J. Ledgard - Submergence

James developed a sense of ease with Aziz. The Iraqi protected him from the more unbalanced among the mujahideen. They talked about America.

‘You talk about achievement. What is the achievement of a shopping centre?’

‘This is student stuff,’ he said. ‘Why always shopping? America put a man on the moon.’

‘So they claim.’

‘Look to yourself. Saudi Arabia is ready for a revolution. All the people do is shop. There is nothing else for them. The country is in a social coma.’

‘The majesties feed in this way it is true,’ Aziz said uncomfortably, then changed the subject.

Aziz had no idea about government and had not studied politics, philosophy, history or economics. He was like a common or garden Evangelical, who reckoned by faith alone his clinic would be raised into a health service. Thomas More would have picked apart Aziz’s worldview in a moment. Not because it was a vanity of a Musulman, but because it was dystopian. The caliphate was as uninspired as it was unmerciful, with no basis in common law.

He accepted there was something ill in Western civilisation; an apple-sized swelling in the armpit. Any clear-minded person could feel it. It was true also that he had with his own eyes seen simplicity and compassion in the Muslim world, how the sick and old were cared for within the community. But that was as far as he went.

They had both killed. James had done it in under orders in the military. Did that absolve him? Aziz had killed on account of personal conviction, the emotion carried him, the affront. He perhaps heard the sentence al-Qaeda wanted carried out: Death to the enemies of Islam by the bullet, by bombs, alcohol, narcotics, rumour, assassination, strangulation, chemicals and other poisons . Aziz was conflicted. A part of him looked with sympathy on James and believed he could become a Muslim. Another part believed there was a space in the Englishman’s chest where his heart should have been — that he was not born whole.

They lied to each other. Aziz had not come to Somalia of his own accord. In the messages he sent to Saudi Arabia he complained of a lack of money and planning and a difficulty in communicating with al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan. Somalia did not have the advantage of Afghanistan, which sheltered fighters and supplied opium to the world. Some of the messages were also filled with nostalgia:

How I wish our enchanted evenings in Afghanistan would return! That dream has passed and produced bitter fruit, but some is the fruit of paradise!

There will be no more open battles in Somalia. The jihadists learned that lesson when they overreached themselves in 2006. They had stood on the border with Ethiopia and declared a holy war on Ethiopia, and for that they were annihilated. The Ethiopians invaded Somalia in a matter of days. They took Mogadishu without a fight and chased the jihadists south to Kismayo. There was a brief battle there in which the jihadists were routed. Hundreds of them retreated to the mangrove swamps along the Kenyan border. These are impenetrable places, with tropical bays, shallows and tidal channels, septic, simmering, with flora and fauna of every scent and hue. Some days passed and then the American AC-130 gunship flew in from Djibouti. The Ethiopian MiGs had already flown sorties from Debre Zeyit and cut up a convoy of jihadist lorries stuck in the mud. But the Ethiopians had nothing to match the Tartarean armaments of the Americans. Without warning, from 20 kilometres away, the gunship filled the mangrove with shells the size of Coke bottles and shredded and vapourised and blew the holy warriors out of this life. It took a moment for the shells to fill the air across the target area the size of a football pitch. There were few survivors. Some escaped inland up the dry riverbeds — the wadis — others went on foot or by dhow into Kenya.

Predictably, these same fighters returned to Somalia and built a new and more radical organisation, with a heightened martyrdom complex, recapturing south Somalia town by town. They discredit merchants who oppose them and dismantle their businesses. They tax goods and livestock coming and going: fuel, rice, pasta, the narcotic leaf qat, which Somali men chew to get high, and all the market stalls down to the fish on their slabs.

The lesson of 2006 has been taken to heart. A jihadist must know how to hide on the land and in the swamps. Somalia is wild. It is from another time. It is possible to live in the scrub with a gun. A man can recite his prayers far from any road, experiencing a sense of holiness, hardening himself. It is not a secure refuge — its fruits are bitter-tasting as Afghanistan’s once were — but it holds a similar promise of paradise. That is why Somalia serves as a trapdoor for Saudi Arabia. Young Saudis are sent there to lay low and to learn how to fight. They are marginal characters — on the run from themselves as well as from the police — withdrawn, stammering, younger brothers, with unresolved inner conflicts, most of them sexual.

She abandoned the beaked whales, left Spesa behind, but kept the cabin in the mountains. She completed her doctorate in Zurich, and remained in the morbid heights of Switzerland for seven years. Her interest in the deep became sharper. It also became more poetic, fed by visits to the Sumerian archive at the University of Zurich.

In those years she liked to board a train to the Alps with her bicycle, choosing the platforms at Zurich main station at random. She found there was veracity in the claim that, in landlocked countries, espionage takes the place of adventure, and police take the place of pirates. Nevertheless, she pushed on into the deepest valleys, the ones which lost their winter sun in the early afternoon. She biked along the valley floors and visualised the day they would be at the bottom of a new sea. The steepness of the slopes matched those of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Waterfalls plunged off rock. They fell in the air, through air. She prefigured them as underwater cascades, water pouring through water. She pictured the ski pistes on a sonar display, the chalets lit up by pinpricks of light, the heated municipal swimming pools as hydrothermal vents thick with mats and carpets of microbial life and not day-trippers from St Gallen.

‘I go to Switzerland once a year,’ he said to her, in bed in the Hotel Atlantic.

They shared memories of Zurich airport. If by some new method these images were downloaded from their minds they would correspond. They had similar sensibilities, and a similar way of watching the flow of people and landscapes and framing them. They had both looked out of the windows of the air terminal to the cow pastures and forest, the streams flowing to Lake Zurich, the inferior coffee in a white china demitasse , the snow on the Alps, while around them was a constant motion of humans and machines, families walking to their gates, the airport train gliding in, the Swiss planes circling above, white crosses on red, but these images were differently settled in their minds.

She retained hers as something familiar; the landscape she looked out upon as a student, the system she worked in. He arrived in Zurich from poorer countries and was uplifted. He saw through the window a display of labour and efficiency which stood in contrast to the Muslim communities he was charged with observing.

They came to the edge of the wood. They wanted to reach the village.