Osama

by Lavie Tidhar

  Joe shuffled to his small kitchen and put the kettle on to boil. Fleetingly, he thought about Alfred.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ he had said, and the old man had shrugged, and said, ‘Are you happy here?’

  Joe had said, ‘What do you mean?’ and Alfred had smiled, and said, ‘I guess that too is an answer.’

  The books were piled up on the low bamboo table. He poured hot water into a mug and spooned coffee and sugar into it, stirring, and carried the drink over to the table with him. He stared at the paperbacks. Assignment: Africa. Sinai Bombings. World Trade Centre. What the hell was a world trade centre?

  You would not find the answer here, Alfred had told him. Joe sighed and sipped his coffee, knowing Alfred was right, had only articulated what Joe himself already knew. Paris, he thought, but the thought tasted sour.

  He took out the black credit card and stared at it again. Expense is not an issue, the girl had said. But Joe knew that wasn’t right. There were always expenses, and they always mattered. Life was owed, always waiting, always afraid of the tread of the debt-collector — he shook his head and sipped from the coffee. Morbid, he thought. He carried the coffee to the window and stood there, looking out. An old man rolling a cigarette in the shade of a papaya tree across the road. Two kids racing each other on bicycles, floating past. A man reading a newspaper, standing up. He looked at him for a long moment. He couldn’t see the man’s face. The man’s shoes were black and polished. He finished the coffee, carried it to the sink, and left it there. When he went downstairs and opened the door to the outside, the man with the newspaper was no longer there. Joe crossed the road, walking the short distance to the call box by the temple. He put a couple of coins in and dialled.

  ‘TransContinental Airways, how may I help you?’

  ‘I’d like a ticket to Paris.’

  ‘When would you like to leave?’

  He didn’t need to think it over. ‘Next available flight.’

  ‘Just a moment, sir.’

  He could hear her shuffling paper, searching through the time tables on her desk, matching the next flight with the passenger manifesto, checking seat availability—

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes?’

  He dropped another coin in the slot. It was hot in the call box, and he pushed the door open with his foot and held it.

  ‘The next flight is at thirteen hundred hours today, going via Bangkok.’

  ‘That sounds fine,’ he said. A group of orange-robed monks walked past and disappeared through the arched gate of the temple. An old brown woman was roasting bananas outside the gate, smoking a long-stemmed pipe as she turned the blackened bananas over and over. ‘You can pay through our offices on Lan Xang road,’ the woman said, ‘we accept cash, cheques or—’

  ‘I’d like to pay with a credit card.’

  There was a small silence. A fly buzzed into the call box and Joe tried to get it, but his palm connected only with air and he lost his hold on the door. The fly buzzed as if laughing at him.

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  The sir was a little more pronounced this time, he thought. He pulled out the black credit card. Here goes, he thought. He read out the mystical string of digits to the woman over the phone, and gave her his name. He thought they might need something else, but that seemed to satisfy her. ‘Just a moment, sir.’

  He waited, trying to trap the fly, but it moved too much. He pushed the door open again and wiped his face with his shirt, staining it. The sun poured in through the glass, almost blinding him, and for a moment he could not see beyond its confines, and his world was reduced to this one rectangular box — ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Please pick your ticket up at the airport. Check-in is one hour before the flight, and you would need to change planes in Bangkok.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Joe said, a little dazed, and the voice on the other end said, ‘Pleasure, sir. Have a good flight.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said again, and then replaced the receiver on its holding arm. He stared at the card again, seeing nothing, then put it back in his pocket and stepped outside.

  a yellow-white coat of paint

  ——

  He decided not to go to the Talat Sao that morning. His carefully-constructed routine had been interrupted, subverted. As he walked back the short distance to his apartment along the Sokpaluang road, he wondered what he should be feeling. Was it freedom that caused such a pulse of sudden, inexplicable fear to pass through him? I should have told her no, he thought, but his mind slid away from the image of the girl that rose in his mind. She had put her hand over his, and her hair had fallen around her face, framing it — no.

  What then?

  As he approached his building, he saw something out of the corner of his eye and, turning, was just in time to see the back of a man disappearing through the door of the small convenience store. He noticed close-cropped hair, a large neck, tanned, pale-blue shirt, unremarkable black trousers, polished black shoes. ‘Son of a bitch,’ Joe said.

  He turned and crossed the road again, almost hitting two girls on a scooter who narrowly missed him and then looked back at him, emitting embarrassed giggles. He waved to indicate he was all right and they sped away, still giggling. He went to the store, navigating his way between crates and spent cartons, and pushed the door open. There was a strong smell inside of drying fish.

  ‘Sabaidee, mister,’ said the girl behind the front table.

  ‘Sabaidee,’ he said, returning her nop. She had put her palms together in the customary greeting and so he answered with his own. The girl was watching a small television set showing a Japanese game-show. On the screen, a Japanese man was capering on a stage in a European clown’s costume, while two contestants to either side of him were trying to hit him with long bamboo sticks. The man ducked and jumped, at once comical and strangely graceful, avoiding their aim.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked the girl, who had already returned her full attention to the screen. She looked up. ‘Catch That Clown,’ she said. ‘They get one hundred yen each time they manage to hit him.’ She shrugged. ‘They never do, but it’s funny.’

  Joe smiled and she returned to her screen. Catch that clown, he thought. He searched through the narrow aisles, but there was no sign of the man with the polished black shoes. ‘Did anyone come through here just now?’ he said. The girl seemed to contemplate the question. ‘Been quiet,’ she said at last, handing down her verdict, and turned up the volume on the television set.

  What did that mean? There was a back way into the store, of course, but it led into the family’s own residence. If so, the man must merely be an uncle or cousin or some other relative hanging around, which, when he thought about it, was the most reasonable explanation. He shrugged and picked up a tin of soup and a new packet of cigarettes, paid, and went back outside.

  A man was climbing into a stretched black Mercedes parked outside Joe’s building. Joe caught sight of polished black shoes disappearing inside. Then the door was softly closed shut, the tinted windows allowed no gaze inside, the powerful German engine purred to life, and the car pulled out into the road. ‘Wait!’ Joe shouted, and he ran towards the car, which was already speeding away. A scooter went past him, too close, and a boy in a student’s uniform said, ‘Watch where you’re going, asshole!’ as he sped away. Joe cursed. The black car was ahead of him and gaining speed. He ran after it. An elderly lady cycled past him, her bicycle loaded with egg trays. She looked at him sideways with a bemused expression. ‘Stop!’

  The car wasn’t stopping. But a window rolled down on the right-side of the back seat, and a hand emerged, holding a shiny object, and Joe stopped, not believing what he saw. It was a gun.

  The shots echoed loudly in the street. The old lady swerved, her bicycle wavered, and then she fell, the bicycle skidding away across the hot tarmac, the trays coming loose from the strings that bound them, releasing their load of fresh eggs onto the road, where they rolled and burst, covering th
e tarmac in a yellow-white coat of paint. At the first sound of a shot, Joe fell facedown onto the road and rolled away towards the pavement. The hand withdrew into the Mercedes. As the window rolled back up a piece of paper caught, perhaps, in the updraft, came floating out of the window. The car sped away and soon disappeared behind the bend.

  Joe stood up. He was shaking. He ran to the old woman, but she had not been hurt. He helped her up. She too was shaking. She did not speak to him. She watched the broken eggs on the ground and began to cry, without sound, the tears flowing down her lined face, like water through a web of ancient Roman aqueducts. Joe went to her bike and picked it up. She took it from him without a sound. She would not look at him. Other people had come out to watch. They stood outside the shop-fronts and gazed, pointing and murmuring between themselves. Joe cursed and decided it was time to be gone from there. ‘Here,’ he said, offering the woman some money clumsily. ‘For the eggs.’

  She took the money from him without comment, tucking it away in a hidden pocket. When she walked her bike to the side of the road a group of women descended on her, escorting her to the shade and offering her tea. The woman gave them a small, sad smile. No one seemed to pay Joe any attention.

  Good.

  As he turned to go, a piece of torn paper hit him on the face and he snapped at it, his anger suddenly released, and he crumpled it into a ball with one violent motion.

  They had shot at him. Why the hell had they shot at him? He jogged away from there as a bus went past and left yolky tire-marks on the asphalt. When he got to his building he went right in, climbing up to his apartment and locking the door behind him. Then he stood with his back to the door, taking deep breaths. He brought his hand to his face, and realised he was still holding the ball of paper. He smoothed it open and looked at it. A dirty scrap of old newspaper, barely-legible but for the date: eleven September, two thousand and one. He shrugged, crumpled it back into a ball, and went to deposit it in the rubbish-bin. Then he packed up some clothes, threw in the three books, and left the apartment.

  caravana de la muerte

  ——

  On the eleventh of September, nineteen seventy three, at zero seven hundred hours, the Chilean Navy had taken over Valparaíso. By zero eight hundred, the Army held Santiago. By zero nine hundred hours, the Army had control of most of the South American country. In his final speech, President Salvador Allende said, ‘They have force and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested by neither crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history… These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.” By twelve hundred hours, Hawker Hunter jet fighter planes finally arrived over the presidential palace in downtown Santiago. They dropped their load of bombs over the palace. Allende died shortly after. One story has it that he died by his own hands, with an AK-47 rifle that was a gift from Fidel Castro, and was engraved on a gold plaque: ‘To my good friend Salvador from Fidel, who by different means tries to achieve the same goals.’

  The Army Commander-in-Chief, Augusto Pinochet, became president of Chile.

  It was an event few knew or cared about outside of Chile. Over the next several years, thousands of people died or disappeared. The Chilean national stadium was used as an internment camp for over forty thousand people. In one instance, an army death-squad called the Caravan of Death, or Caravana de la Muerte, flew across the country by helicopters, carrying out executions. Overall, at least three thousand people had died.

  Was the United States behind the coup? ‘We didn’t do it. I mean we helped them,’ Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told President Nixon five days later over the phone. The time was 11:50 A.M. The conversation began with football.

  ‘Nothing new of any importance, is there?’ the president had asked.

  ‘Nothing of very great consequence,’ Kissinger had said.

  When he heard of Allende’s election to president, the U.S. Ambassador to Chile, Edward M. Korry, said, ‘We shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and all Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty.’

  A communiqué to the CIA base in Chile on the sixteenth of October, less than a month before the coup, stated: ‘It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup… We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end, utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG and American hand be well hidden.’

  It was a date few remembered outside of Chile.

  the imprisoned singing of live frogs

  ——

  ‘Where to, Mister?’ the tuk-tuk driver said. His name was Mr. Kop and he was high on life, and amphetamines.

  ‘The airport,’ Joe said. Mr. Kop cranked up the engine and grinned. ‘Bor pan yang,’ he said, ‘bor pan yang. No problem, no problem. Mr. Kop he take you any place you want go.’ The engine made the tuk-tuk-tuk sound that had given the vehicle its name. Mr. Kop released the gear and sped off down the road, Joe holding on at the back, the artificial wind coming through, cooling against his scalp.

  They had tried to shoot him. Why would anyone want to shoot him?

  The worst moment was outside, just before he had hailed down Mr. Kop. Indecision. An irrational part of him wanted to head over the Mekong, into Siam and a train or bus to Bangkok, or disappear entirely in that great empty space of the continent that lay beyond the river: isolated villages, small fields, a scarcity of roads, a great open silence.

  It only lasted a moment and then he dismissed it and Mr. Kop had stopped for him and he told him the airport. Mr. Kop drove as fast as his ancient vehicle allowed him, taking every bump on the road with relish, singing to himself as he drove, and grinning and twitching a little. Soon they were on the smooth, wide road to the airport and the Mekong was visible, still dry, the rains having not yet filled it up. The distant sand-banks had the colour of Mr. Kop’s teeth. Joe leaned back and stretched out his legs. He thought fleetingly about the girl.

  He paid Mr. Kop outside the terminal building and went inside. He had seen no black cars along the road. He came to the TransAtlantic Airways desk and a girl looked up at him with a pleasant smile. His ticket was there, ready, and the girl directed him to Gate Three. The terminal was small, old but clean. The concrete floor was worn smooth. The sunlight streamed in through high windows. He bought himself an espresso at the kiosk by the entrance and sipped it standing up outside. He lit a cigarette and watched people come and go past.

  They couldn’t know he was going to the airport because he had only made the booking that morning, and so he felt reasonably calm. He had not spotted a tail on the road either, and that was good too. There was the other possibility of course — that they knew he would be going to Paris because that way the trail leading to Mike Longshott lay and they knew about that, about Longshott and Osama, but it wasn’t an option he was entertaining just then. He finished the espresso and bought another and searched for black shoes. An elderly Indian man went past, dressed in a suit, wearing an expensive-looking gold wristwatch. A Chinese family went past, the father ramrod-straight, the mother plump and wearing a loose dress and a worried expression, then two children, a boy and a girl, the boy holding a soldier doll, the girl a paper-bound book, a Lao nanny bringing out the rear of the campaign with the youngest member of the regiment in her arms, a boy or a girl it was impossible to tell. Three white men casually dressed — the kind of casual it cost money to achieve — two in their twenties, one with silver hair and black shades, talking to each other in French. During the war the airport had been used as a base for a loose unit of French pilots who worked under the guise of a civilian airline company. They were called Ravens, and flew missions across the border, into Vietnam. The Secret War, they called it. Some of the old-timers stayed on, still, but the only remains of French Indochina these days were the coins that no
w sold to tourists in the Talat Sao market. A woman carrying a bamboo basket with two chickens inside. Five Africans in flowing robes, and escorted by Laotian functionaries — a diplomatic delegation from Ivory Coast or Senegal, maybe. Two young European women carrying backpacks. One smiled at Joe as she went past him. A bearded Muslim cleric wheeling a suitcase. Two Japanese, a man and a woman, power-walking, movements synchronised, not speaking. A group of Hmong villagers, carrying baskets, one imprisoning the singing of live frogs. Dark shapes peered at Joe through the woven bars of their jail. Joe ground his cigarette into the espresso cup, threw it in the bin, and went to catch his plane.

  IN TRANSIT

  a cold and waterless sea

  ——

  He always felt most alone when he was flying. On a plane, he felt as if he did not exist. There were the overhead lights and the bulky earphones and the canned music, dead notes and dead voices scratchily coming through a tiny socket in the armrest. Outside the world was vanished; once he was above the clouds, all he could see was a white landscape, sheer mountains, deep gorges, bottomless chasms where the clouds momentarily opened, with nothing at all beneath. The cloudscape was not real. It was insubstantial, had no concrete existence. The blue sky was a cold and waterless sea.

  The flight to Bangkok took one hour. Once there, at the modern chrome and glass airport with the king’s picture hanging everywhere, he waited. Airports were made for waiting, sometimes forever. He sat on a public bench and watched people come and go past him, unnoticed by them. When he went to the restroom his urine smelled of coffee. He washed his hands and toweled them dry. There was no day or night inside the terminal. It was a place where time stood still, a pause, a place where there was only a before or after, but no now.