prayer, the priest's prayer now for Pierre Duclair, the sports teacher, forty-three, with a wife and four children, fallen dead on Tuesday as he waited for medicine at the chemist, the priest's prayer for all those hungry and despairing, his admonition to see the scorned beggar at the roadside as Christ, and André made a mental note that this was foolishness because if you did you'd soon be a beggar yourself – but then wouldn't you be like Christ?
A woman in front of him, with three kids, young and pert with short blonde hair curled over her ears, a pretty young body despite the kids. Beyond her another, a little older, tall and slim, hardly any breasts, with a composed ravenous look – which would he spend the night with, if he could?
He chose the young blonde, thought of croissants aux amandes and a café crème to break his fast, after Communion. He could meet Monique at Le Central, but she wouldn't want to with Hermann coming home; at lunch today there'd be fine St. Emilion to go with the lamb, Papa bringing up an armful of bottles spiderwebbed and dusty from the cave – the way they painted the church walls in the twelfth century, you could still see it, frail and dim, the reds last longest, color of wine, color of blood, or is it just that everything turns to that?
The Host in the priest's hands in the mordant light, boys passing each other in the Communion line with quick glances of complicity, coming and going round him the people he'd grown up with, the couples of his early youth now older and tenuous, the girls he'd been a boy with now with girls of their own, lines of worry and comprehension graven in their faces – it was all there for him, hadn't he understood it, at the moment of the Host, the full mystery and miracle of life?
Filing into the street, there was a patter of tires on cobblestones, rain soft as a woman shedding silken clothes, a sad hunger for vengeance and the dry taste of the Host at the back of his throat.
5
AT A CAFÉ by the river Neill bought a 25-guilder bag of Afghani grass and sat smoking on the terrace with a cappuccino. Across the street cars were lined along the canal, parking meters spaced among them like guards among prisoners on a work detail. On the far side of the Amstel rose the stone gingerbread and brick of the Hotel de l’Europe; everywhere cars, bicycles, and trucks were fleeting back and forth as if seeking somewhere to go, people hustling past, the tall slender women with beautiful chiseled faces and red lips set off by their blonde hair; he smiled, imagining their cool long naked skin.
The grass was chunky and sticky and didn't roll easily, the smoke sweet and powerful down into his lungs out into his blood, putting all in perspective, Bev and Freeman and Inneka and the newspaper and the kids and this trip and his forty-two years crowned with no success, no future. It didn't matter, your future, if you could understand this, live fully in this.
Across the street policemen with two trucks were towing away first a gray Toyota then a red Lada. One tall bearded cop had a key that opened the Lada's door instantly. Oh to have a key, Neill thought, that opens everything. A few passersby watched half curiously, a man in a tan beret complaining quietly and rancorously. On the radio a man was whining over some woman's desertion:
And if you leave me now
You'll take away
The very best part of me
A tall slender black man, athletic, passed by with a smaller dark-haired white man – a laughing young-hearted couple. How can I look down on that? Neill thought. Then a blonde girl in a camelhair coat, black high heels, black foam pads on wires over her ears. “You don't have to be alone,” sang the café radio, a husky woman's voice.
Two girls sat at the next table, drinking espressos and smoking hash from a clay pipe. “Hey!” one of them said, and he looked up, but she was calling a young long-haired guy on the pavement who smiled and came over, kissed them and sat down, his hand on one girl's thigh, smoking their hash. I'm the kind of graying soft-faced man, Neill realized, that nobody notices. He caught his reflection in the café's side window: soon an old man, ripe for defeat.
The joint was too resiny and kept going out; he relit it, inhaling the sweet smoke through his nostrils, tasting it. The CIA had shipped Afghani weed like this to Europe to help pay for weapons to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan. Like everyone in Lebanon was selling opium and hash to pay for their weapons.
Through the smoke everything seemed clearer, the blue Jaguar that had parked where the Lada had been towed away, half up on the pavement, the wet leaves on the dirty stones, the rail beyond and the Amstel River gray slate, an orange houseboat chugging up it, the Hotel de l’Europe primly awaiting a change of season, the weary houses, wet streets beneath damp clouds.
For a moment he'd been happy just to let the game of life go on around him.
BY AFTERNOON IT WAS SUNNY and the dew had dried out of the garden. They set the long wooden table on the stone patio, with wine and salad and bread, lamb and potatoes and peas, André's mother not wanting to sit because then there'd be thirteen at table. “Don't be silly,” he said. “You think we'd eat without you?”
She waited till the others, his sisters and their husbands and children, had filed through the kitchen to the patio. “You're going again, aren't you?”
“Just a little while, Mama. Down south.”
“Your father knows but he won't tell me.”
How savage age is, he thought, seeing her lined face, the pallid flesh and dark worry under the faded eyes. “Papa doesn't know anything because there's nothing to know.”
“You've resigned your commission.”
“You know why, Mama. Because they did nothing. After the bombing.”
He saw that the word hurt her and regretted it, took her hand, her skin cold, the flesh bony. When we get old, he thought, the sun doesn't warm us anymore.
“It's because of Yves you're going back,” she said. “But there's nothing you can do, mon cher, cher fils. And instead of losing one of you now I'm going to lose you both.”
“YOU COULD HAVE LEFT me a note,” Inneka said.
“I thought you were gone all afternoon,” Neill answered. “So I –”
“I just went down to Shopi to get you some beer! I get back, wait two more hours before you come. I could have been at work today, for all the good it does!”
“I'm sorry, Inneka.”
“I don't care you're sorry!” She slapped a hairbrush down on the sink. “How do you think I ever want to build a life with you, when I never know where you are?”
Neill followed her into the bedroom, realized what he was doing and stopped, went instead to the window, tucked aside the curtain, watching the umbrellas like black toadstools diagonally cross the street. A gull bobbed on the canal, something white in its beak.
“It's after two,” he said. “In eighteen hours I have to be at the station.”
She came into his arms and they stood there, swaying slightly, silently.
Even when I do think of her, he realized, it's still for me.
ROSA COULD NOT CROSS Rue Madame Curie in the open before dark, and the route she'd planned to take behind the old houses had been hit by Israeli 500-pounders.
A rumble at the far end of Rue Alfred Nobel grew louder
