Jasmine Nights (52 page)
‘It is,’ he said, discreetly ogling her. ‘I shall come back tomorrow and you can give me your answer.’
‘Don’t bother, and don’t come back,’ she screamed at him like a wild animal. ‘They’ve been looking for him, you stupid man. He’s dead, and I’m going home now. My ticket came through last week.’
The door slammed, he was gone. She threw on a raincoat and walked down towards the Nile, sobbing with fury. Gharries, cars, donkey carts swept by her, splattering her stockings with rain. Crossing roads, dodging traffic, ignoring wolf whistles from a passing army truck, her mind flipped back and forth: Ozan was a bully – as bad as the rest of them. What he offered was sleazy and underhand, a song for a life, or a song for death confirmed.
The stone lions on the Khedive Ibrahim Bridge shone with rain as she passed them; fishermen hung over its sides shrouded in tarpaulins or old newspapers, the Nile flowing beneath them, sluggish and grey in the rain, the twinkling fairy lights on the barges dead as fish eyes.
By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, yea we wept
she’d sung these words, set to music by William Walton, with Caradoc once. Her teacher flaming with passion, with something akin to a sorrowful joy, as he told her to feel it, feel it feel it to the nth degree and then rein it back. Looking down at the water, she thought about their first days here. The laughs with Arleta as they’d hurtled in a taxi on their way to that blue-moon night at the Mena House. The rowdy sing-songs on the way home; peaceful breakfasts in the courtyard of the Minerva; her first sunglasses, left God knows where and never replaced; the concerts. The richest period of her life so far, in spite of all the hardships. Now she saw nothing but sadness in the expressions of the gaunt old men who sat by their braziers selling trinkets, the bored young soldiers prowling through the waterlogged souks looking for cheap souvenirs to take home.
Yea, wept, wept! And hanged our harps upon the willow
. The words flew back disjointedly.
I want to die now
. The thought was so familiar it no longer shocked her.
She was walking across the bridge with no specific destination in mind when she heard the pattering of feet behind her.
‘Saba, stop!’ Arleta shouted. Her hair lay in wet strands around her face. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m all right – honestly, leave me, I’m fine.’
She felt a sort of dispassionate sorrow for Arleta – grief was so boring too.
‘Balls,’ said Arleta, seeing her face. ‘Let’s get in a taxi and go home.’
They were soaked by the time they got back to Antikhana Street. Arleta made some Camp coffee and they wrapped their wet hair in turbans and sat in their dressing gowns in front of a single-bar electric fire.
‘Saba.’ Arleta leaned over and took her hand. ‘This is no good, you know. You’ve got to talk to me. You frightened me to death.’
She tried to fob Arleta off at first with vague talk about feeling low and wanting to go home.
‘Is that all, Sabs?’
‘No.’ She fiddled with the cups for a while. ‘I’ve decided not to sing again.’
‘Oh stop that! You know you don’t mean it.’
‘I do.’
‘What?’ Arleta sounded genuinely shocked.
‘I’ve been thinking for a while, it’s not worth it.’
‘Not worth what?’
‘Well you know, those few rapturous moments.’ Saba closed her eyes. ‘It’s caused so much pain to the people around me.’
‘I must warn you, Saba, that you are making no sense to me.’ Arleta’s eyes were slitty and mean.
‘And you see, I had this all straight in my mind, that I’d go home, do something else with my life, something – I don’t know, teaching or being a librarian or a secretary – that doesn’t make you feel guilty, or vain, or stupid, and now Mr Ozan has made me this offer.’
Which she tried to explain even though Arleta’s eyes looked lethal, and she was tugging her own hair.
‘And you see, now he’s left me with no choice,’ Saba said on a rising note. ‘I’ve got to do it: one concert in Alexandria, one in Cairo, and I can’t tell you how much I dread it.’
‘I don’t think it will be that hard once you start.’ Arleta’s eyes were open and friendly again, her voice coaxing. ‘If I’m around, we could do our duet.’
‘And Ozan does know everyone,’ Arleta said. ‘If anyone can find Dom, he can.’
‘Yes,’ she said, thinking, I wish people would stop pretending now.
‘And if you do do it,’ Arleta was quite lit up now, ‘I have one suggestion to make – don’t get cross – that we track down Madame Eloise again, and that you start eating, that you get out of those blasted pyjamas, and we go straight forth to the hairdresser’s, because no one wants a girl who is dull with stringy hair.’
And Saba smiled for the first time that day.
‘You’re an idiot,’ she said. ‘And I love you.’
‘Don’t go all soppy on me.’
‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’
They sat talking by the fire for the next hour, Arleta, who had a performance that night at the open-air cinema, winding her hair into pin curls. ‘Sabs,’ she said, neatly skewering one with a grip, ‘since we are having a nose-to-nose, I have one more thing to confess and you mustn’t be angry with me.’
Saba looked at her.
‘Don’t hate me,’ Arleta said, ‘but I’ve got a new boyfriend.’
‘Why should I hate you? Listen, Arlie, just because of Dom doesn’t mean I—’
‘No, listen, shut up, it’s Barney – Dom’s friend.’
There was a beat of silence while the news sank in.
‘Dom’s friend. When?’ Saba felt a kind of swirling unreality.
‘While you were in hospital.’ Arleta put down her toast. ‘We met and we talked, and suddenly we were sleeping together.’
‘Oh, come off it Arl, what do you mean, you were suddenly sleeping together – that’s such a stupid expression.’ Saba was properly angry now. ‘You don’t just
suddenly
sleep with people, like flies who collide in the air, so just say it out loud – we were making love.’
‘All right – we were making love.’ Arleta’s cat eyes narrowed as she considered this. ‘Although I wouldn’t call it that.’
‘So what would you call it?’
‘A mercy fuck, if you’ll excuse my French. He was in a complete state about Dom, and I was so worried about you.’
‘Oh. So you slept with him because you were worried about me? How very kind.’
‘Partly, yes. Look, no excuses but I was in a state myself. I thought you were going to die.’ Arleta’s eyes filled with tears. ‘And I’m quite fond of you really,’ she said.
And this was so obviously true now that Saba, trembling with rage, forced herself to calm down. She didn’t know Barney, she didn’t own him – her response was unbalanced, like everything else in her life.
‘Oh Arlie, I’m sorry.’ She gave her a brief hug. ‘I’m so mean at the moment, I don’t know what to do with myself. Do you love him?’
‘I could do, but it won’t do me much good. He’s a mess. Anyway, don’t you remember, I’m spoken for, and there’s the small matter of my little boy.’ She took the picture out of her pocket; her face crumpled at the sight of his blond curls, his sweet face.
‘Ghastly little varmint,’ she said.
‘Maybe you should tell Barney – wouldn’t he be pleased?’
‘I don’t think so.’ It was Arleta’s turn to sound bleak. ‘Men don’t usually find other men’s children a great aphrodisiac.’
‘But if he loves you . . .’ She couldn’t help it, she felt a deep dismay at this – it seemed so unfair. ‘He might. It would be nice to have a family after the war.’
‘No. Lovely thought,’ Arleta was quite decisive, ‘but let’s keep our feet on the ground: the man isn’t thinking of me as wife material; practically every friend that he has ever had has died and I am like a sucky blanket for him, and that’s fine. I’m ten years older than him, and he’s in so much shock about your fellow, he can hardly think straight. There was another one too, called Jacko. Did Dom talk about him?’
‘No.’
‘They were all at school together?’
‘Yes.’
They both looked towards the window. A muezzin was calling out the evening prayers. The sky had flushed with the dying sun, and turned the tips of the houses opposite into rose coloured castles.
‘Barney said he was shot down, and that Dom blamed himself for it, and that he shouldn’t.’
‘Bit late for that. Poor Dom.’
‘Poor everyone,’ said Arleta. ‘War is so bloody awful – I don’t know why men like it so much.’ She gave a huge sigh and put her hair net on.
‘Tell me something else,’ Saba said. ‘Does Barney know about me?’
‘A little, I think.’
‘He must hate me. Dom must have told him how I left.’
Arleta’s silence said it all.
‘It was tricky,’ she said at last. ‘I told him what I could about your Turkish adventure. I’m not sure he believed me. Come on, love.’ Arleta stood up abruptly, her face full of a sadness Saba had never seen before. She put the photo of her little boy into her vanity case. ‘Let’s switch dem lights off and get you to bed.’
When Saba woke, around two in the morning, it was pitch black outside their window and she was thinking about Arleta’s fiancé Bill, a man Arleta rarely mentioned now. She wondered if Bill was dead already, or comforting himself with someone else, or back home in pieces with his mum, and for those few moments she saw war as a vast fracturing mirror shattering all their lives.
When he left the tent for the last time, the woman who had been cooking his beans and his flatbread appeared quickly in the mouth of the tent as a pair of liquid, curious brown eyes that stared, blinked, and, in response to her husband’s sharp bark, hurriedly disappeared.
Karim and the boy helped Dom on to a donkey laden with saddlebags. Today Karim was wearing a pair of broken-down sandals patched from what looked like old car tyre; Ibrahim, who led the donkey, had a definite air of swagger about him. He was wearing his best clothes: a spotless, perfectly ironed djellaba, on his head a long scarf wound over and around a woollen cap.
Karim waved his hands at the horizon indicating that this would be a long journey; Dom thought he heard him say Marsa Matruh, but could not be sure; the way the locals pronounced their words was so different, and the long discussion that had followed made him cough.
It was a bright, cold day. For the first hour he saw nothing but the desert stretching around him and the occasional blighted tree. He could feel the boy at his side, casting anxious, furtive looks in his direction. They were friends now – Dom had found a piece of paper in his pocket and made him paper aeroplanes, and after the first shy overtures, the boy had brought his board back and they’d made up all kinds of games on it together.
After nearly four hours’ walk, the dust road became tarmac and he saw the dusty sign ahead of him. It was Marsa and quicker than he’d anticipated. There was a railway station there. He was back in civilisation again – or some approximation of it.
He pointed to it, put his thumbs up, tried to smile, but what he felt most was a profound sadness and shame. On his way here, he’d seen through their eyes the destruction of the land all around: the charred jeeps abandoned by the roadside, the shattered pavements, the aircraft, looking like a broken pterodactyl, half-buried in sand.
The boy seemed excited at the adventure of going into town, but Karim, after looking around him, gave Dom the strangest look, a wry shrug, as if to say
What can you do? This is life and life only
. And Dom thought again of his own elation when he’d dropped bombs on a fuel dump not far from here; the time when the Karims and Ibrahims of this world were tiny toys on the ground. They owed him nothing.
The railway station was on the edge of the town. As they drew closer, Ibrahim’s frail shoulders began to droop, and his eyes grew frightened. It was clear he hadn’t been this far before.
When they reached the ticket office, Dom got down from the donkey. There were British and Australian soldiers walking on the pavements, some of them watching him, and he was beginning to feel self-conscious in the djellaba they’d given him to travel in. The boy was grinning and jiggling around in the dust; Karim touched him lightly on the arm.
And though he was already half-back in his world again, what Dom most wanted looking at them for the last time was to kneel at their feet and thank them over and over again for their incredible kindness.
‘Here.’ He pulled out the leather compass case. The beautiful old-fashioned compass with its scratched leather case and faded mauve velvet lining had once belonged to his father. There were still fourteen Egyptian pounds inside its lid. He peeled off four pounds for himself and handed the rest to Karim – at least they would have a decent meal here and buy some provisions, and perhaps a bundle of alfalfa for the donkey who stood patiently by.
‘This,’ he said to Ibrahim, ‘is for you.’ He handed him the compass and the case. The boy looked completely stunned. He bit his lip as he stared at it, then he looked at his father who was smiling. ‘For you.’ Dom closed the boy’s fingers over his gift. ‘
Sukran
.’ He held his own hand over his heart, and when they had turned watched the small boy, the man, the donkey get smaller and smaller until they’d dissolved in dust and heat. That was it. They’d said goodbye. Dom was saved; it didn’t feel like it.
Inside the station, he bought a one-way ticket to Alex, a two-hour journey from Marsa. Alex was the last place on earth that Dom wanted to be without Saba, but he had no choice. He didn’t have enough money to get to Cairo, and he would be close to the squadron there.
When he arrived, he found a cheap hotel near the Rue Nebi Daniel called the Waterloo. It looked like a dive from the outside, but the bedrooms were clean and quiet, and it was cheap and perfect for his purpose, which was sleep, which he did for close to thirteen hours. When he woke up, he gazed in bewilderment at a long flypaper, covered in dead insects, hanging from the ceiling; at the rough walls. He was out of time and out of place and the dust-covered robe that lay on the floor seemed to belong to someone else.
He was staggeringly tired. The early starts, the late nights, the shock of being shot down, the chest infection which had left him wheezing and weak, had caught up with him. His back still ached from the donkey ride, and he felt light-headed and unreal as he walked out into the street near his hotel. Two doors down, in a dim little shop whirring with sewing machines, a tailor sold him a pair of Western trousers and a white shirt. His flying boots he transformed into black shoes by ripping off the detachable sheepskin on the calf – grateful now for the clever bod at the MOD who’d come up with this idea of inconspicuous shoes for men on the run. Next door to the tailor was a Greek barber who shaved him with a cut-throat razor, heating the water in a little brazier next to his chair, and touching his face afterwards with a cologne that smelled of sandalwood.