The Next Stop

by Dimitris Politis

  About the author

  Dimitris Politis was born in Athens, Greece. He spent his formative years on the Aegean island of Tinos and later studied Economics in Greece and Classics and Italian Language and Literature in Dublin. He has lived in Greece, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Italy, Luxembourg and Belgium. An author of articles and interviews on international working conditions in many languages, he has also published several short stories, in English and Greek, two of which won international literary competitions. His first novel “The Stolen Life of a Cheerful Man” was published in English in 2014. He currently lives in Brussels, Belgium from where he travels frequently to his homes in Tinos and Ireland.

  The Next Stop

  Dimitris Politis

  The Next Stop

  Vanguard Press

  VANGUARD KINDLE

  © Copyright 2020

  Dimitris Politis

  The right of Dimitris Politis to be identified as author of

  this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All Rights Reserved

  No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication

  may be made without written permission.

  No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced,

  copied or transmitted save with the written permission of the publisher, or in accordance with the provisions

  of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).

  Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to

  this publication may be liable to criminal

  prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is

  available from the British Library.

  ISBN (PAPERBACK) 9781784656 57 7

  Vanguard Press is an imprint of

  Pegasus Elliot MacKenzie Publishers Ltd.

  www.pegasuspublishers.com

  First Published in 2020

  Vanguard Press

  Sheraton House Castle Park

  Cambridge England

  Printed & Bound in Great Britain

  Dedication

  To my dearly beloved parents and to the memory of Semin Tekgil, who adored life and defied the fear of death until the final puff of her last cigarette.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. The characters and their stories are creations of the author and any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental, although a few events, such as the Irish uprising of 1916, the Abruzzo earthquake and the Aer Lingus 1968 plane crash, are drawn from news headlines of the relevant periods.

  Original edition Η ΕΠΟΜΕΝΗ ΣΤΑΣΗ (c) 2018 Dimitris Politis

  FOREWORD

  This book was inspired by the countless mornings spent waiting for the next Brussels metro train to carry me to work.

  To those unfamiliar with the Brussels metro, a map of Line 1 (in red) is offered below. At the first stop of the novel, Roodebeek, the first hero Keith MacFarland will board his daily train which stops at Tomberg, Gribaumont, Joséphine-Charlotte, Montgomery and Merode before reaching the last stop for him, Schuman. Each of the travellers who plays a key part in the story will enter the train at one of these stops.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Departure: Palestine, summer, 1990

  Ben Geffen's body trembled. His head felt as if a hot spike had been driven through his skull. He thought he might explode at any minute and disintegrate violently into myriad pieces.

  “My first mission… Just a few more minutes... Just a few minutes!” It hurt to breathe. There was no air. He was suffocating. With every breath, his heartbeat thundered louder in his ears.

  He could discern nothing around him in the grey blur, heard nothing, was aware of no one. Persistent annoying trickles of cold sweat dribbled down his back. “A few minutes, a few more minutes... just a few more!”

  He repeated this mantra over and over. His body seemed to have parted from his consciousness. Something monstrous was growing inside him. An icy, slimy monstrosity which would burst out of his belly, like in that movie, and coil around his throat and crush the air from his lungs until there was nothing left of him but a gasping rattle...

  He was long past any kind of volition. “A few minutes, a few minutes only... a few more minutes!”

  It was the perfect Mediterranean night. A full August moon, pale and proud, dominated the velvety summer sky, drenching the rocky Middle-Eastern hillsides in a misty glow. In the breathless heat, the tin roofs of the hovels in the Gaza outskirts of Noor Jabal were silvered by its delicate, lemony light. These squalid settlements had expanded dramatically over the past thirty years under the influx of refugees from the endless Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Successive waves of human misery forced them to spread haphazardly across the parched landscape.

  The raw ugliness of the battered land which shrieked aloud in the blinding light of day was shrouded; now it was another world, unreal. The sad beauty of the swollen moon created an almost enchanted atmosphere. The sea, a few miles to the west, breathed a faint breeze intoxicatingly scented by dust and dried broom shrubs. Hidden in the darkness of the crevices of unfriendly rocks, swarms of crickets celebrated the moonlight with insistent chirping. A distant dog's bark broke now and then through their monotonous song.

  It was two hours past midnight.

  In the two cramped rooms of Lutfi El Amin’s shanty, high on a hill overlooking the sickly olive groves of the arid plains, everyone had fallen into a sound sleep. He lay in the back room with his wife next to the crib of their newborn son, lightly snoring. In the front room, which served as kitchen, lounge and dining room by day, twelve-year-old Kamal and ten-year-old Omar curled quietly side by side, wedged into a narrow iron bedstead.

  The peace of the night was abruptly shattered as the door of El Amin’s hovel splintered under thunderous blows, and the crickets went mute. Aggressive voices were heard. “Open up! Open up now! Israeli Defence Force! We have a warrant to search this house!” shouted someone in broken Arabic. “Open up or we’ll break down the door!”

  The father leapt from his bed. Confused and half-naked, he switched on the lights and headed for the door, stumbling over furniture and bundles on the floor. The mother, jerked suddenly from sleep into terror, began tremulously praying to Allah and followed her husband to the front room, trying to cover her hair as best she could with a scarf. Frightened by the noise and shouts, the baby twitched in his cradle and began to whimper.

  Armed to the teeth, a platoon of Israeli soldiers burst through the door and swarmed into the front room. Grim faces, cold and unfriendly looks crowded the room, their hands braced to shoot, gripping the triggers of their guns.

  “What do you want? What do you want from us?” demanded the father, distraught, trying to cover his nakedness with a vest. The baby’s cries from the back room grew stormier.

  “We have orders to search the premises for weapons. Out of the way! All of you, out of our way!” barked Ben Geffen, the very young chief corporal, trying to sound as decisive and as menacing as possible. It was his first mission command, and the dozen troopers had by now invaded the entire house uninvited, filling both rooms with their substantial bodies. There was barely room to move their weapons. His Arabic was poor and now these people were all screaming gibberish at the top of their lungs. Unnerved and untried, he felt his heart pounding in his ears as he struggled to control the quaver in his voice.

  “In the name of God! Have some pity on us!” wailed the mother. “We’re a peace-loving family! There are no weapons here. We have small children… do you think small children are weapons?”

  “Mind the kids with those guns of yours! We have a baby in there! In the name of Allah!” plea
ded the father, cornered by the wall by the five loaded weapons aimed at him. He stood there unable to move, forced to witness the dreadful scene unfolding in front of him. As he spoke, the smaller of his two boys hopped out of his bed and ran crying to the back room. Finding no way out, he dived into the wardrobe and pulled the door shut.

  His mother made to follow but a gun barrel pinned her in place. The corporal, desperate to assert his control over the situation, had already aimed the barrel point-blank at her chest. He glared at her. She dared not stir. “Please,” she stammered, imploring. “No, no guns here, Look! Look everywhere!” She turned towards the bedroom and called to little Omar to come out. She got no answer. The panicky sobs of the child could still be heard from behind the cupboard doors.

  “Get out of our house! Get out of here, you bastards!” The older boy, Kamal, began shouting angrily with all his might, in spite of his parents’ desperate efforts to silence him. “Get out!” he cried again, vainly trying to push the gun barrel up, away from his mother. He was too short to reach it, too weak to move it away.

  In her despair, the woman’s wits deserted her. She grabbed the gun barrel with both hands and tried to thrust it aside so that she could go to her son in the other room. It returned immediately to its original position, aimed steadily at her heart. Frantic and weeping, she started towards the cradle where the baby, frightened by the noise and angry voices, had now begun to howl in serious distress.

  In a fraction of a second, it all exploded. A black moment, an accursed instant brought about what nobody had wished for. The raw young officer, flustered by the mother’s sudden move, the shouts of the boy Kamal, the screams of the infant and the general pandemonium that reigned in the crowded house, lost control. Overcome by fear and confusion, his hand jerked on the trigger. With a deafening roar, three consecutive bullets escaped the automatic weapon. Hissing through the air, they pierced the breast of the hapless mother.

  Everything stopped.

  Shocked silence replaced the uproar. Even the baby in the cradle abruptly ceased wailing for a few seconds. The doomed woman’s eyes opened wide and then rolled behind their eyelids. Her body stood petrified for seconds in her last step towards the back room where her child lay. Too late. Her face contorted in a grotesque grimace and she collapsed, heavy as lead. Her lifeless body met the uneven cement floor with a dull thud.

  Defying the shouts, threats and poised gun barrels, little Kamal fell to his knees by the still-warm body of his mother. He tenderly lifted her head in both hands. He frantically began to caress her face, kiss her cheeks.

  Her wide-open eyes bulged at the ceiling, gleaming like soulless white glass beads. There was no life left in them.

  “Mama! Mamaaa! Wake up, my Mama! You cannot die! You must be alive!” he began to bawl hysterically, shaking his dead mother’s corpse. He got up and stood for a moment, gazing about him, bewildered. The young corporal stood motionless in front of him, transfixing him with the same cold, grey wolfish stare – and his gun, its barrel still warm and smouldering.

  “Murdererrrr!” the boy shrieked at him with all the strength of his childish lungs. His insides were churning with outrage and fury. He was drowning in a vast questioning: why? Why such cruelty? Why must he lose his adored mother in such a brutal and sickening way in front of his eyes? Violence, hatred and the loathsome face of death turned his heart to stone in an instant. His body filled and swelled with overflowing rage as if someone had torn out his guts, ripped out all his reason and replaced it with a terrible anger. A monstrous hatred took root in him, blinding him completely; he was transformed at that moment into a savage jackal, filled with hate and thirst for revenge. Hatred for the insolent invading troopers who had forced themselves so violently upon their tiny home that night, hatred for their hellish weapons that had deprived him of his mother for no reason, cravenly shooting her under the terrified eyes of her family.

  The bullets which a few seconds ago had knocked his mother down dead before his innocent eyes had also killed the humanity in little Kamal, turning him into a rabid beast. All he sought at that moment was swift revenge. “Murderer!” he shrieked once again, leaping up with a tremendous bound and rushing barefoot at the startled officer. With the same icy stare, taken aback and now completely off-balance, he pointed the gun barrel at the boy. The father, trapped at the other side of the room by the array of weapons still aimed at him, helplessly watched the nightmare turning yet more gruesome. He shouted at his son to stay back.

  Kamal never flinched. He continued his lunge at the corporal. As he was closing in, a double shot tore through the night, shredding the temporary, uneasy silence that had fallen in the small room. Both bullets found the small head of Kamal at close range. The slight twelve-year-old crumpled face up on the floor by the fresh corpse of his mother, mown down by the same gun that a few seconds past had deprived him of her forever. The fourth and fifth bullets from the soldier’s gun had penetrated his skull just over his left eye. A thick double stream of blood trickled slowly down Kamal's cheek, still alive and warm, staining his face, leaving a red trail down his neck, creating a horrid, crimson lake on the floor.

  Calling on Allah, his stricken father escaped from the rifle trap. He dropped wordlessly over the body of the woman lying on the cracked concrete of the floor, her dead eyes still bulging open, and the wounded body of their eldest son beside her convulsing on the floor.

  “Nobody move or I’ll shoot again!” bellowed the corporal, his hand trembling uncontrollably, his words accompanied by a shower of spit. Kamal made a small movement to crawl towards his beloved mother, groaning and pressing firmly with both hands the wounds on his forehead. He never reached her. His tiny bony body convulsed violently one last time before it slumped lifeless on the blood-stained floor.

  The dazed father, beside himself, cried, “Killers! You have destroyed my family! You have ruined me!” Out of control, with both hands he grabbed a cheap glass vase from the table, and rushed at the officer, his eyes mad and menacing, hurling a stream of incomprehensible curses. The four bullets remaining in the corporal’s weapon knocked him flat, in the same cramped chamber where he had shared, not only poverty and destitution with his family, but moments of hope and happiness, the little everyday transient joys of life. Lutfi breathed his last, sad breath, witness to the double murder of his precious son and his beloved wife a few inches away.

  The corporal’s automatic rifle finally fell silent. A thick deadly hush blanketed the wreck of what had been the modest home of the slaughtered family. The place stank of sweat, fear and blood. Only the undiminished and heart-rending wail of the infant continued to shatter the night silence.

  The song of the crickets outside the shack had long since ceased.

  With a few words, the corporal and his squad hastily proceeded with their mission, no longer hindered. With lightning movements, they pursued their investigations, opening cupboards and dumping the contents on the floor, flipping over chairs, clothing, beds. At one point, a soldier jabbed his rifle at the closed door of the wardrobe; with a quick shake of his head the corporal told him to leave it. There was no more sound from within the closet. The hasty search had already shown that their information in this case had been quite wrong – or with tragic irony, they had chosen the wrong hill. In the dead of night, all the hills in the area were alike as two drops of water.

  The squad knew very well that there was no time to waste. They were obliged to vacate the neighbourhood as soon as possible, lest they attract the notice of the neighbours. No doubt they would have heard the shouting and the shots. Trouble from them could set off a huge conflagration in a fraction of a second.

  As soon as he felt that the investigation was at an end, their leader gave the order. His men obediently followed him swiftly out of the shanty with their weapons covering all directions. They departed at a quick march and vanished into the black shadows of the hills. Not one of the neighbours, all of whom had heard the voices and the shots in the night, da
red to emerge from their houses. The cupboard door in the back room of the hovel remained tightly closed.

  The nightscape, still illuminated by the glow of the setting August moon, subsided into its previous serenity and calmness.

  A single break in the silence betrayed, nevertheless, that something dreadful had occurred: the poignant wailing of the baby. It went on howling helplessly from its cradle, rending the quiet of the velvety night where the fatal slip of a trembling finger had brought death and devastation to Lutfi's wretched dwelling.

  CHAPTER TWO

  First Stop: Roodebeek – Keith

  Keith MacFarland had paced anxiously up and down the long narrow hall of his flat most of the night. He dropped onto his bed exhausted, but every time he closed his eyes, the damned memo appeared inside his eyelids and he was awake again. The sky finally faded into morning, but something seemed to have happened to his brain; he was unable to start his routine in the usual semi-conscious commuter trance. Today he was preternaturally aware of everything, from the individual hairs he was shaving from his chin to the suddenly deafening sounds of morning traffic in the street, four storeys down outside his flat.

  Glaring reflections, a blinding display of flowers, fluorescent green shoes... He was beset by sensory impressions as he traced the familiar route to Roodebeek metro station and groped his way down, only to be pierced by the incandescence of a pair of azure eyes, bright and sharp as diamonds. Stretched out in all her splendour on the opposite platform, she was armed with the complete assurance of a woman aware of her own beauty. She reciprocated his persistent stare with apparent interest, if ever-so-slightly condescending. Her bright face glowed like a full moon in January.