Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 42

30

MOHAMMED stood in the door, blocking the night. “Snow's coming.”

“It's better,” she said. “They can't see us.”

“We can walk right into them. Or they can follow our tracks.”

“The snow will hide our tracks.”

“Until it stops. Then we've got an arrow pointing at us.”

“Next thing you're going to tell me,” she snapped, “is Mektoub: it is written!”

“I didn't say that.”

“But you think it! You say I have no faith but see how you waste yours. The Koran was never so precise. Those are your fears, your strictures.”

Outside there were no stars, just the cold blanket of clouds hugging the earth. She closed the door behind them: I'll be who I will.

Another truck came grinding up the road, gearing down nastily, spitting noise and fire. How easy, Mohammed thought, to throw a grenade down on those forms huddled in the back. War's not hard at all; killing's easy, it's getting along that's hard. Rosa brushed past him down the hill and he sensed her litheness beneath the coat and nurse's uniform, her smooth, scented body. We're out here in the dark, he thought, with no path.

Each time he slipped and fell going down the gravelly damp slope it drove wild pain through his chest. She floated below, never slipping, never looking back. His hands were gloved in rime. Up the canyon the wind came full of ice.

The road was slick with freezing mist. If trucks came up now, he thought, it would be so easy to hit them. She went down the far side of the road into a ditch of broken rock and then up through the sparse cypress and already he was panting and his chest felt as if someone was twisting an arrow in it. The land was so steep he had to grab roots and outcrops to pull himself up. How she hates me, he thought, hating her.

The snow came down in soft fat flakes that made her scarf glisten, got in his mouth and eyes, slicked the lichened rocks. He followed her up out of the cypress, where the slope eased to a flat high ridge and the snow thickened. His arms and head were light and his legs felt disconnected.

The slope flattened to the broad belly of a ridge of chipped stone and boulders that vanished and reappeared in the driving snow. Her shape flitted before him like an angel's – the Arabs had thought angels were daughters of God, till the Prophet called them infidel.

Face down, he bumped into her. “From here on,” she said, “stay in my path. My line of travel exactly.”

The stones were like broken walls of a bombed-out city; once a night bird flew squawking away, rocks and pebbles clattered in the wind that ate through his gown and bandages and into the hole the bullet had made in his side, deep into him, cold against his heart.

She turned back, facing him, gun at her waist as if she would shoot him, and he had an instant of fear, only half seeing her through the blowing snow. I don't know you, he thought. But you saved me. Why is that?

“Wrong way,” she said. “I'm getting lost in this snow.”

He was shivering, terribly cold. “Got to go down.”

“It's all mined. Both sides. Damn this snow. I never thought...”

He felt fury, wanted to shoot her. “What did you think coming up here would bring you?”

“I do what I do for Palestine. Not for you!” She shook snow from her shoulders. “Wait.” She slipped into the snowstorm, and he called but she didn't answer. Snow scurried round his ankles, wind carved his shins.

She came out of the blizzard. “Follow ten steps after me.” She moved to one side among the rocks, holding her hand above her as a signal, but he couldn't see it, got lost, and she came back for him. “Can't you do better?”

“Shut up and leave me.”

“These rocks are full of caves.”

He followed her tracks; crumbling and snatched by the wind, the fleeting white filled and erased them. “Where are you!” he yelled, glancing round, wind and snow in his face, at his back, knocking him down, coating his face, like death, he thought, like death.

“Found one!” She grabbed his arm.

It was body length deep, the front open to the wind, snow building against one side. “Go in first!” she yelled.

He squirmed in till his feet bumped the end. The ground seemed like ice but was only frozen earth. She squeezed in beside him. “We must wrap up together in both coats.”

The wind rose, grinding rock on rock, sucking the snow from the earth, fleeting veils across the night, raging white banners with cold razor edges. The whole world will be like this someday, he thought. He imagined his dust blown by the blizzard across the naked, frozen earth.

The snow built up against the far side of their hole, blocking the wind. The cold earth warmed to their bodies; inside the coat his hands were warm, touched hers. “Tomorrow, in the snow,” she said, “it'll be hard to know the way. To not step on mines.”

Something sharp bit into his back – a rock. Her breath was warm against his neck. He thought of the Christian doctor, his tired gentle hands, his kind and hopeless eyes. She moved her feet and he felt how cold they were, held them between his ankles. What if everything I've believed is false? he wondered. And only this is true?

THE ARMORED MERCEDES took André back down the mountain, now only one guard car ahead and none behind. A squall had come off the sea, wetting the windows, the headlights sparkling on the white-painted stones alongside the road. Rain here meant snow up in the mountains – good skiing, in the old days.

He wondered if the dog would be waiting when he got back. It hung around all the time now, tail between its legs at every sound of guns but getting fatter, some good food easing its worried mind. Leaping on the bed in the mornings to lick him awake – got him mad at first but then he realized it was good to be getting up so early.

The Arab girl kept flitting before his eyes. She moved on bare feet as if out of the past somehow, something he remembered. And Haroun screwing her only made it worse – like one small part of her was saved for Haroun and the rest was bared and hungry.

No, she'd have a guy somewhere, some skinny Arab with wild eyes, in a keffiyeh, all muscle and hate, a worn-out Kalashnikov and a dirty little knife. Fun to fuck her though. No one since Larnaca, the night he'd found the Jericho. A bad idea having the Jericho up front with the guard, but that was the drill. They'd give it back when they dropped him off. Naked without it. If Haroun wanted to deliver him to the French now would be the time. Then he'd never get to screw that girl. Not that he would anyway, she was Haroun's. What a name, Nadja. Makes you want to screw her just thinking of it. Just saying it.

I’m fearing the French, he realized, my own country. As if they're enemies when they're la France, for whom you've sworn to fight and die. But la France is all of us, Yves and all those other guys in the Beirut barracks who gave their lives for perfectly nothing. Every man who has died for France would agree: pay Mohammed back.

France is what we do. We are la France.

The rain had stiffened, pummeling the road and bouncing up wildly in the headlights. Going to be a nasty storm in the hills. He remembered Haroun and the others in the fight for Jabal Sannine, the great flank of Mount Lebanon in swirling drifts, fear and bullets, bright blood on the new snow.