Baghlan Boy

by Michael Crowley

  Behind him his mother lay with his sister Yashfa, who fluctuated between sleep and screams. He protested to his mother with his back turned. ‘I have to look after Yashfa. Who will look after her if I leave?’

  There was nothing his mother could say to console him, to explain or excuse herself. Karam came into view, leaning into the track, edging closer. The younger brother tried to read his face for clues. Karam stood drinking from a flask between his younger brother and his mother’s eyes. Farood knew a deal had been reached. Two deals. A price for the sheep and a price for the agent.

  ‘The agent is coming tomorrow to meet you. He has room for two more. For the price I can get for the sheep you could go a long way. To Europe.’

  ‘How can I? I can’t speak the language.’

  ‘You’ll have to learn, Spider.’

  Karam looked in on his sister and then summoned Farood down the track. He walked like his father had, striding from the hips. He laid his arm on his younger brother’s head. ‘This is your chance, Spider. I wish I was going. When you come back, years from now, I want you to drive through the village in a silver car. You understand?’

  The following morning the sheep were herded to the teacher’s house. They were another wedding gift from the bride’s father and the work that would go with them was a gift from the teacher to Karam and his bereaved family. A price of four thousand American dollars was settled on. For the number of sheep involved it was a lot of money, more per head than you’d get elsewhere. But in Baghlan sheep are more valuable than land because they are easier to live off. Half of the money would go to the agent to pay for Farood to get to the West; the rest would be spent by the family to eke out a living for as long as they could manage. The donkey was loaded with bags of flour, salt, okra and steel pans.

  ‘Take this to your mother. Stay there, help her. I’m going to wait for the agent.’

  ‘I’m not going today. I’m not ready to go.’

  ‘You’re not going today. He just wants to meet you. Tell you about the journey.’

  Farood looked at the sheep they had just sold becoming accustomed to a new pen.

  ‘And stop looking so miserable. It’s going to be an adventure.’

  He led the donkey up the hill but kept looking over his shoulder to his brother who had walked to the edge of the village where the road entered and left. A mile or so before Farood reached the cave, Karam was out of sight. The higher he climbed, the more difficult, the rockier the track became, before it ended abruptly and he had to scramble to the cave. He left the donkey at the end of the track and made two trips with the supplies. His mother had hardly spoken since the drone attack, only whispering into Yashfa’s ear. All the same, for the last few weeks, Farood had continued speaking to his mother as if she did reply. He put the bag of salt in a corner and headed outside again.

  ‘He’s bringing the agent here.’

  ‘When?’ his mother called.

  The boy turned in surprise. ‘Soon. He’s down there waiting for him.’

  ‘Then get some more wood to burn.’

  ‘We’re not cooking for him. We’re already giving him half the money for the sheep. Why do we need to give him our food?’

  His mother was already opening the flour and reaching for a bowl. ‘Do as I say.’

  He went up above the cave to see what he could find, wondering why he had to be shouted at on his last day at home. Then he realised he didn’t mind because it made it seem like any other day, which was how he wanted to remember it. There was precious little to burn. Not much you could call firewood. The cave was approaching the end of the treeline, except there were only shrubs, hence there were only twigs to burn and not enough. He had a bundle of sticks and grass which the flames would consume within a few minutes; he would need a lot more to ignite the dried-out powdery dung that was stacked up in the corner of the cave. The makeshift shelter was gradually inching towards becoming a place to live. Karam had bought some posts and plastic sheeting to catch the water trickling off the walls. He’s also joined with another family in enlarging a second cave for their donkeys. They had agreed to share fuel and, if necessary, ground space, since at a thousand feet higher winter was bound to be more treacherous. Yashfa was on her feet exploring her new surroundings but was still to venture into the starkness of the daylight. They still had the chickens, who took their chances on the mountain and on the track. They were scurrying around Farood’s feet when he spotted the pall of dust moving through the village. He watched the Land Rover materialise from the squall at the bottom of the track and felt its urgency. It had come from a long way, from further than he could see or know, and it had come for him.

  Behind a tinted windscreen, an agent in a leather jacket was telling Karam in Dari that he had never taken anyone so young out of the country before. As the car crackled up the track towards him, he could see the driver with his brother beside him; he could even see behind them, where he would sit. Without even knowing, perhaps, he began to feel differently about what might lie ahead. Beneath the jacket, the agent wore a royal blue sports shirt; he wore dark glasses, a closely trimmed beard and long black boots. To Karam he looked like a man on an advertising board. The agent walked past Farood, twirling his keys, and looked up at the cave.

  Farood ran to his brother and scowled. ‘What are you doing in his car?’

  ‘What do you want me to do, walk behind it? I need to find out how this works. Make sure everything’s okay for you.’

  ‘He’s a Tajik. You can’t trust them.’

  ‘He’s a businessman, Spider. He’s taken a lot of people places, he explained everything to me. He has connections.’

  ‘How it works is that he’s about to take everything we have left. All the money from father’s sheep. The family will never have sheep again.’

  ‘We’ll find other ways to live.’

  ‘What other ways? There aren’t any,’ shouted Farood.

  ‘Look, after you’ve made your money you come back and buy some more.’

  The agent was now sitting at the front of the cave eating warm flatbread and okra as the two brothers approached. ‘You’re Farood? You like the look of the car? Go and sit in it. The front seat, if you like.’

  Farood looked to his brother and retreated. He opened the driver’s door, looked inside. Does the Tajik believe that his luxury will make me trust him? He didn’t know what his father had always said: You can’t buy a Pashtun.

  In the wing mirror he could see the agent counting the money whilst his mother nursed Yashfa. The agent slapped the notes on his own palm. ‘This will take him to Europe.’ His voice contained enough cast-iron confidence to make someone doubt him. He spoke in a Tajik dialect of Dari that people in Baghlan grew up with, along with the Urdu and the Arabic of the madrassa.

  ‘Where in Europe?’ asked Karam.

  ‘I can get him to Greece.’

  ‘I hope so. I don’t have any more to give you.’

  The agent nodded on the contract. ‘Have him ready for tomorrow. Early. And get him something for his feet.’

  Farood’s mother turned away to face the charred wall of the cave.

  ‘You are buying something wonderful for your son, something he can’t have here – a future.’

  The agent walked briskly to the car.

  Farood opened the door and decided to smile for him. ‘I’m eleven now.’

  ‘Don’t bring much, you don’t want to be carrying things.’

  The boy nodded and returned to his mother. The car vanished into a cloud.

  Yashfa was standing for the first time since the rocket attack. She lifted her arms; Farood kneeled and held them around his neck. His mother’s hand was there by his cheek, holding a small roll of money. ‘Take this. And hide it from the Tajik.’

  ‘How much is it?’

  ‘Two hundred American dollars.’

&
nbsp; ‘What should I buy with it?’

  She lifted her veil and her brown eyes possessed her son. ‘You buy food with it, but only if you are starving; shoes for your feet if they become bare. That’s all. Keep it until you get to Greece.’

  Karam flung his little brother into a headlock and wrapped his fist around the notes. ‘A spider doesn’t wear shoes and I need some boots of my own.’

  ‘Farood,’ his mother insisted, ‘I want you to go to the mosque to say goodbye.’

  With his father dead and the sheep sold, there was no other purpose to his day. Since they had moved to the cave, he had had too much time on his hands. Other children his age were clearing stones and rocks from the mountain road and asking drivers for money. Some vehicles stopped and some boys didn’t come home. Without a father Farood was bait for the Taliban. Had he been older the family would have kept the sheep and he would have taken them out on his own, watched by all the other boys, carrying his father’s rifle.

  The mullah was a solemn yet temperate man beneath a greying trimmed beard and plain sack-coloured shalwar and pakol. He was handsome yet seldom smiled and was impossible to read. His eyes had the habit of settling on people and demanding answers. He had heard that Farood was about to begin the journey, but he was only one of many since the Taliban had taken up arms. The mullah remembered them all and he knew their spiritual cleanliness was in jeopardy beyond the frontiers, beyond the village, even.

  ‘What have you learned here?’ he asked Farood.

  ‘Verses from the Qur’an, as many as I can.’

  ‘But what have you learned from them?’

  Farood looked past his teacher at the two children lying asleep on a washed-out blue mattress beneath the wall of the madrassa. There was always a different kind of light in there and today, even though it was still morning, it was shredded and dying.

  ‘What it is to be a good Muslim.’

  ‘You think you know? Tell me just one thing you must remember?’

  He had been attending the school for five years, so he ought to have known something by now, but he didn’t want to seem boastful, for the mullah didn’t like immodest children.

  ‘Allah will be with me wherever I go. East and west, wherever I turn.’

  ‘Of course. But can you remember your Al-Ankabut?’

  ‘Those who believe and work righteous deeds—’

  ‘No. Do you think that your life will be easy by saying we believe? Your heart and soul will be tested, Farood. Things will happen to you that you do not deserve, but they will have a purpose. Anyone for whom Allah intends good he makes them suffer – no more than you can bear, though.’

  A thought hurried the mullah away to his room at the back of the hall. The two children continued to lie motionless, dusty and slight; the slumber of hunger. He returned, and from behind his back showed Farood a grey woollen hat decorated with white stitching of circles and diamonds. He placed it on his pupil’s head and smiled. ‘As-Salaamu ‘Alaykum.’

  *

  ‘He’s late. Are you sure he’s coming?’

  Karam didn’t answer.

  They had been standing at the edge of the village since the agreed time of 10am and it was nearly eleven.

  ‘Maybe he’s not coming. Not today.’

  ‘He’s coming, Spider, and you are going.’

  ‘I don’t mind going. I want to go. I’m going to be wealthy.’

  ‘That’s right you are.’

  He was wearing a plain grey shalwar kameez, his new hat and a pair of brown desert boots that he couldn’t stop looking at. They were indisputable evidence that he was leaving. Most footwear had been circulated around the village, more than once, but these were from a market trader’s box. His mother had tied them for him as he stood in the cave. He took the few steps he could. She pulled his hat forward and he laughed.

  ‘When shall I come back?’

  ‘When you are a man.’

  He knew he would be gone for years, but he didn’t know how many, how long it would be before he stood on his own ground again. His mother reached up to his shoulders. Her hands shook and her eyes closed on him. Then she withdrew and ran her palms over Yashfa’s wavy hair.

  His brother squatted beside him. ‘You are going a long way and you’ll be gone a long time. Work as hard as you can for a few years, return when you can buy us the sheep back.’

  Farood closed his eyes; his brother turned him around and led him away. He was ready. Everything else he would carry as a memory. The place he was from would be an ancestral map on which he would place all that was to follow. His mind was Pashtun no matter where he went and however others tried to shape it.

  They were facing south, away from the village into the haze of the flood plain. The thought began to enter Karam that the agent would keep the money but not his side of the bargain. But then, if he did, he knew where to track him down. Finally, from the road through the village, from the north, a dirty silver Datsun clattered towards them. There was a driver and a front passenger. It pulled up beside them. The driver smiled. A small, slim Pashtun man in his late twenties, dressed in a dirty tan-coloured shalwar and blue waistcoat, got out. He had no beard and his hair was short with long sideburns.

  ‘Farood? Come with me. I’m your driver for the first part of the journey.’

  ‘Where’s the Tajik with the big car?’ demanded Karam.

  ‘He just arranges things, others drive.’

  The boy in the front seat took off his sunglasses. He was in his mid-teens, dressed in Western clothes and a grin. With the engine still running, the driver held open the rear door and beckoned Farood. Karam tapped his little brother on the back and he ran to the car. The car jolted off. He glanced around the inside of the vehicle, then turned to look for his brother. He saw the outline of Karam through a thickening screen of dust. He turned to face the back of the driver’s seat, determined not to allow a single tear blur the road that lay ahead.

  Four

  Lancashire, 2011

  Atherton was right. He and Farood spent the same amount of time down the block. Block time was straightforward. You were either behind the door or you were in an exercise cage. Your own individual cage, adjacent to the next one, which meant prisoners could only get at each other verbally. Initially Atherton and Farood were exercised at different times but then at the same time, deliberately so. When Atherton was let into his cage, Farood chose to look in the other direction. But the Manchester lad was surprisingly affable, as far as people like Atherton could be. He asked about the war in Afghanistan – or ‘Afghan’, as he called it. He said he knew a man on his street that had done a tour. He even asked Farood – or ‘Roodie’, as he had started to call him – where in Afghan he was from.

  ‘From the north, near Tajikistan.’

  Atherton nodded, but his geography didn’t stretch that far. On the seventh morning their doors opened one after the other, Atherton waiting outside Farood’s, next to an officer.

  ‘Right, off you go then, you two.’

  Atherton put on his bewildered expression.

  The hefty officer made for the gate, swung it into the sunshine and looked to the sky. ‘Hey, it’s gonna be nice. But don’t dawdle.’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ acknowledged Farood.

  The two lads made their way back down the concourse to D wing. Officer Scully was holding a scratchy radio to his face at the other end. Prisoners were already working on the flowerbeds in the centre of the concourse. Someone straightened up from a wheelbarrow. ‘Atherton, yer grass!’ Atherton laughed. All the way back lads came to their windows, pushing their faces above the signs that said ‘shouting out of windows will result in adjudication’ and were surprised to see Atherton walking alongside the lad he’d been sent to the block for fighting with. Scully ticked them off on his clipboard at the gate and mumbled into his radio.

  Atherton hea
ded straight for the laundry. ‘Boss, got my old cleaning job back, haven’t I?’

  ‘Behind the door – both of you.’

  ‘No way. Who’s taken my job?’ Atherton looked around him. Someone desperate to get out of their cell would now be happily folding bedding and jogging bottoms. But Atherton would point out to them that they were trespassing.

  Scully pointed his thumb to the balcony. ‘You go to the block – you get sacked.’

  Atherton and Farood sat in their respective pads. Atherton’s south-facing cell was methodically organised: cereal boxes, empty and new, were stacked in fragile raked rows; his faithful toiletries and symmetrically piled Top Gear magazines; the poster of Paul Scholes. This was home; a home he controlled. In Farood’s pad there wasn’t much to order. He’d never had his own room in Baghlan and if he had, there wouldn’t have been anything to put in it; neither had he collected many possessions during his time in foster care or the subsequent bedsit. Although he was going to be spending longer than anyone else there in prison, he hadn’t yet come to terms with making this home. There was only one photo, next to the mirror, of a young woman. She was wearing a work suit, behind her the high-street opticians. He’d met her a few months before he was sent to jail. They’d met at a restaurant in town, where he worked for the owner, Khalid. Her sister had a business meeting with Khalid and the young woman in the photo, Sabana, had come along.

  It was, he recalled, a Sunday, sometime between lunch and dinner, and the newly black-and-white-tiled room of fifty tables was empty except for the visitors, the owner and his willing worker, Farood. The accountant was unapproachably demure, high cheekbones and long eyelashes, dressed in white and pink, in bracelets and make-up. She made notes in a leather-bound book with an expensive ballpoint. Sitting next to her, Sabana’s boredom was obvious. She was taking in the surroundings and watching Farood as he nervously made coffee and plated sweets from the cold cabinet. Cautiously he brought the tray over, bowing involuntarily and inelegantly before lowering it to the table. Sabana looked directly up at him, laughing with her eyes, absorbing him. Then Khalid looked at Farood, his eyes warning him away. Farood was wiping the coffee machine when she walked over in a blue sweater and jeans.