Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  Aziz’s hands were unblemished. James got a good look at them when they rested on his broken nose. The fingers of a pianist: manicured, long, thin, alien. it was peculiar how Islamists were set apart by the length of their fingers the way moustaches used to set apart the maniacs of Nazi Germany and the Kremlin and thick necks the lesser apparatchiks.

  There was a click and the nose was set with a thumb and forefinger. Aziz took a step back.

  ‘Straight enough.’

  ‘For an infidel,’ James said.

  Aziz wagged a finger, but his face was friendly, not at all sallow or vulpine.

  The doctor indicated his injuries on a wall chart of the human body that had the names of bones written in English and Somali. There was no X-ray machine.

  ‘What about the blood in my urine?’

  ‘Not serious. Drink a lot, Mr Water.’

  ‘My name is James More.’

  Aziz gave a hard little laugh. ‘More? What kind of name is that?’

  ‘It has its history. What about my groin?’

  ‘That will heal. I will call you Mr Water.’

  ‘I have to get out of here. Can you help?’

  ‘No,’ said the doctor, smiling.

  The nurse floated into the surgery again and stitched the cuts on him under Aziz’s direction. Her veil brushed his face. Her breath was scented. She was scented. This time, she was wearing latex gloves. Aziz examined the stitches, nodded approvingly, and the nurse left through the door with the no guns sticker.

  ‘My Somali wife,’ Aziz said. ‘It is not proper that she approaches you, but this is medicine. We do what we must. Come sit with me.’

  Aziz helped him out onto the balcony. It was empty. There was the sound of prayers from the ice-cream mosque and the hammering of a small diesel generator.

  ‘I have been given a box of your belongings. We will have to sell them to pay for your care,’ Aziz said. ‘Do you agree?’

  ‘I want to return to Nairobi.’

  ‘If Allah permits. Open your mouth. I forgot about your teeth.’

  Aziz gave him something resembling a dental pick. With some direction, James picked gravel and tooth chips from his gums and spat the blood and bits into a metal bowl.

  He spent the next days on a cot in the surgery. Occasionally he saw the shape of Aziz’s wife behind the door, just standing there. He scratched at the white paint in the windows and saw battle wagons parked in the street and a guard sitting in the shade of a mango tree with a Kalashnikov that was inlaid with beryl and glittered.

  One evening Aziz brought a plate of bread and pieces of goat meat and they shared a meal.

  ‘I’m sorry for what’s happened to you, Mr Water,’ Aziz said. ‘So many of the mujahideen are uneducated. There should be a ban on taking in boys who cannot read. They need to study the Koran themselves in order to decide on their sacrifice. There should also be a ban on injecting the suicide bombers with drugs meant to limit their ability to think.’

  ‘They do that?’

  ‘I once saw it in Mogadishu. I was very ashamed. I am told they do it in Pakistan. But Pakistan … It is not a good practice.’

  ‘Why are you talking to me?’

  ‘You will be gone soon, one way or another.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  Aziz squeezed his hand. ‘They will not kill you. Yusuf made a promise.’

  They were the kindest words that had been spoken to him in his captivity. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘There is no one to talk to here with an education. Besides,’ Aziz’s voice dropped to a murmur, ‘you cannot trust Somalis. You give them money to buy medicine for the clinic and they send it to their family. You give them phone credit and they use it to call other relatives. We foreigners do not understand how attached Somalis are to themselves. The true religion of a Somali is Somalia. I tell you they are weak in all the practical parts of the jihad. There was a boy among those who sleep here who would without hesitation have given his life for the jihad. The other day his uncle came to visit. Whatever he said was worse than death or hell to the boy; in a minute he set down his gun and walked away, refusing to say a word to anyone.’

  James nodded. Somalia was irregular. Hardly any foreigners visited it, yet there were Somalis all over the world. There was internet in one neighbourhood, in the next the people were dying of thirst. You could receive money through a wire transfer, but you could not keep your child alive.

  On another evening, Aziz asked about water.

  ‘What do you suggest we do about the wells in Kismayo?’

  ‘That is what I came here to find out.’

  ‘The water is too expensive for the poor.’

  He had prepared for this moment in Nairobi and in the dark before becoming Mr Water.

  ‘Does the local authority have control over all of the water sources?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You need to drive out the water profiteers by any means necessary. Once all the wells are under the administration they need to be marked on a map and the details of each put in a public record.’

  Aziz pulled out a notepad and a biro and made notes in Arabic. It was difficult for him. He held the biro like a stirring spoon.

  ‘You need to know the depth of each well and the quality of the water in it. The closer the well is to the sea, the more likely it is to be brackish. In the slums, it might be contaminated with sewage. You need to know how many people are using it. You plot all of this on the map. Then you can start to think about setting a fair price for each well.’

  ‘What if the people still cannot afford to pay?’

  ‘They should get the water at no cost. You will need a ration card system. In return for clean water, families will build drains and rainwater tanks. The local authority will have to monitor the water supply and educate the women in water conservation. Eventually, it will need to drill boreholes, secure the spring water and build a sewage treatment plant. I can help you with all of this.’

  ‘You already are,’ Aziz said, and took his hand.

  Aziz had had three wives. The first was Iraqi; she had died. The second worked as a doctor in Riyadh. The third was the Somali. His Iraqi wife had belonged to a Muslim sect that retained pagan elements of star worship. She was fifteen when they married, eighteen when she died giving birth. There was no question Aziz was sincere in the antenatal and postnatal care he provided in the Bari slum, which spilled out onto one of the beaches. It had tripled in size since the Islamists had taken control of Kismayo.

  ‘In such a place,’ Aziz said, ‘only the air is free. There is no comparison between life there and life in Riyadh. Hardly a day goes by without a baby in my care dying of some curable sickness. The people have no work. They have not enough food. They have no school and this is something we want to correct. Three families share a shack,’ he went on, ‘there is terror of fire, especially on hot days. A spark flies on the wind and lights the palm thatch and paper. People are burned alive. It is worse when it rains. Then the mud mixes in with the waste from the latrines. I do believe,’ his voice rose, ‘with so many people packed in such conditions, Somalia will generate a plague that could spread across the world.’

  ‘Cholera?’

  ‘A new plague.’

  ‘You could make a weapon of it,’ he said.

  Aziz reached over and slapped him in the face, just one slap. ‘I am a doctor.’

  His face flushed with anger. ‘You keep company with killers.’

  It was true. Aziz had clinical knowledge and served others, yet he also had a weakness for sermons he could not quite hear, for battle banners, for scimitars flashing far away. His venture was for the jihad, not for humanitarian action. He missed his family, he loved them, it was not easy to live with the secret of being a mujahid. He was choleric. He had fits of rage and the division within him intensified the hatred. Many sentences would begin, I cannot allow the pigs to …

  They were quiet, then Aziz said, ‘There is cholera her
e already.’

  ‘You should report it.’

  ‘Here? To whom would I report it?’

  ‘To the United Nations.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘You need help.’

  Aziz’s eyes narrowed. ‘The Crusades have not ended.’

  ‘What?’ He said what, but he knew what was coming.

  ‘The United Nations is a cover for the Crusaders. The United Nations is the Knights of the Cross.’

  ‘Even UNICEF?’

  ‘Especially UNICEF!’

  He regarded the punch-holes on the doctor’s arm, the belt buckle.

  ‘Such an organisation! Which claims so much for itself but delivers so little to the children? Would you like to know what I really think?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think the Crusaders are led by the Jews!’

  If these words were written down they would look deranged, but Aziz spoke them with feeling; he had some notion the jihad was a cure and the fighting was the cutting out of a tumour under improper conditions.

  ‘What is necessary,’ Aziz said, more calmly, ‘is to turn the Crusaders and their slaves back from the Muslim land of Somalia, so the people can live in a true Islamic state.’

  He was exhausted. He had to respond. He spoke with care, the words came out like stones and pebbles. ‘Is it more important to get help for the women and children you see in your clinic, or to follow the jihad?’

  ‘I see it as one treatment. Medicine is a mercy, the jihad is a duty.’

  ‘What about me? Am I a Crusader? I came here to bring water.’

  ‘You are a part of it,’ Aziz said, unhesitatingly. ‘Allah will ask payment of you.’

  ‘You said I was going to be spared.’

  ‘La, la, la. How can I know the will of Allah. You may die. You may become a blessed one.’

  The Ligurians were split in the Punic wars between Carthage and Rome and remain divided today. There are the muggy streets of Spesa on the coast of Liguria, with rubbish, fish heads rotting on the dock in the sun; and there is the rain and bracing air of the surrounding Ligurian Alps, with vineyards, olive groves, apricots, figs and nuts on the lower slopes, cheese production and game higher up, and ducks netted on the icy tarns in the migratory season.

  Her cabin was high on a mountain overlooking the Ligurian Sea. It had a slate roof. The walls were of stones, logs and moss gathered from the slopes. The windows were square; four panes each. There were always flowers in the window boxes when she was there. Her flat in South Kensington was of the sort Peter Pan might visit, whereas the whole effect of the cabin – the doors and mantles carved with faces and with shapes of animals, the light slanting in, the air, the shreds of cloud and sea through mist and sleet, through trees – was of a scene a wooden puppet might have woken up to in his most resinous childhood.

  The mountain was Janus-faced. One side was sunlit, with slopes of Aleppo and maritime pine. The other was dark. Snow lingered for months; there were Alpine meadows, oaks and chestnuts, and bogs into which deer sank up to their nostrils. It drizzled more often on that side. The farmhouse where she bought her supplies was obscured and could be seen only by the smoke curling up from its chimney. Heading upwards with a pack pony, she was often bathed in sunshine the moment they turned from the landward to the seaward side. On such days she would strip off her hunting jacket and continue up the stony path sweating under the sun, her steps slow with her heavy pack. They raised red partridge from the undergrowth, the dust quivered, and their footsteps resonated off the oldest exposed rocks on earth. It was not the reason she bought the cabin, but it had become an attraction: her property had never been sunk in the Ligurian Sea, or any other. If she were immortal, she could sit on the mountain under the moon and stars – the snow globe – and not get her feet wet in a million years.

  He waded out into the river and for a few steps was covered by the waters.

  He used to go to the Saracen’s Head in Church Street with his sister and her friends and never considered the picture on the pub sign until he had joined the secret intelligence service. He was raised to think of the desert as a desolation, as an absence. The Christian prayer he was given as a child to recite at bedtime, the smell of soap, the towels, brass doorknobs, the heaviness of home, with the rain sweeping in off the North Sea against the window, held the milk and honey of heaven to be beyond the desert.

  Aziz’s childhood was his own turned inside out. His family owned an oasis under a cliff near the Syrian border. They drove there from Baghdad in the season in a dazzling convoy of cars. The cliff blocked out the sun. It was wet with dew at dawn. Water was plentiful. Workers grew vegetables in a field. Metal taps gushed into cement troughs. Camels drank their fill. The horses had their own drinking place. The tents were pitched out of the wind, away from the animals. When Aziz was a small child and it was cold at night, he was sometimes made to sleep outside, covered with sand to keep warm.

  He was the Arab who grew up in a binary world, which went zero one zero one one desert city desert city city. In Baghdad, he drank a can of Coke before reaching the till. He watched Westerns. His best friend had computer games. A boy from his football team spoke of sexual encounters with a maid. There was the dictatorship, the war with Iran, the fume of cars on the motorways in the city, the way the overpass curled up and across. In the desert, there were only the horses and the medical studies he continued in the tent, brushing sand away from the textbooks every few minutes. Nothing was made there except leather. Every living thing in the desert seemed to him to be precious, to have a fixed number and to exist in such a way as to make him feel like a created being. It was no place. It extended through Iraq into Saudi Arabia and all the way to Oman. He took his horses and rode out across it; a sea at the centre of the world, with unfathomable sands, shifting and undulating. Aziz had this in common with James: if he had no sense of duty, he would have returned to his horses.

  The prayers in the desert were different, inexpressibly cooler to accommodate the heat. Aziz’s understanding of the greatness of the Koran came on those nights when the constellations shone in such depth and number that only Allah could accommodate them and every ideology looked insignificant set against them.

  Danny’s colleagues were atheist or agnostic, except for the Anglican, who was struck by a car one afternoon on the Fulham Road. This colleague fell into a coma and her family asked for prayers to be read at her bedside. Danny was reluctant, but it was not a moment to stand on principle. She turned up at the hospital and was given the canticle ‘Benedicite Omni Opera’ to read.1 The words disturbed her. Before any mention of the earth or the sun was a line surely lifted from Sumer:

  O ye Waters that be above the Firmament, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him forever.

  Her colleague went on to make a full recovery. She herself could not let go of the waters behind the stars. She calculated that if such a sea were only the depth of our solar system and the same terms applied, the pressure of atmospheres in its Hadal deep would be so great that the fish there would have no skeletal structure and would move like apparitions.

  James developed a sense of ease with Aziz. The Iraqi protected him from the more unbalanced among the mujahideen. They talked about America.

  ‘You talk about achievement. What is the achievement of a shopping centre?’

  ‘This is student stuff,’ he said. ‘Why always shopping? America put a man on the moon.’

  ‘So they claim.’

  ‘Look to yourself. Saudi Arabia is ready for a revolution. All the people do is shop. There is nothing else for them. The country is in a social coma.’

  ‘The majesties feed in this way it is true,’ Aziz said uncomfortably, then changed the subject.

  Aziz had no idea about government and had not studied politics, philosophy, history or economics. He was like a common or garden Evangelical, who reckoned by faith alone his clinic would be raised into a health service. Thomas More would have picked apart Aziz’s worldvi
ew in a moment. Not because it was a vanity of a Musulman, but because it was dystopian. The caliphate was as uninspired as it was unmerciful, with no basis in common law.

  He accepted there was something ill in Western civilisation; an apple-sized swelling in the armpit. Any clear-minded person could feel it. It was true also that he had with his own eyes seen simplicity and compassion in the Muslim world, how the sick and old were cared for within the community. But that was as far as he went.

  They had both killed. James had done it in under orders in the military. Did that absolve him? Aziz had killed on account of personal conviction, the emotion carried him, the affront. He perhaps heard the sentence al-Qaeda wanted carried out: Death to the enemies of Islam by the bullet, by bombs, alcohol, narcotics, rumour, assassination, strangulation, chemicals and other poisons. Aziz was conflicted. A part of him looked with sympathy on James and believed he could become a Muslim. Another part believed there was a space in the Englishman’s chest where his heart should have been – that he was not born whole.

  They lied to each other. Aziz had not come to Somalia of his own accord. In the messages he sent to Saudi Arabia he complained of a lack of money and planning and a difficulty in communicating with al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. Somalia did not have the advantage of Afghanistan, which sheltered fighters and supplied opium to the world. Some of the messages were also filled with nostalgia:

  How I wish our enchanted evenings in Afghanistan would return! That dream has passed and produced bitter fruit, but some is the fruit of paradise!

  There will be no more open battles in Somalia. The jihadists learned that lesson when they overreached themselves in 2006. They had stood on the border with Ethiopia and declared a holy war on Ethiopia, and for that they were annihilated. The Ethiopians invaded Somalia in a matter of days. They took Mogadishu without a fight and chased the jihadists south to Kismayo. There was a brief battle there in which the jihadists were routed. Hundreds of them retreated to the mangrove swamps along the Kenyan border. These are impenetrable places, with tropical bays, shallows and tidal channels, septic, simmering, with flora and fauna of every scent and hue. Some days passed and then the American AC-130 gunship flew in from Djibouti. The Ethiopian MiGs had already flown sorties from Debre Zeyit and cut up a convoy of jihadist lorries stuck in the mud. But the Ethiopians had nothing to match the Tartarean armaments of the Americans. Without warning, from 20 kilometres away, the gunship filled the mangrove with shells the size of Coke bottles and shredded and vapourised and blew the holy warriors out of this life. It took a moment for the shells to fill the air across the target area the size of a football pitch. There were few survivors. Some escaped inland up the dry riverbeds – the wadis – others went on foot or by dhow into Kenya.