In the Wolf's Mouth (12 page)

A hand on him. George pulling him. They had all turned to run in different directions but he hadn’t heard them say where.

18

Floating now weightless without sound

fear

Fear so great it had washed him empty

Up through his bones his foot beats told him he was

running

Two thumps of explosion, mud splash, fire in it

small shots pecking the ground in several places

People lying on the ground like what are they?

Running, burn of ankle twist over

Like people, shaped like people?

over rocks. Behind rocks, a piece of sky,
towards that

Like dolls! Dropped.

Everything dead already.

Dead piece by piece

a man lying

with one arm already dead

the rest of him thrashing

Dead and running, fast as he could. Dropping to hide flat with the others and wait and his shoulder against the hip of a man in front solid bone, rapid trembling

Over there a man trying to dig a foxhole with his helmet metal pranging off the rocks

Just in front, something moving, effort to focus
to see, before it was too late, but
it was so close, a bug, nothing, moving in a
small circle
on its disturbed patch, jointed feelers dabbling
the ground.
Smart black. Crumb of sand on it.

Planes screaming over.

All matter just matter, jerking with life, some of it. Just jumping a little bit, tearing against itself, fraying, frittering, bleeding, lying still, scattered.

Whizz of eighty-eight. Just short. Throwing stuff in his face.

Pushing himself flatter against the earth. Nothing underneath. Earth darkness. Up.

Running.

Low ridge to get behind and settle and up.
He had to join in now, pulling his trigger at those shapes over there. The crack of his gun faint by his ear.

George! Was George doing the same? Or was he lying, dropped?

Couldn’t see him anywhere.

Smoke rolling across from something.

Up again, into blasts from all directions that he couldn’t survive.

running

19

Several days after seeing the prison, when Will finally cornered Draycott and told him his story, Draycott listened, wincing and shaking his head, and was no help at all. His gaze kept flickering past Will or over him; that reminded Will of their difference in stature. He complained relevantly at the bloody filthy behaviour of the French and affirmed that in no way could they be trusted. When pressed for support for action, he offered none. Will argued his position – something should be done just for decency’s sake and think of the advantage to Anglo-Arab relations here. Draycott, holding the door jamb, looking at Will’s dusty shoes, countered that they should be very wary of upsetting the local balance of power. Perhaps Will could gather intelligence and write something up. Draycott glanced again over the top of Will’s head, stepped backwards into his office and, without saying anything further, closed the door.

Since the nights of heavy bombing, Draycott had been behaving strangely. At breakfast the other morning, spooning trembling scrambled eggs onto his plate, he’d told Will that, from now on, whenever they were in a public place, Will should refer to him as Lieutenant Bryce loudly enough for people to hear. ‘Price?’ Will had asked. ‘No,’ Captain Draycott looked
aghast, his plan about to be compromised. ‘No, “Bryce”, with a “b” and a “y”.’ Samuels had told Will that later that same day he’d walked in on Draycott and found him carefully repositioning every object in his office, dragging his desk to the other wall and changing the left–right order of all the items on it.

It was alone, with no concrete plan to offer, that Will went to meet again the man who had sent him to see the fish pond. He’d left a card days earlier: Dr Zakaria, a physician. In a small Arabic café he explained that he had patients only among the Arabs. He made less money but he didn’t want to risk intimate contact with the French or their idle, dangerous wives. Dr Zakaria sipped from a tiny cup of thick aromatic coffee, an iridescent sheen on its surface. Such contact, he went on, can lead to a bullet in the head or a convenient road accident. He set his cup back on its saucer and rotated it thoughtfully. ‘The prison,’ he said. ‘So now you have seen what it means to be Arab in this place.’

Will wanted to be precise, to resist any theatrics from this little man. ‘I have seen what happens in one part of the prison.’

‘All of this country is a prison.’

‘Dr Zakaria, if I might intrude a note of circumspection, you sent me to the prison, not anywhere else, and the people I saw would therefore be criminals.’

Dr Zakaria laughed, a short blast through the dark tufts of his nostrils. He tilted his head on one side, smiling, his eyes still on his coffee cup. ‘If only life were so logical. They were arrested. They were thrown
into a sewer to rot to death. This is all true. But did they commit a crime? Have you any evidence that they did? I don’t. Perhaps there isn’t any. Perhaps they committed no crime. Perhaps they annoyed a Frenchman or the police needed to make up numbers.’

‘Of course I realise that’s possible.’

‘I am telling you as someone who understands that this is in fact the case. There is no justice here. This is not England.’

‘I do understand. You understand I have to ask questions.’

‘Of course.’

‘I do hope there’s something I can do.’

‘A man on his own cannot do anything.’

‘I think that depends on who the man is and what he does.’

Zakaria smiled again. ‘You are either an optimist or vainglorious. Either way, the prison is a small matter – no? Simple to use your authority and make a little bit of change there.’

‘Arguably it would be a small matter. Bureaucracy among us is rather Byzantine, I’m afraid. I have to pursue esoteric lines of inquiry.’

A crashing brilliance of noise outside the café. Trumpets and a rattling drum. Will and Zakaria looked at the doorway. As the band passed, the sound lurched even more loudly into the café. Senegalese soldiers, the man in front whirling a cane at chest height. Behind him, trumpeters blew and threw their trumpets spinning up into the air, caught them and blew again. Their scissoring strides cast rhythmical triangles of shadow across the café floor. At the back were the
drummers, two of them, who produced an intricate, thrilling racket despite seeming merely to lay their sticks motionless over the tilted surfaces of the drums with their soft dark hands. Somehow from this languid action their sticks blurred and they generated a terrific battery of sound that was shockingly, almost embarrassingly loud as they crossed the open doorway. As the music receded along the street, Will turned smiling, mildly elated, to Dr Zakaria but Dr Zakaria did not smile back.

‘Our country,’ he said, ‘is not our own.’

Will swallowed, sobering his expression. ‘I understand. It must be horribly frustrating.’

‘Yes. That is one word you could use. It is frustrating. It is frustrating to have your goods stolen, to be killed, to be thrown to die into a pit full of shit for no reason, to have your own land filled with strangers, strange thieves, unclean people. That is all frustrating.’ He sipped his coffee once again then removed his spectacles. He polished the lenses with the edge of the tablecloth and returned them to his nose. He looked at something on the table then something else, checking their clarity.

When he spoke again he was calmer. ‘Of course we are told that Arabs are not fit to run their own countries. We are … what are we? I don’t remember. Are we feckless? I think feckless and also chaotic, and tribal and dirty and lazy. Perhaps you think this also?’

‘I don’t,’ Will said, wondering if there wasn’t a grain of truth there, if allowing them to run their own affairs might not end in a mess.

Another sound from outside: the long tapering wail
of the call to prayer. Will loved that sound, so passionately forsaken and faithful. There was emptiness in the sound, empty space that the soul had traversed, a nomad sound. Will also liked the way that people accepted it, registered it without amazement, ignored it, going about their business, or stirred themselves towards the mosque. That outflung spiritual grandeur was natural to them; they lived half in that dimension all the time.

‘I have to go to the masjid,’ Dr Zakaria said. ‘As you can hear, it is time.’

‘Can I come with you?’

Dr Zakaria looked at Will, revising his opinion again, Will thought, elevating it. ‘If you wish. No one will stop you.’

Will walked with the smaller man through the streets to a little square. By a line of taps, the worshippers crouched, washing themselves like cats, looped inside their fluid gestures, rinsing hands, feet and heads, breathing water into their nostrils and blasting it out.

At the entrance, Will removed his shoes. He was noticed by the faithful but they made no comment nor seemed to care, strolling towards their more important business. They found squares of the carpet patterned with these geometric cells on which to place themselves. Again Will felt that rich, assuaging sensation of carpet underfoot, the opposite of desert harshness, a great relief. With no pews or screens to baffle the view, the space was wide. Above was a dome that rested on a ring of small windows. Perhaps, if he could have chosen, Will wouldn’t have included those great brass circles of lamps hanging down on such
long chains. They were the one thing that slightly impaired the open effect. Will faded to the back of the mosque and watched as prayers got underway. He watched the men stand and hug themselves and look left and right and read from the book of their empty hands. He watched them kneel, all at once sinking down to the carpet and bending forwards, the vulnerable, human soles of their feet all peeling up towards him.

Will turned away from the worshippers, leaving them to finish their business. He walked quietly along the back wall, admiring the beautiful patterning of the tiles, regular, mathematical but sinuously growing out in all directions from any point so that the eye raced and rested, raced and rested. It was very cleverly done. Will felt he understood its endless elaboration. Its meaning was divine.

20

Ray was kept from George, travelling in a caravan of the half destroyed. At the back of the advance while the delicate membrane of his hearing healed, Ray got used to medical smells, of bandages and alcohol, sometimes also the smell of burning flesh that could be surprisingly similar to the smell of bacon. There were psychological cases also, the shell-shocked, staring and shaking, repeating precise gestures or clawing at themselves. At night he could see them struggling in their dreams but, being deaf, he couldn’t always hear their cries. Deafness made things distant. They looked like figures struggling underwater.

George was distant. Ray yearned towards him, to protect him. Surely he wouldn’t survive on his own, a secret pacifist in the middle of a war, in the damned infantry for Christ’s sake. Ray wrote letters to him in his head, arguing with him.
My friend
, they began,
my friend
. Ray would assert how important this war was and how the killing was necessary, the lesser of two evils in the world. George didn’t realise how valuable his own life was, so valuable compared to some useless Nazi. His life was precious and he should defend it. Ray imagined these letters – that he never wrote or sent – convincing George on the night before a decisive battle and saving him. At the same time, Ray
imagined George protected by his goodness, a slight shimmer in the air around him, coming through the battle unharmed. George could be the hero of a new kind of war movie, about a man whose goodness triumphed.

All of these thoughts were repeatedly burned up and destroyed in the sudden certainty that George had just been or was just about to be killed, in that moment just gone or coming right now. Confirmation of this came with each new wounded or maddened soldier brought in from the fury of battle to be dragged along behind with Ray, drugged and repaired enough to be returned and properly killed next time.

At night, Ray cried out towards George, his own voice through his deafness high and weightless and weak.

21

‘Is it possible, do you think,’ Will asked Dr Zakaria, ‘that Alloula is a French informant?’ It was a mischievous question, a little flashing out of the excitement that Will felt at these meetings, the dense buzzing in his belly as he leaned forwards, smoking, listening. He asked the question with a hint of a smile.

‘No,’ Dr Zakaria answered, eyebrows raised and eyelids drooping, an expression of serene disdain. ‘Not only do I know Alloula thoroughly but you make the mistake of assuming that the French are interested in us. They aren’t. They don’t think we are capable of anything. We are invisible as far as they are concerned. The Bey is a pet. No one else has any authority.’

‘But now that I’m here and I’ve been meeting with you, their interest might have been piqued.’

Zakaria shook his head. ‘Because you are here, all of you British and others, the French withdraw entirely. They are on vacation. They are waiting for you to go away again and then life will return to normal.’

Alloula was the first of the others to arrive. Tall and sloping, his long heavy belly abbreviated by a tight belt, he looked, as ever, tired. His eyes were vague with worry. He flattened his thick black hair to his head and with the same hand summoned the waiter.

He sat and before he’d made eye contact with Will
or Zakaria, he said, ‘My wife is very unhappy about me coming here.’

‘I see,’ Zakaria answered. ‘She likes the French too much.’

Will rose slightly in his seat as he considered attempting a joke about a French lover but decided against it and sank back.

‘No,’ Alloula answered. ‘But she thinks it might be dangerous, that the French are watching us.’

‘That’s precisely what I was just saying,’ Will said.