The Last Kestrel

by Jill McGivering

  Ellen looked over his body. A wound, Abdul had said, around his stomach. Another lie? She ran her eyes again over the thick stains on his tunic and realized they were more than just filth. She made out dried blood and crusted yellowing pus. She passed Hasina food and watched as she struggled to make him eat. Finally she pulled out the first-aid kit from her rucksack and crawled over to him to do what she could to clean and patch him up. It was a chance too to search him for whatever weapons he might have concealed in his clothing.

  Afterwards, she sat back against the cool mud wall. Hasina and her son were awkward in front of her – she could sense that; but she didn’t want to leave them alone. She didn’t trust them. She switched off her torch, letting a torrent of darkness pour in. She waited, breathing evenly, forcing herself not to let claustrophobia get the better of her, her hand always on the cool cylinder of the torch.

  After some time, Hasina’s low voice started to murmur, gentle at first. Her son’s lips smacked feebly as she tried to force him to drink. Finally he too began to speak, his voice little more than a whisper. What was he doing here?

  Ellen thought about the injuries she’d seen across his torso. The wound was extensive, deep at his midriff, then tapering as it stretched round to his sides. The skin along the wound was yellowed and torn, shredded into fat and sinew and congealed in a putrid mess. It was hard to tell how many days ago he’d been injured, but her sense was that he wasn’t healing well. There was little sign of fresh pink skin emerging round the sores. The sickly smell of the wound itself was underpinned by the acrid residue embedded in pockmarks in the skin: a cheap gunpowder or explosive.

  She nodded to herself as she heard their voices strengthen and flare in argument. An explosion, Abdul had said. That might be true. But he was more likely the victim of some cheap Afghan device, not of the fallout from a British or American bomb. A revenge attack? She heard a light slapping break out, the slowly rising sounds of smacking flesh on flesh. She tightened her fingers round the torch, wondering whether to startle them by switching it on. Perhaps he had fainted and Hasina was trying to rouse him? Silence. Then, finally, the whispers began again.

  She sat in the choking blackness and strained to follow their conversation as their voices rose and intermeshed. In all of it, there was only one word she could pick out, a word they used again and again. Karam. A name she already associated with danger.

  14

  Hasina knew him at once by his smell, even as she crawled into the chamber, her eyes staring greedily ahead into the darkness, searching for him. He was here. She was overwhelmed by his scent. He was alive, but barely.

  His skin was cool and moist to her touch. She closed her eyes to seal off the darkness and felt her way across his body, her heart fluttering with panic. His fingers were limp, his legs dragged as she tried to pull him round into the softness of her lap. She buried her nose in his neck, inhaling him. The gunmetal of dried blood at his stomach where the rags sat bulkily. The animal filth that encrusted him. The richness of the earth in his hair, as if his grave were already hungry for him.

  ‘Aref,’ she whispered. ‘My own precious son.’

  He stirred a little and moaned. She stroked his damp hair and rocked him, trying to breathe life into him. My life for yours, she thought. Know how happily I would give it.

  When the foreign woman appeared, spinning lines of light round the bunker with her torch, Hasina took water and dribbled it into his mouth. He coughed and began to swallow. Water, then biscuit, one of these hard foreign biscuits, crumpled into pieces and dampened. He chewed and ate.

  She dipped the end of her scarf in water and mopped down his face, his neck, as he feebly tried to swat her away. She pulled up his tunic to flannel his body.

  ‘She isn’t a soldier,’ she told him as the foreign woman cut away the rags and dressed his wound. ‘Praise Allah you’re alive.’ His eyes rolled backwards in his head as the foreign woman poked at his flesh. Afterwards he slept.

  The foreign woman, her face pale, had crawled back to the entrance and switched off her torch. The blackness engulfed them at once. Hasina ran her fingertips over the fresh cloth round Aref’s body. Clean. The reek of blood and filth had been overlaid with chemicals. Now she must think. She rocked him, her arms filled with his chest, his shoulders, his lolling head. Think how to get back to him each day to feed and clean her boy, without raising the soldiers’ suspicions. How to make sure the foreign woman wouldn’t betray them. How to get Aref away from here and to safety as soon as he had enough strength to move again. She closed her eyes and swayed, drowning in his close sweet smell.

  Aref had found the bunker when he was a boy. A lonely boy; always the odd one when the children played. Awkward with others. Maybe it was because he was an only child. Maybe he felt the absence of all those older brothers and sisters who never survived. He came into this world with the scent of death on him and the other children were repulsed by it. So, as a young boy, he ranged alone into the desert for hours at a time, playing imaginary games. That was how he’d found the bunker, chasing after some animal and crawling right inside it himself to curl and hide. He had told her about it and sworn her to secrecy. What friends did he have to tell?

  It was left over from the days of the Russians, of course. The local fighters had dug networks of bunkers all over the countryside, turning the hills into ants’ nests. They needed hiding places to lie low when the Russian soldiers came. They crept through the tunnels from village to village, invisible inside the earth, setting their bombs and laying their ambushes.

  He stirred and woke, confused. She pulled out from her tunic the gift she’d brought for him and placed it in his hands. He felt his way round its contours, reading it with his fingertips, uncertain at first. Then she felt him lift the bloodstained Qur’an to his lips and hold it there for some time, his eyes closed.

  ‘It was in the corn,’ she whispered. ‘You must have dropped it.’

  He opened up the clogged pages and pressed the writing against his forehead with reverence. ‘God is great,’ he murmured. After a while, he tucked the book inside his shirt, reached for her hand and squeezed it.

  ‘Karam Uncle,’ he said. She put her face down to his lips. ‘You must tell Karam Uncle I’m here.’

  ‘No one must know,’ she whispered. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  He was silent for a moment. ‘Where is my father?’

  ‘Searching,’ she said. ‘For you.’

  Aref twisted his head and she felt his stale breath on her face.

  ‘Searching where?’

  ‘Everywhere. With the soldiers.’

  He stiffened at once. ‘No.’

  ‘Not helping them,’ she said. ‘Using them. Their cars, their machines. Looking for you.’

  He wriggled and sat up, pulling away from her. ‘He is a traitor then,’ he said.

  Hasina felt for his shoulders and shook him. ‘God forgive you,’ she whispered. ‘Ungrateful boy. Don’t say such a thing.’

  Aref shook himself free. ‘Traitor,’ he said again. ‘My own father.’ He paused. The darkness ran into the space between them. ‘He is not my father.’

  She raised her arm to slap him and caught his skin with the flat of her hand, a smack. ‘Such trouble you’ve caused.’ The words burst out of her. ‘Don’t you see? Messing about with those foolish boys. Their guns and bombs. Have you no brains?’

  She reached for him, raining slaps on his fingers, his wrists, as he stretched his hands towards her to fend her off.

  ‘Look at you. Curled in a hole like a rabbit. Half dead. All of us risking our lives to find you. To save you.’ She sat gasping, depleted.

  Silence. He was breathing hard. He shifted his weight on the earth.

  She tried to touch him again, gently now, and felt him strain away from her.

  ‘Aref. Stop this. Forget what your uncle said.’

  ‘They’ve corrupted you.’ He sounded like a sulky schoolboy. ‘The foreigners.’

  �
��Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘You’re traitors, both of you. You and him. You are shaming our family.’

  She closed her eyes. Please God, she thought, please stop this.

  ‘These foreigners will kill us all. Steal our land.’ He was working himself up. His voice was gaining anger. ‘Why won’t you help me make a noble sacrifice to defend this land, our forefather’s land? To serve Allah?’

  Karam’s words. Aref didn’t have the wit to think these things by himself. He was pulling himself to his feet, leaning against the wall of the bunker. Now what?

  ‘My work isn’t finished.’ He was sounding feverish again. She sensed the trembling in his body. ‘Karam Uncle will help me. I will die a martyr. I will bring honour to myself, to our family.’

  ‘Stop that!’

  ‘What do you know?’ He spat. ‘You don’t know anything.’

  He crawled from her into the darkness. She heard the soft trickle of liquid, then the smell spread, hot and steaming. Peeing in a hole like an animal. Foolish child. He was caught up in events he could not understand. How could she save him, if he were determined to fight, to sacrifice himself? How could she watch him every moment, protect him from his own craziness? Karam, she thought. Karam was to blame for this.

  Hasina led the foreign woman back through the fields towards the village, her heart racing. It wasn’t exertion, it was fear. Nothing she could say had changed Aref’s mind. He was clinging to his notion of martyrdom as if it were his only mission in life. He spoke as if the rest of his life, that sacred gift from Allah, could be squandered without regret. As if doing battle against the foreigners were the only way of redeeming himself.

  Too many young men; too many bodies blown into pieces. She thought again of the bloodshed in the market. The stench of petrol and explosives. The screaming and running. The vile stickiness of blood underfoot. Aref had been saved once already. Hadn’t he seen enough? How could he speak of a second time?

  The corn was stirred by a light breeze, drying the sweat on her neck and cooling her skin. She set down her crutch and lowered herself to the ground, insects nipping her feet, to wait for the foreigner to catch up.

  Better alive, she thought. These men with their talk of honour and death. They’d caused so much fighting, so much grieving. They weren’t the ones who gave birth to these sons, who suckled them. Allah in His Wisdom didn’t give women the chance to bear new life just so their children could destroy themselves. What honour lay in that?

  The earth was dry and cracked between her feet. The corn, close to her face, was splitting. Even if the foreigners left now, she thought, the harvest was spoiled. Such a mess they caused, these men, whatever their tribe, local or foreign. Abdul wasn’t that sort of man. She thought of his gentleness, his quietness. Aref was wrong to insult his father. Abdul was risking everything to work with the foreigners, just in the hope of finding his son. She must tell him. Somehow, without revealing too much, she must let him know that Aref was safe. Abdul should flee while he could and join their neighbours in the desert.

  The foreign woman almost fell. She sat heavily on the earth, shrugged off her bag, opened it and pulled out water to drink. She drank too quickly, in gulps. Trickles ran from the corners of her mouth and dripped onto her shirt. Her face was puffy and burnt.

  Hasina looked at the foreign woman’s hands on the bottle as she lifted it to drink again. Pale-skinned hands with long smooth fingers and neatly cut nails. They had tended her son, those foreign hands, cut away with care the mess of filth around his wound and cleaned his skin. They had shaken foreign powder into his broken skin and dressed it with rolls of fresh white material.

  Hasina shuffled painfully onto her knees. She ran her fingers under the trailing fabric of her scarf and stretched it across the flat of her hands. She knelt, proffering it to the foreign woman, palms uplifted, in a gesture of blessing and respect.

  The foreigner took her lips from the bottle, watching. Her eyes were wary.

  Hasina kept her scarf raised, honouring her with it, enveloped in the rich smell of the earth. She bent her head forward, her eyes falling on the foreigner’s boots, their thick hard toes coated with dust.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered into the ground. ‘Allah Mo Mal Sha. May Allah bless you for the kindness you have done today.’

  15

  Ellen had put off calling London for as long as she dared. Before she did, she wanted to be clear in her own mind what she could pitch to Phil. At the moment, there were too many questions she couldn’t answer. Phil, she knew, would cut straight to them.

  The soldiers, back from morning duties, were lolling around in small groups, setting up their mess tins to boil rations and tea. The air was full of their ragging, insults flying back and forth. She sat apart from them, cross-legged on the sand, throwing the satellite phone from one hand to the other, and tried to straighten out her thoughts.

  Najib had told her that Jalil’s mood had soured just before his death. That unease, he thought, was somehow connected to the Nayullah suicide bomb. Jalil’s letter to his family in Kabul suggested something had disturbed him so profoundly, he’d decided he must leave.

  Then there was Hasina’s son, lying injured in his burrow inside the earth. Hasina’s fear of anyone finding him – and his injury – suggested to Ellen that he’d been involved in some sort of botched explosive belt attack, possibly the suicide bomb itself.

  But why was Hasina’s husband, Abdul, risking his life by collaborating with the troops to look for his son – when his wife already knew where the boy was? Was that just a bluff? If so, it was a bloody dangerous one.

  And where did Karam fit in? She saw again Karam’s hard eyes, the menace as he fixed her with his stare. He was a powerful man. Did he suspect his own nephew was a suicide bomber? And if so, if he were allied with the fighters, what the hell was he doing collaborating with the soldiers, living under their protection? It made no sense. If anyone had a reason to hate the troops, it was Karam. They’d just killed his children. So why had he planted himself here, in the middle of army-controlled territory?

  A stray word from the boys caught her attention. She looked up. A loud-mouthed lad from another section was talking about ‘that Afghan’. She listened.

  ‘Sodding waste of time,’ he was saying. ‘Wild-goose chase.’

  Abdul? Someone made a remark she didn’t catch and sniggered. She got to her feet and walked across. They simmered down as soon as they saw her. The loud-mouthed lad was spreading jam on crackers, the fingers round his knife thick and stubby with blackened, bitten-down nails.

  ‘Can I ask you?’ She crouched down beside him. ‘Were you out with that Afghan man today? The one looking for his son.’

  The two lads exchanged glances. For a moment, they looked about to freeze her out. The loud-mouthed lad shrugged.

  ‘Yeah. So what?’

  ‘What happened?’

  The lad looked uncertain. He hesitated. ‘Nothing,’ he said. He stuck a cracker in his mouth and bit it in half, scattering crumbs. ‘Didn’t find squat.’ He chewed. ‘Waste of time.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  He gestured vaguely with his jam-stained knife. ‘All over. Saw people out there. Just not his son.’ He swallowed and stuffed in the rest of the cracker. ‘If he’s even got one.’ His mate looked at him and grinned.

  Ellen considered. ‘Where is he now?’ she asked. ‘The Afghan.’

  The loud-mouth looked indifferent. ‘Left him out there,’ he said. ‘We came back. He wanted to keep looking. On his own.’

  He turned his shoulder on her, stretching away to reach into his pack. The soldiers beside him lowered their eyes, sneaking furtive glances at each other and struggling not to laugh. She took the hint.

  The young woman on gate duty let her out without question. Ellen tucked her notebook into the front pocket of her flak jacket. Her helmet slipped lopsided on her head, hot and heavy, as she walked. The main street was deserted, the ruts baked hard with t
he midday heat. Her boots beat puffs of dust from the hollows with every step. A gun-turret swivelled as she passed a fortified compound, unseen eyes following her. She felt exposed, all the more conspicuous because she was out alone.

  She followed the mud street to the point where it crested the hill and dipped in its slow descent towards the valley. There she switched on the sat phone and turned in a circle until she found a strong enough signal to call London. She crouched in the shade, helmet by her side, pressed the phone against her hot ear and listened to the far-off ring in the editor’s office.

  ‘Phil?’ The echo of her own voice came right back at her. ‘Ellen here. Can you talk?’

  ‘Ellen? Where are you? What’ve you got?’ She pictured him leaning back in his swivel chair, looking out over the dull rooftops of London, his feet on an open drawer of the filing cabinet, his belly sagging sideways over his belt. He was an aggressive man and his manner was always abrupt, even to his senior news correspondent.

  ‘Out with the troops. Saw John Long here. Is The Times carrying much?’

  ‘Every day.’ His voice was sloppy with food, as if he were slurping coffee at the same time as talking, the noise amplified by the receiver. ‘Eyewitness bollocks. All colour. No new angles.’

  She smiled. John was always prolific, but it didn’t sound as if he’d found anything fresh enough to impress Phil. ‘I’m working on something,’ she said. ‘Not sure what I’ve got yet.’