What Will Survive (2 page)

Photograph of Aisha Lincoln at Cranbrook Lawns by Bryan Brooks. Collage, page 11, © Fabrizio Terzano 1996

Aisha moved in the bed, wanting the reassurance of the body next to hers. She pushed against it, murmured something, and slipped back into a deep dreaming sleep. As if a film was just beginning, she saw her mother sitting in an armchair on the far side of an enormous room, leaning forward and holding out an encouraging hand. Aisha struggled to put one foot in front of the other on the patterned carpet, her legs heavy, and suddenly she was running across the vast expanse. Her mother smiled and began to speak but the sounds that came out of her mouth were unintelligible. Aisha cried out, sure that her father and her sister were somewhere in the garden that had suddenly appeared behind her mother's chair, hiding among the borders of English flowers overgrowing a sunny path.

Abruptly the scene changed. Now Aisha was standing in a narrow street of tall houses, staring up at arched windows and balconies, and her heart began to pound. The glass in the windows was broken, the walls of the buildings pockmarked and stained, the balcony above her hanging down as if it might collapse at any moment. Car horns sounded and she started, surprised by a crowd of people who appeared from nowhere and jostled her as they pushed past. Spotting a figure whose thickset shoulders, grizzled head and camera bag seemed familiar, Aisha called after him, but when he turned he was a stranger and she saw that the bag was a Kalashnikov. She sat bolt upright in the bed, woken by the sound of her own voice, her eyes wide open in the suffocating darkness.

‘Stephen?' She flung out her hand. ‘Stephen? Where are you?' Clutching the sheet, her chest wet with sweat, she reached further, feeling for warm flesh.

There was no answer. On her knees, Aisha scrabbled on the mattress, finding nothing but a scratchy woollen blanket. Edging across the bed, she swung her legs to the floor and gasped as her feet scraped on concrete. What the hell — this wasn't a hotel room. She stretched out a hand until she came in contact with a wall, and groped her way along it until she found a light switch.

An unshaded bulb illuminated a claustrophobically small room and Aisha blinked, unsure for a few seconds where she was: the bed was empty and her clothes were folded on a wooden table, the only other piece of
furniture in the room. She seized her underwear, pulled it on and cracked open the door, blinking as she saw a bare courtyard, bounded by a high wall and a gate. The roughly whitewashed buildings which made up three sides of a square were silent, the pale disc of the sun and a light breeze suggesting it was still very early in the morning. The only human touch was a row of old olive oil cans, planted with mint and geraniums. Aisha retreated into the little room, leaving the door ajar to let in some fresh air.

She lifted her hair away from her damp face for a few seconds, and shook it out. ‘God,' she said experimentally, sitting at the foot of the bed, her voice sounding eerie in the silence. In the distance a dog barked and she thought she could hear goats bleating, but no other signs of life. Where was the young woman who, she now remembered, had brought her to this bare room the previous evening? More to the point, where was Fabio? Feeling a jolt of anxiety, Aisha leaned across the tangled bedlinen — judging by its state, she had spent a pretty restless night — and reached for her overnight bag. She drew her watch and mobile from a side pocket, checking the time as she waited for her phone to lock on to a local network; it was only ten past six local time, which explained why no one was stirring. It was much too early to ring anyone in England, although she had no qualms about trying Fabio's mobile. It was switched off, as it had been when she went to bed, and Aisha left another crisp message. Then she keyed in a code to pick up her messages, hoping to hear Fabio's slightly-accented English. Instead, she got a much more familiar voice and made an impatient sound as she listened to his message: ‘Tim here, meant to call earlier, sorry. Not much to report in my little part of the world, unless you count a break-in at the petrol station — kids, I expect. You certainly got a spread in
Hello!
Not the cover — even you can't compete with the Spice Girls, I'm afraid.' His laugh was ingratiating, meant to take the sting out of the words. ‘Pretty strong stuff, some of it, good on you for getting it in.' Aisha heard a sigh. ‘Oh well, I'll catch you another time. Bye darling.'

Aisha deleted it and a younger male voice came on the line. ‘Hi Ma, it's me, Ricky, you all right? I only just picked up your message and you sound really down. Call me, OK? Listen, Dad's really pissed off because
everyone's seen you in
Hello!
Fab pictures — you're so cool. Bye Mum.'

She was still smiling when the last message began to play. ‘Aisha, fuck, I can't believe I've missed you again. I'm at some ghastly reception and I didn't hear the damned phone. What time is it there? Maybe it's too late to call you — are you two hours ahead or three?' He paused and Aisha could hear noises in the background, laughter and the chink of glasses. ‘Yeah, I'm coming, just give me two seconds,' he said in a muffled voice, then more clearly: ‘This is hopeless, darling, I'll call you tomorrow.' Aisha saved the message, then listened to it a second time, picturing a crowded room in London, perhaps a party in an upstairs room at the Foreign Press Association.

Suddenly a helicopter clattered overhead, drowning out the final words, and Aisha went to the door, wondering if it was the one she had seen yesterday. The machine was directly overhead, blocking the sun and casting a faint shadow over the courtyard. She stepped back, gripped by an irrational desire not to be seen, and stared up at its dark underbelly. The vibration was almost unbearable until it began to rise vertically, then pulled away at a dizzying angle, and Aisha realised she had been holding her breath. A door opened on the other side of the courtyard and someone peered out, spotted Aisha and closed it again.

‘Hello,' she called out, but the figure — possibly a child although she couldn't even say whether it had been male or female — was gone. Realising she was wearing only knickers and a cropped white top, Aisha withdrew into the little room and wondered whether she could locate the primitive washing facilities she had used the night before; she was sure they were on the other side of the courtyard, but behind which door? Reluctant to barge into someone's bedroom by mistake, Aisha decided she would just have to wait for the household to stir and reached for the novel she had begun as they left Damascus the previous day.

They had set off for the border towards the end of the morning, after Aisha had had a final walk in the old city, sitting for half an hour by the fountains in the garden of the Azm Palace. When she had climbed into the back of the Volkswagen, she had not immediately realised that something was going on between Fabio and their driver, Mahmoud, who was taciturn
at the best of times. Mahmoud — Aisha felt slightly guilty for being unable to remember his second name — was in his forties, according to Fabio, but looked older, with tobacco-stained teeth and a permanent smell of stale smoke clinging to his old blue suit. He understood basic English but seemed to dislike speaking it, leaving Aisha to communicate with him through Fabio, and the dispute which finally blew up between the two men as they waited to cross the border into Lebanon was conducted entirely in Arabic. They were so absorbed with each other that they didn't notice when flames burst from the bonnet of the vehicle behind them in the queue, which had been moving with agonising slowness. Aisha had to shake Mahmoud by the shoulder to get his attention and even then he merely hawked through the open window and steered the Volkswagen into another line. She turned and watched as the other driver pulled his wife and small daughter to safety, ready to go and help if need be, but half a dozen men clustered round the vehicle and managed to extinguish the blaze with water carried from a standpipe in plastic bottles.

Later, when she returned from a dingy toilet at the back of a supermarket on the Lebanese side of the border, Aisha glimpsed a wad of grubby Syrian notes changing hands. Fabio was blocking her view with his broad shoulders and she saw him pat Mahmoud conspiratorially on the back before turning to offer her a sandwich made of flat bread and salty cheese. It tasted better than it looked, perhaps because Aisha hadn't eaten since breakfast, and afterwards in the car she opened the pretty box of cakes she had bought from Daoud Brothers in Damascus that morning. She offered them round — Fabio shook his head and Mahmoud grunted, then got out of the car to smoke another cigarette — and was biting into the sugary pastry when Fabio remarked casually that there had been a slight change of plan, which involved driving down into the Bekaa valley instead of carrying on across it to Beirut. When Aisha asked why, Fabio said he'd heard that the Americans were paying local farmers to raise cattle imported from Texas instead of growing hashish as they had before the war.

‘Great picture, huh?' he demanded, holding his hands at the sides of his head like horns. When she did not laugh, he tried to cajole her:

‘Aisha, when we went to Bosra you were worried — remember you said
we cannot make a whole book of Roman ruins?'

Aisha pointed out that at the time they'd seen nothing in Syria but temples, theatres and triumphal arches; since then they'd spent three days in Damascus, where she had loved shopping in the souk and Fabio had photographed her in old workshops where silk was still being woven into bolts of figured fabric on Jacquard looms. They'd also stood in the vast courtyard of the Ummayad mosque, almost blinded by sun reflected from the bone-white pavement, and marvelled at its astonishing mosaics of streams, orchards and palaces. If a detour was on the cards, Aisha protested, they should have left Damascus straight after breakfast, instead of having to prolong their journey at the hottest time of day. She could not recall a previous occasion when Fabio had had to struggle to conceal his emotions but she could tell from the shape of his mouth that he was irritated, even though he continued to put his case patiently.

‘All right,' she said in the end, feeling too sticky and uncomfortable to argue any longer, ‘but I want an early night when we get to Beirut — no dinners with tourist officials, OK?' She retied the box of cakes, asking one final question as Mahmoud ground out his cigarette and flopped heavily into the driver's seat:

‘You're sure this is safe, Fabio? Even I know South Lebanon is still occupied.' He turned and gave her a quizzical look, his good humour restored. ‘Yes, it is safe — except when the grape-pickers are shelled by the Israelis.' She began to speak and he grinned.

‘I am teasing you, Aisha, it is not yet the time of the grape harvest. Anyway, do you think our friend here' — he lowered his voice and indicated the driver with an inclination of the head — ‘would take risks for two foreigners?' Mahmoud gave Fabio a sour glance but started the engine and the journey continued in silence for a while.

Aisha had been reading earlier but now she couldn't concentrate and stared out of the car window, surprised by the realisation that after ten days on the road she had absolutely no insight into Fabio's personal life. If he had interests outside war and photography, he kept them to himself; he hadn't even talked much about his experiences in Beirut during the civil war, although it was a photograph taken on the Green Line that made him
famous outside Italy. On one of their first evenings, after Aisha overheard a fluent conversation in Arabic between Fabio and a waiter, she asked if that was when he had learned the language and received the unexpected reply that he'd picked it up when he was stationed in Lebanon with the Italian army. This was a period of his life she knew nothing about, although it explained his appearance — military bearing, neatly-trimmed beard and an apparently endless stock of freshly-laundered khaki shirts. The thought that a travel iron lurked somewhere in his luggage, like a stylist on a fashion shoot, made her smile. Most evenings, he excused himself after supper, presumably to go off to drink in bars on his own or in search of more congenial company — whatever that might be.

According to her Lebanese guidebook, which Aisha opened as they reached Kefraya, the Bekaa valley was really a plateau, a thousand feet above sea level, planted with wheat, vines and orchards. The vineyards around the village were a welcome change from the arid Syrian landscape and she got out of the car each time they stopped, taking pictures with her own camera as Fabio searched in a rather desultory way for cannabis and cattle. Neither materialised but he photographed Aisha as she picked plump white mulberries from an ancient tree, with Mount Lebanon in the background, and with a couple of children — dirt-poor immigrants from Syria, according to Fabio, although the girl was wearing an embroidered dress for which some English mothers would pay a fortune. The child offered Aisha a red flower, which she pinned in her hair, offering in return a couple of the brightly-coloured felt-tip pens she always carried in her shoulder bag on foreign trips.

When they reached mountainous country at the lower end of the valley Aisha expected Mahmoud to turn back, but Fabio exclaimed over the landscape and told the driver to keep going. They continued travelling south-west, stopping next to a precipitous drop where Fabio spent some time setting up his tripod, leaving Aisha to stare across the pinkish hills, suddenly reminded of Greece. It was at this moment that the helicopter's long shadow swooped over them for the first time, drawing a casual glance from Fabio before he returned to what he had been doing.

‘The UN, Syria, maybe the Lebanese,' he said carelessly when Aisha
asked about it. ‘They will not bother with us — tourists,' he added, gesturing towards his equipment, but the chopper returned and circled over them again as he was folding the tripod into the boot.

Shortly afterwards Aisha dozed off, waking with a start to find the car stationary as Fabio and Mahmoud talked with men in uniforms at the side of the road. Spotting that she was awake, one of the soldiers strolled towards the Volkswagen and stared at her through the glass. He was not wearing a blue UN helmet and when he tapped on the window she rolled it down, instantly nervous. ‘Eeng-lish?' he asked, breaking into a smile that showed a chipped front tooth. ‘Eeng-lish, good,' he added, holding up his thumb and giving her a lingering look before strolling back to join his colleagues. On his return to the car Fabio assured her that the soldiers were Lebanese and friendly.