The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  I had a sudden idea. I strained at the hem of my hospital gown and tore at the cotton. It was hard work and I was still feeble, so instead I worked on one of the bed-sheets and managed to rip off a thin strip of material. I removed my silver earring, threaded the cotton through it, then tied it. Then I opened the ventilating window as far as it would go — which was no more than a crack. I watched the boy for a long time, until the police guards had moved on, waiting until he was almost directly beneath me, then I dropped the earring through the crack and saw it fall to the ground. The boy noticed it at once. I saw his body tense. He looked at it, then stooped to pick it up, turned it over in his hand and put it away quickly. Only then did he look up. Our eyes met and he smiled. I pinched my upper right ear between finger and thumb and tweaked it exaggeratedly. He nodded. Then I spread my hands out, palms towards him, fingers spread, thumbs touching — signifying that I was about to talk Yidshi, our ancient sign-language. He mirrored my gesture; he was ready. Then I began to move through my limited vocabulary of signs as quickly as I could, while he watched in concentration, occasionally looking around him warily. I was still a bit rusty, and several times he shook his head with the palms-down sign that meant ‘I don’t understand.’ It was hard work, palm on palm, fist on fist, finger, thumb, finger. I spelled out my name, Omar wald Maryam and signed ‘I am a prisoner here.’ The boy looked alarmed — to the Hawazim the word ‘prisoner’ signified lingering death. Suddenly he crossed his wrists, with palms closed — signifying ‘stop.’ He went about his watering again and a moment later I was astonished to see a knot of five or six riders trotting along outside the perimeter fence on big-boned camels. The riders wore khaki uniforms and trim camouflage shamaghs, carrying automatic carbines in leather sheaths slung from their military-style saddles. The camels weren’t of the small Hawazim breed, but thoroughbred racers from the Sudan. It was a government Camel-Corps patrol, the Hajana, and I knew its riders were all picked men from the ‘noble’ Bedouin tribes — blood enemies of the Hawazim. They looked formidable, and their presence was as unwelcome as it was unexpected. The boy followed them with his eyes and after they’d gone, gave me his attention once more, with the shaken fist sign meaning ‘Be hasty!’ I began to work through the symbols again, appealing to him to send my fidwa to the amnir of the al-Maqs Hawazim, Mukhtar wald Salim, and have him meet me here in six days. I knew it was a tall order — only the very fastest of camels could do it — but I was desperate, and if it was humanly possible, Mukhtar wouldn’t let me down. The boy gave me the thumb and forefinger circle meaning, ‘I will do as you ask.’ A moment later he’d vanished.

  51

  For the next two days I looked out anxiously, morning and afternoon, to see if there was any sign of the Hazmi gardener. There wasn’t, and that should have been a good omen, but I couldn’t help feeling anxious that he’d been caught — that we’d been spotted talking Yidshi by the guards.

  Then, on the second afternoon, as the guard changed over outside my room, I caught the word ‘camel’ and pricked up my ears. ‘You hear what happened yesterday?’ one of them was chortling. ‘The Hajana had a camel pinched from right under their noses!’

  ‘No, by God!’

  ‘Yeah. They were out on the sands about a day’s ride from here and someone sneaked up quiet as a fox, and went off with a camel, saddle and all. Worst thing was that there was a sentry on guard.’

  ‘So much for the Hajana.’

  ‘It had to be a Hazmi, they say — no one else could have done it. The leader said he wouldn’t have minded, only the thief picked the best camel in the patrol.’

  ‘Why didn’t they track him down?’

  ‘Are you joking. Once they get in the desert those Hawazim are like fish in water — even the Hajana’ d have a hard time tracking him out there.’

  I smiled to myself — my watering-boy had shown initiative to be proud of.

  ***

  I waited anxiously for news of Elena, but Thalwa was no longer on duty and Huda, the sour-faced one who’d replaced her, looked unapproachable. On the third morning after my interview with Hammoudi, Huda marched in with a hypodermic, swabbed my arm with iodine and shot me up with something which burned slightly. ‘What was that?’ I asked.

  ‘Phenobarbital,’ she said begrudgingly.

  It was a truth drug, administered to sap the will, and it had already started to work on me when two broad-shouldered order-lies bumped a trolley in through the door and dumped me on to it roughly. They wheeled me down the corridor and into a lift. We descended two floors, to a windowless basement where air-coolers hummed and where the corridors seemed darker and more claustrophobic. They pushed me into a tall, arched cellar done up like an operating theatre, with banks of instruments and guttering computer-screens, where they transferred me brusquely to an operating table. I stared about me. I’d been here before — in my dreams. This was the ‘chapel’ in which I’d been surrounded by hooded figures. Another figure out of my dreams was standing by the table — the monk, Father Mikhaelis — flicking a hypodermic he was holding up to the light. Both Mikhaelis and the nurse grasping the kidney-tray wore operating-masks, I noticed.

  He turned to me with the syringe poised. ‘Nursh,’ he said, his voice almost parodying the words, ‘Nursh, the swab.’

  The nurse swabbed my arm again.

  ‘I just had a jab there,’ I said, and noticed that my voice sounded slurred and drunken.

  ‘That was phenobarbital,’ Mikhaelis lisped, ‘thish is a stimulant to help you talk.’

  I sensed more figures near me, and I turned to see Rasim and the colonel settling themselves on tubular-steel chairs.

  This time it was Mikhaelis who did the talking. Instead of sitting, he hovered around me, insinuating his chinless face into my vision, examining me with eyes that were stony and fish-like behind the half-moon glasses, as if I was a specimen on a dissecting-board. ‘All right, Mr Rosh,’ he said, ‘could you pleash tell me where your Hawazim people are hiding?’

  ‘No,’ I said, but I could feel his eyes boring into me, willing me to speak, and I could feel the drugs working, prompting me to answer, to help him, to cooperate.

  ‘Rosh, you will help us in the end, you know?’ he lisped. ‘You do know that, don’t you. Why can’t you help us? It doesn’t matter, you know, just relax, let yourself go. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. We are your friends really — we saved your lives — we only want to make sure everything is all right. You really do owe it to us to tell us after all the help we’ve given you.’

  ‘I can’t...’ I said, groaning with anguish.

  The monk looked at me with concern and plucked up my limp hand. His palms felt soft and plump. ‘Oh, but you can, my dear, dear Mr Omar Rosh. It doesn’t matter. After all, what do the Hawazim mean to you? Your mother left you when you were only a little boy, didn’t she? Went off and left you to face the big world alone. It’s her fault you grew up so awkward that nobody would accept you. Poor Jamie, always a misfit. But you’re not a misfit to us — we accept you for what you are. We saved your life. Why don’t you do something for us in return.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Where are your Hawazim?’

  He leaned over and his eyes drilled into me. I wanted to tell him, I really did. I needed to tell him, not just because of anything they might do to me, but because I genuinely wanted to help. The trouble was, I just couldn’t. There was a barrier inside me, a psychic obstacle forged by my childhood which was too strong to break and too difficult to cross.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘I...just can’t.’

  The monk shook his head at Rasim and the colonel.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘could you perhaps describe to us again what you found in the Sand Sea.’

  ‘I’ve already told you,’ I said, and this time my voice came out less like a protest than a child’s whingeing complaint. ‘Would you please tell us again.’

  For hours, it seemed, we went over the same
old ground: Zerzura, Akhnaton’s tomb, the star-ship, the Guardians, the Eye of Ra, round and round in circles, and the more confused I became the more I stumbled. OK, I was no longer so certain about what I thought I’d seen, I admitted. OK, Captain Hammoudi had introduced some points I hadn’t known about, like the fact that Akhna-ton ushabtis had been found by Pendlebury in 1931. OK, it was possible Karlman had made the whole thing up as a hoax. All right, I couldn’t deny that someone had confessed to the murder of Kolpos. Perhaps I hadn’t really found a star-ship that was Akhnaton’s tomb — all right, it could have been a hallucination. Maybe I hadn’t talked to a projection of the ship in the form of my mother. Maybe it’d been just my imagination, induced by a combination of thirst, fatigue and hunger. Probably I just saw what I wanted to see. Occasionally, Mikhaelis would peer over his half-moons at me happily. ‘Good,’ he would coo, ‘very good indeed. If we continue like this I think we shall have you cured very soon.’ On and on went the lisping, insinuating, mock-sympathetic voice, probing, questioning, doubting, teasing out inconsistencies I’d never thought of, but which suddenly seemed so obvious. Round and round we went, the sparkling predator’s eyes, the hypnotic voice, the drugs, the monotony, the repetition, combined to create a mesmeric trance in which I was no longer fully conscious but merely answering questions by rote — giving the answers another part of me knew he wanted. Meanwhile the rest of me was floating somewhere up above it all, running in the body of a spectral jackal — Anubis — through a white desert. I had become the spirit of the Shining, my ancestral spirit, the desert-jackal, running effortlessly, heart pounding rhythmically, feet cutting the sand in a crisp percussion of strikes. Far in the distance was a dark, hooded figure by a rock. As I approached in my jackal-form, the figure turned. It was Maryam, without her burqa — the beautiful, sparkling face I’d seen in the star-ship. I stopped running and sat down in front of her, studying her face.

  ‘Are you my mother or one of the Guardians?’

  ‘Both,’ she said.

  ‘How can you be here?’

  ‘I’m not. I have no material existence, just a mote in your mind’s eye.’

  ‘They say I didn’t really see you, didn’t really find the ship.’

  She laughed refreshingly, showing perfect white teeth. ‘You can control your body by will,’ she said, ‘their pathetic potions can’t chain down someone of your power. Believe in yourself, Omar. You’re an illuminatus.’

  ‘What about the Eye of Ra?’

  ‘I give you a name, Omar: Jibril. Three men called Jibril.’

  ‘What do you mean...’ I asked, but she was already fading, merging with the desert sands. Then I was back on the operating table with Mikhaelis leaning over me, looking worried. ‘What did you say?’ he asked.

  ‘I said you’re wasting your time,’ I told him, clearly this time, ‘I know what I am and I know what I saw. You’re all involved in it. I’m carrying a message from the Guardians, and as soon as I get out of here I’m going to make sure everyone knows about it, and about your squalid little plot to keep it under wraps.’

  52

  The next morning I was left alone, and Thalwa came back on duty. I immediately bombarded her with so many complaints about migraine that she brought me six more Valium caps. I went through the same pretence as before, taking them and then spitting them out after she was gone, and hiding them with the rest in my pillow-case. Near sunset, I settled by the window. The guards were doing their rounds, and as I watched a troop of Hajana pounded around the perimeter again on their magnificent camels. They looked good, I had to admit. They weren’t Hawazim, but they were Bedouin, after all, and they knew the desert — the only section of the armed forces that my people held in any esteem at all. I watched as the guards opened the steel gate and the camels walked in file up the drive with their tasselled saddle-bags swinging.

  Just after sunset I paid a visit to the bathroom, while the nurse and the guard waited outside as usual. I showered and dried myself thoroughly, and was about to open the door when I thought I heard the whispering of voices. I shook my head violently, remembering the ghost-voices I’d heard in the desert; I didn’t want a repetition of that. The voices weren’t in my head though — they were coming from behind the tiny window. It sounded as though there might be another room beyond it, but there couldn’t be, I told myself - no one built a bathroom with a window opening on another room. I glanced back at the door. There was no lock on it; the nurse and guard could burst in at any moment. The window was the sash-type, barred with white-painted steel. I tried it. It came up with more ease than I’d expected and there was a sudden bang. ‘Everything all right in there?’ came the nurse’s call from the corridor.

  ‘Fine,’ I shouted back cheerfully, ‘just lost the soap!’

  The window didn’t open to another room or to the outside, I saw, but to an internal shaft. The same voices came again — much clearer and more distinct now it was open. I realised the shaft must pass by an office on the lower floor, in which two men were standing by an open window talking. I listened again: the two men were Rasim and Hammoudi, and they were discussing me.

  ‘What more are you hoping to get out of him?’ Hammoudi was demanding with his usual insistence, despite the fact that he was talking to a superior rank.

  ‘Nothing,’ Rasim answered testily. ‘We want to make sure he keeps his mouth shut. If he believes that what he saw in the desert was a delusion that’ll be easier.’

  ‘But it was a delusion, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t need to know. Keep your nose out of it.’

  ‘Why not let him go?’

  ‘Conspiracy. Have you forgotten police officers died?’

  ‘He’s not guilty of conspiracy. Source Jibril set the whole thing up — if anyone ought to be charged it’s him. Jibril has knocked us down every time, and you’re still playing ball with him.’

  ‘OK, let’s just say Ross has something that we might need someday. Something that could be very valuable to us. Only he has to keep quiet and to cooperate. Otherwise we can’t use him.’

  ‘Who the hell is this “us” and “we” — not the Mukhabaraat.’

  ‘This is big — much bigger than your bloody piss-pot Mukhabaraat.’

  ‘Oh, so it isn’t dead policemen that count! This piss-pot Mukhabaraat exists to defend the state against foreign powers not to do their dirty shit for them. Who decides what happens to Ross. You?’

  ‘Policy.’

  ‘Whose bloody policy? Ours or someone else’s?’

  ‘Just do your job, Hammoudi, or you’ll get your hat. We still have a chance with Anasis, but Ross is getting more and more resistant. We’re giving him two days’ grace and if he doesn’t come round by then, he gets wiped out.’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘On the grounds of national security.’

  53

  When Hammoudi walked into my room next morning, I was shocked by his appearance. He looked as though he’d aged overnight; certainly he hadn’t slept. His eyes were red, his skin looked sallow and deeply lined, and his great dome head was puckered into permanent creases. I didn’t believe it was squeamishness at the thought of killing me. Hammoudi wasn’t that type. It was something else, summed up in that last phrase I’d overheard — ‘national security’. Hammoudi was a man who’d just had his lifelong values crushed. He slumped down in the chair, switched on his pocket tape-recorder, then switched it off, and lit a cigarette. ‘Well,’ he said wearily as I sat down opposite, ‘our search-team came back from the Western Desert. There’s no trace of debris, no wrecked space-ship, not even a sniff of an explosion. So I think that we can wipe out the aliens theory, don’t you.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘then why are you keeping me? Why not let me go?’

  The same question I’d heard him ask Rasim the day before. He looked troubled. ‘It’s not as easy as that, Ross. Policemen have been killed thanks to you.’

  ‘Thanks to me, or thanks to Source Jibril?’<
br />
  The effect was electric. Hammoudi turned pale, swallowed hard and a tremor went through his cigarette-hand. He stubbed out the butt and half stood up as if he would lunge at me, but he didn’t.

  ‘Who told you about Jibril?’ he snapped.

  ‘You’re slipping,’ I said, ‘you mentioned him at Khan al-Anaq. You said you had a feeling in your bones we were mixed up with a Source Jibril. You’re not so sure now are you?’

  He hauled himself to his feet and walked over to the window. He stared out of it for a few moments then turned on his heel and faced me. ‘Ross,’ he said, ‘do I need to tell you you’re on record here?’

  ‘No,’ I said. What did he mean — did I know the place was bugged? What did that matter now?

  ‘Your story the other day omitted something...’ I said.

  ‘Ross!’ Hammoudi said again. ‘You’re on record here!’

  ‘Good, because what I have to say is for the record.’

  ‘You’re steering very close to the wind, Ross.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Maybe you do, maybe you don’t, but whatever it is you’ve got to tell me I don’t want to hear.’

  ‘I think you ought to, Captain, because as I was saying what you told me the other day is as full of holes as a tart’s stocking...’

  He turned to the door as if considering walking out, then turned back and sat down heavily again in the chair, watching me with narrow, defeated red eyes.

  ‘There was a curious omission from your data,’ I said. ‘The Zerzura Club, formed in 1930 with the objective of finding the Lost Oasis of Zerzura. One of the members of the Club was Aurel Karlman, whom they used to call “The Monk” because for some reason he used to waltz round in Benedictine togs — by a great coincidence, the same order as your friend Dr Mikhaelis who has such an interest in the anti-matter drive.’