The horror of those nights, Hamid, those days. To live without her was impossible. Going to her parents' farm on the hills south of Saida, the rows of old orange trees going down to the cliffs and sea, and each time at gunpoint to be turned away, feeling her eyes behind the curtained windows. Waiting for days beyond the walls but she never came; weeks waiting in Beirut, but she never came.
Easy to see now what he should have done – quit Beirut as if he were going home, then moved quietly down to Saida, paid informers, learned where she was, freed her. Quickly over the mountains into Syria, buy her a passport in Damascus, two tickets home, and they would have had the rest of their lives together.
But when you're young you're easily fooled; her family's rejection becomes hers, on both sides. They'd been right: twenty years later he was a drunk American journalist from London and she the Mother of the Revolution, wife to the Lion of God.
27
“KILLED HIM, didn't you?” Mohammed gasped, trying to keep up.
“For the Lion of God you're pretty weak!”
“I've been shot,” he called, realized it was weak to say it, as if needing excuses. How did this woman keep making him appear a fool? “You'd never make a man's wife, the way you act.”
She stopped on the trail above him. “I could be yours if I wanted.”
He stumbled on a root. “I owe you my life. But not that.”
“I said if I wanted. And your life hasn't been saved yet.”
The path crossed an open starry ridge. There were no trees, no grass, just the wind wailing down the wide bare shoulder of the mountain. He tried to envision his body shut in a box in the earth.
They passed a low stone hut, used in the old days to store snow that turned to ice and could be sold in the valley in summer, bringing it down bundled with straw in the donkey cart, leaving a trickle of darkness behind you on the dusty road, and from the cart's bench seat you see between the donkey's ears bobbing right and left, or down at her back hooves coming back, rising up and going forward, coming back, rising up and going forward, her clickety hooves on the sandy gravel, bits of bitter scrub poking up, the summer air of cicadas, lavender and sage.
The path switched up a steep slippery gully wreathed in mist and he could hear a river's rumble on the far side but they never seemed to cross it. They climbed higher, colder, he took shallow breaths, trying not to stretch his wound, wanting to lean on her, but she was ahead, always moving ahead, accepting no frailty from him, as if he'd fail if he realized how difficult it was.
The river grew louder, crashing down on the rocks above and to the right, wind buffeting them. They crested to a saddle that the wind roared through, and he saw there was no river, had never been, only the wind howling and gnashing at the peaks, roaring through the pass like the million riders whose souls had made the wind, their armor jingling, arrows rattling in their quivers. For an instant he understood war but could not turn it into words, this ancient milling progress toward death and sorrow. We're just not happy if we're happy, he decided. Why?
IN AN HOUR the first muezzin of the day would call and still Neill couldn't sleep. Gone only a week but already home seemed an illusion, as if he drifted aimlessly through sheaves of time.
Yet he missed them. Had to say it. And had to remind himself that life with Beverly would be Hell again three days after he got back. When every word, every kindness, leads to a fight, and each word to make it better only makes it worse.
They had the kids. And some day the tradition of these years together would be something to look back on. To not grow old alone. But would he be like Uncle Vincent, in his eighties, still snarling at his wife?
He'd had no need of sexual binges and thoughtless adulteries to betray Bev, he'd betrayed her enough just in the horrors of daily life. Each little dependency and ignorance and slight, each tiny knife into the pleasures of the other's soul. And there was no point thinking that this time when he came back they could begin again, bridge the last nineteen years. The people they had been were dead, and the new ones didn't love each other. Whom did Beverly love? The occasional lawyer or concert violinist or computer jockey who took the time to spend with her and appear sensitive? The world's most disgusting word: sensitive. Reminds you of a slug or a febrile insect or some little skinny-armed downcast kid, beaten and ashamed.
Why hate him so much, that downcast kid? Because he was you? He's dead, just like the one who married Beverly.
The first bus of the day rumbled and coughed down Bab Sharqi Street toward the gate, its diesel belch rising to his window. If he was going to change his life he would have to sit down with that skinny little kid. Shy little tyke with the endearing smile, the one Beverly had said she'd loved inside him, who had been him, whom he abused.
Feet over the side of the bed, soles on the cold floor, he brushed at something with his toes. Goddamn bugs. Ankles aching, he limped to the bathroom. Forgot your goddamn medication. Some day, the doctors said, a blood vessel's going to blow in your brain and you're dead. Hand grenade inside your head. High blood pressure is essential, the doctors said. Meaning they couldn't find a cause. But the cause was obvious: tension, sorrow, frustration, exhaustion, the joys of city life. Not being who you are.
In the bathroom the light flickered, caught, went out, flicked on. In his toilet kit he found his Innovace and popped one, then the two Paludrine, then two more Klaricid for the soreness under his arm that wouldn't go away. Pretty soon you're all drugs, he said into the mirror, there's nothing left of you.
No point in starting a new life then dying. No water came out of the shower. Hugging his bare chest he went into the bedroom and dressed. Strange, he'd dreamt all night of Layla and awoken thinking of Beverly.
FIRST LIGHT stenciled the bare trees atop the ridge. Yew trees, Mohammed saw. That once made the strongest bows. Some day this whole earth would no longer be useful. Like the yew trees, intended for a weapon outgrown.
He fell on the trail. No further. She can leave me.
Rosa yanked his ear. “Up!”
He took a breath. “...have you shot...”
“That's how you help those who help you?” She was hardly panting, despite the altitude, the climb. “That's Allah's teaching, is it?” She snapped her head back and he thought it was an imperative thrown at him: Get up. But it was just her way of swinging back her hair, mocking her own shamelessness, mocking him. Dizzy with height, he felt split between two worlds, a different one in each eye, one that he'd known and accepted and been happy in, another totally wild and different, which invalidated the first, but which he couldn't deny. One was the way he'd learned to see. And the other he saw was true.
“Like you did?” he said. “With the doctor?”
“He didn't help me. I had to.”
“If you'd told me that, back at the clinic, I'd have shot you.”
“We should have been an hour beyond here by sunrise. We're going to get caught in the open by some Israeli jet.”
“We hide when we hear them coming.”
“Why did I risk my life for you? I had a great dream of you, that's why. But you're not it.”
THE SHELLS came pirouetting down in yellow, green and white starbursts with trailing flares blooming over the city, spreading down like boughs of a weeping willow, a jasmine's twisting petals of red, silver, gold, the soft rain of anti-personnel bombs that exploded in random bright daisies in the dawn streets. From the Shouf hills came a drumbeat of artillery and rockets under the bursting shells, and for André it was suddenly just music and brightness, nothing more, just the human accomplishment of making death beautiful, evil beautiful. That's why we love it, he realized, because of its beauty, too evil to be tarnished, its sexual incandescences,