Blue Damask (19 page)

     When Sonnenby spoke his voice was stiff and cold.  “Go with Mehmet, Elsa.”  He would not answer his brother, nor did he look at either one of them as he turned his back, pushed aside the flap in the entrance, and walked out of the tent.

     Mehmet beckoned her to follow him in the opposite direction from where Sonnenby had disappeared.  She did not want to go with him, yet she knew it would be foolish to try to follow Sonnenby into the British lair.  It was obvious how that would play out.  But to go with Mehmet was to give up all the efforts she had made in the last week.

     He read her face.  “Lady,” he said.  “You will be reunited.  But this is a bad time.”  He lifted her veil from the carpet and handed it to her.

     He was right.  She reluctantly wrapped her head and then picked her way behind him, careful of tent pegs and supporting ropes and piles of horse manure.  He led her to a line of horses tied to a long rope strung between two of the brick houses. The sun had risen; she could see it across the river where the little ripples of current were tinged with its gold.  There were no clouds.  Elsa looked up at the clear sky.  The crescent moon hovered over the western horizon.

    The cool breeze of the night was gone with the sun.   Mehmet gave the order to take her away to his family.  He merely glanced at her before turning and walking back toward the center of the village.  She followed him with her eyes.  One of the trucks had been started up.  She could see dust rising in a widening column as the truck was repositioned.

     She could feel doubt creeping in the corners of her mind.  She started to imagine unpleasant things and quickly stopped them before they could become possibilities. She had to trust Ozgur Mehmet. “Don’t let them kill him!”  She shouted at his back.

     He stopped walking for a moment, but did not turn around.

She watched him until he turned and disappeared behind one of the brick houses.  She made fists with her hands.  She was a scientist.  The facts were indisputable.  She was a woman in a country unfriendly to women.  She was no longer under the protection of the British Foreign Ministry, if she ever had been.  She had no money and she did not speak their language.  She had no choice but to trust him.  Sonnenby trusted him.

     The men who were her keepers stood quietly alert near the horses.  Waiting.  Waiting for something.  She scanned the brush and stones and low shrubs, her hair blew in her eyes when her veil was lifted and bits of sand peppered her cheeks and got in her mouth.  After a long wait she heard shouting.  Then a gun shot.  Just one.

     That must have been the signal, for the men leapt into action. She was scooped up onto a horse, her feet stuffed into the stirrups.  A hard push on her leg against the animal’s body served as a wordless warning to hold on tightly.

     Her horse was not wearing a bridle, the halter rope stretched to the saddle of a man who gave her a meaningful look before kicking his horse’s ribs.  Both animals sprang forward and galloped along the green track near the river.  She did not turn around.  She couldn’t.  She had to concentrate to stay on.  Standing a little in the stirrups helped.  It stopped the bouncing of her breasts which threatened to pound her papers out of their files.  She held on to them tightly with one arm and leaned forward to bend and tighten them inside their folders.  She focused on the space between her horse’s ears and willed her legs to keep her upright.

     The tribesmen pulled up just a few miles from the settlement and dismounted.  They quickly led the horses into a ravine that in rainy weather emptied into the Euphrates.  Now it was quite dry and offered a shelter from view, but not much else.  Elsa tried to dismount, but the man pressed her leg against the horse’s ribs again and gave her a fierce look.

     She heard the sound of an aeroplane in the distance.  So did the tribesmen.  Their looks of alarm and sudden flurry of words and movements suggested a change of plan.  The man beside her reached up both arms and dragged her down from her animal and pressed her into a clay cleft in the ravine while the other men released the horses, and with a shout and a few accurately thrown stones, dismissed the frightened animals.  She watched the horses flee toward the river.

     More people began to fill the ravine.  Woman and children, now, as well as a few goats and a donkey herded by small boys with sticks.  Elsa made room for a woman and her baby next to her.  The people sat or squatted and covered their heads.  They had seen aeroplanes before.  Elsa leaned forward to peer into the gorge to see what the men were doing.  They had gathered at the wide end and seemed to be carrying on a noisy argument.  The engine sound became louder, then faded as the plane banked away and circled Deir El Zor.  More people rushed into the ravine. Some jumped from above while others poured in from the river side.

     She looked at each one, old white-bearded men, covered women carrying baskets and pots and urns, older girls carrying babies, younger men with more goats and blankets and rugs.  These were the people who were too far from their homes to take shelter inside.  Then she saw a European man stumble into the wadi, bent over, a hand holding his sand-colored fedora to his head.  He was wearing the familiar khaki safari bush jacket with the multitude of pockets but with the high laced army boots like Sonnenby wore.  When he looked up to find an empty spot to shelter against, his eyes fell on her with a look of amazement and he broke into a hobbling run to reach her.

     He said something to the woman cowering next to her, who got up and moved to allow him to fold himself in beside Elsa.  He was in his early forties, she guessed, and had vivid icy blue eyes and sandy hair cut very short, his beard looked like he had hacked at it over the last month or so, then given up trying to rid himself of it.  He was covered head to foot in pale chalky dust, and when he grinned at her his teeth were straight and white.

     “
Mademoiselle
,” he said breathlessly, but anything else he might have said was lost in the screams of the women as the plane neared their hiding spot and banked sharply over the river.

     The plane banked and Elsa heard the
pop pop pop
of the gun as it strafed the ground.  The man beside her put a hand on her head and pushed her face into the clay side of the cleft and covered her with his body as the plane roared over the ravine and then faded to the north.

     “
Mon Dieu
!” he breathed, then lifted her shoulders out of the dirt.

     Elsa coughed and brushed the sand and clay out of her eyes.  She looked up at the blue sky and asked in French, “Will it come back?”

     The man stared at her.  “You are a German woman.”  He did not look so happy to see her anymore.

     “Austrian.”

     The look on his face meant the distinction made little difference to him.  “It may,” he answered in a cold voice.  “I believe it is more interested in tearing up Deir El Zor.  Frightening the natives is only a secondary mission.”

     “Why?  How is it you know its mission?  Is that a French plane?”  She kept her eyes on the sky, as did everyone else in the ravine.  Only the wails of babies could be heard. Everyone else was quiet, listening for the sound of a propeller.

     The man snorted.  “No.  It is an English biplane.  Churchill is sending scores of the damned things here.”  But there was no sound of an engine approaching.  Its low drone could be heard fading away.

     “English!”  She turned to face him.  “It is the English in Deir El Zor now, with trucks and machine guns.”

     “And just how do you know that, madam?”

     “I was just there.”

     He shifted in the dirt, sending little pebbles rolling to the bottom of the ravine.  He turned his shoulders to look at her, and with one hand tugged at her veil until it dropped to her shoulders.  Her long hair spilled out over her back and breasts, a tangled mess.  She knew she must be covered with as much dirt and clay dust as he was.  She blinked at him.

     His eyes looked her over and he even bent a little to see her hands and her feet before he spoke.  “My name is Jean-Philippe Descartes.  No relation.  Who are you,
Mademoiselle
, and why are you here?”

     “My name is Elsa Schluss. I am a therapist--”

     “A therapist? 
A therapist
?” His mouth hung open as if she had said she was a gorilla.  He recovered quickly, shaking his head making the thick dust on the brim of his fedora sift down over his face.  “Then you have come to the right place, for everyone here is crazy.”

     She stiffened, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear and straightening the neckline of her dress.  “I beg your pardon,
monsieur
, but I am not joking with you or telling a lie.”

     “More importantly, are you a nurse?”

     “I am,” she answered.  “I spent the war in a military hospital.”

     He nodded and tilted his head, listening.  They both heard the rattle of the plane’s guns again, but this time from at least a mile away.  The people huddled down in the ravine. The babies had quieted and the goats were kneeling in the sand and gravel and chewing their cud.

     Descartes said, “I have a cut on my leg that is infected.  It needs to be cauterized or sterilized, but I can’t reach it. None of these Arabs can do it.  I’ve explained the procedure to them but they say I should pray to Allah instead.”

     She frowned at him.  He was serious.  “
Monsieur
Descartes.  We are taking shelter in a big ditch from an air attack…” she was interrupted by the sounds of machine guns in the distance, punctuating and underlining her words with the occasional
boom
from mortars.  “…and you are requesting medical attention? Now?”

     “It will do me no good to survive a military attack to die slowly from sepsis next week.  You are a European, though regrettably German, and a nurse. I must welcome my good luck when I find it.”

     She stared at him and he let her, meeting her eyes.  His jaw was set with determination, and she read his truthfulness.  She could also see that he was completely unrattled by the situation and guessed this might not be the first time he had taken shelter from an air attack in a ditch.

     “I fear gangrene more than a bullet, Nurse Schluss.”

     “I have nothing with me.  Nothing.”

     “I have what we need in my pack.  As I said, I tried to do it myself, but it is behind my knee on my lower thigh.  Can’t reach and can’t see.”

     “And your pack?”

     He leaned in toward the ravine and looked down to the river.  “On one of my horses.  But now maybe miles from here.”  His voice was dejected.  “I find a nurse and lose my supplies.”

     The sound of the plane roared closer.  The huddled people cried out before one of the men hushed them.  Elsa squeezed harder into the clay cleft and Descartes covered her again.  “They merely intimidate,
fraulein
.  They will not waste bullets on women and children.  They prefer to kill them with bombs and gas.”

     She couldn’t tell from his voice if he were trying to comfort her with lies or telling the horrible truth.  She ducked as the plane flew low over the ravine, banked and returned to buzz the people cowering at the bottom and pressed against the sides.  A short blast of bullets raised a length of dust along the top edge, making her press her hands over her ears.  Descartes leaned into her until she couldn’t breathe.  He was warmer than normal. Fever.  She held her breath, and when the sound of the engine died away to the north again, Descartes let her up.  He brushed some of the sand off of her again, and stood taking her elbow as though he would help her to her feet.

     “He will come back!” she cried, trying to take her hand back.

     Descartes let her go and used his hand to pull a silver pocket watch from his dusty trousers and flip it open.  “No.  I know how much fuel he holds.  He had twenty minutes of fly time here, and now he must return to Palmyra or risk landing in the desert.  No pilot would land anywhere near the tribes.  They would tear his limbs from his body, behead him, then dismantle his plane and feed it to their camels.”

     She blinked at him a few moments then extended her hand.  “Very well,” she said.  He pulled her to her feet and helped her slide down to the floor of the ravine.  The tribesmen watched them carefully, but none moved from their hiding places.

     Descartes nodded toward them.  “It will take them an hour to come out again.”

     “Why don’t you tell them it is safe?”

     “It probably isn’t.  Anyone with a machine gun will look twice before shooting at us, but not a man in a caftan and turban or a
thobe
and
keffiyah
. They are better here until nightfall.”  He still had her hand and was dragging her toward the river.  She could detect his limp now.  He favored his right leg and when he stopped to look around before they emerged from the ravine into the open, she saw the discoloration of his trousers behind his knee.  Her mind immediately began to plan treatment.

     “
Merde
.”  He tugged at her arm and she followed.  “I knew they would run off, but not disappear.”  His head turned right and left as he searched for his animals.