‘Marva. It’s me, Layla. Under the cot.’
Nothing. Was she asleep? Then an arm was flung out over the side of the cot and Marva’s hand dropped down. I reached out my own and grasped it, lacing my fingers tight through hers, and when she squeezed back, I think I was never so glad in my whole life to hold my big sister’s hand.
The squeak of the shoes came closer. I froze. I turned my head and saw a pair of white shoes and the hem of a salwar kameez, right there at the next bed. I dropped Marva’s hand and lay, trembling. The shoes squeaked nearer. Just stay still for another moment, I was thinking, and she will have done her business and be gone. My throat was dry and my eyes clamped shut and my legs pressed together.
‘That’s not looking so comfortable.’
She must be whispering to Marva. I kept still, my body tense and senses screaming.
‘I said, not much comfort under there. You speak Pashto or what?’
I opened my eyes and there, right by mine, was a round face, hanging upside down looking at me. I jumped and banged my head on the wooden bar across the underside of the cot.
‘Your sister, is it?’
I was so dumbstruck, I just stared. Should I crawl out? I couldn’t move.
‘Why not? You can be here,’ the lady was whispering. ‘You’ll cheer her up. Just keep quiet and don’t be a nuisance. And don’t let the boss ladies catch you.’
I opened and closed my mouth but I still couldn’t speak.
‘But if there’s any whiff of trouble, I’ll throw you out myself.’
Her face disappeared and her white shoes squeaked off to the next bed, leaving me shaking with my hands stuffed into my mouth, ready to burst with relief and afraid to giggle out loud.
Marva and I managed to position ourselves, one on the cot and the other under it, so that our faces were just a foot or so apart. Like that, I could just hear her soft voice. When I closed my eyes, I imagined we were in our room back home in the village, as we’d been a thousand times before, and I was lying safely in my cot listening as Marva told me one of her fantastical stories. Only this time her story was true.
After we left, Marva said, the hours were filled with gunshots and the whine of jets and she waited, terrified, wondering what was to come. Finally darkness fell. A group of bearded men burst through the gates to the compound and came in, shouting and waving guns. Marva was hiding inside our house, lying beneath the window, her arms raised to the sill, peering out to watch.
Her first thought was that the men were drunk. They ran through the yard, kicking over chairs and tables. One of them was swinging an axe, raising it over his head with both hands and bringing it down on everything he saw until the air was thick with splinters of flying wood. The others whooped and wailed. They smashed through the windows of Hamid Uncle’s house and climbed inside. Soon piles of belongings were being hurled out into the yard and lay strewn there. Broken sticks of furniture, clothes, the drawers of the cabinets and a mirror from the bedroom wall which shattered into a thousand pieces when it fell. It was one of the precious carved frame mirrors which our paternal grandmother brought into marriage to our grandfather. The other one hung in Baba’s own bedroom.
Marva, seeing the youths come charging next towards our own house, managed to crawl under the cot, pulling a blanket round her legs and tucking them out of sight after her. She curled into a trembling ball, her head buried in her arms, as they shot the padlock off our front door and rampaged through the house. The floor shook under their boots and the sounds bounced along it into her head. The crash of the axe biting into the furniture and wrecking the cupboards and door frames and wardrobes where we used to hide when we were children. The men chanted, ‘God is Great! Praise be to Allah!’
All she could think was, What if they find me? She was shaking so hard she thought the cot must be dancing on its legs above her and when they came running into the bedroom, they would find her at once.
They had started at the back of the house with Baba’s room and then Jamila Auntie’s and next must be our bedroom where Marva was hiding. Outside, there was running and a dog started to bark. She knew the dog. It was our neighbour’s. It had been tied up and left behind to guard the compound. A single crack of a gun. The barking stopped.
The door of the bedroom was flung open against the wall. She screwed her eyes closed, waiting to be seized or shot or worse. A man walked round the cot. Heavy footsteps. The floor creaked under his weight. She was biting so hard on her arm to keep herself from crying out that her teeth cut into the skin and drew blood.
A shout from the passageway and he was gone, they were all gone, their footsteps fading as they ran back out into the yard. More men had arrived and their voices grew angry as they picked over our family’s possessions, stealing what they wanted and destroying the rest. Then the voices grew fainter and it became quiet. She lay, exhausted from fear, thinking she would stay there forever, curled under the cot in her blanket, hidden away from the world.
She woke, groggy, aware of a dry burning in her throat and the stink of smoke in her nostrils. Roaring and the cracking of wood. She opened her eyes. Long tendrils of smoke were reaching out for her. She dragged herself from under the cot. Smoke was blowing in through the open window and from the doorway to the passage. The yard beyond was shimmering with red and black and the window frame was twisting and buckling in the heat.
She pulled herself onto the top of the cot and stared. Her eyebrows and eyelashes stung with ash. Tiny glowing fragments were floating in on the hot air, singeing her clothes and burning her skin where they settled on her hands and face.
She started to scream but the smoke was thick in her mouth and the more she screamed the more grit and ash she breathed in until it was filling her lungs and she could barely even gasp.
She thought strange things, she said, in those seconds that she crouched there, facing her own death. She wished that the men had found her after all and shot her, the way they’d shot the neighbour’s dog, because it would be a better death than burning. She thought about me, she said, and that she’d never see my marriage and children. She thought about Baba and Mama and how angry they’d be when they knew the way those men had laid waste to their precious home and especially that they’d smashed Grandmother’s special mirrors.
Now she was swooning with heat and ash and the smoky air was gyrating and dancing in front of her eyes. Then a man called her name. Marva. She tried to shake the smoke and fire from her ears so she could listen. Nothing. For a moment she thought it must have been a messenger of Allah, sent to bring her to Paradise.
Then she saw him. A thick-set man, silhouetted against the flames, a cloth round his head. Was it a turban? No, it was wrapped around his face, protecting his mouth and nose from the fire. The smoke swirled and he vanished. A phantom, she thought, a ghost. Then he was there again, struggling towards our house, batting back the flames, his salwar kameez streaked with soot. She dragged herself up onto the burning window sill and held out her arms to him, imagining she could jump and fly towards him out of this madness and to safety. As he stumbled nearer, his hair singed and smoking, she saw it was Adnan. She tried to shout his name, but the smoke stole her words and just as he reached her, she toppled and fell forwards, her legs scraping along the collapsing window behind her, tumbling as a dead weight at his feet.
When she talked about Adnan, her voice became gentle and soft. I peered out from under the cot to see. Her cheeks had taken on colour again and her eyes were large and moist. I was older now than when I used to tease her all that time ago at home about Adnan’s love for her and say things to make her blush. Now, after all that had happened to us both, I was more grown-up and wise to the ways of the world so I didn’t utter a single word. I just looked at Marva and saw what I saw.
‘Are you burnt?’ I tried to peer out round the curve of the cot to see her body, covered by its blanket. ‘Is it painful?’
She clicked her tongue. ‘Not so much,’ she said. ‘Adnan bro
ught me cool leaves and I soothed the places and now the skin is already healing.’ She pulled back the blanket and showed me a thick angry weal scored into her skin. It was stained yellow with ointment, sticky down the raw, red centre but dry and flaking at the sides. ‘The nurses put medicine on it,’ she said. ‘It’s starting to mend.’
I thought again about Adnan, scooping her into his arms and rescuing her from the flames. It was terrifying, but now I knew that Marva was safe, it was also thrillingly romantic. I imagined Saeed coming through the flames for me, plucking me out of the fire. I would rest my head against his broad shoulder, my hair tumbling about my face, and melt into his arms, looking pale but quite beautiful as he carried me away. I thought about this for a while.
Then I remembered the way Adnan had disappeared, that first night when we were all sleeping, and the shock for Hamid Uncle and Jamila Auntie the next morning when they awoke to find him gone.
‘He went back for you,’ I said. ‘He didn’t tell us. He just went back to save you.’
‘I know.’
I thought of the way his father had beaten him for my sake, until the skin on his back was peeled like a fruit, just for carrying Saeed’s note, and I felt sick. I crawled back under the cot again and lay there, blinking up at the wooden strut and watching it shimmy into waves as my eyes became wet.
The next day I made an excuse again not to eat lunch and ran back to the medical tent, heart pumping, to see Marva. The area around the tent was quiet. Just a few camp workers were passing to and fro, Westerners striding with papers flapping in their hands. They looked without seeing me, just another refugee girl, one of so many, her face half-concealed by her chador. I hung close to the nearest plastic shelters, watching and waiting for my chance to scurry across the open ground and into the medical tent.
‘Salaam Alaikum.’
A man’s voice, low and almost in my ear. I half-turned, dropping my eyes to the ground and tipping my head so my face was hidden by the folds of my chador. His feet were thin with crooked toes and encased in cheap sandals. The bottoms of his cotton trousers were soiled black with grime. I hesitated, not knowing whether to answer. It was a polite greeting and it was rude not to speak but he was a stranger to me and I was alone, without Baba or my Uncles.
‘I’ve seen you,’ he was saying. ‘You are such a pretty girl, too pretty to rot away your life in a dirty camp, nah?’
His voice was wheedling as if he wanted me to understand, to be his friend. I felt my cheeks grow hot. He had seen my face then, whoever he was. That was very wrong. Talking to me like this in public, without Baba being present, that was very wrong too. But he was calling me pretty, he had noticed me above all these other girls and somehow he knew that I was wasting my life here, spoiling my youth in filth and heat.
‘Would you like a trinket? A present from me.’
He put his hand out, holding it flat as if he were offering food to a donkey with sharp teeth. Something silver was curled in his palm. A short chain, an anklet or bracelet. The lines of his hand were engrained with dirt but the chain glistened amongst them. I shook my head and turned away, embarrassed. I wanted it, of course, but it was impossible. Accepting a gift from a strange man would be very wrong.
‘No,’ I murmured. ‘No, thank you.’
I twisted, hunching my shoulder to him. I wanted him to go away but also wondered if he was going to say anything else to me and, if he did, what might happen next.
There was a pause. He was moving his arm. I couldn’t look. The hand came out again, poked round my shoulder until it was almost under my nose.
‘Have this then,’ he said. ‘No harm in this. Only a sweet. A sweet from your new friend, Doc. For a pretty girl.’
A wrapped sweet was sitting on his palm now, just where the chain had been, as if one had been conjured into the other by magic. The paper was crinkly and bright orange. I reached out my fingers and took it.
‘And what is your good name, pretty girl?’
I shook my head. I wanted him to go now. I had the sweet grasped firmly in my fist and already I was imagining giving it to Marva, my gift to her.
His face had crept closer to mine and for a moment, the smell of him intruded, a smell of male sweat and filthy clothes. He hesitated, then laughed and was suddenly gone.
I lifted my head to look after him as he walked away. He was a slight man, his hair long and slick round his ears. His crumpled salwar kameez flapped around thin arms and legs. As I looked, feeling the hardness of the sweet in my fingers, he turned his head in a quick movement and looked back at me over his shoulder and his eyes were amused. I flushed, feeling exposed, realizing in an instant that he knew all along that I would take the sweet and he knew too that I would look after him as he walked away and that he, turning, would catch me looking.
When I slid under Marva’s cot, I handed her the orange sweet and listened as she unwrapped it and started to suck. Then she turned onto her side and carried on with her story at once, as if she had been waiting all morning while I was at the school, just lying there, waiting for me to come.
That night, she told me, Adnan carried her down the hillside to a lean-to shack in one of the wheat fields which was used to store grain and suchlike. He set her down very gently on the ground there and spread out sacking to make her comfortable and watched over her. Every time she woke, on account of terrible dreams about the flames and choking in her chest and smarting pain from her burnt skin, he was sitting still, waiting to soothe her back to sleep.
The next day she was woken early by the sound of gunfire. It was much louder than the previous day. Again the jets started to streak across the sky. The roar shuttled back and forth round the mountains. She and Adnan huddled together and wondered where the bombs were falling.
When it was light, Marva sent Adnan scavenging for something to eat and for water while she tended her burns. The houses in the compound had been destroyed and they had no proper place to live. She had barely been outside the compound in her life and the broad openness of the landscape, with its echoing gunfire, bombs and dramatic mountains overwhelmed and frightened her.
He had just come back and was sharing water with her when there was a sudden rustling in the wheat and Adnan jumped to his feet, startled. Four men were standing in a semicircle in front of them, pointing guns. They had scarves tied round their faces like bandits and two wore turbans and their eyes were menacing. Marva reached for the chador which had slipped to the back of her head and tugged it forwards to shield her hair.
‘What is this?’ The man at the front spoke boldly like a commander and his tone was mocking. ‘Two crows in their love nest?’
‘How dare you!’ Adnan had jumped to his feet and squared his shoulders to them, all ready to fight. ‘She is my cousin. We are good Muslims. Don’t tell such smut.’
The commander looked amused. There were four of them and they had guns to boot.
‘No insult, brother,’ he said. ‘If you are a good Muslim, you should defend your sister’s honour. But why is she here? Don’t you know the infidel soldiers are coming?’
The men around him sniggered. Adnan was staring closely at one of the men, screwing up his face as if he were trying to concentrate. ‘Saeed?’
Listening to this, lying under Marva’s hospital cot, I almost banged my head in shock. Saeed?
Saeed looked embarrassed, she said, and didn’t speak. The commander looked from one man to the other and broke into a smile. He stepped nearer to Adnan and clasped him by the shoulder as if he were a friend. ‘If you are truly a good Muslim, brother,’ he said, ‘then you are one of us. Welcome, brother.’
Marva had listened with growing unease, wondering what this meant and how she might warn Adnan to be on his guard. On account of his being simple, he was always foolish enough to take people at their word and believe whatever they promised, even though it made him the endless butt of pranks and jokes.
He put his arm round the commander’s shoulder in return and beame
d. ‘May Allah protect you,’ he said warmly. ‘May He give you long life.’
The commander saw the pail of water that Adnan had just fetched and asked if they might sit and share it. Marva had felt a growing sense of discomfort as she observed all this. There was something about the commander she didn’t trust and wanted to signal that to Adnan but he, pouring the water into the commander’s cup, was quite unaware.
The other three men, including Saeed, stood back, watching. They seemed tense, careful not to speak or to be forward in the commander’s presence. Adnan, by contrast, chatted without reservation. He explained that the rest of the family had left but Marva, unable to walk, couldn’t go with them. The commander listened attentively. Then Adnan fell to asking questions, with the innocence of a child, about the commander’s gun and the equipment strapped round his body.
Finally the commander got to his feet and made to leave.
‘Keep her here,’ he said, nodding past to Marva. ‘This is safe ground for another day. Tomorrow we’ll find a way of getting her off the mountainside to her family.’ He smiled a cool toothy grin, and Adnan, delighted, clapped his hands in glee and thanked him.
For the rest of the day, Adnan boasted to Marva, so proud he could barely contain himself. He had gathered fruit for them to eat and Marva sorted through it, discarding the bloated and rotten pieces.
‘See,’ he kept saying, ‘I can take good care of you.’ He grasped her hand. ‘See what good friends I have?’
She nodded and tried to smile, praising him for his cleverness and his courage until he beamed. She kept her concerns hidden.
The commander did come back. Adnan and one of the fighters carried Marva between them on a blanket strung between two branches. They travelled for more than an hour down the steep mountainside. Black smoke rose on the other side of the valley as bombs struck. The clatter of machine guns echoed around the mountains. It was hard to tell where the sound was coming from. Marva lay, afraid, staring up at the wisps of cloud against the blue, feeling herself bounced and tossed on the taut blanket.
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