by Tamim Ansary
Karim fell to his knees and began massaging his friend’s icy limbs with his own frigid hands. Ahmad’s clothes were soaked right to his chin. Even his hair was wet. Even his eyebrows were dripping. His eyes had a bulging stare to them. His skull showed a bulge too, where his head had hit the rock. Karim’s chest fluttered. He had to get Ahmad warm somehow, the boy was going stiff before his very eyes. He pulled at Ahmad’s hands. “Come on, jan-im. Get up, let’s go. Can you walk?”
Ahmad shook droplets out of his hair. “Did we miss the men?”
“Yes, buddy. They’re gone. Too late. We have to head home. You’re cold.”
“We should gather some pine nuts!” Ahmad chattered. “Nana wanted us to gather some pine nuts today.”
“We’ll get them tomorrow. We have to get you warm.”
“I can walk,” Ahmad insisted, though his face looked blue.
Karim put his arm around Ahmad and helped him uphill to where the sun was still shining. They walked upstream in silence, both of them knowing they would have to get back in the water eventually to cross the river and neither of them wanting to talk or think about it.
Then Ahmad began to lope. “That’s good,” Karim applauded. “Run, my boy. I bet I can beat you to that tree. Want to race? Whoever wins gives the other a head rub.”
He himself broke into a gallop and for a moment exulted in the freedom of his young limbs, but he beat Ahmad to the tree too easily, and when he looked back, he saw his friend moving slowly, looking sick. “Dearest!” he wailed, rushing back. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I’m cold,” Ahmad grunted. His whole body was trembling. And then, God be praised, Karim spotted a man with a donkey in the distance. He jumped up and down, waving his arms. “Allahu Akbar!” was all he could think to say, shrieking the words like an azaan. “Allaaaaaaaaahu Akbar!” The donkey stopped and the man craned his head.
“Help!” Karim shouted. The man started toward them, and Karim recognized the disreputable barber’s even more disreputable brother; but this was no time to be choosy. He gladly let the man load Ahmad onto his donkey and shambled along behind them on foot until they reached the water’s edge, where he climbed on too. The donkey carried all three riders across the river. They arrived in Char Bagh just as the sun was setting.
Ahmad’s mother was standing in the doorway of her compound, waiting for her son. When she saw him slumped on the back end of a donkey, she let out a cry and rushed to grab him, just as he was slipping off. She helped him totter into his compound. “What’s the matter with you?” Then she turned on Abdul Karim. “What did you do to him?”
“Nothing,” Karim said guiltily. “He fell in the river. He’s the one who wanted to cross. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do nothing. It wasn’t my fault.”
But Karim already knew he was going to get a whipping for this one, and in truth he wanted a whipping, because this was his fault, somehow. He didn’t know how, but he knew he would be told. Before or after his whipping, he would be told exactly how he was to blame for this.
16
Soraya brought her son indoors and marched him to the room behind the kitchen. A flue carrying hot smoke from the bread oven to the chimney passed directly under this floor. She changed her son into his only other clothes, the festival outfit she kept in her special chest with her jewels and finery. At least they were clean and dry. She piled a blanket on top of him and lay down to give him the heat of her body. Soraya never knew a living human being could feel so shockingly cold. All night she pressed against him, but she couldn’t seem to get him warm. By the following afternoon, his forehead felt hot to the touch, and yet he kept shivering. Another day passed and he stopped eating. She was dimly aware of Ibrahim flittering about, uselessly asking how the boy was. Soraya told him to go away and he went away, flustered and helpless. When she looked at Ahmad again, his eyes had a glazed look. In her mind, she saw a group of men lowering Ahmad into his grave. The image was so vivid, she let out a cry, but no one came, because she had told them all to go away.
After dark, Khadija peeped in. “Soraya-jan? How is he?”
“He’s sleeping,” Soraya snapped. She held this against Khadija. She didn’t know how Khadija could be held to blame, but she didn’t want to hear excuses. She blamed Karim as well, because the boys were together when this awful thing happened. She knew almost nothing about the accident because Ahmad had said nothing yet, but Karim was older, he should have known better. His father was probably giving him a beating right now, breaking stout, solid sticks on his legs, his arms, his buttocks—good. He deserved it. Let him yelp. Nothing he suffered could equal what she was suffering, lying next to her son, waiting for him to come out of his fearful lethargy.
Khadija came all the way into the room. “I brought some broth and tea. Do you think we should wake him and get him to eat something?”
“Wake him! When he’s finally getting some sleep?”
Khadija shrank back in deference. “You know best.”
Soraya looked up. She beamed hatred at her sister-in-law. Khadija had always wanted Ahmad to die so that neither of them would have a son and they’d be even and she could move in on Ibrahim. Yes, yes, Soraya saw it all! Unable to bear a child herself, Khadija resented her for giving Ibrahim his heir. With her own husband dead and gone, she must be brimming with spite, this barren widow. Her ill wishes had probably caught Satan’s eye and brought on this catastrophe. Who could tell what damage a hating heart might do?
“Take those things away,” Soraya seethed, but her voice broke before she got the last words out, and she started to cry. This was so awful. She wanted help, she wanted comfort, the comfort that only Khadija could give her, and now she’d gone and forfeited all right to her sister-in-law’s love. Oh that she could take back that bolt of wordless hatred she had fired.
Khadija settled next to her. “Dinner is ready Why don’t you go eat? I’ll watch him for a few minutes.”
“I can’t,” Soraya moaned. “I can’t leave him. I have to stay beside him.”
“Stay then,” Khadija murmured, squeezing the frail woman’s bony shoulder, “but you need to eat. Why don’t you have this broth I brought for Ahmad-jan? I’ll get some bread for you too, and I’ll keep the rest of the broth on the coals so it will be hot when he wakes up, okay, Soraya-jan? You eat now. Keep up your strength. Ahmad will be well, inshallah. He will be up and singing songs tomorrow, may God grant it. We put our faith in Allah.”
“You’re so good to me,” Soraya sighed, her voice laced with shame. “I don’t deserve your kindness, Khadija-jan. Leave the broth, I’ll have a little.”
But Ahmad did not improve the next day. His bright, black eyes turned dull and acquired a film. His forehead went from warm to hot, and when he coughed, his lips ended up flecked with blood. The itinerant barber happened to be in town, and he prescribed a tea made of sour clover. Now at last, Soraya agreed to leave her son’s side. She veiled herself in her chadari for safety, even though the barber would be with her. Together, they went past the outermost fields of the village and up the northern slopes to gather the herb. Picking and climbing, picking and climbing, they came within sight of the malang. The barber called to him. “Salaam aleikum, Malang-sahib.”
“Waleikum a’salaam,” the other replied from his perch. “How are you two?”
“May you live long, Malang-sahib, the world flows by. Allah is great.”
The malang nodded and watched without comment as they worked. Under the vagabond’s gaze, the barber straightened up self-consciously. “This woman’s little boy has fallen ill, sahib. He fell in the river and now he has a fever. He got knocked about a little too. His head… I’m thinking she should make him some clover tea. Do you agree?”
The malang nodded.
“Do you know about herbs and such, Malang-sahib? What is your advice?” The malang bobbed his head slowly. “Give the boy plenty of hot broth,” he said. “Boil a lamb bone rich with marrow. Wipe his brow with a cool cloth when h
e sweats. Keep him covered with a light cloth. Say your prayers at all the appointed times, do not miss a one and say some extra ones besides. God knows what is best. Trust in His mercy. He makes the wheat to grow and the leaves to fall. He makes the seasons turn. Every year he buries the world in winter, every year he makes spring rise up again. We are all mortal. Nothing lasts but Allah. Yield to his will and await his mercy.”
The barber and Soraya made their way back to the village thoughtfully and silently. The boy sipped the sour clover tea listlessly, but his forehead remained hot to the touch. The lamb broth seemed to give him a few hours of peace and he fell asleep, the rattle in his breath diminishing.
Then sweat began to bead up on his forehead again. He tossed under the light cloth Soraya threw over him in obedience to the Malang’s instructions. The sweat turned cold and the boy began to shiver. He clutched her hands and buried his face in her lap. “Mama?” he whimpered, “I’m so cold. Mama?” His words came out through clattering teeth. The night was dark but warm, oh so warm How could he feel cold? It was almost summer now. Next door, the oven blazed away: Soraya had ordered that it stay lit. Even the air coming through the open window felt like the oven’s hot breath to Soraya. The malang had said only a light cloth, only a light cloth, but her darling boy was shivering. She must obey his body’s needs. She fetched out a heavy cotton-padded blanket and gently spread it over him. The next day he lay still, but when darkness fell, his fever rose again. Soraya lost track of the hours and the days. People came in and out of the room like figures in a dream, offering advice, murmuring consolation. Soraya hugged the boy to herself and whispered all the Quran she knew, and blew her healing breath onto his body, the breath that always made him and other children feel better when they had a scratch or a bee sting, but her breath had no healing power now. This was not a scratch. This was not a bee sting. In the late hours of that moonless night, when the misty Trail of Straw glowed across a sky powdered with stars, her boy released his soul to heaven. Oh, it wasn’t fair! Her beautiful, beloved boy! His young body so full of promise. His head so full of dreams. Her boy who shone among all the boys, his father’s pride, a future leader among the men of the village, the carrier of the family name. Gone. Gone, gone, gone, he was gone, and he took the very life force from Soraya’s body when he left. A sob came out of her, and another, and another. Then she gave herself over to howling, and the sleepers rose from their huddled clumps in this room and that room and the other room—they all came rushing to the mother to gape at the source of her misery and to comfort her with hugging arms and to stroke soothing fingers over her cloth-covered hair, but it seemed to her that nothing could ever soothe the anguish blazing in her heart. She cried herself dry as night bled into morning and went on crying until the sun lit up the pale features of her dead son.
17
The men took Ahmad’s little body to the grave, while the women gathered in Soraya’s compound to mourn. Every woman in the village came. They filled the houses and hallways, the pounded-dirt verandas and the yard. They wailed so loudly that donkeys began to bray throughout the village and dogs to howl in sympathy.
The men gathered in the mosque for pre-burial ceremonies. His dear little body was placed on the dais at the front of the room, covered with a green cloth on which inscriptions from the Quran had been intricately embroidered in gold thread by women who didn’t know how to read but merely transcribed shapes from a page with such scrupulous care that not a single diacritical dot was out of place. Under the cloth his body seemed impossibly small. Another whole body could have fit on that dais with him. In death, he seemed no bigger than a cat.
Ibrahim stood in the front row. The men lined up on either side of him and when the line stretched from wall to wall of that rude mosque, they began to form a second line behind the first, and a third line behind the second one and still people kept crowding in until there were seven rows in all and half of an eighth row; but no one wanted to be part of an incomplete row so the men jostled to get into the next row forward, and each row shuffled apart to accommodate more men, until at last they formed just seven tightly-compacted rows of men standing with shoulders touching.
Mullah Yaqub began the funeral prayer, lifting his thumbs to his earlobes and mournfully chanting out “Allahu Akbar!” His voice twanged out the Arabic syllables. All seven rows of men moved as one, bending at the waist and supporting themselves with their hands on their knees, letting the sacred sounds sweep over them. Ibrahim spoke the syllables quietly under his breath in unison with the mullah, craving some comfort from the divine syllables, some relief from pain, but his throat kept trembling. He remembered this sensation from his childhood; it meant tears were coming up. Oh, if ever there was a time for tears, this was it, but not during prayer. He should hold them back at least until the procession to the graveyard. The men stood up, and he felt his own body straightening as if connected to the others. They all went down to their knees, prostrating themselves before the observant gaze of God, and Ibrahim tried to feel Allah’s compassion but could not. This merciful God had just snatched away his only son. This God had ended all his hopes. His son dead, his wife a wreck dissolving into madness—she would never bear another child. He could feel it already. Something was wrong with Soraya. He had always known it. Her sensibilities were too delicate for this world. The loss of her son was going to unhinge her. She would let go of all worldly duties and sink into a morass of lamentation. He had heard of such things. In his father’s generation, it happened to a woman of Haidar’s clan. Allahu Akbar. God is great. Oh, God is great.
Stand up, he whispered to himself. The time had come. The four men appointed to the task lifted the wooden slab that bore his son’s body. The others parted to let them through and then formed a tattered line that followed them out the door and down the steps of the mosque and into the gray light. The sky was filled with clouds. The valley had a deathly stillness to it. The men marched solemnly up to the graveyard. They could hear the lamentations of the women from Ibrahim’s compound, piercing the morning air, mingling with the squawking of crows circling above the marsh on the other side of the river.
The men made their way over a rise in the path and down a short incline to the graveyard. Ibrahim was breathing hard. The short climb had stolen his breath, but only because his chest was so tight, he could scarcely breathe to begin with. They passed his brother’s headstone, and then his father’s. Crocuses had sprung up on his father’s grave, he noticed. The hole in which his son would be buried had already been dug. The men set the burial slab on the mound of soil and formed up at either end, then seized the ropes and lifted the board up, one of them unnecessarily saying, ”Y’allah,” as if to muster the men’s energy—unnecessary because the board was so light, the dead boy being so very small. Why did this innocent boy have to give up his soul at such an age? Ibrahim remembered all the times the boy had pestered him with questions about his travels to Mecca, what he had seen in all those distant cities …He had given him short answers, turned him out of the room, told him to go pester his mother. He thought of the one time he had broken a stick on his son’s outstretched palm to punish him for losing a bucket into the well. Biting his lips, he wished he could have his boy back just long enough to tell him he had punished him out of love, that he loved him even as he beat him, that he took pride in him for growing up so curious…
The boy was lowered into the Earth’s heart. The men separated into two masses, just to make room for Ibrahim. The time had come for each one to drop three fistfuls of dirt onto the boy’s shroud. And with the first fistful to utter the Arab syllables that meant, “from dust you have given us human form,” and with the second to say, “unto dust you will resolve us again,” and with the third to say, “and out of dust again, yours is the power to resurrect us.” And when Ibrahim had finished he muttered quietly to himself, “Forgive him oh Lord of the universe.”
He moved to the other side of the grave and his cousin took his place. Now men were pi
cking up fistfuls of dirt on all side of the grave and flinging them into the hole in showers of gray-brown soil.
And then Ibrahim sensed a hubbub among the men on the other side of the grave. He peered past the men and saw a solitary figure making its way down the mountain slope—the malang was coming.
Wrapped in his tattered cloak, gazing straight ahead and never at his feet, the malang picked his way steadily among rocks, down a pathless slope, approaching the cemetery from above. With stately grace, he moved directly to the open grave, and those who stood between him and the pit moved aside spontaneously to clear the way. At the edge of the grave, the malang stopped and drew himself up to his full height. He tossed his head back, closed his eyes, and began to recite Quran. His melodic voice rolled across the valley, sounding more like a chorus than a single voice, sounding like a whole plangent chorus. The crows stopped cawing and the keening of the women stopped.
The malang sang for long minutes and whatever had been rustling and stirring when he started, faded into silence. The men around the grave began to sway in time to the malang’s incantatory voice. Then abruptly he stopped chanting and crouched beside the grave. He took a fistful of moist soil and dropped it in. He looked up at the men, spoke the ritual Arabic lines, but then went on to say in Farsi, in their own familiar tongue, “Tell us, where have all the great kings gone, with all their knights and courtiers? Gone into the belly of the Earth to mingle with the meanest of their subjects and the greatest of their ancestors!” He clutched another fistful of dirt and sprinkled it into the grave. Again he chanted in Arabic and then switched to Farsi. “Tell me! Why are the mothers weeping? They are weeping because their children have died and because the children who survive will also die and because all will die and mingle with this soil which is our heart and home.”