“Hell's what Heaven used to be. We keep looking in the wrong place.”
“Remember the imam who was caught in a flood, and he goes up to his minaret to wait for God to save him? The water's rising. A boat comes by, offers to take him. “No!” he calls. “God will save me!” Another boat comes by, he tells them the same thing, “God will save me.”
“You must rest, Papa.”
“And then the third boat comes and he tells them the same. The water rises and the imam's drowned. In Heaven he reproaches God: “Why didn't you save me?”
Mohammed, checking the teapot, turned his back. “And what does God say?”
“Fool,” God answers, “I sent you three boats.”
Mohammed poured a cup, mixed in cool water and a chunk of sugar, held up his father’s head so the old man could sip.
“Are you going to cling to your minaret?” his father said. “You don't remember that the Muslim means He who submits?”
21
THE OLD MAN slept. The woman who had been watching over him returned. Mohammed went into the next room, where sixty years ago his father had lain in bed hearing the Hosseini family beyond the wall. He woke his three sleeping mujihadeen and went back to his father. “Papa!” he whispered, but the old man didn't budge. In his blanched face, for an instant, Mohammed saw his own.
“We should stay another night,” one of the mujihadeen said, yawning and rubbing his face.
Mohammed swung round, checked his anger. “What about Beirut?”
“Beirut's quiet now. You should take this time.”
“We could leave tomorrow at midnight,” another said. “It'd be safer.”
“You let me decide!” He realized his voice was too harsh, tried to soften it. “Hurry!” He went back to his father. The old man's tousled hair stuck up like a white flag of surrender. “Papa!” he said, but again his father did not answer.
“Let him sleep,” the woman said. “Wait a few hours.”
“Wait?” Why did these peasants never understand? Stuck in their slow peasant ways, the world eating them alive. He nodded sharply to his men and led them out, with one last glance back at the thin white head crowned in white. He turned his face toward the mountain, walked the street of tilting houses toward the lake and along its edge, ducks quacking nervously and swimming their young away from shore.
Here was the place in the swamp at the edge where he'd found the little porcelain vase the French archaeologist had said was Roman, that a woman two thousand years ago had used to store her tears. How, he'd wondered at the time, could anyone weep so much?
They circled the end of the lake and followed the river up the mountain, tree roots like black snakes across the trail. They passed by the shepherd's hut and the trail became steep, the river crashing and booming down its bed. In the moonlight the rocks gleamed with frost. The branches were bare and black, splinters of paler black sky between them.
They stopped for breath where the river came churning out of the mountain into a deep pool then cast itself over the edge. Mohammed walked out on the edge and knelt down to the great white stone that was the section of a Roman temple, one that had been built here to honor the river's coming forth from the mountain, the Frenchman had said, a long piece of carved stone that had been placed above columns.
Mohammed knelt and as he had done so many times traced with his fingers the deep lines someone had carved so long ago in the stone. How, he wondered, had they brought up these huge chunks? For there was no white stone like this on the mountain.
It was hard to imagine those people, so diligent and hard-working, leaving their traces everywhere. And others before them, the Frenchman had said: Greeks, Phoenicians, many others. Where were they now? Against them all, how did you weigh one old man's death? He with his thin white hair like a flag of surrender?
Above the thundering river were the dark mouths of caves where he'd played as a boy, the grass slope his goats had climbed each morning to pastures in the sun. Where was he now, that boy?
The lake below was just like his father had said, a pool of moonlight that had flowed and echoed down the mountains all around.
They reached the first crests before dawn. Early sparrows scattered from goat dung on the path; Mohammed pitied their numb hunger, their scratching at dirt and stone. He tossed the Kalashnikov to the other hand, swinging his legs effortlessly into a sudden climb through basalt slabs with gnawed bitter scrub in their corners. He liked stretching his legs out like this, the feeling he could go on forever, never tire.
Here, where they'd beaten the Christians, a bullet-riddled white statue of their Virgin loomed headless over a vast vertical lunar valley of thorn trees and splintered stones.
Beyond the Christians now. His stomach was empty but that felt good too. You could go on almost nothing, really. Cleared your mind for what you had to do. How to trap them with this peace. Make them beg for their own death.
Death like this crystal morning whose blue air stung his nostrils. He must not die before he could trap them. Like the girl said, that girl Rosa, he'd been losing sight of the goal, liberation of the Holy Land. He'd become too caught up in this war of schisms: another Muslim is at least better than an infidel – there his father was wrong.
On the right there were remnants of a stone wall between two boulders. Long-ago separation of the sheep. The liberation of Palestine, the Holy City: first we need Beirut as a base. That's what you must tell Rosa. We cannot move until they're completely encircled. When we have Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, then Egypt will abrogate Sadat's peace and Israel will be driven under.
Stone walls of a house, the sky its roof, the earth its floor. Beside it a ruined sheepcote, the bouldered, barren earth. He hungered to be back with the first people who had come over these hills of sharp basalt and balsamy scrub and down into the valley below, when it had been grass-thick in the meadows, cedars like soldiers up the ridges, the river like a woman's silver necklace down between them. How many lives in those rock walls, how many young women disrobing for their husbands, how many generations of counting up and never having enough?
He'd be foolish to think the liberation of Palestine would change that. His father taking the goats down to the lake, the Hosseini family beyond the wall, their voices in the night.
He looked back to see his men strung out behind him. To the left, up in the rocks, a quick glimmer of a rifle. He yelled, waved his men down but it was too late; from everywhere rifles fired, shattering the cold clear morning, his men twisting and falling on the path. As he fired at the flash and sound of guns, something punched him hard in the back and knocked him face into the ground.
22
NEILL WANTED TO FIND HELL in daylight but there was no point: the woman was untraceable. And what good would it do to find her?
It was wrong, what they'd done. Scaring him like that. He wasn't theirs. He was doing them a favor. If Freeman wasn't such a snide little shit he'd have realized long ago. They didn't care if he lived or died, just wanted him to find Mohammed.
If he did, it wouldn't be how they thought. They'd said they wouldn't follow him, but look what they'd done.
He wasn't doing them any more favors. Like Freeman had said, he'd drop them when he wanted. But not like they thought.
But then, MI6 could have him kicked out of Britain any time they wanted. Freeman had said that too. Just pray, Neill, he had said, that we never turn against you. Maybe that was what he needed: go back to the States, start over.
He was too old to start over. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and hobbled to the bathroom. Anyway, if he tried to find her he'd miss his plane. He sat on the toilet, fell asleep and hit his head on the radiator, stood in the shower, put in the plug and let the tub fill round his