A Dark Nativity

by George Pitcher

  As I lay in Yusef’s spare bed, I recalled that garden now and the dry and rotting smells of sap and nettle and string. The stars were winking at me from the same sky now. No, I didn’t need to bring Hamal or the Troll or any of the lives I’d abused, or taken, snuffed, despatched. They were already here and all was well.

  Yusef returned in the middle of the afternoon the following day. The girl had been in, bringing fresh coffee and food, smiling as if she was servicing a hotel chalet. I was waiting for nothing now. I was an anchoress and I could have lived in a hole in the wall in that refugee camp, this girl and other passers-by handing me their victuals on metal plates, through a hole.

  He seemed satisfied, drank some tea, ate some cake, smoked and turned the radio up. Had I been comfortable and received all I needed? I had. More than he could know. We’ll talk later, he had said, and lit me another cigarette. To the girl, he asked if anyone else had come to the house. No, she affirmed, with a detached shrug. Only Uncle, I pointed out, and he smiled like that wasn’t what he meant.

  Yusef cooked beautifully that night, stirring a large pan of yakneh, pearl barley and goat, as it gave off swinging clouds of steam like a tiny industrial plant. A cold box of beers came from somewhere, though we didn’t drink much. Lovely as everything was, Yusef had an agenda and this supper was a prelude, not an end in itself. I waited. What could possibly be the rush, after all? Yusef had cooked and it was good. This was now. Be still.

  We ate sitting on the squeaky-leather sofa, off the low table. After the stew came pears and mangos, great fibrous slithery lumps that we nuzzled and snogged off the inverted skin. Then it was done and Yusef cleared, brought a little percolator of coffee, no wine.

  He lit up and I refused. Yusef was smoking hard, too much, I thought. Get me, worried about someone’s health. Then he leaned forward, forearms on his knees, cigarette wedged between fingers, his thumbs and forefingers pressed together as a priest protects her fingers for the sacrament at communion.

  “Natalie, listen to me, I want to tell you something, something very important. I think you’re in very great danger. Even more danger if you stay here with me, actually.”

  I smiled like I kept being told that. He looked at me for the first time since the start of this little speech.

  “You understand what I’m saying?”

  I frowned and turned my head slightly.

  “Natalie, I’ve been to see some friends. Important friends. Friends who know a lot of what goes on.”

  I lowered my forehead in a “go on” sort of way. He was being very earnest and I wanted to show serious attention. He was also very sweet and I wanted to grab him.

  “Natalie, when you were taken away, when you were locked up . . . My friends are very important, Natalie. They know everything. Natalie, there was no operation at that time.”

  “Operation?”

  “No Arab operation.”

  “No Arab operation,” I repeated, like I was eliciting a confession.

  “You understand?”

  He looked hopeful. I leaned back, as if taking something in. I didn’t want to disappoint Yusef, he was my friend – no, more than that – and I didn’t want to hurt him.

  “You mean Hamas, Yuse? Or do you mean Hezbollah?”

  I thought I saw a flicker of acknowledgement, or it may have been relief.

  “My friends know everything.”

  “I’m sure they do, Yuse, I’m sure they do. Why do you think I’m in danger now?”

  He was very calm and his shoulders had slumped. He was speaking to me as if I was an intimate, I realised, and in that moment I knew that he’d never done that before, not with me. I was both excited by the thought and a little saddened that it meant all the time I’d known him he’d been keeping his distance. He looked at me now with no defence.

  “Because if it wasn’t an Arab operation, whose was it?”

  He wasn’t expecting an answer, just sharing the thought.

  He went on: “It was meant to look like you were taken by Palestinian freedom fighters. But you weren’t. What does that tell us?”

  I didn’t care. All I could think wildly was that Yusef believed me. I was believed. He knew I’d been held in that room. I just wanted to hang round his neck and be rocked.

  But I said, “I don’t know. What does that tell us?” My mouth was dry.

  “It means someone was trying to make it look like us. It means that someone wanted to make it look like Israel’s enemies had taken you. Maybe even had killed you.”

  I was watching his face closely. He looked more serious than I’d ever seen him, even more than when Asi had gone missing.

  “Yuse, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  I reached out and took his hand.

  “I killed two of them to escape. The two who guarded me at night. I stabbed one and I shot one. It’s made me sick in the head.”

  He fixed me with dark eyes and his hand gripped mine. Now his eyes were flitting between mine, examining me. Then one side of his mouth curled up in a smile and he blinked slowly as if it was a bow.

  “You are a great soldier,” he said. I didn’t laugh. “And you need to be protected.”

  “You believe me, Yusef? That I did that?”

  He spoke slowly and carefully now: “I know that you did.”

  “Do you? How?”

  “I just know you did. It’s the truth.”

  The relief broke over me like a wave. I let out a little sob and lowered my head, my spare palm covering my mouth, while I still held Yusef’s hand.

  “Why haven’t they killed me already, Yuse, or why haven’t they taken me in, arrested me, I don’t know, loads of sirens and police cars when I reappeared?”

  I’d let go of his hand now, so I could put hands to my eyes.

  “They don’t need to. You’re not a big enough danger to them, yet. Maybe you’re more value to them like this – they want to follow you, see where you go. Maybe they followed you here. I don’t know.”

  “Yuse, I’m really sorry,” I said for about the twelfth time, but this time imploringly, my head to one side, craving absolution. “It was Sarah who told me to come.”

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s OK. They know enough about me anyway.”

  “Know what about you.” Like that, not a question, more of an acknowledgement.

  “It doesn’t matter. Well, it does matter,” he shrugged. “But only because I can keep you safe.”

  I had to break the weight of his seriousness.

  “I get to stay here for ever? Oh, Yuse, I thought you’d never ask.”

  But it didn’t work.

  “No, listen, Natalie. We can give you something that’ll keep you safe.”

  “And keep you safe?”

  He looked down again.

  “There are lists. Lists of names. The rest of what you swapped in those envelopes in Jerusalem. It’s what they want more than anything. There are many many lists.”

  “I’m sure there are. Let’s have a drink, Yuse.”

  And we talked into the night out on our car seat, with great drafts of Lebanese deep red peasant wine, Yusef finally relaxing, the stars slowly turning above us, as if we were lying together staring up at the sky from a flat roof, or a hay rake, or from the back of a swan on a dark lake, or from a wheelbarrow full of weeds.

  I slept with Yusef that night. It was inevitable and understood. When the bottles were empty and the night was as still as a promise that there would never be morning, we moved inside, slipped from clothes and between the coarse linen of his bed. It was a large bed and there were heavy ruby drapes hanging the full length of the wall at its head. I wondered if this had been his marital bed, but it didn’t matter.

  We lay kissing gently and only occasionally, a smell of fresh wine on both of us, the rustle of bedding tracing gradual and uninsistent body movements. I think both of us dozed for a while. The sex just progressed in its own time, not ours, and the room was glowing with the first of dawn when I fin
ally took his weight on me, running fingers up through the tight hair on his chest. He was beyond gentle – it was almost as though we absent-mindedly made love, or as if we dreamed it.

  Looking back, I have wondered whether it ever crossed my mind that I would suffer some flashback horror, panic, push Yusef away, cry as I saw that back room and little divan again. But I had a different body now. I was on a flood tide.

  It didn’t even really feel like sex. It was an act of union, a somnolent progression to the inevitability of the night hours. Yes, it was a communion. When he rolled away beside me it was as if my sleeping face in his neck was one and the same act. I watched a ceiling that had now lost its power to be the sky. We were in that firmament now. We were bonded by our common cause, just the two of us, and not because we were lovers. Lovers? What did that mean?

  When the room had awoken, when light distinguished it from the mystery that had gone before, he got up and fetched a bottle of mineral water, then coffee. I padded about naked on the rope carpeting, visiting the outside loo, rewrapping myself in linen. Strangely, I knew there would be no peace for me in this house any more. Not like the day before. I must shake the dust from my heels again. I dressed and moved to the living area.

  “Sit down,” said Yusef, suddenly but not unkindly. And I obeyed.

  “It may be better if you don’t fly from Beirut.”

  “You don’t say . . .”

  “You can be tracked too easily. They may decide . . . you might get taken again.”

  “I’m hoping I could get taken again anyway.”

  I weighted the words to express their puerile ambiguity.

  What could he mean? I couldn’t schlep back into Israel. Syria was out of the question.

  “Do you want me to take the train?” I said at last.

  “I could get you to Egypt,” said Yusef.

  Now I really did laugh, genuinely. A huge release of tension. I wanted to tell him about my dream, but I wanted to laugh at him more.

  “Seriously, Nat. By boat.”

  No, not seriously, Yuse. Not remotely seriously. I’d taken my chance with Beirut. I’d survived Israel. I had a mission. That morning, I felt invincible.

  Then Aysha stuck her head round the door. Someone was here for us. A lady. Sarah appeared behind her and just walked in.

  “Yusef?” she said and held out her hand to him. So she hadn’t met him before, and I was glad.

  There was very little small talk. Sarah was working, I realised. The three of us were at a meeting and there was a single item on the agenda: my transfer to the UK.

  Yusef’s Mediterranean cruise was summarily dismissed. It was to be another private flight, another identity. I looked at the Lebanese passport Sarah gave me. Republique Libanaise. Black and shiny. Pages of Arabic, French and English. The fat, squat cedar tree on the front. Crisp but not new. And my picture on the main page again, a different one this time. Sarah’s file on me must have damn near crashed her laptop. It was stamped with a faded officialdom. It felt like mine.

  “It’s OK,” said Yusef. “It’s safe. I said I’d keep you safe. We do this often. You’ll go out our way.”

  We? Was it Yusef that Sarah spoke to on her smart Israeli terrace? I didn’t like that thought so much and shut it away.

  “She is part of a language-teaching delegation that flies regularly between Italy, Britain and Beirut,” cut in Sarah. “There will be six of you. You’re invisible.”

  That wasn’t quite true. But my visibility had disappeared behind the name in the passport. Huda Serrano.

  “Why can’t I stay here?” I asked and I meant it. “If it’s so easy to get a new identity, why don’t I just disappear here?”

  “Now you’re not in Jerusalem they wouldn’t have to explain you away,” said Sarah. “Mad or dead, they’re not bothered.”

  “But you took me out of Jerusalem.”

  “They were on your case, Nat. It would only have ended in tears.”

  “So tell me how I’m meant to be safer in London? They’ll find me easily there.”

  “We’re going to give you something to protect you,” said Sarah.

  “So Yusef tells me,” I said and I was conscious of lining up with Yusef against Sarah.

  “We’re going to give you a list of names—”

  “Oh God, not again,” I said. “I’m not being your go-between. I’m not being your little postman. Look what happened last time.”

  “But this is different. Names of those working for the Quartet in Palestine.”

  I paused to absorb this.

  “But they know who they are. They’re their own people,” I said blankly.

  “They don’t know we know. And they’ll keep you safe,” said Yusef. I clocked that for him it was all about keeping me safe and I liked that.

  “But that was what I was swapping in Jerusalem in the first place. That was the whole point. Mutually assured blown covers.”

  Sarah looked at Yusef. Then she looked back at me.

  “Those envelopes were empty,” she said. “Decoys.”

  Yusef sucked air through his teeth. I felt the wave break over me. Nobody spoke.

  “So it was all. . . only about me,” I said eventually to no one.

  Sarah just looked at me.

  “I won’t pretend that you aren’t doing us a favour by taking this back to London. There’s no exchange this time. Just telling them we know. But it will keep you safe,” she said.

  “If anything happens to me, you publish the list?”

  She just looked at me, then down at my passport.

  “Will you do it?” asked Yusef.

  “I don’t suppose there’s much choice,” I said to the window. “Who do I tell?”

  “You don’t have to tell anyone,” said Sarah. “You’ll just need to forward an email to the Centre when you arrive and they will take care of everything. You’re just the fence. No one will touch you. But it has to come from you.”

  “OK,” I said.

  But I was already forming another plan. And I wasn’t going to share it with Sarah. There was unfinished business and there could be no redemption without it.

  Yusef drove me to the airport the next morning. I’d said that if I’d been followed, then they’d know who he was taking, but Yuse just shook his head firmly.

  “They don’t know where you are.”

  Funny, he’d picked me up at the airport when I first arrived in Beirut. He hadn’t had much English then. He seemed more remotely Middle Eastern. My courier, I’d thought, good. I’d hardly looked at him, though I thought I was friendly enough, asking about local matters, how the job would shape up. Now here he was dropping me at the same airport, his sometime lover, with a forged passport, saving my life, apparently.

  I tried to calm down, distract myself, by wondering who Huda Serrano really was. What she might look like, if she wasn’t being me. Whether she had ever been anyone. Yusef had just chuckled when I’d asked.

  “She’s no one. And everyone. She is you now.”

  I wore a blue scarf around my head, as I had in the photograph. I was a Muslim convert, making some of the travel arrangements for the delegation, which she’d flown in with two weeks previously.

  “Who was she when she came in, Yuse? Where is she now?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said from behind those mirrored sunglasses.

  He took his hand from the gear lever and held the inside of my elbow briefly, but didn’t say anything else. The subject was being closed down.

  “There is a guide in the group who will check you all through.”

  At the airport, he parked as he must have done a thousand times before. In the departures hall we were joined by a large Arab in a light grey suit and pale skin, a dark and hairy mole on his left cheek.

  “Mr Serrano,” said Yusef and Hairy Mole’s fat lips parted in a smile as Yusef handed over the passport. We joined the small group, a mixture of Lebanese and Europeans, bags on trolleys, small pieces of cabin lugg
age, one of which Hairy Mole passed to me.

  Suddenly the scene started to slip away from me. My self-protective bubble was taking me, but I wasn’t going to let it yet and I fought to stay outside it, so I turned towards Yusef. He just blanked me and shook his head imperceptibly. I felt a twang of resentment.

  We’d lain in bed the second night I’d spent in his house, coiled together, but he hadn’t even kissed me, just the breeze of his breath on my forehead. I understood now. He looked at Hairy Mole and shook his hand firmly, then flicked a salute at me with the palm of his hand and turned and walked briskly away. The back of his neck needed a shave, I noticed. He didn’t walk away slowly. He wasn’t giving me a chance to catch him up.

  The little group busied itself, but none of them looked at me. Only Hairy Mole did, whose name was Mo. He was pleasant enough, it turned out, and moved with a reassuring ease as my consort, showing me to my seat on the plane – a rather bigger jet this time, but unmistakably the cramped and rarefied chariot of the elite – and then sitting in his, some six rows in front.

  He had alleviated some fear, placing a hand firmly in the small of my back as we were waved through immigration. No, the fear I had came from elsewhere.

  As we approached Heathrow, I couldn’t displace the thought that the man sitting behind me and across the aisle in a brown blazer was my tail from Beirut. Rationalising didn’t help, the idea that it was absurd that my erstwhile captors could have infiltrated a flight chartered by Sarah’s Centre. But I clenched the balls of my fists between my thighs and held a rage inside that wanted to spit in his face and claw at his eyes.

  But there was a panic I felt of another kind as we pitched in to Heathrow, and I realised it was a kind of response to bereavement. This was a country that I’d lost, had died for me, and now it was resurrected, unrecognisable but the same, the life outside my tomb, a zombie town.

  It was summertime in London, but it was still cold and bleak by comparison and darkness encroached even the brightest of streets. You could see the denial of this truth on implacable faces. So here was home again, with its permanent hum, its pointless arrogance, its business of self-entitlement. I watched it as a ghost might watch its former world go by, trapped by despair in the places of its former life, following death. The only evidence that I was really there were the little interactions with the show’s set pieces – the Polish émigré at the coffee counter, the boy lawyer’s sharp shoulder, the concierge at the hotel, a tourist asking the way.