Red Birds

by Mohammed Hanif

  She has probably got her heart in the right place but this callousness, this arrogance, is appalling. Trying to fix all the world’s problems with a blackboard and a box of chalk.

  ‘Why can’t we all just stay home,’ I mumble and she hears me.

  ‘Yeah right, why can’t we? Tell me. I volunteered to come here after you forced these people out of their homes. You should have stayed home.’

  ‘I can probably teach some basic arithmetic,’ I mumble. ‘But let’s first try and put up a fence. I don’t want little kids falling into the ditch while I teach them prime numbers.’

  She looks at me with kind eyes. ‘So maybe we can get the Hangar open, shift the school there?’

  ‘You can’t just walk into a military installation. You don’t have the clearance. Children definitely don’t have the clearance.’

  ‘But you do, you lead the way. Think of the children.’

  ‘I don’t interfere in administrative matters. If a place is shut, it’s shut. Why ask why?’

  Lady Flowerbody is definitely not here just to study Young Muslim Minds. It seems she has been sent to play around with my mind.

  A Jeep Cherokee drives towards us and stops perilously close to where we are standing. ‘Now there is somebody who should be in school,’ I change the topic.

  Momo kicks the door of the jeep open and jumps out.

  ‘You still here, dog thief?’ he addresses me, his eyes full of mischief. ‘Still having stomach cramps? It seems you don’t wanna go home. Why are you running away from the wife? Or are you planning to settle down with the Lady? Spy falls for thief, who she gonna spy on?’ Momo is trying to be friendly. I wonder what he wants.

  ‘Can’t wait to get out of this hellhole. But you are going to get arrested for driving that thing. Even here it’s illegal.’

  ‘If the police can find this place on their map, they are welcome to come and arrest me. If your new friend can find me a better vehicle, you can have this and drive back home. Look, she wants a peep into our minds, she doesn’t care about our transport needs.’

  There is nothing more irritating than cocky fifteen-year-olds. What happened to respect for the elders? In our ‘Significance of Elders in Tribal Cultures’ module they emphasized that it’s bigger than class, it doesn’t matter if you have fifty camels or drive a Land Rover, when you see an elder you stand up in respect. Even if you are in your fucking uniform, even if you are driving an illegal vehicle. And here is a kid terrorizing the Camp with his rash driving. He represents everything that’s wrong with this Camp, with its dependent refugee status, its eternal wait for some plane to appear in the sky and relieve everyone of their misery. I haven’t raised children myself but if I had a boy that age I’d make sure that he walked to and from school every day. To toughen him up. But he is not my responsibility. Every badly behaved fifteen-year-old in the world is not my responsibility. That’s not what I signed up for. I signed up to fight in a war, not to foster a family of juvenile delinquents.

  He stands there and stares at me. She walks away as if this boy and his illegal jeep has got nothing to do with her, with us. She has the air of a permanent do-gooder who will just leave when they stop feeling good about doing good.

  ‘Do you want a lift?’ Momo says, fiddling with his I Heart NY cap.

  ‘Where you going to drive me to?’

  ‘Wherever you wanna go. Back to the desert?’

  His wannas, gonnas irritate the hell out of me. He sounds like he was born in New Jersey.

  ‘I don’t wanna go anywhere. Not with you. I can walk.’

  ‘Come with me,’ he says. ‘I wanna show you something.’

  I can’t imagine what there is to see unless he has got a secret tunnel out of here.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ I say, and start walking away from him. He comes after me, cap in hand, and starts to walk in step with me, as if we are two old friends out for an evening stroll, friends so familiar that we don’t even need small talk.

  ‘I wanna tell you something,’ he says, looking straight ahead.

  ‘Everybody wants to tell me something. The only thing I want to hear is a set of directions out of this place,’ I say, making it clear that I have no intention of involving myself in local gossip, petty disputes or family squabbles.

  ‘You’ve seen the Hangar, do you know what is inside?’ he says.

  ‘What’s in there? A departure lounge for passengers stuck in these boondocks?’

  He looks at me with the confused eyes of someone who is genuinely trying to help but has been rebuffed.

  ‘It doesn’t seem you wanna go anywhere in a hurry,’ he says. ‘I understand, sometimes I don’t wanna go home either. In the desert we have an ancient saying about families. They fuck you up.’

  The boy has been acting grown up for such a long time that he sounds like a middle-aged bar-stool philosopher.

  ‘No, seriously, if I don’t get back home very soon, or at least if I don’t get in touch immediately and explain my situation, I’ll be in trouble. Missing in action isn’t what it used to be.’

  Momo raises his hands in the air and looks at me as if reminding me: Look at yourself now. You’re seven thousand miles away from your home base, you have lost your plane, you are at the mercy of the very people you came to kill and you are still worried about trouble at home. You must really love your wife who doesn’t even exist. Or you must really love that fucked-up country of yours that sent you here in the first place and then forgot all about you.

  But for the moment he is not interested in me or my country. He has got family on his mind, which is definitely the most fucked-up country in the world. ‘If Pakistan screwed Afghanistan and USA was the midwife you’d get a country called FAMILY,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, I know about these things.’ He says Mother Dear is very angry with Father Dear. Very very angry. And he comes home every day, before sunset. But she is still very angry.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘You can’t blame her. Nobody should have to cook every day without salt. It’s a strange kind of punishment. And your father doesn’t know how to show love. A man must show love. Even when he is not feeling it. Especially when he is not feeling it. That’s how relationships survive. That’s how the world survives. And you don’t keep count of the number of times you have to show love. When monkeys pick lice off each other they don’t keep a count of how many lice they have picked.’

  ‘Interesting you talk about monkeys,’ he says. ‘I tried to train a monkey once. More stubborn than Americans. Always jumping up and down, but completely empty upstairs,’ he puts his forefinger to his temple.

  ‘Families are the same everywhere. Cath’s mother was popping painkillers all her life but Cath turned out OK. She even runs a book club.’

  He looks at me as if I am trying to give him a life lesson he doesn’t need.

  ‘She cries,’ he says, looking down examining his sneakers. ‘She cries every night after we go to sleep.’

  ‘How do you know if you are asleep? You are probably having nightmares.’

  ‘I can’t go to sleep until she stops crying. Some days she is still crying when Mutt comes to wake me. That’s why I used to be late for school. That’s why I got expelled.’

  I don’t know what I am doing here but I am definitely not here to cure depression amongst middle-aged married women. There are more chances of world peace breaking out.

  I used to think that if I am ever taken a POW I am going to plead that my wife is depressed, I need to go home, please let me go.

  Cath had called during the last Desert Survival Course, and for some reason they put her call through. To think, they have been more kind to Cath than they have ever been to me. There are still some old-fashioned controllers untouched by emergency rules who believe that any call from your spouse is as urgent as any order of the day. I thought she was calling to tell me something significant like she was pregnant or she had lost weight or our kitten was throwing up again. She had only called to say that she was fee
ling hungry and lonely. She didn’t say she was lonely because I wasn’t with her, she didn’t say she missed me or that she would have liked to be with me – not that they would let her be with me, there was no way they would allow a spouse to be on a survival course with anyone. But if you are feeling bored and lonely and your husband is away learning to survive in a desert, the least you can do is tell them that you miss them or you would like to be with them. There is no law that says you can’t say that. But all she said is that there was nothing in the fridge.

  ‘This meat is raw, how am I supposed to eat it?’ she said, and then added abruptly, ‘I am bleeding again.’ I never knew what to say to that. She made her monthly cycle sound like my personal failure. I ignored the accusation.

  ‘Depends if you are making breakfast or dinner,’ I said. ‘There is a time difference, you know, our watches are set to different time zones. I don’t know where I am—’

  ‘And even if you knew you are not allowed to tell me. . . ’ She cut me off sharply. I could tell she was hungry.

  I could have given her a tutorial on how to cook a snake on a hot stone but I just grunted and told her to order a takeaway and hung up.

  I wish she would call now so that I could tell her something about the desert, the real one, not the shimmering fantasy in our simulator. So that I could tell her family is trouble anywhere in the world.

  She doesn’t call anymore. She only appears and disappears.

  *

  Momo takes my hand and pulls me down with a jerk, bringing his mouth to my ear. For a moment I panic, thinking he is about to plant a kiss on my cheek. But he whispers in my ear. ‘Father Dear sold Ali to your people. That’s why Mother cries all night.’

  ‘Who is Ali?’ I say, snatching my hand away from him. I should probably ask him where his father sold him and why.

  ‘Don’t speak so loudly. Everybody in the Camp knows, they think he has gone with the Americans and sends us money.’

  I can’t believe that mild-mannered logistics officer is a seller of children, of a human being called Ali. He sees my perplexed face and says, ‘Bro Ali, my older brother. Two years older. He worked in the Hangar when there was a workshop. He could fix anything. They let him change tyres on planes, when they used to have planes.’

  A pickup truck hurtles towards us. A teenager sits in the back, cradling a gun. A very pregnant goat stands behind him and it looks very scared. Momo greets the boy, the boy ignores us and hugs the goat.

  ‘Why would your father do a thing like that? And why would the folks at the Hangar buy him? We don’t trade in humans. It’s not even legal anymore,’ I say.

  Momo takes my hand and we start walking away from the Camp. ‘Are you gonna keep playing stupid or are you stupid? He says he didn’t do it. He says he got him a job in the Hangar and then he never came back. But it’s obvious that he is lying. He never looks you in the eye when he says that. And he never cries.’

  ‘Some people don’t cry. Your brother probably got lost in the desert,’ I say.

  ‘Nobody gets lost in the desert unless they are a complete stupid,’ Momo says, angry now, then looks at me. ‘He knew the desert very well. I do too. And he taught me everything I know.’

  Then he starts talking like an irritated lawyer trying to explain a fine legal point to his dumb client.

  ‘This is what happened. Before, he used to go to the Hangar sometimes, worked for them and came home in the evening. Sometimes he did things for them which were top secret. Even I wasn’t supposed to know. Mother Dear used to give him breakfast before everybody else. Then one day Father Dear says pack his lunch and he says iron his Boss T-shirt, he says it’s a special day. Bro Ali has got a full-time job. And he goes with Father Dear and Father Dear comes back alone and pretends he knows nothing about why Ali hasn’t come back.’

  ‘Surely he gave some explanation?’

  ‘Yes. He said he must be on his way, fixing radars on the plane. Official business, even Father Dear is not allowed to go in the operations area. Double pay. Special job. When he finishes the job he gets a green card and the same job in San Jose.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘He never comes back. Do you think they might have sent him to San Jose? Why wouldn’t anybody tell us anything? Hangar also shuts down, no planes, no bombs, nothing. Only an alarm that rings sometimes. Mother Dear screams at Father Dear, Mother Dear threatens to go there to find him. He was Mother Dear’s favourite.’ He says this in a state of despair, as if he has lost in a rigged contest.

  ‘Firstborns have that kind of advantage. I’m sure she loves you too.’

  ‘I am her only son,’ says Momo, then adds, ‘until we find him of course.’

  Until we find him?

  And I suddenly realize that behind all the swagger and sharp tongue and fancy boots he is still a child struggling to understand what his parents want from him, what else is in store for him.

  Come on, man, don’t get involved. It’s probably treason to help the enemy against your own country. What if High Command finds out? Even if it’s not technically treason, it’s stupid.

  ‘Maybe he just left. Maybe he ran away. Kids are always running away from home. I always used to dream of running away. One day you’ll run away from home too.’

  ‘Mother Dear has told me she is not going to forgive me her milk if I don’t find him. What does forgiving the milk mean? I can’t ask her because what if it means something really bad. It sounds bad enough.’

  I try and remember some piece of wisdom from my Cultural Sensitivity course. Nothing. We were told they respect their mothers. The more sons a mother has the more respect she gets, but it also means she has to do more housework.

  Nothing about milk. Nothing about forgiveness.

  ‘She probably wants you to focus on your school work, not drive around aimlessly. All mothers want that.’

  ‘Did your mother want that?’ he says thoughtfully. ‘And how about you? Do you have children? What would you do if one of them went missing?’ This is not the first time the little brat has messed with my head. I say nothing.

  ‘I know what my mother wants me to do. She doesn’t realize I can’t do it alone. But now I have got an idea. I have got a team. I have got a plan; but for that you are gonna have to go inside the Hangar.’

  I am pretty sure I am not going to like his idea. I am dead sure that it’s a bad idea. I can’t break into a locked-up military facility along with enemy combatants. I am sure a whole universe once existed there; planes being refuelled, war plans being implemented, pilots sitting in their waiting rooms with their extra hot cups of coffee and their aspirin for breakfast, where master sergeants stood waving orange batons at taxying aircrafts, where you could breathe in aviation-grade gasoline and get high for a few moments.

  ‘What we gonna find in the Hangar?’ Momo asks.

  ‘As you are saying it’s not operational anymore, I wouldn’t know. Probably only an R&R facility?’

  ‘What’s R&R?’

  ‘Rest and Recreation. When soldiers are tired, when they need a break but there is not enough time to fly them home.’

  ‘Did they send you here for rest and recreation? When are you gonna go and check it out? There is not much rest or recreation in this Camp.’ It sounds like a mission brief. The sun is glinting in the green shards on Momo’s house’s boundary walls. Maybe I need to do exactly what Momo wants me to do. Find a way to get into the Hangar, there has to be some comms equipment, I could get in touch with the Roaming Angels and get the hell out of here. But Momo wants to hitch a ride.

  ‘I think the way to start is that you need to talk to Father Dear,’ says Momo. ‘In confidence. That should be the first step. He considers every white man his boss. I think you can convince him that we should go into the Hangar.’

  I am not here to solve your family problems, I have enough of my own, I want to say. I don’t say anything, but Momo already seems to have a strategy in place. I am supposed to talk to the logistics offic
er. In confidence? About what?

  ‘I don’t think your father trusts me,’ I say sheepishly. And I think it’s this moment when I sign on to the project that will seal my fate. I could have said I have no desire to talk to your father. I could have said I don’t want to have anything to do with a man who allegedly sold his firstborn to an invading army. I could have said I am the invading army. I could have said I don’t understand your culture and hence am the wrong person to take part in any local adventures. I could have just walked away. Anyone in my place should have said this is not my culture, I am going to run from this place. But I didn’t. Why? Because my mission isn’t complete yet.

  Say hi to Major Ellie.

  CHAPTER 25

  Mutt

  Whenever I hear the alarm from the Hangar, I know we are gonna go into action soon. It is a shrill sound that stuns the morning birds, pierces through every mud wall, stirs everyone in their dreams. It is the sound of a thousand dead American soldiers screaming their last scream, it rises and falls like their fathers whispering to their dead sons’ pictures and then it rises in cacophony, like all the dead from their bombing, pulling themselves out of their graves and trying to tell the stories of their abruptly ended lives.

  First there is one sound, as if an ambulance is moving in slow motion, carrying someone who was distressed but not dying, then the voice grows louder, and more shrill, and stray dogs lie down on the ground with their bellies pressed against the earth, as if the earth will absorb their fears, migratory cranes lift off in their vast formations and leave the Camp in panic, promising themselves to avoid this route in next season’s migration. The noisy children in their courtyards shut up, and thrust their fingers in their ears and pull faces at each other, goats go around their business, occasionally raising their heads, then, getting bored with this whining world, go back to the essential business of avoiding poisonous berries and chewing the leaves. The alarm sustains itself at its highest pitch for about a minute and just when I think it will ring till eternity, it begins to die down and then, like a choking dragon, it takes a few loud hiccups and comes to an abrupt halt. Its presence vibrates in the air for a few moments, goats pick up their heads and note the silence with approval and then go back to their day-long lunch.