A Walking Guide

by Alan S. Cowell

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  He had worsened. Sweat ran across his face. His body seemed hinged at the waist, the legs stiff, uncooperative and the trunk canted forward, the bad arm hanging as he wrestled to keep his tote bag over his right shoulder while he manipulated his walking pole with his right arm. Once she had called him a coward to his face, on the day he had struck her and broken her faith in him, but she saw no cowardice in the lurching figure before her, still obstinately clad in his faded jeans and vest as the crowd closed and opened and eddied around him, pushing, shoving, forcing him to grapple for balance against an invisible force field of negative energy that had filled the vacuum left by his departed strength.

  TAPE TWO, SEGMENT TWO

  SEPTEMBER 14, 2000, 5:00 P.M.

  MONITORED SEPTEMBER 17

  Camp One. Wrestled with this crazy tent. Like trying to throw a wet bedsheet over crossed fishing poles. One-person bivouac tent, they told me in the store. More like an MRI scan tunnel in nylon, or an oversized condom. Still, you get in, lie flat. Self-inflating mattress self-inflates, sort of, and you are comfortable, sort of. But out of the wind and the rain, thank God. Headlamp on to see what you’re doing. Clothes damp but warming within the sleeping bag. Managed to brew tea, cook one of these dehydrated meals that tastes like cardboard. Have a smoke, jolt of Scotch from the aluminum water bottle. Luxury.

  I came down to the pass quite well, considering. I’d forgotten just how painful the downhill is, how much your knees take a pounding and my thighs are really aching, compensating for the lack of strength in the calves and ankles, I guess. But it was quite welcoming, really, to see that little carved three-shire stone, they call it, like a small obelisk, presumably from the days when Lancashire, Cumberland and Westmoreland met up on the top of the pass. Three counties, now one. Cumbria. But the stone’s still there, like a little beacon, welcoming the traveler. I’d half thought that Eva might have broken the rule and met up with me because this is after all the last place where the road crosses the route and with the weather like it is, I’ll be up in the thick of it tomorrow night at Esk Hause, twice the altitude of here and a lot more exposed. Managed to pitch the tent between two hillocks so it’s quite sheltered. In the bosom, so to speak. Almost room for two in the one-person bivouac condom, if you get cozy. But I made the rule, I suppose: no contact until advanced base. And this is my last chance, my last hurrah. My Everest. And Eva has reason enough to steer clear.

  More Scotch for the confessional. Holy water. Forgive me father. For I have. Because, of course, everybody knew we met up in Gaza that last time, after the Mayo. Not exactly Plan A, though. Supposed to be a secret tryst after that fucking doctor—I’m outta here, baby. Didn’t stay secret for long.

  The day after I flew in and she was waiting for me at the airport we talked our way past the Erez checkpoint and trundled on down in a hard car to Khan Younis, or what’s left of it. Really old by local standards. Refugees. Flotsam and jetsam. The dispossessed of the earth. Wasn’t really our number. Too many other hacks around. TV crews with those new mini-dishes that let them go live from the summit of Everest or wherever. Technology. Certainly they were going live at Khan Younis, and so were the Israelis and the Pals—live ammunition, fire at will. Big boom-boom. Couple of tanks pounding the wreckage of an apartment house. Spirited answering fire from off-target RPGs and at least one .50 cal machine gun. Old thing. Degtyarev Shpagin like they used to have on the duschkas in Beirut, in fact named them after the Degtyarevs, long before the Somalis thought of technicals. Only a matter of time before the Israelis called in airstrikes or gunships so it wasn’t the best of places to hang around.

  She—F, I’ll call her—F was pretty well up on it, no loss of tradecraft, even if she isn’t as stricken by her death wish as she once was. Nimble. Quick. Spotting the shifts in the lines before the combatants. A real pro. And still operating with those short focal length lenses that get her up real close, real in-your-face stuff: Palestinians with rocket launchers, kids with slingshots, one preteen spun around by a bullet in the arm, pirouetting with ineffable, balletic grace until he went down badly. Somehow or other we lost contact. I guess I’d moved on, anticipating which way she’d go and figuring that with the limp and the stick I looked a bit too much like a very large, slow-moving target. So I took cover behind the remains of a wall, and maybe I’d been away too long, but they came around on the flank, the Israelis and started firing past me because I’d got myself caught slap bang between the lines with the Pals letting rip one way and the Israelis the other. Rogue impacts kicking up little fountains of dirt right at my feet. I mean close. Too close. There was only one way out, and F was yelling at me to take it. Take the gap. Because the probabilities were that I’d take some serious incoming if I didn’t move, which would make all the Harley Street and Mayo Clinic mumbo-jumbo somewhat academic. So I had to break cover. Not far. Twenty, thirty yards, maybe—length of a cricket pitch—and not really in the direct cross fire, but exposed. Like on a climb. That moment when you have to move your feet and hands up higher, knowing that from then on you are committed, you can’t reverse the move because it’s physically, technically irreversible, that whatever the rock throws at you from then on, you have to take it, cope with it. But you can’t go back. So that’s what it was, and in the old days it wouldn’t have bothered me, the old doubled-up sprint across the open ground, fast as you can go and glad to be the first one out because no one has time to range in on you. But this was different. I shouldn’t have been there. And I had to be there to accept it. I should not have been in a position where my condition made me a liability to myself, most of all to others, to her. But without going there, I would never have come to terms with the limits. So I cranked myself up and I guess I was vaguely aware that one of the TV crews had drawn a bead on me from some place back from the lines. I saw the correspondent order the camerawoman to home in on me. And I tried to run and I kept thinking of those zinging little signals from the brain, moving into overdrive because of the adrenaline that tries to pump extra blood into your muscles and fill you with oxygen to feed them and get you the hell out of danger. Except that my signals didn’t arrive. Nothing got through. Like someone had cut the telephone wires so no one knew to call the cavalry. And I could not run. I limped. I crabbed. I shuffled. My bad arm swung like an ape’s. I think there were some stray rounds. I heard something crack into a wall: zap zap zap. I remember thinking I had to try harder, but just as I tried, my left foot didn’t pick up properly when I moved my leg so it was kind of dangling loose and hit some rubble and I tripped and I was down in the open which is not where you want to be. I don’t think anyone would’ve deliberately shot me, but you never know and there was a lot of loose shit flying and the next thing I knew while I was trying to get up was F dropping her gear and running out from cover and not even wearing Kevlar and she’s got an arm under my shoulder and hefting me up with a lot of power for someone as skinny as she is, and together we’re limping and stumbling for cover and I’d forgotten about the TV camera filming all this because there was some serious fire going down and when we finally got to cover we both hit the deck and I threw my good arm around her and said: you crazy French bitch and she just let out a big whoop and a laugh and planted a smacker on me, right on the lip. Right on live television around the world on CNN, dear Jesus.

  LONDON. AUGUST 2000

  It is one of those balmy days that reminds her of home and makes her think that, perhaps, this new world is not all so bad. It is the kind of weather that makes a city swelter and makes its dwellers beg for escape to the sea or the countryside where insects hover over mirror-smooth chalk streams and trout rise with languor, dimpling the water as it flows. If she adds the pluses she can make something of them: he has, finally, begun to take his illness seriously and will visit his British neurologist for more tests; despite the poor business climate, she has survived well enough to hire a third full-time teacher for her school in the Rift Valley; on days like this with not too much summer
traffic and birdsong through open windows from their roof garden, she can imagine worse destinies by far. The doubts linger, though. He has not given a full accounting of his stay at the Mayo Clinic, and insists there is no definitive diagnosis; he has not said convincingly why it is so important to be in the Middle East. She is ignoring the gaps in his stories from the Balkans, from Rochester, Minnesota. For no evident reason, she feels she must strive for contentment, even if that is built on an enforced ignorance. Today she has pottered. A girlfriend from Nairobi, in town, insisted on lunch somewhere expensive and exclusive enough to sound good to her friends back home. Jeremy Davenport, she learns over the rughetta and balsamic vinegar, has cleaned up his act, finally. He is busy with clients and his tours have been well received in the trade press and one or two other publications. Coyly, she extracts the information that he has no new romantic interest. Nairobi is little changed—crime, scandal, luxury, threat, all in equal doses. Her father is progressing with plans for Naivasha on the assumption that she will attend, perhaps alone, as hostess. Everyone misses her dreadfully. Over the seared tuna with a fresh Sancerre, she is brought up to date on liaisons and murky business behind the guarded perimeter fences of Karen and Ngong. When she returns home, she discovers that the wine at lunch—a breach of her own rules—has conjured a taste for afternoon liquor. She resists but knows it is futile. There is no one here to police her, to frown disapprovingly or offer an alternative. Given the heat, she chooses gin from the cabinet and pours too much for safety over the ice cubes, barely leaving room for the tonic and the Angostura bitters. Their apartment is big and roomy, befitting a well-placed youngish couple. A large curved window looks out directly over the fields of Primrose Hill and, leading back from it, a polished parquet floor runs the length of the building, back toward French windows open to an artfully arranged roof terrace where there is an oiled wooden table under a square white Italian umbrella and a small, pleasant garden in full bloom. Opening off this one long room, opposite the glassed entrance foyer, and alongside the newly designed kitchen-cum-dining area with its own access to the terrace, there are less public quarters—a main bedroom suite with dressing and bath rooms, a second bedroom with its own shower and other facilities. A large, rear-facing third bedroom has become the corporate headquarters of @Africa. A smaller box room has become Joe Shelby’s study-cum-TV room where he has shoehorned a rolltop desk and a sofa in dark green leather and a television set that she flicks on now, the remote control in one hand, her glass in the other. She settles back in the luxuriant sofa, kicking off tan loafers that she wore over bare feet with her summery linen trousers and sleeveless white blouse. Most men she meets, seeing her so precise and elegant and in her prime, think Joe Shelby the biggest fool for putting wars before her. They do not figure her for a lush, a secret boozer. Indeed, these are not terms she would use herself. But she is not surprised at the hunger with which she consumes her drink, only too eager to obey the inner voice that promises transportation to wonderland: drink me, drink me. The news announcer is mouthing platitudes when a sudden, explosive red banner at the base of the TV screen announces live coverage from Gaza where Joe Shelby has promised he will not get into trouble but has got into trouble right in front of the camera that is focused shakily on him, pinned down in debris and rubble with billows of chalky smoke rising from rocket strikes and the insistent clatter of live automatic gunfire that reminds her of their one day in the battlefields of Cape Town. The ice in her glass rattles in harmony. The drink sloshes onto her blouse and chills her breast. The announcer is saying: we bring you live coverage of a gun battle in Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip where it looks as if a noncombatant, a reporter, we believe, is pinned down under fire. Before he fell he seemed to be limping badly but it’s not clear if that is from a bullet. And, oh my word, it seems as if a colleague is attempting a rescue.

  Eva Kimberly is transfixed. Yes, it is her Joe Shelby, pinned down. And yes, a colleague is attempting a rescue. A female colleague, all in black. A woman with familiar wild looks and skinny legs and crazy eyes. She is running to Joe and Eva is watching, a voyeur. The Frenchwoman is forcing him to stand as the bullets ricochet and ping around them and kick up small tornadoes of dust at their feet. In London, sitting bolt upright now on his green leather sofa, Eva Kimberly is the spy, the outsider. She cannot grasp the obscenity of this technology that transports her thousands of miles, across Europe and the Mediterranean, to share their porno-camera intimacy. She cannot accept the wizardry that has catapulted their togetherness into her home, willy-nilly, unrequested, unwanted, denying the Big Lie he constructed over the telephone from Rochester, Minnesota.

  No, he had not gone there to send a message to his editors, or respond to the urge he felt to restate his own credentials to himself. It was her, the Frenchwoman, after all this time, after all the betrayal and the progression of his illness. When it came down to basics, he had chosen her without even hinting that a choice was being mulled, that a competition had been held in secret conclave to select a winner and a loser. Now, on the television screen, she has levered him upright. The camera shakes. Her earth moves under her feet. Her House & Garden apartment in Primrose Hill is carried into the killing fields. Every bullet and rocket chips away the myths of togetherness embodied in the yellow-wood furniture from the Cape and the intricate silk rugs from Damascus and Diyarbakir. She hears the furious rounds whining from their roof terrace to the percale cotton of their bedsheets, spreading defilement at the altar of their union. She hurls her glass of gin and ice cubes at the television set but her aim is bad and it ricochets, striking the shelf where he keeps his framed happy snaps of himself and his (exclusively male) colleagues in N’djamena and Juba, Grozny and Baghdad. The flying tumbler smashes into the photographs, shattering into shards that mingle with the broken glass of the picture frames.

  They played the clip over and over again, picking at her scar. Mesmerized, she became familiar with every detail of the clanging gunfire and the pockmarked battlefield, the sight of him running in that awful, ungainly, ugly way and then falling, right out in the open in a broad gap between two breeze-block buildings whose symmetry had been destroyed by insistent waves of gunfire and fighting. Then, the woman darted out, time and again, from her hiding place, like some evil insect, wild-eyed and running at a crouch until she was beside him—beside her man—and lifting him to his feet, and then limping and shuffling back to cover with the TV camera zooming in close to catch the total concentration both of them devoted to the business of escaping the open ground for cover. And, worst of all, when they played and replayed the clip, that moment, that awful moment, when they fell together behind the shelter of a battered stone wall that had once been part of somebody’s home. You could still see the debris of the furniture, the broken sticks of chairs, a sofa that had been pummeled with gunfire so that the stuffing poked out from blue-striped ticking, the twisted frame of a large photograph of the Al Aqsa mosque with its golden dome. He said something to her and she laughed and then—and then kissed him, full on the mouth. You could see it. On the television in front of the entire world. He kissed her and she kissed him back and they hugged like babes in the wood, cocooned so closely, so privately that no one would ever intrude between them.

  Throughout that evening, under the high ceilings of the apartment in London, Eva Kimberly paced back and forth, across the polished wood floors with their Bokharas and kilims. All this—their Roman prints and tasteful oil paintings on their walls in the soft beige they had chosen, their hi-fi with its powerful speakers, their ficus trees and bookcases with Africana originals of Stanley and Livingstone bound in maroon leather—all this he had forfeited for a broken sofa in the rubble of someone else’s life. When she called him, her voice unsteady, slurred and raging from too many gins and too much hurt, he had lied—lied outrageously and insistently. And you could always tell, whatever people said, when people who said they were alone were not alone. The echoes were never quite right. There was always the surreptiti
ous click of a bathroom door being closed, the rustle of a chair or bed being vacated, the catch in the voice of someone who was lying to an audience of two—the deceiver and the deceived. She made him say the Judas words. Are you alone? Yes, I’m alone. Do you love me? Yes, I love you. Is it finished between you and her? Say it. Say her name. Say you feel nothing. Yes, it is finished between me and Faria Duclos. And you feel nothing? How can I say that—she saved my life.

  Through the high windows, she watched as the night darkened and the streetlights came on, marking the footpaths on the gentle green flanks of Primrose Hill, casting pools of light over strolling lovers. Why had that woman been there to save him? Why not leave him, with his folly, to die the coward’s death his betrayal deserved? And, worst of all, why had it not been her, fleet-footed in the rubble, rescuing her crippled hero, her fallen giant?

  TAPE TWO, SEGMENT TWO

  SEPTEMBER 14, 2000, 5:00 P.M.

  MONITORED1 SEPTEMBER 17

  . . . needed another belt to go on with this. Because I guess I lied that night when Eva called to say she’d seen the footage and was I OK but what the hell was I doing with that woman and I said it was just a coincidence and she had been reaching for her cameras not embracing me and there had been no kiss—in a war zone for Chrissakes?—and she saved my life after all and maybe I should wipe these tapes when I get down. If I get down. If I go on. But it wasn’t. It was not a coincidence because, right then, when I needed her she was there. And there was a kiss and it was magnificent and a restatement of being alive after all the crap they’d given me in Rochester. I don’t think Eva believed the official version but at least it was something, a fiction, a fig leaf or whatever. When you come up with a lie on that scale, as every adulterer knows, then your only subsequent course of action is to stick with it, defend it, robustly, admitting no doubt or hesitation. She was just there, I said, she’s a war photographer and there was a war on. It was stupid of me to be in the same place, I said, but I didn’t ask her to be there. And, of course, I had done just that, which was about the biggest betrayal you could ask for. The biggest since I’d betrayed F in Kenya on the coast, at least, so there was some kind of symmetry, payback. But it was betrayal, it was and I admit it and plead guilty, and for whatever happened after that I take the fifth. And a last hit of old Johnnie before lights out.