The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North Read Free Book Online Page B

Allah, and I bear witness that Mohammad isGod’s servant and his messenger,” first in English, then broken Arabic, and finally Acholi, which he proudly declared was a language like no other and he, being Muslim and Acholi, was a man like no other. I recited this last several times to try and get the intonation right, and when he was satisfied he slapped me on the back and proclaimed, “There! Maybe you won’t have to burn in hellfire after all!”
    I think it was this soldier, more than the others, who encouraged me to travel. He told fantastical and, as it frequently turned out, entirely fictional tales of glorious lands beyond the Mediterranean Sea, of mysteries and answers waiting in the sands. When the war ended I found the first ship I could to these lands that so many Englishmen were leaving and, drunk on the times, stumbled through various misdeeds and adventures with a blind ignorance worthy of the youth I appeared to wear. In Egypt I became passionately convinced of the truth of Allah’s word, until one day I was cornered in an alley in Cairo and beaten senseless by three of my brothers from the mosque. They pulled my beard out and shaved my head with dull knives, spat in my face and tore at my ill-fitting white robes, which I had acquired with the zealousness of the convert, proclaiming that I was a Jewish spy–albeit a ginger one–an imperialist, a communist, a fascist, a Zionist and above all else, not one of them. I spent four days in hospital and on my discharge went to my mullah for comfort. He politely poured me tea in a glass tulip cup and asked me how I felt about my calling.
    I left the next day.
    In the newly founded state of Israel I toyed for a while with Judaism, but for all my war-wounded credentials in the cause of Hebrew espionage, I was clearly not about to belong, and my status as an ex-soldier of the hated British did me few enough services. I saw men and women with camp tattoos still blue on their skins, who fell to their knees beneath the Wailing Wall and wept with relief to see its sun-drenched stones, and knew that I was not a part of their universe.
    A Catholic priest on top of Mount Sinai greeted me when Iclimbed it in search of a god to answer my prayers. I knelt at his feet and kissed his hand and said his being there was a sign, a sign that there was a god who had a purpose for me, and I told him my story. Then he knelt at my feet and kissed my hand and said I was a sign, a sign from God that there was a purpose to his life after all, and that in me his faith was renewed, and he became so earnest in his declarations of my wonder that I began to doubt it myself. He said he would take me to Rome to meet the Pope, that I would have a life of meditation and prayer to fathom the mysteries of my existence, and three days later I woke to find him on the floor of my room, naked except for a string of beads, kneeling and kissing my hand as I slept. He said I was a messenger and apologised that he had ever harboured any doubts, and I sneaked out of the back window and down the garden wall just before sunrise.
    I headed to India, having heard tales of mysticism and philosophies which might perhaps succeed in explaining my situation where Western theology had failed. I arrived in 1953, securing a job easily as a mechanic for an endlessly failing succession of commercial airlines. Their failure rarely affected me; I could leave work on a Monday employed by one man only to come in for work on a Tuesday to find my old contract destroyed and a new, perfect copy waiting to be signed, all clauses exactly the same except for the date and name of employer. India was settling down from its partition and I was in the south, away from the worst of the bloodshed that had stained her independence. Nehru was prime minister and I found myself madly in love, first with an actress whose eyes seemed to look at me and only me from the silver screen, and then with a look-alike girl who sold fruit at the airport