Far From My Father's House

by Jill McGivering

  ‘We are only just here and already this is our fourth death. When you came, I was just filling the paperwork.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  The stretcher was narrow. One arm had fallen free and hung loose down the side. The hand was slightly curled as if it were groping blindly for something even in death. The skin of the fingers was slightly yellowed, the fingernails ragged and etched with dirt.

  ‘What was the cause?’

  ‘Typhoid. Many of them came off the mountain with fever and diarrhoea. In cramped living conditions like this, typhoid spreads quickly. We have antibiotics,’ Britta sighed, ‘but sometimes it’s already too late.’

  ‘Are they being vaccinated?’

  ‘We try.’ She clasped her hands in front of her. ‘Hygiene conditions here are very bad. Water contamination will become worse soon, when the rains come.’

  Ellen stood for a moment, looking at the covered body. Britta turned and withdrew. Ellen followed her out through the back of the tent, blinking in the full glare of the sun. She adjusted her headscarf, tugging it forwards to shade her forehead and feeling the prick of sweat in her hair.

  Britta was standing quite still outside, her arms by her sides. She had turned away from the tent towards the mountains. Her shoulders were tight with tension. If she lets every death affect her like this, Ellen thought, she’ll drown.

  Ellen pulled a bottle of water from her bag and drank. The mountains in the distance were stark but beautiful, a row of teeth biting into the landscape. They seemed more dignified than the dirty mudflats in front of them which were already filling with tents and makeshift shelters. The air rang with the toc-toc-toc of men banging in stakes for tent ropes and sticks which could form a rough frame for stretched sheets of plastic. The dry air crackled with static. Soon the torrent of the monsoon would break. When it did, this whole basin would flood. Disease would spread quickly. Including typhoid.

  Britta turned to face Ellen. She wore a falsely cheerful smile. ‘Because of the Taliban, we couldn’t reach these people in the mountains. Now we can give vaccinations.’

  She paused and the smile faltered. She’s still young, Ellen thought. She needs to harden if she’s going to survive in a place like this.

  Britta tried again. ‘And maybe the girls can go back to school.’

  Ellen thought about the crowded ward and the exhausted new arrivals sitting patiently outside the gates, waiting for help.

  ‘At the moment,’ she said, ‘what are you short of?’

  Britta spread her hands. ‘For so many people?’ she said. ‘Everything.’

  Chapter 5

  After the day of the picnic, Baba and the Uncles didn’t let any of us, girls or women, leave the compound at all. Not even to go to school or to fetch water. The boys were ordered to take the pails instead. No one would tell me what was going on outside.

  Baba still went to teach at the school each day but when he came back, his face was drawn and his mouth hard and when I sat beside him with my school books and asked him questions, he looked past me into the empty air.

  In the evenings, all the women, young and old, were sent off to bed and the men dragged the low wooden charpoys across the yard and sat together, talking in low voices. I heard the scrape of matches and smelt bitter smoke as the men lit hand-rolled cigarettes. The tips glowed red in the darkness. A hunting bird out on the mountainside gave a low cry. Cicadas screeched in the grass. Somewhere, far away, a man’s voice spluttered and whistled on a badly tuned radio set.

  Before all this, I liked to listen to the men’s voices when they gathered to talk. Even when I lay on my cot away from the window, falling backwards into sleep, I could hear them as they made plans for the planting season or for harvest.

  But now their voices were barely more than murmurs and I couldn’t catch a word. Some nights, I knelt at the sill, looking out at their hunched shoulders and tight faces, watching the bobbing red of their cigarettes, and prayed to Allah, not for the first time, that He in His Wisdom might finally turn me into a boy so I could sit there beside Baba on a charpoy and take part in important talking and be always at his side in the day too and not stuck here in our suffocating compound, surrounded by giggling girls and empty-headed Aunties.

  One evening, Hamid Uncle came home carrying a parcel and told everyone to gather round. When he tore off the paper, two bundles of material fell out. They were off-white in colour and shiny. He took one and held it up to show us. It hung in tightly pleated folds which bulged shapelessly like a vast cloak. The top part was rounded and shaped like a head. A tight grid of cotton strands lay where the face should be.

  ‘A burqa.’ Jamila Auntie was the first to speak. ‘So, has it come to this? You want to make us disappear altogether?’

  She turned to Baba and he looked down, embarrassed.

  ‘It’s for your own safety,’ said Hamid Uncle. ‘I’m the head of this family and if it is needful for any woman to leave this compound, this is what she must wear.’

  The Aunties stared at each other. We had always covered our heads in public but this burqa was something new. Jamila Auntie crossed her arms over her chest. Finally one of the Aunties put out a hand to take the burqa from Hamid Uncle and look at it more closely. She opened it out and pulled it over her head, disappearing from view, then walked carefully round the yard. When she pulled it off again, her hair was untidy and her face flushed.

  ‘So hot.’ She fanned at her face with her free hand. ‘Like an oven.’

  The other Aunties crowded round to try. One by one, they were turned into anonymous blobs by the cloth, as formless as the snow people the boys built on the mountain in winter. Only the toes of their sandals were visible, poking out as they stepped forwards.

  Baba asked us once in school what special powers we’d each like to have, if it be the will of Allah. I said I should like very much to fly, but my classmate said she’d like an invisible cloak, so she could go anywhere and do anything and no one would ever know. Now, watching the Aunties as they were swallowed whole by the burqa, I thought of her wish.

  Finally the Aunties finished playing with the burqa and it was my turn. I pulled the great bundle of cloth over my head. The narrow cap tightened round my skull, then its folds tumbled to the ground, almost covering my feet. The compound fell away from me and, peering through the squared grid over my eyes, I felt as if I’d disappeared into a separate world and was looking out at the familiar scene from a faraway place. The grid was narrow. I could only see things directly in front of me. Now the compound gates. Now, as I turned my head, the charpoys where the boys sat, fidgeting and fighting. Now, as I twisted my body further round, the faces of the Aunties, Mama and Baba and finally Jamila Auntie’s cross face.

  I walked up and down carefully, not tripping as some of the girls had done. I imagined all the places I could visit in secret inside this burqa and all the conversations I could overhear, without anyone knowing it was me. I was tall for my age. I could easily be taken for a grown woman.

  I turned and started to walk back across the yard, pleased with myself, until I saw Mama and Baba’s faces. Mama’s eyes were full of pain and she was wringing her hands, squeezing out an invisible rope of washing. Baba was watching me with the same look of sorrow I’d seen on the day of the picnic.

  ‘What?’ I tore off the burqa as fast as I could as if it might burn into me like a second skin. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Mama’s stomach grew huge. Then her birthing pains came. She lay groaning on her back on the cot while the Auntie who knew how to deliver babies fussed round her and wiped sweat from her face. On the third day, the moans rose to screams and when I helped Auntie wash Mama down with a wet cloth, it came away from between her legs sodden with blood. When I rinsed it out, the water in the pail made red clouds.

  Auntie looked worried. I followed her outside. Something was wrong, she told the women there. The baby was coming out badly and Baba should take Mama to the clinic in town as soon as possible.


  Jamila Auntie slowly shook her head. ‘She can’t go there.’

  ‘But the baby’s stuck.’ Auntie pulled a face behind Jamila Auntie’s back and spat into the dust. The spittle hung there for some time, in the shape of a silver fish, as if the ground were reluctant to receive it.

  Jamila Auntie leant forwards and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘It’s not safe.’

  Auntie called over a boy and sent him to fetch Baba from school.

  Mama was so weak that she could barely walk. The Aunties packed cloths between her legs to hide the bleeding, then hoisted her from the charpoy onto her feet. Her eyes were closed and she was panting with short, hard breaths. When they pulled a burqa over her head, her belly pushed out the loose folds into a ball.

  Baba came breathlessly through the compound gate. I thanked Allah for getting him home quickly. He helped the Aunties move Mama to the door and lower her backwards into a wheelbarrow. She sat there, her head lolled forwards onto her chest, her legs hanging limp over the front. He picked up the handles and pushed her, accompanied by the rumble and squeak of the wheels and the low animal moan emerging from beneath the burqa.

  One of the Aunties picked up the second burqa and pushed it at me.

  ‘Go with your mother,’ she said. ‘You’re old enough.’

  Jamila Auntie opened her mouth and seemed about to speak, then closed it again. I knew why. I’ve told her a hundred times since I was little that she is not my mama and she had no business telling me what to do. Now, for once, I wished she would. The other women were staring at me so I swallowed down my fear, pulled the burqa over my head and followed Baba across the yard.

  ‘Stay close to me,’ Baba whispered as we reached the gate, ‘and don’t say a word.’ His tone was fierce. ‘This isn’t a game, Layla. Do as you’re told.’

  Baba and Hamid Uncle pushed Mama in her wheelbarrow out into the village street. The barrow was tossing and bumping on the rough ground, throwing her from side to side. Her covered head bounced on her chest and her groans came in bursts. I wanted to help but I didn’t know how and I imagined the Aunties watching from behind and whispering. I kept my eyes on the ground, watching my feet through the burqa grid and matching my steps to Baba’s.

  The path was strangely quiet and empty. The gates of our neighbours’ compounds were all tightly closed. Two boys from the other side of the village came creeping towards us. They shrank against the wall and stared with big eyes as we passed. All around us, the village was so silent, it was eerie. Even the goats and donkeys and chickens seemed afraid.

  We turned into the steep path past the mosque. Baba went to the front of the wheelbarrow to steady it on the slope as we descended. The paper notices were still clinging, tattered now, to the trees at the entrance to the mosque. I looked past them to the mosque, ashamed, thinking about the stolen paper hidden under my cot.

  I stopped in my tracks, then strained to see through the burqa grid. The yard surrounding the mosque was so different. It was full of dark pieces of canvas and shiny plastic which had been strung from posts and trees to make shelter. Dusty pickup trucks, not from our village, stood between them. Everywhere strong young men were swarming, men I’d never seen before, dressed in grimy shirts and turbans. Their beards were thick and unkempt. There was no music and no one was laughing or even chatting and there was a blackness in their silence which frightened me.

  A young man on a stool close to the entrance of the mosque looked up and saw me. He was plaiting hemp into rope, twisting the strands between his fingers. His fingers stopped working and the rope drooped in his hands. Then he frowned. I turned and rushed down the path, scattering stones with my feet and panting, until I’d caught up with the wheelbarrow.

  A car was waiting on the road and the men lifted Mama into the back. I slid in beside her and cradled her head in my lap. Her forehead was hot, staining the burqa with sweat. The driver started the car. Baba and Hamid Uncle squashed onto the front seat beside him.

  ‘Baba,’ I whispered. ‘Those men, at the mosque. Who are they?’

  Baba turned back to me and said quietly, ‘You didn’t see them.’

  I opened my mouth to say, ‘But, Baba, I did,’ then saw the warning in his eyes and shut it again.

  Out of the car window, the hillside fell steeply, peppered with rocks and terraced fields. The valley floor below was broad and flat and the river glistened as it spread itself out across the mudflats in shallow ribbons. On the far side, another mountain rose, as high and steep as our own.

  The driver sat hunched forwards, peering through the cracked windscreen. Baba and Hamid Uncle sat in silence, their shoulders tight with tension.

  Mama had stopped moaning. She’s dying, I thought. Please, Allah, in Your Kindness and Wisdom, don’t take her yet, not here, not now. I laid my hand against the cotton which covered her nose and mouth to see she was still breathing. If she dies now, I thought, it will be my fault. Every time the car hit a rock or hole and threw us around, I shook her. I wanted to keep her spirit in her body, rattling in the back of the car with me, until someone else could take over. I wondered too if she were still bleeding and if the cloths between her legs were thick enough. If she stained the seat, the shame would be unbearable and I might get the blame. I turned my head and stared fixedly out of the window through the white grid of the burqa as if not looking would make the bleeding go away.

  The countryside passed in a hundred small squares, divided into pieces by the white cotton grille over my face. In the orchards, men were working in rows, dropping plump apples into baskets on their backs. Their movements were heavy and slow.

  I looked more closely. There were no women doing their usual work of fetching, picking and carrying. There were no women on the paths through the orchards and wheat fields. The land didn’t look right without them.

  I grasped Mama’s head and shoulders to hold her steady as the car swung right off the road, taking the mud track towards town. ‘We’re nearly there, Mama,’ I whispered to her. Mama rarely came to town, on account of her bad nerves, so I described it to her. ‘We’re passing lots of compounds now, Mama, and shops like the tyre shop and the metal welder.’ I didn’t tell her that the compounds were closed and the shops shuttered. We passed the mosque, bigger and grander than ours, with its fancy madrasah. Beyond it, trucks were parked idle in the yards of the marble factory and tobacco-processing plant.

  A woman, covered from head to toe in a patched burqa, was walking slowly at the side of a middle-aged man. She was dragging her feet as if she were exhausted or ill. I prayed: If you have to receive a woman today, Allah in Your Greatness, please take her and leave Mama here with us.

  The driver turned into the town square. I tightened my grip on Mama’s shoulder. Usually it was a market square, a chaos of sounds and shapes. Baskets of apples and plums and oranges. Fish flapping in plastic buckets. Stinking meat, thick with flies, dripping blood into the cobbles. All of it raucous with hawkers’ sing-song cries and the chatter of gossiping women.

  Now, though, the square was shrunken and mean, emptied of colour and people. Our wheels echoed on the stone as we drove through. A pickup truck rounded the corner and careered towards us. The open back was piled with young men, their heads wrapped round with turbans, long guns in their hands. I pulled my eyes away, frightened. The veins in the back of Baba’s neck were swollen with pumping blood.

  The driver pointed the car towards the far end of the square, in the direction of the clinic, and accelerated with a jerk of gears. Almost there, Mama.

  As we left the square, I twisted my head to look back. A thin sack, suspended by rope from a post, caught my eye. I blinked, struggling to make it out. It was lumpy, the loose folds at the bottom bunched and flapping, and hung about with a shadow of flies. It was only as the car flew out of the square that I realized with a cry that it was a man, long dead, strung up by his feet and turning slowly in the silence.

  Mama was taken away
by a woman in a burqa. Hamid Uncle and Baba and I sat on a row of hard plastic chairs which were bolted to the floor. Baba looked into the air at nothing and I drew up my legs inside the burqa and leant against him and prayed in my head for Allah please to be merciful.

  A man and boy sat opposite us. The man clasped his hands together and stared at them as if he’d never seen fingers before. When I narrowed my eyes, then opened them wide and then narrowed them again, he jumped up and down in the grid squares, and I did that for a long time because there was nothing else to do and I didn’t want to think about Mama and what they were doing to get the stuck baby out.

  When Baba shook me awake, his face was grey. I wanted to ask: Is she dead, Baba? But I didn’t dare say it in case it was true.

  He told me the baby had been a girl, a sister, but it was sickly and hadn’t survived. It was Allah’s will, he said. His eyes were red-rimmed. When we finally took Mama back to the compound, she lay on the charpoy, staring into the air as if it had all been a bad dream and she wanted to wake up. When I closed my eyes, the hanging body came to haunt me, strung up and black with flies.

  Chapter 6

  Summer crept up from the valley until it reached us, high in the mountains. At nights, strange sounds drifted through the open windows like bad smells. Heavy marching feet. Banging. The distant crackle of flames and bitter soot which left its black trace everywhere.

  The men went out of the gates each morning, guns in hand, and came back at night with hard faces. Women and girls were shut inside day after day, prisoners in our own homes. As I did my chores, I distracted myself by thinking about Saeed. I imagined him pressing my hand between his own strong palms and comforting me.