The Lost Sisterhood (9 page)

For some reason, the women started screaming again, and Myrina looked around nervously, wondering where to flee. There were several dark door openings to choose from…. But she never got that far.

From somewhere behind her came a gasping shuffle of heavy bodies, and Myrina spun around to see three enormous men approaching her. Unprepared, she tried to duck away, but two of the men had already
thrown ropes around her as if she were a wild animal, and while Myrina struggled to free herself, the third forced a sack over her head.

As they carried her off, she tried to protest in every language she knew, explaining she had come on behalf of her sister—her poor little sister, languishing in the heat outside. But the dusty sack filled her throat with grit, and her pleas were soon stopped by violent fits of coughing.

In her desperation, Myrina was at a loss to guess where the men were taking her. Hog-tied and blinded, she could not be sure, but it sounded as if they carried her through long corridors full of mumbling voices, down a set of stairs, and down again … before, finally, they dropped her on a hard, cool floor and pulled the sack from her head.

Blinking, Myrina tried to understand the space she was in, but before her eyes had adjusted to the dim, flickering light of a lonely torch, she heard the sound of metal sliding heavily over stone. The men had uncovered a black hole in the floor, immediately at her feet.

Myrina tried to move away, but they would not let her.

Without a word, they shoved her forward over the edge, and she fell with a scream into the darkness.

That corner of the world smiles in my eye beyond any others.

—H
ORACE,
The Odes

DJERBA, TUNISIA

I
WAS YANKED OUT OF OBLIVION BY THE PRODIGIOUS RING OF AN OLD-
fashioned telephone. It was sitting on the bedside table, within arm’s reach, half a world away. “Hello?” I mumbled, still not entirely sure where I was.

“My excuses for ringing so early,” said the chipper voice of the hotel concierge, “but Mr. Ahmed is here.”

“Who?” Only then did I manage to fully drag myself out of the deep well of slumber. According to my wristwatch I had been out for just over two hours, and the filigree of light on the reddish tile floor confirmed that, outside the shutters, darkness had turned to dawn.

“Mr. Ahmed is waiting,” insisted the voice. “He says to come now.”

The hotel still appeared to be asleep around me as I emerged on the portico, woozy from having had my much-needed rest cut so short. Despite being commanded to hurry, I paused for a moment to lean on the banister and breathe in the calmness of the courtyard below. A lonely cat was strutting about silently between the potted plants, its tail signaling ownership; the only sound disturbing the morning peace was the faint whisper of a straw broom against a stone floor.

Only then did I notice the figure lurking in the colonnade near the reception area, directly across the courtyard from my room. Clad in a
long white garment and a head scarf held in place by a cord, the man looked eminently Arabic, and I felt a dash of trepidation when I realized this must be Ahmed.

As soon as I came downstairs, he walked toward me impatiently, as if I had kept him idling here for hours. I stopped uncertainly in the middle of the floor. If this was indeed Ahmed, I thought, struggling against a surge of nausea, it was hard to reconcile his appearance with his presumed affiliation with the dapper Mr. Ludwig and the evident prosperity of the Skolsky Foundation. Seen up close, the whiteness of Ahmed’s robe was compromised by a myriad of stains and rips, and as for the man himself, his murky features were dominated by an unkempt black beard and a pair of cheap plastic sunglasses.

“Dr. Mayo?” He held out a grimy hand.

“Who? Oh—” I was so befuddled, I hesitated longer than I should have. It was only a second or two, I am sure, but long enough for Ahmed to pull back his hand with a grunt of dismay.

“This way,” he said, turning to go.

Too shaken to ask a single question, I automatically followed him through the reception area and beyond, blinking against the bright morning sun as we stepped through the front door.

Outside the hotel, right where the taxi had dropped off Mr. Ludwig and me the night before, was now parked a battered monstrosity that could only be Ahmed’s jeep—if indeed “jeep” was the right word for the vehicle.

“Please!” He held the passenger door open for me, probably more out of impatience than gallantry. “You travel light. That is good.”

I stared at him, blocking the sun with my hand. “Are you saying … we’re not coming back to the hotel?”

Even though I could not see his eyes through the greasy black plastic, I felt them boring into mine. “Did John not inform you?”

“John?” I zipped up my jumper a little further.

“Yes.” Ahmed hesitated, as if he, too, was suddenly questioning our association. “John Ludwig. The man who brought you here?”

“Of course!” I was able to recover a smile. Mr. Ludwig. The man who had promised me academic stardom and five thousand dollars.

“On a good day, it’s a twelve-hour drive”—Ahmed brushed off the passenger seat with his sleeve—”and we’re already late. So, let’s go!”

T
O HIS CREDIT, MY
new escort was considerably more civil by the time I finally emerged from the hotel with my luggage. “I apologize,” he said, putting away some species of cellphone in the folds of his ratty skirt, “but they never told me you were coming in so late. Here—” He took my suitcase and flung it into the back of the jeep, over the roll bar, with surprising agility. “Ready to go?”

As we drove away from the hotel, I was struck by the folly of it all. If, at some prior moment in my life, I had been presented with a questionnaire asking how likely I was to get into a car with a strange man of obscure ethnicity, clad in rags, and allow him to take me to an undisclosed location in a foreign country, I would surely have ticked the “very unlikely” box.

Yet here I was.

Even though it was October, the wind blowing against my face and tearing at my hair was warm and dry—so unlike the cool dampness of Oxford that I felt as completely out of place as if I had arrived in Tunisia by time machine. My hastily packed suitcase held primarily clothes intended for Amsterdam, with a few summer items optimistically thrown in. But this morning, in my haste, I had not had the wherewithal to put on anything other than the jeans and jumper I had worn the day before.

“Coffee?” Reaching behind his seat, Ahmed produced two granola bars and a grungy thermos.

“I’m not really much of a coffee drinker,” I told him.

“Here.” He tossed me a bottle of water instead. “Factory sealed.”

While I ate the granola bar, we crossed the bridge that connected the island of Djerba with the mainland of Tunisia. As we drove inland, away from the coast, the landscape changed dramatically. Without the softening effect of the ocean and the valiant efforts of hotel gardeners, the vegetation was slowly drowning in smooth waves of sand rolling in from the south. Fields, groves, orchards … although too subtle to be discerned by the eye, the creamy tide of the desert was unstoppable,
and the roadside produce stands were dominated by curiously beguiling chunks of sandstone in different shapes and sizes. “Sand roses,” explained Ahmed, when he saw me turning in my seat to look. “Minerals. They form naturally here. The tourists buy them.”

I sat quietly, taking in the vastness of the desert surrounding us, reminding myself that what I could see was but an infinitesimally small drop in the ocean of sand that was the Sahara. Thousands of years ago, these regions had been fertile, with prosperous urban settlements, but Nature had cast a fairy spell and put them to sleep beneath a blanket of fine-grained oblivion that no amount of scholarship could ever hope to remove.

“Do you mind,” I asked at length, “if I make a quick call?”

“As long as you don’t tell anyone where you are,” replied Ahmed. “And you can’t use your own phone. Under any circumstances. Here.” He balanced his coffee cup on the dashboard and reached into a pocket. “Use this one instead. It’s a satphone, so there’ll be some delay.”

Despite the coat of sweat and dirt with which it was dressed, Ahmed’s phone gave me an excellent line to England and to the one person I knew I had to call: James Moselane. Not only was James unsurpassed when it came to pulling strings around college without alerting the wrong people, but the words he had spoken on my doorstep two nights before dared me to believe he cared more about my safety than I had hitherto assumed.

I was aware, of course, that James would be none too pleased with my absconding, and was frankly relieved when his voice mail came on right away. In the most breezy terms possible, I left a brief message asking him to please, if it wasn’t too much trouble, cancel my classes and tutorials for the week. Preferably without Professor Vandenbosch finding out.

When I handed the phone back to Ahmed I spied a smile somewhere within his squirrel’s nest of a beard and chose to interpret it as an opening. “So,” I said, “what sort of man is Mr. Skolsky?”

“Mr. Skolsky?” Ahmed screwed the cup back on the thermos and pitched it over his shoulder, into the back of the jeep, where it landed with a clang in a heap of propane tanks. “No idea. I’ve never met him.”

I looked out at the desolate landscape and saw a boy driving a flock of goats across a salt plain. “But you work for him?”

“Let’s just say they hire me for … special jobs.”

Despite his dismissive manner, Ahmed intrigued me. He was evidently a paradoxical sort of person with his Bedouin appearance and fairly Western manners. Take away the accent, and his English was suspiciously colloquial. In fact, I was beginning to harbor a suspicion that he was simply some kooky American with a penchant for dressing up when his phone rang and he answered it in rapid-fire Arabic.

“Is something wrong?” I dared to ask, after he hung up.

“When you are dealing with government, how can anything ever be right?” he grumbled, his fingers drumming on the steering wheel. “But no, it’s okay. We are just strategizing about where to cross the border.”

For no particular reason, my pulse broke into a gallop. “What border?”

Ahmed shook his head. “Dr. Mayo, we are in Tunisia, driving west. Don’t they teach geography in that fancy school of yours?”

F
OR HER TENTH BIRTHDAY,
Rebecca had received a giant jigsaw map of the world from some divorced aunt whose presents were always a bit perverse. She had not been allowed to put it together at home; apparently, the one-thousand-piece folly would have taken up too much space in the humble parsonage.

As we had done with so many other subversive items in months past, we ended up taking the puzzle to Granny’s apartment in the attic. We laid it out on the floor beneath the gable window and began by separating the edges from the rest of the pieces. Come dinnertime we had only really managed to put together the four corners and a few bits in between.

When we returned the next day after school, the jigsaw puzzle was lying, fully completed, on the hobby table in the middle of the room.

“Goodness me!” exclaimed Rebecca, clutching her mouth with
graceful affectation and sounding very much like her mother. “Did you do that all by yourself, Mrs. Morgan?”

We both stared at my grandmother, who was sitting in her usual armchair, staring blankly out the window, one of her crossed legs kicking rhythmically at nothing in particular. A little upset with her for taking away Rebecca’s pleasure in assembling her own birthday present, I said, “How
could
you?”

Granny shrugged. “It was easy. But the map is wrong—”

“No.” Rebecca crawled up on a chair to admire the puzzle from above. “It’s perfect. Look, Diana … she even did the oceans!”

“It says here”—Granny stood up at last, waving the lid of the box—”that it is a world map. But it isn’t.” She gestured at the puzzle. “That world is wrong.”

“Really?” Rebecca was intrigued. “How so?”

Even before Granny began to articulate her observation, I knew we were in for some convoluted absurdity that would leave me cringing. I did not mind it so much when she and I were alone together, but it pained me whenever I saw that look on Rebecca’s face: the look of extreme politeness that comes from finding oneself face-to-face with insanity.

“Firstly,” began Granny, leaning over the puzzle with a frown, “what are we to make of this nonsense over here?” We both followed her finger.

“You mean … America?” asked Rebecca, her eyes round with bafflement.

“I mean all of it—” Granny made a sweeping gesture at the New World in general. “And this”—she pointed at the Statue of Liberty—”belongs over here.”

Rebecca and I followed the path of her finger once again and saw her placing the famous monument in Algeria.

“I don’t think so, Mrs. Morgan,” said Rebecca in that confident voice of hers, which I so envied. “You see, this is the Sahara Desert. Nothing much happens there. Unless I am much mistaken—”

“You are!” Granny bent forward abruptly, as if to catch the puzzle
in midtransformation. “This is all a cover-up. Three camels and nothing else? Ridiculous! Don’t you see?” She tapped a knuckle at the border between Tunisia and Algeria. “We were born here. This is where it all began.”

“What did?” asked Rebecca, oblivious to my tugging at her sleeve. “Are you saying you were born in Algeria? You don’t
look
Algerian. Not that I have ever
seen
an Algerian—”

A spasm of pain went across Granny’s face. Rebecca, of course, did not know that the question of my grandmother’s origins was taboo in my family, because my grandfather—bitter old man that he was—had taken it all with him to the grave. As for Granny herself, she was so confused and erratic that no one except me ever bothered to ask her directly about anything. Regardless of the subject, my parents consistently dismissed her utterings as being “merely the medicine speaking” or “what you’d expect from someone who’s gone through
that.
” They never explicitly referred to the lobotomy when I was present; had I not seen the word in print on the papers in my father’s desk that day, years later, snooping with Rebecca, I might never have known.

Sadly, while she was still with us I never fully understood the reason behind Granny’s partial amnesia, her sudden fearfulness, and, at times, her mortifying childishness. To me it was primarily a matter of will; if she had really wanted to,
of course
she could remember her childhood. And it frustrated me to tears that there was so much she—in my understanding—refused to share with me.

Where did it all come from, that uncommonly wide mouth and those changeable North Sea eyes I had so obviously inherited from her? I wanted desperately to be able to anchor the narrative of who I was in a nation of people just like us—tall, dreamy, with hair the color of ripe rye—instead of feeling, as I often did, that she and I were a pair of disoriented aliens trying to blend in with narrow-minded earthlings.

“I think,” said Granny, poring over Rebecca’s jigsaw puzzle once more, “I remember being here.” She held a hand over Crete, then mainland Greece, wiggling her fingers as if trying to sense some invisible current. “Or maybe it was over here.” Her hand moved to western
Turkey and continued north into Bulgaria and Romania. “I wore fur clothing. Once we were eleven children sharing one egg. I also remember—”

“What kind of egg?” Rebecca had to know.

The question tore Granny out of her trance, and she looked at us both with an expression of disenchantment. “I don’t know. A chicken egg, I suppose.”