by Miriam Moss
We’re called up individually. David is the first in our group.
“Here goes,” he says, grinning. “Bye, you guys.” He kisses me on the cheek and gives me a big hug, and then he hugs Tim. I watch him disappear through the door with a spring in his step.
I wait with Tim. When I hear my name next, I’m surprised that my parents aren’t late. I bend down to kiss him quickly on the cheek. He hugs me tightly and then looks up at me. “Anna”—he’s scrabbling in his pocket—“I saved this for you.” He hands me his last Polo mint. “To eat when you get to school.”
“Oh, Tim.” I well up. “That is so kind. You are the loveliest boy—remember that.” I turn away tearfully and walk in a daze toward the door.
The room beyond is ugly; fluorescent strip lighting glares overhead. In front of me shapes fall away, shadows lift, shift, and in the crowd I see her hair, her eyes. I see Marni! And then Dad too! I run toward them.
She folds me in her arms, and the weight of the last few days falls away. Marni’s soft hands, Marni, smelling of Je Reviens. Marni.
She strokes my hair, my forehead, my face. “My precious girl, my treasure,” she says. “You’re safe. You’re safe now.”
I’m finally released to my father, who gives a wry smile before I’m crushed against his newly laundered shirt, just where I want to be.
“That was a close one, Annie,” he says into my hair. I try to answer but can’t.
As we walk out of the terminal building, neither lets go of me. I feel the soft warmth of Marni’s hand and my father’s strong arm around my shoulders, and I can’t stop smiling, and crying.
Marni keeps stopping to gaze at me, to hug me again and again. “I can’t take my eyes off you,” she whispers. “Can’t believe you’re really here.”
“They’re putting us up in the airport hotel for the night,” Dad says as he collects my luggage from the pile that has somehow arrived at the far end of the next room.
“I tried to let you know I was OK,” I say at last.
“You did so well, darling,” Marni says. “When we got here, we bought all the newspapers we could lay our hands on, and there you were! It was wonderful to see you! What hope it gave us!”
“Where are the boys?”
“They’re with Auntie Di. We’ve been staying with her since we got to London. But we had no idea how long you’d be today. Or what might happen. We thought it better to leave them there with her. We’ve called to update them.”
“Are they OK?”
“Yes, they know you’re safe. We’ll call them later. You can speak to both of them yourself.”
We go through to the hotel reception. “Anything happen?” Dad asks suddenly.
“What do you mean?” I’m confused.
“Anyone hurt you?” he says. “Touch you?”
And I’m back there. Back where I don’t want to be. Horrified at Maria’s muffled cries, her frantic footsteps, the sobbing.
What can I say? What does Dad want to know?
“Um . . . No. Most of the hijackers were nice,” I say. “But one girl got a bit hysterical at the back of the plane one night . . . Someone—” I stop, disoriented. “Someone . . . one of the hijackers . . . touched her.”
“My God!” It bursts out of him.
Marni lays a hand on his arm, as if to remind him of something. He nods, calms himself. “Well, you’re safe now, Annie,” he says. And he takes my face in his hands and kisses the top of my head.
Yes, I’m safe. I hear the words, but I don’t feel safe. Not yet.
It’s like I have a lot of unsafe to get out of my system first. I am happy, though—yes, happy—but my head feels as if it will burst with it all, with everything that’s going on inside it. I’m with Marni and Dad. They’re talking. I’m answering. But I still feel separate somehow, as if I’m looking out from behind a kind of gauze.
53
1230h
We check in to the hotel and go up in the elevator to the modern family room they’ve given us on the fourth floor. It has a double bed, a single one in an adjoining room, and a bathroom. I look at my little bed, with my suitcase already on it, and listen to my parents’ low voices in the next room. Then my father comes in. “Look what I’ve just found, pushed under our door,” he says, smiling. “It’s addressed to you.” He hands me a little brown envelope. It has Post office telegram: no charge for delivery written across it. Typed below that, it says: Anna Milton—Arriving from Amman, hijack plane passenger, Heathrow airport.
I tear it open. Inside are two strips of paper pasted across the page and a purple ink stamp from earlier today.
= WELCOME BACK BABY HOPE YOU HAD FUN WITH THE GORILLAS
LOVE = ALI FI SPUD AND JAFFA + SENDER REQUESTS GORILLAS SPELT LIKE IT
I smile and pass it to Dad and Marni.
“What friends—” Marni says, but is interrupted by a knock on the door.
Dad opens it to a tall young man in jeans with shaggy hair and a camera around his neck. “I’m an authorized photographer, sir,” he says, showing a piece of paper. “Would you consider a picture?”
“Of course, certainly.” Dad stands aside to let the man into the room and introduces Marni and me.
“Been a tough few days for you all,” the man says, smiling.
“Slight understatement.” Dad laughs. “It really was touch-and-go at times, so we’re absolutely delighted to have Anna back.”
Touch-and-go. Is that how it was?
“Are you glad to be home, then, Anna?” the man asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“And how would you sum up your experience?”
Sum up? I hesitate. I don’t want to sum it up. “I can’t,” I say. “Not yet.”
A look passes between Marni and Dad.
“I’m sorry,” I say, feeling useless, my hand feeling instinctively for the Polo mint and the badge in my pocket.
Marni stands. “If you want to take the picture now, then I think after that we’d like to give Anna a little space to recover.”
“Of course.” The man looks disappointed.
It’s probably his first assignment, I think vaguely, but I don’t want to answer questions. I can’t make sense of it myself, so how am I supposed to “sum it up” to a stranger?
The man arranges two chairs with their backs to the TV, in the corner. Marni and I sit on them, and Dad stands behind. Marni holds my hand. Dad has a hand on each of our shoulders.
The flash explodes. Wherever I look, I see blinding bars of white light. They lock in the man’s face, his camera, his body, the patterned carpet, the window. And I’m back there—in the desert with the guerrillas, hemmed in, lying under the seats.
I blink. I am not in the desert.
“Just one more,” says the man. “Smile, please, everyone. Say cheese.” Oh my God, cheese, I think, as the bars explode again.
Dad ushers the photographer to the door and stands chatting with him. Marni and I wander away to sit on the sofa. She’s right here beside me.
“I’ve rung school, by the way,” she says, “to say you’ll be back in a few days. Think you probably need what the army would call a bit of R and R—rest and recuperation. That’s exactly what the school secretary thought too.” Suddenly Marni seems distracted, as if she’s forgotten something, and I see how tired she is too.
“And . . . ?” I say, smiling.
“Yes, sorry.” Marni comes to. “And so I thought the best place to do that might be down with Birdie on the farm in Cornwall. What do you think?”
“I think it’s a great idea. How many days?”
“Shall we say three or four?”
“Four,” I say.
“OK, five, then.”
I laugh. “I love you, Marni.”
“And I do you,” she says. “So much. We just need to get down there, don’t we? Then we can really relax. It’ll be good for all of us. Just think, sleeping in, the farm, Cornish food, and air.”
“
And peace,” I say.
“And peace.”
Dad closes the door on the photographer. “Thought I’d check the news,” he says. “OK?” He pulls the chairs away from the TV and turns it on. The screen flickers. The sound is turned all the way down.
“Oh God,” I say. My plane is there on the screen with the two others in the desert.
My plane. In the heat, the dust, the wind. The silence.
Suddenly a black puff of smoke erupts from the plane’s nose, followed by a huge explosion, blossoming black, bright orange, red. Debris spirals high in the air. A second explosion tears into the main body, ripping it open. The broken tail bursts outward. Thick black smoke rolls along the ground and into the sky.
“No!” I cry. “No!”
Tires explode, plastic blisters and melts. The frame, the doors, the fuselage, writhe and twist in white heat.
My plane . . .
“Good lord,” my father says, stunned. “The hijackers have blown it to smithereens. Why?”
We stand, watching as the flames lose energy. The smoke rolls off. The air clears. The camera zooms in. And all that’s left is a black, twisted wreck.
I feel the earth shift.
My mind translates the images, but I feel that it’s me that’s disintegrated.
That Anna, the one in the desert, has been destroyed, annihilated. Like the plane, she no longer exists.
Dad snaps off the TV, but the image of the plane is still there, exploding, blistering, writhing . . .
“Marni,” I whisper. “Help.”
She puts her arms around me, holds me. “What?” she says. “What is it?”
“I don’t know . . . who I am.”
“You will,” she whispers into my hair. “You will find yourself again.” We are both crying softly. “You will be safe Anna, and calm Anna, again. I promise . . .”
And I look up into her dark eyes, and I believe her.
// Epilogue //
I went back.
I went looking for the Revolutionary Airstrip in the desert outside Amman, where I’d been held hostage on board a plane for four days.
At first I just Google Earthed it, typing in Dawson’s Field hijackings, and found it just outside the town of Zarqa, north of Amman, on the way to the border with Syria. Dawson’s Field is the name of the disused airstrip once owned by the British, a wide, flattened strip of desert between a small escarpment and a line of hills. The hills I’d sat looking at while the deadline ticked closer.
I printed more maps, zooming in and out, and, as I studied them, became haunted by the ghost of the old airstrip lying quite clearly there, running east to west, its track marked out in the sand, unerasable, like an archaeological site or a burial mound. To the immediate left of it were two white-roofed buildings and a perimeter fence of some sort around a small network of roads, and an entry gate at the southern end.
I emailed the British Embassy in Amman and asked the concierge at the InterContinental Hotel about the possibility of gaining access to the airstrip, and was told that Dawson’s Field was right in the middle of a military zone and that I wouldn’t get permission to go in. Perhaps they were jittery about the proximity to the border, where hundreds of thousands of Syrians were gathering, fleeing the civil war that was raging there.
I will go back, I thought. I will find it. I will stand there on the sand and look out on those hills again.
But I didn’t book the air ticket. I made excuses. I didn’t have time. It was the wrong season. And still the landing strip haunted me.
One day I wrote down a list of all the feelings I had about returning to Jordan. I wrote quickly and honestly and found they were entirely contradictory: half positive, half negative. One half were those of a curious woman who was delighted at the thought of an adventure, looking forward to the challenge, to experiencing new sights and discoveries. But the other half belonged to a frightened child. She was hiding inside, looking out through a window, terrified. So I imagined the woman standing alongside the small child. And in my mind’s eye, I saw her gently put out her hand and say, Come on, let’s do it together.
/ / /
“Please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts while we travel through Israeli airspace,” says the voice over the intercom. Why? To stop demonstrations of anguish by Palestinians traveling over the homeland they are forbidden to visit, or because there’s a danger of stray missiles? Three-quarters of those now living in Jordan were originally Palestinians, from several influxes: the first in 1948, when Churchill and the French carved up the area, then after the Six Day War. And more recently there have been more refugees, from Iraq and Syria.
We are flying into Queen Alia airport, named after the late king’s wife, killed in an air accident. It’s newly built, designed by Norman Foster. It was not there in 1970, when Amman, built on seven hills, was much smaller. The InterContinental Hotel, where we were taken after our release and where I have now booked a room to stay the night, has expanded and been refurbished several times since my hijacking. Nothing will look as it did, but perhaps I will be able to experience some of the feelings I felt then, some of the constants in Amman life and the locality that I must have seen all those years ago. The overarching feeling I remember of my ordeal is of being alone. But look, I’m not alone now. I’m with my husband of thirty years. He’s here beside me, holding my hand.
I look out on blue sky and broken cloud and a great expanse of sea below. Ice particles cluster around the edges of my window. As we drop down, I see a haze of red dust and brown sand with crooked paths and cracked ravines, rising mounds, soft folds, a meandering dry riverbed, the shadow of clouds on land. The reddish-brown sand stretches all the way to the horizon. As we descend closer to earth, ripples appear, strange scratch marks, a beaten track, hard and clay covered.
We hit the tarmac, and I feel a great surge of emotion. Tears fall.
We climb down the steps and walk toward the new airport, all glass and concrete. Like a collision of sea and sky, its scalloped roofs, shaped like camels’ lips, rise and fall.
In no time we’re in a taxi, flying past olive groves, fruit and vegetables grown in hoop houses, wide expanses of scrub, new highways, tent encampments, men picnicking on the central reservation. There’s Louis Vuitton, Starbucks, Ikea, and everywhere construction projects, more construction projects, more hollow-eyed, unfinished houses. The seven hills of Amman are densely covered with square, flat-roofed buildings, fawn and white and all the tones in between. And as the sun sets below the horizon, the peach sky leaves us for graying clouds and night.
/ / /
I’m in the foyer of the InterContinental again all these years later, no longer one of a frantic crowd of released hostages being stormed by the media. People sit around unconcerned, elevators ping open, there’s background music and bellboys in uniform, an Arab with a bird of prey on his arm, glass cases displaying jewelry, gray-suited security men. The polished floors reflect and shine. I sit in a carved, lacquered chair and watch the revolving door turn its circle. I look at the reception desk, at the public phones, at a sofa covered in a rattan rug, like the ones we had at home, and I feel numb.
As we settle into our room, I’m aware of the arrival of difficult feelings. I can’t stop thinking about my parents. Both of them are dead now, but back then, when I was released and came here, they were all I could think about. How could I let them know I was OK when I didn’t know where they were, whether they were going to meet me in London? Whether anyone was? I couldn’t even find out if they knew I was alive. There were no mobile phones, and I couldn’t call them on a landline, as I didn’t know where they were. My overriding feeling then was of being alone, and now I seem to be reliving it, as well as feeling an unbearable sense of loss.
The next morning, I stand looking down from the hotel room, seven floors up. I can see twin minarets and a mosque with a pale-blue dome decorated in beautiful patterns. And right below me, on a rooftop by a satellite dish, a Siamese cat ro
lls in the sun from one side to the other, and back again. And there, below it, leaning against a palm tree, a man in a suit is smoking—in the exact way my father did, the same stance, the same way he held his cigarette a little way from him, the same turn of his head to release the smoke. I see them everywhere, the ghosts of my parents: the edge of my mother’s chin in the elevator, the back of her head in the bar, her turquoise dress. It’s taken me by surprise, how much they’re here—when they weren’t before.
We breakfast on fresh fruit and slabs of Jordanian yogurt. There are bowls of oranges, lemons, overflowing mint, tomatoes, and great chunks of halvah looking like layered cliffs.
It’s time to go and talk to the driver we’ve hired for three hours to take us, we hope, to Dawson’s Field. I don’t know what to say, so I ask to go in the direction of the new Hashemite University, and, as we get talking, I gradually mention the reason for our trip. He seems unfazed. His name is Salah, a smart-suited, middle-aged man with an open, friendly face and laughing eyes. He says we can stop and look at my maps when we’re outside the town of Zarqa.
He stops under a road sign. It says Syria, straight on, right for Saudi Arabia and Iraq. We study the maps. It is a military zone, he says, and my heart plummets. I steel myself for disappointment. “But I think this”—he points—“is a sort of military club.”
“Really?” I feel a glimmer of hope.
“We shall see,” he says. “Maybe we can get in there.”
“How?”
“Come,” he says, getting back into the car, “we shall try. I think I know someone who works there.”
He drives on and then turns off the highway, onto a smaller road leading into the military zone. Army equipment lines the road; there are lookout towers, flattened areas of sand, and heaped car tires that look like makeshift rifle ranges. There’s lots of barbed wire. We see a military checkpoint at the far end of the road, and Salah turns around quickly. Suddenly he swings right and stops outside a pair of black gates that have armed security personnel standing both outside and inside. “The polo club,” he says, winding down his window. He shakes the guard’s hand. There’s an amicable exchange in Arabic. He takes out his phone as if to call his friend. The guard stops him and waves us through.