There were nicks in the wrought-iron fencing of the Jardin Public and pieces torn out of the palm trees by bullets. The façades along Arts et Metiers looked beaten up, black eyes and scarred stucco, shutters hanging disconsolately, the smoky night bright through splintered eaves.
But the Harad house was still standing; through the leaded diagonal holes of the living room windows there was candlelight down the edges of the curtains. The black wrought-iron gate was gone but the fence stood, bent in places by machine-gun bullets. Bullet scars marred the front; one corner of the second floor was gone and the lovely French colonial balcony over the front door had collapsed into the patio. The front door was gone and boards were nailed across the hole. “Nicolas!” Neill called. “Samantha!”
The candle went out. “Nicolas!” he called. “It's Neill. Neill Dickson.”
There was no answer and he felt frightened and backed across the pavement. There were no lights on the street. How could you run, he wondered, with all these burnt cars to bump into that you can't even see? It's like Hell, he thought, just like Hell.
“Neill!” Nicolas called. His voice came from the side of the building, the garden. “Quick! Over here!”
Neill went through the empty front gate and cut across the garden, the soft soil making him nervous for mines. “What the Hell are you doing here?” Nicolas whispered, reaching out.
Neill broke away. “Christ, I've missed you. How's everybody?”
“OK. Just fine.” Nicolas squeezed his arm. “Sammy will be ecstatic.”
“How’s her folks?”
“They're fine too. Went to Kuwait. Hurry, let's get inside. The front door's nailed up – we go round here.”
Neill followed him into the greater darkness between the buildings. “Can I stay with you tonight, till I sort things out?”
“Tonight? You can just stay. Nothing would make us happier.” Nicolas guided him down the back stairs. “You have to excuse us, no water or gas or electricity and most of the time we stay in the basement.”
“Nice guy,” Neill laughed. “Telling me to come back down and then I do and you shut off the fucking lights and water. Nice guy.”
They went into a black passage that Neill remembered had once been the back stairway up to the maids' rooms. There was a door into the kitchen and then another corridor smelling of wax leading into the wide dining room with the long table and a candle and two plates at one end. Sammy stood with one hand on her chair, as if not sure whether to run or hide, till she saw it was Neill. She put the revolver on the table and ran forward to hug him. “How are you, dear?” he laughed, swinging her around.
“Oh Neill, Neill, how lovely to see you!” She leaned back to see him clearer. “What? Why?”
“Doing a piece on the war. I'll explain later. Thank God you're fine.”
“Blessed be Allah we are fine. Blessed be Allah you are here. For us, but not for you.”
“GOD TELLS SOME PEOPLE to do wrong, then sends them to Hell?”
Mohammed folded back their coats and crawled forward to check the snow falling faster and faster beyond the cave. “You know the answer to that.”
“To punish them for doing what He says? Like me. You think I'm going to Hell for the way I act, don't you?”
“I'm not always right.”
She rolled to her knees. “When are you wrong, then?”
“God's the one who does no wrong.”
“How comforting to those in Israeli jails. And everywhere else.”
“Most of them understand.”
She crawled forward, beside him. “What if they don't? What if they're tired of understanding? What if they're tired of God and just want Palestine?”
“That's why they don't have it. God’s the one who's tired of human lies. That's who God is.” Mohammed squirmed backwards into the cave, shivering. “I've never known it so cold.”
“Get used to it. You're going to be dead an awfully long time.”
“You don't believe that.”
“Do you actually believe in some kind of paradise?”
He watched the snow coming down, each flake alighting like a bird. “Always. In every way.” He felt a pain in his guts, shifted his hips.
“That's a shame. You need to see through men's illusions to lead them.”
“I never asked for war!”
“You just wanted it more than other things, that's all.”
He shivered. Easy to die out here tonight. Why let her get under his skin? Why let her turn things upside down with her questions? Didn't she know that questions are just for those who have no answers?
If the snow stopped now they couldn't move for fear of tracks. He'd be stuck with her. He was a fool to be so open, suggestible. She just took advantage, lost respect. He stared again out of the cave, hands trembling. How could she make him so angry?
The snow had risen halfway up the cave mouth. Soon their breath would make a hole – a hole someone could see. He checked his watch, 11:12, promised himself he wouldn't look at it again for half an hour, at least till after 11:30.
After 6:30 there'd be light to see, they could travel in the snowstorm, and maybe nobody would see them. If it didn't wane.
She'd got him this far when nobody else would. Of course they would. It was easier for her, as a woman, that was all. “That doctor you killed –”
“It was him or you. Take your choice.”
“I take him. That I should die.”
“No wonder Palestine's enslaved, with people like you to defend it.”
“That doctor, knowing I was Shiite, saved me from another Christian who was choking me.”
“Why?”
“Because we'd shot his brother.”
“War's like syphilis. It just goes round and round.”
“You're truly shameful.”
She eased up next to him, shoulder to shoulder. “The question is, what made the doctor save you?”
“That's what I'm trying to understand.”
“See?” She nudged him. “You're softer than me.”
He was lost in her change of mood. “How did they die, your brothers?”
“That's another story.” Out of the darkness she took his hand. “For another night.”
32
NEILL KEPT HIS HAND in a pan of water but the pain didn't ease. Samantha coated it with fat and wrapped it in an undershirt but that only made it worse. The pain was alive, throbbing and burning and stinging and shooting up his arm like electricity with every pulse. “Can you imagine,” he kept saying, “what she felt?”
The shelling stopped and by flashlight Nicolas led him through dark streets and up stairs, knocking at each door till someone opened and sent them to the third floor right.
The doctor was a small woman with gold-framed glasses and silver hair, in a pink puffy bathrobe. “Come into the light,” she said.
There was a lantern on a mantel and a fire of rubbish and brush in the fireplace. “Yes,” she said, holding his