by Paul Sussman
And of course there remained the obvious problem of how – even if Zerzura did exist and was one and the same as the Hidden Oasis – the Kitab’s author had come about his information. The oasis was, after all, supposed to be hidden.
Curiously it had been Bagnold himself who had provided an answer of sorts. There had long been rumours, he told Flin, that certain desert tribes knew of Zerzura’s whereabouts, Bedouin who had stumbled on it by accident and had guarded the secret of its location ever since. For himself he didn’t believe a word of it, but if Flin was looking for explanations that, in Bagnold’s opinion, was the most likely one: the Kitab’s author had heard about the oasis second, third or fourth hand from a Bedouin who had actually been there.
‘It’s a fascinating tale,’ he had said. ‘But be careful. More than one person has been driven mad by the search for Zerzura. Keep it as an interest. Don’t let it become an obsession.’
And Flin hadn’t. Not in the beginning. He had continued to explore the subject, to turn up whatever information he could, but it had never been more than a hobby, a diverting sideline to his main area of study. And then he had finished his doctorate and moved out of Egyptology and Zerzura and the Hidden Oasis had been all but forgotten.
Only when his life had gone tits-up and he had returned to Egypt, got involved in Sandfire, had he started looking into it all again, going back over the evidence. Only then had it really sunk its claws into him, his interest ballooning into obsession, and obsession into something bordering on full-blown mania.
It was out there, he knew it, he could feel it. Despite what Bagnold and a hundred others had said. Zerzura, the wehat seshtat, whatever you wanted to call it – it was out there in the Gilf Kebir. And he couldn’t find it. He couldn’t bloody find it. However hard he looked.
He stared down at the print, his brow furrowed, his teeth clenched, then glanced up at the clock on the wall.
‘Fuck it!’ he yelled, leaping to his feet. Only fifteen minutes before he was due to start his Advanced Hieroglyphs class. He replaced the print, snatched up his laptop and rushed from the building, in such a hurry that he failed to notice the rotund figure sitting in the window of the juice bar next door, dabbing at his face with a handkerchief and sipping from a can of Coca-Cola.
DAKHLA
‘Al Dakla Centeral Hospital’, as the sign on its roof proclaimed, sat on the main thoroughfare through Mut: a modern, two-storey building surrounded by dum palms, and painted green and white like most of the rest of the town. Leaving the Land Cruiser on the forecourt Zahir and Freya went inside where Zahir spoke to a nurse at the reception desk. She motioned the two of them to a row of plastic seats and picked up a phone.
Ten minutes passed, people drifting in and out of the foyer around them, a faint sound of music echoing from somewhere deep within the building. Then a balding, middle-aged man in a white doctor’s coat approached.
‘Miss Hannen?’
Freya and Zahir stood.
‘Dr Mohammed Rashid,’ said the man, shaking her hand. ‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting,’
His English was fluent, a faint American twang to his accent. He spoke briefly in Arabic to Zahir, who nodded and sat down again. With a ‘Please follow me,’ he ushered Freya down a corridor towards the rear of the building, explaining as they went that he had cared for her sister during her final few months.
‘She had what we call Marburg’s Variant,’ he told her, adopting that sympathetic yet detached tone doctors always use when describing terminal sickness. ‘A rare form of multiple sclerosis in which the disease progresses extremely rapidly. She was diagnosed just six months ago and by the end had lost the use of almost everything except her right arm.’
Freya trailed along beside him, only half registering what he was saying. The closer they came to her sister the harder she was finding it to believe any of this was happening.
‘… easier for her in Cairo or back in the States,’ Rashid was saying. ‘But this is where she felt at home and so we did what we could to make her comfortable. Zahir was very good to her.’
They turned right through a set of swing doors and descended a staircase into the hospital basement then followed another corridor, their footsteps echoing on the tiled floor. About halfway down Rashid stopped, removed a set of keys and unlocked a door – thick, heavy, like the door to a cell. Pushing it open, he stood aside to allow Freya through. She hesitated, the temperature around her seeming to drop suddenly. Then, with an effort of will, stepped past him into the room.
It was a large, green-tiled space, unnaturally cold, with strip lights in the ceiling and a vague smell of antiseptic in the air. In front of her, on a trolley, lay a body-shaped form covered in a white sheet. Freya raised a hand to her mouth, her throat tightening.
‘Would you like me to stay?’ the doctor asked.
She shook her head, afraid that if she spoke she would start sobbing. He nodded and started to close the door before leaning back in again.
‘People here in Dakhla don’t always warm to strangers,’ he said, his voice gentler than it had been, less officious. ‘They did to Miss Alex. Ya doctora, they called her, the doctor. An expression of great respect. Ya doctora, and also el-mostakshefa el-gameela – it’s hard to translate precisely but basically means “the beautiful explorer”. She will be greatly missed. I shall wait for you outside. Please, take as much time as you want.’
The door clicked as he pulled it to. Freya stared at it a moment before turning and crossing to the gurney. She stretched out a hand and laid it on the sheet, pressing down, shocked by how skeletal the body beneath felt, as though there was barely any flesh on it.
For a while she just stood like that, overwhelmed, biting her lip, her breath coming in short gasps. Then, tentatively, she grasped the top corner of the sheet and pulled, revealing first her sister’s face and neck, and then the rest of her body down to the waist. She was naked, her eyes closed, her skin translucently pale save for around the left shoulder where the flesh was stained by a heavy epaulette of bruising.
‘Oh God,’ she murmured. ‘Oh Alex.’
Curiously it was the small things, the obscure details that caught her attention rather than the body as a whole, as though to have taken it all in would have been too much and only by dealing with it jigsaw-like, piece by tiny piece, could she come to terms with the enormity of what she was looking at. Of who she was looking at. The mole on the side of her sister’s neck, the sickle-shaped curve of scar tissue on her left hand, where she had slashed it against barbed wire as a child, and another bruise, this one much smaller, just beneath the bend of her right elbow, no bigger than a thumbprint.
Detail by detail she took the body in, piecing her sister together, reclaiming her, until eventually her eyes came to rest on Alex’s face.
Despite all the pain and distress of her final few months her expression was curiously peaceful and contented, the eyes closed as though in restful sleep, the corners of the mouth turned slightly upward in what looked like the beginnings of a smile. Not the face of someone who had died in pain and despair.
Or so Freya tried to tell herself. She thought of her parents, in their caskets at the funeral home following the car accident that had killed them both, remembered that they too had had that same look about them. Maybe it was just how corpses were, the physical default setting of death. Maybe she was reading too much into it.
She couldn’t help herself, however. Needed some reassurance that her sister’s suicide was not quite as hopelessly, unutterably bleak as it seemed. That at the end Alex had found something good to cling to. That she had, in her own way, died happy. That’s what Freya wanted to believe; needed to believe. The alternative – that she had died alone, in agony and despair – was just too terrible to contemplate. There had to be something more. Some flicker of hope.
She reached out and touched her sister’s cheek: the skin was cold and smooth to the touch, like alabaster. She remembered the time when, aged thirteen an
d out on one of her extended rambles around Markham, she had stumbled across Alex and Greg – the boyfriend who would later become Alex’s fiancé – lying asleep in each other’s arms in the corner of a hayfield. They had been on their side, bodies curved into each other like spoons in a drawer, Greg’s arm clutched around Alex’s waist, a faint smile tweaking the corners of her mouth. That same expression as she now wore in death. Greg and Alex – Freya started to sob.
‘I’m sorry,’ she choked. ‘Oh God, I’m so, so sorry. Please, Alex … please …’
She wanted to say ‘Forgive me’ but the words wouldn’t come. Instead, leaning forward, she kissed her sister’s brow and laid her cheek momentarily against her forehead. Then she drew the sheet back up and hurried from the room.
CAIRO
The US Embassy compound is a walled, heavily guarded affair just off Midan Tahrir. More akin to a high-security prison than a diplomatic residence, it is dominated by two buildings.
Cairo 1, as staff call it, is an ugly dun-coloured tower rearing fifteen storeys from the centre of the compound and home to most of the Embassy’s core services: the Ambassador’s office, governmental liaison, military affairs, intelligence gathering.
Cairo 2, just a short hop across the compound, is altogether less obtrusive than its sister building, with a façade of pale cream stone, slit-like windows and a pair of satellite dishes sitting on its roof like giant jug-ears. Here are housed the back-up departments that keep the Embassy functioning – Accounts, Administration, Press, Information. And here, on the third floor, was where Cy Angleton had his office.
Sitting behind his desk now, the door locked and the blinds drawn, he slotted a needle into the insulin-dispensing pen. Lifting his shirt he grasped a handful of rubbery flesh, the compression causing the skin to turn even whiter than it already was.
Things had moved on since he was a kid growing up in the sixties in Brantley, Alabama. Back then injections had involved a vial, a syringe and a needle the length of his finger. Now it was a neat little cartridge and a dispenser no larger than a fountain pen. If the technology had improved, however, some things never changed. As a lifelong Type 1 diabetic he still had to inject himself four times a day, regular as clockwork (‘Pincushion pig boy!’ the kids at school had used to chant at him). And even now, after almost forty years, he still hated doing it.
He gritted his teeth and started humming Hank Williams’s ‘Your Cheating Heart’, giving it a few bars before banging the pen down firmly onto his stomach. The needle pierced the skin with a sharp, transient sting. He held it there a moment as the insulin pumped out into the fatty tissue, keeping him alive; then, with a sigh of relief, he returned the pen to its holder. Buttoning his shirt he waddled across to the window, raising the blind. Sunlight flooded the office.
It was a small, cramped space, the furniture – desk, chair, sofa and bookcase – bland and ugly: GI furniture, they called it. He would have been more comfortable over in Cairo 1, where the offices were bigger and better appointed, but his secondment was to Public Affairs, and Public Affairs was in Cairo 2, so that’s where he was. Fewer questions that way. It wouldn’t be for too long, hopefully. Once the whole Sandfire thing was resolved he’d pack up and be on the first plane out.
Below him two figures charged back and forth across the Embassy tennis court, the rhythmic thud of the ball echoing dully around the compound. He watched them, wondering, in a detached sort of way, what it felt like to move so freely, before returning to his desk. He sat down and reached for the file he’d been working on before his insulin shot. On the front, stamped diagonally in red, was the word ‘Classified’. Below that was a name: Alexandra Hannen. He flipped it open and started reading.
DAKHLA
There was paperwork to be gone through, forms to be signed releasing the body for burial, a landslide of bureaucracy. It was getting on for late afternoon before it was all done and Freya was able to leave the hospital. The sharp, piercing sunlight of earlier in the day had softened to a rich, honey-coloured haze, although the heat was just as intense.
‘I take you Doctor Alex house,’ said Zahir as they climbed into the Land Cruiser.
‘Thank you,’ she replied.
After which they were silent.
They followed what appeared to be the main axis road north-west through the oasis. Fields of maize and sugar cane stretched out to either side, irrigation canals, groves of olive, palm and what Freya thought might be mulberry trees. She wasn’t really paying much attention, her mind still struggling to cope with what she had seen back in the morgue.
After twenty minutes they turned left onto a smaller road which took them into a village; Qalamoun, according to a dual Arabic-English sign planted on its outskirts. There was a mosque, a cemetery, a couple of dusty fruit and vegetable stalls and, rather incongruously, a glass-fronted shop with a neon Kodak sign outside and a board proclaiming ‘Fast Foto devilp here’.
Just beyond the village they turned again, this time onto a rutted, rubbish-strewn dirt track. Freya clutched the door handle as the Land Cruiser lurched back and forth, watching distractedly as the farmlands gave way to desert, verdant green dissolving into scorching hues of orange and red. Up and down they bumped as the track wound through a messy, disordered landscape of sand hummocks and gravel flats before climbing up onto a low ridge beyond which the desert opened out dramatically. Freya leant forward, the trauma of the hospital receding fractionally as she took in the panorama ahead – a vast undulating ocean of sand stretching away as far as the eye could see, the dunes seeming to rise and sharpen the further out they went so that what began as gentle swells had, by the time they reached the horizon, surged into towering knife-edged waves. Beneath, in the broad plain between the ridge and the first of the dunes, lay a small subsidiary oasis of fields and palm groves shimmering lushly amidst the surrounding emptiness.
‘This Doctor Alex house,’ said Zahir, slowing and pointing to a white dot near the far side of the greenery.
Despite herself Freya smiled, thinking how perfectly suited it was to her sister, how happy she would have been there.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.
Zahir just grunted and, gunning the engine, took them down and across the plain.
They crossed some outlying fields, newly ploughed, what looked like white egrets pecking at the chocolatey soil, and entered the oasis. Now that they were nearing her sister’s home Freya took more notice of her surroundings, her head turning this way and that as they jolted and slewed along the sandy track. Trees pressed in all around, tangled spiderwebs of light and shade dappled the ground. They passed a brushwood animal enclosure, a stack of cut sugar cane and a rectangular threshing floor before a donkey cart piled high with olive branches appeared round a corner ahead and Zahir was forced to pull over to allow it to pass. An elderly, sunburnt man in a straw sunhat leered at them as he went by, a cigarette dangling from his toothless mouth.
‘This Mahmoud Garoub,’ said Zahir once the cart was gone. ‘He no good man. You no talk to him.’
He flicked his eyes at Freya to make sure she had got the message, then shifted the Land Cruiser back into gear and carried on, the undergrowth gradually thinning until eventually the track petered out in a glade of lilac-flowered jacaranda trees. Ahead, near the far edge of the glade, stood Alex’s house – single-storey, whitewashed, with a satellite dish on the roof and a bougainvillaea-framed front door. Zahir pulled up, got out and, grabbing Freya’s bag from the back seat, crossed to the front door.
‘You sure you no want stay in hotel?’ he asked, pulling a set of keys from his djellaba and unlocking the door. ‘My brother have good hotel in Mut.’
She thanked him, but said she was quite happy here.
He shrugged, threw open the door and dropped the bag inside.
‘Housekeeper leave food,’ he said. ‘You heat on cooker, very easy.’
He handed her the keys and gave her his mobile number which she keyed into her own phone.
He broke off, as if reluctant to say the word.
‘Funeral,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
They stood for a moment, Zahir shuffling his feet as if building up to saying something. Freya just wanted him to go. Seeming to read her thoughts, he gave a curt nod, climbed back into the Land Cruiser and, swinging it around, drove away.
Once the car was out of sight Freya went into the house and closed the door behind her. The roar of the Land Cruiser’s engine slowly faded, leaving just the distant putter of an irrigation pump and, intermittently, the soft, rattling hiss of palm fronds as they swayed in the breeze.
The building’s interior was cool and dim and for a moment she just stood there, relieved to be on her own at last. Then, crossing a large living area, she opened a set of shuttered doors and stepped out onto a veranda at the back of the house. It was a beautiful spot, shaded by a giant jacaranda tree and with fabulous views out over the desert. The air was redolent with the scent of blossom and citrus. She imagined Alex standing there, and started to smile, only for the smile to fade as she caught sight of the wheelchair parked up at the far end of the veranda. She winced, staring at it in horror as though at some item of torture equipment, then turned and went back inside.
A series of rooms – kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, study, storeroom – opened off the main living area and she wandered from one to the other, taking the place in. There was little by way of furniture or ornament – Alex had always been like that, living simply, hating clutter – but it was unquestionably her sister’s home, her character stamped everywhere and on everything. It was there in the CD collection (Bowie, Nirvana, Richard Thompson, her beloved Chopin Nocturnes); the maps Blu-Tacked all over the walls; the labelled rock samples lined up along every windowsill. There was even a smell of Alex, invisible to a stranger, perhaps, but unmistakable to Freya who had grown up with it: Wright’s Coal Tar Soap mingled with Sure deodorant and just the faintest hint of Samsara perfume.