With these minor reservations in mind, let me make it absolutely clear that if you ask me out I will say yes, which I hope will remove the element of self-doubt from your decision-making.
Leah
x
Egon Schlender watches my face throughout, his little, clever eyes reading me in turn. He only glances away to look over my head from time to time in what I take to be some kind of residual awareness that staring is either rude or faintly alarming. I do not put down the letter. I fold it along its pre-existing creases and put it back in the envelope, and Egon Schlender watches me for signs of what I will say and whether he is going to have to rip the drip from my vein and beat me to death with a blood rack in order to keep his friend’s heart unbroken. His tapered fingers are tapping a slow, steady rhythm on his knee. I do not have a breast pocket, because I am wearing a hospital gown and not a jacket, so I cannot put the envelope anywhere except next to my skin. It rubs gently, the crisp edges occasionally snagging a hair or an old scar, and I am able by concentrating on it very hard to avoid weeping openly. When I have gotten used to the feeling of having it there (and there it will remain, one way or another, for ever) I look up at Egon Schlender.
“Would you tell Leah, please, that I said yes? That I said yes, yes, yes? That this is the most beautiful thing—that she is—I have ever seen?”
Egon Schlender stands up silently, although there is a strong sense of approval in his face, and walks out. And behind me I hear the sound of her breathing, and I realise that she has stood at the head of my bed throughout, and now she moves to kneel on the floor beside me so that she can stare at me eye to eye, and we stay like that for some time, her two hands on my good one.
I have a date in a war zone.
That’s not bad going, actually, but now I need an Italian trattoria with check tablecloths and linen napkins. I need bruschetta (that’s “broo-SKET-uh,” not “brushetter,” a slender piece of ciabatta toasted and brushed with garlic and oil and covered in fresh tomato and basil—the chunks inevitably fall off the bread and the olive oil runs over your lips and down your chin. The whole thing is delicious, deeply physical and delightfully undignified, and a woman who can eat a real bruschetta is a woman you can love and who can love you. Someone who pushes the thing away because it’s messy is never going to cackle at you toothlessly across the living room of your retirement cottage or drag you back from your sixth heart attack by sheer furious affection. Never happen. You need a woman who isn’t afraid of a faceful of olive oil for that) and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano (from the Cantine Innocenti, of course) and the view from the hills and all the trimmings. I need things which are in no way obtainable, and I need them so that the one good thing in the world will not go away. Fortunately, I have an edge, an old friend who has joined the hero club. If anyone can get me a bottle of plonk and a room with a view in a war zone, he will be it.
“WHO IS SHE?” Gonzo wants to know, as he sits at my bedside with his rugged health and his big bear shoulders rippling in his special forces jacket, and at that moment Leah appears to check my chart and tell him sternly not to wear me out, and to remind me that I am due for discharge tomorrow and not to screw it up. Gonzo’s eyes follow her and check her chart and his hands-off-respectful look is a bit wistful, and when she marches out again without sparing him a second glance he pronounces her good.
“You want me to talk to some guys about some things?” Gonzo asks. “There’s a place out past Red Sector which has an old castle. And a guy I know knows a guy who confiscated some silverware.”
It turns out that between the loot secured in the course of liberating Addeh Katir from our fellow protectors, and the architecture of the cryptocommunist maharajas, I just might get a date after all, although Gonzo suggests I wait until the minefield is entirely laid out and the AA defences are properly entrenched, and then if there’s a bombing raid we will get fireworks after dinner. The only hiccough is that although the fighting has moved on, Red Sector is still classed as a combat zone (unlike, to take a random example, the town where I was blown up, which is supposed to be reasonably safe), so we have to be ordered there. But Gonzo knows ways and means here as well, is an old hand at securing stern injunctions to do as he will, and puts together a mission profile with zero risk which requires the presence of a small commando team (Gonzo and his SpecOps chef, a team of heavily armed and lethal waiters and a command and control unit with a stove), an upper-echelon presence (me and a table for two, napkins officially classed as “flag patches, white linen, surplus”) and a medical officer (Leah in a fetchingly close-cut paramedic jumpsuit with pockets in most intriguing places). Gonzo, as maître d’, is pleased to inform me that there is space in the grill room at seven-thirty.
. . .
RED SECTOR IS HILLY and cool, and there’s a small river which does not have anything unpleasant floating in it. Our light-armoured transport is basically a recreational vehicle pimped by Rambo. Leah sits on my knee, because there is no room for her elsewhere (Gonzo’s calculations regarding gear and manpower were precisely calibrated, possibly to achieve exactly this), and her hair smells of heat and of her. Her hand balances on my shoulder. This proximity is making me extremely horny, and it gets no better when she leans back and stretches because she is cramped (or possibly because she, better even than Gonzo, knows the value of casual contact and accidental rubbings and touches, and she is well aware that her rear sliding over my thighs and her pale neck right there in front of me are causing an involuntary, embarrassing and deeply enjoyable physical reaction in my groin, to wit, a boner of truly splendid solidity which would be visible if she turned so much as a quarter circle and looked down, which she does not do, even when a gorgeous rose light paints the hills on that side of the car and she has to crane her neck to see it).
Behind us a big guy named Jim is driving another monster RV, this one fitted with a fifty-calibre machine gun, and behind the fifty-cal is a beefy, muscle-bound woman called Annabel by Gonzo and Ox by everyone else, and she appears to be speaking or yelling into the teeth of the wind.
I had believed, until earlier today, that SpecOps was a man’s world, and no doubt it used to be, but Annabel/Ox is not alone in Gonzo’s unit: there is also a pretty, long-limbed woman with cold eyes who is known mostly as Sally and sometimes as Eagle and who wears a khaki name badge reading “Culpepper” and when she arrived was carrying a long rifle over one long shoulder. Sally/Eagle rides next to Gonzo and occasionally makes course corrections, but mostly she scans the area with a pair of big spyglasses and draws Annabel’s attention to little heat pockets which might need to be rapidly sprayed with fifty-cal shells whose velocity and spin is so incredible that a near miss will kill you as surely as a hit.
For “little heat pockets” read “people,” although actually most of them so far have been weary, nervous sheep. A war zone is a bad place to be a sheep. It’s not a good place to be anything, but sheep generally are a bit stupid and devoid of tactical acumen and individual reasoning, and they approach problem-solving in a trial-and-error kind of a way. Sheep wander, and wandering is not a survival trait where there are landmines. After the first member of a flock is blown up, the rest of the sheep automatically scatter in order to confuse the predator, and this, naturally, takes more than one of them onto yet another mine and there’s another woolly BOOM-splatterpitterslee-eutch, which is the noise of an average-sized sheep being propelled into the air by an anti-personnel mine and partially dispersed, the largest single piece falling to Earth as a semi-liquidised blob. This sound or its concomitant reality upsets the remaining sheep even more, and not until quite a few of them have been showered over the neighbourhood do they get the notion that the only safe course is the reverse course. By this time, alas, they have forgotten where that is, and the whole thing begins again. BOOM.
The first corollary of this is that sheep are a nightmare if you’re trying to construct a perimeter defence, because they can end up cutting a path right through it and leaving
themselves in pieces as markers showing the cleared route to all comers. For this reason, many military officers now order a mass execution of unsecured sheep when fortifying a position, incidentally incurring the deep displeasure of local shepherds and creating yet another group of grumpy, armed persons who will shoot at anything in a uniform. Knowing this, George Copsen has taken a pro-sheep position, in the vague hope that Baptiste Vasille or Ruth Kemner will begin the ovicide (which may or may not be the official word for a killing of sheep) and suffer the consequences. So far, it hasn’t happened, and a kind of steely cold war of livestock has developed in which we drive sheep towards the other forces in the hope of triggering a slaughter, and they drive them at us with very much the same in mind. An unofficial book is being made on which area commander will snap first, and the betting heavily favours Ruth Kemner, who is apparently something of a scary lady.
The second corollary, which is more interesting in an academic sense, but utterly irrelevant in the real world, is that sheep surviving for a prolonged period in a heavily mined area will gradually evolve, and left long enough would develop into more intelligent, combat-hardened sheep, possibly with sonar for probing the earth in front of them, extremely long legs for stepping over suspect objects and large flat feet to distribute pressure evenly and avoid activating the fuse. A warsheep would be a cross between a dolphin and a small, limber elephant.
The sheep currently surrounding us have not yet had time to evolve physically, and in the meantime have evolved behaviours and coping strategies instead. They follow humans quite precisely, walk slowly and the flock unit has been replaced by a loose-knit affiliation of individual sheep carefully watching each other for signs of suddenly flying into the air and getting spread all over the place. Some have started walking in single file. Loud bangs no longer scare them, or possibly they have gone deaf, and there is a sharp, alert feeling about them which suggests they know exactly where they have just stepped and can retreat along their own hoofprints quite readily. The march of progress has reached even unto the sheep of Addeh Katir.
Just before Red Gate there is an actual Katiri village, or bazaar, or some muddled combination of the two. It is close enough to our emplacements to have fallen inside our defensive net, but far enough away that it has avoided becoming a target. Its name is Fudin, a name to be spoken tonally, carefully and reverently, in the rippling language of Addeh Katir. Fudin is more than a name, it’s a snatch of song.
Gonzo curls us into Fudin to pick up some extras for the feast, and also because the vaulted marketplace there is one of the few remaining things in the whole of Addeh Katir which points to what is buried in the ruins. It is striped like a Gothic cathedral, tiled like Babylon in rich blues and filled with pools and alcoves. It is also of course an outpost of the black market (possibly even a festerance), and Erwin Kumar and probably also our government would be jolly cross if they knew that it was here, operating under our protection. We have conquered this village (except that we haven’t, because we don’t, because we are at un-war and we don’t occupy, we just sort of live in and around and provide staff and police) but it belongs to Zaher Bey.
This is the closest Addeh Katir has to a neutral place, and we wander, ignored by the shoppers. I smell bacon and cooked meat, then fruit, then something pungent and exciting I cannot name. The market is lit with candles and oil lamps which hang from hooks set into the tiles. The lanterns look as if they have been here since before I was born. They probably have. (Leah’s shoulder fits perfectly under my arm. I can feel her against me, her fingers on my back. I stroke her hip very lightly, and she shivers.)
With a thunderous clapping of hands, a dark-eyed man in a glittering hat and a fine white shirt demands our attention. Having got it, he bounces forward and embraces us all at once, as if he has been waiting for us and only us for days, and where have we been? The shirt strains over his considerable belly and the nethermost button gives up the struggle. A slice of smooth brown skin is briefly revealed, startlingly naked. He smells of . . .
“Saffron! Yes! We have been saffron men since before the British!” he trumpets. “We were always saffron men. Our children are born with saffron hearts, our mothers sing the weights and measures to send us to sleep. There are no other true saffron men in Addeh Katir; Fudin is the place where saffron wants to be sold.” He leans close and grins. “If you throw a box of saffron up in the air anywhere in the whole of Asia (except maybe in bloody Russia, which is a crazy mad place full of the children of bears and wanton women from the ice), that saffron will blow in the wind until it falls like rain here in Fudin, and I, Rao Tsur, will be standing outside with a box to catch it in, and welcome it home. We know the secret whispers of saffron; we know how to love it and keep it, and we sell it only to the deserving, always at a fair price . . .” He peers at Gonzo, as if unsure, and then his eye lights on me, and on Leah, and he erupts again. “Saffron is for lovers! There! These two, they are lovers, yes? Hmm?”
And at this point, because our delighted humiliation is not complete, it appears that Rao Tsur has a wife. She is lean, and beautiful in a mournful way. She throws up long arms and spreads wide immense hands. Her elbows bend and straighten, and she looks like an angry heron.
“You are an oaf! Yes, Rao, yes, you are. I am married to a buffoon. May you be forgiven for your clumsiness, so that the shame does not grow too much for me and kill me stone dead where I stand. Yes, stone dead. Yes. My mother (bless her dead and departed soul) was an idiot when she promised me to you. Oh, she said, any child of my friend Seeta and my friend Li will be a fine man, because she is wise and he is beautiful and both are loyal. Oh yes, she said, it’s a fine thing I do now for my daughter. Bah! Do you hear me? Bah! And I, fool child, I looked at the broad-shouldered youth they showed me when it was time, and I saw the fire in his eyes and it lit me up like a tramp! Oh, yes, we were young then, and I thought of nothing but arching backs and sweat and the pumping, clenching ecstasy! I nodded, I agreed to my own doom, thinking with my crotch! Hah! But now look! He is fat! Fat, here and now, when the world is starving all around! How does he do it? Who knows? Not me, who have grown scrawny! Thin like a spider, a witch to fright the children, a stick woman to be broken by the wind. Oh, there was a time when I was fine, with a proud chest like a maharaja’s pillow, all covered in silk. A chest to drive frenzies of lust, to start fights and make women tear at their hair. Hah! But now look”—and here she thrusts out for our inspection an impressive bosom, little weathered by time or hard living, and the muscles in her neck pronounce her fit and strong—“I am a waif! A wreck! And all because of you!” she adds to Rao Tsur, who is admiring the presented cleavage with some interest. “And now, when you should be selling saffron to feed your family and maybe, just maybe, restore to your ailing wife her former strength and beauty, though God knows her looks have departed under your wastrel management and she is dowdy and no doubt you mean to put her aside like a torn waistcoat, now, I say, you are offending these good people, because a blind man could see they are not lovers, not yet, and you have embarrassed them and maybe now it will never be! You may well cringe, husband, like a lardy, corpulent dog with a mouthful of your master’s dinner! You have placed their love in jeopardy, idiot man, and what price saffron in a world where love is unsound? Eh? Eh? Bah!” And with that she collapses into a chair and scowls at him, drumming her fingertips together.
Rao Tsur looks at us, apologetic, and draws close.
“Acute embarrassment. I mingle my responsibilities. This ailing madwoman was placed in my care (curse my compassionate nature and my promise to my father always to succour the weak!) when I was a younger man, just starting in the world. She believed herself a hedgehog then, and spoke not a word. It was a simple thing to tend to her. A bowl of goat’s milk and a warm box of straw and she was quite content. Alas! I meddled, for she was of such surpassing beauty that I fancied God, divine and high above, could not intend her to be thus for evermore. No, I thought, surely this creature has a higher
purpose, an angelic destiny. (Not that I fancied myself a part of it, you understand, no, no, for Rao is modest, you see. No, a mere conduit to greatness, a catalyst, is Rao.) Thus, I coaxed her to the schoolhouse and there educated her in simple language and science, what history and art I knew, along the way demonstrating the fallacy of the hedgehog conceit. She took to learning as if born to it, and I rejoiced, thinking I had played my role in God’s creation. Oh, yes, I was quite cock-a-hoop. But, alas for Rao! I unleashed a monster! She delights in the most foul-mouthed and lascivious pronouncements, and her delusions evolved along with her cognition! Her lusts now focus not on male hedgehogs, which are at least able to defend themselves, but on poor honest Rao! She believes herself my wife. And worse, she has acquired (through ceaseless acts of copulation with troglodytes and roadside peddlers) a brood of children more appalling even than herself! Unhappy Rao, fettered to a howling succubus and her demonic brats, forever punished for his presumption . . . and yet . . . in this rare instance one perceives she has uncovered a fragment of the truth, as a pig scratching in the earth uncovers, without comprehending, the cornerstone of a temple. You are not lovers! I have offended you! I have spoken out of turn (this hag’s infections of the mind are virulently contagious) and I would make amends . . . perhaps a reduced price, if you wished to purchase a large quantity?”
THE ROAD goes by slowly, miles of hill country giving way to forests. I drift, lulled by the soft, easy pressure of Leah’s rump against my lower body. She leans back onto me, perspiration diffusing through her clothes, a wicked, sexual marzipan smell, brushed with a sharp tar of hospital. She cannot fail to be aware that I am daydreaming of her, of her mouth and her buttocks. We are too close together now for such secrets. She lets her head rest against mine, and breathes out against my skin. There is a waft of this morning’s mint toothpaste, and then I can taste her lungs; intimate exhalation.