The Radiant City (35 page)

He thinks about Joseph. The truth is, there probably are not many possibilities for Joseph, who clearly is not going on to one of the
grandes écoles
and will not be a lawyer, doctor or politician. He will work in the restaurant, or as a house painter or construction worker, and there is nothing wrong with that in principle, but Matthew senses Joseph will be unhappy, is already unhappy, and impatient to boot.

Saida was beautiful that night at the restaurant. Her mouth had looked like a soft ruby. Several times her knee grazed Matthew’s under the table. Or had his grazed hers? Since the cops picked up Joseph, she is a mere ghost of herself. On one hand, Matthew tells himself, it is no big deal—just a little graffiti—but on the other hand, it may be the tip of the iceberg.
Banlieue
gangs. He is familiar with all the stories—stolen cars chopped and sold to Russian mobs in exchange for guns. Young girls gang-raped and burned alive. House invasions. Caches of Kalashnikovs. Drug lords. Pickpocket rings are the least of it. Graffiti a mere addendum. Two days ago a blaze lured police and firemen to one of the housing estates and when emergency vehicles arrived, rocks and Molotov cocktails and gunfire greeted them. Two cops are in hospital.

Trouble everywhere. Ghosts.

Every time he closed his eyes the night before, he had seen the faces of a father and daughter huddled up against a wall in Hebron. Begging for mercy. He had seen again the glint of gunmetal and all the possibilities—for redemption, for damnation—that glimmer contained. Yes.
I should have picked up the gun.
No.
Reporters don’t pick up guns.
Pick it up or let it lie. What did it matter? He had walked out of the shadows, crossed over into the circle of hell. Blood in the sand. On his hands. The memory is fire.

You’re getting closer
,
he thinks
.

Yes. The book moves along. Brent is a happy agent. Enough sent to him to keep the publishers happy. Soon, Matthew is going to have to write about Hebron. And so . . . But not yet.

A light drizzle begins to fall from a dirty, towel-rough sky. He sits until the damp seeps into his clothes and then on a whim he decides to wander over to the Abbey Bookshop in the Latin Quarter on rue de la Parcheminerie. He looks for something about God and sex and sorrow by Morley Callaghan, or something by Orwell, or Beckett even, something worth a second reading. In his present state of mind, nothing is, and he turns away from the stacks, disgusted. He walks to the Square du Vert Galant, the small park shaped like the bow of a ship, at the end of Île de la Cité. The drizzle has stopped and a cluster of tramps shares a bottle of wine, sitting precariously with their legs dangling from the stone wall. A young couple loll on a bench, he leaning back on his elbows, she straddling him, her hand on his groin. A woman walks a long-haired, bristly-looking dachshund. Matthew looks down the Seine. The vast brooding bulk of the Louvre is to his right, the Eiffel Tower pierces the grey sky in the distance, all the dark, muddy water is below him. The water is mesmerizing. Hypnotic. An empty plastic water bottle bobs by. He watches it float downstream and disappear. It takes some effort, but at last he turns away and heads home. Not Hebron yet. One chapter left before he has to face it. Chechnya.

As I strolled through the medieval-looking market, I thought the name of the town was still apt. In 1818, General Alexei Yermolov built a fortress in the North Caucasus. His aim was to intimidate the wild and rebellious people living there. He named his fortress Grozny, which means Terrible.

I walked the unpaved road, over the stone and mud, crowded with livestock and an occasional Eldorado or Mercedes. Women shook cabbages and bunches of pale carrots at me from behind their vegetable carts. Men wore sheepskin hats and carried knives in their belts. Ruslan, my Chechen guide, and I walked past the stalls where people sold turnips, lamb carcasses, bricks of hard black bread and vodka, to the arms market next door where men haggled over Kalashnikovs and rocket-launchers.

“
They get these guns from the Russian soldiers,” said Ruslan. “Ironic, no? This is the good word? They barter for these guns. Russians—they love their vodka.” He spit on the ground. “They go trade their guns for bottle. The gun is sold to a Chechen and he use it to kill this same guy later.”

Almost all the windows in the buildings were gone. The remains of a ten-storey apartment building with a missing façade tilted and hung, defying the laws of gravity in such a way that it seemed drawn by a surrealist. Next to it stood, or partially stood, the corpse of what was once probably a concrete-block garage or workshop. Now half the building was nothing but a shambles of caved-in rubble and the other half had only part of the roof and walls intact. Words were painted on the outside wall. Ruslan told me what the words meant, “People they are living here.”

The air was bad. Water service was sporadic at best and the odour of sewage was over everything, including the blood-and-meat smell of the markets. We passed a small coffee shop, no more than an alcove in the bottom of a structure that looked as though it might collapse at any moment. Strings of coloured wool hung from the doorway.

“
We go in,” said Ruslan holding the makeshift curtain back. “I know them.”

Inside, the air was heavy with unwashed flesh and smoke and the perfume of the thick coffee rising from tiny chipped cups. A man with a face so wrinkled he looked like an apple doll set bowls of stew in front of us. It smelled of mutton and was mostly grease.

Ruslan said something to the man who nodded, laughed and made a gesture, holding up his hand to indicate Ruslan should wait there.

“
What’s up?” I said.

“
There is a woman—a fortune teller here. I am hearing she is to be good.” Ruslan shrugged. “We will see.”

A small woman came out from behind a flowered sheet tacked up at the back of the room. She beckoned us to come.

“
Bring you coffee,” said Ruslan.

“
You go. I’m not interested in knowing the future.”

“
No. You come. Pick up you cup.” The Chechen walked away and I followed as was expected. Men looked at me from the corners of their eyes, tense, suspicious. Ruslan said something and the men relaxed. The press was welcome. They knew reporters generally favoured the little guy with the big foot on his throat.

We sat on stools around a barrel the old woman used as a table. She wore a red-and-yellow scarf over her head and layers of dresses, shirts and sweaters, all of different colours and all unwashed. Her hands were farmer’s hands, gnarled, strong and thick.

Ruslan told me to give her some coins. She had us drink our coffee and when we were finished, she emptied my cup and then overturned it. She waited and spoke to Ruslan, shaking her head and holding her hands upward.

“
What’s she saying?”

“
She tell me her nephew he picked up a tape-recorder he find on the ground. It explode in his face. Russian booby trap. Lose an eye. And he blind now, his right hand probably never work good again.”

“
Tell her I’m sorry.”

“
Husband killed by the Russians, both sons taken away. She don’t know where.”

“
Tell her I’m sorry for her.”

“
She knows. She want you to know is all. To tell people what happen here.”

“
I’ll do my best.”

“
She say they hate us because we are Muslim.”

The woman picked the cup up and held it in the bowl of her hands. The grounds had dried and left patterns on its sides, at which she peered intently. She began to speak and Ruslan translated.

“
You have fire in your past, fire in your future, she say.” The woman rubbed her belly. “You must be careful of you stomach. She see sickness there.”

“
Why do you think I’m not eating that stew?”

“
She see a broken chain—a love broken—and a beetle, so there will to be hard challenges.”

“
Nothing good, then?”

Ruslan spoke to the woman and she shook her head, shrugged, said something.

“
She see an owl—what we call night eagles—see things of the darkness. And a bat, not good things. But also she see a tent and a tree, shelter and life, but not now, later, far down the cup, away from the handle. Not here. She say maybe you shouldn’t look so much into the flames. Burn the eyes, then you see nothing but shadows.”

Ruslan’s fortune said he would have grief, but that he would travel, “Maybe to America,” he said. A sword foretold his enemies would fall and a wheel meant fortunes would change. The old woman said a dark man would find him a good bride, which made him laugh.

As we left, she told us to stay away from water.

“
Not really a problem around here,” I said.

The next day as we travelled south, with Leon from
The
Times
, toward the checkpoint Assinovskaya, we came upon a bridge that only moments before had been the target of a Russian bombing raid. People, at least those who could, ran through the streets. Leon and I got out of the Volvo to take a look. Bodies were scattered about, and body parts. A shopping bag, with turnips and bread and potatoes leaking out, looked as though someone had dropped it in haste, and then I realized an arm was still attached to it. The bridge was only partially destroyed and before we knew it the planes returned. We barely had time to dash back to the battered old Volvo, which was missing the doors on the driver’s side. Even as we spun the wheels trying to turn, an explosion rocked the vehicle. Ruslun screamed, his leg full of shrapnel.

I drove to the small hospital for war veterans in Staraya Sunzha.

“
That fortune teller was no good,” said Ruslun, as the nurses worked on his wound. “She told you to stay away from water, not me.”

“
Maybe she was right about the bride,” I said.

A huge chunk of flesh was missing from Ruslun’s calf. There was no anaesthetic and he broke out in a sweat when a nurse began cleaning it, but he did not cry out. It was not clear when he would be walking again but whenever that was, the doctor said, he’d never again be free of a limp.

“
You need a new driver. Try my cousin, Shaikhan.”

I left Ruslun with some money and my thanks and went looking for the cousin. But Shaikhan had already disappeared into the mountains to join the rebel forces.

By the time Matthew finishes it is evening. He eats some bread and cheese, washes it down with tap water and goes to sleep. He does not dream.

A week has passed since Matthew wrote about Chechnya. He is already getting back the first chapters from the publisher with editorial comments. Change this. Change that. Take out this. Put that in. It’s not fiction, he thinks, how can I change what happened? If only he could.

He sits at his desk in the predawn darkness. He feels he must begin as the sun is coming up, for it will give him as lengthy a time as possible of daylight in which to write. He does not want to write this part in the dark.

He goes to the kitchen and plugs in the kettle. Boils water for an egg. Pushes down the toaster button. Simple things. Good rules for beginning: Have something in the belly to ground yourself. Do it slow, but when the time comes—do it.

When he finishes in the kitchen, he carries a large cup of coffee and a plate with a boiled egg and toast to the table by the window. He eats while the sun begins to rise.

And so. The time has come.

Begin with the beginning of that day. He writes a sentence
. I woke up in a puddle of sweat and tears, my heart hammering.
He wills himself not to read it back. He writes two more.
The fire dream had come back. It came back after Rwanda.
The pen begins to move of its own volition
. The narrow bed is hard and damp. My hair was plastered to my skull and my sinuses throbbed from the smell of disinfectant in the room.

I hadn’t had a good sleep in so long it was hard to remember what being rested felt like. I was thinner even than normal, and there was a patch of festering skin on my right thumb, at which I couldn’t stop picking
. Slowly the words come. Light moves across his desk. He discovers he is chilled and pulls a sweatshirt over his head. Pages begin to pile up beside him. He keeps writing. Moving through the day like someone drugged. The phone rings and he lets the machine get it.