Holy War

by Mike Bond

  “Letter?”

  “Explaining we have nowhere and are good workers and will pay as much as we can, if we can stay.”

  “No one would read it. It'd make no difference.”

  “I'll give you a hundred dollars off the car if you can write such a letter.”

  “I don't write letters.”

  The man shrugged. “You're crazy coming here.”

  “I'm betting the war's nearly over. Now might be the time to come in, get ready to invest.”

  “Invest? This war's just beginning. They're going to tear down every brick. The only ones who come out ahead are the ones like you, selling arms.”

  “I'm not selling arms.”

  “You can do what you want. I wouldn't tell.”

  “You don't need to give me a hundred. I'll write your letter. For someone in France. If you get there.”

  He parked the Ford in front of the Hotel des Cèdres. The car had 391-67 on its plates; both sets of digits added up to thirteen. His lucky number. He'd have bought the car for that alone.

  33

  SUN WARMED THE SNOW and water dripped off the rocks; they had to dig a trench in the mud to keep it out of the cave. Then the wind turned cold, the snow crust froze and the water hardened into icicles. Snow began to fall.

  The ground was frigid through their doubled coats. Her hands would not warm even when he held them. “Shivering's good,” she said. “It warms the body.”

  With a crunch of steps a man moved past, his head visible through a notch between two rocks, then his legs through another, his rifle over his far shoulder, his boots wrapped in rags, snow like a cloak down his back. Then came another, bent over under his weapons, the wind snatching chunks of broken snow crust from his shoes and scattering it through alleys of stone. Christians, nine in all, filing past like ghosts.

  “They've saved us,” Rosa said, “we can go back in their tracks.”

  “Tonight. If we don't freeze first.”

  She fought her shivering. “How you talk like a Muslim!”

  “How's that?”

  “A mother's boy, needing reassurance!”

  He opened his shirt and cupped her hands against his chest, her fingers like frozen sticks. “Don't be so harsh. I didn't kill them.”

  She bit her lip to stop shivering. “Who?”

  “Your brothers. They were killed by someone, so you hate everyone.”

  “If there's any God other than a completely impotent one, then it’s God who killed them.”

  “Trying to make you understand just makes you wilder.”

  “The only one who can understand for me is me.” She huddled closer, shivering, her breasts and thighs cold against him. He tried to hold her up on him off the frozen ground but the bullet hole began tearing and he rolled back on his side.

  “We could truly freeze up here,” he said.

  “Like sleep.”

  To get close is to stay warm, stay alive, and if God didn't want us to, He wouldn't make us want it so much. Or is it just to torture us, test us? Her body so little, after all, so slim, such young breasts and such a shame to die.

  “When I was a kid I had a puppy,” she whispered. “He used to climb into bed with me. All night so warm beside me.”

  It shocked him to think of her as a girl, long innocent black hair down her slender back. “How old were you?”

  “I must have been nine. We'd just moved to Mount Hermon. My father got him to help me forget my friends in Nazareth.”

  “You had no new friends on the Mountain?”

  She shook her head as if brushing aside a hair or his query or the thought of having friends. “In the village there were only boys. Like I told you, they threw stones and called me names.”

  He tried to see her hiding in her house, fearing the stones. “What did you do?”

  “Helped my mother. Did what girls do.”

  He had no idea, he realized, what girls do. “What's that?”

  'Keep the race going. While you men tear it apart.”

  “But you're here too. At war.”

  She burrowed tighter. “I'm cold.”

  He was sliding into a delicious peace, couldn't stop. He slipped his hands down her hips and up inside her gown, thinking this is just, this is fair. The backs of her thighs so chilled and thin in his hands, slipping down her brief clothes while she, silent, raised up a knee so he could pull them free.

  Even her core was cold, her smell. “What are you thinking?” he said. “You're so silent.”

  “This isn't how I wanted it.”

  “What did you want?”

  “I was going to be distant, showing by my silence that I didn't approve of you.”

  “You still don't approve?”

  She waited for a moment. “Scarcely.”

  He swallowed the slight. “You've made me less approve of me.”

  She drew to him like a puppy. “I can like you although I don't approve of what you do.”

  “Whatever happened to your little dog?”

  “The boys who threw stones killed him. They put his head on a stick.”

  Tears stung his eyes. I haven't cried for years, he thought. I haven't ever cried. “Christians?”

  “Druze and Christian and Shiite. It was a mixed village – this was Lebanon, remember. The place where we all lived together.”

  “You hate them still.”

  “Why should I? They've killed each other off.”

  “So what's this mourning for Palestine?”

  “Palestine is where the Israelis chased us out and we had to go to the Mountain. Where everything would have been different.”

  The sting behind his eyes was gone. She was as close as his clothes, touching his skin, her skin warming from him, and this is how we keep alive, he thought, this sinister touch, this skin.

  But no matter how deep you are inside a woman, what do you touch? What is sin?

  Sin is what it means to be free.

  A CAR CAME SPLASHING the gutter and they ducked into a stairwell. “And tell her for me,” Neill said, “that my talking with her husband is one way to show he still matters.”

  Hamid shrugged rain off his coat. “I don't do this sort of thing.”

  “You need the money. I need the story. We're the ultimate couple.”

  “You're so coarse.” Hamid's bushy eyebrows made him seem to be looking from under two dark storm clouds. “I've always hated that about you.”

  “People hate everything about me. “Specially those who know me well. That doesn't change a thing.”

  “You think you're tough, saying that?”

  “I'm as scared and dumb as everybody.”

  “Mohammed's not scared. And he's not dumb.”

  “All the more reason for me to meet him.”

  “Wait till you have hot metal going through you, see how you boast.”

  “You had your chance years ago to be a human being and you blew it. Now you've got another chance.”

  “She didn't belong with you. That's what caused this war, all the wars – Christians like you.”

  “I'm scarcely a Christian.”

  “The Crusade's not over, is it? You people are still coming over here to win back your fucking Holy Land. It's our Holy Land, you fucker, not yours. We live here. Not you.”

  “You can have your goddamn Holy Land. Just get me to her.”

  “He'd be crazy to talk with someone like you. I'll tell her that.”

  “I can do him more good than you ever could. Tell her that, too.”

  With a snort Hamid turned away. Neill watched him diminish down the pavement into the rain. Painted on the wall was an American flag with Jewish stars and a huge fist through the middle, with the gold
en city of Mecca atop the fist. I'm becoming, Neill realized, a person I don't like.

  34

  WITH ROSA’S NAKED belly and thighs against him how warm she was! Warm and soft and holding tight as a magnet, her sex hair sticky with sweat and sperm, her skin slippery like olive oil and sweeter than honey. Old men are right, he realized, to love young women, they are the gift of God. Her body so lean and long and never-ending because his hands could not leave it, where there was only one place and that was inside her, only one feeling and that was she. Long after he could come no more he was still locked hard inside her, trying to slide deeper, her teeth in his shoulder, her claws up his back.

  It's not this that's evil, he realized, but its absence. If you submit, it must be also to what you feel, that too is God's will.

  When he woke the new snowfall had broken the cold and she slept warmly against him. Nearly five. In an hour he'd have to wake her. The Makarov she'd given him on one side, she on the other, he lay with neither cold nor pain, watching the snow drift down among the darkening rocks.

  Crazy, what she and he had done. Forgetting the danger, everything. Wild as two newlyweds. Wilder.

  Never had he been to this place of total forgetfulness before. This place of total concentration. Not even in prayer. He took a deep breath, realized he was still winded. Exhausted yet strangely rested. Could watch all night if need be, over her. This strange hateful child for whom so suddenly he was responsible. For whom he wanted no more pain.

  Telling himself not to fall asleep lest he endanger her, he lay watching from the cave while the solitary snow sifted steadily down into the ghostly dusk. Although no men passed he kept seeing them, an endless line, snow caping their heads and shoulders, their backs bent under guns and swords, cloth-wrapped feet trudging the cold slippery snow. In'salah, the will of God. Back to the start of time. In'salah.

  A shadow came up behind but vanished as he turned. Each way he looked, it hid behind him. Its blade drove into his spine and he shook himself awake.

  Near night's faint glow on the snow. She moved, still naked against him, and he wanted her, in terror. The snow was still sifting down. What was that? A footstep? Just wind scurrying among the rocks. The line of her hair black as a veil above the pale brow. Oh God, he thought, how beautiful.

  The shadow rose up behind him. “Nothing,” it spat, “is deadlier than love.”

  IMAGINE finding Black Label here in Lebanon. But that's the thing about war, Neill decided. Either there's everything, supermarkets as full as Saigon's in '65. Or there's nothing at all, Hanoi in '69.

  He'd been going to stay off liquor but that was the kind of intellectual decision he was always making to screw himself up. Nearly everybody drank, he just had to watch it. He'd have no trouble watching it here, at fifty bucks a bottle.

  It poured cool and golden into the cracked white cup, swirling fine shadow, smelling like oak root, turf, musk, all together. His sinuses cracked as they opened, sucking it in. Nothing this good could be bad for you. Warms your tongue, slides cool fire down your throat, you can taste a thousand places...

  The first Katyusha came over whistling like a dove. He snatched the Black Label but the rocket kept going, far away now, a monotonous thud, the air and scraps of window shaking. Out there maybe someone dying, their spirits floating up into the air.

  How strange to sit at this desk in Nicolas and Samantha's guestroom with its empty windows, in the candle's wavering light, like a supplicant, a mendicant, a hermit, this cup of transitory gold in his hands, while out there others died. And when he died they'd be going about their business, unable to help him any more than he could them.

  What if when he died there'd be time to look back? If he saw that he hadn't lived his life well? Hadn't done what he could? Instead of being a nobody reporter at the seamy ends of the earth, what if he'd done something?

  In the mosque in Damascus he'd promised to change his life, improve his character in some way every day; had that too been illusion, both the reason and result?

  This was the way to lose it. Sanity's just a convention: once you start asking questions like this there's no end to where you can fall. And what does it bring you, getting to the bottom of things?

  He'd stop at three glasses. God, it tasted good. All those shut-down lines in your brain coming back to life. The signals going through again. What if he could make enough on this trip to take time off? Working for Freeman could net him twenty thousand a year, maybe thirty. Say thirty. Could live on that, up in the Lake District, a slate-roofed little place with an uneven rock-and-briar wall, looking out over sheepcotes and green valleys.

  His underarm stung as he reached forward for the cup. Leave me alone. Shut down the thinking machine. Just for a while.

  His watch said 4:56. In four minutes he'd promised himself he'd leave. Hamid wouldn't stick around. He wouldn't himself, Neill realized, if he were that scared. He needed an extra little hit, really, to face Hamid. Hamid a true turd on the face of God. Neill tossed back the fifth whisky and gave it a chaser, slammed the cup down cleanly on the table. Hamid source of all my sorrows. Nearly all anyway. He put the bottle under the pillow and went downstairs but Nicolas and Samantha weren't there. They were somewhere going through the foolishness of filming another peace talk for the television station that could not show it because the electricity was dead. He went outside into darkness. Another rocket came over softly hissing, drawing near but kept going, went over the hill.

  Hamid opened his door before Neill knocked, led him into a low red room with beams. “She's a fool. She'll see you.”

  “When?”

  “After this, never come near me!”

  “When, man?”

  'Go back to your place and wait.”

  “Today? Tomorrow?”

  Hamid moved behind him, opened the door. “Do me a favor?”

  “I owe you one?”

  “Lay off the bottle. If you stink of liquor she won't even look at you.”

  “HEY YOU! It'll soon be dark. Time to go.”

  Rosa stretched, still asleep, looked up and saw him, drew closer. “I'm so tired...”

  Mohammed had again a crushing sense of strength and helplessness. “Just a few more miles. Soon downhill.”

  “The minefield.”

  “You know the way across it. We have their tracks.”

  “I've been worried those soldiers we saw were laying mines.”

  He hesitated. “I hadn't thought of that.”

  “Two of them had shovels.”

  “I didn't see them.”

  “Your mind was elsewhere.”

  “It still is. You have completely befuddled me.”

  “I thought I'd hate you. But you're still a boy.”

  “Every conversation I start with you goes somewhere else.” The small of her back was so thin he could hold half in one hand, her fingers up his spine electric, her arm so soft and strong under his, round him. His penis tingled with delight. This had to be right, to be so good.

  35

  THE CAFÉ DE PARIS was open but there was no coffee. Neill sat on the terrace with a Pernod. Few people came by and there were no girls and no one he knew. A cold wind licked his ankles. He had been thinking about a line so difficult to translate in the ancient Arab poem of Qays, a young man who loves the beautiful Layla. She is stolen away by her parents and ceases to love Qays, and he becomes Majnun the Mad, wandering the desert, spurning God and man in his thirst for his beloved:

  I dream a lovely maiden of pure light

  Tall and slender, her limbs of fiery passion –

  No, that wasn't it. The poet meant “fiery passion” but he didn't say it. Damn Arabic so complicated, more full of meanings than English. How do you say she plants love in my heart, waters it with the desire pooled in her great eyes? Any way you try it
in English sounds silly.

  Crazy to be thinking of poetry while Beirut tore itself apart. Hadn't he like Qays been wandering a desert of his own, rejecting life because love had rejected him? Becoming Majnun the Mad, forgetting that love once it's lost is nothing but a poetic device?

  A waste to think such things. A waste of time. He saw Freeman's prim displeased mouth. Freeman wanted results. The stuffy self-worth of a man who has never bet all he had and lost. But have you? Neill asked himself.

  He tucked two dollars under his glass and crossed Rue Hamra, thinking of the traffic in Bratislava that had nearly killed him on Staromestska Street. Here there was no traffic, only danger, yet despite the war little damage but for broken windows, the refuse piled on the pavements spilling into the streets, the smell of charred rubber. He took Rue de Caire, each step deeper into danger but kept going, alongside the silent American Hospital and up Clemenceau past the closed-up Orly Theatre to the University gate. Over its wide golden stone arch the words carved in Arabic and English:

  THAT THEY MAY HAVE LIFE

  AND HAVE IT MORE ABUNDANTLY

  Barbed wire and machine guns blocked the gate. Beyond them the yellow stone edifice of College Hall, where in a seminar on classical poets he had met Layla, was no longer there at all – just a black hole as if it had never been, nor they.

  He went down the boulevard with the trim yellow stone church behind the wall and took Rue John Kennedy toward the beach, down the stairs thick with rubbish and broken boughs where once in the overarching shade of tall trees she had kissed him for the first time, and the taste of her mouth had been the opening of a whole new world, one from which even at the time he'd sensed he could never return. There was a body in the grass, swollen and stinking; around it clouds of flies buzzing angrily at his approach. Some day, he thought, you won't wait till we die before you eat us.

  There was an exploded car in Van Dyck and a bludgeoned building before it, then on the seashore boulevard the two-winged American Embassy with its middle crushed in, the concrete floors hanging down like veils, children kicking a soccer ball across the rubble where people still lay buried – typists with three children at home, an old lady with mops and brooms reflectively chewing her gums, young foreign affairs majors on the way up. The cooking fires of Shiite squatters twinkled on the shattered balconies where bright clothes and bed sheets hung.