Submergence (14 page)

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.
¹
The 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.

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.