Jasmine Nights

by Julia Gregson

When she yelled, he prodded her sharply in the back. ‘Do that again,’ he said in a low voice, ‘and I will shoot you.’

  In the kitchen, the wreckage of the party lay on a worn Formica table – a plate of half-eaten cheeses swimming in wine; smeared glasses; a pat of butter covered in ash and old cigarettes. He locked the door behind them.

  He handed her a tea towel after she had been sick. Stay calm, she told herself, you must stay calm.

  ‘They’ve taken your friend away.’ Severin’s face was pale and twitching. ‘They wanted you to go with him, but I said I would question you first.’

  His unimpressive performance in the bedroom had clearly rattled him. His gestures were muddled, jerky; he seemed to have trouble looking at her. He threw crockery and food into a half-full sink, shattering several glasses as he did so. He swooped down on her, and pulled her so roughly on to the table that her arms almost jerked out of their sockets. He picked up his gun; it was pointing towards her as he inched backwards groping in the direction of a portable gramophone that sat incongruously on the sideboard surrounded by dirty plates and glasses.

  He had several tries at lowering the needle on to a record.

  ‘Don’t move, Turkish girl,’ he said. ‘Stay there and sing your songs.’

  When the music came on, she was concentrating so hard that the room seemed to tilt wildly.

  She felt filthy and defiled. She hurt. But she wanted to live – it felt like the most important thing on earth. The record was old – for the first few bars it crackled like forest flames. And then she heard the sprightly introduction to ‘Mazi’, the song with a tango beat that had once made Tan sigh and roll her eyes. The past is a wound in my heart. My fate is darker than the colour of my hair. Thank God she knew it.

  ‘Sing it.’

  Her mouth felt sore from the gag, but she sang the first verse as clearly and confidently as she could, amazed at the sounds that came out of her – truly, it was like another person singing. When she got to the first chorus, though, her confusion was evident, and she felt giddy with fear – in a couple of bars she’d come to the end of the words she knew.

  The swooping violins dissolved into silence. He took the needle off, and looked at her, shaking his head. His skin was so white that she could see the blue bulge of the veins in his temples as he spoke.

  ‘I am a translator, madame,’ he said softly. ‘My Turkish, I think, is better than yours.’

  He poured himself a glass of brandy and drank it quickly. There was a kitchen clock behind his head; it was almost five o’clock. My last day, she thought; they’ll know now for sure.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell them about me?’ she said.

  He put a piece of half-eaten salami into his mouth; he chewed it, still looking at her.

  ‘I should have.’

  ‘Felipe’s dead,’ she said. She still couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Yes.’

  A stray piece of salami rind hung from his lips; his tongue made a slapping sound as it pulled it back.

  ‘What was your game with him anyway?’ he asked almost mildly. ‘Were you sleeping together?’

  ‘No – we’ve only just started to play together.’

  ‘Why did you come out here with him alone?’

  ‘That’s what we were told to do.’

  She looked at him blearily. It crossed her mind to tell him she’d been booked through Mr Ozan, about ENSA, but they seemed to have reached a point where she could only say simple things.

  ‘What about the others, when will they be back?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He was drinking the dregs from several glasses. ‘You were not very kind always, you wouldn’t sing the songs I wanted,’ he complained, pushing a heap of dirty plates aside.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she answered with the wooden politeness of a waitress dealing with a tiresome customer. ‘Which did you want? I could sing them now.’

  He squeezed his eyes tight shut.

  ‘Yes.’ Some of his brandy had dribbled down his chin. ‘Something nice for me, for once.’

  He was staggering now and when he asked for two German songs, it occurred to her that he had confused her with somebody else. ‘This is a lovely song,’ she said quickly. She sang ‘J’ai Deux Amours’ without taking her eyes off him.

  ‘More songs,’ he said. He was sounding sleepy.

  Behind him the hands of the clock slid to ten past five; it was possible the others would be back soon.

  She sang ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsies’, the songs coming randomly into her head now with no particular meaning to them. Tonight she’ll sleep on the cold dark earth, her own voice as thin and scared as a runaway child.

  ‘A draggle toggle is a funny word,’ he said, his mouth lopsided. ‘What does this mean?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly.’ Her throat was sore now, she was giddy. ‘A collection of things with no meaning.’

  ‘All these songs, what do they mean?’ He put his hand against the table to steady himself.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ She shook her head.

  He asked her then if she knew a song by Purcell called ‘Dido’s Lament’, mumbled something about a sister.

  She said she did not know it, so he sang it for her in German first. The melody was hauntingly sad, even though his voice was slurred.

  ‘What do the words mean, Severin?’

  She saw his lips quiver.

  ‘In English it goes ‘Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate’. They sang it for my sister.’

  ‘Your sister?’ He was shaking.

  ‘She was a musician too, she was on her way to college; one of your bombers got her.’

  He started to cry; his blond hair poked through his fingers. He shuddered and groaned, and shook his head vigorously as if in violent dispute with himself. Then he looked up at her, shrugged, and they exchanged the strangest look – somewhere between wild hilarity and sorrow.

  ‘I have a wife also in Germany,’ he told her. They were sitting opposite each other now, the wrecked party between them. ‘We are childhood sweethearts. I miss her . . . I want to go home.

  ‘It was my wife who sang this at my sister’s funeral; she was at college with my sister. She would be horrified . . .’ His face convulsed. ‘They took me to concerts, they . . .’ His eyes looked shrunken and red.

  He reached out for his glass again; her hand stopped him.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘if one of the others had stayed behind, it could have been much, much worse for me. I know that. I’m sure of it.’

  He gave her a foggy look.

  ‘I nearly did a bad thing. I was so close.’ He held his thumb and index figure together. ‘This close.’

  She felt the sting of sick rise in her throat just at the thought of it.

  ‘I wanted to,’ he mumbled, his head on the table again.

  She touched him on the crown of his hair.

  ‘Listen. Do me one favour – just one! Drive me somewhere, anywhere. I won’t say it was you.’

  He looked at her for the longest few seconds of her life, and then at the clock with a start.

  ‘Oh my God! My God! Dummkopf! Dummkopf!’ He banged his hand to his forehead. ‘Where are the keys? The keys.’ He pulled a drawer out of the kitchen dresser so violently that it fell on the floor. When he found them, he grabbed her hand and flung her out the door.

  Dawn had come in a wash of dull grey light as they made their way towards the car. He made her sit beside him in the front, and placed his revolver between them, and then he abruptly changed his mind and tied her up again and made her lie in a foetal position in the boot, which stank of petrol. A canvas bag of tools dug into her cheek. He drove off in a skid of tyres, and then it was like being a passenger on the worst fairground ride you could possibly imagine, as he drove on and on, faster and faster down the curving road, the car veering from side to side, the canvas tool bag bumping her face.

  She was going to die now, she was sure of it, thinking of his pale swea
ting face, the brandy he’d sunk in greedy gulps before they’d left.

  She tried to think of some prayers from school: ‘Oh my God, I am sorry and beg pardon for my sins . . . forgive me, forgive me my trespasses. I’m sorry . . .’ And then a cracking, tearing sound like a giant forest fire, a dull thunk as her head hit the spare wheel, a shriek of tyres, and then the car left the road, and tumbled over and over and over again until it stopped.

  Chapter 38

  It was Barney’s father Dom first thought of when he found himself face down in the sand and rigid with shock. So good old Barney’s pa was right, he reflected, absent-mindedly picking bits of glass out of his wrist – one more effing overconfident eejit had bitten the dust. He turned over and lay for a while on his back, taking in with an expression of almost dopey wonderment the array of brightly coloured lights jumping behind the shroud of his parachute.

  He tried to work out how badly hurt he was this time. He wiggled his feet, he could feel them; he blinked, he could see. He mentally drew a line down his spine, no pain there, and he could feel earth beneath him – good, that was good – but then he smelled the strong stink of burning fuel, the taste of it in his mouth, and pulling back the parachute silk, he saw his aircraft on fire. And apart from one wing that had been flung clear, it was well on its way to a heap of pointless ash. He swore and would have gone on swearing but it hurt his ribcage. Crawling on hands and knees, too weak to disentangle himself from his parachute’s run lines, he dragged himself towards the wing and lay down underneath it.

  It had happened again, a strange, disconnected, jaunty voice inside him observed – only this time worse: he was in the middle of what looked like endless fucking miles of desert, stretched out dreadfully all around him. He had no map – that had fried in the flames – no cheerful English ambulance staff arriving on the scene, no nurses waiting for him in hospital; he was completely and utterly alone, quite possibly behind enemy lines.

  And joy! it had been raining here too, just as it had rained for the last two weeks at the base at LG39, almost without cease. The sand his face was pressed against was a gritty mash, and at this time of year, when night fell, the temperature would dip to near freezing.

  The pain, when he tried to sit up, was excruciating. ‘Don’t! Don’t, don’t,’ he gasped, as if taking instruction from someone else. Maybe a couple of ribs smashed . . . maybe worse. He opened his eyes and lifted his head an inch or two; the desert, sodden and glistening after a recent shower, looked more like the sea. There was no chance, he estimated, that anyone would come and look for him tonight, if ever. Losing planes was a fact of life here, not an emergency; there were too many other things going on. Horrible to die in a place you didn’t even know the name of was his last despairing thought before he went to sleep; and without her.

  A shower of rain woke him just before dawn. He opened his eyes and looked up in confusion at the parachute silk that had blown over his face like a caul. He tore it off quickly, roaring in pain. He must not do that again. The fingers of his right hand were blistered, but at least he could see now. Above him a few stars pricked through a dense black sky, and around him nothing but sand. There were wild animals in the desert, he knew that, foxes and hyenas, but here nothing but the faint rustling of wind and the sound of his own breath. He was completely and entirely alone.

  He observed for a while the shape of his hands. When he lifted them to his nose they smelled of oil. He wished there was something practical he could do with them – open a map efficiently, wrap them around a gun, switch on a torch, something solid that would help get his brain working again.

  He’d picked up the enemy plane at a landing ground close to Sidi Abd al-Rahman, about twenty-three miles east of Marsa Matruh – that much he remembered. If his map and compass hadn’t become kindling, he could work out exactly where he’d been shot down, but anyway, Marsa Matruh was one hundred and fourteen miles west of Alexandria. The desert between here and Alex was jam-packed with landmines, left from what had been German artillery outposts, and some POW camps. It was also an area the Allies had attacked almost continuously. If the Germans didn’t get him, his lot would.

  He lay back. Enough . . . enough thinking . . . even this much had brought on a great urge to rest, to fall into a dream-like state where pleasant, nebulous thoughts and images drifted through his brain – thoughts of Saba and songs and Woodlees Farm, a barking dog in a meadow full of buttercups, the river at Brockweir. And while he slept, it rained, not heavily, and the parachute silk settled like a second skin on his ribs.

  When he woke, hot and shivering, several hours later, he lay squinting at a sky whose dull grey made it impossible to work out the time. ‘Nothing has changed,’ he said out loud, surprised to hear how weak his voice was. A few moments later, he froze. He could hear the distant drone of planes in the sky somewhere far above the blank wall of cloud. They had come for him after all.

  Chapter 39

  ‘Saba.’ Cleeve was there when she opened her eyes. ‘Thank God!’ he said. He began to cry.

  His face was all nostrils and wide eyes, he was telling her the trees had broken her fall, telling her she was lucky, lucky, lucky, and she mustn’t be frightened now. She was safe, and sound. He’d come to pick her up when Felipe was so late.

  ‘Felipe!’ She started towards him in panic.

  ‘Later,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you later – let’s get you out of here first.’

  Everything was too fast. Having to sit up, having to try and walk up the muddy slope towards the road on legs that felt weak as pipe cleaners. Cleeve rolled up his trousers, his ankles white and skinny; his linen suit got covered in her blood as he pushed her up the hill, bundled her into the back of the car and drove her at top speed back to Istanbul. She sat behind him, forehead on the window, gazing slackly at treetops whizzing by. There was pain in her head and it spread through her body like an oil slick. She slept, and when she woke she was sitting with Cleeve in a bright white room, where an English doctor said she’d been a very lucky girl, and where she was sick. They shone a sharp light in her eye; this won’t hurt, the doctor said. He gave her an injection in the arm; she slept.

  When she woke in the aircraft, it was like sloshing around in the guts of some large and noisy whale. The pain in her head felt worse. There was someone sitting beside her who had a white skirt on and who smelled of Dettol. When they wiped her head with a cool flannel it was nice.

  A clunk, and then a softness as she was lifted into bed. Lovely, lovely sleep at last, and strange flickering underwater journeys inside her head that had music in them. She was not unhappy.

  Oh skylark, I don’t know if you can find these things

  But my heart is riding on your wings

  So if you see them—

  She was flying on a song when the nurse came.

  ‘Saba.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Saba, Miss Tarcan. Come on now, come on.’

  ‘No, no, no, safe here.’ Someone patted her face, but she wanted to stay on the ocean bed swimming in a golden patch of water.

  Squeaking sound. Shoes. No, no, no! I don’t want to come up. Nice here. Like driftwood, like bones.

  Time . . . goes . . . Ouch! Her head hit a big rock and she slept again. A flicker of white light, a spider in front of her, ouch, ouch, ouch, it hurts to open your eyes.

  ‘Saba.’ Go away, go away. The patting continues. ‘Saba, Saba, it’s me . . . it’s me.’

  When she opened her eyes, Arleta was sitting on the bed next to her. Saba was sick all over her and went back to sleep.

  Arleta came again the next day. There was a bunch of wilted roses in her hand. She was crying.

  ‘Saba, thank God, thank God. What happened to you?’

  Saba touched the swathe of crêpe bandages around her head; her hand felt wooden and separate.

  ‘Someone hit me on the head.’

  ‘Well that’s a statement of the bleeding obvious,’ Arleta said. They began to giggle weakly.<
br />
  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘You’re in hospital, darling – the Anglo-American. You’ve been sleeping like a champion.’

  Arleta smelled beautiful; roses and lemons said the bells of St Clement’s. She was dressed in a brilliantly blue frock; her hair was so dazzling it hurt to look at it. It was like electric sparks coming out of her. When Saba put her hand out, Arleta’s kisses left bright red wings all over it.

  ‘Don’t talk. I’m not supposed to be here; they’ll kick me out.’ Arleta started blowing her nose. ‘Oh dear, this is so wonderful. I thought we’d . . . I was so worried . . . Oh I’m such a fool.’

  Squeak of shoes on linoleum, a loud voice – ow! – said cross things that she was too tired to listen to, and then visiting hours in an explosion of sound that made her head shrink. No, don’t go, help me, but when she woke up she was alone again, and swimming through a long, shadowy stretch of water. Her heart felt waterlogged, her spine, her neck, her head ached in a dull, persistent way and the shadows frightened her. She kept swimming, trying to break through into the sunlit shallows where the bright fishes were, but the shadow got thicker and thicker, it was endless.

  In the middle of the night, when most of Cairo was asleep, and everyone seemed to have gone, a moth rattling inside the shade of her bedside light woke her. She sat up, confused by the spartan room with its hard polished surfaces. In the corner of her room there was a child’s wooden wheelchair, with a knitted elephant inside it.

  She looked around her.

  ‘Where’s Dom?’ she asked, her heart racing with fear.

  She pulled a red cord above her bed.

  ‘Where’s Dom?’ she said to the nurse when she came in.

  ‘I don’t know who you mean, dear, I was asleep.’ The night nurse gave her a beady look. Her hair was on end, her apron untied. ‘It’s three o’clock in the flipping morning.’

  The nurse, seeing her wild expression, got her a drink of water, and made her take two pink pills that she said would help her sleep. ‘You’ve had a very nasty bang on the head, dear.’ The nurse had recovered her professional self. ‘You’re bound to feel upset.’