Beside the Syrian Sea

by James Wolff

  – UF asks if LP is still there. LP confirms.

  – UF says she found an old letter from LP’s father when she was sorting through his papers. She wants to read a line or two of it to LP. She says she has stuck it to the noticeboard by the telephone so she doesn’t forget it. She says (pres. verbatim extract from letter): Interminable journey. I’ve never experienced such turbulence. Women were crying, children were screaming. Luggage was thrown from the overhead lockers. All I could think of was our little miracle. That I wouldn’t see his first step, that I wouldn’t be there on his first day at school, that I’d never get the chance to make him proud of his father. Landed just after midnight. In the bus on the way to the conference centre a woman sang a beautiful Nigerian hymn and I read aloud Psalm 121, I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.

  – UF says after that he just talks about his lecture the next day and how he ate something that disagreed with his stomach. She says she knows that you (pres. LP and father) didn’t always see eye to eye but that this is the chance he (pres. LP’s father) has always wanted. She says LP should just be proud of him. She says he (pres. LP’s father) has more character and faith and heart than a hundred of those horrid extremists. She says she wouldn’t be surprised if half of them were Anglicans by now. She repeats that LP should just be proud of him. She says just be proud of him and come home. She says that she has made a bed up for him. She says she will start baking a cake the minute she puts down the phone. She asks him what kind of cake he would like.

  – LP says it’s not that simple.

  – UF says she found a very good recipe for cheesecake the other day.

  (Sound of crying.)

  – They exchange endearments.

  (Call ends abruptly.)

  Transcriber comment: According to call data UF makes fourteen attempts to call back subsequent to above but *883 switched off.

  4

  The first night Jonas and Maryam slept among the ruins of Baalbek, the second night they lay awake in the hills above Arsal. They were just nine miles from the Syrian border. Jonas waited until he thought she was asleep to cover her with his jacket, and over it he laid the blue plastic raincoat with tiny gold stars, in case water came through the roof of the cave. He was sure she wouldn’t willingly accept anything from him, given the things he had done. In the weak flickering glow from his lighter he swept the earth around her head clear of ants and dust. She didn’t stir, even though she was awake, but instead accepted his quiet industry for what it was: a gesture of regret, of affection, of solidarity.

  It wasn’t that either of them was trying to stay awake. But Maryam couldn’t stop thinking about Tobias, and Jonas’s mind was racing because of the noises made by the wind, because the conversation with his mother had upset him, because there was a reasonable chance he would die the next day and he didn’t know what he thought about that.

  They each came closest to falling asleep in the hour or so after midnight. But eight wild dogs turned up at the mouth of the cave, formed a semicircle around them and started barking, one by one and in no particular order, like bell-ringers. Jonas wondered if they usually slept in the cave and were asking them to leave. They looked starved and ragged, with torn ears and bleeding eyes and so many broken or missing teeth between them that when they snarled he couldn’t help but feel sorry for them, as though they were showing him their guns weren’t loaded, as though they were surrendering. It would have been unfair to throw stones at them. By sunrise they had all disappeared apart from the smallest one. Jonas tried to persuade it to join them in the cave, but it would only come near enough to accept its share of his bread and cheese before limping away to a safe distance.

  Thinking about what lay ahead was not really what had kept him awake. After all, once he had run through the variables a few times, he understood it would be pointless to make too much of a plan. They might get lost in the hills. They might encounter Lebanese soldiers or Hezbollah fighters who turned them back. The kidnappers might decide the risks of an exchange were too great or be prevented from reaching Arsal by aerial bombardments and skirmishes with opposition groups inside Syria. They might not have read his email yet.

  What had kept him awake more than any of that was the thought of Meredith making the journey to his parents’ house for a second time and his mother’s heart once again stumbling towards grief at the sight of someone approaching the front door dressed all in black. She would catch herself, though, and smile, shaking her head at the foolishness of an old woman who always thought the worst. She would open the door. And she would see the expression on Meredith’s face and realize that this time the worst thing had happened. In one version she collapsed, in others she just cried and cried. The flower beds along the front of the house were tidy and the roses were red and pink and yellow. Jonas had never found the right moment to tell her that he would be doing the same thing if she had been the one taken hostage. He didn’t know if she would have wanted to hear that.

  It wasn’t too late to turn back. He could have simply left Maryam in the cave and retraced his steps across the twenty-five miles of dust and rock and sharp brittle weeds, avoiding roads and dropping to the ground each time he heard the sound of a vehicle or an aeroplane, until he reached the outskirts of Baalbek. If anyone stopped him he would tell them he had gone for a walk and lost his bearings. He would happily submit to a search. At some point there would be a group of tourists preparing for the return trip to Beirut, and for a few dollars the driver would find an extra seat, and he would ask to be dropped off near the airport. From then onwards it would be a question of his word against the government’s. He would refuse to make any substantive comment on what had happened. They would struggle to evidence his theft of the documents, link him in a compelling way to any cloud storage sites or produce physical proof of any damage that would convince a jury something untoward had occurred. There would be a long internal inquiry of the sort governments can do in their sleep. He probably wouldn’t even lose his pension.

  The easiest thing would be to move back into his parents’ house on a temporary basis and take the bed his mother had prepared in the guest room. They would walk after church on Sunday to a local hilltop his father had loved, where they would sit on a bench and try to name the trees and the birds and the flowers. He would consider a return to academia and even go so far as to apply for a handful of university research positions but decide in the end that they were too far away from his mother. Instead he would get a job teaching history in a local secondary school. He would write occasional articles – on Middle Eastern politics, on the role of the United Nations, on British counterterrorism policy – and submit them to academic journals but grow tired of the drive to the nearest university library and find some pleasure instead in seeing his letters to the editors of national newspapers appearing in print. He put back on the weight he had lost overseas and a little bit extra. No one called it the guest room any more. Once he imagined he was being followed home from the supermarket and he dived down an alleyway between the florist and the charity shop and doubled back through the pub car park to catch them out but there was no one there. He sometimes thought about Maryam and wondered if she had made it to England to join her parents, whether he should contact her to see how she was getting on. He took up gardening. It started with his mother asking for help with the weeding and mowing, since her back and hips made it difficult for her to bend, but quickly turned into a passion of his own. He tested his mind by taking part in a weekly pub quiz with their neighbours. Nothing wrong with this, he would think. Nothing wrong with any of this. Sometimes he would touch the scar on his forehead and think: I tried, I really tried. It’s just so difficult for one person to swim against the current. He would think about tracking down Tobias’s family and telling them what he had done, that it still kept him awake at night all these years later. He would think about his flat near the sea, the charts covering the walls, the endless hours of walking to evade surveillance,
the late-night phone calls from that crazy CIA man, Naseby and his tennis whites. He would remember the cream-coloured Mercedes, the underground car park, the Syrian builder. He would remember the wild dogs.

  When the sun came up Jonas packed everything into his rucksack. Maryam threw away the stiff bushes they had flattened into mattresses. He switched on the mobile phone. There were three text messages from his mother and one from the kidnappers. “Midday,” it said. “Be ready.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “I already said it, bro, I ain’t going to give you coordinates or nothing, I’m telling you in words clear as day where it is. If you’re – where are you, to the what, to the south of Arsal? – Okay, if you’re looking at where the border is nearest to you on the map, imagine there’s a line from you in that direction. About, I don’t know, it’s about halfway. A little bit more maybe. Two stone buildings. Shepherd’s hut, that kind of thing. Nothing else round for miles. One of them ain’t got a roof. There’s two of those oil drums outside. Painted orange. Got it? Right. Your father’s in there. Been there since last night, the other bloke too. They haven’t got any water so you better be quick.”

  A reedy voice, hard to place the age. No more than late twenties. Not the same man who had made the video recording of his father. A Londoner but echoes of a foreign parent. Definitely not Pakistani, probably not Somali, possibly Arab – based on his pronunciation of the name Arsal. Jonas adjusted the binoculars.

  “How do I know they’re in there?” he asked. “Anyone could be in there. You could be in there.”

  “I am in there, you idiot. Here, tell him.”

  “Hello?”

  Jonas struggled to place the voice, it was so cracked, so faint. As though they were thousands and thousands of miles apart.

  The kidnapper again but quieter, at a distance: “Just tell him who’s in here with you.”

  “Hello? Hello?”

  “Is that —”

  “Jonas? What, what is this, what’s happening?”

  “Your old man just can’t do what he’s told, can he? We’ll soon find out if you’re a chip off the old block.” Sounds of movement, a tearing noise. “Let’s try the other one.”

  “So far as we can verify there is only one person in here with us.”

  Werify. Inwent, wery. That flat voice somehow expressing both sadness and anger.

  “Tobias?”

  “That’s enough chatting.”

  “Send one of them outside.”

  “What?”

  “So I know we’re talking about the same building.”

  His father tottered about on newborn legs, lifting a hand to shield his eyes from the sun. They had dressed him in his own clothes, the clothes he had been wearing when they took him. Blue trousers, a crease neatly ironed into them, a clean white short-sleeved shirt. Someone had cut his hair and shaved him. The sun was so fierce that of his own accord he turned around and with outstretched hands groped for the darkness of the hut.

  “Listen up, we’re at the important bit. So you start walking, right? In case I don’t see you, when you’re about thirty, forty metres away, give me a bell. I’ll send the two of them your way. You stay put. No one’s going to do anything, you’re useless to us dead. I bet you’ve put some bare encryption on that stick. Anyway, they come to you. Have a chat, hug it out, whatever. Then send the pair of them on their way. Now this is the bit you need to focus, right? I don’t mind a couple minutes to see that nothing happens to them, that’s human nature. They’ll be moving slow, couple old fellas like that, just let them get on with it. They make it or they don’t make it, that’s up to Allah. The brothers ain’t going to do nothing. But you’ve got to start walking towards me. Even if one of them falls over or something. If you head after them, if you walk away from me – I put a bullet in you and then I go and put a bullet in them. Easy. Wallahi you know I’ll do it bro. I don’t mind dying. But I’d rather keep everyone sweet and get you and those papers and we clear off the way we came. Happy days inshallah.”

  “That’s too close,” Jonas said. “I’m not standing thirty metres away in plain sight waiting for them to come out.”

  “What am I going to do? These hills are crawling with Lebanese soldiers and them rawafid. We’ve stuck our neck out coming here. Massively. Come on, let’s do this, let’s get on with it.”

  There was some truth to what he was saying. This was a difficult area for them: after staging a number of cross-border attacks in 2013 and 2014 with support from sympathetic locals, ISIS fought a five-day battle in Arsal with the Lebanese army in late 2014 and were pushed back into Syrian territory. They would have to move around covertly, in small numbers and on ancient smuggling routes, to avoid being engaged by Lebanese soldiers or Hezbollah fighters.

  “We’ll do it like this,” Jonas said. “I’ll get to about a hundred metres away, from whatever direction I choose. Enough so you can see me. Once they start walking I’ll meet them halfway, at fifty metres, and then wait there till they are out of sight. Then I’ll come to you. It’ll only take a few minutes, no more. If you’re not happy with something, well, from what I could see of my father he’s not going to be able to outrun anyone.”

  “Whatever you say, bro, don’t matter to me. End of the day neither of us is in charge. Start walking. Call me when you’re close.”

  The line went dead.

  He had been lying there for eighty minutes waiting for the call; he shifted to relieve the stiffness in his leg. Arsal was just over three miles to the north, according to the map. Trying to get closer to the town earlier that morning they had seen a tank, three armoured personnel carriers and over a dozen jeeps, some of them in the Lebanese colours of red and green, others flying the yellow flag of Hezbollah. So far as he could tell from a distance, Hezbollah fighters were the ones in desert fatigues, the ones with the newer-looking vehicles, including several Hummers. But the fortified lookout points on higher ground belonged to the Lebanese army, their heavy machine guns pointed east towards Syria and the Qalamoun Mountains.

  Jonas and Maryam had tried to avoid being seen by moving quickly over open ground and keeping away from roads or tracks in favour of uneven terrain that involved scrambling on their hands and knees. Twice they were challenged by soldiers; Maryam told them they were returning to one of the dozen or so refugee camps that had sprung up around the edge of the town, and they were allowed to continue on their way. Jonas took one last look at the huts through the binoculars. If he moved off in a south-east direction before turning northwards at the last minute to approach them he would minimize his chances of being seen by soldiers on the lookout for people coming from Syria into Lebanon. He had to assume it was possible. The kidnappers knew the area well – they wouldn’t have picked those buildings unless he stood a chance of reaching them. If he hadn’t already been spotted, that is, lying there among the dusty weeds with the dog standing in plain sight several feet away just staring at him. He should never have given it any food. At least it wasn’t barking.

  Maryam was waiting for him in the bend of a dried-up riverbed. She was still wearing his blue raincoat, even though the sun was fierce above them. They had separated two hours earlier, wary of being seen together by the kidnappers. He recounted the conversation and for a while they discussed routes, distances and terrain. Then they were quiet. Jonas felt keenly aware of the difference between planning something on paper and planning something like this. Most of his life had been lived on paper, it seemed, with a title to keep him focused on the task at hand, a good clear margin along the edge, straight lines to maintain order. It was hard to be unruly on paper. There were so many things to say but he didn’t know where to begin.

  “I…” He faltered. “I want you to know that I’m sorry.”

  Where to start? He had so much to say sorry for. He remembered the gloomy hotel room, the way Tobias had sat on the bed with his head in his hands. It had been so easy to send him into Syria. It was only right that Jonas should learn what that fe
lt like.

  “If it goes badly, will you visit my mother?” he said. “She’ll need some help. There’s the garden, as well as just getting back to normal after everything that’s happened, and there’s a hill she likes to climb but I don’t know if she’ll be able to do it on her own any more. She can teach you the names of English trees.”

  “Your plan will work, Jones.” Somewhere along the way she had dropped the Mr. “You will be there when I come to visit. We will take her and your father for a walk together.”

  He shook his head.

  “I only know the apple tree,” she said. “Will there be apple trees there?”

  He covered his face with his hands.

  “Jones?”

  “There’s a nice walk out beyond the church that passes through an orchard,” he said softly. “It doesn’t take more than twenty minutes, that’s all my father will be able to manage, but there’s a bench by the pond we can sit on while he catches his breath.”

  “One year from now. Give us time to make a home first. I will remember because it is my birthday today.”

  Something clicked into place.

  “You can buy me some flowers. Properly, this time – not just one.”

  “Today is the fifteenth of May,” he said.

  I walked into the room a priest and I walked out of the room a former priest, at least in their eyes.

  “Maybe your mother can prepare a cake for me,” Maryam said. “An apple cake with apples from the orchard.”

  “You were born on the fifteenth of May.”

  All because of that tiny little thing on 15 May 1985, or maybe it was August the year before that really upset them, it all depends on your point of view.