No Space for Further Burials

by Feryal Ali Gauhar

  There was a dog in the next grave, eating the foot of one of the children. He snarled and snapped at me when I came close. His mouth was bloody, his tongue marked with a swastika.

  Row upon row of graves, dead children, and a dog with a bloody tongue.

  There are more people sleeping in the kitchen now. Every time one of the men downstairs gets sick he is brought into the kitchen for warmth. We now have twelve people here, including a man with a very large head and stick-out ears, another with a very sallow face and a pinched nose, like a ferret, and a younger man with gangrene eating into his feet.

  The big-headed man has a fever. He moans constantly, and fixes onto anyone near him, mumbling something about pomegranates and goat’s milk. Noor Jehan does her best to feed him but he cannot keep anything down, and the place stinks with the stench of vomit.

  The pinched man coughs the whole night long and spits up blood. I am quite sure he has tuberculosis, and I am even more sure that by the end of all this, if I do not die with a bullet in my head or a knife in my heart, I will die with blood coming out of my mouth.

  The young man has auburn hair and freckles. His eyes are dark; he broods and does not speak much. He needs to be helped out every morning so that he can sit in the sun. Waris insists that he must keep his feet uncovered, exposing the rotting flesh to the air. I can almost see the bone of his ankle, or perhaps I am just imagining things, like the children in the graves who tried to talk to me, and the swastika on that dog’s tongue.

  Noor Jehan is having a difficult time finding a place for Anarguli and Hayat. She insists that they must have a separate space and suggests that, at least at night, the women sleep behind the burlap curtain she set up earlier. The pinched man coughs up a clot of blood and spits it into a tin can provided by Bulbul. He looks at Noor Jehan and spits again, telling her that it’s too late for her to try to give these women a place of their own—it’s too late for all of us. No one knows which is outside and which is inside, sister. No one knows which is the earth and which the sky.

  The pinched man reaches into his pocket and brings out a book with a dog-eared cover, red with gold printing along the spine. He handles it carefully, reverently, as if it were a sleeping child he does not wish to wake. He opens the book and begins to recite, rocking back and forth gently and in rhythm. I hear the rounded vowels of Persian and the cadence of poetry as he reads:

  Because love’s sun has abandoned

  The field of my heart,

  The darkened landscape

  Now yields only sorrow …

  He looks up abruptly at Noor Jehan and asks her if she likes this composition, and if she does, should he sing to her, softly, like a lullaby?

  Noor Jehan does not answer him but I can see that she wants to speak. She puts her hand to her mouth instead, and cups her lips as if she’s trying to keep the words in. Then she quickly turns away and throws down the curtain which separates the women from us.

  I don’t know what troubles her, other than the obvious fact that there is certainly not enough food to go around, that disease is now rampant in this wretched compound, and that she must be tired and weary and wondering when it will all end.

  Last night Sabir woke me up. I must have had another nightmare—I did not recognize him for a moment, and was afraid of him standing over me with his crutch held like a weapon. In my dream I was in a small grave again, and I was trying to put together the limbs of a child who lay on his back, looking at me, a torso and a head with dark eyes. I couldn’t see the dog in the dream but I felt him, and I knew he was there, breathing his foul breath over me and the child.

  When Sabir shook my shoulder, I was trying to grab the child’s foot out of the mouth of the dog. I pulled at the foot and fell back into the grave. The ground beneath me was soft and wet and when I raised myself to peer out of the hole, I saw myself staring back.

  Bulbul tells me this morning that I was crying in my sleep, that Sabir had woken up and heard me, and had wanted to rouse me so that I could lose the terrible things that were troubling me. I want to tell Bulbul that I cannot lose these things, that I cannot stop seeing them even when I open my eyes.

  I am on the U.S.S. George Washington. The commander of the 70th wing flying F-14s has just landed his thousandth sortie. He celebrates with us, and tells us that bombing the village was like having a gunfight at the O.K. Corral. We have chicken wings with barbecue sauce that evening.

  The villages of Denar Kheil, Kala Khan, and Qarabagh were bombed with 1,000-pound CBU-87 cluster bombs, each containing 202 BLU-97 bomblets. A single bomblet kills anyone within a sixty-yard radius, and severely injures a person within 100 yards. The “mother bomb” explodes 300 to 400 feet above the ground, dispersing the bomblets which hurtle through the air attached to little parachutes, enabling wider reach of the ordinance. One CBU-87 spreads bombs over three football fields. The BLU-97 has three purposes: to destroy armored vehicles, to ignite fires around military targets such as munition depots, and to kill people with shrapnel fragments.

  The barbecue sauce is thick and red and drips off my fingers and my tongue, and as I lick it I hear the sound of death walking softly behind me.

  Noor Jehan keeps appearing by my side with a bowl of hot liquid which she tries to put into my mouth, but all I want to do is spit it out and sleep. Why don’t they just leave me alone?

  It is hot in here, and I cannot breathe. The big-headed man has ears which are like pancakes. I want to bite him, but he glares at me and shows me his teeth, jagged and streaked with red spittle.

  Waris is trying to choke the life out of that little child, the one who was raped. I know we buried him but he is back in the kitchen again and Waris is trying to suffocate him so that he will not eat the food and take away our clothes.

  It is cold here, in this huge empty room with goats hanging from the rafters by red rope tied around their necks.

  Mama, why did you leave me and let me live? When we buried Carlos his bones were wet with your grief, and I wanted to be buried with him just so I could feel the comfort of your love once again.

  I have no idea how long I have had this fever. Bulbul tells me that I said strange things to him, that he was afraid I had lost myself. Sabir sits with me and wipes the vomit from my mouth and Waris presses my feet, massaging my soles to get the blood flowing again. Noor Jehan and the boy Qasim sponge the fever from my forehead with the end of her veil.

  I have urinated in my pants, and I smell like a dead goat.

  Sabir tries to take the pen away from me; he tells me I must conserve my energy until I am better. What am I to tell him about how much energy it takes to not say the words which fill my head like rocks, hurting me and pressing down on my eyes until I can’t see anything but despair?

  * * *

  There is a fire in the distance. People dance around it and sing. They are joyful; I can hear them. Their voices are like water, like a river, like the song of the ocean.

  Noor Jehan has tried to make me drink this liquid but I cannot keep it down. Sabir has found a spoon somewhere and makes me sip the broth slowly. There is a strange smell in this room, as if something rotted and left its stench on the walls and on the floor.

  They have brought me out into the sunlight. I don’t know how long I was in that room with the dead goat. Bulbul sits beside me and sings some strange song in his broken voice. The girl he loves sits under the tree, and that crazy woman with the tattoos sits at a distance with Noor Jehan and the boy. The boy plays with his broken cart. I know I had to do something for him, but I cannot remember now. I cannot see the others. I cannot see the camel.

  Maybe they killed him, and cooked and ate him.

  Bulbul tells me I was sick with some great fever for many days. I still feel as if my body has been put through the teeth of a massive harvester, like the ones we saw on the farms in the valley.

  Where are all those people? My mother, my sister, my family? Did she have the baby who Carlos will never see? Do they remember me? />
  Tranquility, California.

  Home.

  * * *

  My father would tell us about the time when refugees from Oklahoma rolled into Tranquility like clouds of dust that had risen across the Great Plains, drifting west toward California. The wind that whipped up those clouds stripped tens of thousands of acres of their topsoil, leaving land and life impoverished. My father was a farming man, had been so for many generations before our land became the hunting ground for hungry men traveling in covered wagons, cutting into the Sierra for gold. He told us about how the soil in the Great Plains had been exposed by cultivation which killed the protecting grasses, powdered by protracted drought.

  He told us how dust, drought, and the Depression pushed these pea farmers into our land, traveling in tin cars with anything they could carry stuffed in corners, and carried in the empty caverns of their hearts. After the drifting dust clouds drift the people, he said. Over the concrete ribbons of highway which lead out in every direction come the refugees.

  Waris says we have a serious problem now. There is only one drum of water left, and no rain in sight. We will not be able to wash unless we use the water in the well that has human limbs floating in it.

  The stench from the latrines Waris has dug along the wall is unbearable. Sabir says he will throw the limestone from the rubble into the trenches.

  I don’t know if it’s the smell of excrement or the odor of fear which rests heavily on us like a long night without end. Noor Kaka tells us we must be brave and face this for we are men, and men do not know fear.

  At night I want to hide inside the stinking quilt I sleep beneath and weep my fear into its putrid, rotting fabric. I hear my father’s voice again and I listen, keeping my heart still.

  * * *

  At Fort Yuma the bridge over the Colorado marks the southeastern portal to California. Across this bridge move shiny cars of tourists, huge trucks, an occasional horse and wagon, or a Yuma Indian on horseback. And at intervals appear slow-moving cars loaded with refugees.

  The refugees travel in old automobiles and light trucks, some of them homemade, frequently with trailers behind. All their worldly possessions are piled on the cars and covered with old canvas or ragged bedding, with perhaps bedsprings on top, a small iron stove on the running board, a battered trunk, lantern, and galvanized iron washtub tied on the back. Children, aunts, grandmothers, and a dog are jammed into the car, stretching its capacity incredibly. A neighbor boy sprawls on top of the loaded trailer.

  Most of the refugees are in obvious distress. Clothing is sometimes neat and in good condition, particularly if the emigrants left last fall, came via Arizona, and made a little money in the cotton harvest there. I was young then, but I knew that something big was happening in the valley, that things would change now, that we were no longer the only ones who would plough the land and take from it the wealth held in its belly.

  I can hear the yelling. It is Sabir, telling Waris that someone has to go in search of water before we begin killing each other. Waris tells him there is no water anywhere in this desert, where the dust has embraced us like a burial shroud.

  In my fever I dreamed of the river where my father told me stories while we fished, or just lay on the grassy bank and stared at the tops of trees shading us from the sky. He was young when the pea farmers came to Tranquility, but he remembered the fear of losing his job to the new people who staked a claim to the land he and his father, and his father before him, had lived on and loved.

  Tranquility, California.

  “We got blowed out in Oklahoma,” said the tall, lanky emigrant of old white stock, impoverished now and holding out his calloused hands as if something precious had been taken from him.

  “Yes sir, born and raised in the state of Texas; farmed all my natural life. Ain’t nothing there to stay for, nothing to eat. Something’s very wrong,” said a cotton farmer camping under eucalyptus trees in Imperial Valley.

  A mother with seven children, whose husband died on the journey in Arizona, explained: “The drought come and burned it up. We’d have gone back to Oklahoma from Arizona, but there wasn’t nothing to go to.”

  “Yeah, lots left ahead of us—no work of no kind,” a wizened old man with white stubble said. He was old but he was still looking for work, and my father feared that it was his work which would serve the old man and his bewildered family.

  “It seems like God has forsaken us back there in Arkansas,” another woman told my father. Her children were filthy and thin, and they played with the equally filthy and thin dog as if they were at home in Arkansas waiting for Mother to call them in for supper, after which they would wash and pray to the Lord and thank Him for the Sweet Cream and Good Providence He had given them, and then sleep under the patchwork quilt Granny had made before she died in the time of the Great Hunger.

  There is another argument. Bulbul tells me that Sabir and Waris fight all the time now about water and food. There is not enough for all of us, he says. Someone will get less than the others. But Waris tells him that all of us will eat an equal share—only Allah can deprive some and give to the others. Sabir tells him he can leave for the village again to look for food. Waris glances at him and then up at the sky before turning away.

  It is dark outside. I have not left the kitchen since the first snow began to fall. There is little wood now, so Noor Jehan waits till it is time to cook and then lights the fire in the hearth. What will happen when there is nothing left to cook, and what will happen when there is no fuel to burn?

  My father was not a tall man, but built well, with strong shoulders and thick, muscular arms. He married a white woman and I got her hair and her eyes. My sister got his dark color, and in school no one really believed I was the son of a Wuksachi Indian, born in the shadow of the sequoia tree. No one really believed that any of us existed anymore, and I was always listening for the sounds of his stories even after he died, for he remembered how it happened, how the land was taken away, how people of many colors came to live in Tranquility.

  He told me about the black travelers from Mississippi who entered California at Fort Yuma in March, telling him that they had “just beat the water out by a quarter of a mile.” A sharecropper, stopping tentless by the highway near Bakersfield, with only green onions as food for his wife and children, had tried to buy a farm in Oklahoma and lost it. But he announced proudly that he had left Wagner County “clear,” owing no one. He spoke of crop restriction, naturally only of its sadder side, and of conflict between cotton sharecroppers on one hand and “first tenants” and landlords on the other. “It knocks thousands of fellows like me out of a crop. The ground is just laying there, growing up in weeds.”

  * * *

  Sabir brought Hayat to me today. He says that she may be able to help me with her healing powers. I look at her and see her embroidered mouth, and want to tell her that she should go and practice her magic on someone else. She smiles at me. I wince at the sight of her blackened teeth and believe she is truly a witch. When she extends her hand to offer me something, I notice the markings on her arms and I know for sure that she is not like the rest of us here.

  She holds some weeds and leaves in the palm of her hand. I look, I have nothing to say. A beetle moves between the dead leaves. She collects it into her cupped hands and shakes vigorously. Then she blows into the space between her thumbs and throws the leaves into the air.

  The leaves drift down slowly and settle on different parts of me. The beetle lands upside down on my belly. Its legs struggle for a foothold. Sabir picks the insect up and flings it into a corner. I shut my eyes to tell them I don’t want any more of this circus they’ve put on for me, or perhaps for their own entertainment.

  This crazed woman from Kurile, did she know how far she was coming from home when she got onto that ship with Haji the Healing Man?

  “God only knows why we left Texas, ’cept he’s in a moving mood,” said a woman whose agony at tearing up roots creased her face with deep lines.r />
  Many families comforted themselves with the thought of returning home when the drought and Depression were over.

  A pregnant Oklahoma mother living without shelter in Imperial Valley while the men bunched carrots for money to enable them to move on asked my father for directions. “Where is Tranquility, California?”

  Bulbul came to me today and told me that I should let Hayat heal me—he says that the cut she made on Anarguli’s neck has helped to heal the wound, that it has given her back the words she had forgotten to use. He does not mention whether she can use her eyes again, and I don’t want to tell him that it is probably the winter air that has dried the wound on her head, and the shock of the incision on her neck that gave her back the words.

  He doesn’t notice that Anarguli cannot see at night. And he has not spoken of the swelling where her baby grows even as the food she eats shrivels like a longing passed over and forgotten.

  Bulbul takes me out into the courtyard again. It is snowing. I see the dog digging a hole in the ground, looking for food, perhaps. I worry that he may begin to dig up the graves along the edges of the courtyard. He has not eaten for days, except for the scraps Sabir saves for him.

  I see the camel now, and the mule. Both are haggard and obviously hungry. The camel’s eyes are glazed over with sleep or just the fatigue of waiting. And the mule, he would be better off dead.

  I see the dog sniffing at the air around the mule.

  The ground is white with snow, and in the distance I can see the gray blanket which will descend upon us like a plague.

  * * *

  With bedding drenched by rain while he slept in the open, with a topless car and a flat tire, an Oklahoman with the usual numerous dependents said to my father, “Pretty hard on us now. Sun’ll come out pretty soon and we’ll be all right.”

  I awoke this morning with the sense that something was going to change here, that these past several days of nothingness were just a prelude to a disaster.