Jasmine Nights (51 page)
‘That’s kind of you, Mr Ozan, but I’m going home soon – at least I hope I am.’
‘Will your government fly you home?’
‘Yes.’ She watched two dark birds flying above the wet rooftops and towards the sea. ‘As soon as they can.’
‘But there’s still plenty of work here for artistes. I’ve never seen Cairo so full – your people, our people, Americans, lots of people under thirty wanting to have fun again.’
‘I know, but I don’t want to sing again.’
Mr Ozan’s jaw dropped. ‘You are a singer. You can’t stop.’
‘I can.’
He thumped his fist softly on the table. His voice rose.
‘If you stop singing, you will hurt the best part of yourself.’
‘I don’t think my father would agree with you about that.’
‘Well, sorry for the word, but the man is a twit. Not all men think as he does – not even all Turkish men. The world moves on. Listen.’ He leapt to his feet, gesticulating wildly, and for once his impeccable English let him down. ‘Think of other bipples,’ he said passionately. ‘When you have a gift like you have a gift, it’s the honey you lay down – not just for yourself but for your children’s happiness also.’
‘Well that’s a nice idea,’ she said. Beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead. ‘It’s just that I don’t believe it any more.’ Severin’s face flashed into her mind like a bilious dream.
‘You are saying no?’ Ozan clapped his hand to his temples, incredulous, heartbroken. ‘This concert will be tremendous – fireworks and horses, singers – like nothing these cities have ever seen.’
‘I’m saying no,’ she said. ‘I can’t do it any more.’
For the first four days he lay in a torpor in the corner of the tent, wheezing and coughing and sleeping, then sleeping again. Sometimes the boy, or an older man with spongy red gums and two teeth, came and held a rough cup to his lips with some bitter brackish medicine in it that made him splutter. Twice a day the boy fed him some floury-tasting grain, occasionally with vegetables in it. From time to time he was aware of the dull pitter-patter of rain falling, or the screech of a bird, or, from another part of the house, male voices laughing and the rattle of some game they were playing. Once, an aeroplane flew so low over the tent it almost took the roof off, but he wasn’t frightened, he simply noted it in a kind of dim anaesthetised way, as if it was happening to someone else and in another place.
When he woke up properly, with a thumping headache and a tight chest, the boy was sitting at the end of his bed. He looked about twelve, had a wild mop of black curls, and a pallid complexion as if he might have suffered from malaria, or bilharzia. The boy smiled at him shyly; he touched his fingers to his mouth as if to ask if he was hungry. Dom nodded his head, bewildered and disoriented. When the boy skedaddled on his skinny legs out of the room to get food, Dom took stock of the desperate poverty of his surroundings. The greasy pile of quilts he lay on didn’t look as if they’d been washed for years let alone weeks. On a makeshift shelf at the back of the tent there were small amounts of grain, and dried food in sacks that spoke of frugal housekeeping and small rations.
The boy returned with an older man who wore a faded djellaba and whose flapping sandals were tied with string. He came over to the bed and patted Dom’s arm, beaming with joy, as if his recovery had presented them with a tremendous gift.
‘Karim,’ he said, pointing to himself. ‘Ibrahim.’ The boy beamed.
‘My name is Dom,’ he told them. He had never felt so far away from the person who had that name, or more vulnerable. When Ibrahim handed him an earthenware bowl, he was surprised to find he needed help to feed himself. The boy held the spoon to his lips and dribbled in a thin lentil soup, opening his own mouth as he did so like a mother bird feeding her young.
When he had finished eating, Dom fell back on the pillows, rummaging around in his brain for the word for thank you. Instead he held up his fingers and asked in English: ‘How long have I been here?’ When the boy held up four fingers he was amazed, and then the boy counted out five more and made a joke of it, counting out more. Dom closed his eyes, overwhelmed. He might have been here for weeks for all he knew.
When he woke in the night, scratching himself and very cold, he thought about what a burden he must have been to this poor family, who could barely afford to feed themselves, and how lightly they carried it. He already felt ashamed of the man he’d been who’d first come to North Africa – God, was it less than a year ago – who’d looked at people like these from the air, and seen only toy-like figures moving their animals around. They’d given up their land for foreign soldiers to fight in and he’d barely spared them a thought.
As a child, Egypt had been a vital part of his imagination and his games, the link formed during a bad bout of measles when his mother read to him every day from a book that obsessed him about the archaeologist Howard Carter. When his mother got to the part where Carter had walked down out of the sunlight one day in the Valley of Kings, taken a piece of clay out of a wall and
whoosh!
– the smell of spices, the feeling of hot air – found himself staring into Tutankhamen’s chamber. Dom had jammed himself against her side, hardly daring to breathe.
He’d loved the drama and the anguish of the archaeologist’s long and fruitless-seeming search. How, only a week before he found the treasures, an exhausted, heartbroken Carter had made the decision to go back to England, and live more sensible dreams. How he’d stumbled on a step that led to Tut’s chamber and, looking up, seen the entrance. How he’d walked a couple more steps, found the seal covering the entrance of the tomb, and, breaking it and holding his candle up, seen huge gold couches, jewels, priceless treasures. How the friend waiting outside had asked, ‘Have you found anything?’ and Carter, scarcely able to breathe, had said, ‘Yes. Wonderful things.’
When he’d recovered from measles, Dom spent months scouring the countryside around Woodlees Farm, turning over damp leaves, going through wood piles, looking for his own buried treasure.
But war had a way of making things squalid. The dun-coloured phrasebook handed to serving officers on arrival contained mostly warnings about washing hands, boiling water, guarding wallets, and staying away from local prostitutes, and nothing to do with Egypt’s extraordinary past, or for that matter the humbling hospitality of its people. Today, when the boy had fed him the last spoonful of lentil soup, he had placed his hand over his worn winter jumper and said, ‘
Sahtayn
,’ which he knew from his phrasebook meant ‘two healths to you’.
Later, Karim, the boy’s father, came back carrying a battered wooden board. He threw some counters down on the quilt and became tremendously animated trying to explain to Dom the rules of a game, which Dom had never played and failed to understand. It seemed to be some distant relative of draughts, but he couldn’t make out the rules, and both of them eventually smiled at each other, embarrassed by their mutual incomprehension.
To break the silence, Dom mimed writing, and paper, praying that this family was not illiterate.
Karim sprang up and fetched an old notebook from behind a jar of rice, which had a pencil and a string attached. Dom drew a picture of an aircraft, and then the sea – when lost in North Africa, the first rule of navigation was a simple one: turn north until you hit the coast. He pointed to himself, and then the sea, and looked enquiringly at Karim.
His chest still felt tight and wheezy, but he couldn’t stay for much longer; he could see already how carefully this family eked out its supplies of rice and lentils and corn. He handed his map to Karim – who looked completely bewildered by it. At last he pointed to a spot that Dom estimated would be about forty miles south of Marsa. Dom then drew a train, wondering if one stopped near here. Karim shook his head, and looked confused. He held up four stained fingers, then drew a crude donkey on the page. Four days, or at least that was what Dom thought he’d said.
Karim padded out again, slip-slopping in his broken sandals, and Dom lay scratching himself vigorously. There were bed bugs – though he was used to them by now; mobile dandruff they called them in the squadron, and they didn’t bother him unduly. Much more troubling was the thought of now what? He seemed to have reached some frightening state of spiritual and mental emptiness and the idea of going back to the squadron made him feel weak with exhaustion and a peculiar kind of sorrow he could not put his finger on. The curious life the pilots led here – the frantic drinking, the parties in Alex and Cairo then back to the desert for the killing, the bombing raids – had already created a kind of unhappy split in him that was widening.
Meeting Saba had healed the split. She’d made him feel so lucky, so sure, so rescued from the self he was becoming, even though she was not, in conventional terms, what his mother would call ‘marriage material’. It wasn’t just her lovely dimples, or her singing, or the way they both shouted with laughter at the same things; she had returned him to something essential in himself – her own passion and self-belief connecting him to the boy he’d been, the boy who’d dreamed of a long and arduous journey towards buried treasure. When he’d confessed to her his plan of one day being able to write as well as fly, that night in the restaurant in Ismailia – a dream he hadn’t dared to confess even to Barney – she hadn’t looked sceptical, or amazed, or made him feel pretentious; she’d gone out and bought him a pen and notebook. That was how it happened in her world: you did it and you did it until you got it right.
When Ibrahim came bouncing back later that day, he was followed by two toddlers with black curious eyes and runny noses. The boy pulled a long sad face, that mocked Dom’s serious expression. He’d brought the board game back with him, and was prepared to try again with the dim
agnabi
. And this time Dom concentrated, wondering if this game was a distant relative of Senet, the board game played by ancient Egyptians, charting their journey towards a longed-for afterlife. An elaborately carved version of this game had been found inside Tutankhamen’s tomb.
The boy was babbling passionately now, his dark curls bobbing as he spoke. He placed a bundle of grimy counters in Dom’s hand and, pointing to the dark squares, grimaced and rolled his eyes to indicate the terrible disasters that would befall him should one of his counters land there. The pale squares were plainly the good-luck ones, and the boy’s expression became secretive and calm as he reached them. Because he was enjoying himself, Dom did too. A clear case of cheating was overlooked at one point, when the boy skimmed one of his counters over a bad-luck square, his face crafty, only to move it swiftly back, perhaps frightened of antagonising the gods. And afterwards, Dom, thinking he would teach him snakes and ladders, drew out a board on the piece of paper. The boy leaned eagerly towards him, his face bright with anticipation. When the lead in the pencil crumbled beyond repair, the boy gasped with disappointment. There wasn’t another.
They sat in silence for a while contemplating this disaster, and then a strange look came over the boy’s face. He put his hands to his lips to shush Dom, looked towards the door, and then rushed out.
He returned flushed and breathless ten minutes or so later. He shut the door carefully, sat down on the bed, and drew out of his pocket a stained piece of rag. Inside it were Dom’s watch – the glass on its face smashed – his small compass in its leather case, and the pen that Saba had bought him. In the other rag he’d wrapped the three small bottles of tablets: the benzedrine amphetamine, the salt tablets, the water purification tablets – all standard issue in pilot’s escape kits. The boy lined them up carefully on the dirt floor.
With a carefully neutral expression, he watched Dom seize the pen and hold it, thrilled to have it in his hands again. When he set the pen down, the boy watched him anxiously as he slipped his index finger between two narrow pieces of leather in the lid of his compass case, and felt for the twenty Egyptian pound notes, all pilots were given in case of emergency. They were still there.
He didn’t care about the watch. The pen was the most important thing. And the money – the relief he felt at being able to reward the family was overwhelming. He wondered when the right time would be to give it to them, and before he went to sleep that afternoon, tucked it under his pillow.
Daylight was fading into blood-red dusk when he heard the rackety cries of the goats returning, the hollow jangle of their bells. When the boy’s father appeared in his room, Dom drew a picture of the sea on the notepad and pointed vigorously towards himself. The boy looked sad, but Karim looked pleased, and even more so when Dom peeled off some of the notes and gave them to him, banging his hand on his heart to show how grateful he was. He owed them his life, and with their help there was a good chance – landmines and bombs not withstanding – that he could get to wherever home was now.
The next time Mr Ozan came back, the chauffeur kept the car engine running while he ran up her stairs.
‘Now listen.’ His shrewd black eyes glared at her around the door. ‘I’ve been thinking of our talk the other day, and I am going to make you an offer which you may think is cruel. But I am a businessman. I have a show to put on and I want you in it. If you agree, I will help you look for him, and if he is dead,’ there was no sugar coating this time, ‘you will know.’ He glared at her again.
She stared at him. It was seven forty-five in the morning. She was still in her nightdress, which made her feel furious – her instinctive covering of her breasts when what she most wanted was to perform some violent retaliatory act of her own like screaming or striking him violently around the face. His bargain stood for everything she had begun to loathe about show business – its tin-pot values, its selfishness, its determination that the show must go on, no matter what the cost to other people.
‘This sounds like blackmail to me,’ she said.