The Girl in Green Read online

  She put her hand on his. It covered his wedding ring. She felt it press against her palm.

  He looked down at her hand. He looked surprised, but he did not resist. Instead, he laid his free hand on top of hers. Neither smiled.

  Before morning they were lovers.

  The crisis ended with a whimper. The Kurds wouldn’t get off the mountains until they could be sure of their safety. But Dohuk was below the 36th parallel, which was the demarcation line of the ceasefire in the north. US Lieutenant Colonel Abigail manoeuvred his companies closer to Dohuk to intimidate the Iraqis so they’d pull out and the Kurds could move back in.

  General Jay Garner put two American battalions close by. Two different strike scenarios were drawn up. The Marine Expeditionary Unit, backed by other coalition forces, was going to secure the high ground to the north and east of Dohuk. The idea was that the MEU’s marine helicopter squadron would fly one marine rifle company to the high ground south of Dohuk, a second company would secure the road to the south-west, and a third, mounted in armoured amphibious vehicles, would pass through the second company and secure a blocking position ten kilometres south of Dohuk on the highway to Mosul. If that worked, and Dohuk was taken without a fight, 45 Commando and the Dutch marines were planning to pass through Abizaid’s battalion, enter Dohuk, and secure the town proper, as they had at Zahko. That isn’t what happened, though. The US National Security Council screwed it up, calling it all to a halt because they didn’t understand the situation, and this signalled weakness to Saddam. He got on television and said that Iraq would fight to defend Dohuk. This meant that no one was going home and that the northern disaster was going to press on and on and on, because there was nowhere to resettle the refugees.

  Washington tried to blame their field commanders, but that is what people in Washington do, because Washington is the kind of town that attracts the kind of people who do that. As usual, it was the people in the field who sorted it out, while all the members of the National Security Council went on to better jobs later.

  The press never covered the real story, and the army flowered it over in diplo-speak. What happened was that an American lieutenant colonel named Dick Naab had a long talk with an Iraqi colonel named Nashwan, who explained that Saddam had already issued orders to hold the town and had said so on the national TV, so it would be an insult if they now surrendered it and Saddam had to back down. It was Naab who came up with the idea of having the Iraqis ‘invite’ non-combat forces into Dohuk to start the repatriation.

  Nashwan, being pragmatic, saw the logic of the manoeuvre by recognising that it was in Saddam’s interests to make the coalition forces go away, which they wouldn’t do until the refugees were resettled, having said as much on television in their own countries. So Nashwan took this proposition back to Baghdad, Saddam gave it a think, decided it was a good idea, and the invitation was offered.

  All that was left to do was move hundreds of thousands of destitute people from the mountains, which is what was done in one of the most remarkable and unsung humanitarian operations of the twentieth century. The end of Operation Provide Comfort was not mentioned in any newspaper in the United States or Britain.

  Märta went back to Sweden, and slept for three weeks. For the next several months she followed Benton’s bylines in the newspaper, but after a year she stopped. She and Erik were engaged, and soon married. What she had had with Benton she considered private, contained, and over: a tryst.

  She thought the word meant the same as the French triste — ‘sad’. It was strange to learn, on looking the words up, that they were only distantly related.

  PART II

  THE LONG, COLD, HARD, AND DARK OF IT

  22 YEARS LATER

  8

  The cragged land holds tightly to the last heat of the day. Thomas Benton’s collar flaps gently in the late-summer shamal wind. He sits on the bleachers by the Domiz refugee camp, overlooking a pitted and littered playing field as the world fades to a pastel pink under an expanding indigo sky. Iraqi, Kurdish, and Syrian children are kicking and chasing an oblong American football up and down the remains of a once-tended soccer pitch. A well-meaning man from a US aid agency shouts instructions to them about what they are doing wrong.

  A skinny boy without shoes is covered in dust. Or perhaps he is made of dust. If he is, he is dissolving before Benton’s eyes, because behind him is a thick and heavy cloud choking everything slower than himself. By his speed and direction, this means most of the Eastern world. Blacked out, he is a Semitic stick figure of eyes, teeth, and feet. This boy — this genie, this pillar of fire — has somehow gained a measure of control over the foreign ball, and with tremendous timing and balance shoots from the far edge of the pitch. As the ball passes between the two broken and bent tubes that were once the posts, the children — on both teams — all cheer. The applause is as youthful and sincere as it is startling and welcome.

  Benton watches the children as he opens a Kit Kat chocolate bar he bought from a cold store, and pops open a Fanta bottle scarred opaque from reuse. He is sixty-three years old. It is a poor dinner for an old belly, but its virtue lies in familiarity. He learned long ago that being a successful world traveller means little more than having the ability to eat anything without suffering adverse consequences.

  A man whom Benton hasn’t noticed before is sitting on a lower bench. As the ball passes through the posts, he leaps from the edge of his seat and cheers. He is an Arab. He wears shabby trousers and a blue blazer. His black hair is dirty and poorly cut. From the fit of his jacket, it seems he is wearing donated clothing. That, or he is vanishing.

  He turns to Benton — the only other person in the bleachers — and smiles. It is not a smile of happiness but of pride, and in this precious moment it runs deeper than an empty well. He looks to Benton because he needs to know if anyone saw what he saw.

  To Benton, it is a familiar look in the Middle East. Answering the man’s unspoken plea, he speaks first. ‘That your boy?’

  ‘That is my son. He is better than Beckham. Better than Ronaldo.’ His accent is Arabic, and his English is inflected with British intonations rather than American ones.

  ‘He’s got talent,’ Benton says through a weak smile.

  ‘I would like to see Beckham chase around a ball shaped like that.’

  ‘So would I.’

  ‘Fifty-two aid agencies here. Not one brings a real football for the children. Imagine that.’

  ‘I don’t have to,’ Benton says.

  ‘Where you from?’ the man says.

  ‘England,’ Benton says. ‘A town in Cornwall. You’ve never heard of it. Fowey.’

  ‘Is it near Penzance?’

  ‘Further east. Halfway to Plymouth. What do you know about Penzance?’

  ‘I saw the musical with the pirates,’ the man says. ‘West End. In 1996. It was May. That was very nice.’

  ‘Ninety-six was a better year.’

  The man puts up his hand. He can’t talk about that.

  ‘Why were you in London?’ Benton asks.

  ‘I did my master’s degree in education at the University of London. When I got back to Damascus, I was made principal of the elementary school where I worked. I liked the theatre. It was too expensive for a foreign student, but there were half-price tickets in Leicester Square the day of the performance, if you weren’t too picky about what was left. I was often very lucky back then.’

  ‘You’re Syrian?’

  ‘I’m nothing,’ he says, the smile gone. He glances back to his son and makes sure he is still there. ‘There is no Syria. There are no Syrians. For the first time in three thousand years. I am a ghost. I live in a tent. There is no work here. Nothing for the kids to do all day. I had to pull him out of school. Now he’s a year behind, when he was once ahead. I teach him by myself in a tent with no books, no maps, no Internet. I have nothing but my son.
But he is worse off. He has only me.’

  Benton knows he shouldn’t ask the next question but does, because it is the only question to ask.

  ‘Your wife?’

  ‘My wife? My wife was eight-months pregnant when a government sniper shot her and my unborn daughter. It went through my daughter’s brain and out the back of my thirty-four-year-old wife, a woman whose kindness and gentleness of heart contained more poetry than will ever come from Ali Ahmad Said. They died from the same Russian bullet, provided as a gift by Vladimir Putin. When I got to the hospital, I saw eight other men like me — because that day eight other women were shot the same way. You see, the government snipers were playing a game. They shot pregnant women that day, ones that were near term. And they shot them in the same part of their bodies — through the baby. For target practice. For a laugh. Maybe for a bet. Assad wanted to teach us that we were powerless. He wanted us to know he was in charge. The big man. I haven’t told my son. At home, I was still checking under his bed for monsters at night. He was too old for this, I thought. Why at eleven? But now I know he was right to ask me to check. How do I tell a boy who is so sensitive and gentle that his mother has been murdered and that his baby sister will never breathe life? How do you explain to a child that the only place there aren’t any monsters is under the bed? I can’t explain it to myself.

  ‘My son is waiting for her to come here and meet us. He is excited about the baby coming with her. Every time I try to work up the courage to tell him the truth, I vomit. I don’t even have tears. My body cannot accept the truth. It tries to reject it. Coughs it up like an illness that will destroy me. I sob without tears. The air leaves me. Have you ever in your life seen anything like this?’ the man asks.

  His eyes plead for an answer.

  ‘Yes,’ Benton says.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t lie to you.’

  ‘You’ve been to Syria? You came from there?’

  ‘I saw it here. In ’91. In Iraq.’

  ‘Kuwait? Desert Storm?’

  ‘No. After. The civil war.’

  ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘The Shaaban Intifada. You saw it.’

  ‘In Samawah. I saw it all.’

  ‘Why did you see it?’

  ‘Because I couldn’t close my eyes.’

  The man nods. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That’s right.’ He turns back to watch the boys as he talks.

  Benton says nothing. The boys have regrouped and are chasing the ball back toward the other end of the dirty pitch. Benton removes a bright red bandana from the inside pocket of his jacket, wipes his face, and returns it there.

  ‘You know what shaaban means?’ the man says.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It means “separation”. Iraq was splitting apart. He was a weak tyrant after a bad war. Iraq erupted. No plan. No vision. No weapons. Everyone competing. Everyone running away, but not toward. You see the difference? They all hated Saddam, but what did they love? No one knows. Iran making trouble. Like now. But it erupted. Like now,’ he says, tilting his head to the west, toward Syria, though possibly toward all of it. ‘But then Saddam killed everyone. Everyone-everyone. So fast. No mercy. One hundred thousand. Two hundred thousand. No one knows. He did this in two months. Imagine. No one remembers. Hundreds of thousands. No one remembers.’ The man continues to stare ahead. ‘How can the world swallow up a hundred thousand people without a trace? I am terrified by this world.’

  ‘I remember,’ Benton mutters.

  ‘You speak Arabic?’ he asks.

  ‘No,’ Benton says.

  ‘A very beautiful language. Filled with nuance and poetry. Many games. Many, many wonderful games. Puns and jokes and allusions. But also contradictions. You see, shaaban is the same word as the eighth month of the Islamic calendar. There is a story that on the fifteenth day of the month of Shaaban, the doors of mercy and forgiveness are thrown open, and those who sincerely repent for their sins are accepted by God. I am not a religious man, but I find this very beautiful. It seems wrong to me that this word should be shared by such events. That the word should be shared by God’s forgiveness and also such cruelty. It is wrong. They should not be shared. I can’t help but see this. This is my education. And so it is my curse.’

  The man turns away from Benton and watches the children, who see nothing but the ball.

  ‘Tell me why you’re here. You are important? A Big Man?’ the man says.

  ‘I’m not important. I’m an old journalist. I’m a dinosaur. They want me gone.’

  ‘You’re a journalist. You can tell the story.’

  ‘They’re letting me run out a budget line that I asked for so they can fire me when I come up empty. I asked to come here for spurious reasons, and I think they know that. They had to let me because of my seniority, but I’ve cashed in all my chips. I’ve given them the excuse they need. This is my last trip.’

  ‘Where is your wife?’

  ‘In the bed of another man.’

  ‘Go back to England, my friend. Make peace with your wife. Forgive her. Forget the work, the newspaper, all of this. It is all dust. We are all dust. Your family is all that matters. Save them, if you can. It is the only way to honour the dead.’

  ‘I have a debt to pay before I go back.’

  ‘Here? In this place?’

  ‘It’s an old debt. A friend of mine saw something, and he said he wants to set it right.’

  ‘What did he see?’

  ‘I don’t know. A coincidence. An echo. A midday moon in a blue sky.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Neither do I. There was a news broadcast,’ Benton says to the man on the bleachers, ‘about an attack not far from here. They had footage somehow. It was broadcast all over the world. It happens sometimes that there is footage of an incident, it catches the world’s attention, and it goes around. Anyway, the man I mentioned … he saw someone in it who looked very familiar and yet who could not have been there, because she was already dead. She died long ago. In March 1991.’

  ‘Ah,’ the man says, not sounding surprised. ‘He saw a ghost.’

  ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ Benton says.

  The man shakes his head. ‘That doesn’t matter. People see things that do not exist all the time. They see hope. They see love. They see trust. They see a future. These things do not exist for many of the people who see them. Ghosts are no different. You see? Whether they exist or not, we see them. Your friend, he saw a ghost.’

  ‘This girl is in a video. She’s not a ghost. I’ve seen it.’

  ‘So you have seen this girl, too.’

  ‘Yes. It can’t be her. She’s someone else. The resemblance, though, is uncanny.’

  ‘So you have seen proof, like your friend, but deny it.’

  ‘It is proof that there is a girl who was caught in an event who looks like someone I once knew, if briefly. It is not proof of a ghost.’

  ‘Proof. There is nothing more theoretical than proof. The pagans asked the Prophet Muhammad for proof — he split the moon in two, but that was not enough for them. In the West, you stare at the bodies of our dead in fifty thousand photos, all at the hands of Assad. Tens of thousands. You have the photos. High-level Syrians smuggled them to you. They have been forensically analysed. The videos are everywhere. And yet some of you debate whether you have proof — and if you have the proof, what does it mean and what should you do? We have all the proof we need. It is the making sense of it — that’s the problem. Deciding what to do about it — that’s the problem. You came here to find this person? This girl? To help her? To help your friend?’

  ‘I don’t know why I’m here.’

  ‘Ah. Then you’re here to suffer. You are in good company.’

  They watch the boys run for a few more moments. Benton then makes to leave, but as he does, the man says
, ‘You think we’re going to die here? Me and my son?’

  ‘I think,’ Benton says, ‘that whatever comes next isn’t life.’

  ‘That’s right,’ says the man, turning away again. He nods to himself as he watches the boys. ‘That’s right,’ he whispers.

  Benton checks his watch. Night falls quickly here. He stands up, dusts off his clothing, and puts the empty bottle and Kit Kat wrapper into his satchel. He’ll toss it in a rubbish bin when he finds one.

  ‘Keep your son safe,’ Benton says as he leaves.

  ‘Remember us,’ the man says. ‘Me and my boy, and my wife. My daughter’s name was to be Adar. Adar. Remember her for me in Cornwall. Remember her for me so that the earth does not swallow us up and we die twice.’

  9

  Only three days before, Benton was sitting in his living room, drinking beer from a glass, watching a re-run of The Good Life with Richard Briers. The actor had died in February, and somehow it felt like a national loss. Tom and Barbara had come around for a bath and drink after their chimney ‘cleaned itself’, leaving them covered in soot. Benton was enjoying the cold drink and the warmth of the show. Vanessa had gone. He’d kicked her out three weeks earlier, on finding her in their bed with another man. Their daughter, Charlotte — a scholar in palaeontology at the University of Bristol — had since been trying to solve their marriage as though it were an evolutionary riddle. Her technique was to study each of her parents’ morphologies to find common traits, in order to try to prove that they were, by nature, members of the same family. Benton tolerated it, knowing she couldn’t help but arrange dead things into orderly systems.

  She was not actually helping, though. He had decided he needed a break from her calls, and so gave himself a seventy-two-hour respite from answering them. So when the phone rang as Tom and Barbara headed upstairs to bathe together, he let it ring.

  The ringing, however, became persistent, and while persistent was in character, Charlotte was never deliberately rude. After fifteen and finally twenty rings, he had to answer it or unplug it. As he didn’t have his reading glasses, it made unplugging that damn little plastic thing on the base of the phone all but impossible; and so, with little choice, he opted for his daughter’s lecture and answered it.