“Skin. It was her face melting, and it fell on you.”
As they went home shells started drifting down from the Shouf, cracking randomly in the streets. They ran, Nicolas leading and shining the light behind. Once inside, Neill had to hold the wall, dizzy and afraid. The malaria, that was it. He had to take his goddamn Paludrine.
A shell came in short and hammered the next street. “Motherfuckers!” Nicolas screamed. Neill ran after him into the cellar, skidding feet first down the steep stone stairs, wrenching his ankle. He hobbled toward a twitching candle where Samantha sat knitting and a man and woman crouched on the floor over a little boy, more people behind them.
“They're from next door,” Samantha told Neill. “This cellar's deeper.” Another shell was coming in louder and louder and louder, right down on top of their heads. This is it, Neill thought, diving. How crazy to come all this way just for this.
There was perfect silence.
WHAM.
Roar and crash, thundering walls, clattering stones, wailing glass inside his brain and blowing out to the end of the universe. I've been killed, he thought, astonished. The heat shook and slammed him down, a wall of shelves toppling on him, cans of food. The dirt floor stopped shaking. With a wrenching groan of iron beams bending, holding, then easing, the concrete floors of a building in the next block cascaded one by one into the street.
Then another crunch, not so near, new dust tumbling before the candle, the little boy's eyes upraised in frozen terror to the ceiling.
“Who is this?” Neill yelled. “Why the Hell are they shelling us?”
“Anybody.” It was a man with a Turkish moustache, a fat wife and two children behind, then an old lady in a black shawl, her arm round a boy in a baseball cap. “It could be anybody. Who'd stop them?”
ANDRÉ WOKE from a dream that had made him warm and happy. The dog was growling softly in its throat, its nose at the window. What had he been dreaming? Why the dog growling? He slid the Jericho from its holster, ducked to the window, reached up one-handed and popped it open. The dog leaned out, paws on the sill, the fur on its neck raised, teeth bared, a snarl in its throat.
He crouched far back into the dark room and stood carefully, looked down in the street and saw dogs trotting away, their pelts glistening in the rain.
He sat back down, cradling the Jericho in his lap. Get an idea stuck in your mind and straightaway it poisons you. The idea la France is hunting you. Because Haroun said. Haroun with his little Arab pussy, warning you.
If they’re after you it's just to show some distance. Or do they really want you? For planning to kill Mohammed? For breaking the ultimate rule: always do what they say.
He sat cross-legged, hearing the pulse in his temples, the steady shelling, now in West Beirut. What if the purpose of life is for God to test your virtues: how good are you?
How badly could they want you?
THE SNOW STOPPED before dawn. Under the last stars Mohammed could see a bleak snow-clad hill and the rough flank of a higher ridge to the right, straight ahead a sharp sky and the far pale crests of Mount Lebanon. “We'll never get back,” he said.
“Not if we leave now,” she said. “We must wait till tonight. Unless it snows again.”
“I have to go outside.”
“We can't. Any low-flying plane will see the tracks.”
“Just round the corner of this –”
“No. Do it at the back of the cave. We have to. Cover it and wait till tonight. I'll go first if you're shy. Face out the front and cover your ears.”
He did as she said, uncovering his ears to hear her urinate at the back of the cave. She came back, laid down beside him. “That's better.”
It had always horrified him, the idea of women excreting. Why did God put it there, her paradise place, between two places for excreting? It was truly unholy to touch a woman. Yet the Prophet said respect women, who have borne you, for Allah watches over you. It made no sense.
You're not supposed to question, he reminded himself. Was he some infidel, running always to questions like a kid to its mother's teats? Man had pre-eminence because of the advantages God gave him over women. Man the seed of life, woman the dirt it is planted in. She is unclean but must be taken as such.
With a handful of snow he performed his ablutions, knelt toward the rising sun. Muslim means he who submits, he repeated to himself. Muslim is he who submits.
NEILL SAT ON THE BED in his room, banging his ears to clear them, could barely hear.
“I'm sorry,” Samantha said, sweeping the floor. “To get shelled your first night. It's not like this every night.”
“I'd like to kill them,” he said, cocking his head against the roar in his ears, his words seeming to rise from the bottom of the sea.
“They did us no harm, thank the Lord. Just this glass.”
In the cracked mirror he saw he had a sharp cut across one cheek, like an African initiation scar, from a piece of flying window. He'd got it in the street, coming back with Nicolas, hadn't even known it. More than twenty years a journalist and never been hurt. Now twice in one day. Here in Beirut when everybody said stay out. Except Freeman with his little transmitter under your arm.
Where were they now, these invisible beings who watched over his transmitter? A chip in a satellite, two ragged Arabs on some hill with a little radio, who? Now, in all this danger, why? What use to them? When London didn't give a damn what happened to him.
“Nobody's shelling now.” Samantha swept the shattered glass into a dustpan and tossed it out the gaping window. “Nicolas has gone to the office. There's talk of a new ceasefire and if they get together he'll try to film them for the news. Let's go out and try to find some food. Maybe there'll be carrots – or some salve for your hand.”
In the next street a building had fallen, crushing three cars. A fat man was digging in the ruins, glancing up at the loose concrete. A child's broken plastic gun lay in a smashed doorway. At the corner they went into a shop where the man with the Turkish moustache stood behind the counter, stacking packets of Marlboros.
“That's all anybody does here,” Neill said. “Smoke.”
“It calms the nerves,” the man said, a pen clenched in his teeth. He took the pen out and put it behind an ear, glanced at Samantha. “How's your place?”
“New broken windows. How's yours?”
“The windows were already gone.” He came round the counter and set a table and three chairs out on the pavement and brought out pitchers of thick strong coffee and hot condensed milk. “Just like the Sixteenth,” he smiled. “A café on the Bois.”
“The Bois are full of junkie hookers now.”
The man shrugged. “See, I was right to come back. If we make it, we can look back, say we were here.”
“If it ever ends,” Samantha said.
“Look at it this way: we're investing in peace. If we can fight long enough, kill off everybody who wants to fight, maybe we can have peace for a while, build back up.”
“To tear it down again.”
“Every fifty years a war. For five thousand years. Ten thousand, maybe. Since there was man. What are you going to change? You just get in the rhythm. Ten years of war, fifty of peace.”
IT WAS A BLUE 1957 FORD with high tail fins, a fat American car. The paint faded but clean, a few nicks, one long dent down the right side. The trunk was big, with more space if he needed it under the back seat and in the doors. The oil in the crankcase wasn't too dirty and the engine didn't run too rough and