The Messenger (3 page)

The whole morning has been like one extended shock treatment, everything moving fast, and having exchanged the ticket, she feels like she’s a little more in control.

Giving in to her nervousness, she ambles around, from gift shop to newsstand. Stares at rows of candy bars, memorabilia, T-shirts with German colors. Not really seeing anything, but turning her face away, still looking for a place to hide. She is still doing that, she thinks.

She is still a child, deep down. Too easily lulled by novelties. Still realizing the meaning of things long after they’ve occurred. Distracted sometimes like any young person, and missing clues that should have been obvious. She had been telephoned for a medical interview, given instructions to taxi halfway across Rome to have a little place scratched on her shoulder and a droplet of vaccine placed on it. An
inoculazione
, the nurse called it. It was the woman’s first in twenty years of nursing. An older nurse was helping her by looking in on the procedure. “You’re traveling soon?” she asked Daria.

“To Brazil. To visit my fiancé,” she says without hesitation, and the two women laugh. She leaves with instructions not to scratch or pick at the scab that forms. Afterwards there will be a scar, like actors had in the old movies. And the older nurse laughs.

At the time it all went right over her head. It was a strange afternoon, and this is what it meant, and she hadn’t even noticed because of course she was going out and was already planning her night.

But everything is different now. Everything happening suddenly, and now she’s … scared. Of course she is. And ashamed of her fear. Trying to turn her back on everything. She wills herself to calm down. Takes long, slow deep breaths as she scans the newspapers and magazine racks looking for a clue—
Why now?

Why is she preparing to board this plane, on this particular day?
It’s late in September, there’s no special anniversary to celebrate. No great atrocity, assassination, or coup d’état that must be avenged
today
. There are governments on the verge of chaos all over the world, too many places where the armies have come into the streets. So … why is today the day she must go?

She cannot figure it out. Finds her way back to a mostly empty section of seats, an island of solitude where she can close her eyes. She gets the iPod Nano out of her bag, plugs in some long trance that reduces the world to a windy silence, and transforms her into a tired passenger at the start of a long day. Like everyone else.

She may have slept. She can’t tell. Everything seems so artificial around her. None of it is helped by the architecture, which can best be described as space-colony. On the television above her head, a racing car is pinwheeling off the track until it splinters against a wall of tires. Announcements are made in a quartet of languages. When it’s time, she is allowed to board early because of her class, and finds 4A, on the right side of the aircraft.

Lufthansa Flight 7416 is everything their marketing department promises. Daria is not quite petite, but she knows that swaddled in a Lufthansa blanket, fully reclined, wearing a set of noise-cancelling headphones, and resting on a puffy antibacterial pillow, she’ll look as comfortable as a sleeping kitten.

She buckles in, presses her skull back against the headrest, and lets her eyes roam the indecipherable controls arrayed around her seat. She can’t focus on anything. When will the police suddenly appear in the aisle? She’s suddenly nervous. She can’t take her eyes off the floor and stares at her fingernails, the carpet, afraid to make eye contact with the passengers taking their seats around her.

The safety information is explained. She gazes at the card as if it matters. There are awkward-sounding bumps and collisions in the cargo bay of the plane. The air is chilled, then suddenly turns stuffy. She tries to catch her breath, but she can’t. Her hands are clammy when she presses them to her cheeks.

The doors are closed.

The airplane begins to slowly taxi away from the gate. The pilots make their announcements. She is sweating. For a moment she feels sick and checks to make sure there’s a paper bag in the seat in front of her. The attendants make one last voyage down the aisle, then buckle in.

She presses her hot cheek to the window. Slashes of gray pavement and artificial turf. Engines screaming, the gigantic airplane rolls down the runway. Now it’s too late for her to get off; strapped in, she’s a prisoner as they bump along. Then, as if the pilots have gathered their courage, they rush forward and, somehow defying the laws of nature, lift into German airspace.

Across from her a woman, very stylish, opens the Lufthansa magazine and looks over with a smile to acknowledge their mutual brownness. Daria nods, and fans herself. The woman’s smile broadens.
“Sie bringen uns gleich Champagner. Alles wird gut.”
A lilt to the voice, the curve of the vowels. Her earrings alone are worth ten thousand euros, Daria suspects.

“Grazie,”
she replies. The woman smiles and returns to her magazine.

For a moment she watches the glamorous woman paging through the magazine, evaluating, rejecting, considering, judging. Exercising her taste.

She realizes that for a few moments the shock has vanished. Is it just human contact? She breathes. Just as predicted, the champagne arrives, served to her by a dark-haired German boy.

Lufthansa Flight 7416 with its 372 passengers has departed in the morning. From Berlin it is direct and expensive. First class, very much more so. There will be a meal coming, but the boy hands her a blanket in case she might want to turn in early or if the air-conditioning is too much. He’s very handsome and eager to please. Maybe he’s new to the job and, like her, a little awkward; trying to cover by acting cool, his smile coming and going as he works the aisle.

Once up in the air, everything is okay, everything is fine. You can see it in the weary, relaxed gait of the flight attendants as they go up and down the aisles taking drink orders. When the boy serves them
champagne, the stylish woman looks over. Raises her glass.
“Cin cin,”
she says.
“Salute,”
Daria murmurs. They both take discreet sips. The champagne is cold, refreshing. Perfect. Just what she needs.

The climb has been straight and powerful and now they are comfortably near the stratosphere. So far it’s been just what you would want in air travel—uneventful. She takes another fizzy sip. But only moments after she has started to relax, a long series of tremors ripple beneath the wings and unsettle the plane.

On the screen in front of her, there is an animated silhouette of an airliner describing a yellow arc across a leaf-green Europe. These days the volcano is quiet, and now the jet is above Norway, almost at the coast. Soon they will break away and Lufthansa 7416 will find herself crossing an expanse of deep blue with only sprawling Greenland to look forward to.…

The spells of turbulence, like Daria’s panic, come and go. Sometimes the stillness is worse.

She should be riding in the back like a refugee or a soldier. Well, she has been a refugee, but now she is a soldier first of all. Yes, a soldier fighting a war. And at the moment she is fighting it quietly. Nervously. Yes, okay … all that’s admitted. Her excuse for the nerves is that it’s the flying, simply the flying. Those unanticipated bumps one encounters at five hundred miles an hour.

She is Signorina Daria Hirsi Vermiglio, but that too is a lie.

She’s supposed to be invisible, but now she is fanning herself, enjoying the champagne and a laugh with her anonymous friend across the way. There are movies on the screen that she quickly learns to access, and between pauses in their conversation, both of them touch their way through the menus. Most of the films she’s seen, but there is always something interesting. Her eye falls on a documentary about Le Corbusier … but she doesn’t want to think. Not now.

And wouldn’t it be more normal to chat with the woman, to become her companion for the trip? If her strategy is to be invisible, shouldn’t the best tactic be to act in an ordinary way? Go ahead, have a conversation with a stranger, why not? It will only look natural.

It turns out that the handsome woman is Sinhalese, born in Goa but raised in Sri Lanka and married to a German for many years. “Travel is hard,” the woman says, “and the only tolerable thing is to go first-class. We are slaves. We chase money, we chase money all over the world. Poof!” She makes a grabbing motion with one hand at the invisible money and raises her glass.

“Do you fly a lot?” Daria asks.

“No, not really. Only a few times a year. Every time the airlines say that it is all new. Everything new and supposedly better.” They have switched to English. The woman has lived in London for thirty years and is fluent. “But really it’s the same, and now I hate everything about it. They cut costs and it’s more and more dangerous every day—oh, I’m sorry.” The woman reaches across the aisle and, before Daria can react, pats her arm—the fingers gentle against the fabric of her jacket. It’s a touch that will kill her.

They both laugh at Daria’s apparent nervousness, and after a few minutes, when their conversation takes a lull, Daria curls up in her blanket with the champagne flute. She is just not ready, she thinks. Everything is happening too fast.

Shock. Looking at the little cartoon airplane lost out there in the wide blue.

She watches one of the in-flight movies; produced in Hollywood, but carefully designed to appeal to all the major markets. It’s the kind of movie she’s seen a hundred times, the same story but with minor variations. It is violent but no one bleeds. There are no curses, or rather none you couldn’t hear in any school yard. It is realistic, but everyone is beautiful. It is relevant, but there is not a word about Israel. Or Chechnya. Or Algeria. Never anything about Algeria. Or the camps. Or Sudan. Somalia. Nothing really about them. Indonesia? Jordan, Lebanon? Might as well not exist, she thinks. Gone. Vaporized. First you are erased from their culture, and then you’re erased from their maps, then finally you’re just erased. Isn’t that what they are doing? Isn’t that what they are always boasting?
We’ll pave your fucking country
.

She’s heard that.

And she’s carefully learned the definition of “jihad”: struggle, striving. And when they are trying to kill you, you fight back. That’s the progression, the ramping up of an individual’s commitment. Common to all of humanity, why is it so hard to understand?

The beautiful boy comes around with her meal. The Germans are noted for their breakfasts; there are eggs, potatoes, some kind of sausage, a twist of orange and some bits of melon. A packet of brittle toast, a tiny cup of yogurt. The coffee is poured from an elegant silver service. She eats and watches the movie. The two stars are trying to decide if they love each other enough to go through with the rest of the plot. She thinks she knows the answer.

Quietly she smiles and eats, listens to the ridiculous dialogue. She cannot stop thinking about simulations, about the masks behind the masks. It is the shock. The mental shock. Jangled, people would say—“You were shaken up by events, jangled.” Sometimes the jangling lasted the rest of your life. But now she feels as if life
is
a movie, planned out, edited, and prescreened in the eye of God. Looking around the huge airliner, her certainty grows. She can feel it in her bones. It is the physics of life, a ball running down a board of pegs toward its ultimate hole, the destination decided just as surely as God knows she will eat the last of her scrambled eggs. It has all been written long ago.

The leading man reminds her a little of Tété, and that is maybe her one regret. Even as she lets herself float back to those sunlit happy hours, she realizes that she is just giving in to … what? Juvenile nostalgia. Romance. That’s the fun of it, she supposes. An imam would say that the fun of it was exactly what was wrong. Men and Women were not intended to have fun, but to mirror the creative act of God. To work and have children, to further God’s plans. Fun has no place in it. Fun, flirting, romance, it is all based on the attraction of the illicit. She knows that.

Still, he was so sweet.

There is an announcement that punctuates the soundtrack. The pilot repeats it twice, once in German, again in accented English. They are climbing to avoid the turbulence.

It is time to work. She goes to the little galley where the first-class attendant is brewing up more coffee. She asks for water and is given a plastic cup. Affecting to help out, she pours the water herself. It comes from an ice-cold plastic bottle. She runs her hand across the top of the cart where the drinks are prepared, leans against the counter and searches for a napkin, touches the attendant on her shoulder by way of thanks. Steps into a vacant washroom, and touches everything. Runs her fingers through her hair, stares at her reflection in the mirror.

There is no tear in her eye. The wide unlined brow, her nose small and straight, but mostly it is her eyes—dark and dancing. She half-turns and looks at herself over her shoulder. Yes, she can dazzle with that smile, and her eyes seem to gleam. A small mouth but full lips. The face of death, they will call it, she thinks.

Ostensibly to get some exercise, she walks the length of Lufthansa 7416. Her hands travel from seat back to seat back as she keeps balance. This is for you, Amir, this is for you, Ra’id, this is for Mother, for my lost childhood, this is for all the people in my building, on my street … for the ones living in tents, for the times of starving, and all the ones who were killed or will be.

At the rear of the plane, she steps into another washroom and runs her hands over everything; she flushes, fondles a paper towel but doesn’t use it, grasps the faucets, inspects every surface, every knob, bends down and breathes on the door latch as she opens it, and then strolls through the aft galley and asks for another glass of water.

The flight attendants mostly ignore her while they continue chatting in feathery, accented German. They are her opposite in every way. Golden-haired wraiths, hyper-conscious of maintaining their thinness. The German phrases elude her, but in her new state of heightened shock she has the gift of fully imagining their conversations. There is no glamour anymore in flying. The wages are getting lower as too many airlines compete. Safety standards are eroding, and the union has no clout. These girls will get out of the racket as soon as they snag a husband.