In the Orchard, the Swallows

by Peter Hobbs

  They accused me of many things. Of trying to kill your father, trying to steal from him. I told them these were lies but they did not listen to me. They asked me if I had raped you. I did not know what it meant. I grew afraid that I had done something to hurt you, and not known it. That it would explain your anger.

  They beat me until I answered yes to all their questions, to the ones I understood and the ones that I did not. I believed I was as guilty as I was made to feel. I wrote my name on blank pieces of paper, without understanding what I was doing.

  And then they returned me to the cell. The soles of my feet burned as the blood beat there, bringing crippling waves of pain. I could not stand on them. I lay on my side and curled tightly around myself, and I waited for my father to come and fetch me.

  A second night arrived and passed and he did not come. I thought he must be too ashamed to see me, that I had done something terrible. I imagined him angry and disappointed. I felt very foolish. I sat in the cold cell and cried.

  By the next morning I was cold. I had not eaten for two days, but the pain made me sick to my stomach and I felt no hunger. No one had come during the night, and I looked up in hope when the door screeched open. One of the policemen came in and I craned my neck to look for my father behind him, waiting outside. I did not see him; he was not there. Without warning, the policeman hit me hard over my head with his baton. I was unprepared, and fell to the ground, shocked. Blood dripped from my eyebrows, and I raised my hand to my forehead. My arm felt light; the world seemed to vibrate.

  He pulled me from the lock-up. My legs would not hold beneath me, and so I was dragged along the corridor and into the sun. My face was wet, and through the blood and bright light I looked around stupidly for my family.

  I was lifted from the ground and thrown into the police jeep. The door slammed behind me. Even then I thought I would be taken home, the violence I had inflicted on your father already repaid tenfold. But the engine started and the vehicle rolled forwards, out of the yard and turning right, heading further down the valley, away from my village, away from home, and everything that was left in my heart descending with us.

  *

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked the driver.

  The policeman sitting beside him laughed.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ he asked. ‘He wonders where we are going.’

  He leaned back over the seat. ‘Where do you think we are going? We are going for a nice day out! We are going to have a picnic.’ He laughed at his joke.

  I put my hand to my forehead. The cut no longer ran and the blood was clotting, but I felt nauseous, and the wound was a vicious, persistent throb. I could feel the thin split flesh, the open bone.

  A few minutes later the man turned back to me, his voice calm and serious. ‘You assault a girl, and then attack her father. Don’t you know he is a very important man? So we are taking you into the desert to shoot you.’ He leaned sideways to show me the gun in his holster, the metal and leather smart and black, snug against his belt. ‘Bam! Like this. It will be over quickly.’

  They did stop, on the way, at a deserted roadside, and I was terrified. I huddled against the seat, expecting the door to be thrown open. I began to panic. My hands searched for something to hold on to, and my fingers tightened on the seat belt, prepared to hold on with every bit of my strength. But they did not come for me – the driver stood with his back to the car, relieving his bladder, and when he was done he got back in the car without looking at me. In a minute we were travelling again.

  The car threw up dust from the road, which swirled in through the windows. It filled my mouth and my thirst was tremendous.

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘may I have some water?’

  I was ignored. We drove further and panic began to set in. I did not know where we were, had never travelled so far. I craned my neck to look back the way we had come, trying to remember the turns we had made, but I had not been paying attention, and I was lost.

  ‘I am thirsty,’ I said. ‘You must give me water!’

  Again I was ignored, and so I shouted louder. I demanded to know where they were taking me. ‘Where is my father?’ I shouted. My fear left me, and I became reckless. What did it matter, if they were going to kill me? I screamed at them until the jeep stopped again, and the door gaped open and hands reached for me. I felt the sharp roadside stones on my palms and knees, and then a baton hard and crippling on my thigh, a heavy boot in my ribs.

  I curled into a ball for the remainder of the journey. I remember the sickness more than the pain. It caused deep groans to well up from my stomach, but I quietened them, moaning to myself beneath the engine noise.

  The Garden

  It is the afternoon, and I am resting in the garden, recovering from my walk this morning. It is so pleasing to be able to rest here. When I first rose from my bed and went to sit outside, I needed Abbas’s help to move. He placed my arm around his shoulder and almost carried me at his side. I was so light I think he could have lifted me with a single arm. Alifa skipped ahead of us, impatient to show me her corner of their garden. After so many days in that bed, after so many years of longing for light and space, I could not have been more disenchanted. I thought I had replaced one cell for another. The walls of the garden hemmed me in. It seemed a small place, and only the blue roof of it, impossibly high above, reminded me that I was no longer imprisoned.

  I sat on a step in the shade, and it was a long time before the beauty of the place came to me. I do not think I saw it at all at first. My eyes could not focus on the gentle order Abbas had created, or on the flowers Alifa was naming. The vision was overwhelming. I saw nothing but a jumble of colour. I saw nothing but the walls. I felt dizzy, and I bent forwards over my legs, my head down, waiting for my trembling fit to stop. I breathed deeply. I wanted only to return to the bed I had been so glad to get out of. I bent over, burrowing back inside myself.

  And yet as I breathed, I became aware of a strange sensation growing inside me, some force that seemed to swell from my chest and then spread through my body like an energy. I felt almost faint. I was stunned by it. I did not know what was happening.

  ‘What is that?’ I said, reeling.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Abbas. His concern was quiet, but urgent. He put a hand on my shoulder to steady me.

  I could not explain it. I waved my hands around in the air to try to communicate. And suddenly he seemed to understand. His face seemed sad and pained. When he spoke, his voice was low.

  ‘It is the roses,’ he said.

  ‘No, no . . .’ I began. I thought I had not explained myself.

  But to my amazement, I realised that he was right. It was the scent of roses, the smell faint but so sweet, and it came to my dulled senses as powerfully as any narcotic.

  I sat there for a long time until the shade had moved from me and I felt the warmth of the sunlight on my skin. My sensitivity was such that it prickled and brought a rash which lasted for days, but I would not move when Abbas tried to bring me in.

  ‘You should take care,’ he said. ‘The sun will still be here tomorrow.’

  ‘A little longer,’ I said. ‘Please. I want to feel it now.’

  I have come to love the garden since then, and I think that my time resting outside, shaded from the sun but enjoying the warmth, my skin alert and alive to the slightest breeze of air, has been the equal of any of the medicines I was given. Alifa tells me about the roses and I allow my eyes to linger on their colour. Abbas explains to me a little of the different plants he grows there, the flowers and herbs, and I begin to appreciate the carefulness of his arrangement, and how the stone wall shelters them, allows them life.

  On the left-hand side, in one of the thick streams of mortar that affixes the stones of the wall, a script flows, carved in beautiful handwriting. The alphabet is familiar to me, but the words are foreign. It is Persian, Abbas has told me, a line of poetry that reads: ‘If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.’ H
e told me that this word, pairidaeza, is from the old Persian, and originally referred to a walled area, a garden. So in my first weeks in this place I have come to understand that not all enclosed spaces are prisons, and that some are for safety: some are sanctuaries.

  *

  I am sitting there now, as I write, sheltering from the afternoon sun. Alifa is playing a game in the doorway, which seems to require her jumping with both feet across the entrance, first this way, and then that. She had been playing indoors until her father berated her for making too much noise, and sent her outside. I think she has become accustomed to my presence in her home now, and rather than seeing me as competition for attention, slowly begins to regard me instead as another source of it.

  ‘What are you playing?’ I ask.

  ‘I have to cross the river without getting wet.’

  ‘But why don’t you swim?’

  ‘I don’t know how to swim.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ I confess.

  Her jumping continues for a while, and I write to the sound of bare feet slapping lightly against the ground. She counts under her breath as she leaps. When I become aware that she has grown quiet again, I look up, and see her standing there, watching me.

  ‘What are you writing?’ she asks.

  ‘I am writing stories,’ I say.

  ‘Will you tell me one?’

  I look down at my notebook.

  ‘Not one of these. Perhaps I will write something else for you, later.’

  The answer seems to satisfy her and she returns to her game.

  How strange it is to be resting here, acutely aware of the fragrance of the flowers in my nostrils and watching a child play in the doorway of her home, yet turning my mind to such dark places. There are things about which it is hard for me to write. I own impulses that are difficult to reconcile. I want to tell you what has happened to me, but there is a stronger force, something akin to shame, that seeks to compel me to keep quiet, to push the story deep within and bury it in the darkness. This, my body tells me, is the easier course. But I do not trust this urge, and so although it is hard, I will tell you the story, as best as I am able, and I will tell you about:

  The Prison

  I will tell you about it because I want you to know the places I have been. It causes me pain to think that you know nothing of my life. It is a selfish desire, I know, one I trust you will forgive me for. Above all, you must understand that I do not want you to think that I suffered because of you: I did not. You could never cause me to suffer. There is evil in the world, which finds us all, and which did not arise from you and me.

  The prison they took me to is many miles from here. A long way south, in the plains. The earth has a different colour there; the sand is paler. But I saw little of it. Our cell was a concrete room with a low ceiling. There were raised concrete slabs with holes drilled into their sides so that we might be chained to them. I was not able to stand up in that room for a long time. The chains were heavy, and dug deeply into my skin where I had to lie on them. There were ten such slabs, in two close rows, but sometimes the men in the room numbered eleven, or fourteen, or seventeen, and those who had no slab were squeezed onto the floor between them, and chained there.

  My first memory is of the smell. I was confused when I arrived, and in great pain from the beatings, but as they carried me into the room the stench of it woke me, and I tried to push back against the men who carried me. The air was thick with sickness and faeces and sweat and I could not stomach it. On the first day I retched constantly, my stomach heaving dry until I was vomiting only air and saliva. I sought to expel the taste from my mouth, but eventually I had no spit to summon. The smell clung to my dry throat, and seemed to penetrate every part of me. It saturated everything. It is true that, in time, one grows used to such things, but even as the body becomes accustomed to it, it learns the smell so completely that it becomes impossible to forget. The sensation is overwhelming, and allows nothing else to stand. Until that day in Abbas’s garden, when I first became aware of the roses, I had forgotten what it was to have a sense of smell. Even now, despite the slow healing of my senses, some mornings I awake to find it thick in my nostrils and full in my mouth, and I am filled with horror until I realise where I am, and the reek, which was merely a phantom of my mind, evaporates.

  It was worst in the heat of summer, and if there were many of us chained against the rough floors it became hard to breathe the stifling air. Only rarely were we taken out into the yard. Inside, we lay still, and tried to breathe slowly, deeply. It was a relentless suffocation. A single small window, barred over and set high in one wall, was the only ventilation. But in the winter nights, unprotected by blankets and with only thin prison shirts to cover us, we would shiver and freeze.

  The place was a nursery for sickness. The water we were given was meagre and filthy, and the toilet was an uncovered hole in one corner, layered around in faeces. We lived with rats and flies. Over the years I was ill constantly, and there was no medicine for us. Within days my body was covered in a rash and at night the itching was unbearable, particularly on the soles of my feet where I could not reach it. I rubbed them against the floor to ease the awfulness, though it sometimes made it worse. I pulled against the chains, so that the pain of it would distract me from the itching. In the places I scratched it, my skin thickened into crusts, until my face carried the same scarring I saw on the other prisoners, scabs the colour of honey collecting over our chins and around our noses.

  My family did not come. The hope that they might lived for a long time in my heart, until I knew at last that it deceived me. A hard truth, in the end, is not so cruel as false hope. And though I blamed myself for my foolishness, I came to understand that they did not come because they were prevented from doing so, or because they did not know where I was. I knew my father. However much I had displeased him, he would not have abandoned me. But it is easy for powerful men to do these things, to make their enemies disappear, even if their enemies are children. Perhaps they were told the same lie the policeman had told me: that I would be killed. Perhaps they mourned for me, said prayers for me. Perhaps they petitioned for my body to be returned, so that they might bury me.

  The Prison

  Above all else, the prison taught me that there are evil men in the world. It is in all of us, perhaps – I do not think anyone knows what they might do, should they find themselves in extreme circumstances. No one can say that they would not do wrong. There are places that cause wicked thoughts and actions to arise unbidden in everyone who goes there. But this is not all. There are men, too, who seem to have been born without the capacity for remorse, and for whom pleasure exists only in causing suffering to others.

  Of the men I knew in prison, some of them, in time, were kind to me. Some even became my friends – but later, much later. I first needed to know that in order to trust, you must learn to distrust. When I arrived I was too young, too soft to be anything other than a victim. What could I have imagined of evil, with the childhood I had known?

  My initial lesson came in the form of a man, Saleem Mahmood. He owned factories in Mardan and Peshawar. He had killed a man, one of his own workers, after a disagreement. Had followed him home after an argument, the story went, and killed him at his own door. He was in the cell when I arrived, and it was soon clear that it was his space I had been brought into.

  I was a child then. Weak, and ignorant of the things men could do to one another. I am sure he saw my weakness clearly. He befriended me and told me that he would protect me, that I would need a friend if I were going to survive. He took pleasure in control. Took pleasure in playing games in this way, in building up my trust, and then, through unspeakable acts of violence, destroying it. I will not speak the words. I was at the mercy of that man for too long.

  In the end, my only good fortune was that he was not among us for long. He had too much money, friends who would pay for his release as soon as a minimum time had been served. I do not mean to compare him to yo
ur father – the two men are not alike – but there was one aspect only that was familiar to me. He had no turn of anger, as your father does – his calmness was terrifying – but even in his chains he had an aura of power to him. A sense that the world would be as he willed it. And he willed the world to be a dark place: he manipulated others into suffering so that something in him might be satisfied.

  *

  It was not only the other prisoners. The guards, too, beat us, and because of the chains we could not defend ourselves.

  Sometimes they would unchain us and take us to another room, where we would be tortured. They held our arms behind our backs, pulling them into positions which were unbearable to hold and tying them tightly. My arms and back still ache, the muscles and tendons forced into forms they were not meant to take. For the remainder of my life there will be something about me that is misshapen. Sometimes they would hang us from our ankles and use a reed to cut into the soles of our feet. Or while we hung, they would take wires from a battery and apply them to our chests or our bellies, or our genitals, to see how we spasmed, to see how we twisted. To hear our groans, sounds wrung up from the deepest pits of our insides. I remember biting my tongue once, and the blood filling my mouth, pouring into my throat and nose so that I could not breathe, but even as I choked, the shocks still came and my nerves still writhed.

  Every instinct of the body is to recoil from pain, but they allowed us no escape. An awful sense of powerlessness grew steadily, as though I were inhaling a great breath of air and was unable to stop. The horror became overwhelming, and from some hidden place in my mind I felt a darkness, something huge and unnameable, begin to form.