“Where you going?”
“Perhaps France. Or London. I'm a jeweler. If I can get a job –”
“Just you?”
“My wife and four kids and then my mother-in-law and father-in-law and maybe others.”
“You'll have to sell a lot of cars.”
“Everyone says the best way is Larnaca to Athens which will let us in on a tourist visa, then from Yugoslavia to Trieste. Do you think so? Those hills between Yugoslavia and Italy, do you know them?”
“Mountains. In the north, near Austria.”
“Excuse me for asking, but do you know anyone who'd write us a letter?”
“Letter?”
“Explaining we have nowhere and are good workers and will pay as much as we can, if we can stay.”
“No one would read it. It'd make no difference.”
“I'll give you a hundred dollars off the car if you can write such a letter.”
“I don't write letters.”
The man shrugged. “You're crazy coming here.”
“I'm betting the war's nearly over. Now might be the time to come in, get ready to invest.”
“Invest? This war's just beginning. They're going to tear down every brick. The only ones who come out ahead are the ones like you, selling arms.”
“I'm not selling arms.”
“You can do what you want. I wouldn't tell.”
“You don't need to give me a hundred. I'll write your letter. For someone in France. If you get there.”
He parked the Ford in front of the Hotel des Cèdres. The car had 391-67 on its plates; both sets of digits added up to thirteen. His lucky number. He'd have bought the car for that alone.
33
SUN WARMED THE SNOW and water dripped off the rocks; they had to dig a trench in the mud to keep it out of the cave. Then the wind turned cold, the snow crust froze and the water hardened into icicles. Snow began to fall.
The ground was frigid through their doubled coats. Her hands would not warm even when he held them. “Shivering's good,” she said. “It warms the body.”
With a crunch of steps a man moved past, his head visible through a notch between two rocks, then his legs through another, his rifle over his far shoulder, his boots wrapped in rags, snow like a cloak down his back. Then came another, bent over under his weapons, the wind snatching chunks of broken snow crust from his shoes and scattering it through alleys of stone. Christians, nine in all, filing past like ghosts.
“They've saved us,” Rosa said, “we can go back in their tracks.”
“Tonight. If we don't freeze first.”
She fought her shivering. “How you talk like a Muslim!”
“How's that?”
“A mother's boy, needing reassurance!”
He opened his shirt and cupped her hands against his chest, her fingers like frozen sticks. “Don't be so harsh. I didn't kill them.”
She bit her lip to stop shivering. “Who?”
“Your brothers. They were killed by someone, so you hate everyone.”
“If there's any God other than a completely impotent one, then it’s God who killed them.”
“Trying to make you understand just makes you wilder.”
“The only one who can understand for me is me.” She huddled closer, shivering, her breasts and thighs cold against him. He tried to hold her up on him off the frozen ground but the bullet hole began tearing and he rolled back on his side.
“We could truly freeze up here,” he said.
“Like sleep.”
To get close is to stay warm, stay alive, and if God didn't want us to, He wouldn't make us want it so much. Or is it just to torture us, test us? Her body so little, after all, so slim, such young breasts and such a shame to die.
“When I was a kid I had a puppy,” she whispered. “He used to climb into bed with me. All night so warm beside me.”
It shocked him to think of her as a girl, long innocent black hair down her slender back. “How old were you?”
“I must have been nine. We'd just moved to Mount Hermon. My father got him to help me forget my friends in Nazareth.”
“You had no new friends on the Mountain?”
She shook her head as if brushing aside a hair or his query or the thought of having friends. “In the village there were only boys. Like I told you, they threw stones and called me names.”
He tried to see her hiding in her house, fearing the stones. “What did you do?”
“Helped my mother. Did what girls do.”
He had no idea, he realized, what girls do. “What's that?”
'Keep the race going. While you men tear it apart.”
“But you're here too. At war.”
She burrowed tighter. “I'm cold.”
He was sliding into a delicious peace, couldn't stop. He slipped his hands down her hips and up inside her gown, thinking this is just, this is fair. The backs of her thighs so chilled and thin in his hands, slipping down her brief clothes while she, silent, raised up a knee so he could pull them free.
Even her core was cold, her smell. “What are you thinking?” he said. “You're so silent.”
“This isn't how I wanted it.”
“What did you want?”
“I was going to be distant, showing by my silence that I didn't approve of you.”
“You still don't approve?”
She waited for a moment. “Scarcely.”
He swallowed the slight. “You've made me less approve of me.”
She drew to him like a puppy. “I can like you although I don't approve of what you do.”
“Whatever happened to your little dog?”
“The boys who threw stones killed him. They put his head on a stick.”
Tears stung his eyes. I haven't cried for years, he thought. I haven't ever cried. “Christians?”
“Druze and Christian and Shiite. It was a mixed village – this was Lebanon, remember. The place where we all lived together.”
“You hate them still.”
“Why should I? They've killed each other off.”
“So what's this mourning for Palestine?”
“Palestine is where the Israelis chased us out and we had to go to the Mountain. Where everything would have been different.”
The sting behind his eyes was gone. She was as close as his clothes, touching his skin, her skin warming from him, and this is how we keep alive, he thought, this sinister touch, this skin.
But no matter how deep you are inside a woman, what do you touch? What is sin?
Sin is what it means to be free.
A CAR CAME SPLASHING the gutter and they ducked into a stairwell. “And tell her for me,” Neill said, “that my talking with her husband is one way to show he still matters.”
Hamid shrugged rain off his