she'd fallen asleep waiting for us to make a move. She would've screwed us both.”

“The tall and slender one? Curly hair and freckles?”

“Daisy. After you went to Beirut she and I got real tight. She was doing research, Roman agricultural systems, some shit like that, pollen and seeds and old plant species. Then I get reassigned, Helsinki of all places. My last day in Rome she and I are sitting in this café with a fountain and music and the sun coming down, and I think, hey, why don't I just stay here with Daisy? Why don't I say no to this job, do something real – that's how I thought, then – and I looked at Daisy with the bright sun on her freckled nose and I realized I loved her. But you know what? She was too unusual, I didn't dare marry her, didn't dare ask. See how fucked up we get about women?”

“Trying to get back up where we came from. Doesn't work.”

“Man I'm just driven by sex. It's not a choice – yes, it is. I could say, OK, no more fucking. But why? It's the best thing there is. But it's a drive, see, has nothing to do with me. Just my genes pushing, these sperm saying, hey, we need to get out, fertilize somebody.”

“Paradise, that.”

“What?”

“Our longing for paradise – I just realized it's nothing more than the cell's memory of the sperm and egg finding each other.”

“The one sperm beating out all the others.”

“It’s a lovely place, between a woman's legs. The source of life. Her magnificent breasts that feed life. Her lovely slender body that carries life into the world ... No wonder we're entranced by it, can't get enough.” Neill felt foolish, as if he'd revealed too much. “My grandmother used to toss me on her knee and sing Gaelic lullabies about all the young men the English killed. The very first thing I knew in life was to hate the English. Maybe we hate to make our women love us.”

“That's crap.”

“I've got over it; if anything, now, I hate the IRA, but I still like to tell that story, and someday I'll tell it to some kid whose mind is looking for something to do with his life and, bang, I've helped to start a war.” Neill emptied dregs of spilled coffee from the saucer back into his cup.

“Without war we'd be back with the animals. Hand to mouth, jabbering at each other. War's brought us progress, scientific genius, creature comforts.” Mick shrugged. “Made us what we are.”

“But I'm afraid of this one.”

“So don't go.” Mick spat a tobacco shred. “What d'you think you've bloody got? Some invisible shield? Like the guy who thinks if he closes his eyes the bullets won't hit him?”

“We all think that.” Neill reached across the table, elbow in sticky coffee, hand on Mick's hairy wrist. Absurdly it reminded him of Mick's story how they'd held hands that night, each thinking the other was Daisy. “We're getting old, Mick. Fearing what we never used to fear.”

“Then don't go!”

“I want to interview Mohammed. Something, a sixth sense – he's got something to say.”

“Ask him about those bloody hash shipments out of the Bekaa.”

“Everybody's running drugs in this war, not just Hezbollah.”

“You've gone soft on the sodding ragheads.”

“I'm not soft on anybody, Mick. That's my problem.”

“And I say to you, true believers, take not the Jews or Christians for your friends...”

“Doesn't apply to me. Anyway, that sura is contested.”

Elbows on the table, raised hands clasped in a double fist, Mick leaned toward him. “These ragheads,” he glanced round the café at the men in keffiyahs talking at other tables, “it's against their sodding religion not to kill you.”

“To reach God you've got to step on lots of people.”

“You know why? Because God's a killer, that's why. And He loves His own kind.”

“He just called Allah a murderer,” a voice said behind Neill, in Arabic.

“You've misunderstood,” said another. “Listen more carefully.”

“He did!” The first rapped knuckles on the table. “That's what he said!”

You've done it again, Neill thought. Kneeling before the Lada's moth-spattered headlight, the girl's gun at the back of your skull. Expecting the awful wham. “You've bloody well blown your cover!”

“Cover? What the Hell's that? I've been who I am since the day I came. The British sodding Military Attaché and I don't give a sodding damn what these ragheads think.”

Neill tossed three hundred piastres on the table and stepped into the street. Mick stood on the pavement, craning to look over people's heads. “Down there's Bab el Faraj.”

“The Gate of Deliverance.”

Mick went down the steps ahead of Neill. “Let’s try this little place I know, fabulous food. And down behind the Umayyad Mosque, in al-Qaimarriyeh, a great whorehouse.”

Here you are boozing in Damascus, Neill thought. Like the girl from Hell said. Doing every little thing wrong. Imagining English is some kind of shield when it's really a target.

“AND THERE FELL DOWN many slain, because the war was of God. That's how your book says it.”

“True believers fight for the religion of God,” the doctor answered. “That's how your book puts it.”

“Do you remember,” Mohammed turned on his elbow, head propped on his hand, “your Saint Bernard? The one you've named a dog for, because he gets people drunk in the snow.”

“It's not like that. But you can't be expected –”

“Woe to any man whose sword tastes no blood – that's what he said. And you made him a saint.”

“I didn't. And we have to stop using God as a reason.”

“You don't have a God.”

“I don't, no. Not personally.”

“So why fight for them?”

“I’m a Christian, it's my heritage. But I've seen how the Maronite bishops thirsted for this war. How they do still, while the hills of bodies rise around them...” The doctor drew his packing crate closer to Mohammed's bed, sat again. “On your side they're just as bad. These crazy imams and mullahs ranting for blood.”

“Plenty to go around.”

“That's what I've sometimes thought – war is caused by too many people, we're all crushed together, fighting for space. A detail is soon an obsession, like the disagreement between Mohammed's heirs fourteen hundred years ago that's led, now, to how many million deaths?”

“If one religion is true, then only it can be true.”

“If one religion's false, they're all false.”

“That doesn't follow.”

“We're all the same and all different, we have to follow our own paths. The Koran gives you a reason and a law for everything, so you don't matter at all.”

“It's not we who matter. It's God. Jihad is the sacred war between God and the Devil.”

“All wars are holy, because they're damned. All wars are between Heaven and Hell. And Hell always wins.”