Haji Allum died shortly after reaching his village—they say he became ill with a great fever while at sea and did not live for long after the end of the journey. His wife, the Firangan, was given a new name by his family, Hayat, and when Haji died, his father thought it best to marry her off to his nephew. But Hayat resisted, and on the night of the marriage ceremony she tried to cut off her wrist with her husband’s chaakoo, the knife he used to whittle reeds for the birdcages he had been making on the journey home. She had bled so much that the family thought she was dead. When the women began to wash her body to prepare her for the burial, they saw that she had thick, dark hair all over her body, even between her breasts, like a man. And there were complicated tattoos that covered her arms, something no one in that village had ever seen before. There was even a tattoo on her mouth which made it seem as if she had a mustache—thick, dark, twirling whiskers.
Just as the women were completing the ritual and wrapped Hayat’s body in its kaffen, the burial shroud, she moaned and moved her head, trying to breathe through the white covering. The woman who would usually take care of the ritual cleansing of the dead body ran out of the room, screaming that this was not a human corpse, it was the body of a nekhnaa, a witch. She refused to wrap the rest of the kaffen around Hayat and no one else had the courage to finish the task. So Hayat sat up, half naked and half covered with the white cloth, and began to talk in a strange language no one could understand. Her father-in-law proclaimed her to be a practitioner of black magic; he accused her of being the cause of his only son’s death, of being responsible for the drought that had destroyed their crops, and also for the deaths of so many children from unknown diseases which had spread throughout the village ever since she had arrived. He pleaded with the council of village elders to banish this evil creature so that no more harm would come to his family and to the village. The council decided that she be taken far away from the village and left in an isolated spot, blindfolded, so that she could not find her way back. One of the men entrusted with leaving her in the desert took pity on her and put her on a bus headed for the city. She has been here since then.
Her name was not really Hayat, Bulbul said, it was some other name, some foreign name which sounded like Hayato. He knew that because she had spat it out at him one day when he teased her about her long hair and the various things she braided into it. He had dared to touch her braid, pulling it to see if it was real, and she had lunged at him, threatening to claw his face, and repeated her name over and over again: Hideko, Hideko, Hideko.
That’s what her name was, Bulbul said, her real name, the name her mother must have called her by when she was still in her own home, safe and warm and comfortable.
Sabir has called a meeting in the kitchen. I don’t know what this man wants to tell us, but I will certainly try to listen and understand his words since he is the only one who has managed to get anything done here. Or at least he is the only one who has stepped outside the walls of this compound and seen what lies out there, in that valley of wind and sand and bones.
I cannot sleep, and I try to write this standing up against the bars of my cell so that the moon can light up the page. I don’t know why I have this compulsion to continue writing—it’s not as if someone will find this garbage scrawled on scraps of paper and make sense of it. All I know is that I need to say these things which fill my head and which find no listeners among these people here. I cannot even address this to anyone I know, to anyone I love, my family, my friends. To do so would be to imagine that they will receive this ridiculous record of events taking place in an asylum for the mentally ill. And much as I feel that I have perhaps earned the dubious distinction of being rightfully among the insane in this place, I know I haven’t completely lost my mind, and I cannot suppose that anyone will ever come to know what has gone on here. None of this will figure in any historical narrative of our country’s military achievements in the twenty-first century, no one will know about the lunacy of this war, and no one will care to learn about the courage of those who fought for their lives with nothing in their hands and only some kind of misconstrued hope in their hearts.
The bombing began late at night. I did not hear the aircraft passing overhead. It was the massive explosions that jolted all of us out of sleep. One corner of the compound was hit—I heard the huge blast and then the sound of screaming and barking and braying. Then a deep silence. The second time the compound was hit, I could actually hear the whistling sound of the explosive hurtling through the air. The second bomb did not detonate. We saw it in the morning, lying half-buried in the debris of the shattered building which housed the patients. No one wanted to go near it, not even the sick ones. Waris and Bulbul and Sabir occupied themselves with digging bodies out from beneath the collapsed walls and roof. There were many bodies. Those who survived sat on the debris and under the tree (one of its branches caught fire last night—I don’t know how it sur vived). It is as if they have no idea what happened here. Perhaps that is better. Perhaps it is better not to recognize the bodies of men one sat with the night before, sharing a meal served in dented tin plates.
We have pulled out several bodies of children too, hopelessly mangled under the weight of the concrete roof which collapsed on them while they slept, wrapped up in the filthy gray blankets that Noor Jehan tries to air on sun-filled days. Some of the children had soiled themselves in the night, leaving dark stains of urine alongside the blotches of blood where they were crushed.
By midday the heaps of bodies and blankets smelled of burned flesh and excrement. We will have to dig more graves now, before sunset, and find a place to house the survivors so that they do not freeze to death in the cold night air.
There were twenty-three bodies—eleven children and the rest adult men. My back feels like I have a steel rod inserted in my spine, and my hands are blistered so badly I cannot clench my fist or even curl my fingers around this pencil without wincing.
We did not dig separate graves for the dead. There was no time—burials have to take place here before sunset, and in winter the sun sets early. Waris suggested that we bury them along the wall where we had dug the ditches for the clay. The ground is still saturated with moisture and is easier to dig. There is no need for separate graves since many of these bodies were not even whole when we managed to pull them out from under the rubble.
Whose names will we mark on this grave, this pit which contains the remains of children and men who had no use for war?
* * *
I cannot believe what I have seen buried beneath the debris we cleared today. I cannot believe it, or do not want to face what lies at my feet like a malevolent beast waiting to be woken up.
This morning, when Waris and Sabir and Bulbul were scouring the rubble for signs of life, calling the names of men they did not see among the survivors, and who they did not recognize among the dead, I stood beside the unexploded bomb and read the markings stamped along its iron shell. It is a USAF JDAM, a smart bomb intended to destroy an entire village, 2,000 pounds of deadly explosive packed into a cylinder bearing a message scrawled in marker on its side: Hijack this, fags.
There is a name beside the message. I do not want to read it. I do not want to know who it is—I might have sat with him one evening and he might have showed me a picture of his girlfriend and told me that she would be waiting for him when he got back from this godforsaken hellhole.
At the top of the cylinder is the flag of my country, marked clearly and with so much pride.
five
I remember a day when my mother was speaking to my sister on the phone at the beginning of the war. Suddenly her face turned pale, her hands trembled, and she put the phone down and turned toward me, distraught and unable to speak. My sister was eight months pregnant and while she chatted my mother, a car had arrived at her front door. She whispered something about a “government” car, and my mother understood. She waited for my sister to return to the phone. All she could hear at the other end was my sister’s hy
sterical screaming, repeating the words No, no, no, it can’t be, it can’t be, over and over again. My sister’s husband, a KC-130 tanker pilot, had been shot down.
When they come to inform the family, it’s as if there is no need for words. It is quite enough, I am sure, for the wife of a military officer to see a chaplain and a man in uniform at her front door, waiting for that door to open and for that woman’s life to change drastically. I am sure the words sound quite hollow in any case: We regret to inform you that your husband, First Sergeant so and so, was killed in the line of duty in such and such …
I did not intend to join this war until the day we buried Carlos Negrete. I had other plans. I had a job in the public library and I had spent many silent hours reading and imagining the places drawn out by a writer’s steady hand. I wanted to go to college, working nights, working hard. I wanted to be a writer, but had never imagined that I would begin by writing on bits of paper salvaged from the wreckage of a place a million miles from anything I have ever known.
Life showed me something other than my naïve belief that the world exists according to plans drawn on the highly polished surface of a military officer’s desk at headquarters. I am nothing now, will never be what I dreamed I could be. I am the silence that fills all the empty spaces of my heart.
We have finally cleared most of the debris. Our hands bleed and our limbs feel weighed down with lead. Noor Jehan tries to keep the fatigue away with her sweetened tea, and Qasim helps by removing bits of the broken concrete on his cart. I still haven’t fixed its fourth wheel. I don’t know if I want to fix anything, now that everything is broken.
I didn’t want to eat dinner today. It’s not that I can’t face another plate of the same unpalatable gruel we are served every day. By the time we had cleared the south portion of the wrecked building, I couldn’t even find the energy to keep my eyes open or swallow my own spit. I crawled back into my cell at sunset when we stopped working, too tired to ask Noor Jehan for some warm water with which to wash. I collapsed on my mattress and slept fitfully until Bulbul woke me up when it was already dark and the sky was lit with stars and half a moon.
I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t hungry, that he should leave me alone, that I was sick and tired of this place, and that all I wanted was to get out, or failing that, just to stay in my corner and die.
But Bulbul was not asking me to join him in the kitchen. He was begging me to help him—after working on that pile of debris for the whole day, he had sat near the fallen trunk of a tree and rested for a while when he heard a sound, a soft cry like a whimper. He thought he was imagining things—he had not eaten since the morning and his stomach was restless with hunger. But then the noise came again, a low groaning sound. This time Bulbul stood up and turned around, facing the bombed-out side of the compound. He stopped. It seemed to be coming from beneath the rubble. He couldn’t believe it at first, but then the moaning became a little louder and he heard the words, Ya Allah, Oh God, Oh God, over and over, fainter each time. Bulbul was certain now that he was not hearing things and he rushed to Waris and Sabir, telling them that there was somebody beneath the rubble, that someone was still alive three days after the bombing. Waris and Sabir went back with him to that spot with the fallen tree branch and waited to hear the sounds of this survivor. Night had already fallen; the men were tired, and there was no sound except for the wind. They stood for a while as Bulbul walked over that patch of debris and called out to the person he knew was still buried beneath the collapsed building. But there were no more cries, and Waris and Sabir left after explaining to Bulbul that he must have imagined this, that there was no one there, no one could have survived three days without food or water.
Bulbul insisted that he was right. How can we be so sure there is no one there? he asked me. How can we just let this person die without even trying to dig him out?
I went with Bulbul to the shattered building and helped him remove chunks of concrete from around the big branch. We didn’t hear anything, no sounds, no human voice, but Bulbul insisted that we continue with the work. I didn’t want to refuse him—his insistence was like a claw pulling my flesh, and if I turned away I would tear off my own skin.
We continued searching the darkness in silence. It was when we were ready to leave that the words Ya Ali, Mushkilkusha, Ali, Ease my burden floated up from the rubble. Bulbul rushed back to the branch and tried lifting it. It was impossible to move that massive piece of wood, wedged as it was between the collapsed walls of the building. We had to look for some other way to dig out the trapped man. That is when the dog, Sabir’s great mastiff, came forward and joined us. He found us on top of the mound of debris and began sniffing the ground near the fallen branch. We let him guide us toward a shallow burrow through which Bulbul could crawl, reaching the man pinned underneath. I rushed to get Waris and Sabir and called to Noor Jehan in case she could also help lift the branch to free the trapped man. But there were not enough of us, and finally Waris decided he would try the impossible. He would bring some of the men he had herded into the basement to try to get their assistance. I thought this was a long shot—these were men who had no idea of even their names, or the faintest notion of the place they were stuck in, that deep, dingy basement in which the odor of death clung to the stone walls. But we didn’t have a choice—a shot in the dark was better than no shot at all.
I have yet to come to terms with how things work around here. If there is an equation that rules the lives of these people it would be: nothing + nothing = something. That is the only way I can describe what I saw last night.
Waris managed to convince seven men to follow him out of the basement and try to lift the huge branch. These were men whose clothes had not been washed for months, they had not bathed for as long (I’m not sure if these seven did the naked dance that night in the rain). In short, they stank, they were diseased, most of them had lice, and all of them were insane. They had no idea what lay beneath the tree—they just repeated what Waris asked them to do: Lift the branch, lift the branch. I watched as they worked in unison with Waris as their leader, looking toward him for guidance. They did not talk, unless the sounds they made could be considered language. One of them kept staring at me as if I was someone familiar, or perhaps he was just curious about this man who did not seem to belong. Or perhaps I delude myself—maybe I do belong here now. In any case, I am a part of all this madness until I find a way out.
At that point, in the middle of the night, Bulbul managed to crawl through the rubble and pass a long rubber hose into a small opening. He told the trapped man to breathe through the end of the hose; Bulbul blew into the other end, helping to keep the man alive while we found a way to dig him out. Bulbul talked to the man, coaxing him to hang on to the thread of life which stretched between them. He now appeared like a grown man, not the child I sometimes saw in my cell when he told me stories about his life. I watched him and knew that he would succeed in his mission—he could not fail, the faith he had would sustain the man and it would see all of us through this night.
It is morning now, a clear day, no clouds in sight, just the haze of dust and smoke which have dulled the air since the bombing. We managed to pull the man out toward sunrise. He is old, very old, with no teeth and hard of hearing. He emerged from the bottom of that pile of destruction lisping and asking for a cup of tea. Noor Jehan had a cup ready—she had stood alongside us the entire time, waiting for the survivor to ask for sustenance. It seems that this is a regular occurrence in this land of conflict, burying the young and digging up the old.
His name is Noor el Din. Bulbul tells me it means Light of Faith. He calls him Noor Kaka out of respect for his age. And he takes care of this old man like he was truly his long-lost uncle, raised from the dead.
When we found him he was still wearing his glasses, patched and mended, but perched on his great beak of a nose, curved like a dagger, standing erect on his wizened face like a wall. One of the lenses was cracked, but Noor insisted on wearing the
m. Otherwise he was as blind as a mole and he wanted to see each of the faces of those who had dug him out, giving him another life.
Noor Jehan rushed back to the cooking fire to warm his tea while Waris and Bulbul carried the old man to the kitchen. Sabir guided the seven men back into the basement. I followed this new member of our flock inside—I needed a cup of tea, and I wanted to hear his story.
Waris kept apologizing to Noor for not having found him earlier. He said we had called out everyone’s names but there had been no answer, and he had thought we’d lost Noor to the bombing.
Sabir looked up at me when Waris mentioned the bombing. I didn’t look back but I felt his gaze on me for a long time, warming a patch of skin on my forehead as if a hole was being bored through it. Sabir had read the markings on the bomb—the others cannot read English but all of them recognized the flag, even young Qasim, who has a T-shirt with the same flag and the slogan We Love Our Troops written across it in bright blue letters. They didn’t speak to me about the bomb that day, but Bulbul soon asked me about the handwritten words in marker. I read them out to Bulbul though I did not attempt a translation. I didn’t want to explain what all of this was about since none of it made any sense. But Bulbul had understood despite my silence, and he said that perhaps the bomb was meant for me, perhaps the men in the aircraft thought I had joined the enemy.
No Space for Further Burials Page 6