by Mike Bond
For a moment he'd been happy just to let the game of life go on around him.
BY AFTERNOON IT WAS SUNNY and the dew had dried out of the garden. They set the long wooden table on the stone patio, with wine and salad and bread, lamb and potatoes and peas, André's mother not wanting to sit because then there'd be thirteen at table. “Don't be silly,” he said. “You think we'd eat without you?”
She waited till the others, his sisters and their husbands and children, had filed through the kitchen to the patio. “You're going again, aren't you?”
“Just a little while, Mama. Down south.”
“Your father knows but he won't tell me.”
How savage age is, he thought, seeing her lined face, the pallid flesh and dark worry under the faded eyes. “Papa doesn't know anything because there's nothing to know.”
“You've resigned your commission.”
“You know why, Mama. Because they did nothing. After the bombing.”
He saw that the word hurt her and regretted it, took her hand, her skin cold, the flesh bony. When we get old, he thought, the sun doesn't warm us anymore.
“It's because of Yves you're going back,” she said. “But there's nothing you can do, mon cher, cher fils. And instead of losing one of you now I'm going to lose you both.”
“YOU COULD HAVE LEFT me a note,” Inneka said.
“I thought you were gone all afternoon,” Neill answered. “So I –”
“I just went down to Shopi to get you some beer! I get back, wait two more hours before you come. I could have been at work today, for all the good it does!”
“I'm sorry, Inneka.”
“I don't care you're sorry!” She slapped a hairbrush down on the sink. “How do you think I ever want to build a life with you, when I never know where you are?”
Neill followed her into the bedroom, realized what he was doing and stopped, went instead to the window, tucked aside the curtain, watching the umbrellas like black toadstools diagonally cross the street. A gull bobbed on the canal, something white in its beak.
“It's after two,” he said. “In eighteen hours I have to be at the station.”
She came into his arms and they stood there, swaying slightly, silently.
Even when I do think of her, he realized, it's still for me.
ROSA COULD NOT CROSS Rue Madame Curie in the open before dark, and the route she'd planned to take behind the old houses had been hit by Israeli 500-pounders.
A rumble at the far end of Rue Alfred Nobel grew louder through the shelling, the singing inwhistle of Katyushas, the mortars' irregular rattle and thud making the ground pulse like a heart. With a prehistoric roar a Syrian T-34 ground up the hill of ruined houses, its turret gun swinging down Rue Nobel as its treads shuddered and clanked toward the mound where she hid, and all the greatest fears she'd ever had came to one, the great crushing treads, the engine's throaty snarl coming toward her, but if she got up and ran they'd surely shoot her. She had to stay, stay in this hole as it crumbled in the tank's nearing vibration. She had to use the grenades, that would stop them, but the sack wouldn't untie and she should have thought of it earlier. Thrashing the earth the tank passed her by, concrete and steel crunching and writhing under its great steel paws, its sour exhaust in her face. It halted, swung its gun uphill.
They're looking for me, she thought, hearing the rumble of a second tank, a louder higher engine. It swung over the top of the hill and down the flattened street behind her and she darted up and across Rue Madame Curie hoping maybe they wouldn't see her, for a half-fallen building was blocking them. The tank's snout came round the edge of collapsed stones as she leaped into a well, smashing down some kind of stairs that broke the grenades loose when she fell. I'll die now, she thought, scrambling down the stairs after the grenades, they'll explode and me with them. She found the sack and there were three, five, six, seven – they were all there, the thirteen grenades. Holding her breath, she felt for the pins – all there. If they hadn't been it would already have been too late.
Loose stone banged down as the tank neared, shuddering the earth. She scrambled feet first down the stairs into the blackness – it was a courtyard, not a well, this earth above and around her the debris of houses. Fumbling along a wall, she found a window, barred, then a door to smash open and here was an open corridor, chunks of ceiling and something – dishes? – on the floor. Chairs, furniture in the way but she scrambled over them as with a white wham a grenade went off in the courtyard and a wall cascaded down between her and it. The tank overhead ground into gear and rumbled away.
Plaster and rock clattered down around her, the air thick with dust. Her ears roared, deafened. Bent over the grenades, she held her breath as long as possible then tried to breathe through her veil. When the air cleared and things stopped falling she tied the grenades up again under her raincoat and peered round her in the shallow darkness. Along one wall was a buffet with dishes and crystal, along the next a coat rack with a man and a woman's long coats and children's jackets. In the middle of the room was a wooden table, set with six plates, silverware, and glasses, all covered with dust.
6
THE GRENADE the tank crew had thrown into the courtyard had imploded the front wall of the living room and the facade of the other floor had dropped in on it. Rosa could find no way out. She felt her way back through the dining room to the kitchen but the next building had fallen in and filled the back door and windows. Her watch said 19:21; already she was late. She put the sack of grenades on the table and began to dig a hole through the rubble blocking the courtyard.
Every handful of rubble she pulled aside only made more tumble down. But cool air was coming in and she scrambled up to it – a fistful of night. She pulled and punched at it, forced the hole wider, slid back down for the grenades and squeezed out through the hole, went down into the courtyard then carefully up its stairs to the gap she had earlier thought was a well. Beneath this opening she listened. There was no sound of the tanks, of footsteps, bullets, or shells. For a moment there was no sound at all, no rifle or mortar anywhere, nothing but the night. Then one round hissed down. No bang: a dud. Or a delay. She tried to decide where it had landed.
A flare burst, half-lighting the street and across it a stairway. Without thinking she crossed the street and climbed the stairs, the light shifting up the steps as the flare fell. The flare died and darkness leaped out at her from the head of the stairs as she caught a glimpse of a vast low room of hunched machines.
She stepped into the room. No sound. Slowly then faster she walked down the aisle alongside the machines. They were like huge animals sleeping, making her afraid to wake them.
Another long low room to the right, then a corridor climbing beyond, then stairs to a dark passage; beyond it a broken door, another dark room.
Wind came through the broken door and chilled her back. She could just see the rectangle of greater darkness that was another door beyond. In between was dark shadow, lumpy, rubble maybe, from the roof through which the tiles had fallen, leaving only a few rafters with splintered crosspieces, a skeleton's ribs black against the sky.
Toward Ras Beirut a machine gun opened up, throaty bursts like migraine jolts, then a long twisting fusillade, answered by the metallic chatter of Kalashnikovs, the hot spat of Galils. She imagined the bullets smashing and clattering through shattered walls and piles of concrete, snatching innocent flesh by hazard, tearing and splattering it.
Someone came through the door behind her and stood, panting.
Whoever it was hadn't seen her. Or he'd seen her and was waiting. To see what she'd do.
She twisted round silently to face him, sinking to her knees to drop her profile from view. He hadn't seen her because he was just standing there. Now he was looking around – she saw the dark shadow of his head move. Automatic rifle in his right hand, smell of burnt oil and
powder. Pale shirt, stink of his sweat, cigarette breath. Surely he must smell her too?
He coughed softly, his head moved, and he spat spraying her face. He lunged on ahead, down the corridor into the night.
When his footfalls had cleared the room ahead she followed, toeing her way in and around the smashed concrete, along a path many feet had hardened. Before the next door she halted, expecting him to be there. But he'd gone on, a stripe of moonlight skidding off his shoulder. Twenty yards ahead now, moving fast.
Three more rooms, rubble, splintered beams, starlight, silence, the quiet of roaches and rats, of all that feed on corpses. She imagined them eating, the little shreds of flesh, flesh that had made love, had held children and danced to music, then felt the chill of death.
Ahead a sudden scuffle, a gasp, grunts, three men at least, a voice: “Calm down, brother! Tell us, what religion are you?”
The man in the pale shirt kept gasping, trying to gain time to decide if these men who had grabbed him out of the darkness were Christian or Muslim, Druze or Hezbollah, Sunni or Shiite, Maronite, Syrian, Palestinian or Israeli.
“Answer right and I kiss you,” one of them said. “Answer wrong and you die.” The others closed up behind him, one's shape blocking the corridor. Rosa edged back into the rubble of the room, knelt down, reached under her raincoat and untied the sack of grenades.
“Just going to Rue Hamra,” whispered the man in the pale shirt. “Please, brothers.”
“What religion?”
“Truly, brother, I don't care about religion.”
“One last time, brother, before I shoot. What religion?”
“Allahah akbaar,” the man sighed.
Clink of pistol cocking. “Recount the faiths.”
“Do not hurt. Do not lie. Do not steal.”
“Which of those are you doing tonight?”
“I was just going to Rue Hamra. My family –”
“You are truly a Muslim, brother?”
“Truly.”
“You're in luck, brother: so are we.”
Rosa took three grenades from the sack, laying them side by side on the ground. She retied the sack tight around her abdomen, put a grenade in each pocket and took the third in her hand.
“Allah be praised,” the man in the pale shirt kept repeating. His voice was shivering. The other men were joking with him now, about his being almost shot for a Christian. “Those pigs!” he said, “eat their own children's entrails.”
“How do you know, brother?” one of the men laughed.
“Because I've made them do it.”
“Really, now?” One voice took interest. “Tell us.”
“No, not really. Just joking...”
“It is a joke, really,” another put in, softly. “The joke is that we're Christians.”
“And you're a filthy little Muslim,” said the first questioner, “who sucks his own cock.”
“Please, brother, oh God, please! I'll help you – I've got money –”
“Open his legs!” one said.
The man was screaming then moaning through something, then choking. “See!” one laughed. “I told you Muslims suck their own cocks!”
“That's homosexuality,” another said. “You know the sentence for that.”
“Certainly.” There was a sharp, three-shot burst.
Beretta parabellum, Rosa decided, 9 mm, Israeli issue. Thus perhaps truly Christians. No way could she go back up the shattered corridor without them seeing her shadow cross the opening where the roofs had fallen in. Stay here and sooner or later one of them would light a match, a flashlight, and see her. Or circle round, to take a piss, run right into her.
The grenade was a hard perfect weight in her hand. But even then could she be sure? Should she move back into the rubble by the wall of the room and wait for them to leave? She put down the grenade, cupped a hand over her wrist and slipped back the sleeve to check her watch: 21:42.
She felt behind her with her toe for a clear place in the broken concrete, stopped when it made a slight hiss against plaster and cement dust. She found another place for her foot, further back, slowly shifted her weight and moved a step backward.
7
RAIN STREAKED the windows. Holland is the only place on earth, Neill thought, where the rain comes down sideways.
In Beirut there’d be no rain now. The wind down from the hills, pine and lavender, the cafés on Rue Hamra full of espresso and cigars and sweet liquor and sex, the sounds of traffic, music, laughter.
No, Hamra's barricaded and bombed. And the only people who go out become the dead ones on the pavements.
“You've been married nineteen years,” Inneka said. “No one else I know, but for my parents, their generation, has stayed married so long. How are you going to explain divorcing to Edgar? Even worse, to Katerina?”
“They'd barely notice if I went.” He slid his hand slowly up the curve of her waist. So smooth, he thought, nothing stops you.
“I refuse to be the one who makes that happen. If you're going to break from her, do it for yourself, not me.”
“I'm crazy,” he let his hand fall, “to be thinking of going from one of you to the other.”
“You're the one you have to learn to live with, darling.”
They dressed in the hesitant glow of the streetlight through the window; he couldn't find one sock till she put on the lamp. “We'll have to go all the way to Rembrandts Plein,” she said.
The rain had cleared, white clouds dashed across the moon. Wind cut up Prinsengracht, ruffling the black canal, sharp as a knife at his neck. She wrapped her coat tighter, hugging his arm as they walked. “You should've worn trousers,” he said.
A bell tinkled coming up behind them on darkened Keizersgracht by the Advent church, making him jump up on the pavement. “Just a bike,” she said.
It was a black rattletrap ridden by a girl in a long blue wool coat who took the bridge across Reguliersgracht, parked the bike and went into the Coffeeshop African Unity.
“It's because you don't want to go on this trip,” Inneka said. “That's why you're so jumpy.”
The Rhapsody on Rembrandts Plein was still open. At a chilled table on the terrace they ate Greek salad, tournedos and spaetzle. The couple at the next table were arguing gently in Italian, under the Motown on the café stereo. On the pavement an electric sign of a woman in blue, a gray cat, and a red-labeled black bottle of instant coffee: “Sheba. Een teken van liefde.” The sky had lifted, the moon's light slinking down the slate roofs, the wind chasing scraps of paper and dust around their ankles. On the far side of Rembrandts Plein flashed a red neon sign, “La Porte d’Or – Live Music”, and he realized he'd been thinking of going in there as if it were a place where he could forget everything, as if there'd be a truth there. A secret.
A trolley ground past, absurdly painted. “Damn graffiti,” she said.
“This used to be a nice town.”
Behind them three dealers were talking low in French, one with great wide hairy ears. “Seventy balles,” another said, “I'd take that.”
“We should try seventy-five,” great ears said.
The first pointed at a car outside. “Look at him, turning round in the street!”
“Like Paris, do whatever they want.”
The third raised a finger. “Je veux dire un truc, moi. Let me say something.”
“But he's not so great. He hustles sometimes but then he just lets himself go...”
“Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, still on your side,” sang the stereo.
“That's four thousand balles each.” Great ears held up his cigarette, shrugged. “Not so bad.”
The third raised his finger. “Moi, je veux dire un truc.”
Going down Reguliersgracht, the canal kept ca
tching the moon, its reflection ducking under the bridges. Cars passed furtively like hunted animals. Inside the tall peaceful living room windows, books stood seriously on shelves, pictures hung meaningfully on white walls, and people dined under crystal chandeliers at long tables, all talking animatedly. What, Neill wondered, do they have to talk about? What can they believe?
Outside a girly bar a kid in jeans with torn knees, a cloth cap, and holey coat was playing a beaten white Strat hooked to a twenty-watt Peavey, the wind so cold his fingers were blue, his caved-in junkie face all caught up in the music that soared out of the black box as the blue fingers raced up and down the strings. A shorter man in a white jacket came round with a cup.
“Amazing,” Neill said.
“My student,” the man in the white coat said.
Neill dug out his change. Three guilders. “All I have.”
The man nodded peremptorily, moved toward another couple. “He's amazing,” Neill repeated.
Inneka tugged herself closer to him as they walked. Why am I so nervous? Neill asked himself. Is it about this trip, like she said? He should've given more money to the guitarist – it'd been a lie, about the three guilders; he had guilder notes in his wallet. He could have given him five guilders, even ten. You don't hear that every day, someone so connected to God. To hear someone play like that. It was as if it was a lesson, a test, to see if you were willing to pay for what you get.
“Why do you keep turning round?” Inneka said. “What are you afraid of?”
TEN TO MIDNIGHT but the men hadn't left. Four of them, Rosa had decided. With M16s and handguns – Christians hiding in a deserted factory while Beirut raged around them and their brothers battled to their deaths.
One of the Christians kept too far apart, a sentry – she couldn't be sure to get him with the first grenade, he might have time to dive among the rubble, and then it'd be his rifle against her grenades. She should have disobeyed Walid, brought a pistol. But a pistol in this darkness was like having a flare to show people where you are.
If she used two grenades there'd only be eleven left, and Mohammed's men would be angry. But if she waited any longer the grenades might be too late. Then she'd never get to see Mohammed.
