Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 38

26

THE DOG backed away from the garbage pile, licking its chops, half hopeful, half afraid, watching for a gun. A skinny dark male, Belgian shepherd maybe. When it decided André had no gun, it stood waiting for him to pass. He whistled softly, patted his thigh; it wagged its tail low but wouldn't approach. He moved closer and it backed up and knocked over a rubbish bin and ran toward the Green Line.

At the foot of the hill a little restaurant was open, and empty. He asked for wine.

“Ah,” the man said. “Before the troubles I had a good cellar, monsieur. Good Bordeaux and a few fine Burgundies – that's not easy, getting a good Burgundy to survive all the way down here. There was Beaujolais, good rosés – do you know the rosé des sables?”

“I like it best. That and the pinot noir.”

“That's not truly a rosé. Not like the rosés of Provence. The rosé des sables, I served it chilled with fresh crevettes from the Bay of Saint Georges, in a bed of lettuce from my gardens, new olives...” The sound of jets was getting louder and he waited for them to pass; the earth shook and the roar of bombs quivered the windows. “Just Israelis,” he said, “hitting the port.”

André went outside but the Mirages were gone, their thunder streaking southward over the sea. A cloud of dust and smoke was twisting and rolling up from the port.

“You want it bloody, your meat?”

“Bloody.” On the wallpaper a shepherdess was leading her flock uphill toward a grove of olive trees. In their shade a man sat playing a flute. All along the wall the same girl kept climbing the same hill toward the same man, frame after frame, the paper darkening with grease as it neared the kitchen. Never did she reach him, never did he stop playing his flute, never did the obedient sheep cease their patient upward plodding.

“Last year's.” The man uncorked a bottle of Lebanese Burgundy and poured a glass. His wrist, André noticed, was trembling. But he spilt none on the cloth.

The wine was rough and strong. From the year the yellow Hezbollah truck drove into the French compound and blew it into great pieces that came down on Yves and the others. And yet if he avenged their deaths he'd be an outlaw in their country and in his.

Not a bad wine. It had the taste of the sun-stroked crumbly slopes of Mount Lebanon, a sense of place. Like Burgundy – just say the word and you see vineyards and forests and wheat fields and castles and stone walls and slate roofs, the taste rooted in the soil.

Through the open door came early darkness and a guitar's plaint and the tang of lemons and spiced meat – the distant lap of sea on pilings and sand, a woman's voice, a man's answering. The ancient duality, he thought; why revere the inevitable?

He paid the sad quiet man and walked uphill toward the Hotel des Cèdres and there was the dog again, raffling in the rubbish bins. He turned and went back to the restaurant. “You don't have any bones, stuff you're throwing away?”

“Throwing away?”

He reached into his pocket. “I'll pay you.”

He went up the hill and put the newspaper of bones and meat scraps and vegetable skins on the pavement. Again the dog backed away, cocked its head. “C'mon, you big-eared thing,” he said. It edged nearer, stood by the paper, quivering as it ate. André moved closer and it moved away. He held out a scrap of fat and finally it ate from his hand, then with his hand on its shoulders, then patting the coarse fur down its back. “You're just a pup,” he whispered. “What happened to your masters?”

The dog stayed a few feet behind him along the darkened streets lit by candles through curtained windows. At a grocer's he found Israeli powdered milk, a can of ravioli, and some bread. He knelt and let the dog sniff them. “You take care of me, I'll take care of you.”

The dog licked his cheek and he wiped it off with the back of his hand. It followed him to the Hotel des Cèdres, hesitated at the door, then came up the stairs to the room. André mixed some milk, ravioli, and chunks of bread and the dog ate it all. He opened the window and the dog stood for a while with paws on the sill watching the garden. Then it turned round and curled up on the carpet under the window and went to sleep.

“I’VE TALKED MY WAY through three roadblocks to here, but there's no chance I'll get you back through them. Instead we have to cross the mountain. Hurry!” Rosa jammed the coat over him, glanced at the legless man who watched with a mute, fatalistic inquiry. “Hurry!”

“Where's the doctor?”

“Hurry!”

Mohammed shook her. “Where is he?”

She pulled a gun from under her Red Cross uniform and gave it to Mohammed. “I have more clips.” She swung her pistol on the legless man.

“No!” Mohammed yelled, grabbed her arm and shoved her ahead of him up the ladder into the cold starry night.

“Now they'll have a witness.” She bent and locked the hatch. “The girl too.”

He realized it wasn't a bunker but a bombed-in cellar. Downhill were the outlines of a few buildings with dim lights, men's voices, a white Land Rover parked at the end of the road. “Where's this?”

“Lasa. We have to climb the Jabal el Mnaitra and go down to the Bekaa.”

“What if it snows?”

“It won't. Go!”

Beyond them the dark hills dropped through steep canyons to the black sea. The sea swung round and became the dark hills that came round to the mountain and then the sea again, spinning faster; he stumbled a few feet and threw up. “Hurry!” she hissed.

He felt even dizzier. “What did you do to the doctor?”

“He's fine! Go!”

He jabbed the gun against her jaw. “Where?”

She slapped it away. “You can rot here!” She turned uphill, walking fast across the open ground past the bombed-in cellar. He stared at the gun in his hand, didn't recognize it, glanced downhill at the quiet dark shapes of houses where people huddled, waiting for bombs and bullets, pain and sorrow. He couldn't see the doctor anywhere. He turned and followed Rosa up the mountain, her shape flitting before him like a faraway white dove.

IN THE HOT SUMMER NIGHTS in the souk Layla would open the damasked curtains to catch the cool breath of the sea, turn toward him unbuttoning her blouse and slipping it backwards off her shoulders, unhook her bra and slide down her long-legged jeans and the white underpants, and loosen her hair, letting it tumble down over her breasts. She’d sit cross-legged before him on the thin mattress on the floor, her body lean and coffee-golden in the candle glow as she crushed hashish into the pipe.

There'd be distant voices from Martyres and the rattle maybe of a Peugeot 403 working its way up Patriarch Way, the chatter of passing sailors and whores, the hushed breath of the sea. There was the smell of orange and lemon trees in the garden, the late wisteria, honeysuckle and oleander, the rosewater on her skin, in her hair, the sweet resiny hash.

How sacred to lie side by side, touching, to love anyone this much. Sacred and unforgettable, her lips tasting like avocado, her tongue sucking him in, sweeter than honey, her breasts soft yet full against his chest, all sacred, the soft hair of her cunt that he licked aside, silky strand at a time, with the tip and side of his tongue for the side was softer, smoother, even more slippery, licking down, licking her wide open, open inside and feeling every shiver inside her, kissing up one side to the smooth inside of a thigh, up to her belly, down the other side, circling closer down into her, her shivers and sweet cries driving him wild.

She came and came again, and again, rocking her cunt against his lips, taking him deeper into her own mouth, her own throat, and each time she came he tasted her anew, fluid and hot against his lips, her lips down over him, softly her teeth, till she could take no more and turned round to slide her body down along him till he was deep inside her, her hair a dark Bedouin tent atop them, her voice rough with hash and love as her pelvis rose and fell, rocking on top of him, and it seemed far too lovely to ever end.

To lie like this for hours, side by side. Again she'd light the hash and they would take turns, hearing and feeling the night and each other and the worn silk bedspread and beyond the mattress the cool pine floor and walls of old stone, her lips down over him like the softest night breeze, like a warm sea, sliding and slipping her tongue round him and biting with her lips down the side, the tip, and above them both the old cracked ceiling was a holy writ in which their fates might be divined, they could see themselves as Heaven saw them, love and bones destined to be dust, drowners drowning in each other's arms, mortal flesh aching for mortal flesh.

“Tomorrow night I can't,” she whispered, dressing before dawn, her body dark against first light. “I have to see my brother.”

“Come afterwards.”

“It's too late. He may make me stay.”

“I'll wait anyway. Come if you can.”

She squeezed him. “You fool, I love you so.”

Come pillow your long soft hair against me, Layla. I've missed you so, all these twenty years. Let me taste the wonder of your lips and the sleekness of your skin. We were both fools, we did what others wanted, not ourselves, too young to know you never get a second chance.

Tomorrow she never came, instead her brother Hamid pounding the door and shaking his fist in Neill's face and putting out his cigarette on the silk bedspread where the night before she'd lain.

“But I intend to marry her. I'll call the British Consul, the Embassy, do everything I can. You can't keep her.”

Hamid laughed, a snarling peasant from Saida despite his Mercedes and his trips to Gstaad and a family progressive enough to send his sister to the American University. “You'll never see her again. She's left the university and she's left Beirut. If you ever even try to find her, you fucker,” he took a little silver pistol from his pocket, “you're dead meat.”

The horror of those nights, Hamid, those days. To live without her was impossible. Going to her parents' farm on the hills south of Saida, the rows of old orange trees going down to the cliffs and sea, and each time at gunpoint to be turned away, feeling her eyes behind the curtained windows. Waiting for days beyond the walls but she never came; weeks waiting in Beirut, but she never came.

Easy to see now what he should have done – quit Beirut as if he were going home, then moved quietly down to Saida, paid informers, learned where she was, freed her. Quickly over the mountains into Syria, buy her a passport in Damascus, two tickets home, and they would have had the rest of their lives together.

But when you're young you're easily fooled; her family's rejection becomes hers, on both sides. They'd been right: twenty years later he was a drunk American journalist from London and she the Mother of the Revolution, wife to the Lion of God.