Anatomy of a Soldier

by Harry Parker

  You woke slowly and I was the most comfortable thing you’d experienced for a long time. My white duvet cocooned you; you knew you were at home but didn’t know why. It was familiar and you felt safe. Your nerves fired from your feet and you could feel them under my duvet but they felt cold. Why were they cold? You tried to move them. Then you were absolutely awake and remembered why you were in me, downstairs in the room where Christmas happened, and not in that other place.

  Your mother knocked on the door and brought in your breakfast. You sat up and took the mug of tea while she opened the curtains and you looked out at the early autumn morning.

  Later, you went out into the garden and lay on the grass and the dog’s tail wagged as he tried to lick you and you pushed him away.

  The next day, you were on me reading a paper when she knocked and brought a man in. She introduced him and said he’d come to talk to you. He wheeled himself over with confident thrusts of a chair like yours. She left and the two of you talked. He told you how he had been hurt and how long it had taken to recover and what it was like always being in a wheelchair. He said you would be much more mobile. You saw he was broken but found it hard to relate to him.

  He told you about his wife and children and how he’d overcome the despair and what he had achieved. He said he now appreciated every day and was making the most of life. He told you what had happened would make you appreciate life more.

  You nodded and smiled but didn’t believe him. You couldn’t see how what had happened to you could be in any way good. Before leaving he turned and said that you probably didn’t understand it yet, but one day you would. You thanked him for coming, rolled over in me, pressed the remote and watched a programme about antiques.

  Your mother helped you pack your things and you left. I was empty for a few weeks and waited for you to return. When you did, you were stronger and you briskly wheeled yourself in and she propped two mechanical legs against the sofa. They stayed there and you often glanced at them and wondered if you should put them on and practise but you were too tired. At night, when it was dark and you were asleep, they rested there motionless and it looked like someone might be standing among the shadows with us.

  *

  I stayed downstairs and you came back every few weeks and your mother looked after you. You became stronger and spent less time in me. And you put the legs on and went past the window with jerking steps, leaning on the walking sticks you held in each hand.

  One morning she came in with a cup of tea and pulled the curtains and the brown leaves blew across the garden.

  ‘I wouldn’t change it,’ you said to her.

  ‘Sorry, Tom?’ She turned around and glanced at my covers. ‘What needs changing?’

  ‘I wouldn’t change it.’ You took a sip from the mug. ‘Any of it.’

  She came and sat on me and looked at you. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I wouldn’t change what happened to me.’

  ‘Of course you would.’ Her brow was creased. ‘You don’t have to say that, Tom.’

  ‘I mean it. It’s part of me now. I know I can’t change it anyway, so it’s a stupid thing to say, but if someone walked in and asked me if I wanted to go back and for it never to have happened, I’d say I wouldn’t want to.’

  She shook her head. ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘I do.’ You grinned at her. ‘It’s hard to explain but it’s already too much a part of who I am. Life’s changed and it’s been grim, but I’m experiencing so much.’

  After that visit, you didn’t need me in that room any more and I was taken back upstairs.

  31

  I was ridden around a city that pulsed with the fumes of stationary traffic and the incessant horns of tuktuks. A man rode me through this to work but one day I was stolen and loaded onto a truck with many others like me. We were driven a great distance, the air became cooler and we waited while a mountain pass was cleared, then we crossed over and down into a new country. I was sold at market to a man who took me home and gave me to his son, Faridun.

  I had a green steel frame and a red plastic saddle; I had a bell that rattled through potholes. I was too big for Faridun when I was first given to him; he couldn’t reach my saddle so he pedalled me standing up. His father jogged alongside holding us as Faridun smiled and steered me in small circles around the road outside their compound. Finally his father pushed me off and watched us wobble away down the road until I veered into a ditch and Faridun catapulted over me.

  But he learnt to ride me for the sheer pleasure of speed and freedom. He pedalled me as fast as he could with a kite fluttering behind. His friend Latif ran alongside, both of them laughing. He shouted at him to go faster until he couldn’t keep up. They got bored with the kite and the lack of wind. So his friend sat on my saddle and Faridun pedalled me to a river and I lay in the reeds while they swam.

  *

  Faridun did grow into me as his father said he would. And I carried him around the district when he ran errands for his family.

  Faridun’s father controlled the network of irrigation that kept the land green for the farmers. He decided which sluices should be opened and whose fields the water should slosh into. He told Faridun it was difficult to be fair and how in some dry years men came open-handed and pleaded with him.

  When Faridun was becoming a man, his father began explaining how he governed the fragile web of water. He sent Faridun out to work and he rode me to one of the ditches and met older men who worked for his father. They would stand in the muddy channels and shovel silt into wheelbarrows or pile it up at the edges of fields.

  Faridun propped me in the shade of a tree, rolled up his trousers and worked with them. When the men stopped for lunch, they didn’t invite Faridun to sit with them, so he sat with me under the tree. He tried to listen to what they were saying and sometimes thought he heard them talking about his father.

  Every few days his father came to inspect the work they’d done and to pay the men. He dropped down into the channel and checked its depth, then told them to dig deeper or widen the channel and remove rotten wood. He gave them more instructions and told them where they should work next. He never looked at Faridun, who listened to the men muttering to one another after his father had gone.

  Sometimes they would joke and laugh with each other and sit around in the heat doing nothing. Faridun wanted to tell them to do what his father was paying them for, but he was frightened so kept working alone, ignoring them, and each new scoop of mud fuelled the ache in his back.

  The fighting each summer was more intense than the last and the distant popping of gunfire made them lean on their tools and look around. Sometimes it was close by and they would run away, back to their houses, and Faridun would jump on me and cycle home.

  Bombs were hidden under the roads more frequently, and Faridun became careful of the paths he steered me on. His father told him where he could go and his mother worried anyway. Whole stretches of road were riddled and everyone knew not to use them. But Faridun always skirted around the little piles of rock or creases in the road surface that didn’t look right.

  More checkpoints barred the roads and he couldn’t avoid them all. He would show his papers and we would ride on. But sometimes he had to give money and once a man at a roadblock pushed me over and my sprocket caught and tore open Faridun’s ankle as he fell. They forced a weapon deep into his mouth and stole the sack I’d carried from the market. They laughed at Faridun as he limped home, pushing me beside him, worrying about his family and his sister and angry with Latif.

  *

  After a day spent clearing a channel, Faridun was riding me home, his wet trousers clinging to his legs. He turned a corner and saw soldiers walking towards him. He was frightened but there was nowhere else to go, so he pedalled me on down the centre of them. One smiled below his helmet and then jeered, making another laugh. He thought he might be able to ride straight through the column and home, but one of them called in his own language, ‘Hey
, young man. Wait. Peace be upon you.’

  Faridun pulled my brake lever, my pads pinched my rims and I stopped. He looked back. The soldiers were sinking down to kneel. One was walking towards him. He spoke through an interpreter who wore sunglasses and cloth tied around his head.

  ‘Peace be upon you,’ the interpreter said. ‘May we speak with you?’

  ‘I am just on my way home,’ Faridun said. ‘I have been working in the fields.’

  The interpreter talked to the soldier, who smiled and then told him something and nodded out across the fields.

  ‘We are looking for a man who lives around here. His name is Kushan Hhan. We need to talk to him,’ the translator said.

  Faridun twisted his thigh over my crossbar and looked at them. He glanced down and fidgeted with my stem.

  ‘I do not know this country well,’ he said. ‘I am just here to work.’

  The interpreter spoke to the soldier, who was holding a map and writing on it.

  ‘I just told this captain what you said; then I told him you were lying.’ He smiled at Faridun. ‘I know where you’re from, and I know you’re a bad liar. Your eyes are too honest, young man.’

  The soldier started to interrupt but the translator held up his hand for more time.

  ‘This captain is a good man. He means no harm,’ he said and grinned. ‘You should help us – you know that, don’t you? The government of the republic would want you to help us.’

  Faridun looked across the field in the direction the soldier had nodded. It was his house and he knew his father would be there. He knew his father didn’t think much of the government but had worked with the soldiers before.

  ‘I know where he is,’ Faridun said and looked at the interpreter.

  The soldier looked surprised when his words were translated.

  ‘Can you take us to him?’ the interpreter asked.

  As soon as Faridun started to push me down the road with them following behind, strung out in a column, he wished he hadn’t agreed to help. He wanted to shrink away before anyone saw him with them. He felt vulnerable and stared out across the fields. Please don’t be watching, he thought. But he knew they would be; they always watched the soldiers.

  It wasn’t far and he turned me down the track to the complex of walls that huddled around the main compound he lived in. He thought of his family sitting on the carpets around the stove and chatting. He wished even more that he hadn’t agreed.

  The soldiers spread out around the compound and Faridun leant me next to the tall, black gate.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said and went in.

  The soldiers were moving across the front field and a group dropped down by a thicket of bushes. Another team was pushing out along the main wall, crouching beside it and across the road. The soldier closest to me was talking into a radio, then said something in his foreign tongue and the interpreter shrugged.

  Faridun’s father walked towards us down the road from the back field. He had seen the soldiers arrive. He saw me and thought of Faridun and hoped he was all right.

  He put his hand over his heart and spoke to the interpreter, who stood next to the lead soldier. ‘May peace be upon you, what brings you to my house?’

  ‘And upon you be peace,’ the man said and nodded his head respectfully. ‘We are looking for Kushan Hhan.’

  ‘You have found him,’ Faridun’s father said and smiled. ‘How may I help you?’

  ‘My captain would like to speak with you.’

  The soldier spoke to the translator and offered his hand to Faridun’s father, who shook it.

  ‘He apologises for coming to your home, but he wants to resume the dialogue that the security forces once had with the elders in this area.’

  The gate opened and Faridun came out and saw his father. ‘These men want to see you, Father,’ he said.

  ‘I know, son. I have just heard.’ He smiled at him and turned to the soldier. ‘Please wait for one moment,’ he said. ‘I need to make sure my house is ready. Then we shall talk.’

  Faridun grabbed hold of my handlebars, wheeled me through the gate and propped me against the post of an awning at the edge of the garden. His father signalled that the women were not visible, and Faridun led three of the soldiers inside the large room at the end of the compound, beyond the veranda.

  When they had finished talking and the men were gone, Faridun’s father came into the garden and sat on a low bench near where I waited.

  Faridun followed him at a distance. ‘I am sorry, Father,’ he said softly and twisted a vine leaf in his fingers. ‘I should not have brought them. But I thought, with their weapons and power and money – I thought you might want to talk to them.’

  ‘It is done now, Faridun.’

  Faridun looked over at him. ‘Will they punish us? Will Lalma be okay?’

  ‘I don’t know, Faridun,’ he said. ‘We will have to wait. God willing it will be of some use.’

  Faridun crouched down and dangled his fingers in the water that trickled along a concrete gutter into the garden, disturbing the small track of silt at the bottom. ‘Are they winning now?’

  ‘Winning?’

  ‘Will the soldiers make us safer? There seem to be more of them, and they come farther into our land. Are they pushing Hassan and his people away?’

  ‘It’s not just Hassan, Faridun. It is complex. The elders will want to know what I have said as well.’

  He stared through the lattice of green that hung from the pergola: if he didn’t focus, it was a shifting emerald blur. Conflict had always raged beyond his walls but he and his family had only ever known peace in this compound. However, the world outside was encroaching now. He looked at his son.

  ‘What I do know,’ he said, ‘is that no one wins.’

  *

  Faridun rode me to work each day and the dread that he’d endangered his sister and family twisted through him. He wished he’d stayed quiet and lied to the soldiers. A bark of frustration burst out of him as he pedalled me and he shook his head, grasping his fingers tightly around my grips.

  He returned home and expected that Hassan’s men had visited. As we rode down the track to the compound he imagined what they’d done to his family. He prepared himself to see his sister’s headless body and his dead father and mother, the rest of his family all slaughtered around them. He’d been told that’s what they could do. But everyone was fine and welcomed him in and he sat with them as they prepared for the wedding.

  A few weeks later, Faridun’s father sent us up to the edge of the desert that had been abandoned when the soldiers arrived. Their base was attacked most days and the buildings and compounds were punctured with holes and strike marks. Many had collapsed and entire sections of wall had been destroyed. His father told Faridun that they had to keep the channels clear for when the people returned, for when the fighting was over. It was their duty, he said as he waved us off.

  Faridun cycled me up to one of his father’s small buildings. The men were waiting and grunted at him. I was against the wall and he opened the door with the key his father had given him. The men filed in, took tools from the stacks by the walls and pushed a wheelbarrow out, then walked across a wheat field and started dredging a ditch.

  That afternoon, I was flat in the dry grass beside Faridun. He was sitting on his haunches, loosening the jammed slat of a sluice gate, banging it with a hammer until it crunched free. Then he worked it up and down, untied a grimy bag of grease and spread it into the gate’s notches.

  He looked up when the firing started, then over at the other men, who had also paused. There were trees blocking their view, but it was close and from the direction of the soldiers’ base. Faridun wiped his hands on the grass, lifted me up and pushed me towards the men.

  ‘It is near?’ one of them said.

  ‘From the base,’ Faridun called back. He wheeled me down the path next to the channel. The gunfire stuttered and then built again.

  ‘What do you think?’ Faridun said as he
pushed me up to an old wall that ran alongside the ditch the men were clearing. They stepped up onto the path, drips from their clothes darkening the dust.

  ‘They are too close,’ one said. ‘I am going home.’ He picked up a shovel, put it in the wheelbarrow and walked away. The others followed.

  ‘Wait, it might be over soon,’ Faridun said.

  One of them dismissed him with a wave and said it was nearly the end of the day anyway.

  They began running when the air above started to crack. The sound sprayed across the sky as they sprinted in a crouch for the small building. Faridun saw them chuck the tools down by the door and sighed. They disappeared through the trees and down the road. They won’t be back today, he thought.

  Faridun rested me beside the wall and slid down until he was leaning against it. With the wall between us and the firing he was safe and waited, listening to the bullets and looking up at the sky as it ruptured above him. There was no visible sign of the noise. He thought how odd that was but knew the tiny bits of metal would travel far into the district before they landed and kicked up a puff of dust in a field. He’d seen that several times.

  The sound subsided and only the occasional bullet snapped overhead. Then it roared in a crescendo and he heard the whine of a ricochet sail up through the constant cracks. He didn’t feel frightened behind the wall, and told himself the firing would stop soon, the attackers would drift away and the soldiers would wait in their towers again.

  But it went on much longer than Faridun expected and he took some dried apricots from his pocket and started eating. There was one last burst of gunfire and finally it was silent. He was about to get up and pack away the equipment when he heard shuffling through the foliage next to the wall, a hiss of breath and murmuring. Then they came around the corner and Faridun stood up and reached for me.