Osama

by Lavie Tidhar

  ‘None of us should,’ she said. He looked at her sideways. Her wide almond eyes looked back at him steadily. She made a gesture with her fingers, signalling the bartender. The man ambled over, replaced Joe’s glass without comment, and put a shot glass in front of the girl. Not looking at him, she put a note on the counter. The bartender took it and ambled off.

  The girl held Joe in her sight. Her eyes were like screens; he wondered what he was projecting onto them. The girl said, ‘Where are you from?’

  Joe broke eye-contact. The sight of his glass was welcome. He took a sip, and then another. He had had several drinks already, going from one bar to another, searching for a fat, pale man — like a mushroom, the bartender a day and several bars ago had told him — and with an eye for working girls. There were several men he had seen who might have fit the description, but none of them had turned out to be Papadopoulos. He felt the weight of the girl’s expectation beside him and turned, unwillingly, and said, ‘Here and there.’

  ‘Here and there,’ she said flatly, repeating him, and he shrugged. ‘All about,’ he said.

  ‘All about,’ she said, imitating him. Her hand grasped his on the counter; her fingers were long and brown and strong where they held him. He faced her. He wondered if the bleached blonde hair was a wig. She had very full lips. They seemed soft, but her eyes were hard. ‘Everybody comes from somewhere,’ she said.

  He turned from her and looked away, at the swaying drunken couples and the solitary drinkers slouched on the bar. Candle-light flickered in an unseen, unfelt breeze. There was nothing beyond the windows. He spoke very quietly then, his lips barely moving, speaking to no one but the emptiness of this compressed world, and it was as if he didn’t even know that he was speaking. ‘Then where do we come from?’ he said. He turned to her, but she was not looking at him any more. She too was looking away. ‘And where do we go?’

  She was crying. Her face was turned away from him; her glass was empty. Her hands were withdrawn, closing her off from him; they were a screen to shelter her.

  They didn’t speak. When she took away her hands her makeup had run, but she seemed not to notice, or care. She said, ‘Is that why you are looking for him? You think he could lead you? Where? Forward or…or back?’

  He didn’t know what she meant and he didn’t reply, but he offered her a cigarette and she accepted and he lit it for her, and one for himself, and signalled for a drink, the actions reduced to ritual between them, something established, a pattern worked out. There was comfort in ritual. ‘I need to find Papadopoulos,’ he said, and then, looking at her face as he spoke — ‘Papa D.’

  The girl, flatly: ‘I haven’t seen him.’

  ‘No,’ Joe agreed. ‘I haven’t seen him either. But you must know where he stays? Did you ever go back with him to his place?’

  He had some hope as he was saying the words but the girl merely shook her head and looked tired. She said, ‘I don’t know where he lives. If he can afford a girl he never goes far. There are cheap rooms. I don’t know where he lives.’

  ‘Would you tell me if you knew?’

  The girl shook her head again. When she looked at him he felt trapped: he could not move away. The large brown eyes examined him, stripping him down without emotion, looking inside, a doctor checking for tell-tale signs of a terminal disease. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why should I? He never did us any harm. And he cares, Joe. He cares. Life isn’t a pulp novel, Joe, and death isn’t either.’ And she got up and threw her head back and downed the drink, the last drink, and put down the glass on the counter and walked away, and he watched her, and it was another ritual established, another pattern followed, agreed upon, comforting. They both needed comfort, not of sex or even drink but of a reason, any reason, and in the absence of that there were only empty rituals. And the door closed behind her and the couples danced, seeking warmth in each other’s bodies, and the slow recorded jazz played on, and the smoke from Joe’s cigarette formed Lazarus castles in the air, grey and insubstantial, and he thought, I never told her my name.

  into Monceau

  ——

  The next morning he was stationed at the post office again but this time he wasn’t watching for the man. He was only watching the post box. Joe was a tourist. He was buying stamps. He engaged a teller in a long conversation on first day covers; he chose and replaced postcards; he spoke terrible French, but was determined to make use of it for conversation; when he couldn’t make himself understood, he resorted to speaking loudly and slowly in English; he wrote out long messages to absent friends, scribbling them on postcards, leaning on the counter, saying to everyone how beautiful he thought the city was; in short, he made himself a nuisance of the kind that was happy, it was clear to everyone in sight, to remain at the place all day.

  It was lucky for all concerned that the boy came a mere one hour and fifteen minutes after the post office opened.

  Joe had almost missed him. The boy had brown hair and dark skin and he was small and he went unremarked through the adults who came to check their mail. He carried a small brown bag on a strap on his shoulder. Joe had hardly paid him attention, the small, shy figure passing through the cavernous hall of waiting boxes, going to one end of a row of boxes—

  There.

  For just a moment, there was post in the boy’s hands. Envelopes. A small package. A couple of single-sheet flyers. And then they were gone into the small brown bag and the boy turned to leave. No one could have seen him.

  And, to the relief of the employees of the Avenue Hausmann branch of La Poste, the annoying tourist with the bad French and Parisian manners had suddenly lost interest in the display of pre-independence Algerian stamps he had been giving so much noisy attention to in the past quarter of an hour, and with only a brief merci had finally and rather unexpectedly left the premises.

  Joe was relieved, too. Focusing attention on himself came hard to him, almost as a physical exertion, an actual sense of discomfort, as if to draw these people’s attention was to bodily grab them, and do so while moving through a viscous, gelatinous liquid that was resisting and restricting his movements. It was a strange feeling, and it left him, as he in turn finally left, light-headed and a little disoriented. As he walked down the wide avenue it seemed unreal to him, the cars moving along seeming like translucent crawling beetles, and the trees were hands, raised into the sky with fists that opened and closed, and as he looked at them he could see their veins, a map of blood vessels traversing the stump of a hand. He tried to shake the feeling away. He needed sugar, he thought. He felt like a man who had given blood: he needed coffee, a slice of cake, and he would be fine. Instead he lit a cigarette and coughed, and kept his eyes on the boy and his distance from him, and worried about who else might be following.

  For it occurred to him that he was not alone. There had been someone — perhaps several someones — watching him in Vientiane, and in Paris too he got echoes of them, nothing concrete, nothing established, but little echoes coming back a little off, a tone of voice, the way an answer had been phrased — too smoothly, too quickly, as if the person being questioned had had occasion to formulate the answer before. There could have been someone else on the same trail, they could even be using Joe — it was a possibility he didn’t like to contemplate, but there it was, and so he worried, and smoked, and followed the boy at a distance, and at the same time watched for a tail, but he could see no one following, and it occurred to him how ridiculous he was being, and yet—

  They had shot at him. And perhaps it was merely a warning shot, but they were watching him, he had to go on the assumption that they were, whoever they were, whatever they wanted — and it occurred to him that, sooner or later, he would have to find out. The boy meanwhile was walking along with no care in the world, an anonymous, small brown boy, turning away from Avenue Hausmann, going north, Joe following, the road becoming narrower and quieter, and when he looked in the reflection of shop windows he could still see nothing and no one behind. It was a hot
day. The cigarette had scorched his fingers and he had dropped it and now he was sweating, and still the boy was going ahead with the mail meant for someone else, until at last he had crossed a road and disappeared into a green grassy space, and Joe paused: it was the back of the Parc Monceau.

  He hesitated before going in, and he didn’t know why. He had never been there before, and yet it felt as if he had. The knowledge of a memory, rather than the memory itself, nagged at him. He knew the park, without quite knowing how or why he knew it.

  He walked down the tree-lined Avenue Ruysdaël, and into Monceau.

  fabriques

  ——

  It was a small green place, a little self-contained bubble of a world inside, and yet away from, the city proper. On a bench in the grass an elderly man sat, slowly eating a sandwich. The man seemed entirely occupied with the laborious process of eating. He brought the baguette to his mouth and took a bite from it, nibbling the sides so that they were equal, then brought the baguette down again to the off-white napkin spread on his knees, and chewed. He chewed with great concentration, all teeth involved in the process, while his hands held the partially-eaten baguette over his knees and his eyes stared into space, grey bushy eyebrows moving up and down with the rhythm of his eating. At last the man swallowed, waited, allowed the food to travel before lifting the sandwich again and repeating the process.

  Joe continued to follow the boy, but more with his eyes. The boy had been there before. He knew his way through the quiet. Joe wished it were the same for him. There were curious structures dotted around the park. There was a Chinese fort. There was a Dutch windmill. There were Corinthian pillars. And the word came to Joe as he followed the boy’s progress towards — yes — the miniature, brick-made Egyptian pyramid that sat nestled under the trees.

  The word was fabriques. Those things, those structures erected in Moceau in miniature, were things made to resemble the real, but not real in themselves. They were architectural fabrications, an invented scenographic landscape: they were lies, constructed for the purpose of art — but they were not real, Joe thought. They were not real. The park was a fictional space in the midst of the city. Outside it buildings were erected by the forces of commerce, by the human need for habitation — by the dual forces of greed and need. And the buildings were there for a reason, and people lived inside them, worked inside them, slept and ate and fucked and died inside them, and made the city, the space where people lived, real and substantial, just as the park was not. He stopped and stared out across the grass at the mottled grey and white pyramid, and he saw that as the boy went around it and came out the other side, his brown shoulder bag was gone, and he almost smiled. He followed the boy’s progress, standing still on the grass, and listened to the quiet. A couple was walking, hand in hand, and the girl wore a summer dress, though it was not yet summer, and when she turned her head, for a just a moment, he thought about his client, the woman who had hired him, and he felt something he couldn’t put into words, but which hurt, and he turned away from the couple.

  Statues littered the small park. The figures of still and silent men, frozen in pose, staring out to the distance, men who once moved and loved and laughed: Chopin, his fingers still, his music dead, and Maupassant, whose frozen fingers could no longer write but, of course, they were not real either: they were the replica of the men who composed music and words, but not real: they too were fabriques.

  The English word for fabrique was folly, and Joe wondered what it meant, that difference in languages. Was it really folly, to exist in a world that was a fabrication, that was not real, but only made to seem it? Or did existence itself count for something, the statues, though not real, nevertheless existing as a reminder of what had been before, markers of memory in the terrain of shadows and half-truths that was the past? As he circled the park he was checking the lanes, the people passing, watching for watchers, for anyone who may have followed him, for shadows that shouldn’t have been there — and then he didn’t have far to look because they came directly at him, three of them, and they were smiling, which was never, Joe reflected, a good sign.

  There were three of them and they wore black suits that must have been new once, and black ties that made them look like undertakers or — to take a word from the pulps — the mob, but they were neither, and another word from the pulp novels came into Joe’s head, and it was G-men.

  They smelled like government. They came up to him and stood around him in a loose semi-circle and they were grinning as at a long-lost friend. The one in the middle had greying hair and was the oldest of the three. The ones on either side of him were younger, black hair slicked back: the one on the left had a small discreet scar running down his right eye like a tear. ‘Joe, Joe, Joe,’ the one in the middle said. ‘What are you getting up to?’

  ‘Do I know you?’ He was less tense than perhaps they thought he should be. But he had expected them, expected someone to be there, sooner or later, and their coming had almost been a relief. They could have been the ones from Vientiane, but somehow he didn’t think so. They were watchers, yes, but he thought they didn’t like to watch: they liked to control.

  ‘Does he know us?’ Grey Hair said, turning to the other two, who Joe had decided were merely the muscle. It was the one in the middle he had to listen to — and the others to watch out for. ‘I don’t think he does,’ the one on the left said.

  ‘Maybe we should talk louder,’ the one on the right said.

  ‘Or maybe he should listen harder,’ the man with the grey hair said.

  ‘Should I?’ Joe said, ignoring them.

  ‘Should you what?’ the man with the grey hair said, as if oblivious.

  ‘Should I know you?’

  Grey Hair shook his head. ‘No reason why you should,’ he said. Then: ‘It will go better for you if you merely listen.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ Joe said. He wondered if he could take all three of them — or if he could outrun them. He glanced at the muscle on the right and saw the bulge of a gun under the once-new jacket.

  ‘He’s listening,’ Grey Hair said, and nodded, and said, ‘Did you hear that, boys? He’s being very gracious to us.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Joe said. Grey Hair nodded.

  The punch came from his left and sank into his kidneys and the pain was unbearable and then he was hit in the small of the back and his legs were kicked out from under him and he fell, the two muscle boys holding him, lowering him almost gently to the ground. Grey Hair kneeled beside him. ‘We’ll be dealing with all of you, sooner or later,’ he said. Joe moaned. Grey Hair slapped him. ‘Pay attention!’ he said. Joe tried to focus. The man was a grey blur above him. ‘Go back, Joe, go back to your little hidey-hole and your make-believe play-pen and stay out of trouble. Only kids want to play detective. And kids should know when to do what they’re told.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Joe said. The words bubbled out of his mouth. His lips felt covered in saliva, thick and stringy, and he couldn’t wipe it off.

  ‘The name would mean nothing to you,’ the man said. Joe realised that he had an American accent, as did his two assistants. ‘You stink of government,’ he said. Grey Hair nodded again, and the pain that shot through Joe’s right side made him arch his back and moan again. ‘It’s nothing personal, Joe,’ Grey Hair said. His voice was soft, surprisingly gentle. He reached down and touched Joe’s hair, smoothing it. His touch made Joe flinch. ‘We are only concerned with the greater good. I won’t tell you again, after this. Stay away.’

  Grey Hair stood up. The two men either side of him rose too. From Joe’s perspective on the ground they looked like shadows, hovering above him, the black of their clothes contrasting with the whiteness of their skin until they seemed to him, for just a moment, like ghosts.

  He wasn’t fast enough. He saw the shadow on the left move, but it moved too fast, and its foot connected with the side of Joe’s body and he thought he heard a bone crack through the pain. Then they left him.

  cheap suit
s and American voices

  ——

  He was interested not in the mail but in who came to collect it, but more than that, he resented being worked over before lunch. When the men left Joe remained on the ground for a long time, staring up at a blue-grey sky where clouds wrapped themselves into the shapes of pyramids and windmills, a backdrop as false as the one below. His ribs hurt, and his mouth had the warm salt taste of seawater or blood.

  No one approached him. There were few people in the park and none had come over. At last he rolled over, groaning, and rose to his knees, and then he was sick all over the grass.

  When he felt well enough to stand he did so, and the world spun. It was a curious sensation. He would fix his eyes on a point in space and they would move of their own accord, swinging away from it. Again, he would focus, anchor his vision in a concrete spot, only for his eyes to betray him and swim away again. He steadied himself against the trunk of a tree and took deep breaths, and at last the world began to settle again. Cheap suits and American voices, he thought, and something else too — what were they afraid of?

  He went with unsteady steps and sat down in view of the pyramid. It felt good to sit down. The pyramid had a small opening at the bottom, an empty doorway jutting out from the main structure. The bricks were mottled browns and greens descending to a grey-white closer to the ground. There were two decorated stone urns outside it. He thought the boy had deposited his bag inside the opening of the pyramid, but he was in no hurry to go and check. He fished out his packet of cigarettes and was dismayed to see it was crumpled. Nevertheless he shook one out and straightened it as best he could and lit it, and drew the smoke into his lungs with a shuddering breath, and held it still for a long moment before exhaling. The pyramid was a dead letter box. He watched it and listened to the sounds of traffic in the distance, and breathed in smoke and the smell of the trees. There were more clouds overhead now and he could feel the rain coming, and when it did the drops were soothing on his skin and he raised his head and opened his mouth to trap the drops; his tongue felt swollen. He turned his head as a ray of light shone down through the clouds, touching the ground on the far side of the pyramid, and for just a moment he thought he saw her again, the girl who had come to him, wavering there between the sun and the raindrops, looking at him, and then she was gone and took the sun with her. His head hurt and he knew he should leave and go back to his hotel but he persisted and then he saw Papa D’s other courier and felt little surprise, more like a suspicion confirmed: it was the girl from the bar, and she was wavering a little unsteadily across the bare-ground path to the pyramid, and when she arrived she reached inside and her hand came back with the small brown bag. She slung it over her shoulder and then paused and pulled out a small flask from a coat pocket and unscrewed the top and took a deep pull before screwing the top back shut and secreting it away in her coat. She wore a long black coat that reached almost to her feet and a wool hat over her hair and she didn’t look around her as she began to walk away.