Mike Bond Bound. Mike Bond

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СКАЧАТЬ don't know! Get into bed. Sometimes I worry about everyone.”

      He lay beside her, the bed still warm. I could have been dead, he thought, and my bed still warm.

      Before dawn he rose and washed, said his prayers, his back stretching and limbering as he knelt forward, face to the ground. It bothered him that she could see him, she who would not pray. “Why am I with her, God?” he asked, smelling her musk on his hands. “What do You want?”

      He finished the prayer. She sat naked, cross-legged, brushing her hair. It made a ripping sound, like a fire spreading. She's a jinni, he thought, she can help or kill you. The backward people of Yammouné still believe that if a jinni wants a young man she'll condemn his beloved to death. But Rosa doesn't want me.

      “In half a day,” she said, “we'll be back in Beirut. To who we were.”

      “I was wondering, could we stay up here?” He shrugged. “I suppose now it's my house.”

      “If you've come back from the dead,” her eyes warmed him, for an instant, “then it's to drive them out. Palestinians and Shiites together – we can do it.”

      His arms felt weak. It's still the wound, he thought. “If we go back –”

      “If?”

      “We'll get a lift with somebody, go by Baalbek and Zahlé. After that I don't know what I'll do with you.”

      She stood in one motion, elastic. “Nothing! I'm on my own.”

      “But I don't want that!”

      She smiled, watching him. “Jealous?”

      “You've slept with other men.” He trembled, not wanting to hear.

      “So did Mary, the Prophet's servant girl, before she gave him a son.”

      His insides congealed. “We didn't –”

      “Don't worry!” she laughed. “Anyway, the Prophet never married her.”

      “Of course not.”

      “But when his wife complained, he threw her out and banished all his other wives, and only lived with Mary. Then people criticized him, so he had a new revelation that it's fine for prophets to do this but nobody else.”

      “I'm no prophet.”

      She cocked her head, biting her lip. “Why?”

      “I can't find my own way out of the desert, let alone anybody else's.”

      “Neither could the Prophet. He just did what he wanted. As with Mary. And told everybody to do what he said, not what he did.”

      His head spun. Once again she was contorting things. He wanted to sit down but that would seem weakness. To whom? To her? He sat on the floor.

      “Hey!” She rushed to him.

      The room was going round. If she saw it as weakness that meant she didn't care for him and then he couldn't chance being himself. But what if he could be himself, all the way? Nauseous dizziness washed over him. When it lessened he pushed her away and stood. “When we get to Beirut I start anew. The path of peace –”

      “Lie down, you fool,” she clicked her tongue, “pushing yourself!”

      The ceiling stopped spinning. He smiled up at her, heart full of joy. “You're the one who's been pushing – “Oh, don't stop!” he moaned. “No, don't, not now ...”

      She slapped him. “Pig! I should leave you to them!”

      “Who?” he laughed.

      “Everybody who wants you!” She tried to stalk away but the room was too small so she bent and snatched her underpants and stepped into them, yanked them up. With sorrow he watched them cover her luscious black crotch, the bra hooked over her lovely tight-nippled breasts, the robe like a curtain coming down. I’m a fool, he thought, not knowing why.

      NEILL WOKE to the recorded plaint of a muezzin out of a loudspeaker across the Jardin Public. He thought of Layla waking now, warm and drowsy, Mohammed snoring beside her. She probably has to take a piss, he reminded himself. Just like me. He had to piss too much to go back to sleep now that he was awake, thanks to the muezzin. His burnt hand still hurt against the rough bandage. Our God, the Bible says, is a consuming fire.

      Once he got up and wandered down the stairs to the outhouse in the back yard, he might as well stay up. Another tired meaningless day. Another day closer to death. Waiting for Mohammed. For Layla, really. Like he'd been doing all these years.

      Another day of helping Nicolas and Samantha look for food – we're right back in the hunter-gatherer mode, he thought, maybe we never left it – and trying to make contact with other people who might know Mohammed. People he hadn't seen in years, hadn't wanted to. Why had he become a journalist when he hated people? Actually, he realized, it made perfect sense.

      If he didn't speak to Mohammed, Freeman was going to want his money back. Freeman didn't give a shit about Layla. Neill hugged his arm against his ribs.

      He sat on the edge of the bed, bent over rubbing his neck. Another day. He really did have to piss. He stood, found his trousers and pulled them on, trying not to jiggle his bladder.

      He went down the echoing dusty stairs, trying not to wake Nicolas and Samantha, and out the back corridor. New blue daylight glistened over the trees. Already dawn, he realized, and no shells, no rockets, no sound of guns, no wail of ambulances or bray of fire trucks.

      War's like the Devil, he thought as he hopped barefoot across the cold crinkly dew-wet grass. Sometimes it just gets tired of tormenting you. Those are the times called peace.

      40

      MOHAMMED STEPPED FROM his father's house into the sun-bright street. The air was cool, down from the ice sheets of the mountain and perfumed with the spring herbs of the valley, the warm smell of charcoal in the village hearths, the fur and dung of animals, the onions hung on stone walls to dry in the sun. “Cover yourself,” he said, turning to check that Rosa had hidden her hair completely under her scarf, that the veil covered all but her eyes and that the gown fell to her feet.

      A boy and two little girls passed, holding hands; he did not recognize them, nor the crippled old man driving goats down the street, waving a bent stick. He went into the shop's cool spicy shadows but did not know the woman behind the counter. “Good morning, young man,” she said; he realized she was the sister of a boy he'd gone to school with, up the hill.

      “You're the shopkeeper now?” he said.

      “Yacoub's dead – you don't remember?”

      “Of course...”

      “And you're still fighting.”

      “Perhaps soon we can stop.”

      She was cutting the stems of garlic bulbs and tossing them into a basket. “Don't believe it.”

      “I need СКАЧАТЬ