Chapter Thirty-Four
‘Davis!’
The dog scratched and pawed at the edge of the dream, trying to claw me back to that place, that sacred space.
‘Davis!’
I opened my eyes. There was a blanket over me. I was still sitting where I’d slept, but Ankit had put a pillow behind my head, and a blanket over my chest. My hand was in my jacket pocket, holding the small automatic. A deep breath told me that the golden vest was still in place.
Okay.
There was a stranger stooping over me.
Not okay.
‘Back off, friend.’
‘Sure, sure,’ the man said, straightening up and offering his hand. ‘I’m Horst.’
‘Do you often wake people up to meet them, Horst?’
He laughed. It was loud. Too loud.
‘Okay, Horst, do me a favour. Don’t laugh like that again, until I’ve had two coffees.’
He laughed again. A lot.
‘You’re kind of a slow learner, aren’t you?’
He laughed again. Then he offered me a cup of hot coffee.
It was excellent. You can’t dislike someone who brings you good, strong coffee, when you’ve been thirty-minute drunk only four hours before.
I looked up at him.
His eyes were sun-bleached blue. His head seemed unnaturally large, to me. I thought that Ankit’s coconut lime drinks were to blame until I stood, and saw that he had an unnaturally large head.
‘That’s a big head you’ve got on you,’ I said, as I shook hands with him. ‘Ever played rugby?’
‘No,’ he laughed. ‘You can’t imagine how hard it is to find a hat that fits.’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘I can’t. Thanks for the coffee.’
I started to walk away. It was still in the half-light. I wanted to beat the dawn to my bedroom, and sleep a little more.
‘But you have to report, at the checkpoint,’ he said. ‘And believe me, it’s much safer for us just after dawn, than at any other time, ja.’
I was still wearing the flak vest marked PRESS. He was inviting me, as a fellow journalist. If I had to do it, it was better in company. Sleep no more.
‘Who are you with?’ I asked.
‘Der Spiegel,’ he replied. ‘Well, I’m freelancing for them. And you?’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Long enough to know the safest time to report to the checkpoint.’
‘Do I have time to wash up?’
‘Make it quick.’
I ran upstairs to my room, stripped off, had a cold shower, and was dried and re-vested in six minutes.
I came down the stairs in a jog, but found the lounge area empty. The windows of dawn light were at exactly the same intensity as the lights in the room: a light without shadows.
A soft, scraping sound stirred the stillness. Gardeners were working already.
I walked through to the long, wide veranda, directly above the open wound of lawns surrounding the hotel: a wound that the jungle ceaselessly sought to heal.
Seven servants were hard at work, hacking, chopping and spraying herbicide on the perimeter: the urban front line in the war with nature.
I watched them for a while, waiting for Horst. I could hear the jungle, speaking the wind.
Give us twenty-five years. Leave this place. Come back, after twenty-five years. You’ll see. We’ll heal it of all this pain.
‘I’d like to have a few of those fellows working for me,’ Horst said, as he came to stand beside me. ‘My girlfriend has a place in Normandy. It’s lovely, and all that, but it’s a lot of work. A couple of these guys would fix it up in no time.’
‘They’re Tamils,’ I said, watching them drift across lawns lit by hovering dew. ‘Tamils are like the Irish. They’re everywhere. You’ll find hard-working Tamils in Normandy, if you look hard enough.’
‘How do you know they’re Tamils?’ Horst asked suspiciously.
I turned to face him. I wanted another coffee.
‘They’re doing the dirty work,’ I said.
‘Oh, yeah, yeah,’ he laughed.
It wasn’t funny. I wasn’t laughing. He pinched his laugh to a frown.
‘Which agency did you say you’re with?’
‘I didn’t say.’
‘You’re a real secretive guy, aren’t you?’
‘The shooting is wallpaper. The real war is always between us, the journalists.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Horst asked nervously. ‘I just asked you who you’re with, that’s all.’
‘See, if I make friends with you, and I break a story, and then I find out you stole it from me, I’d have to hunt you down and beat you up. And that’s not good.’
He squinted at me. His eyes flared.
‘Reuters!’ he said. ‘Only you Reuters pricks are so stingy with a story.’
I wanted another coffee. Ankit appeared at my elbow. He was carrying a small glass of something.
‘I thought that a fortification might be required, sir, if you will forgive the impertinence,’ Ankit said. ‘The road you walk this morning is not kind.’
I drank the glass, discovering that it was sherry, and damn good.
‘Ankit,’ I said, ‘we just got related.’
‘Very good, sir,’ Ankit replied equably.
‘You there,’ Horst said to Ankit. ‘Can you find out, please, if any of these fellows have work permits for outside of Sri Lanka?’
I held Ankit’s response with a raised hand.
‘Are we gonna get going, Horst, before the bears wake up?’
‘Bears?’ he said, making it sound like beers. ‘There are no bears. It’s tigers, not bears. The Tamil Tigers. They’re absolutely crazy, those fucks. They all carry suicide capsules, in case they’re caught.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘They don’t seem to realise that when they do that, commit suicide like that, they make the other side even more determined to throw them out of the country.’
‘Are we gonna do this?’
‘Yeah, yeah, sure. Don’t set fire to your pants.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t set fire to your pants,’ he repeated crossly, crossing the lawn.
‘Already with the rules,’ I said, following him out onto the main road.
Fighting in Trincomalee had ceased, and a slender ceasefire had prevailed for weeks. The German staff of Der Spiegel had returned to their home offices for other assignments. Horst, an Austrian stringer, had stayed on.
He was holding out for a new story: one that he could break without competition. He was hoping, in fact, that the Tamil Tigers would launch an offensive in the area, and that his faded-blue eyes would be the first eyes on a new war.
He was a tall, healthy, well-educated young man, in love with a girl, probably a nice girl, who lived on a farm in Normandy, and he was hoping for more war in Sri Lanka. Journalism, Didier once said to Ranjit, the media baron, the cure that becomes its own disease.
‘You haven’t got a camera?’ Horst asked, after we’d walked and talked about Horst for about fifteen minutes.
‘In my experience, checkpoints are allergic to any cameras but their own.’
‘True,’ he agreed, ‘but there was a severed head on the road, yesterday. The first one for a month.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘And . . . if we see another one today . . . I’m not going to share the pictures.’
‘Okay.’
‘It’s not my fault that you left your camera.’
‘Got it.’
‘Just, you know, so we’re straight on that, okay?’
‘I don’t want your pictures of severed heads, Horst. I don’t even want to think about them. If there’s another severed head on this road, he’s all yours.’
There was another severed head on that road, only fifty metres further along.
At first, I thought it was a trick: a pumpkin, or a squash, shoved onto a pole as a macabre joke. In a few steps, I saw that he was a dead kid, maybe sixteen or seventeen.
His head was propped on a bamboo pole, driven into the ground so that the boy’s dead face was face to face with any living face that passed, on the main road.
The eyes were shut. The mouth was wide open.
Horst was adjusting his camera.
‘I told you so,’ he said. ‘I told you so.’
I started to walk along the road. He called out to me.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Catch me up.’
‘No, no! It’s not safe, alone on this road. That’s why I wanted to walk together. You should stay with me. I mean, for your safety.’
I kept walking.
‘Two, in two days!’ Horst said, as distance lost him. ‘Something’s up. I can feel it. I knew I was right to stay.’
He was clicking his camera.
Click-clack. Click-clack.
Killing the kid was a crime, but spiking his head was a sin, and sin always demands expiation. My heart wanted to find a way to return the kid’s head to his parents, help them find the rest of him, somehow, and lay him to rest.
But I couldn’t listen to my heart. I couldn’t even lay his dead young head on the earth, which every instinct inside me cried to do. I had a vest full of gold and passports, and my own passport was as false as my journalist accreditation. I was a smuggler, on a mission, and I had to walk away.
Alone on the road I grieved for that kid, whoever he was, whatever he’d done. I walked on, finding my hard face again, trying to lose all thought of it in the jungle, bright in a brief halo of sunlight between storms.
Trees were plentiful, growing tall and strong in nurseries of shrubs and plants, some waist-high, some reaching to my shoulders.
The leaves shivered drops of the last rain onto the thick roots of the trees: devotees pouring scented oil on the feet of tree-saints, whose raised-arm branches, and million-hand leaves had prayed the storm from the sea. Without trees to pray for it, there’s no rain, Lisa once said to me, as we’d rushed out to enjoy a warm, monsoon rainstorm.
Winds from the sea pacified storm-shaken trees. Branches dipped and swayed, foaming leaves waving with the sound of surf on the shore of the sky. Birds hovered and swooped, vanishing in walls of green, and darting out again, their shadows glittering on the wet road.
Nature was healing me, as Nature does, when we let it. I stopped grieving for the lost kid beside the road, and the lost kid inside me, and I stopped saying the words severed head.
A car approached me from the north. It was a battered white sedan, with the headlights covered in stars of black tape. The driver was a woman. She was chunky. She was short. She was thirty. She was wearing a sky-blue hijab.
She stopped beside me and leaned over to roll down the window.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ she demanded.
‘I –’
‘Don’t tell me.’
‘But, you just asked –’
‘Get in the car.’
‘Who are you, again?’
‘Get in the car.’
I got in the car.
‘You’re compromised,’ she said, a pinched frown of contempt looking me up and down.
‘Salaam aleikum,’ I said.
‘You’re compromised,’ she repeated.
‘Salaam aleikum,’ I said.
‘Wa aleikum salaam,’ she replied, squinting at me angrily. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’
She drove off but in a few seconds we saw Horst, still standing beside the kid’s head, still trying to get that perfect shot. She wanted to drive on but I stopped her, some ten metres past the journalist.
‘He’ll ask questions, if I disappear from the road. Let me handle this.’
I got out of the car, and jogged back to Horst.
‘What’s going on? Who’s that with you?’
‘I’ve just heard,’ I said breathlessly. ‘Fighting has started again. I’m getting the hell out of here. You want a ride back to the hotel?’
His eyes narrowed, as he looked north on the deserted road.
‘No, see, I think I’ll hang around. You go. It’s okay.’
‘I don’t like to leave you like this, when it’s getting dangerous.’
‘No, no, I’m fine. I’ll go see what’s happening at the checkpoint. You go on.’
He fumbled with the camera, and offered his hand. I shook it.
‘Good luck,’ I said.
‘Same to you. And do me a favour? Since you’re going, keep this to yourself for as long as you can, okay?’
‘Not a problem. Bye, Horst.’
He was already walking away, preparing his camera.
Click-clack.
When I got back in the car, I saw that Blue Hijab had a pistol in her hand. She was pointing it at me.
‘All good,’ I said.
She drove off at speed, one handed. She was changing gears with the hand that held the pistol, and making me nervous enough to flinch as she nudged the lever violently with the heel of her hand.
‘What are you two, sweethearts?’ she demanded. ‘Blah, blah, blah. What did you tell him?’
‘What he wanted to hear. Are you going to shoot me?’
She seemed to consider it.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What did you tell that man? Whose side are you on?’
‘Your side, I hope. And if you shoot me, you’ll put a hole in one of the passports.’
She swung the car into a clearing that became a parking bay amid the trees. She turned off the engine, and put both hands on the gun.
‘You think this is funny? I’m dragged from a cover that I’ve worked on for two years, to pick you up at the hotel, collect the stuff, and drive you to the airport.’
‘A cover? What are you, a spy?’
‘Shut up.’
‘Aaah . . . okay, who are you again?’
‘I find you on the road, alone,’ she said, staring enigmas at me. ‘Then you stop to talk to a stranger. Convince me this isn’t a mistake, or by Allah I’ll put a bullet in your head, and strip the gold off your body.’
‘If you know your Holy Koran,’ I said, ‘it should be enough for me to give you the number of a verse.’
‘What the hell?’
‘Two, two hundred and twenty-four,’ I said.
‘The Cow,’ she sneered, giving the name of the verse from the Koran. ‘Are you trying to make a point about me? Are you saying I’m fat?’
‘Of course, not. You’re . . . curvy.’
‘Cut it out.’
‘You started it.’
‘Back to the verse, smart guy.’
‘If you’re not a Muslim, and you’re gonna learn a few verses from the Koran, verse two, two hundred and twenty-four, is a nice place to start. And make not Allah’s name an excuse in your oaths against doing good and acting piously –’
‘– and making peace among mankind,’ she finished for me, smiling for the first time.
‘Shall we do this?’ I asked, beginning to wrestle out of my jacket.
She put the gun in a pocket of her skirt, opened the back door of the car, and began to pull the back seat upright.
There was a hiding place underneath, behind a false cover. When I handed her the vest, she did a thorough check of every pocket and each passport.
Satisfied, she put the vest into the hiding place, and concealed it with the snap-fit cover. The seat clicked back into place, and we got back in the car.
‘We’ll stop at the hotel,’ she said, driving off. ‘You have to check out. We need you to be a ghost from here.’
‘A ghost?’
‘Shut up. We’re here. Go inside, get your stuff and check out. I’ll put petrol in the car, and meet you here in fifteen minutes. Not a second more.’
‘Do you –’
‘Get out!’
I got out. I ran the steps, entered the reception area and heard my name.
‘Mr Davis!’
It was Ankit, the night-and-day porter, standing in a bay window. He had a tray in his hand.
‘I saw Blue Hijab,’ he said, as I approached him, ‘and thought you might be needing this.’
I took a long sip of the long drink.
‘They don’t call you The Complete for nothing, Ankit.’
‘One strives to please, sir. Your things are with me at the desk. You need only sign the register, when you’re ready.’
‘Let’s do it now.’
‘You’ve got a six-hour drive ahead. I’m here, if you want to take a minute to freshen up.’
When I returned, Ankit had refilled the drink, and there was a packet of sandwiches, some water, and two bottles of soft drink beside my backpack on the counter.
I gave him a small roll of money. It was about five hundred American.
‘No, I can’t take this,’ he said. ‘It’s too much.’
‘We may never see each other again, Ankit. Let’s not part fighting.’
He smiled, and put the money away.
‘The snacks will keep you going, and this might help, if things get . . . a little tense . . . with Blue Hijab.’
It was a dime of hashish, and a packet of cigarettes.
‘I should smoke hash, if things get tense with an armed, angry woman?’ I asked, accepting the gift.
‘No,’ he said. ‘She should.’
‘Blue Hijab smokes hash?’
‘Loves the stuff,’ Ankit said, packing the drinks and food into my backpack. ‘It’s like catnip. But save it, for as long as you can. She gets mean when it runs out.’
A car stopped hard outside. The horn sounded three times.
‘You should imagine that she’s Durga, the warrior goddess, mounted on a tiger, and behave accordingly.’
‘How’s that, exactly?’
‘Be respectful, devoted and afraid,’ Ankit said, wagging his head wickedly.
‘It’s been a pleasure, new-old friend. Goodbye.’
I turned at the door to see him smiling and waving. I looked back at the car to see Blue Hijab, jabbing a finger at me, the engine of the car revving.
We roared out of the driveway and onto the main road, heading south toward Colombo. She leaned forward in her seat, her arms taut and her knuckles white.
After ten minutes of listening to her teeth grinding the pepper of her temper, I decided to make conversation.
‘I met your husband, Mehmu.’
‘This is how you break a serene silence? With mention of my bloody husband?’
‘Serene? I’ve seen more serenity under interrogation.’
‘To hell with you,’ she said, but she relaxed against the seat, drained of rage. ‘I’ve been . . . tense. And I don’t want to get any tenser.’
I wanted to say something funny, but she had a gun.
She drove well. I studied her style for a while as she passed trucks, slowed for temporary barriers, and hit sharp corners. I love being driven by a driver I trust. It’s a rollercoaster, with fatal risk.
The windscreen was a bubble, moving through space and time. Tree shadows arched over the car as we passed, trying to comfort us as the forests ended and fenced houses became beads and baubles on another chain of civilisation.
‘I shot a man, yesterday,’ she said, after a while.
‘A friend or an enemy?’
‘Does it make a difference?’
‘Hell, yeah.’
‘He was an enemy.’
We drove in silence, for a while.
‘Did you kill him?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘Could you have killed him?’
‘Yes.’
‘The mercy outweighs the shame,’ I said.
‘Fuck you,’ she said.
‘All that cursing isn’t exactly in line with Islam, is it?’
‘It’s in English, it doesn’t count, and I’m a Muslim communist,’ she said.
‘O . . . kay.’
She pulled the car into a roadside stop amid fields of flowers, sprung from sodden earth. She looked around, and turned the engine off.
‘Did Mehmu look well?’
‘He did.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, I like him. A lot, actually.’
She sobbed, suddenly, tears falling as freely as the raindrops that began to spatter the windows.
Just as quickly she recovered, dried her eyes, and began to open the bag of sandwiches.
She cried again, and couldn’t stop: something inside her was all of it, everything at once. I didn’t know what it was: I didn’t know her.
I saw the new-moon chips of nail polish near her cuticles, the bruise on her face, about the size of a man’s ring, the cuts on her own knuckles, the fragrance of fresh soap in her clothes, hand-washed in a hotel basin, the bag on the back seat, carrying essentials for a quick escape, and the quick escape she made every time her eyes detected that I might be looking into her, and not just at her.
But observation only took me to a tough, brave, devout girl on the run, who’s meticulous in her hygiene, but won’t clean the last coloured fragment of the girl she was from her fingernails. The why of her was still a mystery, because the why of anyone only comes with connection.
I felt helpless to console her. There were tissues in the bag. I handed them to her, one at a time, until the tears dried and the sobbing stopped, as the rain all around us stopped.
We got out and stood by the car. I tipped a stream of water from a bottle into her cupped hands, so that she could wash her face.
She stood there for a while, breathing air scented by white flowers, clinging to vines all around us.
We got back in the car, and I mixed a cigarette joint. She wouldn’t pass it back to me, so I mixed another. She wouldn’t give that back either, so I made a couple more cigarettes.
Minds floated free across fields of green velvet to memory’s greener pastures: that place, inside, where the soul is always a tourist. And I don’t know what memories danced for Blue Hijab, in those minutes, but for me it was Karla, turning and twirling, as she danced at the party. Karla.
‘I’m starving,’ Blue Hijab said. ‘And by the way –’
‘I know. If I speak a word of this to anyone, you’ll shoot me.’
‘I was going to say, thank you. But damn right. Pass me a sandwich.’
She started the car, and eased it out of the parking bay.
‘You don’t want me to take over for a while?’
‘I drive,’ she said, heading out onto the highway again, at speed. ‘I always drive. Give me a sandwich.’
‘What kind do you want?’
‘Give me one of those I-don’t-give-a-fuck sandwiches. You got one of those?’
‘A whole sack, as it turns out.’
She never spoke again on the trip. Sometimes she muttered zikr, phrases spoken in remembrance of God. Once, she broke into a chorus from a song, only to fade again in a few bars.
And when we stopped, before the road swerved into the entrance of the airport in Colombo, she simply turned the engine off and stared at me, in a continuation of that long silence, as strange as it was surprisingly sad.
‘I-muh’sinina,’ I said.
‘The doers of good?’ she translated.
‘You were saying it, while you were driving.’
‘Do you have a second passport?’
‘Of course.’
‘Get the first flight out that you can. Get home, as fast as you can. Do you hear me?’
‘Get home, as fast as I can. Okay, Mummy.’
‘Be serious. Do you need anything?’
‘You never told me how the mission was compromised.’
‘And I won’t,’ she said evenly.
‘You’re tighter with a story than a Reuters correspondent. Anyone ever tell you that, Blue Hijab?’
She laughed, and I was glad to see it.
‘Go. Now.’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘I have something to give you. But if I do, you have to promise me something.’
‘What . . . something?’
‘Promise me not to shoot Mehmu . . . again. At least, not for something connected to me. I like the guy.’
‘I married the guy,’ she snarled. ‘But okay, okay, I won’t shoot him. I’ve already shot him twice, and he never stops whining about it.’
I took the small automatic from my pocket, took the spare shells from the other pocket, and handed them to her.
‘I think he wanted me to give you this,’ I said.
She cradled the small gun in her palms.
‘Mehmu, mehboob,’ she muttered, then tucked the gun away into another of the pockets in the pleated curtain of her black skirt. ‘Thank you.’
I stood from the car, stooping to say goodbye.
‘He’s a very lucky man,’ I said. ‘Allah hafiz.’
‘Much luckier, now that I pledged not to shoot him again. Allah hafiz.’
She drove away, and I made my way on foot up the entrance ramp to the airport.
In forty-five minutes I’d checked in. I was lucky, or Blue Hijab’s timing had been perfect. I only had an hour to wait.
I found a place where I could watch the people walking past, look at the faces, study the walk, see tension or empathy, lethargy or urgency, listen to the tenor of a laugh or a shout, feel a baby’s cry ripple through the hearts of almost all who hear it: a still moment in a public space, watching and waiting for the expression or cadence that writes itself.
A man came to sit beside me. He was tall and thin, with a bushy moustache and slicked-back hair. He was wearing a yellow shirt and white trousers.
‘Hello,’ he said out loud, and then changed to a whisper. ‘We should greet one another as friends, and go to the bar. I’m your contact here. It will look less suspicious if we’re having a drink.’
He offered his hand. I took it, drawing him in closer.
‘I think you’ve made a mistake, Jack,’ I said, holding his hand fast in mine.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘Blue Hijab called, and gave me your description.’
I released his hand and we stood together, pretend friends.
‘Her description was perfect,’ he said. ‘She really studied you.’
‘Somehow, that doesn’t fill me with reassurance,’ I said, as we walked to the airport bar.
‘Hell, no,’ he replied, throwing an arm around my shoulder. ‘With Blue Hijab, it’s better to keep it to fuzzy recollections.’
‘What is it, with the communist connection?’
‘When you’re looking for fighters, the enemy of your enemy is a good place to start.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I can’t say any more than that.’
We talked the waiting minutes. He told me stories that might’ve been true, and I listened with what might’ve been belief, and then I cut him off before he started a new story.
‘What’s this all about?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nobody has an exit contact at the airport,’ I said. ‘And Blue Hijab said I was compromised. What’s going on?’
He looked me over for a while, and seemed to conclude that my patience was drifting toward a storm. It was a good call.
‘I can’t say anything,’ he said, looking away.
‘You can. And you should. What the fuck is going on?’
‘Going on?’
‘Is there a threat to me in this airport, or not? Am I in danger? Am I gonna get busted? Spit it out, or spit your teeth out.’
‘You are not in danger,’ he said quickly. ‘But you are the danger. I was sent to watch you, that you didn’t do anything crazy.’
‘Crazy?’
‘Crazy.’
‘Crazy, like, what?’
‘They didn’t say.’
‘And you didn’t ask?’
‘Nobody asks. You know that.’
We looked at one another.
‘What were you going to do, if I did something crazy?’
‘Smooth it over with the authorities, and get you out of the country and back to Bombay as quick as possible.’
‘That’s it?’
‘I swear. And I don’t know any more.’
‘Okay. Okay. I’m sorry for that crack, about spitting your teeth out. I felt like I was walking into a trap for a minute or two there.’
‘You are not in danger,’ he said comfortingly. ‘But do not go directly to your house when you return.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just report to the Company as soon as you return.’
‘Does this have something to do with how the mission was compromised?’
‘I don’t know. Sanjay was very specific about reporting to him. Very specific. But he didn’t explain.’
My flight was called. We shook hands again, and he slipped away through the crowds.
I took my seat on the plane, and had two drinks before take-off. I’d done the job. It was over. It was my last mission for the Sanjay Company. I was free, and my heart, the fool in that castle in the sky, sang all the way to thirty thousand feet.