‘You know this girl?’
‘That’s Layla. I’m hoping she’ll translate for me.’
‘She speaks English?’
‘A bit.’ They walked towards her. ‘You’re treating her sister. I think she had polio.’
Britta nodded, looking thoughtful. ‘There’s one girl with childhood paralysis. Dehydration, minor lesions and burns. Not serious.’
‘You mind if Layla comes in to see her?’
‘Of course not.’ They were just a few paces from Layla now. Britta put her hand on Ellen’s shoulder and squeezed it as she moved past her to enter the ward. Layla, still looking uncomfortable, didn’t lift her head to greet them.
‘You all right?’
Layla stared at her feet in silence.
‘What was that man saying?’
She squirmed. It took her a long time to speak. ‘He likes to give me things.’
‘Give you things? What sort of things?’
Another pause. Her fist was clenched. She opened it slowly, guiltily, to reveal a sweet wrapped in red paper in the hollow of her palm.
Ellen shook her head. ‘Layla, look at me.’ The girl forced herself to lift her eyes, dragging them up with reluctance. ‘You keep away from him. Don’t let him give you anything. He’s not a good man.’
‘OK.’
Ellen took her arm and together they followed Britta into the cool of the tent to seek out Layla’s sister and to work together on translating the stories of the women who were strong enough to speak.
That evening, Ellen lay on her bed fully dressed, too tired to move. There was noise in the corridor, running feet and banging on doors and men’s voices shouting and laughing.
Britta was right to be afraid. The monsoon would break any day now, she could sense it. The dryness in the air was reaching breaking point. The cases of typhoid they’d seen so far were barely the start of the season. She thought of Syma’s body, so fragile and alone on the adult stretcher.
There was a knock on her door. She hesitated, wondering whether to bother moving to answer it. A second knock, more insistent. Housekeeping, probably, to check the minibar or to turn down the bedding. She pulled herself to the door, thinking through the Urdu expression for: Now isn’t a good time.
‘You look pleased to see me.’ Frank seemed surprisingly perky. He had his bottle of Scotch secreted in its paper bag in his hand.
‘I was just going to bed.’
He looked at his watch. ‘Ten after nine?’
‘Tough day.’ She thought of him ushering the young Pakistani man into his room and turned away. He followed her inside.
‘Did you eat yet?’
‘I’m not hungry.’
He was trying to catch her eye. She rummaged in the hotel cabinet for a glass and handed him one for himself. Just one. She pulled together some cushions and propped herself up against the bed’s headboard.
He sat on the other single bed, his ankle crossed over his knee, and sipped his whisky. ‘Any idea how much longer you’ll stay?’
She shrugged. ‘Another day or two. London wants a follow-up but I think that’ll be it.’ She thought about her story. ‘I meant to ask, can you go on the record? I need an overview. We can negotiate questions.’
He nodded without replying. She had the sense he wasn’t really listening. She persisted: ‘Maybe tomorrow. How about ten?’
‘Not morning.’ He shifted, his eyes on the carpet.
She observed him more closely. ‘Aren’t you around in the morning?’
‘No.’
The tip of his tongue flicked the corner of his lips. Tension, she thought.
‘Why? What’re you up to?’
He gave a short cough. ‘Meeting the chief of police. You know. Security.’
‘Security?’
He sipped his whisky, didn’t speak for a moment. She waited.
He said, ‘There’s a lot of Taliban in the camps. I need to figure out a way of dealing with them.’
‘How do you know?’
‘People come to us. They talk.’ He shrugged, swishing the whisky round his glass and staring into it. ‘They’ve come all this way to be safe, then one day they’re in line for food and some guy who burnt out their house or threatened their kids is right there in line too. Frightens the hell out of them.’
‘So what do you do?’
‘First of all figure out who to believe.’
She thought of the way Frank had greeted the young man in the half-light of the corridor. ‘If they are here, what’re they doing?’
‘Intimidating people. Spreading rumours. Causing trouble.’
She looked at his carefully lowered eyes. ‘Stealing your supplies?’
He looked up at last and gave her a quick, complicit smile. ‘Maybe.’
‘That’s why you’re seeing this guy?’
‘Partly.’
She nodded, thinking about Ibrahim and the Taliban leader he’d described. ‘This commander, Mohammed Bul Gourn. Is this his patch?’
Frank looked taken aback. ‘You know about him?’
‘A bit.’
He nodded to himself, drank a mouthful of whisky. ‘Yeah, I believe it’s his turf. Sounds like he’s a rising star.’
Overhead, heavy objects were being scraped and dragged. Someone was moving furniture. The noise was grating. She thought about Mohammed Bul Gourn. It was unsettling to know he had spies in the camp. Fatima had said that too. It might be a strong angle for the follow-up. People flee the Taliban only to find they’re still not safe from them.
‘Who’s he got in the camps? You identified them?’
He shook his head. ‘Don’t go there, Ellie.’ He seemed preoccupied, keeping his distance from her. He drank off his whisky, paused. ‘I’m serious. They’re everywhere. If they think you’re a problem, I can’t protect you. No one can.’
‘I know.’
‘Being a journalist won’t save you. Being a woman won’t either.’
She tutted. ‘Got it. Don’t worry.’
They sat in silence for a while. The muffled scraping and footsteps from above hung between them.
He set his empty glass on the table and picked up his bottle to leave. ‘Anyway. I should go.’
He got to his feet. She followed him to the door to see him out. When he turned to say goodnight, his face was troubled.
She stood in the doorway, watching him walk down the centre of the corridor. His back was broad and he moved briskly. Cones of bright, hard light fell at intervals from the ceiling. As he stepped through them, his hair shone silver, then returned to black a moment later as he hit shadow. She waited until he reached the lifts, watching, despite herself, to see if he’d turn to check if she was still there, looking after him. He didn’t.
Chapter 15
Death had come to the place and there was little Jamila could do to comfort Syma’s parents. She sat with her arms round the slight body of her young cousin’s wife and rocked her as she cried. At first the girl was full of anger. She shrieked, shuddering for air, as she wept, struggling with Jamila and trying to pull her hands free to tear at her face and hair, to strike out with her fists.
Jamila held her hard, pinning her wrists at her sides. After some time she became quieter and sobbed into Jamila’s neck and finally her body went limp. The baby boy sat nearby in the dirt, unnaturally still, and stared at them with eyes full of fear.
Jamila leant forwards to dip the end of her chador in the bucket and wet it, then lifted the girl’s blotchy face away from her shoulder and washed over her cheeks and eyes with the licking tongue of cloth.
‘It is the will of Allah,’ she said. ‘It is His wish.’
The girl’s eyes were closed now. She looked as if her hope of life had been extinguished.
‘Syma was not yours,’ Jamila was saying. ‘She was a gift from God. Now He has taken her home.’
The baby boy opened his mouth wide and started to scream. The girl lay against Jamila, her swollen face expressi
onless, and didn’t move. Jamila watched the baby in his growing panic. He would learn to wait.
A little later, when the girl finally settled on the ground and slept, Jamila gathered up the baby and went to speak to the young cousin. He was sitting on a piece of wood in the mud, his legs drawn up under him. His eyes too were red with crying. The last time I saw Syma, she was sitting still and silent like that, Jamila thought. I wish she had never left our village, she and Old Auntie both.
Jamila sat down on the wood, a little distance from the young man. The baby was restless and heavy in her arms. Her knees creaked as she lowered herself. The dirt was hard and dry with too much sun.
‘I made her take Syma to those doctors.’ He was scraping his nails in the dust. ‘I thought it was right.’
Jamila didn’t speak. She looked at the tracks he was making. She is buried in that ground. That small girl who liked to skip and chatter. The earth has swallowed her whole. How is that right?
‘People say that medical place is evil,’ he went on. ‘They say the foreign doctors kill people there. I said that was nonsense. That they had good medicine. I said they’d make Syma well again.’
Jamila didn’t look at him. The child was buried here, on these bleak plains. She and Old Auntie also were far away from the graves of their ancestors, far away from Mutaire and the family compound where they were both born and where they should both have passed. That too was not right. How could the girl rest peacefully when she was so far from home?
He raised his eyes and stared at the figure of his sleeping wife, lying there in the dirt. ‘Now what can I tell her? Was she right?’
Jamila turned the baby on her lap. He was fussing, grumbling and grabbing at her hair. ‘You have another child. He needs you.’
The young cousin looked blankly at his son as if he had never set eyes on him before. ‘She dressed her up in fancy clothes for the burial,’ he said. ‘That’s not normal.’ He swallowed, gathered his strength to speak. ‘She fussed over her hair, plaiting it and pinning it.’ He looked frightened by the memory of it. ‘When they came to take her, she made them wait while she wrapped a blanket round her shoulders. “She’ll catch cold,” she said.’
The baby was fretting, threatening to cry. Jamila reached out and dangled the child over his lap. The baby was panting with exertion, his grubby feet paddling his father’s thighs.
The sky was darkening with cloud. Jamila sniffed the air as she walked smartly back to the tents. She drew her chador across her face until just her eyes showed, protecting herself from the light breeze which was whipping dust through the camp. It was stirring up the small children, setting them prancing and chasing each other in giddy circles like swirling leaves. It is coming, she thought, the first rain. She quickened her pace. The plastic walls of the shelters and makeshift fences shifted and crackled.
Inside the tent, the heat was oppressive. Layla’s mama was lying alone, sticky with sweat. She was speaking nonsense. Jamila knelt close to the woman’s face to listen. Babble. Some talk of babies. She was agitated, trying to raise her head, then falling back again onto her mat, telling some story about finding a child or feeding one. Her breath was foetid.
Jamila lifted the younger woman against her thigh and put a cup of water to her lips. Her shoulders were light, the skin slippery and hot with fever. This was already the third day that she had been unable to keep food in her stomach and she was becoming weak.
If only our imam were here, she thought. He would cast out this bad fever from her body. She pressed her fingers under the woman’s sleeping mat and felt for the knife she’d slipped there that morning. It was still in place. She wanted it to cut at the demons and frighten them away, the same way a knife protected a newborn baby when it was too weak to defend itself.
Layla should be there, doing her duty by tending to her mama. The girl hadn’t been taught to be respectful and modest. Jamila had seen her, walking boldly about the camp in full view of young men. It was dangerous for her now she was a young woman and especially here, outside the safety of the village. If she were dishonoured, it would shame them all. Ibrahim spoiled her. She tried to warn him but he was too blinded by love for the girl to listen.
She lifted the cup to the woman’s lips again and tried to force her to drink. She seemed chilled now and her limbs were twitching. Jamila piled a third blanket on top of her and pressed it to her body.
The young cousin was right about the hospital. Everyone was afraid. When the big fever came, the foreign doctors came to the tents and carried away the patients; she had seen it with her own eyes. No one knew what happened to them afterwards. No one lived to come back and tell tales. Ibrahim said all this was nonsense and he’d have no talk of it. She knew why. It was because Marva the cripple was already there. He’d left her with those doctors and now he was afraid.
Layla’s mama was moaning to herself, a low, half-hearted murmuring. Jamila set down the cup and blotted her lips. She wrapped her arms around her shoulders. The illness inside her body was shaking her, knocking on her skin, trying to break through and escape. The woman smelt bad. She needed cleaning. Jamila tutted under her breath. The girl should be here to do it, her own daughter. No wonder her spirit was sick. A mother needed her daughter’s care as a daughter needed her mother’s.
A voice rose, close to the tent. Ibrahim was there. He was calling. Jamila set the woman on the ground again and crawled out to him.
He was peering at her with his poor eyes, as if he had forgotten which wife she might be.
‘She’s sleeping,’ she said.
He put his head on one side and looked at her and she could feel his mind working but couldn’t hear what he was thinking.
‘She’s tired, that’s all,’ she said.
He didn’t speak, just gazed at her as if he knew she was lying and wondered why.
‘She has a headache.’
He bent down and picked up a stick, dropped by one of the children. He started to scratch something in the dust. ‘She’s been ill for days now.’
She shook her head. ‘Nonsense. She just needs to sleep.’
His stick scratched, scratched. ‘If she’s ill, I should fetch a doctor.’
‘For a headache?’
Finally he turned, trailing the stick in his hand the way a small boy might and walked back out into the camp. All around, women were fastening down their plastic walls, securing them against the flapping breeze, and, where they had twine, tying it tighter round staves and sticks. Ibrahim paid them no attention. He just walked straight ahead between the rows of tents, dragging his stick, his mind disappeared to some other place.
Jamila walked around their own female sleeping tent where Layla’s mother was now lying. She knotted the string more firmly and shifted the stones to make sure they were squarely on the plastic rim, holding it in place. She fetched the pail and went to stand in the queue for the water pump. I should have asked him, ‘Where’s your daughter? Why isn’t she here, safe inside the family, tending to her mother?’ She shuffled forwards, smelling the coming rain in the air and waiting to fill the pail.
Jamila looked over the woman’s body as she stripped her off and washed her down. The light filtering through the plastic walls of the tent had an unearthly blue tinge but she could see that the woman’s brown skin had become yellowish. Her body was burning and yet she was shivering, hugging her arms to her chest as if she were cold.
Afterwards she seemed quieter. She lay on her side, with all the blankets in the tent heaped on top of her, and slept. Only her face poked out. It was thin now and her skin was sallow. Jamila sat with her hands resting in her lap and studied her. You were such a beautiful girl when you came to our house as a bride. You had long limbs and a shy, tender face and such innocence. Ibrahim had more love pooled in his eyes for you than I’d ever seen.
Jamila shook her head. She had been tormented by such jealousy when this woman first came to Ibrahim’s house and took Jamila’s place. That was a long time ago. Al
l she felt now, as she looked at the sickly yellow of her cheeks, was a great sadness. But I am glad that you never gave him a healthy boy. That would have been more than I could bear.
Something rapped on the plastic by her head. She looked up. Another tap. Then a light hail of them. Children throwing a shower of dirt, perhaps? The clattering was louder now and becoming harder as something glanced off the stretched ceiling above them. She crawled towards the entrance of the tent.
The dust outside was pitted with dark circles. Rain was falling, swelling to full heavy drops which were striking the ground and exploding in splashes. They were beating a steady rhythm all around her on the plastic. The air was dark with water and instantly cooler.
When she tipped her head and looked up, a million stripes of rainwater fell towards her, making lines directly from the heavens all the way to her face. The banging of the rain was raising a barrage everywhere and above it, through the camp, people were shouting. A group of men ran past, dashing for shelter. They were living streams, running with water, saturated hair pouring sheets down their faces and onto their shoulders, their chests. Their clothes became transparent where they stuck to wet flesh. They were laughing and, seeing the water running into their grinning mouths, she could taste it too.
Across the path, men and women were huddled in their shelters, children pressing against their legs. They were reaching up and pulling out lips of plastic above their heads, extending it as they tried to direct the flowing water away from them, and peering, mesmerized, at the falling rain. All around now, puddles and pools were forming, struggling to penetrate the compact, baked earth.
She looked back inside the tent. Layla’s mother was motionless under her lumpy pile of blankets, sleeping on through the din. The plastic roof over them was dark with channels of water, gathering and running off, and bowing under the growing weight. Already she could see the weaknesses, fault lines where water was intruding, bubbling and dripping down onto their sleeping mats. She crawled through the space, trying to gather the bedding into the driest spots.
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