A Dark Nativity
Page 17
I returned to England only about a month later, the local UN desk having absorbed much of the administration of the social and education projects we had set up. Through the good offices of the NGO that had sent me in the first place, I took a job administering a teaching-support charity in north London. It was only part-time, three days a week, but it was something to do. It wasn’t where I was going. I started at The Fed shortly after that.
The interview was perfunctory. I’d worked in Sudan and I’d worked in the Middle East. But they did ask me why I’d been ordained as a priest.
“Is that where your compassion comes from?” Jake had asked me.
“No,” I’d replied before I’d thought about it properly. “No, I don’t think it’s about compassion actually. It’s more about justice. I think it’s more about anger than pity.”
Jake had cocked his head in attention to this. “But I suppose it’s the Christian’s imperative to love our neighbour as ourselves, no?”
“Yes, but I think it’s ambitious to suppose that that brings peace, for other people or ourselves,” I’d said. I was a bit on a roll so I went for it. “He also said that he hadn’t come to bring peace, but a sword.”
Looking back, I see that by my mid-twenties I was carrying a sword, rather than a cross. I didn’t know how to use it then. Indeed, it was probably piercing my own heart. But I would learn.
12
The job Toby drove me to in Jerusalem was utterly banal, with no shadow of the horrors to follow. He parked a couple of streets away and I walked maybe a half-mile dogleg of streets. There were a couple of dusk drinkers sitting outside in the orange light. Inside, everything was dazzling white plastic.
Two young men in bomber jackets were sitting at the bar and turned towards me as if I was expected. I pulled the envelope from my pocket and ran it over my knuckles, raising my eyebrows to the young man who was now standing. He flicked his head as if to beckon me and put out his hand to his colleague, who produced an envelope from a black leather shoulder bag. It was an A4 envelope, folded double. The envelopes passed each other briskly and without fuss, no tugging, no ceremony of laying them down together.
“Thank you,” I said, and he flicked his head again and grinned.
I walked briskly back to Toby. He was parked in one of those herringbone Jerusalem bays, reading a paper. I went to his open window.
“There you go,” I said and passed the envelope through the window.
“Splendid,” he said. “Jump in.”
“Do you want to know anything about who I saw, what they looked like?”
“Nope. No offence, Nat, but they’re people like you. Or me. Just doing someone a favour.”
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
“Above my pay grade. Come on, get in.”
If I had, if I’d gone for a drink with Toby, maybe some supper, I wonder how things might have turned out. I doubt it would have altered anything; they’d have got me later, is all. As it was I made it easy for them.
“No, you go on. I’ll walk back to my digs. It’s a nice enough evening.”
That’s what I was doing. Swinging along between the low shrubs beside the main road, heading west, about a kilometre from my conference apartment, when I heard my name barked from behind me and turned instinctively. A dark vehicle with dark windows was pulling up next to me. Arms on my arms, a large heavy hand on the top of my head. I was in the back of the car before I’d seen who’d called me.
And there was no dwindling dusk, no gloaming to which the light of my day submitted. Light straight to dark. I was alive and then I might as well have been dead. Breath still inflated me, but imagination and consciousness were gone, like my own hard-drive had crashed.
I was plunged from the light of my day into the dark of a nylon hood, as I lay across the back seat of a saloon car, bucketing like plane baggage in turbulence. I can’t say what I was thinking about, if I was thinking at all. So I can’t claim I was violated. More like invalidated. Tough as it is to concede, all that surrounds us defines us. We have no other identity. I amounted to Natalie Cross, Anglican priest, inadequate wife, minor canon, sometime missionary. That’s me in London, or Africa, or the Middle East, floating but anchored to a deathless litany of functions. From this moment, I had no purpose other than those defined by other people. Perhaps this is the sense of objective calmness that enfolds some at moments close to death. I was being unwound, wiped clean – though emptied, not purified.
It wasn’t so much that I could do nothing; it was that I had become nothing.
And it’s as though I write of another person, someone spawned in that car journey. What happened didn’t happen to me, but to the person I became. I can’t view it now with anger or fear, far less with penitence, but only with a dispassionate clarity – she was abducted, she was abused and beaten in captivity – but in that cold wasteland, in that stripped-down world in which she was denied any of her customary points of reference, she found a new life in her, a new person, capable of acts she couldn’t have imagined. She feels guilty that she can scan those days and collate hideous events without the slightest catch in the throat, no gasp, and that her hands stay steady as she talks of them.
It happened to her, you see, not to me.
We drove urban streets for perhaps half an hour. I heard no talking and my breath became damp and muggy around my hooded head. Some movement on the seat beside me heralded a fresh intervention, and I was pulled up by the shoulder, my head following trunk like the lagged response of one roused from sleep. The hood snatched off like a magician’s reveal and a wordless, dark young man next to me, holding a small plastic cup to my mouth, the size of a tablet dispenser. He pinched my nose with a reversed hand, the palm covering my eyes and I ingested the contents of the cup. It was viscous liquid and tasted like a bad soda I drank on that last night in Sudan. The hood rustled back; I was less a falcon being returned to blind calm than a parrot being put to sleep in its cage. The arrhythmic road had straightened and I vacated myself, neither asleep nor now fully conscious but in a parallel peace.
So I can’t say how long I was in that car, nor even properly when I left it. I believe I can remember some stairs, though that seems like it was longer ago, which either I negotiated well, leading my mysterious escort party like old friends, or up which I was partially carried, my feet tentatively exploring where they might find some purchase.
I was asleep for a long time, I think. I could have slept for ever and I don’t think anything awoke me. My room came to me in episodes. There was a radio somewhere and it had been playing long into my consciousness, a man’s voice telling me in Arabic how good minted fluoride was for the gums, maybe. Or it may be that the voice was occupying my head, as the tongue I located in it, which had clearly been up and about its business before others of my components had awoken, was exploring the remains of the viscous film behind my teeth.
It was tranquil, like sleeping in as a child, the sun shining insistently through a high window beyond numb feet, covered absurdly with a candlewick bedspread. Fingers still played at the base of my throat and I heard unrestricted airflow through my nose, expelled air from a dormant windpipe. I recognised the fingers as my own, raising the index and middle to tap at my chin. There was some gluey stickiness around my mouth and I supposed I’d been gagged.
Above me, a hexagonally tiled ceiling. I felt no desire to move, ever again, until a deep breath, perhaps even a raucous snore catching the back of a dry throat, raised me to consciousness properly and the sun had passed the window.
This time, my head moved to my right side and my eyes followed. The bed was a divan, wooden framed, and against a distempered wall to my left. The floor was a beige-brown rope-cord carpeting that had been neatly cut against a thin skirting board, painted magnolia. The room was twenty-two feet by twelve, because I paced it out in the early days when I thought the detail might be important in any subsequent debrief. It was the kind of room an estate agent might describe as a singl
e bedroom, or even ambitiously as the study. The only window was the high little one to the right of my feet, more of a skylight really, through which the sun now shone what I guessed to be its afternoon tone. The door was at the opposite end of the wall to my bedhead and flush with it. There was a small alcove, no more than a recessed fitted cupboard really, at the foot of the bed. Nothing on the walls, no other furniture.
Swinging my legs and sitting up without having made any real decision to do so, I saw a black length of fabric-reinforced duct tape on the floor beside the bed, about eight inches long and still curved from the shape of my chin. My gag, still sticky. I picked it up.
Instantly, I needed to pee. It was time to tell Dad I was awake. I called a “Hello”, rather cheerily under the circumstances.
The air of human presence and the changing blink of shadow on the wall indicated the arrival of the young man who I presumed served my in-flight cocktail in the car. Tidy dark beard, sleeveless navy shirt, fashion combat pants, late-twenties I’d guess and reassuringly unarmed. He looked at me blankly.
“I need the toilet,” I said like a child, ridiculously, and he indicated the alcove to my left with an upturned palm, expressionless and without judgement, a simple declaration of direction.
I stood gingerly and my head expressed alarm, like a conning tower in fog. Through slightly tunnelled vision, I saw the alcove contained two white enamel buckets, a pitcher of water covered with a coarse grey towel and two large white linen napkins. I squatted over a bucket and then laid one of the linens over it, like an altar offering. The young man reappeared by and by, collected and returned it empty, without speaking, as I sat on the bed.
It never occurred to me to ask where I was. It was both obvious and irrelevant. It wasn’t, anyway, a question that could be answered with a geographical reference. I was in my own clothes, I noted, but my watch and wrist-purse were gone and, of course, my mobile phone. I propped the single, foam-filled pillow against the bedhead and watched the cast of the sun across the room’s corner.
A little later, he brought me some sustenance on a small, orange plastic tray. Some flatbread, hummus, an oily salad of leaves and a tourist bottle of fizzy water with a flip-cap and teat. Wordlessly he dealt with my ablutions again. A single switch lit a central ceiling bulb with a round paper shade. After a while I turned it off, just to see if it worked and was under my control, and let it grow dark. I could hear the drone and sliced air of fast traffic somewhere, but no voices. I lay on my back, my fingers plaited together on my abdomen and thought of the feeding station in Sudan and the weeping doctor. There was no point in considering my own circumstances; the effort was pointless, like starting out in a desert for a location over the horizon, without a map. It wasn’t even worth starting and it would be mortally dangerous to do so.
Morning brought a fresh aspect to the room, the sun lighting the window only by reflection. It would only, I learned, start to catch the sills directly at around what I calculated to be midday or early afternoon. The bearded dead face brought me slices of orange and dates.
Sweat in the night had started to chap the inside of my thighs where my trousers creased, so I moved awkwardly. I stretched against the bare wall and called out facetiously for the window to be opened for some air.
“It’s too small to climb through!” I reasoned loudly.
The bed couldn’t help me reach it as it was screwed to the wall with brackets and an upturned bucket didn’t provide the height. No answer. I had tried the door handle with a gentle and silent turn of the wrist. So far as I could tell, one simple bolt on the outside.
I’d been awake, I thought, perhaps two or three hours, when the motionless day and the rhythms of a solitary bluebottle was fractured by the clatter of new arrivals beyond my door, male voices in the clacking beat of Arabic and dull thumps of furniture supporting the weight of human and metal cargo. The bolt turned and a burly man ambled in, with a head like a waxen orb, long pale shorts with sandals and a light flak jacket. He inspected me as he walked an arc across the room, drawing on a cigarette and watching me, as one who would inspect a second-hand car before purchase.
A younger man, almost a boy, followed, a gun slung over his shoulder, then a troll of indeterminate age, black-toothed and sweating, their driver perhaps, I thought. He wore a loose, rustcoloured turban, that trailed at the back. Odd colour, I thought.
“Hello,” said Burly at last, flatly.
I nodded neutrally. I was striking a balance between truculence and compliance. He stood over me.
“How are you?” I didn’t answer, just stared at the wall. “Do you have all you need?”
“I need to be in Jerusalem,” I said. “There’s a conference I’m attending, you know. They’ll miss me.”
He smoked. “I want you to know that you are of no value to us,” he said, in good English. “We only need you for a little time, maybe to serve a big purpose. Or maybe a long time. Short time, long time, it doesn’t matter. We will use you and throw you away.”
I was looking at his stomach, straight ahead. His shirt was made by a French designer.
“Are you Hamas?” I said pathetically. It was like I was networking at the conference. Silence on his part.
“What do you want me to say?” I said, I hoped tonelessly. “That I’ll cooperate or something?”
He squatted down to look me in the eye and I caught the acrid breath of tobacco, the sweet kind, not the dusty foliage of truckers. He took the pace from his voice, so the words just rode the air from his throat hoarsely.
“We’re going to make you a movie star, Christian lady.”
His eyes darted between each of mine, looking for reaction. Looking back, I now know this was the only moment that I felt the knot at the base of the sternum that precedes crying. The cold fear of physical violence, even the prospect of immediate death, never gave me that feeling again, not this simple room, nor in the other rooms of the flat. I could handle the serious stuff. It was being patronised with the simple imagery of schoolgirl dreams that nearly did it.
“What is this?” he said suddenly, pointing at my eyebrow.
“It’s a scar,” I said.
“Scar? How is that?”
“In a sword-fight,” I said. “You should see the other guys.”
He paused and contemplated me. Then he snorted a laugh and put his hand on my knee to support himself as he stood and the moment passed.
“You know you should never have come back to Palestine,” he said as he turned his back, the boy and the Troll parting to let him out. Then they followed him. The lock snapped and I looked upwards to the ceiling to clear the moisture from the lower lids of my eyes and realised I was praying.
“Dear God,” I was whispering over and over again. “Dear God.” It became a chanted litany as the hours ran from day to night. “Deargoddeargoddeargoddeargod.” A rhythmic, gibbering appeal because there was nothing else to ask, because there was nothing to be understood.
But in the still of that night there was the call of another thought. From a remote hill somewhere, another voice was shouting a single question into the wind. “Deargoddeargoddeargod.” Yet a further, more insistent petition was pressing me: why “back to Palestine”? Why “back”? How much these people knew of me was the background noise to my exhausted despair, like the endless faint dog-bark that carried on the breeze to my high window.
Time passed again and this was to be the routine of my existence in that room over days that turned into weeks – torpid longueurs punctuated with intense engagements, interludes of heightened reality, then endless isolation, with only feeding and defecating events, while voices in the next room affirmed that I was never alone. I wondered if I would ever be able to wash properly; I dreamt of washing my hair in a mountain stream.
The low sun shining on to my tiled ceiling showed it was late afternoon when they returned some days later. It was the Troll who opened the door and the boy swung in like a bellhop with a letter.
“This
way,” he directed and seized my upper arm as I passed him, needlessly pushing me through the door. This must be what it was like to have been hanged in Britain, I remember thinking dispassionately, as I left my condemned cell for the first time.
The next room was only slightly larger than mine. It held a square, dark wooden table, some plastic easy chairs and a heavy door facing the one I came through, with two heavy bolts across its cross-beams and a single mortice lock by its round handle.
My heightened consciousness took in the metal-framed window with its short and dirtied coral fabric curtains, through which I could see the top of a wall that might mark the boundary of our building and some roofs in a parallel line beyond, implying a narrow street or an alley. We were, I guessed, on the second floor. There was an open arch to my right, to a space with a stove and a fridge, also bathed in natural light from another window. I assumed this had a bathroom to its rear, next to my room. We were in a one-or two-bedroom flat.
This front reception room had five men in it. Burly, the Boy and the Troll, who had been joined by two others, a youngish man who could have been the boy’s elder brother, who was talking in Lebanese to a more European-looking man in maybe his forties. This one was tinkering with a camcorder, wired by telephone spring cable to a laptop on the table.
This table was being shifted, leading to an altercation between the technician and the European. The young men were simultaneously climbing into dishdashes and arranging turbans above dark cowboy-style neckerchiefs. Sheets of paper with Arabic slogans were taped to the wall opposite the camera and I was manhandled on to a stool in front of them.
The boys, dressed, picked up automatic weapons and flanked me.
I can follow Lebanese patois rather more easily than Palestinian, so I gathered it was proving difficult to frame me with the slogans and the militia boys. I was stood up and sat down again as the chair was moved forward and back. Then the camera tripod was pulled back hard against the opposite wall, with its operator deploying its autofocus while holding the laptop in his spare hand. The cable jumped from its socket and he swore.