“You understand?”
He looked hopeful. I leaned back, as if taking something in. I didn’t want to disappoint Yusef, he was my friend – no, more than that – and I didn’t want to hurt him.
“You mean Hamas, Yuse? Or do you mean Hezbollah?”
I thought I saw a flicker of acknowledgement, or it may have been relief.
“My friends know everything.”
“I’m sure they do, Yuse, I’m sure they do. Why do you think I’m in danger now?”
He was very calm and his shoulders had slumped. He was speaking to me as if I was an intimate, I realised, and in that moment I knew that he’d never done that before, not with me. I was both excited by the thought and a little saddened that it meant all the time I’d known him he’d been keeping his distance. He looked at me now with no defence.
“Because if it wasn’t an Arab operation, whose was it?”
He wasn’t expecting an answer, just sharing the thought.
He went on: “It was meant to look like you were taken by Palestinian freedom fighters. But you weren’t. What does that tell us?”
I didn’t care. All I could think wildly was that Yusef believed me. I was believed. He knew I’d been held in that room. I just wanted to hang round his neck and be rocked.
But I said, “I don’t know. What does that tell us?” My mouth was dry.
“It means someone was trying to make it look like us. It means that someone wanted to make it look like Israel’s enemies had taken you. Maybe even had killed you.”
I was watching his face closely. He looked more serious than I’d ever seen him, even more than when Asi had gone missing.
“Yuse, there’s something I have to tell you.”
I reached out and took his hand.
“I killed two of them to escape. The two who guarded me at night. I stabbed one and I shot one. It’s made me sick in the head.”
He fixed me with dark eyes and his hand gripped mine. Now his eyes were flitting between mine, examining me. Then one side of his mouth curled up in a smile and he blinked slowly as if it was a bow.
“You are a great soldier,” he said. I didn’t laugh. “And you need to be protected.”
“You believe me, Yusef? That I did that?”
He spoke slowly and carefully now: “I know that you did.”
“Do you? How?”
“I just know you did. It’s the truth.”
The relief broke over me like a wave. I let out a little sob and lowered my head, my spare palm covering my mouth, while I still held Yusef’s hand.
“Why haven’t they killed me already, Yuse, or why haven’t they taken me in, arrested me, I don’t know, loads of sirens and police cars when I reappeared?”
I’d let go of his hand now, so I could put hands to my eyes.
“They don’t need to. You’re not a big enough danger to them, yet. Maybe you’re more value to them like this – they want to follow you, see where you go. Maybe they followed you here. I don’t know.”
“Yuse, I’m really sorry,” I said for about the twelfth time, but this time imploringly, my head to one side, craving absolution. “It was Sarah who told me to come.”
“Don’t be sorry. It’s OK. They know enough about me anyway.”
“Know what about you.” Like that, not a question, more of an acknowledgement.
“It doesn’t matter. Well, it does matter,” he shrugged. “But only because I can keep you safe.”
I had to break the weight of his seriousness.
“I get to stay here for ever? Oh, Yuse, I thought you’d never ask.”
But it didn’t work.
“No, listen, Natalie. We can give you something that’ll keep you safe.”
“And keep you safe?”
He looked down again.
“There are lists. Lists of names. The rest of what you swapped in those envelopes in Jerusalem. It’s what they want more than anything. There are many many lists.”
“I’m sure there are. Let’s have a drink, Yuse.”
And we talked into the night out on our car seat, with great drafts of Lebanese deep red peasant wine, Yusef finally relaxing, the stars slowly turning above us, as if we were lying together staring up at the sky from a flat roof, or a hay rake, or from the back of a swan on a dark lake, or from a wheelbarrow full of weeds.
I slept with Yusef that night. It was inevitable and understood. When the bottles were empty and the night was as still as a promise that there would never be morning, we moved inside, slipped from clothes and between the coarse linen of his bed. It was a large bed and there were heavy ruby drapes hanging the full length of the wall at its head. I wondered if this had been his marital bed, but it didn’t matter.
We lay kissing gently and only occasionally, a smell of fresh wine on both of us, the rustle of bedding tracing gradual and uninsistent body movements. I think both of us dozed for a while. The sex just progressed in its own time, not ours, and the room was glowing with the first of dawn when I finally took his weight on me, running fingers up through the tight hair on his chest. He was beyond gentle – it was almost as though we absent-mindedly made love, or as if we dreamed it.
Looking back, I have wondered whether it ever crossed my mind that I would suffer some flashback horror, panic, push Yusef away, cry as I saw that back room and little divan again. But I had a different body now. I was on a flood tide.
It didn’t even really feel like sex. It was an act of union, a somnolent progression to the inevitability of the night hours. Yes, it was a communion. When he rolled away beside me it was as if my sleeping face in his neck was one and the same act. I watched a ceiling that had now lost its power to be the sky.
