“It's sore,” Mohammed said, “to be so little –”
“It missed the lungs – just muscle and soft tissue. A quick in and out beneath your shoulder blade. You have very thick muscles.”
“In Ainata I am a mason.”
“Soon they'll come to ask you about all that.”
“All that?”
“Who you are and where you were going.”
“I didn't want to go. But they came to Ainata, the tall one and the one with the scarred cheek. His name's Ahmed. They said we had to send two young men, to fight in Beirut. I have no work now so the village decided to send me.”
“Who was the other?”
“He was not really from Ainata but from a farm up on the mountain. Just a kid. He has no family, that's why they sent him.”
“It's natural to feel guilty. When they died and you didn't.”
“I didn't know the two mujihadeen. I didn't like them. I didn't know the kid either. I'm sorry they're dead but it was just luck.”
“Yes, you were very lucky.”
“What happens now?”
“Once you're healed you go to a camp. Depends who you are – we might exchange you.”
“Hezbollah doesn't even know me. You don't need to tell them. If you trade me then I'll have to fight.”
“No trying to escape – it'd kill you.”
IT WAS THE MALEV-Middle East run, Budapest through Sofia, an old TU 44 that flew fast and high and dropped steeply into Istanbul like a pigeon to its roost, took off again across the once-vast forests of an Anatolia now barren and gray, the deserts of the Crusader kings, their castles from the air like pimples on the earth's dark skin.
They'd visited these castles, he and Bev, so long ago. In a past that had shrunk to a tiny memory like the tiny castle so far below. A honeymoon across Byzantium to Ancyra, in a time of their own vague Christianity, south past Caravansary through the gate where Saul quit Tarsus for Damascus, across the plains and hills where later the Crusaders would build their great kraks to wall out what they never could defeat.
Castles jutting from the desert like rotten teeth on eroded mountain jaws, walls half fallen and filled with dirt, a village huddled downhill against a bitter April wind, the earth blowing past them in crumbles, small boys running to them with handfuls of coins – gold and silver with faces of long-dead kings, Richard the Lionheart, Philippe Auguste. “Don't buy them,” Beverly had said, “it just incites them to dig up more,” but once half out of pity he'd given one boy a handful of change for the ancient handful. He'd taken the coins home and they were later stolen by some friend of Edgar's who'd then moved away.
Like the coins, the British mandate too had vanished, nothing but a rainstorm across these peaks and deserts, nothing after a thousand years of Constantinople, eight hundred Ottoman years. From the first tribes out of the African crescent, how many generations of empires won, lost, and forgotten? Like Judges, that most honest of the Old Testament books, one long litany of victory, vengeance and defeat.
Across the broad brown desert a single track, and on it a single string of dust blown windward, the wind that had gnawed the dry earth clean of centuries of dead, its walls of empires, their endless battles over what? How many total minutes of human misery and sweat and pain? Animals too – burdened donkeys, hunted gazelles, the last wild horses, wolves dying of poison – all down there, blown away with the sand.
What had he and Bev found and lost there, with their urgent young sex in cold Turkish hotel rooms? Their bitter willingness, at first, to understand each other? What had they paid for, he wondered, that was later stolen and always regretted?
Empires of wind.
MOHAMMED lay on a burlap mattress on a bed of concrete blocks. The blocks were hard and cold through the mattress, and he kept trying to find a better position. When he moved the pain was sharp, cleaving him like a sword. Otherwise it was the dull ache brought on by painkillers, giving him a sort of weary elation.
Overhead a hardened mix of mud and plaster hung down unevenly between the rafters; under the main beam a kerosene lantern fluttered in the wind through the eaves. The wind was sharp and smelled of desert. Why, he wondered, and wondered at himself for wondering, did I stay so long in Beirut, when it's the desert mountains that I love?
What had driven him to quit the barren slopes of Yammouné, its fertile valley, for the festering Shiite slums of Beirut? In Yammouné there had been the beauty of the land but no future. In the Shiite slums there was rancor and misery, but a little work too and, slowly, comprehension.
He took a breath, letting it hurt all the way down into his lungs and across his back. Comprehension, fool that he'd been, of the last thirteen centuries of Shiite bondage and poverty, and how, finally, they might be overcome.
He slowed his breathing; the pain had made him dizzy. Layla would be worried. To be a Warrior of God you should have no wife, no children. The time for changing his people's destiny was now; far more important than a wife, than children. Any man could have those.
But wounded like this he'd never escape. Not all the way back across Mount Lebanon to the Muslim side, down to the Bekaa. He'd have to seem too weak to move for as long as possible, till maybe he could get away.
At his elbow stood an upended wooden case with an extinguished candle and clean bandages. Above his head a crucifix was nailed to the wall; from a nail in a rafter hung a sack of glucose with a drip line to his wrist. Beyond the wooden box were four more beds, in each a wounded Christian. The nearest sat staring at his stump legs, berating them and God. The next kept whimpering, “Halima! Halima!” The third lay motionless with pain and heroin, his face blown hideously away. That one won't live, Mohammed decided. The last seemed dead too, he was so quiet. There had been two others, but a taxi had come up from Qartaba to take them down.
The man in the next bed wept quietly down on his missing legs. For war shall lay thy legs bare, Mohammed quoted to him silently from the Koran; this is what happens, Christian, when you will not listen.
The wind sucked under the ceiling as a trap door opened in the corner and white running shoes came down a ladder. It was the doctor, ducking under the beams, his bifocals shining. Nine steps down, Mohammed counted. It's a bunker, he decided. Half underground.
The doctor went first to the one who kept calling “Halima”, speaking quietly, holding his hand.
Breathing steadily, softly, so as not to disturb the hole in his body, Mohammed raised his head. The doctor was not carrying a gun. He wore a leather jacket, gray slacks, and the white running shoes. There was blood on one shoe.
The doctor spent a long time with the man whose face had been blown away. Mohammed rested his head. It was too heavy to move. The doctor was speaking now with the legless man. “You can't think like that,” he said. “Learn to live for others, now.”
“Fool!” the man wailed.
“I wish there were something I could do.”
“Find the one who put that mine in the middle of the street.”
The doctor checked Mohammed. “It's good you're healing quickly, for soon you must give up your place.”
“For where?”
“The camp. New wounded are coming.”
Mohammed took a soft breath. “From where?”
“I haven't a clue.”
“Yet you heal Muslims too?”
“You wouldn't heal ours?”
“I've