by Claire North
(A voice yet to come, a voice already heard: We will build Jerusalem.)
(A conductor in Palestine: Humans hear music. All humans. Everywhere.)
(A girl, who Charlie does not yet know, sobbing in her local town hall: Please, please just listen to me.)
Qasim must have seen something resembling doubt in the Harbinger’s eyes, because he drew back a little, haughty, arms straight, and added, “Until you have not been free, you cannot understand what freedom means.”
Charlie was silent.
In the valley, far, far below, War prodded the tracked surface of the road with his toe, sucked his teeth in a little, then exhaled and declared, “I think it’ll do … it’ll do …” and all the soldiers cheered.
Famine walked by the old woman, her life’s goods on her back, the village burning behind her, and said, “Chin up, missus, things can’t get any worse …”
Pestilence held a finger up to the wind, and mused, “The problem about building latrines in these sorts of conditions …”
Charlie sat in silence with a man called Qasim, who was suddenly quiet, and for the very first time, afraid. Not of Death, perhaps, not of his own physical demise, but of the words he spoke and the ideals he upheld, and of the gift of mousetraps sitting in his lap.
Two years later, twelve weeks after the Longview Estate began to fall in south London, and four weeks after the first prospective apartment in the new development was sold for £575,000 to a buy-to-rent landlord from Horsham, the Harbinger of Death sat once more in Esenboga international airport, looking for Qasim again.
Chapter 44
“I want to go to Germany to become educated. Of course—they have money, they have schools, they have hospitals, of course they should help me, I have nothing. I think it is only fair to expect that from them, since they are so wealthy.”
“They killed my mother, my father, my uncles, my sister, my brothers, my neighbours, my friends …”
“Wir sind das Volk!”
“She’s having a hard time at school, understandable, but we don’t really have the resources to counsel someone who’s been through what she …”
“The schools can’t cope, the hospitals can’t cope …”
“What do you mean, there’s no tomato ketchup?”
“I don’t believe you’re sixteen. I don’t believe your story. I am sorry but your application is going to be …”
“Wir sind das Volk! Wir sind das Volk!”
“They drive the wages down, undercutting the natives here, and fundamentally if that’s what’s happening, if they’re working longer hours for less, and I know that it’s us who hire them because we like things cheap, but even so, being given that option …”
“Fourteen different types of condensed milk! Fourteen! And that’s a fundamental part of their cuisine. I mean, what do you even do with …”
“The nurse was Polish and actually, given where she put it, I thought she handled it very well, I hardly felt a thing …”
“Last year Japan accepted eleven asylum-seeker applications from five thousand; the USA takes about forty-eight thousand; Sweden with a population of nine and a half million took nine thousand four hundred and thirty-three; this year Germany is expected to process four hundred thousand asylum applications, and what I want to know, what the burning question is …”
“I don’t want to generalise, but Mexicans are criminals.”
“Brexit promised three hundred and fifty million a week for the NHS, they promised controls on immigration, they promised an end to the housing crisis, to the education crisis, to the economic crisis, to the …”
Human human human human human rat …
“Luegenpresse, luegenpresse! Wir sind das Volk!”
“What I don’t understand is that when the British public voted to name a research vessel Boaty McBoatface, the government said no. But when we voted to commit cultural and economic seppuku, the powers-that-be didn’t seem to have a fucking clue …”
“But you see, some of my best friends are black.”
Chapter 45
A nightmare journey. This was not how it was supposed to work, not repeat appointments, he’d never heard of such a thing, and the way it had been organised, Charlie’s calendar had updated with less than forty-eight hours before he had to fly out; very odd. He wondered if Saga had ever heard of such a thing, not that it was a problem, he was growing confident now, just all very strange, and here he was again …
… a few miles north of the Syria–Turkey border, lying on the hard, biting mattress of the hotel, staring at a line of insects marching in a perfect straight line across the ceiling, wide awake. Heading back to Syria, looking again for Qasim Jahani, unheard of, Death tended not to visit twice …
(A frail deduction made in the middle of the night. True: the Harbinger of Death tended not to visit twice, whereas Death was a constant recurring companion in so many lives …)
Not that this is frightening. Charlie is now an old hand at dubious border crossings—remember the three nights spent on a donkey in Honduras? Those were the days …
No. What is causing him to lie sleepless and confused in the middle of the night is this: he has been told how he’ll get into Syria, but not how he’ll get out. And while he has a huge amount of faith in the Milton Keynes office and their ability to organise things, up to and including a tapas tasting menu in Peshawar and a string quartet at Fukushima, this is not the first time he has been to Syria in recent years and the thought is …
… disquieting, all things considered.
Not that he believes everything he sees on the TV. Hardly believes any of it at all, not any more, not really. Travel has blurred the edge of certain commonly perceived truths.
Charlie lies awake, and watches the insects, and must sleep, because at some point he is shaken awake to see two men, their faces lit by torches, leaning over him.
“You Harbinger? You come!”
Their arrival, while heart-jumping, is not entirely unexpected. “I come,” he grunted, reaching for the light switch.
“No! No light! You come.”
“No light, I come,” he repeated, rolling groggy out of bed. By the glow of the street lamps outside he collected his small travel bag, pulled his trousers over his pyjama shorts and a shirt over his pyjama top, and coat barrelled round him like a hypothermic sea lion, he shuffled out through the darkened kitchen of the hotel and into the night.
The two men didn’t give themselves names, didn’t say who they worked for. Milton Keynes had told Charlie to wait at a hotel, and he had waited, and they had come, and that was pretty much the full extent of what he knew. He remembered Qasim Jahani’s name, with fondness even, a smiling, bubbling poet with dreams of freedom, and this gave him some comfort as the two men opened up the boot of an ancient Fiat and said, “Inside!”
He stared into the darkened back of the car, mumbled a mute enquiry.
“Inside inside!” they snapped, eyes glancing fitfully around the street. Charlie hesitated, then shrugged, and crawled inside.
In many ways, the inside of the boot was surprisingly peaceful. Sleep deprived, warmly wrapped in his coat, once he grew used to the relentless bouncing, it was possible to curl into a foetal huddle, head tucked into the nook of his arm. Sometimes the car ran smooth and fast, sometimes it bumped and shook, gravel pattering up loud against the undercarriage, so close Charlie half wondered if he wasn’t going to wake with a pebble in his ear.
Once, the car stopped for nearly half an hour, and Charlie thought about hammering on the walls, but at almost the same moment he decided to do so, the engine revved again, and it sped off on its way. The second time it stopped, the two men came to get him, opening the trunk and barking, “Yallah, yallah!”
Charlie rolled onto the ground, stiff, feet tingling as blood began to flow, and zombie-like dragged one leg behind him as he hobbled across the rough ground. The car was parked on what once had perhaps been a scenic overlook, a dusty hill where a di
rt road had been extended round one of the perilous switchback curves to create a parking and picnic area, allowing views down to a valley of straight-sided fields of machine-ploughed earth and the occasional stubby smoky chimney above a metal-roofed town.
Waiting a few metres from the first car was a second, a boxy, polished four-wheel drive, black sides, black-tinted windows, the passenger door standing open at the back, two men in grey combat fatigues, great keffiyehs of red and black woven round their necks and heads, pistols in holsters at their sides.
He was waved towards the vehicle, climbed in. The seats were synthetic cream leather, the air smelt of pine freshener. There were some old magazines in the seat pockets in front of him—a copy of Time, a copy of the Washington Post, the pages yellow and curled; a Syrian road atlas from 1994. The men sat up front, their keffiyehs hiding their faces. One leant back and said in heavy English, “Drink?” and waggled a bottle of mineral water in front of Charlie’s nose.
He took it gratefully, thanked them. The water was cold, clear. He didn’t know where to put the empty bottle, so put it in his bag, in case it was useful later. Something bumped against his foot. He picked it up. A single 45 mm shell casing, cold, a tiny incision on the back where the bolt had struck. He stuck it in the curve of the seat besides him, and watched the darkness roll by.
In the distance, fire, which at first he thought was dawn. A pinkish glow on the east, which only when it failed to spread, failed to lighten, did he understand for what it was.
Once they pulled over, hard and fast, and shouted, “Move, move!” Charlie ran, because they ran, a blind, mad pelt, throwing himself down into a muddy, dried-up ditch some fifty yards from the dirt road, the car engine still running, the doors open, a beacon in the dark.
A plane rushed overhead, then another, flying low, the engines pushing hard against the sky.
They waited, five minutes, ten, and no more planes came, so gently they nudged Charlie back into the car, and drove on.
Dawn began to break—real dawn, spreading fast and grey against a land the colour of ash. Charlie didn’t know where they were, where they were heading. He’d been told to wait at the hotel, and he had waited, and for all he knew he was in Iraq, or halfway to Jordan. The old signs had lost their meanings; no longer Syria, but government-controlled Syria, rebel-controlled Syria, al-Nusra-controlled territories that recognised no borders save those laid down by God.
In the rising light of the dawn, he saw a town with no roofs left, except for two or three houses bang smack in the middle that had somehow escaped the shelling.
In a field in a nowhere place, where nothing lived and no one could possibly have any reason for fighting, mortar holes like meteor strikes had filled with grimy water from the shattered irrigation ditches, and now long-legged birds waded between the scattered fingertips and torn clothing of the men who’d been blasted in its making.
On the side of a water tower, a banner hung, which Charlie slowly translated in his dubious Arabic. When the horn is blown once, the earth and the mountains will be carried off and crushed; utterly crushed. That is the day when the inevitable event will come to pass.
He wondered where the checkpoints were, and once they passed a barrier, swung to the side of the road, where a checkpoint had been, and once they passed a burnt-out shed near a shattered bridge, the face of the President charred all away except for the tip of his chin.
And once they passed a convoy of trucks, heading in the other direction, and Charlie thought they were fine until the last truck swerved to a halt and men jumped down, grenade launcher, assault rifle, pistol, axe, screaming at them to stop.
The driver stopped the car, casual, controlled, opened the doors with a sigh and gestured at Charlie to follow. He did, swathed in his coat, awkwardly bulging around his pyjamas. A conversation ensued, guns pointing, men shouting, the drivers replying calmly, calmly. Charlie struggled to follow it, but at one point the driver of the car took him by his shoulders and presented him to the shouting men, and they looked fearfully amongst each other. At another point, the man who rode in the passenger seat went to whisper to a man with a great beard and an AK-47 across his shoulder, and they talked earnestly with their backs to the rest of the road, and when they were done, the men with weapons climbed back into the truck to go about their merry way, and the driver turned to Charlie and said, “If you want piss, now is good time.”
“I’m fine, thank you,” Charlie mumbled, and with a shrug, the driver waved him into the car, while the other man went to have a piss on the side of the road.
They drove, as the midday sun grew hot and high.
Once they stopped, and barrels of petrol were pulled from the boot of the car and tipped into the tank.
And again, they stopped on the edge of a small town where only the dogs roamed, and if anyone else lived, they were hiding, somewhere beneath the rubble of their shattered lives. The buildings reminded Charlie of ancient, abandoned beehives, walls the colour of dust, peppered with bullet holes, strange geometric forms caving in on themselves, a criss-cross of cables overhead where electricity had flowed, now collapsed down to a giddy prism of unravelling coils. Some living being once smothered this street, and died, and now only a chitinous corpse remained.
They sat in silence, ate bread and olives and spat the pips into the empty street. Charlie grew hot under his coat, asked if he could walk away a little, change his clothes—they didn’t mind. He shambled through the sun-pierced shadows of the streets, saw the sign hanging from the pharmacist’s, blasted to nothing, and the broken-up cabin that had been the mobile repair shop, and at last stood, awkward and strange, in the shade of a fallen piece of ceiling, balanced over the street, to pull off his coat, his shirt, his trousers, and finally, his grimy pyjamas. Standing naked, he looked around, wondered what a watcher would make of this, and tangled his feet in his trousers in his haste to pull fresh clothes on, expecting any second to hear someone laugh at his bare backside.
Fresh clothes on, old clothes in bag. His stomach growled, his lips were dry. He walked back in the direction of the car, and as he walked, he felt someone watching, and thought he heard the click of a gun.
Silence in the street.
Silence in the shade.
Charlie turned, slowly, and saw no one. Turned again, and thought perhaps he saw a distortion in the darkness, a tiny motion blinking from between the tumbled-down remnants of an old wall. He watched the dark, the dark watched him; for an eternity time lingered, locked in contemplation.
Then the driver of the car called out, “Harbinger! Harbinger! Yallah!”
Charlie walked away, and no one followed.
Glimpses of a strange world, of a world turned mad.
A village, pictures hanging of heroes who Charlie couldn’t name or recognise. Children in the streets, old women kneading bread, a man berating another for breaking eggs. Is there war, in this place? Perhaps not, until they pass the wall where the photos of the fallen lie, men smiling proudly to camera, all dead now, all dead.
A group of men, sunbathing on the side of the road. They wave at the car as it goes by, and continue lounging, reading books, picking at sweet fruits with their fingertips.
A hill, half blasted to nothing. There was something military there, mumbled the driver, and it went away. God took bites out of the mountainside, left jagged marks where his teeth had been.
A family of five, Pappa, Momma, Grandma, the two kids, walking north. They have a cart pulled by Pappa and the kids. Momma walks behind; Grandma sits on the top of a hill of family furniture. Charlie wants to ask where they’re going, but there isn’t time.
Four children, in dusty vests and flip-flops, run by the vehicle laughing as it navigates a particularly slow, grubby bit of road.
A town where the electricity still burns, the roar of generators. An old woman in a black veil keeps the library open, though the windows are boarded up. It’s important, she whispers, as the car stops to buy water, it’s important that we
keep these things going.
A funeral procession. The women scream until they fall down in a faint, the men hold them up, the boys cry silently and swear to take up arms in their father’s name. It is the same funeral procession that their fathers saw, their fathers before them, and their grandfathers unto generations unknown, where the same vow was taken.
A hot air balloon, bright stripes on its side. A group of happy tourists look down from its height, enjoying the day, enjoying the view. Where have they come from? Why are they here?
(They come from Latakia, where War has not yet visited, and the sea shimmers with a suntan oil slick. But the Harbinger of War was seen there a few weeks ago, buying a honeycomb ice cream, and the Harbinger of Famine booked a room with a view across the water only yesterday …)
Out of nowhere, the earth shaking, the world coming apart, the driver screams, out, out, and they run, plunging into dust and scrubby, biting tufts of grass. Charlie ran as the world exploded around him, grit in his eyes, thunder in his ears, the world jerking out beneath his feet. Something hard hit him in the side and pushed him down, he struck the ground and curled into a ball, hands covering his head, and still the sky fell and around him the earth burst open, scars popping out of the dirt and a falling rain of mud.
When at last it stopped, he opened his eyes slowly, his whole body wobbling like blancmange. The sound of the ground falling back down made a gentle pattering, like cake crumbs thrown onto clay. The dust was a swirling fog, the car lost somewhere in the grey. He climbed onto his hands and knees, saw the driver already on his feet, calling out a name, calling for his friend.
His friend didn’t answer.