The Catastrophe

by Ian Wedde

  A faint chemical smell had entered the room, and he saw her notice that he’d sniffed it – but she kept her impassive look and her silence. She was waiting for him to make the next move, ask the next question, set something in motion. But he didn’t have any power in this situation as far as he could see and, anyway, he was exhausted. The excitement of his sprint down the stairs and into the taxi, even the involuntary bravado of his hoarse vomit in the lavatory, closing the shutters – these stimuli had drained away.

  ‘Actually, I’m really tired,’ he said, and though he tried to stop it, an enormous yawn prised his jaws apart and made his eyes squeeze shut and water.

  Her slap, which he didn’t see coming because of the yawn, snapped his head around. ‘And what, this is a hotel, Mr Hare?’ She was standing over him, close. If he could get up quickly he could rush her – but of course he couldn’t. He wouldn’t. ‘And that was a taxi?’ She took one of her long strides away from him. Then he saw that she had the gun in one hand – she must have taken it from her jacket pocket. He couldn’t help it, he didn’t make them do it, but his hands flew up in front of him to make a shield.

  ‘No, please, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Her scorn was also incredulous.

  ‘And it was, after all. A taxi.’

  Her huff of frustration, her head-wag – had they reached another moment when something was going to change?

  ‘And I’ve stayed in worse hotels.’ He waited for a moment. ‘May I ask your name?’

  The woman folded herself carefully into the armchair opposite him and placed the gun on her side of the table.

  ‘In another situation, Mr Hare, in a nice hotel perhaps, sharing a taxi, we are perhaps at a convention about food, what to do about the problem of it, a famous food writer has some interesting suggestions perhaps, we can discuss how things are in the refugee camps, in Baqa’a, or shall we say Gaza as a whole, nutrition, the menu, Mr Hare ... yes, in another situation we are having perhaps an agreeable conversation, an enjoyable one probably, and in these circumstances when you tell me how sorry you are I have another opinion of it, not a lot better, we can’t be sure of that, but anyway different. Different from this situation, Mr Hare, where you are now and where I am also, in this room.’

  This was the first time he’d heard her speak at any length and he was completely floored by it. She’d spoken with a kind of control that resembled precise biting.

  ‘May I say too, Mr Hare, that in more ...’ – she paused, thinking – ‘... genial circumstances I, too, might enjoy what is your evident sense of humour. But,’ she tapped the gun that lay on the table, ‘as we both know, this is not a hotel and that was not a taxi. And this,’ tapping the gun, ‘is not an aeroplane ticket or a nice piece of chicken or ...’ She waved her hand impatiently in his face. ‘You have to wake up, Mr Hare. Wake up! And no, I am not going to tell you how I am called.’

  ‘What difference would it make, if you’re going to shoot me?’

  That surprised her – and the tone of his own voice surprised him as well. Had he ‘woken up’ as she’d demanded? Nothing had really changed; he was still sitting hunched up in the armchair where her slap had driven him back, she was still sitting forward in her chair opposite him, one hand close to the gun on the table between them, and the acrid whiff of what smelled like paint was still, inexplicably, wafting into the room at something after midnight. It was breezy outside – the jalousie shutters rattled from time to time on the other side of the glass. The rest of the house was silent, so perhaps the men were sleeping.

  There was a place high in his guts, just under where his ribs parted and above where his stomach, these days, rested on top of his pants, where he was used to feeling the effects of eating too much of some things, for example rich Provençal rabbit cooked in red wine with thyme and juniper. But now a placid sensation seemed to have developed where he might rather have expected a dyspeptic burn. It was a soft sensation, calm, and it seemed to spread out to his breathing. Weights dropped from his shoulders – his shoulders themselves drooped, as though no longer resisting some pressure or other. His thighs stopped trembling and he let his hands hang down the sides of the armchair. No, he wasn’t afraid. He didn’t know what he was. But at least he was calm.

  The woman saw this, or something. She seemed to be trying to encourage him with her silence. Yes, yes, this is better. Keep going!

  ‘That’s true, isn’t it?’ he asked her. ‘If you tell me your name that means you’re going to shoot me. And if you don’t ... ? Tell me your name, I mean?’

  She continued to watch him, not speaking, without expression.

  ‘Am I right?’

  ‘My name is Maya Yazbeck.’ Her smile shocked him – at once savage and amused. She hummed a harsh little tune, beating time with a long index finger. ‘I am a popular carabet singer.’ Then shaking her head, the smile gone – a vicious, impatient tut-tut with her tongue. ‘You believe that, Mr Rosenstein?

  But this had to be the moment. He pushed his new calmness towards her scorn.

  ‘I’m serious.’ He meant it. He believed it. ‘These camps that you ... that’s why you ... ?

  ‘That’s why I did it? You think?’ Then she was tired of this. ‘But you know nothing, I think.’

  ‘But maybe I can ... ?’

  ‘Maybe you can learn?’

  ‘Maybe I can help?’

  ‘My name is Dr Hawwa Habash,’ said the woman, in a flat, factual tone of voice, as if merely repeating a bureaucratic requirement. ‘I am a physician and my speciality is pédiatrique. I look after children.’ Then she smiled her not-smile. ‘I am not your teacher, Mr Hare. Or your future. And now you are convinced that I am going to shoot you. Of course this is possible.’

  Was she watching for his response? Was this a threat? The calm sensation in his midriff continued to spread, reassuringly – it seemed to need oxygen, and he heaved a deep sigh, not of emotion but out of comfortable physical necessity, as if the event that was taking place in his stomach had expanded and created a space that needed to be filled with ordinary air, a space of now.

  His companion in the room seemed to misinterpret this sigh – she shook her head as if disappointed – but then, how could she know what he was feeling? The sensation was unfamiliar even to him.

  ‘Yes, you may sigh, as if it is your fate for which I have now written the ordonnance. But let me tell you, Mr Hare, that the world of my colleagues in this house is indeed a simple one. In this it resembles yours. As you have described it to me, just a little. Your,’ that thinking pause again, ‘analytic, I think you say in English.’

  ‘Analysis,’ he said. ‘My analysis.’ And then he thought, Why not? ‘Not something I’m often credited with.’ She was waiting for him to shut up. ‘Apart from food, that is.’ He made a sewing-up motion across his lips, to show good faith.

  The woman smiled at this, but without much humour. ‘But you see, I have not shoot you, or had the others take you somewhere and do it, so perhaps it is not so simple, or perhaps it does not need to be so simple.’

  ‘Dr Hawwa Habash,’ he said, ‘who works with children.’ He remembered the place names she’d spoken – he knew one of them. ‘In Gaza,’ he added.

  ‘So, I can see, you like to take risks. First you jump in the taxi and now you expose yourself to my information, you begin my interrogation. Why is that, I wonder?’ She waited, keeping her gaze directly in his face. Expecting an answer. ‘Perhaps it is because you want to die, Mr Hare. You think I will oblige, as you saw in the restaurant?’

  She seemed to be joking, but he surprised himself with the certainty and confidence of his answer. ‘No,’ he murmured, feeling the thought reach urgently ahead of what he was saying. ‘I don’t want to die. I want to live. Believe me, shit, do I ever.’

  ‘And this is why you jump in the taxi and now interrogate me, knowing now my name, about where I do my work, with this weapon here that you have seen I can use?’ She was pinching the bag under one
eye again, rolling it between her long fingers. When she let go of it the skin remained raised, a little reddened, before subsiding back to being a plain mark of weariness.

  His first response was a simple Yes – yes! But the illogic of it – or the shock of the thought’s strangeness – stopped him. He realised that his mouth was dumbly open. It was as though he kept catching glimpses of himself as she was seeing him.

  ‘You look tired,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you should get some rest.’

  Her look of annoyance struck him as ungrateful. But then, inexplicably, she began to laugh – real laughter, not that clanging bark of derision he’d become used to hearing. Her large mouth opened wide, she fanned herself with one hand, and the harsh sound of her laughter almost seemed to rattle her bony frame. She even smacked herself on the thigh – the woman who’d slapped his face, hard, only moments ago. Her unrestrained guffaws conveyed powerful physical confidence, and he felt his own compliant response shaping a hopeful grin, then a titter. But he didn’t know what was so funny. And then, again, that abrupt shift, scaring the living daylights out of him. Her laughter stopped when her hand stopped smacking her thigh and instead smacked violently down on the table. Once, twice. The dirty cups and the Coke bottle rattled. Then she shook her big clenched fist, with her index finger extended, in his face, right under his nose.

  ‘Why – did – you – do – it!’ She spat the word ‘it’ with such rage that a little froth stuck to her bottom lip. Though she’d startled him for a moment, he still felt weirdly calm.

  ‘I seem to remember asking you the same question not so long ago – Dr Habash. And does my life depend on the answer?’ How prissy he sounded – TG would have had a field day. Oh, Chris-tuh-for!

  ‘To what the answer – why did I do what I did, or why did you do it?’ Her chest was still heaving a little with the force of her breath, and the nostrils of her large nose were pinched and pale with fury, or restraint.

  ‘Whichever you like.’ How strange, to feel so calm, when really what he wanted to ask was, What are you waiting for? Why don’t you just shoot me now and get it over with? Because she seemed to be playing with him, in some way he couldn’t figure out. She was shaking her head from side to side in disbelief, tut-tutting.

  ‘So, okay, why did you?’ He easily resisted saying, Show me yours, I’ll show you mine – but the fact that the thought even occurred to him made him smile again. But then he quickly shut the smile down – no more yelling from scary Dr Habash, thank you very much! ‘You tell me why you shot that man and ...’

  ‘And the woman also?’

  ‘I was going to say, and then I’ll try to explain why I ran after you – but yes, why did you shoot her?’ Again, he easily stopped himself from blurting out the next thing that came into his head, which was the French phrase he knew, crime passionel. Because nothing about that romantic explanation fitted what he’d seen and what was highly organised in some way, the taxi, the house, the other older man with the moustache who seemed to be keeping an eye on things.

  But then she beat him to it, anyway. ‘Enfin, this was not exactly what I believe you will be thinking, un crime passionel, how do you say that? – that is in any case quite banal.’

  ‘That? Banal? Boy, I’d like to see what you guys do for kicks.’

  Clearly, again, he’d nearly gone too far – or else she didn’t really understand the joke, such as it was. He even felt a little exhilarated that he was having a conversation like this, with the woman who clearly wasn’t joking when she said she might have to shoot him. Exhilarated but still calm – or able to be exhilarated because he was still calm. He’d felt the same way with his head in the fake Gucci bag, on the way here.

  ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I’ve just thought of something?’ He had, too. It was Nana’s rooster, back at Tolaga Bay. By day he’d strutted importantly, with little tosses of his inflamed comb, his shrewd eyes on the watch for misbehaving hens or young Christopher approaching with food scraps. But in the evening, after the last spasms of crazed yodelling that announced that his hens had roosted, Nana would plonk an empty cardboard box over him on the floor of the hen-house, and here, after a few muffled shrieks, he would become calm. He would time-out until Nana Gobbo took the box off again in the morning, once everybody was already awake and on the job.

  Did he, Christopher, feel less calm, now, remembering the stupid rooster under the box? No – rather, a line of memory seemed to have opened up that ran through his life and into the box of the present moment. The momentum seemed to want to continue, it seemed to be inevitable, somehow, to be going forward beyond this moment, and all he had to do was to accept the choices that appeared – to see the choices when they appeared and to accept the one that was moving his view forward.

  Dr Hawwa Habash was waiting – for whatever it was he’d thought of. But he sat there for a moment, feeling around in his mind for the limits of this enclosure within which he felt so peaceful. Not bored, not impatient, not frightened, not harassed – not even missing TG any more, or only a bit. What was this about? And that line of simple memory that seemed now – now that he had his head in the bag or under the box, in this dirty room – seemed now to spool away like the view of a country road through the back window of a car. Back along through a terrible rowdy mess of years, flat-out or written-off, with yelling in kitchens or in beds, slamming doors, laughing and laughing, the sound of his suitcase wheels trundling along somewhere at night, the television studio floor-manager yanking his earphones off and throwing them on the floor, the lines of people who’d already eaten too much waiting to get their Christopher Hare-slash-Mary Pepper books signed so they could go home and fuck themselves up even more – that view along which he saw himself over and over saying I’m sorry on the one hand and on the other standing all puffed up across the table with Robuchon’s famous caille caramelisée avec une pomme purée à la truffe on it, utter rubbish, he’d mocked it by making it into a rocket launch-pad with the quail pointing up from a foaming base of purée, and Robuchon’s chef de cuisine in Monaco, Christophe Cussac, the almighty lieutenant, yelling at him from the other side of the table that if he published a single word, that magazine would be pariah, its name would be shit. And almost out of frame, lovely Miss Mary Pepper, whom they hadn’t yet fought over calling ‘Thé Glacé’, let alone TG, grinning behind her elegant, ‘wealthy Chelsea’ hand.

  Once again, the room’s stale air rushed into that calm space inside him – not a sigh, though when he let it out again he allowed it to vibrate his lips, clownishly.

  ‘Never mind, Doctor,’ he said. ‘It was just a thought.’ What had also occurred to him was that it was only because he’d rushed down the restaurant stairs on impulse and jumped into the white taxi with this woman that he’d discovered his calm place, his rooster box, his time-out present moment, and this view from it back along the crazy path of his life.

  The woman shrugged as if to say, What’s wrong with thinking? Still she didn’t speak. But then she picked the gun up from the table and dropped it into the side pocket of her jacket – withdrawing her hand afterwards, and folding it with the other in her lap. So that seemed to indicate something.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘This may sound crazy. But I think I’m here because this is the present. This is the only place from which I can go forward.’ He tried to say ‘go forward’ with an ironic tone, but she didn’t hear it. Her expression just waited. The large eyes lidded with weariness or thought. He tried hard to make what he was saying go past her watchfulness.

  ‘Where I was before, in the restaurant, that was the past. I was stuck in it. When I ran after you, I escaped. I escaped from the past. From,’ he couldn’t help it, mocking himself to please her unexpected sympathy, ‘from Rosenstein.’

  Still no expression on her face, the long hands folded in her lap.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said – and heard himself. ‘And sorry for the sorry. Probably that doesn’t make any sense. What I just said.’

  He wa
nted to try again with the future view, that vivid taste of hope. Maybe I can help? Why was that such a joke? But he saw her lips hesitating over what to say.

  ‘On the contrary,’ murmured Hawwa Habash. ‘It make very good sense, I understand completely. For me it is also perhaps not so different. What you say about the past.’ Then he saw her pause and collect her thoughts, or the words for them. ‘But there are some things I have to tell you, Christopher.’

  It seemed to him that her pause had been about a decision to use his Christian name – to move herself into a space of some intimacy, to make herself vulnerable, even – this woman who had smacked him so hard across the side of the head that his ears were still ringing, who had held a revolver against his ribs and thrown his cellphone out the car window.

  ‘Now you must listen carefully, because this future you see for yourself, it has conditions. I will explain. You have to understand, it is important.’

  ‘Life and death.’ And then he nearly said sorry again, at her grimace of annoyance.

  ‘Yes, if you like. But not yours only. There is a danger now for us, from you. You are a danger. I will explain.’ She seemed to be beginning again. ‘But please – do not tell me that you are sorry. I can see that you like to do this. Now it is too late for your sorry,’ – that thinking pause – ‘Christopher.’

  ‘Okay, Doctor.’

  ‘And please – do not play with me. I am not your doctor, specifically I am not your therapist. And I do not think you are a child. My responsibility is ...’ But then she lifted her clenched hands impatiently, as if holding her anger back. ‘I advise you, do not waste my time, or ...’

  Or.

  Yes, the word entered his calm space in-the-bag, the box, the room, and settled there as if it, too, might start squawking once its cover was removed. Meanwhile he listened to her explain that this was indeed une mission secrète, that the cabaret singer’s name, Maya Yazbeck, was indeed her nom de cadre, that the window table he’d occupied in the restaurant had been the one where the big man’s bodyguard would have been seated had he been in the restaurant, watching the street – and that therefore he, Christopher, had been a signal. When, from the taxi, she first saw someone in the window, she had to make a decision. This was their chance. Much work had made it possible. So then, from the other side of the road, even though this made her more visible from the restaurant and increased her risk, she was able to look again at who was in the window – not the bodyguard of her target, she was then quite sure. So, did he understand, it was as though by being a signal involuntary he was already compromised in what was going to happen.