A Dark Nativity

by George Pitcher

  I checked my legs and arms; there were scratches and one deeper gash on the back of one calf, caked now with dried blood. My arms were pinked with my own as well as the Boy’s blood. The overtrousers were torn and the back of the smock was wholly scuffed with slate dust, but I’d just have to explain that away somehow. I washed in the brook and, clocking that the sheep that had started their dawn bleating were downstream, I drank a little as it looked cool and clear, living water that soothed my sickened stomach.

  That dawn, I guessed, I was in the foothills of the Chouf mountains, but I’d need a road sign or a talkative driver to get some bearings. So I straightened up and patted down my incongruous clothing and scrambled up the bank to the roadside. There was a utility bin, grit or sand perhaps, away down the road and I strode down purposefully to sit on it.

  Only one vehicle, a coach of sorts, passed in the opposite direction. Sitting on the bin, I let a lorry pass, then another, while pretending to examine an imaginary smartphone in the palm of my hand. A lorry has connections, professional curiosities.

  Then a suave executive car. I didn’t stand, but offered an inquisitive palm, such as a professional stuck in a wilderness might offer if their car had broken down and they were wondering what to do next. It too passed.

  I became keenly aware of the risk I was taking. Mr Silent might take this route to his work as my janitor, or Burly, or any of his mates might already be out on the road looking for me. I’d be picked up, driven up a track somewhere and despatched. If I was lucky. Women who behaved like men could be particularly brutally treated. Raped and stoned, maybe; there were enough rocks around.

  I thought of taking off across country again, but the crags rose sharply on the other side of the road and this was wild country. I had to take the chance of a car ride.

  I remember them all. A station wagon, a van, a woman with children. The children looked at me, heads turning as the car passed. It must have been past seven, or even later, a school run. I’d soon have to think of hiding again.

  I became more demanding. I stood, stuck out my thumb. Would that be recognised as British? No, thumb in Lebanon, flat palm in Syria, I recalled. Several more cars between the lorries. The working world was waking.

  Then a red flatbed arrived, the sort with the maker’s name written large across the back, the kind we used in the desert. I saw sun-wrinkled skin, a white singlet, grey stubble. I felt his gaze focus on me from within the cab, like I was a sign. So my head followed its passing and the brake lights came on, its nose dipping slightly, dust rising from the kerb.

  I should have a bag to pick up, I thought, as I ran to catch up, surprised that my legs were working so well. The passenger window was down and a wiry, bronzed little man, probably late forties, but dried up by the sun, like a prune, was leaning across, his bright blue eyes the only colour in the cab.

  “Hi,” he said, leaning his fist on the rug of the passenger seat. Popeye’s Mediterranean uncle.

  Dust and earth and cigarette packets on the dash, a long-extinguished air freshener swinging from the rear-view mirror. Placed there optimistically by a wife, maybe? It was shabbier and it smelt of bricks, but it reminded me of Yusef’s truck, the same sense of enclosed safety, nothing to do but wait and watch, the sun winking from behind the windscreen struts.

  “Thanks,” I’d said girlishly as I fell in, like a cowgirl.

  Then a bit too quickly, “I’m a relief worker with the UN. Been doing a tour of camps on a sanitation inspect. Just broke down. My truck was just taken away.”

  “Yeah?” he said, grinning and wincing forward.

  He wasn’t engaging with that narrative and I concluded that he wasn’t with my captors. I was motoring away and I wanted to go with that presumption, away from glassy eyes and sticky blood and the condemning silence.

  “Where you going?”

  “Just down to the border,” I said.

  I hadn’t thought that far yet. I was still concentrating on departing, getting away, not on arriving anywhere. I started to build an assumption that border guards would be sufficiently bureaucratic to turn me in to the authorities, where I could contact the UN Mission and maybe the British consulate. Just a dippy relief worker who had got separated from her team. Even if they recognised me from the TV bulletins, they’d pass me up the line. They’d not want to get involved.

  “Border?”

  He chuckled softly to himself and rested just one hand on the top of the steering wheel. He looked out through his open window and shook his head a bit.

  “I know,” I said, trying to enjoy whatever the joke was. “I need to check some supplies coming in.”

  As casual as I could be. Keep it vague. I guessed he was a Lebanese builder, busy over the years with the rebuilding of the Beirut suburbs and the bombed south.

  “Border,” he said again. “Is that what you call it now?”

  I didn’t understand. The road was black and new. I stayed silent and he drove quite slowly, that one brown arm holding the top of the wheel, the other hand cupped in the slipstream outside his window.

  “I’m going down to Jericho. Which side will I drop you?”

  Still I said nothing. The Lebanon/Israel border was long closed, a militarised zone. Very few passed that way and only with the highest authority. He couldn’t possibly be passing in a builder’s truck. I didn’t want to direct the conversation towards my lack of papers or passport.

  I felt the swing in my stomach as I started to lose control again. It was like one of those fantasy games where you can’t escape your dystopia, always ending up back in the same place. A truck passed. Something about its licence plates? I was finding it hard to concentrate.

  Then a road sign, growing larger, like a dawning idea. It was coming to me gently to tell me something. A direction on to a slip-road, two lines, two languages. One Arabic. One Hebrew.

  I pretended to be lost in thought. The road was straightening out from the hills and we were looking out across a plain.

  “Remind me of the name of that village, that town, where you picked me up? Where I broke down. I’ll need to tell them to pick up my truck.”

  He shrugged and stuck out his bottom lip. “I don’t know. One of the developments. A new one, I think.”

  Some more traffic, passing too quickly for me to catch details. What did Lebanese plates look like anyway? How did it look when Yusef was driving me? Come on, girl, get a grip.

  “Where are we, I mean, how far to the border . . . to the . . . barrier?” I couldn’t think of the words. “To the wall. Roughly, from here.”

  “We’re only twenty minutes, maybe half an hour from the checkpoint now,” he said calmly. He hadn’t baulked when I said “wall”. Why had I said wall?

  “You have papers, yes?” He looked at me only for the second time. I was carrying nothing. This could get him arrested.

  “Bumbag,” I said uselessly.

  A larger sign, blue across the road, which now widened into traffic lanes. Hebrew again. Oh God. I felt sick with madness, everything rocking, not just the car. I wanted to say to let me out now, here, deal with this panic attack on my own, hyperventilate beside the road with my head between my knees. Is that prayer?

  The traffic filter was to another trunk road, a big town from the size of the sign, just eight kilometres away. Hebrew again. Oh, Jesus Christ. It says Nazareth.

  “Drop me here,” I said. Then, pathetically, “We have an office. I just remembered. It’ll be fine. Please, just pull up before the exit.”

  I sounded urgent, distressed, panicky. Not good.

  But he flicked his indicator arm, glanced at his wing mirror and channelled. He must think I’m a mad bitch. Or is this where he pulls a gun, parks up beside a smarter van. In it is sitting Burly and the Troll, maybe Hamal in the back.

  I’d be glad to see him. In a strange way, it would make everything OK.

  “Just stop, please. I feel sick.”

  He cupped his hand up to indicate that it made no diffe
rence to him. “It’s easy. I’ll drop you at the roundabout. Better for lifts.”

  Suddenly it was all true and I’d readjusted all sensory perception. This is where I am, I thought. This is reality. The road to Nazareth.

  I needed time to think. I’d killed my captors. I had to come to terms with that. But here was the shock of the new: I hadn’t been held in Lebanon by Hamas. I hadn’t even been held in the occupied West Bank. I’d never left Israel. I needed to absorb that knowledge, or let it wash over me like a rising tide. I needed to know what it meant for me, for what I’d need to do next.

  In the end, he drove me nearly into town, where the traffic started thickening and telephone wires criss-crossed the road. There were boys on bicycles. A petrol station.

  He grinned from the driving door as he drove away, made a sweeping pass with his hand. Onward and upward. He had flicked a radio on when we’d left the freeway and I suddenly felt bad that maybe he’d been expecting to talk more, have some company.

  He swung the truck around in the road. He was just a regular Palestinian – Muslim? Christian? – going about his business. The simplicity of that encounter made me want to weep by the road. I couldn’t really remember a time when I’d related to anyone who I didn’t think might kill me and I wasn’t ready for the shock of human kindness.

  I was now severed from my previous life, when I’d known human warmth like that as ordinary. But I had a kind of freedom again. The road rose before me and I could walk into Nazareth from here.

  *

  I sat on a low white wall on the edge of a square, on the edge of the Latin Quarter. On the edge of a wall again, as I had by the leaning tree at Jerusalem University with Toby an eternity ago.

  But I’d fallen back into my old familiar bubble like an old armchair. All around me crowded in, jostling for space, coming too close, but nothing and no one could touch me in my own world.

  Watch but don’t touch. The cyclists ramming past, the tourist coaches schlepping up the hill into the old city, some stalls selling oranges and bananas between palm and plane trees, the sun pinking the tarmac between their creeping shadows.

  The people of Nazareth went about their chores and I didn’t think of them or me. I just sat, I suppose for some hours, not thinking but only watching. No one in the world knew I was here. Just being, I think you’d say, conscious, breathing steadily, watching without really seeing.

  The sounds pressed in too, the sound of motor engines, the voices, the footsteps. But I was set to a different rhythm, a more somnolent metronomic tick. I was in my own little viewing gallery.

  I knew I had murdered two people since the last moon. I had stabbed one to death with a crude weapon I had fashioned and shot the other twice in the chest with two different guns. Before then, weapons of choice had been my voice, my knee and a carpentry circular saw. I’d graduated.

  But these thoughts took no purchase, like gulls flying into glass, and they just fell away. So I sat in silence, with no judgement made or received, just waiting, until a time came not to do so.

  Beside me on the wall was the peel of an orange that had been tossed to me by one of the market boys. He’d held it up and called in Arabic to me as I crossed the square. Maybe because he was Palestinian. Maybe because of my clothes. I had shrugged in a manner that was meant to convey something between not being bothered and having no money, and he’d lobbed it to me and I’d caught it and smiled. I hadn’t wanted to attract any attention and dropping it might have done so.

  Then there had been a skip, full of building materials for recyc-ling, by one of the eternal building sites that pepper Israeli towns, patching up the flimsy buildings that hang between the international construction. There was a short length of copper piping among the cluster of plumbing detritus in one corner, and I slipped it into my sleeve as I passed between skip and plastic sheeting that hung like curtains around a wounded patient.

  As ever, I can’t claim to have had any plan, but knew vaguely I shouldn’t have thrown my murder weapon away. The little piece of tap piping, about the length of a child’s geometry ruler, now lay under my orange peel, and I sat waiting for the reason I’d taken it to come to me.

  I know all about wordless prayer – you don’t need words to pray; Yusef’s mother-in-law had shown me that – and so I waited for direction. It’s good enough to acknowledge there’s a plan, but you don’t need to know what the plan is.

  What I did know is that I had more time for my enemies than my friends. More time for the dead Hamal and Troll, even Burly, and for the people that ran them than for those who had let them take me.

  I slid my backside from the wall before I knew I was leaving it and I had a sense that I’d started an enterprise. Here we go. I slipped my copper tube back into my sleeve, then crossed the square confidently and directly, invisibly, to the cafe opposite, up two tiled steps, a narrow terrace where two men had been playing backgammon for as long as I could remember sitting on the wall, and into the cool of the bar.

  There was a stocky young woman who I’d watched serving at tables. A taller young man had left as their customers dwindled, probably for a nap, I thought, or to buy food in the market for the evening shift. A Jewish family working an inherited franchise hard, I’d guessed.

  She turned from wiping cups, showing her teeth but not smiling. She had expressive dark eyes – deeply loved by the man in her life, I supposed. They flicked me up and down, not rudely, almost imperceptibly.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said in Hebrew, then in English: “I’ve lost my phone. I’m afraid it may have been stolen. I’ve no way of contacting my boyfriend to pick me up. Could I possibly use yours, just for a second?”

  The briefest of pauses, then her face broke into a broad and effortless smile.

  “Naturally.”

  She started to disentangle a landline from below the shelf of the bar, then gave up and picked a mobile out of a breast pocket, from behind her order pad. I sighed that this was too gracious, apologetically, and she waved in dismissive generosity. The global sisterhood for needy phone calls to errant boyfriends trounced any curiosities she may have harboured of this Westerner, with poor Hebrew, in Arab clothes.

  I pointed to the terrace and she said, “Sure,” in English. In the Jewish way, she’d gone for the whole hospitality sketch and had decided that I wasn’t going to run off with her mobile.

  I didn’t need to gather myself; perhaps I’d done that on the wall. A swift internet search reminded me of Toby’s office switchboard number and I punched out his direct extension line with a jabby forefinger. I recalled it without pause. Prayer without words.

  It rang out and gave me Toby’s voicemail, more serious in tone than he really was. I was committed, I knew that, and after the beep I didn’t miss a beat.

  “Hi, Toby, it’s Nat. Remember me? Call me on this, why don’t you.”

  I snapped the phone shut. The girl was standing in the door, wiping her hands.

  “He’ll call me back,” I said, holding up her phone. She didn’t take it.

  “Sit down,” she said. “I’ll get you coffee.”

  I half-laughed. “I haven’t any money. Stolen too.”

  “Pay me next time.” And she disappeared inside.

  I sat down, the borrowed mobile in front of me. How quickly could they trace it? Do they have that sort of technology anyway?

  I figured I’d sit for about half an hour, then move on. That way they’d only find this girl and her phone. And I’d try from somewhere else.

  Suddenly I wasn’t sure what I was doing; I wanted Toby to come for me, not a hit squad. Pulling that off depended on how I floated my fly on their water. But I knew now I couldn’t trust my friends any more than I could give myself up to Burly and his pals.

  The girl brought olives and figs and coffee in a small percolator. I didn’t wait long. Perhaps eleven minutes. Approximately. Who am I kidding, I counted them. The screen lit with the number I’d dialled. I answered but stayed silent, the girl watc
hing me.

  “Nat?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Bloody Nora, Nat, where’ve you been? We’ve – I’ve – been worried sick.”

  That’s exactly what he said.

  “Listen, Toby, listen very carefully. Don’t screw this up or I’ll never see you again, you understand? I’m in Nazareth.” He started to interrupt and I talked across him. “I want you to come and pick me up. But only you, Toby. Got that? Only you – and you tell no one, absolutely no one, that you’re coming. That’s really important, got that, Toby? I’ll know if you do and you’ll never see me again. Know that.”

  “What’s going on, Nat. You OK?” I suddenly wanted to cry, a great wracking sob welling up inside.

  “Not dead, Toby.”

  I started to spit down the phone, my voice breaking.

  “Not fucking dead. So you get here now. Alone. I’m in the square behind the Mennonite church, on the Latin side. Park opposite the building site next to the palm trees. It’s Giuseppe Market. You come alone in your little silver car, all right? Or – listen to me, Toby – the whole bloody thing goes off and we’re all dead.”

  “Giuseppe Market. Nat, tell me—” But I hung up, weeping softly.

  The girl was standing in the doorway. This time she looked severe and turned away. Oh, sod it, I thought, I give up, do your worst, call the police or Mossad or whatever. I’m finished. Spent.

  But she returned almost straight away, with two glasses and a pichet of white wine, some bread and a pack of cigarettes. She sat, took a cigarette and pushed the packet towards me, without a word.

  “I’m Esther,” she said after a while. “What’s your name?”

  “Maria,” I said. I wanted to protect her.

  I stayed more than that half an hour. Toby was on the case and I’d blown my cover, as I believe the argot has it. He’d had time, before he called me back, to speak to colleagues and record the conversation. I estimated that it would take him less than an hour and a half to collect his car and drive to Nazareth. He’d drive up the road that followed the exclusion wall of the Occupied Territory. That was certainly the way I planned to return. No papers for the West Bank.