The Last Kestrel

by Jill McGivering

  Three kids in all. All dug out. Two girls and a boy, not one of them more than seven. The soldiers handled the bodies with exaggerated care, making their apology to the dead, avoiding each other’s eyes.

  She’d seen a lot of dead bodies in her time. The very first ones, years ago, had bothered her the most, haunted her even. Then she lost count. Mangled remains dug out of earthquakes and landslides. Disconnected body parts scattered by bombs. Corpses so disfigured by flood or fire they barely looked human. She wasn’t immune to them but she always forced herself to look. She knew she had to see it to write about it, and writing about it was the only means she had of paying them respect. They were just dissolving flesh by then. Whatever life they’d had, whatever had made them people had gone. By thinking that, she shut them out.

  But the deaths of the children were different. When she was crawling in the ditch, disorientated, they’d been close by, still breathing, still alive. It was a cock-up, clearly. She wanted to blame the soldiers but, the truth was, she felt responsible too. She’d been there. She was left with the lingering sense that maybe there was something she could have done, so the children might not have died.

  The lads were upset. This kind of thing always caused shock-waves. It messed up the image they had of themselves, the belief that kept them going through all the danger, the misery of war. No one wanted to be a child killer.

  ‘Collateral damage,’ the Sergeant Major had said as they’d straightened out the bodies and wrapped them in dirty cloth they’d found. The small rolls lay there, side by side, in the dust. Frank and Dillon had refused to look at her.

  ‘First rule of war,’ the Sergeant Major said. ‘Shit happens.’

  A fresh breeze skimmed sand along the ground and made her cough. She turned over, onto her other side. What had that woman and her children been doing there? She knew there had been warnings. The Afghan translators had been hollering across the valley with loud-hailers from first light, warning civilians to get the hell out of there.

  Mack had hinted that the family had been used as human shields. Could that be true? She didn’t know. Someone had certainly attacked the troops. She remembered the explosions, the splattering of dirt. But if he were right, where had the fighters gone? The bomb had been a direct hit. No time for anyone to run.

  The image of the woman came to her, with those green eyes. The dead were beyond pity. The bereaved were a different matter. The woman shouldn’t have survived. The medics had sedated her for now but sooner or later she’d have to surface. She’d have to become human again. The horror she’d face then, the grief, would be suffocating.

  She thought of Jalil’s mother. Kneading her hands endlessly, staring wide-eyed at nothingness. Jalil’s young brother, desolate, pressed into her side for comfort. The cool pride in his sister’s eyes as she pushed the money back at her. She knew what had happened. It was her fault Jalil had come to Helmand, had placed himself in such danger. She was the one to blame.

  She twisted quietly and reached for her rucksack. She felt in the darkness through her possessions, put her lips to her shampoo bottle and felt the seeping warmth of the vodka run through her body and numb her into sleep.

  The next morning the lads were ordered to unload new supplies from vehicles: boxes of bottled water, telecoms kit and ammunition. Jets screeched overhead, sparking a distant boom of explosions. The offensive had moved on towards the next village.

  Ellen watched. An Afghan man was hanging around at the bottom of the slope on the far side of the village. He was dressed in threadbare cotton, the long tunic and baggy trousers that all the village men wore, a traditional hat on his head. The cloth must have been white once. Now it merged into the village dust as if he were frightened of being seen. He wasn’t a short man but he exuded a sense of smallness with a thin, malnourished body.

  He seemed agitated, moving forward repeatedly towards the soldiers who were guarding the track from the low fields into the village. His shoulders were stooped, his hands imploring, his head tilted to one side. Whatever the soldiers said to him, it wasn’t welcoming.

  Repulsed, he then backed off again, his arms limp at his sides, his hands opening and closing in the empty air. After walking a few steps, he’d sink down to the dirt track and squat on his haunches, staring at his palms. A little while later, he’d get up and approach the soldiers all over again.

  Ellen went across to the Sergeant Major and pointed him out.

  ‘That man. I’d like to know what he wants. Is there a translator I can send down?’

  He narrowed his eyes. ‘A turp?’ He looked round, shrugged. ‘If there’s one free.’

  Ellen went across to the young Afghan who was standing in the shade, half watching the soldiers and shifting his feet in the dust. He was wearing shabby civilian clothes with army-issue body armour on top. The flak jacket was too big for him, sticking out beyond his shoulders. He seemed wary when she approached.

  ‘Salaam Alaikum.’ She inclined her head to him, placed her hand on her heart. ‘My name is Ellen.’

  He was the younger and slighter of the two translators she’d startled in the house the day before when she’d greeted them from the corridor.

  He nodded, gave a shy smile. ‘How do you do?’ He bowed. ‘My name is Najib. I am from Kabul.’

  She remembered what Jalil’s sister had said, that Najib and Jalil had been school friends. Najib’s face was young, with a fresh stubbly beard. He held himself proudly but she sensed his awkwardness. As they spoke, his fingers worked the strap of the military helmet in his hands. Out here, he should be wearing it.

  When she made her request, his expression changed to unease. She nudged him along, nodding and smiling so politely it was difficult for him to refuse. Finally he gave in with a sigh. He lifted the cotton scarf from his neck and wound it carefully round his face until only the strip of his brown eyes showed, strapped his ill-fitting helmet on his head and headed down the slope to negotiate with the soldiers. They spoke, shrugged, let him through. At the bottom of the slope, an irrigation channel ran from side to side. Najib approached the man with one eye on this ditch, scanning for movement.

  Najib dwarfed him, not with his height but with his solidity, his years of good food. The older man seemed distressed, beating the air as he spoke. He took a step towards Najib and made to grasp his hands.

  Najib’s face was grave when he came back. The Sergeant Major walked across to listen.

  ‘That man,’ Najib said, ‘he is saying his wife is disappeared. I am telling him: everyone is fled, no one is here. But he is repeating. He wants to come, to look.’

  No one spoke. Najib looked embarrassed. ‘He is saying he has bad feeling,’ he added. ‘Very bad. About his wife.’ He shrugged, as if to apologize for the foolishness of villagers.

  Ellen looked at the Sergeant Major. He was staring doggedly at his boots.

  ‘Take him to see the bodies,’ he said at last. ‘We need to bury them.’

  Najib looked uncomfortable. ‘And about his wife?’

  ‘See if the kids are his first. If they are, tell him we’ve got his wife. I’ll ask the Major about letting him see her.’

  They walked through the village in procession. Frank, sent along as protection, walked with his jaw hard, his eyes wary. The Afghan villager’s stride was long and irregular as he hurried them forward. He was bombarding Najib with a nervous, machine-gun stream of words. Najib struggled to translate.

  ‘Abdul,’ said Najib. ‘His name is Abdul. His house is on the far side. He was together with his wife when they heard news of the attack. Everyone was shouting to leave.’

  ‘So why didn’t they?’ said Ellen.

  ‘He did. He went to the desert. But his wife said first she must pack their belongings. Their cooking knives and pots and clothes. She said she would follow afterwards. But she never came.’

  ‘And his children?’

  ‘He has a grown son. He is…’ Najib switched languages to check the details. ‘He goes
for work in Kandahar. Abdul is very proud. He is a…’ Najib hesitated, tapping his palm against his forehead as if shaking vocabulary to the front. ‘He is a learning businessman.’

  ‘A business trainee?’

  ‘Yes.’ Najib’s face lit up with relief. ‘That is good.’

  ‘What about the others?’ She paused. She wanted to avoid the word ‘dead’ in front of their father. ‘The young ones?’

  Najib shrugged. He seemed too embarrassed to ask.

  Ellen read the gentleness in Abdul’s face. He was scurrying across the ground like a mouse, his eyes low, his body folded in on itself in the effort to shrink from them all. She looked away. She needed to stay detached, to protect herself. If she started to know him even a little, it would make his grief harder to withstand.

  They climbed down the track from the top of the village and skirted the fields to approach the bombed house. When Abdul saw the small rolls of cloth, laid out on the mud, he let out a cry and quickened his pace to a lumbering run. He collapsed to his knees in front of them and tore at the material covering their faces. He emitted a low-pitched moan, slow and painful, as if his lungs were collapsing. He raised his arms above his head, his fists grasping at the air, opening and closing. Then his chest sank forward. He lay prostrate, his face buried in the children’s bodies, his arms stretched out to the sides, gathering all three of them into his embrace.

  Ellen imagined the feel of the bodies against his face, their awful stiffness, their sour-sweetness in the gathering heat. A familiar nausea gathered in the pit of her stomach. There was no smell as repulsive or cloying as putrefying flesh. It cut her to the quick. It brought back a decade of memories, returned her to the very first time, in a warm, wet field, where she’d stood to bear witness as forensic investigators had dug for evidence, watched by bereaved relatives standing, desolate, in a silent huddle.

  Abdul’s back and shoulders started to undulate, a convulsive motion. His moaning gave way to wailing. She looked away. Frank was standing guard at a distance, his weapon raised across his chest. He’d set his body at an angle, looking half towards Abdul and half out across the valley towards the distant ribbon of river.

  Far below, close to the river, engineers were at work. They were putting in the foundations for a more substantial bridge, wide and strong enough to take supply vehicles. The soldiers, light brown figures in their desert camouflage, were directing the diggers, their arms signalling and pointing.

  Najib appeared at her side. She sensed his need, his awkwardness in the face of Abdul’s grief. ‘Give him time,’ she said, keeping her voice low. ‘He’s in shock.’

  Najib nodded. He hesitated beside her a little longer, then crept back to Abdul and knelt beside him, reaching out his hand and gently patting his back, the way a mother might soothe a baby. After a little while, Najib started to speak. It was a rhythmical incantation that she knew, without understanding it, to be prayer. She found her mind running through the only prayer she knew. Our Father, Who Art in Heaven. It was absurd, of course. Hypocritical. She wasn’t religious. But, even without faith, she always found comfort in the cadence of prayer.

  The whole pitiful business took less than an hour. The Sergeant Major sent two men down with stretchers to carry the bodies away. Abdul stumbled behind, his hands groping after them like a blind man. The soldiers had dug small, bundle-sized hollows in the graveyard behind the village. The ground was as unyielding as rock and they ran with sweat. Lying once again in the dust, the rolls of cloth were already buzzing with flies.

  When no one was looking, Ellen slipped back alone to the bombed house. It was eerily quiet. The corn sat neglected in the surrounding fields. From this side, the softly flowing water in the irrigation ditch, where she’d crawled in fear of her life, looked innocent. The sun was high overhead, bleaching the colour from the rocks and fields. The light wind, carrying in sand from the desert, rasped her face.

  She knelt beside the low compound wall and examined the impact of the blast. The scars were clear. A crater surrounded by rough pockmarkings across the surface of the mud. The fragments of a grenade lay in the dirt. She turned them over. They didn’t look Western. Russian, perhaps. She stood up, judged the distance from the house. A slightly firmer pitch, a higher angle of elevation and it would have had them. It had been close. She ran her hands over her face, feeling the bone beneath the flesh. Her legs trembled. Far too close.

  She breathed in deeply and thought of Jalil. He had always been fatalistic. She heard his voice in her head, his quaint English. When it happens, it happens. It is God’s will. His God had picked a strange place for him to die. A random patch of desert in Helmand, so far from his family. A place so barren, it didn’t even have a name. He could have been in America now, walking across a college campus. She imagined his emails to her, full of gratitude, of professions of friendship across the miles. His mother would have been faint with pride. But instead…

  She shook the thought out of her head, walked back to the debris and picked her way through the broken fragments of mud brick. The goats had been piled to one side and were starting to rot. The rancid stink hung heavy in the air.

  The soldiers had cleared what they could. A heap of belongings sat on the earth. She turned over filthy pieces of clothing with the toe of her boot. Broken chairs and stools. Two cots, sturdy wooden frames plaited across with layers of rope. One of them was stained where the woman’s leg had bled against it. Fragments of pots, a metal ladle, a cooking spoon, a knife, a large blackened pan.

  They were country-made goods, rough and basic. Judging by the debris, the whole house had only been one or two rooms, with the goats in a lean-to at the back. The fire-pit for cooking was in the open air, just outside. The earth was scorched and soft with fresh ash. She remembered the small windows that had looked down on them as they crawled up the slope. A dark home, then, well insulated against the sand.

  Ellen looked round. A couple of days ago that Afghan woman had been sweeping here, feeding her goats, milking them into one of those pots. Chopping up her vegetables over there, with that machete of a knife, setting her blackened pot to boil here. And now she was lying injured in a military camp, her children buried, her home destroyed. And, despite the pain as they dug her out, she’d still found the energy to spit.

  She walked along the sides of the clearing, looking at the ground. Their boots had trampled a path through the corn, ending in confusion along the low wall. She turned to compare with the far side. There the corn was still erect. Unblemished. Apart from one place. She went across to look. A narrow path had been gouged out. She bent down. The stalks were mature and freshly broken. Almost as if…She followed the path into the corn and through the field until it disappeared into a deep stony ditch. An escape route?

  As she paced it back, a dark square caught her eye. A small brown book, lying off in the corn to one side. She picked it up. The print squiggle of Afghan script. It was a well-worn volume, the cover hanging off. The paper was brittle and the outer edge smeared brown with dried blood. She lifted it to her face. It smelt of stale spices and cheap ink. She put it in her pocket and turned to look back through the corn to the ruins of the house. It looked different from here, less sinister in the burning sun. Smaller. More pathetic. She walked back to the clearing.

  A rusting metal trunk lay to one side, perhaps two and a half feet long and a foot across. Battered and dented but still intact. She pulled up the metal clasp to find a mess of books inside. Old school exercise books with missing covers. A few printed books in the same state, their paper speckled. She wondered who in the family had enough schooling to read.

  Right at the bottom, some typed documents in a cardboard folder. And a photograph album. Its shiny cover was a gaudy design of bright red and blue flowers on an egg-yolk background. The pages inside were cheap peel-back plastic. The photographs had thick white borders and were arranged with care, four to a page.

  Sweat was pricking her hair, her neck. She eased off her helmet,
unzipped her flak jacket and settled down on a flat mud brick. Ahead the sweep of fields, the corn, stirred in the low breeze. Here and there, mud compounds were dark in the landscape. Beyond the river, glinting in the sun, the scrub and sand nothingness of the desert stretched to the horizon. It was land that had seen almost constant warfare for the last thirty years.

  Her ears were buzzing with pumping blood. She let her shoulders sink and thought again of Jalil. They’d covered so many stories together, bumping down dirt roads on endless trips, sharing bottles of water. They’d crouched together countless times inside dark fetid mud houses like this one, skins filthy and slick with sweat, trying to coax a story out of some villager. Trying to make sense of fragmented scraps of news. There was a lot about Afghanistan, about tribal rivalries and customs, that she understood now because he’d taken such pains to explain it to her, creasing his brow, struggling to find the right words in his strongly accented English.

  You must understand my country well, he used to say. He seemed to take her instruction as a matter of personal pride. You must report it well and tell the world the truth about Afghanistan. The truth? If only life were that simple.

  As a traditional Afghan male, he’d been protective. So much so, he saved her life once.

  They’d been driving back from a village on the Shomali Plain, north of Kabul, close enough for them to reach and return in a single day. She was working on a story about the fate of returning refugees. They’d flooded back in their tens of thousands, drawn to their newly democratic country from cramped camps in Pakistan and Iran. Communities of youngsters who’d grown up as foreigners, seeing their mothers spat at in the street and their fathers competing for menial, poorly paid work. Old people whose bones ached for home, for the stark shadows cast by sunlight on pitted Afghan mountains and the bleak expanse of the desert.