I stared, shaking, at Baba and the Uncles to see what they were going to do. They just stood there and looked as the donkey stopped twitching. Its eyes were open and it looked as dead as if it had never lived. The fourth man turned away and led his fighters briskly on down the edge of the mountain towards the village. While they were still in sight, no one moved.
The picnic outing was over. The Aunties rocked the smaller children in their arms, crying with them. Baba and the Uncles went across to the donkey and Baba bent down and tickled the soft patch between its ears, the way he always did, and I knew he was saying goodbye.
In truth, it had been a bad-tempered animal which nipped us with its strong teeth when we children pulled its ears or climbed on its back for a ride. But it had been part of our household since I could remember and now it was dead and I had to bite hard on the inside of my cheeks to keep from crying.
Baba and the Uncles made pairs and lifted the shafts of the cart themselves and pulled the Aunties and children back down the mountainside. The toddlers cried and struggled and had their legs slapped to hush and keep quiet. Mama, her huge stomach pushing out beyond the edge of the cart, was pale.
I walked alongside Baba. His face dripped with sweat as he heaved the cart and his spectacles kept sliding forwards on his nose and I wished I could help him. I asked, ‘Who was that man? Why did they do that?’
Baba glanced down at me and his expression was sorrowful.
‘His name is Mohammed Bul Gourn,’ Baba said. ‘He is a very dangerous man and I pray God you will never see him again.’
My hands tightened into fists at my sides. ‘But why did they shoot our donkey?’
Baba was panting. The strain made deep lines in his face as if he were already old. ‘Don’t ask so many questions, Layla.’
I stopped. Other people had said that to me since I was a little girl, Jamila Auntie and the cousins and the other Aunties and even Mama but never Baba; Baba had never said such a thing. He and I were explorers, he used to tell me, searching for knowledge. I stared after him, shocked and hurt, as he and his brothers and the laden cart rumbled on.
Chapter 4
They drove from Islamabad to Peshawar. Ellen sat in the back of the four-wheel drive beside Frank. In the front, the local driver was sitting low behind the wheel, a round cap on his head, a brown blanket trailing from his shoulders.
She was eating her way through a packet of stale biscuits, spraying crumbs and picking them laboriously off her trousers. Frank was trying to pour steaming chai out of a Thermos flask without spilling it over his thighs.
Her face ached. The bruising had bothered her all night. Now she was full of painkillers which made the passing landscape seem remote and a little blurred. Islamabad’s city traffic, the overladen carts, brightly painted lorries and crowded motorbikes, had fallen away. The motorway stretched ahead, almost empty. They’d set off at dawn when the sun was little more than a shy red glow. Now it had whitened, burning dew off the grass and making the wheat fields shimmer.
Frank’s phone rang. She smiled. The ringtone was a phrase from a Rolling Stones track. The music ran on in her head even after he’d answered it. She followed it until she reached the chorus and the title came back to her, carrying memories of sweaty student bars and tables sticky with spilt beer.
He’d lodged the plastic cup of milky tea between his knees to take the call and she reached across and took it for him. His jeans were worn at the knees and crumpled. They ended in heavy boots. He seemed to be confirming arrangements.
Almost as soon as he finished, the phone rang again. It was a long call. Frank’s voice was soft, dotted with mantras of ‘absolutely’ and ‘understood’ and ‘that’s all you can do’. Afterwards he took back the cup of cooling tea and turned to the window, presenting her with a hunched shoulder.
‘Everything OK?’
He didn’t look round. His fingers were tight round the rim of the cup. Finally he said, ‘Not good. They sound overwhelmed.’
He drained the cup and held it out so she could refill it for herself. His lips were pursed. They both kept their eyes on the flow of steaming tea from the Thermos.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last. He didn’t reply. He seemed distant, preoccupied.
The driver started to fiddle with the car radio. The silence was filled with bursts of white noise and high-pitched music. She drank her tea, trying not to swallow the black specks circling at the bottom.
‘You want an apple?’ Frank pulled one out of his bag and rolled it to her along the seat.
A car veered in front of them and the driver was forced to brake, pumping the horn with the heel of his hand. The sun was hard on the windscreen, burning streaks of light across the tarmac.
She bit into the apple, still thinking about the strains on the camp. ‘You got funding?’
He gave a snort. ‘I just spend money we don’t have. Then the guys in head office curse the hell out of me and run in circles trying to fill the holes.’
‘Have they launched a special appeal?’
‘Not yet.’ He shrugged. ‘It hasn’t made the news yet. But they say a rich Brit might help out. Hasan Ali Khan. Know him?’
She nodded. She knew of him. ‘Quentin. Quentin Khan. That’s what he calls himself in London.’ He was a middle-aged Pakistani. Vastly rich and now part of the London smart set. ‘Made a fortune in transport. Lorries and ships.’
‘That’s him.’
‘And he’s giving money?’
‘I guess. They’re talking to him.’
They were slowing down, approaching the row of booths that signalled the end of the toll road.
‘Good.’ Frank nodded ahead. ‘Our guys.’
Two trucks of armed police were waiting at the side of the road, just beyond the booths. As their own car emerged from the barrier, one truck slid out into the traffic in front of them and the other slotted in behind. They were open-backed. Policemen were sitting in two rows down the sides, rocket launchers across their knees and guns upright between their legs.
The young policemen at the ends of the seats were staring down at her through the windscreen. She adjusted her scarf, making sure her hair was properly covered. One, with a shaggy beard and long loose face, looked forlorn. His opposite number was much younger, all designer stubble and bulging biceps. His eyes were hidden by dark sunglasses.
‘Do we need them?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. They offered.’ Frank grimaced. ‘There’s a lot of Taliban around. The roads aren’t secure.’
Peshawar had always had a bad reputation. She’d first come some years before to write about Afghan refugees who’d spilt over the border to escape the Taliban there. She remembered driving through the bazaar, a dusty, colourless array of stalls selling piles of plastic toys and cheap cotton clothing. Men with shaggy beards and woollen tribal hats had stopped to glare in through the car windows. The metal noses of guns glinted at their sides. She’d wanted to stop, just for a moment, to buy a hookah pipe for her father. The driver refused, wagging his finger.
‘Not safe for ladies,’ her translator explained. ‘Very bad place.’
As traffic forced the car to a walking pace, a man with deeply lined skin had stooped and put his face to the glass, squashing the tip of his nose against the window. His palm pressed beside it in white flattened pads of flesh. His eyes found hers. They were cold and threatening. The car shuddered and jerked forwards and the man stumbled, left behind. The butt of his gun rapped against the glass. That was Peshawar a few years ago. By all accounts, it was worse now.
The convoy veered off the road and bumped down a long track onto mudflats, a raw landscape of cracked earth criss-crossed with ditches. Off to one side, boys were struggling to launch a homemade kite in the still air, running and whooping as it bumped along the ground behind them. Inside the car, the air was metallic, cooled and filtered by the air conditioning. She could imagine the heat and stink waiting for her outside.
‘That’s it.’
Frank pointed.
A shanty town of coloured plastic and squat white tents was looming on the plain. Ellen straightened up so she could see through the windscreen. She felt her senses quickening as she judged the scale of the camp and thought of ways to describe the terrain. The camp was sprawling but it was dwarfed by the bleak, featureless mudflats which stretched in all directions. She could see why this great expanse of land hadn’t already been settled by local people. There were no natural features to provide shelter, not even rocks or scrub. Far beyond, obscured by cloud, a range of mountains rose, jagged, on the horizon.
They drove closer. A tattered group of several hundred people was waiting in front of the camp’s gates. They were standing with drooping shoulders, bundles, baskets and bags piled at their sides. Ellen looked into the faces as they drove past. An elderly woman was sitting in the dirt, her cheeks sharp with bone. She looked exhausted, too listless to raise her eyes to the passing vehicle. A girl, about five years old, was lying motionless in her lap. Her small belly was distended, bulging beneath a grubby kameez. Her stringy hair had faded from its natural black to the colour of straw. Malnourishment, Ellen thought. She looked at Frank. His mouth was set, his shoulders tense.
The camp’s perimeter was defined by a wire fence. A small group of men was extending it, a youngster balancing long wooden staves on his shoulders while a pair of older men, stouter and fatter bellied, worked beside him. They had unrolled a drum of metal mesh and were hammering it into place on a fresh post.
The car drew up at the gate. Frank rolled down the window and spoke to the security guards. Their uniforms were baggy, their AK-47s battered and slack in their hands. One of the guards bent to stare in at her and she shielded her bruised face with the edge of her scarf.
Just inside the fence stood a small, single-storey building in sand-coloured brick. A broken flagpole rose from its roof. It looked old but solid in the sea of tethered white canvas. Several large tents, the size of small marquees, sat beside it.
They swung through the gates and off to the left, to an open sweep of ground close to the brick building. They stopped behind a garishly decorated truck, painted green and ornate with flowers and slogans. A confusion of eager young men was crowded round its back, shouting and jostling as they unloaded sacks of rice. Ellen eased herself out of the car, aware of the ache in her limbs. The heat reached in and sucked the moisture from her mouth.
Frank was besieged at once. Two dark-skinned men rushed over to talk to him. A smartly dressed Pakistani man pushed between them, interrupting and competing for Frank’s attention. Ellen watched them. Frank put a calming hand on the man’s arm and silenced him, making him wait his turn while the others spoke. Frank’s face was composed as he listened. He has more presence, she thought, than he had as a young man. More authority.
Someone touched Ellen’s arm from behind. She turned. A young Western woman with strands of wavy blonde hair springing free from her headscarf. Her eyes were a striking green, the irises ringed with black as if they’d been first drawn, then coloured in. She looked at the cut above Ellen’s eye. ‘Shall I put a dressing?’
Ellen smiled. ‘It’s nothing. I’m fine.’ She put out her hand. ‘I’m Ellen Thomas, NewsWorld.’
The young woman nodded. She was wearing the stiff white coat of a doctor. Ellen sensed that she’d been waiting for her. Frank must have warned her that a journalist was coming.
‘I am Britta.’ Her handshake was firm. ‘I’m the medical in charge here, working for Medicine International. Perhaps you’d like to see the ward for ladies?’
Her accent was lilting. Swedish, Ellen thought. Or Finnish. She looked across to Frank. Several more men had gathered round him now, pressing to be heard. He was standing patiently, the tallest amongst them, his hands slightly raised as if he were conducting the men’s voices.
Ellen turned away and followed Britta. They traced a circle round the chaos of the unloading bay. Young men were staggering, bent double under sacks of rice, carrying them out from the back of the truck. At one side of the clearing, they tipped the sacks over their shoulders, letting them fall, slap, raising a cloud of dust, onto the pile growing there. The air was thick with shouts. Britta led her past the vehicles to the entrance of one of the giant tents which stood nearby, close to the brick building.
The sun was filtering through the canvas roof, making the light inside dappled and soft. They had entered a women’s ward with two rows of field beds, about twenty in all, tightly packed together. Ceiling fans whirred overhead, battling to clear an oppressive bodily smell of stale breath and vomit and urine all papered over by disinfectant.
A young Pakistani girl, wearing a dark purple salwar kameez, was at the far end of the ward, washing a patient. The patient, a middle-aged woman, sat, hunched inwards, holding onto the girl’s shoulder for support. Her back was bare, the skin glistening. The young girl was sponging down her thin shoulders. Her movements were brisk and rhythmical. The water splashed in a plastic bowl on the bed as she dipped and rinsed her cloth. She looked up as they came in and nodded to Britta, glanced at Ellen with shy eyes, then lowered her head again to her work.
Britta had walked to the first bed and was waiting for her there. An elderly woman lay on her back, her eyes closed. Her left arm was bandaged and raised.
‘Gunshot trauma,’ Britta said. ‘The elbow is fractured. Malnutrition and fever also. Many of these ladies are not strong.’
The old woman’s skin was puckered and deeply wrinkled. Her veins were raised into transparent channels of viscous purple. Her mouth was slightly open, her lips cracked. A fly settled on the woman’s forehead and started to walk across it. Ellen raised her hand and wafted it away. The woman did not stir.
Britta had already moved on to the next bed. This patient was a girl, perhaps seven or eight years old. A drip, connected to her right arm, clicked as it discharged fluid.
She gazed up with dull eyes as Britta laid her hand on the girl’s head, stroking her hair as she talked.
‘Many of them are already sick when they arrive,’ she said. ‘This girl has typhoid.’
A revolting sulphuric smell of decay hung around the bed. Ellen turned, looked away down the ward. She tried to distract herself, to close her nose to it.
‘She is weak,’ Britta was saying, ‘but there are no complications. And she’s young. In a day or two . . .’
The girl’s hand was lying inert on the sheet. The fingers were thin, the nails square and bitten. Britta was talking about dehydration but Ellen was only half-listening. She should take the girl’s hand. Reach out and hold it. Pat it, at least.
Britta went to the foot of the bed to consult the notes there. The hand on the sheet lay motionless, waiting. The ward was silent around them. The only sounds were the swish of the ceiling fans spinning overhead and the low mechanical hum of medical equipment.
Britta straightened up, turned and walked on. Ellen followed, conscious of the girl’s eyes staring unseeing at empty air.
A young woman was lying twisted on one side. Her eyes were closed. Her cheekbones and chin protruded, sharp and angular under a thin coating of flesh.
Britta lowered her voice. ‘As well as medical problems, we have also the trauma. Many of these people have seen terrible things.’
‘In the fighting?’
‘Of course. But also before it, in their lives under the Taliban. The violence and the terror.’
The young woman’s legs were curled up into her body. Her fists made tight balls at her chin.
‘What can you do?’
‘Not so much.’ Britta stood for a moment, looking down at the young woman. ‘We simply don’t have the capacity.’ She seemed hollowed out, eaten by exhaustion. Ellen sensed eyes pulling at Britta from all around, a soft, relentless tug of need.
‘Is there somewhere we could go?’ Ellen nodded towards the back of the ward. ‘To talk.’
At the end of the tent, a canvas flap covered an exit. Britta held it back and
they passed through. The area beyond was partitioned by hessian walls into a series of small rooms the size of cells. The clicks and whirrs of the ward were muted.
The first room had been converted into a makeshift office. A table in one corner was piled with files and papers and a battered laptop. The space around it was dominated by piles of roughly stacked cardboard boxes. Ellen moved inside to look at them. Each box was identified by a printed sheet of numbers and a barcode.
She turned to ask Britta about them. A short, stocky woman in her thirties appeared right behind her, blocking the entrance. She was holding a metal basin in her hand and, like Britta, she wore a buttoned white coat. Her skin was dark and her hair completely covered by a neatly folded and pinned hijab. She stared at Ellen.
‘How can I be helping you?’ Her accent was clipped. Her eyes, a deep brown, were overshadowed by thick black eyebrows which almost met above her nose.
‘It’s OK, Fatima.’ Britta’s mild voice rose from behind her. ‘This is Ellen. She’s with me.’
Fatima looked again at Ellen, opened her mouth as if to speak, then hesitated and closed it again. Ellen stepped forwards and offered her hand. Fatima’s fingers were stubby and strong.
‘I’ve just arrived,’ Ellen said. ‘I’m a journalist, with News-World.’
‘I am Fatima, chief nurse here.’
Britta squashed between them into the small room. ‘My right-hand woman.’ She put her hand on Fatima’s shoulder. ‘Fatima is from Egypt. I am from Denmark. We are mini-United Nations here, isn’t it?’
Fatima looked up at Britta, allowed herself a half-smile, then nodded to Ellen and turned on her heel, pushing past the canvas curtain back into the ward. Britta waited until the canvas had fallen back into place.
‘We are both a little nervous.’ She steered Ellen further forwards to the final cell at the end of the row. It too was partly filled with stacked boxes. Beyond them a stretcher was lying on top of a trestle. The stretcher bore the long, lumpen shape of a woman’s body which was loosely covered with a sheet. The sunlight, pressing in through the canvas, touched the surface of the cloth, giving it a luminous sheen.
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