“My brother was a finalist in the regional poetry championship. Listen, it goes like …”
“Doctor! For God’s sake someone get me a doctor … I’m … I can’t … I …”
“He did? No. When? How’d it happen? No, I didn’t know. Does his wife know? Of course he has a wife, didn’t any of you tell her? Of course she needs to know, how can you be so …”
On his third day in a place that might have been Syria, might have been Iraq—these things were hard to measure now, the border had been swept away by the fire—Charlie went to look in his bag for the satellite phone, and it wasn’t there. He rummaged with a sudden fury, face flushing hot, and then tore his room apart looking for it, which was as futile an act as any he had performed because he knew, of course he knew, where he’d put it, the same place he’d put it every night as he reached out for rescue, to Maureen or Samantha or Lucy in the Milton Keynes office (they all sounded the same), who all replied with “Don’t worry, dear, all in hand!” and never told him what it was, or how it was being handled.
Now his phone was gone, and with it, that lifeline to the outside world.
Charlie sat on the end of the bed and for a moment felt utterly alone, and hugely sorry for himself. A strange, childlike inclination to cry surfaced briefly—not in fear, but in a petulant frustration and impotence—and he stood up and paced from one end of the room to the other before it could overwhelm him, and so it passed.
Two hours later, a convoy of trucks pulled up outside the palace, and Qasim, dark sunglasses and a jaunty beret, leapt down from the front and bounded inside, and Charlie nearly took the stairs two at a time to meet him, catching him as he neared his office.
“Qasim! Qasim, I need to …”
The poet/general swept straight by him, as if he wasn’t there, sparing him not a glance. Caught in a wake of lesser ranks, Charlie was buffeted and turned by the surge, reaching out, trying to grab the attention of the passing man, but Qasim was gone, the door slammed in his face.
In the afternoon, Charlie stood on the edge of the largest hall in the building, and watched men turn towards Mecca to pray. Afterwards he met a woman, come from the service in the room next door, and her eyes reminded him of the eyes of the woman who’d come to his bedroom on the first night he’d stayed, but her face was shrouded, and she quickly looked away.
Charlie drifted like a ghost through the bowels of Qasim’s army, and had nowhere to go, and nothing to do, but like a fond puppy was fed and watered and kept warm at night, and generally ignored while the business of the day unfolded.
On the fourth night, the sound of jet planes was much closer. When they dropped the bombs, Charlie was surprised that the shaking was greater than the noise. The shock of it blasted the glass from his windows, bounced him out of bed. He crawled under the still-rocking bed as dust trickled from the ceiling, as the outside world went thump thump thump. When it stopped, he crawled to his feet and looked out to see that the building opposite the palace was gone. There was no remnant of wall or hint of crooked ceiling; there was no still-standing door or piece of furniture left behind. There was simply an absence, a great pall of dust, and here or there the odd brick raining down from the sky, pitter-patter, into the near-perfect circle punched into the ground, as if the earth had acne.
Men and women started to scramble out into the dark, torch beams clearly visible through the still-swirling fog. Charlie felt a cold breeze on his face through the broken glass, by candlelight observed that the bed in which he’d lain was now ticktacked with shards, the headboard spined with embers. He wondered if he should tell anyone, but given the rising commotion outside, it didn’t seem so important. He stood in the window and looked down, and beheld the rider of the Apocalypse on the edge of the crater below, his face swept by the moving points of light, dust on his skin, fire at his back, one hand in his pocket, the other caressing a cigarette.
Charlie looked at War, and War, sensing the gaze, looked up at Charlie, and smiled, and flicked ash to one side, and turned, and walked away.
Three other people beheld War that night, and each saw their own version of the same thing.
Nabil, a geology student who’d been studying at the University of Aleppo, right up to the day it was bombed, and who had escaped death by being late for his exam, looked up from his desperate, futile scramble in the dirt, a quest to find any living being that might yet be breathing beneath the flattened oval of the bomb’s impact, and beheld …
War, clad in armour of ash, his eyes blazing red through the gas mask, a bloodied sword at his side, an AK-47 across his waist, an electric whip in his hand. The skin of his neck and wrist was visible, swollen, bursting with thick white goo from the effect of the poison gas that young Nabil had seen pictures of once, when it was used on the Kurds in the north, and which he had never forgotten. Though he was far off, as he walked, his footsteps crunched, cracked the earth, and he moved at a mighty, cumbersome pace, unstoppable as an avalanche, as inevitable as night itself.
And Amira, whose town this had once been and who had clung on, clung on, because her mother was too old to leave and her sister was too young, because there was nowhere to go and because she had to believe, had to believe in hope and the goodness of men, ran through the dust to help search for survivors, and beheld War and saw …
A man with a bandanna across his head, and dirt on his face, with ankle boots and camouflage trousers, with curly dark hair and a scar all the way round his neck, and she realised with a start that his face was the face of her brother, but not her brother, for he was dead, he had run away to fight and never come home and they said he had done some terrible things
but this was not he
but War himself, passing by.
And the Harbinger of Death looked down, and saw War, and knew he was War by the quality of his suit, perfectly tailored, cut to his slim, gym-built figure. And he knew he was War by the smartphone clipped to his belt, and by the cufflinks on his sleeves, and by the way he looked upon destruction and smiled, like a man sensing opportunity.
Qasim also saw War that night, but couldn’t recognise the face he wore, having ordered all the mirrors in the palace smashed many, many months ago, for staring at him too reprovingly.
Chapter 50
A jump, a start, wake up!
Hands shaking him roughly. “You, you, wake up!”
Charlie woke, groggy, lying on the couch away from the window, his bed still full of glass, a blanket wrapped round his shoulders, fully dressed—somehow he’d got in the habit of sleeping with his clothes on. Two soldiers stood there; one held a flashlight, the other shook him even though he was awake. “You! Up up up now up!”
Charlie rolled to his feet, one soldier pulling him by the elbow, dragging him down the grey pre-dawn corridors, half-light slithering in, the grumble of a generator out back, chugging down petrol. He tried to pull free, mutter, okay, okay, I’m coming, but the soldier just held on, bizarre, almost pinching his elbow between his fingers, not exactly restraining but refusing to release. Charlie had seen a taxi driver do the same once to a man who couldn’t pay his fare, hold him like a child as they walked across the street, in case he ran, stand by him with one hand on his shoulder at the ATM. He hadn’t known at first if what he was seeing was two lovers out for the night, or a kidnap in progress.
The door to Qasim’s office, opened quickly by a woman dressed all in black, a necklace of bullets slung across her chest, Charlie pushed through, the door closed behind him.
Blinking, the shutters open on the windows, Qasim framed by the rising sun, head bowed, writing, always writing, paper on the desk, paper on the floor, crossings-out and scrawls on both sides, different inks running over each other as thoughts came and went. Charlie hadn’t seen him for days, every effort rebuffed, and now here he was, here they were, another day.
Qasim, wordless, tilted the tip of his pen towards an object on the end of his desk. Charlie followed the motion with his eyes. His satellite phone, b
its of circuitry dangling by pale wires, the keypad caved in from where the butt of a rifle had struck it. Charlie stared at it, then at Qasim, and the adrenaline surge that had carried him out of bed faded, and there was nothing now but quiet, a silence where he felt sure some sort of feeling should have been, and the scratching of Qasim’s pen.
Words across the page …
… and we shall build a new world, the old world perishes and now only there is left the cleansing of the …
… of these ideas that old men speak of, we say to them now …
… Salafist, Wahhabist, republican, atheist, Catholic, Copt, Sunni, Shia, Sufi, Armenian, Orthodox, communist, fascist, capitalist, Daesh, Jewish, Azeri, Druze, Kurd …
Charlie watched him write, found the movement strangely hypnotic, realised he was swaying where he stood, looked around for something to sit on, but the chairs were all gone from the room, taken away, everyone stands in the presence of the general.
What is the purpose of history? It seeds only hate. All the history books should be burnt, so that we are no longer the peoples of our lands, but merely peoples …
The sun rose higher, the shadows stretching out across the floor, the greyness giving way to yellow-white. What darkness was left in the room seemed deeper by comparison, and still Qasim wrote.
There once was a man who walked to Medina and in that place all the tribes gathered and in that gathering they spoke of peace and of
He stopped, the pen poised to find a word that never came.
For a moment, the world hung there, waiting. Word, pen, poet, and the Harbinger of Death.
Then, laying the pen down, the words still unfinished, Qasim sprung to his feet, marched past the Harbinger of Death without meeting his eye, threw back the doors and exclaimed, “Follow me!”
Charlie guessed that this command was meant for him, there being no one else handy, so he followed.
They drove in a convoy of five trucks. In the middle of it was Qasim’s car, black and air-conditioned, a minibar in the front, speakers in the back pumping out the latest pop song from the UAE. Charlie sat next to the poet, aware suddenly in this pristine, clean vehicle of how badly he smelt, of his unshaven face and crumpled clothes, of his tired eyes and empty mouth.
If Qasim cared, he didn’t show it, and they drove in silence, an hour, an hour and a half, music blaring, the car too cold inside to be comfortable, Qasim staring out of the window. Charlie also watched the land run by, but saw only yellow emptiness, obscured by the tint of the window. Empty fields and empty homes, bumpy roads and the occasional crust of a place where life had been lived, of schools and hospitals and things worth fighting for, all burnt.
When they stopped, it was on the edge of a village that could have been anywhere in the world. Little white houses with bright red roofs; a petrol station next to a convenience store, a few packets of crisps still in the window. A central street lined with lovingly cared-for palm trees. At the top of one, a nest of wasps had made their home amongst sprouting fronds, and the fat-bellied creatures hummed and clung to windows nearby.
Qasim hopped out of the car, busy busy busy, and gestured for Charlie to follow. He did, without complaint, but one of the soldiers clearly felt that more was required, and pushed him by the shoulder, causing him to stumble. He glared, but said nothing, and followed the poet into the belly of the town.
A playground.
A school.
A little dried-up bed where a stream had run.
A mosque, a hole carved in its white dome.
A vet’s clinic, the glass torn out, the benches bare.
A field where once they grew … Charlie didn’t know, only stalks and dusty earth remained.
A ditch, recently carved in the earth.
The sound of flies, the smell, the smell that made your clothes rot from your body, the smell that made your eyes pop from your skull, the smell that you tasted in your throat, the smell that told the story to your very stomach, of flesh become liquid, liquid running into the earth, of blood drunk by wolves, of toes munched on by rats, of maggots popping from muscle, of
Charlie vomited before they reached the pit. Qasim stopped, already at its edge, and waited, impatient, hands on hips. When the puke was out, the soldier who’d pushed him picked him up, pulled him by the scruff of the neck to the edge of the earth, grabbed hair at the back of his head and forced him to look down.
A face stared back, a woman, her eyes open but their colour gone, her teeth broken, her dress torn. The child she had died protecting lay beneath her, one bare foot sticking out from beneath her back. Others had fallen face-down; some had their hands tied. The men were, in a way, easier to look at than the women, since they had had their heads chopped off first, along with their hands and their feet. Some of the boys had died from the machete too. At first Charlie thought that snakes were living on them, until he realised that the writhing masses he saw were the creatures still happily feeding on burst intestines, their half-digested matter spilt and black around the burst sacs of the bodies that had held them.
Someone had shot the baby through the roof of its mouth to quiet its screaming; another woman had perhaps fought back, and been shot no fewer than ten times, the holes strangely neat across her tangled, fallen body. Some of the corpses were naked; some were old, a man and a woman with hands reaching out for each other in death.
The flies buzzed, and the town was silent.
Tears ran down Charlie’s face, triggered first by the smell, which his body seemed to want to wash away, but which clung to him the more he sweated. He whispered, “I’m going to be sick,” and the soldier pushed him to one side. He fell onto his knees and heaved, but had nothing to throw up, and being on his knees he stayed there and wept, wept and wept, shook and heaved and shed salt onto the earth, and wept.
Qasim stood by, staring into the graves, and waited until there was no breath, no sound left in the Harbinger of Death. Then he pulled two objects from the pocket of his jacket.
One was a mousetrap, still in its packet.
The other was a pen.
He said, “We are fighting for a better land, we are fighting for freedom. We wish only to have hope again in our lives, to have a safe place for our mothers, our children. We wish for justice. We wish for holidays. We wish to go walking in the sea and eat ice cream. We wish for antibiotics when our brothers are sick. We wish for a job that finishes at six o’clock in the afternoon. We wish to pay rent, to cook food with our own hands, good food, to taste cinnamon again. We wish to decorate our homes, and smell fresh paint, and be proud of the lives we have built. We wish to practise our beliefs, piously and in peace. We wish to know our neighbours, and play simple games, and read books, and watch the TV. Is this so much? Is this more than any man desires? Do you understand?”
Charlie understood, and made no sound. “You said to me once that you were sometimes sent as a courtesy, sometimes as a warning. I thought then you had come to tell me that I would die. But how? Were you a self-fulfilling prophecy; would I hear your words and change my ways, and in doing so go to my death? Then I knew I would stay and fight, for my family, for my friends, for my beliefs, and I thought perhaps you were a warning that this fight would kill me, and I should flee, take the road to Europe, where your governments say that we are not people as you are, and you build walls to stop us coming. Swarms, rats, rats of people, fleeing the sinking ship, we are rats and then …”
He held the mousetrap up thoughtfully, then tossed it into the pit.
“Then I thought, this is what war makes of us, is it not? This is the meaning of your gift. These extremists, the ones ruled by fear and the gun, they rejoice at every massacre because those who do not believe what they believe are not human. They are animals. They are the lowest carrion that scuttle upon the earth. They are rats, scrabbling for a tiny scrap of meat, feasting upon the lowest gutter. Had I fled, I would have been a scrabbling rat. In staying, I have killed my fair share of vermin. Either way, Death comes. He com
es.”
So saying, he raised the pen. “Of course, I did not die. You came, and you gave me your gift—it is very funny, I see that now, ha ha—and I lived. And I thought, well done me, I have made the right choice. Had I fled, Death would have come for me, and now I have stayed, and so you were only a warning, not a courtesy, and Death, as they say, passed me by. Death passed me by, what a narrow view. Death has been my bosom brother for many years. I know him, I know his voice, his touch, his caress, more intimately and with more sanctification than you ever will, Harbinger of Death. He has spoken to me for so long, and I have spoken back, in his language, the secret language of lovers, and I have done … such things. And now you come again, speaking your crude, human speech, as if words that may be uttered have meaning any more, and you bring me a pen, a pen that was once my pen, the ink run dry. I lost it years ago but now here it is, returned to me, and Death laughs at me and says … I hate having to use words to translate it, but I will try … Death says ‘told you so,’ and here we are. A world has ended, and only tomorrow remains.”
He threw the pen into the pit, watched it fall, waited for it to stop, then turned to Charlie, examined him, curious, squatted down in front of him, brushed his face, felt the texture of tears on his skin, almost smiled, at a thing he half remembered but had long ago forgotten.
“The people I fight are not human,” he breathed. “The men who burn other men alive. The men who beat their enemies with electric cables. The rapists. The mutilators. The ones who stone children to death. The government men with their prisons and their gas; the Russians and the Americans who kill us from overhead like we are pixels on a map; they have become animals. Do you understand? They were human, and war has made them something else. The world is better off without them. When my men killed this place, they laughed as they did it, because they were not killing people, only taking out the trash. That’s all this was. That’s all this is. The world is ending. We are come to a time of cleansing, and when all the world is cleansed, then we shall be free.”