I’ve weathered (that old cliché) a few spells of ‘turbulence’ in the hundreds of flights I’ve survived. There was never in my memory anything like this. Lorrie feared for me: a hijack. This was a hijack by the elements. Whatever force had us wouldn’t let go, no escape by gaining height or lowering it. There were crashes sounding from the galley. Two cabin attendants collided and the one fell across a passenger’s head. The commands from the cockpit became a gabble. Behind the seats where the woman and I were strapped, trapped, someone was vomiting in heaving waves and gurglings. The plane dropped as under a great blow and then bounced this side and that. It wanted to rid itself of us, our laptops, our headsets, our dutyfree, the caverns weighed with bags of possessions we lug around the world as if our life depends upon them.
Our life.
The voice from the cockpit made itself heard through broken-up amplification, the captain was going to attempt an emergency landing at a military airfield whose name I recognised as a sign that we had been blown off course. A woman was screaming, there were sobs and voices calling out for help — from whom, where? — praying — to whom, for what? My heart thudded wildly Lorrie’s fear: now mine. I suddenly realised that while everyone was appealing in the solidarity of human terror to everyone else, the woman beside me and I had not looked to each other, had not spoken. So I turned to her.
Incredible.
She was sitting calmly with one hand loose upon the other, not clutching — the seat the armrests anything — as I was. She was letting the fury of the plane slap her about, her lips at rest, no grimace of the animal fear that was everyone’s face. She flicked her quiet open eyes to acknowledge my presence, this unknown human who was going to die in intimacy beside me. My last woman. And then she turned directly to me and I heard again the voice that had spoken only once, two words, Good evening.
— It’s all right. The plane will somehow land. You’re safe. Everyone.—
I didn’t know if she was unbelievably courageous, duped by some religious faith, or mad.
She spoke again, her head resisting the tumultuous pulls against her body. — It won’t happen. Because I’m aboard. This last year I have to tell you I have tried three times, three different ways, to end my life. Failed. No way out for me. So it seems I can’t die, no flight I take will kill.—
THE order came from the cockpit to assume the emergency landing position, heads bowed over knees. The plane struck the earth as if it would crack the rock of the world. We descended in a fairly orderly way — those desperate to live pushing through women-and-children-first, I restraining the instinct — by slides let down from the plane’s sides. Banners of flame unfurled about it behind us as we ran. In the confusion I did not see whether the woman was among us, the saved, all of us.
I’m sure she was.
mother tongue
BUT everything’s by chance — how else would she ever have met him? Been here.
THEY fell in love in her country. Met there.
A taxi he had taken skidded into her small car. It was raining the way Europe weeps in winter, and the taxi driver slammed out of his vehicle and accosted her from the other side of her window, streaming water as if dissolving in anger. His passenger intervened, exonerating her and citing the weather as responsible. The damage to taxi and car was minimal; names, addresses and telephone numbers were exchanged for the purpose of insurance claims. — A hoo-hah about nothing. — He said that to her as if this was something he and she, in their class as taxi patron and private car owner would rate it before the level of indignation of the Pakistani or whatever the taxi man was. The passenger spoke in English, native to him, but saw through the blur of rain the uncertain nod of one who has heard but not quite understood. He didn’t know a colloquial turn of phrase to translate the passing derision into that country’s language.
How he came to call her had to do with a document he was to sign, as witness; couldn’t have been an opportunity to follow up any attraction to a pretty face, because the rain had made hers appear smeary as the image in a tarnished mirror. So they met again, over a piece of paper in a café near the lawyer’s office where she worked. It was of course still raining, and he was able to make conversation with his cobbled-together vocabulary in the country’s language, remarking that you didn’t have days on end like this where he came from; that’s how she learnt: from Africa. South Africa. Mandela. The synapses and neurons made the identifying connection in the map of every European mind. Yes, he had picked up something of her language, although the course he’d taken in preparation hadn’t proved of much use when he arrived and found himself where everybody spoke it all the time and not in phrase-book style and accent. They laughed together at the way he spoke it, a mutual recognition closer, with the flesh-and-bone structure, shining fresh skin, deep-set but frank eyes, before him in place of the image in the tarnished mirror. Blond hair — real blond, he could tell from experience of his predilection for Nordic types, genuine or chemically concocted (once naked, anyway, they carelessly showed their natural category). She knew little of his language, the few words she remembered, learnt at school. But the other forms of recognition were making communication between them. They began to see each other every day; she would take his calls on her mobile, carried into the corridor or the women’s room out of earshot of others in the lawyer’s office. There among the wash-basins and toilet booths the rendezvous was decided.
He worked for one of the vast-tentacled international advertising agencies, and had got himself sent to her country by yet another kind of recognition; the director’s, of his intelligence, adaptability, and sanguine acceptance of the need to learn the language of the country to which he would be sent as one of the co-ordinators of the agency’s conglomerate hype (global, they called it). He was not a copywriter or designer, he was a businessman who, as he told her, had many friends and contacts of his generation in different enterprises and might — as they were all on the lookout for — move on to some other participation in the opportunities of their world. By this he also meant his and hers, both of them young. He saw that world of theirs, though they were personally far apart geographically, turning round technology as the earth revolves round the sun.
She shared an apartment with a girl-friend; the first love-making was in his apartment where he lived, alone, since coming to Germany some months past. He had had his share of affairs at home — that surely must be, in view of his composed, confidently attractive face, the lean sexual exuberance of his body, and his quick mind; by lapse of e-mails and calls between them, the affair with someone back there was outworn. The girl met by chance probably had had a few experiments. She spoke of ‘a boy-friend’ who had emigrated somewhere. Of course she might just be discreet and once they were in their sumptuous throes of love-making, what went before didn’t matter. Her flesh was not abundant but alertly responsive — a surprising find. He’d thought of German female types as either rather hefty, athletic, or fat.
But it was her tenderness to him, the lovingness in the sexuality that made this foreign affair somewhat different from the others, so that — he supposed it’s what’s called falling in love — they married. In love. Passed that test. An odd move in his life, far from what would have been expected, among his circle at home. But powerful European countries are accustomed to all sorts of invasions, both belligerent and peaceful, and this foreign one was legal, representing big business, an individual proof of the world’s acceptance of Germany’s contrition over the past. He was suitably well received when she took him to her family, and as a welcome novelty among her friends. With their easy company he became more fluent in the to-and-fro of their language. And of course it was the language of the love affair and the marriage that had been celebrated in true German style, a traditional festivity which her circle of friends, who had moved on to an unceremonious lifestyle, nevertheless delightedly animated around the veiled bride and three-piece-suited groom. His was a personality and a growing adeptness in exchanges that, in their remaining months there, made Germany a sort of his-and-hers.