What do you want?
What if, like the Prophet says, you can change your life?
ANDRÉ went down to the port and paid fifty Cyprus pounds for a single cabin to Jounié. A minibus took him and four Lebanese Christians to the Larnaca Rose leaning rustily against its wharf as if trying to summon strength for one more trip. Christians stood in line at the boarding ramp, waiting for the captain to check their papers. The one in front of André was unshaven and swarthy, thick black hair in a squat ponytail at the back of his neck. He carried a black bag and wore a maroon sweatsuit, and kept moving edgily from side to side on his dirty white sneakers, scanning the line.
André's cabin had two comfortable bunks and a desk with a curtained porthole looking across the companionway to the rail and the high cranes of the port. The head stank execrably; a fresh turd floated in the seatless toilet and would not go down when he yanked the chain.
People were smoking and drinking in the small café on the main deck. Down below, three men were playing roulette in the restaurant. “Join us!” one called, smiling, a tall, distinguished, silver-haired man in a gray suit whom André had noticed going on board. André shook his head and went back upstairs.
The boat rumbled and churned away from the dock and through the twin stone groins of the harbor. A gray-white Cyprus Ports Authority patrol boat came alongside and the pilot descended a ladder down the side of the Larnaca Rose and jumped onto the patrol boat's deck, his back turned, as if abandoning them to their fate.
They passed three ships at anchor and rumbled out across the black swelling sea, the lights of Larnaca fading to starboard, to port its oil refinery lit up like a great Christmas tree.
The ship churned peaceably through a soft swell, the Big Dipper nearly straight overhead, the North Star to the left. The orange flare of the refinery stack lingered last above the western horizon. The air was damp, the wind cold. A seaman came out and dumped a bucket of trash over the stern rail into the blue-black frothing sea.
A lopsided orange moon rose through the greasy clouds above the eastern horizon. It grew larger and larger, split by the bow mast, casting a whiter and wider swathe across the water, till it seemed they sailed right for it, would sail right off the end of the earth, as if they were already in space.
The Jericho felt tight and hard under his left arm. Richard the Lionheart had once sailed from Cyprus to attack the Holy Land, was captured, finally ransomed, and returned to Les Andelys to build his castle on the hill over the town and the church in the town square. Christians had always used Cyprus to attack the Levant. For arms, a jumping-off place. But this trip seemed not an attack but a voyage to a new life, as if to somewhere he'd never been. Silly, that; how many times already had he been to Lebanon?
After the sea wind his cabin smelled of rust and urine. He lay on the comfortable bunk, thinking how it had been made and bolted into the wall by human hands, in a ship created and run by human hands. People he'd never met carrying him across the sea, while others who had never met killed each other, as he had done also, had been taught to do.
How could it be that in Larnaca humans were friendly and cooperative, while in Beirut they tortured and executed each other? Most people did not seem to hate. It was just the few, by murdering and lies, who split the rest apart. Rooting in the cave of their own hearts.
24
“YOU’D JUST LEAVE HIM?” Rosa said. “Till somebody recognizes him, if they haven't already? You're going to carry that to Allah some day? On your life?”
“They'll take him to the camps.” The mujihadeen captain with the sharp beard bent forward to tug at a loose shoelace. “It's easier to rescue him once he’s there, or even maybe trade for him.”
“Hah!”
“It's not your place, Rosa, to be disgusted.”
“Warriors of God!”
The shoelace broke. The captain swore and took off his shoe, fished the broken lace through. “He's in the middle of the Christian sector. We can't just walk in there.”
“Without him we have to start all over again! There's no time!”
He spliced the lace and put the shoe back on. “You're a foolish woman. Excuse me, that's redundant. It would take two hundred men to get Mohammed out of there.”
“I'll show you, then. That one foolish woman is worth two hundred men.”
MOHAMMED SLID his body to the side of the pallet and pushed himself up, taking deep breaths to stretch his chest muscles and ease the pain in his back. In the next bed the legless man slept; from a crack in the ceiling daylight blazed down.
The man who had whimpered “Halima!” had been carried feet first up the ladder like the bearded man's brother. On his bed a shell-shocked girl, eleven maybe, crouched face down as if praying, hands clenched to her head, but facing the wrong way, away from Mecca.
He had missed prayers. Three days and nights he'd been here, the doctor had said. But how do you pray in a Christian place? A jet went over, low. Israeli. He waited for the crump of its bombs shaking the earth, but it did not come, the jet's reactor fading through the hills like a stone skipped over water. As each prayer, each life, is skipped across the waters of death, to drown in the great sea of souls. But that was the problem: what is a soul? Even the Prophet admitted to the Jews he had no knowledge of the origin of the soul.
Mohammed thought of skipping stones as a boy on the lake at Yammouné, their ripples merging long after they sank. Like his father before him, and his father's father, stepping from the ember-warmth of the house out into the great star-spangled night, cold earth stinging his soles, his lungs afire with sharp air. Clench-toed, bare-legged, across the stony dung-littered courtyard to lift and slide back the wooden gate that was heavy and cold-slippery, making him fear it would fall on his toes as the goats came butting and shoving out of the pen into the courtyard where for a moment they'd stand wary, ears forward, tails high, defecating and calling to each other. He climbed over the next gate, brushing a hot lump of dung from between his toes, unbolted and swung it aside and the goats scampered out, bawling and mewling, their small hard hoofs thudding the ground, the smell of juniper and sage bushes as the goats snatched at them, the kids dashing nervously in circles on the trail down to the lake, he throwing stones to keep them in line, whistling the strange high birdlike whistle that had come down through the centuries like the land and the house from countless ancestors.
The goats stood drinking ankle-deep along the shore, their ripples merging toward the center of the lake and glinting like knife blades in the starlight. While the goats grazed the bare lakeside, he would skip stones one by one across the water toward the light growing in the east.
His chest was hurting too much so he lay back down. The only excuse for missing prayers was that he'd been unconscious with pain. Did Allah demand prayers then? Was he, Mohammed, taking refuge in pain?
He moved to a less difficult position. Miraculous and life-giving Lord, I am here. I thank You for this life and regret I've not loved You better.
He felt Allah's warm strong hands in his and despite the pain raised them to his forehead. Allah the all-forgiving.
MICK WAITED till the waiter placed the rakis and coffees on the table and left. “I recommend you don't.”
“It's not that bad. I can't afford for it to be that bad.”
Mick brought his chair forward, elbows on the table. Neill raised his cup to keep it from spilling. “I wouldn't chance it,” Mick said. “And I'm not carrying your baggage.”
“The reason you buggers don't get anything done here is you never take chances. This place is built on luck.”
Mick pulled a Lucky from the pack in his pocket and lit it with a Zippo, puffing the smoke up. “Luck shifts, mate.”
“Anyone who smokes a pack of cigarettes a day knows nothing about luck. You ever see those pictures?