by Simon Conway
Every year on November 5, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot—the failed assassination attempt against King James I by a group of English Catholics in 1605—a straw-stuffed guy in the likeness of one of the academics was burned on a bonfire down by the largest pond. Jonah remembered the excitement that had filled him the year that his father was chosen. It seemed strange now: after all, his father was a Palestinian Catholic.
He had driven the twenty-five miles from London to Silwood Park ostensibly at his mother’s request, though the request had been made some weeks before. He was in a rented car. He didn’t own his own car, or much of anything else for that matter. He’d been divorced for over two years. That brief chapter—house, car, dog—was now over. He got out of the car and stood in the drizzle. His shoulders ached from driving down through the mist and he stretched, working the blood into his muscles. He had not seen his father for six months, not since before Sierra Leone and 9/11. His mother had briefed him on what to expect. Even so, it was still a surprise to see the collection of BBC Bristol vans and caravans parked on the gravel forecourt and on the lawns.
He followed electrical cables up the steps and into the building. Inside it was almost unbearably hot and he caught a whiff of something earthy with a hint of decay in the still air. He didn’t recognize it. He slipped off his jacket and eased his way down the passage towards the great hall.
Viewed from the entrance to the hall the raiding colony seemed to be a single living thing, the feeder columns writhing from side to side on the lengths of dockyard rope that coiled through the rooms. He stepped between the rails laid for a track dolly and followed one of the suspended ropes down a corridor toward his father’s office.
In a side room, he glimpsed one of his father’s PhD students emptying out a bucket of leaves and petals onto an old billiard table. She was wearing a white paper suit and a shower cap. He saw that the table legs were standing in plastic buckets filled with water. She waved as he passed. His father had always had a devoted student following.
He went down the steps into the atrium and stood among the African palms, staring upward at the ropes converging to form a single trunk that ran the length of the hothouses. Up in the foliage a camera panned on the end of a gib-arm. Across the room, a cameraman sat in front of a flickering monitor. Jonah walked over and stood at his shoulder for a while. On the screen an apparently endless column of worker ants carried leaf fragments in one direction and a line of unburdened workers advanced purposefully in the other. Wedge-headed soldiers with massive jaws flanked the gangways, separating the opposing columns and maintaining the direction of travel. It was difficult to comprehend the scale of the enterprise.
“There is no mind,” Joseph Said called out as he hurried across the atrium towards him. He stopped just short of him and looked Jonah up and down, as if he were a stranger. There was a bright yellow butterfly on the shoulder of his threadbare tweed jacket. “It’s shaped but leaderless.”
He was thinner. He seemed to get thinner each time Jonah saw him, thinner and taller, as if he were being stretched. He was an old man, with dark spots on his hands and neck, but his eyes were still striking. They sparkled with amusement. For a moment, Jonah wondered whether he recognized him.
“It’s the largest colony of leafcutters outside the Amazonian rainforest,” his father told him. “They range sixty meters on the longest rope. They’ve taken over the whole building.”
“It’s impressive,” Jonah said, after a pause.
His father held him at arm’s length and winked. “They let me get away with anything now.”
They kissed three times on the cheeks, the Palestinian way. His mother’s comment to Jonah, over a teacake in the tea room at the House of Lords, had been: “He’s completely out of control. You have to speak to him.”
Jonah wondered what it was that he was expected to say. It was usually Jonah’s sister who acted as intermediary between his mother and father, who edited and softened, protecting them from each other’s more fervent outbursts. He settled on the mundane. “How do you keep them from escaping?”
His father grinned: “Vaseline on the steel hawsers that hold the rope. The students keep them greased. We’ve only had a few minor breakouts.”
The cameraman beside him stifled a chuckle. “Relatively minor, then. They are pretty vigorous.”
Jonah wanted to say, I love you, old man. But they did not do large talk. Instead his father took Jonah by the arm. “It’s the closest thing to farming in nature. Workers go out foraging for leaves, which they cut up with their jaws and carry back to the nest. The leaves are used as compost to cultivate garden colonies of fungi. Enzymes from the fungi digest the cellulose cell walls of the leaves and make them suitable for eating. The garden is vital for the ants’ survival; without the continuous farming and feeding of the fungal colonies, the ant colony will die. Come, let me show you the nest.”
They walked down a corridor that had seemed endless to Jonah as a child, ducking to avoid the teeming trunk.
Standing at the entrance to the lecture theater, with the river of ants just above his head, Jonah was reminded of a scene from the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The nest resembled a mountain: a pile of leaf litter and humus, rising several meters from a huge glass tank that took up most of the stage.
“How many of them are there?” Jonah asked.
“It’s hard to say, eight million or so. As many as live in London.”
“What are you hoping to learn?” Jonah asked.
His father’s fingers tightened around his bicep. “Ostensibly we’re trying to study their reproductive cycle.”
“But in fact?”
His father pointed across the aisle to the nearest row of seats.
“Sit down.”
They sat side by side and contemplated the teeming mound. “It’s a city,” explained Joseph Said. “A megacity. It’s no less artificial or volatile than any other city. London. New York. Bombay. Here in captivity, with its population prevented from escape, it resembles a city under siege. I’ve christened it Gaza City.”
“Is this a protest?” Jonah asked gently.
“Not really.”
“But you’re making a point?”
His father smiled ruefully and patted Jonah on the knee. “The truth is I find their mindlessness comforting.”
It was too painful, and Jonah turned away to stare at the far wall. It wasn’t fair.
“We lifted this nest from a remote corner of Venezuela, where stunning flat-topped mountains called tepuis rise out of the forest. It’s an ecologically pristine environment. And it’s doomed. Their flat tops mean that the animals have nowhere colder to climb to if the temperature rises. Darwin’s dice have rolled badly for the planet, I think.”
He paused.
“Come to my office,” he said abruptly, and got to his feet. “Let’s sit and have a coffee. You can do your mother’s bidding.”
Jonah followed him back down the corridor to his office with its view of the grounds. He looked around, searching for familiar items. He spotted the narghile pipe on the top of a bookcase and on the wall the framed deeds to the family home in Bethlehem, where his father had been born and which Jonah had never seen. The house was now occupied by an Israeli family that his father had been conducting good-humored correspondence with for several decades. His father pulled a bag of coffee out of a drawer and ducked out into the corridor to fill his dented aluminum coffee pot with water. A familiar ritual.
“Where have you been?” he called out.
Jonah waited for him to return.
“I was in Sierra Leone,” Jonah told him, “and after that New York. I’m flying to Afghanistan tonight.”
“Wherever there is trouble, that’s where you are,” said his father, lighting the gas-ring stove he kept on a table beside his desk. He set the pot on the stove. “When are you going to tell your mother what you do?”
“I’m not in any hurry,” Jonah replied.
“You should tell her what you do,” his father said. “Soon I’m going to forget. Somebody in the family should know.”
This was how they communicated, in this particularly English way, by means of hint and pause, in which what was happening to him was described by what was not said rather than what was. Funny, really, when you thought about it, given that neither of them was really English.
“Mum says that the faculty is threatening to have you evicted.”
“Really?”
His father didn’t seem much concerned.
“She’s worried,” Jonah said.
“They can’t evict me. The nest’s too big to move and besides we have a TV crew now. I’m a celebrity. I’m invulnerable, for now at least.”
The coffee boiled and he filled two cups.
“Here,” he said. “Drink that.”
The coffee was thick, black and gritty; which is how he had always drunk it. They stared at each other over the rims of their cups. It was time to do his mother’s bidding.
“How are you?” Jonah asked.
His father pulled a face. “It’s happening gradually: a misplaced word here and there. Memories slip away. I forget people’s faces. I get my students to wear name tags. I’ve got one for you in a drawer somewhere. Under your name it says son—you’ll know when it’s time to start wearing it. We’ll be able to get to know each other all over again every time.”
“Mum says you’ve stopped coming home.”
“Someone needs to keep an eye on the nest. I have a camp bed here. It’s not uncomfortable.”
“Mum wants you to come home.”
“Your mother has an aversion to events that are out of her control.”
“She’s worried about you.”
“Lots of people are worried about me. They like to tell me how worried they are. I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t join them.”
“I promised I’d try, Dad.”
“Well done. You tried. Now, drink your coffee.” He took a packet of cigarettes out of the drawer. “Smoke?”
“No thanks.”
“I’ve taken it up,” his father said. “After all, why not?”
It had been six months since his father had been diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s, six months in which to contemplate the inevitability of his physical and mental decline. There was nothing good to say about Alzheimer’s.
“Are you still staying in that place on Black Prince Road?” his father asked.
“Yes,” Jonah replied.
“Have you got yourself a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“You can’t always live in the past,” his father told him gently. “It’s just memories. You’ve got to look to the future. That’s what I’m doing.”
“I’ll try, Dad.”
Jonah looked at his watch. It was time that he left. He had to drive back up to London and pack for the flight to Afghanistan. He set his coffee cup down on its saucer. “Shall I walk you out?” his father asked.
“I’d like that.”
His father accompanied Jonah down the corridor and through the glasshouses, to the great hall and beyond it the main entrance. It was a long walk. Jonah reflected that they hadn’t always made each other’s lives easy. He was an irritating and difficult son. His father could be short tempered. But that was all gone now, there was no more competition. Alzheimer’s had rubbed it away, leaving them with just this moment. They paused on the steps and embraced clumsily. It had stopped raining, and the lawns sparkled with droplets of water.
“I’m glad that we had time to get to know each other,” his father told him.
It was only later, when he was on his own, that he realized that his father had said goodbye. He was lying on his back, with his backpack as a pillow, staring at the ceiling of a hangar at RAF Brize Norton, when it came to him. It had been almost matter-of-fact, as if the issue had already been decided and he had been aware of it as an outcome for some time—a sad and precious parting.
For hours, while he waited for the plane, he turned the thought over in his mind.
IN THE CAGES WITH SILENT BOB
December 2001–January 2002
Jonah corkscrewed into Kandahar by night with a cargo of freshly captured prisoners, the plane’s descent near vertical to deter Stinger missile attack. They hit the ground with a bone-jarring thud, and bounced down the rutted runway towards the darkened terminal building, while the cargo ramp descended and airmen in insect-like goggles and flak jackets pulled the manacled and hooded prisoners to their feet. Jonah tightened the straps on his backpack and tapped the magazine on his rifle to check that it was secure.
The plane spun on its axis at the end of the runway and military policemen swarmed out of the icy darkness with red-lensed flashlights. An airman yelled, “Move!” and the ragged line of prisoners stumbled down the ramp, their breath escaping in clouds through the burlap sacks over their heads. Everyone was screaming—MPs, prisoners, airmen—the stream of commands and obscenities inaudible as the spinning plane’s engines roared in preparation for take-off.
Jonah followed the line of prisoners across the tarmac and through a sheet-metal door, into a barbed-wire enclosure lit up with stadium lights and overlooked by watchtowers manned by armed MPs. The prisoners were hurled into sandbag pin-downs where MPs in surgical gloves cut away their rags with scissors. A huge MP flashed his light in Jonah’s face and demanded that he identify himself.
“Jonah. OGA attached,” Jonah shouted back at him, supplying the words that he had been given. OGA—Other Government Agency—CIA nomenclature.
“You are now in a combat zone,” the MP yelled. “You will keep the magazine in your rifle at all times. You will never leave your rifle more than an arm’s length from you. You will engage any target that threatens you. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“This way.” The MP led him down an abattoir-like tent tunnel past a line of naked prisoners and a doctor who was screening them, his gloved hands moving across their skin and probing their mouths. They hurried through a cloud of lice powder and past piles of rubber-soled shoes, blankets and brightly colored jumpsuits. At the end of the tent a couple of FBI agents with cameras and flashguns were waiting expectantly for the first of the processed prisoners. The MP led Jonah past them, out of the tent and past a row of smoking oil barrels giving off the sweet, sickly scent of burning human excrement. They went through another sheet-metal door into a mud-walled compound with eight large tents, each one surrounded by concertina wire. They skirted the row of tents, stepping between the stumps of apple trees, and exited through another door.
The MP walked over to the first of a huddle of olive-drab tents, tapped on the pole and stuck his head inside the flap.
“Got the OGA for Silent Bob here, sir.”
“Send him in,” someone called.
The MP stepped back and held the flap open for Jonah. “In you go, sir.”
Inside, a group of army interrogators and analysts, bundled up in flannel shirts and winter parkas, sat in camp chairs tapping away at laptops or lying sprawled on cot beds. One of them, wearing a sergeant’s stripes, looked up from a sheaf of papers and said, “You’re OGA Jonah?”
“That’s me.”
“You’re late.”
Jonah recognized the type: hard working and fiercely proud, trying to hold together his team in the bleakest conditions. And every day getting walked all over by outside agencies—it was no wonder he resented the intrusion.
“I’m here now,” Jonah told him in a neutral tone.
“Tired?”
“Not particularly,” Jonah replied, though in truth he was exhausted by a trip that had brought him from Rhein-Main US Air Force base in Germany via Incirlik in Turkey and a former Soviet air force base in Uzbekistan to Bagram airbase on the outskirts of Kabul, where they had picked up the consignment of prisoners, and now, finally, Kandahar. He was determined not to show it. “I’d like to see the prisoner immediately.”
“Let’s do it, then. Nakamura, take him to the Joint Interrogation Facility, and you there, Heaney, go and fetch Silent Bob from the cages.”
A young Japanese American with a crew cut looked up from his laptop and gave a quick nod, while behind him a tall, skinny white man rolled off his cot with a groan and stuck his bare feet in a pair of boots.
“This way, sir,” said the soldier named Nakamura, pulling a woolen cap down over his ears. He led Jonah from the tent past a ramshackle collection of bomb-damaged buildings towards a large metal gate at the entrance to a walled compound. The gate was topped with barbed wire and was marked with a spray-painted sign that said NO ENTRY. There were guard towers manned by MPs with machine guns and the area beyond the gate was lit up with stadium lighting.
An MP opened the gate and waved them in.
“Welcome to the Rock,” Nakamura said.
Inside, they walked down a passage between the outer tin wall and an inner mud wall that was fifteen feet high and decorated with a mural with the silhouettes of the Twin Towers superimposed on an image of the Pentagon. Underneath were the words
WE WILL NEVER FORGET.
Nakamura led him past murals of the New York Police Department and Fire Department shields, and through a beaten metal door into a high-walled compound with a set of six round tents in two rows surrounded by barbed wire. Each tent had a piece of cardboard above its entrance with a number from 1 to 6 written on it. At the end of the compound, between the rows of tents, there was a fire burning in a halved oil barrel. A huddle of interrogators and MPs were standing around it, feeding cardboard into the fire. They looked up as Jonah approached.
“You’re the guy here to see Silent Bob?” asked one of the interrogators.
“You think he’s going to talk to you?” added another.
“Maybe,” Jonah replied.
“You better watch him real close,” said one of the MPs, “he bites. He just about took one of Lopez’s ears off.”
“Here he comes,” said another.
The door at the far end of the compound clattered open and a prisoner in a blue jumpsuit, handcuffs and leg irons was hauled through it and forced to race with baby steps by an MP on each arm. His head was covered in a sandbag and steam rose out of the pointy ends like devil’s horns. Nakamura pointed to the nearest tent and the MPs took the prisoner inside.
