Spooky Stuff
[Pre-Day 7—Day 10]
My Lords,
Murder is widely thought to be the gravest of crimes. One could expect a developed system to embody a law of murder clear enough to yield an unequivocal result on a given set of facts, a result which conforms with apparent justice and has a sound intellectual base. This is not so in England, where the law of homicide is permeated by anomaly, fiction, misnomer, and obsolete reasoning. One conspicuous anomaly is the rule which identifies the ‘malice aforethought’ (a doubly misleading expression) required for the crime of murder not only with a conscious intention to kill but also with an intention to cause grievous bodily harm. It is, therefore, possible to commit a murder not only without wishing the death of the victim but without the least thought that this might be the result of the assault. Many would doubt the justice of this rule, which is not the popular conception of murder and (as I shall suggest) no longer rests on any intellectual foundation. The law of Scotland does very well without it, and England could perhaps do the same. It would, however, be fruitless to debate this here, since the rule has been established beyond doubt by R. v. Cunningham [1982] A.C. 566. This rule, which I will call the ‘grievous harm’ rule, is the starting point of the present appeal. –Opinions of the Lords in Appeal for Judgment in the Cause: Attorney-General’s Reference №3 of 1994
Fatima’s Story
1
It began, as such things so typically do, with decolonisation.
The end of the Fourth French Republic came in 1958, due to the perceived failings of the parliamentary system and ongoing mismanagement of the civil war (France’s position) or independence war (the position of the groups native to the area in question) in Algeria. After the newly-installed Prime Minister of France, Pierre Pfimlin, implied that he would try to negotiate with Algerian nationalists, the French generals in Algeria refused to recognise his Government. They took control of Algiers and threatened to conduct a parachute assault on Corsica and Metropolitan France unless retired General Charles de Gaulle was placed in charge of the country.
René Coty, the President at the time, was in no position to point out that this was not how parliamentary democracy worked, chiefly because the anthropologist, technocrat, and all-around public intellectual Jacques Soustelle was by now essentially holding Paris hostage with a ragtag army of common men, dissident military officers, conservative thinkers (such as himself), and quasi-retired colonial officials. De Gaulle indicated that he would be willing to assume emergency powers, laughing off fears that he would dismantle civil liberties by saying ‘Have I ever done that? Quite the opposite, I have re-established them when they had disappeared. Who honestly believes that, at age sixty-seven, I would start a career as a dictator?’
The people in Algeria took Corsica in a bloodless military action, de Gaulle orchestrated a referendum on changing France’s system of government from parliamentary to semi-presidential, and the Fifth Republic was born. All French colonies (Algeria was considered a département, not a colony) were given a choice between immediate independence and accepting the new Constitution. All colonies except Guinea chose to remain affiliated with the Fifth Republic. They gained independence two years later in a different circumstance.
Djibouti at this time was the Territory of Afars and Issas and held the somewhat vaguely-defined status of ‘Territoire français d’outre-mer’. This meant that France could do pretty much whatever it liked with the area, including instituting a citizenship law that favoured Afars for unclear reasons (this was in large part why the Issas were so keen to seize as much power for themselves as they possibly could after independence). Even after de Gaulle changed policy on Algeria and granted its independence in 1962, France kept a death-grip on this tiny part of Africa because of its strategic location on major shipping routes. It took another fifteen years for the French to quit Afars and Issas.
Once Afars and Issas became Djibouti, the Issas rose up, toppled the Afar nobility, tried really hard to stop being mostly nomads, and took everything in the country that was worth taking. Fatima Sharif’s grandfather, a man named Ismail Omar Abdullah, became a high-ranking civil servant and took the name ‘Sharif’. The family genuinely did have a claim to descent from the Prophet’s grandson Hassan, which is what the name/title Sharif would tend to imply, but taking a surname at all (as opposed to just using ‘sharif’ as a descriptor) was decried as a French-ish affectation by many within the traditional Issa society. Ismail Omar Abdullah really hated many within the traditional Issa society. In fact it could easily be argued that Ismail Omar Abdullah really hated Djibouti in general, and wanted to make it as unlike itself, so to speak, as he possibly could.
Without impugning Djibouti’s right to exist, it would be hard for anybody not constantly high on khat to deny that the place had serious problems. This was a country whose own inhabitants (who were as a whole no more or less patriotic than the inhabitants of any other country) regularly and in some cases consistently referred to it as ‘the donkey’s anus’ or, cutely, ‘the ass’s arse’. One hundred degrees Fahrenheit was a usual temperature in the comparatively cooler part of the year. Most of the populace could read both French and Arabic but had no occasion to because something like half of them were too poor to afford any books other than a Qur’an and if they were very lucky a poor translation of Beau Geste. Djibouti City was, according to one sarcastic American traveller who visited in the 1990s, ‘exactly like downtown Detroit but with brown sand instead of grey snow and khat instead of heroin’.
Again: this is not meant to impugn Djibouti’s right to exist. But no tourist to Djibouti not explicitly there for drug tourism has ever reported a ‘hey-I-want-to-live-here’ experience. Ismail Omar Abdullah did not want to live there either, but he felt a moral imperative to try to make it better instead of just giving up and leaving.
Ismail Omar Abdullah accomplished very little in his civil service positions. Essentially it was limited to a few paved roads in Obock.
Ismail Omar Abdullah Sharif was fifty years old when his son Acmed Ismail Sharif was born in 1965, and was thus sixty-two at Djibouti’s independence. He died at seventy-one, quite a long life by the standards of the time and place, in the same year that Fatima Sharif was born in Obock.
Fatima was born an Issa in a majority-Afar area during a bad period in the bad history of an unpleasant and depressed country, and things just got worse in her early childhood. By the time she was seven or eight years old, when the claustrophobic spaces of the tiny country were all filled up with people stabbing and shooting and exploding one another, Fatima began to perceive something wrong with what she had previously seen as just the way the world around her was.
This was in large part because of the French presence remaining in Djibouti. In 1993 Fatima met a young Foreign Legionnaire named Milos. Milos had left his native Slovakia for unclear reasons that seemed to haunt him greatly. He was often at odds with his comrades but was good with children and animals, and Fatima took a shine to him as a source of treats and information about the world. Fatima was at this point just getting into the heyday-phase of childhood curiosity about everything and Milos was more than happy to talk to her about the big wide world, in French or in Arabic (Milos had a great faculty for languages).
2
In Europe, Fatima came to believe, they had streets of chocolate and gold, money rained periodically from the windows of government buildings, and so on and so forth. It seemed no place for the old people around her, and she could not for the life of her figure out why Milos had left.
Neither could Milos. He had felt the call to leave his old life, to leave it all behind, to go off on a masochistic quest for adventure, but this was not what he had wanted or expected, at all. The civil war was messy, squalid, and on a claustrophobically small scale compared to the sort of broad T.E. Lawrence-type desert actions that Milos had been led to expect service in Africa was like. Just a hop, skip, and a jump away, Eritrea was violently disentangling itself from Ethiopia, whose communist government in turn was in slow-motion self-destruct mode.
Going through childhood in the Horn of Africa in the early-to-mid-1990s was like spending one’s formative years in the caboose of a train that was going off the rails and tumbling over a cliff at a very slow speed but with no hope of reversal. There was another set of rails further down but whether or not you would be able to get on them was very much up in the air. Also it was a hundred and ten degrees in the shade.
There were quite a few people who really loved living here for various reasons—nostalgia, family, drugs, genuine liking of a comfortable place that they had carved out for themselves. But as the nineties went on, Fatima hated everything.
‘You’re so useless,’ a girl said to her in school one day in 2000.
‘Fucking oppressor scum,’ said another girl. ‘If you’re no good to anyone…’
‘Is it really worth living if your whole race and its government is just a burden to everyone?’
‘Go back to your flea-ridden tents in Kenya, you sad piece of shit.’
‘If I were you…’
‘If I were you I would just die. It would save FRUD[1] a lot of trouble if you could take your blasted clan with you too.’
‘But…the civil war’s almost over…’ said Fatima weakly, tears dripping on to her notebook. ‘They can’t…they can’t do…we shouldn’t hate like this any more.’
‘The major fighting may have ended five years ago but you just have to look out the bloody window to see that there’s no peace or happiness here,’ said the first girl. ‘It’s still going on out there in the desert.’
Fatima was silent. Another girl waved a hand in front of her face.
‘Are you listening to us, Sharif?’ She spat the name as a curse. ‘We’re asking whether or not you’re aware of the trouble that you, your family, your clan, your whole crew have been giving this country ever since independence.’
‘There shouldn’t be that trouble,’ said Fatima. ‘Not any more.’
‘Too bad!’ said the oldest and least pleasant girl in the class. ‘I’m not even a member of one of these groups and I can see how highly you think of yourself, Sharif, and how little justification you have.’ She tore a piece of paper out of her notebook. ‘I want you to write ‘I, Fatima Acmed Ismail, am part of a huge parasite sucking the life from this country’.’
Fatima took the piece of paper, calmly crumpled it up, and threw it in the girl’s face. ‘Have you any idea what it’s like?’ she shouted. ‘Have you any idea what it’s like for me, for my family, or do you just go through your life only ever assuming? You think I like the life I lead? You think I like this tiny squalid place the way it is?’
‘Well, you…’
‘NO!’ shouted Fatima. ‘No! No more! Things have to change here. Things have to…we can’t just…’
‘So you agree with us. Good. Leave.’
‘Nursing ethnic wounds is not the way,’ said Fatima.
‘Holy crap,’ said another girl. ‘Holy crap. You really are just THAT idealistic. You really do believe it.’ She laughed. ‘What’s that there?’ She pointed to a book lying face-down on Fatima’s desk. ‘I said what’s that book you’ve got there, Sharif?!’
Fatima flipped the book right-side-up. ‘It’s an Arabic edition of a book by an American author called Pan-Arabism,’ she said.
‘You’re fourteen!’ said the other girl.
‘What does my age have to do with anything?’
‘Fourteen and already looking over new ways to grab more power and privilege than you deserve! You make me ill.’
‘Wait, what are you talking about…?’ asked Fatima softly.
‘I’m just trying to help you, you sad piece of shit.’
Fatima Acmed Ismail Sharif’s eyes were still closed—she still felt tied down to this her place. The chain remained unbroken though strained as the last peace settlements were forced through. FRUD took its place in a national government, and hopes were high.
Then the khat just got really, really out of hand.
Khat is a leafy plant native to the highlands of Ethiopia. According to legend its narcotic properties were discovered a thousand years ago when goats that ate it began acting strangely. Since then its use—its cult, even—has spread through the Horn of Africa and the southern part of Arabia, up along the Red Sea. Something like half of all the arable land in Yemen is devoted to its cultivation. People from every single segment of Djiboutian society right up to President Ismaaciil Cumar Geelle use it.
Khat contains the alkaloid known as cathinone, a stimulant causing excitement, loss of appetite, and euphoria, similar to the amphetamine family. There is an entire culture in the Horn of Africa and Yemen devoted to its consumption. Khat sessions often begin in the late morning or early afternoon and last until dawn the next day, and new shipments of the plant typically lead to pandemonium as people try to get as much as possible before it goes stale (which happens quite quickly compared to many other drug plants).
UN and World Bank reports issued in the late 1990s and early 2000s characterised Djibouti and the surrounding area as the world’s first full-fledged narco-society, drawing direct and explicit comparisons to the use of soma in Huxley’s Brave New World.
The truly staggering amounts of the area’s scarce water resources that went to growing this crop, which had no obvious uses other than drugs, were the specific issue that forced open Fatima’s eyes as she was searching in vain for a drink of water one day in the streets of Obock. She saw where the water was going. She saw that things were no better than they had been in her childhood. She saw that the civil war had solved nothing. She saw that the girls would never stop hating her for absolutely no comprehensible reason. Fatima Acmed Ismail Sharif saw, putting it simply, the undesirable truth of things in her time and in her place. She went to Milos—she still knew Milos now—and told him. She needed out.
3
It is no simple holiday game to quit one’s squalid, tiny, obscure country immediately after a sudden epiphany. Milos told Fatima as much. ‘It will take a miracle, Fatima, for you to, ah, achieve escape velocity, so to speak’. Just like that. Just that frank. Milos was a pathologically honest man.
‘I have finished schooling here,’ said Fatima. ‘I should like to look at universities in France. I know it will take some doing…’
‘It certainly will!’ said Milos. ‘Fatima, you are brilliant and have a lot to your name for a person of this country. But even so, from here to one of the universities of France…’ He sighed. ‘I trust this is…?’
‘A hope,’ said Fatima. ‘A fond hope. But not an expectation.’
‘What do you, in fact, expect, then?’ Milos asked. ‘A person like you should have at least some expectations.’
‘Most of my life is affectation from my grandfather,’ said Fatima. ‘What I expect is that I will continue to see ways in which that affectation is simply not real; I will continue to be me and this place will continue to be this place; I expect nothing good to come of it unless we band together with our better-off cousins.’
‘You sound like Gamal Abdel Nasser[2],’ said Milos with a wry smile.
‘I consider that a compliment.’
‘You like Nasser?’
‘I like Mahmoud Mohamed Taha[3] more.’
‘So you’re more pan-Islamist than pan-Arabist.’
‘I consider myself pan-Arabist,’ said Fatima, ‘because a union of all Muslim countries, as opposed to just the ones in the Middle East and North-East Africa, would be far too large for anybody to effectively rule.’
‘Ah!’ said Milos.
‘And also because, putting it simply, I do not wish to be associated with people like those who blew up those towers in America a while back.’
‘Ah!’ said Milos.
And yet she tried, Fatima did. And she succeeded, achieving the miraculous escape velocity. She sincerely hoped that her family and clan wouldn’t mind it; she still loved them, still loved culture even as country disillusioned and betrayed her.
Family and clan supported her, miracle on top of miracle. Family and clan loved her as she went off, and happiness welled within her. Her part of the world was unredeemed—but it was not irredeemable. That was what she was learning, and that was whence the new joy came.
4
Of course actually getting to France to go to university there was even more difficult than Fatima had anticipated. Parts of the Foreign Legion went to and fro between France and Djibouti quite a bit, but Milos was not one of these parts and according to him there would be no reason for them to let Fatima tag along anyway. Djibouti’s only real airport only went to a regional airport in Ethiopia, which in turn connected to the much larger airport in Addis Ababa, and there were only planes a few times a week. The other option was to find some boat in which to go up the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal, and along the Mediterranean to the French coast.
‘Yes, but what about the pirates?’ asked Milos.
‘What pirates?’ asked Fatima’s father, Acmed Ismail Omar.
‘The, the pirates in the Red Sea,’ said Milos. ‘You didn’t know that the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Somali coast have a lot of pirate activity?’
Acmed looked worried. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I did not know that. How did I not know that?’
‘Had…forgive me for asking, sir, but had you been paying attention?’
‘Attention to what?’ asked Fatima’s mother, Ayaan by name.
‘Attention to the goings-on in this part of the world,’ said Milos.
‘Of course this family has been paying attention to that!’ said Ayaan. ‘I had heard about piracy in the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden; I just had no idea that it was so pervasive.’
‘Where do you think most of the money for what few amenities our relations in Raas Xaafuun[4] have comes from, mum?’ asked Fatima.
Ayaan clutched her forehead. ‘Foreign aid, the Legion, France…’
‘There is no foreign aid in that area,’ said Fatima. ‘The pirates are…’ She shook her head. ‘They are fine. There are communities that need them. They exist for a reason. But one does not want to run into them.’
‘Well, then,’ said Acmed, ‘we are looking at you going to Addis Ababa on one of the khat flights?’
‘On principle,’ said Fatima, and trailed off. She wanted to say that on principle she would not ride on any plane that also had khat on it; but her father used khat and she was worried that he might become angry. So she trailed off.
The question you have to ask yourself, Fatima, is: what would you rather have—a Greater Arabia with a high standard of living but within which places like your homeland or the Maghrib would be backwaters? –or a Greater Somalia, Greater Horn of Africa, in which Djibouti would be more central, but which would have to either include places like Kenya and Uganda or be an impoverished basket case of a khat-fuelled narcocracy?
–N.S.
She realised that even being able to see the problems and wickednesses and vicissitudes and hardships of her existence gave her, in itself, a sort of privilege.
She also realised that even in a privileged position she really had no better choice than the drug-running planes, whether she wanted to or not. It was 2004; Operation Enduring Freedom—Horn of Africa was in full swing, the United States had been at war in Iraq far to the north for about a year, and there were the pirates to consider. There was simply no other simple way in and out of Djibouti that was not either incredibly dangerous or predicated on her willingness to cross the Danakil Desert on foot. She would just have to ride with the khat and live with herself afterwards. It wasn’t that different to how her life was anyway. It seemed like every other building that she passed in the streets of Obock was a mabraze (like a bar, but for khat) these days.
There was a saying that Fatima liked: ‘If one’s heart is at peace, even a donkey’s arsehole can be a mabraze’. Fatima interpreted this as meaning that if you approached life peacefully, calmly, and constructively you didn’t have to use a drug that destroyed your ability to recognise the concept of ‘bad’. This was not the interpretation of the saying that most of the elderly men with milky eyes and disjointed expressions who actually said it had. Even in the mosques, at least a few people were invariably overly relaxed, giggly, and noisily chewing. Not so many, because [Fatima liked to think that] most people were at least tactful enough to recognise the difference between ‘mabraze’ and ‘masjid’, but a few. It was pervasive, and likely why nobody except for some of the survivors of the civil war had a problem with things like the same party holding every single legislative seat, or Ismaaciil Cumar Geelle getting one hundred per cent of the presidential vote.
But, in addition to being drug dens, the mabraze were sort of mutual aid societies, serving the function that in a less dysfunctional country may have been filled by group therapy sessions or religious support groups.
Fatima’s vision was terrible, and in France (once she finally got there) she at last got the glasses that she needed. It was in some ways sad that this was the most important thing that she got out of her first year at the Sorbonne, but being able to see is important.
In the first year at the Sorbonne Fatima discovered sex. She did not actually partake in any, but she discovered it and found herself actually somewhat chastened as to, not her own, but seemingly everyone else’s potential to resist sinful temptations. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Her French peers’ treatment of sexuality did what nothing else had been able to do and made Fatima outright dislike humankind in general.
In the second year at the Sorbonne Fatima met Roderick Burnside. This was a boy from Britain who had, like Fatima, made his way to France for studies. Fatima was still writing letters to Milos, and Roderick got in on this to create a happy little triangle of three very different young people arguing about life, the universe, and Middle East policy. This made Fatima quite happy and actually helped her get over the whole fornication debacle.
In the third year at the Sorbonne Fatima started writing her thesis, a grand summation of all the twining histories of the post-colonial/post-Ottoman Middle East. She fell in and out of love with several great figures of the region’s modern history, giving each their place in turn: Nasser, Bourguiba, Arafat, Qaddafi, even Qutb. Her family, the closest anyone in Djibouti could possibly hope to be to comfortably middle-class, feared that Fatima would become radicalised. This did not happen. But she did become politicised.
This was in 2006 and 2007. Fatima twisted and extended her academic schedules a little; for some reason there was a little inner voice telling her that May of 2009, exactly that month, would be a good time to take her degree.
Even in this third year the French university system was confusing Fatima a little.
Fatima became theologically Hanafi in the fourth year. This was a more liberal school of fiqh[5] than the Shafi’i with which she had grown up, and associated with more northerly areas—the Balkans, Turkey, Syria, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the Muslim bits of the Indian subcontinent and China. Shafi’i by contrast was very conservative and traditionalist and associated with Arabia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Maldives, Egypt, and East Africa, including Djibouti.
The more Fatima learned the less she wanted to go back to Djibouti—but the more Fatima learned the more she wanted to save Djibouti. Clearly something had to give, be radically clarified, or both.
Europe? It looks like she had thought of Europe as an ancient, pompous land of fusty lords and senators too frightened to go back and help Africa after abandoning it. What did she EXPECT us to do?! –M.C.
Europe has for the last several decades been an absentee, negligent, abusive, or sometimes just incompetent parent to the parts of the world that it ruled. –N.S.
The blazing anger at Europe’s betrayal…does this Fatima Acmed Ismail have that fury within her? Hm…I wonder… —S.T.
5
It was the seventh morning of September 2009 and Fatima Sharif and Reveka Metawi were walking together along the streets of the Old City.
‘I really appreciate this, Reveka,’ said Fatima. ‘When I saw that I didn’t have the fare for the ‘bus, when I knew that I didn’t want to go all the way on foot because I’ve got a bum leg…well, did I mention that I cried?’
‘It’s fine,’ said Reveka. ‘I want to see the Western Wall, you want to see the Dome of the Rock, they’re important to our faiths, they’re both on the Temple Mount. This being the case…it’d be remiss of me not to give you a ride!’
There was a man in a stall selling various small goods. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you going to the Dome?’
‘Yes!’ said Fatima cheerily.
‘You want a shawl? New prayer rug made by the imams of Jerusalem?’ The man grinned. ‘Cheap, you can get them easy around here because, well, we’re right in the Old City, we are, we are, so…’
‘All right.’ Reveka stalked over to the man’s stall. ‘That is enough.’
‘Hey, lady, what’s your…’
‘I have heard about you,’ said Reveka. ‘Avigdor ‘Bullshit’ Mizrachi, that’s you, right?’ She turned to address Fatima while ‘Bullshit’ Mizrachi groped for something to say. ‘This is common, Fatima,’ said Reveka. ‘The hawker of wares who seems honest enough, but whose shop is, metaphorically, in the back of an idling Mack truck.’
‘Look, lady,’ said ‘Bullshit’ Mizrachi. ‘I’m trying to run a business here, so if you could…’
‘Are there at least real shawls and rugs?’ asked Fatima, frowning judiciously.
Reveka nodded.
‘Yes,’ said ‘Bullshit’ Mizrachi rather desperately, ‘I can sell them this cheap because there was, there was a thing, fighting, and, and some of the things involved got stuff on them, but, but, uh, these didn’t.’
Reveka smirked cruelly. ‘Bullshit,’ she said. ‘Those shawls and rugs were made in a Jordanian sand factory by Bedouins[6].’ She picked up one of the shawls. ‘Although you are getting better about this, I have to say. I’m pleasantly shocked that you aren’t gouging these prices a lot more.’ She took Fatima by the hand. ‘Come on, there’s a good fruit-seller around here.’
As they passed, Fatima clapped ‘Bullshit’ Mizrachi on the shoulder. ‘Aim high, Avigdor,’ she said.
They came to the fruit-seller’s.
‘Now, here we have something that really has no way to deceive,’ said Fatima. ‘Either the fruit is good, or it is not.’
‘I don’t have money for fruit,’ said Reveka. ‘I have fruit at home!’
‘Oh, come on!’ Fatima gave Reveka a half-smile. ‘I have money. I can buy you some fruit.’
‘You have money?’ asked Reveka as Fatima looked over the oranges, lemons, figs, and melons. ‘How…how do you have money, Fatima?’
‘Milos sends me money.’
Reveka narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms. Fatima tested a melon while the fruit-seller looked on, then set it down and weighed some oranges in her hands instead. ‘And who is Milos?’ Reveka asked.
‘Milos Capek is a Foreign Legion man who I know back in Djibouti,’ said Fatima. She looked just about to decide on the oranges. That was fine by Reveka. Reveka liked oranges. ‘One of the few people worth going back to that place to.’
Reveka growled a little under her breath. ‘Is he your boyfriend?’
‘What? No. Not at all! It would be weird, almost like incest, we have known each other for so long. Besides, Milos is seventeen years older than me.’
Not much happened for the rest of the day, and they went to sleep, each in her own flat, in different parts of West Jerusalem.
6
Quick as you can, the eighth morning had begun. Mary Cosgrove watched herself get out of bed and read her morning devotionals. She felt that she should be doing it as well. It was weird, lip-synching with herself.
‘Miss Henderson promised that they not could see or hear us,’ said Schlomo.
‘She also promised that the next existence would be better,’ said the Nish. ‘That we’d be able to observe from inside our own heads. She said she could even keep refining it from there until we found something that would allow us to resolve the mystery.’ She chuckled bitterly. ‘It’s all a bit When They Cry, don’t you think?’
‘I don’t understand the reference,’ said Cosgrove, ‘but I was thinking of The Man Who Was Thursday only even scarier. Because things are generally scarier when they’re happening to you.’
The Nish nodded, then went to watch herself in the kitchen. She was drinking milk from the carton.
‘Ugh, did I really do that?’ asked the Nish. ‘I guess I must have been sick or something.’
‘Yes, you do look pretty ill,’ said Cosgrove. She peered around the Nish to regard the other the Nish’s visage in its waxy pallor.
‘One wonders how this happened,’ said Schlomo. ‘Did Miss Henderson mention if we can, how would you put it, fast-forward to important things?’
‘I think we can,’ said the Nish. ‘The problem is…how do we know what’s important and what isn’t? I seem to remember being in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at one point in these days, so that’s something to look for, but other than that we really don’t even know what it is that we’re trying to find.’
‘Therein lies the problem,’ said Cosgrove ruefully as Cosgrove began washing up in the bathroom. ‘Nish, you’re awfully quiet this morning.’
‘Yes, I suppose I am,’ said the Nish as the Nish loped past where her guitar stood on a chair. ‘Likely on account of how crappy I look and presumably feel.’
‘So this is eighth of September,’ Schlomo mused. ‘Sixth and seventh, we saw, nothing happened?’
‘Well, we actually didn’t see the sixth,’ said Cosgrove, ‘but as nothing seems to really be that different I doubt it’s tremendously important. I think that we should probably go see what Fatima’s up to—it’s her we’re supposed to be watching in this existence, after all.’
And so they did.
Fatima, Reveka, and Hildy were sitting in Jerusalem’s Botanical Gardens eating pita and babaghanouj. Reveka did not seem to be enjoying herself and Hildy looked pensive, but Fatima looked quite happy.
‘So did you enjoy Mary and the Nish’s flat on Friday?’ Fatima asked.
Reveka nodded. ‘It was a little weird,’ she said. ‘Overcrowded, honestly.’
‘Well,’ said Hildy, ‘to be fair, I think that was a problem that the Nish had as well, so it was hardly out of malice on their part.’
‘No, I’m not saying it was! Believe it or not, Miss Wildermann, I don’t ascribe everything that I don’t like to people conspiring against me.’ Reveka tore off a piece of bread with her teeth and swallowed it before continuing. ‘I don’t think Mary thought it through, though, and…’
‘Hey!’ said Fatima. ‘I like Mary Cosgrove!’
Reveka nodded. ‘So do I. But I don’t like how she sometimes doesn’t think things through.’
‘Everybody sometimes doesn’t think things through, Reveka,’ said Hildy. ‘And from what I saw of her, Mary definitely at least did not seem like an idiot.’
‘Aigh, Hildy!’ groaned the observer Cosgrove off to the side.
‘Yeah, talk about damnation by faint praise,’ said the Nish. ‘Okay, now concentrate. We’re supposed to be looking into two of these people’s murders.’
‘Do you think police have seen yet?’ asked Schlomo. ‘Back in our own existence, I mean.’
Cosgrove sighed. ‘Two things, Schlomo,’ she said. ‘First, it isn’t really ‘our own existence’ since we’ve come adrift; our job is to fix things, not just to figure out what went wrong. Second, let’s be quiet and just listen now.’
And they were quiet and just listened then.
Hildy went on and on about the human geography of Israel and Palestine; Fatima and Reveka were visibly forcing themselves not to start sniping at each other. Eventually what Hildy was saying mutated into a nearly half-hour speech, and Reveka cut her off.
‘You don’t want me to finish?’ asked Hildy, hurt. ‘This doesn’t interest you?’
‘Not really, no,’ said Reveka. ‘Sorry.’
‘I’d really appreciate it if…’
‘Can we discuss something else?’ Reveka snapped.
7
‘So September’s eighth night comes,’ said Cosgrove. ‘And we still don’t perceive anything actually wrong.’
‘And,’ said the Nish, ‘because we’re not to the point of stalking our alternate selves yet, we still don’t know what we’re up to during all this time.’
‘Uh…’ said Schlomo, ‘I do not know if you were aware of it, but…you know, I have all my memory from these past weeks.’
‘Really?’ The Nish frowned and furrowed her brow. ‘Why didn’t you mention this earlier?’
‘I…I did not know it would be an issue.’ Schlomo shrugged. ‘Only thing out of the ordinary was, a man in white mask and cloak followed me around a while. Nobody noticed him because he looked like just another one of those religious crazies hang about the Old City.’
‘White mask and cloak…’ mused the Nish. ‘Religious…Hey, Mary, do you know of any Christian holy orders that wear white?’
‘Well,’ said Cosgrove, ‘the Pope wears white, for one, and some Anglican and Protestant figures can depending on the church season, but Schlomo sounds like he’s describing more a monk than a priest. There’s always the possibility that this was just a random person and not any…’
‘No,’ snapped Schlomo. ‘Mary, I served in army a long time and I never saw a person like this. It was frightening. This man did not just look like a dybbuk, he was howling, begging permission to cross thresholds, and so on. He was intense.’
‘…A ‘dybbuk’?’ asked the Nish. She had over the past few minutes suddenly rocketed from reasonably assured to very confused[7]. Nobody responded. ‘So,’ she said nervously, ‘how, uh, how far do we intend on pursuing this thing?’
The ninth morning. In the gardens again.
‘Acknowledge the Jewish state NOW, Fatima,’ Reveka was saying.
‘I will not,’ said Fatima. ‘Not until settlements are stopped.’
‘Acknowledge it!’ Reveka was roaring in Fatima’s face. ‘Do it now, before Hildy gets back from the bathroom.’ Fatima just gave her a smug smirk. ‘Do it! Acknowledge it, Fatima!’ She seemed increasingly desperate for some reason. ‘Acknowledge us! Acknowledge me!’
‘Only when you acknowledge the sphere and culture of the Arab people—the history, the passion and beauty of the forefathers,’ Fatima whispered, and she lifted her hand beneath Reveka’s chin.
‘A co-opted culture for you, Arab, not Somali?’ whispered Reveka. She gazed into Fatima’s four eyes. ‘To recognise that in you? Oh, my dear Fatima, expecting that of me is naïve.’
At this point Hildy Wildermann sent Reveka Metawi a text message saying that she just remembered, she had to run and go do something up in the districts around the Knesset. It was important, it was for the university, and it involved urban engineering. She would see them later.
‘I am a little glad of it, I admit,’ said Reveka, reading the message and putting her phone back in her pocket.
‘Um,’ said Fatima. ‘I am not sure quite how to say this, but…your phone plays ‘Bad Romance’ when you get a text message.’
‘Yes,’ said Reveka, a little irritably. ‘I know that, thank you, Fatima.’
‘But…your phone…’ Fatima, exasperated at her inability to communicate her feelings, grunted. ‘Reveka, you work for the bloody Mossad!’
Reveka shrugged. ‘What does that have to do with anything?’ She smiled, a smile that acquired a predatory cast. ‘Let’s get back to our little game of chicken, Fatima, dear.’
‘I do not think we should be doing this in public,’ said Fatima, sitting primly, pushing her glasses up her nose. ‘People might come by and think that we are actually fighting.’
‘All right,’ said Reveka. ‘But…you know, I thought we were actually fighting!’
‘We were,’ said Fatima with a smile, ‘in our way.’ As you do.
‘Watching them,’ said Schlomo, ‘is strange.’
‘What,’ said the Nish dryly, ‘you’ve never seen a geopolitics-centred lesbian BDSM relationship before?’
Cosgrove gasped. ‘Nish!’ she moaned. ‘At least respect their privacy, Nish!’
‘Oh, come off it, Mary. They’re acting like this in public and we kind of have to pry into people’s lives if we want to puzzle this out.’
Cosgrove shivered a little. ‘I know, I know…’ she said. ‘But,’ she groused, ‘all the same, this makes me feel creepy, voyeuristic, unclean. I feel like I’m one of the Lords of Xibalba all of a sudden.’
‘Lords of Where?’ asked Schlomo.
‘Xibalba,’ said Miss Henderson, phase spacing into this existence. ‘The death gods of the ancient Maya religion. They belong to only two basic types, respectively represented by the sixteenth-century Yucatec deities Hunhau and Uacmitun Ahau mentioned by Landa. Hunhau is the lord of the Underworld. Iconographically, Hunhau and Uacmitun Ahau correspond to the Gods A and A’. In recent narratives, particularly in the oral tradition of the Lacandons, there is only one death god (called Kisin in Lacandon), who acts as the antipode of the Upper God in the creation of the world and of the human body and soul. This death god inhabits an Underworld that is also the world of the dead. As a ruler over the world of the dead (Metnal or Xibalba), the principal death god corresponds to the Aztec deity Mictlantecuhtli. The Popol Vuh has two leading death gods, but these two are really one: both are called ‘Death’, with only the prefixes (‘One’ and ‘Seven’) being different. They were vanquished by the Hero Twins. The underworld is inhabited by many were-animals and spooks (wayob), with the two principal death gods themselves being counted among them. The God A way in particular manifests himself as a head hunter and a deer hunter.’
‘Are…are you just spouting Wikipedia copy?’ breathed Cosgrove. ‘Miss Henderson, Mayan religion was my elected course in a non-Christian faith tradition. I think I could have explained more about the Lords of Xibalba than that, at least! You didn’t even mention Bone Sceptre.’
‘Who or what is Bone Sceptre?’ asked Schlomo. ‘What is going on?’
‘Bone Sceptre is not aligned in this,’ said Miss Henderson. ‘Bone Sceptre’s conditions have been totally cleared.’
‘Wait,’ said Cosgrove. ‘I had only mentioned the Lords of Xibalba out of pique. Why are you talking about them in the first place?’
‘For the same reason that I will on an early day begin my talk on golems, no doubt,’ said Miss Henderson airily. ‘As you do,’ she said as she vanished.
‘Wait, what?!’ squawked the Nish.
8
It was the ninth evening of September.
‘I’ve seen the film It!: Anger of the Golem,’ said the Nish. ‘My friend Maureen likes to bring me out to California and sit me down so we can watch old American movies together—the cheesier the better.’
‘It!: Anger of the Golem,’ said Schlomo. ‘Somehow I doubt that is what Miss Henderson referred to, meant when she meant golems. There are other golem legends. The legend of Israel and of the Jews go back a long way. For instance, we are now, all of us, acting like the wise men of Chelm.’ He gave a short, rough laugh. ‘Imagine that!’
‘Who are the wise men of Chelm?’ asked the Nish.
‘When God created this all,’ said Schlomo, spreading his arms to indicate the world, ‘he gave two angels two sacks—one with the wisdom of the world, one with the foolishness. They were to distribute it among people. But the foolish sack weighed so much more that the angel had more foolishness than there were souls to make foolish! So he spilled it all out at the top of a mountain when he had gone through the rest of the world. That is where they built the city of Chelm, and…’ He laughed. ‘Do you get it?’
‘So ‘wise men’ of Chelm is sarcastic,’ said Cosgrove. ‘You’re saying that, really, we’re just running around like chickens with our heads cut off.’
‘Yes,’ said Schlomo. He grinned. ‘Would you like me to tell some Chelm stories? I like telling Chelm stories.’
‘Sure, I’d love that,’ said Cosgrove. ‘We could use some humour in all this, God knows. But, uh…’ She lifted one finger. ‘First…where exactly is Chelm? Is it a real town?’
‘Yes, it is in Poland now. The old Russian Empire.’
‘So. The Chelm stories.’
‘Is this going to be anything like ‘Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins’?’ asked the Nish. ‘Because Maureen really likes that story.’
‘No, Herschel of Ostropol is entirely different figure,’ said Schlomo. ‘Anyway.’ He cracked his knuckles. ‘In Chelm, the shammes—synagogue sexton—went about waking everyone in morning for communal prayers. The people saw that when they woke up in winter months the shammes walking around had already spoiled the beauty of the snowfields. Their solution was to have four people carry the shammes around on a table in the winter mornings, so that he could get around without leaving tracks in the snow.’ He grinned. ‘Let it sink in a minute.’
The Nish pursed her lips, furrowed her brow, then dissolved into a short gale of laughter. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is asinine!’
‘I know!’ said Schlomo. ‘I know!’
Cosgrove grinned.
‘Tell another,’ said the Nish, ‘tell another. Then I can tell you the joke about the king of the monkeys and the moon.’
‘Well,’ said Schlomo, ‘there was the time they put the poor box suspending from the ceiling of the city hall to discourage theft, then built a spiral stair up to it so people could still contribute.’
The Nish chuckled. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘all right. Here’s the joke about the king of the monkeys and the moon. This is an old Japanese joke from the seventeenth century. Are you ready?’
Cosgrove and Schlomo nodded.
‘Wait,’ said Cosgrove. ‘Have you told me this one before?’
‘Maybe,’ said the Nish. ‘I can’t remember. Anyway, here it is: the king of the monkeys decides that he wants to own the moon; he sees it in a still pond and orders his one thousand monkey helpers to try to go get it, one after another. Nine hundred and ninety-nine of them try and fail. But finally, the thousandth one succeeds, and brings the moon from the water to his king. ‘Well done!’ says the king. ‘You have exceeded expectations!’ ‘Thank you,’ says the monkey, ‘but what will you do with the moon now that you have it in your hands?’ The king of the monkeys looks at him, looks at the moon, thinks for a second, and then says, ‘Well, yes, I hadn’t thought of that’!’ She laughed and held her hand to her face, covering her mouth.
Cosgrove and Schlomo looked at her as if she had gone utterly mad.
‘That joke is not funny,’ said Cosgrove, ‘therefore, it is. It is so far from being in the conventional sense funny that this in itself lends it a kind of humour.’
‘Yes,’ said the Nish, ‘well, that’s sort of why I told it.’
‘Really?’
‘No. But I’m glad it got some positive response.’
‘If you were worried about that,’ said Schlomo, ‘why did you tell it anyway?’
The Nish changed the subject. ‘To-morrow is Thursday 10 September,’ she said. ‘The day of four horrible murders in an alley in West Jerusalem. The reason we’re doing this. We must remember that.’
Schlomo nodded. ‘Of course I remember,’ he said. ‘I live in the next flat over. It is strange standing outside Flat 19, watching myself come and go. Even stranger than being able to see two versions of you at once.’
‘The fact that we are copies of ourselves is tangential to the real issue,’ said Cosgrove. ‘I am trying very hard to take the brutal mutilations and grisly murders seriously, and I think we’ve set aside both enough time for jokes and more than enough time for complaining about how confusing this all is.’
‘So what are you proposing?’
‘That we go back to following Fatima around.’ The Nish threw her hands up. ‘Simple as that!’
Schlomo nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Right. Yes, right, I agree, that would be best.’
The Nish yawned. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now, they didn’t look as if they’d been dead very long, so I’m imagining the death is to-morrow, probably quite late in the afternoon or in the evening.’
‘Or overnight,’ said Cosgrove. ‘Since I woke up in the alleyway next to the bodies, it could be a good idea for us to start following me around, but if Miss Henderson is willing to continue this process there’ll be more opportunities to do that later.’
‘So you agree that we ought to focus on Fatima for the moment?’ asked the Nish by way of confirmation.
‘Yes,’ said Cosgrove with a nod. ‘The looping that Miss Henderson promised will give us all the time in the world for the task at hand. I want to approach this meticulously and methodically.’
9
On the morning of the tenth G.T. Schuster-Slatt was trying his hand as a busker in the street, playing some Leonard Cohen, some Tom Petty, some very poorly-rendered Metallica (hard to do on acoustic guitar), and some of his own work. He was taking in money at the rate of about twenty-five shekels an hour—something of a disappointment given his expectations.
‘Well, G.T.! Fancy seeing you!’
Schuster-Slatt looked up. It was Fatima, with an all-too-amused expression on her face.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Hello, Fatima. How are you?’
‘How much money are you making from this?’ asked Fatima. She was not asking out of malice or schadenfreude—well, maybe a little schadenfreude—but as a concerned friend—for a certain value of friendship.
‘Uh, about…twenty-eight shekels an hour,’ said Schuster-Slatt, judging that there was no harm in slightly inflating the figure for Fatima.
Fatima twisted her face in a way that could have been interpreted as either smiling or frowning. ‘Well,’ she said in a way that could have been interpreted as either sardonic or sincere, ‘keep up the good work.’
Schuster-Slatt nodded. ‘See you around, Fatima.’
Fatima nodded, and walked away.
‘It’s a Thursday,’ said Cosgrove. ‘Why’s Victor Jara busking in the street? Usually he only plays at the week-end.’
‘I don’t know,’ said the Nish. ‘I don’t know the man well, really. Maybe he just felt like it. Is there anything else that he has to do on a regular basis?’
Cosgrove thought about this for a minute. ‘Not that I know of,’ she said. ‘He seems to have a fairly leisurely life in Jerusalem. If he’s ever short of money he borrows it from Santana.’
‘And how does Santana have money?’ asked Schlomo.
‘Some business thing,’ said Cosgrove. ‘I’m not sure. Could you work on finding that out, Schlomo?’
‘Why would I have access to such information?’
‘You were in the Israeli Army for a long time,’ said the Nish. ‘I’ve heard that you have some contacts in intelligence organisation.’
‘This is not espionage!’ snapped Schlomo. ‘And I am not a spy!’
The Nish sighed. ‘Okay, Schlomo,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you have at least some expertise in finding things out. You were able to pull up that biographical information on the victims pretty quickly. A cursory Google search for ‘Victoriano Santana East Texas’—we know that he lives in East Texas, near Hayward—or even for ‘Victoriano Santana laicised priest’—’
‘There might be some extraneous results with that,’ said Cosgrove.
‘You think there’s more than one laicised Catholic priest named Victoriano Santana?’ asked the Nish. ‘Really, Mary?’
‘I going to question the relevance of this whole thing, what Santana does,’ said Schlomo. ‘He is not a victim. Schuster-Slatt is not a victim. Why do we care?’
Cosgrove thought about this for a second. ‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘Er…Nish, would you consider personal friendship with the victims a form of ‘relevance’?’
‘It depends,’ said the Nish. ‘How close-knit was this little group?’
Cosgrove shrugged. ‘Pretty close,’ she said, ‘but not to the point of a second family. At least, not among all of them; maybe between some and some others. Fatima and Reveka, for instance, or Padre Hermosa and Santana…’
‘So Santana was close to Hermosa?’ asked the Nish.
‘Yes,’ said Cosgrove. ‘Very. Santana sees—saw, whatever—Hermosa as somewhere between brother and father.’
‘How old is Santana, about fifty?’
‘Yes, about that.’
‘And Hermosa was nearly eighty-six,’ said the Nish. ‘Did he mention that he was working at the seminary where Santana went and that’s how they met, or am I misremembering something?’
‘Yes, that’s how they met,’ said Cosgrove.
It was the tenth evening of September when Fatima Acmed Ismail Sharif, Salvador Manuel Hermosa Amante, Willard Benedict Hayward, and Hildegard Theresa Wildermann met for dinner and drinks[8].
‘So how are your lives going?’ asked Padre Hermosa. ‘Tell me, are the three of you beginning to love Jerusalem as much as I do?’ He lifted a bony brown finger. ‘A wonderful, sacred city,’ he said.
‘The Old City is,’ said Hildy. ‘Spending time in the New City I’m struck by how similar to other Middle Eastern cities it really is.’
‘You came here directly from…where was it, Fukuoka?’ asked Benny.
‘Kagoshima, actually, but yes, southern Japan. It’s been a while since I was in the Middle East.’
‘And where were you then, child?’ asked Padre Hermosa, folding his arms and leaning forward to indicate interest.
‘Mecca,’ said Hildy.
There was a short beat and Fatima spluttered her drink from her mouth and right nostril. ‘By God! How the Hell did you get into Mecca?!’
Hildy laughed breezily. ‘Are you angry, Fatima?’
‘No, but…HOW?’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Benny. ‘What’s so special about that?’
‘Non-Muslims are not supposed to be allowed inside Mecca,’ said Hildy. ‘I got in by bluffing, really, because it is hard to, with diligence and accuracy, screen people by belief system.’
‘Fatima, child,’ said Padre Hermosa gently, ‘you are not offended by this?’
‘Not especially,’ Fatima admitted. ‘Mainly I find it actually quite hilarious. It is only offensive in that you even had to bluff, Hildy.’ She smiled. ‘Between us, I think the Saud family make absolutely terrible Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques.’
‘Well, who would you rather be in charge?’ asked Benny. ‘Al-Qaeda?’
To everyone’s surprise, and driving home the fact that they really were in the Middle East, not Benny’s Ark-La-Tex region where ‘Al-Qaeda’ had mutated into something almost Pavlovian over the years, Fatima smiled and said ‘That might be a step in the right direction, but it is not really what I would prefer.’
Padre Hermosa looked pale.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Benny.
‘I was just thinking of something from my country’s mythic past,’ said Padre Hermosa. ‘The discussion of terrorism being preferable to crushing authority, at least in the short term…’
‘That…was not exactly what I was trying to say,’ said Fatima.
‘Even so…’ said Padre Hermosa. ‘It reminded me of the excuses that the conquistadors used…the ‘civilising’ excuse, the ‘barbarians’ excuse, the ‘not knowing God’ excuse, the ‘improvement on human sacrifice’ excuse…’
‘But those excuses had the ring of truth to them, didn’t they?’ asked Benny. ‘The Aztec religion was some seriously bloodthirsty stuff going down.’
‘Just because the excuses were true does not mean that they actually do excuse the Spaniards’ actions,’ said Padre Hermosa. ‘I am zambo even though I am from in a primarily criollo area[9]. I would have been trodden down and had my face smashed into the dust of the earth in those days!’ He shook his head. ‘Besides which, anything the Aztecs did cannot reach the heights of how afraid I used to be of the Moche.’
‘And who were the Moche?’ asked Fatima.
‘A tribe of coastal Peru who worshipped something called the Winged Decapitator God,’ said Padre Hermosa.
‘…A ‘Winged Decapitator God’? Seriously?’
‘Yes, the Decapitator God,’ said Padre Hermosa. ‘It was part-man, part-jaguar, and had utter power over life and death. It was a god of decapitation specifically for unclear reasons—this may have been a punishment for the damned. And the terrifying thing is that it could fly about at will! In fact, nobody ever…’
He turned blue.
‘What is it?’ asked Benny.
‘AAAAGH!’ shouted Padre Hermosa, pointing over Hildy’s shoulder. ‘THERE IT IS!! THE DECAPITATOR GOD!!!’
So loud was Hermosa’s scream, and so convincing his terror, that the other three at the table dropped their utensils and whipped their heads round to look behind Hildy. There stood a tall, bulky man with a strange greyish pallor, one of the waiters, with a Hebrew word written on his forehead.
‘Excuse me, sirrahs,’ said the waiter in astonishingly bad Hebrew, ‘might you could tell what yelling what about? WHY YELL? No please no you sirrahs yell.’
‘For God’s sake!’ shouted Hildy. ‘It is not the Decapitator God! It is just a waiter!’
‘Waiter I waiter yes have been made give live,’ said the waiter, and mopped up a spill on the table and gave Padre Hermosa a glass of water.
But Padre Hermosa was in an inconsolable state of abject terror. ‘The jaguar,’ he said. ‘The teeth of the jaguar…skin of a jaguar…everything, the jaguar-man, coming on wings of gold, to bask in the fires of Hell…’
‘Are you what talk about,’ said the waiter.
‘Why is his speech so awful?’ someone at another table was hissing. ‘Is Hebrew even his first language? …Is he Israeli?’
‘Teeth,’ said Padre Hermosa. There was a great red and gold thing looming in his vision, glaring at him with eyes stirring the deep blue, piercing him in line of vision. It was pain, more pain than he could possibly have conceived of, and as the world went away, and everything turned to jaguars, he felt more afraid than he had ever been before. The visage of the Moche’s protector and destroyer, the image of the Winged Decapitator God, became everything, and everything became the Decapitator God.
‘What is wrong with you, Padre?’ asked the Decapitator God with Benny’s face.
‘Are you all right?’ asked the Decapitator God with Fatima’s face.
‘Should we go get somebody?’ asked the Decapitator God with Hildy’s face.
Padre Hermosa ran. He ran out the back of the restaurant, through a series of twisting alleys, with the god leering at him in every shadow and on every stone.
‘Watch this space,’ said Schlomo. ‘All right. We have them going after him…make sure he is all right, even though we see him not to be…’
Hildy flitted through a shadow.
‘And there something intercepting, coming in from the side…’
It was Hildy. She whirled around through a short-cut into another alleyway. The other three came in. Hildy produced a gun and shot them—first Fatima Acmed Ismail Sharif, in the stomach; then Willard Benedict Hayward, in the chest; then Salvador Manuel Hermosa Amante, three times, twice in the right groin (which tore off the leg) and once in the solar plexus.
‘Hildy!’ cried the Nish. ‘—No! T—toshite? Toshite?’ After a few loud and probably profane exhortations in Japanese, she fell to the ground, crying, as Hildy stood over the bodies. ‘Hildy…why?’
Hildy turned the gun to her own chest, pulled the trigger, and slumped over.
‘Why did Hildy kill everybody?’ whimpered the Nish.
‘Is that something there really can be answered?’ mused Schlomo. He stood looking down at the bodies.
‘Don’t be heartless,’ whispered Cosgrove. ‘Hildy was a dear friend to…’ She looked over at the Nish. She was sprawled absurdly on the ground, weeping and weeping. Cosgrove sighed. There was really nothing…nothing she could say in a situation like this.
And then she saw herself, staggering into the alleyway for some reason, and she saw herself seeing the bodies, and falling down in a swoon.
[1] The Afar insurgency, Front pour la Restoration de l'Unité et de la Démocratie.
[2] President of Egypt from 1954 to 1970, who led the abortive United Arab Republic (a federation of Egypt, Syria, and possibly North Yemen depending on how one counted it) and continued to work for pan-Arab nationalism throughout his career. Eventually the UAR was meant to also take in Iraq, Sudan, and potentially Jordan, but this never came to pass because Syria seceded only a few years in. Unfortunately Nasser’s movement eventually led to the Ba’ath Party and Saddam Hussein’s brutal rule in Iraq.
[3] A Sudanese mystic and political theorist who espoused a sort of reformist Islamism and was executed as a danger to the state in 1985.
[4] A cape in Somalia, some eleven hundred or so kilometres along the coast from Djibouti; the nomadic character of much life in the Horn of Africa meant that this was not seen as the sort of staggering distance between the branches of the family that it may otherwise have been. The relatives in Raas Xaafuun were of the Majertain clan, not Issa; there had been two intermarriages about four or five generations back.
[5] Islamic jurisprudence.
[6] There were no ‘sand factories’ in Jordan. Reveka Metawi had some racial…issues that she tried very hard to set aside for Fatima.
[7] A dybbuk is a (typically malicious) revenant in Jewish mythology.
[8] In the Muslim Fatima’s case, the drink in question was a sort of extremely sweet non-alcoholic punch-type concoction.
[9] Zambo—mixed African and Amerindian ancestry. Criollo—European ancestry.
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