THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER (32 page)

The lie came easily 'I missed it, no problem. I saw it coming, hunkered down in shelter. There was some drifting round the wheels but I dug them out.'

When had she last lied? Beth could not remember. It was not in her nature to lie. Everything she had learned at the convent, and at home, had told her that an untruth chased a liar.

The question slithered quietly from him. 'Did you see anybody, Miss Bethany, in the Sands?'

She blustered: 'No . . . Who?'

'Any travellers, any traders?'

'Why do you ask?'

'I merely ask because, if we had had to search for you, Miss Bethany, I wonder if we would have met travellers or traders who had seen you and would have directed us towards where you were.'

'No.' It was the second lie. 'I did not see anybody.'

'These are difficult times . . . there are rumours . . . It is said men travel in the Sands, who are illegal and dangerous . . . only whispers, I do not have evidence of it.'

The lie tripped from her tongue. 'I told you, there was nobody.'

'Promise me, you will not go alone again into the Sands.'

'I saw nobody . . . But I want to tell you what I did see.'

She told the deputy governor about the ejecta field where the iron-ore fragments had come down, and she ran outside. She tipped the sample bag on to the plastic patio table, and the stones and glass pieces rattled and rolled on the table's surface. His hands were cupped and she laid the largest pieces in them. His fingers stroked them. She told him that when she had written her paper, when it was submitted with maps, photographs and samples to the American-based society that collated meteorite finds, she would give the field his name. She saw the pleasure in his face and the joy with which his fingers, hesitant, touched the pieces. He had been frightened for her

- he did not own her, she owned him. There was one man whom she did not own.

As he handled the pieces, with love, Beth heard the soft drone in the air and looked down from her patio into the brightness of the low sun. She saw the small aircraft lift from the runway. It did not have the grace she had seen before, but seemed to yaw and struggle clumsily for height. There were khaki tubes, one under each wing .. .

The aircraft climbed. She saw that her patron looked up, watched the aircraft's slow, pained climb, then his eyes were back on the stones, bright with fascination for them.

She had lied, she had avoided the promise. She let the deputy governor keep two pieces for his collection, then saw him go.

Beth ran her bath, and stripped . . . She did not recognize how greatly the lies she had spoken had changed her.

High in the control tower beside the runway, the deputy governor was given binoculars. He raised them and studied the tent camp by the far edge of the perimeter fence, and a frown puckered on his forehead. The beauty of the glass and the stones slipped from his mind.

His host passed the glass of Saudi champagne. It was done awkwardly, and the man's heavily strapped wrist restricted any fluency of movement. Bart smiled, took the glass. He thought his host would have preferred a sling, as if it were a Purple Heart ribbon, but Bart had decreed that a tightly wrapped bandage was appropriate. It was only a sprain. By way of reward for coming across Riyadh at the speed appropriate for an emergency, he had been invited to an all-American picnic. It was not permitted to barbecue in the park of the diplomatic quarter, but the host's wife had cooked the beefburgers in her villa kitchen, had wrapped them well in tinfoil, and they were still warm. The talk bustled round him, and Bart thought he was expected to look and feel privileged to be present.

'I don't know where this country is going, except down. I don't see a future here. Once they got it into their thick skulls that they could do without us, without Americans, when they'd got that delusion into their heads, they were going nowhere but down the pan.

'What really sucks is the absence of gratitude. I have spent ten whole years here, eleven come Thanksgiving, and I have never heard a Saudi say that he is grateful for what we have done in their country.

All right, they have oil. All right, so we want the oil. At every stage we have shown them how to exploit and market that asset. Up to last year we have posted the finest young men and women in our armed forces here, let them live out there in the desert, for the protection of the regime. I ask you, did you ever hear any thanks? Arabic for

"thank you", I'm using it from morning to night, is
shukran,
and I don't hear it said to me much. You know, in 'ninety-one we fought a war to stop this place ending up as an out-station of Baghdad, and we get no gratitude.'

Bart seldom met Americans. They inhabited their own compounds. They used their own Chamber of Commerce, had their own fenced-off section of the grandstand at the races. Insularity was the name of their game. These men, Bart accepted it, were not fools.

Bombastic, yes. Arrogant, yes. Stupid, no.

'They are living in denial. Their heads are in the sand. They're the source of Al Qaeda, they bankrolled that gang of fanatics, zealots, psychopaths. I read that think-tank report from back home. Quote:

"For years, individuals and charities based in Saudi Arabia have been the most important source of funds for Al Qaeda, and for years Saudi officials have turned a blind eye to the problem." Unquote.

You wait till that nine/eleven law case gets up steam. You remember what that Pentagon briefer called this virtuous and God-following Kingdom: he called it a "kernel of evil". What I say - who needs Saudi Arabia? We got Iraq, we don't need these people. We're the power, they're nothing. They sowed the field, let them harvest it.'

His mind drifted. The condemnations and criticisms wafted around the linen tablecloth. Food filled the mouths, the best that could be bought in the supermarkets of the Riyadh shopping malls.

He thought they rolled out this talk each time they met, yet still retained a fervour for it. If the place was such shit, why stay? Bart reckoned they stayed because the money was good, and because they were, one and all, too proud to consider that the Al Qaeda crowd - the fanatics, zealots, psychopaths - could make them scuttle for the airport. Why did he stay? Bart half choked on the end of his burger. Maybe it took more courage to run. Bart could have torn up the airline ticket, not caught the flight to Tel Aviv, could have refused to get into the waiting car, could not have checked into the Dan Hotel and settled himself into a room with a beach view. To stand against the wind took more bottle than flowing with it. An Englishman had come first, had thanked him on behalf of a medical charity, whose name and background Bart assumed had been cobbled together in the last week. The Englishman had eczema on his wrists, and the signs of over-high blood pressure - Bart was good on symptoms -

and a nasal voice. 'What I heard, you were looking for a route back to respectability, old boy. I can put you on that route, but I promise that travelling on it might be bumpy . . . In my sort of work, I trade.

I do a friend a favour, and I know I'll get a favour back. Let's call you the favour. You are the favour I'm doing for a friend.' Bart could have walked out then, but it would have taken more guts than he had. An hour after the Englishman had left him, while he'd been watching the swimmers on the beach, there had been a knock on the door. He had met Ariel. Ariel was cheerful, bouncy, had the happy enthusiasm that made problems disappear. It would have taken a better man than Bart to refuse Ariel. After the burgers, flushed down with the bogus champagne, the wives sliced portions of apple pie, crowned them with dollops of soft-scoop vanilla ice cream from the cold box, and the venom gathered strength around him.

'What I can't stand is the corruption - nothing's transparent - the skimmers, the pay-offs, back-handers, and the middle-men's cuts.'

'I can live with that. The stone in my shoe is the waste, the extravagance - you know what it cost the last time the old king went for his summer vacation to Spain? Three million dollars a day, believe me.'

'If they don't learn, and fast, a truckload of humility, one day they'll wake up and find we're gone. Then you'll hear some hollering.'

The host's wife smiled at him, like it was outside church and everyone felt good. 'You haven't said much, Dr Bartholomew.'

There was much he could have said, but Bart chose the easy path, 'Been enjoying myself too much. Wonderful food, fantastic hospitality, couldn't have been bettered.'

*

Al Maz'an village, near Jenin, Occupied West Bank.

He saw the blood drip down and felt the guilt.

The best house in the village, on the central square, was an older building. It would have been constructed before the Second World War, perhaps by a merchant, and it represented a long-gone prosperity in the Palestinian community. Before Bart had arrived to work in the village, the building had been a target for Israeli tank shells during an armoured incursion. Now, extraordinarily, the family that had long ago scattered from the West Bank and had made money in the United States of America had sent funds for the restoration of the building and had pledged it to the village as a centre for local administration, adult education and for a communal meeting-place.

The first stage of spending the donated money was to erect scaffolding so that the building could be made safe around the shell holes. Over the weeks he had been in the village, Bart had watched the erection of the scaffolding but had seen precious little work carried out there, and he'd thought the benefactors had only a damn small return to show for their bucks. The body hung from the scaffolding.

He was a doctor who was familiar with the south-west of England, the Torbay district of the county of Devon, the town of Torquay. Where he came from could be summoned by cream teas, rolling fields grazed by cattle, families holidaying on beaches, retirement homes for men and women in their twilight years . . . The body of a lynch victim was suspended from the rusted scaffolding poles. The vomit rose in his throat. He understood, knew how far he had fallen.

The legs no longer kicked, but the rope between the poles and the neck twisted in the light wind and the heavy rain; the body spiralled rhythmically. The rain was dragged off the windscreen by the wipers. Bart had a clear view of the victim and of the mob below.

He could not have said whether the knife cuts that loosed the dripping blood had been inflicted before the victim was hanged, or while he was hanging but still alive, or after life had been jerked away. The rain fell hard on the body and the man's T-shirt was soaked against his chest and his back, and the flow of water made the blood run easily. In the dulled light, he saw the brightness of knives and a butcher's cleaver raised above the heads of the chanting crowd. Bart had been driving into the square, had seen the milling mob, had braked. Only when he had stopped had he seen the object of the crowd's fury - the body below the rope and the drip of the blood.

Kids were at his window. They tapped on it. Their faces were alive with excitement. One wore a football shirt from a German team. It was not a game that the kids had watched as spectators, not a goal that had thrilled them: it was a killing by lynching. Their voices jabbered broken English at him, their faces were distorted by the rain running on the driver's window.

He did not need to be told.

'He was an informer . . . He was a traitor paid by the Israelis . . . He had his reward for taking their money . . . His information killed a hero of the armed struggle.'

It was necessary for Samuel Bartholomew to play out his part, to stifle the vomit. He took up his medical bag, locked the vehicle and walked forward.

He was a Pied Piper - kids ran and skipped after him. Joseph, in the hut at the checkpoint, had told him, 'We take great care of you. You are a jewel to us, so precious. Have no fear. . . ' To save him, an informer of lesser importance had been sacrificed. Word would have been passed, a channel of disinformation would have been opened. He had killed an activist, that he could justify. Bart had seen the photographs of the aftermath of the attacks by suicide bombers. He could tell himself that the death of an activist, by his hand, was acceptable - not the death of an informer that he might be protected. The crowd thinned, the knives and the butcher's cleaver were lowered, voices hushed. He walked the middle line: he would not condemn, nor would he condone.

Bart said, a little stammer in his voice, T think it would be better if he were taken down. Could you, please, cut him down?'

A man, his face masked, climbed nimbly up the scaffolding, unfastened the rope and the sodden body fell. It crumpled on to the paving near to Bart's feet. He felt weak. He wondered if his knees would buckle . . . He saw the woman who huddled, all in black, at the building's doorway. The crowd had thinned, and the kids. The woman watched Bart, her eyes flitting off the body to his.

In a croaking aged voice through the translation of a youth, the woman said to Bart, 7 am his mother. I came. His wife would not come, his children did not come. His wife said he had shamed her family. His children said he, their father, had betrayed them. When he was taken his wife hit him and his children spat on him. Only I came. Who will bury him?'

Bart bent, felt the neck and wrist of the body, and found no pulse.

'What do 1 do? Do I bury him alone? . . . What he did was for his family.

He took the money from the Israelis, but it was to feed his family who had no food. The Israelis killed him, and I curse them . . . They will not bury him.

Who will?'

'You have not spoken.' Hosni's voice was coaxing.

'You are like a man who is tortured,' Fahd said.

The Egyptian had dropped back and the Saudi had come forward.

They rode on either side of Caleb. It was the middle of the afternoon, the sun high, and he did not welcome them.

'Did you find your memory?'

'Did you breathe life on it, as Hosni said you should?'

He stared ahead, watched the guide's back as the man rolled with the movement of his camel. Each day they went more slowly, and each hour less ground was covered. He sensed they were either near to their destination, or the march would fail. He had not asked the guide how much further they had to travel, but that morning, and at the midday break, there had been a smaller measure of water in the mug. The snap was long gone from the camels' stride. They went heavily, and the crates had had to be taken off them before they would attempt to climb a slope that a week before they would have managed without having to be unloaded. If they failed they would die in the sand. First to die would be the camels, then Hosni and Fahd, then Caleb. After he had died it would be the turn of Ghaffur, the boy, and last to die would be the boy's father, the guide. Caleb had no fear of death in the desert. The fear was of his recalled, reclaimed memory.