A Walking Guide

by Alan S. Cowell

  She believed because, when she dreamed of him, she dreamed of him whole and caring. She dreamed of his body coiled and lithe as it had been when he had surfed into view in Jadini. She dreamed of his confident, easy smile, his assumption of control over events, his unassailable self-confidence as they drove together to Guguletu or performed feats of endurance and creativity in the big bed of the Mount Nelson Hotel. She knew he dreamed of it, too. Inside, he was still that same man, and that was why the sight of his reflection pained him by confronting him with the new Joe Shelby, who stumbled and limped and could not run and whose self-confidence had transmuted into rage. She did not need anyone to tell her she was a fool to be standing here, calling to a man beyond reach. But if she was a fool, then he was doubly so, firstly to have embarked on this voyage of self-justification and now to pursue it without knowing that his heroic precept—a gauntlet thrown down to God and mortality—was false after all. “Treatable, if not at present curable”—hardly the stuff of the life-and-death epic he had wished to be his memorial.

  She returned to the car and lit a cigarette. She brushed her hair and began to repair the damaged landscape beneath her eyes, then dribbled eyedrops to remove the redness. On the passenger seat, the overnight fax mocked all her efforts to deliver it to Joe Shelby, to pass on its message from the physician they were counting on to undo Rochester’s malignant spell.

  Chapter Twelve

  JERUSALEM. SEPTEMBER 2000

  It is a day of accidental truce. The momentum has faltered. The commanders in their breeze-block, sandbagged bunkers cannot muster energy for the initiation of hostilities. The foot soldiers rest over rifles and machine guns and rocket launchers, watchful but inactive. They smoke, drink tea, play backgammon, attend the obligations of their mutually exclusive faiths as they await the clarion call to battle but do nothing to hasten its sounding. It is a coincidence, a mutual, fleeting exhaustion, an undeclared, incomplete cease-fire that will not endure. Perhaps it is no more than a chance overlap of hostile intents that has produced quiet while further carnage is plotted. The politicians, who turn the gauges of conflict with a crafted phrase, a deniable provocation, find themselves baffled: they have called for peace in their public speeches without really meaning it, and yet, for a day, miraculously, it is here.

  Those who chronicle the war’s progress chafe at inactivity but relish calm. In this downtime, their antennae need not be attuned to the crackle and zing of incoming fire, they do not have to worry that every breath will be their last, or flinch from the hostile gaze of every high building that might be a sniper’s eyrie, or ponder whether every empty, rubbled street might be the highway to premature reunification with their Maker. Yet, they pine for the joy of peril. They know that war is the only real yardstick: on the battlefronts, the fat of pretense and dissimulation is cut away; all that counts is the imperative of survival. It is a world they never want to leave because in this world, set apart from all others, they are permitted to live by their own codes, not those imposed by the societies that produced them. And outside of this world, they are nonentities, faces glimpsed and passed by without recognition on Fifth Avenue, ciphers among the crowd flowing over London Bridge to where the bells of St. Mary Woolnoth kept the hours.

  —

  In Jerusalem, the official versions, purveyed by radio stations and anonymous officials, offered up “relative calm,” meaning the fatality count had notched up in low single figures and there had been no particular escalation to ignite the interest of a jaded world—no nightclub bombing of teenage girls in miniskirts, no napalm, no especially young babies with neat bullet holes through their smooth unknowing skulls. There would be anguish somewhere out there, in the refugee camps of Gaza and the West Bank and in the apartment houses of Tel Aviv, but there would be no great hunger to share it in the newsrooms and edit suites, in worlds where people had their own priorities. In the earliest days of this newest conflict, the tally might have excited some interest. But horror’s threshold is never lowered: the benchmark is always the next atrocity. Without incremental expansion of the carnage, the adrenaline of the outsiders does not run, so meaning is restricted to the insiders.

  On this quiet day, when there was no pressing need to go looking for trouble, Faria Duclos sought out Du Plessis in the familiar garden of the hotel courtyard. Since Joe Shelby’s departure, after Gaza, she was restless, groping toward a decision. Du Plessis was no father confessor but he was the only one who knew Joe Shelby as he had been. The hexagonal stone fountain sparkled in the late summer sunlight and the geraniums drew vermilion patterns onto bright old limestone walls and arched doorways. He had found a shaded corner table to nurse a beer, take respite from the heat and the sporadic gunfire that had become uninteresting, rehearsed. His flak jacket, stained with sweat, rested against the leg of a white, wrought iron table. His cameras hung from his chair. He was using long-focus lenses, the kind that do not require the photographer to move in too close. He had covered sixteen wars. Each new conflict made him more irritable with the combatants, and exposed signs of carelessness and unnecessary risk taking on his own part—the danger signals. This war annoyed him in particular because both sides seemed so patently incapable of finishing the job. Wars needed a beginning, a middle and an end. The Middle East was lodged permanently in the middle. In his own part of the world, the end had not been to his liking, but it had drawn a line: white rule finished, black rule began. Life went on. His past lay buried somewhere in the bush of Zimbabwe and Angola and the Congo, along with his combat fatigues and rifle. His future lay in his cameras. He used long lenses because he wanted the income from the seventeenth and eighteenth wars before he retired to a wine farm in the Cape. With his hair cropped short, he was looking more and more like a retired mercenary, a legionnaire past his prime. The gilt of youth was off him and there was a malice to his thoughts about his younger, more enthusiastic competitors. It rankled with him still that Faria Duclos had performed heroics he would gladly have undertaken himself to save Joe Shelby’s life. But she had moved first, and he accepted that both of them had a special bond that went beyond shared space for words and images.

  “Thinking of writing a novel,” he said with heavy sarcasm as she sat down opposite him. “The secrets of Room 5.”

  “There are no secrets.”

  “Tell that to the marines.”

  Since Joe Shelby’s brief sojourn, since what Du Plessis called the Gaza kiss-and-tell, since the desperate attempts at the old craziness, Faria Duclos seemed to Du Plessis to have mellowed. In the days Joe Shelby had spent holed up in Room 5 at the American Colony, Du Plessis had watched him try and fail to reconstruct his old persona. It had been a sad chastening experience: how could you play the two-fisted, devil-may-care war junkie when you could not even prop up the bar without a leg buckling, an arm hanging useless, incapable of raising even a shot glass? And since he had left, Faria Duclos had changed too. She had taken to tanning and swimming on the quiet days. She seemed, in turn, cool, distant, excited, like someone preparing with trepidation for the journey of a lifetime, or for a decision she knew she should have made long ago. Whatever else had happened in Room 5, Du Plessis thought, Faria Duclos was no longer indifferent to her own health and safety. He had observed her eating more than salad. She had been seen to toy with grilled steak, poached fish, an order of fries. The flesh was returning to her gaunt cheekbones. When she swam in a bikini—in private times at the hotel pool when she thought herself unobserved—there was perhaps just a modicum of flesh building on her xylophonic rib-cage. Du Plessis had even caught her in the hotel gym, asking a personal trainer for tips on exercise. Exercise! In this job, you got exercise enough just staying one step ahead of the unfriendlies—and Jerusalem had more than its share of those, whichever way you looked. Most of all, the way Du Plessis saw it, Faria Duclos wanted a blessing, a sign that the direction she had chosen was the right one. Maybe he was wrong, but he believed—as much as he believed anything—that she and Joe were a unit,
a number, that neither would ultimately allow to be sundered.

  Now, with her black hair drawn back tight and glistening, her dark eyes clear and sparkling, it was barely surprising that she had figured on fashion magazine covers: her features, olive and faintly oriental in the uplift at the corner of the eyes, were haunting and vulnerable, imperious and aloof, hinting at unknowable secrets that could only be unlocked in the perilous zone beyond her full lips, her tight, slender body—almost boyish with small breasts and a backside that would not take two full man’s hands to grasp. If she had not been Joe Shelby’s girl, Du Plessis would have made his play long ago, but she was Joe Shelby’s girl and that was that. The thought brought him a measure of relief: she was Joe Shelby’s girl and so he had an excuse for avoiding the certain rejection that greeted everyone else. She was Shelby’s babe, and so he had no need to compete with him for her. In Du Plessis’s book, she was the kind of woman, the kind of photographer, who should be labeled a health hazard: accompanying this person in the vicinity of combat can kill. But, for all he was viewed outside his circle as a loose cannon, a crazed roustabout, Du Plessis had powerful loyalties. The fact that she was Joe Shelby’s girl meant not just that she was off limits, but that he had a responsibility to see them whole, for Joe had erred and required help in rediscovering his true path. There were some who thought Du Plessis cunning, devious, untrustworthy, loud-mouthed, prone to gratuitous violence and devoted to drink and misbehavior. But he would not see harm or misguided circumstances come to Joe Shelby. Or Faria Duclos. And now she was asking his advice: should she follow Joe Shelby, as if he were a phantom beckoning from the cusp of another world?

  “Joe is having a tough time.”

  “Joe’s a cripple. But he’s still Joe. And you’re still the babe. She’s the princess. You’re the babe.”

  “Not like that. We changed. We all changed. You changed, Du Plessis. Don’t tell me different. We do our wars, we get our scoops. But in the end it becomes a routine. It’s what we do. Like Joe says, we go to shitholes because that’s the only place we’re at home, where we can escape all the usual rules, the regulations and the regimentation. What did he say once: you go to war to get some peace. War’s simple. Live, die. Good, bad. No one out there will tell you to pay your taxes or drive on the right side of the road, or change your knickers or clean your teeth or give up smoking. They’ll tell you not to endanger them, not to draw fire, but that’s all. Everything else is irrelevant. All these petty laws that get you parking tickets and interest payments. Out there is cloud cuckoo land.”

  “And the entry visa’s getting more expensive.”

  “See? It’s getting to you, too. You know you’ll get it one day. You know that you can’t just go on forever sticking your neck out. Look at Joe in Gaza. OK, he fell. But it could have been anybody. There was no second guessing. There was fire coming from at least seven points. No one knew what was friendly and what wasn’t.”

  “So that would have made us collateral damage?”

  “Exactly. We are collateral. That’s all. But collateral like in a mortgage or an assurance. We are what the comics put up against the risk of someone else having a better picture. Just collateral, hedging. That’s all. And we’ve done it.”

  “Been there. Got the fucking tee shirt. Sixteen times over.”

  “After that thing in Zim. On that farm? I was scared. Like I’ve never been. Jesus. Before, I thought there was something wrong with me, thought I hadn’t been given the fear gene. But I was frightened that day, because it was the first time the images really came alive for me—jumped through the range finder and under my skin and I was thinking: Jesus, these stiffs are still warm and the killers are standing right behind me, looking at my ass and tits and it’ll take just one little push to shove them over the top again. That’s when I realized that fear is projection, imagination. You know? You know. Don’t try that dumb look with me, Du Plessis. You know what fear is when you imagine yourself in someone else’s position, when you imagine the next moment when the bullet smashes into your skull. Fear is your imagination. And the other side is this: fear builds up, like a bank account, with compound interest. Every little incident is a deposit, and then you get the interest so your fear account is a bit fatter and you go on to the next shithole and make another deposit, and in the end you think: I’ve got a lot of fear, enough fear. Fear is debit. Fear is in the red. Fear has to be repaid. And that’s when you start to think: how long can I go on making my own luck? How long will it be ’til it’s my turn, ’til someone calls in the markers? Just look back over the past few years. Where do we meet up? Where do people like us hang out? Everything important that ever happens to any one of us happens in some place that no one in their right mind would go to. Where did I meet Joe? Gaza. Where did we break up? Rwanda. Where did we meet up again? Kosovo. Where do I see him after that? Khan Younis. We spend all our time in places where kids carry rifles, talking our way past roadblocks, watching people kill people. We think we’re smart to get ourselves to places where no one else wants to go, except the crazies who live there. That’s no life.”

  “Oh, sure. I can see you doing calendars and Bar Mitzvahs and weddings and baby’s first portrait. Goo-goo-ka-chook. And let’s have the bridesmaids in this one.”

  “You are a philistine, Du Plessis.”

  “A realist you mean. I’ve seen fear, real fear, not through a camera lens. Through a fucking sniper scope, through the sights, when you’re shitting yourself in the bush and you’re scanning the tree line and you suddenly realize there’s some gook there with his AK pointing right at you and you see his eyes and he’s scared like what you are, but you pull the trigger first and—bingo—those eyes go out like a candle, man. That’s fear, man. When you’re in it, part of it, on the line. Not some fucking observer tripping in and out with your cameras.”

  “Sometimes I think you are full of shit, Du Plessis.”

  “But I know.”

  “Know what?”

  “The secrets of Room 5.”

  She blushed and he caught it. He laughed, uproariously, and spilt beer on his olive tee shirt. It mingled with a line of sweat. He knew by now what she wanted him to say.

  “I know you, Duclos. Everyone thinks you’re the big tough chick who’s hacked it in every war that’s ever been invented. I’ve seen guys run a mile rather than get in a car with you in case you take them on one of your hell runs. But inside you’re just a babe. Inside you’re looking for Prince Charming and you don’t mind if he’s a cripple or a gimp, just so long as he’s the one for you. And if he can’t walk properly, then he can’t run away from you anymore. Right? Look, he came here. He looked for you. You found each other again. Like two little lovebirds.”

  “So what do you suggest?”

  “Go see him, man. Block him straight. Ask him to choose. Shit or get off the pot. You know what I’m saying. You say you know what fear is, but you’re crapping yourself in case he turns round and says he’ll stick with his princess. But how long has he got, for fuck’s sake? How many months are there before he tops himself because they want to put him in a wheelchair? Take what there is while it’s still there, man. Do you think the princess can hack it with him? Do you think she can bring him back to life for whatever life he’s got left? Show him a good time. You’re the babe, the real one. You know where he is. There are five hundred flights a day out of this dump. If you want a break, take a real break. Take the gap. Hire a car and find him. Otherwise I’ll put the secrets of Room 5 on the Internet. And remember what Dylan said: when you’ve got nothing you’ve got nothing to lose.”

  Mock-crooning, he finished the verse that they both knew well: go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse. And then the chorus, familiar from late nights over whisky bottles, the lament of the lost and the self-pitying: You’re invisible now, got no secrets to conceal. How does it feel? To be on your own. Like a rolling stone.

  “You never liked her, did you? You never thought she was Joe’s type.�
�

  “That’s not the point. I know you. And I know Joe. And that’s all I’m saying. You’ll never rest until you know why he came here. Why he came for you. You know he needs you. But you don’t know whether you need him.”

  “Shall I tell you the real secret of Room 5, Du Plessis?”

  “Like I don’t already know?”

  “No, you don’t. The real secret is that it’s no one else’s secret. Not yours. Not hers. So work that one out. And, yes, I want him again—but he has to give a sign.”

  “Listen. The only secret you have to work out is whether to get on BA straight to London or transit Paris to pick up a frilly dress on the way.” Du Plessis thought that was very funny indeed and ordered another beer.

  THIRLMERE. SEPTEMBER 2000

  She realized now what must have happened and rebuked herself, half in self-reproach, half in relief. He had made camp and struck camp, then caught a lift into the valley with a car or a sheep truck or a tractor or whatever. The person she had seen high on the fells—or thought she had seen—was a chimera, a specter conjured by the mist and rain. A shepherd, or figment—the abominable rainman, a phantom.

  She was becoming familiar with the route, back over Blea Tarn and through Great Langdale, then turning left onto the A591 at Ambleside for the narrow, winding road past Rydal Water and Grasmere, soaring over Dunmail Raise below the slopes of Helvellyn to the east, alongside the forbidding waters of Thirlmere in the pine forests to the west. Since he had not taken his mobile phone, he would have no means of contacting her, so he would make for their rendezvous, advanced base, traveling by hook or by crook as he did in his former life as a correspondent, talking his way past the visa officers, bribing, cajoling, blustering to sidestep passport or accreditation rules. He would know what had to be done. He called it his tradecraft. If he could make it from Ouagadougou to Tashkent without a stop or a visa or a hiccup on the way, he could certainly make it from Wrynose Pass to Thirlmere, although why he had insisted in choosing one hotel for the eve of his expedition and another for its conclusion remained a mystery. Perhaps he wanted bookends, beginnings, endings, lines drawn in the sand, or at least the mud.