J. Ledgard - Submergence

They were quiet, then Aziz said, ‘There is cholera here already.’

‘You should report it.’

‘Here? To whom would I report it?’

‘To the United Nations.’

‘Never.’

‘You need help.’

Aziz’s eyes narrowed. ‘The Crusades have not ended.’

‘What?’ He said what, but he knew what was coming.

‘The United Nations is a cover for the Crusaders. The United Nations is the Knights of the Cross.’

‘Even UNICEF?’

‘Especially UNICEF!’

He regarded the punch-holes on the doctor’s arm, the belt buckle.

‘Such an organisation! Which claims so much for itself but delivers so little to the children? Would you like to know what I really think?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think the Crusaders are led by the Jews!’

If these words were written down they would look deranged, but Aziz spoke them with feeling; he had some notion the jihad was a cure and the fighting was the cutting out of a tumour under improper conditions.

‘What is necessary,’ Aziz said, more calmly, ‘is to turn the Crusaders and their slaves back from the Muslim land of Somalia, so the people can live in a true Islamic state.’

He was exhausted. He had to respond. He spoke with care, the words came out like stones and pebbles. ‘Is it more important to get help for the women and children you see in your clinic, or to follow the jihad?’

‘I see it as one treatment. Medicine is a mercy, the jihad is a duty.’

‘What about me? Am I a Crusader? I came here to bring water.’

‘You are a part of it,’ Aziz said, unhesitatingly. ‘Allah will ask payment of you.’

‘You said I was going to be spared.’

‘La, la, la. How can I know the will of Allah. You may die. You may become a blessed one.’

The Ligurians were split in the Punic wars between Carthage and Rome and remain divided today. There are the muggy streets of Spesa on the coast of Liguria, with rubbish, fish heads rotting on the dock in the sun; and there is the rain and bracing air of the surrounding Ligurian Alps, with vineyards, olive groves, apricots, figs and nuts on the lower slopes, cheese production and game higher up, and ducks netted on the icy tarns in the migratory season.

Her cabin was high on a mountain overlooking the Ligurian Sea. It had a slate roof. The walls were of stones, logs and moss gathered from the slopes. The windows were square; four panes each. There were always flowers in the window boxes when she was there. Her flat in South Kensington was of the sort Peter Pan might visit, whereas the whole effect of the cabin — the doors and mantles carved with faces and with shapes of animals, the light slanting in, the air, the shreds of cloud and sea through mist and sleet, through trees — was of a scene a wooden puppet might have woken up to in his most resinous childhood.

The mountain was Janus-faced. One side was sunlit, with slopes of Aleppo and maritime pine. The other was dark. Snow lingered for months; there were Alpine meadows, oaks and chestnuts, and bogs into which deer sank up to their nostrils. It drizzled more often on that side. The farmhouse where she bought her supplies was obscured and could be seen only by the smoke curling up from its chimney. Heading upwards with a pack pony, she was often bathed in sunshine the moment they turned from the landward to the seaward side. On such days she would strip off her hunting jacket and continue up the stony path sweating under the sun, her steps slow with her heavy pack. They raised red partridge from the undergrowth, the dust quivered, and their footsteps resonated off the oldest exposed rocks on earth. It was not the reason she bought the cabin, but it had become an attraction: her property had never been sunk in the Ligurian Sea, or any other. If she were immortal, she could sit on the mountain under the moon and stars — the snow globe — and not get her feet wet in a million years.

He waded out into the river and for a few steps was covered by the waters.

He used to go to the Saracen’s Head in Church Street with his sister and her friends and never considered the picture on the pub sign until he had joined the secret intelligence service. He was raised to think of the desert as a desolation, as an absence. The Christian prayer he was given as a child to recite at bedtime, the smell of soap, the towels, brass doorknobs, the heaviness of home, with the rain sweeping in off the North Sea against the window, held the milk and honey of heaven to be beyond the desert.

Aziz’s childhood was his own turned inside out. His family owned an oasis under a cliff near the Syrian border. They drove there from Baghdad in the season in a dazzling convoy of cars. The cliff blocked out the sun. It was wet with dew at dawn. Water was plentiful. Workers grew vegetables in a field. Metal taps gushed into cement troughs. Camels drank their fill. The horses had their own drinking place. The tents were pitched out of the wind, away from the animals. When Aziz was a small child and it was cold at night, he was sometimes made to sleep outside, covered with sand to keep warm.

He was the Arab who grew up in a binary world, which went zero one zero one one desert city desert city city. In Baghdad, he drank a can of Coke before reaching the till. He watched Westerns. His best friend had computer games. A boy from his football team spoke of sexual encounters with a maid. There was the dictatorship, the war with Iran, the fume of cars on the motorways in the city, the way the overpass curled up and across. In the desert, there were only the horses and the medical studies he continued in the tent, brushing sand away from the textbooks every few minutes. Nothing was made there except leather. Every living thing in the desert seemed to him to be precious, to have a fixed number and to exist in such a way as to make him feel like a created being. It was no place. It extended through Iraq into Saudi Arabia and all the way to Oman. He took his horses and rode out across it; a sea at the centre of the world, with unfathomable sands, shifting and undulating. Aziz had this in common with James: if he had no sense of duty, he would have returned to his horses.

The prayers in the desert were different, inexpressibly cooler to accommodate the heat. Aziz’s understanding of the greatness of the Koran came on those nights when the constellations shone in such depth and number that only Allah could accommodate them and every ideology looked insignificant set against them.

Danny’s colleagues were atheist or agnostic, except for the Anglican, who was struck by a car one afternoon on the Fulham Road. This colleague fell into a coma and her family asked for prayers to be read at her bedside. Danny was reluctant, but it was not a moment to stand on principle. She turned up at the hospital and was given the canticle ‘Benedicite Omni Opera’ to read. 1The words disturbed her. Before any mention of the earth or the sun was a line surely lifted from Sumer:

O ye Waters that be above the Firmament, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him forever.

Her colleague went on to make a full recovery. She herself could not let go of the waters behind the stars. She calculated that if such a sea were only the depth of our solar system and the same terms applied, the pressure of atmospheres in its Hadal deep would be so great that the fish there would have no skeletal structure and would move like apparitions.