I sat back with a gasp of exasperation and threw an arm in the air theatrically. It was good to feel it working again.
“What the bloody hell does that mean?”
“If they’d picked you up, it would have made it look like you were important to them. As it was, you were an unstable associate who’d had a massive breakdown. The only harm that would come to you is what you did to yourself.”
“And Toby knew this?”
“No, as I say, above his pay grade. But he was told to look after you, I expect.”
I was quieter now, acknowledging that Sarah was giving all she could.
“How about you, Sar, how did you know all this?”
“We have people working with them. That’s how I found out you were in Jerusalem.”
“But how did you know I was in that hotel?”
“Our people were picking up more from Toby’s office – they knew where you were too. That’s why I was in such a rush to get you out.”
“Do they know where I am now?”
“No. You’ve just disappeared again. Like magic. Except this time it’s not their magic, it’s ours.”
“Doesn’t the hotel have CCTV?” I was struggling to find a weakness in her case.
“Oh, please, Nat. . . it’s always crashing, and guess what? It crashed just before we arrived.”
She looked at me reproachfully. I could tell she was trying to lighten the tone.
“What happens now?” I asked, defeated, Sarah’s junior again.
“We’ve got to get you home safely. The important thing is to make you safe.”
“How do we do that?”
“I don’t know yet. Friends are working on it. More in the morning. Let’s walk by the lake. It’s really lovely in the moonlight.”
Down by the lake the velvet darkness of the water absorbed rather than reflected the stars, as if heaven had been pulled to earth. A bat jinked across it like a fallen angel.
“Where’s Mr Sarapov?” I asked.
“Vienna. Then New York. You should meet him. You’d like him.”
“Any husband of yours is a friend of mine,” I said. “Do you have a cigarette, Sar?”
“Back at the house.”
We turned to go back up the lawn.
“I don’t know who I can trust any more,” I said. “But I do trust you, Sar.”
Sarah sighed. “I wish you had a choice,” she said.
From early morning, I could hear Sarah on her mobile and laptop, in snatches of Russian, Hebrew and Arabic. When I joined her, she was sitting among untouched plates of fruit, yoghurt and meats, drinking thick black coffee. I ate a little and waited for her to stop tapping.
“Well encrypted, I hope?” I said when she paused.
“Yes, but no one’s looking here,” she said. “I’m on Russian trade lines.”
She shut the laptop and looked at me. The melancholy of the night before had evaporated in the hot morning air.
“We’re going to get you out and home but we’re going to do that by arousing no suspicion.”
“Out to where?” I said through a mouthful of brioche.
“London.”
I put down the coffee pot. “Why will I be safe there?”
“We’re going to make you safe. We’re going to give you stuff to make you safe.”
“Like a Russian tank? Or a Palestinian suicide vest?”
“Shut up, Nat, and listen.”
So I did. She outlined her plan and then got on to travel arrangements.
“We have a jet. We can’t fly direct to Europe from here – too dangerous, they could pick us up on customs and immigration. We’ll take you out of Beirut. But we can’t fly direct there. So we’ll take you to Amman. That’s easy, we do it all the time. Then you fly scheduled Amman to Beirut, you’ll not get picked up on that. You have your passport?”
“And UN Blue Card, yes.”
“You won’t need either of those. We have a brand-new Russian passport for you. And visa. You’re with the Centre now. In fact, you have been for . . .” She looked at her laptop. “. . . eleven years. Congratulations. I have your old one to be safe.”
She picked it up and waved it. “So please don’t say you have a British passport again.”
“Who am I, Sar?”
“Maria. Maria Koltsov. Masha for short. You’d like her too, as it happens. We use her all the time.”
“Maria. How funny.” I thought of Esther. “But I don’t speak Russian,” I said.
“It’s fine. Nor does she. She’s from Detroit. But no one will ask.”
She looked at me in her authoritative way. “We go this afternoon. I’ll meet you in Lebanon. At Yusef Nasser’s place.”
She was going too fast and I held my arms out, palms flat.
“Whoa, Sar. You know Yusef?”
“I know who he is, yes. Sorry for the intrusion. Go to him. He’s your other friend.”
17
The anxiety only started to kick in again at Amman airport. Until then, the day had been like a business trip. Sarah had hand luggage with soaps and creams, bless her, and changes of clothes: brand names, light and loose tops, a bra at last. She promised warmer things for London.
Another 4x4 waited and we drove down on to the plain, and there was an airstrip with a few light aircraft and a small executive jet with its engines idling. Two guards peered into the car, but seemed to be expecting us.
“I’ll see you there, hun,” said Sarah, and kissed me. “Two or three days at the most.”
And then we were airborne over the top of the Dead Sea, just me and one of the Russian staff, a big but nice man who just smiled reassuringly in my direction. We taxied into a kind of private jet enclosure at Amman, then through two lounges where my escort showed passports and visas and spoke Arabic with a dense accent.
He left me with my tickets on landside, pointing at the departures board and I waited less in anonymity than pseudonymity, trying to see the world as Maria would.
You have to fly through Jordan to reach Lebanon from Israel. Amman airport is plastic and inauthentic. All that Arabic vaulting that tries to look like palm trees, reflected in mirrored black flooring that was meant to look like marble but was some kind of veneer, no depth in its reflection. Just a transit point, somewhere to travel from, not to. As it would have been for the magi, it’s a point to the east that’s much less important than your destination to the west.
Waiting for my connection – a cute little earner for Jordan – the anxiety returned and I trembled slightly, but no sweats, nor shortening of breath. As I sat on a marble-style bench, I wondered again if I was being followed, whether someone even now was checking me out from the passing travellers or from the mezzanine balcony of cafes and bars.
I played around with the things I knew for sure to calm me down. I’d been a game-changer since I killed to escape. But they hadn’t wanted to bring me in, arrest me, shut me up. If they’d wanted to kill me, they could have done, easily. But they’d left me with Toby, poor sweet Toby, who I prayed wasn’t any part of this, even if he had spiked my coffee.
I wondered what had happened to him. But I was no longer disappointed or even surprised to recognise that I didn’t care. I was too tired emotionally to care about anything. If they were leaving me in the wild, it was because I could lead them somewhere. I’m afraid I didn’t care about that either. Where else had I to go?
All my explorings were leading me to where I began, to recognise the place for the first time. But that was only part of my internal poetry. I was recognising myself for the first time, watching my little token as I moved it in the game. Looking at the little hunched figures in the mock-marbled mass of the transfer hall at Amman, I realised I was formed now entirely by events. Taken at their flood, they were washing me back where I’d come from.
I once went back to my school not long after my dad died. I suppose, with him gone, I’d wanted to check how much of my childhood was real. I wanted to know if it looked any different without him arou
nd.
Sometimes you expect a place to wait for you, to keep its memories fresh for your return. But it hadn’t done that. It looked just the same, but it wasn’t part of my story any more.
The corridor where they’d laughed at Sarah had been repainted with a gloss magnolia over the two-tone institutional light-blue and brown of our schooldays. It seemed to shrug at me and didn’t care that I hadn’t been there. Many other girls had laughed and cried through it since. It had moved on without my memory’s permission. We don’t own places. They own us and then they throw us away.
It was a bit like that when I arrived in Beirut. When I reached the camp, I noticed it had a new parking area at the foot of the incline. The washing had been edged out of the way to make room for satellite dishes, like Arab figures huddling from soldiers.
The water channel still ran down the centre of the passageway, but it didn’t seem so steep now, like I’d been a child when I was here before, and the way was shorter than I remembered, meaning I had to walk up and down it twice to be sure I was in the right alley.
But then I found the house as if it was an old friend waiting patiently to be recognised. It was shuttered, but the car seat was still outside, though covered in a tarpaulin and bright orange blanket, which had made me hesitate in case I was standing before something similar but not the same.
A young neighbour, tall and scrawny – had I seen him as a boy? – told me that they couldn’t be far, and I walked up the hill a bit to where some lads were playing basketball on a cleared terrace. I sat on a bin, in the shade, idly watching them for about an hour I suppose. When I wandered back down, I was pleased, though not exultant, to see that the windows of the house were now unshuttered. There were new stringed beads hanging as a curtain across the door. I just walked in. I was home, after all, and I simply called, “Hello?”
Yusef emerged from the back rooms. He was wiping his hands on an old stretch of towelling. His hands were oily – I thought for an instant that he might be mending a bike for Asi. But, of course, he’d be all grown up now. He had been mending a washing machine, perhaps. The old lady’s chair was gone, I noticed, along with the painting of the Madonna. In its place was an old L-shaped leatherette sofa, cream-coloured and cracked, and a low glass table, which Yusef would have plundered from a college somewhere.
He had pulled up short, just looking at me. I suddenly felt relieved. His tummy was only slightly looser, I noticed, and a few white hairs flecked his stubble.
“Yuse, I’m in trouble,” I said. He just took the three steps forward and, still holding the rag to protect me from the oil, hugged me in the way that I’d forgotten he’d hugged me when I left years before.
He cooked lamb and I told him my story. Part of my story. I didn’t tell him about the Boy and the Troll. Not what I’d done to them anyway. I was neither ashamed nor afraid of Yusef’s reaction, but – and here’s the weird thing – I didn’t think it was relevant. I’m aware now that I’ve put that episode – no, that event – in its own compartment. I have killed two people. I stabbed one in the throat and shot the other. Twice. There. But why tell Yusef? That’s not why I was here. But later he extracted part of the truth from me.
“How did you get out?” he asked as we sat on the car seat again, like the old days, even if we sat there as different people.
“They were men. They wanted to do things to me that men do. The young one did.”
“He raped you?”
“I raped him.”
Yusef said nothing more and I was grateful for that. And that was it.
After a while, watching his cigarette smoke spiral into the dark like incense, Yusef turned to me. “Who knows you’re here?”
“Only Sarah, I think,” I said. “I’m sorry, Yuse. I had to come. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s OK, it doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t think I was followed. But they may have the flight trail. I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said again. “Everyone knows where I live anyway.”
“Sarah Curse does. How does she know you, Yuse?”
He just smiled and resumed his smoking, blowing rings now.
“You’ll sleep here. You’ll be safe.”
And I did. In what I guessed had been his boy’s room.
“He’s just finished college now,” is all Yusef said. “Army next.”
“I don’t want to get you into trouble, Yuse,” I said pathetically. I don’t know what I was imagining. Some American drone taking out his house and half the neighbourhood, maybe.
The next morning he brought me coffee and fruit and crispbread, and he was energised, like he had a plan. I wondered if he’d been awake all night, whether he’d spoken to Sarah.
He stood out in front of the house, on a mobile, smoking hard, then just stood for a long time looking at the ground, hand on hip. He had to go away, he said, when he came back in, he’d be about a day, back tomorrow anyway, probably later in the day, maybe thirty-six hours. It was important, he said, and he thought he could help.
“Trust me,” he said needlessly. I was to go nowhere. Someone – it sounded like Aysha – would bring me food. But I had to promise that I would stay in the house.
“You’ll be safe here,” he said. “But you’ll only be safe here.”
I wanted to stay in Yusef’s house anyway. Just try to get me out, I thought. When he’d gone, only a little while later, I began to melt into a tranquillity I hadn’t known for what seemed a lifetime, one I couldn’t remember ever having felt. One I haven’t known since either, if I’m honest.
Yusef’s concrete house in its maze of little alleyways enfolded me. I lay on that nasty Seventies sofa, smoking his cigarettes and staring sightlessly at the ceiling as if my bones had sunk to the bottom of a sack-like body. In the distance, a radio played Western pop. The sun in the alley shifted listlessly. Occasionally children shouted. I felt remote, untouched, lost in Lebanon. How could I have thought I was in Lebanon when I was a prisoner? This was Lebanon. And I was out of the game at last.
It turned out Aysha was a young girl, maybe fourteen. She brought meatballs and salad and water on a tray, and just smiled innocently and scampered away, her bright pink headscarf fluttering.
My reverie wasn’t even really broken by Uncle, more hollow-eyed now, a little gaunt, when he looked in to roll a ciggie and pat my knee, just to see if I was true, I think.
When he left, I wandered outside with him and two men straightened up against the wall opposite. They were very much like the young men who had departed into the night with Yusef when Asi had disappeared as a boy. They grinned and raised a hand, whether to Uncle or me I wasn’t sure.
I dreamed lazily back on the sofa, halfway between waking fantasy and sleep. I dreamed that Yusef drove me again, down through Israel somehow, my thonged feet on his dashboard, my elbow out of the window. I don’t know how he’d managed the border, he’s clever like that, and on we drove, the pop station in the house melding with his car radio, down the coast road, with bougainvillea in the central reservation and the sea washing up in endless white strips beside us, down through the posh suburbs of Caesarea, down past the verdant fig orchards of Gaza, where Hamal waved as we passed, and we pulled in only for diesel and a wash in the salty sea, Yuse smiling under his mirrored aviators as he put me back in his truck and drove on, taking me away, down south, to the desert lands, across into Egypt, where we would never be found, between palm fronds and pyramids.
I hardly knew night from that day, or light from dark. Later, I should have been turning restlessly under the single clean sheet Aysha had put on the bed. I should, it occurred to me in wakeful moments, have been sinking just under consciousness where ghosts awaited, then jerking awake with an ecstatic gasp, my blank eyes staring into an invisible face. But I didn’t. I slept gently in swan down, on soft eddies of the night’s tide.
Speak to me with silence, I had said, and a voice in my heart had picked up its rhythm: “be still, be still, be
still”.
This was wordless prayer again, I knew that, but it brought no gift of tears, the kind the old mystic women relished. I pushed at a garden door to bring my own gift, my own jar of nard. But, looking down, there was blood in the cups of my hands, blood I’d spilled in a back room probably not a hundred miles south of here. I was kneeling now, dropping tears on the boy’s lifeless feet, drying the blood from around the white-faced Troll’s head with my hair.
But I knew I couldn’t bring them with me, up here, to lay on a catafalque, dignified in my memory. I couldn’t bring them, for they are dead and I had put them in another place. Be still, be still, be still, the insistent beat. The swan turned the sky above me. I was asleep now, I knew that, but I hadn’t abandoned this house, Yusef’s boy’s room, and I could stare with open eyes at the ceiling sky and it sparkled the reflection of my swan lake.
I’d watched the sky like this as a child, I remembered. Not long after my mother died, my father had set to work in the garden and made me help him, clearing the foliage of a spring that had run unchecked while Mum was ill. I think he wanted to keep me busy, distracted. But I was listless in my grief, half-heartedly pulling at dry shoots, swinging meagre armfuls that fell across the lawn between me and the wheelbarrow.
Dad wasn’t reproachful – there was a moratorium on parental discipline at that strangely liberated time. And when he had filled the barrow he told me to sit on its chaotic contents as he wheeled it to where autumn’s bonfire was building. I fell back as he wheeled it, spreading my arms to clutch at the spilling weeds.
I watched the sky then, its lighted white winking at me through the branches of suburban border trees. At the foot of the garden he left me there, peacefully comfortable as I was now, while I traced his movements in sound, the abrasive plunge of a spade in loose earth in the vegetable patch, or the clack of shears restraining the privet’s incursion.
Still I watched the sky, the arc of clouds turning in the orb of a single opened eye. And I knew – be still, be still, be still – that all would be well with us, whatever happened when I left my barrow, however much it seemed so very far from well.
A Dark Nativity Page 25