The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance (Suspense and Political Mystery Book 1) (18 page)

             
"Let's get out of here," I said.

She did not move, nor did she resist when I pressed her to me and buried my face in her hair, breathing in her scent. 

"Wait for me outside," she said into my shoulder in a dry voice.

I left through the kitchen door.  From inside came the noise of water followed by the usual sounds of a woman dressing.  A few minutes later she emerged and walked in front of me with that slow, hesitant gait dictated by her wounded leg.  Only when we were among the bushes, on the hidden path that led to the summit, did I notice the bag she was carrying.  The zip was open.  I could see the top of a folded sheet and part of a blanket.  I took one of the handles from her.  She let the other one go too.  The bag remained swinging in my hand.

              At the summit an evening breeze was blowing.  The ruin was enveloped in shadow.  I put my arm around her waist as we climbed in through the window.  Beneath the thin fabric of her dress, her skin seemed to freeze at my touch.  She shook the old mattress, laid the sheet smoothly on top of it and spread out the blanket.  Her movements were detached from the event and charged with housewifely skill.  I stood beside the window and looked out until she had finished taking her clothes off.  After that I got undressed too.  She watched me in silence and moved over, leaving me room beneath the blanket.  For a long moment we lay beside one another.  The floor, too close and charred, gave a sense of stability.  The deep and infinite sky bent over to look.  The wind brought sounds it had gathered in the distance.  I closed my eyes and put my arms out.  She moved and came into them obediently.

             
Later, when it was dark, I pulled the blanket back to reveal her body.  She did not reprove me.  With a gentle hand I studied her.  I had spent years considering those features in women that aroused me: a movement of the head, a pout, a way of speaking, of walking, of moving their buttocks, of laughing.  Each had proven a disappointment.  For how many more meetings would this magic last?  How far would I have to fly on a rotting magic-mattress in a Lebanese village because of my aspiration to touch the soul of a village nurse, a faded beauty, who had not even asked me my name?

             
"My name is Simon," I said softly, wondering if the name would arouse the same association for her as it had for the priest.  She did not react.  "I thought you'd want to know."

             
High above us a star detached itself from its place and sank into the depths of the sky. 

             
"If it wasn't for Anton I wouldn't be doing this," she said.

             
I bent over and kissed her on her lips.  They were hard and dry. 

             
"Don't you need a little affection?"

             
She did not reply.  Only her cheek, in a very delicate, unseen movement, rubbed against my arm.  I kissed her once more.  This time her lips moved.  Dura, the mountain, the ruin, were suddenly very imprisoning and unsatisfying.

             
"How did you come to be in this place?"

             
"This place is the best thing that ever happened to me," she said in a tone which bore within it the tip of a very distant thaw.

             
Slowly, gently, I moved my finger around her mouth:  "Tell me."

             
"It's a difficult story..."

             
My finger wandered along her cheeks, which came to life, sending out, by the light of the sinking moon, one of those beautiful, full expressions of hers. 

             
"You ran away," I whispered, trying out what I knew, "you escaped..."

             
"It's a difficult story," she said again, and this time she continued.  "It's connected with Michel."  Her voice was low, like an untuned piano, and throaty.  "And with the war."  I put my face close to hers and the words flowed to me through her skin, her smell, the beating of her temples.  "On the day he was born the shelling began.  If it hadn't been for that the midwife would have taken him straight away.  We waited for it to get dark.  He didn't stop crying.  I wanted to breastfeed him, just once, but she wouldn't allow it and bound my breasts with cloth and kept saying, ‘In a little while, in a little while we'll leave...’ "

She fell silent.  I buried my face in the hollow of her shoulder.  Suddenly she said:  "His father had disappeared long before that."  Her hand touched my hair lightly.  "And I...I intended to leave him."

              I held her to my breast.  This time there was a slight spasm in her body, reflecting need rather than response.  I stroked her hair gently.  Her lips fluttered by my skin.  "There were fixed places - a famous hospital, a well-known charitable institution...  Perhaps because I was a nurse I chose the hospital.  The accepted place was at the back, at the service entrance.  But I insisted on putting him at the front, on the steps.  That was a kind of advantage I could give him, that he'd attract attention, be noticed before the other babies..."  Now the words were coming out of her of their own volition, falling over one another.  "I didn't feel anything.  The midwife stopped a cab, pushed me inside and left.  I meant to get to my aunt in Damour, but even before we left Beirut I knew that I wanted to go back.  The driver agreed.  All the way back I prayed, 'Let him not be found, Let no one have taken him.'  I planned to comb all the orphanages, all the convents, not rest until I'd found him, until I'd got him back."  Sweat covered her body.  She moved away from me and pulled the blanket over herself.  "But he was there, and so were some policemen.  When babies are abandoned at the back the nurses come and collect them secretly.  At the front - they have to call the police."

             
I heard her moving on the mattress, picking up her clothes.  "The policemen were taking me to their car when the duty doctor suddenly appeared, took one look at me and said, 'Get her straight back into bed, together with the baby.' "  She swallowed.  "That was Anton."

"I can imagine the rest," I said with a sense of staleness. "He took you into his flat, fed and supported..." 

"No," she said immediately, "those were his last days in Beirut.  He moved here, to Dura, and I found a flat in a different neighborhood, far away, and moved there with Michel.  My family was one of the richest in the city.  I didn't need help..."  Her clothes rustled as she put them on.  I put out my hand to feel for her.  "Until the war came and the big air-raid...  I was wounded.  Michel escaped miraculously.  Everything around us was either dead or destroyed: half of Beirut, Damour, my parents, my aunt and uncle...  Only Anton was left."  My hand found her at last and I put it round her shoulders affectionately.  She wriggled away. 

"I want to go."

I straightened up quickly. 

"Tomorrow?"
I asked.  "Here, at the same time?"

She bent to do up the plastic sandals she was wearing.  I held her ankle.  "Will you come?"

              Her fingers lingered on the buckle of her sandal.  "Are you going to see him?"

             
"Tomorrow," I lied eagerly.  "In the morning."

             
She straightened up and stood over me, wobbling.  "Bring me a letter from him, even a note or just regards on a piece of paper..."

***

I lay there on my own, naked, lighting one cigarette with another, until it got colder and the dome of stars was obscured by a black haze.  The tree in the middle of the room assumed the shape of every fear.  Far away, the night fires began. Once again all was frozen in a moment of silence.  The old, familiar unease returned, a longing for an explosion to rent the silence swelling towards me, that threatened to envelop and drown me within it.

             
But there was no question of an explosion.  All that remained was to report to Tel Aviv, which would doubtless cancel all the plans and withdraw me from Dura just as Yvonne began to open up.

             
And if I did not report, if I stayed here, I would have no choice but to go to the detention camp to meet him.

             
How did one get there?

             
I rolled up the bedding and stowed it away in the hollow trunk of the tree.  I would have to ask Scheckler.  Who else?  As I walked slowly along the dirt track I had the uncomfortable feeling of another presence.  Was it just a sense of oppression or was I being watched?  A nearby clump of bulrushes rustled ominously.  A section broke away from it and walked towards me.  Its features were too familiar for me to make any mistake: a thick vertical structure from whose center emerged a smaller, deadly offshoot:  an armed man.

"
Irfa Idak.  Hands up."

I recognized the voice.  Slowly, with a sense of inevitability, I put my hands in the air.  He came closer, his blond forelock bouncing nervously on his forehead.  In his hand was the rifle which had been stolen from the guard who had been attacked.  The noise cast a charmed calm over me, together with surprise at my body's acceptance and my mind's recognition of the appropriateness of the punishment.  Which of my various crimes did he know about and was going to repay me for?  My meetings with his mother, the doctor's arrest, the way I had threatened the priest?  I relaxed my position and closed my eyes in readiness.

              When I opened them he was no longer there.  The path stretched out in front of me, long and empty, and the clump of bulrushes merely bent apologetically.

CHAPTER EIGHT

From afar it looked like a scene from a fairy-tale: a crown of high mountains, a valley as flat as a pancake and a wheat field flowering with hundreds of brown tarpaulin cones.  The notice at the entrance ("Military Police, Stop your vehicle, turn the engine off and wait") enforced a sobering delay. 
Scheckler, beside me, showed a grumpy-looking officer the documents he had prepared early that morning: a letter of appointment, a movement pass, warrants.  Only three of the five accompanying soldiers, who were sitting behind us in the command car cabin, were included in the entry pass.  Scheckler had foreseen everything. 

             
"You've got to give them something to latch on to," he had explained when we set out, "otherwise they'll really start looking at the papers..."

             
"Two have to stay outside," the officer growled.

             
Scheckler bowed his head in submission.  Two soldiers jumped over the side and the barbed-wire barrier was dragged aside so that we could enter.  The road was fenced in on both sides.  Along it flowed an open sewage ditch.  "The MPs call this Shit Road," Scheckler said, with the same pride as he had introduced me to Dura long before that, when we had gone to arrest the doctor. The soldiers behind us laughed.  An unseen loudspeaker, deep inside the camp, responded with a croak.

             
Another barrier was drawn aside.  An MP wearing a helmet studied the instructions his superior officer had scribbled on our wad of permits.

             
"You won't be able to go into the actual camp, only as far as the offices."

             
"As far as the offices is enough," Scheckler said.

             
After a few minutes journey came the smell: the sourness of urine and sweat, the fecundity of drying excrement and the poison of disinfectants. Then, a long way behind the network of internal fences, the first inmates.  Wearing army trousers and light colored T shirts, they were gathered around a cooking pot set on an open fire.  When they noticed us they began waving their open hands, forming the V-sign.  I narrowed my eyes.  From a distance they all seemed to of be the same height and to share the same unshaven face, as though they were playing a trick in order to look like one another and the doctor.  All at once, I realized that behind these few, in a network of square pens, there were many, many more, stirring, moving and producing that smell.  From their throats came shouts which reached us in the form of broken, taunting syllables, somewhere between a curse and a slogan.  The armored troop carriers patrolling the road aimed their gun barrels upwards, like admonishing fingers.  The noise merely increased. 

             
"Instead of being finished off," Scheckler complained, "they've been brought here, and still they're insolent."

I remembered two or three prisons in which I had spent some time, always on my own, never with any feeling approaching the power and comradeship of these people. 

"I've been somewhere like this before," I said in a low voice.

             
"Me too.  In Seventy-Three.  I was guarding Egyptian POWs.  Five thousand, would you believe it?  Five thousand POWs in one camp the size of a small town, and all of them disciplined..."

             
The rumor of our appearance travelled faster than we did in the command car.  At every turn in the road they were waiting for us, clustered together, various shades of gray.  At one spot there was a small enclosure, perhaps for specially privileged prisoners.  Its inmates stood and watched us in silence.  Their expressions were not hungry, not even pained, just, at the most, impatient.  They wore the priest's arrogance together with Yvonne's experience of suffering.  How would the doctor look at me when I met him?  Unobtrusively, I sniffed my hands and my body, to see if the morning's shower had erased the scents of the night.

             
A large fan was humming in the office hut.  The pages of the logbook fluttered in the breeze. 

             
"We left him here," Scheckler said, putting his documents on the counter.  A bored clerk looked them over. 

             
"Okay," he said eventually.  "Khamis, Anton, Dura.  Second of August, Nineteen eighty-two.  So what do you want?"

             
"To talk to him."

             
He looked at us suspiciously.  "It's not customary, we don't have arrangements."

             
"It's a special case.  It says so here..."

             
The clerk studied the papers again.  "Right, but..."

             
"There's no but about it," Scheckler raged at him.  "If it says so, you've got to do it, right?"

             
The clerk pulled the logbook along the counter.  "They've gone completely crazy at Nabatiya," he muttered.  "How am I going to get him out of there?"  His damp finger, its nail badly bitten, wandered across the entries.  The second of August, you said..."

             
"In the afternoon."

             
"Then maybe they registered him on the third..."  He turned a page.  His lips moved soundlessly.  After a moment he looked up and said with relief, "Nope.  He's not registered."

             
"Try Kamis, Kumis, Hamis..." I contributed from my experience.

             
He turned the logbook round towards me.  I looked down the cramped lines.  The names were meaningless and could equally have represented machine parts or the ingredients needed for an enormous cake. 

             
"Perhaps he had two names..." I suggested.

             
The clerk shrugged his shoulders.  "Maybe."

             
"No," Scheckler said suddenly.  "He was registered as Khamis.  Now I remember."

             
The clerk pointed silently at the logbook. 

             
"Not here.  In the stores, where they leave their things," Scheckler said.

             
"So find out there.  Bring me his number..."

             
We jumped over paving stones between which the dying wheat-field stubbornly sent yellow fingers of stubble. 

             
In a huge, dim tent which smelt of compressed heat and unaired clothing the quartermaster shouted, "Why on earth should I show you my book?"

             
Scheckler led him aside, to confer in secret.  His arms flailed like a windmill as he described something big, maybe a reward.  The quartermaster glanced at me then dived into the piles of clothes.

             
"I told him that you were an examiner for the Efficiency Prize committee," Scheckler whispered.  "So say something nice when you've finished reading..."

             
The quartermaster's book was bound in a decorated cloth wrapping, the product of a great deal of boredom.  I leafed through it.  I remembered some of the names on the page for the third of August from the logbook.  I turned another page and read the names from the second of August.  When I got to the first of August I closed the book with a dissatisfied bang.

             
"Impossible," Scheckler said.

             
The quartermaster looked at us suspiciously.  "Has something happened?"

             
With a sudden understanding I took back the book and looked through it quickly.  The war passed before me in the details of its provisions, the weights of people and the size of their clothes.  Each page was divided.  On the right-hand side was information about the prisoner when he entered the camp.  On the left, when he was released.  The pages were numbered: 210 pages, and 57 lines on each.  Not one was crossed out, except the eighth line from the bottom on the page for the second of August, which was covered with a thick line of black ink.

             
I showed it to the quartermaster.  "Whose name was here?"

             
"How can I remember...?  They're all alike."

             
"Why did you cross it out?"

             
He snatched the book away from me and held it to his chest.  "Who are you, anyway?  The Efficiency Prize committee never checked that kind of thing..."

             
"They've changed the rules this year," Scheckler said drily.  "Come on, let's go."

             
"No," I insisted.  "I want to understand."

             
He gripped my arm and led me around the tent.  The loudspeakers came to life:  "Pen leaders, get the men away from the fence..." 

"Don't be stupid, Simon,"
Scheckler said.  I shook his hand off.  "Calm down," he beseeched.  "Don't make a fuss..."

A lorry maneuvered between the barbed-wire fences and spat out a fresh group of men.  They were tied to one another by strips of plastic that allowed an embarrassingly limited range of movements.  A youngster with a pockmarked face expectorated onto the ground.  A short, balding man looked at him with disgust through a pair of thick glasses.

              An MP led the first man in the row to the stores.  The others followed behind, like sausages on a string.  A door opened in a prefabricated building nearby.  A figure wearing a white coat stood in the doorway. 

             
"I want to eat, so bring them here for their injections first."

             
"What do you think, Doctor," the quartermaster shouted through the opening of his tent.  "Don't I need to eat too?"

             
The caravan stopped abruptly.  The MP calmly cut the plastic ropes and divided the men into two groups. 

             
"Wait a sec," I said to Scheckler and attached myself to the end of the line making its way to the clinic.

             
A medic ordered them to form a row facing the front and interviewed them jointly: "Syphilis, tetanus, typhoid fever," he read out in Arabic from a form, "ringworm, trachoma, mental disease..."

             
"I'm from HQ," I said to the doctor, who was sorting through blue index cards, "and I need the medical file of a prisoner..."

             
"Detainees," he said without looking at me.  "They're called detainees here."

             
"I've never heard that..."

             
"That's just the idea.  There's no such thing, and what doesn't exist can't violate the Geneva Convention," he peered at me with a bitter look.  "If you're from HQ you should have known.

             
"I'm new."

             
"You'll learn.  Which file do you want?"

             
"Khamis, Anton."

             
He wrote the name down on a piece of paper and pulled out a drawer in a nearby cupboard.  "When was he arrested?"

             
"The second of August."

             
"Diabetes, stomach ulcer, piles, varicose veins," the medic recited.

             
The files hung in clusters on a rail and he began moving them one by one.

             
"He's a doctor too."

             
He stopped, closed the drawer and turned round to me.  "Are you guys never going to stop pestering me about that affair?  First you wanted his file, then his card, in the end someone found out about the blood sample and I was reprimanded..."

             
"What sample?"

             
"I don't want to talk about it..."

             
"Maybe the reprimand can still be cancelled..." I said, surprising myself with my spontaneity.  I had never told so many lies in one month.

"You really don't know a thing yet..."  His mouth twisted disapprovingly.  "That's according to the Convention too.  We aren't allowed to keep sick people in a camp.  In the beginning we took samples of blood, excrement and urine from everyone.  After a few days, when the clinic was stinking and completely clogged up, some legal adviser in Tel Aviv discovered that we'd also be covered if every detainee signed a health declaration instead of being checked.  But when that doctor of yours arrived I was ashamed to make him sign, so I told the medic to take blood from him for examination..."

              "Do you remember anything?  What he said, how he behaved, where they took him?"

             
He shook his head in negation and watched the medic, who had finished reading out the list of diseases and was going along the row.  He was holding a pencil and a pack of blue cards for the men to sign their names on.  The door opened.  An MP led in the second group already wearing camp clothes.  Scheckler gestured to me through the open door.