Abigail – The Avenging Agent: The agent appears again (41 page)

Karma came out and Abigail yelled to
him:

“Look for the girl and the woman, who
sat facing us, they stole my ring!”

Suddenly, she saw the girl in the crowd
and she made her way to her slowly, so as not to frighten her and laid her hand
lightly on her shoulder.  She pointed to a man carrying a heavy crate, held on
his shoulder with a broad strap, who was shouting:

“Ice cream! Ice cream!”

Abigail called to the man and asked the
child to select the color and flavor, as she scanned the crowds for the
mother.  They were standing between two giant tree trunks, to which fluttering
torn pages were attached with strings.

Karma came up to them, panting for
breath,

“So,” he said.  “What now?”

“I can’t believe she abandoned her
child.  Perhaps she’s not her mother.”  She said.  “Let’s wait for her for a
few minutes.”

Right then, she caught a figure in the
corner of her eye that almost approached them, then, turned around on the spot
to get away.  With two strides, Abigail reached her and grabbed her arm.

“Let go of my arm or I’ll shout for the
guards right now,” the woman hissed.

“No problem, but if I let you go now, I
will take your daughter with me.”

“That’s fine with me!”  She answered
quickly.  “Her name is Uma. She’s six year’s old and the daughter of my crazy
sister.  I don’t mind if you take her.”

“Is that so?  Very well,” Abigail said.

She pinched the woman till she screamed
and said to her:

“I am prepared to buy my ring back from
you.  How much do you want?”

“Ah, now you’re talking, only stop
hurting me!”

“Very well, why not?” Abigail agreed but
when she released the woman’s hand, she trod hard on her foot and blurted out:

“Oh, sorry.”

The woman lifted her hurt leg and
Abigail asked innocently:

“Why don’t you call a policeman?  Are
you frightened I will complain that you stole my ring?”

“Give me five hundred thousand Rials,”
she said quickly when she understood she would not be able to get out of
Abigail’s grasp.

“Pay her one hundred thousand rials,”
Abigail told Karma, as she held on to the thief’s arm.

“I won’t return the ring for such a miserable
sum,” the woman exclaimed and Abigail could not resist laughing.

Karma took out the money and handed it
to the woman. The little girl approached from Abigail’s rear, threw away the
ice-cream cone, then grabbed the notes out of Karma’s hand, before she ran away
and disappeared among the people roaming around the passenger-filled station.
 
Abigail yelled and raised her arm to hit the woman, who immediately declared: 

“Here, take it back, only add something
for me.”

The woman began to fish around in her
clothes slowly and Abigail was sure that she was looking for the chance to get
away and not return the ring she had stolen, perhaps even flee like the child.

“Listen here!  If you don’t give me the
ring right now, I will pull your hijab off your head, tear your blouse and send
you bare-headed and half-naked amongst all these people.  I will also shout
that you stole my money.”

Within seconds, the woman held on to the
ring, threw it on the filthy ground then lifted her foot to step on it but,
Karma bent down and grabbed it.

“God, you are so corrupt,” Abigail
hissed and let go of her hand.

When the woman had disappeared, Karma
and Abigail exchanged glances and sighed.  Abigail said:

”Welcome to Azerbaijan,” and she slipped
the ring back on her finger, noticing how the color turned dark that very
second.

When they left a crowded area of the
station, Abigail sought out a cab while Karma looked out at the high mountains
that surrounded them.  He wondered at the beauty of the scenery around them as
compared to the human ugliness they had met up with today.  The air was filled
with the odor of frying and the calls of peddlers:

“Oh, the aroma is tempting.  Let’s buy
something to eat, I’m starving.”

Behind them, a stall offered kibbeh hamusa,
filled with meat and potatoes.  Abigail pointed to the kibbeh filled with potato.
The courteous vendor stuffed the kibbeh into pitas and served them wrapped in
paper. The stood eating in silence and then returned to the taxi rank.

“Can we get a ride with you to
Shemakha?” Abigail asked the driver.

“We are in Shemakha,” he replied, “where
exactly do you want to go?”

Abigail made an effort to recall the
name of the street that had slipped her mind momentarily and the driver waited
till she looked at her visa and said;

“22 Azar Street.”

Something about the driver reminded
Karma of Robin, the cab driver, who had driven both of them when Abigail was
injured when they fled from the ‘Imam Mosque.’ He noted that Abigail was also
examining the driver and the car.

At first they drove in silence and Karma
took in the passing scenery through the cab windows.

“Are you newcomers?” the driver asked as
he stared at Abigail through the rear-view mirror in front of him.

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean by ‘sort of’?”

“I’ve owned the house for two years, but
we have only now decided to occupy it,” she replied with a smile and the two
dimples in her cheeks, deepened.  Her gaze met with the driver’s eyes in the
mirror and she asked,

“Does that make us newcomers?”

“That really is ‘sort of,'” the driver
replied as he thought what a beautiful woman she was.

“Who do you know there?”

“Oh, Karim and Alice.”  She responded at
once, wondering at her good luck that she had someone to mention.

The driver was impressed: “Is that so?
The Kodor couple?  If I remember correctly, he is an Ambassador to the Middle
East.”  He reached for a newspaper lying between the seats.

“I have the front page of the
newspaper.  Would you like to read it?”  He picked it up and passed it back to
Abigail.

“Oh, the “Yeni Muswat:” Abigail read the
name of the newspaper and laid it alongside her.

“What’s your name?”

“Eliav,” he responded, Ilam Eliav, and
yours?”

“I’m Karma, and this is Naima, my wife.”

Abigail smiled to herself since this was
the first time she had been referred to by the term “my wife” and she had not
yet absorbed it.  She paged through the paper and murmured aloud:

“I wonder how much an apartment in Baku
costs nowadays?”

“Oh, Baku is really very expensive. 
Baku is a very different world.” Eliav said.

“An apartment there can cost twenty to
thirty million Rials.  But you have no idea how luxurious those apartments are,
they’re really like palaces,” he enthused.

“And here, near the mountains?” Karma
asked and glanced back, at Abigail.  The driver blurted out a contemptuous
remark:

“Here, near the Caucasus, an apartment
can cost about two or three million Rials, but it would far less grand.”

“Maybe not as luxurious, but what about
the view?”

You’re right about that, there’s no
comparison.  Most of us live with that view and we are satisfied with what we
have.”

“Don’t tell stories,” Abigail objected,
“you’re not really contented. For example, what about the division of the
country into three regions, and I mean the Ardabil Province, the east and the
west of the country.”

Ow, I see that you are really well-informed,
right?  I won’t deny that I dream and pray that I will see unification before I
die,” he claimed with a tremor in his voice, “and I wish it would come about.”

“What or who does it depend on?” Karma
inquired.

“Listen here, as long as we have the
Iranians standing over us – who knows.”

“Ah, are you afraid of them?”

“It’s not that we are afraid of them,
but rather, that this country is still…” he hesitated for a moment.

“You know, I don’t think it’s a wise
move to go against Iran, nevertheless, I would do anything, with God’s help, to
achieve unification.”

All the while, Abigail paged through the
newspaper and did not interrupt the men’s conversation on the front seats of
the cab.

“Where are you from, originally?”

“I’m a Kurd.”

“You don’t mean to say! Where are you
from?”

“From the Turkish region, I’d like to
tell you that the Kurds also yearn for unification.”

“Now, really, there’s no comparison! 
You don’t have a country and you never will have one,”

At this point Abigail intervened, as she
continued flipping through the newspaper:

“You forget
that
the Kurds are dispersed in the mountains and miserable villages and have
nothing to sell, right?  And here, in Azerbaijan, you have oil, oil, and more
oil. Long Live the little difference!”

The driver burst into loud laughter and
curled his mustache with pleasure as he continued in the same vein:

“That’s right
because there is money involved, a great deal of money and once again, even
more money.”

“If that’s the case, why aren’t you
sitting counting your money instead of driving a cab?”

The driver laughed bitterly,

“Hey, hello, my oil wells dried out.  At
home, there are thirteen mouths to feed and…”

“Do you have eleven children?”

“No, my wife’s parents live with us as
well as my sister with two of her children.”

“In short, an exemplary
bunch
and are you the only breadwinner?”

“Sort of.”

“There’s no ‘sort of,' remember?”

“Ah, my brother-in-law works sometimes,
he earns a few cents here and there, so for lack of choice, I go out with this
cab.”

“So, I understand that the money doesn’t
exactly roll in the streets here,” Karma stated.

“It depends on who you are.”

“Really, who are you?

“Have you visited Baku?  Have you seen
what’s going on there?  I would say that money does roll in the streets there!
Mercedes, Rolls-Royce, Jaguar, gold faucets in the houses – it’s a different
world!”

“So why don’t you move there?”

“Because we weren’t born into the right
family.  All that wealth goes to families owning oil wells. The rest of us are secure
in the knowledge that we were born poor and will also die poor.”

When Karma and Abigail fell asleep, the
driver took the liberty of staring long and hard at the face of the sleeping
passenger in the seat behind him. He whistled and murmured a silent prayer to
the martyrs, Ali and Imam Hussein.
The driver glanced at
Karma to check he hadn’t noticed him admiring his beautiful wife.

The road wound through the high
mountains, came closer and moved away from boulders and wooded slopes and in
front of them were the white, eternally snow-covered mountain peaks. The wind
grew stronger outside and the branches of the trees blew wildly and shook the
overhead electric cables like the strings of a giant harp. When they touched
one another, they set off sparks that fell to the ground, leaving lines of
white smoke.

Abigail opened her eyes and caught the
driver staring at her. She pretended not to notice and when he looked at her
again, she had covered her face with the veil that lay beside her cheek and the
driver immediately turned his gaze back to the road.

Karma also woke up and noticed the
sparks flying all over.  He pointed to them with concern and Eliav explained
that a storm was coming up and electricity outages in the region had already
begun.

“Electricity outages?  Are they common?”

“Yes, very common. I hope you have
enough candles at home and matches, of course.”

When the first houses in the region came
into view, Abigail attempted to recognize the way to her house and a few
minutes later, the driver stopped at a house on the lower slopes of the mountain. 
Abigail screwed up her eyes, unable to recognize anything.  It was so different
from what she recalled and she hoped that the driver had erred.

Karma paid the driver and Abigail moved
away from them, as she went to the building and looked at it.  She had
difficulty recognizing the place and could not even find the entrance. 

“Are you sure this is the house?  Did it
look like this when you bought it?”

“Absolutely not.  For example, I
remember we went in and out through a large entrance and now it has just
disappeared.”

“Come here, there seems to be a gap
between the branches.  Perhaps the entrance was here.”

He held the branches that were entangled
with one another and shook them to separate them.  Abigail pulled out keys that
had a sharp blade attached to them and cut the branches, letting them fall to
the ground. Taking a big step over them, they entered the yard and stood among
the wild plants and dry grass.  Most of the trees were bare of leaves and stood
like skeletal branches for creepers and vines to wind around.