‘I feel less daunted knowing there are alternatives to bribing the guards.’
‘That’s a way of life for frontier people. Dealing with refugees. Militia. Intelligence officers. Smugglers. And in Nursaybin there are five or six hotels to choose from, all with telephones. I am told there is a minibus to Adana – a town with an international airport.’
‘We will never be able to thank you and Khalid enough. To have worked this out for us when I was spending the night despairing! I trust you won’t return to Aleppo straightaway, will you? We need you to negotiate things with your Kurdish friends.’
‘What else you want to know?’
‘How can we leave the hotel without raising suspicions? What about Walid Hadidi?’
Abdul’s face relaxes into a warm chuckle. ‘No fear. Walid turns out to be quite a decent man by today’s standards. He will help Khalid escape tomorrow by one of the service doors to Souk Al-Attarine.’
Walter nearly chokes over the turn of events. ‘Isn’t that suicidal? How can you be sure of the man?’
‘How long can you trust any man? Two days? I’ve made Walid understand that by letting us go he is helping Omar and the Minister in the long-term.’
‘How so?’
‘Walid is one of the security men working directly for the Minister to spy on Khalid. That’s why we can trust him. He already knows everything that may be of interest to them. And he’s unhappy at the idea of Khalid being… knocked about for nothing.’
Shrunk inside a grey jalabiyya, unusually disorderly, Abdul stands up, ostensibly to examine the view, slowly regaining his composure. ‘We haven’t told my brother anything. Omar should not be compromised. He must be free to fight our corner. Normally he is quick at picking up the way the wind blows at the Ministry of Petroleum. Much depends on what goes on between that Ministry and the Ministry of Information. Khalid being under house arrest, that’s a plus already for them but they’ll fight as to who takes the credit for it. There are bullies, as you say in English, barking instructions without always wanting to be obeyed. Mao, Hitler, Nixon were like that. Blunt men of power, unstable, ruthless with rivals. With no honour. And they must know that once Zaida is safe, Khalid will never make the accusations they want.’
Abdul sinks back into the seat. ‘Pray Allah they realise the game is not worth the… candle? That’s what you say? Khalid is a marked man inside Syria, where nobody will contact him for legal advice. Once he is outside they’ll keep on his trail from country to country. That’s the sort of reasoning we hope they’ll work out. With the help of Walid and my brother. There is no-one else to turn to.’
He has his faith, Walter thinks with some envy – I have none. He feels empty, beached like a salmon at the end of its course.
‘Don’t despair, Walter. We need you. I’ve ordered breakfast on the top terrace with Zaida. Ian already knows about our plans. You two talk and make her understand the situation. She can’t cry on the coach! Help her pack but not until tonight. Well, that’s all for now. I have to go and book the seats at Al-Baron station.’
‘Understood.’
‘Later I’ll take her to the mosque. We’ll be back within an hour, as I promised Walid. For tomorrow we’ll buy toshkas at the stalls, her favourite sandwiches.’
It will be their last visit to the mosque together. For a time Abdul loses his nerve, pacing around the room, tossing his head violently as if to wake up. He stops short, shaking Walter by the shoulder. ‘You understand, don’t you? We’ll split up if anything goes wrong. You understand? You’ll have her papers. Hide them. And I’ll have other papers for her, just in case I have to return to Aleppo with her. She is to be kept safe at all costs. We’ll have all the papers tomorrow morning. And a lot of cash. Money is our best ally, as ever.’
‘How do we pay you back?’
Abdul gives him a rueful smile. ‘Shukran, my brother. Be a grandad and father to our princess. Give her my poems. Tell her… I’ve loved her as much as our blessed Seema.’
‘I promise. And I swear she will study Arabic… Do you really think Khalid will be alright?’ Walter’s voice, hoarse and hardly audible, suppresses all the impossible questions he could ask while watching the blood drain from Abdul’s already ashen face.
An ear-splitting silence.
Abdul’s hands have pale nails, neat and trimmed, and long and graceful fingers: doctors’ hands. Like his. He bends over and clasps them both into his, making a silent wish of eternal friendship, dogged, ‘Back in Leaford, our place will be under surveillance by a whole range of intelligence people – yours, ours, Americans – depending on which groups claim your son. Tell him to contact our very good friend Marianne Castagou. He will remember her. Virginia took him to her place in the south of France. We’ll send her dollars so she can wire them to him wherever he is. Her place is so remote, tell him it is safe. For him to stay there, I mean.’
‘With Allah’s will, my brother.’
Waiting for the impeding storm, eyes clouded with dark tears smudging the grey sheen of the morning, unshaved, the elderly fathers look at each other beseechingly, wishing that at least the other would believe in salvation. At that instant, bereft of gifts for the next generation, trumped by fate, bereft of hope, Abdul Al-Sayed and Walter Franklin can no longer comfort each other: their souls are laden with stones. What will be will be. A cacophony of deaths and no redemption.
They embrace tightly. Farewell. Allah ma’ak. They let go with a gentle rush like the wave parting from the sand at the turn of the tide.
– 20 –
On The Road
It is the last afternoon coach to Qamishli where Abdul’s relatives would see to their crossing. Sympathetic to the Kurdish Democratic Party, they know how and why Khalid has been blackmailed; they will do their utmost to get the British girl out of Assad’s claws. There are passages through the porous border manned by different groups, unpredictable in their allegiances, but they can work together against the regime.
Ian and Walter pour over a tourist map of north-eastern Syria. Back into their third coach from Aleppo. Things have been uneventful. Long-distance coaches are comfortable and equipped with Bollywood films on receding screens that pop out at the press of a button. They sit near the front, acting out the frail gentleman enjoying his trip with his devoted son. They do not acknowledge Abdul and Zaida when these two, dressed in hooded grey and white djellabas, walk past to reach their rear seats.
Walter seems engrossed in the Lonely Planet guide but, to Ian’s amusement, his head soon rolls to the side, mouth open, snoring slightly. His authority has melted away during the journey, relegated to the role of flâneur, not a boss any more. All the decisions have been taken by Khalid and Abdul. Necessarily. And there are plenty of reasons to accept the fatigue enveloping them both.
Ian snaps closed his iPad with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the Swedish thriller everyone else has read. He is too whacked to take anything in. Pushing the seat into a sleeping position, memories float back of mindfulness workshops he shared with Clint. Eyes closed, he attempts to relax every part of his body while paying attention to each breath. Don’t rush. Filter out negative thoughts. Give your full attention to positive emotions. His mind drifts off to a Vancouver Island beach. With Clint on towel mats watching a boy playing by the ramshackle reservation for the Nuu-chah-nulth. Don’t lose the detail. Scrawny and naked, the kid pats the sand into conic tepees with seagull feathers for flags, shingle for paths, shells for pots and seaweed for fires. With an odd smile, the boy walks away from the ancestral camp. A ritual only Clint understands: ‘Hold on, man, let go of the guilt. You stole no land. Breathe in and out. From your tummy. Not too fast. Anchor yourself onto me. You betrayed no friend. Listen to the incoming surf. Good. Let it wash away the tepees and the self-blaming.’
The Franklins appear to be resting from worrying, so Abdul guesses. Whatever front of confidence he puts
up for them, he is well aware that Zaida’s life is being moulded by too many hands. It’s imperative to keep an eye on each move in and out of the coach and make sure they are not being followed. The number of travellers has gone down since Hasakak. In this semi-arid steppe, families carrying the paraphernalia of the urban – leather bags, sneakers, comics etc – have been dropped off in austere villages to call on impoverished relatives. There are too many signs of the encroaching desert. Dried-up wells. Abandoned settlements. Abdul feels in his arthritic bones the fragility of the country he has returned to. The Khabur river, once sung by Mesopotamian poets, stopped flowing months ago – a shocking sight from that bridge. Since the Euphrates, he has seen new villages exploiting scarce water resources for seasonal crops instead of herding goats and camels. There will be wars over water, like over oil. Abdul is engulfed by a surge of nostalgia for vibrant diverse communities; when people respected the land and each other’s way of life. But why be so gloomy when the trip is going so well? He should just care for his ‘sick’ grandchild. He smiles. At the last stop, he brushed off an inquisitive mother who asked why his child was left inside the coach. The matron backed off. Pray Allah it will be as easy with the next nosy parker.
Just on the other side of the alley there is a young female he observes with tact – as in his clinic when he could practise discreet admiration of femininity as an occupational perk. A ravishing profile. A student travelling on her own? With a guitar and a backpack covered with red, white and red stickers – the Kurdish flag. Not a spy! Head crushed by a woolly bonnet. Wearing a black military jacket. Lost in her thoughts.
Why is the coach pulling to the side? There are murmurs of annoyance and surprise at being parked beside some rudimentary garage-looking sheds. Piles of tyres spill outside breeze block walls; rundown cars rust between a trailer and two Toyota vans. Why stop so close to Qamishli? The driver shouts some explanation before disappearing inside the workshop.
‘Everyone is to leave the coach. To wait outside. Child, they’re just checking the water tank.’ Abdul helps Zaida gather her clothes before leaving the safety of the coach. Bemused, Walter and Ian find themselves in a café of some sort. The other travellers settle at the wicker tables, buying Turkish coffee, chatting with the mechanics carrying buckets of water and preparing for a long wait. When her grandfather takes the girl to pee in a tuft of weeds behind the shed, people drop their glance out of respect as these two sneak past.
At the zinc counter, the foreigners buy tins of Pepsi and offer bottled water to the elderly man waiting to be served. Fancy him addressing them in English!
‘Are you British? Let me explain what’s happening. The water gauge is red. The driver is checking how serious the leak is.’ He introduces his granddaughter, now happily munching through a bag of Walkers at an isolated table. Black hair curling out of the hood, she contributes with brio to the agreed pantomime when thanking them for the soda – tight-lipped, she bows and joins in front of her chest her beautiful hands, manicured and henna-tattooed. Abdul misses the blonde child but Aunt Halima insisted on the disguise to facilitate the escape of an obviously local pubescent girl.
With Zaida settled in the coach, Abdul is free to engage with the driver. An usually coarse face with eyes Abdul can’t read anything into – a studied blankness acquired over generations of service.
‘Only 50 kilometres left.’ He shares his suspicions with Walter and Ian. ‘I can’t figure the driver out. He won’t talk, I mean, to a bossy Sunni. But he isn’t that upset by the delay. Does he get a bit on the side from the café?’
Tyres screaming to a halt deafen them. A Ford pickup pulls in. Hoods, goggles, shouts. Defiant Al-Nusra black flags sway from the open rear. There is a rush to the coach door. The truck roars, storming out in the opposite direction. Lost youth playing at war. Abdul’s heart praises Allah. A futile panic.
Zaida likes sitting by the window, on the right side. They have the back of the coach to themselves now that most people have left. Sinister clouds of sand are creeping up above the horizon, bleak and threatening. She snugs herself by her grandfather, holding his hand tight under her cloak – no-one is watching – listening to him humming a prayer until they are disturbed by the coach coming to a brutal stop. Again! A police car is parking on the verge. There is a persistent banging on the door. A security patrol! There is some furious barking. The student, with guitar and pack, hobbles into the seat next to them. ‘Please, help.’
Groaning at their bad luck, Abdul figures out that she has no papers. She leans an imperceptible weight on his shoulder, bonnet over her eyes, frozen. He spreads a blanket over the two figures immobilising him, reassuring, ‘Look sick and moan if someone comes close to you. We’ll stay inside the coach. We’re family.’ He takes out his beads, deep in prayer, ignoring the passengers spilling out onto the macadam. Jumping up the steps, a policeman, rubber baton in hand, urges Walter and Ian to get out. They pull out their travel documents but the officer waves them off as the group left inside attracts his attention. But he is pushed out of the way to make room for another olive-green uniform handling, with some difficulty, a sniffer dog. A German Labrador. Excited, yelping, growling, lips turned up at the mouth corners. A beautiful beast. Abdul recognises the race trained by the Nazis to sniff out hiding Jews. The same dogs are now trained to find dealers and terrorists. As dog and man search up and down the alley, Zaida, terrified, squeezes her body further into Abdul’s lap.
‘Shush. The dog won’t hurt you, he is looking for drugs! See! They’re leaving.’ Tail down, impatient. No drugs. No guns.
On the road again, passengers sigh with relief. The raid has failed. No-one was arrested. They applaud the return to an apparent normality. Free. People move seats and chat for the first time across the rows with strangers. Zaida listens to their new companion talking to Abdul. As a mechanic engineer, she works for Kurdish women resistant fighters. Why the guitar? A singer, she rewrites ancient melodies to sing protest songs – ‘All about Azadi,’ she explains, ‘our freedom. In Arabic, you say, Houriya.’
‘In English, freedom. In French, liberty,’ Zaida whispers, raising her head to show that, having recovered from her fright, she has had enough of acting dumb. Do these words all mean the same? Abdul wonders. Is there anything gained as well as lost in translation? Abdul hugs his clever girl, dreading their parting.
Qamishli: eight hours from Aleppo. Dragging their bags out of the coach storage, travellers exchange their last farewells. The student embraces Zaida and Abdul, all smiles. ‘You good to me. Shukran.’ She vanishes like a firefly into the night. Will she become a martyr, like his fallen daughter? A blasphemous question!
‘What was her name?’
‘Whose name?’
‘Your girl friend, silly.’
‘Promise you won’t get upset? Her name is… Seema.’
She stifles her cries. Is he senile? She glances at the deep wrinkles, the warts masking the upper lip, the receding chin, the overgrown eyebrows. Pity fills her heart. Sensing her dismay, to restrain her trembling, he holds her up against his chest, struggling to express an intolerable cocktail of sadness, anger and hope that any young person would find inconceivable.
‘It’s a good sign, dear. Her name is Seema Mouslem! She’s asked for our protection. It’s not a coincidence. It’s Allah’s way to show us we are not abandoned.’
No, she won’t faint. She has to trust Him or Grandad.
She runs to Walter and Ian, waiting at the entrance gate to the parking lot where deserted coaches spend the night on the outskirts of the small town. There is no-one else around. It is pitch dark except for the occasional lights sweeping from the road leading to the centre. Zaida tells them about Seema Mouslem. They comfort her. Her brave friend knows the region; she is bound to reach a refuge among like-minded people.
‘Here is my brother Shervan.’
Nervous exhaustion is being replaced by feeli
ngs of pride and hope at the sight of a red and white kerchief jumping out of a battered Red Army 4x4 – short and scruffy, so unlike Abdul, but with a scintillating laughter. They cheer frantically, praising their hosts. ‘Hurrah! We’ve done it. Owing to you, Abdul.’
Walking up and down the yard, the brothers have a long conversation in half Kurdish, half Arabic, keeping the Franklins waiting, now glum and crotchety, inside the jeep.
‘What’s going on? I’m done in.’
‘Sorry, Walter! I needed to check every step of what’s left of your journey. Zaida, listen. My heart sings. Your dad is nearing the Lebanese border.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He phoned Walid, who contacted Shervan today.’
‘How far from the frontier?’
‘5 kilometres. Chin up, child. Allah is bountiful.’
Exhilarated, high on the news, the Franklins congratulate the brothers for their cunning. Chanting ‘Khalid, Khalid’, Ian runs around the car, punching the air like a footballer celebrating a goal. Zaida joins the rampage as Walter turns to Abdul.
‘What about you? Back in Hama? Do take care of yourself! Don’t phone anyone. Be as quiet as a mouse.’ Walter grasps his friend’s hands, holding both for a while, eyes fixed on Abdul’s, mouth shivering with fatigue and apprehension.
‘Wait, you two!’ She sprints to her grandfathers and hangs onto each neck in turn, perusing the floppy flesh and uncouth hair covering their tired faces. She kisses their cheeks to blow their frailty away. In this blessed instant, they register the strength of her affection – she loves us equally! Over her head, they grin at their own vulnerability.
Homecomings Page 20