Eugène is sleeping now, finally. My joy at finding him again is tempered by the knowledge that he is changed, that he seems, still, not to know me. He does not cry, does not respond as a child should. He is withdrawn, silent. What did they do to him? What traumas has he endured?
You are up on the deck somewhere, chéri, exercising or staring out to sea. Last night I lay in bed and watched you change. You turned away from me. Only the small light over the sink was on, but I could see the thickness in your shoulders, the heavy slabs of your shoulder blades flexing as you pulled off your shirt. You carry no fat around your waist, unlike Hamid. The muscles of your legs are very big, almost too big for your derriere, which is compact and angled. Everything about your body is edged, hardened, familiar. The damage is there quite plainly, also: the new welted scarring across your side and those other traumas you have suffered. Your ear is healing quickly, but with the old scar across your cheek and the smaller gun welts from the farm in Cyprus, it is only your pale eyes and the cut of your jaw and the stubble of fair hair that keep you from being ugly.
As I watch you, the man who killed the father of my son, confusion and regret surge through me. I have simply no idea what I should feel, how I should behave, what I should do in the face of everything that has happened. Only with Eugène, caring for him, hoping that he may begin to respond to me again, do I find solace, some measure of meaning.
What was Hamid doing there, on that mountainside, looking down as that horrible massacre unfolded? I can only conclude that he, too, was a member of GI. It is clear to me now that it happened over the course of his many work trips to Egypt. The woman, Fatimah, must have played a key role in radicalising him, in bringing him to make such a monumental decision. Did he love her? I know from the way she spoke to him on the mountainside that she did not love him. How long had they been planning it? Hamid said, there on the mountainside, that he had done it for me. What can that possibly mean? The knowledge that he betrayed me this way – taking our son and framing me for murder; the lengths to which they went – the planted emails on my computer, the DNA in the incinerator, the teeth, the clothing, all of it – makes me shudder. My violation is now complete.
And yet the irony seems like the work of Greek gods, toying with us for their fancy. The four of them – Yusuf, Hamid, the Kemetic, and yes, even her – fighting a terrible evil, not just the pollution and the poisoning of innocents, but the systematic exploitation of an entire nation, an entire people. And each of them reaching a different conclusion on what means were justified, each finding in the response of their enemy the limits of their own conviction, and eventually, coming to the same end.
That this end should come as it did! How could this have happened? The only man I have ever loved kills my husband. I kill my husband’s friend, one of the few men brave enough to stand up to this scourge, this legal crime. Samira is killed for getting too close to me. And, if I had told you, Claymore, there in Garbage City, to kill those two crooked policemen, you surely would have, and perhaps Samira would be alive now, and her girls would have a mother now instead of a foster family.
And for all of it, nothing has changed. As Mahmoud said, this last atrocity will only allow the government and the people that control it to further restrict freedoms, to redouble their efforts to eliminate dissent, to rule this country and its people purely and solely in their own interest. I am crying inside. The waste.
For the first time in my life, I doubt God.