*
Time passed as I sat on that stone but it seemed to stretch, to grow sticky. I wondered whether my captors were not simply playing a cruel trick on me, whether they were standing by silently, watching my every move, anticipating the moment when I would risk removing the blindfold, to finally kill me. When, after some time, I did remove it and my eyes adjusted to the light I saw that the man with the rifle had left a flat trail through the poppies that led back to the road. The car was gone and so, too, were the men. I followed the track back to the road, but once I was there I realised that I did not know which way was forward and which was back. I did not know where I had come from and I did not know in which direction I should head. So I simply chose one direction even though, as I tell it now, I don’t remember which it was, because through the hours that followed, as I walked in steps that grew steadily less certain, the landscape did not seem to change. There was always the river and always the mountain. By the time the day had grown hot, and I did not know whether it was the sun or the fever that was to blame, I heard the crackle of an approaching vehicle. It was an APC that I recognised as the type that had been sold to the local force by the Polish government, but this one seemed to have been commandeered by an American contractor.
‘Muthafucker,’ said the driver when I told him where I had been taken from. ‘That’s at least a thousand muthafucking miles from here.’
Inside the APC I sat beside a man named John Oates whose skin glistened in the slitted light. It gave him the sheen of a young man even though he was probably in his mid-forties or even fifty. When I asked him why he was doing such a shitty job so late in his life, I saw his comrades laugh a little.
‘You sick, buddy,’ he said. ‘You got fever. Best you shut the fuck up a little.’
He was right. I did shut the fuck up and let the fever quiet me into a kind of sleep so that I did not have to endure the small shame I felt at having embarrassed him.
When I woke it took me some minutes to work out that I was now in another vehicle. The light had faded and I’d been strapped by my wrists to a gurney and had an intravenous drip in my arm held fast by a strip of grubby tape. John Oates and his company were gone, or rather I seemed to have left them, but this did not strike me as the order of things at the time. I came to again in a bed. A man’s voice was singing a lullaby in a quiet language. I knew the melody but not the words and I hummed it to myself. It was, I suppose, like a cat’s purr. Something healing.
Once I had regained clarity I established that I had been evacuated to a hospital in the large Flemish base in the north of the country. The ward itself was populated by journalists and private paramilitary contractors who called it the Mercenary Wing. It had taken three days from the time I had been found by the side of the road to get there. The voice that I had heard singing belonged to a Brazilian photojournalist who was in the bed across the aisle from me. He had been blinded in a helicopter gunship attack on a maternity clinic. We spoke about our work and our families. His wife was a singer and an intellectual and he didn’t feel worthy of her.
‘My eyes are my intelligence,’ he said. ‘And now they are gone.’
I told him I had left my son with his grandmother to come here.
‘He thinks I am a hero. He is ten. I am his hero. War is heroic to a ten-year-old.’ The Brazilian made a face that I could not properly read because of the bandages over his eyes.
The following day the lieutenant arrived with a thin man whose tag said Howard Sherlock. Sherlock’s face was neat and eager. He struck me as probably new to his job and wanting to please someone. The purpose of the visit was, as he put it, for them to ask me questions and for me to answer them. I remembered the terms of the schedule and I imagined that this was more or less an obligation. Whenever I spoke Sherlock keyed notes into his device. I guessed it was also recording the sound of our words.
I told them about the roadhouse, about the call from the man who spoke English with such a ringing Geordie accent that I wondered it wasn’t a joke someone was playing on me.
‘Do you know who the source was?’ the lieutenant asked.
Her tone was generous and her round head tilted towards her shoulder, the crease of a smile on her lips. It was an act, of course. But it didn’t matter. I liked the lieutenant and I liked her pretending to like me. I think for a time she actually did.
‘No,’ I said. ‘There was no way of knowing who the source was. The tip was anonymous.’
Sherlock came to life then.
‘What kind of information did this source have?’ he said.
I resisted rolling my eyes.
‘Obviously there was no information,’ I said. ‘It was a trap.’
‘Of course it was a trap. But what kind of information were you expecting?’
When I said Rasheed Omar’s name the lieutenant shifted in her chair. I noticed it. Sherlock noticed it. I wondered if he knew how to read it.
‘You think there’s more to know about him?’ he said.
Sherlock seemed earnest and even more naïve perhaps than I was but I wasn’t sure if it had been trained into him the way it had been trained into the lieutenant. The lieutenant had been there three years already. She knew what went down but pretended she didn’t. It had crossed my mind more than once that the kidnap was a warning for me to play nice, to say nice things about Omar. I still didn’t really know anything more about Rasheed Omar than the rumours. So I didn’t know what to say. The only things I ever say are things I know for certain.
‘I can’t say,’ I said.
Sherlock made a face at this semantic gap. I guessed it gave him the impression that I was playing a game with him, trying to be evasive.
‘I mean I can’t say. I don’t know.’
Again I looked to the lieutenant. She seemed to relax, to rest back in her chair a little, happy, now that I had refused to be drawn on Omar, to let Sherlock take over.
‘Where did they take you?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. I was in the boot of a car for ages.’
‘Ages? For an hour?’
‘Maybe. Maybe more. It was hard to tell. I was scared. I wasn’t worrying about how long I’d been travelling. I was worrying about how much time I still had left to live. You measure it differently.’
‘Did the car stop along the way?’
‘No. There were no stops.’
‘No checkpoints?’
‘Not that I could tell. The car never stopped.’
‘Did you hear traffic?’
‘No.’
‘Animals? Were you on a farm?’
‘No, there were no animals. No planes. No children. Just …’
‘Yes?’
‘Wind.’
‘Wind?’
‘Yes. Wind. It whistled.’
I made a whistling sound to demonstrate and Sherlock made an earnest note of it in his device. I asked him how it might be significant.
‘I’m the one asking the questions here,’ he said. ‘Now, tell me about the people who held you. How many of them were there?’
‘There were three.’
‘You seem very sure. Are you sure? What did they look like?’
‘I don’t know. Whenever they were in the room they had their faces covered.’
‘But you’re sure there were three. How?’
‘I saw their shoes. There were only ever three different pairs of shoes. The brown loafers, the black shiny shoes, and the blue sneakers.’
Again Sherlock made a note.
‘And how did you communicate? Did they speak English?’
‘Nope. At least they didn’t speak it to me. They asked me no questions and I gave them no answers. I was not tortured. I was fed. I was taken to a toilet blindfolded. If it weren’t for my neck, I think I would even have slept comfo
rtably.’
‘Is this the truth?’
‘Yes, it is the truth.’
Sherlock looked from me to his screen and back again as if he were making a portrait. The lieutenant leaned across to him and pointed to something on the screen and he nodded, typing another note. When he was done he closed the screen and stood.
‘Thank you for your cooperation,’ he said.
He did not offer a hand for me to shake or wish me a speedy recovery or anything friendly of that nature.
*
Two days later the lieutenant came to visit me again and we took a walk through the hospital grounds, past the broken walls of buildings that had been abandoned perhaps back in the days of another foreign occupation, or more recently even. I did not know the country so well.
‘We sent out men to look for you,’ said the lieutenant. ‘They put their lives on the line for you.’
‘I didn’t ask for that.’
I thought she might spit but knew that it was a projection. A cliché. This wasn’t a movie.
‘He doesn’t even believe you were taken hostage, you know. No one ever made any demands.’
I could not say anything to that.
When we returned to the ward, the Brazilian looked as if he had been waiting the whole time just to greet us. We had become friends, of a sort, in the way that hospital roommates are forced into a basic bodily camaraderie.
‘I know who that is with you,’ he said as we passed. ‘That’s the lovely soldier. She smells so nice.’
The lieutenant did not smile or frown. If anything I thought the compliment seemed to tire her. I sat on the side of the bed and bounced on it lightly. The lieutenant stood back against a wall.
‘Do you want to go home?’ she said.
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘Yes. Technically you’ve still got a few months left on your embed. We have an agreement after all. A contract. It’s your choice.’
I guessed that Sherlock wanted the lieutenant to keep me close. Better to have me where I could be seen than allowed to make mischief elsewhere.
‘I’ll let you know.’
When she turned to leave and had walked halfway to the door, I called after her.
‘Petra,’ I said. I waited until she had returned to my bedside to show her a face that said I had something to confide in her.
I looked over to the Brazilian. He was pretending not to listen, so I lowered my voice to a whisper. She leaned into it.
‘When they left me at the side of the road back there, the one with the blue sneakers put his hand on my shoulder and said “Sorry.” That’s it. That’s the only thing he said to me, the only thing any of them said to me directly the whole time. He tied the blindfold on me and I thought he was about to shoot me and was apologising for it. Maybe he really was going to shoot me but changed his mind when I felt for his shoulder. “It’s okay,” I said to him. “It’s okay.”’
*
It had just gone night when I arrived back at the base. There were two soldiers on security detail at the gate. One of them trained a gun and a bright light on my face while the other frisked me. I’d been there for five weeks before I was captured and I had supposed these men would have known me, but they did not show a single sign of recognition. The soldier who frisked me took a good hard look through my credentials and my kit. He found the camera I’d paid the Brazilian photojournalist a thousand US dollars for on my last day in the hospital. Without him knowing I had copied his pictures onto my memory card and now the soldier was scrolling through them. They were the last pictures the Brazilian had taken before he was blinded; among them were delicate portraits of an expectant mother in the maternity clinic who, moments later, would be dead.
‘I’ll want that back,’ I said.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘You’ll get it back.’
Inside the gates a group of soldiers had formed a ring of chairs around a campfire. When I approached, one or two nodded their acknowledgment and one lifted a can of Coke in salute. None of the others followed.
The only spare camp chair left in the circle was beside a muscular Queenslander whom I had only ever heard addressed as Jezza. He had been the first to turn his head away when the other soldier had tried to lead the toast. I folded my arms into my university pullover and made a show of not looking in his direction but a moment later he nudged me with a fist in my ribs. When I turned to him, he looked long and hard into my face. He was pale, freckled, and blinked his long white lashes often as if sand had been blown into his eyes.
‘You know,’ he said, and he paused in a way that gave the appearance of having chosen his words with great consideration. ‘Back in Bundy mine was a cock to be reckoned with.’
I grinned in the way I had learnt to as a man in Australia with other men who were drinking, even if now they were only pretending at it with Coke and Red Bull. And in so doing I met the provocation. I was trying to show him I was sound.
‘I bet it was,’ I said.
He put his arm about my shoulder and gripped my chin with his free hand.
‘I did my fucking money on you, you weasely cunt. I thought they’d got your fucking head for sure.’
I tried to hold my grin as he said this, but felt it turning sour beyond my control.
‘Hey Smalls,’ he yelled. A wide-lipped boy at the opposite end of the circle lifted his head and nodded in our direction. Jezza had also found the attention of the entire group. ‘Here’s your hundred bucks, cunt.’
He crumpled a note and tossed it Smalls’ way. It unfurled and fluttered to the ground, almost into the fire.
‘Pick the fucking thing up and give it to him before it melts.’
It took me a moment to realise that Jezza was talking to me. I stood and picked up the note and handed it towards Smalls. He snatched it from me and a ripple of laughter tracked around the circle.
I sat back down and pulled the hood over my head, self-conscious now about the dressing on my throat, no longer convinced that it looked as heroic as I had first thought it to be when I was being treated in hospital.
*
In the morning I reported to the lieutenant, who handed the camera back to me.
‘I’ve taken those images and passed them on to Mil Intel. They’ll have to be vetted before we can release them back to you. You haven’t made copies for anyone else have you?’
‘No,’ I said. I didn’t know how she thought she could trust only my word. But it was the truth. I had made copies for no one but myself.
‘Well you can sign to say so just the same.’
I signed on the form she offered.
*
The election was coming and even though he didn’t need them Rasheed Omar wanted votes. He had decided to pull a PR stunt in the nearby town, a walk through, pressing the flesh. The lieutenant had signed up to it and was sending along a couple of soldiers and a compliant media body to give it the spin she wanted. Local cooperation. Democracy. Delivering autonomy. The two soldiers were a South African named John and the Queenslander, Jezza. I was the media.
I met with the soldiers at the camp gates just before ten in the morning. Jezza barely acknowledged me. When I made an extra signal of greeting to him he had to ask for my name.
‘Oh, yeah. The journo, right?’
‘Yeah. The journo.’
The South African pointed us in the direction of a white car parked a short distance away on the open road.
The man in the driver’s seat drew a finger across his wispy moustache as we neared. The man beside him swigged from a clear plastic bottle of water. This was Omar.
At the car I stepped ahead of the soldiers and the young man pushed the door out so that I had to move back. He stepped out as if he were the one to be greeted.
‘What do you want?’
he said.
It was the man with the gentle Geordie accent I had spoken with on the phone and who had given me the tip about the roadhouse. I looked at his shoes. They were the blue sneakers.
‘Media,’ I said. ‘Australian media.’ I held out my pass.
He smiled, nodding, and made a long introduction through the open door of the car. I guessed it told the story about the kidnap. At the end of it Omar’s face spread into a broad smile. I thought then that it was the smile that drew the permanent squint across his face and that made him look as if he were always staring into the sun. I found out only later that he was almost blind in both eyes. This is how the truth of a person arrives: in pieces and usually late.
We shook hands and he said something that the translator listened to and repeated back to me. While his accent was coal-mining Geordie, I couldn’t fit him together because he spoke in sentences that were overly formal; the rhythm of his words didn’t have a clear pattern of belonging.
‘Rasheed Omar is very pleased to make your company. He has heard of your recent troubles and hopes that you have recovered.’
Omar pinched his hand about his throat, smiled and spoke again.
‘He says that while the criminals who kidnapped you must be brought to justice he wonders if you are a changed man after your experience.’
I looked the translator in the eye, then down at his shoes again. He followed me. He seemed embarrassed, as if he had not until then realised that he had given himself away.
‘I still aim to tell the truth,’ I said.
The translator made a grim face and turned to pass on my message. Omar nodded sagely. I guessed there was a kind of respect in it but I knew that I’d been shut out.
Our group walked the short distance along the approach road from the camp into the town. The South African soldier moved into a forward position. He kept perhaps ten or twenty paces ahead of us. The translator kept by Omar’s side. I tried to nudge my way between them but when I tried to ask a question the translator ignored me. Instead he touched at Omar’s elbow, guiding him away. Jezza gave me a look.
‘Leave him alone,’ he said. ‘Just watch and see what happens, okay? That’s your job.’
The Best Australian Stories 2012 Page 27