“I’m sorry, it’s just—I can’t often leave Papa alone.”
“Pishogay.” Her father patted her hand. “You should go. You need more people in your life than your old father who is perfectly able to care for himself.”
Perhaps she should accept her father’s offer. She turned back to Mirri, but Mirri stopped her.
“I have things to do now, but let me come to the clinic later and we can plan a time for you to come to my home. Will that suit?”
“More than suit, Mirri-khor. Perhaps we can even sneak tea when you come.”
She saw her father’s smile as she hugged her friend. It would be good to have a friend. A true friend. A woman friend.
A straggling queue of patients had already formed along the narrow side street outside the clinic. Mohammed unlocked the worn wooden door that still held the Taliban’s warning bullet holes. They’d shot the doors when there were rumors Papa and Yaqub treated women.
Papa would not have the holes fixed. He said they were righteous holes—because they had treated the women—as compassionately as they treated every patient.
The simple, two-room clinic held two cupboards—one locked for drugs and valuable medical instruments and the other open with bandages and tongue depressors and other lesser goods—and a small, locked fridge that was chained to the wall.
A table set against the other wall served as both desk and examining table. The second, curtained-off, room in the back had a stool and a door that allowed access into a lane where a community well gave ready access to clean water. Totally primitive compared to an English hospital, yet it helped people more dramatically than any Western hospital.
Khadija unlocked the cupboard and set out equipment while her father fumbled into his medical coat. The stethoscope he placed around his neck seemed to straighten his back and remove years from his face. His hands shifted his treasured blood pressure cuff, the boxes of bandages, the tongue depressors she’d positioned, until he was satisfied.
One more thing she couldn’t do properly, it seemed.
An old, lame Kaabulay in a tattered grey salwar kameez was their first patient of the day. His wife shoved him inside.
“As-salaam ‘alaykum,” her father said. “What is the problem?”
“My leg. My foot. I cut it on a stone. My wife nags me and it will not heal.”
The old man’s voice grated in the room. He glared back at the door where his wife waited in her burka and Khadija almost grinned.
The old man’s feet were covered in the worn, black boots of a shepherd, the legs of his loose-fitting trousers tucked into the tops.
“Sit here.” Mohammed motioned to the table. Khadija went to his side. A faint odor came from the old man—something too sweet—and the scent of poppy.
Sometimes the old men chewed the tar because it helped with pain. She caught her Papa’s hand and placed it on the old man’s knee, then stepped back as the patient toed off his boot.
The gag-sweet scent of rot filled the room. Though the flesh gleamed pasty white with ragged yellow toe nails, at the heel a deep wound festered purple-black. Long trails of red ran from the wound up the lower leg and down the arch of the foot.
Khadija coughed and held her chador to her nose.
“The smell,” she apologized.
“Tell me what you see.”
The patient frowned as she hesitated. As a woman, she should leave the room. The patient could describe the wound as well as she.
But her Papa commanded.
With gloved hands she turned the heel, describing what she saw. She released the man’s leg and stepped back, not liking the sense of defilement on her hands.
“How long ago did this happen?” her papa asked.
“A moon at least.”
“A month. Khadija, ampicillin, please.”
She unlocked the fridge and placed an unwrapped needle and the ampoule in her Papa’s hands just as rumble rocked the room.
Explosion. Close. Too close. The clinic shook. Medical instruments rattled.
Dust rained from the ceiling and a medical tome struck her father’s shoulder as it fell from the cupboard shelf. Papa dropped the needle. The old man shouted for his wife. Khadija ran to the door.
Screams came from the main bazaar. Dust and cordite ran up the street on the heels of terrified people. The line of patients—others from the bazaar—crowded up to her, past her, trying for the clinic’s safety.
“Stop!”
The people ignored her.
“Stop!”
Papa’s voice boomed and the frantic crowd subsided. She urged them back to the street, to a sea of frightened faces surrounding the door.
Papa fumbled to the door and gripped her arm, his blind eyes turned towards the distant screaming.
“The bazaar?”
“Yes.”
He turned back to the people.
“You’re safe here. Now let me do my work. Khadija, go help.”
“Papa?”
“The hospitals take time to respond.” He fumbled for another needle and filled it with the antibiotic. “You’ve been trained. You’re more skilled than anyone else these people have. Now take bandages and go!”
Chapter 6
Khadija hesitated. Her medical skills—were Western. To use them meant she might have to touch men.
“Go!”
Her father clasped the old man’s roped arm and eased the needle in.
People were injured. All her training kicked in. She grabbed packs of sterile bandages, needles, the last of their morphine, and threw them in a bag. She left the clinic at a run.
People still flooded uphill from the bazaar. She fought through them. Blood covered faces. Blood on their clothes. The iron-scent of blood everywhere. Screams.
She should run. Turn with the crowd and retreat. Let the military, the hospitals help these people. Or her father. He would find someone else to be his eyes, would treat the walking wounded as best he could.
But she kept pushing forward. Papa had ordered her to the bazaar. Allah had given her skills she must use. Obedience and faith. The cloud of dust stopped her.
Dust in her eyes and cordite burning her nose. Dust golden in streamers of new sunlight overhead. Below shadows and blood and bodies. The stink of bowels and raw sewage worse than anything she’d ever scented in England. The stench of spices from shattered storefronts. The cart of bras and underwear was embedded in the front of the kite maker’s shop, its owner crushed under its weight.
Worse than she’d seen in London. This was a battleground.
She swallowed back fear and began her assessment. Clinical.
The fountain had been the epicenter of the blast. The wall of the pool had been destroyed, bodies there were almost unrecognizable. Blackened limbs and faces. The severed head of a donkey suggested perhaps the animal had carried the bomb into the crowd. A tattered red kite sank into the growing pool of water. A child’s empty shoe sat next to it.
Cowardice. Bloody cowardice. Who would do such a thing?
A burka-clad woman moaned in the dirt. Khadija went to her aid. Blood stained the garment’s pleats purple. A tearful little girl—what? five?—in a blood-stained scarf sat holding the woman’s hand.
“What’s your name, little one? You’re very brave. Shall we be brave together?”
Khadija glanced at the girl as she tried to pull up the woman’s burka. Hands under the blue fabric fought to stop her.
“Miriam,” whispered the child.
She slid closer to Khadija, a small hand catching in the fold of Khadija’s covering.
“Don’t be a fool,” Khadija barked at the woman, then smiled at the child. “Be brave like Miriam if you want to be here another day. Let me tend to this.”
The hands stilled. Khadija pulled up the blue cloth and checked the woman’s breathing, but the lattice work grill of her burka made sight difficult. She closed her eyes. She must do this. Her father said the Prophet only commanded that his own women be cove
red—not all women.
“Allah, forgive me.”
She swept up the front of her burka and wore it like a cape draped from the crown of her head. Air and unfriendly gazes shivered across her skin as she examined her patient.
Something had torn into the woman’s flesh, tearing through the burka, chador and salwar kameez to leave a gaping wound in her thigh. Tatters of cloth were embedded in the flesh. Blood flowed, but not with the pulse of arterial damage. Khadija slapped a thick dressing on the wound, then turned to Miriam.
“You must be very brave and very strong. I need you to hold this bandage here and press down. It will help your mother. Understand?”
The child nodded and Khadija moved on.
Don’t think. Just do. Remember emergency triage.
It seemed so long ago that there had been an accident involving one of London’s famed double-decker buses and an emergency room too full of victims.
Find those you can help. Those who can be saved. She went from woman to woman, doing what she could, but they were often not the ones who needed her most.
Blood seeped from the chest of a young man sprawled amid the dead near the fountain. His face was blackened, his body twisted as if he had been tossed aside by the explosion.
“Amniat. Amniat. Amniat.” His voice was weak as he pleaded for peace.
Khadija closed her eyes. She could not leave him like that, even though she should not touch him.
She was not a doctor!
But Allah had set her here. She was all the help there was.
In the distance she heard sirens. Perhaps he would live until they arrived.
“Amniat.” The soft pleading.
She knelt beside him, feeling naked, feeling she disobeyed everything she believed in—God’s laws. Allah knew what he did. She did not have a calling for medicine as her brother had, but….
Check the airway. Fine.
Check the man’s breathing. Liquid burbled in his lungs. Gently she shifted his hand away from his chest. Blood bubbled in the wound.
His lungs, then. She scanned his twisted body. Along with probable broken pelvis and left leg there was a good possibility of spinal cord injury. This was one for a hospital, not the middle of a bazaar in the midst of a city that was no more than rubble. That made her angry and she found strength out of that.
The sirens screamed closer.
The moans of the wounded were the groans of the earth.
“Khadija?” A frightened voice.
She looked up at the blue-clad form.
“Mirri? What are you doing here?”
The burka nodded. “I—I was still in the market. I—heard the explosion.”
Mirri looked around and a shiver ran through the pleats that covered her.
“There are so many hurt. I never knew….”
Khadija checked the injured man’s pulse, the devastation of his face.
“Someone sent a donkey loaded with a bomb. Now run to my father’s clinic and get all the bandages you can. Bring whoever you can who can help.”
Khadija pulled the vial of morphine from her bag and filled a needle, then plunged it into the man’s arm.
“The donkey…yes.” Still Mirri hadn’t moved.
“Did you hear what I said? Our people are dying. Now go!”
Mirri went.
Khadija placed a thick bandage over the man’s wound and placed his hands over them.
“Hold this.” She tore open her last medicated bandage and tied it over his eyes. “Allah, let them be healed.”
She wasn’t hopeful, but Allah would do as he would, Inshallah. She touched his one good hand.
“There will be help soon. Stay still.”
He nodded blindly and his lips moved.
“Amniat, shúker.” Peace, thank you.
She went on and on, from man to man. Swift medical assessment. Do what she could with the training that had cost her father his dreams and turned her into a hollow thing. Some time in there Mirri returned and began to help her, handing bandages as asked, using gloved hands to hold an arm still as Khadija wrapped it, or to help pull cloth from a man’s wounds. Occasionally Mirri would run back to the clinic for more from Khadija’s father’s meager stock.
Praise be to Allah, Lord of Worlds,
She slapped a dressing on a wounded belly.
The Infinitely Good, the All-Merciful,
She injected morphine into an arm.
Thee we worship, and in Thee we seek help.
Turn to the next victim and conduct the ABCs of emergency medicine.
Owner of the Day of Judgment
Show us your straight path,
not the path of those who earn your wrath
nor those who go astray.
She closed the eyes of a man who did not make it, felt grief fill her chest as she knelt amid the carnage.
The military and the ambulances arrived; police and medics flooded the area. Khadija kept working, going from one injured person to the next. Praise be to Allah, Lord of Worlds.
Suddenly there were only bodies and blood, and the growing pool of water from the broken fountain. Show us your straight path.
The stench of burst entrails and of cordite surrounded her as she stood, swayed. The dust coated everything. Her lips, her mouth tasted like dust and death and her body felt leaden under the weight of the hard sunlight on her back.
This was Kaabul. The Light City of the Angel King, no more. This was what the foreigners brought.
not the path of those who earn your wrath
nor those who go astray.
A slow anger filled her belly, like the sun heated the pavement and the shattered remains. A woman’s sobbing filled the air. Where? Who?
A red-headed aid worker stood in the entrance to a side street. She wore bloodied jeans and a t-shirt, her head covered in a plain blue scarf.
“We only wanted to help,” the woman sobbed in a Manchester accent thickened by tears. “We only wanted to help.”
“Whore,” Mirri hissed. “They deserved it, bringing their kofr ways to this place.”
Khadija pulled her burka down over her face and glanced at her friend. Her burka was covered with blood, but there was nothing for it. She glanced back at the spreading pool of water. The bodies were mostly dressed in Western jeans and t-shirts. The donkey had had direction, then, even if the devastation had gone much farther.
The anger coalesced in her belly. At the foreigners who drew the bombs? At the bomb makers? She wasn’t sure. Eventually the westerners Would learn they were not wanted in her country.
“I swear, the kofr—they distill a poison in our country.”
“You believe this?” Mirri’s voice was soft.
Khadija nodded. Every moment she looked at the destruction she believed it more. The whole world was infected with a poison. It could not come from Islam, because that was Allah’s word. Mirri gripped Khadija’s arm.
“Khadija-khor, we need you. We need your passion and your strength. Look at how you help your people. We need all Afghans of our belief to help in our cause.”
This again. Khadija was too tired to argue.
“I told you, I can’t.”
“But you believe. You know we must get the foreigners to leave. We must bring back Islam—Islamic Law.”
“I still can’t help you. I��m here for my father. I’m all he’s got. How would he live without me?”
“But the cause….”
“…will go on without me. Please, Mirri-khor. You’re my oldest, dearest friend. Don’t make this more difficult.”
The blue burka sighed, the gleam of Mirri’s eyes disappearing beyond the grill in the cloth.
“I’m sorry, Khadija-khor. I’d just thought we would be Mujehaddin together.”
Mirri’s embrace showed her warmth, though the faint scent of cheap Russian soap caught in Khadija’s nose.
“We all fight for God’s word—just in different ways,” Khadija whispered, as they pulled apart. She wo
uld make sure Amrikaayi did not come to her house again.
“Then we will have tea together, instead.” Mirri’s voice carried her smile. “Come to the apartment. Perhaps tomorrow? Mizra will be waiting, I’m sure.”
Even through her fatigue Khadija felt herself flush and was thankful for the burka. Her friend had been playing matchmaker between her brother and Khadija, determined to make sure the two were suited before beginning negotiations with Khadija’s father. So far Khadija had left Mirri to her fun, though her mild older brother was not the man of Khadija’s dreams.
“First we’ll have tea at the clinic. After all your help, that’s the least I can do.”
She dragged Mirri through the crowds, focused on the tea she would brew. It would be good, and with it would come clear water to wash the blood from her hands.
The clinic’s queue had lengthened with many bloodied faces and broken limbs, but the door to the clinic was closed when they arrived. Khadija pushed inside, Mirri behind. The main room of the clinic was empty, but low voices came from the back room. Usually that was where women were treated.
Papa knew better than to treat a woman alone. Such actions would make the clinic a target for bombs.
“Papa? What are you doing?”
She pushed the curtain aside and stopped. Behind her, Mirri hissed.
Not a woman.
Michael Bellis stood there, fatigue on his face, the knee-length shirt of his salwar kameez removed to expose a broad chest of hard muscle patterned with scars. The drawstring trousers slung low on his hips, showed the lean striations of his abdomen. Blood from a wound on his side stained his clothing.
She yanked her gaze to the floor, but the sight of his body was burned on her brain more strongly than any of the bodies she’d seen in London, more than the bodies in the bazaar.
“Were you caught in the explosion?”
“This wound is deeper than our friend thought. Thread a needle. It seems Michael cannot.”
Her father flicked his hand at her. Thankfully, the burka covered her hesitation and embarrassment.
Ashes and Light Page 5