A little later, he brought me some sustenance on a small, orange plastic tray. Some flatbread, hummus, an oily salad of leaves and a tourist bottle of fizzy water with a flip-cap and teat. Wordlessly he dealt with my ablutions again. A single switch lit a central ceiling bulb with a round paper shade. After a while I turned it off, just to see if it worked and was under my control, and let it grow dark. I could hear the drone and sliced air of fast traffic somewhere, but no voices. I lay on my back, my fingers plaited together on my abdomen and thought of the feeding station in Sudan and the weeping doctor. There was no point in considering my own circumstances; the effort was pointless, like starting out in a desert for a location over the horizon, without a map. It wasn’t even worth starting and it would be mortally dangerous to do so.
Morning brought a fresh aspect to the room, the sun lighting the window only by reflection. It would only, I learned, start to catch the sills directly at around what I calculated to be midday or early afternoon. The bearded dead face brought me slices of orange and dates.
Sweat in the night had started to chap the inside of my thighs where my trousers creased, so I moved awkwardly. I stretched against the bare wall and called out facetiously for the window to be opened for some air.
“It’s too small to climb through!” I reasoned loudly.
The bed couldn’t help me reach it as it was screwed to the wall with brackets and an upturned bucket didn’t provide the height. No answer. I had tried the door handle with a gentle and silent turn of the wrist. So far as I could tell, one simple bolt on the outside.
I’d been awake, I thought, perhaps two or three hours, when the motionless day and the rhythms of a solitary bluebottle was fractured by the clatter of new arrivals beyond my door, male voices in the clacking beat of Arabic and dull thumps of furniture supporting the weight of human and metal cargo. The bolt turned and a burly man ambled in, with a head like a waxen orb, long pale shorts with sandals and a light flak jacket. He inspected me as he walked an arc across the room, drawing on a cigarette and watching me, as one who would inspect a second-hand car before purchase.
A younger man, almost a boy, followed, a gun slung over his shoulder, then a troll of indeterminate age, black-toothed and sweating, their driver perhaps, I thought. He wore a loose, rustcoloured turban, that trailed at the back. Odd colour, I thought.
“Hello,” said Burly at last, flatly.
I nodded neutrally. I was striking a balance between truculence and compliance. He stood over me.
“How are you?” I didn’t answer, just stared at the wall. “Do you have all you need?”
“I need to be in Jerusalem,” I said. “There’s a conference I’m attending, you know. They’ll miss me.”
He smoked. “I want you to know that you are of no value to us,” he said, in good English. “We only need you for a little time, maybe to serve a big purpose. Or maybe a long time. Short time, long time, it doesn’t matter. We will use you and throw you away.”
I was looking at his stomach, straight ahead. His shirt was made by a French designer.
“Are you Hamas?” I said pathetically. It was like I was networking at the conference. Silence on his part.
“What do you want me to say?” I said, I hoped tonelessly. “That I’ll cooperate or something?”
He squatted down to look me in the eye and I caught the acrid breath of tobacco, the sweet kind, not the dusty foliage of truckers. He took the pace from his voice, so the words just rode the air from his throat hoarsely.
“We’re going to make you a movie star, Christian lady.”
His eyes darted between each of mine, looking for reaction. Looking back, I now know this was the only moment that I felt the knot at the base of the sternum that precedes crying. The cold fear of physical violence, even the prospect of immediate death, never gave me that feeling again, not this simple room, nor in the other rooms of the flat. I could handle the serious stuff. It was being patronised with the simple imagery of schoolgirl dreams that nearly did it.
“What is this?” he said suddenly, pointing at my eyebrow.
“It’s a scar,” I said.
“Scar? How is that?”
“In a sword-fight,” I said. “You should see the other guys.”
He paused and contemplated me. Then he snorted a laugh and put his hand on my knee to support himself as he stood and the moment passed.
“You know you should never have come back to Palestine,” he said as he turned his back, the boy and the Troll parting to let him out. Then they followed him. The lock snapped and I looked upwards to the ceiling to clear the moisture from the lower lids of my eyes and realised I was praying.
“Dear God,” I was whispering over and over again. “Dear God.” It became a chanted litany as the hours ran from day to night. “Deargoddeargoddeargoddeargod.” A rhythmic, gibbering appeal because there was nothing else to ask, because there was nothing to be understood.
But in the still of that night there was the call of another thought. From a remote hill somewhere, another voice was shouting a single question into the wind. “Deargoddeargoddeargod.” Yet a further, more insistent petition was pressing me: why “back to Palestine”? Why “back”? How much these people knew of me was the background noise to my exhausted despair, like the endless faint dog-bark that carried on the breeze to my high window.
Time passed again and this was to be the routine of my existence in that room over days that turned into
