‘Stay close to me,’ Baba whispered as we reached the gate, ‘and don’t say a word.’ His tone was fierce. ‘This isn’t a game, Layla. Do as you’re told.’
Baba and Hamid Uncle pushed Mama in her wheelbarrow out into the village street. The barrow was tossing and bumping on the rough ground, throwing her from side to side. Her covered head bounced on her chest and her groans came in bursts. I wanted to help but I didn’t know how and I imagined the Aunties watching from behind and whispering. I kept my eyes on the ground, watching my feet through the burqa grid and matching my steps to Baba’s.
The path was strangely quiet and empty. The gates of our neighbours’ compounds were all tightly closed. Two boys from the other side of the village came creeping towards us. They shrank against the wall and stared with big eyes as we passed. All around us, the village was so silent, it was eerie. Even the goats and donkeys and chickens seemed afraid.
We turned into the steep path past the mosque. Baba went to the front of the wheelbarrow to steady it on the slope as we descended. The paper notices were still clinging, tattered now, to the trees at the entrance to the mosque. I looked past them to the mosque, ashamed, thinking about the stolen paper hidden under my cot.
I stopped in my tracks, then strained to see through the burqa grid. The yard surrounding the mosque was so different. It was full of dark pieces of canvas and shiny plastic which had been strung from posts and trees to make shelter. Dusty pickup trucks, not from our village, stood between them. Everywhere strong young men were swarming, men I’d never seen before, dressed in grimy shirts and turbans. Their beards were thick and unkempt. There was no music and no one was laughing or even chatting and there was a blackness in their silence which frightened me.
A young man on a stool close to the entrance of the mosque looked up and saw me. He was plaiting hemp into rope, twisting the strands between his fingers. His fingers stopped working and the rope drooped in his hands. Then he frowned. I turned and rushed down the path, scattering stones with my feet and panting, until I’d caught up with the wheelbarrow.
A car was waiting on the road and the men lifted Mama into the back. I slid in beside her and cradled her head in my lap. Her forehead was hot, staining the burqa with sweat. The driver started the car. Baba and Hamid Uncle squashed onto the front seat beside him.
‘Baba,’ I whispered. ‘Those men, at the mosque. Who are they?’
Baba turned back to me and said quietly, ‘You didn’t see them.’
I opened my mouth to say, ‘But, Baba, I did,’ then saw the warning in his eyes and shut it again.
Out of the car window, the hillside fell steeply, peppered with rocks and terraced fields. The valley floor below was broad and flat and the river glistened as it spread itself out across the mudflats in shallow ribbons. On the far side, another mountain rose, as high and steep as our own.
The driver sat hunched forwards, peering through the cracked windscreen. Baba and Hamid Uncle sat in silence, their shoulders tight with tension.
Mama had stopped moaning. She’s dying, I thought. Please, Allah, in Your Kindness and Wisdom, don’t take her yet, not here, not now. I laid my hand against the cotton which covered her nose and mouth to see she was still breathing. If she dies now, I thought, it will be my fault. Every time the car hit a rock or hole and threw us around, I shook her. I wanted to keep her spirit in her body, rattling in the back of the car with me, until someone else could take over. I wondered too if she were still bleeding and if the cloths between her legs were thick enough. If she stained the seat, the shame would be unbearable and I might get the blame. I turned my head and stared fixedly out of the window through the white grid of the burqa as if not looking would make the bleeding go away.
The countryside passed in a hundred small squares, divided into pieces by the white cotton grille over my face. In the orchards, men were working in rows, dropping plump apples into baskets on their backs. Their movements were heavy and slow.
I looked more closely. There were no women doing their usual work of fetching, picking and carrying. There were no women on the paths through the orchards and wheat fields. The land didn’t look right without them.
I grasped Mama’s head and shoulders to hold her steady as the car swung right off the road, taking the mud track towards town. ‘We’re nearly there, Mama,’ I whispered to her. Mama rarely came to town, on account of her bad nerves, so I described it to her. ‘We’re passing lots of compounds now, Mama, and shops like the tyre shop and the metal welder.’ I didn’t tell her that the compounds were closed and the shops shuttered. We passed the mosque, bigger and grander than ours, with its fancy madrasah. Beyond it, trucks were parked idle in the yards of the marble factory and tobacco-processing plant.
A woman, covered from head to toe in a patched burqa, was walking slowly at the side of a middle-aged man. She was dragging her feet as if she were exhausted or ill. I prayed: If you have to receive a woman today, Allah in Your Greatness, please take her and leave Mama here with us.
The driver turned into the town square. I tightened my grip on Mama’s shoulder. Usually it was a market square, a chaos of sounds and shapes. Baskets of apples and plums and oranges. Fish flapping in plastic buckets. Stinking meat, thick with flies, dripping blood into the cobbles. All of it raucous with hawkers’ sing-song cries and the chatter of gossiping women.
Now, though, the square was shrunken and mean, emptied of colour and people. Our wheels echoed on the stone as we drove through. A pickup truck rounded the corner and careered towards us. The open back was piled with young men, their heads wrapped round with turbans, long guns in their hands. I pulled my eyes away, frightened. The veins in the back of Baba’s neck were swollen with pumping blood.
The driver pointed the car towards the far end of the square, in the direction of the clinic, and accelerated with a jerk of gears. Almost there, Mama.
As we left the square, I twisted my head to look back. A thin sack, suspended by rope from a post, caught my eye. I blinked, struggling to make it out. It was lumpy, the loose folds at the bottom bunched and flapping, and hung about with a shadow of flies. It was only as the car flew out of the square that I realized with a cry that it was a man, long dead, strung up by his feet and turning slowly in the silence.
Mama was taken away by a woman in a burqa. Hamid Uncle and Baba and I sat on a row of hard plastic chairs which were bolted to the floor. Baba looked into the air at nothing and I drew up my legs inside the burqa and leant against him and prayed in my head for Allah please to be merciful.
A man and boy sat opposite us. The man clasped his hands together and stared at them as if he’d never seen fingers before. When I narrowed my eyes, then opened them wide and then narrowed them again, he jumped up and down in the grid squares, and I did that for a long time because there was nothing else to do and I didn’t want to think about Mama and what they were doing to get the stuck baby out.
When Baba shook me awake, his face was grey. I wanted to ask: Is she dead, Baba? But I didn’t dare say it in case it was true.
He told me the baby had been a girl, a sister, but it was sickly and hadn’t survived. It was Allah’s will, he said. His eyes were red-rimmed. When we finally took Mama back to the compound, she lay on the charpoy, staring into the air as if it had all been a bad dream and she wanted to wake up. When I closed my eyes, the hanging body came to haunt me, strung up and black with flies.
Chapter 6
Summer crept up from the valley until it reached us, high in the mountains. At nights, strange sounds drifted through the open windows like bad smells. Heavy marching feet. Banging. The distant crackle of flames and bitter soot which left its black trace everywhere.
The men