In the Orchard, the Swallows

by Peter Hobbs

  Abbas sighs, and recites: ‘Learning makes a good man better, but an ill man worse.’ He looks at me. ‘It is a proverb,’ he explains. ‘Both sad and true.’

  Alifa’s own school has been closed since then, though Abbas is hopeful that it will reopen. He is away from the house often, talking with his friends and the village leaders, agitating for calm, for reason.

  Still, he is unhappy that I continue with my morning walks.

  ‘But what would such men want with me?’ I ask. ‘I have no money, nothing for them to take.’

  ‘They are looking for recruits.’

  ‘But I do not wish to join them.’

  He looks at me to see if I am serious. Sometimes he forgets that I know little of the world.

  ‘I do not think that would be a popular position with them,’ he says.

  He has made me careful, at least. As I walk I stop from time to time, no longer to gather my breath, but instead to watch ahead and behind for movement. I have not encountered anyone, save for the occasional goatherd, wandering with his animals through the high ground, or the passing of a lone truck, cheerfully painted and bejewelled as though for a wedding. One morning a man came towards me on a motorcycle, a simple, ancient machine, little more than a bicycle with a small engine attached. Three large boxes were stacked precariously behind him, held by rope. I stepped to the side of the road, but he did not even look at me, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the uneven road as the cycle putt-putted forwards, carrying him along at little more than walking pace. I do not know where he had come from, or where he was heading. So for now, at least, my walks continue. If the roads become unsafe for me, then how much more will they be for you, and then the purpose of my journeys will in any case fail.

  In the orchard the pomegranates hang ripely on the trees, their red skins darkening by the day, turning to crimsons and purples. They should have been picked by now. Every morning I arrive expecting the branches to be emptied, but still they are full. It is clear that the owner is neglectful of his crop. Perhaps it is simply that he does not know what he is doing, or perhaps he does not need the income, and the orchard was indeed merely a gift he did not want, a payment for some service rendered or some loyalty proven. It would make me terribly sad to think so, to see land that was tended for years with love given over to greed and waste. The fruit will begin to split if it is left for much longer. Soon, the touch of rain on its stretched skin will be enough to cause it to swell and open. A storm will devastate the crop.

  The Garden

  Today I sit with Alifa while she reads from her books. She has been missing school, and we have been fasting, too, which does not greatly improve her mood in the afternoons. But she has decided to expend her frustrated scholarly energies on me, and so we have ended up spending more time on my own reading and writing than on hers. Alifa is a far stricter teacher than her father. Abbas kindly allows me to make my own mistakes, and if in my own time I do not see them he will gently draw my attention towards them. But his daughter watches my pen intently, and pounces the instant the inevitable mistake is made, taking the pen from my hand and correcting it, then pointing, exasperated, at the new version on the page.

  ‘Ah yes,’ I say. ‘You are quite right. How clumsy of me.’

  She gives a brief nod of satisfaction and we continue, until the next mistake.

  Her stamina for this type of work is greater than mine, and my attention wanders long before hers has begun to. She persists with me for a while, until, perhaps deciding I am a hopeless case, she leans back from the book.

  ‘You won’t get any better if you don’t try.’

  I nod, faking a melancholy I do not feel. ‘It is such a shame,’ I say, ‘because you are a good teacher.’

  She wrinkles her nose in thought for a moment, as though to decide whether I am teasing her.

  ‘I think so too,’ she says, and she sounds so sure of it, so serious, that I cannot help but laugh. She starts at the sound – I doubt she has heard me laugh once in the months I have been here – and then looks hurt, and I have to be swift to mollify her.

  The truth is, I am simply grateful for her help. I have had so much to say to you, and had wondered for a long time how I might do so. In person, it would come in a rush. I would have too much to tell, and no way to begin. This way, I have not needed to tell you everything at once, but just one piece at a time, measured out in bites, as though you were eating a fruit. And if you do come to read these words, then you can be sure that the passages have been immeasurably smoothed, their mistakes excised, thanks to the close attentions of a child who is a significantly better writer than I will ever be.

  The Orchard

  Good morning, trees; good morning, wall. Hello, my ant friends. I do not know how many more days I will be able to come and meet you here.

  They are harvesting the fruit at last, though they are doing so carelessly. There are pomegranates broken underfoot. They were so ripe they might have split open as soon as they were touched, and then have been cast aside as worthless. For those that did not, it is still too late. If it is picked early, the fruit will store for months, its sweetness safe within the tough rind. But it has been left too long, and now the fruit will continue to ripen after it has been taken from the trees, so that much of it will be spoiled by the time it has reached the market stands. Perhaps the owners know this, perhaps they are ignorant. Perhaps they do not care.

  I wonder if I, too, have come too late. If you came here once before and satisfied your curiosity. If you came many years ago, and allowed yourself to put the past from your mind, and will never come again. It is possible, but I have come, all the same. I have always hoped.

  There are times when I think I would suffer all those years again, if you would only come.

  Soon I will have to leave. Abbas thinks it is time. I am not sure he will ever ask me to go, but he makes it clear that he fears for my safety. He has offered, indirectly, to purchase a bus ticket to Multan for me, and has hinted that if I need to go further than that he will be able to help again, that he has friends who will find papers for me.

  And I know he is right. Though I have not exhausted my friend’s hospitality – surely, I must have tested its limits – I have stayed far longer than I expected to, and far longer than I was entitled to. For one thing, I am no longer too sick to move on. The walk was easier this morning; my body hurt less and the air came smoothly to my lungs. I am not whole – I do not think I will ever be that again – but I am well. More than I believed was possible.

  I have been selfish, these last months. But it has been so pleasant to stay! I have had here the comfort and the company I had lacked for so long, and I have drawn out the days as much as I have been able to. Simply, I am afraid of the future, afraid of uncertainty. In the prison my days were meted out for me. I am unaccustomed to having choices, which seem to spread wider and wider, like many paths overlapping and opening into plains of fear. How much better it would be to stay here, to spend my mornings in the orchard, my days in the garden.

  Yet I know in my heart that I cannot. I must travel south, away from the mountains. I have to find my family, and I will have to find work. To rouse my courage I imagine Multan, summoning an image of the city waiting for me as though it were the one that Karim used to talk of, full of wonder and life, with cinemas, and ice-cream sellers running stalls at the roadside. I picture film stars walking the streets, a cheerful pickpocket dancing along at their heels.

  But I cannot leave yet. Not yet. Who knows where I will be next year – if I will be able to return? I count the days remaining for me at the orchard, one at a time. Insha’Allah I will come tomorrow, and then I will come the next day. After that, I do not know. All things are possible.

  The Garden

  The rains came yesterday, in the afternoon. All morning long the air felt heavy, and the breeze came sluggish and too warm from the south. The sky was a single cloud without any colour to it, almost invisible until it began to blacken. After I
had returned from the orchard I stood at the gate with Alifa, watching the lightning in the distance, listening to thunder which came dimly at first, but grew in power as it tumbled up the valley, and came finally to sound like the crack of an enormous whip or a switch in the air above us. We both jumped at the sound of it, and Alifa gave a stifled squeak of fear before retreating inside. It was an immense sound that seemed to completely fill the vast spaces of the sky. The valley darkened beneath the clouds and though the sight was beautiful I felt very small and powerless in the world. I was not far behind Alifa in returning inside.

  This morning I tried to reach the orchard again, but the downpour had been heavy on the mountain, and a torrent had swept away the road. I stood at the edge of the landslide, thinking to pick my way across it, but the slough was thick and muddy and still slowly flowed over the side of the road. I did not trust that I had the strength to cross it without getting stuck, and so I turned around and came back to sit in the garden.

  The storm will have destroyed the last of the fruit in the orchard. It is winter now; the season is over. If we are fortunate we might perhaps have a few last days of good weather after the storm is done, but nothing is certain.

  Abbas worked the morning in his study and came to sit with me as I finished preparing lunch. I tried again, as I had many months earlier, to show him how grateful I was. ‘I want to thank you for your hospitality. I will never forget it.’

  He smiled, and tilted his head to one side in recognition.

  We shook hands.

  ‘Alifa will miss you,’ he said. ‘Not that she will say so.’

  ‘She will find other poor students to bully. And no doubt they will be more attentive than I have been.’

  He nodded, amused, though the smile fell quickly, and his face was downcast.

  ‘Things will not be easy for her,’ he said.

  ‘But you’ll stay?’

  ‘As Allah wills it.’

  I try to understand his generosity. I have imagined myself in his position, owning a home, and taking in a sick man I had found in the street. Providing him with a bed, clothes and food, paying for his medication. And each time I fail. I am ashamed by it, but the truth is that I cannot see myself acting as he has acted. Perhaps it is the instinct of self-protection, learned from the prison, or perhaps only a childish selfishness I have not yet had the chance to outgrow. Either way, I must try to be like this man, as much as I am able. I must study him as I have studied his books, and I must try to learn the lessons.

  After we had eaten I helped Abbas tidy the garden, sweeping the paths while he cleared debris from the flower beds. And then I stayed a while to write there until the rain returned and drove me inside once more. The storm tonight has not been so violent as yesterday’s, but the drops are fat and thick in the air, and slap heavily on the floor as they land.

  Tomorrow, then, if the weather relents, and if the road is passable. One last day.

  The Orchard

  Saba, beloved, forgive me if you are tiring of this story. I have just one part of it left to tell. A part that is not my own, but which is about a friend I once knew. I knew her for only the shortest of times, many years ago. Perhaps you will object that I have been gone too long, that I could know nothing of her now. Well, it is true, I know almost nothing. She is a stranger, no longer the girl she once was, and she has lived a life that has taken her far from me. I know neither what she has encountered nor how it may have changed her, know nothing about the circumstances of her life.

  All things are possible. If the shame of what is said to have happened to her long ago did not ruin her, then she may live far from here, she may be married and have children who are as bright-eyed and quick-witted as their mother. She may love her husband, she may be happy. I have hoped only for her happiness. You must not imagine that I would wish to take it from her. I know that she will not, cannot possibly, have held on to the thought of me in the same way I have held on to that of her.

  But I believe that she still remembers this place, that she thinks of it more often than she allows herself to admit. She remembers how beautiful the trees are in the early morning, how swift the birds that dart between them. And she remembers with something close to sadness the boy she once knew there, even though she does not know what became of him, even though she may suppose he is dead.

  I believe, too, that there will be days when the ache of memory needs to be soothed inside her, when it will wake her early, before the dawn speaks into her room. From time to time – perhaps when the pomegranates are in season and appearing in the market – the ache will come so powerfully that she will rise and dress, and in the near-dark will make her way from the house, muttering, if she needs to, excuses of work to be done or relatives to be visited.

  If it is not a long way, she will travel to the town she grew up in, and to the valley above it. In the rose dawn light she will climb the road, the mountains glorious in their paleness. They will surround her and protect her; their familiar weight will be a comfort at her side. On the mountain air she will smell traces of wild jasmine.

  She will walk until she comes to places she once knew well, and when she has reached them she will make her way finally to an old orchard, where the last of the season’s fruit clings, rotten, to the trees. The rest has been picked, though late, too late. As the sun’s light begins to step down from its lofty peaks she will find her way to a particular tree, against the roots of which she once slept. And there she will pause, the solitude of her morning walk broken. Beneath the tree a man will be sitting, in the exact place she herself had planned to sit.

  She will be cautious of him, perhaps a little afraid, but the man will not rise, nor reproach her for being there alone. He will seem not to notice her at all, though his position affords him an excellent view over the path, and he must have seen her approaching from a long way back. He will sit with his shawl wrapped around him, his head bent over the notebook he has brought with him, a pen swimming swiftly among its last pages.

  She will watch him for a minute, until something in his nature or aspect decides for her that he is harmless – perhaps she will notice how the swallows are undisturbed by his presence. Her confidence will return, and she will bow her head and greet him, As-salaam alaykum, intending to ask perhaps about the orchard, about the family it once belonged to. For a long moment he will not reply, as though he has not heard. The air will be still. His pen will continue to slide along the paper. Eventually, it will stop, with the assurance of a story finally closed, and his hands will rest. He will raise his face to her, and she will see above his beard a familiar angle to his cheeks, take in the precise colour of his eyes. In a sudden second she will know him, and the words she was preparing will slip from her mind.

  For a moment, you will each wonder if what you are seeing is real. And then he will look you in the eyes and smile. He will greet you as though you had been apart only a day.

  ‘My swallow,’ he will say. ‘I was just waiting for you.’

  His hands will wrap a long string around his notebook to bind it. He will stand, and carefully, like a child offering a piece of fruit, he will hold out the book to you.

  ‘Here,’ he will say. ‘Take this. It is for you. It is finished.’

  About the Author

  Peter Hobbs grew up in Cornwall and Yorkshire, and lives in Montreal. His debut novel, The Short Day Dying, was published by Faber in 2005. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and won a Betty Trask Prize. A collection of stories, I Could Ride All Day In My Cool Blue Train, was published by Faber in 2006.

  By the Same Author

  The Short Day Dying

  I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train

  Copyright © 2012 Peter Hobbs

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  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Faber and Faber.

  This edition published in 2012 by

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  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Hobbs, Peter, 1973– In the orchard, the swallows / Peter Hobbs.

  eISBN 978-1-77089-211-8

  I. Title.

  PR6108.O235I63 2012 823’.924 C2011-908580-1

  Cover design: Faber and Faber

  Cover illustration: Jessie Forde

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.