‘I like coffee.’
‘– and you love talking about it,’ she said. ‘I know.’
‘I like –’ he began to say, but she stopped him. ‘You like to sit in the front on a bus but you like trains, not buses. You hate flying and always order the kosher meal so you get served first and you always ask for a window seat. You try not to drink on flights so you don’t have to go to the toilets and you always get dehydrated when you fly. You don’t like taking pictures, think ordering take-away on the phone is an extravagance, you like wine but prefer beer, you don’t like shopping for clothes –’
‘Who does…’
She didn’t smile. ‘You like to stand in your underwear in the lounge with your hands on your hips and survey your domain. You get very possessive about your personal space. You don’t like phones. You gave your penis a nickname when you were thirteen –’
Shocked: ‘I never –’
‘And you called it Hermann after the commander of the Luftwaffe, which only you think is funny –’
‘Well, that’s –’
‘You like eating standing up by the sink. You like eating chillies even though you always suffer the next day. You dance in front of the mirror when you think no one’s looking. You like to bring your upper lift up against your nostrils and smell it. When people ask you where you’re from you like to say you come from Japan. Also when they ask where you go. A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’ is your favourite joke. You like soup only when you’re sick. You smoke too much –’
‘Yes, you did say. I –’
‘And you know it’s bad for you but you still won’t stop.’
The sudden silence between them was like a toppled glass: he was afraid of it breaking, knew that when it would, the exploding fragments would hurt. In the still air there was the ghostly echo of battle helicopters, passing. The loose lock of hair was still across her face. He reached out and his fingers touched her skin and he pushed the lock away. Her skin was warm. He could smell the faintest trace of patchouli. He couldn’t read the look in her eyes.
‘I remember the explosion,’ she said, in a small voice. ‘At least, I think I do. Or maybe it’s just that, knowing there was an explosion, my mind reconstructed it, a memory that isn’t real – but how do you know?’ she said, almost pleading, it seemed to him. ‘How do you know what’s real? All of us, imagining lives like something out of a screen.’
‘You were a club singer,’ he said, remembering the Blue Note, the stage, her singing. She shook her head – tired? angry? – said, ‘I worked in a cinema. A laugh died, still-born. ‘And you –’
‘I’m a detective,’ he said.
She hit him.
He almost fell back. He had not expected her to do it. Her fists were on his chest, pounding him. She was almost a head shorter than him. ‘You’re –!’ She said the name again, the name that meant nothing to him, not unless he let it. She said it again and again, her small fists beating a tattoo across his chest.
He reached out. His arms engulfed her, pushed her close to him, and she slowly subsided against him, warm and real in his arms. He buried his face in the crook of her neck and felt the blood coursing through her.
‘Why Vientiane?’ he said then, thinking of the life he had been dreaming, and she said, ‘Do you remember? We always wanted to go there, and never did… somewhere so remote and secluded, where nothing ever happened and it was always warm…’
‘I promised you you’ll never be cold again,’ he said, and she shivered in his arms. ‘I am always cold,’ she said.
He held her. He wished he could keep holding her forever.
‘You have to choose,’ she said softly. Her breath tingled on his skin. ‘You have to choose what to be. When you’ve been stripped of everything: a name, a face, a love – you could be anything. You could even choose to be yourself.’
He held her close to him, there on the hills above the city, as the sun slowly drifted downwards across the sky. Soon it would be dark, the last traces of sunlight fading in a multitude of colours on the horizon.
‘I know,’ Joe said.
EPILOGUE
puddles of rain
——
In the rainy season the unpaved side-streets of Vientiane turn to mud, and water stands still in flowerpots and discarded car tyres. The whole city seems to reach upwards then, green shoots rising up from the ground, spreading branches and leaves, like open palms waiting to cup rainwater between their fingers. When it rains it feels as if a sea had been upturned over the city, and the rain falls and falls in a never-ending cascade. In the crowded markets the ground is paved with packed newspapers and feet squelch as they pass under the market’s awnings. Frogs look hopefully out of their deep cages, sensing an escape. Along the Mekong, sandbags line the bank, piled high on top of each other, a makeshift barrier against flood.
When it rains it drowns sound. There is silence in the rain, a sort of white noise. It can be very soothing. Before it rains the wind picks up, dragging clouds with it, like an angry other pulling reluctant children by the hand. The sky darkens quickly. In the nights apartment on Sokpalunag, he liked to count the seconds between thunder and lightning, measuring the distance of the storm.
The mornings were warm and bright and as he walked down the road he could see his face reflected back at him from the many puddles. He took to wearing a raincoat and a wide-brimmed hat he’d picked up somewhere, and he cut down on his smoking. His face looked to him as it always did. The air was fresh and clean, pregnant with rain.
In the mornings he liked to walk the half-hour distance from his apartment to the morning market, turning right on Kouvieng, past early-morning monks collecting alms and the women who fed them, past the dogs that sometimes barked at him, past naked chickens rotating slowly on a stick, past the bus station and the vegetable market and the traffic lights and into the small coffee-shop on the corner.
He would sit there, drinking the bitter mountain coffee, and look out of the glass windows at the people coming and going from the market, lives flickering like the light of distant stars as it passes through the atmosphere.
Later, rising, he would walk the short distance to his office by the black stupa, climb the short flight of steps and sit at his desk. There was a fifth of whisky in a drawer but he seldom touched it anymore. There were never any clients, which suited him fine. He would sit in his office and stare out of the window, waiting for it to rain. Sometimes when it rained the clouds parted, for just a moment, and sunlight shone through, and at those times he thought he saw a girl standing there, in the place where sunlight pierces rain, looking up at his window, but then the clouds would close again high above and she would be gone.
OSAMA
Copyright © 2011 Lavie Tidhar
The rights of Lavie Tidhar to be identified as Author of this Work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in printed book form by PS Publishing Ltd. in September 2011. This electronic version published in August 2011 by PS by arrangement with the authors. All rights reserved by the authors.
FIRST EBOOK EDITION
ISBN 978-848631-80-9
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
PS Publishing Ltd
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Contents
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
PART SIX