Situation 1 — a hotel story in the desert and hats

…For weeks up in the desert. Running away in the dark, he often had reproached the night for a companion dreamed of already…. Preface (auden cut and misremembered)

So before I write this, after admitting that i misremember the Auden poem, in an office in London after our return and before we leave again actually its her office, and its years later, we are going on holiday for a couple of weeks, (just to remove any narrative suspense), if you were here I would say that’s her making Russian tea for us on a ‘ursday afternoon, whilst I write these words. Writers in exile…

This is how it all began. I bought a battered paperback book from a riverside bookstall. It was warm and dry. They collected me from the Boulougne and we went to the airport by Taxi. The plane was delayed, and it landed and then crashed at an airfield about thirty miles due north of Sagit Aux Hamsat, perhaps ten or twenty miles from the coast. I have never known how far from the coast it was. The woman and I were the only ones left standing. We can’t stay here, she said, they aren’t coming to rescue us, only to kill us. We will have to walk out, walk due north to the coast, I said. Behind us we left the crashed plane, the bodies of the crew and the people who tried to kill us, some were still alive then, her really, as I thought the idea that anyone would want to kill me absurd. I searched for useful things through the wreckage of the plane. Water, tent, veils, walking boots and socks for her and robes. Where do we go? She asked. I think we are about twenty miles from the coast. It might be less. In that direction I pointed north. The sea, water, people live on the coast I explained. I took the hat and blue veil off one of the dead and gave it to her. We left the wreckage of the plane with the desert wind relentlessly blowing grains of sand into our faces. We hid amongst rocks a few miles from the crash site when the attack helicopter flew past towards the wreckage. (The question that remains after all the extraneous information is removed is: In the multiverse in this situation do we usually live or do we die? I imagined we died then just recently I was talking to Sam and he said I was wrong, that they all lived as they needed them alive. Friends are hard to come by for people like us, Sam said.) Days later in the hotel on the coast, whilst she was in the bath and I’m watching her wash herself, we decided that I was collateral damage. It was only then that we talked about who did this to us. But this was a few days before then. Just before dawn as I said we left the plane and walked five miles due north towards the sea, rested in the heat of the day, the desert was mostly sand, rocks and stone. We may have moved like angels over a given expanse of desert, but we were hardly angels and the movement relates to actualities other than those of the the the present. It’s strange looking back from now to that situation given how the anthropocene loves desertification, I imagine the desert presents a mythical recreation of the world, our situation.

It was hard work, but we walked as if in a dream, side by side, one foot in front of the other, a driftwork walking across the baking desert, ghosts escaped from exploring cities. Through our veils and masks we talked a little. With each step we unknowingly became more nomadic, with each step we left the liquid modern behind. With each step in our walk across the desert we became closer. Time was not linear in the desert. With each step a microscopic amount of dust rose into the air to be blown away by the desert wind. The second law of thermodynamics meant nothing, did not apply in this desert. Even in the early morning the sun rising up along the ellipsis was burning. In the mid to late morning we stopped and put the tent up behind a particular large rock, sheltered beneath the tent, sweat was trickling down our faces. In one of the periodic rests I imagined living here all the time, talked with the woman about being Tauregs. Do you like them? she asked. Like is not the word, i replied. I met a few in Mali. I was supposed to be there now. Holiday? work ? Not sure I said, both perhaps. She had taken off her teeshirt and desert robe, and was laying on her back trying to breath coolly. I lay on my back to avoid looking at her. She looked at him and thought he was probably mad. The tattoos, do they have meaning? Her skin. I asked her. Yes, my history is written on my body in ink. Why? she asked for me. Because that is what people in my business in Russia do. Though we didn’t know this in our shelter neither of us were fascists. We stayed in the tent for six hours, sipping water occasionally. Why were you going to Mali? The desert music festival, I was meeting some people there, a Taureg novelist… I was meeting some Russians, she explained, nothing very exciting. Will they be looking for you? Perhaps and you? I doubt it as I was away and nobody knows where I was. I was looking at her again, and wishing we had two tents. She was damp and shiny and worse, for some reason she made me want to laugh. If I hadn’t seen her kill the aircrew I would probably have reached out and apologetically touched her body. Here we were on what I hoped was the edges of the desert. There was nothing else on earth, nothing, no one. Only us. We had been reborn in the desert. It took a long time until the second and third situation for us to lean to trust.

I would like to say we said nothing, wanted nothing. But it was not true then or now. I pretended in the tent that I was simply hot because of the desert. He fell asleep very quickly, I wanted to laugh at him, perhaps it was a sort of evidence: evidence that there was something to understand. There was nothing else to do but wait until the late afternoon before walking north. The wind swept over the tent, almost through it. We lay down, thirsty, lips and faces dry. We ate a pouch of the the the the rations each. sipped water. Even then we were hungry. Neither of us were very verbose in those days, only later, no idea how how long, we had become human beings who had found someone we could talk with. By the time we walked into the hotel a few days later that was already true. It was the middle of the day, two people hiding in a desert colored tent, the sun burning down from the sky, the occasional helicopter flying a hunting sortie looking for us, her probably. Later as the dusk began to fall we packed and began to walk north. Have you done this before? She asked me . Leaf, I said my name is Leaf. Pointing at myself. She smiled, Ludmilla she said touching her chest with her right hand. I have done something similar, less extreme I said. Are we going to be all right, Leaf? She asked him in a tone of voice that made me answer her seriously. I think so, as long as neither of us gets injured and the terrain stays like this, we should reach the coast tomorrow or the day after. Good. she said in slightly slavic accept, at least you weren’t in the french foreign legion. The sound of my laughter on the sand dunes.

So it was in the late afternoon that we rolled up the tent, buried our waste, and walked northwards again with the sun setting in the west and the dark falling. When it became dark we walked in the moonlight occasionally she used her metal torch to illuminate the ground. Do you think the anti-photons have mass ? She asked. As we walked down into the hard surfaces towards the coastal plateau. Yes, they attract the light, I said That first evening we walked for another 5 or 10 miles, before putting up the tent again in the moonlight around eleven in the evening, and rested for the rest of the the night. Are we going to make it Leaf ? She asked again. Yes I told her today or tomorrow we will reach the coast. What else did we talk about in the tent that first night ? We lay in the dark, the silence, we talk about our lives. Do you have a partner? Do you? No we both said. What do you do ? she asks me. If you can’t tell me, don’t. We could die tomorrow. So if your asking for the truth and no lies, we really should wait until the coast. She turns on the torch and is sitting up crossed legged. Yes, I think so, I am, I’d like you to know who I am and to know who you are. To say that at least once in the desert we should be honest. I look at this woman and she said I can only say this if i can see your face. She is smiling at me. I was going to Mali for work. I held my hands up. Wait. Have I ever been truthful, honest with a woman in the past decade or so? No. I can only do this after we get out of the desert, then you can at least make a safe decision after we survive this. I’m not that bad, she said. I wished we were at the coast so I could speak. I’ll protect your back for as long as I can, before I have to run. She says and sips a little water and offers the bottle. This should make me nervous, cautious at least, but as we are being honest I haven’t felt this relaxed for years. We shouldn’t talk about such things whilst in the desert, the sand. the sand. If we make it out.

We are in the dark again. She listens to him sleep. And at dawn began walking again… I think it was four or five hours later In the mid morning when we reached the sea. But no there was there another day of walking and resting in the tent during the middle of the day, sleeping in tent, slowly dying in the heat, and then after walking in the evening, we are tired, exhausted coated in dust, more than anything surprised at how secure we felt in each others company. There is a hot wind blowing dust northwards. Our lips are cracked, our skin coated in dust. After two days of walking its the fourth rest period, in the dark we erect the tent behind the wall of an abandoned farm house. People used to live here before the desert arrived. She said. Her voice is cracked and dry. Not that long ago. Except in China all the worlds deserts are growing larger. Perhaps ten or twenty years ago this was a subsistence farm. I wonder where the people went. To the coast like us. Became refugees, migrants. We’ll get there tomorrow I said to her. Hope so, I only have a few more days of this before I collapse. It was the end of the second day, We both knew neither of us could carry the other and we wouldn’t expect the other to try. I inspected her ankles before we slept and in the morning, before we set off I strapped them with cloth. Neither of us had more than a days walking left in our bodies.

The desert unrolled before us, step by step, as we approached the sea the air began to change. Either way, it was mid-morning when we appeared at the top of the last dune and looked down the slope towards the sea and beyond that along the coastline to a village and the port town in the distance, the cloud of fine sand settling down behind us as we walked. Made it, the man said to the woman. Slowly and carefully they walked down the slope towards the sea. Walking side by side and talking. Now that I look back at our situation i realize that we had discovered how to speak to one another. To speak is to rely on the other. She had the rifle hung over her back, it was the third day. We still had water left, and walked noiselessly over the rock and sand, maintaining the steady pace down towards the sea. Astonishment and wonder, we have found this place, let’s visit it together before hearing in it’s musical silence the white noise of the rising sea levels eating the shore. The shore offered a utopia that is like a park and here on this beach all we need is a map. We have found the beach, the sea. What sea is this? The Atlantic? The Mediterranean ? We didn’t know. Words accelerated, meanings became social again drinking more of what remained of the water, rinsing dust out of our mouths and faces. It was on the beach as I told her “I am so tired” and she responded, “I ache all over”, that I realized how many comforting words and phrases we had exchanged during our walk across the sand desert. She must have thought the same as she put her arm around me. We walked along the line of the beach where the sand and shingle had been impacted into a damp firm surface. And then imperceptibly carved out of the earth, the inanimate stones of abandoned buildings. Baskets left empty by the walls. The habitations do not separate the outside from the inside, in the shadow of the decayed walls plants grow in the cracks of the constructions, bits of bleached grey wood, salty and lime white. Becoming village. Becoming ruins. Soon all traces of the village will have vanished. The architecture, is in this uninhabited part of the village being dissolved by nature. There seem to be be people on the other side of the village. She says. The people by the beached fishing boats are watching us approach. We should keep going, I say to her. Over there their might be a hotel and perhaps… Let’s ask. A bath, water, she interjects, and something nice to eat.. We try talking to the fishermen, who look carefully at these two dusty and dangerous looking people dressed similarly to Tauregs, a woman who has her veil hanging hanging off her face, cracked lips, dehydrated, with a carbine hanging off her back and a man with bags and a rolled up desert colored tent hanging to one side. Are there places to stay there, places to buy clothes? I ask in my broken arabic. There is a woman repairing a fishing net looking across the boat from the shade looking at her. She seems to find the two of us vaguely entertaining and say something in the local dialect to the man. Who tries not to laugh but does. Ludmilla steps forward and puts her hand on my arm, we should walk on. The woman tells us where to go. We walk on following the line of the bay from the village to the port town, hoping for a hotel in the town. It takes an hour to walk there. The exterior is not distinguished from the interior. The buildings are as we walk past them, through them, no longer decaying, collapsing. I find myself limping, exhausted. Neither of us is sure who is supporting the other any longer. The streets of the port town are brown with dust, stones and sand, we walk along the coastline, along the road past the docks. The smell of fish, hanging, drying. A man and a woman, we look half dead, are half dead, she stumbles and I grab her and hold her up, its OK Ludmilla, we made it, to hold her up and then we walk along the streets until we reach the market square, its still empty. She pulls herself upright, I thought I was going to die. she says to me. I know, I did too. I manage to let go of her. I am surprised I can. People are staring. Does it ever rain here, do you think? She wonders at me. I doubt it, I said. In the square she washes her face again with the last of the bottled water. Across the square is the black hotel — fort that we stayed in for a week or more… I wonder if they can dispose of the gun for me, she says… keep the handguns…

…For weeks up in the desert. Running away in the dark, he often had reproached the night for a companion dreamed of already…