A Deeper Sleep

by Dana Stabenow

  No one looked at him. No one even glanced in his direction. Their shoulders were hunched, their backs taut, their feet splayed on the ground as if they were about to step forward.

  To get into line.

  To take their turn.

  Only the stern eye of the council kept them where they were. The four men inside would inflict all the justice Allah required.

  For not the first time during the last seven hellish days did he regret his return. Even more bitterly did he regret his departure. He should have rejected the scholarship bestowed by a benevolent corporation that had led to his five years in the West. Had he stayed safely at home, free of the corruption of infidels and their indecent ways with women, he would not have fallen so easily into conversation with the wife of another man.

  But that first naive conversation had changed everything. He wondered again where she was, what had happened to her. He wondered if there was another hut somewhere, with another tribal council and another crowd of men standing around it, straining to hear the tear of clothing, the striking of flesh on flesh, the panting, the grunts, the groans. Or had she been killed, stoned to death by her own husband?

  If Allah were merciful, she would have been beheaded.

  As he should have been. Suddenly, without volition, he heard himself bellow, “Where is it written?”

  The hands manacling his own loosened in surprise and he took advantage, tearing himself free, not to run, no, instead, just this once, to stand up strong in front of the men of his village and accuse them face to face of the evil that they did. “In what sura is it written that my sister should be punished for my crime? Why—”

  Hashim Hassan, the youngest member of the council, took a step forward and backhanded Akil across the face. Hassan was a big man, broad across the shoulders, arms heavy with muscle from loading and unloading goods from the one ancient Ford pickup truck that was the sole asset of his freight business. Akil heard his cheekbone crack. Blood welled from his mouth and splattered down his shirt front.

  He and Hashim had been born into the same village not a month apart. They had gone to school together, studied the Koran together. They had flown hawks together from childhood, competing with others from as far away as Gujar Khan. He looked up at Hashim’s hard and unyielding face. Where now was the blood brother, the companion of his childhood, the friend of his adolescence?

  He spit out blood and cried, “Did not the Prophet Himself say to the girl who had been raped, ‘Go now, God has already pardoned you’?”

  Hashim Hassan hit him again. This time he spit out a tooth. “I am guilty! I admitted it! I—”

  The rest of the council looked annoyed and the eldest snapped out a command. The third time Hashim hit him Akil lost consciousness, his last thought a fleeting relief that at least now he would not have to bear further witness to the shame that his own criminal carelessness had wrought upon the most beloved member of his family.

  When he woke he was facedown in the dirt. He couldn’t see out of his left eye, and he couldn’t breathe through his nose. For a moment he couldn’t remember where he was, and then memory flooded back in a scalding rush.

  Over the thrum of blood in his ears he thought he heard sobbing. He squinted around, and through blurred vision managed to distinguish a shape on the ground in front of the hut. He rose up on his elbows and dragged himself to it.

  “Adara,” he said, around a tongue that felt swollen in his mouth. He reached out a trembling hand to touch her shoulder.

  She flinched away. She was naked but for her qameez, and it was torn to shreds. She had pulled one of the few remaining folds over her head, covering her face, hiding from her shame. She was curled into a fetal position but he could see that her legs were covered in blood, the rest of her body in bruises and rapidly crusting cuts. They had not just raped her, they had beaten her with their fists and kicked her with their boots.

  He cringed from the sight of his sister’s nakedness, and of her wounds and all that those wounds meant, and steeled himself to speak. “Adara,” he said again, and began to sob. He let his head fall forward, once, twice, a third time, again and again, beating his head against the dirt. A scream built in his throat and backed up until it could no longer be contained and he let it loose, a long, high howl of anguish that went on and on.

  It was carried on the night wind to the circle of mud houses that formed the village not a thousand yards distant, but no one came to help them.

  Akil knocked softly. The door cracked. An eye peered out. “Go away,” a gruff voice said.

  “Uncle,” Akil said. “Please.”

  “Go away!” the voice said, more loudly this time. The door slammed in Akil’s face.

  Akil staggered back to Adara, clad now in his shirt and sitting on a rock by the side of the lane staring vacantly into space. At least she had stopped weeping. “I’m sorry, Adara,” he said—how many times now? “He won’t let us in.”

  Her breast rose and fell in a soundless sigh. “None of them will,” she said, her voice the merest thread of sound. “Akil, you must end this.”

  “No!” he shouted. She flinched. “No,” he said, more temperately. “No, Adara. We will find someone who will help us, give us food and shelter for a night, and then we will leave this place.”

  “And go where?” she said. “Our parents turned us away. Three of our uncles, two of our cousins. There is nowhere left for us to go, Akil.”

  “I’ll find a place,” he said. “Trust me, Adara. I will find us a place to go, where you can be safe.”

  And he would have, he knew he would have, but when the third cousin refused to let him into her house and he returned to Adara, he found her hanging from the branch of a neem tree, strangled on a knot made from the sleeve of his own shirt.