‘I see Ishmael,’ said Alan dryly. ‘You are better informed than I am.’
‘You don’t have to be informed. It’s common sense.’
The taxi driver shouted at them. Alan had forgotten him and was surprised to see him again seated at the wheel. He started up and set off rattling down the Beka’a.
C H A P T E R 1 3
As the sun sank westward over the mountains the shadow of the escarpment crept forward across the valley, turning Lake Houssaine to a dull, slate grey and stilling the play of its waters. On the far side of the valley the sun still lingered, striking warm rose red on hills so bare that the few features that adorned them—a thorn bush, a white boulder, a contorted almond tree—became significant and mysterious as though inhabited by deities.
In Joseph Jemali’s house the hens and the goat had been taken in for the night. The town was quiet; and in the silence the spring that gushed out from a chasm in the hillside above the town and plunged down into the lake lent a solemn note to the Ain Houssaine dusk.
With the coming of darkness Sarah began to feel the boredom of captivity. She paced the room impatiently and at length, to pass the time, opened the bottle of wine that Joseph Jemali had sent to her. The first glass revived her spirits so she took another and eventually finished it. Feeling drowsy and rather stupid she lay down on the divan and went to sleep.
The effects of the wine did not entirely work off until the following morning and perhaps contributed in some measure to the feeling she was to have of this night’s strangeness. She seemed, alternatively, to wake and dream; to move through a world invaded by fantasies, through a darkness intermittently lit by curious images, the most vivid of which later seemed the least credible.
She awoke suddenly, and lay in the pitch dark conscious that the door was open. She could feel the cold air blowing in on her. A sound like the heavy breathing of an animal came to her ears and she started up fearing that something had come into her room and was snuffling toward her.
Then someone whispered, very close to her ear, ‘Silence, taisez-vous!’ And a hand touched her shoulder.
She caught her breath. Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness. She saw the figure of a man outlined in the doorway. Another man bent over her and, feeling for her hand, drew her to her feet. ‘Taisez! Taisez!’
She could not see the face of either man, but the stealth and silence of their entry into the room and their whispered words reassured her. She followed them with perfect trust. It was flight, for her, into darkness with two figures as obscure as angels. They led her to the door. On the verandah, the beast that had frightened her turned out to be Joseph Jemali, snoring.
They crossed the courtyard—the two men moving soundlessly. As they reached the steps leading down onto the road, there was a snort, as sleepers sometimes make upon waking. They ran down the steps. Sarah stumbled and they lifted her up so that she fled along between them, her feet hardly touching the ground. It was an extraordinary and pleasing sensation. She floated like a ballerina skimming on the tips of her toes, but faster, faster. She was to remember not having run from Ain Houssaine, but having flown like a bird out of it.
They reached the outskirts of the town, where the spring cast its foaming torrents into a pool of darkness; a path led up the steep slope alongside it. Sarah caught the sting of ice-cold spray on her face and her ears were deafened by the roar of falling waters. The din confused her and it seemed to her that the town from which they had escaped had broken into shouting.
They hurried on up the hill, feeling their way round damp boulders and over rivulets that had broken away from the main body of the stream and gushed down to the lake in torrents of their own. The two men glided on their sure mountain feet, like cats that can see in the dark, for their pace hardly slackened as they ran light-foot over stepping stones, lifting Sarah between them. She kept her eyes on the path and at first did not see that there were other men nearby. Then someone spoke to them and they passed close to a boulder where a man crouched, rifle in hand. Suddenly, over to their right, came the sound of a report and a livid tongue of fire flashed out in the dark. Shots rang out below, and all around the hillside burst into answering fire.
Sarah’s two escorts paid no heed but continued on up the mountain. It was lighter as they came out of the valley and the moon was about to rise. Over the crest of the hills the sky was thin like silver gauze. They could see the grim cliffs ahead, the contorted shapes of thorn bushes and boulders with flat, slanting sides like gigantic flints, as though some ancient race had fashioned stone heads for their spears, and had passed away, leaving these huge flakes of stone as evidence of their industry.
Suddenly, although all this time she had hardly put foot to the ground, Sarah felt exhausted. ‘I’m tired, I must stop and rest.’ The two men paid no heed, but carried her on up the hill.
They joined a road paved with big blocks of cut stone and edged by a rough stone wall. The moon rose, flooding the road, the valley and all the surrounding hills with clear, cold light. Sarah could see the way now. She looked at the rough wall and the worn surface of the stones beneath her feet. She thought, This is an old road. It must be the Emperor Domitian’s road leading from Akfa to Ain Houssaine.
They were walking more slowly. The two men talked in low voices. Sarah, stupefied with exhaustion, allowed herself to be dragged between them. Once she looked down to see, lying on a stone in front of her and clear in the moonlight, a single full-blown rose, but this seemed too extraordinary, there was not a rosebush in sight. She put it down to imagination.
Soon after this they met the pilgrims; a great company of men and women, chanting and singing. They wore a strange dress that Sarah had not seen before; the women carried torches high above their heads; their long black hair hung unbound and was garlanded with red anemones. ‘Adonis! Adonis!’ they shrieked. Their eyes flashed white in the moonlight, like the eyes of wild animals. The men carried in their hands, above their heads, their severed and bleeding members, and they too shouted, ‘Adonis! Adonis!’ And so immersed were these beautiful, bloodstained people in the intoxication of their pilgrimage that they did not notice Sarah and her two rescuers, who slipped past them into the night.
The singing died away behind them and the flare of the torches disappeared as a bend in the road hid them from view.
In the silence that followed the moonlight was brighter on the ancient road. Sarah remembered that pilgrims had not passed that way for many hundreds of years.
She felt that they had been walking half the night when at last they came to Chakra. The moonlight showed a white church—the minaret of a mosque like a tall white pencil against the dark cliff behind. People came running to meet them. She heard shouting and laughter.
They came to a square. She was being led into a house. People clustered around her.
In Emile Khalife’s house Sarah sat wrapped up in rugs, drinking coffee. The room was full of people—women were going in and out carrying trays of food, men wearing cartridge bandoliers and carrying rifles strode importantly about. Most of these people came up to Sarah and looked at her and spoke to her gently and respectfully. They brought her more coffee, another blanket … they offered her arak, olives, a basket of fat green figs.
She was their heroine, their saint, their special blessing. In days to come they would light candles for her in the church and put flowers on wayside shrines in her name. How she had served them they did not quite know. They did not really care to go into this; they simply accepted her. She had set out to save them from bloodshed. She had been captured by their old enemies; she had endured untold terror and suffering. They hovered about her looking with admiration at her blue eyes and milky skin. They remembered their Frankish ancestor, the beautiful Christian girl whose name the Chakra-Ain Houssaine feud had begun.
Emile Kahlife was a broad fat man whose belly when he laughed shook up and down like a half filled sack of wheat. Often when he didn’t laugh, he chuckled, a deep husky s
ound that seemed to travel up from the soles of his feet and emerged much grated by its journey. His thick hair grew villainously close to his eyebrows, his moustache was abundant and tilted up into a waxed finish; but unmarked skin and the clarity of his eyes led Sarah to feel that she was looking at two men, imposed one upon the other, each fighting for preference.
Sarah was disconcerted to discover that on giving him his letter, he tucked it unopened in the purple sash that was bound several times around his waist. They both sat down on low, rush covered chairs, which with two wide divans spread with camel hair rugs were the only furniture. The room was lit by a kerosene lamp that flickered shadows on the white- washed walls.
It was a large room, similar to the one she had occupied in Ain Houssaine, with two arches overlooking the village square. A third arch led into another room, dimly lit and guarded by a man squatting down and holding a rifle.
Emile Khalife asked Sarah how she had been treated in Ain Houssaine. ‘They were kind but at first I was rather frightened.’
‘Mountain people lose their heads at times. Probably the altitude.’ He chuckled and his belly flopped up and down. He touched his moustache, which Sarah felt was a stage prop and could be taken off and put on as he wished. ‘But on the whole they are hospitable people. Jemali isn’t such a bad fellow.’
He stood up and said, ‘I hope you will be comfortable here. You need some rest and it is still a few hours before dawn. Don’t go into that room. There is a man there. He is seriously ill and he must not be disturbed.’
In a small room leading off her own, a doctor was attending to the wounded man. Every now and again she could hear the low murmur of his voice. She did not turn to look at this room, but was never forgetful of it; on the extreme edge of her vision she could see the open door and the light burning within.
After the doctor had left, Emile Khalife instructed Sarah again not to disturb the sick man, then he too left, and Sarah was alone.
She waited a little and then, taking off her shoes and carrying the lamp, went quietly into the next room and kneeled down beside his bed. The guard sitting in a corner with a rifle by his side was asleep. So was Raschid. Sarah lifted the lamp and studied his face. I couldn’t remember, she thought, and who could? So many gods and goddesses hovered in the Lebanese skies, it needed only a fractional shift of thought to believe in them. She put her hand on his forehead, lightly, so as not to awaken him, and discovered a short white scar, partly covered by his hair. An imperfection. He would not fade away in a twist of smoke. She bent down and kissed him.
A slight contraction of the muscles of his lips might have been a response. He opened his eyes, still foggy with sleep, and blinked twice to clear his vision; then shook his head as though to assemble his thoughts.
‘Sarah, what are you doing here?’
‘What you told me to do. I’ve delivered your letter to Mr Khalife.’
He put his hand on her wrist and smiled.
‘But I don’t suppose it matters any more.’ She stood up but he gripped her hand.
He said, ‘Don’t go. Stay with me.’
Sarah brought cushions and camel hair rugs and put them down by his bed. He lay on his side and every now and again put out his hand and touched her face.
Sarah thought, He won’t remember this, then she slept and dreamed. She was the principal boy in a pantomime. She wore a tight-fitting green jacket with a short skirt, like a ballet dancer’s, standing out around her hips, sparkling with silver thread. She wore green glass slippers. She was in a cave lit by torches in sconces on the walls. Around her were large trunks with domed lids. Some of the lids were open and strings of emeralds, diamonds and rubies hung down from the sides of the trunks. Inside the trunks gold coins glittered when she held them in her hands and fell with a rushing sound, as she dropped them.
Then she saw a hand just above her head, holding a rope of pearls. The hand dropped the pearls around her throat and disappeared.
The torches died and Sarah was alone in the darkness of her sleep.
She awoke lying on the divan in the other room and wondered where the dream had begun.
The car moved slowly for the land was rough. Emile drove, Sarah beside him; Raschid sat in the back, supported by cushions.
‘How are you getting on back there? Is this a bit rough for you?’
Sarah turned her head to catch his reply. Raschid saw the curve of her cheek and a lock of hair tucked behind her ear. He made no reply. ‘He’s asleep,’ said Emile.
As they reached the Beka’a, the first signs of dawn were showing in the sky and the ridges of the anti-Lebanon stood out against a band of luminous pallor. Between them and these mountains expanded a sea of grey obscurity, but as the light increased, the ancient land slowly put on its features. Emile Khalife yawned. ‘The day,’ he said, ‘of the revolution.’
‘Well, I don’t want to know about the revolution,’ said Sarah. ‘As long as you stop it and people don’t get killed, that’s all that matters. What I want to know is—’
‘But, Mademoiselle, you have supported the government,’ broke in Emile. ‘You are on our side.’
‘I’m not,’ said Sarah. ‘I’m just against violence.’ This in fact summed up her political convictions; revolutions interrupted the natural happy course of life and men got killed who might otherwise have stayed alive so that women could love them. ‘What I want to know,’ she said, ‘is—’
‘Ah! Mademoiselle,’ Emile interrupted her. ‘You have a lot to learn about us. You think that because we arrest a few spies and confiscate a few rifles that violence has been stopped. Revolution is a great ball rolling around the Middle East. We do not stop it, we merely dodge out of its way. It is probably rolling off to Jordan now, or up to Iraq.’
Emile, in spite of his lighthearted tone, was worried. He had little relish for the business ahead. The tables might yet be turned. He had no intention of compromising himself by giving unnecessary information to a headstrong young woman.
So it was not until some weeks later that Sarah learned what had happened to Raschid after he had been shot down in Rue Zahle.
Raschid had regained consciousness shortly after he had been taken to hospital; and even in those first hazy moments his most distinct thoughts were of Sarah. This was perhaps not surprising. The world had darkened around her face; her compassionate gaze had pursued him into oblivion and, awakening now out of it, he saw her face again, as though it had never left him.
For a long time his thoughts did not even touch upon his own hazardous position. He had escaped death, but something much more important than mere escape had happened to him, for in doing so he had collided with his destiny.
His nature dealt largely in extremes and the hours he had passed with Sarah came back to him. He told himself that no other woman had meant anything to him and that in their short meeting were the seeds of a lifetime’s happiness. The idea, once having taken hold of his mind, possessed it. He had not simply fallen in love. His whole life had put on new colours.
A nurse came into his room, and with her a man wearing the uniform of the Lebanese Police. A little older than himself, thought Raschid, and a man who looked alert and intelligent. But Raschid did not know him for a friend or foe and evaded a number of his questions.
Some men had shot at him from a car, he told the inspector. He did not know who they were or why they had wanted to kill him.
‘Where were you going? What were you doing in Rue Zahle?’ the inspector asked him.
‘I was visiting Colonel Mahumud Yazid of the Syrian Trade Mission.’ They had had an appointment, he explained, to discuss the proposals they were going to put up to the Lebanese.
‘Someone must have known of this appointment,’ the inspector suggested. ‘They must have been already waiting for you.’
‘Possibly.’
‘Do you have enemies in this country?’ the inspector asked him.
Raschid watched him with half closed eyes. ‘Not that I know of
.’
‘Lebanon is small. Perhaps you have enemies in other neighbouring countries.’
‘If so, I know nothing of them.’
‘This, Colonel, implies more than one.’
‘It was you, Inspector, who implied more than one.’
‘In spite of what you have been through, Colonel, you seem to have a clear mind.’
‘The wounds in my shoulder and thigh are of no great matter.’
‘But the wound in your chest, so your doctor told me, was close to your heart and could have killed you.’
Raschid smiled. ‘But it didn’t. I’ve been very lucky. And I think the man or men who shot me realised this or they would not have come back.’
‘Concerning Mr Yazid, you did not come to Lebanon together?’
‘He came three days before me. He had relatives to see.’
‘And you also have a brother in Beirut?’
Raschid made no reply, and the inspector continued the interrogation, asking questions that came alarmingly close to the bone.
‘My friend, I love Syria. I do not want to spend the rest of my life in exile wandering round Europe from one casino to another—you mistake my character if you think my ambitions lie in that line. I understand that the Lebanese would like nothing better than for me to make accusations against my country. I can imagine what is happening—they are saying you killed me. Is that it? My body is to be used as a bridge to the next uprising. Well, let them tread over me. I am not dead yet. Do you imagine that because I am used unjustly, I shall fly to your protection like any traitor? What good would it do if you waved my confessions in the face of the world? My people would turn against me; they would say I have sold myself to the Lebanese. As for Colonel Yazid, they would make a martyr of him. And what should I see then of Syria? Tell your politicians that if they use me in that way I shall denounce them throughout Arabia.’ He turned away and closed his eyes.
Arms for Adonis Page 17
