Upstairs in the bathroom he poured the last of his wine into the toilet, felt guilty and drank the dregs. Just don't understand. Dear God, I just don't. Right away the answer came to him: all that counts is wrath.
Love doesn't matter? he asked.
No, came the answer, it surely doesn't. Drink no more.
But what would that change? What else do you have?
He took a leak and flushed the loo, the red and yellow liquid sucking down. Every drop of the Thames goes through nine people, says the National Rivers Association, between the Cotswolds and the Channel. Drinking piss, we are, cradle to grave.
Clasping the empty glass to his chest he wandered back down the corridor with the blue-red Persian runner that Bev had paid good money for, to the head of the stairs. At forty-two he shouldn't be afraid of tripping down the stairs. Trick is to have each foot well posed. Like each question posed but never answered. Dear God, if I could only understand.
THE DOOR SWUNG open, damp urine odor rushing out, no light. Broken glass underfoot, tinkle of a bottle cap. Smell of corpses beneath the rubble.
It was a long low cellar with a gaping window at the back. Footsteps clattered into the alley behind her; Rosa ducked into the cellar, shut the door. The men dashed past, three or four, frightened, gasping. One tripped on debris and fell with a crash of metal then ran onward, wailing.
Streets away a Kalashnikov barked; death seeking someone. A whoosh and wham of shells against the next hill. A scream – no a ricochet; anguished metal hunting a home in flesh.
More men ran into the alley, panting, halted, clink of steel on steel. A crackle of Hebrew on the radio. “Damn you,” she said, pressed herself back into the corner of the cellar, beside the window, reached under her raincoat into the sack round her waist and took out a grenade.
A rocket swooshed over. The ground shivered, a roar split the night. Chunks of wall and ceiling pattered down, one punching her shoulder.
Bullets whacked and crashed into the alley, an M16, uphill. Galils chattered back, someone called out, Israeli. Again the Galils roared, the noise deafening through the street door. A man was moaning, as if he'd had the wind knocked out of him. Another whispered, Israeli, then harsher, louder. Ahead, the Galil spat more bullets down the alley. She bent over her sack of grenades, trying to cover them, fearing the noise would explode them.
Sounds of choking, ripping cloth, someone speaking fast in Hebrew about a medic in five minutes and a recoilless rifle; she couldn't understand.
A spent round pinged down into the street. Stab of light under the door, fifty-caliber bullets hammering off distant walls.
The Israelis broke the door and dragged the wounded man into the cellar. They shut the door and snapped on a flashlight. One tall and broad-chested, on the floor, gut shot. Another trying to compress the wound while a third held the light, tearing open a medical kit.
Her heart was beating so hard she couldn't hear what they said. Steps thumped across the ruined floor overhead – more Israelis taking up positions. No. The Israelis in the cellar were silent, holding their guns, listening. The wounded man's legs began to quiver and another put a hand over his mouth, shut off the flashlight.
She took a deep, silent breath. Two grenades clicked together in her sack; she held her breath; the Israelis didn’t hear.
A shell came down sighing and smacked into the next street, the earth shook, staggered, a building began to fall. In the roar Rosa crawled quickly through the window, over a tile roof that had fallen in one tilting piece, then down the next alley, listening, moving ten feet and listening again. A Mirage came in low and dropped napalm, the sky bright as a hearth, wind roaring through the streets toward the seething flames, the screams, the wail of metal, stone and flesh bending, breaking, melting. So this is Hell, she thought, running up the narrow street under the boiling red clouds, her sack of grenades clasped tight to her belly.
3
NEILL WOKE WITH HIS STOMACH AFIRE. There was a distant, nearing rumble. A 747, the first United from New York. In that plane the passengers would be waking, stretching, gathering their things after a night over the Atlantic. Not the same as the first time he had crossed fourth class in the SS Statendam, a kid of seventeen deserting Cleveland for the London School of Economics and a world of excitement and anticipation.
The plane passed over rattling the glass. What if he'd stayed in the States – how could it have been worse than this? What would he have become, an editor on some local paper, chasing down dog-bite stories, living in some split-level suburban slum? He'd have never gone to Beirut, Czechoslovakia, all those other places, have never met Bev.
He got up and closed the window. “I was going somewhere with Jonathan Tremaine,” Beverly mumbled. “In his Austin Healey. The wind was blowing our hair.”
“Good old Jonathan.” Neill got back into bed, wondering if in the dream she'd slept with him. A 707, a charter maybe, crisped over, closer to the Thames, landing lights blinking as it crossed the window.
Without Bev he wouldn't have had the kids. He thought of them sleeping in their rooms above the ceiling. If he never came back would they miss him? They'd grow up fine without him. Or is even a lousy father better than none? Edgar already had too much of the world on his broad young shoulders. And the boys like sharks round Katerina – a fatherless girl is always easier to screw. Even if they don't think so they need you. More than you give.
But you always feel like this before you go. A total coward, always have been. Admit it. You may be a world-jaded journalist but you've hated or feared or been bored by nearly every moment of it.
And aren't kids better with a father who does what he wants, instead of one who's always afraid? He noted the triumphant smile of peace on Beverly's sleeping face. Would that I could. He raised his knees but the knot in his stomach wouldn't go away. Beverly a believer in twenty-year cycles. Ready to slip from him to the next. He sat up, feet cold on the carpet, rubbing his stubble. Can I shower without waking her?
A SHELL SCREAMED over like a siren, Syrian from the hills, aimed here, coming down louder, louder, shaking the night, shuddering the earth, shrapnel shrieking through the streets.
Beneath her raincoat Rosa cradled the sack of grenades closer. “You're crazy,” the Christian guard said.
He had a scar down one cheek, under the stubble. It cut into his lip and in the early morning light made him seem petulant. She adjusted her weight. “He's still in there, my father. Rue Lebbos –”
“We've cornered some Shiites there. You can't go in.”
“He's blind. I have to get him out.”
He tipped up her chin with his rifle, watching her eyes. “There is no more Rue Lebbos.”
“He's in a cellar.”
“They've all caved in. There's no one there any more, sister.” He glanced at the round belly beneath her raincoat. “Bring us new life. Forget the old.”
He seemed kind, despite his scar, maybe not one of the Christians that murdered the two thousand Palestinian women and children and old people here in Shatila last year. She pushed round him, over the broken concrete. “You'd treat your father so?”
He pointed the rifle at her belly, nudged the muzzle up to her face, tapped the trigger as he swung the muzzle up and the bullets spattered over her head off the wall and up into the sky. Chunks of clay fell down on her head and shoulders. “It's for your child, sister, that I didn't shoot you. Perhaps I still will.”
“Shoot me, then.” She turned and walked between the broken houses, tensed for the bullets to bore like rods of fire through her belly, spine, and brain, the grenades blowing up and spreading her in tiny chunks of flesh and bone.
A