Tibetan Cross

by Mike Bond

  Six nights, so little sleep. Comatose. All that comes together suffers dispersal. Molecules and nations. Universes and the flesh of women and men. He felt his swollen knee. CIA's closing in already. Waiting in Athens. I'll die not knowing why I've lived.

  Despite the knee he wandered forward again, glanced out the galley window. The moon was hidden. Cold and lonely to die. I'm losing faith. But faith's a habit. After all, what is there to lose faith in?

  WHEN HE RETURNED to his seat the woman raised her eyes. “Can't sleep either?” A brief smile. “It's your grass that's done it.”

  Her eyes were iceberg green. Or are they blue? Slightly tilted, a cat's. Her voice throaty yet soft, an abrupt breathless style of speech, an almost theatrical lilt. A Vassar voice. Jesus protect us all from Vassar voices. Atop the cleft of her breasts glinted a heart-shaped diamond pendant. Wonder who gave her that. And what he got for it. I know the answer to that. “It was hash – should make you sleep.”

  “That's why you're pacing?” He shrugged; she added, “Where you coming from?”

  “Thailand.” His voice echoed inside his head as if his ears were blocked.

  “Sounds more fun than Teheran.”

  He rubbed his knee irritably. “Then why go there?”

  “For a story, but it didn't pan out. The good old Shah, friend of democracy, is building a summer palace covering half an island in the Persian Gulf. It's all hush hush – too many starving Iranians might get upset…And they don't approve of women doing anything except making babies and taking care of men.”

  “You're a journalist?”

  “Freelance. Politics mostly. You?”

  “Just wandering.”

  “Sounds like fun.” One of her top teeth, he noticed, was chipped. “I've always wanted to do that.” She closed Der Spiegel. “It takes money to be free.”

  “Money's slavery, too. The worst kind.” He settled into his seat and closed his eyes.

  HER VOICE AGAIN. “I bet you're hungry. I am. I'm like a cat – feed me and I sleep.”

  The leopard's unwavering green eyes on the cliff below Tensan Bazaar. In the cypress outside the deserted Rana palace. She would have slept well with me in her belly. “What day's it?”

  She glanced down. “Saturday, three-twenty a.m., Teheran time.” She stood and walked up the silent aisle, pushed aside the First Class curtain, returned moments later with four sandwiches in plastic and two bottles of wine, and sat beside him opening a bottle. “'Antidote to grief and anger, dispels all care…'” Her voice deepened, semidramatic, “'…although one's father and mother both were dead, and though his brother had fallen before his eyes…'” She smiled primly. “Homer, speaking of Nepenthe, an Egyptian drug.”

  “How'd you..?” He turned away in shock.

  “Oh I was a Classics major, can reel off hundreds of lines like that – very dramatic ones: ‘Behold me, princes of Thebes, the last daughter of the house of your kings – see what I suffer, and from whom, because I feared to cast away the fear of Heaven!’ Antigone, nearing the end.” She put the wine glass in his hand. “Only an Iranian could be opposed to Montrachet. Come, cast away fear of Heaven!”

  He calmed his face. “Who are you?”

  “Who am I? Claire Savitch. Twenty-seven. Till tomorrow, that is.”

  “Who are you going to be tomorrow?”

  She giggled. “Then I'll be twenty-eight. So how long were you in Bangkok?”

  “How did you know?” His voice stumbled. Stop it. Dreaming things.

  “You told me, silly. Said you'd been in Thailand. So I assumed Bangkok. Was I right?”

  He tried to watch her face but the light was wrong. A sign of madness is when every phrase has portents. “Yeah, I was in Bangkok.”

  “How long?”

  “Three or four times, last two years.”

  “Hmm. Did you miss the States?”

  “Never.”

  “I don't either. Been gone for nearly four years – occasional necessary visits only. If it disappeared from the face of the earth I'd hardly notice, though once I was rah rah – quite the patriot.”

  “Our recent actions aren't much to be proud of.”

  “What country's are? Oh how lovely!” she added, tucking back her hair and bending past him to look out the window where saffron moonlight tinted the wing.

  He breathed deeply, sat back in his seat. “As a freelance journalist, do you write things and hope people buy them?”

  “Not that simple. Have to be where the action is – or I do in-depth stuff when I can't hit the earthquakes.”

  “Earthquakes?”

  “You know, all people really want to read is about the deaths and sufferings of others – wherever there's gore, I go. But mostly I prefer the in-depth politics, behind the scenes.”

  “How do you set those up?”

  “I get assignments – a magazine wants a quickie on political murders in Indonesia, say, and they check with the agencies to see who's free and close by. Maybe I get picked. Or I have an idea, send a query. Sure it's hand-to-mouth, but it beats the nine a.m. obeisance five days a week.”

  “What kind of in-depth politics?”

  “NATO, SEATO, war and economics – human interest stories.”

  “Why so cynical?”

  “It goes with the territory. Journalists look beyond what people – politicians – say, to what they do. Usually they're lying.”

  “Who, the politicians or the journalists?”

  “Sometimes both. But often the politicians, the ‘statesmen.’ Though most journalists do a lousy job – contented to file the official version and go back to the bar. Like whores, most of us don't put our hearts in it.”

  “Do you?”

  She grinned. “I'm learning more and more to take an interest in the truth that doesn't get out. Trouble is there's no end to levels, to truths. At one level a man commits a crime, at another level he may be a hero, patriot. At a certain place you leave journalism and enter art – what was it Picasso said, fiction's the highest form of truth?”

  “I wouldn't know.”

  “Where are you going now?”

  “Nowhere. I mean, I've got nowhere to go. Athens, really.”

  “You live there?”

  “No.”

  “I'm stopping there too.”

  “Doing a story?”

  “A few days off, celebrate my birthday.”

  “What story you working on next?”

  She drew her hem over her crossed knees, her breasts filling her blouse. “Nothing planned – go back to Brussels eventually, see what my bureau has for me. What a strange look – what were you thinking?”

  He shrugged. “Remembering that old song – ‘The ghost of electricity…'”

  “'Howls in the bones of her face?’ How weird – am I really like that?”

  “In a way I'm like you – seeing the world as transition.” He tried to extend his sore leg. “Where d'you send your stories?”

  “Depends how timely, what subject.” She screwed the cap back on an empty wine bottle and stowed it in the seat pocket. “If I learned a three-star restaurant in Paris is substituting mushrooms for truffles I'd send the story to Gourmet or Time. But a story on diplomatic lying in Washington might go to Le Monde. Or The Nation.”

  “Not The New York Times?”

  “The trouble with our newspapers is by their very existence they represent the status quo of which they're a part. Newspapers're owned by the same few who own the rest of industrial productivity, so little that threatens that industry's profitability gets serious and honorable coverage.”

  “How do you see the States?”

  She thought. “I didn't grow up there, and I see the States as Europeans do, with some nervous distrust. Following the State and Defense departments does nothing to make me feel better.”

  “Do you ever get – what's it called – a story no one else has?”

  “An exclusive? Everybody tries. Enough of them, you're set for life. Sure,
I've had a few.”

  “If someone gave you information – how would you check it?”

  “The joke of my profession is that truth's immaterial. What counts is your sources. Basically, I track down as many people as I can who'll verify the story.”

  “What if that's not possible?”

  “That's what I was saying a few minutes ago, about levels of truth. What we read in the papers is often completely off the mark. The true gets stonewalled.”

  “Ever do anything on undercover agencies?”

  “A little. Why?”

  “I'd think it might be interesting. I mean, from what I read.”

  “Very little of what they call ‘intelligence’ ever surfaces.

  Just for once I'd love – love – to uncover something. Put down all the goody-goody politicians with blood on their hands.”

  “Suppose such a story were hard to corroborate?”

  “Then you float it from the individual source, see what happens. But that's easy to stonewall.” She smoothed down her skirt. “So it's best to have another source – even one other person – to validate it. If you want your story to be believed.”

  “How'd you become a journalist?”

  “Probably my stepfather. And my mother. I was thinking about it, tonight after I got on the plane. Iran's such a farce – it got me wondering, am I wasting my life? It's a nowhere place, Iran, a spiritual vacuum. People with no leadership, no focus. Did you know the CIA put the Shah in power? That back in fifty-four they dumped the democratically elected Iranian government? When the Shah gets the boot – the people hate him and we can't keep him there forever – there'll be hell to pay…So why am I covering such garbage? As if it were real, had meaning? Who cares if the Shah builds himself another palace or gets more U.S. tax dollars to buy more U.S. jet fighters?”

  With one fingernail she scratched the corner of her mouth. “My stepfather – he's like the Shah – he's the one who made me what I am. Not in a good sense, not by example. No, maybe that's it – it was by example…he gave me an example of what not to be.”

  “What's that?”

  “He's an infinitely devious man with strong scruples. But his scruples are based on fear.”

  “How did that make you a journalist?”

  “Tonight I was remembering one example. He and my mother have a farm near Nemours. When I was at the Sorbonne I lived on the rue de Dantzig; there's an abattoir in the quarter. Often in bed at night I could hear hoofbeats on the paving stones – that was before the riots, before the streets were covered in asphalt so Parisians couldn't dig up the pavés to throw at the CRS – at night I could hear the hoofbeats of horses being led to slaughter. On the farm I had a horse too, Ulysse, who'd been with me ever since I was a little girl; my father bought him before he died.”

  “When did he die?”

  “He was a colonel under de Lattre, and was killed two years after de Lattre died, at Dien Bien Phu. Well, one night – it was a strange night in my life anyway – I dreamt that Ulysse was with the horses going to the abattoir. In the dream I saw his mane – he had a long silver mane – flapping on his neck as he walked under the streetlight. Three weeks later I went to the farm; Ulysse was gone – my stepfather said he'd run away – they hadn't been able to find him. Ulysse was old and going blind and had never run anywhere. “My mother sat beside my stepfather and said nothing, backing him up. He'd sold Ulysse to the slaughterhouse because he was jealous of my father. While my mother did nothing to intervene…That was her politics – her political compromise. I was learning to look beneath words for motives. From there it was an easy step to journalism.”

  Cohen eyed the darkness beyond the wing. What motives lead to my truth? Tell me, Kim. Tell me, Alex. “Why was it a strange night anyway?”

  “It was the first time I was ever with a boy. A psychiatrist would have fun with that, wouldn't he?” She sat upright. “Must be getting drunk.”

  “Why?”

  “So talkative.” She shivered. “I'm cold.”

  “I'll get a blanket.”

  THEY SLEPT NOT FAR from each other's warmth under a thin blanket as the plane traversed the starred dome of Asia Minor. He woke with her shoulder against his, her hair tickling his neck. “What you going to do in Athens?” she mumbled, half asleep.

  He did not answer. The plane decelerated into dawn that snuffed the scattered lights of Anatolia and cast cinnabar across the uprippling Aegean. Twenty-two more days. Would she believe me? He watched through the plastic window as an expanding haze became Athens, crouched under its smog like a squid in ink.

  8

  THE TIBETAN'S HASHISH tucked in its leather bag beneath his shirt, he stood painfully in the Customs line.

  “You aren't afraid they'll find what you're carrying?”

  “Sssh.”

  “Aren't you?”

  “Quiet!”

  “You're the kind of man who wants a subservient wife. I can see it.”

  “I don't want any kind of wife.”

  “Careful. You can't always get what you want.”

  “You have no baggage?” The Customs inspector had liquid, searching eyes.

  “No,” Cohen said.

  “You stay how long in Greece?”

  “A few days.”

  “You have money to stay?” The inspector's eyes dropped to Cohen's clothes. “Every foreigner must show certain money to stay in Greece.”

  “I have friends here who will give me money.”

  The inspector took back Cohen's passport. “You must wait in Customs Office for them to come.”

  She shoved forward. “What's the matter?”

  The inspector scanned her. “You are with him?”

  “Yes. And I have lots of money. Want to see?”

  “Give him fifty dollars. Then he comes in.”

  Cohen waited as the inspector rooted through her lingerie and notebooks. She took his arm as they entered the terminal. “What's with your leg?”

  He returned the money. “Sprained my ankle.”

  “Don't walk, then.” She pushed the money back at him. “I'm hungry as a tiger. Buy me breakfast.”

  “With your money?”

  “Why not? Feed me!” She hailed a cab and held the door as he eased himself into the back seat. “For a Jew you have a very Jesuit mind.”

  “Oh?”

  “'Oh?'” she mimicked. “That's a priest's answer – the confessional: ‘Forgive me Father for I've sinned’ – ‘Oh?’ – ‘Yes, Father, I've had relations with the Virgin.’ – ‘Oh?’ You see, it gives nothing away.”

  “What should I give away?”

  “Are you Catholic? Jewish?”

  “My father was Jewish. He died when I was six. My mother was Irish, Catholic. Soon after he died, we went to the States to visit family, get away from Ireland. Several years later, over there, she remarried, an American. I grew up Catholic.”

  “So which are you?”

  “Both. Maybe neither.”

  “That's being cat and mouse. Victim and executioner. Ugh! I wouldn't want that.”

  His knee pulsed unbearably. Angrily he said, “So what are you?”

  “Me?” She laughed. “Tell me and I'll love you forever. I'd like to know.” She watched the ugly outskirts of Athens roll by. “Maybe I'm learning.”

  “We're always learning. But we never learn.”

  AT THE CAFÉ in front of the Hotel Britannia fragrances of coffee, ouzo, and croissants hovered in the still, smoggy air. She thumped her suitcase down beside her chair. “They have eggs and rashers here.”

  He ordered ouzos one after the other, resting his aching leg on a chair as she inhaled eggs scrambled and fried, croissants and scones with lime marmalade, bacon, feta, olives, a Spanish omelet, more scones and bacon, cups of cappuccino leaving brown intertwining circles on the gray marble table. He chewed his ice cubes, adjusted his leg, winced. “I've seen a whole village live a week on less than that.”

  She licked the underside of he
r fork. “I'm to feel sorry?”

  He shrugged. “I'm comparing, not judging.”

  She grinned. “Like the man said, if it feels good it is good.”

  “That kinda thinking gets you into trouble.”

  “So does its opposite.”

  He cleaned his glasses on the tablecloth, aware of traffic and clattering heels on the sidewalk. How good it will feel to kill them one by one. When did I cross the boundary between good and evil? What boundary? Is there good, evil? The waiter brought another ouzo and he drained it before the waiter could leave. “Just bring the bottle,” he said.

  She pushed back her plate. “Your leg really hurts.”

  He raised one eyelid. “Less and less.”

  “Now what are you going to do?” She cocked her head.

  “Now?” Now, silly, I'm waiting for Paul. Waiting for the semaphore, the wireless, the subconscious signal that won't come. That says you're alive, Paul, alive and on your way.

  She grinned, playing with her hair. “Yes, now. Now that you've drunk nearly a liter of ouzo for breakfast, and, for all I can see, don't have the wherewithal to get as far as Delphi, let alone the physical ability, given that leg, I must admit that my journalistic curiosity is raised as to what you plan next.”

  He yanked his leg from the chair. Hardly any pain. “Never plan, just do. That's the secret.”

  “Secret to what?”

  He shrugged, a stupendous lassitude descending like the smog and noise of traffic over his shoulders. He emptied his glass and slapped the knee: all better. With her spoon he scraped the sugary grounds from the bottom of her coffee cup and ate them.

  “Aren't you hungry?”

  He shook his head, stood, then sat at once as the knee pounded with pain. Why's she pushing me? “I'm staying in Athens a day or two, Claire. If I get to Brussels sometime I'll call you.”

  “Why not call me here?”

  “Here?”

  “Sure. I'm not going to Brussels now. I can't get over you.” She leaned forward, hands on the table, “Here you are, can't walk, no money.”

  “I've got friends here.”

  “Let's call a cab and take you to them.” She folded her napkin as if planning to reuse it, slapped it on the table, and gathered up her things, waving to the waiter.