by Adam Roberts
I was married to [Name deleted: see above] and resident in Liberty [New London] for three years before the events related in this document. I became involved, sexually with [Name deleted: see above], but afterwards I became estranged from him. I have reason to believe that he subsequently commenced an affair with [Name deleted: see above], the wife of [Name deleted: see above]. I was aware, or I had suspicions, that [Name deleted: see above] had become involved in terrorist activities – this was after I had ended my affair with him. The political climate was tense, heated almost to the point of hysteria. People had died in the various explosions. There was a great deal of animosity. I met with [Name deleted: see above], who begged me to intercede on his behalf with my husband. He was scared for his life. My husband left town on unspecified military activities. I heard that [Name deleted: see above] had been arrested on suspected terrorist charges. Then four soldiers arrived at the door of my own apartment, and I was placed under arrest myself.
I was taken in the night by three military police to a holding station on the outskirts of Liberty, and there I stayed for an unspecified amount of time. I estimate that I was there for at least a month.
I was interrogated many times: asked hundreds of questions, most of them variations of the one question: was I involved in the bombings? No, I said, no. But they reconfigured the question, dressed it in different guises, and asked and asked and asked. How did I know [Name deleted]? I worked on a committee he chaired. Wasn’t it true that I had had an affair with him? Oh God, how embarrassing, yes that was true. But it ended a year ago, and I have had no dealings with him since then. No dealings at all? Almost no dealings. Do you expect us to believe that? Do you really expect us to believe that?
I have no expectations at all.
I was, to begin with, in a cell in Liberty, built out of metal, prefabricated wall. I could see the places where bolts the size of my big toe clasped the coigns of these walls together. But the floor had been carpeted, the little bed was well provided with blankets, and a hot pipe ran along the floor of the right-hand wall, so I was comfortable enough. Opposite this was a window latticed with the sort of ironwork shopkeepers use to swathe their shop fronts with at night to discourage thieves. Used to use, I should say. The view from this window was not extensive: I could see the corner of the L-shaped block in which I was being kept. I could see a stretch of wall over the way, and poking above it a communications pole cobwebbed at its top with a fan-spread of metal wires.
Was I frightened, alarmed for my future? Of course. It was a very frightening time. I think I assumed that execution awaited those convicted of terrorism, although this was never made plain for me. And I assumed that in the superheated political climate of Liberty at that time I would certainly be found guilty. And yet the monotony of living in a cell, a monotony broken only by the delivery of food, and the arrival of guards to take me for another bout of interrogation, was, in its way, a soothing thing. When a life’s routines have been disarranged as comprehensively as mine had been, under arrest, regular routines become the last architecture of sane existence. Had that been taken away (had I been woken in the night, moved continually, never allowed to settle) I would have fared much worse.
Outside my cell I was aware, from time to time, of the rhythms of city life. I heard helicopters pass overhead, and truck engines clearing their throats, and sometimes I heard people’s voices. But most of all I heard, as did everybody in Liberty, the continued bombardment. One day I counted four distinct detonations: the pea-whistle of approach, the slam-banging of the explosions themselves. I asked my guards about these, and sometimes received accounts of the ruination of a housing block, or the collapse of a warehouse wall. But sometimes I would receive only sour expressions, and I was reminded that, to these guards, I was myself somehow implicated in the continuing bombardment.
But one thing was obvious even to me, in my seclusion: every explosion, whether near at hand and startling or further away and muffled by distance, was preceded by the whine of an object hurtling through air. These were not, as were the first two bombs, devices placed by hands and left to blow up: these flew in from outside the city.
After several weeks the interrogations stopped. Shortly after that I was transferred to another cell, one I shared with three others. I spent, I think, five days in this cell. It was not a large space, and the four of us were cramped, sleeping in two bunkbeds. I recognised two of my new cellmates in the vague way one recognises everybody in a small town. But I knew the third very well. Her name was [Name deleted], and she was the wife of a senior military officer, and she had also, I was sure, had had an affair with [Name deleted], and he had been the cause of all my troubles. She was very mournful when I came into her cell. She almost fell upon me with joy, just for the pleasure of seeing a familiar face. I was almost so pleased to see her long black hair, her beautiful face, that it came close to modifying my previous animadversion.
For the first days we spent together she clung to me, in the desperation of her fear. It was almost impossible, in the face of her sorrow, not to try and console her, although I felt a certain repulsion as well. She presented the aspect of a bottomless hunger for such consolation. Her black hair was almost the emblem of that black-hole urgency, and she gobbled up my company, my words of reassurance, everything about me. The curious thing is that I saw, eventually, beyond this. It turned out that there was a ground to her need, there was a fundamental point which, when touched, settled her anxiety: but it took me several weeks to understand it.
‘What’s going to happen?’ she would say.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t you say that,’ she would complain. ‘Don’t you say that.’
And so the next time she asked, ‘Do you think they’re going to execute us? Do you think they’re going to use torture?’ I would say, ‘Of course not, of course not,’ and she could draw strength from that. My speaking was enough. ‘It’s going to be OK,’ I would say, hugging her, and feeling her heart kicking like a restless thing against my collar bone. ‘Everything’ll be fine.’ Finally I found myself saying, ‘You stick with me, I’ll make sure it’s OK.’ And she would purr, like a cat.
It took me several weeks to understand it, but once I did I found comfort in it myself. I could only reach that calm place in myself by passing through her heart. I don’t mean to speak in riddles, but you have to understand how completely physical beauty draws a veil over a person, even the beauty of one woman in the eyes of another. When you look at a beautiful person you will, almost inevitably, see the beauty, not the person. [Name deleted]’s tears of anxiety, her querulous complaints about the food and the cold, her phases of incessant, nagging questions (‘what will they do with us? Will they put us on trial? Will we be executed? Will we ever get out of jail?’ – to none of which I knew the answer any better than her) – all this seemed only an aspect of a weakness wholly consonant with her physical beauty. It fitted, like light throwing shadow. And over the weeks I realised that this wasn’t her at all, in any meaningful sense. Underneath the face and the hair and the figure and the carefully modulated voice was something much more interesting, something wilful and real, a selfishness concentrated into something powerful and authentic. I began to see her differently, as if she were steeped in a clear stillness, like the transparent air through which a dawn or a sunset achieves its imponderable depth. More, perhaps more importantly, I could believe that only I could see that about her. To other women she was merely annoying, and to other men merely attractive, but to me she was something more. This was her pole star, and it was about this that I oriented myself. The other dots in her constellation, her privileged birth, her background of wealth, private education, her pre-Snow litany of ski-trips and Bahamian summers and tedious but well-monied boyfriends – all that became perfectly neutral to me.
I know she will read this, which of course influences what I say here. Perhaps it’s enough to say that in two weeks we became very close. Circumstances had thrown us tog
ether. I don’t, really, want to say too much about this; it’s none of your business. I’ll say a bit more about it in a little while, but I don’t want to dwell on it. People will read this document, and perhaps it will cause trouble for me.
Then one morning we were all taken out of the prison block. We were handcuffed and hustled over the bright snow to a military aircraft. Several cell-fuls of prisoners were brought out and prodded into the belly of the plane, and then the doors were shut and we rattled and dragged our way along the snow and up into the sky.
‘God knows where they’re taking us now,’ said [Name deleted].
The flight lasted a few hours. Then the plane landed on a dry-slope grid, which rattled and burred underneath the wheels. It took a long time, or so it seemed to me, for us to come to a complete stop. Then we were hustled out by the guards, eleven of us in droopy-roped handcuffs, standing blinking in the sunshine. The air was sharp in my throat after the mugginess inside the plane, but at the same time I could feel the warmth of the sun as a palpable pressure on my skin. I lifted both my hands to push my hood back.
‘Warm sun, cold air,’ said [Name deleted]. She had uncovered her own lustrous hair.
‘Summer,’ I said. ‘Snow.’
We were both squinnying into the hard white light, the bright sky and the brighter land. Wind had scraped gentle undulations with oddly sharp ridges between them, over all the snow in front of us, but otherwise the land was as featureless as a blank page all the way to the horizon.
Behind us, eight hundred yards away, was a wired-in enclosure, a hectare in size, with wooden barracks and larger storage sheds. Frost-dulled items of military hardware – sled-tanks, one-man planes, guns – were just visible between the buildings.
‘To see a bear,’ said [Name deleted]. She sighed. ‘Even one. Just to see one white bear …’
‘Polar bears? You’re kidding,’ I said. ‘What’s for them to eat?’
‘Hn,’ she agreed.
We stood for about an hour. There was nowhere to sit. My legs grew tired. ‘Should we sit down?’ I asked [Name deleted]. Such friends had we become. She had become the friend you seize on during your first terrifying day at school, the person to cling to and who clings to you. ‘Should we?’
‘I don’t want to get my clothes wet,’ she said.
‘Wet? But that snow is powder dry. It’s cold, sure, but in fact it’s too cold to be wet. It’s like deep-frozen pearls.’
She laughed briefly at this, as at a palpable absurdity. But it was nothing but the truth. The snow was so dry it squeaked like polystyrene when we walked upon it. Nevertheless, we neither of us sat down. We’d lived with the snow for years, and still somewhere in our heads we couldn’t rid ourselves of the belief that this was ordinary slushy snow. We hadn’t, even yet, come to terms with the reality.
Eventually a knot of military men formed at the open gateway to the camp, and started marching towards us. Our guards perked up, and herded us into a line. ‘Maybe,’ said [Name deleted] to me sardonically as we stood side by side, ‘they’ll explain why they’ve brought us out here.’
‘To have us shot,’ said somebody further along; a man.
‘No,’ said [Name deleted], loudly, as if trying to persuade herself. She shook her head, her long black hair a pendulum. ‘They could’a shot us in Liberty. They wouldn’t waste the gas on flying us out here if all they wanted to do was—’
She stopped, because the military men had arrived and were standing before us.
‘Good morning,’ said the first of them, calling the words distinctly and clearly in the bright air. He leaned his head forward to give special emphasis to some of his words, which added a jerky earnestness to his speech. ‘Welcome to Camp Yalta,’ he shouted. He grinned and adjusted his sunglasses on the bridge of his nose with one finger. ‘Why is this temporary military structure called Camp Yalta?’ He didn’t wait for an answer to his own question. ‘It’s a little joke that you may come to appreciate in a little while. Shortly you will be led to a secure barracks building inside the camp, and you will be processed in due course – I should remind you that you are not prisoners, and do not have access to the rights of legal representation and so forth. You are internees under the provision of the terrorism act.’ He looked up and down the line, grinning.
It was then that I recognised him. Something familiar about him had been nagging at me, and that grin brought the memory back. I had met this man before. His name was [Name deleted]. I had met him before, during my very earliest days in Liberty. He was the one of my husband’s subalterns who had first made representations to me about his commander’s desire to marry me – I had called him ‘Pander’, after the fashion by which we invent daft names for the people around us, for our own personal satisfactions. I had never particularly liked him, and indeed had lost track of what had happened to him, except that he had been promoted and had passed from my husband’s staff early on in our marriage. I think he went to New NY for a while.
But here he was, strutting and crowing.
‘I’m not going to ask if anybody has any questions,’ he said, smiling, ‘because if I do you will invent stupid questions to vex me, and I’m not in the mood. I have no sympathy for terrorists.’ He beamed enormously at us, as if seeking our approval for this manifestation of virtuous civic zeal. ‘But before you take your place in the secure barracks, there is one set of orders I must carry out. These orders come directly from [Name deleted].’
I jumped a little to hear my husband’s name. I had not been expecting it.
‘The general reports that his wife,’ Pander was saying, ‘has been transported here in this plane. I have orders to separate her from the other prisoners and have her delivered individually to the advance camp, where [Name deleted] is conducting operations out on the snow. Would Tira [Name deleted] make herself known to me please?’
‘That’s me,’ I called.
Everybody looked at me. I blushed a little, I think. It embarrassed me to be the centre of attention, so unexpectedly. It embarrassed me to realise that [Name deleted] had had me in his thoughts, that he still cared enough for me, despite all our troubles as a couple, to want to rescue me from this situation. Most of all it embarrassed me to think that I would soon be freed from this penal gang of internees – I worried what the others would think of me. Of course they would hate me. I would hate any of them who received this sort of special treatment.
Pander had walked over to me and was looking carefully at me. He said: ‘I don’t think so.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Lady,’ he said. ‘I could almost admire your chutzpah. But if we trucked you all the way to [Name deleted], and he said this ain’t my wife, we’d only have to truck you all the way back. You don’t want to put us to that bother. You’d wouldn’t like us after. We might hold a grudge.’
‘But,’ I said, ‘I am his wife.’
Pander nodded. ‘Your name?’
‘Tira Sahai,’ I said. ‘Tira [Name deleted]. Tira London.’
He shook his head. ‘Tira [Name deleted] I just gave you. The others, I don’t know what they are. I’ll tell you, lady, I know the woman I’m looking for.’
I was genuinely baffled. ‘But I’m the woman,’ I said.
He shook his head, once, to cut me off. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You didn’t hear what I said? I know this woman. I was the man who introduced [Name deleted] to his wife, I was at the meet, and I spoke to her, helped set up the relationship.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I remember you.’
He shook his head again. ‘You think my memory is pie-eyed? You think I don’t remember the woman I introduced to the general? It’s only two years since.’
‘But it’s me,’ I said.
‘Once is chutzpah,’ he said, taking one step away from me. ‘That’s almost likeable, that shows spirit. But to persevere like this, that’s just annoying. That’s kind of crazy.’
‘I really don’t understand what game you’r
e playing at,’ I said.
‘You know me?’ he said, suddenly snarling. ‘You know my name? You met me before?’
And in that instant I couldn’t remember his name at all. I could only remember that I had christened him Pander in my own head. Obviously I couldn’t tell him that. And, looking back on this moment, I don’t believe it would have made any difference if I had been able to remember. He would have dismissed the fact – I’d seen him about Liberty, I’d heard of him, one of the guards had told me, there would have been some explanation he would have lighted upon. He had looked at me and decided I was not the woman. It was idiotic. It should have been funny. I’d think of it funny today, if it hadn’t had such miserable consequences.
‘No,’ he snarled at me. ‘I thought not. You must be slow-witted. When it was me introduced the two of them? You think I woulda forgotten that the general married a white woman? You think I’d be fooled into thinking the general had married a,’ there was a catch, a momentary hiccough in the sentence, and he finished, ‘black woman? No dice, sister.’ He stepped away.
[Name deleted] to my left, spoke up. ‘But she is, I’ll vouch—’
‘This!’ Pander yelled, suddenly shouting as loud as a sergeant major. ‘This is why I don’t allow question-and-answer sessions – you internees, you’re all interested in wasting our time. Trying to be tying us in knots! The general’s wife is clearly not in this group – I’d recognise her if she was. The fact that one internee is prepared to vouch,’ he almost spat the word, ‘for another, that doesn’t impress me terribly much.’
I had the sense, almost an instinct, that this was a lifeline, and that I should struggle not to let out of my grasp. I called out. ‘I tanned, that’s all. I’ve had two years in the sun – you know what the sun’s like up here, even when it’s cold. It’s tan.’
‘Oh, there’s no difference,’ Pander called, with sarcastic inflection, ‘ ’tween suntan and black skin.’
