Flesh

There’s some sort of holdup. Every day they expect to fly out and every day they are told it will be “another twenty-four hours.”They’re staying in a hotel with a swimming pool. They spend most of the day next to the pool.

It’s not really hot enough for swimming. It’s not quite pool weather. It’s like seventy-five or something. Still, they spend most of the day at the poolside—there isn’t anything else to do.

The plastic sun loungers next to the pool face those towers—those three towers that look like spikes pointing at the sky, with a few blue spheres impaled on two of them.

He opens his eyes and sees them there, in the middle distance, pointing at the empty sky.

Usually in the afternoon a sort of light sleep comes. Sounds in a spaceless world take on an abstract quality. Sparrows.

A passing helicopter.

Voices at different distances. Something else, he isn’t sure what. Sparrows.

He opens his eyes and finds things different. The shadows in different places. The quality of the light not quite the same, softer, more opalescent, and part of the pool in the shade, making the water there look flat and deep.

You want to have your last swim while the sun still has enough strength to warm you up again afterward. So at around four he stands up and approaches the edge of the pool.

For a while he lingers there, with a sad feeling.

Then he dives in, and the water sloshes and swallows in the drains at the side.

*

They have these vouchers they can use in the hotel restaurant, which is always a buffet. They eat all their meals there. There’s a weird selection of things.

What there isn’t is alcohol.

There isn’t any alcohol anywhere.

Once or twice they go out into the city. There isn’t anything to do there so they soon return to the hotel.

In the evening there’s the sound of the mosques or whatever.

They start up all over the place, not at exactly the same time but sort of overlapping, so that the overall effect is slightly chaotic.

There’s something about it that he likes, though.

The air seems to vibrate.

When they stop it’s not all at exactly the same time either. They drop out one by one until there’s only one left, and then that one stops too, and it’s almost dark, and you can hear the sound of the swifts, the shrieks as they zoom around with what seems like incautious speed in the lingering twilight. Quite often he’s sitting outside at that point, smoking a cigarette, with the swifts shrieking in the air around him. They skim the surface of the pool, he notices, taking a drink. It must taste horrible—the water is strongly chlorinated.

He stubs out his cigarette in one of the sand-filled ashtrays and takes the elevator up to the fifth floor.

He and Norbi are sharing a room.

Most of the prostitutes in Kuwait are from Southeast Asia.

*

At supper on Thursday word goes around that they’ll be flying out tonight. They pack their stuff and wait in the lobby, still half-expecting to be told that it was a false alarm. That has already happened twice.

Buses arrive, though.

There’s a murmur of excitement when they see them through the front of the hotel. These two white buses with nothing on them to identify whose they are.

For quite a long time after that nothing happens. The buses just wait there, with their Pakistani drivers smoking next to them.

Then finally the major arrives and they board the buses, which set off through the mild, quiet streets of the city.

Facing them from the front, holding on to two seats to maintain his balance, the major says that they’re on their way to Ali Al Salem.

They won’t be flying home, though.

He tells them that they’ll be flying to Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

“From there there’ll be transport to Tata. I’m sorry, lads,” he says over their disappointed voices. “At least we’re going home tonight.”

There’s some problem with the plane, though. It doesn’t leave until the next morning.

They spend the night lying on the floor at Ali Al Salem, using their packs as pillows.

There’s a table with sandwiches wrapped in plastic, baskets of Mars and Snickers bars, glass bottles of soft drinks, and tokens for the coffee machine.

There’s also a cigarette machine.

Using his last Kuwaiti coins, with their Arabic writing and pictures of sailboats, he buys a few packs to take home.

*

It’s already midmorning when they walk across the asphalt to the plane. The plane is painted pale gray and like the buses doesn’t have any markings on it to show whose it is.

It’s an American plane, though. They know that. For one thing, there are Americans on it too.

They mostly arrive in the morning, the Americans, looking like they’ve had a proper night’s sleep. They’re noisy and high-spirited.

“Where you guys from?” one of them asks. “Hungary,” István says.

“Oh yeah?” the American says. “Yeah,” István says.

With their heavy packs they walk across the asphalt to the waiting plane.

It’s slightly cloudy. When the sunshine filters through it’s soft.

If the weather here was always like this it would be okay.

They leave their packs on the asphalt to be loaded and walk up the metal steps.

There isn’t allocated seating. It’s a free-for-all. He sits with Norbi and Balázs, and they talk about the night out they’re planning to have when they get home. It’s something they’ve been planning for a long time now, something they’ve sort of promised themselves—this massive night out, their first night home.

*

He sleeps on the plane.

He wakes up and looks around.

Everything seems exactly the same as it did when he fell asleep.

Most of the others are sleeping too.

From somewhere there’s the sound of music leaking out of head-phones.

More than half of the window blinds are pulled down, including the one next to him. He lifts it a little. Strong light pushes in so that it’s painful and he slides the blind down again. It’s impossible to tell from the quality of the light what time of day it is, wherever they are. It is day, though, and not night, even though it feels like it should be night.

*

They’re waiting at the American air base in Germany. The Americans who were on the plane with them have disappeared. It’s just them, the Hungarians, about a hundred of them, waiting under fluorescent lighting with darkness outside the windows. There aren’t enough seats for everyone. Some people are sitting on the floor. The officers went off somewhere as soon as they arrived. They come back later with a cart with sandwiches on it. The officers don’t eat from the cart themselves, they seem to have eaten already. The men mob the cart, though. They’re very hungry, there wasn’t any food on the plane. While they eat, the major tells them that the buses will be there in about two hours. “They’re on their way from Tata as I speak,” he says, and there’s an ironic cheer.

István, Norbi, and Balázs are sitting on the floor with their sandwiches. They’re talking again about the night out they’re planning. “We need to get some speed or coke or both,” István says.

“Yeah,” Norbi says.

“Do you know anyone?” István asks.

“At Tata?”

“Yeah,” István says.

“Not really,” Norbi says.

“You?” István asks Balázs.

Balázs, eating, shakes his head.

*

The walk from the building to the buses waiting in the darkness outside, their engines shedding a strong smell of diesel, is the first time that he has felt real cold in over a year.

It’s quite a pleasant feeling, the clean sting of it on his face, the unfamiliar sight of his own breath.

The light inside the bus is dim orange, almost brown.

He takes a window seat a few rows back from the toilet, and balls up his jacket to use as a pillow.

*

He wakes from a shallow sleep to find himself looking at a European landscape. Churches with onion domes. Wet green fields. It’s weird to be back here.

*

When the buses arrive at Tata, about four hours later, they disperse to their allocated rooms. István dumps his pack and then sits on the toilet, and after that has a shower and a shave. He has this meeting with the colonel. He puts on his dress uniform, after ironing the shirt with the communal iron in the room at the end of the corridor.

“You managed to get some sleep?” the colonel asks him.

“Yes, sir,” István says.

“We hoped to get you boys back here last night,” the colonel says. István’s eyes are focused on a point beyond the colonel’s shoulder.

“Yes, sir,” he says.

Behind the colonel is a window, beads of rain partially obscuring a view of the car park.

“So you’ve decided not to do another five years?” the colonel asks.

“No, sir,” István says.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’re a brave man,” the colonel says, looking at a paper on his desk.

“Thank you, sir.”

“What do you plan to do?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“There are support programs that you can take advantage of,” the colonel says. “I suggest you do so.”

“Yes, sir,” István says.

His five-year enlistment contract doesn’t actually expire until the end of January, but he’s owed enough leave to mean that this is basically it.

“Good luck,” the colonel says. “With whatever you do do.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And please remember that until the end of next month you’re still a member of the armed forces.”

István keeps his eyes fixed on the point beyond the colonel’s shoulder. “Yes, sir.”

“Conduct yourself accordingly.”

“Yes, sir.”

After leaving the colonel’s office, he makes his way to the men’s room on the first floor.

The private is already there when he arrives. They spoke on the phone earlier.

They go into one of the stalls and the private takes out the stuff. They asked around as soon as they arrived that morning and his name was the one that was mentioned most often. He sells István a few wraps of speed.

“Have you got any coke?” István asks him.

“No,” the private says. “Not now.”

“Okay,” István says.

*

Norbi’s brother has an apartment in Budapest. They arrive there in the middle of the afternoon, after taking the train from Tata, and then the metro. Norbi has a key to the apartment. His brother isn’t there. He works in England or somewhere. “What does he actually do?” István asks.

“I don’t know,” Norbi says.

“He must have money,” István says. “Look at this place.”

Norbi shrugs.

He’s cutting lines of speed on the black marble worktop.

István sits on a leather sofa, using an empty Red Bull can as an ashtray.

Without the speed and the Red Bull to keep him going he probably would have fallen asleep already. He didn’t sleep much on the overnight journey from Germany. He only fell asleep properly once, he thinks. That was toward dawn. He must have slept for a while though, because when he woke up it was broad daylight and there was a wet patch on his T-shirt where he’d drooled on himself.

He stands up from the sofa to snort his line from the black marble surface. He feels the drug trickle down the back of his throat with a warm phlegmy sensation. He sniffs and rubs his nose.

“What time is it?” he asks Norbi.

He has no idea what time it is.

He keeps forgetting where he is as well. There was a moment, sitting there on the sofa, when he seriously thought he was still in Kuwait.

“Five,” Norbi says.

István has a look around the apartment. It has an empty, unlived-in feeling.

Though there’s furniture there don’t seem to be any personal possessions.

There’s some sort of huge Jacuzzi thing in the bathroom, with steps down into it.

He breaks open another Red Bull from the otherwise empty fridge and lights another Philip Morris.

“You hungry?” Norbi asks him.

“No,” he says.

*

He feels edgy as they troop down the stairs, which are massive and made of stone. Their feet and voices echo. They’re making a lot of noise, an unnecessary amount of noise, shouting at each other, pushing and shoving, laughing loudly at stupid things.

Then they’re in the street, walking along in the early evening darkness and the sound of the traffic. They have a few beers in a sports bar, the first place they see. There’s soccer on a screen. Toward the end there’s a punch-up, with several players involved. One player is sent off. Soon after that the match ends and they go to the men’s room to do some more lines. They take turns in the stall and snort the speed from the plastic top of the toilet. They’ve been looking forward to this evening for a long time. It was something they talked about a lot at Camp Babylon—this first night out when they got home. Just a normal night out, essentially. That’s what they wanted. And that’s what this is. Except there are moments when the very normality of it feels like a sort of outrage.

*

They tell the police that they’re soldiers, just back from Iraq. The police found them pissing against the wall of a building. They were standing there pissing when the squad car rolled past and pulled over, and the policeman got out and said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

It turned out that the wall they were pissing against was the wall of a police station.

“Hey,” István said, doing up his trousers. “Sorry, seriously. We didn’t realize.”

That was when he told them that they were soldiers, just back from Iraq.

Flecks of falling rain show up in the headlight beams of the stationary squad car.

“I don’t care about that,” the policeman says.

“Okay,” István says.

“What difference does that make?” the policeman says. “How does that make this okay?”

“Whatever,” István says.

He tries to seem more sober than he actually is. He has had a few beers, on an empty stomach, after two more or less sleepless nights and a long afternoon of speed and Red Bull and more speed.

He’s trying to hold it together.

It’s not easy.

“Sorry,” he says again.

“Go on, then,” the policeman says. “Get out of here.”