by David Szalay
He said to Mohammed, ‘And you’re sure it’s not Mariama?’
‘No, sir.’
‘How is Mariama?’
Mohammed just shrugged.
‘And the kids?’
Mohammed did not answer this. He seemed in fact to tense up, and Cheikh wondered if something might have happened to one of the children – Mohammed and Mariama had four children. Mariama had been no more than fifteen when the first of them was born – and Cheikh thought how pitifully young that seemed to him now, now that he had a son, Amadou, who was that age, and still so obviously just an innocent kid. Mohammed himself had been older, of course. He was … what? Ten years older than her? Something like that. Neither of them exactly literate. There had been problems over the years. Cheikh and his wife had tried to help. There’s only so much you can do though. Some things, perhaps, are not meant to be. Some things are meant to be, some things are not meant to be.
Cheikh pressed him. ‘So they are all well? Your kids.’
Mohammed answered with a minimal nod.
‘El Hadji,’ Cheikh said, referring to Mohammed’s eldest son – he was almost exactly the same age as Amadou. As small children they had played together, had been friends. Cheikh had permitted that, up to a point. ‘He’s doing well?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ Mohammed said, in a voice that was almost a whisper.
Cheikh was paying for El Hadji’s education at a private school. Not the same private school that Amadou went to – the new French lycée in its sleek modern building, with its tennis courts and its Mandarin option – a simpler, more local one. Still, a decent enough school and El Hadji, though unlikely to go to university in France, would have an opportunity to make something of his life. It pleased Cheikh that he was able to do this, to make such a decisive difference to someone’s life, to be a figure of such transformative power in the world of Mohammed’s family.
He said, ‘Then what is troubling you, Mohammed? Do you have something to tell me?’
Yes, Mohammed had something to tell him.
That was suddenly obvious from the way, when Cheikh asked him the question, he just stared straight ahead, with this dead expression in his eyes.
Cheikh found, from nowhere, that he had a quiet hankering for a cigarette. It had been over a decade since he had quit – Amadou, at five years old, having been told that smoking killed people, had one day asked his father to stop, and Cheikh, after thinking about it for a moment, had stubbed out the cigarette he was in the middle of smoking and promised his son that he would never smoke another. What had touched him was the simple fact that his son actually cared about him, that he actually cared whether he lived or died – there were not that many people in the world who actually cared about you all that much, and if you were lucky enough to have a few who did, he thought, then surely you owed it to them not to destroy yourself avoidably, surely you owed them some sort of effort. Since that day he had not smoked a single cigarette. He was proud of his will power. Occasionally, though, at moments of stress, the hankering still came.
‘What is it, Mohammed?’ he asked, in a quieter voice.
They were nearing the house. They were in smaller streets – streets on the hill next to the sea where the smog was thinner and there were larger trees, their stiff dropped leaves littering the asphalt under the street lights. Outside many of the properties were sentry posts.
They were nearing the house.
There it was, its high metal gates. ‘Stop,’ Cheikh said.
Mohammed stopped the car in front of the gates and sat there still staring straight ahead through the windscreen. The headlights lit up part of the white-painted metal of the gates. The paint was speckled with rust. Here, next to the ocean, with the tall surf chewing away at the foot of the hill, the spread of rust was a never-ending problem.
‘You have something to tell me, Mohammed,’ Cheikh said. ‘What is it?’
There was a long silence. Then Mohammed said, ‘Madame will tell you.’ His hand, as he worked the remote control that opened the gates, was shaking.
Cheikh was afraid. Something terrible, he now understood, was waiting for him inside the house.
With a scraping noise, the gates slid open and they drove in.
‘What is it?’ Cheikh asked. ‘Why are there no lights on?’
Mohammed had nothing more to say.
After a few seconds, Cheikh emerged from the car and slowly, as if he was going to his own death, walked up the steps and into the dark house.
3
DSS – GRU
THEY SAID THE boy was dead. It happened too quickly for Werner to follow. There was a sudden smash and the taxi squealed to a stop, making him lean sharply into his seatbelt. Nothing too serious seemed to have happened. The taxi driver said some swear words in French as he pulled on the handbrake. He would obviously have to get out – there would be words to be had. Werner assumed it wouldn’t take long. At first he didn’t move from his seat in the back of the taxi, an ancient Mercedes, probably an early 1980s model, and the colour of swimming-pool tiles. Most of the taxis in Dakar were like that.
He sat there waiting for the driver to do what he needed to do, so that they could be on the move again. He was thinking about Sabine, the woman in Frankfurt he was sort of seeing. They had slipped into a kind of non-exclusive arrangement that for a while had seemed fine to him. Increasingly, though, he had found himself wondering what she was doing when he wasn’t with her. It had happened almost imperceptibly over a week or two – the shift from something like indifference to the state he was in now, in which he was phoning and messaging her more and more often just to satisfy himself that she was alone. He looked at his watch. It was late afternoon. Low sun shone through a line of palm trees with partially whitewashed trunks. The road ran along the ocean. On a wide beach numerous games of football were in progress on the sand.
Werner noticed that a small crowd had formed near the taxi and people were shouting. He leaned out of the window, trying to see what was happening – and when he was unable to see that way, he opened the door and half-stood. A moped lay on its side, damaged. No one, however, was paying any attention to that. The crowd had gathered around what seemed to be a young man, also lying on the warm asphalt, motionless, and wearing, as far as Werner was able to make out, a pale blue football shirt. A policeman was there now, in his military-looking uniform, trying to make the crowd stand back and asking questions. He obviously wanted to talk particularly to the taxi driver and Werner looked at his watch again. If this went on much longer he would need to find another taxi somehow. Traffic was building up behind the incident and filtering slowly past. A blast of wind from the ocean made the palm trees wave and clatter. ‘Il est mort,’ Werner heard someone say, someone who had been hanging around on the edge of the crowd and now had to leave, had somewhere to go to.
Werner also had somewhere to go to.
He wondered what to do.
It seemed terrible, in a way, to worry about getting to the airport on time when a boy was lying dead on the road.
It was, he thought, the first time he had actually seen a dead body. Not that he could really see it. He saw the motionless limbs, but he could not see the face, the eyes. There was a dark liquid on the asphalt – it looked too dark to be blood, but that’s what it must have been.
The sun was low in the sky and shadows stretched across the road.
The policeman was asking the taxi driver aggressive questions. A few other policemen had also appeared now.
Werner looked at the beach again. He hated beaches. In the distance the oceanic surf was visible as a mass of white spray hanging in the evening air.
When he was five years old his sister Liesl had drowned in the sea.
His earliest memories were of that day, of moving with terrible frantic fear among sun umbrellas and loungers with his father, who was holding his hand painfully tightly. The sand was also painfully hot under his feet, though the overwhelming sense of emergency prevented h
im from mentioning that as his father almost dragged him along. The place was a small seaside resort in north-eastern Italy. It was popular with families with young children because of the way the water was so smooth and shallow – you could wade out hundreds of metres and it was still only waist-deep.
He wasn’t sure which of the images in his head were actual memories of that afternoon, and which were things he had been told in the years since then. Probably most of them were things he was told afterwards, although he had no memory of anyone ever describing that afternoon to him, or talking much about it at all.
He had an idea that, as he and his father hurried over the hot sand, someone started to make an announcement on the public speakers – that a woman’s voice, speaking Italian, started echoing metallically in the air. Perhaps he understood that what the voice was saying had something to do with the fact that Liesl was missing, as that was apparently when he said to his father, ‘I hope Liesl isn’t gone, because I love Liesl.’
Some years after the event he overheard his father telling someone else that he had said that. Of course he had no memory of ‘loving’ Liesl, and found it hard to imagine what he might have meant by it. He knew as a matter of fact that for nearly four years they had been together practically all the time, which was strange as he was now unable to remember a single moment of those years, or a single thing that his sister had actually done.
He never saw her again.
When they went home, he was surprised to find that her bed had disappeared from the room they shared.
Even so, it was a long time before he understood that he really would never see her again.
It was a long time, as well, before he understood that his parents would never be the same again either.
In other words for a few years he thought that it would be possible to go back to how things were before – that Liesl would somehow reappear, and things would be like they were. It was hard to say at exactly what point he realised that that was never going to happen, that this new situation was one that was going to last forever.
He looked at his watch again. He would need to find another taxi. He stood at the road’s edge, trying to flag one down.
The sun was setting and the muezzins were starting up. Each time there was a faint crackle of static and then the voice would launch into the words, the long, stretched-out syllables – Allahu akbar.
He was half an hour late to the airport. He apologised and told the captain, who had already started the walk-around when he arrived, that he would explain what had happened later.
They finished the walk-around together and went up the outside steps into the plane, which was an old McDonnell Douglas freighter, strange-looking with its third engine stuck in the tail. Werner would be flying it. At the head of the runway he waited for permission to take off. A voice in his earphones. ‘Lufthansa Cargo 8262, runway one, cleared for take-off.’ ‘Cleared for take-off,’ Werner said back, ‘runway one, Lufthansa Cargo 8262.’ The engines spooled up to a high-pitched whine and then delivered their thrust, at which the plane started to move. It picked up speed and when it was travelling at 278 kilometres per hour it took off. Werner always liked to think of the fact that at that moment the plane was unable not to take off, that nothing would be able to hold it down.
The ocean slipped under its nose. The blue curve of the planet. Two hours later, they were still ahead of the night. The night was moving faster than they were, though, and overtook them somewhere over the Atlantic. The sky flamed on the western horizon. The ocean winked as the sun fell into it. ‘Contact now Atlantico.’ The voice of the air traffic controller, still in Dakar. ‘Thank you,’ Werner said. ‘Goodnight.’ The captain, sitting next to him, pointed at the nearly dark and disappearing ocean and said something. There was still a faint light where they were, eleven kilometres up. Werner was thinking that it was night already in Dakar. In Frankfurt it was already night. ‘This is where it went down,’ the captain was saying.
‘What?’ Werner asked, his thoughts elsewhere.
‘Air France 447.’
Werner peered into the silvery dimness.
‘Pretty much on the equator. So what happened?’ the captain asked. ‘Why were you late?’
‘There was some sort of accident,’ Werner said. ‘A traffic accident.’
‘Yeah?’
‘The taxi I was in hit a scooter,’ Werner explained. ‘The kid who was on the scooter was killed, I think.’
‘Ah shit,’ the captain said.
‘Anyway they had to take the taxi driver away, the police. And I had to get another taxi, which wasn’t so easy at that time.’
‘Sure,’ the captain said. ‘That’s sad, about the kid.’
‘Yeah, it is,’ Werner said. ‘You know,’ he said, a minute later, ‘I had a sister – she died when I was five.’
‘Yeah?’ The captain was obviously unsure what he was meant to do with that information. He and Werner knew each other only slightly and Werner had never told him anything significant about his personal life. ‘Was she older than you?’ the captain asked, trying to show some sort of sympathetic interest.
‘No, younger. She was three.’
‘That must have been hard on your parents,’ the captain said.
Werner said that it was.
For a while there were no pictures of Liesl in the flat. Later there were some again, and it was strange to see them because by then he had forgotten what she looked like. And of course she still looked the same, in those pictures, while he was already a few years older than he had been that day. That was when he first started to think about what she might look like if she had lived. He still thought about that sometimes – not only about what she might look like, but about what her life might have been like. She would be thirty-three now. When he thought about that he had an eerie sense of her absence from the world.
From the moment they landed in São Paulo, he dreaded being alone in a hotel room again. He hated the silent solitude of hotel rooms. This one was on the twenty-third floor, with windows that didn’t open. He fetched a glass from the bathroom, and the bottle of Wild Turkey he had picked up as he hurried through the airport in Dakar. He poured some into the glass. And then, even though it was after 2 a.m. in Frankfurt, he tried to phone Sabine again – he tried her knowing that she wouldn’t answer. He had tried her many times in the last twenty-four hours, and she had never answered and now it was the middle of the night where she was. And yet his heart still seemed to stop as the numbers were fed with little flicking sounds into networks that stretched to the other side of the world. Seconds passed, seconds of silence. And then, it felt like some kind of miracle, like something impossible actually happening, her voice was present in his ear, was saying, ‘Hello Werner.’
‘You’re still up?’ is all he said, in surprise. He was looking out at the silent lights of São Paulo, the way they shimmered in the distance, like a mirage.
‘Yeah, I’m still up,’ she said. ‘How are you?’
‘Okay,’ he told her.
Their talk lasted no more than five minutes, and when it was over he wished he was still in the sky.
4
GRU – YYZ
THE NEXT MORNING she had to lose the pilot before she could leave. He was still in her bed, asleep. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Hey. I have to go.’ He opened his eyes – light blue. There was reddish stubble on his big jaw. He looked around, still not sure where he was. Outside, the last rain of the São Paulo summer was falling, audible in occasional plinks and tinks on the window.
‘What time is it?’ he finally asked, propping himself up.
‘Almost eleven,’ she told him. ‘I have to leave in ten minutes.’
Looking around in a more focused way now – maybe trying to find his clothes – he wanted to know if he had time for a quick shower.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘If you want. But as I say, I have to leave in ten minutes.’
Last night, he had wanted to talk a lot first. There was a po
int when she wondered if talking was all he wanted to do. That happened sometimes. She had swigged from her Heineken and asked him what sort of planes he flew. ‘The McDonnell Douglas MD-11F,’ he told her. ‘The freighter.’
‘The freighter?’ she asked, taking another impatient swig.
They were sitting next to each other on her sofa.
‘Yeah.’
‘What’s that like?’
He shrugged. ‘Not so different from flying passengers,’ he said.
‘Do you do that sometimes?’
‘Not any more.’
She had one of those moments when the presence of a large stranger in her apartment suddenly seemed surreal, and for a few seconds even slightly threatening.
‘So why’d you switch?’ she asked.
He shrugged again. He was perched on the edge of the sofa, as if he wasn’t planning to stay long. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. And then, ‘The pay’s a bit better.’
‘Better? For flying freight around? Than people?’
‘Yah,’ he said, sort of seeing her point. He tried to explain. ‘The freight side is more profitable.’
‘Okay.’
‘So what do you do?’ he asked.
She told him she was a journalist.
He didn’t seem sure what to make of that. He said, ‘So … What sort of … You write things or …?’
‘Well, for instance,’ she said, ‘I have to fly to Toronto tomorrow to do an interview.’
‘Ah,’ the pilot said. He seemed to be wondering how this affected their present situation. Then he said, ‘Who are you going to interview?’
She told him – Marion Mackenzie.
She wasn’t that surprised when he said he hadn’t heard of her.
‘She’s a pretty famous writer.’
‘I don’t read much,’ he admitted.
‘She’s kind of a heroine of mine.’