by Nadim Safdar
He grinned, his strong teeth like tombstones. ‘You will, Brother Akram – you have only have to look up.’ His hands pointed towards the heavens.
‘You think you can be forgiven?’ I shook my head. ‘Just like that?’
‘You think you can live among us yet fight us,’ he replied.
‘I thought I was done with fighting.’
‘Touch me,’ he said.
I turned away.
He reached for my hand and put it to his chest. I could feel his heart beat fast. ‘Touch me to signal that I am forgiven.’ Caught by the wind, his long hair winnowed behind him, and on his face spread a broad smile.
I shook my head, pulled my hand away and went to grasp my walking stick, fallen just slightly out of reach. Surprisingly strong, Bobby heaved me to my feet and carefully put the stick in my hand. As I found my balance, he dropped to the ground and sat with his legs crossed and hands in the prayer position.
Making my way back down towards canal level, I fell several times, grazing my hands on the gravel and incurring scratches from the thicket that lined the path. When I reached the base of the hill, struggling to catch my breath, the brothers who had been training in the mill passed me without a glance. Now wearing high-visibility orange vests and swinging an iron weight in each hand, they ran short sprints up the hill while their instructor counted down from ten. They ran in formation as though they were military.
I returned to the towpath. A barge, painted bright green and with small round windows cut into its side, motored past. A name was stencilled onto the paintwork: MusicMan. Just after it passed me, the noise of its engine changed into something more laboured, and I watched nervously as it slowly reversed and sidled up to the towpath where I was standing.
Mustafa, wearing broad, mirrored sunglasses and a sailor’s cap with an anchor stitched at its centre, was manning the steering column. ‘Mash Allah. Mash Allah,’ he said, putting his hands together in supplication.
He pushed a plank onto the towpath and helped me aboard. ‘What happened to you?’ he asked.
‘Fell,’ I said, flinching from his touch. He nodded knowingly at my scratched and muddied face.
We motored towards Netherton Tunnel. Mustafa disappeared into the cabin to switch on a CD player. I lowered myself to the wooden deck, rolled up my trousers and took off my shoes and socks. Averting my eyes from the sight of my left leg, I slid to the edge of the barge and lowered both feet into the ice-cold water. Here, like this, I was no longer aware of my defect.
The vessel crept into the tunnel. Mustafa cut the engine and the music rang out clearly, a deep rousing tenor echoing off the arched brickwork. Then a woman’s voice, soft and fluttery like birdsong, straining to be heard over the violins, trumpets and crashing cymbals. I pictured an orchestra playing in a lush garden.
Mustafa’s heavy feet shook the deck as he made his way over to me. His hot breath was startling as he bent over and whispered in my ear, ‘I prayed all night that you’d come.’
The voices alternated, the man’s and the woman’s, singing a naath in Arabic, ‘La ilaha il Allahu la ilaha ila Allah’. The weightlessness of my feet in the water felt, for a moment, like a miracle. Then both voices sang at once, perfectly in sync, the sum of them greater than their individual parts. They sounded like angels calling out to Allah. The boat drifted further into nothingness and the volume of the song slowly rose.
Mustafa lowered himself down onto the deck and placed a bottle of whisky and a pack of cigarettes between us. He put two cigarettes into his mouth and lit them, then offered me one. ‘Drink and smoke,’ he said, unscrewing the bottle top and pushing it towards me. ‘We who have not long must enjoy ourselves.’
He began to chant, ‘Allahu, Allahu,’ his head nodding to the beat. I was enjoying the echo against the walls. ‘They won’t find us here, Brother Akram. Allahu. No wives here. Allahu.’
Leaving me with the bottle, he switched on a flashlight and stepped off the barge onto the towpath. The barge drifted on, as thought its direction were divinely set. The beam of the torch elongated along the tunnel walls. It lit up Mustafa in silhouette as he searched for something among the brickwork. Moments later he jumped back onto the barge, the force of his landing vibrating through the wooden planks. He now carried what looked like a military daysack. Still holding the bag, he clambered onto the low roof.
Mustafa extinguished the flashlight, and deep in the tunnel the darkness was complete. I saw a small spark as if two live electrical wires had been touched together. It was momentary, but as it glowed blue it lit up Mustafa’s face, bent towards the source, a cigarette dangling carelessly from his lips. He appeared ghost-like, whiter than I had ever seen him. The smell of tobacco, cordite and worked steel clouded the air above, familiar like the smell of a live bullet issuing from a chamber; the spark flickered a second time, and I saw Mustafa’s broad pink smile and his fragile blue eyelids bordering unwavering eyes.
Leaving the daysack on the roof, he returned to sit beside me. ‘You like this tunnel? British engineering. Only fifty yards short of two miles.’
‘I’ve always wanted to go through it playing opera music, but this is better.’
‘In here,’ he said, ‘it’s the hereafter.’
‘It’s certainly something,’ I said, my eyes beginning to adjust to the darkness. ‘It’s somewhere between worlds.’
‘This atmosphere is good for my eyes,’ he said. He put an arm around my shoulders. As I picked up the bottle he leant his mouth into it, knocking back a large gulp.
‘Brother, it really burns.’ Violently he shook his head and screwed up his face. ‘How can the gora like whisky?’
‘You start with something weaker, something like cider and blackcurrant.’
‘You have lived with the gora. You know their ways.’
‘Whisky is fine neat but improves with a mixer.’
‘I was never part of their society, therefore I am ignorant of their habits.’
‘It must be a cheap blend,’ I added, unable to inspect the bottle in the darkness. ‘What you want is a pure single malt; that, with a drop of water, is tolerable.’
‘You, Brother Akram, have an advantage over me.’
‘I would have preferred a pint of Banks’s – tastes like dishwater but I got used to it.’
‘Society,’ Mustafa repeated, tasting the word. ‘It is time you knew your own. You, Brother Akram, your fate was sealed before you were even born. Up to this day, it has been child’s play, but from now on you must step up and become your own man.’
I took a swig from the bottle and drew on the cigarette. Like a tender lover, Mustafa rubbed my back. ‘Take your time, brother. Take six months, even a year. Learn about who you are. Let Allah take over your body, let Him put whiskers on your chin and ease your pain.’
I laughed. ‘Can you fashion me a third eye?’
‘With a gentle rub of gunpowder I can, or maybe a match,’ he laughed knowingly, ‘but I warn you it will burn.’
‘Through the pain I might learn something,’ I carelessly challenged him.
He shook his head. ‘No, brother. You must also span the other society. When you are needed you must also blend.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Become a brother to the brothers. Grow the sign of a believer’s beard and know one thing above all else, that only through Allah’s grace do we understand the term justice.’
‘Allah is a strange thing. One that has followed me all my life.’
‘When you wake up and see the impotence of our people in the face of the white man’s crusade then you will come to me and say, “Brother Mustafa, tell me what I can do. Equip me with the power of what I must do.”’
‘Are you certain I will do that?’
‘When you say “Allah”, think justice. Just substitute those words.’
‘All my life, as a kid and at school, it wasn’t so much about being brown and not white; even then, really it was a religious war.’
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‘It’s not just religion. It’s a supremacy of morals, ideas; it is the future of mankind. That duty as it has been written, that of killing for vengeance, that noble act is not for the cowardly sweetmeat carriers or the men who trudge blindly around shopping centres behind their wives. It is for men who follow their faith to its natural end.’
A loud drumbeat accompanied the chant. Feeling giddy, I sang along with it, ‘La ilaha il Allahu la ilaha il Allah,’ my voice and the bass echoing loudly into the distance, bouncing off the mossy brickwork like a clap of thunder.
18
Grace helps me upstairs and I dress clumsily, using the edge of the bed and the bedroom wall for balance. Her arms folded at her waist, Grace watches quietly but does not help. She wants to slow it down, my inevitable departure, as do I.
She follows me to the door, my cap in her hand. I flip the daysack over a shoulder. Her eyes dart to it.
‘We soldiers do love to hump.’ I try to laugh.
She opens the door and I step out into the street. She stands on the step, half a foot taller than she actually is. ‘It’s not soldiers I fear. It’s those that come not in uniform.’
I nod gently in understanding. ‘Don’t put your lights out, Grace. Promise?’
‘I’ll see Britney once more, in a few hours.’ She holds back her tears. ‘After that—’
‘You will see her again after that.’
‘You can’t help me?’ Her voice breaking.
‘Remember what Adrian would have said. No pain.’
Briefly, she laughs and cries at the same time.
‘Hold on.’
She nods, wiping her eyes with a fist.
‘One day you’ll be walking along the street minding your own business and this beautiful young woman will walk right past; then a few feet on she’ll stop and glance back, and she’ll be like, “Fuck, Mum?”’
Grace smiles, considering the scene I have painted, but says nothing.
‘And when she does turn, be yourself, she will love you for it, and tell her all about her dad.’
‘I’ve decided to stop,’ she says earnestly. ‘You know, the job.’ She shrugs her shoulders. ‘Wasn’t much good at it anyway.’ She reaches up on her tiptoes and places the cap on my head. There is a long pause as we try not to look at each other.
‘Got to crack on.’ I offer a quick smile and half turn to go.
She half closes the door. ‘Was it a coincidence? Us?’
‘Allah has a plan for each of us.’
‘Don’t be such a cryptic bastard. You came to get it off your chest?’
I nod. ‘I came because Adrian would have wanted you to know.’
‘Will I see you again?’
‘Inshallah.’
A thought lingers on her lips and floats out of view as I turn, my boot scrapes against the pavement, she closes the door and the latch clicks shut.
Grace’s voice, ‘Inshallah,’ rings in my ears. It was the second time she had said it; it sounded curiously different on her lips, as though it was more important when spoken by the gora. Inshallah – God willing. A cruel God meting out a brand of justice none of us, least of all Grace, can comprehend.
I walk, pounding the pavements of my hometown, lost in a daze, my face battered by the wind, my thoughts returning to the One from whom I came, Allah. I am conscious of the daysack weighing me down but it feels good, exhilarating, it reminds me of recruit training, of endless route marches. And then of daysacks humped on patrol, weighted with teabags, sugar, powdered milk, stove kit and ammo. Although I attempt to tread quietly, each boot step clips against the pavement, sharp and loud. A weapon slung across my bent arms would counterbalance the daysack, would make me feel whole. The wind blows intermittently and the sun has not completely broken through the cover of purple-grey clouds: the best conditions for a route march. I recall cooling wind on a perspiring brow and false peaks in the distance and training sergeants and corporals lining the route at mile intervals drinking tea from large green canteens, bellowing encouragement mixed with insults with a wit peculiar to the army.
I reach a roundabout at the base of a hill and proceed upwards. Time is closing in, counting down. The occasional minicab races past, well above the speed limit, and I, a crippled former soldier heading towards the monument, occupy an infinitesimal and fleeting space in the thoughts of its driver.
An unmarked white coach trundles past, belching black smoke. In low gear its engine creates a vicious racket, as though its hulk is squeezed onwards through a thin slip of air. In its rear window, now receding slowly from view, hangs a drum sergeant’s dress tunic and the top end of a black case with comforting curves that evoke the brass instrument within. Perhaps one of the coach’s occupants sees me, one of their own, and considers a wave, and the vehicle moves on faster than he can raise his hand. The cap rubs against my damp brow and I take it off, allowing the wind to my hair. Grace, fingering the double-headed eagle pinned to the cap, had called it two-faced. I had never thought of it that way, but now it seems apt. She described the two personalities of her disorder, a dark phase that could last for months and then, as though the sun had broken through the clouds, give way to lightness. She had lost her child in her helplessness – a state I cannot imagine. Grace, almost without thought, revealed the dark gap in her mouth and smiled, a trusting smile. She did that so that I could see her for what she was. I could stay or go: to her I could easily have been just another man passing through, and in some ways I have been just that.
To the east a small shaft of light penetrates the clouds, opening a gap, and instinctively I say a Bismillah. Out of the bend the road slopes steeply up towards the town centre, where a stone cross stands on a flat piece of ground, and behind that is a dip where once was a moat. Beyond that, in jagged spurs like those of a looming mountain, are the remains of a castle casting a broken shadow as old as old England. England was then for the English, and as the great castle sprang up, how grand it must have seemed to the peasants in their dwellings at the base of the hill – imperious like a structure of the Lord. And within the castle must have resided a lord who, having read his barometer (looted during his most recent foray into France), might have stood looking down from the highest wall, clapped his hands, and proclaimed that by virtue of his God-given powers, he knew that a storm was coming. And when the storm did come how the peasants, who knew nothing of barometers, must have bowed to the words of the lord, who, they whispered, was a reincarnation of the Almighty.
Now, in our time, the only illusionist that remains is Allah. Even as children we are taught the simple secrets of the physical world, but Allah remains our Lord, unidentifiable and unseen.
As though I have been unconscious for these last few minutes, the traffic seems to have suddenly built up. A string of vehicles wait at a traffic signal where a broken arch signifies a gate to a once medieval castle. A child waves from the side window of a car. I smile and return the gesture. She reveals a plastic poppy and shakes it at me. The girl presses her nose against the glass. The car moves away.
Towards the crest of the hill the white coach has stopped at a car park and its occupants are climbing out. Men and women in military dress uniform. On the concrete, some are putting the finishing touches to their attire: doing up brass buttons, squeezing peaked caps onto their heads and patting down berets. A man with a large belly – a band sergeant major, I judge from the stripes and crown emblem on his arm – is going from person to person, dusting down their shoulders with a clothes brush. Instruments are unpacked from their cases and tuned, a noise that slowly builds into a cacophony of broken squeals. The car park’s rough concrete and dilapidated signage appear as an inappropriate, ugly backdrop to the splendour of the military scene. The military would, with their bellies and their instruments, their gleaming brass buttons and sashes of red against black and green, defend every inch of England, for ever England – once, I too would have defended every inch of its green pastures, but not the car parks or the dreary u
rban uniformity under a grey sky. Out there that’s not how any of us remembered it.
The body of the long coach bisects the scene. On one side are the memorial and the assembling band, and on the other is a volunteer tea stand. Folding tables and chairs are set out, and after ordering a tea, I take a seat shielded by the cover of the bus and place the daysack beneath the table, hoping no one will notice it. The daysack is a field patrol item, not something a soldier would carry while in ceremonial dress.
I rest my head in my hands and picture the most beautiful scene I ever saw. It was in Afghanistan. We were finishing up a night patrol and dawn had just broken. The sky was streaked with reds and pinks, and the pink was so thin where it met the snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush that it seemed to melt into the white snow. It was impossible to determine where the earth ended and the heavens began, and at the sight of its magnificence my eyes watered. Then from a distant loudspeaker I heard the call to prayer, the still cold air carrying it to my ears as though it was sung right beside me. I stood on a plain between mountains on each side, and the plain was still dark, still to be illumined by the sun. I shivered and looked around as though for the first time in my life I was properly seeing. The scene had no borders, no left or right; on each side it melted into the dewy air. Everything I needed – rations, a stove to boil water, ammunition – I carried in a daysack, and in that moment I felt like picking up my pack and just walking straight ahead to get as high as I could, to lose myself in the Hindu Kush.
I remember thinking that there would be only one thing better than the view from down on the plain. If I were up on that peak where the air was so thin and the wind chill so cold that I could endure it for only minutes, there I would be closer to Allah. Imagine the light-headedness, the exhilaration, the peril. I could almost touch it. For those freezing minutes I would be truly free and experience something beyond beauty. I would be in some vital place man does not inhabit, more alone than can be imagined. My appreciation of Allah would be equal to my fear of death, but despite that fear I would feel no pain. At any moment the winds would sweep me off and my sublimation would be complete. That would hit it. That’s what I want. That is Allah.