It is dark. I cannot sleep, not even in the relative comfort of the kitchen. I stare at the darkness, at the shapeless forms around me, moving gently with the breath that enters them and sustains them in this time of so much uncertainty. I watch them, and I watch the darkness hoping that it will reveal what I need to know most.
Hayat is awake too. She sits with the knife clasped in her hand and observes me as if she has known me for a while. Then she moves toward me—the knife catches some light from the glow in the hearth and throws a flash of red in my direction. I don’t move, I don’t know what she will do next, and I don’t want to be butchered here, on the kitchen floor, by a woman who has more hair on her body than all the men in Tarasmun.
Hayat sidles toward me. She comes close enough for me to see the intricate lines etched around her mouth. I can also see the gray hairs of her beard and the deep sockets of her eyes. I am as fascinated as I am afraid. Who is this creature who has come from a land even stranger than this one? A land which produces women who grow beards and are marked like snakes?
Hayat shoves her face forward. I can smell her breath and I gag. She is breathing hard, as if slithering along the floor with that knife in her hand has exhausted her. She stares at me and then reaches inside her tattered robe. In one sudden move she rips off an amulet strung on a grimy, beaded string. She bows her head, closing her eyes.
I have frozen into a numb carcass. She prods my shoulder with the point of her knife and I retreat further into my corner. No one moves in the dark stillness. She whispers something I do not understand. Then she hands me the amulet. I take it only because of the fear slinking down my back. It takes me awhile to gather myself and open my clenched fist which holds the amulet. My fingers unfurl like a leaf and I hold it tentatively, examining it in the embers of the fire. It is a metal disc engraved with elaborate markings. I lean forward, holding it closer to the fire. There is a design etched into the metal, three fish following each other in a circle. There are wavy lines surrounding that circle, like the ocean, and jagged lines which could be mountain peaks.
I look back at Hayat. She has opened her eyes and stares at me. I question her with my hands, she moves closer to me and whispers something in my ear. I am not sure what she says, it sounds like short bursts of staccato fire: Ainu, Shiraoi, Iburi. I gaze at the disc as if it could decipher the words for me. Hayat repeats the words: Ainu, Shiraoi, Iburi. I am totally lost. Then she speaks again and I believe I recognize one of the words, unless I have totally lost my mind. She snatches the amulet back from me and spits out the words: Ainu, Shiraoi, Iburi, Bihoro, Katami, Honbetsuy, Tokachi, Kusharo, Kushiro, Kurile, Kurile, Kurilskaya.
She says these words rapidly, then repeats the last one over and over again, pointing to the disc with the fish and the mountains on it: Kurile, Kurile, Kurile.
Could she be talking about the Kurile Islands near Japan? Could this crazed woman be a native of those islands which were surrendered to Japan by Russia more than a hundred years ago? How old is this woman, and how on earth did she get here from that place thousands of miles away?
I do not believe this and close my eyes, wanting to shut out the night and the confusion. I can still hear her breathing, repeating the same words: Ainu, Ainu, Ainu.
This morning I thought I should make one last effort to secure my release from this place of madness. Now that I am no longer stuck in that cell I believe I have an opportunity to escape from here, and even if I don’t get very far at least I will have tried and died fighting, like Captain Souter, the Camel Man dressed in yellow and convinced of the rightness of his mission of conquest.
But I’ve never wanted to conquer anything. All I wanted was to find a reason for my sister which would help her understand her husband’s death. All I have found so far is the absolute madness of war, and all I want now is to get as far away from this madness as I can.
* * *
I talked to Bulbul this afternoon after spending the morning wandering around the compound, searching for something that would lead me toward an exit. I know all ways out of here are blocked—the massive gate which protected this place collapsed and blocked the entrance in one of the earlier strikes, when the warlords used rocket launchers collected over years of warfare. The unexploded bomb sits in front of that gate like a treacherous guardian who will betray you the minute you approach. The only place left in and out of this godforsaken place was the hole in the wall which has now been repaired, thanks to the diligence of Waris and his crew, and to my stupidity. Why hadn’t I left when there was an opportunity to do so? Probably because Waris watches me with hawk eyes, and I didn’t have any idea where I would go, dressed in a curtain and a dead man’s clothes.
I still don’t know where I will go if I get out of here. The rebels took the jeep when they captured me, and there’s not much chance I will get far on foot.
Bulbul was buoyant when I sought him out, basking in the warmth of having seen Anarguli and spent time with her in the kitchen. She and Hayat were brought out into the courtyard, and were seated beneath the tree near the well. Hayat held the same knife in her hand; she was ripping off the skin from a dead twig and gnawing it, supplementing her diet, obviously. She would chew and spit a glob of greenish fiber into the palm of her hand, smell it, then wipe it with that amulet she had shown me.
When she saw me, she acknowledged my presence by bowing her head and closing her eyes. I nodded back at her, then surveyed the courtyard before I spoke to Bulbul about my planned “departure.” Waris had brought out six men from the basement; six others had been taken out in the morning and guided to a pit in the corner which is being used as a toilet. I gag every time I have to go, and the odor of the excrement clings to my already filthy clothes like a really bad memory. Bulbul laughed the first time he saw me heaving near that nasty open pit. He patted me on the back and said: Hey, Firangi, here we treat shit like shit!
Waris was busy digging another pit along the side of the wall. I don’t know what purpose another hole in the ground will fulfill, but at least it kept him occupied so he wouldn’t listen in on my conversation with Bulbul, animated as it has to be since the language of words is not sufficient for my half-crazed friend.
I sat beside Bulbul and cleared my throat to begin the speech I rehearsed in my head last night. I told him it was time I found a way to leave this place since my family would be worried sick. In any case, the rebels were probably not coming back, food is scarce, and one less person would mean that the others would have more to eat.
Bulbul looked up at me and let a manic grin spread slowly across his face like a river in flood. I prepared myself for the worst—that he would begin laughing and draw attention to us sitting together. That would be the end of any attempt on my part to confide in him.
He laughed. Loudly. I wanted to kill myself for even bothering to talk to him. He was just like the others, like Geedar with his hyena screech and Karim Kuchak with his refrain of Look at me, I am so small! I shouldn’t have talked to him, but who can I speak to about my plans to get out? How can I do this alone?
I worried about Waris hearing Bulbul’s manic out-burst but he was engrossed in digging, and only Anarguli and Hayat looked toward us. Bulbul saw Anarguli and waved to her; she actually lifted her hand and made a small gesture of acknowledgment. She could see, it seemed. Perhaps it was the dark which made her blind. Night blindness, caused by a vitamin deficiency? That must be it, I thought, when Bulbul started babbling in his strange tongue: My friend, you think the food you eat takes away our share from us? Is that what you think?
I nodded, convinced of the rightness of my argument. He laughed again, then bent down to the ground and picked up a pebble. He held the pebble in the palm of his hand and looked at it as if it were a gem, a precious jewel, admiring it with his monkey eyes. Then he reached for my hand and placed the pebble in my palm.
Each one of us is born with our names written on grains of wheat that Allah has provided for us, my friend. You have your share,
I have mine, they have theirs. No one is hungry here; we all have what we are meant to have.
Yeah, sure, I thought to myself. That’s why the woman you love probably can’t see at night—because she had her share of wheat when she needed it. And Karim Kuchak had his in order to become the stunted little dwarf that he is, and Geedar with the manic screech has a brain the size of a pea because he got his share of wheat with his name written on it.
It is impossible to talk to these people. There’s no logic here at all—everything is nonsense strung together like lines from a bad poem. I wanted to tell him that I am hungry all the time, I am sick of the gruel Noor Jehan cooks up for us even if she tries to make it more palatable with the spices from the basement. I wanted to tell him this is not the way I’m supposed to live my life, that I don’t want to end it like this either, in a dead man’s clothes with nothing but a large gaping hole in my belly.
But I couldn’t have said much, for just as I was trying to find the words, Anarguli screamed and fell onto the ground beneath the tree. Hayat was hunched up behind her, holding the knife which was now tipped with blood and gleamed in the sunlight.
We have revived Anarguli; she rests in the kitchen, protected and cared for by Noor Jehan and Sabir. She hadn’t actually passed out; she was just hysterical and probably frightened to death of what Hayat was trying to do to her. When Bulbul and I rushed to Anarguli, Waris ran across the courtyard, shovel in hand, and almost hit Hayat with it, believing she was harming Anarguli with that knife. But Bulbul seemed to know better—he held on to Anarguli and asked me to restrain Hayat, to try to get the knife away from her.
I held Hayat’s arms behind her back in the manner that we were trained at boot camp. She did not resist, she just kept making some whistling sounds like air being expelled from a punctured tire. Anarguli was swooning and Bulbul called out to Noor Jehan. She hurried from the kitchen and helped him carry Anarguli inside. Waris and I held Hayat and dragged her to the room where the animals were gathered for the night. She kept looking at me and showing me the amulet again. It was now covered with that green spittle, and it made me sick to look at it.
Once we were inside the shed, Hayat tore her bodice open from the back and pulled it down to show us several markings between her shoulder blades. These were tattoos in the shape of swastikas the color of ash, etched deep into her skin. Waris turned away; I kept looking, trying to decipher what this meant, the swastikas, her amulet, the knife with which she wanted to cut Anarguli.
Hayat began blabbering again, in a mix of the local language and the one in which she had spoken to me last night. Waris asked me to hold on to her while he went to search for Sabir. I dragged her to a corner of the shed and did what I could never have imagined I would do to a woman—I pulled her ridiculous braid out from under her veil and tied it to a stake in the ground. This is where we tied the camel and mule to keep them from straying in the night. I was confused by the power I was exercising over this lost, insane woman who had dared to trust me, and I was terrified that I was becoming like those I have always detested, the ones who would inflict cruelty on those who can’t strike back. Maybe it’s this place that is making me do things I don’t want to. Maybe that is what makes people behave the way they do—the place they find themselves in, the place which shows them what is good, what is evil, and what is necessary. Maybe that place is always inside us, waiting to be entered.
Sabir hobbled into the shed and went straight to Hayat, who began talking the moment she saw him. He translated her speech to me after she had exhausted herself and slumped onto the straw-covered floor.
She told him that she was a healer, an Ainu woman from the island of Kurile near Japan. Her father, Miyamoto, a famous healer himself, was the chief of their tribe in Iburi province. She was his oldest daughter and had been taught how to heal illness and injury. She had also been taught the traditional practice of carving tattoos into the arms and faces of the men and women of her tribe. But it was the healing that gave her power; it was the healing that Haji Allum wanted to learn from her, to take back to his people beyond those mountains outside this asylum.
We listened in amazement to this woman’s story. Sabir struggled to keep up with her staccato rhythm and total absence of pauses between thoughts.
My father, the great Miyamoto, was taken away by the Japanese from the island of Shumushu to the mainland. My family was promised protection from the Russians, and we were to get Japanese papers which would let us stay on the mainland. We were first put in a place called Bettopo on the western coast of Shumushu Island. But there was not enough for us to eat—we were no longer able to hunt and fish as we had done for hundreds of years. The Japanese moved us again to Shikotan Island, where many of us died from the great fever that ate our insides and made the blood from our stomachs come out of our mouths. There were only a few houses left when the Japanese took us again and sent us on a long journey across the seas, where my father, the great chief Miyamoto, had to earn a living by carrying provisions for the men building the great line that would run through this new country, this country where there were people darker than us, but with less hair and no tattoos. There were white men there too, and people like you, Crippled One, people like him, the Gatekeeper, and like that other one who loves that girl with no hair on her head. Those people spoke your language, and they had also come from far, across another ocean, and they had brought with them many camels like the one you have standing outside, that miserable beast who smells and shows his teeth and whose arrogance is strung across his eyelashes like washing on a line.
The man who brought me here, to this desert, Haji Allum, spoke like you—he was older, like my father, and like my father he too was a healer and a collector of herbs. Haji Allum was a rich man—he had many camels, and the white people paid him well for his services. My father had nothing, we lost everything, and he once asked Haji Allum to let him have some money so he could buy clothes for us, my mother and my sisters. We had come in what we wear in Shumushu, robes we call attushi, woven from the inner bark of the mountain elm tree. We would embroider these with delicate patterns, like the tattoos we embroider on our skins. But these robes were too heavy for the desert where we found ourselves, and my father wanted us to look like the others, wearing white people’s clothes.
Haji Allum gave my father money in exchange for learning the secret of healing. After many years, when I had grown up and my father had died, leaving my mother and my sisters on our own, Haji Allum offered to marry me, and my mother gave me to him believing that he would keep me safe from harm in that strange land.
Haji Allum was good to me. We traveled from that desert to this desert on a big ship, and that is where he got the great fever, bringing up blood from his stomach every night until he had no blood left. By the time we got to his village in these black mountains, Haji Allum was only bones covered with a long beard. I tried to heal him, but I did not have the herbs I needed on that ship—there was nothing there with which I could heal him, and so Haji Allum died very soon after we reached his home.
I could not heal that good man, but I know I have the power to heal this girl with the wound on her head. That tree beneath which you sit and enjoy the air, that tree has medicine in its leaves and in its skin. We healers know this, and I know that it will cleanse the girl of the poison in her blood which is making that wound worse, even though the Gatekeeper’s wife keeps washing it to keep it clean. But that is not enough—the girl needs me, she needs the power of my healing, and you have all prevented me from helping her. See, all I had to do was make the same marks that were made on my back near the base of her skull—that would heal the wound and make her well, and even make her see and speak. I have not heard the girl’s voice until today, you know. At least you can believe that I have healed her voice.
Hayat spoke without taking a breath, as if she had waited all these years to tell her story. And we listened as if we had waited all this time to hear it, this incredible tale of lost people findi
ng others who had also gone astray.
She asked me to return her knife to her. I looked at Waris and Sabir. They said nothing and I, ashamed, lowered my head and hoped she would not hate me for having tied her up like an animal.
I don’t know if I should let her have the knife. Perhaps it is better that I keep it and use it when the time comes.
seven
I still haven’t had a chance to talk to Bulbul about my plan. I don’t even have a plan, just a desperate desire to get out. Sometimes I feel I’m losing my mind, I don’t know what is real anymore, and I don’t know if what I feel is real. It’s like living inside a person with several lives, none of which has any connection with the other. Sometimes I feel I have no relationship with anything, not even with the people at home who have even less of an idea what this war is all about. It’s as if my heart is so still with fear that it has forgotten to beat life’s rhythm into my veins.
The nails on my fingers and toes have grown until they’ve begun to curl like the roots of an old tree.
Sabir insists on speaking to me. I pretend he isn’t there, I don’t want to hear what he has to say. And I have nothing to say to him.
Bulbul, too, comes to me in my corner and keeps offering me this pale liquid they call tea.
I have large red splotches all over my back. I spend the night scratching myself like a demented man. I have been given the gift of Tarasmun in plentitude—fleabites the size of quarters, swollen and burning and driving me insane.
* * *
I must have slept last night. I traveled in my sleep, I found many graves in which small children were sleeping, curled up, their hands beneath their cheeks. When I peered inside, one of them opened his eyes and stared back at me. He was saying something but I couldn’t understand the words. In his eyes I saw a reflection of myself, and in my eyes I saw a reflection of the child looking at me. There were many of us, of me and the child, of dead children and a half-crazed young man wandering into their graves.
No Space for Further Burials Page 9