Bride of a Bygone War (26 page)

“I envy your freedom, Lorraine,” Lukash answered with a weary smile.

“You are free to do whatever you want, Walter. You just have to decide what is important to you.”

She spoke forcefully, but Lukash could see that her anger toward him was mostly spent. Before he could think of a suitable reply, a flash lit up the sky to the west. A second later the distant report of a massive explosion drove the words back into his throat.

“Their aim seems to be a bit off tonight. We’d better get inside,” he said, taking her by the elbow. He shut the double doors behind him and released the roll-down wooden slats that served as a storm shutter covering both doors.

“Once again I didn’t think to bring home a movie for the video machine,” he said.

“Never mind, I have a book,” she replied without looking at him.

“Would you like a glass of white wine or some port while you read?”

“Thank you, no. If I need anything, I know where to find it.”

“I’m going to write a couple of letters in the bedroom,” he offered. “If you need anything, just let me know.”

“You could get me a sheet and a blanket, if you wouldn’t mind. I think I would prefer to sleep on the sofa tonight, if that’s all right with you.”

Lukash looked at her as if she had stung him deeply and then he assumed a resigned expression. “The beds are made up in two of the spare bedrooms. Take your pick. Or if you really do intend to sleep on the sofa, the linen closet is at the end of the hall.”

“Thank you,” she replied without emotion. “And don’t worry about taking me back to the port crossing tomorrow morning. It’s not really on your way. I can phone a taxi.”

“Don’t be absurd, Lorraine. This isn’t London. What time do you need to be at work?”

“Half past eight.”

“We’ll leave here at a quarter past seven.”

Chapter 15

A fine mist fell from a ceiling of slate-gray clouds that extended across the Mediterranean as far as Lukash could see from the hill overlooking the Port of Beirut. He fastened the top button of his raincoat and peered out over the quays, warehouses, cranes, and stacked shipping containers toward the no-man’s-land at the heart of the divided city. His attention was drawn at once to the morning’s first commuters who careened at top speed around the curve between the port’s second and third basins to evade any snipers who might not have gone to sleep after fighting all night along the Green Line.

By now the taxi that had taken Lorraine westward from the port’s Phalange-controlled eastern gate would almost certainly have been waved through the western gate and was probably coming within view of the first Syrian checkpoint at rue Allenby. The Syrian sentries, similarly bleary-eyed and eager for the eight o’clock shift to arrive, could be expected to let the taxi continue on its way.

Lukash knew from Lorraine’s silence as he drove her to the taxi stand just outside the port that she would not be coming back anytime soon. Her complaints of the night before had been made calmly and without the heat of sudden emotion. Her resentment against him, having gathered during their time together, had coalesced and precipitated as naturally as the soaking winter rain that now covered the morning landscape.

He felt somehow lighter, as if freed from a burden he had carried long enough to have nearly ceased noticing it. Now that it was gone, his unconscious mind seemed to be taking the measure of his strength and looking ahead. What other unacknowledged burdens remained to be shed? At once the answer came back and burst through into his conscious mind with dazzling clarity. He knew what he needed to do.

He stepped back into the BMW and turned once again onto Avenue Charles Helou. No one would expect him at the Phalange intelligence compound for at least an hour, maybe two. If he drove quickly, he could be in Anteliás by half past eight. That would be early enough. How long would he need? Maybe an hour, maybe less than a minute—it was impossible to know what he would face there. But once he was finished, he would be free in a way he had scarcely dared to imagine for the past five years.

As he crossed the Beirut River at the Qarantina Bridge, he noticed the oncoming traffic becoming heavier, as if Radio Liban had given the all-clear signal and all the westbound commuters had left their driveways in Achrafiyé, Burj Hammoud, and Sinn el Fil at the same moment to form the queue now behind him at the port’s eastern gate.

His breath came more quickly and his pulse stepped up its beat as he muscled through the traffic circle at Dora and continued eastward toward the autostrade. He tried to imagine how the scene with Muna would play itself out: how he would feel, what he should do and say, how to know when the time had come to leave, and what would remain unsaid when it was all over. But the closer he came, the harder he found it to concentrate on anything beyond maintaining his resolve to go forward.

He parked the BMW directly opposite the front door of the apartment block and looked at his watch. It was twenty-five past eight, ten minutes before the time he had observed her leaving for work a week earlier. He put his hand on the door handle and then took it away. What if he ran into her coming down the walk, or in the lobby? Would she recognize him? Should he stop her, or let her pass and come back another time? Set-piece encounters seldom ever played out according to plan, no matter how many moves had been plotted out in advance.

He stepped outside the door, locked the car behind him, and advanced rapidly toward the building’s entrance, as if he feared someone might be following his movements from an upper-story window. To his relief, no concierge occupied the folding metal chair just inside the lobby door. He advanced toward the twin elevators, confirmed from the indicator lights over the doors that neither was in use, and then pressed the call button. The door on the right opened at once. He stepped in and pressed the button for the eighth floor.

No sooner had the elevator door slid shut than panic held his chest in a vise grip. He thought he would know how to react if she were too shocked to speak, or sullenly resentful, or even actively hostile. But what if she were truly happy to see him after his five-year absence? He reminded himself that his purpose in returning to her was to regain his freedom, not necessarily to renew old obligations. But now he felt confused again. He went over his planned speech one more time, wondering what he would do if she refused to believe it.

The elevator door opened with a hollow thud. He stepped out onto a narrow corridor of unpolished stone tiles and went forward until he came to apartment 8D.

He scarcely had time to take in a deep breath after ringing the bell before he heard her footsteps approach and then stop. The door opened a few inches and Muna Khalifé looked at him, her eyes opened wide in shock. Her hands flew up to cover her mouth and she remained motionless for an endless moment before Lukash saw tears welling in her eyes. Without a word she opened the door wider and a trace of a smile formed at the corners of her mouth.

“William?” Muna whispered, as if he were an apparition likely to disappear the moment she invoked his name.

Without waiting for an answer, she stepped forward and threw her arms around his neck and held him with desperate strength. Lukash stood immobile before her, no longer able to think what to do next. For all the time spent anticipating how she might react to his return, he had spent scarcely any anticipating his own feelings toward her when they at last came face-to-face. Before she could sense his indecision, he picked her up in a joyful bear hug, lifting her feet off the ground and burying his face in the soft hollow between her shoulder and neck. Her hair was as soft and fragrant as it had been five years before, and the fullness of her breasts against his chest aroused him as Lorraine’s boyish flatness never had.

Muna responded by holding Lukash even more tightly, her arms frozen as if in some involuntary spasm. At long last she released him and stepped back to take another look at the face she had not seen for so many months and years. She kept him at arm’s length, seizing his left hand, then his right, as though by releasing her grip for even for a moment he might drift off again and be lost. Lukash used his free hand to close the door and to gently lead her back into the foyer.

Muna Khalifé’s outward appearance seemed to have changed remarkably little in five years. She still wore her chestnut hair tied behind her head with a silk scarf and, unlike most of her countrywomen, resisted the urge to wear makeup other than lipstick and a touch of eye shadow. Her figure, a bit too angular for his taste five years before, had been much improved by the addition of a kilo or two at the hips and bust line.

But the most striking change in her, he thought, was her eyes, which now carried a look of placid dignity, as if she had relinquished the illusions of her youth and was resigned to what would take their place. But no sooner had he sensed this change in her than the old sparkle seemed to return to her eyes and she was once again the twenty-three-year-old girl he had met in 1975. To his surprise, he could not recall ever having felt as close to her as he did now.

“William, tell me it is you!” she said in Arabic, interrupting his thoughts. Then she caught herself and switched to English. “Say anything,
habibi,
but I must hear your voice before I can believe that this is not a dream.” She raised a hand to his face and stroked the softness of his stubbly beard.
 

“It’s no dream, Muna.”

Muna giggled softly as she slipped her arms around his waist and held her cheek against his chest. “If it is not a dream, it is something impossible to believe. One week ago I was prepared to abandon any hope that you would return. After five years of waiting, I could no longer remember your smile or the sound of your whisper in my ear or the feel of your arms around me. I thought that this must be how they said it would feel when at last I would be ready to turn my back on the past. I thought that perhaps now my life would move forward. Perhaps I would leave Beirut, maybe even…remarry.” She giggled again, with greater abandon than before.

So this is my wonderful sense of timing,
Lukash thought. After five years Muna had finally found her freedom, and in five minutes he had managed to steal it back. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have come,” he said. “Maybe it was wrong of me to intrude on you like this after so long.”

She let out a shrill laugh that was in stark contrast with her easy confidence a moment earlier. “Intrude?” she asked. “Do you see anything here that could suffer from your intrusion?”

“You said you were about to move forward. I don’t want to stand in the way, Muna.”

Muna gave him a searching look. “Did you think that I can forget your face one day and call for a priest the next? I have thought of marriage to another man only because of the emptiness these last years—and because others expected it of me. William, do you remember the boy I used to tease you about just to make you jealous, the boy my father wanted me to marry since I was a schoolgirl?”

Lukash’s face went blank.

“No, you never met him, because he was studying in France in those days,” she continued. “Well, after all this time, Elie has asked me to marry him.” She gave the same forced laugh again. “I think my father must have urged him to propose to me, because Elie could not have had any reason to believe that I would accept. Imagine, William—my father, a man who hated Phalangists even more than he hated the Syrians, encouraging his only daughter to marry a Phalangist officer!”

Lukash said nothing and Muna went on. “But Father insisted that Elie was different from the others,” she said bitterly. “On the very morning they murdered him, he assured me that Elie was not a Phalangist in his heart, because he had first been with Father in the Ahrar.”

“I heard about your father’s death, Muna. I’m very sorry,” Lukash said. “But it’s not fair to blame Elie. I’m sure he could not be responsible for what happened at the Libramarine Club.”

She shook her head. “No, Elie is no commando. But it is all the same. If one Phalangist has killed your father, every one of them has had his hand on the gun.”

“Come, let’s sit down, Muna,” Lukash offered, changing the subject. “It’s been so long, I don’t know where to begin.”

He put his arm around her shoulder and led her into the living room, where a luminous shaft of morning sunlight streaming through the open French doors pointed the way to the sofa. He waited for her to sit, then he took his place beside her.

“Do you still work for that advertising agency in Jall ed Dib, the one owned by that ridiculous Parisian with the handlebar mustache?”

Muna smiled. “Antoine left at the beginning of 1976, during the cease-fire when the Phalange lifted the siege of Tel al-Zaatar. The poor man was taken from his car on his way to work one morning and was held for two days by Palestinian fighters. He left not long after.”

“It’s odd, but Antoine was one of the few Europeans I was certain would still be here,” Lukash remarked. “He loved Beirut so much, I didn’t think anything could shake him loose.”

“There were many like Antoine in those days,” Muna observed sadly. “They vowed they would never return to the clouds and rain of Paris or Brussels or Amsterdam. When the fighting started, they said it was a passing incident and that we shouldn’t be worried. Then when their friends were captured at roadblocks or injured in the shellings or killed by snipers, one by one they departed. Antoine never returned to the office even to wish us farewell.”