Osama

by Lavie Tidhar

  Stupor, Longshott had called it. Joe stayed until the pipe was done, and Longshott’s eyes, though opened, no longer saw him. Then, rising, he softly left the room.

  folly

  ——

  He knew she would be there, even before she appeared. In a way, he thought, she had always been there, waiting for him on the edge of vision, where light met water and allowed her to form. There was a film of tears on his eyes and he let it stay there. We are all shades, he thought — ghosts, the unexplained. We are bad omens that only appear under certain conditions. He thought of the beds he slept in. They were never disturbed when he woke up. He could never remember sleeping. He was just… he just wasn’t there. The realisation did not come as a relief. It was merely there, like the voices of the others, whispering far away. Through blurred vision he watched the distant mountains where nothing grew. A haze shimmered over red-brown dust, and through the haze she appeared, a small, vulnerable figure, all alone on that swathe of road, empty-blue skies behind her, and the mountains like signifiers of a burial.

  ‘I found him,’ he said. His voice sounded hollow, a lost small thing floundering in the open space on that hill above the quiet town. He fumbled in his pockets then and found the black card she had given him back in his office, in Vientiane, which now seemed little more than a dream. He made an attempt to give it back to her but she ignored the gesture and after a moment’s hesitation he let it drop to the ground, where it seemed to disappear in amidst the dust. It was no more real, he realised, then anything else — a prop, a fabrique, a folly. He said, ‘I found him,’ again, and hated the sound of his own voice, but she smiled. She said, ‘I knew you would.’

  They stood facing each other across the chasm of the hills. In the background Mike Longshott’s house, a ruined castle, stood in a silence of its own. The heat was heavy on the land, as thick and syrupy as a dream. She said, ‘I missed you.’

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘You found me.’

  She smiled at that, then frowned. A lock of hair fell over her face and she left it there. Joe had the urge to reach out and move it, held himself still. ‘Do you remember?’ she said. It was said, he thought, with some urgency. He said, ‘I remember you coming to my office. You hired me to find him—’ He gestured at the house. He knew that wasn’t what she was asking, but he was afraid of the other answer. Suddenly, he was deathly afraid.

  The girl glared at him. ‘God damn it!’ she said. Her voice was like an explosion and it startled him. He took a step back and she advanced on him. ‘Me, you bastard! Do you remember me! Do you—’ she took a deep breath as if trying to steady herself. She looked very angry. He sensed then, or knew from somewhere deep inside him, that she had the kind of anger that could shake the earth and make mountains. And also, something inside him added, a voice he tried desperately to silence, she had that kind of love.

  Joe

  ——

  ‘You love black and white movies and detective novels,’ she said. It all came out in a rush. The sun was falling smoothly down the sky. ‘You love rum and raisins ice-cream, sourdough bread, butter and not margarine, salads but not with onion.’ Her hands were bunched into fists. She said, ‘You hate beetroot and avocado, you’re indifferent to politics, you like to sleep on the right side of the bed as long as it’s facing the wall. You like to turn the pillow over at night so you get the cool side. You hate people who walk slower than you. You can iron but very slowly, have no idea how a washing machine operates, and like to leave your clothes on the floor so you can pick them up again first thing in the morning. You change your underwear every day but will keep wearing the same pair of jeans until they start smelling. You cried when your grandfather died, you like romantic comedies but you won’t admit it unless you’re drunk, you only drink socially and you smoke too much. Your name is—’

  ‘Joe,’ he said. ‘My name is Joe.’ There was an abyss around him, and the voices of the others chattered like birds far away. He had a sudden, desperate craving for a cigarette. ‘My name is Joe,’ he said again, holding on to the name as if it were a single tree-branch above rapid waters.

  She said another name. The words had no meaning to him. ‘You like cowboy hats but won’t ever wear one outside,’ she said. ‘You think of yourself as a cowboy but you’re not—’

  He said, ‘Hey!’ and she almost smiled, but didn’t.

  ‘– and you’d argue about if challenged. You like Humphrey Bogart, you re-read Sherlock Holmes stories, you hate it when people sit next to you in the cinema, you like eating chicken and chips and you don’t like exercise, you prefer a shower to a bath and you sing when you’re in a good mood. You don’t like the cold and you don’t like humidity. You drink too much coffee.’

  ‘I like coffee.’

  ‘– and you love talking about it,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  ‘I like—’ he began to say, but she stopped him. ‘You like to sit in the front on a bus but you like trains, not buses. You hate flying and always order the kosher meal so you get served first and you always ask for a window seat. You try not to drink on flights so you don’t have to go to the toilets and you always get dehydrated when you fly. You don’t like taking pictures, think ordering take-away on the phone is an extravagance, you like wine but prefer beer, you don’t like shopping for clothes—’

  ‘Who does…’

  She didn’t smile. ‘You like to stand in your underwear in the lounge with your hands on your hips and survey your domain. You get very possessive about your personal space. You don’t like phones. You gave your penis a nickname when you were thirteen—’

  Shocked: ‘I never—’

  ‘And you called it Hermann after the commander of the Luftwaffe, which only you think is funny—’

  ‘Well, that’s—’

  ‘You like eating standing up by the sink. You like eating chillies even though you always suffer the next day. You dance in front of the mirror when you think no one’s looking. You like to bring your upper lift up against your nostrils and smell it. When people ask you where you’re from you like to say you come from Japan. Also when they ask where you go. A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’ is your favourite joke. You like soup only when you’re sick. You smoke too much—’

  ‘Yes, you did say. I –’

  ‘And you know it’s bad for you but you still won’t stop.’

  The sudden silence between them was like a toppled glass: he was afraid of it breaking, knew that when it would, the exploding fragments would hurt. In the still air there was the ghostly echo of battle helicopters, passing. The loose lock of hair was still across her face. He reached out and his fingers touched her skin and he pushed the lock away. Her skin was warm. He could smell the faintest trace of patchouli. He couldn’t read the look in her eyes.

  ‘I remember the explosion,’ she said, in a small voice. ‘At least, I think I do. Or maybe it’s just that, knowing there was an explosion, my mind reconstructed it, a memory that isn’t real — but how do you know?’ she said, almost pleading, it seemed to him. ‘How do you know what’s real? All of us, imagining lives like something out of a screen.’

  ‘You were a club singer,’ he said, remembering the Blue Note, the stage, her singing. She shook her head — tired? angry? — said, ‘I worked in a cinema. A laugh died, still-born. ‘And you—’

  ‘I’m a detective,’ he said.

  She hit him.

  He almost fell back. He had not expected her to do it. Her fists were on his chest, pounding him. She was almost a head shorter than him. ‘You’re—!’ She said the name again, the name that meant nothing to him, not unless he let it. She said it again and again, her small fists beating a tattoo across his chest.

  He reached out. His arms engulfed her, pushed her close to him, and she slowly subsided against him, warm and real in his arms. He buried his face in the crook of her neck and felt the blood coursing through her.

  ‘Why Vientiane?’ he said then, thinking
of the life he had been dreaming, and she said, ‘Do you remember? We always wanted to go there, and never did… somewhere so remote and secluded, where nothing ever happened and it was always warm…’

  ‘I promised you you’ll never be cold again,’ he said, and she shivered in his arms. ‘I am always cold,’ she said.

  He held her. He wished he could keep holding her forever.

  ‘You have to choose,’ she said softly. Her breath tingled on his skin. ‘You have to choose what to be. When you’ve been stripped of everything: a name, a face, a love — you could be anything. You could even choose to be yourself.’

  He held her close to him, there on the hills above the city, as the sun slowly drifted downwards across the sky. Soon it would be dark, the last traces of sunlight fading in a multitude of colours on the horizon.

  ‘I know,’ Joe said.

  EPILOGUE

  puddles of rain

  ——

  In the rainy season the unpaved side-streets of Vientiane turn to mud, and water stands still in flowerpots and discarded car tyres. The whole city seems to reach upwards then, green shoots rising up from the ground, spreading branches and leaves, like open palms waiting to cup rainwater between their fingers. When it rains it feels as if a sea had been upturned over the city, and the rain falls and falls in a never-ending cascade. In the crowded markets the ground is paved with packed newspapers and feet squelch as they pass under the market’s awnings. Frogs look hopefully out of their deep cages, sensing an escape. Along the Mekong, sandbags line the bank, piled high on top of each other, a makeshift barrier against flood.

  When it rains it drowns sound. There is silence in the rain, a sort of white noise. It can be very soothing. Before it rains the wind picks up, dragging clouds with it, like an angry other pulling reluctant children by the hand. The sky darkens quickly. In the nights apartment on Sokpalunag, he liked to count the seconds between thunder and lightning, measuring the distance of the storm.

  The mornings were warm and bright and as he walked down the road he could see his face reflected back at him from the many puddles. He took to wearing a raincoat and a wide-brimmed hat he’d picked up somewhere, and he cut down on his smoking. His face looked to him as it always did. The air was fresh and clean, pregnant with rain.

  In the mornings he liked to walk the half-hour distance from his apartment to the morning market, turning right on Kouvieng, past early-morning monks collecting alms and the women who fed them, past the dogs that sometimes barked at him, past naked chickens rotating slowly on a stick, past the bus station and the vegetable market and the traffic lights and into the small coffee-shop on the corner.

  He would sit there, drinking the bitter mountain coffee, and look out of the glass windows at the people coming and going from the market, lives flickering like the light of distant stars as it passes through the atmosphere.

  Later, rising, he would walk the short distance to his office by the black stupa, climb the short flight of steps and sit at his desk. There was a fifth of whisky in a drawer but he seldom touched it anymore. There were never any clients, which suited him fine. He would sit in his office and stare out of the window, waiting for it to rain. Sometimes when it rained the clouds parted, for just a moment, and sunlight shone through, and at those times he thought he saw a girl standing there, in the place where sunlight pierces rain, looking up at his window, but then the clouds would close again high above and she would be gone.

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2011 Lavie Tidhar

  The rights of Lavie Tidhar to be identified as Author of this Work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form by PS Publishing Ltd. in September 2011. This electronic version published in August 2011 by PS by arrangement with the authors. All rights reserved by the authors.

  FIRST EBOOK EDITION

  ISBN 978-848631-80-9

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  PS Publishing Ltd

  Grosvenor House

  1 New Road

  Hornsea / HU18 1PG

  East Yorkshire / England

  editor@pspublishing.co.uk

  www.pspublishing.co.uk

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