Arwood says to Jamal, ‘Listen, kid. It’s like Chinatown. You see Chinatown? We just need to “find the girl”. The rest is noise. We’re looking for a spot south of Dayrabun near the foothills. Whoever’s there is there. Whoever’s not is not. That’s the fact of the desert. In fifteen minutes, we’ll know.’
‘Which means that whatever happens is what happens,’ Benton says.
Arwood turns around and looks at Benton. ‘The girl’s alive.’
‘The girl is dead,’ Benton says loudly, asserting himself. ‘She’s just as dead as the girl the colonel shot in ’91. As dead as all the people we saw die in Samawah. Now as dead as the man you killed, however evil he might have been. We need to get back to Domiz, regroup, and then leave this country before anyone knows we were here, or else we’re going to an Iraqi prison, and we’re going to die there. No one will come for us — no one. Because we will not only have burned our bridges with Märta, but we’ll have put all her work in jeopardy. No one is going to walk across a minefield for us, Arwood.’
Arwood looks out the front window. He is unfazed by Benton’s scolding.
The land has levelled off again. It is bush and rock. It is the cradle of Western civilisation, and nothing grows here. Not a crop. Not an idea.
‘Is this why your people are so brutal?’ Arwood asks Jamal. ‘Because of the land? The land isn’t merciful, so you figure your people shouldn’t be either?’
Jamal does not turn his head, but anger swells in him — anger he was planning to bury and keep hidden until this was over, but Arwood has pushed his button. ‘World War II,’ Jamal says loudly. ‘You kill sixty million people. You kill more people than anyone ever. With bombs and tanks and gas. Then you make Hello Kitty. Think it was always like that. You think you are so special, but you are the worst.’
‘Hello Kitty is Japanese. You can’t lay that shit on us.’
‘My Little Pony. That’s American.’
‘Shut up and drive.’
‘Ms Märta teaches us many things. Things they never teach us in school here.’
‘What else does she say?’ Benton asks.
‘She says America has a big mouth and small ears.’
‘That’s not right,’ Arwood interjects. ‘We talk softly and carry a big stick. We have a big stick, not a big mouth.’
‘No, no. Big mouth. Small ears.’
‘It’s a Swedish expression,’ Benton explains. ‘She’s translating from the Swedish. Jamal’s right.’
‘You know what? Who cares? Because what makes us better than you,’ Arwood says to Jamal, ‘is that we can imagine a better future. All you can imagine is a better past.’
‘Fuck you,’ says Jamal.
‘Whatever. When this is over, I’m going home to green grass and high tides forever. You’re stuck here,’ Arwood says.
The horizon is so flat that it curves with the edge of the earth. Objects in the distance do not become closer; they grow as though the passage of time itself swells their mass. They drive for more than an hour. Jamal turns off the main road, and then off the secondary road. He follows tyre tracks in the dirt made by some vehicle with massive wheels, and therefore heavier than the Toyota. If the truck did not detonate an anti-vehicle mine, the small white car probably won’t either.
They pass two men walking. They hold hands in a way Western men do not. Together they watch the car drive by. No one waves or smiles.
The land is shattered. The few green strands of grass that do push out and survive are too far apart to form a field or even a bed. What lives is sharp and determined, faceless and eternal. The earth is spent. Whatever it was, whatever civilisations once crossed it and blessed it with art and ideas and possibility, it will never be again. It is barren now. They drive across it in order to leave it behind.
The Japanese engine and the wind fill their ears. They are out of conversation, and beyond emotion.
In time, they come onto the carcass of the convoy. There are three vehicles. One is a small tanker truck, which has exploded and is on its side, its wheels facing south like a hippo with rigor mortis. The other two are cargo trucks. Both remain standing.
The area is utterly motionless.
‘Up there,’ Benton says. ‘What are those?’
Arwood looks at his GPS watch again to confirm they are in the right place.
‘They’re Ural 375s. Russian army. Iraq uses them. Those two are 6×6s. I don’t know about the tanker. Get closer,’ he says to Jamal.
‘I don’t like it here.’
‘We won’t be here long,’ he says, pointing ahead. ‘Park by the one on the far left.’
Jamal parks the Toyota parallel to the first Ural. The canvas tarp covering its back sits like ragged wool over a mammoth. It is mostly intact. There are rips, possibly from shrapnel. It is dark inside.
Arwood is the first out of the car. ‘Start looking,’ is all he says as he walks away.
Benton steps out from the car. The sun is high and the air is warm. It is good to stretch. He grinds his foot into the earth to hear the sound.
The bones of the Ural don’t look to have been picked over by the vultures and nomads yet — otherwise the ground around it would have been littered with jetsam. It is not a good sign that even the local thieves haven’t come for the spoils.
Below the trucks are the bodies. Their flesh is covered in yellow dirt. Their blood is dried and blackened. They are scattered about.
‘We’re here,’ Arwood says. ‘Find the girl.’
‘There’s nothing alive here, Arwood,’ Benton says. ‘Nothing has been alive here for days.’
Benton watches Arwood and Jamal walk briskly and separately, from body to body, trying to identify the dead and see whether the girl is among them. Benton feels no need to rush the confirmation. There is a certain reward in delaying the moment a little longer, though he knows they have to go.
Dusty, tired, and sunburned, Benton takes his camera from his satchel and starts clicking. Since getting on the plane at Heathrow, Benton has been able to convince himself that he was only coming for Arwood. That it was the placement of the mortar which gripped him. Now that he is here, and Jamal and Arwood are counting bodies, he has to accept that this was not the reason. It was the girl. It really was. Not to rescue her, of course — days have passed since the attack. But in coming here, he could at least acknowledge her death. He could return her body to her family, or at least bury her remains. He could offer her some dignity. In doing this, he could live on better terms with himself, which is a skill he’s been losing. This might be a strange place to find it, but, as Arwood said, it’s also where he lost it.
Benton raises a high-resolution digital SLR camera to his eye and shoots some more. The Times will want its money’s worth, which it cannot possibly get, so to play out the game he needs to get as close as possible.
He sets the camera on automatic so it can make its own decisions. If he doesn’t like the results, a kid in the photography department will clean it up in Photoshop. The days of the purists are over. Benton doesn’t care. The camera frames are too small to capture reality anyway.
But he needs to snap some photos, so he does: here’s one for aesthetic value; here’s one for romantic associations; here’s another with a familiar colonial motif; here’s a tragic one of Meals Ready to Eat that children confuse with cluster munitions; and here’s a melancholy flower growing beside a corpse.
‘This is bullshit,’ he mumbles to himself.
‘What are you doing, Benton?’ Arwood shouts.
‘Huh?’
‘Let’s hurry this up,’ Arwood shouts again.
‘Yeah. OK.’
‘Over there,’ Arwood says. ‘That one. Go look at that one.’
Arwood is pointing at a body about twenty metres away. It is in a foetal position, its back to them. It is far from the others. She
must have been one of the walking wounded, and made it that far.
Benton turns off the camera and places it back into his satchel as he walks to her body. He kneels to the ground when he reaches her. When he does, he knows.
She is smaller than he remembers; smaller than she looked on television. He wants to touch her shoulder, as he would wake Charlotte on school days, but he does not. She is not his daughter. It is the four-day-old corpse of a stranger. The connection is an illusion, and whatever feelings her appearance reignited, the fact is that this girl is another person, another victim, of a war that lives on as a continuum across generations.
And yet, his sadness for her is also real, and for a moment he allows himself to feel it, if only because its wellspring is humanity’s only hope.
You should have been taken to the mghassilchi — the body washer — he thinks. By tradition, she would have been cared for by her co-religionists, and she would have been tended to before her body was laid to rest in the earth, with the expectation that her soul would travel to God, where it belonged. Instead, Thomas Benton sits beside her, dry and dirty, and soon to leave.
‘They should all be washed,’ he yells, as Arwood pushes over another corpse with his foot to check its face.
‘Yeah, OK,’ he says. ‘You do that.’
‘What’s happened to you?’
‘What’s happened to me?’ Arwood yells. ‘This. And more of this. And a lot more of this. Meanwhile, I’m still the only one I know doing anything about it. Are you going to leave that one and keep looking, please?’
‘Arwood,’ he says too softly, ‘it’s her.’
Benton walks to the front of her body and looks into her face. She is in a foetal position — knees up, her hands against her belly. She is soaked in dried blood. She was shot in the stomach, walked this far, dropped in pain, and stayed in pain until she was dead.
Gently, and carefully, Benton brushes the hair back from her face. It was cut into bangs not so long ago. She and her stylist would have discussed the length. Being a girl, she probably had strong opinions. It is unlikely she would have considered the results perfect, if she was anything like Charlotte in her own teenage years.
He studies her face. It is familiar, but not as familiar as he thought it would be. The distance and the angle and the distortion of the camera must all have made her look more like the girl from 1991 than was actually the case. She looks different enough, in fact, that he is surprised he was mystified at all. Surely, death has changed her. And time. And the sun. And the neglect. It doesn’t matter — whatever connection he felt with her through the television screen is gone. She is another dead girl.
From his bag, he takes a small bottle of water and opens it. He first cleans the earth from his hands. Then he pours some onto his red bandana. He washes her face with the towel, brushing her eyelashes, tracing her cheeks, dabbing the tip of her nose. Her eyes are closed, but there is no peace on her face. Not even in death.
If only it would rain.
‘I’m so sorry for you,’ Benton says to the girl. ‘And I am so sorry that more people are not.’
Arwood hasn’t heard Benton, and has continued his search. Benton is not certain how long he’s been alone before he hears Jamal’s voice calling him: ‘Mr Thomas?’
He looks up at Jamal. The poor boy must have turned manic after the morning’s events, let alone now, after seeing more than two dozen dead on the ground, abandoned here to dogs.
He is smiling, almost laughing, as he calls out to Benton.
Mad as a hatter.
‘Jamal, calm down. We’ll head back now. I’ll take a few more photos, and then off we go. But if you don’t collect yourself, I won’t want you driving. Most deaths in the field are actually caused by traffic accidents—’
‘She’s alive! The girl — she’s in the truck. Mr Arwood found her.’ Then he says something in Arabic that might be a prayer, but could just as well be hip-hop lyrics.
‘Who’s alive?’
‘The girl.’
‘The girl is dead. She’s right here, Jamal. Open your eyes.’
‘That girl there,’ says Jamal. ‘She has a blue dress. The girl in the green dress is OK. She has been living off the rations in the humanitarian truck, just like Mr Arwood said. He is a crazy man, a very crazy man, but he was right. The one in the green dress — she is alive.’
17
Benton stands at the back of the Ural 375 and watches the young girl in the green dress dangle her feet off the back like the teenager she is. Arwood has given her an apple. She has bitten off a piece that’s a little too big for her mouth, and she’s trying to get an angle on the thing with contorted jaw movements in an effort to work it down to something manageable. Arwood sits next to her. He’s rifling through his rucksack. He eventually finds what he’s looking for, and removes a juice box — the sort with the little plastic straw glued to the side. In English, it reads, ‘Juice Drink’ and ‘Contains juice.’ Without a word, he removes the straw, places it through the little silver button on the top, and hands it to her as though to a little sister before the movie starts.
She takes it without looking at him.
Jamal is around the front of the truck, for some reason.
Arwood looks at Benton and smiles. ‘I told you so,’ he says.
‘You most certainly did, and I have never been more wrong. Is anyone else hiding here? Have we looked about?’
‘There aren’t a lot of places to look. There’s food and water in here, and the canvas kept her cool enough. If we can get her back to Märta, I think she’ll be fine.’
‘You’ve had quite the day, Arwood Hobbes. We aren’t finished talking about it, not by a long shot, but this goes on the balance sheet. It surely does.’
‘Let’s go home to the refugee camp, where we belong.’
‘All right,’ Benton says, taking a quick look around. ‘What’s her condition?’
‘She’s very happy to see me.’
‘She trusted you? When you looked in the truck?’
‘Why wouldn’t she?’
‘You’re a piece of work, I’ll hand you that. Look, do you think she might answer a question for me before we leave? I might be able to salvage my job if she does. I can’t say I’d given it any thought until now, but given events—’
‘What do you want to know?’ Arwood calls Jamal over to translate.
‘I’d just like to know what happened,’ Benton says, taking a recorder from his own jacket.
Her eating is voracious. While she doesn’t appear starved, there was clearly no fresh food in the truck, and all she’s been eating is dried rations and MREs.
‘Jamal, ask her what happened here.’
Jamal hops down from the truck and dusts his hands off on his jeans. When he translates, he sounds young and kind, like someone’s son.
The girl talks with her mouth full of apple. Jamal nods, and asks clarifying questions that Benton doesn’t understand.
The girl points toward a small gully back by the tracks they followed here. She points at her own clothes.
Jamal frowns. He points at his own clothes, and repeats the word she used.
She nods, and points at two of the dead people.
Then Jamal says, ‘We have to go. We have to go right now. Right this second. Very dangerous. Very, very dangerous here. Big mess. We have to go. Right now.’
Arwood hops down and extends his hand to the girl. She takes it, and walks with him, hand in hand, to the car.
‘What did she say?’ Benton asks, jogging alongside Jamal. ‘Why are we running? No one’s here. No one’s been here for days.’
‘ISIL.’
‘I thought we had this discussion.’
‘No, no. You don’t understand. The girl was near the back of the line. She had the best view on everything. She says it wasn’t Kurds
. It was men wearing black, like ISIL. She saw them carry the mortar, but didn’t know what it was. After the mortar landed, she hid in the truck. She saw two men come out after all the other people ran away. She said they shot the survivors. Everyone. Everyone. And then, when they were finished, they went to the video camera the news people were using, and took something from it. It is over there,’ he says, pointing to the spot where the camera once stood on its tripod. ‘After they took this disk, they went to the tanker truck and put a big black flag on it. This means it is theirs. They will come for it when they want. Anyone caught near it, or taking from the truck, dies. Maybe they come in a month, in a week, in a minute. We don’t want to be here. We must go right now.’
‘Why hasn’t she run away?’
Jamal doesn’t translate because he knows the answer for himself: ‘Something about cousins. I don’t understand. Look, she’s fourteen years old!’
‘The video camera they picked up, is it still there?’ Benton asks. ‘You said they took a disk, not the camera.’
‘Who cares? Your head is more useful than a camera. Have to go.’ They reach the car, and Jamal gets in and starts the engine.
‘I’ll be right back,’ Benton says, seeing that Arwood and the girl haven’t reached the car yet.
‘You crazy man! Get over here.’
‘I’ll be right back,’ Benton says over his shoulder.
There, eighty metres from the Ural, sits the video camera. It’s a familiar high-end consumer model with HD video. It is obviously broken, and the lens is cracked.
Panting, he collects the camera, which burns the tips of his fingers with the heat of the midday sun. Gingerly, he unscrews the fastening bolt that connects it to the tripod, and drops the dead weight to the ground.
Arwood has thrown open the back door, and Benton flops himself onto the hot grey vinyl and pulls the door closed.
The Girl in Green Page 14