Souls in the Twilight

by Roger Scruton

  “You will understand, my dear Mr. Strickland, how interesting our position is to you and your readers. We are the only community of the Holy Catholic Church which is deeply familiar with Islamic society, with Islamic thought and Islamic law and with the language which expresses them. Islam does not recognize Christ the Saviour or the Virgin Mary or the Trinity, and therefore our dialogue with it remains, how shall we say, an existential dialogue—a dialogue of life but not of concepts. We continue to say no to Islam and shall always say no. We recognize the freedom of every conscience, the dignity of both men and women, and the equality of citizens before the law. None of these are recognized by Islam. But we have no desire to fight with our Muslim brothers, and are being pushed into this confrontation by powers which have everything to gain from extinguishing the Christian religion in our country. That is why we need your help.”

  Looking down from his extra-terrestrial regions, Harold foresaw nothing but disaster from this meeting; just as he had foreseen nothing but disaster from his meeting with Sarah. But he goaded his terrestrial self into a simulacrum of acceptance and promised to write the truth in the Daily Monitor.

  “But first you must visit my country. My friends are waiting. You will have everything you need.”

  “I am grateful.”

  “It is for us to be grateful. I should add that your visit will be entirely unofficial. It is safer that way.”

  “Unofficial?”

  “There will be no record of your entry or exit, no papers, nothing that might arouse the slightest interest among our enemies. I trust you agree to this.”

  Abu Tariq delivered the words in his accustomed monotone, which seemed to leave little room for dissent. Harold saw himself accept the terms with a burst of relief, for it would be easier to deprive Judy of information if his mission were clandestine. Yet this too, he knew instinctively, was inviting disaster.

  “You will fly by helicopter from Larnaca. Our friends will show you what you need to see.”

  And so it was arranged. The day before their departure, Sarah left a letter for him.

  Nobody but you could have arranged this. It will change my life and I shall never regret it. You are the only person who really exists for me. When we reach that church on the yellow hilltop, I shall know everything. I don’t believe in God or angels, but an angel is with me when we are together. I shall never be a trouble to you, and when we get back, you can tell me to go away.

  They found the church on the hill, and it was just as Sarah had dreamed. The priest who stood in the stone porch, his breast pierced by a bullet, cried out as they approached—though whether with a curse or a blessing they could not tell, since his words were lost in the blood-swollen sobs that were the last sounds he uttered. The man who had shot the priest was their guide, to whom they had been handed by the soldiers of the Christian militia in Souq-el-gharb. Harold’s fear, which had never abated since the helicopter landed under a hail of machine gun fire in a ruined garden near Beirut, had formed a tight and immovable knot at the sight of Guillaume, as the guide styled himself. Thin, gaunt, bearded, with crazed, sunken eyes and a constant film of sweat on his upper lip, Guillaume was a young man in his mid-twenties, but with an old man’s fixed expression and unyielding manner. He refused to look at Sarah, or to shake hands with Harold, but simply nodded in their direction as he negotiated with the militia soldiers who had brought them by jeep from the city. With neither a smile nor a farewell to anyone, he ordered Harold and Sarah, with a wave of the hand, to follow him. They found themselves in the cabin of an army lorry, which bumped along the pot-marked highway into the shouf. After thirty minutes of silence, Guillaume turned to Harold and informed him in idiomatic English that he was now a guest of Islamic Jihad. Sarah gripped his arm. Outside, in the April twilight, the silvery grasslands of the shouf sped past the window. The scattered villages of stone, with their square flat Maronite churches and white-washed concrete villas had been abandoned, and many of the buildings lay in heaps by the roadside.

  “I don’t understand,” said Harold, who understood only too well. “We were guests of the Tamzin Christian militia.”

  “You think so?” Guillaume answered.

  “I know so. They brought us from Cyprus.”

  Guillaume swerved to avoid an old woman who was picking her way along the road in the twilight, leading a donkey piled high with wood.

  “Everyone in this country has his price, Mr Strickland. Everyone except Islamic Jihad. We are the incorruptibles. You will learn much during your time with us.”

  “You make it sound as though I shall be with you for quite a while.”

  “As long as you are useful to us.”

  “And my friend here?”

  “She is useful too. It will make an interesting story in your newspapers.”

  Harold thought of Judy and the inevitable impact of this front-page news. He glanced at Sarah’s pale face, and was overcome with astonishment, that he should have so artlessly brought this ruin on them all. That night, as they tried to sleep in a ruined cellar, at the door of which a guard with a machine gun murmured soporific verses from the Koran, Sarah broke her silence.

  “It doesn’t matter what they do to me and my family, I mean, they don’t know anything or care about me anyway. So when you can, you go, that’s best, and I’ll delay them. I know it can be done.”

  He reached out and she grasped his hand. This faint, uncertain character, he knew, lived for its sudden excesses. He did not doubt that she intended another one, though how could it be done? He knew, as he lay on the bed of straw, shifting beneath the coarse military blanket that Guillaume had thrown to him, that Sarah was dispensable—that she had been sent to him precisely so that he could cast her off. And without Judy he might as well become another hostage in this land of hostages, swallowed by the animosity that grows in the no-man’s land between religions. His one thought was to return to Judy and erase this winter of mistakes.

  When Guillaume drove off the Damascus road and stopped beneath the slight hill on which the village of Kafr el ‘Ain had been scattered as though dropped from the sky, Sarah turned to Harold with an elated expression.

  “This is the place in my dream,” she said.

  They were ordered down from the cabin and marched towards the church. A shot was fired behind them, and Harold fell to the ground. But it was not repeated, and when he raised his eyes, it was to see Sarah walking calmly towards the priest, who was panting out his life in the porch, his blue Melkite robes encumbering his limbs as he struggled.

  Guillaume called on her to stop and began to run after her. She quickened her step, and another shot rang out as she reached the porch and plunged out of sight inside. Guillaume continued to run, beckoning to Harold and cursing in Arabic. As he disappeared into the church, Harold turned and walked, slowly at first, but then with a quickening step, towards the lorry. The keys were still on the dashboard. He had turned the vehicle round before another shot rang out, smashing the passenger window.

  The road to Souq-el-Gharb was sign-posted in French and Arabic. At a crossroads, someone in military uniform waved him down; Harold made a gesture indicating urgency, and the soldier dropped his weapon. Within half an hour he had entered Souq-el-Gharb, where he abandoned the lorry and began the long steep descent to the suburbs on foot. A car slowed down and moved beside him: two young men with guns eyed him curiously from the back of it. He walked on, ignoring them. The car sped away, and was replaced by a military jeep sporting the Palestinian flag. Its open back contained a riot of young people in student dress, holding automatic weapons which they fired into the air as they passed.

  At last he reached a group of drab concrete shops, in front of which people seemed to be queuing for a bus. He collapsed on to the muddy ground beside them and waited, his feelings numb with anguish and shame.

  In his account to the British Ambassador that afternoon, he made no mention of Sarah and was reproached only for his peccadillo in entering such a cou
ntry without a visa and in trusting to the friends of the notorious Nabil Abu Tariq.

  Inside the parcel was a porcelain panel in a gold frame; painted upon it, in a Disneyish kitsch, were St. George and St. Elias, the patron saints of Lebanon. Harold sat down abruptly, pale and troubled. He did not know who had sent it, for it had been posted in Germany, and bore no return address.

  “I must do something,” he said. “I must go back.”

  “But why does it trouble you so?”

  Harold looked at Judy with a desolate expression. His hands clenched and unclenched in his lap as he told the story. He described a Melkite church on a hill above the shouf, where an attempt had been made to kidnap him. To this place he had come through deserted villages, where murdered Christians lay in collective graves beside the sacked remains of their churches. It was the last outpost of our world, the shabby corner from which the web of Europe, he said, will one day be unravelled, but where the threads are still patiently rejoined each day. The path through the village was pitted by mortar shells, and the blasted vaults of Ottoman houses lay open to the spring rain, which gathered in pools where families groaned and died. Here and there in the ruined village, a candle burned beneath an icon like the one she held. A walled garden kept by nuns served the few survivors. Gourds hung on mangled carob trees, and goats, chickens, ducks, and rabbits were crammed into a tiny enclave, protected by shrapnel-torn sandbags from which the red sand dribbled like blood. He spoke briskly of the murdered priest in the porch of the church, and of his flight down the hillside, as the “Islamo-progressivist” militia made its presence known from the windows of the crumbling convent.

  “Maybe those nuns are no longer alive. But they have been witnesses, seamstresses of the moral fabric. In some obscure way, we depend on them. Take them away, and there will be nothing left of our civilisation save a ghoulish pretence.”

  His story was odd, full of lacunae, but she accepted it as an explanation of his anguish, and begged him to take her with him, when next he should go. The flow of her love soothed and softened him; the pinched expression released its grip, and his face lay slowly calmer beneath her caresses. He let his head fall into her lap, and her hands were wet with tears. Without me, she thought, he is lost. And the thought made her happy.

  Their journey was slow, confused, and uncomfortable; only five minutes before it sailed for Junieh were they granted a cabin on the ferry that plied from Larnaca. And the militia jeep which took them from the docks to the suburban bunker had room only for one beside the driver, so that Judy had to sit on Harold’s lap, her neck bent at 90 degrees to her neck beneath the metal roof, as the driver gunned the machine down ruined alleys, and swerved around the craters and pot-holes that littered the streets. She collapsed on the bunk when they arrived, but was ashamed of her exhaustion. The coarse blankets smelled of urine, and the one blocked lavatory disgusted her so that she was ashamed too of her disgust. To prove herself, she insisted on going with Harold to the Green Line, where ignorant armies faced each other with grievances too old and dark to be stated in words.

  On their second day, the jeep was larger, so that they could sit side by side. They were nosing down a pitted street, between old stone houses with delicate ogee arches, standing in sandbags like bath-robed beauties in their padded slippers. Behind the street, an office block had collapsed in a pile of concrete trays, from which the twisted iron fingers reached aloft imploringly. They were approaching the Green Line; the bustle of Beirut had subsided, and the streets were empty except for the few people, too old or poor to move out of danger, who scraped a ratty life among the ruins. A mile away, in Ashrafiyeh, a plume of black smoke billowed upwards into the clear blue sky, flattening out suddenly and speeding horizontally towards the shore. Judy prayed that the shell had fallen far from the car-park that they had visited, in whose concrete layers families had been crowded into cots, each with a candle-lit Madonna, and the icons of St. George and St. Elias, to safeguard what was left of home. As the shells landed in the streets nearby, the walls of the car-park flexed closer together and then recoiled again, as though a giant were cautiously prodding the sandbagged exterior with his toe. The women greeted the visitors with cardamom coffee cooked on a primus stove and pushed their groomed children into presentable lines. In their slow-moving Levantine eyes she saw Harold’s face reflected, and the hope which sparked in their weary faces mirrored the hope and trust in her soul. The exhilaration of his presence was more reward than she had ever expected. She felt herself completely joined to Harold, and in the midst of the danger and the suffering, a song of love and triumph hummed in her veins. Her pity for these helpless refugees became the supreme vindication of her marriage.

  He sat beside her in the jeep, his face gauzed with purpose as they approached the barricaded alleys of the Green Line: shipping containers, burned-out buses, rolling stock from the defunct coastal railway, built in Ottoman times—all had been heaped in crazy jagged piles, on which the rifle bullets slapped and ricocheted. As they entered the demarcation zone, the jeep spurted forward at full speed, the shots cracking in the air above them. A mortar-bomb exploded behind them as they darted across an exposed corner, and a few shards of shrapnel clattered on to the roof. Their destination was a narrow side-street, from which an alley wound between crumbling houses of stone and stucco into a little garden of shattered jasmine trees.

  A broken door beneath a vine-clad roof yielded to Harold’s shoulder, and they fell from the blazing sunlight into darkness. She made out the forms of old people lying on mattresses and wrapped in dirty sheets, their clay-like limbs protruding shapelessly from the mounds of off-white linen. The young militiaman who had shown them to the door stood guarding it in the shadow-streaked sunlight, his eyes registering no emotion as he scanned the nearby ruins, cradling his automatic across his tiny stomach. His hairless olive face, which had never known childhood, caught the rays of the sun and glowed like a lamp.

  Even these people, so ruined that they are forced to live in the cross-fire, endeavour to rise at the approach of visitors, to make signs of welcome, and to beckon for the coffee that will prove them worthy of their guests—although they are beckoning only to ghosts. A smell of sweat, urine, and rotting fruit clouded the air like stale incense, and the constant murmured greeting—ahlan wa sahlan, ahlan wa sahlan—formed a dirge in the background. Judy looked at Harold. He was offering comfort to an old woman who held his hand and who twisted her toothless gums in a smile. It was typical of him that he had troubled to learn of this desolate refuge in the heart of war, that he had wanted to come, and that he was now beginning to record the old woman’s needs in his battered pocketbook. A burst of machine gun fire ripped through the trees outside with a tearing sound, and somewhere higher up the hillside, a bomb went off with a desolate thud like a fallen statue.

  A woman was moving in the shadows. She seemed young, awkward, and uncertain of herself. As she came forwards, limping slightly into the half-light, Judy noticed that her right arm hung paralyzed at her side, like the arm of a rag doll. She wore a long smock of grey serge, tucked up at the waist into a belt of string. Her face was pale, her eyes grey, wide and staring, and there was something in her posture that suggested a religious novice or a student nurse—something submissive, pious, and expectant. Harold looked up from his notebook and caught sight of the girl. The gauze of purpose was ripped from his face, and a look of terror burst like a bomb across it.

  “Sarah!”

  The girl stopped.

  “You,” she said softly, as though answering a question. Then she turned and let her eyes rest on Judy. It was a look neither of curiosity nor of assessment. It addressed Judy as a fact, a fact of the same order of magnitude as Harold, as Beirut, as the war. In those clear English eyes, Judy saw neither emotion nor judgement, but a simple recognition of herself, as the woman with Harold. But she saw something else—an abyss of misfortune and suffering into which she herself was falling.

  She turned with a question
ing look to Harold, who was standing rooted to the spot and silent. He took a step in the girl’s direction.

  “I thought you were dead.”

  His voice was dry, flat, beaten down by emotion.

  “No such luck,” the girl replied. She was holding on to a chair with her left hand, and her body swayed slightly, as though she found difficulty in standing. “I wanted to, while it was going on and the pain was worse every second, die I mean, and then I could because of you.”

  The short speech seemed to exhaust the girl, who panted for breath and leaned more heavily on the chair.

  “But you escaped,” said Harold. And this too, Judy saw, was a great misfortune.

  “There were heaps of them, adventures, only I didn’t think I would. See you again, I mean.”

  “Harold, what is this?”

  Judy’s cry awoke him from his trance.

  “I—I’ll tell you later. We must get you back to England,” he went on, addressing the girl. She answered with a whispered breeze of laughter.

  “You mean you want to stay?”

  “This is the only place,” she replied after a pause. “And there is no more in me except this thing here that’s good. Who’s she?”

  The girl nodded at Judy with a gesture that in any other person would have been rude and dismissive, but which had the same harmless matter-of-fact quality as her every look and word.

  “She—well, she’s my wife.”

  “Oh, then you’re married. Were you always married?”

  Harold suddenly covered his face with his hands.

  “Sarah,” he groaned. He turned and began walking to the door.

  “Was he always married?” The girl addressed the question now to Judy.

  “We’ve been married for two years. Why do you ask?”

  “Nobody except him deserves it, though, to be happy,” the girl said, as though to herself. She subsided into the chair, and with a careful gesture lifted her right hand with her left, and let it fall into her lap. And then she sat still, looking nowhere in particular, as though waiting for whatever they had planned for her. Harold turned at the door and addressed the room with an imploring look. “Ahlan wa sahlan,” came mechanically from one of the beds; an old man tried in vain to raise himself on his elbow and then collapsed with a sigh; the girl did not move.