The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [122]
“When will you be coming home, Papa?” asked Nadim, who was strapped safely in the back seat next to his sister, May. She was too young to understand why Papa was going away.
“Just two weeks, I promise. No more,” their father replied. “And when I get back, we’ll all go on vacation.”
“How long is two weeks?” his son demanded.
“Fourteen days,” Hamid told him with a laugh.
“And fourteen nights,” said his wife as she pulled up to the curb below the sign for Turkish Airways. She touched a button on the dashboard and the trunk opened. Hamid jumped out of the car, grabbed his luggage from the trunk, and put it on the sidewalk before climbing into the back of the car. He hugged his daughter first, and then his son. May was crying—not because he was going away, but because she always cried when the car came to a sudden halt. He allowed her to stroke his bushy mustache, which usually stopped the flow of tears.
“Fourteen days,” repeated his son. Hamid hugged his wife and felt the small swelling of a third child between them.
“We’ll be here waiting to pick you up,” Shereen called out as her husband tipped the skycap on the curb.
Once his six empty suitcases had been checked in, Hamid disappeared into. the terminal and made his way to the Turkish Airlines desk. Since he took the same flight twice a year, he didn’t need to ask the girl at the ticket counter for directions.
After he had checked in and been* presented with his boarding pass, Hamid still had an hour to wait before they would call his flight. He began the slow trek to Gate B27. It was always the same—the Turkish Airlines plane would be parked halfway back to Manhattan. As he passed the Pan Am check-in desk on B5, he observed that they would be taking off an hour earlier than him, a privilege for those who were willing to pay an extra sixty-three dollars.
When he reached the check-in area, a Turkish Airlines stewardess was slipping the sign for Flight 014, New York-London-Istanbul, onto a board. Estimated time of departure, 10:10.
The seats were beginning to fill up with the usual cosmopolitan group of passengers: Turks going home to visit their families, those Americans taking a vacation who cared about saving sixty-three dollars, and businessmen whose bottom line was closely watched by tight-fisted accountants.
Hamid strolled over to the restaurant bar and ordered coffee and two eggs sunny-side up, with a side order of hash browns. It was the little things that reminded him daily of his newfound freedom, and of just how much he owed to the United States.
“Would those passengers traveling to Istanbul with young children please board the plane now?” said the stewardess over the loudspeaker.
Hamid swallowed the last mouthful of his hash browns—he hadn’t yet become accustomed to the American habit of covering almost everything in ketchup—and took a final swig of the weak, tasteless coffee. He couldn’t wait to be reunited with the thick Turkish coffee served in small bone china cups. But that was a tiny sacrifice when weighed against the privilege of living in a free land. He paid his bill and left a dollar on the little metal tray.
“Would those passengers seated in rows thirty-five to forty-one please board the aircraft now?”
Hamid picked up his briefcase and headed for the passageway that led to Flight 014. An official from Turkish Airlines checked his boarding pass and ushered him through.
He had been allocated an aisle seat near the back of economy. Ten more trips, he told himself, and he would fly Pan Am business class. By then he would be able to afford it.
Whenever the wheels of his plane left the ground, Hamid would look out of the little window and watch his adopted country as it disappeared out of sight, the same thoughts always going through his mind.
It had been nearly five years since Saddam Hussein had dismissed him