by Claire North
For nearly an hour they walked together up and down the ruined landscape, looking for the man in the passenger seat. The flat earth was now an undulating hillside. The car stood, untouched and dirty, in the middle of the storm. Charlie couldn’t see where the shells had been fired from, asked, “Were they trying to hit us?”
The driver shook his head, spreading his arms wide, no words left on his white-dust lips, his bright-red eyes. There was nothing here, not a living thing worth killing, not a crop to uproot, not a hut to demolish, only dust and the smell of hot metal. Somewhere, someone who couldn’t see his target had opened fire on nothingness, and where there had been nothing before, now even less of nothing remained. The mathematical incongruity of it kept rattling round Charlie’s head; as he staggered dumb over craters and along the edge of the road, he found it almost impossible to think of anything else.
Eventually, they found the other man’s right leg. The driver of the car saw it, turned, and puked. Charlie just stood and stared, not sure if this was a real thing. Perhaps some trickster had left it here, as a cruel and well-prepared joke, and if prodded, it would turn out to be plastic with a bit of paint. He found he couldn’t think, that he had to deliberately force himself to remember the words that would surely be most apt—words such as grief, horror, shock, trauma, despair, fear, danger—but as every sound took such a phenomenal effort to hold in his mind, he let it go, and his mind drifted back to the mathematics of nothingness, and how much his left foot itched.
He sat for a while on the side of the road as the driver finished coughing and puking and shaking, eyes too dry for tears. Then, when he was a little more composed, the driver stood up and said, voice breaking on the sound, “My name is Murad. You ride in front,” and that was all there was to it.
Charlie rode in the front, and onwards they drove.
By sunset, the petrol tank was nearly empty. At fifteen miles an hour, they crawled into a town whose name had been painted over so many times, Charlie couldn’t begin to guess at it. The roar of generators from the town square was one of the only sounds. A few figures scurried indoors as they approached, driving up what might have been the central street past the low-domed mosque to where a large beige building was still glowing with light. An arcade of high arches ran along its base, and two wings stretched out either side of a pointed front hall, behind which a cupola sat. Great bands of black and white tile ran up the front and sides, and glass lanterns hung down behind every arch, filling the building and the square in front of it, where a fountain still trickled, with light. A flag flew high overhead, the script on it lost to sight. A woman, her face entirely covered, black gloves on her hands, rushed out of the main door as the car pulled to a stop, rattling off words too fast for Charlie to hear. Murad nodded, tired, and with a jerk of his head towards the waiting escort said, “Go. Follow her.”
Charlie hesitated, suddenly loath to leave his near-silent companion. Should men who had been shelled together not have a few more parting words? But Murad’s eyes had already turned away to some other place, contemplating some other thing, so Charlie slipped from the passenger seat, and followed the woman inside.
A military headquarters.
Men in camouflage gear, black strips of cloth tied around their right sleeves. As Charlie approached, some covered their faces—sunglasses, goggles, keffiyehs, balaclavas, a medley of goods from a hundred different sources. There was little resemblance between the camouflage clothes they wore, some yellow, some grey, some flecked with blue. Nor was there any uniformity in their weapons, but rather a mess of guns of every sort had been thrown together, and of the men Charlie saw, too many still had their fingers on the trigger, even here, and their heads jerked sharply as he passed, eyes flashing like startled cats. Voices, some female, most male, drifted through the high corridors, the ceilings and floor mosaicked with great geometric lines and zigzags, now cracked and crumbling from the pressures of time and too many boots. Empty mirror frames, the glass long broken and swept away; empty picture frames, the canvas carefully removed by an unknown curator.
Up a flight of stairs beneath a crystal chandelier, along a corridor where once, perhaps, colonial administrators, fresh from Paris, had drunk good champagne and smoked small cigarettes and debated the best tax to impose upon this territory, and where now men who served …
… Charlie wasn’t sure what …
… slept in hastily arranged bunk beds against the walls.
A door stood open at one end, the green paint scoured from the wood. Charlie was hustled in, the woman bobbing silently as she pulled the door shut behind her, and in the half-light of the single burning lamp on the heavy oak desk, he saw Qasim.
It took him a moment to recognise the little poet. He was thinner now, a trace of grey in his hair. Two fingers were missing from his left hand, and as he glanced up from the papers on which he toiled, he did not smile. He too wore combat fatigues; a pistol lay on top of the papers on which he worked.
His pen moved, his head stayed down, and in his elegant, flawless English he said, “Do you know the city of Deir ez-Zor, Harbinger of Death?”
“No.” Charlie’s voice, a tiny thing in this sprawling room.
“It is one of the last holdouts of the government regime in the east. As a result, it has been under siege for many months. A few weeks ago, the government closed the last of the bakeries to the civilian population, saying that the soldiers needed the bread. They are charging fifty thousand Syrian pounds for every man, woman and child who wishes to leave. It is criminal, you see, to run away from war; it is treachery. If the people run, do you know what they meet then?”
“No.”
“They meet the extremists. They meet the boys whose fathers died before they could teach them about humanity. They meet the angry men, the kids who never worked out who they were until God told them in a bloody dream. They meet the lucky survivors, the ones who escaped the bombs, and who, seeing their friends dead, knew it was only heaven that saved them. They meet the soldiers who did not want to fight, whose families will die if they do not. They meet the men who fight for a cause, and have chosen the cause over life. They meet the beheaders, who are happy to saw through the spines of teachers, doctors, nurses, journalists and children. They meet the men who stone women to death, and set fire to prisoners inside metal cages. Tell me, do you know the Harbinger of Famine?”
“A little, yes.”
“She went to Deir ez-Zor a few weeks ago, to talk to the mayor. I was surprised that you didn’t go with her.”
“My work sent me elsewhere.”
“Your work brings you back to me?”
“Yes.”
Qasim’s lips twitched, a tiny hm, a little nod of his head, kept on writing. Charlie stood almost to attention, clutching his travel bag in front of him, and waited.
Finally the poet finished his words, snapped the lid on his pen, leant back in his chair, hands folded behind his head to cushion it, one leg over the other, and seemed for the very first time to see Charlie, and looked unimpressed.
“So. Here you are. You gave me mousetraps and I lived, and others died, and now you’ve come back again.”
“I guess so.”
“And what do you bring me this time? That’s what you do, isn’t it? Death sends you before, and you bring …?” A flicker of his eyebrows, commanding, expecting obedience.
Charlie rummaged in his bag, pulled out the box that lay within, put it gingerly on the table. Qasim studied it for a long moment, then in a single motion unfolded himself, scooped it up, opened it. The box was some fifteen centimetres long, four centimetres wide. The fountain pen inside was stained with black ink long since run dry, the lid was cracked. A long while Qasim looked at it, and then he laughed. He threw back his head and laughed until the tears rolled down his face, and Charlie’s shoulders jerked a little to be in the presence of laughter, though he couldn’t find anything funny in it.
“First mousetraps, now a pen!” howled the little m
an through his merriment. “Death has a sense of the thing!” He leapt to his feet with sudden energy, nearly sprinted round the desk, slapped Charlie on the shoulder and exclaimed, “It is good to see you, my friend, it is very good indeed! Come with me—we must eat at once!”
Chapter 46
Charlie …
… he’s not quite sure how this happened, but here he is …
… sits on cushions in the middle of a ballroom in a place with no name, as women in veils serve him dates and fresh fruit and hot bread and chickpea and mutton stew, and Qasim talks brightly about campaigns and planned victories and the perfidious Russians and the danger of aerial bombardment and the new aquifer he’s going to have built and …
Charlie sits in a daze, and eats, and listens, and wonders what the hell he’s doing here.
Death knows Deir ez-Zor.
She has been here many times.
Once, she marched with the Armenians, back in the time of the First World War. She had been busy in that time, huddled in the trenches in northern France, holding the hand of the man covered in mud, his screams unanswered in no-man’s-land. Sometimes Death beheld her sisters—Pestilence, her face hidden by the lice that roamed in a living grey skin across her face; War moving through the yellow-green clouds of gas, his bare hands blistering, rupturing, dripping pus. When it was over, Pestilence had said it was a shame, it had been such an exciting time, but wasn’t flu interesting?
And Death had marched with the Armenians, across the desert of bones to Deir ez-Zor, and Famine had walked too, holding the hands of the old and the children, and when there were no more children to walk, Famine had walked with the mothers and the fathers, until at last they came to this city in the east, and Famine had conceded her work was done, and only Death remained.
Later—much later—the city had built a church and a memorial to those days, raised up words in honour of the dead, held prayers to the nameless lost, their bodies given to sand. Death liked that. Death always paid the proper price for the votive candles she lit.
For a little while, the church had stood, and then the war had come, and angry men who knew no peace had declared that it was obscene and heathen, and had blown it to dust, and in that dust Death stood, and felt briefly irritated that the ones she had taken were not being treated with proper respect, and resolved that before the day was done, many men would know her indignation. For Death, like all the riders of the Apocalypse, may be summoned, but once summoned, may not obey the will of man.
Behind Death, Famine stood, though in truth, she has too much going on right now to give the past much in the way of thought.
Busy busy busy busy …
There was music.
And there was dancing.
And there was knock-off Pepsi that made Charlie’s mouth burn.
And there was more food.
And there was more dancing.
And when it was done, Charlie and Qasim staggered through the tumbledown remnants of this had-been imperial palace, and Charlie said, “You’re so kind, you’re … so very kind …”
And Qasim, whose face was flushed a brilliant red from drinking something a little bit stronger than fizzy drinks, mumbled back, “For the Harbinger of Death, what man would refuse?” and laughed at some very funny joke, and showed Charlie to his room, which had an actual four-poster in it, and a copy of the Quran on a bedside table of beautifully carved wood, and a Tom Clancy novel in French on the table on the other side of the luxuriously puffed mattress, and Charlie mumbled thank you, thank you, thank you, and Qasim laughed some more and said, “No problem!” and went his own way to bed.
And five minutes later, Charlie’s face wet from the bowl of water left by the heat-bent mirror on one wall, there was a knock on his door, and before he could answer, a woman came in wearing a silk dressing gown and very little else, and mumbled, “I was sent for you?”
“Uh … no?”
“You are the Harbinger of Death?”
“Yes, but you weren’t sent.”
“I was sent,” she replied firmly, reaching to undo the gown. “I was sent.”
Charlie flapped his hands like the wings of a frightened chicken, and made it to her just in time to stop her undoing the knot. “No,” he mumbled in his feeble Arabic. “No I’m not … you’re not …” He stopped, trying to find a way to explain, to unravel this mystery, and saw her flinch and realised he was holding her wrists tight, and the skin beneath his hands was bruised black and purple, old markings not given a chance to heal.
Abashed, he stumbled back, and the girl stared enquiring into his face. She was barely more than a teenager, her hair sometime recently cut brutally short, and only now beginning to grow back. “I’m married,” he blurted. “I have a wife.”
Her face fell, she stared down at the floor, pulled the robe tighter around her skinny shoulders. Guilt, fear, anxiety—he wasn’t sure which emotion to name—welled up fast, hard enough to make his head spin. “You can stay,” he added, softer. “I’ll sleep over there …” a gesture at a low wooden couch, layered with pillows. “You sleep in the bed.”
“I stay?”
“You stay. You sleep there, I sleep here.”
She hesitated, seeming not to understand, so Charlie pushed his bag under the couch, rolled onto it, tucking his knees to his chest, and closed his eyes, making a great show of sleeping.
For a while she stood, staring at this bizarre man, before at last, seeing that he wasn’t about to stir, and wondering if maybe his pretence had become real, she walked towards the great padded bed, crawled under the sheets, and stared up at the ceiling.
If either of them slept a wink, neither knew it, and she ran away at the first light of dawn.
Chapter 47
In the morning Charlie said: “I’ve given you the pen, I should be going …” and Qasim exclaimed, of course, no problem, we’ll get you a car, just wait here …
And in the afternoon Charlie said, “I was told a car was coming, is Qasim …” and the colonel said, I’m sure it’s being handled, don’t worry, I’ll look into it.
And in the evening Charlie said, “Thank you for your hospitality, but there’s places I have to get to, and it’s not here, I’ve got …” and the major replied, no cars, not tonight, not tomorrow, but you just wait, we’ll get you out of here, you’ll see.
And at night, there was a yellow glow on the horizon, and five jets skimmed overhead and someone muttered, “Damn Russians!” and someone else, on the other side of the courtyard muttered, “Damn Americans!” and no one was quite sure who was right, but what did it matter? As to those above, those below …
And Charlie sat on the porch of the old palace, his hands between his knees, and asked if anyone had seen Qasim, and the poet was everywhere and nowhere. He was on the front lines, fighting with the men; he was in the city, defending the women. He was taking a piss, he was having a cigarette, he was seeing his mother, he was helping protect the granary, he was negotiating with a warlord from the east, a man who had no allegiance to anyone or anything. He was writing poetry to the moon, to the thin slivers of light that still shone over this dark land. He was skyping a girl he knew in South Korea. He was looking after the kids. He was immortal. He was preparing to die. He was a monster, walking over the graves of the dead. He was a hero, in every place at once, and nowhere his enemies, or Death himself, might find him.
Afterwards, when the generators finally powered down and the quiet men and women of the palace padded around with candles shrouded behind cupped hands, Charlie lay on his back, fully dressed, in his grand, ridiculous room, and stared at a ceiling where the frescoed image of a cloudy sky laced with moist sunset had chipped away to bare plaster, and thought he heard a man screaming in the darkness, before that scream was cut off, and realised he wasn’t sure how he was meant to get home.
Chapter 48
Click click click click.
Hi, it’s Charlie, is that Samantha?
No, dear, it’s Maureen.<
br />
Maureen, I’m sorry, I should have … the line is very bad.
How are you, dear?
Thing is, Maureen, I’m stuck in a place in Syria and I don’t know where I am. I’ve got a satellite phone but I don’t … I don’t want anyone to find me with it. I can’t really say why it’s … I’ve got appointments next week, I’m in a war zone, is there a plan? The office said to wait at a hotel and I did and now …
Syria, you say? Ah yes, I can see on the calendar—meeting a general, yes?
A poet, but yes, I suppose, a general.
Good good!
And now I’m stuck here.
No, not at all, you have meetings next week.
And no way to get to them. I have a plane ticket out of Ankara next Tuesday, but how am I meant to get to Ankara?
It’s all been arranged.
Has it? I don’t have those details, could you tell me …?
I’ll send you an email.
I don’t have reliable internet access right now.
Just check your inbox first thing!
No, but I’d …
Byeeee!
Click click click.
Chapter 49
Voices.
Listen to the voices, and find that calm that comes from lives, living, always living.
“… for the six a.m. muster and then we move out to collect the water from the local …”
“… she said, but I said that is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, that is just—what planet are you even living on?”
“I like the dates they get from the west, there’s something in it, not too syrupy but just the right sort of texture when you …”
“That’s disgusting.”
“So the gun went from Belgium to France to Libya to the rebels to the Palestinians to Hezbollah to the soldiers to the …”
“Problem is they’re still weak in defence. Now if they changed formation, put three at the back and two up front I think they’d be scoring two, maybe three more every match …”
