by George Foy
PC was going to tell her he was leaving, now, but once he looked at her eyes he could not pull his own away. Her pupils had all the tones of expensive wood and precious metals mixed at night. They were dark as smoke and clear as the moon above this place. He took a breath to refuse, to deny what those eyes were asking, and could not speak.
All of a sudden, to deny what Noor wanted of them seemed tantamount to denying the part of him that made him worthy of loving, and being loved by, Noor or someone like her.
PC was not falling in love with Noor. She was not the type he sought. He had coined a term once for the infatuation of an instant – an affaire de fruit-fly, he called it, after the short life span of drosophilae – and in that short instant he had an affaire de fruit-fly with Noor’s eyes; and he cleared his throat and found himself grunting, ‘I guess we could, uh, do something, as long as there’s no fluids—’
‘Good,’ Noor interrupted. She turned, took off her shawl, put on a white coat, and started working without further delay. She got Ela and PC to boil water and take temperatures. She asked the pilot to clean up the men who were too sick to take care of themselves, while she took care of the women. The pilot, suddenly paying more attention to PC’s warnings, touched the men gingerly at first, keeping towels between himself and their hot bodies. After a while, though, the olfactory centers grew numb to the stench, and despite his efforts his hands were soon splattered with human secretions. After half an hour he had to remind himself to wash off between patients.
Two babies and one old man died in the first hour they were there. PC and the pilot wrapped the dead in some of the dirtier linens and laid them in the courtyard to freeze. Ela – already tired from the trip and dizzy from the fumes of ether, the only medicine the hospital seemed to possess in quantity – tried to take a six-year-old’s temperature and found the child had stopped breathing so long ago he was cold. She went into an empty supply closet and hyperventilated to keep down the sudden rush of nausea.
PC was not immune to the initial stomach-level block that came from dealing with the deaths and excretions of others. His stomach too reeled from the effects of these implications of common weakness.
Despite his earlier reluctance, however, and in a surprisingly short space of time, he began to get the hang of taking care of sick people whose language he could not understand. There was no time to wonder why he was doing this; the urgency was such that he completed each task and went on to the next without questioning. Maybe this was the downstream effect of being a doctor’s son. He communicated with hand signs and a firm sense that this had to be done. Within twenty minutes he felt as if he’d been mopping mucus from nostrils and cleaning the bottoms of sick babies for months. His hands absorbed the lesson faster than the mind could keep up with them.
Ela, peering out of her closet as the spasms of revulsion died away, focused on PC’s hands as they gestured and moved and swabbed.
The embarrassment and shame of her own inability to help got lost in fascination. For the first time she noticed how strong and sure his gestures could be, how long and expressive his fingers, how sensuous the hairs on the back of his hands. She felt the reaction come, soaking, violent, totally unanticipated. She found she wanted to make love with PC the way kids stuck in a gray classroom wanted to go out that window among those bursting maples and roll in the sunshine on the first warm day of spring.
She saw the pilot pull a stretcher through the cacophony of noises and smells. He came through again, looking for her, and in the confluence of desire and emotion she could read her body like a thermometer and know, by the extent and frequency of loosenings, exactly how much of this new and powerful current of emotion came from knowing the pilot, and how much came from the changes that being with the pilot entailed.
Jeeps ground through the entrance gates, full of blood-soaked clothes with limbs angled anyhow inside. A bomb had gone off in the market of Garam Chasma, twenty miles up the valley.
Nassir took five of the most critical and lined them up on the tin counters. The hospital, which had seemed crowded to the utmost with the sick and dying, with their noises and smells, somehow swelled to accept the added inflow.
In her closet, Ela felt her stomach rebel again. She went to find the pilot and asked him to take her back to the fort. He hesitated, then, remembering the Dacoits, agreed – telling himself, and believing it mostly, that he would return later.
*
In the madness after the bomb victims came, Rocketman and Noor Zayid Shah emptied pans of blood, changed linens, moved cots and blankets from room to room. They said little to each other, just touched gazes when they could. It seemed to Rocketman that among all the entropy of pain they had each found a basic proposition of trust. The proposition was so simple, so flagrant even, that it offered no angle to attack it from, or texture to grip onto. They simply looked at each other, and that was sufficient for each passing moment.
At four that morning he helped her back to the fort. No bandits were visible, but the road was slippery and she was drained of strength. He held her around the waist to support her.
She almost fell a couple of times, and he lifted her easily. She felt as light as a tiny bird to him, and to carry all her weight gave him an overwhelming sense of joy and value. If someone had come up to him in that instant and made him emperor of all China he would not have felt more important. The second time she slipped he did not put her down. She let herself be carried, let her head fall back so she could see the sky.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘The stars are bright again, now the moon is down.’
‘I think I care for you very much,’ he told her.
‘Even if you do,’ she said, ‘it is no use. In this country, I belong to my husband. And in this valley, to belong to Zayid Shah is to belong to God.’
‘Maybe I’ll get religion,’ Rocketman said.
‘Religion isn’t enough,’ she replied. ‘That is one thing you learn, in Chitral, in the winter. Religion isn’t enough.’
But with Noor in his arms, Rocketman was ruler of the most valuable place in the world, and he did not allow himself to be damped down. Nor did he pay as much attention to the road behind as he usually did. So he did not notice the dark shape that hugged the black shop stalls on the street that led to the fort, keeping pace exactly with the tall man and his burden.
*
The pilot woke up with the dawn, and the muezzin howling outside his window, and the jackals, ever responsive, barking back from the hills.
Through his window he saw clouds with saffron tops curdling around the peaks of Tirich Mir. Vultures rode the updrafts by the hospital. It was cold in the room, and Ela had stolen most of the rough blankets. He dressed quickly and went outside.
It was not hard to find the Daftar Daud Khan. The pilot went into a chai house on the main drag and drank sweet brown tea with the ritual nan. Men gathered around the open shop to watch the westerner. They all wore turbans and sandals, long shirts and baggy pants. They were wrapped in earth-colored blankets for warmth. All wore beards, and carried Chinese-made AK-47s, and most of them had one or two sidearms buckled around waist and chest for added comfort.
This was the purest form of smuggler, the pilot remembered, from the Smuggler’s Bible – the ones who smuggled because they simply did not recognize borders, or nation-states.
When he asked them how to find the Daftar Daud Khan, all started talking at once. A couple of men were merchants and knew a little English. ‘Daftar’ meant place of business, an office. Daud Khan’s daftar was outside town, across the river, they said. They dragged a seven-year-old boy out of nowhere and volunteered him as a guide.
The boy led the pilot through refugee camps, and dead cornfields, and across a beautifully engineered, stone-anchored suspension bridge built by the British Army in 1920. Snow rattled sporadically, driven from various quadrants by a mountain-crazed wind.
They marched for an hour and a half. Toward the end the pilot was dragging. The road here was paved in stone, a
ncient worn cobbles of a type no one had made in five hundred years, but they were mostly covered in slush and his boots did not grip, and anyway he had not got enough sleep, what with the late night at the hospital, and Ela. She had left the hospital with some great need in her eyes, and had come into his room at one in the morning to slake it on his body. Her orgasm had been powerful, shuddering, silent. She had not looked at him as she came. He had lain confused and awake till well past three.
Eventually the pilot and his guide reached a long low building built of stone and wood, with watchtowers set on the corners. Armed men squatted at the gates. Horses and mules stood tethered on every side. To the north, men on horseback were charging each other across a field, yelling wildly. One of the riders tackled another rider, clawing at a round object held underneath the first rider’s elbow. His horse fell, he fell, the round thing fell and rolled on the packed mud-snow. The round thing had hair, a short nose, and brown frazzled twine where the neck once had been. The pilot looked away. The kid laughed, and pointed at the head.
‘Dushman,’ he said happily. ‘Tshuravi.’
A Russian.
The courtyard of the daftar was filled with crates of ammunition and truck tires. Cases of vodka and pieces of ore sewn in canvas lay on the sides, half shrouded behind burlap screens. In an office under the tower, two large men with very long beards sat at a desk writing up columns of figures with cheap Chinese fountain pens. The man with the longest beard was Daud Khan.
Daud Khan was very serious. He sat quite still and let his companion do the communicating.
Daud Khan’s colleague was called Abd el Haq. He had a good laugh. It shook his large belly and made his cheeks quiver. He used it frequently because he knew no English and laughter seemed to him the only sensible means of communication. His eyes were very dark and liquid. They gave off sparkles whenever the pilot mentioned the name ‘Hawkley.’
‘Hawkley, acha, Hawkley,’ Abd el Haq would reply, nodding wisely, shrugging, pointing up in the air, all at the same time. Then he’d go off in a gale of laughter again. ‘Achaaa, Hawkley,’ and Daud Khan would nod, seriously, and add another figure to the column.
After thirty minutes of this they found a Kabuli who spoke a few words of Lingua.
‘Hawkley, long before time,’ he told the pilot, making flying gestures. ‘Him come, him andalay, summertime, acha.’
A Pashtun came in with pots of tea and bowls of goat stew that you ate by scooping it up with nan. Abd el Haq and Daud Khan squatted on the mounded Shiraz in the room’s center and slurped at the food. An ozone shower passed overhead, whipping snowflakes through the wooden shutters. The stew was good but too greasy. The pilot finished his bowl because that was what courtesy demanded among tribes such as these.
His spirits hung around his ankles as he trudged back into town. His stomach was still a little smarmy as a result of the gore in the hospital, and from watching the Russian soldier’s head being used as a polo ball, and on top of that, the goat grease. The ozone shower had disappeared; standard cumulus piled up heavily against the peaks. A cold wind had steadied out of the south, and it numbed his face. The hotel owner bounced down the track in his jeep and gave him a lift back. Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs sang ‘Woolly Boolly’ on the cassette player.
So this was the end of the trail, the pilot thought. Defeat washed over his brain in a tide of mental pus, and gray chemicals. The quest had seemed so pure while movement gave it meaning. Now it had petered out to nothing, and its basic uselessness was revealed, like a broken monument on a stone plain, all worshippers dead. The men who guarded the borders had won, would always win in the end; as inertia overcame movement, as fossils outlived the quick worm that once squirmed in their shell, as death waited out life.
Some small rebellion must have still been alive in the pilot’s gut, however, for once back in town he found a gems trader who was happy to swap a kilo of the purest blue Panjshiri lapis lazuli for the six high-power Czech night-vision binoculars the pilot had smuggled in from Breslau.
When he got back to the fort the pilot found Rocketman lurking in the blue snow between stripped aspens and battlements. He beckoned the pilot to one side, pulled him into the shadow of an earthen barbican, out of sight of the guard posts.
Rocketman looked sick, the pilot thought. His mouth hung open in a Punch-and-Judy mask of despair. His hands clasped and unclasped repeatedly. He lit a cigarette from the butt of the last.
‘She’s gone,’ he told the pilot without preamble.
‘Who?’
‘Noor. Zayid Shah’s wife.’
‘What do you mean, she’s gone? I don’t understand.’
‘I can’t find her. She’s not at the hospital. She wasn’t here for breakfast, or lunch. And Zayid Shah just smiles. Aaaaah – that man is a monster. He’s done something with her, I know.’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ the pilot told him, though a small flutter of nerves contradicted the words inside himself. ‘Have you asked him?’
‘I told you – he just smiles! I asked him maybe three – four times already.’
‘Calm down,’ the pilot said. ‘She’s bound to be somewhere.’
‘It’s a military dictatorship,’ Rocketman moaned. ‘It’s an Islamic military junta. They can do what they want with her.’
‘Why would they want to do anything with her?’
‘Because,’ Rocketman said, torturing his fingers into positions they were not meant to assume. ‘Because we have this thing. Her and me. I don’t know. I can’t say. We didn’t sleep together, ya know, we didn’t even kiss or anything! Aaaah – but we have this thing, when I look at her; when we change bedpans together. I can’t explain what it is, but it’s there. We know it – and Zayid Shah knows it, too. Christ, Joe,’ Rocketman continued desperately, ‘why did I ever leave Bellevue?’
‘Don’t think like that,’ the pilot reassured him, ‘we’ll find her.’
But they did not find Noor Zayid Shah.
*
Dinner that night was very quiet, in terms of voice and volume; but the room shrieked with tied-down tensions. The emptiness of Noor’s habitual seat was as loud in their minds as a bass drum. A huge fire roared and snapped to itself at one end of the hall. Zayid Shah sat like a column of carved stone, tapping brittlely at the laptop, shifting pieces on his Gō board to match the new moves his program prompted, eating nothing.
Even the engineers said little. The chinless one played with a rupee piece, flipping it constantly from knuckle to knuckle. Rocketman sat rigid in his place, and did not eat anything either – just sucked on cigarettes and looked at the district commissioner with an expression that could cut oak.
The wind, clawing its way through leaky casements, whistled among them in drafts and currents, persistently blowing out the oil lamps so they sat half the time in smoke and darkness, and the other half in a flickering kind of yellow gloom.
Ela was silent and calm.
PC was at the hospital.
He walked in halfway through the lamb stew, in clothes that stank of ether. He had worked with Dr Nassir all afternoon. He sat down next to Ela and the pilot, and talked quietly as they ate.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he said. ‘I’m not gonna leave. I’m gonna stay here for a while. I’ll sleep at the hospital.’
PC so far had slept two hours total, and there were magenta half-moons under his eyes, but the eyes themselves were bright, and his movements quick, and he spoke with more spring in his words than any of them.
‘You better clear it with Zayid Shah.’
‘I already did.’ He glanced at the head of the table where the district commissioner sat alone with his war game.
‘You could be here a long time,’ the pilot warned. ‘You remember what Jamal said; the snows’ll cut off the pass any day now.’
‘I’m so sick of nan,’ one of the American engineers commented quietly, ‘I could scream.’
‘And you could die from too much nan,’ the pilot f
inished, looking at the engineer.
‘I don’t care.’ PC leaned forward. ‘I’m just getting this amazing feeling. From working at the hospital. I mean, it just makes me feel so awesome! I’m totally into it.’ He tore off a chunk of bread from Ela’s plate and chewed it quickly.
‘Emptying bedpans,’ Ela said neutrally, watching PC’s hands. ‘Sticking thermometers up people’s assholes.’
‘But it matters,’ PC said, ‘don’t you see? What I do matters. I save lives! Maybe not directly, but what I do helps. Like, I’m useful. I’m needed.’ He took another bite of bread and repeated in a quieter tone, ‘I’m needed. I’ve never really been needed, before.’
‘It always affects ’em this way. I’ve seen it other places.’ The pilot turned to Ela. He pulled the dark glasses from his jacket pocket, put them on like bifocals. Affecting a Marin County sort of accent he said; ‘Classic capitalist bourgeois individualist complex, man. Based on guilt, nicht wahr? The guilt of America, for being so rich, for living off the sweat and blood of the world’s oppressed.’
‘It’s not like that,’ PC interrupted.
‘Please, no more monologues,’ Ela pleaded. ‘Between you and Rocketman—’
The pilot ignored them both. Because of the fire it was very hot in the dining hall and somehow the heat had sapped his tolerance.
‘You work in the Peace Corps for eighteen months, you get your hands dirty, you get dysentery from the water – then you come home, and figure you’ve paid your dues, and you can tell your exotic tales for—’
‘What’s the matter with you?’ PC hissed at him. His eyes were so narrow they seemed to hiss as well. His mouth was still full of bread. He spat crumbs as he talked. ‘Sure, maybe all of that’s true. But what difference does it make?’
‘PC’s right,’ Ela said.
The pilot leaned back in his seat and observed PC through the sunglasses, as if meeting him for the first time. He picked up a napkin and wiped his brow. He shouldn’t give PC a hard time, he thought. It wasn’t PC that had got him upset.
‘I know,’ the pilot agreed, finally. ‘I just wanted to make sure he knows; because two weeks from now, when the novelty’s worn off and all the passes are blocked – well, PC, you just better have your motivations straight, ’cause by then it’ll be too late to change your mind.’