Текст книги "A God in Every Stone"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Now there were nights she dreamed different dreams and woke up with a longing even more unbearable than dread.

Private Andrews, twenty-one, who died of wounds; Private Smith, eighteen, who died of septic shock; Corporal Grimes, thirty-three, who died of pneumonia. The one with the bow-lips, recovering well, who never woke up and no one knew why. The one who called her ‘Queen of Sheba’, and didn’t live long enough to explain it. The one – sandy-haired, blue-eyed, the inexplicable scent of apple on his breath – who clutched her hand and asked her to sit with him, which she said she couldn’t do because it was against hospital rules, even though she knew he was very near the end and everyone understood when exceptions were permitted.

He was the one from whom she couldn’t recover.

She stood in the shadow of the red-brick hospital building, shaking and shaking. It wouldn’t stop. Matron told her to pull herself together; the doctor slapped her sharply across the face; Mary put her arms around her and sang a lullaby.

– Send her home, she heard Matron say. She has a few leave days due. After that, she’ll be right as rain.

Her bed felt unfamiliar, the colourful motifs of the wallpaper hurt her eyes. Her parents’ voices were raised outside her door, words coming through which made no sense. The shaking had stopped, outwardly, but her mind couldn’t hold a thought for any length of time without splintering apart. She took a deep breath, thought of a cliff above the sea, the taste of figs on her tongue, a man’s index finger touching the jut of her wrist, the sea so blue she thought it might drive her mad though she understood nothing of madness then. She closed her eyes, and slept without dreaming.

– So, your father thinks you’re ready to go back?

Mrs Spencer bent to examine a half-opened bud in Regent’s Park Rose Garden, flicking an insect away from the petals.

– Papa knows best, said Viv, wondering why her mother had insisted that they take a walk together when the swift summer shower ended and a rainbow looped across the sky. There was a sound remarkably close to a snort, before Mrs Spencer straightened and looked at her daughter.

– Are you to spend the rest of your life making up for my womb’s insistence on killing his sons?

Viv scuffed her shoe in the rain-damp grass, and didn’t know what to say to that, the unmentioned topic of their lives.

– There’s a war on. We all have a duty.

– Oh yes, we certainly do. How quickly everything that was inconceivable for a woman has become her duty. Isn’t it miraculous that competence has sprung up in us in the exact shape of men’s needs?

Viv looked around anxiously, hoping none of the other women or the wounded serviceman out for an evening stroll could hear. It had been the most welcome of surprises to find Mama all consideration when Mary half-carried Viv into the house two days earlier, but she had gone right back to being the difficult Mrs Spencer now that Viv was up on her feet and feeling foolish about her behaviour, which her father assured her was down to nothing but exhaustion. Two days of solid sleep and you’re fine, Dr Spencer had cheerfully declared this morning when Viv came down to breakfast and ate three eggs and five rashers of bacon.

– Have you even thought about the fact that you’re almost at the end of your six-month term at the hospital?

– It doesn’t mean anything. Everyone signs on for another term as soon as one ends.

– Everyone isn’t my daughter. Do you have any idea how terrifying it was when Mary brought you home? What you looked like? Empty. Your face – just a shell.

– It was exhaustion.

– That was only part of it. You father, he doesn’t want to see or can’t see, I don’t know which, but I don’t share his blindness. Not about you, not about how far this war is from ending. Will you give your entire youth to it? Give your health, and your heart and your sanity?

– Mama, you’re being dramatic.

– Every time I see you there’s less of you there. I don’t think you have any idea what you want for your life other than pleasing your papa. Making up for the fact that he doesn’t have sons to send into the trenches to have their heads blown off. Next month when you turn twenty-three and he reminds you you’re old enough to join the mobile nursing units at the Front – what will you say then? You know he’ll do it, don’t you?

They walked in silence after that for a while, around the circle of the garden; raindrops dried on the petals of yellow and pink and red roses, and the sun moved further beyond the reach of clouds.

– Peshawar, Viv said finally, tentatively. That’s what I want for my life. I want to go to Peshawar.

She waited for her mother to look outraged or disbelieving, but Mrs Spencer only said, Why?

– Because there’s more past than present there.

– There’s no need to be so coy about it. You mean you want to be away from the war?

– Yes.

– Thank God there’s some sense in you. Why Peshawar?

– Two and a half thousand years of history beneath its soil. How long a list of reasons do you need?

– Tahsin Bey mentioned it in that Christmas card.

– Yes. He knew it’s a place I very much want to see.

The explanation sounded false to her own ears, but Mrs Spencer merely nodded. It began to occur to Viv that this conversation was in earnest.

– Papa would never agree. And I can’t just go off half way around the world, in the middle of the war.

Mrs Spencer picked up a rose which had tumbled off its stem into the grass, and brushed its softness against her cheek, her eyelids drooping with the pleasure of it. Viv had the strange sensation of witnessing her mother as she had been as a very young woman, when the world had more possibilities than disappointments in it.

– You went off to Turkey, to live in a tent, on a hillside, with no one within hundreds of miles known to any of us except an unmarried foreign man. That was your father’s doing. He’s in no position to object when I find you a situation far more conventional than that in the heart of our own empire.

She nipped at a petal, pursed her mouth in distaste and threw the rose back into the grass.

– I don’t understand. What will you say to him? What conventional situation?

– Leave that to me.

Viv began to see she hadn’t the faintest idea what kind of woman her mother really was. Until now, it had never seemed particularly interesting to find out.

April 1915

Qayyum raised the buttered bread to his nose, the scent of it a confirmation that Allah himself loved the French more than the Pashtuns. Beside him, Kalam Khan, impatient for the taste of fruit, bit right through the skin of an orange to get to the flesh beneath, eyes closed in pleasure as his jaws worked their way around the peel.

– How is it?

– Tasteless.

Kalam wiped a smear of butter off Qayyum’s nose and spat a mix of peel and rind onto the train tracks, grinning – a boy who grew up in fruit orchards delighted to discover that his father’s produce in the Peshawar Valley was superior to anything France could grow in her soil. No matter that everything else here was better than the world they’d left behind – the cows sleeker, the buildings grander, the men more dignified, the women. . what to think about the women? One of the men coming out of the station made a gesture as if holding two plump melons against his chest, and there was a rush of men towards the doorway just as Lt Bonham-Carter stepped out, followed by a Frenchman and a woman whose dress was cut to display her breasts as if they were wares for sale.

– Whore, Kalam said cheerfully, but Qayyum looked away when he saw how the woman first crossed her hands in front of her chest and then, raising her head to stare down the men, lowered them to her hips.

Lt Bonham-Carter asked for the regimental band to gather together. The Frenchman refused to take any money for the cigarettes, coffee, oranges and bread the men had purchased, and had asked instead for the band to play the ‘Marseillaise’, as it had when the 40th Pathans disembarked at the port of that city and processed through town. Lt Bonham-Carter smiled as he relayed the information – he’d been the one to teach the dhol and shehnai band how to play the French tune on the journey from Alexandria. The brilliance of the English was to understand all the races of the world; how the French had cheered the 40th Pathans as they made their way from the docks to the racecourse in Marseilles. Les Indiens! Les Indiens! A cry of welcome that made the men heroes before they had even stepped onto the battlefield. How much finer this was than Qayyum’s first deployment to Calcutta where the Bengali babus were trying to cause trouble for the Raj and required a few Pathans in their midst to instruct them how to behave.

The band followed up the ‘Marseillaise’ with their regimental song, ‘Zakhmi Dil’, all the men joining in, including most of the English officers. Kalam turned to Qayyum, arms spread in resignation as he sang the opening words on a platform in rural France where the Pashto language might never have been heard before: There’s a boy across the river / With a bottom like a peach / But alas! I cannot swim. When the song ended the Frenchman, for whom none of the officers had provided a translation, declared, Magnifique! And the woman rested both elbows on the back of a bench and leaned forward, looking straight at Qayyum. Magnifique, she echoed.

Embarrassed at himself for wondering if she wasn’t talking about the song, Qayyum looked away and around the platform; how proud they were – Punjabis, Dogras, Pashtuns, all! – to be received with such warmth by these strangers. The generosity of the Frenchman was all it had taken to allow them to set aside the disgruntlement they had been carrying around since Marseilles, where they were told they had to give up their turbans and drab-and-green regimental wear in favour of balaclavas and badly fitting, prickly uniforms of grey that were better suited to the climate. And their guns, too, had been taken away because they weren’t right for the French ammunition; the new rifles were unfamiliar, the weight, the shape of them not yet a natural extension of the soldiers’ bodies.

But a few minutes later, in the storage room where the smell of coffee beans soon fused with an even earthier scent, the French girl showed Qayyum how quickly an unknown body could become joined to yours. He was tentative until that became impossible. His only previous experience had been in Kowloon, the night before the 40th shipped off to France, with a woman who didn’t pretend he was giving her anything she wanted other than the money he’d been told to place on the table before they started. That had been less troubling in some way than the responses of this girl who seemed to derive pleasure from things that made him worry he was hurting her. Would a Pashtun woman react this way? he wondered, almost as soon as it was over, the thought making him feel ashamed both for himself and the French girl who kissed him on the mouth and said something he couldn’t understand. It was only then he realised they hadn’t said a word to each other, and when he spoke to her in his broken English she shook her head and laughed. He had assumed all white people could understand each other’s language in the way all the Indians in the Army had at least one tongue in common.

Kalam was watching for him when he stepped out of the storage room, his expression mocking, slightly hurt.

– Watch out, brother. You are too much in love with these people already.

– Salute your officers, Sepoy.

– Yes, sir, Lance-Naik, sir!

His salute was so sharp it meant to draw blood. Qayyum – his promotion from sepoy just days old – dismissed him with a lazy wave of his hand, refusing to take the challenge. Yes, he was in love with these people, this world. The shame had passed as quickly as it had arrived, and he drew himself up to his full height as the train whistled its arrival, understanding at that moment what it was to be a man – the wonder, the beauty of it.

They arrived in Ouderdom in the rain, Kalam hobbling on the ankle he had twisted when he slipped on a slick cobblestone. The fall had been a bad one, and Qayyum fell out to help him up, putting Kalam’s arm around his own shoulders, prepared to support him for as long as they needed to keep marching. But a Belgian woman came out of her house and put salve on Kalam’s ankle, bound his foot in a bandage and disappeared back inside without a word. Kalam had felt shamed by that and hadn’t said a word since, except to tell Qayyum that he could walk on his own feet.

But now Kalam looked up across the farmland and smiled – there, walking across the field, were men whose faces were known to the 40th, not personally but in the set of their features, their expression. The soldiers of the Lahore Division, the first of the Indian Army to arrive in France. Above the howl of the wind a voice called out in Pashto, What took you so long? Too many peach bottoms distracting you along the way?

– We thought we’d give you some chance at glory before taking it all for ourselves!

Kalam, restored to good humour. Qayyum looked around at the men of the 40th grinning, name-calling. Not just the Pashtuns, but also the Dogras, the Punjabis. Brothers recognising brothers with a jolt of love, a shot of competition. What Qayyum felt on seeing battalion after battalion of Indian soldiers bivouacked on the farmland was something quite different – a deep, inexplicable relief.

The havildar-naik of 57th Wilde’s Rifle fell into step with Qayyum as he walked across the moonlit stretch of grass. No sound except that of snoring soldiers and the call of a solitary night-bird.

– Worrying about tomorrow, Lance-Naik?

– Sir, no, sir.

– I don’t want to be ‘sir’ just now. Mohammad Khan Afridi, from Landi Kotal.

– Qayyum Gul. Peshawar.

– Do you think one day they’ll tell stories about us in the Street of Storytellers?

The Afridi lit a cigarette, handed it to Qayyum, and lit another one for himself. Qayyum’s shoes squeaked on the wet grass as he rocked back on his heels, blowing smoke up into the air, watching the ghostly trail of it ascend and dissipate.

– Did you hear about the 5th Light Infantry? the Afridi asked.

– No, sir. What? Are they here also?

– No, Singapore. On trial for mutiny. Not all of them, but many.

– Pashtuns?

– Pashtuns and Rajput Muslims. They heard a rumour they would be sent to Turkey to fight fellow Muslims, so they mutinied. Killed their officers.

Qayyum swore loudly, and the older man nodded his head, held the tip of his cigarette against an oak leaf and burned a circle into it. The smell carried a hint of winter fires.

– They join an army which fights fellow Pashtuns in the tribal areas, but they’ll mutiny at the thought of taking up arms against Turks. That’s our people for you, Lance-Naik.

Qayyum shook his head, looked over the encampment. At 5.30 tomorrow morning they’d be on the march again. He cleared his throat, moistened his lips.

– What’s it really like? Fighting the Germans?

– Go and sleep now, Lance-Naik. Dream of Peshawar. That’s an order. You’ll have the answer to your question tomorrow, at Vipers.

Again and again the pain plunged him into oblivion and a fresh burst of gunfire pulled him out. Then there was silence, and he waited for the darkness to claim him but there was only fire racing along his face, licking deep into his eye-socket. An ant climbed a blade of grass and his laboured breath blew it off in the direction of the stream, a few feet away, unreachable; the sun that made the fire burn more fiercely on his face turned playful as it dipped into the balm of the water. I will die here, Qayyum thought, and waited for Allah or his family or the mountains of Peshawar to take hold of his heart. But there was only the fire, and the blood drowning his eye and the stench of dead men. Was he the only man alive, or were there others like him who knew the gunners would find them if they twitched a limb?

Perhaps he was dead already, and this was hell. The eternal fires, yes. It must have happened just as they ascended the slopes – the Germans were right on the other side of it, just over the crest of the hill. But the first round of bullets must have killed him and flung him into this devil-made world in which men had to run across a field without cover, stumbling over the corpses of their brothers, and when the tattered remnants of one division reached the enemy lines on the slope across the field, a yellow mist entered their bodies and made them fall, foam at their mouths. Cover your nose and mouth, the order came, swift and useless; if they’d had their turbans they would have wound them around their faces but there were only the balaclavas. Qayyum remembered the handkerchief in his pocket, the one Captain Dalmohy had instructed him to dip into the buckets of liquid they passed, and he held it up against his face even as he watched the breeze move the yellow mist eastward. So this wasn’t hell. The mist would have leapt into his lungs if it were.

The emerald green of the grass turned to pine green; the sun sank entirely into the water. His hand had gone to sleep but he was afraid to shake it awake even though the numbness was moving up his arm. There had been a sepoy sitting upright in the field as men advanced around him, one arm ending at the wrist. Qayyum picked up the severed hand he’d almost trodden on, and passed it to the man who thanked him, very politely, and tried to join the hand in place. I think there’s a piece missing. Can you look? he said, and died. Qayyum had forgotten this, though it had happened only hours earlier.

Qayyum tried to pray, but the Merciful, the Beneficent, had abandoned this field and the men within it. Something was moving along the ground, a heavy weight; a starving animal, wolf or jackal, with its belly pressed against the ground, smelling meat; a German with a knife between his teeth. Grass flattened, the thing entered the space between Qayyum and the stream. Any movement was pain, any movement was target practice to the gunners. And then a whisper, his name.

– Kalam, stay there. They’ll shoot you.

– Lance-Naik, sir. Shut up.

One afternoon in the Street of Money Changers, Qayyum and his brother Najeeb had stumbled on an object in the road – a dead rabbit with its lips sewn together, foam at its mouth. A man walked past a hundred cruelties in Peshawar every day, and nothing about the rabbit made him slow his stride, but Najeeb knelt on the street and carefully cut away the thread, the animal’s fur-and-mud-caked head in his palm. When Qayyum put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, Najeeb looked up and asked, Do you think its family was near by and it tried to call out to them? As if that were the real reason for distress, not the needle lancing the animal’s lips, the hand which would have stopped the breath at its nose. Oh Allah, the cruelty of the world. How had Najeeb known this terror, this loneliness of dying alone? Kalam’s hand clasped his ankle and he felt tears dislodge the blood in his eye, which he couldn’t touch without feeling as if he was wiping off his whole face.

– Don’t leave me.

– Brainless Pashtun, do you think I came all this way just to smell your socks?

Time had never moved more slowly than in those minutes – or was it hours? – in which Kalam inched himself along the ground until his face was level with Qayyum’s, and he could see what the fire had done.

– Tell me. How bad is it?

– Don’t worry, Yousuf, all Zuleikhas will still want to seduce you and so will the Potiphars.

– Kalam, don’t joke.

– It’s this or tears. Just be patient, we’ll retreat when it’s dark.

– The sun has gone.

– My friend, you’ve forgotten the moon, large and white as your Frenchwoman’s breast and climbing through the sky. Still a few more hours. But I’m here, don’t worry. Your Kalam is here.

The end of his sentence disappeared in gunfire. Qayyum’s body jerked in anticipation of the bullets that would rip through him, but Kalam had a hand on his chest, telling him to hold still, the gunners were aiming at something else. You stay still too, Qayyum said, but Kalam braced on his elbows and used them as a pivot for his arms, the rest of his body motionless as – again and again – he lowered his palms into the stream and slowly, hardly spilling a drop, brought them to Qayyum’s parched mouth, washed the blood from his face and tried to clean the mess that was his eye. With the stink of blood all around, the only light in the world came from those cupped palms, the shifting water within them.