Dazzling the Gods

by Tom Vowler

  It was a surprise to everyone when his father stopped playing, the set stowed away instead of adorning the alcove mid-game. Only when Yasmeen returned from school one day and requested he show her how to play, were the pieces retrieved.

  He prepares their lunch, leaving Yasmeen eyeing his weakened king-side pawns. Food is more plentiful since the ceasefire – olives, dates and bread abundant again. He salivates at the thought of za’atar for breakfast in the coming days, of fresh sardines barely an hour from the ocean. There is a rumour it will be safe to fish again soon. Later he will head out to the lemon grove his own grandfather planted in the fifties, check this modest source of income has not been destroyed. It amazes him how fruitful these citrus trees are, how hardy they have become, despite the parched soil. Much of their best arable land falls inside the buffer zone, where they are forbidden to farm.

  Work is harder to come by since the Egyptians flooded the tunnels at Rafah. He is not sorry, his body too beleaguered to be hauling livestock and fuel underground for half a mile in appalling conditions. It is a younger man’s work. They say it is the biggest smuggling operation in the world, employing tens of thousands, a lifeline of their economy but also a death trap. Tunnel walls collapse, cables snap, fires break out. A cousin once tried to smuggle in a lion for the zoo. The animal, insufficiently sedated, awoke mid-tunnel, opening him up from neck to belly.

  The day he started work there, the tunnel owner led him to a well shaft secreted inside a tent. Suspended above it was a crossbar with a pulley attached, below which hung a harness for lifting and lowering goods and people. As he sat in the harness, a spool of metal cable turned on a winch, lowering him the sixty feet into the twilit bowels of the earth. Five to ten of them worked twelve-hour shifts, day and night, six days a week, communicating with the owner via a two-way radio that had receivers throughout the tunnel. They earned around $50 a shift but could go weeks or months between payments.

  And so an economy functions; not as others do, but money finds its way. He knew people who went by tunnel to the Egyptian side of Rafah for medical treatment, had heard of VIP routes for wealthy travellers, complete with air-conditioning and cell phone reception.

  He misses the market at Rafah, the noise and fumes of generators blending with the braying of donkeys, the piquant smoke of shawarma spits, row upon row of stands selling all that had emerged from the tunnels.

  Were Yasmeen interested in the history of her country, he’d tell her how it has always been fought over. By ­Pharaohs, Hebrews, Philistines, Persians, Alexander the Great, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Ottomans. Later still Napoleon, the British, the Egyptians. Armies marching into the desert relied on the city’s fortress walls and gushing wells, while for merchants Gaza was a bountiful marine spur of the spice routes and agricultural trade. Travellers sought out its inexpensive tobacco, its brothels; even now Israeli chefs covet Gaza’s strawberries and quail. Invaders to the shores these days would be greeted by bullet-pocked buildings, skeletal seaside cafés and fetid tide pools, while inland abandoned Israeli settlements lie decaying, their fields sanded over, their greenhouses ramshackle, weatherworn. Gaza’s airport, once a source of enormous pride, is now used only by herders grazing sheep, Bedouin feeding their camels.

  He watches Yasmeen make a move and then retract it, a habit he needs to relieve her of. She loops a twine of hair round a finger in contemplation, every now and then emitting a sigh of self-admonishment at a strategy’s shortcomings. Her face, he realises, has a new configuration these days, the puppy fat of childhood receding to leave an angular, more exacting beauty.

  The shell that damaged the black king that day also took away her brother, Hasan, and their mother. They had been told it was safe to return, a window of calm in which to gather belongings, to leave the relative safety of the UN facility. Yasmeen was tired so stayed behind, her brother insisting he come to help.

  Less than a second after the explosion, rubble from the neighbour’s house surged through their windows and walls, half a home blasted into their own. When the air cleared and the ringing in his ears became something he could bear, he tried to stand but his legs would not obey him. Later, as he sat bleeding by the side of the road, he watched as someone carried his wife’s body from the debris, laying her down beside him as if putting her to bed. The next day a crane removed large segments of the two homes that had become one. They found Hasan shortly before dusk.

  One of the last shells to fall this time landed in the cemetery at Jabalia, the dead – though as far as he knows not his dead – forced to partake in the suffering of the living, their ashen bones scattered about broken gravestones, in need of a second burying.

  Yasmeen calls to him. She has made her move, a simple pawn push, subtle but one that strengthens her position mid-board. It is conservative and he smiles, placing their food on the table. Once again he vows to mend the black king, to locate the leather-bound journal documenting her grandfather’s games. Chess, according to his father, is both art and science, the smoking out of an opponent’s king rarely achieved with cunning and intuition alone, requiring flair and bravura also. He believed in its poetry, its grace. Its solemn beauty.

  After lunch he will check on the birds. Last year, on what would have been his wife’s forty-first birthday, he converted the space where Hasan’s room once stood into an aviary, in which around twenty birds now dwell: pigeons, sparrows, hummingbirds, creatures injured in the fighting, brought to him in boxes or towels once word got out. He has become known as the Birdman, the one who fixes the birds, though most won’t fly again. Some respond well, adapting to their internment; others fight it, fight each other. In time a few can be released, the ones he deems sufficiently recovered to survive, to take their chances. He asks those who bring them where the birds were found, in order to return them to the same patch of sky. He likes to watch them, their suspicion as he opens the door of the small wicker cage. There is a moment’s hesitancy as the terrain is assessed, as they scan for predators, and then they are gone.

  Scene Forty-Seven

  She’d made it. He didn’t recognise her name – she must have married – but there was something about her face, when she was doing disapproving or upset, that caught his attention. He’d assumed her career, like his, had stalled after the film. But there she was, some fancy US drama. What would she be now? Early forties. A little younger than himself, he remembered.

  He got the email address through her agent. An old friend from England, he said, wanting to catch up.

  ‘Hello,’ he typed. ‘I hope this finds you well.’

  It had been his first role of any note, having previously scraped a living from fleeting but regular appearances in sitcoms, the occasional voiceover. She’d had a small part in that hospital drama, but was otherwise known for the stage.

  The director, an unremarkable journeyman, was out to shock, to ruffle establishment feathers in the twilight of his career. He wanted relative unknowns to play the parts, so their egos didn’t compromise his aesthetic vision for the piece. On three occasions during the audition he said the scene would be the main character.

  ‘I’m not sure where to begin,’ the email continued.

  She clashed with the director for days beforehand, but he insisted the scene was integral, that it had to be done that way. The only concession she got was on the number of crew allowed on set that afternoon: two cameramen, someone on sound, and the director. She could pull out, she was told, but she’d likely not work again. He’d see to it.

  ‘I saw you in that new series,’ he typed. ‘It’s got a primetime slot over here. You’ve done really well.’

  He’d played her lover, recently jettisoned. Scene forty-seven opened with an argument. ‘Take me back,’ he said over and over. ‘I’ll do anything.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘it’s finished. There’s someone else.’

  The director kept talking about authenticity. He wanted the audience to experience what she felt. Shortly before filming, the director took hi
m to one side. ‘We can only do this once,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to hold back. Don’t worry about what she says or does. We only stop when I say cut.’

  The script was vague at this point: there were probably only half a dozen lines of direction between Argument moves to bedroom and CRAIG leaves the flat. ‘Just go with it,’ the director said. ‘Draw on whatever you have to.’

  It was the last scene they had together. He saw her on set during the rest of the filming, but they hadn’t spoken again.

  ‘What’s America like?’ he wrote. ‘You look . . .’

  The reviews were polarised. One called it the most important artistic endeavour of the year. Another regarded it at gratuitous and sickening. Calls came for a ban, which were largely resisted. He never watched it.

  The parts began to dry up. He acted for another year, maybe a little longer.

  Pouring another drink, he deleted the email.

  The Offspring Badge

  The drive to his house takes me through a tunnel of arcing beeches, skeletal boughs writhing into one another above the car. The road itself falls away in a ribbon of mauve, earlier rain sheening its surface, the sluicing beneath me amplified by the trees. His directions had been comprehensive, overly helpful, and I imagine others receiving an abridged version, my navigational deficiencies still flung at me after all this time. Glancing at the printout of his words on the passenger seat, I note again the underlined advice: If you reach the sculpture that looks like a scrotum, you’ve gone too far. I’m tempted to drive on, to witness such a spectacle, but poor timekeeping was another stick he beat me with, albeit cloaked with banter, and so I take the sharp left as instructed, onto a single-track road. A mile or so later I see the lane as described, a thatched cottage a hundred yards along it, pretty without being quaint. Parking next to the only vehicle, an expensive-looking MPV complete with child seats in the rear, I fold up the directions, putting the sheet in the glove compartment as if it wasn’t needed. I want to check my face and hair, but sense someone at the front door.

  We meet mid-path, greet each other, then hug briefly, the gesture, although not entirely awkward, still a harbinger of the nine years that have passed. It wasn’t mentioned on the phone but I assume we’re alone, his wife at work or courteously absent, the children he spoke of at pre-school. Perhaps he assumed correctly that I knew of their existence – a boy and girl, a year apart – but the nonchalance with which he announced them was at best insensitive.

  ‘Come in,’ Ben says. ‘Just making coffee.’

  The kitchen smells of freshly-baked bread and jam, a large rustic table still adorned with the delights of a lavish breakfast. A noticeboard is dominated by a child’s painting, a crude watercolour of some nondescript ­creature, limbs and teeth in abundance.

  ‘This is lovely,’ I say, looking around.

  ‘It wasn’t when we moved in. Jaz is the creative one. Saw through the rising damp and rubble. She did most of it herself.’

  Hearing her name abbreviated is somehow another small cut in a year of unrelenting assaults. I’d found some small humour in the unabridged version when a mutual friend uttered it, knowing how Ben would once have found it pretentious. Jasmine. Delicate and fragrant. But who apparently turns her hand to property development in between motherhood and a dynamic career.

  ‘Do you still take sugar?’

  I nod, assuming this to be sufficient, though apparently it isn’t.

  ‘Two, please.’

  He pours the beans into an antique grinder and I have to stifle a laugh as he struggles with the mechanism, beans spilling out onto the flagstones, hopping around us in a chaotic beat.

  ‘Jaz’s preserve, I’m afraid. There’s a technique.’

  ‘Instant is fine,’ I say.

  The log burner draws my eye, not because it’s the room’s focal point, but lying before its bronzed flicker, asleep on the rug, is a dog: a mature Border collie crossed with something, perhaps a spaniel. The last time I saw Ben, he’d driven up to the cottage I shared with my then husband, his visit to observe the last rites for a dog we’d got together, that I’d taken with me when I left him. For a moment, this revelation hurts more than the evidence of a family – because the breed is similar, because the roles are so manifestly reversed now, I’m unsure.

  ‘Lazy thing,’ Ben says. ‘Only goes out when it has to. Lets the kids climb all over him, though.’

  The animal lifts its head, acknowledges my presence, then returns to the business of slumber. I want to stroke it, feel the warmth deep in its coat, but Ben’s casual allusion to the dog suggests it’s more Jasmine’s or the children’s than his, and so I head to the window, gaze out at the garden.

  ‘That’s next year’s project.’

  ‘It’s lovely,’ I say, revolted by my sycophancy, my inability to find another adjective.

  ‘The children want a pond, but there’s not been time. Do you know anything about ponds?’

  I shake my head, force a smile. The coffee is good, too good for instant, and I sense the best of everything is indulged here, a decadence he’d have ridiculed back then. I’d like a real drink, something he would once have offered a guest, despite it only being midday. Carpe the vinum, as he liked to say.

  Ben’s face has weathered, the final vestige of youth flown at forty, although there’s a case for his being more handsome now, threads of grey behind his temples adding a note of distinction. Contentment seems to hold him.

  ‘I was sorry to hear about you and Peter,’ he says.

  It feels too soon in my visit for condolence, though Ben’s words sound genuine. He’d every right to a lingering smugness, my infidelity – the overlap, if you will – never fully articulated, but felt by him, I’m sure. I see now, more than ever, how that day he came to see the dog must have been insufferable, my life with Peter on display in all its attendant happiness, the dying animal an unsubtle emblem of it all.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say, the lie tiresome these days and presumably transparent. If Ben is at all smug, he hides it well.

  Nobody ever tells you how numbing divorce is, how inert it leaves you, the silence once cherished in parts of the house now condemning as you struggle to conceive how life will be lived. They don’t tell you how much you’ll miss marriage’s easy boredom.

  At first, after the verdict was delivered, Peter played well the part of considerate husband.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘We’ve got each other, that’s the important thing.’

  He told me what I needed to hear, clichés delivered with precise timing, and for weeks I think I believed him. Perhaps he believed them himself, for who can account for the implications of such news immediately? Or maybe he simply denied the results, the reality some temporary affliction visited upon us, a problem science and medicine would soon solve. Either way, the permanence of my condition began to fester in him, decades without a family of his own stretching out, barren and without purpose, without legacy. I think I not only became redundant in his eyes, but a source of misery, our future burdened with the cargo of my infertility. The final time we made love, his movements verged on violence, as if this could compensate for my shortcoming. A battering ram to breach the sterile defences.

  The garden isn’t as neglected as Ben makes out and for a moment I imagine what I’d plant, this being my preserve, at least it was before Peter’s solicitor instructed the sale of our cottage. The letter stated I could buy him out, if I was so inclined, to which I replied inclination had little to do with it. But even if an unlikely windfall bequeathed itself, how could I have stayed, cohabiting with ghosts? By comparison my parents’ garden, modest and manicured, requires little more than the neighbour’s weekly attention with the mower in summer. I’ve offered to perform this duty for as long I’m there, but it would risk offence apparently. My mother is kind enough not to mention the future, ask how long I’ll be staying. And she hides well her disappointment at the theft of grand­parenthood. Is that a word?

 
I can hardly remember Ben’s lovemaking style. ­Certainly never violent. A little too tender, I think. Too considerate.

  I’m ambivalent about the prospect of seeing a photograph of Jasmine, curious yet uneasy. Attractive in a classical way, a thoughtless friend described her. Younger as well. A Nobel Prize winner in waiting, no doubt. How will Ben describe me to her later? I’m no threat, of course, but he’ll still have to play it carefully, choose the right words, somewhere between indifference and disdain. Oh, you know, she looked older. Bigger.

  Ben shuffles about the room, perhaps wondering how long I’ll stay, my standing unnerving him.

  ‘How’s the business going?’ I ask. ‘Have you still got the canoes?’

  ‘We sold up, got an offer that was hard to turn down. I went back to teaching.’

  I try to hide my surprise, my disappointment at his returning to a world he despised.

  ‘Don’t you miss the great outdoors? Being your own boss?’

  ‘It was hard work, insecure. I’m at a good school now.’

  Our conversing allows me to scan the room a little and I see a photograph on the bookcase, a family portrait in monochrome, trendily artistic. Even in this glance I get a sense of Jasmine’s beauty, which now fills the lounge like a gas. I wonder who Peter has upgraded to, knowing he couldn’t be single for five minutes, how the prospect ter­rified him. Perhaps he conducted interviews, a one-question assessment to filter out the unfruitful. He would have us come with a badge, a sign alluding to our status, a use-by date, so there’s no ambiguity. This is what you’ll be letting yourself in for. These are the miles on the clock. Perhaps a contract would work, clear and binding, either party able to withdraw if terms weren’t met. Caveat emptor.