Mrs. Pollifax Unveiled (20 page)

“What … what,” faltered Amanda, “did those two men look like?”

“They were all legs. They wore shorts, like tourists.” He shook his head in disgust.

Amanda sank back in the car in horror. “From the camp? It sounds as if they must be from the camp. I feel sick.”

Antun gave her an alarmed glance. “No, no, they did not stay, they were gone when I left.”

“Good,” said Mrs. Pollifax, and considering this no time to consider possible complications she changed the subject by saying briskly, “Now what are your plans for us?”

“No
Citadel. In backseat you note small bag on floor, my best clothes for Jordan and photograph of my dead wife. Keep bag for me. Now
dir bálak.”

“Pay attention,” nodded Joe.

“I leave you at Bal al-Hawa, the western gate, the Gate of the Winds. There is kina tree there for shade. Me, I will restore car to Bosra and at
maghrib
—”

“Sunset,” supplied Joe. “After call to prayer.”

He nodded. “I go for small walk—and meet you.”

“And how far is the border?” asked Farrell.

He shrugged. “A rough walk. Two wadis to cross. Ten miles.”

Mrs. Pollifax winced, but Amanda broke in to ask, “Is there a fence at the border? Is it electrified?”

“Yes and yes,” said Antun, “but we will not cross where I led the peoples who betrayed me. I have dug a new hole under the fence.
Maalesh
, it is covered with earth, across from a big, big
hájar
shaped like a
beid.”

“Egg,” translated Joe. “A big rock shaped like an egg. But the country’s so flat, and so rocky, and without a light to guide us?”

“Me you have to guide,” said Antun. “I know the stones.” He pointed to the mountain in the east. “That is Jebel Druze, the border we cross is in its shadow and that is when we light a
fânûs
to find the stone. Only then. There are cities up on Jebel Druze: Salkhad, Dieben, Alghariyeh, there will be lights on the mountain.”

“But—
fânûs?”
asked Mrs. Pollifax.

“Lantern,” explained Joe.

Antun nodded. “This too lies at your feet, I leave it with you to keep safe for us.”

The ground ahead of them was changing now, rising out of the valley toward Bosra. They could see the shape of a town, the silhouette of a spire, a line of columns such as they had seen in Palmyra, and ahead of them a large stone arch with the detritus of what had once been a wall scattered across the earth.

“The Gate of the Winds,” said Antun, and glanced at his watch. “You would still not be here if you walked; Allah be praised I find you fast!”

He stopped the car beside the arch. “Go,” he said. “Not quickly—I have given ride to four weary people, no more. Sit. Be quiet. Rest. And pray at sundown.”

Once they were out of the car he rattled away in his dusty Austin down a cobbled street, leaving them to take shelter under the shade of the kina tree that he had promised them.

“So,” said Farrell, as they seated themselves on the earth among the bricks of the vanished wall. “We have made it to Bosra … He strikes me as a reliable man.”

“A desperate one,” suggested Mrs. Pollifax. “But he didn’t ask for money.”

“Not even
rabûn
—earnest money,” Joe said. “It would be his right to ask for some when he comes at sunset.”

“Yes,” agreed Mrs. Pollifax, with a worried glance at Amanda, who had withdrawn from them and looked tense and anxious. She said to Joe, “Talk to us. Tell us something about this country we’ve scarcely seen. At the Tell Khamseh, Amy Madison told me of the lovely places we were missing.”

Joe smiled faintly. “Yes, you’ve pretty much traveled underground all the way.” He too was watching Amanda.

“Can people still write books here?”

“Oh, yes, if they are nonpolitical. Love stories are very popular, often about other eras. One of my favorites is the poet Nizar Qabbani, who left Syria years ago, but ironically—he writes so obliquely—President Assad calls him a national hero. I especially remember a few lines from his
Notes on the Book of Defeat
, supposedly addressed to a long-ago sultan: ‘Half your people have no tongues, what good their unheard sighs? The other half, within these walls, run like rabbits and ants, silently inside.’

“Which pretty much applies to the people here, full of unheard sighs. But,” he added with a reminiscent smile, “so friendly and generous a people.”

“You sound really attached to the place,” Farrell told him with a smile.

“It’s so full of history,” he said simply. “Up north near the Turkish border archaeologists have uncovered what they’re convinced is the long-lost Urkesh … it’s all so biblical. I’m continually astonished to come across places I heard about in Sunday school, and yes,” he admitted with a grin, “I was taken to Sunday school as a child, not always happily, but it was a darn good background for an archaeologist, I admit it freely.”

It was doubtful that Amanda had heard anything he said, her mind was obviously struggling over the meaning of the two mysterious strangers who had arrived in Bosra that morning. Because Joe had just quoted a line of poetry, Mrs. Pollifax found herself remembering a line from the Emily Dickinson poem that Amanda had brought with her—“I looked in windows for the wealth I could not hope to own”—and she was surprised at how fiercely she wanted to see Amanda placed inside of life, not outside looking at it through glass. The girl had moved from subtle cruelties to malevolent cruelties and she deserved better—if, of course, they successfully crossed the border to safety.

There were no more efforts at conversation; they sat in the heat and dust looking out at the fields over which they must soon make their way, fields of red soil littered with black basalt rocks, although in the far distance she could see a grove of stunted trees offering a small amount of cover. If they could reach them.

She sighed, never enjoying suspense. It held one in thrall,
plucking at tired nerves, and she was already tired. She would love to have a warm bath now—how many days had it been?—and then sit down to an American dinner. “Of hot dogs,” she heard herself say, and was looked at in surprise by Farrell.

“Hot dogs?”
he said. “Are you all right, Duchess?”

She laughed. “Just wistful.”

Soon the call to prayer could be heard from the town beyond the gate, and, bringing out her white scarf, she placed it over her suffocating
burqa
and joined Farrell, Joe, and Amanda in prostrating themselves, with only Joe murmuring the words of the
Sala
. When the prayers’ reverberations had died away the last rays of the sun had vanished, leaving them in a brief twilight and Jebel Druze starkly black against the darkening sky. There was a peaceful stillness following the
Sala;
they didn’t hear Antun’s approach but he was suddenly with them, squatting on his haunches and speaking in a low voice.

“We go first slow, looking for maybe
azhar.…
”

“Flowers,” said Joe. “Or something lost?” he suggested.

“Na’am
. Or
battikh asfar?”

“Sweet melons,” nodded Joe. “I gather they harvested a crop somewhere in those fields.”

“You see the trees?” said Antun. “We must go to them before the
kamar
—sorry, before the moon rises high; it will be still bright this night. They grow thick to the
tarik
along the border.”

“Tarik?”

“Road,” murmured Joe. “Apparently there’s a road that runs along the border. For the patrols.”

“How often the patrols?” asked Farrell sharply.

Antun shrugged.
“Ma’alesh.”

“He means never mind,” Joe explained, and Amanda stood up and said in a strangled voice, “I feel like screaming.”

Joe smiled at her and grasped her hand. “But you won’t.”

She looked at him with widened eyes. “No.” she sighed, and drew her hand away. “I’ll be all right. Can we please, please
go?”

“Yes, but first some ‘earnest money,’ ” Mrs. Pollifax said firmly; she was ready for this and passed to Antun half of their remaining Syrian pounds. “The rest once we’re across the border.”

His round face shone. “So much! I will be rich in my new country—
Shukren!
Oh, I take
taib
care of you!”

“You’d better,” murmured Farrell.

“Rich
Amerikâni,”
murmured Joe flippantly.

Antun, excited now, said,
“Yallah!
Let’s go!”

A
ctually, thought Mrs. Pollifax, it was like theater for an unseen audience, should there be one. They walked slowly, stopping to lean over and pretend to pluck something from the earth; they stopped, they pointed, they strolled on, their pace slowly quickening as the town receded behind them. There were three fields to cross, each defined by low walls of black stone, and they were large fields, but the trees ahead grew slowly nearer. The moon that had been full two nights ago was on the wane, but as it rose out of the east it was dismayingly bright. They crossed the first dried-up riverbed, or wadi, and a mile later reached the first gnarled and stunted trees that gave them cover.

“Now,” said Antun, “we go
fast.”

But what Antun had failed to mention was that these were
thorn trees, tall, overgrown spiny shrubs with thorns as sharp as needles, rendering it impossible to hurry. There were gasps of “Ouch!” from Amanda, and a few well-chosen curse words from Farrell, and although Mrs. Pollifax was well wrapped in her black shroudlike
abaya
and
burqa
, her hands were soon bleeding as she pushed her way in and out of close-knit groves with Antun pleading with them to go faster, faster.

From time to time the thorn trees mercifully thinned but it felt to Mrs. Pollifax as if they’d been plodding through hell for hours, even days, when Antun abruptly stopped. Placing a finger to his lips he bade them to be still and silent and then, frowning, he nodded and they continued. The moon was high in the sky now and Mrs. Pollifax guessed that it must be nearing midnight. Off to their left, looking up, she could see the pinpricks of light on the Jebel Druze, as Antun had described, but it had begun to be an effort to lift her head; she could only put one foot after another, her eyes on the ground.

At last she dared whisper to Antun, “The border—how far now?”

He stopped, and when he turned to look at her a chance ray of moonlight illuminated his face and she saw that his eyes were glazed with terror. “One mile,” he said, and then, “Someone is following us. We are being followed.”

“How do you know?” she whispered, alarmed.

“Listen,” he said.

She listened but heard nothing.

Farrell and Joe, returning to her side to ask why they’d stopped, looked at her questioningly.

“He says we’re being followed.”

“Oh God,” murmured Farrell. “What does he hear?”

Joe whispered to Antun in Arabic. “He says he has heard the snap of trees being cut—off to our right—and he has seen birds fly away—and he knows how to listen.”

Amanda returned to join them, saying, “What—”

“Sssh,” whispered Mrs. Pollifax, and in the silence that followed they could hear at some point behind them the snap of a thorn tree branch, and suddenly Mrs. Pollifax realized that she was the eldest member of this group and that, tired as she was, Carstairs had placed her in charge. When Farrell hissed, “We can’t stop like this, we’ve got to make a run for it,” she said,
“No.”

“No?” whispered Antun.

“No,” she repeated in a low voice, and to Antun, “If they capture you, Antun?”

He shuddered. “I know too much. Prison.”

Joe understood. “Yes, and no doubt torture, whereas we are four Americans, we have an embassy to appeal to—with luck,” he added grimly.

“Exactly,” she said. “I say we split. If we’re being followed they’ll follow us whether Antun is with us or not, and he mustn’t be found with us. If he steals away alone—with his lantern … Antun, you could cross the border and light the lantern for us, couldn’t you? So we could find you?” And hated herself for adding, “And pay you the rest of the money? We’ll carry your bag for you, too.”
Just in case
, she thought.

She had underestimated Antun.
“Na’am
—oh
yes,”
he exclaimed, and there were tears in his eyes. “I am … am hit hard by such kindness. I would not fail you, I promise. Take my bag,” he said, handing it to her. “It has all my new life in it.”

“Thank you,” she told him, “and now you must tell us
exactly what we must do. We reach the border, the fence, the road and …?”

“Go
dughri
—straight on—to meet road at border. Then half a mile to east—”

“To the left,” emphasized Joe.

“Yes, toward Jebel Druze. To the big black rock that shines even in moonlight. With Allah’s blessing I will have dug away
wasakh
—no,
earth
—and light lantern.”

“Then go,” said Mrs. Pollifax. “Now. Quickly.”

“Shukren, shukren,”
he said, and stepped in among the thorn trees and soon vanished to their left, and at once they resumed their own flight toward the border.

“Who would be following us?” asked Amanda in a desperate voice. “That policeman Fuad?”

“Keep your voice low,” counseled Mrs. Pollifax and added, “We seem to have done all that bending over and looking for melons for nothing, if we’ve been watched from the beginning.” A pity, she thought; their performance had been tiresome.

They could hurry now, for the thorn trees were behind them and once again the earth was littered with rocks, and the moonlight was of no help because, perversely, it had disappeared behind a cloud. They reached and crossed the second wadi, met with a scattering of trees, and then suddenly came upon a rough dirt road, and—

“The fence,” whispered Amanda. “We’ve reached the border!”

“Turn left,” pointed Joe, “and let’s pray Antun has already reached the crossing.”

“Half a mile,” Farrell reminded them. “He said half a mile. Dare we run?”

“No,” said Mrs. Pollifax sharply, and purely from instinct. “We don’t know—can’t know—if Antun is there.”