Absolution

by Paul E. Hardisty

  I have found a corner in an empty lot where several other unfortunates have fashioned shelters from old sheets of asbestos roofing, cardboard and discarded plastic tarpaulin. We are all clustered up against the brick wall of a low-rent apartment building in old Giza. My shelter is strangely cosy already, and my neighbours are surprisingly, well, human – friendly and good-humoured and, despite all their various afflictions, as helpful as they can be. What had I expected? A snarling community of animals, devoid of compassion or feeling?

  Today, my immediate neighbour, a woman in her mid-thirties with two children under the age of ten, seeing that I was struggling with the roof of my shelter, took the time to help me. I thanked her, and after, we spoke. She spends her days with the Zabbaleen, the garbage pickers of Cairo, scraping out a living for her family. Her name is Samira. She is a widow, like me. And like me, she has known better times.

  The canal nearby serves as both latrine and water supply, and the smell is something I cannot describe. I try to stay away. I have three big bottles of good drinking water here in my shelter, and some tinned and packaged food. For a bed, I have three layers of cardboard and an old blanket. It is comfortable enough.

  There was another bombing here yesterday, Claymore. This time in Alexandria. I read about it in a newspaper that someone discarded on the street. El Assad, The Lion, claimed responsibility on behalf of Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, the same group who perpetrated the attack in Taba a few days ago. Again, the target was a tourist resort. They blew a hotel reception area to pieces, injuring five workers. Again, no tourists were harmed – they appear to have planned it for very early morning.

  The Lion released a statement, condemning the wealthy families who control the nation’s businesses and the government, plunder the country’s wealth, and maintain the majority in a constant state of poverty and illness. How can people do such things, Claymore, however just they believe their cause to be? These terrorists are not Muslims. For them, Islam is nothing but a convenient camouflage. They are political extremists, nothing more. These cowards debase themselves and our religion. I burned the newspaper in my evening fire.

  Claymore, as I lie here and write this, the flame of my candle flickering on its wick, I think of that first time we were together, in Yemen. It seems so very long ago now, almost a dream, even though it is only three and a half years. Oh, chéri, I cannot describe the conflict that explodes inside me whenever I think of you. And while I know that you will never see this, it helps me to write it, to think that perhaps one day I will understand what is happening to me. I am alone, childless now after two attempts to bring a life into the world. Guilt crushes me, from the inside out. Now that Hamid is gone, I know that I did not love him. I think, now, that I loved the idea of him, a good Muslim husband who nevertheless aspired to the secular and modern, who would let me be my own person, have a career. Please do not misunderstand me, Claymore. I do not mean to imply that you would have sought, if we had married, to domineer me in any way, quite the opposite. Sometimes, back then, when I would contemplate what it might be like if we were to be married – and I did, often – I imagined that as a husband you might actually be too malleable for me, too easily manipulated. I need somebody strong. My father was strong.

  Thinking back, I am not sure what it was that kept making me push you away every time you got close. In part, I think, it was that I simply could not imagine a life – the kind of life I wanted, stable and gentle and happy – with you. Your violence frightens me, Claymore, that volatile, unpredictable core that seems to burn so close to your surface. I have seen what you can do, the brutality you are capable of. I know it frightens you too. And yet, how gentle you can be! There are times I have felt as if I could crush you in one hand, like the most fragile of shells. And when, in Istanbul, you told me that you were incapable of love, something inside me let go. I did not believe that it was true, and still do not, as I told you on the phone a few days ago. But the very fact that you believed it made me understand that you were not ready – might never be ready – for me, or for anyone.

  Oh, chéri, I hope that going back to South Africa to testify has helped to exorcise some of the terror you carry within yourself. What I do know now, very truly and clearly, is that you are the only man I have ever truly loved. And if God sees fit to bless me with one more day with you, that is what I will tell you.

  And if not, if Allah makes it my destiny to wander this earth alone until he chooses to take me to his Grace, I will thank him for the time we have spent together, and for the gift of knowing, if only for a few days, the grace of being truly loved.

  Goodnight, my tortured soul, wherever you are.

  Yours always, Rania.

  * 14 *

  The One Who’d Taught Him

  They crossed the border into Ethiopia later that day, flew on as the sun set big and red over the highlands. Before the light faded, Crowbar found a strip of lonely dirt road that cut, long and straight, through the scrub. He brought the Cessna down low, lowered the flaps to their full forty degrees and put the plane down. This time the wheels kissed the gravel.

  ‘Welcome to Ethiopia,’ said Crowbar. They were the first words he’d spoken since leaving Marsabit.

  Crowbar shut down the engine. They jumped out and pushed the Cessna off onto the shoulder and then into a small clearing surrounded by dry acacia and spreading juniper, where it would be well hidden from the road. Under a spreading iridium sky, they lit a fire and unrolled their blankets.

  Soon the coals were glowing. Crowbar adjusted the stones of the fire ring into an even square and balanced a grill over the coals. Then he unwrapped four big pork chops from the paper he’d bought them in and laid them carefully on the grill. The fat sizzled and dripped. Orange flame burst and flared, lit Crowbar’s face and the bladed phyllodes of the trees and reflected from the aluminium skin of the plane. They drank the last of the beer as stars filled the sky.

  Crowbar turned the meat. ‘Hope and Kip should be in California by now,’ he said. It was as if their earlier confrontation had never happened.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Clay. ‘They’ll be safe there.’

  ‘She wants me to join her.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Clay. ‘Get out.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can leave this place,’ said Crowbar, looking up into the night sky.

  Back again in the land of his birth, this land of spirits, Clay knew exactly what Crowbar meant. Africa, it reached down inside you and attached itself, became part of you. You could no more detach it than pull out your own heart.

  ‘You said it yourself, Koevoet – they won’t stop looking for you, not as long as you’re on the continent.’

  Crowbar stared into the fire, said nothing.

  ‘I’m going to kill Manheim.’ said Clay. A hunger opened up deep inside him, Neolithic, old as the extruded rift-rock on which they lay, as undeniable. Time stalled. Precession reversed. Lost equinoctial markers reappeared. Ancient gods and spirits, long dormant, threw off their slumber of centuries. It was all there, above them, writ in the constellations.

  ‘We’re going to kill him,’ said Crowbar.

  Clay nodded. ‘Okay. We. How?’

  ‘I called my business partner, told him I was flying to Cairo, that I was planning to stop in Sudan, close to the Egyptian border. We have connections there, have been doing some business. I told him to leak it to the AB.’

  ‘Your business partner has links to the AB?’

  Crowbar nodded but didn’t elaborate.

  Clay left this alone. ‘Can you trust him, Koevoet?’

  ‘We’ve been partners since ninety-four. We were in the DCC together.’

  ‘That wasn’t my question.’

  ‘Who the fok knows? Can you trust anyone, Straker?’

  ‘Where in Sudan?’

  ‘I didn’t tell him.’

  ‘Then how will they know?’

  ‘Don’t worry, they will.’

  Clay said nothing.


  ‘I’m going to put you down about a hundred miles south of the rendezvous point. You’re going to go in by road. They’ll be waiting for me, but they won’t be expecting you.’

  Clay let this settle, looked up at the stars. ‘What if they don’t bite down on it?’

  ‘They will.’

  Clay’s pulse quickened. Still two days away, then, this killing. He could feel the anticipation simmering within him. It felt like lust. ‘Good,’ he said.

  ‘But if not, we go on as planned.’

  ‘And after, no matter what happens, you get out, go to Hope.’ He regretted his earlier outburst, but he wasn’t going to say anything about it.

  ‘Fokken soutpiele, giving me orders again.’ That big grin, impossible to resist.

  ‘Promise me, oom. We get to Cairo, you get out. I’ll find Rania.’

  Crowbar nodded, speared a chop with a sharpened branch, handed it to Clay. ‘Okay, Straker. Okay. But one condition: we kill every last one of the bastards.’

  Clay nodded. ‘You said before that Manheim owed you. What happened, oom?’

  Crowbar crushed his beer can under his palm. ‘Like I said, we were friends once. Close friends. A couple of months after an op inside Angola, a bad one, we went on pass together to his family’s farm near Bloemfontein. Beautiful place. He introduced me to his parents and his younger sister.’

  Clay waited for him to continue.

  ‘We had fun. His sister was lekker, a real knockout. We hit it off. Hanneleen – that was her name. We exchanged addresses. She wrote me a couple of times. Not long after Manheim got transferred to the Recces.’ Crowbar tore off a chunk of meat, chewed. ‘Next time I got a pass, a few months later, I went back there, on my own. Didn’t tell Manheim. The family welcomed me like I was one of their own.’ Crowbar closed his eyes, filled his lungs. ‘One night I was banging Hanneleen out in the back, when three kaffirs broke into the house. They shot Manheim’s father, cut his mother up pretty bad before I could get there. I killed all three of the bastards.’

  ‘Jesus,’ muttered Clay.

  ‘His mother died in hospital a few days later. The next time I saw him, a couple of years later, he’d changed. That was when he joined the AWB. I never saw him again until a few days ago.’

  Clay speared a second chop from the grill. ‘A thinker? You’re joking.’

  ‘Don’t underestimate him, seun. Manheim is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. In his own fokked-up way.’

  ‘You saw what the bastard did to Zuz,’ said Clay. ‘Grace and Joseph are dead because of him.’

  ‘Like I said, he changed.’

  Clay filled his lungs, held it, exhaled. ‘Leave the bastard to me.’

  Crowbar looked up at him. Firelight lit his face, flickered across his retinae.

  ‘When I kill him, I want him to know it’s me,’ Clay said.

  Crowbar closed his eyes a moment, opened them again, stared hard at Clay. ‘It’s just business, seun. That’s the way you’ve got to do it. The minute you forget that, the wrong people get hurt. We are going to do a job. That’s all.’

  Clay stared back, hearing, understanding. Despite what he’d heard, hate burned inside him, plasma hot, and he was unable to govern it or separate its effect from its origin.

  ‘Straker?’

  Clay nodded. ‘That’s why you chose Sudan.’

  ‘Ja. A few extra bodies in a place like that, who the fok is going to notice?’

  Early the next morning they pushed the plane back out to the road and roared off towards Sudan under a monochrome sky. The weather in the highlands had grown unsettled, and all day they dodged thunderheads and the swept-back anvil tops of towering cumulonimbus. Bands of rain slanted across the green hills, darkened the landscape for a time then vanished, ghostlike. Lightning flashed in the distance.

  By late afternoon they’d refuelled and were approaching Sudanese airspace, halfway through a bottle of Johnny Walker Red that Crowbar had produced from his pack. Clay watched Africa slide away below him like a dream. Once more he was flying into a country at war – a place he had never seen – to kill. He could still remember a time, very soon after he’d been sent to the war in Angola, when he was young, when killing was an abstract, unknown quantity, made unreal by its sanctioned legality and the brute, industrialised indifference with which it was carried out. But then, as the corpses multiplied, the shocking waste and cruelty of the war had permeated his soul. He was poisoned, infected, lost. And he’d never recovered. And then, later, after being badly wounded, witnessing firsthand the horrors of his country’s chemical and biological weapons programme, he’d deserted, fled over the border into Mozambique. It was 1982. He was twenty-two. Still badly injured, exhausted and out of water, he’d been taken in by a family of itinerant farmers. An old healer had sewn his wounds, nursed him back to health. The generosity of these simple people had stunned him. It was with him still, locked away like a precious talisman. And yet the old healer’s words continued to haunt him.

  Clay depressed the talk button on the headphone mike. It was the first time he’d done so in hours. ‘Do you believe in spirits, Koevoet?’

  Crowbar looked over at him. ‘What, like the Holy Ghost?’

  ‘No, not that. The evil kind.’

  Crowbar passed him the bottle. ‘Witchery?’

  Clay nodded.

  ‘Me, no. But I’ve seen people die, just drop dead, after being cursed by the local witch doctor. Belief is a powerful thing.’

  Clay drank, felt the alcohol cut into him. ‘An old healer I met in Mozambique, in eighty-two, he said I had an evil spirit inside me.’

  Crowbar laughed. ‘That would explain a lot, ja.’

  ‘I’m serious, oom. He said it would never leave me. That I’d have to live with it until I died.’

  ‘Fok, Straker. We all have one of those.’ Crowbar grabbed the bottle, drank.

  ‘He said it was strong. That it wanted to kill.’

  ‘Good. Get it ready.’

  ‘That’s the problem, oom. It’s always ready.’

  Crowbar raised the bottle. It was three-quarters gone. ‘Good thing to have in this life, a spirit like that.’

  ‘I’ve tried to live with it. I can’t.’

  Crowbar drank, one hand on the wheel, wiped his mouth with the wrist of his drinking hand. ‘Here’s what you do, seun. When you’re ready – I mean, really ready – go and get some village juju man to incant it away. As long as you believe it’s gone, it will be. It’s all in your head, seun.’

  ‘Are we paying for what we’ve done, Koevoet?’

  Crowbar’s eyes narrowed behind his aviator’s Ray-Bans. ‘Don’t talk kak, Straker. We all do what we have to. You, me, even fokken Manheim. Stay alive. Do your best. That’s all you can do.’

  ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ said Clay. He could feel the alcohol blurring his thoughts now, its folding, looping distortions. And yet, suddenly, it all made sense.

  ‘What are you talking about, Straker?’

  Clay swallowed another mouthful of the whisky. Everything was clear, clear as the rarefied ten-thousand-foot atmosphere, as the rumpled topography spooling out beneath him like a carpet he could step out and walk on. It had always been Crowbar, ever since his first kill, just after his nineteenth birthday on that hot, dry day in Angola. It had been Crowbar who’d put him on point that morning, and when they flushed that terr, he’d told the rest of the platoon to hold their fire so that Clay could take the shot. And after, standing over the body of the boy who’d been not much older than Clay, Crowbar had clapped him on the back. Good kill, he’d said.

  It was Crowbar who’d taught him the art, in all its beautiful variety, who’d been there to congratulate him every time he’d torn an enemy’s stomach open with the high-velocity 5.56 millimetre rounds from his R4, every time he’d blown apart someone’s skull or severed a spine. And it had been Crowbar who had told him to forget the other things – the killing of innocents, of children – as if it were si
mply part of the process. Which of course, it was. Crowbar had taught him that too. It was all just a business. And for people like Crowbar and his erstwhile employers, a horrifyingly lucrative one. Even now, flying towards another killing, the taste of it already sweet in his mouth, Crowbar was here, guiding him, preparing, planning, marshalling his resolve.

  ‘It’s you,’ Clay said again. ‘God damn it. Fuck. Of course. How could I have been so stupid? It’s you. That’s what the old guy was trying to tell me. It’s been you all along.’

  Crowbar reached over, grabbed the bottle from Clay’s hand. ‘What the fok are you ranting about, Straker? Calm down, for fok’s sake.’

  Clay ripped off the headphones, threw them into the backseat.

  ‘What’s wrong, seun?’ shouted Crowbar.

  ‘It’s you,’ said Clay, mouthing over the noise of the engine and the air rushing past the open windows. ‘You’re the spirit. It’s you. It’s always been you, god damn it.’

  Crowbar shook his head, pointed to his headset, spoke something into his mike.

  But Clay did not answer, just stared out across the mountains and plains to the future.

  6th November 1997. Cairo, Egypt. 22:40 hrs

  I write this from my shelter in Giza. I am still shaking.

  Tonight, Samira and her children shared their evening meal with me. She had had a successful day, she told us as she stirred the pot over the fire. Under a pile of rotting vegetables she had found a small trove of almost-new electronics: a tape deck, amplifiers, a personal computer. The Coptic Zabbaleen she works for was very pleased. He took her finds back to his shop in Moquattam, above the City of the Dead, and will burn out the plastic, recovering the precious metals: gold, copper, perhaps titanium.