Chapter 41

Fareeha was getting less and less sleep with the passing of each long night. In the early mornings, sometimes even before the artillery started, she would drag her tired body from the bed, remembering fragments of dreams and reliving those long periods of wakefulness.

On Sunday night, Hassan had come haunting first, smiling out from his mountain fastness. ‘No money,’ he cried, ‘There’s no money.’ He lunged his bayonet into the body of a government recruit then reached forward and pulled from the ripped, bleeding stomach a hundred-dirham bill. ‘It mine,’ he laughed, ‘all mine.’ Blood splashed down his arm from the fluttering banknote.

Monday evening, Fareeha decided to terminate her involvement in the scheme: tell everyone that they could go ahead by themselves, just leave her out of it. But that night she saw her own decapitated corpse bloodying the battlements of the citadel and her head being kicked over the ramparts into the crashing waves far below.

Tuesday morning brought her back to reality, when she could see again under a bright sun just how desperate her existence had become: the ruined house, the useless pump, the dead garden . . . And over a glass of cloudy water for breakfast she told herself that she had nothing to lose and she determined again not to give up.

But however strong her resolve, fear was never far away. With every glimpse of the citadel and with the sound of every distant ship’s horn, it came back. She recognised her own dread reflected in the muted faced that swirled around her in the marketplace. She saw danger in the eyes of the armed gangs as they smoked by in their Jeeps. Every sound of gunfire, near and far, made her jump. At times, she even found herself fearing for Phipps, out there on the steppe, alone amongst bands of desperate and hostile nomads.

She was thankful for only one thing in her life: that she had thrown out all the mirrors and couldn’t see how ugly she was becoming. She caught her face, however, in some of the dreams, with its sunken, dark eyes, its drawn, tight skin, and sallow complexion—all framed by tufts of chewed-up hair.

Mrs Sharwalla had stopped mentioning a baby. Her neighbour knew that Hassan wasn’t likely to show his face any time soon, but his absence hadn’t stopped the taunts in the past; and probably even she could see, with her one eye, that such a scrawny bag of bones would never be able to reproduce itself.

On Wednesday morning, even before the sun had driven into hiding Sa’ An’s many dark secrets, Fareeha was sitting at the old kitchen table. With the first boom from the mountains she ran her fingers over her face. They stopped in the deep sockets that held her sore eyes. She then found the scar on her forehead and scratched a fingernail along it.

‘Missis Azziz.’

Fareeha dropped her hands and looked up.

‘Missis Azziz,’ it came again, a child’s voice, calling in from the street.

Fareeha walked to the window, pulled back the flour sack, and found a small boy, standing with his toes in the edge of crater. Ignoring everything else about the child—his filthy, ill-fitting clothes, which looked as if they had been patched together from rags, his matted, unwashed hair, his stained face—her eyes shot down to the white paper he was clutching between his soiled fingers. Hassan, she almost said out loud, I knew it. But before she could realise the stupidity of her mistake, the urchin opened his mouth:

‘Mister Hussein,’ he said, holding up the envelope, ‘it’s a message from him.’

‘Oh,’ Fareeha said, ‘wait there.’ She stepped out of the kitchen, walked through the living room, and slipped out of the house between the linoleum and a door-post. But as she began to walk around the crater, the boy raised a hand to his mouth and stepped back, staring up at a point well above Fareeha’s eyes. ‘What?’ Fareeha snapped. She combed her fingers back through the tufts of hair atop her uncovered head. ‘Just give that to me.’ She pushed out an arm.

The boy stopped backing away and held up the letter. ‘A coin please, Missis . . . for a bit of breakfast.’

Fareeha snatched away the letter. ‘There’s not a coin in the house,’ she said, ‘and besides, the harbourmaster must have already paid you for the delivery.’ She turned and retraced her steps around the crater as the urchin scurried away into the twilight.

Back in the kitchen, she drew the flour sack to let in more light, before dropping the envelope onto the table and falling onto a rickety chair before it. But instead of tearing at the paper, she raised her elbows onto the tabletop, balled her hands into fists, and dropped her head onto sharp knuckles. She stared down and made out the date, which was printed neatly above her name. ‘Really?’ she sighed, realising that today was a festival day.

Fareeha had not celebrated a single festival day for many years. During each one she had cried from its beginning to its end, remembering the happy times she’d had as a child with her family. The family that had disowned her when she married the wrong young man; the family that was now a thousand miles away, having fled the country at the start of the revolution. A family that was truly gone for ever.

The sudden knowledge that today was a feast would have thrilled her as a child; even as a young woman it might have lifted her spirits. For the past few years it would have made her cry. But today, however, the date meant nothing and the only emotion she was experiencing was evoked by the knowledge of what lay behind it—inside the envelope. But still she wouldn’t open it.

These days not even her neighbours could find cause for celebration and festivals were mostly quiet, leaving her own memories buried and undisturbed. This particular festival was a relic from ancient pagan times that had miraculously survived fifteen hundred years through a different order of things. The current war, however, had managed to do what all those years of intolerance had failed to do: stop the people from celebrating.

Fareeha suddenly got up and went to the corner of the room. From a large Jerry-can that sat on a broken, three-legged chair she drained off a glassful of brown water—water that should have gone onto Farooq’s peanuts. She held her breath, gulped once, and returned to the table. The first rays of morning sunlight fell through the empty window-frame as she fell back onto the chair. It must be urgent, she thought to herself as she closed her eyes and took another gulp. Why else would it come at sunrise?

At last she picked up the envelope and ripped it open. Eight neat and harmless words arranged near the top of a plain piece of white paper told Fareeha that the harbourmaster wanted to see her. Something she’d known since she realised that the letter wasn’t from the mountains and didn’t provide for her a last-minute way out. She dropped the message onto the tabletop, pushed herself up, and went to put on her sandals. Her glass stood half empty next to the fallen paper.

*

It was early and Fareeha’s feet were the first to kick up new layers of red powder that had settled during the night. It seemed that a windstorm had disturbed some remote part of the steppe after dark and sent a thick dust-cloud across to the city. She thought of Phipps and wondered if he was out there anywhere; but she supposed that he’d be well able to take care of himself in any bad weather.

Today’s festival was as stillborn as most of the new babies in the city and Fareeha saw none of the gaiety of former times: nobody sold the traditional breads and pastries in the market, and none of the children sang the rhymes and verses that she had heard so often before. Not a single person greeted her.

*

She tugged at the knot beneath her chin, checked the top buttons of her dress, and knocked once on a glass pane in the harbourmaster’s door.

‘Come in, come in,’ Muzaffer boomed from inside.

She saw his face metamorphose into a huge blubbery smile and then watched as he struggled to hoist himself up from his chair. Well, she thought to herself as Muzaffer bounced his heavy weight through the piles of rubbish towards her, at least this is making one of us happy!

‘Good news, my dear,’ Muzaffer said, swinging open the door. ‘very good news.’

Fareeha clenched her teeth and walked in.

Muzaffer led the way back through the salvage yard of his office and from a chair in front of his desk, he picked up a pile of ledgers, which he dumped on the floor. He wiped the seat over with his handkerchief. ‘Sit, please sit,’ he said, ignoring the ledgers that keeled over when Fareeha moved forward.

She sat and immediately the chair rocked to one side. ‘Aghh,’ she said.

Muzaffer turned around. ‘Just a moment, please,’ he said, and he bent down to reach for one of the hard-backed account books that were now fanned out on the floor. He shoved it beneath a chair legs. ‘Try it again,’ he said.

When they were both seated, Muzaffer spoke: ‘I’ve talked to McBride.’ he said. The statement, unlike most of his others, was not repeated; it was simply left hanging there for Fareeha to chew on.

She did not even bite.

‘My dear, are you alright?’ Muzaffer said at last to break the silence.

Fareeha coughed and mumbled something about being thirsty.

‘Good heavens, why didn’t you say so.’ He reached behind him for a jug. ‘Anyway,’ he said, filling a glass, ‘he will be steaming through the Gulf tomorrow night.’ Muzaffer stopped and using his hairy forearm he cleared a space on his desk. ‘He’ll be waiting for you here.’ He planted his index in the middle of a big blue nautical chart that he had just uncovered. He looked up and smiled. ‘Oh, here’s your water, my dear,’ he said. He picked it up and reached over.

Fareeha leaned forward to receive the glass and to try to get a better look at the chart. She screwed up her eyes.

‘Don’t worry, don’t worry,’ Muzaffer quickly said. He reached behind and picked a notebook out of one of the shelves. ‘Everything is in here.’ He tapped its blue cover. ‘Just give it to . . . eh . . . Kahlil.’ He inhaled a chesty lungful of air, a fat man’s breath, then continued in a raspy voice. ‘McBride will be between these two islets at one o’clock.’ He again pointed to the vast blue emptiness of the chart. ‘I don’t know how many knots your boat can do, but you’ll need to cover sixty three nautical miles, and the current and the wind will be against you.’ Muzaffer looked up from the chart and caught Fareeha’s attention with his moist eyes. ‘My dear, you must make sure you leave early enough; if you are not there on time, McBride won’t wait for you.’ Muzaffer sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over the front of his bulging shirt. ‘But don’t worry about McBride; he’s an honest enough chap; I have known him for years—as indeed you have, my dear. You should be alright.’

His words didn’t do much to slow Fareeha’s whirring mind; the throttle was stuck on ‘fast’ and she was skidding all over the surface of the harbourmaster’s vast, blue nautical chart.

Muzaffer threw the notebook across the water. It splashed in front of Fareeha but she didn’t fish it up.

‘Oh and no guns,’ Muzaffer added, as if it were an afterthought. ‘McBride made that very clear; if he so much as smells a weapon, he’ll sail away. And trust me, his nose is pretty good.’

Fareeha missed that last bit, about McBride’s keen sense of smell: her stomach had cramped and her heart had thumped at her bony ribcage as she saw herself telling Bashar Khan and his gang that they could not bring their best friends.

‘My dear, are you alright: Fareeha?’

Too many things were crowding in on her; she buckled again at their onslaught, feeling her intestines drain out through the chair beneath her, pounded down by the banging of her heart. The tides and winds (to say nothing of Muzaffer’s previous warnings about undercurrents, squalls, and whirlpools), the distances, the times—too many things to get her mind around. And the guns!

‘Are you sure that you can handle everything, my dear?’

She rose quickly, lifting up her attenuated intestines and their contents. ‘Yes . . . yes , I am fine . . . but I must go

‘Is there anything else I can do?’ Muzaffer asked as Fareeha turned for the door. ’Won’t you stay for a little tea?’

Fareeha shook her head and began to make her way to the door. When she got there she opened it and left with no more than a perfunctory goodbye, leaving the excitable harbourmaster to the dusty ledgers and yellowing papers of his cluttered office.