Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 37

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ABOVE THE DISTANT WAVES a darker crest rose for an instant and was gone. Then it was back, taller, across the frothy horizon. Slowly Mount Lebanon rose from the wind-raked waves, its plunging ridges and peaks of snow and ice, then the dark rocky shoulders far below, the steep pine slopes dropping to the first high stony farms, then the white buildings, the first roads, the towns, down to the cities and ragged gray coast.

Jounié Bay was an oily flotsam of green and blue detergent containers and ketchup bottles and beer bottles and chunks of styrofoam, torn nets, vegetable crates, dead sardines and groupers, blue and transparent plastic bags, a woman's black high-heeled shoe in creamy sewage scum.

Behind the port the town rose in a horseshoe of French colonial mansions in affluent gardens and tall nondescript apartment towers jammed among the ancient terraced fields and haphazard palms, linked by inarticulate writhing streets and drooping telephone lines. There was no shell damage. But there wouldn't be here, he realized. Among the wealthy and blessed merchants of the Levant.

The Christian guards in the Customs shed rooted through his rucksack and nodded him through. The rucksack over one shoulder, the Jericho in its holster under the same arm, he trudged uphill past lounging militiamen and whores, and the feel of the crushed rock under his feet was as if part of him had always been here, that he was whole again.

Outside the port's cyclone fence taxis waited in the bright sun. It was ten dollars to the Christian suburbs, fifteen to East Beirut. “No going near the Line,” the driver said.

“Anywhere's fine. The Jesuit school...”

The dirty concrete of bare buildings everywhere. Patches of shore grass between gas stations, garages, junkyards, scraps of orchard. Tanks in a line, guns down, looking sleepy and bored. Graffiti over a tunnel, Fuck War, overloaded trucks grinding and belching up the hills, the racket of horns and bad mufflers, sometimes the hiss of the wind, the sea.

There was a burning rubber smell, smoke, a barricade of tanks at Dora, another at the river. The taxi stopped at the first steep streets of East Beirut. “Can't go up there.”

André eyed the street of gray tall buildings climbing and curving toward upper Beirut. “Nobody's shelling.”

“It's not that. The engine overheats.”

There was little damage all the way up Rue Cheikh Ghabi till it turned to Independence, but few cars in the streets and fewer people on the pavements. Many of the shops were shuttered and many windows broken. As he got closer to the Green Line, there were holes in apartment buildings and whole houses rubbled down on their foundations.

A young woman came out of the Emergency entrance of the Hospital Rizk, slender and fast-moving, lovely raven hair, a tan raincoat over a nurse's uniform and white sneakers. God if they're all like you, he thought. She ran to a white Land Rover marked Croix Rouge du Liban, yanked keys from her pocket and tried them but none seemed to fit. She took out more keys but they didn't work either. She was lithe and lovely as she bent with each key to the lock. Her black hair was nearly red in the early sun.

“Let me try,” he said, slipping the rucksack off his shoulder.

“It's nothing.” She backed into the street, glanced up and down, watching him.

“Here.” He reached for the keys and after a moment she gave them. She moved to the far side of the Land Rover as he tried the keys. One said Leyland but did not work. He showed it to her. “You've got another like this?”

“It isn't my car. They didn't tell me which key. There's been a car bomb in Ashrafiyeh, I have to get there...”

He slid his knife up the rubber edge of the passenger window and popped the button, slid into the driver's seat and tried the Leyland key but it still didn't work.

She was in the passenger seat now, her scent of orange blossoms and roses dizzying. “Thank you, please hurry,” she blurted. “I've got to get there.”

“These aren't the right keys.”

“Oh dear.”

He wanted to drown in her brown eyes. “Go and get them.”

“Somebody's taken them, by mistake.” She glanced down the street, biting her lips, fighting back tears. “This war ... Nothing ever works ... Now these people will die...”

He fished his knife under the steering wheel and cut the wires. “Just separate these two when you want to turn it off,” he told her, “touch this third one to them to start it.” The motor caught at once, black smoke flaring out of the back. He cut it and started it again to show her. She was ready to slide over, looking up and down the street, up at the hospital. She smiled and he felt his whole face light up, warmed. He hopped out and she reached up and pulled him down by the collar and kissed him, let him drink in her eyes for just a moment before she shoved the Land Rover into gear and drove away.

GOD, YOU ARE BEAU, Rosa thought, watching the Frenchman in the mirror as she accelerated toward Independence. She leaned down and pulled the seat one notch forward and unbelted her raincoat as she drove east down Independence past the Lazarist Mission toward the Christian suburbs.

Was she doomed forever to crave this terrified elation of being hunted? This hunger to run?

Through the Land Rover's windows she watched the street jolt past, the shell-caved walls, charred woodwork, shattered shutters listless on bullet-chewed walls, the collapsed balconies making her think of Romeo and Juliet, the faded splintered shop signs like confessions of defeat – El Ibrahim – Your Best Tailor, Vision Camera, Parfumerie de Paris. Everywhere graffiti and the xeroxed photographs of missing young men glued to pockmarked walls and twisted lampposts, a pavement sprayed with paint dark as old blood – or is that really blood, she wondered, a tag of music, “Your love's the hangman of my heart', from an open store. What, early in life, had made her so hungry to run?

She'd told Mohammed the truth. Always, when you can, tell the truth. Her father and brothers had been killed. Her mother and sisters too. On that account we're all sisters. But lots of people lost their families and didn't end up like this.

The virtue of war is that there's no time for anyone to have a past. You are for the moment only what you seem. Even brave, if need be.

God he was beau, the Frenchman who hot-wired the Land Rover. She realized she was thinking in his language. Some day I'd love to have him.

“THERE’S NO BATHROOM,” warned the woman at the Hotel des Cèdres. “You have to use the hole in the garden like everybody else. And usually there's no lights or water. But it's a nice room. I keep my rooms clean.” She squinted up at him. “You a journalist, somebody like that?” She folded his two fifties into an empty purse and buttoned it in her pocket. “You're too late. Lebanon's gone. Back when you could have said something, you never did.”

“I'm no journalist.”

“Nobody comes to Beirut now but journalists and gun runners. And since Tripoli refinery is n’t working, sometimes traders come, selling gasoline. Have you ever been to Lebanon?”

“Not before now.”

“Now? Lebanon's gone, I told you. If you'd ever known Lebanon, how it would make you weep, this!” She glared at him, her mouth pinched, as if he too had had a hand in the death of Lebanon. Which we all have, he thought, taking the key from her outstretched finger and locking the door she slammed behind her.

A pernicious little room stinking of dried sewers and mould. Skinny bed cringing against one wall, crippled table under the window half-shuttered on a sloping rocky garden of three junipers. A curtain in the corner round the toilet that was stuffed with newspapers in a failed attempt to block the sewer smell.

As a base camp it couldn't be better. Situated in the Christian stronghold of steep streets between the Convent of Our Lady of Nazareth and the Franco-Arab High School. And only three blocks from the Green Line. It had taken no shell damage – nobody's target. It might even be safe.

He opened the cracked, taped window, spiders racing for the corners. There were two bullet holes in the aluminum frame. The garden was surrounded by a stone wall; against its far side was a rubbish heap smelling of cinders, wet cardboard, rotten chrysanthemums, and jasmine, over which flies slowly circled.

IT SOUNDED like a Land Rover, crunching and grinding closer uphill, its engine rattle loudening through cracks in the ceiling. Mohammed climbed the ladder but couldn't push the hatch open to see. There was the hard uneven idle of the engine, the crunch of feet on gravel, a woman's trenchant voice, the doctor answering.

There was no way out and nowhere to hide. Breath sharp with pain, he suddenly saw himself clearly, as if from above, the Warrior of God with his silly half-bald pate, downsloping shoulders and pointed toes, scurrying like a rat in a trap, a fool in a farce. To die is nothing; why be afraid?

He sat on the bed. The legless man watched him, chewing his lip. The girl was praying, still facing away from Mecca. Even though she was a Christian and was simply hunched up in agony, Mohammed felt furious with her, her crinkled red-splotched soles and writhing toes.

The trap door squealed open and a woman in a white gown came backwards down the ladder, then the doctor. They went to the girl and the woman tried to speak to her.

The woman's haughty East Beirut accent made him hate her, before she turned to face the legless man and Mohammed saw it was Rosa.

“This is our mujihadeen,” the doctor said. “The one they mentioned in Faraiya. Tomorrow he goes down to the camp.”

She put a cool hand to his forehead. She wore a Lebanese Red Cross uniform and smelled of soap. She folded down his blanket and checked his bandages. “Can you turn over?” she said, and Mohammed did, her fingertips flitting like spiders over his back. She bent closer, whispered, “Tonight.” She turned to the doctor: “It's very good, what you did, bringing him in. I'll note it in my report.”

“Please don't. People misunderstand.”

“How so?”

He shrugged. “Saving Muslims, all that.”

She shook her head. “This war.”

“How bad is it hitting you?” he said in French.

“I'm OK, most of the time. You?”

“Going a little crazy. I can see it but can't seem to stop.”

“Like the Jews say, if it didn't make us crazy we would be.”

“Be what?”

“Crazy.”

“Right.” He smiled at the wall of dirt, the Christ. “That is a consolation.”