Far From My Father's House

by Jill McGivering

  Twice the commander directed them to hide and they darted behind bushes or into gullies while a jet tore through the sky above them or a military convoy passed below. Finally they reached the road. Many people had already fled but the road was still busy with human traffic, families walking slowly from high in the mountains with exhausted children and elderly relatives, bent and frail.

  The commander stopped the first handcart they saw. The man pushing it fell silent when he saw them, looking first at their guns and then their faces. Finally he looked at Marva. His wife and children stopped some paces behind and waited, too tired to care.

  The cart was piled with metal farming implements, cooking pots and bundles of clothes.

  ‘This is your cart?’

  The man narrowed his eyes and nodded. The commander’s tone was threatening. The man looked wary.

  The commander signalled to his men and they started to unload the cart, clearing a space. The man protested. ‘Please,’ he said, as spades and scythes and hoes were thrown in the ditch. ‘How will I live? I need—’

  The commander ignored him. He told Adnan to lift Marva onto the cart. Adnan settled her there and tucked a blanket around her thin legs.

  ‘This man will take good care of you,’ he whispered. ‘He has a kind face.’

  Marva, seeing only anger in the man’s eyes, said nothing.

  ‘Find her family in the camps. Deliver her safely.’ The commander’s gun was poking into the man’s chest, making him glassy-eyed with fear. ‘If not, I will know and come for you.’

  Her last sight as the man lifted the handles of the cart and pushed it, protesting, into the road was of Adnan, beaming a proud goodbye, his large eyes focused on nothing but her face, while the commander at his side laid a possessive hand on Adnan’s shoulder as if to say: I have let you go but this one I claim as my own.

  Marva fell silent when she’d finished telling her story. I reached up my hand and patted her body until she took my hand in her own, weaving her fingers through mine and squeezing them tight.

  Chapter 14

  Ellen found Britta and Fatima in one of the poky back offices. They were talking in low voices. Britta’s face was drawn, as if she’d barely slept. When she saw Ellen, she looked embarrassed.

  ‘I am sorry.’ She opened her hands wide in a gesture of pleading. ‘That interview you wanted. I know I said now. But maybe a little later?’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  Britta’s eyes were red with tiredness. ‘A little girl. Typhoid fever. Diarrhoea. Now she has some respiratory infection also. We’re just discussing—’

  ‘Of course.’ Ellen left them to talk. She walked back through the ward, scanning the faces. Many of the women were twisted on their sides with closed eyes. Others stared out at her blankly, their minds elsewhere.

  The girl was in a bed close to the entrance. She was a small thing, lying on her back, her eyes closed. The lower half of her face was consumed by a moulded plastic mask. Her chest was rising and falling in a frantic scrabble for breath. The oxygen was being discharged to her in a steady whisper which was almost drowned out by the desperate sucking and rasping of her lungs.

  Sweat was slick on her face, running down her temples and into wild tufts of hair which stuck up above her forehead. Her closed eyes looked abnormally large, bulging above the sharp lines of her cheeks. A needle, taped to the soft inner skin of her arm, was slowly discharging liquid. Something about her struggle made Ellen think, It’s already too late.

  Fatima came towards them, carrying a bowl of water. Her steps were quick. She set the bowl on the floor, squeezed out the cloth inside it and began to wash the child, stroking her skin with cool water. The girl’s eyelids fluttered but didn’t open.

  ‘Is she conscious?’

  Fatima shrugged. ‘She slips in and out. She has delirium.’

  The girl’s limbs flopped like a cloth puppet as Fatima lifted her this way and that, holding her body with care as she washed her down. The vegetal stink of the girl’s body was overlaid by antiseptic. There was a new sound now, the soft murmur of the water in the basin as Fatima rinsed and squeezed the cloth.

  The sunlight outside was piercing. Ellen sat in the line of shade beside the unloading bay, pulled out her notebook and wrote some lines of description for herself about the little girl and the atmosphere on the ward. Then she drank down some water and flicked through the last few pages of notes. She needed to think. She wanted to write about the spreading typhoid. But it was sensitive. All the camps were fighting for funding. The last thing Britta and Frank needed was doubt about their standard of hygiene and healthcare.

  A shadow fell across her notebook. A figure, blocking the sun. She looked up. The schoolteacher, his face in shadow, his round hat perched on his head, his glasses crooked on his nose.

  ‘Salaam Alaikum.’ He was breathy with emotion.

  ‘Ibrahim. Good news.’ Ellen patted the ground beside her. ‘They’ve agreed to let me see their records. At the camps. They haven’t registered everyone but—’

  ‘I have found them.’ He settled himself at a respectable distance, his legs crossed under him. ‘My family.’ He placed his swollen hands together, the palms engorged by grubby bandages. ‘Here, in the camp.’

  ‘You have?’ She was confused. He seemed deflated. ‘Are they OK?’

  He paused, considering the question, then nodded, making his short beard waggle. ‘They are here in safety.’ He leant closer towards her and lowered his voice. ‘My daughter has bad legs.’ He touched a hand to his own leg by way of explanation. ‘Some illness when she was young. Very terrible illness.’

  Polio, she thought. Bound to be. ‘How did she get here?’

  ‘She is coming alone, with Taliban.’

  Ellen stared. ‘With the Taliban?’

  He tutted. ‘A man brings her with his cart.’ He mimed pulling a handcart, then showed a two-fingered gun to the head. ‘The Taliban are making him to do this.’

  ‘Why?’

  He pulled a face, shook his head. ‘Some peculiar business is there. What to do?’ He stared dismally at his feet.

  ‘Is she OK?’

  He pointed to the medical tent. ‘She is inside the hospital.’ He looked directly at her and she saw pleading in his watery eyes. ‘I cannot go in this place. It is for ladies only but the ladies in my family are very much afraid to go. Too much superstition. Please tell me, when it is opportune, how does she do.’

  Ellen nodded, thinking. ‘I’d like to ask her,’ she said. ‘I’d like to talk to many of the women there. But I can’t speak Pashto. Do you know any lady who could translate? I could pay.’

  His forehead tightened as he followed the words and made sense of them. He sat, staring at the ground for a moment, thinking. He seemed to come to a decision. ‘I am knowing about a very good girl. My own daughter.’

  Ellen pointed back to the medical tent. ‘She speaks English?’

  ‘Not this daughter.’ He held up his hand to indicate two with his fingers. ‘I have two daughter. She is very good student. She speaks English almost as good as me.’

  He was waving his bandaged hand now, possessed by growing excitement. ‘You will find her. She is teacher in the school. Her name is Layla.’

  ‘What school?’

  ‘Some classes, here in the camp only. I am teacher for boys and Layla is teacher for girls. Small girls.’

  ‘And I have your permission to work with her, if she wants to help me?’

  ‘Of course.’ He smiled, showing blackened teeth. ‘She will very help you.’

  The sound reached her first. High-pitched children’s voices, chanting lessons in unison. Ellen knocked on the woven partition and a young aid worker let her in. She led her through a circle of gossiping women to a large hessian tent, stretched over a square metal frame.

  Inside, about forty girls were sitting in rows, cross-legged on a carpet of sacking. Their heads were parcelled in brightly coloured headscarves and their faces
were grubby. The youngest, shyly sitting against older sisters, looked only five or six. Many were several years older. They were rocking themselves as they chanted, some with hesitant whispery voices, others almost shouting, and patting their palms against their knees to keep the beat. At the head of the class, a young girl was conducting them with some gusto. A blackboard and easel stood behind her.

  The children turned and gawped at Ellen. The young teacher, following their eyes, turned to look too. She broke off and the children faltered through another few beats, then fell silent, too distracted to concentrate.

  The aid worker was starting to explain. ‘So many families here,’ she was saying, ‘have taken the chance to send their girls—’

  Before the woman could finish her sentence, the young teacher stepped smartly forwards, placed her pointing stick at the bottom of the easel and approached Ellen.

  ‘How do you do?’

  Ellen smiled. She was a striking girl, slight but forceful. She exuded confidence and a youthful naivety. Her eyes were bright and her gaze direct and she held herself with dignity.

  ‘My name is Layla,’ she said. ‘Please, what is your good name?’

  Her accent was heavy but she spoke the English words with precision as if these were sentences she had spent all her life practising, in preparation for just such a moment.

  ‘My name is Ellen. I know your father, Layla.’

  Layla paused, licking her lips. She seemed surprised and straining to think what to say to this. The children, wide-eyed with wonder, gazed at them in silence. The aid worker was beaming, proud of the girl and her boldness.

  ‘This is the school of girls,’ Layla said at last and smiled, her eyes meeting Ellen’s. ‘You are most welcome.’

  Ellen spent the rest of the morning at the school. Layla carried on with her teaching and, when she was free, acted as Ellen’s translator so she could talk to the children. Many of the young girls were too afraid or too traumatized to say very much. They gave her ragged patches from the same common story, of the Taliban and the changes in their lives, of bombs and soldiers, of the long journey from their homes to the camp. When the classes ended and the teachers stopped to eat their lunch, Ellen headed back to the medical tent. Layla promised to find her there after she’d eaten.

  Ellen sensed at once that the atmosphere there had changed. Fatima didn’t look up as she entered the ward. The little girl’s bed was empty, the bedding cleared. The earlier tension had been replaced by weary defeat.

  Ellen walked the length of the ward to the small rooms at the back, feeling the eyes of the patients moving with her. Britta was sitting on a chair by the girl’s covered body, her head bowed. Her fingers were gripping the cross at her neck.

  The girl was so slight that she barely reached halfway down the stretcher. The cloth which covered her fell in drapes over a series of tiny mounds, from head to feet, and billowed out onto the floor. Ellen thought of the child a few hours earlier, lying in the same position on her back, her eyes closed, her lungs noisy with the struggle to breathe. The thin limbs, which Fatima had carefully washed, not realizing they would soon be washed again for burial, lay straight and lifeless.

  Britta sensed her there and turned. Her eyes were red-rimmed.

  ‘She didn’t respond.’ Her voice was thick. ‘She wasn’t strong but she should have made it. We had her. We were treating her.’

  Ellen pulled up a chair and sat beside her. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  Britta looked distraught. ‘What do I say to her mother?’

  Ellen shook her head. ‘You don’t say anything.’

  Britta turned away. The room had a sickly smell of disinfectant. Flies were buzzing against the window, banging the glass, trying to escape.

  ‘It’s not right. I’ve worked with typhoid, I’ve treated it many times. This, what is happening, is not right.’ Britta’s fingers had reached again for her cross and she was clutching it as if it were the only steady object in a spinning world.

  Ellen sat quietly, watching the agitation in her fingers, the anguish in her face. ‘Come away for a bit. Just for a break. Let’s go for a Coke or something.’

  ‘I hate Coke.’ But she allowed Ellen to persuade her out of the small room, leaving the child alone in the silence.

  They walked out of the back of the medical tent and towards the low administrative tent behind it. Ellen sat her in the shade of the tent flap and went inside to pull fresh bottles of water from the boxes stacked there for workers.

  Britta starting talking as soon as she sat down again.

  ‘The monsoon is coming. Any day now. Then the latrines and ditches will overflow and contamination will come everywhere and typhoid will really spread. This is nothing.’

  ‘Is it just the women?’

  ‘Men too.’

  ‘What can you do?’

  Britta shrugged. ‘I’ve made a request for money. We should run a campaign here for hand-washing, soap, all that. Better latrines. And we should vaccinate. First we need quantity of vaccine, then we must make people agree.’ She gestured out towards the tube wells where girls were filling buckets, splashing and playing in the falling arc. ‘In a place like this, stopping the spread is very hard.’

  Ellen thought of the small medical tent, already almost full to capacity. ‘Will you get more staff?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. Medicine International is small. We need money from outside.’

  ‘It might come.’ Khan might announce another donation. It took time for the world to wake up to disasters, especially when they were slow-moving.

  Britta was sitting still, her shoulders hunched. She looked utterly dejected. ‘I called my mother last night. She asked how things were. What does one say? I started to tell her about the typhoid, about the little girl. Syma. Her name’s Syma. Did you know that? Pretty, isn’t it?’ She drifted back into silence.

  ‘What did your mother say?’

  Britta sighed. ‘She said: “Oh dear, that is a pity.” Then she started to tell me about the new garden centre which has opened just outside our town. It has a sale and she bought some very good plants for the side garden. There is a tea shop in the garden centre, she told me. And a gift store. “We’ll go there together when you come home.”’

  Ellen smiled.

  Britta was still talking, her hands stretched wide with exasperation. ‘How can she think I want to talk about tea shops? No one at home understands anything. Don’t you know? You come back from Somalia or Pakistan or some difficult place and they say: “How are you?” And even as you open your mouth to tell them, their eyes are already becoming bored. Not even two minutes. Then they are talking for hours about some new brand of biscuits or some celebrity programme on the television.’

  She tore the plastic top off the bottle of water and drank. Her hair was plastered to her forehead, green eyes shining with indignation.

  Ellen drank from her own bottle. The water was tepid but a relief, swilling dust from her throat. ‘It’s a different world. People don’t know how to relate to it.’

  ‘They could listen. That would be a good start.’ Britta was fiddling with the bottle top, tearing with her fingertips at the jagged plastic edge. ‘I’m already twenty-five years old,’ she said. ‘All my friends are married and having babies. It’s all they talk about. Pregnancy and teething and schools. They don’t know what to say to me any more.’

  Ellen thought of her own friends and the gulf that had opened up between them through the years. ‘It isn’t easy.’

  ‘My mother tells me she’s very proud of my work but I think she wants me to stop it now and go home and have babies myself. Then I could go to the tea shop with her every week. She’s the only one of her friends with such a crazy daughter. Maybe that is wrong.’

  ‘It’s your life.’

  Britta set the bottle between her knees, lifted her headscarf and raked her hands through her hair. Her damp fingers left track marks. ‘My grandmother used to make this wonderful cake. Apple
cake. Her own special recipe. It’s very Danish. Do you know it? With certain spices, I don’t know the names in English.’

  Ellen shook her head.

  ‘So good.’ Britta smacked her lips. ‘Better than any cake I can taste. She taught it to my mother too but she never makes it any more. She says it’s for children to enjoy. Why make apple cake with no children here to eat it? It’s not worth so much trouble.’

  Ellen drank the water and listened.

  ‘When will I ever have time in my life to make apple cake? And who will I make it for?’ Britta kicked at the dirt with her boot, angry. ‘I am here in Pakistan and my patients are dying, one after one, and the world will lose forever my grandmother’s apple cake. How is this right?’

  Ellen sat quietly beside her. The silence stretched. Finally she said, ‘Make it. Next time you’re home.’

  They heaved themselves to their feet and walked slowly back to work.

  Layla was standing by the entrance, waiting for them. It was clear from her posture that she was unhappy, her body twisted, her chador held high to cover her face. She was using her shoulder as a barrier to hold off a man who was standing close to her, talking. His hair was unkempt, his clothes dirty. It took Ellen a moment to remember where she’d seen him before.

  ‘That’s Doc, isn’t it? What’s he doing here?’

  Britta shrugged. ‘Don’t worry. Fatima will see to him.’

  Ellen watched him as he leant in towards Layla. She thought of the young girls at the hotel party, sharing a single cigarette.

  ‘He comes here a lot?’

  ‘He hangs about. There isn’t much to do in the camp, you know? People are bored.’

  Ellen grimaced. ‘You don’t mind him?’

  ‘Come on.’ Britta sighed. ‘There’s more important things to worry about. He’s harmless. Fatima deals with him. She doesn’t take any nonsense from anyone, especially not him.’

  Doc looked up and saw them. He grinned, showing crooked teeth, then oozed away from Layla and slid off in an instant between the tents. Ellen looked after him and frowned. Layla too had seen them now and had turned her face to the ground.