Aliyyah

by Chris Dolan

  “I might just, soldier.”

  “Would they let you?”

  She laughed again. “I don’t suppose the General would be too pleased. Then again, he might accept my decision. Especially if it turned out to be well-timed. It’s hard to believe we will always be safe here.”

  “And Duban?”

  “He’d be lost without me. Without me and Aliyyah.”

  “One so wise, so easily lost?”

  Haldane wanted to ask her about the soldier visitor last night, but feared she would think he had been spying.

  “I wonder what it would be like to be a soldier,” Ma’ahaba said. “Me, a soldier. Would I be told that I look tough and professional, especially when I’m carrying a gun? Even more so if I was wearing lipstick.” She clapped her hands, pleased with herself, the way Duban liked to do. “Or I could be like the Egyptian goddess. Isis. Wasn’t it she who gathered the parts of her murdered and mutilated son, flung all over the earth, and stitched him back together and breathed life into him? The warrior mother bringing life, not death. What do you think, Captain?”

  “This Isis would be a handy person to have on the battlefield.”

  “Your radio seems to be in bits and pieces.” Ma’ahaba had a habit of changing the subject abruptly. He explained to her how he needed to find a way to connect it with the phone batteries.

  “My fairy lights! We used to do that in university, turn our cells on when sitting on the lawn. And wave them, at concerts? Do they still do that? And now we have a way now of bringing them back to life again. And you think it could work for the radio? How clever you are.”

  “Yes, well, we’ll see.”

  That day Aliyyah and Haldane spent, or so it seemed to him, less time together than usual. He had been busy all morning with the radio and she did not appear until late afternoon.

  “Ma’ahaba has been helping me with my cerement.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A robe? But a special one we all have here. We make them ourselves, in preparation.” Aliyyah giggled under her veil.

  “Preparation for what?”

  “For our wedding.”

  “Are you thinking of getting married, Aliyyah?”

  “But the gown is not finished with then. We continue sewing, expanding it, embroidering.”

  “Why?”

  “Eventually it will be the dress in which we meet our maker.”

  Haldane stopped walking. “It’s a shroud? And a wedding dress? You spend all your life making your own shroud?”

  “Hardly all my life. It’s the first time in many days that I’ve taken it up. Ma’ahaba and I do both ours together. She is no better at it than I. We are butterfingers. But we tell each other stories. She tells me of her days out in the world. And I often just make stories up.” She bent towards him, whispering a secret: “To be honest I think Ma’ahaba makes up her stories as well! But we don’t care. It’s fun.”

  In the evening as Haldane worked on the radio, Ma’ahaba and Duban came and went, the old man with a different book in his hand each time, she supplying the soldier with glasses of sweet fruit juices.

  Haldane could see it must be possible to create a little series of phone batteries by connecting them to each other, but how many he might need to power the radio he had no idea. And anyway he had nothing to connect them with. He had tried the bits of copper wire Duban had given him, then bits of barbed wire from the fence, but they didn’t work.

  “I can’t place them firmly in the jacks or whatever you call them. Perhaps that’s the problem. Or maybe you need a special kind of wire.”

  “I may,” Ma’ahaba said, “have a possible solution to the first problem. You place the wires in the little sockets and I’ll bind them tightly with threads. Would that work?”

  “Well, it’s better than anything I’ve thought of. We could give it a try.”

  Haldane and Duban whiled away an hour in the library, supposedly looking for practical manuals but the old man getting distracted by rediscovered books, each of them it seemed printed in a different script. Eventually Ma’ahaba called them back to the table where she was ready with threads of every colour. Haldane set up three batteries in a row and poked the wires into the tiny holes. Ma’ahaba skillfully wrapped the corners of the batteries with threads, breaking off the ends with her teeth. Haldane then connected the jacks from the last battery and laid them over what he thought must be the right tiny pieces of metal. Ma’ahaba spun her delicate little web again. Then they switched on all the batteries and, finally, the radio. Depressingly, it remained dead.

  “I have always believed that silence is eloquence,” said Duban. “My confidence in the idea I admit is shaken, my friend.”

  Dispirited, Haldane decided to walk outside in the night air before retiring. The stars were fainter tonight and the darkness felt fuller than usual. And there was a different movement in the sky, sudden dartings, almost touching him. It took him a moment to realise they were bats, dancing darkly in the trees around him. Taking one of the little paths that led alongside the irrigation conduits he tried to think of solutions to the radio problem. Getting no inspiration he turned and made his way back to the house.

  In the sky before him he saw an extraordinary sight. At first he thought his vision was playing up on him again, or that he was dreaming. But there, low in the night sky and some three hundred feet in front of him was Aliyyah, suspended in mid-air.

  He could not see her features but it could only be Aliyyah – young, slight, slim, there was no one else in the house it could have been. She was dressed, as usual, all in white and the currents and zephyrs up there caught the material so that it willowed and rippled, her whole form ebbing and flowing unsupported.

  Haldane quickened his step, alarmed for a moment that she was falling. But she remained where she was, looking out over his head towards the mountains behind, invisible in the dark. The fright the vision gave him, and the incomprehension at what he was witnessing, caused his heart to race and his head to thump. He felt, though he was the one safe on the ground, he was back in the helicopter being sucked out of the sky.

  Approaching nearer to where she was drifting, he finally understood. Now he could make out the shape of the house, hidden in the night a few steps further back. The outline of the highest story of the house became clear, and he realised she was merely standing at an open window, lit by lamplight in the room, the draft ruffling her gown. He laughed at his own stupidity and credulousness and, just when he was about to call up to her, she moved away from the window, closing it behind her.

  “But there, low in the night sky and some three hundred feet in front of him was Aliyyah, suspended in mid-air.”

  Re-entering his own quarters the recon officer decided he had learned one thing at least from the experience: he was now quite certain where Aliyyah’s bedroom was.

  The Story of the Family Curse

  The next morning, he was back staring at the radio, wondering what to do next, when Ma’ahaba entered. She stood watching him for a while then said, “You thought it might be the wrong kind of wire?”

  “Or I’m connecting the wrong bits to the wrong bits. Or the wrong way round. Or the whole idea is misguided. Ma’ahaba I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  “But if it is a question of the wire. We have old lamps here. Perhaps the electrical cord in them might do the trick?”

  “It’s worth a try.”

  Together they went back to the great chamber and Haldane saw for the first time that there were old standard lamps, not unlike those he remembered from his childhood. They had wires and plugs that either lay useless on the floor, or were still plugged into dead sockets. After placing the charger back out in the sun, he used a knife Ma’ahaba brought from the kitchen to cut open the plastic covering on the cord. Inside were tendrils of wire similar to the copper stuff he already had but much finer, and different to the touch.

  “One concern occurred to me last night,” he said when Duban joined them
. “Let’s just say, and it’s a long shot, that this works. I have no idea how much voltage or whatever the radio can take. Maybe we can’t make nearly enough. Or worse, what if it works, and it’s too strong and we blow that damned thing altogether?”

  As they worried in silence together, Haldane looked at the old lamp. “Unless… Let’s try this. I think there should still be enough power in some of those batteries for this little experiment.”

  When Duban had brought the batteries and Ma’ahaba more thread, they set up the sequence of batteries again and the soldier played around with the other ends inserting them into the bulb fitment. “How much of a shock can you get from a phone battery I wonder?”

  None, as it turned out. And the bulb remained unlit. They tried connecting a second battery and, after endless configurations with the lamp end, Haldane felt a prickling on his skin. All three stared at the bulb and, gradually, the faintest of lights appeared.

  “We have done it!” cried Duban. “Where there is unity, there is victory!”

  “Well we’ve made a bulb glow. A bit.”

  With a third battery – and this time keeping it turned off until Haldane had stopped adjusting the bare wires – the lamp glowed perfectly bright. A fourth blew it entirely. Together they reckoned, purely through guesswork, that four might be about right to fire up a radio. Again Haldane tried different jacks and plugs and tiny slabs of metal in the motherboard, Ma’ahaba having to tie them on – a delicate operation, but which she managed each time with dexterity. And, just as the bulb had gradually come to life, so too did the radio set.

  “Hallelujah,” said Haldane, genuinely pleased with himself.

  “Indeed, my friend. All praise belongs to God!”

  “Except we’ve made it fizz and hiss,” Haldane said, “but that’s all.”

  “Be not afraid of progressing slowly, Thomas, only of standing still.”

  Haldane, playing with the dials and little antenna, shook his head. “Your optimism is admirable, Duban.”

  “Also,” Ma’ahaba smiled, “often insufferable.”

  Haldane asked for a tray and set the radio, now in pieces clamped and stuck precariously together, on it. “I can take it back to my room and keep playing with it. Fingers crossed.”

  But back in his quarters, the radio made the same static white noise no matter how he adjusted the aerial or turned the buttons, and he suspected that the thing would never work. He conceded for the first time to himself that his unit might well have given up on him and he would never be able to make contact.

  In all probability, he was numbered among the dead. He began to feel that, in a certain sense he was actually dead, or as good as. He was an echo of himself, reverberating in this dreamlike place, like the stagnant non-stop white noise of the broken transistor.

  Memories of who he had once been were all he was left with and now those memories came back in quick succession, like a row of dominoes falling, each memory triggering the next. Mick the pilot – his name was Michael Samson, and he had been a friend since day one of Haldane’s tour. That was eight months ago now, he reckoned. Or eight months from the day of the crash, whenever that was. Mick was brash and rowdy, forever making jokes, in the growling accent of his native city. No doubt it was something he had said that had made them laugh just before the ’copter bucked in mid-air. Gunner Simon was Simon Kane. Haldane remembered how he thought the two men had got mixed up: Mick, the working-class highly trained pilot; Simon the public schoolboy, finger on the trigger like an old-fashioned Tommy. The three of them got on well enough, as they had to, but there were arguments. Simon believed in the war, and saw the enemy as the enemy; Mick the professional swore that their leaders, military and political, were idiots. For his part, Haldane took an agnostic line, more to keep the peace between the three men than out of any considered position.

  Now both comrades were dead. Their remains lying out there in the lonely mountains of exile. As he was too. Marooned, sundered from his life, his world, in this inescapable no man’s land.

  And then Aliyyah comes to mind. Her green eyes like balm, her voice a liquid lullaby. She comes to him like medication, reviving him, and he knows that all is not lost. And yet. Renewed now, determined once more to keep fighting, he knows that his mission is to leave this place and most probably, Aliyyah, behind.

  Curled up in his bed, limbs tight against his chest, under a single clammy sheet, the dreams that come to him do not feel like dreams, but all too real. The theatre of battle where he himself had acted. The burst of guns and the burst of blood. Howls and the sobbing of grown men, dying men, men without arms or legs, the stench of sodden darkness, the hopeless, endless, emptiness of it all. Amid the clamour he hears Duban’s quiet voice: “Evil earns the evil it sows.” Then Ma’ahaba’s: “One life is not enough.” And Aliyyah: “Death is our true home.”

  The sky was lit by an exploding shell and he saw his helicopter transformed, as it had been in other dreams, into a chariot pulling up and onwards, not down into the conflagration. He could see three bodies slumped inside – Mick and Simon and himself. But she who was driving it, he could not tell, in the spinning, the chaos, whether it was Ma’ahaba or Aliyyah.

  After showering under the walled-off fountain, the water crisp from night, and washing off the shadows of his dreams, he placed the charger out in the sun and went back to sleep for a while. When he woke he considered the possible problems with the radio. It was bust completely – but not knowing for sure there were other things to consider. The antenna wasn’t working. Or there was simply no signal here. He remembered vaguely that the armed forces used very high – or was it very low? – frequencies. Either way, wavelengths he did not have access to in this remote spot. Or perhaps he simply had to amplify whatever signal there might be.

  “… and he saw his helicopter transformed … into a chariot, pulling up and onwards, not down into the conflagration”

  He took the radio out into the garden, collected the refreshed charger and made his way down past the clearing where Ma’ahaba had met with her friend in the glow of phone fairy lights. From there further down the path to the back gate – the quickest way, as far as he could estimate, to the barbed wire fence. With the radio, batteries and charger all on an old tray from the dining room, the parts held well enough together. He placed the aerial against a metal pole in the fence and turned the radio on.

  The hisses and fizzes began to change, first softening, then shrieking, until something resembling human voices and words began to emerge from the crippled machine. Men speaking, then a woman somewhere singing. More speech and crackles and back to the white noise. So now he could pick up something from the outside world. But how on earth would he be able to make contact with a tiny, covert military base amidst all the sounds and broadcasts of the planet? He had to hope that, by pressing buttons and twirling dials, throwing switches – there were so many controls on it – he would eventually find the right frequency.

  That was a problem that would need to wait. He needed to walk, and he needed to speak with Aliyyah.

  He found her sitting reading by the fountain held up by little lions.

  “What’s the book?”

  “Oh old stories I first read as a child. I like to go back to them.”

  “What’s the story you’re reading now?”

  “About two brothers, during a time of peace. Shall I tell you it?”

  She seemed so eager, he did not want to disenchant her. She put down the book and turned fully towards him.

  “The father of these brothers left them each land on either side of a mountain. The elder’s land was blessed with sun most hours of the day, while the younger’s lay mostly in shade. As a result, one farm was fertile and prospered and the other rocky and dry, its crops withering.” Haldane got the impression that she was not so much recounting the story but reciting it from memory.

  “The elder brother felt this to be unfair and decided to help make the dying land live again. But he did not wa
nt praise or thanks so he went about the task at night. For weeks he dug irrigation channels, sowing his own best seeds and grafting cuttings from his sturdiest crops. Eventually the shaded land began to bear fruit. He also, inch by inch, extended his brother’s land into his own where it would be touched by the sun.”

  The soldier smiled at the girl’s pleasure in telling the story, animated and wide-eyed.

  “But the younger brother comes across him one night when the older was hard at work.” And here Aliyyah frowned, almost comically. “Without asking, he realises what has been happening and the reason behind his recent good fortune. He approaches his brother, does not find the words, so simply embraces him. At once the entire mountain was lit up by the depth of their love, and the sky began to glow. And so, at night, when you see a light on the horizon, you know that, somewhere, brotherly love is blossoming.”

  “It’s a very pretty story.”

  “Do you like it Tom? It’s just a child’s story.”

  “If only it were true.”

  “It is, in a way.”

  “Aliyyah.” Haldane sat down beside her. “It is at least possible now that I will be able to inform someone out there of my whereabouts.”

  “I have heard that you have made progress.”

  “Even if I do manage to make contact, of course, rescue might still be impossible.”

  “You feel you need to be rescued, Tom?” Aliyyah said sadly.

  “I only know it is my duty.”

  “But are you still a soldier? Even here?”

  “I’d have thought you, Aliyyah, of all people would accept that duty is important.”

  “Why?”

  “You seem… dutiful. You obey the laws of this house.”

  “Whilst I am here. And you, you obey them too. You are very respectful.”

  “Aliyyah. Would you consider leaving?”

  She looked away and said nothing for several minutes.