Maybe it’s just the fact that I really haven’t been here since the fever took me away. And now that I’m back I expect something to go wrong, not that anything has gone right even in my dreams.
The pinched-face man is called Gulabuddin Shirazi. Waris and the others refer to him as Gul Agha, which roughly translates to Mister Rose. I want to laugh every time I see his miserable face and then think of his grand name, better suited to a comic book character.
Gul Agha has never really liked me. I can tell from the way he glares at me, with narrow eyes and a snarl on his thin lips. Last night when Qasim brought me my bowl of gruel (I don’t move around much; my legs feel like sponge when I try to get up), Gul Agha spat in my direction and then very deliberately wiped his mouth with a grimy sleeve, his gaze trained on me the whole time. Waris told him to wipe the spit from the floor. Mister Rose fumed at him with hatred glowing in those narrow slit-eyes. He refused to do what Waris asked and instead spat again, staring at me long and hard. When Sabir got up and asked him why he was spitting on the floor and not into his tin can, Mister Rose said something softly, the words hissing ominously through his clenched teeth: It is my country; I can spit where I want and you cannot stop me.
Then he clutched at his breast pocket, where I believe he keeps his red book, and shouted words at Sabir, looking at me as he finished his recitation:
Note well the effect
Of a destitute orphan’s sigh:
A hundred celestial battlements collapse.
Sabir did not speak. Instead he reached into the hearth for a handful of ashes which he threw over the globs of bloody phlegm. He turned to me and mumbled something to Waris. Both men walked out of the kitchen and I knew that something was being said about me, this Firangi who had no business in this country, in this asylum, in this wretched kitchen, eating into meager supplies and taking up space on the floor of the only warm place in this frozen wasteland.
It was quiet for a moment, then suddenly there was the sound of howling from the far corner of the kitchen, like a dog barking at the moon. I rose up on my elbows and saw Gul Agha screaming and gesticulating like a wild man. He was crawling on all fours toward me. In his hand he held the tin can full of phlegm. I could see that he wanted to throw the spit at me and I held up my quilt like a shield, my only defence against the assault I knew was coming. Bulbul rushed forward and threw himself on Gul Agha, pinning him to the floor. Noor Jehan ran out, calling for Waris. I could hear Anarguli whimpering behind the curtain and Qasim had begun to sob. Mister Rose was still screaming when Waris and Sabir hurried back into the kitchen. He kept repeating the word Qatil, Killer, over and over again. And he kept his gaze fixed on me, loathing in his eyes and in the twitching of his mouth.
Waris and Bulbul carried Gul Agha out of the kitchen. I had no idea where they were taking him—it had snowed heavily during the day and the only other place with a roof was my cell where the drums of water had been stored. I didn’t really care where they took him as long as he was taken someplace where I didn’t have to see him, and where he could not look at me the way he does, with so much hatred.
When Bulbul came back he told me that Gul Agha had been put in the shed with the animals. It was warmer in there than in the cell, and there was still some dry grass on the floor which would shelter him from the cold. I was wishing he would freeze to death when Bulbul began to tell me Gul Agha’s story. About how he had taken his family from their village in the north after the drought killed his animals and crops, and even his youngest child who was born like a small animal with eyes that could not see and a mouth that did not cry.
Gul Agha had seven children, and after years of the war, after many of the villages had been abandoned or destroyed, he decided to head south toward the city where he had heard that food was being handed out to refugees like him. He and another family hired a tractor and loaded whatever they could carry from their homes into the trailer. They traveled for many days over the high mountain passes—the snow made it impossible for the tractor to cross much of the terrain, and the trailer would often get stuck in the deep ruts and craters blown into the land by bombs. Gul Agha and the other men, some only young boys, decided that they must walk and lead the tractor over this narrow trail, letting the women and girls stay in the trailer.
After many days their caravan made it through the pass into the valley, and it was at that point that the fire fell from the sky. Gul Agha says there were many planes and many bombs which fell around them like huge hailstones. The tractor was destroyed. The trailer, too, was hit. Gul Agha’s wife and three of his children were killed, one was maimed, and two others died at the camp from hunger and cold. He was never able to understand why their small caravan was attacked, and he has never forgiven himself for letting his family remain in the tractor while he stood by as the bombs fell and annihilated everything he had ever loved.
When Gul Agha reached the refugee camp he was told that U.S. warplanes had attacked a party of rebels, killing eleven of them but missing the tall man who appeared to be the leader of the party and who walked beside the trailer, guiding it over the rough ground.
Gul Agha is not a tall man, Firangi, you can see that. But that day he was carrying his young son on his shoulders and had covered him with his chaddar to keep him warm. That child is still in the camp, perhaps, although many children froze to death that winter, and with no one to care for him now he is probably dead too.
I cannot sleep. I keep hearing the dog barking and the mule braying and the camel grunting in this still night hushed with snow. I look out at the snow-covered courtyard and see the footprints of a man burned into the white shell. I see a man carrying a child on his shoulders because the child has no legs. The child holds onto his father with hands that have been burned by the sun and are dark, the skin cracked and bleeding.
The snow is thick; it covers the many wounds on the earth and it conceals the sorrow which runs beneath it.
No one has attacked the asylum. Perhaps the war is over. Waris says that when the snow covers the ground it is not easy for the rebels to move through the mountains. He knows that some of them in the north use young boys to carry provisions through the narrow passes. The children live on weeds and roots, and carry guns and ammunition on their thin backs because of the promise of food once they reach the rebel camp. The rebels need the children because they are small enough to squeeze into the tight passages carved out by the wind and water when it flows in abundance into the lavender valleys below.
Sabir says it has been quiet because it’s not easy for warplanes to find targets in this weather. I want to tell Sabir about global positioning satellites and laser-guided systems which demolish buildings and kill people with the push of a button, without seeing them, without knowing them. Perhaps it is better not to speak and to let all of them rest. It has been so tiring, living in fear, waiting for the end.
Last night the dog attacked the mule, killing it and then eating the flesh that hung from its bones. Sabir wants to shoot the dog, but there is nothing to shoot it with. Waris wants to let the dog go, to leave the compound. He is clearly distraught, arguing with Sabir about granting the dog mercy. Sabir refuses to come in when evening falls, and Waris worries about him.
Bulbul says that the dog was hungry, that’s all. He is not a mad dog, just driven mad with hunger.
When I saw the snow outside the shed stained with blood, I wanted to vomit. There was offal all over the place, long strips of gut spilling out of the mule’s belly.
Its eyes were not completely shut, and its mouth hung open, a blue limp tongue, its end stuck to the snow that must have melted from the heat of its dying breath, and then frozen again when the breath vaporized into mist and obliterated the memory of the night before.
eight
The silence of this place is boring a hole in my heart. I have begun to read my words to myself just so there is something here other than the wind and the dance of the dust, and the long pauses between thought and speech which carry many meanings
that I have not yet learned to understand.
Even when they argue they wait until a thought has been born and nurtured on parched tongues. Only when it is well-rounded does that thought dress itself in words, only when the hard edges of need and hunger and desperation have been chiseled into some semblance of acceptability does it find the arrow on which it travels toward its adversary.
I do not know if that is the way these people talk among themselves ordinarily, waiting for the words to be measured on their tongues before being expelled into the still air. Sometimes I think it is hunger that stretches the silence and strings it across the sky above this courtyard, like a tent or veil covering the secrets of women, hidden from sight, living in silences deeper than the graves we have dug recently for two of the men from the basement, and for the murdered mule.
Noor Jehan has not spoken much for several days now. She nursed me back to health, or back from the dead, and does not come to this corner at all, as if I must be avoided now that I am whole again, now that I can see her again as a woman.
She does not talk much to Waris either; I often see her going behind the curtain separating Anarguli and Hayat from us. Whenever she emerges I hear her sighing, and at night I can hear her whispering to Waris or humming a lullaby to Qasim. The boy has become a skeleton and his face is pale and miserable, a constant cold plaguing him. Noor Jehan tries to keep him clean but it is a losing battle—he has cold sores around his mouth which he licks to keep them from cracking in the dry air. His eyes are hollow now, and I try to read the words trapped inside them, but all I can see is his misery and the hunger which must consume his gut as it does mine.
We are sustaining ourselves on tea and the crusts of dried naan that Noor Jehan would feed to the mule. The tea itself is pale and weak, tasteless. Obviously we have run out of sugar, and the lumps of molasses that Sabir brought from the village have disappeared, leaving only a trace of golden flecks at the bottom of the saddle bag which was once strapped around the mule.
Bulbul says we should have eaten the mule after the dog killed him. Waris has a dark cloud cross his eyes when he hears Bulbul talking like this, making light of the delicious mule pilaf we could have had. Khar pulao, he says, and laughs. Sabir joins him, telling Waris that God would forgive us for eating the flesh of a cloven-hoofed animal because these are the circumstances in which we have found ourselves, and if God is Rahim and Rahman, Merciful and Beneficent, then khar pulao would be acceptable even to the staunchest believer.
Waris does not share their laughter. His face is dark now. The thought perches itself on the edge of his tongue but does not leave the stillness of his mouth.
I have begun to walk around in the snow now, after Bulbul outfitted me with a pair of boots he says he found in the rubble of the collapsed barracks. It seems Bulbul has a cache of goods which he finds and hoards and brings out when the time is right, bribing me with something I desperately need, reminding me of the treasures that will be his once we are out of here.
I think of the orange parka and the yellow corduroys and I want to weep. These have no laces, but that is the least of the problems. One of them has a mouth which has fallen open, and the other has a hole in the bottom. Bulbul has fashioned some kind of fastening for me from the dried and twisted mule gut he salvaged from the heap where Waris and Sabir buried the remains of that animal. The parts that could feed the dog have been buried in a drum and covered with snow. At least the dog will eat well. And at least I can get out of the kitchen and feel the soft layer of snow covering the courtyard like a white gauze bandage.
I stood for what seemed like hours at the edge of the compound near the wall, and tried to make out the place we repaired with bricks made from hard earth and effluence. There seems to be no trace now of the gaping hole through which I entered this world. All the fissures around the edges of the hole have been plastered over with rivulets of mud, and there are so many graves now that I cannot even remember which wall it was that spelled my fate with the brittle points of jagged teeth. There are small graves where the children are buried, larger ones that hold the bodies of nameless men, and an unmarked pit where the head and carcass of the mule were interred as if it, too, had been part of this war.
We have not eaten a meal, or what was passed off as a meal, for several days now. Karim Kuchak has been shouting from the basement; I have heard him hurling abuse at Waris and Sabir, calling them greedy thieves and one-legged, one-eyed bandits. Bulbul tried to explain to him that there is no food for anyone, that all of us are hungry, but he just snarled at him and smirked while calling him khazolak, an effeminate man, a man who has lost his honor and become like a woman.
Tell that guday, that lame man, to run off to the nearest village and fetch us some food, tell that mangak, that rat-faced woman, to stop eating it all up, tell that ruund, that one-eyed man, to stop hoarding the food and let us eat.
Karim Kuchak shouted this and we all listened in silence, as if there were no words left with which to defend our collective honor. And to think that all this invective was coming from a small, deformed creature who had crowned himself king of the trash heap, lord and master of the unwanted.
Bulbul laughed while telling me Karim Kuchak’s story. Later at night, when Waris and Sabir and Noor Jehan had fallen asleep, he spoke to me about the time when he had known hunger after his mother disappeared, taking Gulmina and a few coins in change with her.
I was bringing in very little at the time, you see. Not many would part with a few coins because there was not much money to go around, even to buy bread for a family that would earlier have eaten lamb and chicken regularly. Everybody was hungry and my sister was hungrier than all of us, not able to eat, or not able to keep down whatever she ate. My mother asked my Uncle Sangeen to go find medicine for Gulmina but he refused, saying there wasn’t enough money to buy bread, so how was he supposed to buy medicine?
My mother wept and pleaded with him, but he would just beat her or show her the back of his hand, threatening to strike her if she spoke about Gulmina’s illness again. Gulmina was nothing but a heap of bones—she had beautiful eyes, my sister. Brown eyes that changed color with the time of day. At some point all that was left of her were her eyes, but they had no light in them, my friend. They were like holes filled with darkness.
One evening, after I came home with some pieces of bread from the tandoor where I worked, my mother asked Sangeen Kaka once more about medicine for Gulmina. My sister had just taken a bite from a scrap of naan I brought for her, and my mother was trying to spoon some hot tea into her mouth. We watched as Gulmina threw up the liquid and pieces of naan, her pale face shadowed over with distress and exhaustion. My mother held her, trying to ease the retching, and I watched in silence as her belly heaved and brought up the air which filled it and all the empty spaces in her thin body. She was still hunched over the floor when my uncle stepped forward and slapped her, saying that she had wasted precious food and wasn’t worth the effort of keeping her alive. My mother threw herself over Gulmina, trying to protect her. My uncle kicked my mother’s back; she fell forward, burying Gulmina beneath her. I was too frightened to move, but I remember worrying that Gulmina would not be able to breathe with her face in the vomit. And I remember my mother’s tears when she raised herself to face me.
That night, while Sangeen Kaka slept, she woke me up and asked me for the few coins I carried in my pocket. She said she needed the money to buy medicine, to take Gulmina to a doctor or a hakeem who could heal her with herbs and would not ask for much money. I gave her what I had and watched as she covered herself and my sister in the great shawl she had worn ever since I could remember. It was a red shawl, faded now to a dirty brown and torn in many places, but it would keep her warm in winter and shield her from the sun in summer, and protect her from the eyes of hungry men.
Sangeen Kaka took me across the border shortly afterward. We traveled part of the way on the back of a truck bringing food supplies from a neighboring country. Sangeen Kaka kn
ew the driver who had promised to help him look for a job once we got across. But when we reached the border he asked us to get off the truck and take the route across the mountains. We had no papers and the police at the border would not let us through without them. We walked across the mountains for several days. My feet were bleeding by the time we got to the city. I wanted to cry but was afraid of my uncle’s anger, afraid of being called a woman. When we reached the city we made our way along a sewage drain that ran for miles and miles beside a camp where there were many others like us, come from across the border. I had to take off the shoes I was wearing because my blisters had burst and the skin was sticking to the plastic sole. At a tea stall where my uncle stopped to ask about a friend who had lived in this camp for a while, I removed the shoes but I was ashamed to let the men at the stall see my mangled feet. When one of them asked what had happened to make them look like raw meat, my uncle laughed and told them that I was lucky to have feet at all, whatever shape they were in, for I was the son of a man with no legs and a woman with no honor.
We have been waiting for something to happen, something to deliver us from this awful emptiness. Some days I want calamity to strike the compound, to put us out of our misery, to liberate us from this state of being and not being. I want to be found, even if it is too late. I want to know that this is not endless, this anguish of not knowing, of not having any dreams within which I can lose myself, finding what I have lost and what I may never find again.
Before I left home I learned of the mission Carlos was on at the time his plane was brought down. He was carrying two children with him who had been injured in a mine explosion. They had found the yellow care packages which our pilots dropped from the sky, and had run to their village with the packets of food meant to sustain them in the time of such great hunger. The village had been bombed sometime earlier with CBU-87s. Many of the bomblets had just lain in the fields, unexploded, waiting for something to touch them, to set them off. The children saw these yellow bombs, the size of soda cans, and rushed to pick them up. Their hands were blown up, arms torn off and flung across the fields. The girl lost part of her face; her brother had a hole in his stomach when they were brought to the base hospital in a wheelbarrow. Carlos was carrying them from the base along with several of our men who had been injured. They were headed to a place where they could be treated, but that was not to be. The plane was downed, and we never found out if it had been hit by a missile or if it crashed into the side of the mountain on a day when the clouds covered the earth with their infinite purity.
No Space for Further Burials Page 11