Red Birds

by Mohammed Hanif

  We were huddled in a makeshift trench in the courtyard, Mother Dear covering Ali and Momo under her arms like one of those mad hens who can gouge your eyes out if you mess with their chicks. Father Dear was waving at the sky, as if saying hullo to the approaching plane. Unlike everyone else I am not prejudiced against Father Dear. They are always accusing him of licking white men’s boots – well maybe he likes the taste. I think with his hand gestures he was asking the plane to go back, like sometimes I wave my paw to shoo away a fly. But that thing in the sky was no fly. It said hullo back to Father Dear by dropping a smart bomb on our house. Father Dear had been given some money by them to build the house in the first place, but it was still our house, and now they had just spent a thousand times more money to obliterate it. I have never understood how money works. That’s Momo’s domain.

  ‘What did they do that for?’ Bro Ali shouted in a trembling voice, trying to escape Mother Dear’s arms. The bomb had gone through the roof, windows were torn away, doors flew in the air, there was a shower of brick and wood and plaster and steel and it all settled into a heap of rubble where our house had stood. I was relieved that it wasn’t one of those bombs which start a fire and burn everything down to a cinder. Even in times of mayhem – especially in times of mayhem – I can focus on small mercies.

  ‘Maybe you gave them the wrong target?’ Momo was angry at Bro Ali and was trying to squirm away from Mother Dear’s protective custody. He thought he could run to the house and undo the destruction.

  ‘I didn’t give them any target today.’ Bro Ali was angry at Momo.

  Father Dear raised his hands in an attempt to keep them calm. Father Dear is the kind of head of the household who doesn’t want work discussed in front of the family even when that work might have resulted in the complete and utter annihilation of the family’s only abode.

  ‘Sometimes there are mistakes,’ said Father Dear. ‘Even the best of us can make mistakes.’ He was still on their side.

  ‘This is not a mistake,’ Bro Ali snapped at him. ‘They never get it wrong. I know. They have done it deliberately.’

  For Father Dear this discussion had already gone too far. ‘Why would they do that, to their own colleagues? After all you have done for them.’

  Bro Ali didn’t seem very proud of what he had done for those people at the Hangar. I had accompanied him on his night missions when he used to jabber into his radio. He was trying to clean up the place by giving them targets. I didn’t judge him; he sounded heartbroken enough. ‘They have done it to show us that they can.’

  ‘Who are they trying to show?’ Momo was inconsolable. He had always looked at the blue plastic roofs with contempt.

  ‘That they can bomb your house. They’ll say they did it for our own good because people were beginning to be suspicious. They have restored our honour by making us homeless. Now we are like everybody else. This is their idea of being fair.’ Bro Ali made a short speech as Mother Dear checked his hands and limbs for injuries. ‘Thank God, we are all safe,’ she said.

  ‘They’ll pay compensation. Maybe we can add a bedroom and get a new kitchen,’ said Father Dear. He had already moved on to the post-war reconstruction phase.

  ‘They better pay up,’ said Momo. ‘I’ll draw up a damages list.’

  ‘I have to go and work in the Hangar,’ announced Bro Ali, still whimpering in anger and hugging Mother Dear. It was a startling claim, as if the bomb demolishing our house was not a senseless aerial attack but a job offer.

  ‘They don’t hire foreigners, not to work inside the Hangar,’ said Father Dear, always the guy telling you things you don’t want to hear.

  ‘They have taken in many boys, everyone knows that. And what have they achieved? This.’ Bro Ali pointed to the rubble surrounding us.

  ‘You are not like those boys,’ said Father Dear.

  ‘I know that, I am the best they have ever worked with.’

  Bro Ali’s mind was made up. Did he want to turn them into peace-loving human beings by working with them? Did he want to work from within the system and change it? Did he want to blow it up from inside? Or did he want to learn? I could smell his rancid anger, milk at the boiling- point rage, but I had no idea how he wanted to achieve his objectives. If I want to go from point A to point B I dash, sometimes if a human is posted along the way to interrupt my journey, I’ll lunge towards the left and as they stumble to stop me I’ll abruptly turn right and reach my destination. That’s the extent of my deception. Humans are different. If they want to make babies, instead of humping each other they’ll invite the whole village, feed them, tell them about their noble intentions, then go hide in a room and try to make babies. When they want to fight evil they become evil.

  I still don’t know how but he has achieved one thing. Since Bro Ali went inside the Hangar there have been no more strikes. There have been no supplies. The gates have been shut. There’s an occasional crack in the sky, occasionally an unexpected chill in the air, but they have retreated. Can a seventeen-year-old stop a long-running war? Or was our house the last target left on their list and now they have called the whole thing off?

  Most people are indifferent to the basic question – why has he not come back?

  Most people are indifferent; indifference smells like the bleached bones of your fellow dog.

  I have my theory about why the bombing stopped when Bro Ali joined them. He said no more bombings, no night raids, no day runs. When you make profit from evil, you always tell yourself that if I don’t do it someone else will. This is the biggest fib we tell ourselves. If I don’t steal this bone, the other guy will steal it, if I don’t hump this leg someone else will. When Bro Ali stopped, bombing stopped. Of course, there could be other explanations, we shouldn’t always fall for that whole thing about how one man can change the world.

  Maybe they got bored of bombing us? Maybe they needed those bombs elsewhere? It’s a big, bad world out there. Maybe Bro Ali actually convinced them that they should stop bombing us, but those people in the Hangar, even if you convince them, don’t just go away. Maybe this is the price that Bro Ali had to pay, he had to become one of them to convince them to stop bombing. That thought scares me. I can contemplate the mysteries of the universe and the perversions of the human heart, but I don’t want to imagine Bro Ali becoming one of them.

  Bro Ali had the power to be someone; he could fix tyres on a plane, he could cure homesickness, a total multi-tasker that Bro Ali. He could fight like a ninja and pray like a priest. And he never did it for any rewards.

  That’s the spirit, Bro Ali. I have lost many of my own comrades, some in the bombings, some while trying to rescue their human companions after those bombings, others have perished in horrible diseases that spread after the bombings. Do we ever ask for any medals? Do we have roads named after us? Do you really believe we all deserve to die a dog’s death? Let me tell you, death is a bit more irksome than living with the memory of those who have already left.

  Father Dear could have stopped Bro Ali but instead he went ahead and got him a job in the Hangar. Momo goes around saying Father Dear sold him. That boy can only see life as a series of transactions. We don’t know what the deal was, but Father Dear got himself a deal. He never thought that his boy might also disappear like the other boys, because he was his boy. He was special. They needed him. He was almost as good as those people in the Hangar.

  Momo doesn’t realize how fathers hedge their bets. Having one son inside the Hangar and another one outside seemed like a sensible solution to him. One will be inside the heart of a machine and stay safe. The other one will stay home and keep us safe. Regret smells like burnt bread.

  CHAPTER 13

  Ellie

  Here comes Momo’s father. He arrives on a Honda 70 motorbike, sitting on the petrol tank as the seat is piled high with a stack of files. He beckons Momo, who comes jumping and skipping, unties the stack of files from the bike and takes them inside. He notices me as he parks his bike and rushes towa
rds me as if he has been waiting for me.

  ‘He is the man who tried to steal our Mutt,’ shouts Momo. ‘I caught him in the desert. He has stomach cramps.’

  The light goes out of Momo’s father’s eyes; he comes and stands next to me. The man is wearing a striped shirt, faded brown corduroy slacks and carries a handkerchief in his right hand with which he dries his forehead periodically, although his forehead is perfectly dry.

  ‘I should thank you probably but I wish you had taken that dog away, this Mutt’s a curse on our house,’ he whispers, as if he doesn’t want Momo to hear our exchange.

  I smile. A polite, culturally sensitive smile, which is supposed to mean I do understand but don’t really give a fuck. What’s a man to do? I didn’t find the mutt. The mutt found me.

  A woman’s voice from the kitchen: ‘I see you are back. First your son goes looking for one mutt and comes back with two and now you come back with your files. Am I going to cook these files? Did you manage to get some salt?’

  This place is no fancy bistro but I am ravenous, and the water has settled down in my stomach. How about some food? I want to shout. Where’s your famous frigging desert folks’ hospitality? Where’s my chow? I can smell onions being fried in the kitchen, hear the hiss of raw meat over hot iron. I’ve had some strange midnight snacks but this is the real hunger, for meat and bread and something that you can slurp down, something hot followed by something cold. Oh bring me your spicy meats, give me your broccoli soup. Toss me some tofu. Feed me.

  I have seen these places, these compounds with their clay ovens, in our simulations, but there were no hunger pangs in the simulations. As part of our Cultural Sensitivity programme they sent us on a halal cookery course. As if I am going to find a fattened lamb here to practise my halal skills on.

  ‘Have you come to reopen the Hangar?’ Momo’s father asks.

  ‘What Hangar?’ I say. ‘I had an accident, I was lost in the desert.’

  ‘But we have been waiting for you for seven months.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘For someone to come. I have got all the files, all the paperwork.’

  ‘That’s not why I’m here. I told you, I had an accident.’

  In the updated simulator exercise, ‘Beyond Blitz’, they introduced these old city centres where we could wing a building, almost scrape against a balcony and get a bonus red star. Then came compounds with families waiting for dinner. There were also lots of moving targets, dreamt up by some kid who’d never seen the inside of a cockpit but had watched plenty of video games; people, convoys, camels, occasionally trains. The basic rule was that if it moves, hit it. But then a technical problem: sometimes as you were about to hit it, it stopped moving.

  We had workshops and brainstorming sessions and there was no consensus. Our capacity-building sessions turned into screaming matches. To bomb or not to bomb, or as Central Command started to put it, ‘To B or not to B’.

  I told Cath about this problem. We were told it helps to talk about such things if you are a long-term couple and love each other but have reached an emotional impasse. The stuff that confounds you in briefing rooms, or in front of simulators, should be discussed at the dining table and it will start to make sense. It was supposed to improve our relationship as well.

  ‘And why do the targets move?’ asked Cath, looking suspicious.

  ‘How am I supposed to know, Cath?’ It was the truth.

  ‘Maybe they hear the planes approaching. And surely when they hear a plane approaching it’s one of yours and they know that it’s not there to take them somewhere nice for a holiday. Maybe they think you are there to kill them, or photograph them so that you can send another plane to kill them. And they don’t want to get killed. You can’t blame people for wanting to not get killed,’ she said.

  ‘In that case it’s clear that they are the enemy combatants, otherwise why would they start moving when they hear a plane approaching?’ I gave her a bit of my theory of modern warfare.

  ‘What if they just need to go somewhere?’ asked Cath. ‘When I quit smoking I still used to get the urge to get up from my desk and go out every hour. That didn’t mean that I was still a smoker, I just needed to get away from my workstation,’ she continued. I was already regretting this. Even if I have an argument with a pizza delivery boy, she is always on the pizza delivery boy’s side.

  ‘But you were very depressed when you quit smoking,’ I murmured.

  I used to wonder what I would do if I was ever taken as a POW. What would I say? My wife is depressed. I need to go home, please let me go. Although she said that she was just trying to think things through in her head, things she was working through in her head were not easy to work out. I could see that. Some days she couldn’t even change TV channels without letting out a sub-zero sigh. ‘Why are you crying, baby?’ I would make it a point to ask, and she always looked at me as if I had no right to ask that question. But sometimes she could work things out for me. I was stuck with the new scoring system on simulators, so I talked to Cath about it again. She wasn’t interested.

  Sometimes a discussion with Cath is like tossing a coin. It’s not as if she ever tells me whether or not to do something, but after she asks why I would even think of doing a certain thing, the only way to find out is to go ahead and do it. So in the simulator I hit them, the moving and the stationary, and then felt lighter. Nothing better than shedding your load, that shoulder-sapping feeling, like the first few days of marriage.

  ‘But those are only simulations,’ she said when I told her. ‘You can always change your mind when you have to go and do the real stuff.’

  Cath always calls my work ‘stuff’. I can’t call her day-long shoots for Safe Cats commercials ‘stuff’. I have seen desert simulations. Cath hasn’t. With the air conditioner on full you can do as many sorties as you want and your butt doesn’t burn. Yes sir, I have done many desert simulations but this is not a desert simulation. Because never did I get sand in my butt crack during desert simulations. And I have never felt so ravenous in my life.

  ‘I was the local logistics officer for USAID,’ Momo’s father explains helpfully. ‘I have to keep the records. You never know when the auditors might come.’ Logistics Officer is a thin, wiry man with a neatly trimmed moustache, like a struggling jazz singer who hasn’t landed a gig in years. He pulls up a camping chair emblazoned with UNITED NATIONS FOOD PROGRAMME and sits down, but he is so restless it seems he might get up at any moment and start running a marathon.

  ‘Have you had any visitors?’ I ask politely. I am the only visitor, I know. And I’m not here to talk about your career prospects, I want to scream. Where’s dinner anyway? There’s an entire fucking US of A government department to feed them, a five-star Hangar to protect them, all funded by my countrymen, by my taxes, to feed these guys, now where is my food? Why is that woman taking so long cooking whatever delicious thing she is cooking?

  ‘They haven’t visited in seven months but I have kept all the files updated. I have been writing to them regularly about the situation on the ground but I haven’t been able to send my updates for obvious reasons,’ he pats his files. ‘It’s all here because sometimes they like to catch us unaware.’ I wonder what they could catch him doing? Being dull? He seems like the kind of man who is always getting caught without ever committing a crime. Waits for the police to knock on his door because he has been fantasizing about his neighbour’s wife.

  Things are a bit slow here. That woman in the kitchen is taking a century rustling up dinner, auditors don’t visit for seven months. There is an annoying stillness in this place. Some people might call it peaceful, some might call it a sleepy town. But I’m hungry. You can’t go to sleep on an empty stomach even if you’re in the sleepiest fucking town in the world. No wonder nobody visits this shithole.

  Momo comes in cradling Mutt. ‘The doctor is coming,’ he says, reassuring the mutt and his Father Dear.

  ‘Doctor is busy killing dengue mosquitoes, he is busy
growing vegetables without pesticides, he doesn’t have time for naughty dogs,’ Father Dear says. He doesn’t seem sure of his authority in front of his son. A sissy father. A pussy-whipped, middle-aged man with a pretend job. I bet there’s nothing in those files. I suspect he might be a closet poet, who doesn’t share his poetry with anyone because he believes it’s too precious and other closet poets will steal his metaphors.

  Mother Dear’s voice rings out from the kitchen, something strikes a pot, making a call-to-attention noise.

  ‘You have brought files?’ asks Mother Dear, who as far as I am concerned is on a mission to make the slowest dinner in the history of dinners.

  ‘Yes, I have all of them,’ says Father Dear enthusiastically, as if he has just discovered a new source of fresh water in the desert.

  ‘And have you brought salt?’

  Father Dear gets up from his chair, clenching his fists as if trying to decide whether to divorce or kill this annoying woman who is insulting him in front of a foreigner.

  ‘The plane didn’t come today. But it should be here any day,’ he shouts back.

  ‘What am I going to put in the food if there is no salt? Your sense of duty?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ shouts the sissy logistics man. ‘Your father owned salt mines, and you can’t get a pinch for your stew. Heavens are not going to fall if there is no salt in your stew. No salt. No blood pressure. Half the diseases known to mankind are caused by salt. It’s an addiction. They are not sending us salt because it’s not good for us. If you don’t like it here go live somewhere nice. You can go back to your salt mines.’

  You fly around half the world, almost get killed, only to visit a couple who are arguing over dinner preps.