This Eden

by Ed O’Loughlin

  Michael, she said.

  After a while he turned and faced her.

  It’s OK, she said.

  What is?

  She crooked her left thigh and laid it over his knee, feeling sweat-softened denim, coarse on her skin.

  His arm came around, rested on the small of her back.

  I shouldn’t, he said.

  She lifted her head, laid it carefully in the curve of his bicep. The sleeve of his T-shirt had ridden up; his arm there was bare. She wanted to lick it, to taste the salt. We exude things, she thought, because we are mammals.

  This is different, she said.

  But she thought, after they were finished, as he lay beside her, maybe already sleeping, that they’d both been so gentle. It made her feel guilty, which she hadn’t expected. Maybe, she told herself, it was because they were tired. Or maybe it was Alice he’d held in the dark. And so what if it was? She told herself, fiercely, that she owed him that much.

  Part Four:

  Milk and Honey

  The trails that brought the Karamojong to Uganda have existed for longer than mankind itself. They still exist today, if only for the Karamojong, smuggling cattle and guns from the Kenyan frontier.

  Picture two deep ruts in the sand and the gravel, snaking through the dry thorn bush where humanity was born. They pass north of the forests of Mount Moroto, curve to the east through a notch in the escarpment, and then – if the pass isn’t washed out by rain or blocked by fresh rockfalls – plunge down to the floor of the Eastern Rift Valley.

  There are no signposts to mark the border with Kenya, no customs, no garrison, not even a couple of bored policemen with a string across the road. Outsiders rarely cross here, and those who do are expected to present their passports at the nearest police post. If you don’t have a passport, you don’t have this problem.

  *

  Early each morning, a few dozen Toyota pickups appear beside the runway at Wilson Airport, a rustic airstrip on the edge of Nairobi. Their cargo, sacks of green leaves, is tossed into a line-up of old twin-prop aircraft with expired markings, and sometimes no markings at all. The planes take off, turn north. Khat, a herbal amphetamine grown in the Kenyan highlands, begins losing its potency as soon as it is harvested. It has to reach its Somali markets on the same day that it’s picked.

  Their boat had been built for somebody’s navy in some long-ago great power war. It was steel, slab sided, with an open-decked hull. The bow was a flat armoured ramp, designed to be lowered to let troops storm ashore, but it had rusted shut a long time ago, and was now bulling north through a steep and nasty cross-sea, hugging the Red Sea’s African shore.

  The boat was fast, but its bottom, flat and shallow, wasn’t designed for long ocean voyages. Two eyes, painted for luck either side of the bow ramp, washed themselves, turn by turn, with each gut-heaving pitch and roll.

  Aoife leaned over the rail outside the wheelhouse. The fumes from the old petrol engine added to her nausea. And when the wind dropped, or backed into the north, the stench from the cargo made life even worse. Dozens of camels, legs lashed beneath them, filled the bed of the boat, roaring and spitting and shitting and puking.

  When she could look up, every now and then, she would fix her eyes on the hills to the west, shimmering red. They were half a day out of Berbera, where their khat flight had landed. That must be Eritrea off to port, she thought. Or maybe Sudan. If she could only focus on the hills, level her world on them, she might forget to be seasick. Poor Michael lay flat in the scuppers beside her, too far gone to lift his head.

  The door of the wheelhouse opened and Towse came out. He lit his cigarette, smiled.

  Aoife managed to speak:

  You couldn’t get us a better boat than this?

  This boat is perfect. There’s a line of reefs along the Saudi shore. A boat with a deeper draft wouldn’t get over them.

  Why Saudi Arabia?

  He waved a hand at the cargo.

  Camels are Somalia’s main export. And Saudi Arabia is the biggest market – especially during the hajj, for their milk and their meat. But camels can spread a coronavirus. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. It kills one in three people who get it. So now the Saudi market is strictly controlled. Which pushes up the price of camels.

  We’re smuggling cheap camels, that could kill lots of people?

  Our Somali skipper is. He doesn’t want to, but he has no choice. He used to make a decent living as a pirate, but the western insurance firms priced him out of the game. They kept raising the kickbacks they charge on each ransom, until they’d squeezed out his margins. Now he has to flog camels instead.

  Too bad. Why do we want to go to Saudi?

  We don’t. We want to go to Jordan. But if we land in Saudi, our skipper’s clients will sneak us across to Aqaba at night. They’re Bedouin. Howeitat, in fact. Very traditional people. They don’t believe in viruses or borders. In the desert, they still go where they want.

  Why do you always have to drip-feed us your plans, Towse?

  Because I don’t think you’d like them.

  A wheel struck a pothole, Aoife’s head smacked the window, and she woke to the onrushing night. Her neck ached. She straightened it, shook her head, looked around her. Michael had toppled over sideways in his sleep. His head, lolling as the old Mercedes swept through long, fast curves, rested on her thigh. Towse, up front with the driver, peered up to the right. There was a glow on his face from outside the car. He turned to look back at her.

  Moonrise. Now you’ll see something.

  Silver light softened the glare of the headlamps, showed her a slope of grey scree and loose boulders. Another rift valley – or was it the same one, extending infinitely? – and another volcanic escarpment. But here it was grassless, treeless, forgotten by time. She looked to the left, across Michael’s sleeping body, and saw moonlight on water, dancing away from her, then a further escarpment – another line of futile, ageless mountains, grey in the moonlight, marching in parallel.

  Salt flats reached out to the edge of the water, cracked, pocked with sinkholes, hinting at ancient corruption below. Her window let in the smell of old soap, caked in a plug hole.

  That’s the Dead Sea!

  If you’d slept any longer you’d have missed it. We’re almost past its northern end already.

  She’d been through Jordan several times, to get to other places, but she’d never been down to this valley before. There was only one other place you could go to, from here, and she’d never worked there. It was out of bounds.

  Over there, she said. That’s Israel.

  Actually, it’s the West Bank. Occupied Palestinian Territories. But it comes to the same thing, as far as we’re concerned. We have to go through Israeli security to get there.

  Seriously? We’re going there? The Americans are after us. The Israelis work with them.

  They do when it suits them. Sometimes, they don’t. And I have to go to Jerusalem, to pick something up.

  You’re with the Israelis, too?

  That’s a complicated question. But they’ll take us in tonight. I have an old friend waiting for me.

  I don’t doubt they’ll take us in, Towse. Getting out again is the problem.

  They had reached the lowest point on earth, where the Jordan dribbles, polluted, into the Dead Sea. Here, where farming was born and our Golden Age ended, water stolen from the river drags a ten-thousandth crop from exhausted soil: date palms, dusty citrus, fields of sad onions.

  Towse pointed out landmarks in the bright moonlight.

  Those lights in the valley ahead of us, off to the left – that’s Jericho, the oldest city in the world . . . And beyond it – that mountain – that’s the Mount of Temptation. That’s where Satan tried to get Jesus to defect.

  He shook his head.

  Now that was a fucked-up recruitment. You never l
ead off with the bribe . . .

  There was a junction, a road block, men in camouflage uniforms. A Humvee sat under an awning, a soldier pointing the machine gun mounted on its cab.

  Another soldier appeared at the driver’s window, and one beside Towse. They shone lights on Aoife, on Towse, on Michael, who woke. The driver spoke to the soldiers in Arabic. A radio crackled, the men waved them on.

  The Mercedes turned west, off the main highway. There were no fields here, or fruit trees, just desert scrub, barbed wire, and signs, in English and Arabic, warning of mines. The car drove under a steel arch and passed, without slowing, a low, brightly lit terminal building. Ahead, a line of lamps showed a narrow two-lane blacktop, curving west through the brush of this forsaken plain. Another Humvee pulled off the road in front of them, letting them pass. Their car slowed, stopped.

  This is where we get out, Towse said.

  The driver pulled a U-turn, drove back the way he’d come.

  They were standing on a flat concrete bridge, floodlit from either end. Before them was a heavy steel gate, concrete blast walls, a watchtower, and then heaps of broken ground, miniature mesas, the badlands of the valley floor. Beneath the bridge, a stream flowed listless between bullrushes and reeds. It had an estuary smell.

  Towse pointed over the parapet.

  The River Jordan. The spring where John baptised Jesus is right over there.

  He tapped the iron railing.

  Allenby Bridge. It closes at night. Best time to cross.

  The metal gate slid open and a jeep drove out to meet them. The jeep was brown, armoured, empty apart from the driver. He was balding, like Towse, but short and plump, and when he opened his door, Aoife saw that he wore jeans and sneakers and a grey puffer jacket. She also saw the carbine cradled in his lap. He looked at her and at Michael, then at Towse.

  You didn’t tell me you had people with you.

  He spoke English well, though with an accent.

  You can swing it for me, said Towse. I found that thing for you. Remember?

  The man jerked a thumb.

  OK. Get in. But I don’t want any introductions.

  Towse opened the back door, showed Aoife and Michael into the jeep. Then he got in the front, turned back to them.

  This is Captain Jones, by the way. Jones – meet Rose and John.

  The driver, who’d been letting the clutch out, put his foot down again.

  Go fuck yourself, Tavass.

  Towse grinned at Aoife and Michael.

  Tavass is just a nom de guerre, he said.

  So is Jones, said their driver. And I’m not a captain anymore, either. I’ve been promoted.

  I know, said Towse. Thanks to me.

  Jerusalem, a small and unimportant town in every way but one, sits in a notch in the hills between the sea and the Jordan. To the east of the Old City, screening it from the dawn, is the high stony ridge that is called, in many different languages, the Mount of Olives. A neck of land connects it to an even higher northern spur, known for thousands of years – in Canaanite, Hebrew, Coptic, Aramaic, Persian, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Frankish, Turkish and English – by some variation on the same meaning: lookout mountain. In English, we call it Mount Scopus. The Egyptians and Persians camped on its summit, and the Romans and Arabs and Crusaders and Turks, then Allenby’s army and the Zionist Haganah, to mention a few.

  Let’s approach Mount Scopus from the east, climbing from the Jordan valley, in a taxi that is driven by a man who is not a taxi driver, whose real name we don’t want to know, and who has tucked his M4 carbine between his knee and the door. Let’s watch, red in the dawn, the rocky hills on either side of us, the Judaean Desert, God’s abandoned building site, ugly as mine spoil, with stony tracks to the left and right, disappearing into badlands of hillocks and ravines, leading to military firing ranges, to Bedouin villages condemned to demolition, and to hilltop trailers from which the latest brood of cyclical fanatics, like the zealots and anchorites and stylites who preceded them, look down on the world in fear and contempt.

  Now the summit of Mount Scopus looms over our taxi. From its crest, Ofrit Camp, an Israeli army listening post, squints into the dawn with its parabolic dishes, towards Jordan, Syria, Iraq and, beyond that, Iran. For twenty years after 1948 the summit of Mount Scopus, containing the Hebrew University and the Hadassah Hospital, was a besieged Israeli enclave in Jordanian-held territory. After the 1967 war, when Israel seized everything west of the Jordan, it built Ofrit Camp outside the boundary of that former enclave, in what was now the occupied West Bank. Jerusalem itself, then and now, is a disputed city under international law, officially belonging to no one, yet. So Ofrit is nested in several ambiguities, not entirely anywhere, a black hole on the hillside, sucking in data, emitting no light. Its military staff handles cyberwar, signals intelligence, online surveillance, stuff like that. There are other people on site too, unacknowledged –

  American staffers from the No Such Agency, the Never Say Anything, the Maryland Corporation. They, more than anyone, aren’t really here.

  Look up at Ofrit’s eyes and ears, at those graceful steel bowls in which dawn is reflected, at gantries and antennae, black against the morning sky. And now our taxi disappears into the road tunnel, brightly lit, that takes Route 1 under Mount Scopus. When it emerges, two minutes later, we’re in modern Jerusalem, with its early-morning cars.

  *

  I’ll have to let you out here, said the man who wasn’t a captain and wasn’t called Jones. I’ll get the thing from Ofrit and come back for you.

  They were on the southernmost curve of the road that loops around the top of Mount Scopus. To the north rose a sheer retaining wall, and, above that again, the yellow stone blocks of the Hebrew University. To the south, a stand of conifers and bay trees, grit scattered with pine cones, and then the steep drop into Wadi al-Joz.

  Pull over, said Towse. We’ll wait for you here.

  Jones reached into the glovebox, pulled out an ID attached to a lanyard, hung it round his neck. He left the back, which was blank, facing outward.

  I’ll be about twenty minutes.

  They stood, orphaned, in the fresh morning air. It was the first time in days that Aoife had felt cold. She rather liked it. Towse led them across the pavement, through a gap in a low wall and into the trees, where it smelled of pine needles and rosemary. The hillside fell away before them. The Old City of Jerusalem was spread out below.

  Who is that guy, Towse?

  Someone who owes me a favour. I helped him find something that he’d lost.

  Towse smirked to himself, then recalled where he was.

  That doesn’t matter. While we’re up here, let me show you the view.

  Towse waved his left arm.

  Over there is the famous Mount of Olives. Those white arches you see are the Mormon University. The Mormons get to have a whole college in Jerusalem, but my Raëlian pals can’t have one little alien embassy. Fucking Abrahamic bias . . . I wouldn’t mind, but Abraham was an alien too . . .

  He moved his hand to the right.

  Over there, that tower on the hill is the Chapel of the Ascension. That’s the exact spot where Jesus ascended into heaven. Assuming that Jesus was Russian Orthodox . . .

  He lit a cigarette, puffed, exhaled, coughed, recommenced. He sounded bored.

  Beyond that is the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. If you can get yourself a grave there, you have a ringside seat at doomsday. Because down there, beneath the cemetery, between the Mount of Olives and the Old City, is the Valley of Jehoshaphat. That’s where God will assemble and judge all the nations of the earth. Good luck with that, nations of the earth.

  He moved his hand south.

  That big yellow thing is the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock, Mosque of Omar, Haram esh-Sharif, whatever you want to call it yourself. The Western Wall is beyond it, but you
can’t see it from here. Then there’s the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which they’ll tell you is built on the hill of Golgotha. And that, down there, is the Damascus Gate – I like the Damascus Gate, because it really is a gate, and it does face Damascus . . . Beyond the Old City, in that falling ground, is the Wadi Nar, the valley of fire. It runs east, past Bethlehem, down to the Dead Sea. And just down there to the right, where that tram is running, is the old Green Line between East and West Jerusalem. The Green Line doesn’t exist anymore. Unless you happen to be an Arab.

  You don’t seem to like this place much, said Michael.

  I spent a lot of time here.

  He pointed at the road beside them. Cars sighed past at intervals –

  early birds, heading to work.

  This road, here, is called Martin Buber Street. Buber was an existentialist philosopher. But a religious existentialist, not the fun kind. He used to teach here.

  Are you the fun kind of existentialist, Towse?

  I’d like to think so, Aoife.

  He pointed at the sheer, fortress-like buildings of the university.

  I used to do research here, if that’s what you can call it. For my war games. I worked mostly in the university, but I also had an arrangement with the Israeli army. Sometimes I’d pop across the road to Ofrit, to use their mainframes. And sometimes I’d go for walks around Mount Scopus, to remind myself what the world looks like in analogue.

  He raised two fingers.

  I used to walk around Mount Scopus twice, a mile and a half in each direction. Ideally, I’d have preferred to go around three times –

  I don’t like even numbers – but twice one-point-five is three miles, and that’s an odd number, and also a good distance to walk. It took me an hour. I don’t like to walk fast . . .

  You don’t seem to like to do anything fast, Towse.

  One time, my head was particularly fuzzy. I’d been up here on the mountain for seven days straight, working on an especially difficult problem. Free will, as it happens. I needed a break. So I walked twice around the mountain. But this time I didn’t stop at two laps – because my answer had just come to me, on the second lap. And I’d also just realised that I was going to leave this city. I’d learned all I could from Jerusalem. So I decided to walk round again, for one last look at the view. Three times around Mount Scopus. I didn’t think I’d ever be back.