Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 40
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FROM THE SINGLE WINDOW of the goat shed Mohammed watched the road below. Many trucks of men went up and down it but none stopped. A wedge of small spindly cypress climbed halfway up the far slope. The road glistened with rain, the hiss of truck tires and the rumble of their engines echoed up the canyon.
“It's just games between us,” the doctor had said. “These wars. If we were all identical we'd find a freckle on someone's neck and that would set him apart. He'd be the other. So we'd kill him.”
The doctor had saved Mohammed from the angry Christian but Mohammed had not saved the doctor from Rosa.
When ye encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads.
God commandeth you to fight his battles, that he may prove the one of you by the other.
But what if, as the Hanefi say, this commandment was meant only for the Bedr war, at the beginning of our faith, and not for all time? Now that the doctor's dead, have I like the apostate Walid Ebn al Mogheira hired another to bear my guilt? Who when caught by an arrow refused out of pride to dislodge it from his cloak till it cut the artery of his heel and he died?
“They don't bother you?” he snapped at Rosa, “those Syrian and Christian trucks together down there? Six months ago Hezbollah fighters were dying to protect their Syrian brothers from the Christians, the same Syrians who now unite the Christians and Israelis against us. Six months ago they were all torturing and castrating each other.”
“You'd say that Allah does what Allah wills.” She pulled her coat tighter about her, shivering. “And what Allah wills is right.”
“Why mock me so?” He turned away from the window. “Don't you worry, the way you act, that no man will marry you?”
“You are backward and ignorant, from the Bekaa, where nothing has happened for two thousand years, ten thousand years.”
“And you are a wise young woman of the new Palestine, more modern than Beirut and even more corrupt.”
“You Persian in Arab clothes, you goat farmer, don't you see?” Her teeth flashed at him out of the gloom. “If we don't change, we turn into Nigerians or something, always going backward!”
He wanted to reach out, strike her. “So you go to bed with Western ways? That's better?”
“Is Islam only the province of fanatics, or can reason enter also? Why let folly divide us? Who is the Prophet's successor? Who cares? The Prophet was here and his word is quite explicit.”
He felt weak, looked for a place to sit. “I agree.”
“Then why don't you live it?”
“If everything is Islam, then Islam is nothing...” There was just a rock bench, rough, beside the cold fireplace.
“If everything is Islam then Islam's everything.” She knelt before him, took his hands. “Bend a little, and you have it all. Don't let Israel divide us, as it always does. Please, Lord?”
His feelings rushed right out of him, wildly, down over her. He touched her shoulder; the act seemed inevitable and wrong, one he'd do no matter what. “What if we made peace?”
She looked up into his eyes. “If we make peace with Druze and Amal and Syria, we can drive the Israelis out of Lebanon.”
“I mean peace between us...”
“We're not at war, Lord. But the Israelis.”
He pulled back his hand. “You, the Palestinians, you brought the Israelis in.”
“We were running from them!”
“What if we made peace with them all? Israelis, Christians, all?”
“Not without Palestine!”
“If we got more Palestine with peace?” He felt winded, dizzy; the mountain air was too thin. “As I've said, I'm willing to wait a hundred years, even a thousand.”
“I don't have a hundred years to live, Lord.”
“But with luck you might have thirty, fifty more. Don't condemn others to die at eighteen, at twenty-one! At three or four.”
“We'd rather die than lose Palestine. That's what we've decided. I thought you agreed.”
His wound was hurting, wearing him down. “If you could go back to ‘75, before Bloody Sunday, the first bad times, wouldn't you want to?”
“Not without Palestine!”
“We're all so tired of your goddamned Palestine!” he yelled, hurting his chest. “I don't know a single Lebanese, Shia or Druze, Sunni or Christian who wouldn't prefer things the way they were back then! Before you came to Lebanon! No one will win this war now. No one but the Devil.”
“We can't stop now.”
“You're twenty-two, a Palestinian all your life, and you don't yet see how Israel relishes this strife?”
She stepped round him, glanced out of the window. “In two hours we can go.”
“If you didn't hate men so much your life would be easier.”
She turned sneering at him and once more he was shocked by her sudden ferocity, terrified for her, what would happen to her. “Why don't you tell me about your brothers,” he said. “While we have time.”
Her face was shattered for a second then re-formed with no cracks showing. Once again he expected her fierceness, but her voice was soft, out of focus. “I'm tired, I want to rest.”
He felt tenderness again for her, then pain again for the doctor, anger that she'd killed him. Her skin was pale as an ostrich egg – what would she be like to possess? What might it bring him, and what could he lose?
THE RAIN CEASED and low sunlight came under the clouds and fell over the slope as they drove up through gleaming groves of olive and cypress, dates, oranges, and almonds, André in the back beside one bodyguard, another beside the driver in front. The one beside him had a brown suit and a skinny moustache and smelt of nervous garlic and kept glancing back at the cover car. The Mercedes was heavy with armor and wallowed in the curves, its engine gasping to keep up with the lead car on the upgrades.
Rows of grapes loped northward over the coastal hills, the sea beyond them making him think of Phoenicia, of what had been lost, millennia going hungry for a truth, any truth, and never finding one. He imagined Yves driving north here with some Lebanese girl, doing it with her in the bushes, on the beach, in a quick hotel downtown on the Christian side.
The house sat back against the hill, a single-story white villa with a tile roof. They went through the metal detector into the house and General Haroun came out of a side room. His camo shirt was dirty and wrinkled and he was unshaven. He kissed André on both cheeks and led him into a low room of bookcases. “How's your dad?”
“Complaining there’s too many Arabs in France.”
“I could have told him, ten years ago. Anyway, give him my love.”
“He sends his, and Mother too. To Francine also.”
“Where you staying?”
“In the city.”
“You could be here. What, you're afraid I have too many enemies?”
André laughed. “Fuck your enemies.”
“Some of them, probably. You want some coffee, a drink? You staying for dinner?”
“Some of them what?”
“Must be fine young things, worth fucking. Hundreds of them.”
“Of course I'm staying for dinner.”
Haroun sat back, a cowboy boot propped up on a low table. He had, André realized, a certain heartiness that comes from frequent killing.
An Arab girl came in with two cups of Turkish coffee on a brass tray. “You're wasting your time, mon cher,” Haroun said when she'd left.
“What's she doing here?”
“Nadja? We've known her family for years.”
“When you get it, that's how it's going to be – some stupid mistake, like her.”
Haroun nodded his chin at André: be quiet.
“She's your enemy!”
“No one's anybody's enemy. We're all friends who kill each other.” Haroun nodded his chin again: pay attention. “You're wasting your time with this Mohammed.”
“What if he died?”
“You're thinking then we could split the Druze and Amal and Hezbollah and keep the Syrians at bay? But it won't happen. If I've learned anything from this war it's have no expectations. You shouldn't either.”
“I'm checking terrain, options. Nothing's decided.”
“Nothing's even possible.”
“Wait and let's see.”
Haroun dipped a sugar cube into his cup, watching the coffee rise up it. “If he could be reached, don't you think we wouldn't have done it by now? You think we're that maladroit?”
“Your mistake was thinking Arabs would fight for you.”
“That's water under the bridge. We're clean now, tough. With nowhere else to go.”
“And fooling yourself if you think you can win. You had all Lebanon and now you've just got half of Beirut and a piece of coast and hills. And they can shove you off that.”
“That's just talk.”
“France won't come in, Emil. All the bright boys at Matignon are sucking up to Khomeini these days. He's got more natural gas, apparently, than you.”
“He's a flaming asshole. I can hardly compete.”
“That's how it's going to be decided.”
“Then he'll pull his pecker out from under their noses and they're going to be grabbing at nothing.”
“History hasn't taught them that yet.”
Haroun laughed raspily. “History doesn't teach a goddamn thing.”
