The Orange Grove

by Larry Tremblay

“We didn’t tell Halim anything, he was lying,” Amed replied in a hurry.

  Soulayed smiled. He placed his hands on Amed’s shoulders.

  “Don’t be afraid, child, you did nothing wrong.”

  Amed freed himself. Began to run toward the dirt road. Soulayed turned to the other boy. Asked him if he was Amed or Aziz.

  “I’m Aziz.”

  Then he turned to Amed, who was running away. He cried to him: “Amed, Amed, listen to me, Halim told me about the day your kite string broke. I know what happened that day. God is great. He’s the one who broke your string. Believe what I say, Amed! He broke it so that things would come to pass as they must.”

  Amed stopped running. Soulayed took Aziz’s hand and led him toward his brother. All three sat down in the shadow of a rock.

  “You came here to fly your kite. All the children around here know this is the best place for it. Since the bombings, no one risks coming here anymore, but you two came in spite of the danger. And your string broke and the kite, freed, flew off as if it wanted to rejoin, beyond the hills, the sea’s immensity. Suddenly the wind stopped. As if by magic. You saw the kite fall from the sky and vanish on the other side of the mountain. And you went off to find it as if it were the most precious thing in the world. Paper and wind! I think it must have been fabulous, your kite. Full of bright colors. Maybe it was shaped like a bird or a dragon. Or maybe a dragonfly?”

  “No, no, nothing like that,” said Aziz. “It was our grandfather who’d made it. Just paper and wind, as you say.”

  “And you began to climb the mountain. Am I right? Answer me!”

  “We had to go home with the kite, or our father would have had questions,” Amed explained.

  “Yes,” Aziz went on. He began to imitate his father’s voice: “Where did you lose it? You have no heart. Lose your grandfather’s gift? Where did you go?”

  “He would have waited for our answer,” Amed continued. “And we would have told the truth, we couldn’t lie to our father.”

  “That’s good, you must never lie to he who gave you life.”

  “Our father would have killed us,” Aziz said, “if he’d learned that we came here. We had to go back with the kite. We began to climb the mountain. It wasn’t very high. And there was the ghost of a road snaking through the rocks. It was easy to follow. We laughed. It was exciting to climb so high and to see the valley below and, very far off, the green spot of the orange grove.”

  “He who has the courage to rise up embraces his whole life at a glance. And also all his death.”

  Saying that, Soulayed smiled. He offered the boys cigarettes. They smoked, sitting all three on the ground that became, despite the shade, more and more scorching. Soulayed’s neck shone with sweat.

  “Your grandfather was right in the end. In his day he planted orange trees on the good side of the mountain. Because on the other side, our dead were being ripped out of their tombs. The living were massacred, their houses destroyed. Their fields and their gardens were razed. Each day that passes, our enemies gnaw away at the land of our ancestors. They are rats!”

  Soulayed took a long drag on his cigarette.

  “Well, Amed, and you, Aziz, when you reached the top, what did you see on the other side?”

  “The other side of the sky,” replied Aziz. “I saw the other side of the sky. There was no end. As if my eyes couldn’t reach any farther. And then, in the dust blown up by the wind, I saw in the distance a town, a strange kind of town.”

  “It wasn’t a town,” Amed corrected. “It didn’t look like a town. At each end there was a tower that threw flashes of light into the sky.”

  “Military installations, that’s what you saw. You saw warehouses surrounded by barbed wire. And do you know what’s inside? Our death. They’ve been planning it for years. But God broke your kite string and now it’s their own death they’re warehousing.”

  Amed and Aziz didn’t understand Soulayed’s last words. They wondered if he was losing his mind.

  “You knew you’d go to the other side of the mountain. Who doesn’t? We’ve been at war for so long. You knew it, no? And that’s what you told Halim.”

  “No! We didn’t know it!”

  “Don’t lie!”

  “My brother doesn’t lie!” shouted Aziz, standing up. “He only told Halim that our kite flew over the mountain.”

  “I just wanted to impress him, that’s all,” added Amed, tears in his voice. “Halim was the best kite flyer around. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Listen to me, both of you. It doesn’t matter what you knew or didn’t know. And it doesn’t matter what you really told Halim. Those are childish things and we don’t need to talk about them anymore. Do you want to know what really happened that day?”

  Soulayed stood up without waiting for their answer, and set off with long strides toward the mountain.

  “Follow me!”

  They walked under the sun for a good ten minutes before they came to the foot of the mountain.

  “Around here, I imagine, was where you climbed the mountain to find your kite?”

  “Yes,” Aziz admitted.

  “Right there,” his brother added.

  “Just what I thought.”

  Soulayed wrapped his arms around the two boys.

  “You didn’t know that with every step you took, you could have been blown up by a mine. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  Soulayed stroked the boys’ heads.

  “A miracle is what really happened that day. God broke your kite string and God guided your steps on the mountain.”

  They returned to the road in silence. Aziz felt like throwing up because of the cigarette Soulayed had given him.

  Back at the jeep, Soulayed burst out laughing. He picked up a bottle of water lying at his feet. It was half-full. He opened it and poured its contents over his head. The water washed over his hair and his beard and wet his shirt. His laughter frightened the boys. He turned to them with a big grin. His white teeth were beautiful, perfect. He started the motor. Amed didn’t dare say that he was thirsty too. He searched with his eyes to see if another bottle was lying around. There was no other. Soulayed drove faster than he had on the way there. He said in a loud voice, speaking over the noise of the jeep and the wind: “Do you see now what you’ve accomplished? You found a road to lead you to that strange town. You’re the only ones who’ve done it. Others who’ve tried to do so were blown to smithereens by the mines. In a few days, one of you will go back there. You, Aziz, or you, Amed. Your father will decide. And the one who is chosen will wear a belt of explosives. He will go down to that strange town and make it disappear forever.”

  Before leaving them, Soulayed said again: “God has chosen you. God has blessed you.”

  Amed took refuge in the house. For a long time, Aziz stood watching the cloud of dust stirred up by the jeep’s departure.

  While the boys waited for Soulayed to return, time became strangely long. Minutes stretched out as if made of dough. One of the brothers would be going off to war to blow up military installations in the strange town, as Soulayed had called it. They talked about it all the time. Who would their father choose? Why one rather than the other? Aziz swore that he wouldn’t let his brother go off without him. Amed said the same thing. Despite their youth, they were aware of the honor Soulayed was conferring on them. Suddenly they had become real fighters.

  To kill time, they played at blowing themselves up in the orange grove. Aziz had stolen an old belt from his father that they weighted with three tin cans full of sand. They took turns wearing it, slipping into the skin of a future martyr. The orange trees also played war with them. The trees became enemies, endless rows of warriors poised to launch their explosive fruits at the slightest suspicious noise. The boys worked their way between them, crawling and scraping their knees. When they activated the detonator—an old shoelace—trees were uprooted by the force of the explosion, shooting into the sky in a thousand fragments, falling ba
ck down onto their shredded bodies.

  Amed and Aziz tried to imagine the impact of that fatal moment.

  “Do you think it will hurt?”

  “No, Amed.”

  “Are you sure? And Halim?”

  “What about Halim?”

  “There must be little pieces of Halim all over now.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Do you think that’s a problem?”

  “Why a problem?”

  “For going to heaven.”

  “Think, Amed. It doesn’t matter what happens on earth. The real Halim, the whole Halim, is already in heaven.”

  “That’s what I think too, Aziz.”

  “Then what are you worried about?”

  “Nothing. Yesterday I had a dream. Our father had chosen me. Before leaving, I gave you my yellow truck.”

  “What yellow truck?”

  “The one in my dream.”

  “You never had a yellow truck.”

  “In my dream I had one. I gave it to you. And I left with the belt.”

  “And me?”

  “What?”

  “What did I do when you left with the belt?”

  “You played with the yellow truck.”

  “That’s a stupid dream, Amed.”

  “You’re the one who’s stupid!”

  The two brothers looked at each other in silence for a long moment. Each tried to guess what the other was thinking. Aziz saw tears well up in his brother’s gaze.

  “Aziz, do you sometimes hear voices?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Voices in your head.”

  “No, Amed.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  Amed was disappointed by his brother’s answer.

  In the beginning, he’d thought everyone heard voices. “If that’s how it is . . .” But in time, Amed had come to the conclusion that he might be the only person in the universe to have had such an experience. No one around him had mentioned any such thing. Only that once had he found the courage to talk about it to his grandmother, but it was impossible to describe the strange words that came without warning.

  The voices reeled off incoherent sounds inside him, turned words inside out, endlessly repeated a sentence he’d just said or that his brother or his mother had spoken the day before. Amed felt as if he harbored within himself a tiny Amed, a kernel of himself made of material much harder than his own flesh, and that had several mouths, like his character Dôdi. Sometimes the voices spoke as if they knew more than Amed himself did. Perhaps they’d been born before him? Perhaps they’d lived elsewhere before settling inside him? Perhaps, when he slept, they traveled and absorbed knowledge inaccessible to him? Perhaps they knew languages other than his own. Despite the times when they deformed words or babbled them senselessly, perhaps these voices had important things to tell him?

  Zahed spent several days cleaning up the debris of his parents’ house. He cleared the property around it as well. Salvaged photos, clothes, some dishes. But he didn’t keep the few sticks of furniture that were still usable. Tamara helped him as much as she could. The boys offered to lend a hand, but their father chased them away. Husband and wife worked in silence. Silence that was heavy and painful. Several times, Tamara wanted to open her mouth and as many times she held back. It was the same for Zahed. A truck came to collect what was left of the house’s walls. There was nothing now but the floor stained with blood. Zahed took his wife by the hand. She didn’t understand what he wanted to do. Seeing her unease, he asked her to sit down. She obeyed. He sat near her on the floor bereft of walls, mourning those who had lived there. Tamara wanted to laugh. She felt like her in-laws’ house had been swept away by the wind, and that she and her husband were on the verge of uprooting themselves from the earth in turn, leaving it for good.

  Zahed broke the silence: “It will be Amed. He’s the one who will wear the belt.” Tamara’s heart stopped.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Zahed went on, painfully. “I know what you want to say. I’ve thought about this for a long time. It won’t be Aziz. I’d be ashamed, Tamara. I couldn’t go on living if I asked Aziz to wear the belt. I couldn’t face God. Yes, Tamara, I’ve thought about it for a long time. I’ve turned the question over thousands of times in my heart, and . . .”

  “But Aziz will . . .” Tamara couldn’t finish her sentence.

  “Yes, Aziz will die, I know it as well as you do. I told you what the doctor explained to me. It would not be a sacrifice if he wore the belt. It would be an offense. And it would be turned against us. Also, Aziz could not succeed in his present state. He’s too weak. No, Tamara, it can’t be Aziz. You don’t send a sick child to war. You don’t sacrifice what has already been sacrificed. Try to think it through, Tamara, you’ll come to the same conclusion. It’s Amed who will go.”

  Tamara wept and shook her head no, unable to speak.

  “Why do you think Soulayed came to offer me his condolences and brought Kamal with him? Listen to me, this man lost his wife when his only son was born. And he agreed to sacrifice him.”

  Zahed rose. Tamara watched him move off, his back bent, into the orange grove. She was not surprised. She had known Zahed would choose Amed. In her heart, she had always known. And it rendered her mute with pain.

  That night, in the garden, she looked at the moon, bathed herself in its distant light. Suddenly she remembered a song. Her mother had murmured it into her ear to put her to sleep:

  One day we will be light.

  We will live with eyes always open.

  But tonight, child, close your eyelids.

  A sensation of cold seized hold of her belly. She thought she was going to be sick. But the cold, which usually moved downwards, now climbed as high as her lips, her tongue. Icy words formed in her mouth. She realized it was too late. Nothing could melt those words and the thoughts they contained. She waited for night to envelop the house, then she went up, silently, to the boys’ room. She heard the whistling of their breath. They were sleeping deeply. She approached Amed’s bed, and placed her hand on his brow. She waited for him to wake. When his eyes were half-open, she tenderly took his hand.

  “Don’t say anything, don’t wake your brother, follow me.”

  They slipped out of the bedroom like thieves. With Amed, she went back into the garden. They sat down on the “moon bench,” as Tamara secretly liked to call it. Amed didn’t seemed too surprised that she’d woken him in the middle of the night and led him out of the house. His eyelids were still heavy with sleep.

  “Listen to me, Amed. Soon your father will go into your room without a sound, so as not to wake your brother, and will place his hand on your head as I did myself just now. And you, you’ll slowly emerge from your sleep and you’ll understand, seeing his face bent over yours, that it’s you he’s chosen. Or he’ll take you by the hand, lead you into the orange grove, and sit you down at the foot of a tree to talk to you. I don’t know just how your father will reveal it to you, but you’ll know before he’s even opened his mouth. Do you realize what that means? You will not come back from the mountain. I don’t know what all Soulayed has told you, you and your brother, but I can guess. Your father says he’s a man who can see the future. An important man who is shielding us from our enemies. Everyone respects him, no one dares disobey him. Your father fears him. Me, as soon as I saw him, I found him arrogant. Your father should not have allowed him to cross the threshold of our house. Who has given him the right to go into people’s houses and take away their children? I’m not stupid. I know that we’re in a war and that we must make sacrifices. And I know that you and your brother are courageous. You’ve told your father that it would be an honor for you to fulfill your duty and wear this belt. He told me what you said. You’re ready to follow in the steps of Halim and all the others. Your father is overwhelmed. He’s proud of your determination. God has given us the two best sons in the world, but Amed, I am not the best mother in the world. You remember
my cousin Hajmi? You remember, don’t you? She was sick. Aziz suffers from the same sickness. His bones are decaying, melting away inside his body. Your brother is going to die, Amed.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Don’t tell your mother she’s lying. The big-city doctor told your father. Aziz will not see the next harvest. Don’t cry, my dear, it’s too hard, I beg you, don’t cry.”

  “Mama.”

  “Listen to me, Amed, listen to me. I don’t want you to wear the belt.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t want to lose both my sons. Talk to your brother, persuade him to take your place.”

  “Never.”

  “Tell him you don’t want to wear the belt.”

  “It’s not true.”

  “Tell him you’re afraid.”

  “No!”

  “Oh, Amed, my child. Aziz will be happier if he dies over there! You know what’s ahead of him otherwise? He’ll die in his bed, suffering horribly. Don’t deprive him of a glorious death for which God will welcome him with all the honors due a martyr. I beg you, ask Aziz to take your place. Don’t tell anyone, above all not your father. It will be our secret unto death.”

  Amed headed back to bed like a tottering little ghost. Tamara remained sitting on the moon bench. She struggled to calm her heart. After a long time, she held out her hand to the nearest rose. She stroked its petals with her fingertips. Tamara thought she could see the flower’s heart breathing in and out. “The scent of flowers is their blood,” Shahina had said to her one day. “Flowers are generous and brave. They shed their blood without caring for their lives. That’s why they fade so fast, worn out from offering their beauty to whoever wants to lay eyes on it.” Shahina had planted this rosebush when the twins were born. It was her way of celebrating the arrival of her grandsons. Tamara quickly got up from the bench and brusquely tore off the roses. Her hands bled, scratched by the thorns. She felt horrible. That terrible thought, she’d given it voice: she’d sent her sick son to his death.

  The next day, a voice woke Amed well before his brother. To his amazement, it possessed the accents and unique rhythms of Halim’s voice. No mistake, it was really his. It spoke inside Amed without really speaking to him, as if it were a song sung by someone who didn’t need to be listened to in order to exist.