Beaufort by Ron Leshem

Author:Ron Leshem [Leshem, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-26T04:30:00+00:00

Oshri's farewell party was scheduled for Wednesday. That's part of procedure when a member of the command staff leaves: you take his soldiers out for a morning of fun in the ancient fortress that sits next to our outpost. The Arabs call it Qalaat A-Shakif. It's three stories high with seven more built downward into the hill, or maybe more. Legend has it that the fortress reaches all the way down to the Litani River, to the place where they would draw water, like some endless underground high-command bunker. But we stop two floors below ground level since if you go any lower the fortress is apparently booby-trapped—by terrorists, Palestinians, from back in the time of the Lebanon War eighteen years earlier. No point in taking chances. We leave our secure area, climb the rusty metal ladder at the back of the outpost, step over the ruins of the outer stone wall, and find ourselves in the courtyard of the Crusader castle. Thistles reach as high as your chest and scratch the shit out of you. We squeeze through the narrow opening one by one, sucked inside, crawl through tunnels, descend with ropes, cram into a dark and narrow stairwell to a wide hall that looks like a place where kings might have paced back and forth at night when they couldn't fall asleep. What an empire they set themselves up with here: suddenly huge arched windows come into sight and long, tall firing slits that cast narrow sunbeams. Whoever planned the lighting for this place was a genius. If you look outside you catch sight of the clear water flowing down below at an angle you can't see from anywhere else on the hill. Trees with thick, green crowns send branches into the water, and there are dark, slippery stones. These are my favorite places, the kind where you can see how everything was here, once: in the time of the Bible and the Middle Ages and the world wars and the Lebanese civil war. No matter when you were to pass through here—on a caravan of elephants, on camelback, on a French tank, or in a group of warplanes that drops you from the sky—no surprise would greet you here. Everything's as it was, nature. Same view. The only change is the flag—blue and white at the moment. It's time for the Argentine video camera.

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