Authors: Annmarie Banks
“Can you not tell me what this is all about?” She could not stand still. She moved to the side of the tent and then to the other.
“The Turks--” he lowered his voice. “Most of the people who live here have no idea that the foreigners are coming to take their land. Some didn’t even know their government backed the wrong side in the war. Both the Anglo-Persian and the Turkish Petroleum Companies have a great deal of money invested in this area and the French want it. The British want it. The Turks want it. Even the Germans still want it. They fight about it now in boardrooms and government offices. If the company puts derricks on their land the tribes will tear them down. This can’t happen. People will be exterminated to protect the wells. So they must be convinced to welcome them.” He took her arm as she passed him to stop her from pacing. “Can you see this now, Elsa?”
“And why are you involved…specifically?”
“My father had a very intimate relationship with these villagers.” He stared hard at her. “He offered his wife to their leader as added incentive on the negotiations he made some thirty years ago, and he had the shares to prove it.” He squeezed her arm as he said it and his eyes clouded over. “He had some favors, bought with my mother’s cu…” He dropped her arm and went back to the flap and looked out. His back hunched like he’d been struck in the abdomen again.
“Consent?” She tried to finish for him.
He did not turn to face her. “No. ‘Consent’ is not the correct word.”
Elsa pressed her lips together. Her thoughts were as jumbled as the crumpled paper pressed to her middle and tied with her sash. He was right. Her dissertation seemed completely unimportant now. His suicidal tendencies, moot. A suicidal man doesn’t fear murder. Why cure a man on his way to his death? She raised her eyes and looked at him differently. Not as a patient. He stared back. Not as a patient.
“And what will happen to me?” she asked him. She did not care what the answer was; she wanted to watch his eyes as he told her. He dropped the flap and came back to her. He put his hands on her upper arms below her shoulders and looked directly at her. There it was. He did care what happened to her.
He said in a low voice, “If the general finds you, you will be considered an inconvenient witness and will conveniently disappear. If I die, Ozgur will be obligated to take you as his wife. He has two already. Are you prepared to change your religion and learn a new language and live in the dirt and be a man’s slave?”
“No,” she told him. “Therefore you are forbidden to die.”
He did not change his expression. “Unlike you, I do not have a choice in the matter.”
“There is always a choice,” she lowered her eyes. “I just haven’t thought of all the options yet.”
He gave her a wry smile. “Commendable, but futile.”
“The tribesmen will not permit the British to kill you.”
“Elsa, as soon as they realize how they have been betrayed, they will kill me themselves.”
“I will not p—“
“Yes, I know you would not permit it. But there it is. The worst part is that the French and British think that killing everyone will leave a nice empty space for their derricks. But there would be a terrible blood feud. It makes no sense. It is crazy.” He squeezed her gently when he said that. “But the Allies think that since they won the war, they rule the world.”
Her knees went weak and she lowered herself to the bright red rug.
Sonnenby followed her down on one knee and crossed his arms over his thigh. “What is it? What are you thinking?”
“The only solution is for the tribe to kill the British and bury their trucks in the sand. This must be what they are planning.”
“That is exactly what Mehmet wants to do.”
“Does Mr. Mehmet have guns?”
“Of course he has guns. He has a Vickers and a Lewis and they are dragging a howitzer up from God knows where.”
“They outnumber the British.” She said it in a flat way, like talking about an attack was different from doing it.
Sonnenby said, “Women and children will be killed.”
“I am well aware of what big guns will do.” She had cared for those who had survived such attacks and washed the bodies of those who did not. “Then they must evacuate. Sneak the women and children out before the fighting starts.”
“There are too many in this city. Right now we are in a camp on the outskirts. There is the whole town of Deir El Zor closer to the river with houses and streets and buildings and telephones and electricity. I told you what Mehmet wants to do. But the older men want the gold that has been promised. They do not want to evacuate or to attack. Either way, this whole area will be like a disturbed anthill, Elsa. You can see that. There will be no peace for anyone, anywhere. For decades.”
She put a hand on his arm. “You are exhausted and injured, whether you admit it or not.”
He made that humorless chuckle again and shook his head. “In another day and time, Miss Schluss, I would enjoy taking you for a ride in my motorcar and buying you a lemonade and perhaps attend an evening concert in London. But this is it. It is over. I do not know what will happen to you after I am dead. The general may conveniently lose you in this beautiful wasteland and apologize to Doctor Engel with all the courtesy of the British Government. It appears they already have tried.”
“How can you be so fatalistic?” Her mind raced, no longer thinking about the files.
“Fatalistic?” He was looking at her now as if she were crazy.
“I do not believe you are suicidal,” she told him.
He stared at her. “I have tried to kill myself many times. Those are the facts. It should say so in your files. I keep trying and failing. I tried in Acre, in Cairo, in Aleppo. I tried in Crete, in St. Johns and on the shores of Istanbul at Gallipoli.”
She recognized the names from the commendation file. She tapped the file beneath her gown. “You were a hero in those places,” she said softly. “You acted with extreme courage. You saved many men and made the missions successful. It says so in here.” She leaned closer. “They gave you a
medal
.”
His face hardened and he said nothing.
Elsa shook her head slowly. “You wanted to die, so you did what the other men were afraid to do. You marched toward death instead of away from it.”
He said, “If I try to kill myself in a hospital room I am insane. If I do it on a battlefield I am a hero. If I snap a man’s neck on a battlefield I am courageous and virtuous. If I do it in a tavern I am a foul murderer.”
He was right. She had nothing to say to that. She stared at the carpet for a long while, thinking. He was silent. She could hear him breathing. Neither of them moved. She thought about the nature of futility. If a man wants to kill himself, why should he not be given that freedom? Does he not have the right to make that decision? He did not chose to be born, but once born is his life not his to do with as he pleases? Long or short, rich or poor, kind or cruel? Elsa grimaced.
She was studying a field that championed individuality, yet at the very core presupposed a very firm middle ground. There was an idea of how a man or woman was supposed to think and feel. There was a right way and a wrong way. There was normal and deviant. If a man kills himself in a fit of despair because he is ill with depression or narcotics or strong drink it is a physician’s responsibility to stop him. But what if he is perfectly sane and reaches the decision through logic and reason? Who has the right to stop him? Is suicide ever reasonable?
“Elsa.” His voice was soft and had a tone of finality. He was saying good-bye.
She looked up. “I don’t want you to kill yourself.”
He did not answer, but turned his head and searched her face with his dark eyes. She saw the long lashes blink. Beautiful lashes. And such a fine aquiline nose, and high cheekbones that made his eyes wide and deep. He was beautiful. She had not thought about that before. When he was her patient his appearance was not relevant, but now she thought of him as a wounded soldier like so many she had watched die. Her grief preceded his death. She tried to imagine him lying there as a corpse.
“What are you saying, Elsa? Are you saying you do not wish to analyze my suicide in your dissertation?” There was a harder edge to his voice and she knew what he really meant. He told her. “I am not going back to the asylum. Ever. I’d rather be dead.”
She tried not to wince. She chose every word carefully. “I would be affected in a negative way by your loss.”
“True. But Mehmet would have a very pretty third wife.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I do not wish to be Ozgur Mehmet’s wife.”
“I don’t give a damn what you wish. I will have him take you away from here and try to get you on your way to Damascus before anything happens. Let me go to sleep. I want to be alert when they kill me tomorrow.”
He lay down and rolled over in the blankets, his back to her. She lay down, crinkling the papers as she stretched out. She was too warm to need a blanket.
Elsa did not sleep well. She awoke many times and lay there, staring into the darkness. Her dreams were disjointed and disturbing. Dr. Engel had put great store in dreams and required that she keep a journal of her own. They would discuss them the next day at the clinic. He would share the insights he gleaned from her dreams and demonstrated how they could be interpreted for the benefit of the patient.
Elsa had a thick stack of dream journals back in Vienna. On this trip she had not bothered to keep notes, but now she was sorry she did not. These troubling dreams involved trains and ships and automobiles. She seemed to be always late for her connection, rushing to catch the train, leap the gangplank of the ship and fill the empty tank of a motorcar.
She turned her head. It was still too dark to see Sonnenby but she could hear him snoring softly. Again she tried to imagine a return to Vienna without him. She imagined the final stop at the station, stepping down from the train and walking across the platform and getting a cab to take her the last mile or two to Dr. Engel’s house and her little room on the third floor. She imagined the cozy bed and her familiar writing table and the window that opened out onto the quiet street. She imagined greeting Magda and handing over to the housekeeper the bags and her coat and smiling at Dr. Engel. “I have returned from Damascus,” she would say. And then it would all fall apart, because after that there would be nothing but failure.
Elsa sat up and took a deep breath. She would not sleep any longer. She sat there until she heard movement around her in the camp outside the tent walls. Horses were being walked back and forth and she heard them crunching fodder. Soft voices in Arabic or Turkish came from all directions. She knew that if she went to the tent flap she would see a blue glow in the east where the black of night was fading to day. She turned to look down at Sonnenby. He was just a darker shape in the lightening gloom. She could see his shoulders rising and falling as he slept.
He was very different from the sullen man in a straightjacket just a week or so ago. She thought about the power of society over the lives of individuals. Someone somewhere signed a paper stating that Sonnenby was insane. After that it was an indictment. Events rolled from that pen stroke. She imagined the asylum, the treatments, the physical and chemical restraints. There was no legal recourse for that signature. Innocent men were sometimes accused of crimes and sentenced to prison. There may be some legal way to get them out again. New evidence might free a man. But there was nothing that could be done for a man who had been signed into an asylum with a stroke of a pen.
This was a lifetime verdict with no chance of parole. Yet Sonnenby had been paroled by Mr. Marshall. She raised her knees, set her elbows on them and rested her chin on her hands. Marshall must have known Sonnenby was sane. He must have done something, talked to someone higher up than the man who sent Sonnenby to the hospitals. He must have cared. She thought about everything that must have been done to get Sonnenby out. And get him a therapist. No one went to that much trouble if he thought his efforts would be futile.
What was the British Foreign Service doing out here? She glanced at Sonnenby’s back again. The light outside was growing enough now that she could see the outline of his body as it lay on the rug. What was unique about him in this situation? And why would they remove him from a hospital, drag him out here by force, then kill him? It made no sense to her. There must be a missing piece, but Sonnenby refused to tell her what it might be. And why should he? They had just met. He had demonstrated a complete lack of trust in anyone. Understandable. She imagined the many betrayals he must have suffered in his life.
If what Sonnenby told her was true, and the British merely needed the goodwill of the tribesmen to set up their derricks, what good would come of killing their ambassador? None. And if the tribes were in disagreement with themselves about the value of British gold versus their freedom to control their territory, what good would come of killing Sonnenby? None. Yet he was adamant that his life was over. She frowned.
Unless he knew something that would change the plans they were making. If Sonnenby’s presence was necessary for step one, but threatened step two, then his convenient death would make sense. She sat up straighter. So what was step two? Did Marshall know about step two? Would he have brought Sonnenby out if he knew? It occurred to her that the two parts to this plan might actually involve two different powerful factions.
Outside a tent flap snapped loudly, like a gunshot, in the morning breeze and Sonnenby sat up and kicked the blanket from his legs, then put his body in a crouch of readiness to attack or to flee. She didn’t move. She had seen this behavior before in the hospital.
Loud sounds could cause a sudden uproar in the sleeping ward. One night a clumsy nurse dropped a tray laden with metal bedpans she was bringing back from the washroom. The screams and cries from the ward took an hour to quiet down. Men were under their cots, up against the walls, and two of them rolled in the aisle pummeling each other. Shell shock, they called it.
She called to him softly, “Henry.”
He relaxed immediately. “Damn.”
“Were you dreaming?”
He turned to look at her and then sat down on his backside and felt for the laces on his boots. “No, Doctor Therapist.” He tightened the laces and made a knot, then reached for the other boot. “I was not dreaming.”
He was lying.
He finished with the boots and stood up. The morning light made the outside of the tent glow on the east side. He looked at it, judging the time, then turned as if he would go out. His dark hair fell forward over his face and his shoulders sank. Elsa thought he was thinking about what he was going to tell her about this day’s events, but a moment later he collapsed to the carpet and lay there, still. His eyes open.
She quickly moved to him and knelt to loosen his. She put a hand on his cheek and felt his temperature, and then moved her fingers to his throat to feel his pulse. Sudden loss of conscious would have been noticed and recorded in both school records and military ones. She had not seen anything in the records until his commitment to the asylum. She wondered if a war wound had damaged his brain. There was no record of head trauma.
Mehmet entered the tent so quickly that she suspected he had been watching, waiting for them to wake. He knelt on the other side of Sonnenby’s body and felt him as she had. He looked up at her and said, “What has happened? Has he fainted? Is he ill?”
“He is ill, Mr. Mehmet.”
“Why are his eyes open? He looks like a dead man, but he breathes. Is he dying?”
She released the breath she had been holding. “No,” she assured him. “He is unconscious.”
Mehmet nodded and patted Sonnenby’s cheek. “Wake up, brother, it is time to work.” He turned to Elsa. “Is it epilepsy?”
She looked up at him sharply. It had not occurred to her that Mehmet would know about epilepsy, or that he was Sonnenby’s brother, but now, looking closely, she could see the resemblance in the eyes and in the thick black lashes. She looked down at Sonnenby. None of the papers in her file had suggested he had epilepsy. She passed a hand over Sonnenby’s forehead, brushing a stray lock from his open eyes. That would explain quite a bit, actually, but it was impossible. Epilepsy would have shown itself much earlier in his life. He was nearly thirty. She frowned. Seizures, though. Interesting.
Mehmet said in a low voice, “He must come with me soon. The British want him at dawn, after prayers.”
“They will have to wait, unless you are prepared to have men carry him out.”
“Can you not bring him around?”
She patted Sonnenby’s cheek and his eyes blinked. “These episodes don’t usually last very long.” Elsa took his right hand and rubbed his wrist. It was always fascinating to her to watch the sense return in a patient’s eyes. One moment the eyes were vacant, like fish eyes, and next there was something there that hadn’t been there before. Yet that ‘something’ could not be described. It was not as though the eyes were physically different, but one could tell when there was someone looking out of them, and when no one was home.
Sonnenby inhaled sharply and tried to rise. Elsa pushed him back. “Wait just a few minutes until you are all here.” He looked confused, his eyes twitched and he blinked rapidly. “You are in Deir El Zor, with Ozgur Mehmet,” she told him.
“Ugh,” he rubbed his face with one hand. “I feel terrible.”
Mehmet agreed. “You look terrible,” he said in English, but his voice was kind as he bent over his brother. He then spoke in Arabic. Or maybe Turkish. Sonnenby listened intently. Both men seemed to have forgotten that Elsa was there. She watched them, and the longer she looked the more the family resemblance became evident. It wasn’t just in the eyes, but in the width of their shoulders and the shape of their jaws. Mehmet wore a turban, but the one lock of dark hair that had escaped from the black cloth over his ear was thick and curled into a ring. She looked at Sonnenby. The Englishman had his hair cut very short except for the long forelock. There was a definite wave to the way the dark strands fell.
Now, with one man on his back and the other leaning over him she could see the two profiles, the strong bridge of their noses and the firm chins. One man’s skin was very pale and the other’s was brown like fine walnut, but they were very alike.
Mehmet’s tone changed. Sonnenby reached up and put a hand on Mehmet’s shoulder and squeezed it. Both men were silent, staring intently into each other’s eyes, and then Sonnenby said something and they both nodded. Sonnenby tried to sit up again, and this time Elsa sat back and let Mehmet pull him to a sitting position. He bent his knees and held his head between them with both hands. Mehmet had a hand on his back and leaned forward to see his brother’s face. He said something soft and low and Sonnenby replied, along with a shake of his head.
Mehmet turned to Elsa and said in English, “My brother has asked that I send you away with my family.”
“Oh,” she said.
“My family will take care of you for now,
insha'Allah
”
“Go with him, Elsa. For God’s sake.” Sonnenby reached for Mehmet and the other man helped him to stand. He wobbled a moment before he spread his feet and braced himself on Mehmet’s shoulder. “You know what is coming.” He tried to give her a smile, but failed. “Don’t forget your papers.”
“No,” she said. “I can’t leave you. I just found you. You are obviously ill.”
“The British are not going to wait until I am better. I have to go or they will come and get me. I don’t want them to find you here.” He swayed and Mehmet moved a little closer.
“No,” she said.
Mehmet said something long and hard in Arabic or Turkish which made Sonnenby smile, but Elsa crossed her arms over her chest and pressed her lips together. “I have a responsibility. I have been tasked with your care. I am your therapist.”
“I release you, then,” he said.
“You divorce her?” Mehmet was visibly shocked. “Brother, no. Do not do that.”
Elsa frowned. She was quickly losing control of this conversation. “There must be a third way.”
“You saw the machine guns.”
She stomped one foot. “
Gott im Himmel! Verdammte Männer und ihre Kriege!”
Mehmet blinked at her, but Sonnenby lowered his eyes. “I agree with you wholeheartedly, Brunhilde. But the guns are here, the ammunition is in the trucks and the bullets in the guns. Guns and gold, Elsa. It’s what makes the world work.”
She ground her teeth but refrained from another outburst. It was not professional. She made fists and pressed them to her eyes.
Think.
She hated the idea that there could be no solution that would benefit everyone involved.
“I see you working this over, Elsa. I have spent days at it. Give it up. Put on your veil and go with Mehmet’s family. He will try to get you back to Damascus.”
“This is not about me,” she snapped at him viciously, making both men widen their eyes. “I am not trying to get back to Damascus. I am trying to get your life back for you, Henry Sinclair.”
Sonnenby pushed Mehmet away and took a step toward her and said softly, “We are in a
tent
, Elsa. Keep it down.”
She stomped her foot, then turned to pace again. “There is something you are not telling me. Something doesn’t make any sense at all. They don’t need you to negotiate with the tribe. The gold does that. And you are not the only translator for the British.” She shot him a fierce look. “You have not told me everything.”
She saw the confirmation in his face. He tried to hide it, but she saw how his face twisted in defeat before he composed it into that British stiffness she so disliked. Marshall’s face was like that all the time. Mehmet was looking at Sonnenby with dismay. He said something in Arabic. Elsa guessed he was asking, “Have you been lying to me, too?” The way his eyes searched his brother’s and the sad sound of betrayal in his voice needed no translation.