Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 45

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SUN WARMED THE SNOW and water dripped off the rocks; they had to dig a trench in the mud to keep it out of the cave. Then the wind turned cold, the snow crust froze and the water hardened into icicles. Snow began to fall.

The ground was frigid through their doubled coats. Her hands would not warm even when he held them. “Shivering's good,” she said. “It warms the body.”

With a crunch of steps a man moved past, his head visible through a notch between two rocks, then his legs through another, his rifle over his far shoulder, his boots wrapped in rags, snow like a cloak down his back. Then came another, bent over under his weapons, the wind snatching chunks of broken snow crust from his shoes and scattering it through alleys of stone. Christians, nine in all, filing past like ghosts.

“They've saved us,” Rosa said, “we can go back in their tracks.”

“Tonight. If we don't freeze first.”

She fought her shivering. “How you talk like a Muslim!”

“How's that?”

“A mother's boy, needing reassurance!”

He opened his shirt and cupped her hands against his chest, her fingers like frozen sticks. “Don't be so harsh. I didn't kill them.”

She bit her lip to stop shivering. “Who?”

“Your brothers. They were killed by someone, so you hate everyone.”

“If there's any God other than a completely impotent one, then it’s God who killed them.”

“Trying to make you understand just makes you wilder.”

“The only one who can understand for me is me.” She huddled closer, shivering, her breasts and thighs cold against him. He tried to hold her up on him off the frozen ground but the bullet hole began tearing and he rolled back on his side.

“We could truly freeze up here,” he said.

“Like sleep.”

To get close is to stay warm, stay alive, and if God didn't want us to, He wouldn't make us want it so much. Or is it just to torture us, test us? Her body so little, after all, so slim, such young breasts and such a shame to die.

“When I was a kid I had a puppy,” she whispered. “He used to climb into bed with me. All night so warm beside me.”

It shocked him to think of her as a girl, long innocent black hair down her slender back. “How old were you?”

“I must have been nine. We'd just moved to Mount Hermon. My father got him to help me forget my friends in Nazareth.”

“You had no new friends on the Mountain?”

She shook her head as if brushing aside a hair or his query or the thought of having friends. “In the village there were only boys. Like I told you, they threw stones and called me names.”

He tried to see her hiding in her house, fearing the stones. “What did you do?”

“Helped my mother. Did what girls do.”

He had no idea, he realized, what girls do. “What's that?”

'Keep the race going. While you men tear it apart.”

“But you're here too. At war.”

She burrowed tighter. “I'm cold.”

He was sliding into a delicious peace, couldn't stop. He slipped his hands down her hips and up inside her gown, thinking this is just, this is fair. The backs of her thighs so chilled and thin in his hands, slipping down her brief clothes while she, silent, raised up a knee so he could pull them free.

Even her core was cold, her smell. “What are you thinking?” he said. “You're so silent.”

“This isn't how I wanted it.”

“What did you want?”

“I was going to be distant, showing by my silence that I didn't approve of you.”

“You still don't approve?”

She waited for a moment. “Scarcely.”

He swallowed the slight. “You've made me less approve of me.”

She drew to him like a puppy. “I can like you although I don't approve of what you do.”

“Whatever happened to your little dog?”

“The boys who threw stones killed him. They put his head on a stick.”

Tears stung his eyes. I haven't cried for years, he thought. I haven't ever cried. “Christians?”

“Druze and Christian and Shiite. It was a mixed village – this was Lebanon, remember. The place where we all lived together.”

“You hate them still.”

“Why should I? They've killed each other off.”

“So what's this mourning for Palestine?”

“Palestine is where the Israelis chased us out and we had to go to the Mountain. Where everything would have been different.”

The sting behind his eyes was gone. She was as close as his clothes, touching his skin, her skin warming from him, and this is how we keep alive, he thought, this sinister touch, this skin.

But no matter how deep you are inside a woman, what do you touch? What is sin?

Sin is what it means to be free.

A CAR CAME SPLASHING the gutter and they ducked into a stairwell. “And tell her for me,” Neill said, “that my talking with her husband is one way to show he still matters.”

Hamid shrugged rain off his coat. “I don't do this sort of thing.”

“You need the money. I need the story. We're the ultimate couple.”

“You're so coarse.” Hamid's bushy eyebrows made him seem to be looking from under two dark storm clouds. “I've always hated that about you.”

“People hate everything about me. “Specially those who know me well. That doesn't change a thing.”

“You think you're tough, saying that?”

“I'm as scared and dumb as everybody.”

“Mohammed's not scared. And he's not dumb.”

“All the more reason for me to meet him.”

“Wait till you have hot metal going through you, see how you boast.”

“You had your chance years ago to be a human being and you blew it. Now you've got another chance.”

“She didn't belong with you. That's what caused this war, all the wars – Christians like you.”

“I'm scarcely a Christian.”

“The Crusade's not over, is it? You people are still coming over here to win back your fucking Holy Land. It's our Holy Land, you fucker, not yours. We live here. Not you.”

“You can have your goddamn Holy Land. Just get me to her.”

“He'd be crazy to talk with someone like you. I'll tell her that.”

“I can do him more good than you ever could. Tell her that, too.”

With a snort Hamid turned away. Neill watched him diminish down the pavement into the rain. Painted on the wall was an American flag with Jewish stars and a huge fist through the middle, with the golden city of Mecca atop the fist. I'm becoming, Neill realized, a person I don't like.