Hands pulled at her elbows and half-dragged her to her feet. She was shoved forwards, then bent in two and pushed head first into the back of a car. A stranger’s car. The plastic seat was hot. Her ears were straining, trying to understand what was happening around her. She felt hot, then cold and very sick. Breathing. All she could think about was breathing. Her breath was hot and wet on her face.
There was a cry, Layla’s cry, then a slap and silence. Where was she? Somewhere to the left. Ellen was losing her bearings. Still she couldn’t breathe. People pressed against her in the car. The door slammed shut. The bodies digging into hers were male, warm and hard with muscle.
A hand forced her head down and pain flared through her neck. The change of angle tightened the cord at her throat. It cut across her windpipe, choked her. Breathing. She thought of nothing after that but breathing. Inhaling hot stale air. Exhaling into the mask of sacking against her face. Just that. One breath at a time.
Bodies crushed against each other and the car juddered into motion, bouncing across open ground. She was breathing in, breathing out, forcing herself to fight panic. She tried to stop herself from crying out. Her face was slick with sweat and her limbs juddered. Her lungs were gasping for air, her breaths sharp and shallow.
The road was bumpy. The man beside her put his hand on her face to hold her still. His fingers were thick and smelt of earth. The sack was coarse against her lips. The taste of it made her feel sick.
She struggled to concentrate on breathing and not to lose control. Layla was in the car with her, she could sense her. Frank and Ibrahim. No, she didn’t think so. Two cars. There were two. They must be in the other one. Breathe in, breathe out. The cord tightened round her neck. She wanted to lift her head, to ease the pain and to reach for Layla, to comfort her, but the man held her fast and she sat, bent double, the sack pressing into her face, the hot thick hand on her forehead, fighting for breath. The butt of his gun was a hard finger in her ribs.
A man’s hands loosened the cord round her throat and pulled the sack off her head. There were black pellets on the floor, goat droppings. She swallowed and felt the bruising in her throat where the cord had cut into it. She was in a mud-brick room with a cement floor. It was dank and dirty. The man untied the rope round her wrists and shoved her backwards against the wall. Mud flew out in a dry cloud when she hit it and she coughed.
Layla was in the room too, standing to one side, looking at the man. Her face was white and her scarf had slipped to her neck. Her hair fell in dark curly waves round her shoulders. It made her look different, softer and more Western. There were score marks across her throat where the cord had sawed it.
The man spat to the side and walked out, shutting the door. A bolt on the other side scraped home.
Layla turned to her. Her expression was terrified. ‘Where’s Baba?’
‘Layla, I don’t know.’ The tips of Ellen’s fingers were numb and her wrists burnt where the rope had skinned them. ‘Maybe he escaped. Got away.’ She lowered herself to the ground and sat back against the wall, massaging her hands and feeling the blood flow back to the broken skin. She felt utterly exhausted.
Layla hadn’t moved. She stared at Ellen with eyes round with panic. Ellen looked down at the dusty bobbles of cement dotting the floor. I made them come. Frank and Ibrahim. I did this. She remembered the way the men had attacked Ibrahim, kicking him in the back and stomach, and wondered if Layla had seen it too.
‘It must be a mistake.’ It was all she could think of to comfort Layla. ‘Once they realize that, they’ll let us go.’
There was one small barred window, set high in the wall. There was no glass. If it rains, she thought, water will blow right in. A rusty bucket stood in one corner. When we use it, it will stink in this airless room.
Her legs started to shake against the floor. The memory rushed back to her of the air in the car. It had been dense with sweat and stale breath. They waited for us, she thought. They knew. Her chest tightened. Someone must have listened when I asked Frank about going to visit Adnan. It wasn’t a mistake. Someone told them.
Layla brushed away goat droppings with her foot and squatted down next to Ellen, sitting on her heels. She was trembling and her forehead glistened with sweat. They sat together in silence for a while.
Finally Ellen said, ‘Are you OK?’
Layla didn’t answer. She was biting her lip and her breath was catching in spasms as if she were fighting back tears. She’s just a child, Ellen thought. She has no business being caught up in this. I should never have let her come.
She spoke softly, trying to distract her. ‘Tell me about teaching.’
Layla hesitated. ‘My baba is a good teacher,’ she said. ‘He knows everything. Mathematic and reading and English also.’
‘That’s wonderful.’
‘He made travel all over Pakistan.’
‘And what about you, do you want to travel?’
Layla gave her a quick look of surprise, then lowered her head and studied her nails. She didn’t answer for a moment and when she did, her voice was dull. ‘That is not possible. Not for a girl.’
Ellen considered her for a moment. She had visited small villages in the mountains here, in the years before the Taliban came. ‘It’s more difficult,’ she said. ‘But not impossible.’
They sat quietly side by side. Ellen wanted to sleep but pain shot through her neck whenever her head started to droop. She sat rigidly against the wall, wondering what had happened to Frank and Ibrahim and the driver and feeling the ache in her forehead slowly worsen. After some time, Layla’s breathing thickened and her head slid sideways onto Ellen’s shoulder.
The window was a white square of heat. Ellen tried to work out what direction it was facing, thinking of the time and the angle of the rays hitting the mud bricks. A gecko scuttled across the top of the wall, close to the ceiling. It hesitated on the window sill, then darted to the side and disappeared. She forced herself to concentrate and listen. The air was heavy and still. There was an echo of male voices, calling in the open. A heavy engine, an old motorbike or field tractor, revved and chugged in the distance. Near the window, a bird cawed and was answered by another.
She closed her eyes and tried again to sleep. Would people know about them yet? She wondered how long it would take for someone to sound the alarm. They weren’t expected back until the evening but the abandoned car might be found before then. She thought of the driver and his low pleading as they pulled him from behind the wheel. Of Ibrahim, curled on the ground as they beat and kicked him. His watery eyes had looked naked without his glasses.
Layla’s breathing was becoming husky. Ellen put her hand on the girl’s forehead. It was burning. She eased her gently round until she was stretched sideways, her head resting on Ellen’s leg. The girl moaned in her sleep, then settled again. Her skin was clammy, her cheekbones prominent. She’s very young, Ellen thought, to lose her mother.
The wall opposite stared blankly back. Ellen counted its bricks. Starting at one side. Then again from the other. Then from top to bottom. She worked out the central brick, straddling the midpoint. The cramp in her legs burnt away as the muscles went numb.
The intense brightness at the window gradually became more mellow. Layla didn’t wake. Her skin was still burning and her clothes damp with sweat. Her breathing was laboured. Ellen sat in silence, listening to the echo of men’s voices outside and staring at the darkening bricks, wondering who had taken them prisoner and why.
She closed her eyes and imagined being at home in London, walking slowly around her flat. The battered sofa where she curled to read or watch television. Her mother’s old writing desk with its secret drawers and hiding places. The tiny kitchen with its dark tiles and softly humming fridge decorated with her nieces’s pictures. When she opened her eyes, the bare walls pressed in, suffocating.
The door scraped open and a boy came in. He had a metal plate of rotis in one hand and a pot of daal in the other. He set them bot
h down on the floor without a word and left.
Ellen gathered up the food and tried to make Layla eat. The girl seemed feverish and confused. When she had swallowed down a little food, Ellen folded her chador and set her gently on her side on the floor, her cheek against the cloth. She was worried. She watched the girl as she ate what she could of the rotis. This was more than grief and shock. Layla was ill. She wondered what they’d done with her rucksack, if they’d left it behind in the car or taken it. Her medical kit was inside.
The boy came to collect the remains of their meal.
‘Please.’ Ellen pointed to Layla. ‘She needs medicine. She’s ill.’
The boy, understanding nothing, pulled a face and left.
The cell drained of light. She and Layla were melting into the shadows. At night, they would disappear completely. The soft, high song of the call to prayer rose outside, floating in through the bars. She clung to the notes. Later, a light clicked on in the compound near their window and threw milky streaks across the ceiling.
The door was thrown open and a man stood there, young with a scruffy half-grown beard. He beckoned Ellen to him, then bound her hands together, this time in front. Layla lay sprawled in the semi-darkness.
Outside the cell, another young man was sitting on a plastic chair, a gun across his knee. Her guard nodded to him as he bolted the door. She was pushed down a dank corridor. She and Layla had been locked in a room in a low, single-storey house. She passed a second door and a third and counted off her steps. He turned and led her outside through a dimly lit courtyard to a building beyond. High walls marked the edge of the compound. Beyond, all was blackness. Cicadas scraped and sang. The night air was cool against her face. We’re on high ground, she thought, above the plains. They walked through a swarm of gnats. She blew them off her lips and lifted her bound hands to fan them away from her eyes.
The man knocked at a door in the second building, then opened it and pushed her inside. She smelt food, pungent cooked meats, chicken and goat and freshly cooked rice flavoured with spices. Eyes turned to stare. Blank, hostile faces. Four men were sitting cross-legged round the edge of a faded woven carpet, gathering food into clumps in their fingers and bending forwards to eat. Only one of them didn’t raise his face to her. Saeed. She knew him at once.
The dishes, heaped with meat and thick sauce, were spread on an oilskin cloth in the middle of the carpet. A portable electric light, encased in cheap plastic, hummed beside them, in a halo of fluttering insects. The greasy sheen shimmered on the surface of the plates, the meat and the men’s lips.
‘Salaam Alaikum.’ She put her hand to her heart and inclined her head.
The men shifted their attention to a figure to the left of the room, waiting for his reaction. She looked too. He was the largest man in the group and the most imposing, with a crooked nose, a thick dark beard and the broad shoulders of a warrior. His mouth and hand were busy with a chicken leg.
The man who had guided her from the cell hesitated, uncertain. Finally he closed the door behind them and leant back against it, some distance from the food. No one spoke. She felt the tension in the room and knew she had caused it. No one acknowledged her. After a few moments, she slid to one side and settled on her haunches against the wall, keeping her distance from the men. She waited. She kept her eyes on the most imposing man, aware that the others were doing the same.
He ignored them all and continued to eat methodically and with great appetite. His face was weathered and his eyes quick and hard. When he drained his glass of tea, the younger man beside him quickly replenished it. The other men chewed slowly, distracted by her, flicking their eyes across her then back to their food. One made a remark in a low voice to his neighbour and they sniggered for a second, then extinguished their laughter and again became wary.
The room was almost bare. A barred window was set in the far wall and two metal trunks were stacked under it, piled with woollen blankets.
Eventually the leader of the group finished. He swallowed, pushed away his plate and sat back against the wall. His legs were loosely folded in front of him, his knees splayed. He looked her over. One of the men handed him a cloth and he wiped his greasy fingers. ‘You speak Urdu? Pashto?’
‘Toree, toree.’ She lifted her bound hands to gesture: A little.
He shrugged, unimpressed. ‘I am knowing English.’
He burped and wiped off his beard and mouth with the cloth, then threw it onto his dirty plate. He shifted his weight from one buttock to the other and sat, picking lazily at his teeth, staring out at her. His presence was powerful and suffused with threat.
‘You are journalist. You think I don’t know? I know everything.’
She lowered her eyes, submitting to him. The men around him had jumped to their feet now and were clearing away the debris of the meal. The aroma of the meat hung heavily in the hot air.
‘And you are Mohammed Bul Gourn.’
For a moment, he looked taken aback, then he narrowed his eyes and she saw warning in them. ‘Why you are in Pakistan?’
She kept her eyes on the ground. The men were rolling up the splattered oilskin. ‘Reporting.’
‘About what matter?’
‘About the people who’ve fled the fighting.’
‘What people?’
‘Ordinary people.’ She spread her hands as if to say: People anywhere. ‘I talk to people in the camp.’
His English was thickly accented but good. She was careful to speak slowly to make sure he could follow her. When she glanced up at him, his sharp eyes were always on hers.
‘These people. What do they tell to you?’
She shrugged. ‘They’re tired and frightened. They want peace. They want to go home.’
‘And about the fighters?’
‘I don’t ask them about that.’
There was a pause. He shifted his weight again and she felt him watching her. To her side, the door opened.
‘Why do you make Pakistani soldiers fight their own people? Killing their brothers for America?’
She didn’t speak. Her legs were juddering beneath her with strain but she was too tense to move. The men filed out in deferential silence, closing the door behind them. Now only her guard and Mohammed Bul Gourn remained. If they plan to hurt me, she thought, it won’t be now. He wouldn’t do it himself. He would use his men. She tried to drop her shoulders and to breathe.
‘I’m just a journalist,’ she said. ‘I only—’
‘You’re an infidel.’ He shook his head and spat to the side. ‘An American whore.’
‘I’m British.’
He shrugged as if to say: What difference is there? He stabbed the air with his finger as he spoke. His anger swelled until it filled the room. ‘The people of this country, they are people of Islam. Of Allah. They must live by His law. They must live without corruption, without oppression. This is our purpose. We will die for it.’
Her guard, standing against the door, stared down at his dirty boots. There was a moment’s silence. Voices, shouting, drifted in from outside. Metal scraped and a gate clanged.
She waited, weighed down by her sense of powerlessness. He had complete control. He would spare her or kill her as he chose. He knew it and she knew it and the knowledge was a rope binding them. All she could do was wait and suffer his decision.
She raised her eyes to the level of his chest and spoke softly. ‘Was it your men who killed Doc and the girl?’
He made a crushing motion with his hand as if he were extinguishing the life of an insect. ‘They were enemies of Islam,’ he said. ‘My religion does not allow thieving and whoring. Does yours?’
‘And your men caused the riot in the camp?’
He grimaced. ‘These villagers are traitors. They should stay on their land and fight with their brothers.’ He leant forwards, his eyes bright, and stabbed a finger at her. ‘Your American friend, he lives off these people. Women and children both.’
She stared, feeling panic. ‘Tha
t’s not true. He’s—’
‘He is corrupted. Taking foreign money for his own self.’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s—’
‘He lets people die.’
She sat quietly, hearing the rising note of anger in his voice and fearing it.
‘Allah will punish him.’ His eyes were glinting. ‘I will punish him.’
She felt herself flush and turned her eyes to the floor. The cement was stained with a splash of sauce which had escaped the confines of the oilskin cloth. Now it was black with ants, hurrying to and from it in a single solid line. She thought: Frank is still alive then. He is here. Then at once this was knocked aside by a second thought: He’s the one they want and now they have him, they will kill him. It is my fault, she thought again. I pulled him out of the camp without a guard and made him vulnerable. She sat, sickened.
‘It isn’t true.’ She spoke quietly, without hope. ‘You don’t know him. He’s a good man.’ Her eyes were on the ants. It would be so easy to crush them all.
‘You were going to help that idiot boy, nah? I know everything.’ He threw back his head and laughed. His throat was thick with beard and the hair on his chin wagged. ‘You are a fool.’
His mention of Adnan reminded her of Layla. She raised her head and looked him full in the face for the first time. ‘The girl is ill. She’s done nothing. Be merciful. Let her go.’
He grimaced. ‘Let her go? No. Why am I letting her go?’
‘At least give me medicine for her. It’s in my bag.’ She shifted a little. Her wrists smarted where the rope bound them. ‘She’s just a girl.’
Mohammed Bul Gourn was watching her closely. He isn’t thinking about Layla any more, she thought. He doesn’t care about her, one way or the other. His eyes had a sudden sharpness. He was thinking of something else.
‘This man. This Pakistan man.’ He leant forwards. ‘Hasan Ali Khan.’ He was speaking in abrupt bursts. ‘He is rich, nah? What is he wanting here?’
Far From My Father's House Page 22