The Girl in Green (20 page)

She takes it without looking at him.

Jamal is around the front of the truck, for some reason.

Arwood looks at Benton and smiles. ‘I told you so,' he says.

‘You most certainly did, and I have never been more wrong. Is anyone else hiding here? Have we looked about?'

‘There aren't a lot of places to look. There's food and water in here, and the canvas kept her cool enough. If we can get her back to Märta, I think she'll be fine.'

‘You've had quite the day, Arwood Hobbes. We aren't finished talking about it, not by a long shot, but this goes on the balance sheet. It surely does.'

‘Let's go home to the refugee camp, where we belong.'

‘All right,' Benton says, taking a quick look around. ‘What's her condition?'

‘She's very happy to see me.'

‘She trusted you? When you looked in the truck?'

‘Why wouldn't she?'

‘You're a piece of work, I'll hand you that. Look, do you think she might answer a question for me before we leave? I might be able to salvage my job if she does. I can't say I'd given it any thought until now, but given events—'

‘What do you want to know?' Arwood calls Jamal over to translate.

‘I'd just like to know what happened,' Benton says, taking a recorder from his own jacket.

Her eating is voracious. While she doesn't appear starved, there was clearly no fresh food in the truck, and all she's been eating is dried rations and MREs.

‘Jamal, ask her what happened here.'

Jamal hops down from the truck and dusts his hands off on his jeans. When he translates, he sounds young and kind, like someone's son.

The girl talks with her mouth full of apple. Jamal nods, and asks clarifying questions that Benton doesn't understand.

The girl points toward a small gully back by the tracks they followed here. She points at her own clothes.

Jamal frowns. He points at his own clothes, and repeats the word she used.

She nods, and points at two of the dead people.

Then Jamal says, ‘We have to go. We have to go right now. Right this second. Very dangerous. Very, very dangerous here. Big mess. We have to go. Right now.'

Arwood hops down and extends his hand to the girl. She takes it, and walks with him, hand in hand, to the car.

‘What did she say?' Benton asks, jogging alongside Jamal. ‘Why are we running? No one's here. No one's been here for days.'

‘ISIL.'

‘I thought we had this discussion.'

‘No, no. You don't understand. The girl was near the back of the line. She had the best view on everything. She says it wasn't Kurds. It was men wearing black, like ISIL. She saw them carry the mortar, but didn't know what it was. After the mortar landed, she hid in the truck. She saw two men come out after all the other people ran away. She said they shot the survivors. Everyone. Everyone. And then, when they were finished, they went to the video camera the news people were using, and took something from it. It is over there,' he says, pointing to the spot where the camera once stood on its tripod. ‘After they took this disk, they went to the tanker truck and put a big black flag on it. This means it is theirs. They will come for it when they want. Anyone caught near it, or taking from the truck, dies. Maybe they come in a month, in a week, in a minute. We don't want to be here. We must go right now.'

‘Why hasn't she run away?'

Jamal doesn't translate because he knows the answer for himself: ‘Something about cousins. I don't understand. Look, she's fourteen years old!'

‘The video camera they picked up, is it still there?' Benton asks. ‘You said they took a disk, not the camera.'

‘Who cares? Your head is more useful than a camera. Have to go.' They reach the car, and Jamal gets in and starts the engine.

‘I'll be right back,' Benton says, seeing that Arwood and the girl haven't reached the car yet.

‘You crazy man! Get over here.'

‘I'll be right back,' Benton says over his shoulder.

There, eighty metres from the Ural, sits the video camera. It's a familiar high-end consumer model with HD video. It is obviously broken, and the lens is cracked.

Panting, he collects the camera, which burns the tips of his fingers with the heat of the midday sun. Gingerly, he unscrews the fastening bolt that connects it to the tripod, and drops the dead weight to the ground.

Arwood has thrown open the back door, and Benton flops himself onto the hot grey vinyl and pulls the door closed.

‘Go,' he says, leaning his head back for a rest, but the vinyl only scorches his neck. He is too tired to move it away. He settles into the burn. ‘We're done,' Benton says.

The girl sits between the two men. The camera is a grey stone that lies across his lap. Jamal is running the Toyota in third, as usual, and Benton hears the underpowered engine thump like a dated outboard.

Jamal is not making a sound. Neither is the radio. There is only the breeze through the window and the breath of one extra passenger who has finally stopped eating.

Benton musters the gumption to cock his head left. Arwood, on the far side of the car, is looking very pleased with himself. His eyes are closed. His sunglasses are off. He is enjoying a moment that shouldn't be happening.

The girl is quiet. Benton doesn't want to stare, but he has no choice. She is the spitting image of the girl in green. They look at each other and — against all reason — he can't help but wonder if she recognises him.

By the truck,
he wants to say.
We were crouched together, hiding from the helicopter. We ran into the Americans, and you met Arwood, who tried to save you. I had more hair. Do you remember me?

‘How are we for petrol?' Benton asks Jamal instead.

‘We're good.'

Jamal makes contact with the main road heading east and speeds up.

They are all quiet in the car. There is little traffic, as people rest during the hottest times of the day. They will open their shops again later; for now, they are home with their families. The speed cools the car. Benton finally peels his neck from the seat, and drinks an entire bottle of water. Sated, he turns to the girl and decides to be sensible.

‘Do you speak English?'

The girl shakes her head.

‘My name is Benton,' he says to her, touching his chest. ‘What is your name?'

‘Adar,' she says. ‘Adar.'

18

Märta stopped smoking ages ago. These days she doesn't smoke, unless she's socialising, drinking, worrying, fundraising, or needs a cigarette.

She needs a cigarette now. She does not have one. And so she holds her Bic fountain pen as though it is the cigarette that she ought to have. She is sitting on an orange chair at a white table, listening to a briefing provided by a Swiss-based research organisation concerning affairs in eastern Syria that might affect operations in northern Iraq. It is early evening, and she is already tired.

The researcher is young — late twenties. She has blonde hair and eyes that speak of her excitement at being part of something darker than herself, as though proximity to horror somehow might strengthen her own character. In most cases, though, it's the opposite. It unravels us. But Märta isn't about to explain this to her.

The girl began her presentation, some thirty minutes ago, by quoting Thierry Lefebvre's 1927 article ‘
Le vilayet de Mossoul
'
,
telling everyone that ‘Ninawa is no longer Iraq and not yet Kurdistan'. This remains true, Märta thinks, but, as a piece of analysis, sort of leaves you hanging. The girl then seemed to prove Märta's point — and not her own — by focussing the rest of her talk on change and the future, rather than on continuity and the past, which was the West's first error over here.

The Swiss researcher holds a laser pointer, and the red dot dances over the bullet points in PowerPoint. There are twelve other people in the room, each from a different aid agency or governmental mission. Märta wants to feel more magnanimous about the young woman's efforts to explain the Kurdish versus Sunni versus Shiite dynamics in Ninawa, but she feels the girl is misunderstanding what she's otherwise accurately describing. She speaks in a cluster of words that have no organising principle:

followed by ‘solutions' such as:

Märta's national staff once explained to her — after she insisted that their annual report be translated into Arabic for the first time — that almost none of these words have homologues in Arabic. In fact, the ideas themselves are so foreign and often irrelevant that Arabic speakers, in speaking to one another, simply insert the English term into their conversation. This happens directly in front of senior Western diplomats, who are oblivious to its significance.

The analysis being once again
hors sujet,
she checks her watch, and realises that Benton should have radioed in by now.

By
before
, actually.

She calls Benton's phone. It rings and activates the voicemail.

Why do men build the very systems they refuse to use? Why don
'
t they follow instructions? You look them dead in the eye; you snap your fingers to ensure brain activity; you tell them what you
'
re going to tell them, you tell them, then you tell them what you
'
ve told them, but still nothing.

She calls Benton's phone again. It rings and activates the voicemail.

They do this with their health, too. They think they
'
ll be fine. They aren
'
t. Then they crumble like a dry sandcastle.

Benton's phone rings. He answers it.

‘Hello?'

Märta stands, waves an excuse to the rest of the room, and then ducks out into the hallway before letting Benton have it: ‘Where the hell have you been? Why aren't you following instructions? It's late. The radio room can't make contact, and you haven't called in. If you're not on your way back, you better turn that car around—'

‘We found her. She's alive. She's sitting next to us.'

Märta places her hand against her cheek. ‘The little girl? The teenager?'

‘The girl in green. The one from the video. The reason Arwood made all this happen. She's in the Toyota with us. She's fine. She's a little malnourished, I think, and she seems to like and trust Arwood, which might suggest shock and trauma, but otherwise she's fine.'

‘How?'

‘She's been living off the rations that were in the convoy. We're coming back.'

‘Have you been listening to the radio-room instructions?'

In his silence, Märta finds meaning. She can visualise the look on his face. It is the look that men get after women use such phrases as ‘Did you call about that appointment? Did you remember to mail that? Did you unload the dishwasher like I asked?'

Every moment waiting for a man to answer such questions is a moment wasted.