Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 49

37

HE COULDN’T STOP his ankle from quivering or steady his toe and heel against the soil, couldn’t keep his foot from shaking the mine. If it had a fuse or timer it'd blow any second. “Go back!” he yelled at Rosa, waving his arm, voice snatched by the wind.

Could he dive aside? Lose his legs only? If it were timed, wouldn't it have blown by now? Under his instep the crumbly soil was sifting, the mine sinking. He kept pushing down harder on it, but that could make it blow too, trying not to lose his balance in the wind and to keep his foot steady under the snow on the mine. He waved her away but she came right up as if it was nothing and he wondered, how can she be like this? She just doesn't care about her life, that's all. Why would anyone do this, bury this hard piece of agony and death for people they've never met?

She knelt. “Keep your foot still!”

“Get back! I order you!”

“Hold still!” She dug snow and dirt from round his foot, then deeper. “The little metal ridge, on the side – it's American.”

“The one that jumps up?”

“It has a ten-minute back-up fuse.”

“How long has it been?”

“Five minutes, maybe. Seven.” She leaped up and ran, and he lurched to call her, didn't want to die, wanted her, wishing she'd said goodbye, waiting each thousandth of a second for the mine to blow, his whole body shriveling away from it, seeing his whole life not in little pieces but as God would, all at once. So this is how they judge you, he thought.

It was easy, viewing it all at once, to see where he'd gone wrong: the pride, the stupidity so viciously defended, most ruthlessly against those he loved; how he'd failed them absolutely except in the most superficial ways. If there's no holiness with your family, none of that deep happy love, then you have none at all. He thought of his father dying alone.

Rosa came dashing back with an armload of rocks and built them up round his foot and ankle. “Go!” he screamed. She ran away, coat sailing in the wind. The wind was trying to push him off the mine. If he could soar now, like a bird. Now it explodes. Now. Ten minutes now. He tried to remember back to when he had stepped on the mine but it was very long ago. So much and nothing. Now it explodes. Chunks of his body and blood spraying through a hail of white metal. Who would make a thing like this, to do this?

She ran back, built the wall of rocks further up his shin, shoving away snow, three rocks deep. Maybe I could live, he began to hope. Just lose a leg? He'd take that deal now, any deal with God, promise to change the life he could see in this vast diorama, the little it added up to. He saw the faces of the men he'd sent to death and how ill it suited them, had hurt them, how many he'd pained, and for so little. It came in a flash so strong he could not argue it down. I will make peace. Spare me, God, and I'll find a way to make peace. A good peace. Do You want peace, God?

“Just leap straight back.” Rosa placed the last rock on top of the others. The wall was two feet high, six to ten rocks deep. “Now!”

“Get away!” When she'd run back about thirty feet, he dove sideways over the wall, hit the ground and rolled up and ran through the snow, Rosa safe ahead, no blast.

He caught her and they stood gasping, half crying, knee-deep in snow under the implacable stars. “Dud!” she kept saying. “Dud!”

Her body was life, his life. “Reborn...” He couldn't speak.

Welded to him, she looked up into his eyes. “For what?”

THE DOG trotted, sometimes ahead sometimes behind, stopping to piss on corners and lampposts, down Nabaat, the cemetery gloomy on both sides. West Beirut was beginning to get hit, rockets dropping from the hills, Syrian, Christian, or Israeli. They made André want to turn back but now's the time to find a way in there, he rebuked himself, when nobody's watching. You can always get out when it turns hot.

The dog bounded ahead, nose to the ground. The street dipped and narrowed toward the stadium; two men came out from doorways on each side, Phalange, and warned him to go round by the Lycée, there were snipers in the stadium.

“Palestinians?”

“Geagea's men. Crazy Christians.”

There was no point getting caught in some battle between Christian militias over a drug shipment. He went back uphill and swung round by the Lycée, down the hill by the Hotel Dieu. “You're crazy to cross over,” said the Phalange captain at the Museum barricade.

“My wife's parents live by the Conservatoire.”

The captain handed back his passport. “Everybody coming through here says they're going to see family. With all these blood ties you wonder why we're fighting.”

“Lots of stuff coming over tonight?”

“From us?” The captain shrugged. “Don't stay out late.”

André stepped into the wide empty half-lit bowl of the Museum intersection feeling the rifles trained on his chest, the dog romping unawares beside him making him fear it would step on a mine. Or did it know where not to step? The Amal barricade loomed closer and he felt they were waiting till they could have his body before they cut him down. This is foolish, he told himself, people cross here every day.

The Amal fighters on the other side were like skinny kids compared to the Christians. They didn't speak, glanced at his passport and laughed, waved him through.

He took Rue Basta uphill toward the Conservatoire. More shells were coming over, heading downtown, and there was the rumble of Israeli offshore fire, hitting near the port. A 155 hissed down and smacked into the next street. He started running, the dog loping beside him; things were falling, metal and glass, in a choking cordite stink. Up a side street something was burning – two cars, a truck, people yelling. A man waved at him – help. You shouldn't do this, he thought, running toward him.

There was a distended flaming Mercedes with its doors and trunk gone, its roof peeled up, a red truck squeezed flat, a collapsed building. The man was yelling in Arabic but when André spoke French he just yelled more, pointing to a hole where two other men had jammed a steel bar under a fallen slab; they waved, flames flickering on their faces. André followed the man down into the hole – a cellar stairs. There were children crying beyond the slab. Together, the four of them pushed the slab aside enough for people to squirm and drag themselves out and scramble up the stairs.

The people from the cellar stood in the middle of the street in the light of the burning Merceds, counting each other and crying and staring up at the remains of their building. Another 155 was coming in and they ran against the wall. It hit somewhere near in a scream of steel. Yet another was coming and there was nowhere to run, all these people crushing against the next building. Luckily it hit a roof with a whip snap crack and a great white silence trying to suck them up, and another was coming.

He ran after them toward the stairway of the next building, not liking it because it was old and made of sandstone. He tried to call them back, the rocket's scream louder and louder down over his head. I'm fucked anyway, he thought, diving down the stairs, and the son of a bitch hit somewhere else with an awful thud, shaking loose bricks and floorboards, the stairs shuddering, and another one was coming down, you could hear it over this one's roar, a sharp dying scream – it knows it's dying, wants to kill us too, why are they doing this? Jesus, where the Hell's the dog? And it crashed like a jet plane, the earth lurching, new bricks and boards tumbling down. This, he thought, is where you buy it.

“THEY’RE HITTING over by the Conservatoire.” Nicolas closed the window, pulled the curtain.

Samantha relit the candle. “And the Israelis are shelling the port.”

“Amal's got some Hezbollah cornered there,” Neill said. “Wants IDF to finish them off. That's the easiest way.”

“It's always bothered me to sit drinking wine while a few blocks away people are being hunted to death with high explosives.”

“Does no good to cry.” Nicolas shrugged. “Besides, it's lousy wine.” He drained his glass and poured another. “In a crossfire today between pro- and anti-Arafat Palestinians, this eleven-year-old kid gets hit and is lying wounded in the middle of the street. His parents keep getting shot at when they try to get him till finally the father dashes out waving a white shirt and they wait till he picks up the kid then they blow him away with a fifty caliber. Right in front of my secretary's eyes – she was pinned down too. So anyway, the militias pull back and the wife gets her husband and son, and others drag away the dead before they start to stink. And my secretary apologizes because she's twenty minutes late.”

“Sooner or later,” Samantha said, “we'll bring people together. But first we have to stop fighting.”

“It'll only stop when it's imposed from above,” Neill said. “That's what I learned talking to Layla. They'll never stop.”

“They've got the least to lose.”

“They've always had that – the least.”

“I agree, that's part of the problem.” Nicolas was rubbing his eyes, flexed his arms behind his head. “So what else did she have to say?”

“You'll never win them over to a negotiated settlement. Not till they lose a lot more people. Or if they lose Mohammed.”

“You suggesting this?”

“He may represent valid and serious concern for people who've never had a voice. It's easier to integrate him than hunt him down. If you do, you're going to get burned.”

Nicolas raised his hand, listening to planes coming in from the southeast, louder, closer. Neill wanted to get down on the floor but Nicolas and Samantha sat there as calmly as if it were a noise on the radio, of what it sounds like to get strafed. The jets swerved to the south then north. Mirages. You could hear them deepen and settle into their runs like a snake striking and there was a sharp snap and the sky lit up like lightning in a total white silence and awful bang.

“Allah!” Nicolas said. “How they are getting it!”

“Who?” Neill wanted to yell Aren't you afraid?

“The Palestinians down by the Conservatoire. Getting their poor ignorant brains blown out. That was a vacuum bomb.”