Читать книгу Mike Bond Bound - Mike Bond - Страница 53

41

THE TINK TINK sound of steel on concrete had returned but seemed farther away. “They're back digging!” she cried.

He tried not to talk too much, too thirsty. “When we get out – we'll go up to the Casino. Have dinner. Looking out over the bay –”

“Stop! Don't do this.”

“What would you eat, right now?”

“I would've said lobster, but have you ever seen them, the poor things, thrashing in the pot?”

“If you worry about that, Anne-Marie, you'll starve.”

“People are digging!” She hammered louder, in rhythm, waited; the other skipped a beat, followed the rhythm. “See?” she kept saying. “See?”

André told her the Morse code letters for SOS and she hammered them out and the others repeated them note for note.

“They don't know what it means,” he said.

“They're just repeating,” she stopped knocking, “everything I do.”

“Buried,” André said. “Just like us.”

THE SHELLING HAD DESTROYED all the buildings around the Conservatoire. Neill stood watching the rescue crews and bulldozers digging out the corpses, once a whole family still alive, all crying and holding each other. Over one rubble-filled basement a single column of concrete stairs spiraled up several flights and ended in a half-step over the void. Stairway to Heaven, the words came to him bizarrely.

If they could only see this, all the people letting this happen. If you could only write it well enough, they'd see. What the Hell did they think the world was coming to as they went about their profitable mortal businesses, propagating money, children, carbon dioxide, effluents and hazardous waste?

They? Him too, everyone. The next century was going to be a horror like none in history: warring billions of swarming hordes tearing everything down in their hunger, the technical horrors, the diseases, the weapons of Armageddon. While a few unraveled the riddle of aging, the toxins of death, traveled to new planets, learned to speak with machines, the barbarians were going to be tearing it all down faster than it could be built.

The shelling started again in midafternoon and Neill ran home. He took the Black Label down to the basement and sat at Samantha's typewriter but could think of nothing to say.

He finished the whisky. Finish this article, he promised himself, and you can buy more.

The hardest was the beginning: “I wish you could all be here...”

When the article was done, it was five hundred words that went from a statement of theme to detailed description and out the other side to clear conclusions and a final demand to the reader: make us stop.

Like Icarus falling from the sky while the farmer ploughs his field and we all go about our business, the Lebanese are dying in their cellars barely a quarter mile from me. There is nothing I can do to help them but to write this. If we are the cells of a greater body then each cell must feel, share in, and try to prevent the loss of any other. As Beirut dies, so does our world.

Feeling free of everything but sorrow he went to the window and listened to the shelling. When it seemed to slow he went up Emile Eddé to the Commodore and called the story in. “Wait a min'it!” the girl on the other end in London said, chewing her gum. “Yer talkin' too fast.”

He tried to speak slowly and clearly but the line was very bad and he kept asking her to repeat it and that made her angry but finally she seemed to get it all down. “Can you switch me up to Editorial?” he said.

“Editorial?” She snapped her gum. “This is the typing pool, honey. Those blokes've all gone home.”

“DO YOU THINK there's something after this?”

He was thinner, André realized, could slide a little toward her under the slab. “I'm a Catholic but I don't think there's anything more.”

“I keep wondering, will I see him? My husband. Will I ever see him again?”

“You'll see him, Anne-Marie. If we die, you'll see him soon, but I don't think we're going to die because the shelling's stopped again and soon they'll dig us out.”

I'm starting to believe in them, he thought. On the boat coming from Larnaca it seemed strange that people would build a boat for others to travel on, perfect strangers. And now I'm dreaming that others will dig down into this mountain and find us.

The tick tick was back and he wanted to slap out at it, silence it. What right did they have, wanting to be saved?

Anne-Marie was talking to the two girls in a low throaty Arabic that made it seem impossible this same voice could speak French.

“What did you tell them?” he said.

“One's getting very feverish and we've nowhere to go, we're in our own wet...”

“That's fine. That's who we are. Now we know what it's like to be human.”

“It's not so bad, being human. I want to live, want these girls to live!”

“What was he like, your husband?”

“He was afraid all the time –” She stopped, spoke to the girls. One was arguing back, plaintive. “He was a photographer and had to go out every time there was a street fight, a bombing. He tried not to show it, but at night he'd tremble. All night beside me in bed, trembling.”

“It's all right, Anne-Marie. It's all right.”

“The bombings broke his heart and the fights scared him to death.”

“Why didn't he quit?”

“He felt if people saw his pictures of how awful the war is maybe they'd want to stop it.”

You don't learn about war in the newspapers, he started to say, but there was no point. The newspapers only printed the nice shots. The bodies under blankets, trailing a little blood. Not the heads on bayonets, the women slit from jaw to crotch, the disjointed limbs of children. “I wish I'd known him.”

“You don't need to say that.”

“I don't have any friends like that. I wish I'd known him. I wish you had him still.”

“If he was here, he'd dig right down, get us out.”

“What happened to him?”

“A car crash. In the rain. Hit by a truck. Going up to Dora for some meeting.”

One of the girls was weeping almost silently; the other joined in. “Don't let them,” he said.

“Why not? Why can't they feel what they feel? It's such an awful death.” She too started to cry. “It's such an awful death...”

“After we go to the Casino we'll drive up the coast –”

She halted through her tears. “It's bad luck, saying that.”

“It's good luck. Showing God we want to live.”

“Have you ever been to Byblos?”

“When I was a boy. I remember ruins and cliffs going down to the sea.”

“With the golden Phoenician city and the Crusader castle and wild poppies and the water so warm and sweet in the bay ... André, it's the loveliest place on earth. If we ever get out, I swear it, we'll go there.”

“And we'll make love in the tall grass going down to the sea, Anne-Marie. I swear that too.”

“You shouldn't say that.” For a moment she was silent. “Yes, maybe you should.”

“I promise you, Anne-Marie. I promise God. If we get out, we'll do that.”

“What are you like?” she said. “Are you tall?”

“Two meters. Almost.”

“I'm one eighty. I was two centimeters taller than my husband, even in flat shoes.”