Ibrahim & Reenie

by David Llewellyn

  Within the first month of joining her local library she’d read eight novels, culled from a predictable enough list of ‘Books to Read Before You Die’. She found Wuthering Heights enchanting, Brideshead Revisited fun if a little bogged down by all that Catholicism, and she hated Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises with a passion. She took up knitting, producing a misshapen scarf and matching, hideous cardigan that no one would ever see, let alone wear. She then took Spanish Made Simple from its case.

  She’d given up knitting, those first abortive attempts enough to put her off for life, and her reading had slowed – she’d been wrestling with Midnight’s Children for over a month and was barely a hundred pages in – but she was determined to persevere with Spanish. Just maybe not tonight.

  It was as she neared the dual carriageway, taking a left at the crossroads and heading down beneath the gleaming edifice of a chain hotel, that she noticed a dark shape at the roadside. It looked at first like a bundle of rags, or something stolen and abandoned on the cycle path, but then she saw the outline of limbs, a head, and the suggestion of movement, perhaps breathing.

  Could be a drunk, another drunk, too paralytic to make it home after a day spent sitting on a bench drinking cheap cider. The kind of person beyond help. She saw enough of them in the hospital, and there and then it was her duty to help, however impatient she might get, however frustrating it was to help someone who just won’t help themselves, but here? Out here on the road, at night? What obligation was there? Who would know if she carried on driving?

  She sighed, pulling in to the narrow hard shoulder and flicking on her hazard lights. Probably a drunk. Another drunk. Dark stain around his crotch. The musty stink of booze, old sweat and sick. He’d get surly the minute she woke him. They always did.

  She hesitated, clenching and unclenching her fingers around the steering wheel. The embankment, and the dark, all-too-human shape at its crest, were lit up by the orange pulse of the hazard lights. Maybe not a drunk. Old man walking his dog, had a heart attack. Dog ran off, yapping, into the bushes. Or someone who’d been mugged.

  Natalie stepped out of her car, and with uncertain, clumsy steps made her way up the embankment and towards the body on the path.

  15

  Reenie was looking at the stars.

  Earlier that evening she had eaten a light supper. Her supplies of food and water were running low. She had hoped to pass a supermarket or any kind of shop where she could buy groceries, but there were few villages in this part of the country, and she’d made little progress since leaving the farmhouse that morning, walking only a few miles before tiredness hit her and she was forced to set up camp again. The next large town, and most likely the next place where she would find shops, was Chippenham, but it would take another two or three days for her to reach it.

  Along the way she had picked blackberries from the roadside, collecting them in a plastic carrier bag, and as soon as she stopped walking she ate a few, without rinsing off whatever muck might be on them. What little water she had left was for drinking only. Solomon, the lucky sod, had a full supply of food, enough to get him to London and back several times over.

  That night was colder than any other on her journey so far. The summer was coming to an end – the evenings getting darker, the night air laced with the scent of dry leaves and burning wood – and what struck her, out here in the country, was the darkness of the night sky. She had lived in cities her whole life, and it was decades since she’d last seen a night untainted by the glow of streetlights. The darkness above her wasn’t black, but rather a deep, velvety shade of blue. The stars she saw weren’t distant pinpoints but a spray, and she counted dozens of shooting stars. She saw the moon – perhaps a third of it erased by shadow – and if she squinted and strained her eyes enough was sure she made out the craters on its surface.

  The sky had been this dark when she was a girl. She remembered rushing, with Mrs Ostroff, to a neighbour’s Anderson shelter, and, while they waited for the all-clear, Mrs Ostroff reading her fairy tales and nursery rhymes; Babele-ber and that song by Bialik, ‘Under the Little Green Trees’:

  ‘Unter di grininke beymelekh

  Shpiln zikh Moyshelekh, Shloymelekh,

  Tsites, kapotkelekh, shtreymelekh,

  Yidelekh, frish fun di eyelekh.

  Fartrakhtn zikh tif un farkukn zikh

  Oyf nekhtige teg un oyf feygelekh,

  Oy, mir zol zany, yidishe kinderlekh,

  Far ayere koshere eygelekh!’

  She recalled, with greater clarity, the final attacks on London, shortly before the war’s end, remembering not images or precise moments but noise; when rockets began falling from the sky.

  The first of them came with two warnings. First the drone, like a swarm of angry bees, but getting deeper in pitch, singing out with a low, throbbing hum before cutting off, and that sudden silence, the absence of noise, was their second warning. The rocket was now tumbling to earth, and it took eleven seconds to fall. She knew this because Mr Ostroff was an air-raid warden, and had timed their descent with his watch. Eleven seconds of absolute silence between the last monstrous yawn and the heavy thump of the explosion. A thump if the impact was far away, almost like the sound of somebody beating a rug. If it was closer, not one noise but many. Thunder. Breaking glass. Masonry being pulverised. The hiss of sand and dirt raining back to earth. Screaming.

  Then came the second wave of rockets, and with these there was no warning. They travelled at such speed you’d only hear their approach after they struck, and it seemed in that moment as if the sky was the enemy; a vengeful force of nature meting out its punishment on the city below. By the time one of those rockets slammed into Green Street, just five minutes’ walk from the Ostroff’s home, Reenie had reached an age when she could no longer be distracted by fairy tales and nursery rhymes. By now the idea of death was real. She had been surrounded by it too long for it to remain distant and abstract.

  She had been playing in the street when a telegram arrived for number fifty-eight, and she saw Mrs Ingram break down, right there on her doorstep, crying for all the world to see. And the boys in school, the O’Leary brothers, who simply weren’t there one morning, after the attack on Plaistow, and no one ever mentioned them again.

  And when the rocket hit Green Street its explosion rattled every window in their house and shook ornaments from shelves, and Reenie and Mrs Ostroff hid beneath the dining table and watched as a world that had always felt safe, even when the rest of the world was burning, quaked as if it were trembling.

  Reenie later learned how these bombs came not from planes, or even cannons, but from space, and that knowledge filled her with a tingling sense of awe. If the Germans had weapons like this, weapons that fell almost silently from space, what hope was there of winning the war?

  No one seemed to mention that these days. As if no one wanted to admit it was what they had often thought, when the rockets were falling. What if we lose? Because they still could have lost, even then. What if the rockets hadn’t stopped falling until there was nothing left but brick dust and ashes?

  Later still, when she was married, Reenie learned how the men who created those rockets were neither tried nor punished. Watching grainy black and white footage of a man climbing down onto a featureless grey world, Jonathan turned to her and said, bitterly, ‘And to think, it was a Nazi who got them there.’

  She asked him what he meant. He’d often say something, as if ending a sentence started in his head, and she’d wait for him to expand on it, to fill in the gaps.

  ‘Von Braun,’ he said. ‘Rocket scientist. A Nazi. Member of the SS. Twenty-five years ago he was building rockets that killed thousands. Now he’s building them so the Yanks can go to the moon. If it wasn’t for that Nazi they’d never have beaten the Russians at this…’ And he punctuated his remark by stabbing the stem of his pipe towards the television screen.

  Reenie looked at the screen, then her husband. The windows of a nearby school were filled with
crayoned pictures of spaceships, moons and American flags. A neighbour of theirs, Mr Powell, had resisted buying a television until that very week, when she had seen him hoisting its oversized box from the boot of his Austin Westminster. At the hairdressers, on Monday, it had been the only topic of conversation. Incredible. Amazing. Never see another moment like it in our lifetimes. In the week when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Jonathan Glickman was, it seemed, the city’s – no, the world’s – only curmudgeon.

  ‘Well, at least he’s done some good,’ said Reenie, meaning Von Braun. ‘Maybe it’s his way of making up for what he did. His way of atoning.’

  Her husband laughed and lit his pipe with a match. Puff puff puff. ‘Atoning? The man never faced up to his crimes. The slave labour he used to run his factories. The thousands killed by his inventions. So he puts a man on the moon. So what? What does a man on the moon mean if we turn a blind eye to murder just to get him there? What kind of progress is that?’

  She looked at him from across the sitting room. Could he understand what his words meant to her? Had he forgotten everything about her, everything that happened to her before they met? It was, she supposed, easy for him to forget. He’d never met her father, and nor would he. His family had been British for so many generations, and they’d lost no one in Europe. His outrage at Von Braun and the Nazis was the outrage of a very British Jew; horrified and at the same time distanced from the event. He’d admitted to her, once, that there were members of his own family who, before the war, resented and distrusted European Jews. And to them, to Jonathan and his family, the atrocities were both personal and academic. Personal because German troops could have landed on the Kentish coast. Academic because they hadn’t.

  Bristling for a moment (how could he not know what his words meant to her?) Reenie thought about Von Braun’s factories, about his slaves. Had her parents helped to build those rockets, unaware they’d one day fall on the city where their daughter lived? Was history’s sense of humour that sick? She could believe it was.

  She’d never tell him, Jonathan, how he hurt her that night. He hadn’t meant to, she knew that. It would have crushed him, had he known. Perhaps he thought she’d appreciate his outrage, as if he were somehow defending her, or even her parents, so many years after the fact.

  She wanted to tell him: but we don’t talk about it. We never talked about it, about any of it. Some things, well… it’s as if some things are too big to talk about. As if there aren’t enough words.

  And now, eight years a widow, Reenie saw in the night sky the blinking specks of satellites once carried by rockets, and the world had changed again and again, and the factories and the slaves had been relegated to the status of footnotes. When the rockets stopped falling on London the blackout ended and the night sky was reclaimed by the city’s fuzzy orange glow. Its darkness, and the threat that darkness contained, were gone, as if the city was now cocooned safely beneath a dome the colour of rust. Only here, sat beside her tent and her trolley, could she once again feel the terrifying vastness of space above her. There was a beauty to a clear night sky – she couldn’t deny that – but with it came a humbling immensity, no more so than in those places where the land was flat and the horizons distant.

  Before climbing into her tent Reenie looked east, across the dark fields barely contoured by starlight. She’d thought she might see some hint of the next large town, a dull umber light, but there was nothing; only darkness and stars.

  She felt very small and distant from the world that night. For the first time since leaving Cardiff it occurred to her she might never make it to London, that she could become lost between the towns and cities; that the realities and hardships of her age might catch up with her and take her in the night. She doubted there was anyone in the world thinking of her at that moment, wondering where she was, what she was doing, not even Ibrahim, who – so she imagined – was halfway to London by now and never looking back.

  16

  He was woken, if it could be called waking, by the sensation of movement, a gentle rocking, and by the dull throb of an engine. Only one of his eyes would open properly, and through it he saw orange lights dancing against the black sky. He was inside a moving car for the first time in four years, but even so it took a moment for the gravity of this to hit him. He tried sitting upright, but every part of him was in pain; even the slightest movement was agony.

  ‘Try not to move,’ said the driver; female, well-spoken, a slight gravelly quality to her voice. The kind of husky voice he’d heard on countless adverts. He saw long dark hair and, in the rear-view mirror, dark brown eyes.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m a nurse. We’re on our way to Gloucester Royal.’

  ‘What’s that? Is that a hospital?’

  ‘Yes. I work there.’

  Easing himself up, Ibrahim gripped the headrest of the front passenger seat for support.

  ‘No hospital,’ he croaked. He could taste blood.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘No hospital. I can’t go to the hospital.’

  ‘You’ve got some really nasty injuries there. You may have broken something. I’m taking you to the hospital.’

  ‘No. Please. Don’t.’

  Because hospital meant doctors and nurses and examinations and pills and x-rays and everything he had gone through before. It could mean the end of the road and the white flag of surrender, and he couldn’t give up, not now. He clenched his fingers into the headrest until he thought the stitches in its upholstery might burst.

  ‘Let me out,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Pull over. Let me out.’

  Beyond the car’s windows he saw a motorway’s orange lights passing overhead as if flying in formation. The glaring white headlights of the cars in the adjacent lane, and the red tail lights of the traffic ahead glowered in single file, curving off towards the horizon. All that traffic, all those people, all that chaos. He felt a tightening in his stomach, and his body seemed to shrink, as if anticipating disaster.

  ‘Please. Let me out.’

  ‘I can’t do that. We’re on the dual carriageway.’

  ‘Please. I’m serious. Let me out of the car.’

  He was leaning forward, between the front seats, and as he drew close the nurse flinched.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘Are you in trouble? What is it?’

  ‘Please. Stop the car. I’m going to be sick.’

  Sighing impatiently, the nurse drove on another hundred yards until they’d reached a stretch of hard shoulder, then pulled over and hit the hazard lights. Though still in pain, Ibrahim launched himself across the back seat, opened the door, and fell out onto the tarmac. Hunched over and kneeling, he dry heaved three times, his insides clenching and unclenching, his entire body breaking out in a cold sweat. Dimly, he heard the driver’s door open and close with a loud clunk, and the sound of footsteps on the road.

  ‘You have to go to a hospital,’ said the nurse, standing over him. ‘I’m not leaving you here. D’you know, I’m legally obliged to help you? So I literally can’t leave you here.’

  ‘What’re you talking about?’ He mumbled. The nausea was beginning to pass now that he was out of the car and breathing fresh air.

  ‘Like I said, I’m a nurse. And you need treatment. I can’t leave you here, on this bloody hard shoulder. Here. Let me help you up.’

  He shook his head, waving his hand to fend her off, and he tried to stand, but couldn’t. ‘I can’t go to a hospital,’ he said. ‘Not again. Please.’

  ‘Well, will you at least get back in the car?’

  Could he do it? He wished he could undo the last four years completely, unravel the threads that brought him here, and make so many different choices. He knew he was being ridiculous; all his choices in the last four years had been ridiculous. A rational, undamaged person would have taken the train to London, would have been there by Tuesday afternoon. Even if that rational, undama
ged person found himself in the situation Ibrahim was now in, he would accept help, go to the hospital, but Ibrahim’s mind no longer worked that way. His every thought was strewn with boulders and brick walls. Nothing was ever simple.

  ‘I can’t go to the hospital,’ he said, and he heard his voice breaking and felt the stinging weight of tears in his eyes.

  The nurse looked down at him, and he caught her expression; one of equal parts pity and frustration.

  ‘Well, would you let me treat you, if I took you somewhere else?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘My house. God… what am I thinking?’ She sighed. ‘I live near here. I could take you to my house. I’ve got some stuff there. I can take a look at some of your cuts. But if it’s anything more serious than cuts and bruises, I’m calling an ambulance.’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah. Your house. That’s fine. I think.’

  She reached forward, hooking her arms beneath his, and hoisted him off the ground with a strength that surprised him. When she lifted him into the car he slumped across the back seat with a groan.

  ‘You’re strong,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m a nurse. Lifting pensioners out of wheelchairs works wonders for your upper body strength. Arms like a bloody navvy, me.’

  He closed his eyes again, and heard her walking around the car, getting back behind the wheel, starting the engine.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m taking you to my house,’ she said. ‘I must be insane. I don’t even know your name.’

  They pulled out from the hard shoulder, but he stayed lying down, his eyes shut.

  ‘It’s Ibrahim,’ he said. ‘Ibrahim Siddique.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Ibrahim. My name’s Natalie. You okay back there?’

  He nodded and grunted in reply, and tried to ignore the feeling of motion and the sounds of the road; the tug of gravity each time she accelerated. He heard sirens, growing louder, then quieter as an ambulance or police car sped past them, close enough for him to see the faint blue flicker of light through his eyelids. He remembered night-time car journeys when he was a child, the way the shadows slid up the back of the driver’s seat with every street light they passed, and how those sliding shadows would often lull him into sleep.