Saeed is clever and funny and strong. He has thick hair which falls in a curl across his forehead and a large straight nose and deep brown eyes and now he has a beard. He is sixteen and stockier than my cousins. He could beat any one of them in a fight. And he has spirit, like me. He can run to the top of the mountain, high above the village, in barely two hours, which is faster than anyone else I know.
But Saeed is gentle too. He writes notes to me on scraps of paper with words about the sun in the mountains and the rich scent of peaches in the orchards and, of course, about how lovely I am and how his heart is breaking for me, and he writes all this with such tender feeling that sometimes these notes make my eyes fill with tears, in a joyful way.
Before these so-called Faithful Soldiers of Islam came and everything began to change, I was allowed to go to and from school on my own and to run errands for Mama, on account of Marva’s affliction and of having no brother to go. This was when Saeed first saw me. Sometimes he would lie in wait near the mosque gates and follow me. He walked at a distance but watched me all the time. I couldn’t speak to him or even look back. Some tittle-tattle would have told. But I knew he was there and I sensed he could tell from the swing of my hips that I knew and, for the time being, that was enough.
Then he started to send notes through Adnan, my cousin. Adnan is a large boy, the same age as Saeed, but he was born simple-minded and Hamid Uncle has never forgiven him for it, although the Aunties are always hugging and fussing him as if he were a baby. He is stupid but sweet tempered, always smiling and willing to fetch and carry and help the women with their chores and he amuses the young cousins by rolling about with them in the dust for hours, playing foolish games and letting them ride on his back and pull his ears.
Adnan has a soft corner for my sister Marva. He is forever hanging around our door with big eyes, waiting for her. When she comes into the yard, he sits for hours by her side as she tries in vain to teach him basic letters and sums. When she finally gives up, she tells us tales, crazy, magical stories about the village and the mountains which, on account of her legs, she can never leave the compound to see for herself.
Given the star-struck look on his face, I say he’s in love with her – I’m sure he is – but when I told Marva that, she blushed plum red and scolded me. Perhaps she thinks she’d be a laughing stock if she had an idiot for a husband but I say he’s less of an idiot, in his own foolish way, than some of the men who have three wives and beat them all so hard they can barely stand. And besides, it’s a harsh thing to say but a girl with withered legs should be grateful to have a husband at all and Adnan is at least hard-working.
Jamila Auntie thinks the same. I’ve caught her looking at the pair of them and once, when we were sitting side by side chopping potatoes, she said to me, ‘If Allah in His Wisdom put together his body and her head, He could make a good person out of the two of them.’ I saw at once what she meant. In a strange way, they fit together.
Since Baba confined us to the compound, I hadn’t heard from Saeed and I was fretting, wondering if he’d forgotten me. Then, about two weeks after we took Mama to the clinic, I finished sweeping inside the house and came out to find Baba sitting on a charpoy right there, waiting. I started. It was unusual for him to be home so early. When his eyes fell on me, they darkened and he shook his head. His chest puffed out a little and collapsed again as if he had sighed. He lifted his hand and beckoned.
I was too taken aback to set down my cleaning things and just went straight to him, broom and brush and all. My sandals scuffed up small puffs of dust with every step and each one exploded with an anxious thought. What had I done? May Allah protect me. Had he found out about the notice I stole from the tree? How could I explain that it was exciting to keep, precisely because it was so forbidden?
I sat down at his feet, the broom beside me, and looked up at him. The skin round his mouth was puckered.
‘You have disgraced me.’ He looked heavy with sadness. His breath was hot in my face. I blinked up at him stupidly and didn’t speak. I had never heard Baba say such a thing. A silence stretched between us.
‘Layla. My own daughter. How could you behave with such dishonour?’
I tried to swallow but my mouth was dry. My mind was racing, trying to think what I might have done, but it came up blank. My face burnt with shame. Just when I was ready to burst into tears, he pulled a note from his pocket.
I recognized it at once. From Saeed, of course. Wobbly black letters on a scrap of rough paper, the kind used by shopkeepers. He always used it. But how had Baba got hold of it? No one knew about Saeed’s notes, not even Marva.
Baba was holding it taut between us in his hands. Some pretty words were there, about starlight and the sun. I couldn’t speak.
‘Who wrote this?’ His voice was quiet but there was a danger in it which I had never heard before.
I stuttered. Part of my brain was thinking: Does Baba really not know? Maybe I can still protect Saeed. I was terrified. I didn’t know what he might do, either to me or to Saeed or to my poor broken mother. I started to cry in great sobs that set my shoulders heaving.
‘Answer me.’
Baba set his hands on my shoulders and his touch at first was a comfort but then he lifted me to my feet. His fingers dug into my skin. The crying in my eyes made his face wobble and I twisted away to make him disappear altogether.
‘Tell me.’
I was gasping now, refusing to look at him, taken up with sobbing and snuffling. He was holding me so tightly, I couldn’t even raise my hands to my face and wipe it clean. I squirmed and tried to break free.
He started shaking me. I struggled to stay upright. My brain knocked in my skull. His angry face and the house behind it flew into splinters, speared by black streaks and flecks of bright light. The shock of it stopped my crying at once. He was strong and I was slight in his hands and I had the feeling I was flying, my legs dancing in the dirt.
My mouth was wide open, stretching as I tried to draw in breath. Dust flew into my throat and I started to cough and cough as if my lungs would burst. I must have gone limp in his hands because the next thing I remember, I was sprawling on the ground, flat on my belly with my limbs splayed and my kameez up round my waist in disarray, and my hands flat against the ground as if the earth were spinning so quickly that I had to grab hold of it to hang on and stop myself whirling off into space. Everything around me was turning and my body was juddering against the ground as I tried to breathe. Somehow I pulled myself over onto my back and faced Baba who was shaking from head to foot with the exertion and the weight of his own rage. His face was red and sweaty and his eyes were moist and I saw the old man he would one day become, hidden there inside his skin.
‘You are a wicked girl.’ He was panting. ‘You will not have contact with this boy again. I forbid it.’
I stared at him. ‘Baba . . .’ It was all I could say, staring at him stupidly with the world still slowly spinning around me. He tore the note into a dozen pieces and threw them over me and they slowly fluttered, specks carried by the currents of air, before coming to rest at last. Baba turned his head and strode away.
That evening, Adnan came tapping at our door. His face was swollen with tears and he crawled into the house, whimpering for Marva like a little boy. I bolted the door behind him. When he calmed down enough, he lifted his kameez. I grimaced and Marva turned away her face. His back was a pulpy mess of broken skin, hanging in scraps and fragments. Fibres from his clothes and dirt from the yard were embedded in the blood which had congealed and was holding the whole sticky surface together.
He let us put him, face down, on my cot and flinched as I wet a cloth in the pail and dabbed at his back. Marva sat watching, her eyes full of distress. The marks made a criss-cross pattern across his spine. He’d been flayed with a split cane.
‘Was it Baba?’ I asked.
He moaned and shook his head. ‘My baba, not yours.’
‘Why?’
‘Those
stupid notes.’ He twisted, raising his head to look at me. His childish eyes were full of reproach. ‘Saeed said they were nothing. He said it was all right.’
I swallowed hard. The blood on his back was coming away in dried flecks as he moved. It smelt of gunmetal. His face crumpled and he started to cry again, snot running from his nose in long stretchy strings to the cot.
I couldn’t look Marva in the eye. I carried on dabbing at Adnan’s cuts while she comforted him. If Hamid Uncle knew about my disgrace and had done this to his own son, what might he and Baba do to Saeed? When I went to squeeze out the cloth, my own face appeared in the water, my eyes wide and afraid.
After some time, Adnan’s crying subsided and I carried the dirty pail outside to empty it. The men had gathered in the courtyard to smoke and talk. I had the feeling, as I poured away the water, that someone was watching me. I glanced round at the men. They were bending forwards and talking in low voices, not paying me any heed. I twisted towards the house.
There was a woman there, standing back from the window so the shadows half-concealed her. Was it Mama? Did she know what had happened? I narrowed my eyes and looked more closely. No. Not Mama. The face swam into focus as I stared. A sad, plain face. And, seeing it, I knew at once who had betrayed me. Who had spied on me and Saeed and seen our notes and taken the chance to stop them. Jamila Auntie.
Chapter 7
Jamila crouched in the shade of the orchard wall. The burqa was tight round her head, driving its seams into her skull. She was trying to think but it made her head ache. It was nonsense. Never had the women of Mutaire been forced to wear the burqa. It was not their culture.
She peered through the small grid over her face. On the other side of the orchard, too far away to notice her, old men climbed heavily on the ladders, their bones creaking as much as the wood. She tutted to herself. Now that women were banned from working in the orchards and fields, many of the peaches, plums and apricots would spoil.
Hamid had finally given her permission to visit her relatives across the village. On the way, she was stealing a chance to breathe the smell of the fruit trees. She shifted her weight and a brittle twig cracked. The earth beneath her sandals was dry and tired, beaten by the sun for too many months.
Love the land like a husband, her father used to say when she was a little girl, playing around him in the fields, digging holes and poking insects with sticks. It will always be true to you. It has always been true to our people. She had crouched in the dust at his feet, listening, as her father’s broad body blotted out the sun. The land is wise, he’d told her. The land never forgets.
But people forget, she thought now. The young are foolish. They think they know everything but understand nothing. She sighed. Layla’s anger weighed her down. This nonsense with the peasant boy was dangerous. It had to be stamped out before people’s tongues wagged and the family’s honour was tainted. The girl didn’t understand the risks. She was headstrong, spoiled by Ibrahim, her baba, who was so desperate for a son that he treated his daughter like one. She blinked. I wanted to give you ten sons, Ibrahim. If I had, you wouldn’t have pushed me aside for a second wife. But it was not Allah’s will.
A light breeze blew through the trees. The peaches swayed, plump and heavy on the branches. Jamila looked again at the old men on their ladders, clawing at the fruit. They wouldn’t see her. She lifted the front of the burqa, throwing it back in a rush to expose her face. Cool air swept in and wiped her hot cheeks, dried off her forehead. She closed her eyes.
After some time, she scratched up dirt and twigs and leaves in her palms and buried her face in it. It pressed itself into the softness under her nails. She rubbed it into her skin, tasting it, filling her senses with its rich, vital scent. ‘You are our land,’ she whispered as she squeezed it between her fingers and watched it fall, powdery, to the ground. ‘Our history. No one will have you from us.’
Jamila reached her old family compound late in the afternoon. One of her relatives, a young boy, peered round the gate when she knocked. How these times are changing us, she thought. Everyone is afraid.
He ran ahead of her across the courtyard as she lifted off the burqa. Old Auntie’s great-granddaughter, Syma, came skipping across the yard to meet her, calling and waving her arms. Her hair stuck up in wild tufts above her forehead. Out of habit, Jamila reached out her fingers to smooth it down but it sprang back at once.
‘Salaam, little one. Why aren’t you helping your mama?’
The girl was quiet for a moment, ignoring the question, then she grabbed hold of Jamila’s hand. She swung her arm back and forth as they walked, pumping a smile.
‘The boys brought a basket of plums yesterday and when we washed them, there was a frog.’
‘A frog?’
‘A tiny one.’ She took her fingers back to show the size, then reached for Jamila’s hand again.
‘Where is it?’
She looked round at the yard hopefully. ‘I don’t know. It went hopping off. I tried to catch it.’
‘And how is your mama?’
She shrugged. ‘OK.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I want to pick the plums myself but Baba won’t let me go.’
‘Your baba is right. You must listen to him and do what he tells you, like a good girl.’
The girl sighed. Her hand was small and firm inside Jamila’s. If Allah had allowed me a girl, she thought, she might have been such a child as this.
‘Go and play quietly,’ she said at last as they approached the house. She bent to the child and kissed her forehead. ‘Hush now. Don’t disturb your great-grandmother. Look, she’s sleeping.’
Syma turned and skipped carefully away to the other side of the yard, humming to herself.
Old Auntie was sitting outside the house, wrapped in a blanket. Her face was turned to the dying sun, her eyes closed. The mellow light was teasing her skin, smoothing out the hollows, pockets and wrinkles.
Jamila crouched on the ground and simply watched. Finally the old eyes flicked open. Jamila went forwards to greet her, kissing her cheek. ‘Salaam Alaikum, Auntie. How is your health?’
The old lady inclined her head. ‘I’m still alive, thanks be to Allah.’
No one knew exactly what age Old Auntie had reached. On some days, she said she was eighty-five. On others, she shook her head and said: Did you know I am almost a hundred? There was no one left of her own generation to disagree.
Jamila took her hand between her own. Although the day was warm, the skin was dry and cool. The fingers were shrivelling to bone, a handful of fleshless twigs.
‘Are you quite well?’
Old Auntie shrugged. ‘At my age,’ she said, ‘there is only dead and alive. Not well.’
She closed her eyes again and seemed to drift away. Jamila stroked the back of the papery hand. The blood, sluggish, disappeared from the vein where she touched it, then crept slowly back.
‘Fetch me water. My mouth is dry.’
Jamila went into the house where Old Auntie’s granddaughter-in-law was cooking. Her stout baby was crawling on the floor beside her.
‘They won’t let us fetch water from the well,’ the young woman said, as Jamila filled a metal cup. ‘Only the boys can go.’
Jamila shook her head. The baby lifted its head to stare at her.
‘I wouldn’t mind but they spill half of it. You know what boys are.’
Outside, Jamila held the cup to Old Auntie’s lips and waited as she sipped. The water seeped from the corners of her mouth and ran down her chin. When she had finished, Jamila wiped off Old Auntie’s mouth.
‘When I was a child, my grandmother used to tell me stories,’ Auntie said. ‘Such good old stories, they were shiny and worn with telling. They were told by grandmother to granddaughter through a hundred generations. Did I tell you the story about the donkey?’
She started the story, then closed her eyes and Jamila leant forwards, scanning her face. She seemed to be swallowing hard. After a moment, she opened her eye
s and looked up at Jamila with a vague, troubled look.
‘Your story,’ Jamila prompted. ‘About the donkey. You should tell it to the children.’ She’d heard it herself a hundred times before.
‘Those children, they have no time to listen. No time and no patience and no respect.’
She sat still for a moment, staring into the empty air. Jamila got to her feet and patted her shoulder. The sun was sinking rapidly now, coating the courtyard in its red, sticky light. ‘I’m tiring you,’ she said. ‘I should go.’
She took the cup back into the house and said goodbye to the girl who had lifted the baby onto her hip and was dandling him as she stirred the pot.
Outside, Old Auntie reached for her as she passed. She pulled her down and put her damp mouth against Jamila’s ear.
‘When I die, bury me with my brother and his wife. I don’t want to be in the ground alone. The darkness makes me afraid.’
‘Hush, Auntie.’ Jamila shook her head and tried to free herself. ‘No such talk of dying and burying.’
‘It’s a big enough grave,’ Old Auntie went on. ‘If he were here, he’d say yes. He was a good brother to me.’
Jamila loosened the old woman’s fingers and arranged the blanket more closely round her thin shoulders before she left.
She found Ibrahim on the charpoy outside their house, trying to read in the last flicker of daylight. His body was bent over, his spectacles low against the book. She stood for a moment, observing him. He looked paler than ever, as if life were steadily washing the colour out of him. He was deep in his book and didn’t stir.
She tutted. He was all book learning. It had seemed a blessing at first, that she’d married such a gentle man. He wanted to teach her to read when they were newly-weds but she had refused. No woman in her family read books.
She remembered the day she had first set eyes on him when he and his father came to visit her parents in the family compound to discuss the arrangements for marriage. They had brought gifts of boxes of rich sweetmeats and a parcel of white lace, picked out by his mother. She, still a girl, had hidden in the kitchen, straining to hear the murmur of conversation between the men. It was only when the visitors said farewell and got up to leave that she dared to look through the kitchen window and saw him crossing the yard, a thin, bookish boy.
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