The Pathless Sky

by Chaitali Sen

  “I’m glad you found a friend.”

  “I want to see you, Mariam.” He hoped he sounded more like himself. “Are you still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I’m going to marry you.”

  “John, stop.”

  “I love you, Mariam. I do. When the time is right I’m going to come and marry you.”

  She laughed. “When will that be? When I’m eighty?”

  He could see Mariam as an old lady, frail and beautiful with her gray hair in a bun. “When we’re eighty we’ll live by the sea,” he said. “Then we’ll get into a little boat and float away.”

  “You’re drunk,” she said.

  Someone called out that the pub was closing. “I have to go, Mariam.”

  “All right. Will you remember any of this tomorrow?”

  He thought she was being funny. “Why wouldn’t I?” The bartender told him he’d owe more money if he didn’t hang up. “I have to go now. I have to go.”

  After he hung up he realized she hadn’t said goodbye. Neither had he, for that matter. He wanted to call her back, but the bartender had begun tossing stragglers out by their collars. John sidestepped him and ran out the door.

  At the end of the street, he found Sherod, Flaco and Gordo, each as drunk as the other, and they celebrated heartily at their reunion. Eventually their conversation turned to making their way back. The plan was for Sherod to drop Flaco and Gordo back at their posts, then go back to the shack and pack for his departure. They almost made it, but in the headlights, as they approached the watchtower, they saw a Military Police truck parked on the roadside. “Shit, shit,” they said. “We should run. We should keep driving.”

  “Let me do the talking,” Sherod said.

  The MP came up to their jeep, staring into the backseat at Flaco and Gordo, who were supposed to be on duty. “Can you two goatfuckers tell me why these posts are abandoned?”

  “It’s my fault,” Sherod said. “It’s my last night. Really my service ended as of midnight, but I’m not shipping out until the morning.”

  “Did you order these men to leave their posts?”

  “No, no,” they all objected. “It wasn’t like that.”

  They had to exit the jeep and get on their knees,. Their wrists and ankles were shackled and the four of them were thrown into the back of the MP truck. As they sobered up they each shared stories of their night, what they could remember of it.

  Finally, Sherod said, “I’m sorry. This is all my fault.”

  They all balked. Gordo said, “It was worth it, for me.”

  “I’ll get you out of this,” Sherod promised as he was pulled off the truck. By then they were all sober, and Flaco was crying.

  “Stop crying,” Gordo said. “Do you know what they’ll do to you if you cry?”

  As far as John knew, they were all put in the hole for a week of solitary confinement, but since he never saw any of them again he couldn’t be sure. After his solitary, he was given an extra three weeks of service penalty and transferred to a new post. John didn’t know where he was being sent. He was put in the back of a transport jeep that traveled steadily for about two hours. He was convinced again that he was heading for Northern Sulat, but he was let off in front of some barracks marked with a sign that said Menud Fort, and John suddenly wished he’d been sent to Sulat. Menud Fort was a military prison, another one of the assignments all of the reserves had feared. The only reason to be there was to learn advanced interrogation methods. To become a torturer.

  He was lucky, then, to only be given transport duty, driving detainees from various points to the facility. He never saw the inside of the prison and never had to handle the prisoners himself. All he did was drive, let the checkpoint guards open the back of the truck, and drive away. He never stayed to watch the struggle behind the prison gates. There was always a struggle. To get a detainee behind the gate, he either had to be outnumbered or unconscious.

  He tried to write to Mariam as soon as he was transferred, but the only thing he could think to write about was the prison, the monster in the middle of the desert, and the men he sacrificed to it.

  * * *

  The letter she wrote to the pub came back to her unopened. She’d written it on a single sheet of onionskin paper, late at night with her impulses firing, her handwriting so small it was perhaps not even readable. By the end it was overflowing with lovesick entreaties. Every day I think only of you and wait and wait and wait.

  When the letter came back, she called his house in Alexandria. His mother answered. Not knowing what to say, Mariam asked if John was home, and of course his mother said, “He’s finishing his service. He won’t be home until summer.”

  “And he’s all right?” Mariam asked.

  “He’s doing fine. Who is this?”

  “It’s Mariam.”

  “Mariam?”

  “Yes.”

  “A friend from school?”

  “Yes, from school.”

  “Call back in the summer. You can speak to him then. Or I can tell him you rang. He calls on Sundays.” She didn’t wait to hear what Mariam wanted before she hung up.

  At least he was all right, she told herself. But in her heart she knew what was happening. She knew that she was being forgotten. She was thankful to be so busy, though sometimes at night she couldn’t sleep and she wanted to know that her whole life would not be like this. That John, or someone else she could love, would help her sleep.

  One morning, Mariam and her mother were drinking coffee before the sun came up, as had become their private ritual. Mariam was silent that morning, preoccupied with a transcript of testimonials about a bombing in the south, in Belarive where her mother had grown up, in which a school with sixty-three children inside was leveled to the ground. Forty of the children died, many were maimed, some escaped with no injuries, and three of them, mysteriously, were never found. Most of the testimony dealt with the intent, whether the bombing was accidental or part of a military strategy targeting civilians. The commanders of the operation said they’d received deliberately misleading intelligence that the building no longer operated as a school but as a rebel base. They swore under oath that the rebels knew the attack was coming and did nothing, that they had sacrificed their own children for their immoral crusade. Mariam wanted to ask her mother about the school. She would have been in Germany already but she must have known some of the children’s families. She must have heard about the bombing from her family that was left behind. Mariam wanted to talk about it, to get it off her mind, but she had signed an oath and didn’t want to betray it, even to her mother, who would not have told anyone of importance.

  Mariam broke her silence. “Do you know what I’ve been thinking about lately? Our trip to Belarive when I was little.”

  Mama smiled. “How can you remember that?”

  Mariam did remember it clearly, even the train ride. For a long time there was nothing but fields of grass and wheat, then hills and streams, made by God, her mother said, unlike the canal, which men had built. They had seen storm clouds in the distance and Mariam knew there would be rain before the rain came down, and this delighted her, the possibility of knowing what would come before it happened. She and Mama curled up on the cot and slept through the downpour and then woke up at Kasbah Station, to the melodic call of the fajr prayer. It came over a loudspeaker from the mosque near the station, and Mama told her about the minarets, the tall towers from which the imams would call out the prayers in the olden days. The platform of Kasbah Station filled with men who kneeled and bowed in unison. Later that morning, they pulled into Belarive, still in ruins ten years after the war, the ground strewn with rubble that had tumbled from the now skeletal buildings. But Mariam had not seen destruction. She saw a happy lot of children who had climbed a mountain of rubble. They were at the summit, jumping up and down and waving to the t
rain, and Mariam had waved back, wanting nothing more than to join those children on that mountain. Now she wondered if that had been the remains of the school.

  “I should never have taken you there,” Mama said. “I wanted to see my family, but everyone had changed. It seemed we could never understand each other again, the ones who lived through the war and the ones who didn’t. The only thing that mattered was that I had left.”

  “That wasn’t up to you. They couldn’t have blamed you for it.”

  “Maybe they didn’t. But nothing was as I remembered it. It was a difficult time for me, Mariam. I thought it would help me to go home.” Mama shook her head. “It didn’t help at all.”

  Mariam remembered that her father had not accompanied them. It was Mariam and Mama alone, and they stayed in a large house run by her great-uncle, her grandmother’s brother, a house where many people lived, though none of them children Mariam’s age. The house was so large she sometimes lost her mother in it. She would walk through the house crying until Mama was found. In her memory the house was a cement box, bare and cold, with little furniture and everyone sitting in chairs pushed against the walls, as if the rooms had been cleared for a party that never began. Her mother was sad, her smile artificial and discomfiting, and Mariam had been afraid of being left there forever. It was probably only a week before they took the train home to an empty house.

  “It must be better now,” Mariam said. “We should go back. I’d like to meet my family again now that I’m older.” Her uncle died some years ago but her mother still kept in touch with her cousins. Sometimes Mariam heard her laughing on the phone with one of them.

  Mama didn’t jump at the idea. “Go and get ready,” she said. “You’ll be late for work.”

  As Mariam was getting ready in her room, she looked up and saw Mama standing at her door. She was clutching a framed photograph. “If you have a few minutes, there’s something I want to show you.”

  “I have time,” Mariam said.

  Mama entered cautiously and sat down on the bed, asking Mariam to come and sit next to her. She showed her what she had carried in. It was her grandparents’ wedding picture, which had always been in its frame atop a tall bureau in her parents’ old bedroom next door, the room they abandoned after her father’s stroke.

  “Do you remember this photo?”

  “Yes,” Mariam said, but she had never looked at it this closely. Her grandmother was beautiful, wearing a white dress with a high neck and long sleeves, her hair covered by a lace veil, and her grandfather was equally handsome. She could just make out the traditional embroidery of his white wedding shirt. Their expressions were somber in the way of all old photographs but there was some confidence, some brightness in their eyes. It was still a joyous photograph, as if they were assured of their happiness and the happiness of their children.

  “This is your grandmother. She wore hijab,” Mama reminded her. “Do you remember one time I showed you a picture and you asked if she was a nun?”

  Mariam did remember. She remembered how it had made her mother laugh, just like she was laughing now. It was a perfectly reasonable question at the time. No one in English Canal wore hijab, and she had only seen nuns cover their hair. She knew her grandmother gave it up in Germany, maybe out of fear or shame. She knew a fair bit about her grandmother, come to think of it, little things Mama had told her over the years. She knew her grandmother was very intelligent, though not highly educated. She was a lover of card games, and ruthlessly competitive at them. It was the only time she raised her voice, playing card games. And Mariam knew some of her dishes, which Mama struggled to replicate. She knew she died shortly after Mama’s own wedding.

  “This is your grandfather, Suleiman Momin,” Mama said, pointing to him. She paused and took a long breath. When she spoke again her voice was airy and weak. “He died when I was seventeen. We hadn’t been in Germany a year. He hanged himself in the middle of the night.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mama. I didn’t know.” This had been her mother’s war, and she had lived it for a long time.

  Her mother clasped her hand. “These last few weeks, I see a change in you, Mariam. You’re so grown up all of a sudden. I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time, but I never knew the right time.”

  Mariam smiled. “This is the right time, Mama. I’m glad you told me.”

  “To tell you the truth, I never wanted to come back here. Your father wanted it. He said he wanted to restore order and beauty to his true home.”

  “Beautiful infrastructure,” Mariam said.

  “Yes,” her mother said, surprised to hear Mariam repeat her father’s phrase. “I didn’t agree to come for him. It was for my own father. If he were alive it would have meant so much to him, to know it was possible to come back. But coming back doesn’t heal anything, Mariam. It causes new wounds.”

  “You were a good daughter,” Mariam said, but Suleiman Momin had relinquished his right to a dutiful daughter. Therefore, Mama had done it thanklessly, on behalf of the dead.

  One day, at work in the document room, she saw her grandfather’s name as a subject heading in the index of a newspaper that was no longer printed—Momin, Suleiman—and it looked so uncanny to her, as if he had been waiting for her to discover him there. She looked up each reference and printed a small collection of microfiche articles, which she arranged in chronological order to piece together a frame of a narrative. The early articles were about his work as a lawyer. He had argued an important case that had moved through the provincial high courts, attempting to overturn a ban on the niqab, the veil some Muslim women wore to cover their faces in public. Her grandfather said the ban would further segregate the province into Catholic and Muslim ghettos, setting neighbors who had lived side by side for years against each other. Another set of articles was about his involvement in the New Sulat Democratic Party, the NSDP, a party of social democrats whose chairman was Peter Moses, a Catholic. There was a photograph of her grandfather and Peter Moses talking to each other at a podium. According to the caption, Peter Moses was about to deliver a speech to a crowd of ten thousand on the occasion of the prime minister’s visit. In his speech he compared the prime minister to other foreign interlopers, the English, the French, the Ottomans, and others even before them who had tried and failed to create permanent outposts in Sulat. In the early days of the war, Peter Moses was arrested and killed in military custody. After the death of Peter Moses, the leadership of the party collapsed quickly.

  She tried to tell her mother what she’d discovered, thinking how little her mother at sixteen must have understood the circumstances of their exile. Here was an explanation. Her grandfather would have certainly been arrested and probably executed if they had stayed. But her mother showed little interest. She said her father was indeed an important man. He was always going off to meetings and demonstrations. There were always a lot of men passing through their home. She told Mariam that she had perfectly understood, even at sixteen, their reasons for leaving.

  * * *

  On Sunday mornings, John did the transport runs by himself. He got to sit by his truck with his coffee and a newspaper and watch the sunrise. He was almost finished with his military service, almost home, and he decided before he did anything else he would go and see Mariam.

  He couldn’t wait to see her now. These were his Sunday mornings. Everything was clearer, and easily decided. It was on one of those Sundays, the start of his last month of service, that he was called to a checkpoint on the hospital road.

  “How many?” he asked.

  There was only one to be transported. As he drove up to the checkpoint, one of the guards ran toward him, flagging him down and stopping him before the gate.

  “We’ll bring the prisoner here,” he said.

  The protocol was to drive all the way up to the detention area. There was too much that could go wrong while transferring detainees on foot.
“Where is he?” John asked, squinting at the road in front of him. He saw the other guard standing by a car several feet in front of the checkpoint. “I need to pull up,” he said, and he kept driving.

  As soon as he stopped, the guard who’d been chasing him opened the back of the truck. He’d never seen them in such a hurry to load up. He watched the two guards lift the prisoner, whose face was covered with blood, and John was so intent on watching them he almost didn’t see that the car up ahead was occupied. John got out of the truck and approached the car. He saw the unmoving figure of a woman in the front passenger seat and slowed down. The guards had loaded up the prisoner and were calling to him to come back. John already knew the woman was dead, there was nothing more to be done, but he kept going and stopped by the side of the car. He stared into the backseat. There was a little girl, dressed in a pretty frock, with her chest shot open.

  In a daze John opened the back door and put his fingers on her wrist. Next to her tiny hand, his fingers were monstrously large, engorged. He felt around on both wrists, unable to find a pulse, but he couldn’t say for certain she wasn’t alive. Her face held all the serenity of a sleeping child. Her fingernails were painted with bright pink nail polish.

  The guards were still yelling at him to come back. John looked in the front seat, at the woman he’d seen from a distance. Now he saw that she was pregnant, far along judging from her size. They had fired into her abdomen. He wondered if she had been in labor.

  One of the guards was behind him now. “What the hell happened here?” John asked him. This guard, a kid John had seen every day for the last three months, looked no different today than he did yesterday. He had an unmemorable face with inexpressive eyes, still, even now.

  “They’re waiting for you,” he said. “Don’t worry about this. Someone’s coming.”

  “Who’s coming?”

  “We went through the proper channels. Someone’s coming.”