by PW Cooper
You shake your head. You are ashamed of yourself, your fantasy.
She touches your arm. Her smile seems born of an endless sorrow. You wonder if she has ever been happy.
“I am Mahrukh.”
“Where is your husband?”
“Jamil?” She shakes her head. “No... he is not my husband. We were going to wait until the war ended.” She laughs, and the laughter is sadder still than her smile. “We didn't want to do anything we might regret. You never know what will happen in wartime, never know what's coming... He said that he didn't want to break my heart.” She shakes her head. “What children we were.”
You see him curled up on the floor beside his seat and snoring lightly “Is he alright?” When will he die? Are they planning to kill him too?
She shakes her head. “Poor thing, he sleeps so badly. Such dreams he has. Bad moon dreams.”
“You were going to get married?”
“We were. Once. I don't suppose we'll have the chance now.” There is a wistful finality in her voice. She has accepted death. Her will is set to it. She wipes at her dry cheek. There are no more tears there to spill. “This was supposed to be our... I don't know. A kind of honeymoon. We'd agreed to be married after the war so... it was a kind of engagement. Our parents... they were very strict, you understand, very old fashioned. We weren't allowed to be alone together.” She laughs, “I suppose they were afraid we might get ourselves up to some impropriety. Or that he might... Little chance of that with Jamil, he's a perfect gentleman. We decided to meet each other in town. He said that he wanted to make me a picnic. It was far too cold, of course, but he wanted it anyway. He took me to the old barn on the edge of town, do you know it?”
You shake your head.
She touches you. Her skin is so very dark. A dark as chocolate, as toffee. Something rich and sweet and special. Her hair is crimped and black and full, her eyes bright. She is like some beautiful spirit. She smiles at you and her lips are thick and soft and her cheekbones high and proud. You think that she is beautiful.
“That's where they found us. Together in that barn. They said things to us, called me names. Jamil, he... he wouldn't stand for that. He fought them. Not to stop them from taking him, but because they were saying those things about me. They... well, you know what they did. Foolish of him to fight, but brave. He was so noble. They brought us to the train station. We stood there on the platform and these people were all around us. I saw the old woman and her husband clinging to each other. He held her. She held him. I knew that we had made a mistake... I should have married Jamil. Should have married him sooner. I should have... held him. Now I don't think I ever will...”
Her eyes are wet. She looks at you. “We're alike, child. We're so alike. And we will never know...” She looks back across the aisle. “He means everything to me...”
You reach out and you take her hand in your own. Your skin and her skin are almost the same, almost beautiful. You lay your head on her shoulder. The train is shuddering.
Night is everything.
* * *
The fragile sunrise light shines down on the tatters of Nazmiya's poem. Thick strands of black smoke are rising on the horizon. The pencil is poised in your hand. The world here is barren, the woods left behind in the night and the train now crossing a great brown expanse, churning towards the shadows of a lonely strand of slate-gray mountains.
We will finish it together.
You touch the tip of the pencil to the rumpled cloth. It makes a very faint mark there. You lift the pencil. You want to finish the poem, but you have no feeling for it, no understanding of how Nazmiya's words flow. For so many hours you sit there with the shawl crumpled in your hands, waiting with such keen dread for morning, when you will have light enough to finally read the poem. You mouth it to yourself over and over again by the faint light of dawn, though the words feel awkward and stilted on your tongue. The images are vague, ephemeral and seemingly without meaning. You do not understand.
It seems to you tragic and grand, of such a totality. Power beyond that of its individual fragments. You finish reading it, come to that last hanging line, and you look up at the sunrise, at the smoke billowing, you feel...
Maybe it is a kind of hope.
You do not know how to finish the poem. You do not think that you can do it without her. Her absence is an edge along your spine, an ache in your belly. You wonder how many of the prisoners will come at last to that line of smoke against the mountains, you wonder that you have not all been killed. The train shakes, like to rattle the teeth from your head.
You look around the train car, at those who go with you to this end.
Jamil and Mahrukh are still asleep, their limbs entwined, their foreheads touching. Their mouths are open, lips parted. Her mouth moves with a kind of hunger, the faintest motions of want. His fingers twitch, gathering little folds of her skirt, her shirt. They move together gently, blurred beyond the curtain of sleep, waiting. He shifts in his seat and she nuzzles against him, a slow smile curling on her mouth. They are free in their sleep, not owned. The smoke is very close now. You read the poem again.
She is there in it. She lives. Nazmiya eternal. Burn the shawl and sent her words streaming upwards into the greater conscious. She will never die. She is. She is.
You come again to that last hanging line, waiting for you.
We are but lonesome children.
You look down at the poem in your hands. The pencil moves. You write in a last line. You feel her in you.
* * *
The sun is high and hot and the vast waste shimmers with a hungry heat. The train moves implacably slow, like an old man wandering out into a nameless desert to die. The machine feels crippled, the struggle finally too much. But it will not stop, not until it has come to its final end.
The prison camp stands in the shadow of the mountains, all glittering barbed wire and black chrome smokestacks, strange low buildings huddled together in a cramped slum ringed by high watchtowers. Prison towers. And the huge buildings like great furnaces.
Smoke chokes the sky, rising black with anger towards heaven, spark and ash all clamoring for an explanation which will never come. And their rage burning in the garden for an age.
The guards who work in that factory are every day transformed on their surfaces to the very objects of their hatred. They emerge after the day with skin as black as night, and one would not know them at a quick look from those whose bodies feed the flames. They go back to their barracks and they stare into little shaving mirrors no bigger than postcards, and the faces they see looking back fill them with revulsion. They do not understand their hate; they rub away their shame in sulfurous water, wondering every time if they really are any different from those men and women and children, the children. They each night assure themselves that they must be different, they must be better or else how could they do these things? If they are not justified then how could they bear to live? They stop looking each other in the eye and they dream strange and miserable dreams. The most fearful dreams.
And the camp gnaws at them all in the barracks and the slum alike, its teeth shining and pitiless. Its appetite insatiable.
* * *
You can see out the soot-smeared window of the train. The high gates of the camp are coming upon you now. The rings of wire are like coils of tinsel in the sun. There is an emaciated child pressed up against the fence, her fingers wrapped through the links. She stares out across the beige ocean of sand, her brow furrowed and her eyes hard as they search for some sign of life in the waste. She does not seem to see the approaching train. Her gaze passes over it, through it. She is like a mirror image of your former self, waiting at the station to be put on the train. How long has it been? A week? Two weeks? It has been forever and it has been no time at all. Time did not travel with you, but waited, breath drawn, suspended in agony while you crawled over the face of the earth, bound down to those two corroded tracks.
The voices of the remaining pa
ssengers onboard the train are rising in fear. They clutch at the windows, their faces pressed to the glass and their fingers curling desperately around the bars. Their questions are ragged and urgent and unanswerable.
“Where is this place?”
“My God, how has it come to this?”
“What's going to happen to us?”
The people of the camp come slowly out, drawn to the train like flies to rotten meat. The guards are all dressed in the familiar red uniforms. They watch the train with loath disinterest, cradling automatic weapons and skulking in whatever shade they can find. The prisoners of the camp seem hardly alive. Their flesh is sallow and tight and close to the bone. Their dry tongues lick uselessly at cracked lips. They come surging in around the train, standing so close that you think they will surely be crushed. They reach up, some of them, grabbing uselessly at the barred windows. Some dark fingers flicker up at the bottom of the windows like the curious feelers of a deep-sea creature. Their clothing hangs on their bodies like rags of peeled away skin.
The passengers on the train look down upon the gathered prisoners and they weep. They look down on brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers and sons and daughters and they are met with empty desperate eyes which seem now to beg for death in every glance, in every look.
Is this what will become of you?
You stare out at the crowd, the great swelling crowd. There are so many, so many hundreds, so many thousands. You think that you see your brother's face in the crowd and you cry out, you press your hands against the glass. Can it be him? That face is too thin to be him, too drawn and feral, too savage. It is not the familiar face. The loved face. It is the face, perhaps, of your brother's shadow, snarling and hurt. And then it is gone, lost in the crowd.
The train creeps on into the heart of the camp.
The two old men are again speaking:
“We're going to die.”
“I think we are.”
“I can't... I don't think that I can even be afraid anymore. You understand?”
“Yes. Yes. Yes.”
“Just give me a gun and let me do it myself. I swear I would.”
“Those three were right to remain. To fight. We should have stayed there.”
“Do you think they buried them? Out there in the woods, I mean?”
“They did not. You saw. We left them there.”
“Even so. Better than here. Anything.”
You look around the train car. Tamir is sitting quietly in his seat. He is holding the shattered pieces of his radio. Every so often he lifts the earpiece up, hoping perhaps to hear a whisper from beyond, to hear her voice once more. And each time his face falls, his hope disappointed. The passengers are paralyzed with a hollow terror, a fear so total and complete that it leaves them empty and staring and unable to resist.
Jamil and Mahrukh have embraced. Their lips touch, brushing together. Hands reach into clothing, beneath and through, pulling off, pulling away. They move with a numbed determination, an instinctual desperation. They cling to one another, hands clasping flesh, fingers digging into skin. Their clothing falls piece by piece to the cold floor of the shuddering train. They come together, emaciated limbs entwined. Their bodies slid together, rubbing softly. They shut their eyes, cheek to cheek and rocking gently to the motion of the train. A kind of calm comes over them, a distance. You want to look away, but you cannot. Two lovers together, the beautiful animal, the beautiful machine.
The train comes to an agonized stop, hissing and wheezing, wearied at last as it approaches the low platform. You look through clouded glass. Captain Brighten is stepping down off the train. He speaks to a man in a black coat, the camp commandant, perhaps, a man whose pale and hairless head seems to float over the void blackness of an ankle-length coat. The Commandant looks at the train and his face is impassive. The Captain seems annoyed with him. The Commandant gestures to the guards and the Captain shrugs and slumps off the platform and towards the low barracks on the far side of the compound. He tugs off his gloves as he goes and he does not look back.
The Commandant walks along the edge of the platform with his hands clasped behind his back. His bare skull shines in the morning light. His eyes are sunken deep and his teeth protrude. The guards are carrying something, a crate spilling tubes and wires out the open top. They move out of sight. You can hear heavy mechanical sounds from the next train car.
Some of the passengers try the doors. They are locked and bolted. The passengers moan with fear, but the truth is that they are somewhat relieved. They feel safer inside the train car. They are glad that they are not being herded out again.
The two old men are sitting back in their seats, gazing out the windows together, their eyes watery and pink with age. “They're going to kill us,” says the first man. The second man agrees. They cannot, however, agree as to why. The first man thinks that it has all been a sort of cruel joke, a tease. Why not just kill us at the station? These men are sadists, my friend, what more reason do they need? The second man suggests that the camp is overcrowded, and that they are being killed purely out of necessity, that there is no space left for the living, only for the dead. Perhaps you're right. God, what times are these in which we find ourselves?
I am almost happy to be leaving this world. I think that I can bear it no longer, knowing what we are. That this is the species.
But I am glad to have known you. I've not been so close to anyone since my school days.
I cannot imagine you as a schoolboy. God knows, I can scarcely recall my own childhood. It all seems so far away. Those long summers naked in the grass. Playing in the shadows of the trees, watching the girls walk by in flower bright skirts, turning over stones in the little river.
To have been a child, that is the only gift. Now we have grown where do we belong in this world?
The two men kiss. A chaste kiss, you can see their lips just touching.
And then the gas starts seeping in, hissing in through those horrid black vents, through the long pipes running the length of the train and out shapeless black mouths. The passengers on the train do everything they can to escape. They batter at the door, they crack their hands on the barred windows, they scrabble at floor panels hidden under the stained carpet. They struggle. It is useless, of course. Some turn to each other and others turn against. Violence meets resignation, and all around the crowds are pushing in on the train car like the piling of earth over a coffin.
You feel dizzy. The air stings when you breathe, biting at your insides. You feel blood running down your face, from your ears and nostrils and mouth and eyes. Your throat feels as though it is being torn open.
Some of the passengers are spitting pink foam, rolling in the aisles, writhing in their seats. Their eyes roll liquidly in their heads. Some others seem to be sleeping; they are still as statues hewn in ancient rock.
You crawl to the window, your hands fawning at the glass. How strange that it could all come to this.
The guards in their red coats are waiting on the platform outside. The commandant in his black coat is no longer paying attention. The surging crowds of people seem to have lost their faces. They are only bodies.
You see – or are you only dreaming? – the faces of your parents outside the train car. Your mother and your father. Their aching faces twisted with pain. They recognize you, they scrabble desperately, uselessly, at the steel hide of the train. They are crying out, screaming, but you hear nothing. The sound of it is drowned out by the desperation of the others, and then by the roaring of the blood in your ears. Your parents touch the skin of the train. Their faces are an agony of fear.
The gas hisses in through the vents. The passengers try to block them up, with their clothes, with anything. Nothing stops the gas.
Then comes a stillness in the train. No more gas seeps in beyond what already hangs in the air. There is nothing left to struggle against. Those still alive have returned to their seats. They sit with their hands folded on their laps. Is it complacency? Ac
ceptance? A last grasp at dignity? They wait.
Your hand is pressed through the bars and against the glass, fingers splayed.
You blink. It seems a very long and exaggerated motion, the slow flutter of the eyelid down. And opening again, reborn, the world remade. The glass is not glass. It is the surface of the water. You reach through. The faces of your mother and father are at peace, they are calm, they are beautiful. They love you. They reach through the water, Your hands wrap themselves into the hands of your parents and they pull you free, out of the water, out of the train car. Rising, rising. Serene.
The hissing in your ears builds to a static as thick as the roar of a tumbling ocean. Your eyelids are too heavy, you cannot keep them open any longer. You cannot feel your body. You are beautiful. You are content.
Slowly, inch by dreamy inch, you leave yourself, leave everything and rise rise rise. Rising over the smoldering camp through rags of smoke and cloud, rising through nothing, into the heat of stars, rising until that world is shrunken with distance, rising until that world is gone.
Arrival