Godsend

by John Wray

  —Taliban, Abu Suhail said, repeating the word like an invocation. —Taliban. Taliban. His voice was all but drowned out by the rattling of the trucks.

  The driver of the foremost pickup leaped down lightly and went to the passenger door and helped a small black-bearded man out of the cab. The others remained in the idling convoy. The small man’s beard was spade shaped and sparse and his heavy-lidded eyes were dark with kohl. His legs stuck out grotesquely behind him, as though his knees had been turned backward, and his forearms rested on aluminum canes with molded plastic braces. He addressed Ziar in a warbling voice, erratic and sluggish, like someone just woken from sleep. Try as she might she couldn’t understand a word.

  —What’s he saying? she asked Abu Suhail.

  He shook his head dazedly. —Brother, he said, —that is Abu Abdullah Nazir. He took her by the arm and began to sway lightly in place, keeping his eyes on the man with the backward-turned legs.

  —Can you hear what he’s saying?

  Abu Suhail only laughed. —It doesn’t matter.

  After what seemed a great while Ziar nodded slightly and the man called Nazir made a sign to his driver and the engines were all killed at once. The sudden silence pressed itself against her ears.

  —God’s greetings to you, soldiers, Nazir said in Pashto. —May you never tire.

  —Stand up, all of you, said Ziar. —Take up your packs.

  —Leave them just as they are. It’s you I want to see, brothers, not the burdens you carry.

  As if at some hidden signal Nazir’s men swarmed down from the flatbeds. He inched forward so totteringly that it seemed he might fall. She saw now that his eyelids and his brow were scarred and puckered. This man is not asleep, she told herself. Remember that, Aden. This man is not asleep.

  He went to Abu Suhail first and bent so close to him that they seemed to be kissing. The smile left Abu Suhail’s lips and his eyes rolled upward as if he might faint. Nazir spoke a word to him in Pashto that she’d never heard before. Then he was standing before her.

  —Khe chare, mu’allim, she said. —As-salaamu alaikum.

  Nazir inclined his head toward hers and took a ragged breath. The lower half of his body seemed to dangle from his crutches like a marionette’s. She averted her eyes and waited for him to address her. When at last he did he spoke in faltering English.

  —How can it be? he said. —And for what reason?

  —Forgive me, mu’allim. What did you say?

  —You do not speak.

  He wavered before her, the plastic braces of his crutches squeaking. She stared down at the ground between her feet. He said something musically over his shoulder and she heard a voice repeating it and Ziar’s own tired voice rising in agreement. Ziar said something else then, almost too quietly to hear, and a fourth voice assured him that all would be well.

  She was told to raise her head and found the driver of the truck standing where Nazir had just been, holding a Makarov eight-shot toward her by the barrel. She took it and gripped it as if in a dream. One of the pickups was maneuvered so that its bed faced them and she let the driver push her forward and stood stiff-armed with the Makarov in her left hand while the driver worked the tailgate with both arms to get it open. Somewhere nearby a voice was singing praises, La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammadun rasul Allah, and she recognized that wheedling voice just as the tailgate dropped. The guide lay in the flatbed with his limbs hogtied with wire. A small curse escaped her. He stopped singing then and arched his back until his eyes met hers.

  —Payment of wages, a voice said behind her.

  In a dream she looked on as the guide was pulled backward and pitched to the ground at her feet. A circle of men closed around them. She looked for Ziar but couldn’t find him. She thought of the magpie in the sunlight and the memory helped to calm her. She raised the pistol and the crowd fell back at once.

  —Suleyman! came Ziar’s voice. —The safety.

  The pistol was one she’d trained with at the Mountain and she knew very well that its safety was off. Safety off and a round in the chamber.

  —I want to know what he’s done, she said, hefting the Makarov. Its weight was a comfort. She reset the safety.

  Abu Suhail mumbled something in Pashto and reached for the pistol. She hadn’t noticed him standing beside her. He met her eyes and stopped short. Someone started to laugh.

  —You should fire, he whispered. —You should have already.

  —Mu’allim Nazir?

  —Yes, my child.

  —I want to know what he’s done.

  The silence that fell seemed to give the guide hope. He pressed his forehead to the road and rolled himself onto his shoulder. Sand clung wetly to his lips and to the left side of his beard. He seemed unsurprised to see her above him, mute and expressionless as a dressmaker’s doll, pressing the Makarov to her chest to keep it safe. He saw her for exactly what she was.

  —God knows full well who the wicked are. You will find them, out of all mankind, those most attached to life.

  —Suleyman, said Ziar. —Little brother.

  —Unbeliever, Nazir said to her in English. —Unbeliever. Sisterfucker. ISI.

  —Give it to me, said Abu Suhail. —Give it to me. I can fire.

  —But if a brother is forgiven what is ordained, then gracious pardon must be offered. An act of leniency from your Lord and a mercy. Whoever commits aggression thereafter—

  —Who’s forgiven you? she asked, disengaging the safety.

  Abu Suhail seized her wrist and tried to take the pistol from her. She spun away and freed her arm and swung it in a smooth arc as she fired. The old man’s body seemed to shiver with excitement or surprise. She counted the rounds down from eight, sab’a sitta khamsa arba’a, and came to rest at wahid staring at the knot of wide-eyed men behind her. Ziar was first among them with his thin mouth hanging open. The driver’s face was empty of expression. Nazir was already hobbling back to the trucks.

  —I apologize, Abu Suhail was stammering, either to her or to the body on the ground. —I apologize to you, brother. Do you hear?

  She thought of Hayat as she let the gun fall. She closed her eyes and saw herself lying on her bedroll in the corner room in Sadda, in the time of her illness, watching the play of light and dark across the ceiling. She thought of Ibrahim Shah and his reasonable voice. She saw herself reciting at dawn in the courtyard, then riding the bus from Karachi with Decker, then sitting in her father’s warm and well-appointed office. The gun hit the gravel. She was lying on her bed in Santa Rosa, head tucked under the covers, feeling the whole house shaking as a plane passed overhead.

  * * *

  For seven weeks they lived and trained at Abdullah Nazir’s camp, the Orchard, four days’ march into the mountains from the fabled Torkham Gate. It lay on a wedge-shaped spit of land at the convergence of two great gorges and the ground was black and fertile and the camp itself was shaded by stands of holly oak and pine. It had been an experimental farm during the Soviet occupation and stumps of olive trees partitioned the field on which their tents were pitched. To the south and the east the gorge walls hid the sun but to the northwest the view was open to a great distance and in the evenings the Hindu Kush blazed blue and cold against the sky. It was said that the coming offensive would take them north over those ranges but whether this was true or hearsay none among them seemed to know. Even Ziar could only smile and shrug his shoulders.

  The training they were given was taken largely from a Pakistani manual for the drilling of light infantry and involved a large amount of standing at attention and running in place. It was monotonous and mindless, and often in direct contradiction to what Abu Imam had taught them, but she welcomed any duty that might help the hours pass. She’d begun now with killing and could see no way clear of it and found herself impatient for the killing to resume. It was the waiting that she couldn’t stand, that made her anxious and sick, not the killing itself. Shooting the guide had been quick. Decker still somehow persisted but
she never said his name aloud or thought about her life before the camps. There was no way out for her but straight ahead.

  The bed of one river was lined with smooth brown pebbles, the other’s bed was lined with shards of yellow quartz, and in both of them the hulks of exploded bridges lay like the bones of dragons just beneath the surface. The trucks that supplied the camp drove straight into the water just downriver of the bridges, regardless of how many men or sacks of flour they were carrying, and when they stalled in midstream there was much imprecation and quotation of scripture and submission to the greater will of God. But over the ironwork the current was broken and shallow and a person on foot could pick his way across. It was hot now in the afternoons and blackberries and Persian roses thrived in the shade on the north-facing banks and she often found time to slip away unnoticed in the hour just before the evening meal. A short walk upstream along the quartz-bedded river lay a bend where the current doubled back into a pool and on days when her chest gave her trouble she’d pull her kameez over her head and unbind her rib cage and let the water do its work until the itching and the ache were washed away.

  The tents they slept in were made of heavy sun-bleached nylon with UNICEF printed at intervals both inside and out and she shared hers, by a random stroke of fortune, with no one but a seven-year-old boy. He had come across the sea from Yemen by way of Iran with his three elder brothers, he told her, and his three elder brothers had left him behind. He spoke a beautiful and cultured Arabic and asked very few questions and aside from his sobbing each morning he gave her no cause to complain. Ziar was like a god to him and in the evenings when they spoke together in a flowing Yemeni dialect she would sometimes even catch him in a smile.

  As the days and weeks passed she found herself venturing farther from camp, saying her prayers by the banks of the river, or in some clearing in the woods that she could never find again. She had no means of determining the hour except by the height of the shadows against the walls of the gorge and she would kneel and pray whenever the mood took her. She prayed for the man she had killed and the friend she had lost and petitioned God to grant her some small sign that He was near. She prayed to Him that her father might not condemn her for her ignorance and that her mother might forget her altogether. She begged on all fours to be freed from her doubt and restored to the purpose she’d found at Sadda. On those days she lost count of how often she prayed. On other days she never prayed at all.

  Ziar was absent now for days at a time, often as much as a week, and ignored her when she asked him where he’d been. She began to wonder whether the killing of the guide had changed him as well, whether he might feel as she felt, but when she mentioned this he simply shrugged his shoulders. Soon afterward he began to bristle at her questioning and she learned to keep such notions to herself.

  One Juma’a evening Ziar came to the tent, muttered a preoccupied greeting to the Yemeni boy, then took her hand and led her out into the twilight. Wild sorghum had grown up around the olive stumps and she thought about the Russians and whether they’d been pleased with their experiments and whether they were still alive or long since dead. They passed the tent of the Arabs, who called out to them both, and Ziar let go of her hand for a moment to return their salutations. By some system of barter too intricate for her to grasp the Arabs had acquired a water pipe and she could barely see their faces through the smoke. It was a beautiful pure white smoke and smelled of apples. Everything was beautiful now in the midsummer dusk. As they rounded the corner of the abandoned grain depot with its rusted doors stamped in Cyrillic she stopped and looked back and saw the smoke rising like steam from a laundry and a feeling she had no name for made her chest and throat go tight. A memory or perhaps a premonition. Ziar stood waiting where the footpath disappeared into the trees.

  —How are you managing in this rest home, Suleyman? Have you expired yet from boredom?

  —You ask me that on every walk we take.

  He nodded. —Because I don’t believe your answer.

  —I’m not bored. I don’t let myself be.

  —You’ve been absent from meals, I’ve been told.

  She glanced at him. —Who told you that? Abu Suhail?

  —Also that you keep to yourself in your tent. And that you choose not to bathe with the others.

  They walked in silence for a time. At last Ziar sighed.

  —You must realize, brother, that your behavior here is not inconsequential.

  —I shot a man for them already. What more do they want?

  —You had no choice but to shoot him. That’s how Nazir sees it.

  She stopped walking. —Why give me the gun at all, then? Why not leave me alone?

  —Because you were the one who gave them the most doubt.

  —Aside from the old man, you mean.

  —Which old man?

  —The guide.

  Ziar shook his head. —The guide was of no consequence at all.

  They’d come to the fine spit of sand where the rivers rushed together with a low pauseless thrum like the spinning of heavy turbines underground. A stand of tamarisks hid them from camp and a flock of yellow mynas squabbled harshly in the trees. The rivers were differently colored, the western slightly muddy and the eastern blank as glass, but the difference was so subtle that she’d never truly seen it. Now she saw it plainly and Ziar commented on the strangeness of the billowing milky boundary and the stubbornness of the two competing streams. He spoke the names of each river and then the name of the river they were subsumed by in turn and she nodded and watched him and felt something change. Her breath had gone shallow. If he was aware of her excitement he gave not the slightest sign.

  —Are you unhappy here, Suleyman? Tell me the truth. Are you forgetting all we taught you at the Mountain?

  —If you’d been here you’d know.

  —Am I not with you now?

  She stared into the water.

  —Forgive me, little brother. He ducked his head to catch her eye. —I’ve been here when I could.

  —It wasn’t enough.

  —You’re right, he said. —Not nearly enough. My spies tell me you’ve grown undisciplined and fat. He reached out suddenly and pinched her through the cloth of her kameez. She gave a cry and jerked herself away.

  —Did I hurt you, Suleyman? He grinned. —Then you must not be as fat as I supposed.

  She wavered there on the balls of her feet, her shoulders hunched forward, her arms held out toward him. A shudder ran through her.

  —What is it you have on inside your kameez? It felt like a bandage.

  —It is a bandage.

  His expression changed. —Show me.

  —Don’t touch me, she told him in English.

  He kept still for a moment, frowning ever so slightly, then lowered his arms.

  —I’m pleased to see your courage hasn’t left you.

  —It’s not courage.

  He nodded. —That may be. But I choose to call it that.

  —Why did you bring me down here, Brother Khan?

  —Ah, Suleyman. He looked back toward camp. —When you call me that it feels like a reproach.

  —Tell me.

  —A company is being formed for the foreign trainees at the Orchard. All the khariji. The Arabs and the Moroccans and the Chechens and the Turks. And the Americans, of course. He winked at her. —Of which there is, at present, only one.

  She studied his expression. —A new company.

  —This is a particular honor, brother. A company called the Ansar. Nazir will have you brought to him tomorrow morning, to his offices, after second prayers.

  —The Ansar, she repeated. —The Helpers.

  —So it is to be called.

  —Where will we go? To the front?

  —That’s for Nazir to decide. There may be other uses—

  —It’s not an honor, Ziar. He doesn’t trust us. He doesn’t want us in his army.

  Ziar shook his head and turned back to the river.

  —You�
��re fighting already, she said slowly. —That’s what you’re not telling me, isn’t it? That’s where you’ve been going when you go away.

  —Take care not to speak in this tone to Abu Nazir, Suleyman. Mind what questions you ask. Mind your voice and your manner.

  A rush of contempt for him made her suddenly lightheaded. —I’m not speaking to Abu Nazir right now. I’m speaking to you.

  He made a gesture of frustration, violent and quick. —I’ve cautioned you once already. You were a favorite at my father’s madrasa, and even at the Mountain, but only on account of your novelty. Many of us had never spoken to an American in our lives, let alone a devout American, sworn to the faith. You were like the peacock in the rich man’s garden. Do you know of this fable?

  —I’m guessing that it doesn’t turn out well.

  —Don’t make light of my words. Don’t make Ali’s mistake.

  She closed her eyes. —Please don’t say that, Ziar. Don’t say that name to me.

  —I’ll say whatever name I choose. Is this an American custom, to ignore considered counsel? To play the fool when the opposite is called for? I myself told Ali—

  —Let’s go to him now.

  —What?

  —Let’s go to Nazir. If he has doubts about me let him say so. I’ll tell him anything I need to tell him.

  —Anything you need—

  —That’s right. She took his hand in both of hers. —So I can stay with you.

  She waited a long and breathless moment for him to reply. When he said nothing she let go of his hand and started back up the path. She willed herself to move loosely and mannishly, ignoring her lightheadedness, swinging her arms with each step. The walls of the depot were coming into view through the trees when she felt Ziar’s hand on her shoulder.

  —Don’t go to him now, little brother. He has visitors. A delegation from Peshawar. Persons it is better not to meet.

  —Tell me what I have to do to make him trust me.

  —He won’t ever trust you. You’re khariji and American besides. These are not advantages for you. Not with Nazir.

  —But you’ll help me? She took a step and tried to bring him with her. —You’ll tell me what to say?