What Will Survive Read Free

which door? Reluctant to barge into someone’s bedroom by mistake, Aisha decided she would just have to wait for the household to stir and reached for the novel she had begun as they left Damascus the previous day.
    They had set off for the border towards the end of the morning, after Aisha had had a final walk in the old city, sitting for half an hour by the fountains in the garden of the Azm Palace. When she had climbed into the back of the Volkswagen, she had not immediately realised that something was going on between Fabio and their driver, Mahmoud, who was taciturnat the best of times. Mahmoud — Aisha felt slightly guilty for being unable to remember his second name — was in his forties, according to Fabio, but looked older, with tobacco-stained teeth and a permanent smell of stale smoke clinging to his old blue suit. He understood basic English but seemed to dislike speaking it, leaving Aisha to communicate with him through Fabio, and the dispute which finally blew up between the two men as they waited to cross the border into Lebanon was conducted entirely in Arabic. They were so absorbed with each other that they didn’t notice when flames burst from the bonnet of the vehicle behind them in the queue, which had been moving with agonising slowness. Aisha had to shake Mahmoud by the shoulder to get his attention and even then he merely hawked through the open window and steered the Volkswagen into another line. She turned and watched as the other driver pulled his wife and small daughter to safety, ready to go and help if need be, but half a dozen men clustered round the vehicle and managed to extinguish the blaze with water carried from a standpipe in plastic bottles.
    Later, when she returned from a dingy toilet at the back of a supermarket on the Lebanese side of the border, Aisha glimpsed a wad of grubby Syrian notes changing hands. Fabio was blocking her view with his broad shoulders and she saw him pat Mahmoud conspiratorially on the back before turning to offer her a sandwich made of flat bread and salty cheese. It tasted better than it looked, perhaps because Aisha hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and afterwards in the car she opened the pretty box of cakes she had bought from Daoud Brothers in Damascus that morning. She offered them round — Fabio shook his head and Mahmoud grunted, then got out of the car to smoke another cigarette — and was biting into the sugary pastry when Fabio remarked casually that there had been a slight change of plan, which involved driving down into the Bekaa valley instead of carrying on across it to Beirut. When Aisha asked why, Fabio said he’d heard that the Americans were paying local farmers to raise cattle imported from Texas instead of growing hashish as they had before the war.
    â€˜Great picture, huh?’ he demanded, holding his hands at the sides of his head like horns. When she did not laugh, he tried to cajole her:
    â€˜Aisha, when we went to Bosra you were worried — remember you saidwe cannot make a whole book of Roman ruins?’
    Aisha pointed out that at the time they’d seen nothing in Syria but temples, theatres and triumphal arches; since then they’d spent three days in Damascus, where she had loved shopping in the souk and Fabio had photographed her in old workshops where silk was still being woven into bolts of figured fabric on Jacquard looms. They’d also stood in the vast courtyard of the Ummayad mosque, almost blinded by sun reflected from the bone-white pavement, and marvelled at its astonishing mosaics of streams, orchards and palaces. If a detour was on the cards, Aisha protested, they should have left Damascus straight after breakfast, instead of having to prolong their journey at the hottest time of day. She could not recall a previous occasion when Fabio had had to struggle to conceal his emotions but she could tell from the shape of his mouth that he was irritated, even though he continued to