I returned to the front door and quickly knocked before anything could change. Inside the house I heard rustlings, sounds of urgency. When the door opened the priest cast a distant look over my shoulder and, as usual, stroked his square, authoritative jaw. His external appearance betrayed no recognition of the fact that anything untoward had happened.
"May I come in?" I asked.
No line of his face welcomed me as he gestured towards the inside of the house with his hand, adding immediately, "I thought you would not be coming any more..." In his hand, as usual, a white handkerchief appeared. "Very impressive, the reinforcements you have received..."
I waited patiently until he had finished wiping his face.
"It was necessary, after everything that happened..." I walked behind him into the house, peering out of the corner of my eye into the kitchen, a small, empty niche. "...And who knows what else you had planned to do..."
"You said ‘you had planned'..." he noted drily. The living room was empty too. On the table stood the usual bowl of apples and the curtain was drawn. Where could the other man, the one who had sat so still at the window, be hiding?
He did not ask me to sit down, but stood behind the table, gripping its edge with strong hands.
"Yes?"
"I was here in the afternoon," I said carefully.
He replied immediately, "I always study at that time."
The words came out of his mouth so rapidly that for a moment I wondered whether there was not a simple explanation. Something mundane and trifling, like a back door through which he had gone out some way to the wood and returned straight away.
"Can we talk?" I hesitated.
"Go ahead."
Nonetheless, I sensed something in the air: the smell of secrecy and conspiracy. I glanced around. "Alone, I mean..."
He had inexhaustible reserves of confidence. "We are alone," he asserted patiently.
"A few questions," I said quietly, "have occurred to me, and have joined with all kinds of rumors..."
His face remained calm but something in the way he stood indicated a quick moment in which impatience and some inner concern had overcome the control he was displaying. A wave of satisfaction swelled within me. If he did not want to exchange his arrogance for friendship or cooperation, I could at least melt it into anxiety.
"We may have to search here..." I looked around.
It was precisely at that point that the gray shadow of apprehension left his face and he recovered his composure.
"That is your job, I suppose..."
The time had come to set the trap for him. "I can help you."
"Why?" All I had succeeded in doing was rekindle the anger in his face. His voice became hard and harsh. "Why do you want to help?"
"Maybe because I think one step ahead of you..."
He thought for a long moment, then asked suddenly, "Do you expect me to cooperate with you?" In his directness there was something out of place, unexpected from an agent, let alone a double agent.
"Yes," I said in a low voice.
"And if I do not agree?"
I spread out my hands. "We'll have to start investigating..."
Suddenly the sour smile I remembered from our first meeting in the church appeared again.
"Simon," he said. "That's the name, isn't it? Like the Samaritan who offered the apostles money to become an apostle too..." His fingers massaged the nape of his neck, near the red chafe-mark left by his woolen habit. "He made the apostles choose between comfort in this world and a reward in the next. You are proposing that I choose between discomfort and nothing. An investigation and death..."
"Who said anything about death?"
"Everyone who has cooperated with you, wherever you have ruled, has been killed eventually, after you left. It happened in Gaza in Fifty-Seven, in the Sinai in Seventy-Nine, and it will happen here too..." He wiped himself with the handkerchief again. For a moment I could see myself in his eyes.
"Nobody will know," I said with all the sincerity I could muster. "I'm ready to undertake..."
He moved his head slowly. "No. Not me."
Would he consent with a bit more convincing conversation? I did not have the patience to continue. The changing light of the afternoon, which brought the memory of the clinic and Yvonne, hit me at once with the full force of desire. It was as if the center of gravity of my life at Dura had shifted up the mountain. From the Athenaeum to the sandy square of the clinic, from the priest's house to the ruin at the summit.
"All the same," I returned to my plan, "I am prepared to help..."
His eyes wandered impassively over the tabletop. His heavy lips rested in an expression of peace, almost complacency. But now I knew him better than to let him mislead me.
"The man who visits you from time to time," I added softly, with the meticulous care of someone setting a particularly delicate mechanism, "who damaged my car, who rolled the burning barrel onto us, who hit our soldier and used your paint-sprayer to spray the same green paint I saw staining the table the last time I was here - that man had better give himself up. Perhaps we might treat it as a youthful prank."
His face remained calm. My chance, if it existed at all, lay in the slight tension concentrated in the knuckles of his hands.
"You won't manage to restore peace to Dura," the voice was hard behind his usual pronouncement, "until you bring Anton back."
I turned toward the door. He responded immediately, as though he had been waiting for that moment, and glided behind me. I looked outside. If there had been someone else sitting at the window, perhaps he had slipped out to hide in the garden while we were talking? The priest's body and voice and the urgent shuffling of his feet exuded impatience.
"You cannot get away from it," he grumbled. "You are responsible for his welfare."
In a burst of aggression, I responded. Maybe I had arrested the doctor, but who had caused the arrest by the reports he had sent from this place for months, maybe years?
I turned back to him. "If things are as I understand them, you are more to blame than I am."
He did not protest, simply fixed me with his gaze, steady, expressionless and frozen, the way people look when they feel guilty or are caught red-handed or lying.
***
Successfully implemented plans can cause me as much worry as joy. The ability to mock chance raises the question: whose plan am I a part of now, what objectives am I serving unknowingly?
I hid myself well in a thicket of oleanders, facing the sandy square. It was difficult to assess how long it would take for the priest to act - an hour, two, maybe more. Meanwhile I watched the games the dogs played, the reflection of the last rays of the sun in the windows and the lazy movements of the waves of sand in the wind. Around seven o'clock, soon after the heavy chime of the church bell, the sound of metal scraping on metal together with the low hum of a human voice could be heard coming up the mountain. I crouched down, holding my breath. A boy was pedaling along slowly on a rusty bicycle, accompanying the rhythmic movements of his legs with a soft singing, the embodiment of patience. Even before he reached the edge of the sandy square I recognized him as the boy I had seen in the backyard of the church and afterwards in the café. The dogs burst into their usual outcry. He wheeled his bicycle along the invisible path and knocked on the clinic door. After a moment he put his hand out to the corner of the doorpost. The door of the house opened. Michel peeped out then emerged.
They spoke calmly, without excitement, until I began to think that this was not the conversation I had hoped to cause. Michel looked beyond him towards the village. For a moment his glance lingered on the clump of oleander bushes. Experience had taught me to restrain my impulse to dig myself in. As still as a dead branch I waited, among all the insects and bugs which shared the dry carpet beneath my feet: dragonflies, field-mice, snakes and others waiting for the night. My yearning for the woman made me part of the design. We were all going to the same places, at the same pace, with the same fervor. The carriag
e which contained me was simply larger and less confident.
Michel went back into the house. The boy waited for him, leaning on his bicycle. He called playfully to the dogs and toyed with a cross on a chain he pulled out of his shirt. Suddenly the Rolls started up very loudly. A black cloud ascended slowly to the top of the sycamore. The boy got onto his bicycle. The Rolls sailed across the sand, awkward and majestic. As it passed the clinic the boy put his hand out and gripped the back wing. Michel shouted something through the open roof and accelerated, the youth lifted his feet off the pedals, which began turning at an insane pace, as they rode along the road down the mountain.
The square in front of the clinic was deserted. The windows became dark. The crow which nested in the summit of the sycamore hovered silently, waiting to get at the dogs' food. As usual, the dogs growled as I walked along the fringes of their domain. As they watched me, the crow plunged rapidly and pecked out the best morsels behind their backs. When I reached the clinic door I felt for the electric button on the top of the frame which was as sticky as a used sweet. I pressed once, then again. Somewhere a bell rang shrilly. Nothing else happened.
Between me and the house was a short stretch of ground. How could I cross it? The dogs watched too, waiting for me to step outside the permitted boundary of the clinic. Could I beat them at a run? No, not at my age. Could I frighten them, scare them off? There were too many. I picked up a stone and threw it at the crow. In the clatter of plates, the shrieks of the greedy bird and the offended anger of the dogs, I crossed the ground to the door with three rapid strides.
I knew the first room. The big table was empty. Photographs of the doctor admonished me darkly from the mantelpiece, in the fading light of dusk. There were already signs of a woman living on her own around: a comb with hairs trapped in it, a chewed pencil, a record on the turntable of an old Garrard record-player. I bent down to look: "Dalida - her best songs." On tip toes, I advanced along a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor. A half-open door led into a small, untidy room, shrouded in the usual atmosphere of adolescence. The door to the next room was closed. I turned the handle cautiously. The little light which came from the corridor cast a pale stain on a long-haired carpet and a narrow bed.
She woke immediately and switched on the fussy bedside lamp. Her hair was loose. She looked rapidly from me to the door and back. The next moment lay before us like a doughy lump of tepid time which could have contained everything - coercion, gallantry, faintheartedness, promise. All I could put into it was impersonal practicality.
"He's gone out," I said in an attempt to allay her non-existent fear. "Michel, that is..."
She moved where she lay uncomfortably. I retreated backwards, to the corner of the room and then, wrapped in a sheet, she backed off the bed and slipped behind a creaking door.
Something of the yearning which had motivated me vanished, leaving behind it dizzy exhaustion. I sat down on a stool, facing an imperfect mirror which reflected my face, swollen and impassive. The silence around me was astoundingly complete, almost absolute. I went over to the door and listened with concern. After that I knocked. There was no answer. I pushed the handle and went in.
It was a bathroom - tiny, monastic and painted blue. A line of ants maneuvered between the stains of damp on the wall. Water was running from a blackened tap into a concrete basin. The woman was standing in it, beneath the stream of water, her back to me. I rattled the door-latch. She did not react. I put out a heavy, hesitating hand to her hair, her neck, her shoulders.
She turned round slowly, with the mechanical movements of a sleepwalker. In effect, it was her body which turned round, an emissary appointed to preserve the agreement between us. Her eyes, her look and any feeling behind it remained somewhere far away on the wall.
I touched her face. Her wet clinging hair had made it smaller. Streaks of silver shone in her hair like trails left by snails. Her long, somewhat sinewy hands rested on the lower part of her body, from her groin down, trying unsuccessfully to conceal a long shadow on her left thigh, a very deep cut, a furrow plowed in her flesh. I could feel the beat of a changing mood, perhaps inspired by the house, with the photographs in the next room.
"Let's get out of here," I said.
She did not move, nor did she resist when I pressed her to me and buried my face in her hair, breathing in her scent.
"Wait for me outside," she said into my shoulder in a dry voice.
I left through the kitchen door. From inside came the noise of water followed by the usual sounds of a woman dressing. A few minutes later she emerged and walked in front of me with that slow, hesitant gait dictated by her wounded leg. Only when we were among the bushes, on the hidden path that led to the summit, did I notice the bag she was carrying. The zip was open. I could see the top of a folded sheet and part of a blanket. I took one of the handles from her. She let the other one go too. The bag remained swinging in my hand.
At the summit an evening breeze was blowing. The ruin was enveloped in shadow. I put my arm around her waist as we climbed in through the window. Beneath the thin fabric of her dress, her skin seemed to freeze at my touch. She shook the old mattress, laid the sheet smoothly on top of it and spread out the blanket. Her movements were detached from the event and charged with housewifely skill. I stood beside the window and looked out until she had finished taking her clothes off. After that I got undressed too. She watched me in silence and moved over, leaving me room beneath the blanket. For a long moment we lay beside one another. The floor, too close and charred, gave a sense of stability. The deep and infinite sky bent over to look. The wind brought sounds it had gathered in the distance. I closed my eyes and put my arms out. She moved and came into them obediently.
Later, when it was dark, I pulled the blanket back to reveal her body. She did not reprove me. With a gentle hand I studied her. I had spent years considering those features in women that aroused me: a movement of the head, a pout, a way of speaking, of walking, of moving their buttocks, of laughing. Each had proven a disappointment. For how many more meetings would this magic last? How far would I have to fly on a rotting magic-mattress in a Lebanese village because of my aspiration to touch the soul of a village nurse, a faded beauty, who had not even asked me my name?
"My name is Simon," I said softly, wondering if the name would arouse the same association for her as it had for the priest. She did not react. "I thought you'd want to know."
High above us a star detached itself from its place and sank into the depths of the sky.
"If it wasn't for Anton I wouldn't be doing this," she said.
I bent over and kissed her on her lips. They were hard and dry.
"Don't you need a little affection?"
She did not reply. Only her cheek, in a very delicate, unseen movement, rubbed against my arm. I kissed her once more. This time her lips moved. Dura, the mountain, the ruin, were suddenly very imprisoning and unsatisfying.
"How did you come to be in this place?"
"This place is the best thing that ever happened to me," she said in a tone which bore within it the tip of a very distant thaw.
Slowly, gently, I moved my finger around her mouth: "Tell me."
"It's a difficult story..."
My finger wandered along her cheeks, which came to life, sending out, by the light of the sinking moon, one of those beautiful, full expressions of hers.
"You ran away," I whispered, trying out what I knew, "you escaped..."
"It's a difficult story," she said again, and this time she continued. "It's connected with Michel." Her voice was low, like an untuned piano, and throaty. "And with the war." I put my face close to hers and the words flowed to me through her skin, her smell, the beating of her temples. "On the day he was born the shelling began. If it hadn't been for that the midwife would have taken him straight away. We waited for it to get dark. He didn't stop crying. I wanted to breastfeed him, just once, but she wouldn't allow it and bound my breasts with cloth and kept saying, ‘In a little while
, in a little while we'll leave...’ "
She fell silent. I buried my face in the hollow of her shoulder. Suddenly she said: "His father had disappeared long before that." Her hand touched my hair lightly. "And I...I intended to leave him."
I held her to my breast. This time there was a slight spasm in her body, reflecting need rather than response. I stroked her hair gently. Her lips fluttered by my skin. "There were fixed places - a famous hospital, a well-known charitable institution... Perhaps because I was a nurse I chose the hospital. The accepted place was at the back, at the service entrance. But I insisted on putting him at the front, on the steps. That was a kind of advantage I could give him, that he'd attract attention, be noticed before the other babies..." Now the words were coming out of her of their own volition, falling over one another. "I didn't feel anything. The midwife stopped a cab, pushed me inside and left. I meant to get to my aunt in Damour, but even before we left Beirut I knew that I wanted to go back. The driver agreed. All the way back I prayed, 'Let him not be found, Let no one have taken him.' I planned to comb all the orphanages, all the convents, not rest until I'd found him, until I'd got him back." Sweat covered her body. She moved away from me and pulled the blanket over herself. "But he was there, and so were some policemen. When babies are abandoned at the back the nurses come and collect them secretly. At the front - they have to call the police."
I heard her moving on the mattress, picking up her clothes. "The policemen were taking me to their car when the duty doctor suddenly appeared, took one look at me and said, 'Get her straight back into bed, together with the baby.' " She swallowed. "That was Anton."
"I can imagine the rest," I said with a sense of staleness. "He took you into his flat, fed and supported..."
"No," she said immediately, "those were his last days in Beirut. He moved here, to Dura, and I found a flat in a different neighborhood, far away, and moved there with Michel. My family was one of the richest in the city. I didn't need help..." Her clothes rustled as she put them on. I put out my hand to feel for her. "Until the war came and the big air-raid... I was wounded. Michel escaped miraculously. Everything around us was either dead or destroyed: half of Beirut, Damour, my parents, my aunt and uncle... Only Anton was left." My hand found her at last and I put it round her shoulders affectionately. She wriggled away.
The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance Page 13
