He was not asleep, but he was already dozing. He lay with his tousled dark head on her shoulder, his good arm thrown carelessly across her breast.
"Salim was a lucky boy," he murmured, with a smile in his voice. "A girl like you, that's a cause to die for."
"Who says he died for me?"
"Tayeh said this was possible."
"Salim died for the revolution. The Zionists blew up his car."
"He blew himself up. We read many German police reports of this incident. I told him never to make bombs, but he disobeyed me. He had no talent for the task. He was not a natural fighter."
"What's that noise?" she said, pulling away from him.
It was a patter, like paper crackling, a row of dotted sounds, then nothing. She imagined a car rolling softly over gravel with its engine off.
"Someone is fishing on the lake," Khalil said.
"At this time of night?"
"You never fished at night?" He laughed drowsily. "You never took a little boat on the sea, with a lamp, and caught fishes with your hands?"
"Wake up. Talk to me."
"Better to sleep."
"I can't. I'm afraid."
He began to tell her a story of a night mission he had made into the Galilee long ago, he and two others. How they were crossing the sea in a rowing boat, and it was so beautiful that they lost all sense of what they had come for, and fished instead. She interrupted him.
"It wasn't a boat," she insisted. "It was a car, I heard it again. Listen."
"It was a boat," he said sleepily.
The moon had found a space between the curtains, and shone towards them across the floor. Getting up, she went to the window and without touching the curtains stared out. Pine woods lay all around, the moonpath on the lake was a white staircase reaching downward to the centre of the world. But there was no boat anywhere and no light to lure the fish. She returned to the bed and his right arm slipped across her body, drawing her to him, but when he sensed her resistance he gently drew away from her and turned languidly onto his back.
"Talk to me," she said again. "Khalil. Wake up." She shook him fiercely, then kissed him on the lips. "Wake up," she said again.
So he roused himself for her, because he was a kind man, and had appointed her his sister.
"You know what was strange about your letters to Michel?" he asked. "The gun. 'From now on, I shall dream of your head on my pillow, and your gun beneath it'-lovers' talk. Beautiful lovers' talk."
"Why was it strange? Tell me."
"I had exactly such a conversation with him once. Precisely on this very matter. 'Listen, Salim,' I told him. 'Only cowboys sleep with their guns under the pillow. If you remember nothing else I teach you, remember this. When you are in bed, keep your gun at your side where you can hide it better, and where your hand is. Learn to sleep that way. Even when you have a woman.' He said he would. Always he promised me. Then he forgot. Or found a new woman. Or a new car."
"Broke the rules then, didn't he?" she said and, seizing his gloved hand, considered it in the half darkness, pinching each dead finger in turn. They were of wadding, all but the smallest and the thumb.
"So what did this lot?" she demanded brightly. "Mice? What did this lot, Khalil? Wake up."
He took a long time to answer. "One day in Beirut, I am a little stupid like Salim. I am in the office, the post comes, I am in a hurry, I am expecting a certain parcel, I open it! This was an error."
"So? What happened? You opened it and there was a bang, was there? Bang go your fingers. That how you did your face too?"
"When I woke up in hospital, there was Salim. You know something? He was very pleased I had been stupid. 'Next time, before you open a parcel, show it to me or read the postmark first,' he says. 'If it comes from Tel Aviv, better you return it to the sender.' '
"Why do you make your own bombs then? If you've only got one hand?"
The answer was in his silence. In the twilit stillness of his face as it lay turned to her, with its straight, unsmiling fighter's stare. The answer was in everything she had seen since the night she had signed on with the theatre of the real. For Palestine, it ran. For Israel. For God. For my sacred destiny. To do back to the bastards what the bastards did to me. To redress injustice. With injustice. Until all the just are blown to smithereens, and justice is finally free to pick herself out of the rubble and walk the unpopulated streets.
Suddenly he was demanding her, and no longer to be resisted.
"Darling," she whispered. "Khalil. Oh Christ. Oh, darling. Please."
And whatever else whores say.
It was dawn, but still she would not let him sleep. With the pale daylight, a wakeful light-headedness possessed her. With kisses, with caresses, she used every wile she knew to keep him present with her, and his passion burning. You're my best, she whispered to him, and I never award first prizes. My strongest, my bravest, my most clever lover of all time. Oh, Khalil, Khalil, Christ, oh please. Better than Salim? he asked. More patient than Salim, more cherishing, more grateful. Better than Joseph, who sent me to you on a plate.
"What's the matter?" she said as he suddenly disengaged from her. "Did I hurt you?"
Instead of answering, he reached out his good hand and with a commanding gesture lightly pinched her lips together. Then lifted himself stealthily on his elbow. She listened with him. The clatter of a waterbird lifting from the lake. The shriek of geese. The crowing of a cockerel, the chiming of a bell. Foreshortened by the snowbound countryside. She felt the mattress lift beside her.
"No cows," he said softly, from the window.
He was standing at the side of the window, still naked, but with his gun looped by its belt over his shoulder. And for a second, in the extremity of her tension, she imagined the mirror image of Joseph standing facing him, red-lit by the electric fire, separated from him only by the thin curtain.
"What do you see?" she whispered at last, unable to bear the tension any more.
"No cows. And no fishermen. And no bicycles. I see much too little."
His voice was tense with action. His clothes lay beside the bed where she had thrown them in their frenzy. He pulled on his dark trousers and white shirt, and buckled the gun into place beneath his armpit.
"No cars, no passing lights," he said evenly. "Not one labourer on his way to work. And no cows."
"They've gone to milking."
He shook his head. "Not for two hours do they go for milking."
"It's the snow. They're keeping them indoors."
Something in her voice caught his ear; the quickening in him had sharpened his awareness of her. "Why do you apologise for them?"
"I don't. I'm just trying-
"Why do you apologise for the absence of all life around this house?"
"To quell your fears. Comfort you."
An idea was growing in him-a terrible idea. He could read it in her face, and in her nakedness; and she in turn could feel his suspicion form. "Why do you wish to quell my fears? Why are you more frightened for me than for yourself?"