The Golden Scales

by Parker Bilal

  The uneven track twisted and turned, winding up into the hills. The rocky walls drew in around him as the track led him deeper and deeper into the shadows. A few minutes later he came around a bend and saw a gently sloping ramp leading at an angle on to a circular platform that jutted out from the rockface. On the top of the promontory a large building perched on the hillside facing towards the sea.

  The Mercedes coasted to a halt, engine off. There was no sign of the car he had been following, no sign of anything or anyone. No lights showed in the building. It looked abandoned, a toothless face with windows for eyeholes. Makana made sure the car’s interior light was off and then clicked open the door, acutely aware of how sound travelled, echoing from the walls around him.

  He didn’t hear them come up behind him until it was too late. A slight crunch of stone underfoot and then the cold barrel of a gun was pressed against the nape of his neck. The muzzle prodded him to move forward. The gravel crunched under his feet as he climbed the track towards the empty building. It looked like a hospital of some kind. The hollows of the empty windows stood open like invitations. A flashlight clicked quickly on and off. So far no one had spoken a word. Hands seized his arms to steer him up the steps and into the building. Their footsteps rang hollowly through the ruined shell as Makana found himself propelled along. They led him deeper, along corridors where the flashlight bounced back off walls that closed in. The darkness shifted around him. Walls gave way, opening into rooms to left and right, shadows moving fluidly across them like malevolent spirits. The air was damp and cold, rich with organic rot. His shoulder, already raw from the reef, bumped into a wall, then he was bounced down a set of stairs, along a narrow corridor and finally into a room, where he was sent sprawling on to a heap of rubble. The flashlight flicked around the room and then clicked off. The footsteps withdrew. He heard a door slam and a bolt being shoved home.

  The fear he felt then was a physical sensation. A memory locked into his body from another time. He had to fight the rising panic. Already he felt the claustrophobia that still haunted his dreams, brought him awake in a heaving sweat. It was all too familiar. The weight on his chest, the sense that he was suffocating. It had been so long ago, and yet here it was, coming back to him as vividly as if it had been yesterday. The unbearable physical memory of being imprisoned, locked away. His breath came in short quick stabs, his heart racing. He forced himself to take deeper breaths, fighting the impulse to scream. I’ve done this before, he told himself. I can do it again.

  Makana crouched on his heels in the dark, drawing himself into a ball, taking up as little space as possible, making the room around him expand. He couldn’t tell if the darkness extended above his head for hundreds of metres, or whether it stopped just in front of his face. It was as if he had slipped beneath the surface of this world into another, subterranean plane of existence that was wired into his memory. His whole body was shaking uncontrollably now. He had been shivering with cold in the car. Now sweat poured from him. There was no point in fighting it, he realised. It was coming to carry him back.

  Out of the darkness, it was coming.

  Chapter Forty

  Help me! Please help me!

  A ghost house. He knew it as soon as he opened his eyes. He woke up in his own filth, the filth of others who had passed through these narrow walls before him. The air too thick to breathe, fetid with the acrid reek of piss and shit. His own body waste mixed with that of countless, faceless others who had disappeared before him. This was where they became nameless. This was where they vanished. This was where men were reduced to nameless creatures, without families, or hopes, or beliefs. Their bodies scraped across these walls as they were pushed out of this world.

  Save me, Baba!

  He couldn’t let go, he told himself. Not just yet. Heaving himself to his feet, he hurled his weight at the door, feeling the jolt of pain as the metal thumped back into his shoulder like a drum. Barely enough strength to stand up. ‘Let her go!’ he screamed, over and over, until his lungs burned. Then he fell back, silent, pressing his ear to the door, straining to hear.

  Baba!

  ‘Nasra!’ he called. Silence but for the flies crowding round his face, trying to get into his mouth, buzzing at his nostrils, his eyes. His ears were alert to the slightest sound. A locust’s wings. A leaf spinning on water. A cough, a sigh. Any change in the air that would signify that his daughter was safe, alive. Exhausted, his legs buckled and he sank down to the ground, back resting in the pool of filth. When they hosed out this room all trace of him would be gone, he thought. This is all I am, all that remains of me.

  What were they doing to her? he wondered. His eyes scoured the wall of darkness for any crack, a hairline fracture that might promise light.

  Baba, help me, please!

  Night and day. At times he knew the voice was just in his head, screaming at him from somewhere inside, a part of him he could not identify. But then he would come awake in the early hours with a gasp, as if someone had poured ice-cold water over him. The days passed in a blur, shadows closing in on him from all sides. If he pressed his head down to the bottom of the door he could feel the cool night breeze brushing his face. A narrow slit, no more than a couple of centimetres. It was all he had to hold on to. A moment. A breath of air. A tiny increment of hope that told him life went on out there. That people lived and talked and laughed and loved. It was important to believe that there was more than this. Lying there with his face in the filth. The scrabbling of beetles and ants crawling over him. Worms wriggled, coiled over his eyes. A mosquito buzzed in his ears like a diesel engine. Just a single breath of air. It was all he needed to know this would end.

  ‘Nasra! Nasra!’ he called over and over. Silence.

  At times there were other voices. Whispers coming through the door. Low and persistent. A babbling brook that seemed to be trying to warn him. But what were they saying?

  Flinging himself to the ground, wriggling, trying to slide under the door to get closer to them, to hear what they were saying, convinced that they held the key to his fate.

  ‘What? What is it?’

  He slept against the wall, propped up against it for protection, feeling the plaster rub off against his skin, trying to dig himself inside. He would be woken at all hours. The door would open and the men would enter and start beating him. So many there wasn’t room for them to lift their sticks. Heavy boots thudded into his ribs. Other times water would crash over him. Sometimes it was not water but the toilet bucket, the stench so powerful it made him gag, his eyes stinging.

  Days passed like decades. Centuries, it felt like, his life withering into bile and then dust. Fever made his eyeballs ache, his head throb. He vomited when there was nothing left inside him, a thin green trickle running down his chin. He floated in a state of suspended animation, no longer sure of who or what he was. A cockroach? A beetle?

  Some days, just to remind him of what the open air was like, they let him out. He hated that. It disoriented him. It was a taste of freedom, a reminder of the power they had to take it away again, any time they pleased. When they pushed him back into the cell, he would kick and scream. The walls yawned open to draw him in, sucking him back down into the waiting darkness and filth.

  One night they flung him in and he stumbled. Something unfamiliar was occupying the floor. He fell silent, his heart telling him what he could not bear, that it was his daughter. Frantically, he fumbled for another explanation. Panic fought the logic which told him that the body was too big. A man’s arm. A man’s body. Not a child’s. Alhamdoulilah. He wept with relief as he continued his investigation. The man’s face had softened where his teeth had caved in. Cheekbone and nose broken. Makana’s fingers found the halo of white hair around the crown of his head. Professor Manute. The man he had tried to save. Would he have lived if Makana had not intervened?

  The rusty bolt squeaked itself open to reveal light. His eyes tried to adjust. Eventually, he saw dusty walls, the leaves of a tree in
the distance. A world whose existence he had forgotten. Still, he did not move. He knew this game. A familiar outline appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Bring him out.’

  The cell shrank suddenly as two men squeezed in, grabbed hold of him and hauled him up, stumbling over the dead professor, and out, to dump him like an old mattress in the sun.

  ‘Clean him off.’

  A hiss of water stuttering in warning from a hosepipe before it hit him, making him gasp in shock. So cold. So clean. He scrabbled about, tumbling this way and that in his effort to get away. Then silence. Drops fell from his shivering head to the muddy pool that had formed beneath him. In that brown mirror he saw something resembling a monster which could only be himself. Another shadow clouded the sky.

  ‘What are we to do with you?’

  Makana recognised the voice without raising his head. Mek Nimr squatted beside him.

  ‘You’re a dangerous man, Makana. You know why? Because you put yourself before the common good. You think you are above the rest of us, but no one is more important than the salvation of the nation, not even you.’

  ‘Salvation?’ gasped Makana. ‘Is that what you call this?’

  Mek Nimr smiled. ‘We’re the same, you and me. The difference is that you married a woman from the educated classes. That doesn’t make you any better than me. But you’ve always behaved as if you were superior.’

  Makana managed to lift his head. ‘We’re not the same.’

  ‘You lack humility. You will thank me for this one day, for saving you from yourself. You would have wound up an atheist like that poor old professor, thinking that his learning put him above the rest of us. Is that what you want to do, corrupt good Muslims with your atheism?’

  ‘I want to see my wife, my daughter.’

  ‘In good time. Patience.’

  With that Mek Nimr turned and walked away. The men who had brought him out of the little cell helped Makana to stand. His feet were swollen and he collapsed, seeking the ground again. It was too painful to stand. A large sergeant he remembered from a lifetime ago took pity on him.

  ‘Carry him over there and put him in the shade. Give him something to drink.’

  They put a hand under him on either side and dragged him across the yard to a bench set against the wall of an office. No sooner had they set him on it than he keeled over, collapsing to the floor like a sack of dates.

  ‘Get him up again,’ ordered the sergeant.

  How long did he spend sitting there, the stench still on him? In his skin, his hair, his pores, inside his very being?

  ‘We’re going to take you home now,’ said the sergeant, leaning over him, close to the wall, as he spat a long brown stream of tobacco against it. ‘But bear in mind that he won’t be satisfied until he is finished with you.’

  Makana tried to turn his head, to look up, but the sun blinded him. The big shadow passed over him like wings and was gone.

  He barely registered what was going on as they drove him across town, pushed him from an unmarked car into the road. Stumbling along the uneven street, his bare, broken feet shuffled over stones and shards of glass, sheep’s jawbones filled with teeth, rusty cans. Neighbours stood in their doorways watching him go by. Everyone knew him. They drew back. Doors closed quietly. He didn’t blame them. If a police inspector was not immune then who was safe? Still, the news reached his house before he did. Muna rushed out into the street. She threw herself at him, disregarding whoever might be watching, and led him inside.

  ‘We thought you were dead.’ Her eyes were red and puffy, her face drawn. He barely recognised his own wife.

  ‘Our daughter . . . where is she?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ sobbed Muna. ‘She’s asleep.’

  ‘I must see her . . . now,’ he said.

  Taking his hand, she led him like a stranger through his own house, shuffling along, his feet leaving a bloody trail behind him on the veranda tiles. He didn’t believe Nasra was going to be there. Convinced that somehow Mek Nimr had taken her, spirited her through the walls, back to the cell Makana had just vacated. But there she was, stretched out on the bed in their room, as if she was flying.

  ‘She’s fine,’ murmured Muna soothingly. ‘She’s fine.’

  That was when he broke down, sobbing helplessly in her arms.

  ‘We have to get out of here,’ he said finally.

  ‘Why? What are you talking about?’

  There was nothing here that he wanted to keep. It was all coming down around him now. Nothing that couldn’t be better the next time.

  ‘It’s not safe for us.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she whispered, stroking his forehead.

  ‘Get as far away as possible, before they come for me again.’

  ‘Go where? Why should they come again?’

  ‘They’ll come.’

  As if in response to their fears, the telephone began to ring on the bedside table. Makana saw the terror in her eyes. He wished he could protect her, but he couldn’t see how. Extricating himself from her arms, he rolled upright and placed his feet on the floor. The pain brought fresh tears. He stared at the telephone but couldn’t bring himself to reach for it. Muna stepped past him and lifted the receiver, putting it to her ear.

  ‘Hello? Hello?’ She held it out. ‘There’s no one there.’

  Makana stared into her eyes. They wouldn’t leave his family alone. Not now, not ever.

  ‘We have to go, now,’ he said, getting to his feet and throwing open a cupboard. ‘Get Nasra ready, whatever she needs.’

  ‘But where? Where will we go?’

  Makana stopped to think. ‘North. We can get across the border to Egypt and head for Cairo.’

  He took his spare pistol from the locked drawer beside the bed, a Tokarev 7.62mm automatic. He checked it was loaded. Then he remained still for a long time, just sitting there staring at the blunt-nosed weapon. If the time came, would he be able to do it? he wondered. Surely ending it all would be better than subjecting Muna and Nasra to whatever horrors were imagined for them?

  ‘We’re ready.’

  He looked up and saw Muna standing in the doorway, the child cradled in her arms. She saw the gun and he looked away before she could see what was written in his eyes. Standing, he tucked it into his holdall before leading the way out. The car was parked on the other side of the narrow alleyway. An old Volkswagen Passat, its bodywork bruised and scarred by countless previous owners. He placed the suitcases in the back, the canvas holdall under his feet in the front.

  ‘You drive,’ he said. What made him choose not to drive? Was it the pain in his feet, or the fear that he might pass out, still weak after his ordeal? Or because that way he could keep an eye on what was going on around them, and then if he had to use the gun, both his hands would be free?

  The streets were quiet. With curfew hour fast approaching the few vehicles left on the road were making their way home as swiftly as possible. They would have to hurry if they were to make it, but if they were stopped just after curfew they would probably be let through as last-minute stragglers. The guards on the bridge were regular army and despised the new militias. He still had his identity card if there was any doubt. The bridge was the noose through which the thread of their freedom passed. Beyond that the borders of the city were porous. They could slip out into the open emptiness and nothing could stop them after that.

  The approach to the bridge was deserted. As the Volkswagen curled along the long open road Makana spotted the soldiers casually moving towards the centre of the tarmac, guns slung over their shoulders. One of them raised a hand. Makana stuck his out of the window and waved back.

  ‘Slow down,’ he said.

  Muna began to panic. ‘They’re not going to let us go,’ she whimpered. ‘They will kill us!’

  Makana glanced over at her. Muna’s eyes were wide with fear.

  ‘It’ll be all right. We’re just a family getting home late.’

  They slowed and came to a halt.
A couple of soldiers ambled slowly forwards. They were still setting up the barrier for the night, rolling oil drums into place in slow, lazy arcs, turning them on their rims, letting them fall into place. Then Makana saw something else. In the shadows beyond the arc of lights tracing the bridge were other shapes. Objects that his eyes slowly made out. The end of a vehicle. Two pick-ups, men moving around them like smoke in the fluid darkness. A trap, he realised, too late. He was reaching under his seat for the automatic when Muna gave a cry of panic and stamped her foot down on the accelerator. The old Volkswagen puttered and struggled, whining up the incline, trying to gain speed. She ground it up another gear. One soldier rushed forward, stepping into their path, only to go spinning off as the front wing brushed him aside, the wing mirror splintering.

  They had almost reached the top of the bridge’s arch. On the other side the road would be clear with nothing to stop them sliding down into the deserted, unlit streets, to vanish into the soft darkness beyond. The army lorry appeared out of nowhere. A huge Magirus Deutz lumbering up the incline towards them. The highbeams came on, blinding them both. Muna wrenched the wheel to the left. Makana heard a pop as one of the old, worn tyres gave out, then they bounced up the kerb and struck the railings. He was flung sideways, against the passenger door. It gave and he flew out, hitting the road hard. There were shouts and a siren, the thunder of boots approaching. His head was ringing, his sight blurry. He blinked furiously to clear his vision, scrabbling about for his gun. Then his sight cleared and he stopped.