‘What the hell are you feeling guilty about?’
‘We killed someone.’
‘He was taking those boys. You know what he was doing, right?’
‘I know. I know that.’
‘What if it had been your son?’
The man on the log didn’t reply.
‘I mean, can you imagine?’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘He was evil. The worst kind of evil there is.’
‘Did you not hear what happened to Sadik’s son?’
This wasn’t really a question, and the man sitting down lowered his eyes, running his hand over his face.
There was silence for a while and I didn’t dare to move, to even take a breath. The wind picked up and leaves on the trees rustled above us and I could hear footsteps in the woods and the sounds of laughter and faint music.
The man sitting on the log stood up now to face the other man. ‘What leads a man to do such things?’
I didn’t hear the reply because a group of boys walked between us, about five or six of them. One held a football in his hands, another had an Arabic song playing on his phone and a few of the boys sang along to the chorus. The two men took this as their cue and began to walk back to the camp. I took their place on the log, and felt its ridges and grooves with my fingers. I imagined Nadim; I could see him, as if he was sitting right there beside me, penknife in his hand, slicing his skin, that look in his eyes, full of rage.
‘What happened to you, Nadim?’ I said out loud. ‘What led you to do such things?’
And the wind replied, it lifted the fallen leaves, it tossed them about around me and then dropped them and the laughter and the music faded now completely, the boys lost to the depths of the woods.
Then I returned to the camp. Angeliki had gone now and I lay down beside Afra.
‘Where did you go?’ she whispered.
‘There was a problem.’
‘What kind of problem?’
‘You don’t want to know, trust me. It’s finished now.’
I remembered a verse from the Qur’an:
Be merciful to others and you will receive mercy. Forgive others and Allah will forgive you.
I then recalled some words from the Hadith:
The prophet would not respond to an evil deed with an evil deed but rather he would pardon and overlook.
And I looked at my hands, turned them over as if I was seeing them for the first time: one wrapped in a bandage, the other that had held the bat. I began to feel that fear again, the kind that had consumed me in Aleppo, alert to every movement and sound, imagining danger everywhere, expecting that at any moment the worst would happen, that death was near. I felt exposed, as if people were watching me from the woods, and when the wind blew it brought with it whispers: murderer, Nadim is dead, murderer.
I placed my palm on Afra’s chest, feeling her chest rise and fall, matching my breath to hers, slower, steadier. I recalled Mustafa’s British black bees and kept my eyes closed tight until I could see purple fields and rolling hills of lavender and heather, spilling over the edge of the world.
*
When I woke up, it was the afternoon. I looked at the step where Nadim should have been sitting, rolling a cigarette. I looked at the white statue – the head and shoulders of a bearded man, the inscription in Greek and the date: 1788–1825, and wondered what kind of a man he was. In my anxious state, I remembered vaguely the stories my mother used to tell me. In these tales statues were not objects of art or reverence – they were evil-averting talismans or guardians of treasure, or human beings or animals who had been turned to stone. In some stories demons entered the statues and spoke through them.
Afra sat beside me and I wished that she could see, wished that she could be the woman she used to be, because Afra had always had a deep understanding of the world; she had a way of seeing things. Afra always knew too much, burdened with the ability to strip people and places of their masks, to find the remnants of the past in the present. I noticed that Nadim had left his rebab on the step of the statue. I walked over and picked it up. I strummed the strings and remembered the beautiful melody that had washed over me and through me like water, quenching the scorched cracks in my mind, like the feeling of the first drop of water on my tongue when the sun sets during the month of Ramadan. That was what Nadim’s music felt like, and this thought alone twisted my mind, distorted my thoughts. I closed my eyes and focused instead on the sound of children playing, laughing, kicking a ball.
11
IT IS THE DAY OF our interview. Afra is sitting beside me on the train and I know that she is nervous. Diomande is standing, holding the rail; there is a free seat for him but he won’t sit down. His tall distorted body is even more prominent in this public place. He looks like a character from a fairy tale, and I find it strange that out of all the people in the carriage I am the only one who knows his secret. Diomande is reading the advice in his notebook, muttering under his breath. ‘This is not a history lesson,’ he says in English, ‘and they do not need to know too much about the last president, unless they ask.’