29

Ash Shummari, Syria

She woke early that last day; woke to an immense silence, an immense heat. She could see by the utter blue beyond the window that the days of cloud were past. The wind had stopped and the sun was thrusting itself into the closed room like a magician’s sheaf of swords. The mattress was damp against her back and as she swung her legs to the floor; sweat trickled down them. There was another wetness, too, and she went into the bathroom, away from Nan and Moira and Michael, snatching up her purse as she went.

Thank God for mascara and eyeliner … and most of all for cold cream. She repaired the wreck in the mirror as well as she could, then brushed her dirty hair till it took on a dull sheen.

When she came back, wishing that the gathering mess from four people could be flushed away, the others were awake. Michael stood by the window, stretching. She could hear his joints crack. Moira sat on the bed looking haggard, not even glancing up as Susan said “Good morning.”

Nan lay motionless, her face flushed. Susan knelt beside her, feeling a rush of guilt and apprehension so intense it made her knees weak. Her child was sick, and she was worrying about her appearance.

Oh God, God, when would this be over.…

“Baby. How are you doing this morning?”

She moved only a little under Susan’s hand, without opening her eyes. “Oh hot again. Mommy, I want water. I itch.”

“I’ll get you water. Where do you itch?”

“Down in my throat, like.”

“Oh. Guess you can’t scratch too good there, can you?”

“I guess not.” She smiled a little. “Mommy … I had a dream. About Daddy. When is he coming to get us?”

“You’re so good, you’re such a good girl. I don’t know—but I hope soon.” She got up quickly, tears making the image of her child waver. She blinked them away, angry at herself. Nan’s condition had no connection with what she had done. She loved her, she would do anything for her, but guilt was not an appropriate response. Not to this.

But someone within her was not convinced. It was all too ready to blame her for her daughter’s suffering. Illogical … but depressing. She pressed her hand to her own forehead, unconsciously mimicking her gesture to her daughter, and went out into the hallway.

The corridor was full of sunlight and bedraggled people. She took her place in line in front of the bucket and fell with relief into what passed for conversation.

“Did you have a good night?”

“More water, excellent. I came out here around midnight, and it was all gone.”

“Someone’s thinking about us,” suggested a woman, her voice desperately hopeful. “Aren’t they? They aren’t like you were saying, so ruthless, are they?”

“Has anyone seen breakfast?”

Susan joined the rueful laughter at that remark. Breakfast … her stomach began to growl just at the word, as if it needed a sign to become hungry. We’re reverting, she thought. Water and food, avoiding danger, that’s all that concerns us now. She looked at her fellow hostages. They were apathetic, listless, their faces limp and pale. They reminded her uncomfortably of a PBS special she had once seen, on public mental hospitals. She dipped two glasses of water, sloshed a sip around in her mouth. The rest would be for Nan.

She was in the bathroom again with her hair, fighting out tangles and cursing at the flies—they were persistent and thus ultimately successful like all lower forms of life—when Moira came in and closed the door. Susan did not look away from the mirror. The broken veins under her nostrils looked so ugly. Her nose was oily, her lashes stuck together, dirt showed at the collar of the T-shirt she had worn now for three days.

“I’m a mess,” she said aloud, her back to Moira. She heard the hollow clank of the toilet seat and then the rattle of the Ox pissing.

“God, it stinks in here.”

“Moira … are you all right? You don’t sound well.”

“I’m all right.” Lieberman, still slumped on the seat, ripped off a stingy piece of American Archaeology from her purse and rubbed her face with it. “It’s so goddamn hot … no, I think it’s the diet that’s getting to me. I wanted to lose ten pounds, but this is doing it the hard way.”

“We’ll get more food soon. Hanna—”

Her heart jumped. She knew it was too late then, but stopped anyway as she realized what she’d said. Moira reached back automatically to flush, but the handle only rattled loosely. “God damn it,” she said.

Susan thought: She didn’t notice. Her heart began again. “Yes, it’s a mess … good thing you brought paper, though—”

“Betts.”

Uh-oh, she thought. “What?”

“This Majd character.”

“What about him?”

“I woke up last night; you weren’t in your bed. I don’t want to pry, but I saw how he was looking at you yesterday. Did anything happen last night I ought to know about?”

“Nothing happened last night.” She heard the defensiveness in her tone, and saw that Moira heard it, too. “I just talked to him for a while.”

“Talked to him?” Lieberman stood up, looking alarmed.

“Don’t get excited. There’s no harm in—”

“Susan. You’re not a kid, don’t act like one.” Moira moved up beside her, looking over her shoulder into her face, into the mirror. She saw that she was not the only one who looked tired. Her roommate’s hair was scraggly, there were dark heeltaps under her eyes, her cheeks sagged. She looked like a three-week drunk. “This isn’t the place to play around, Betts! This bastard is out to kill. He’s said that, hell, they’ve done it in front of us. What happened last night?”

“It’s none of your business,” said Susan.

They looked at each other in the mirror. “Betts,” Moira said at last, low, “what is happening to us?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said again. They looked at each other, and knew they knew, and there was nothing more either of them could say.

*   *   *

There was so little to do, she thought later. Except wait, and sweat, and try not to think.

Getting up so early made it bad. The weather made it worse. Susan could hardly credit how storm, rain, and cool had become airless and choking heat practically overnight.

She lay on the hot mattress, feeling sweat crawl like ants over her ribs, and thought.

“When is Daddy coming to get us?” Nan had said.

When is Daddy coming … that was the child speaking. When will someone rescue us from this; when will someone deliver us from uncertainty, fear?

He won’t, babe, she thought, lying in the fly-buzzing heat, feeling the thud of her heart and the occasional fruitless slap of her hand as her only distinction from a corpse. She felt angry and so sad she wanted to cry. No one will come. We’re here, and we’re helpless.

She rolled her head to her child. Nan lay as if thrown on the bed, facing away from her, giving only the curve of her cheek and the line of her closed eyelids. Susan studied a bead of sweat on her forehead. She mused on the unfinished, pert curve of her nose, half-Asian, half-European, the inward dip between the eyes she had often congratulated herself on as more practical than the vision-obscuring Caucasian ridge. Yes, she did look like Dan … and like her … and altogether like herself, not a mixture but something different and new and precious. She contemplated with wonder the fact that something once part of herself had become separate and distinct and new, dependent now but not forever. In a way it made her feel that the child was not her own, but belonged to someone else, someone she could not know.

She mused on that for a time, drifted into a doze, and woke again seconds or minutes or even an hour later. But nothing had changed. The room was close and hot and flies rose from the corners of her eyes as she opened them. Conversation murmured from the corridor. Arabic, but too faint for her even to separate its fluid rapidity into words.

Unbidden, brought perhaps by the voices, she found herself thinking about him.

About the Majd.

She lay motionless for a long time, her only motion to blink when the insects returned. She was trying to understand how she felt, and to justify what had happened the night before, in the dark, in an empty room.

She did not lack excuses, rationalizations, and coldly, in turn, she evaluated each. Weren’t hostages often attracted to their captors? Stockholm. Patty Hearst. But this was not an emotional response. She had submitted deliberately, to gain his protection. For insurance. That was what she had told herself the night before. But her mind was less certain in the daylight. Danger made you want sex … didn’t it? She lay and her hand moved gradually downward. No, the others were awake, sitting up … her hand came to rest on her midriff. She scratched at a pool of sweat in her navel, and half-turned again, switching her hips down into the hot ticking.

She had been faithful since she was married. It wasn’t the end of the world, even if—and she knew that this was one thing it was not—it had been a random fling, a sideshow enjoyment. It was how you felt about a person that mattered, and not whom you slept with, once in a while. Dan, conservative as he was, would be horrified at that attitude. She knew he felt more strongly about fidelity than she did. But she had accepted that, accepted that it was important to him, just as she had stopped smoking because he disliked it.

But now that was over. Not the way she had sometimes fantasized it: a chance meeting at a bar; the daydreams she had dozing at the beach about the blond-stomached, long-limbed Frisbee players. But in a way not so different. Because she hadn’t planned it, hadn’t really thought about it, before it happened. What was that phrase of Erica Jong’s … it had been his idea. She had not given herself. She had been taken.

No, that was not true, either. She rolled to lie on her side, hearing a trapped buzz beneath her that quickly died. She had talked with him, sat with him. Then she had made that remark about her and Dan. With his Arab ideas about women he would take that as a blatant come-on. She should have known that. And there at the end, when he lifted her, a part of her had wanted him. It had not been rape or anything like it.

Stay with the truth, Betts, she told herself sternly. It’s going to be hard enough getting through this without lying to yourself about it.

“Mommy—”

She groaned and got up for water. Coming back she thought, Why try to sleep anymore? She sat on the bed and dispiritedly watched the sun-faded tatter of curtain stir to a breath of air so faint she could not even feel it.

“This is crazy,” she said.

“That’s the way the weather is around here,” said Cook. Like a caged animal, she thought, he paced and stared out, stared out and paced, switching an invisible tail. It made her nervous. Now he was leaning his forehead against the glass, rocking on his heels, his face drawn into a frown. “This strip of coast is too narrow to generate its own weather. It just takes whatever comes off the sea.”

“What are you looking at out there?”

“I’m not sure … I can see one of those jeeps once in a while, over between those buildings. They’re moving around, but I don’t know what’s going on.”

Nan said, “Will they shoot us?”

They stared at her. “Of course not,” said Moira brightly, going over to the bed. “Aunt Moira can promise that. Nobody would hurt a little girl as pretty as you.”

“Ox, please. I don’t want her to get that kind of image of herself.”

“Sorry, Betts … Yes? What do you want?” she said, her voice suddenly rising, hardening.

Susan turned. Harisah was standing in their doorway, alone.

“I’ve brought you some bread,” he said, holding out the loaf to Michael. It was the same rough meal as the day before. “Can you use it? There is fresh water in the hallway.”

“Thanks,” said Cook, his voice guarded. As Harisah turned away his glance swept the room and found hers. She felt herself stiffen, felt her back actually flatten against the wall against which she leaned, like a cat hiding from thunder. She held his dark eyes only for a second, but in that time she felt a sense of danger and tragedy so immanent and personal it was as if the veils of culture and inculcated prejudice that separated their two worlds had disintegrated like nightweb on a branch tossed into flame. She knew for a moment that yes, it had happened to them, what must happen between men and women. And at the same time—at the same time—she hated him, his single-mindedness and cruelty, and was afraid.

It was unlike anything she had felt before, and it, or the heat, made her dizzy for a moment.

The Majd said, turning his eyes away from her to Cook, “There may be some changes today.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Turks are considering our offer. The Syrians tell us that. So, there is some hope they will answer our demands, if they are convinced we’ll do what we say.”

“Meaning, we’d be released?”

“It’s possible.”

“Why don’t you do it now?”

“I can’t do that,” Harisah said. His eyes took on the hardness. “I won’t do that. I am waiting for a messenger from the committee. One is to come today, this morning, soon. He will give me instructions on how to proceed.”

“Committee? I thought you were the leader,” said Susan. Moira glanced at her.

“I am za’im of these men. That is, a leader in battle. But there are others. Some of us fight; others are better to do the negotiating.”

Harisah went to the window, lowering his rifle as he passed Cook, and peered down. It was the same position of body, the same attitude, that the American had taken, but Susan saw how much more fluently the Palestinian leaned, how his shoulders drooped naturally and without tension. How his muscles bunched under the damp cotton as he lifted his arm to lean against the pane. How the edges of his eyes crinkled as he peered upward into the sunlight, then downward to the square.

“There’s a jeep coming,” said Michael helpfully.

“I see it.” The terrorist peered down at it for a moment longer, and then turned suddenly. His shoes rattled briefly on the stairs. Then the hot silence returned, marred only by the slow patrolling of flies and then the nasal beep of an automobile horn.

Susan elbowed Michael, and felt Moira join them at the window. Side by side they looked down at the wide sweep of square. Empty asphalt, cracked, and beyond that, small between them and the hills, the glitter of sun off the immobile aluminum of the abandoned plane. The only movement was the eddying of air as heat shimmered up, the only sound the mutter of the jeep’s engine.

It waited in the center of the open space, an open boxy vehicle. The red-white-black Syrian flag drooped from the aerial and another—Palestinian?—from the left bumper. The two men in it, foreshortened by height, wore short-sleeved suntans and officers’ caps. As far as Susan could see they were unarmed.

“What are they doing?”

“Waiting for our fearless leader,” said Cook. He pointed. “And there he is.”

Harisah stepped into the street, into their sight. He was not alone; two of his men tagged a step behind, to left and right.

Susan saw that he was still carrying the rifle.

And suddenly she knew what was familiar. It was straight out of a John Wayne. The windless heat, the tense, loose way the men sauntered toward the jeep, the motionless intensity with which the officers watched them approach.

“It’s some kind of confrontation,” said Cook.

“You felt it too—”

“Shut up and watch,” said Moira.

The talk seemed to take forever. After the first few minutes it became animated. The distant figures waved their arms, pointed back to the hotel, and the shouting came faintly up to the watchers.

“I don’t get it,” said Moira.

“It’s the messenger he was talking about,” said Cook. “Can’t you see that truck? Back beyond the hill?”

“No. You know I can’t see that far away.”

“Well, I guess there’s some trouble. The Majd is—”

“Wait,” said Susan.

Harisah had turned away, shrugging his shoulders in exaggerated disgust. If this weren’t the Mediterranean, she thought, we couldn’t tell what was going on nearly as well; the pantomime was transparent, even from this far away.

What was not clear was the appearance of two more guards, and in front of them, edging forward apprehensively across the blazing, silent square, two old people.

“The Stanweises!”

“That’s them, all right.”

“Where has he been keeping them? They weren’t on this floor.”

“Look—she’s still got her dog.”

Susan turned to make sure that Nan was not watching. No, she was still in bed, her face turned to the wall. She watched for a moment more, just to catch the rise and fall of her chest, then turned her attention back to the light-filled square.

The two Americans were being prodded forward. One of the young men behind them carried a rifle, the other a grenade. They stayed closed up, as if the old people might try to run. But neither of them can, she thought.

The horror of it was gradually overtaking the three spectators. They were quiet now. “What is he trying to do?” Moira muttered. “God—I wish I could see better. What does he look like? Is he smiling?”

“No,” said Cook. “He’s frowning.”

Susan leaned against the casement, staring out.

Turning, far below, the tall figure pointed back at the couple, then confronted the uniformed men once more. There was renewed talk, then more shouting.

“They won’t let it through.”

“What?”

“The truck. The cordon has it. Harisah wants it.”

“Or?” said Moira.

“I think that’s what we’re about to find out,” said Michael, and raised his hand to shade his eyes from the sun.

The old couple, prodded forward, came to a halt a few feet away from the jeep. There was more talk, a lot of it.

Then, suddenly, Harisah stepped back. He made a sweeping gesture with his free arm.

The guard with the rifle raised it to Mr. Stanweis’ silver hair.

“No, you bastard,” Susan heard Cook whisper, beside her. Moira was muttering something under her breath, something long. And she herself stood frozen, horror under her heart like an iceberg that once congealed there would never melt. There in the heat, sweat running into her eyes, she felt the touch of death as surely as the old doctor, who stood stiffly, back bent but still dignified, the muzzle just behind his ear.

The tableau was still for a minute. And then, slowly, one of the officers in the jeep nodded.

Harisah nodded too, and the Palestinian behind the old man lowered his gun. Stanweis raised a shaking hand to his face. Susan thought then: He knew. Had known and had said nothing, done nothing. Just waited, for life to continue or end, there on the hot loneliness of asphalt, in a strange land, with his wife and dog.

“Thank God,” she muttered.

“He’d have done it,” said Cook, his voice tight. “He was ready. He was going to do it.”

“I’m not sure,” said Susan. “Maybe he just—”

“I think you’re right, Mike,” said Moira. “Jesus … let’s close the fucking window. I can’t watch any more of this.”

“Wait. Here he comes.”

A second jeep barreled across the square at top speed, canvas top fluttering, a battered blue panel truck not ten yards behind it. Both vehicles squealed to a stop beside the first. From the interior of the truck two men unwound themselves, hopped stiffly down to the pavement, and walked toward Harisah. When they met they hesitated for a moment and then shook hands, oddly formal.

Harisah turned then, motioning to his own men. “Junior,” as they had taken to calling the boy terrorist, waved the truck by. It headed out toward the plane, raising a dun cloud as it bounced and wavered into the desert mirage. Behind it the party began to walk back to the hotel.

Halfway back they stopped. They stood in a close circle, for just a moment.

A white-haired figure broke away, into a shambling run, back in the direction of the jeeps.

“What the hell—” breathed Moira.

The shot cracked in the stillness like a breaking rope. Stanweis did not take the next step; instead he jerked forward. He moved twice on the hot pavement as a man eases himself in bed, small from their height, insignificant. The dog began to bark then, high and spoiled-sounding. It leapt from the woman’s arms and ran across the empty square. Too stricken to speak, their eyes followed the moving animal, its little legs working too comically rapid for its speed, until it came to a bewildered stop above the old man’s body.

*   *   *

“Ninety-three of us now,” Mike Cook whispered, squatting beside them on the worn carpet of the corridor.

Susan patted Nan’s hair, again and again, and said nothing. She was afraid. Even though she could see that her nervousness, the fear around them in the mass of refugees crowded under the eyes of their possessors, turned itself in the little girl’s mind into terror, she couldn’t argue or numb herself away from it any longer.

At least Nan had not seen it. Susan was glad of that. But though she’d been asleep something of it had communicated itself to her. Some change in the way people talked, or did not talk; some new vibration in the air too high for older eardrums. Susan remembered, a little, what it was like at her age. You were an antenna, but you did not understand what you received. You knew emotionally, perhaps as an animal knows, but you didn’t know what it meant.

And knowing only that you were threatened, and were helpless, dependent, you were afraid. And so Nan huddled herself close against Susan, just as she had when she was tiny, and looked out at the people around her silently, with large frightened eyes.

“That’s all? I thought there were more,” Moira whispered.

“Counted them twice.”

One of the guards detached himself from the wall and went over. “Quiet,” he said to Michael, gripping him by the shoulder.

Cook shook off the hand. He said something just loud enough to hear.

“Skhot’!”

“Michael, for God’s sake—”

Cook nodded and fell silent, looking at the carpet. The guard hesitated for a moment, watching them through hostile eyes, and then went back to the wall and leaned against it.

The captives were massed together, seated, in the second-floor corridor. Pushed and shouted out of their rooms, they had been forced close together, crammed thigh to thigh, for more than an hour. Now the heat, the closeness and smell, were becoming unbearable. Susan felt sweat drip from her chin, and wiped it from Nancy’s cheek. Nan didn’t move. Her mother’s hand came away dirty. We’re all filthy, Susan thought. Her skin itched.

Nan stirred uneasily. “Mommy—”

“Wait, baby. Be quiet.” The guard was looking their way again. She hoped he did not understand Cook’s muttered curse.

“Got to go. Go to the bathroom.”

“Wait, baby. You have to hold it this time.”

“Go bad,” the child whispered again, but obediently did not say anything more. She looked in a frightened way toward the guard who had shouted at Cook.

A few minutes later the waiting was ended by the ring of boots on concrete, the jingle of metal, and the chatter of voluble men. The stairwell door slammed open and several of the terrorists came out. All were armed. One of them was the Majd. Beside him, looking angry, were the men who had come that morning.

They talked among themselves for a few minutes. Then, with an abrupt, impatient gesture, Harisah stepped out, almost within the front row of sitting hostages.

“You Americans, you British,” he said loudly, “you are being prisoner here. And now, because of the stupidity and arrogance of your governments you are in great danger. It’s time for me to tell you why.

“These fighters, these men,”—he swept his arms around at the guards, who straightened—“are mujahiddin, fighters for the freedom of Palestine and the unity of all Arabs. They aren’t paid; they fight of their free wanting because they have nothing left but guns. They fight against injustice of the invader. The Jews have taken our country and oppress our brothers. And America arms them against all of Islam.

“They are here to fight this, to regain freedom for our comrades and justice for the Palestinian people. They will do it here more surely than in the front lines.

“We fight also, shoulder to shoulder with the others who battle for freedom, against those whose puppets the Turks are; against American injustice and imperialism.”

He paused, putting his hands behind him, a little grandiloquently, Susan thought. He strolled to the window and looked out. Every eye followed him. He’s had training in speaking, somewhere, she thought.

She noticed then, half-amused and half-horrified, that for a moment she had felt proud of him.

He turned, and his face had become dark. “Believe me, I do not like to shed blood. If your government had been reasonable you would all be safe. But now our friends tell us the imperialists have tricked us. They talked; and talked; and now the American marines are landing in Lebanon.”

He paused, waiting perhaps for a response from them; but none of the crouched hostages moved.

“They will not reach here, whatever they intend. We will use you to stop them, to drive them out. How? The same way we wanted to use you to release the freedom fighters they hold prisoner. It will work; we have proved this already. The Turks did not wish to talk. Now, under American pressure, they are meeting with our leadership in Yemen.

“When that is done, we go on to remove all the Jews from Palestine, the same way.”

“All the Israelis?” she heard Cook whisper. “That’s not even PLO doctrine. These guys are some radical fucking splinter—”

“Goddammit, Mike, not now,” hissed Moira.

Harisah paced back and forth. “You may say, how will we do this? We started by taking the embassy. But now that the Americans are taking foolish risks we must go further. How? By harsh measures.”

He paused again, but no one said anything, no one gasped, no one moved. The flies buzzed sleepily above his captive audience.

“I have carried out the first execution. The Syrians have been told that there will be another at nightfall. This is for transmission to your people. Another at dawn. Another at noon tomorrow. This will continue until our demands are met. When the Americans withdraw and our men are released, executions cease. When our comrades arrive here with us, or at one of our camps, we disappear one night, and you all go free.

“Executions will be carried out in the square, in view of witnesses, among whom will be the American and Turkish ambassadors to Syria and any news persons who may wish to come.”

“This is crazy,” Cook whispered tensely. “He can’t mean this. The Turks are busy in Cyprus, and a new regime isn’t going to start out by knuckling under to foreign terrorists. They’ve got enough of their own. No way.”

“Goddammit, Cook, shut up.”

“To help this plan work faster,” Harisah went on, raising his eyes to them, “you are going to help me. You can save people of your group, perhaps yourself, by letting the British and Americans know that we mean what we are telling them. We have a recorder here. You will make tapes, speak to your families if you wish, or to the American authorities. We will deliver your messages at nightfall, before the second demonstration.

“And for that demonstration, I think”—he raised his arm high, pointing—“that tall young man in back, who talks while I am talking—”

“Michael! No!”

Moira punched wildly at the first guard to reach them, but the man simply pushed her over; off-balance, she fell into the other hostages. There was a tangle of arms and legs, shouting and crying. Cook did not struggle; he stood up, face paling, but not fighting the men who beat him out from the crowd with their rifle butts. The others shrank back as his guards pushed him forward. Harisah waited, looking grim, and then turned his head to speak briefly to the two men.

Susan sat rigid, unable to believe what was happening. She could not move, could not speak. She held Nan tight, and wondered that she did not whimper. She felt like whimpering herself.

“Goddammit—let me up. Mike! Mike!”

And then Moira was on her feet, running through the still-cleared path behind the guards. Cook turned at her shout. He started to wave her back, and then his arms were twisted behind him and he was pushed toward the stairwell.

Harisah nodded, and two men stepped in behind Moira. And at that Susan was up too, holding Nan tight and screaming: “Majd! Hanna! Not her, too!”

Harisah looked in her direction. As they caught hers his eyes became opaque, the gaze of a stranger.

“Of course,” he said, “the Jewish woman may also die if she wishes.”

And Susan sat, slowly, unable to think or speak. She lowered her eyes. Fear and guilt rose in her throat. She had thought, somehow, that her sacrifice would protect them. But it had not been a bargain. What had Moira said—you can’t bargain with a terrorist—

She did not want to look at him again, ever.

Harisah looked around, at all of them. “There; you see I mean this business. Now you can go back to your rooms. Do not open the windows. Do not leave rooms. The guards will bring the recorder to you there.”

He paused, looking toward the stairwell. From the open door a shout floated up, but so faint that she could not tell whether it was Michael or Moira, or even a man or a woman. The Majd’s scowl deepened. He turned from the stairwell to them.

“You should know me well enough by now to know that the Majd does not lie, he does not bluff. Make your messages convincing. It is the only way any of you will escape death.”