Читать книгу Far From My Father’s House - Jill McGivering - Страница 10

Chapter 7

Jamila crouched in the shade of the orchard wall. The burqa was tight round her head, driving its seams into her skull. She was trying to think but it made her head ache. It was nonsense. Never had the women of Mutaire been forced to wear the burqa. It was not their culture.

She peered through the small grid over her face. On the other side of the orchard, too far away to notice her, old men climbed heavily on the ladders, their bones creaking as much as the wood. She tutted to herself. Now that women were banned from working in the orchards and fields, many of the peaches, plums and apricots would spoil.

Hamid had finally given her permission to visit her relatives across the village. On the way, she was stealing a chance to breathe the smell of the fruit trees. She shifted her weight and a brittle twig cracked. The earth beneath her sandals was dry and tired, beaten by the sun for too many months.

Love the land like a husband, her father used to say when she was a little girl, playing around him in the fields, digging holes and poking insects with sticks. It will always be true to you. It has always been true to our people. She had crouched in the dust at his feet, listening, as her father’s broad body blotted out the sun. The land is wise, he’d told her. The land never forgets.

But people forget, she thought now. The young are foolish. They think they know everything but understand nothing. She sighed. Layla’s anger weighed her down. This nonsense with the peasant boy was dangerous. It had to be stamped out before people’s tongues wagged and the family’s honour was tainted. The girl didn’t understand the risks. She was headstrong, spoiled by Ibrahim, her baba, who was so desperate for a son that he treated his daughter like one. She blinked. I wanted to give you ten sons, Ibrahim. If I had, you wouldn’t have pushed me aside for a second wife. But it was not Allah’s will.

A light breeze blew through the trees. The peaches swayed, plump and heavy on the branches. Jamila looked again at the old men on their ladders, clawing at the fruit. They wouldn’t see her. She lifted the front of the burqa, throwing it back in a rush to expose her face. Cool air swept in and wiped her hot cheeks, dried off her forehead. She closed her eyes.

After some time, she scratched up dirt and twigs and leaves in her palms and buried her face in it. It pressed itself into the softness under her nails. She rubbed it into her skin, tasting it, filling her senses with its rich, vital scent. ‘You are our land,’ she whispered as she squeezed it between her fingers and watched it fall, powdery, to the ground. ‘Our history. No one will have you from us.’

Jamila reached her old family compound late in the afternoon. One of her relatives, a young boy, peered round the gate when she knocked. How these times are changing us, she thought. Everyone is afraid.

He ran ahead of her across the courtyard as she lifted off the burqa. Old Auntie’s great-granddaughter, Syma, came skipping across the yard to meet her, calling and waving her arms. Her hair stuck up in wild tufts above her forehead. Out of habit, Jamila reached out her fingers to smooth it down but it sprang back at once.

‘Salaam, little one. Why aren’t you helping your mama?’

The girl was quiet for a moment, ignoring the question, then she grabbed hold of Jamila’s hand. She swung her arm back and forth as they walked, pumping a smile.

‘The boys brought a basket of plums yesterday and when we washed them, there was a frog.’

‘A frog?’

‘A tiny one.’ She took her fingers back to show the size, then reached for Jamila’s hand again.

‘Where is it?’

She looked round at the yard hopefully. ‘I don’t know. It went hopping off. I tried to catch it.’

‘And how is your mama?’

She shrugged. ‘OK.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I want to pick the plums myself but Baba won’t let me go.’

‘Your baba is right. You must listen to him and do what he tells you, like a good girl.’

The girl sighed. Her hand was small and firm inside Jamila’s. If Allah had allowed me a girl, she thought, she might have been such a child as this.

‘Go and play quietly,’ she said at last as they approached the house. She bent to the child and kissed her forehead. ‘Hush now. Don’t disturb your great-grandmother. Look, she’s sleeping.’

Syma turned and skipped carefully away to the other side of the yard, humming to herself.

Old Auntie was sitting outside the house, wrapped in a blanket. Her face was turned to the dying sun, her eyes closed. The mellow light was teasing her skin, smoothing out the hollows, pockets and wrinkles.

Jamila crouched on the ground and simply watched. Finally the old eyes flicked open. Jamila went forwards to greet her, kissing her cheek. ‘Salaam Alaikum, Auntie. How is your health?’

The old lady inclined her head. ‘I’m still alive, thanks be to Allah.’

No one knew exactly what age Old Auntie had reached. On some days, she said she was eighty-five. On others, she shook her head and said: Did you know I am almost a hundred? There was no one left of her own generation to disagree.

Jamila took her hand between her own. Although the day was warm, the skin was dry and cool. The fingers were shrivelling to bone, a handful of fleshless twigs.

‘Are you quite well?’

Old Auntie shrugged. ‘At my age,’ she said, ‘there is only dead and alive. Not well.’

She closed her eyes again and seemed to drift away. Jamila stroked the back of the papery hand. The blood, sluggish, disappeared from the vein where she touched it, then crept slowly back.

‘Fetch me water. My mouth is dry.’

Jamila went into the house where Old Auntie’s granddaughter-in-law was cooking. Her stout baby was crawling on the floor beside her.

‘They won’t let us fetch water from the well,’ the young woman said, as Jamila filled a metal cup. ‘Only the boys can go.’

Jamila shook her head. The baby lifted its head to stare at her.

‘I wouldn’t mind but they spill half of it. You know what boys are.’

Outside, Jamila held the cup to Old Auntie’s lips and waited as she sipped. The water seeped from the corners of her mouth and ran down her chin. When she had finished, Jamila wiped off Old Auntie’s mouth.

‘When I was a child, my grandmother used to tell me stories,’ Auntie said. ‘Such good old stories, they were shiny and worn with telling. They were told by grandmother to granddaughter through a hundred generations. Did I tell you the story about the donkey?’

She started the story, then closed her eyes and Jamila leant forwards, scanning her face. She seemed to be swallowing hard. After a moment, she opened her eyes and looked up at Jamila with a vague, troubled look.

‘Your story,’ Jamila prompted. ‘About the donkey. You should tell it to the children.’ She’d heard it herself a hundred times before.

‘Those children, they have no time to listen. No time and no patience and no respect.’

She sat still for a moment, staring into the empty air. Jamila got to her feet and patted her shoulder. The sun was sinking rapidly now, coating the courtyard in its red, sticky light. ‘I’m tiring you,’ she said. ‘I should go.’

She took the cup back into the house and said goodbye to the girl who had lifted the baby onto her hip and was dandling him as she stirred the pot.

Outside, Old Auntie reached for her as she passed. She pulled her down and put her damp mouth against Jamila’s ear.

‘When I die, bury me with my brother and his wife. I don’t want to be in the ground alone. The darkness makes me afraid.’

‘Hush, Auntie.’ Jamila shook her head and tried to free herself. ‘No such talk of dying and burying.’

‘It’s a big enough grave,’ Old Auntie went on. ‘If he were here, he’d say yes. He was a good brother to me.’

Jamila loosened the old woman’s fingers and arranged the blanket more closely round her thin shoulders before she left.

She found Ibrahim on the charpoy outside their house, trying to read in the last flicker of daylight. His body was bent over, his spectacles low against the book. She stood for a moment, observing him. He looked paler than ever, as if life were steadily washing the colour out of him. He was deep in his book and didn’t stir.

She tutted. He was all book learning. It had seemed a blessing at first, that she’d married such a gentle man. He wanted to teach her to read when they were newly-weds but she had refused. No woman in her family read books.

She remembered the day she had first set eyes on him when he and his father came to visit her parents in the family compound to discuss the arrangements for marriage. They had brought gifts of boxes of rich sweetmeats and a parcel of white lace, picked out by his mother. She, still a girl, had hidden in the kitchen, straining to hear the murmur of conversation between the men. It was only when the visitors said farewell and got up to leave that she dared to look through the kitchen window and saw him crossing the yard, a thin, bookish boy.

However much money his baba might have, she thought, staring in disappointment, it won’t be enough to make up for having such a weak, girlish husband. Why is the older brother already taken? Why do I get this one? She was still pouting when he reached the gate.

Her father went to scatter the chickens to the side and unfasten the bolt and the boy turned and looked back, right into her watching face. He broke into a broad smile and she, seeing the look in his eyes, thought, Well, that is the kindest face I ever saw, he will do very nicely for me after all, and went quickly into the sitting room to admire with her mother the quality of the white lace and eat her share of the sweetmeats before her brothers finished them all.

Now, so many years later, she folded away the burqa and sat beside him on the cot. She lifted the book out of his hands, closed it and set it on the ground. He looked up.

‘Old Auntie told me one of her old stories. The one about the donkey.’

‘The donkey?’

‘Who tries to change his shape and ends up forgetting who he is.’

‘Ah.’ He took off his spectacles and rubbed them against his kameez. His watery eyes gleamed in the half-light. ‘That is called an allegory.’

He replaced his glasses. She knew what he wanted. He wanted her to say: Please, my clever husband, what is an allegory? Instead she frowned. ‘It’s a warning, that’s what it is.’

‘Did her grandmother really tell her these stories?’ he said. ‘Or does she just make them up?’

‘What does it matter?’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter about the story, about the donkey. It matters about us. What are we going to do?’

He shook his head sadly and looked at the ground.

‘It won’t end here.’ She counted off the problems these strangers had caused. ‘First they stop the music, the barber. Then they shut women in their compounds. They call away the young men and give them guns.’

‘Hush, lower your voice.’ Ibrahim looked round the courtyard.

‘In my own house? What nonsense. You men sit together, whispering like frightened girls. They will drive us off our land. Don’t you see? They will take everything.’ She was shaking and close to tears.

Ibrahim rubbed his hands down his cheeks. ‘There are too many of them.’

She reached for him in the darkness and grasped his arm. ‘What must they do to us, what crime so terrible, that you’ll finally do something?’

He didn’t reply. Jamila’s brother-in-law, Hamid, came out of his house and lowered himself onto a charpoy on the other side of the courtyard.

She sat with her hand on her husband’s arm.

‘You must go and get help,’ she said. ‘You must fight for what is ours by right.’

Ibrahim turned away from her.

Across the courtyard, Hamid struck a match. It flared at his face, lighting his cupped hand and the cigarette between his lips, until the match died and the end of the cigarette pulsed red.

They won’t stop, she thought. You men are blind if you can’t see it.

Jamila had wondered what it would take for Ibrahim to act. Her question was answered when the fighters destroyed his beloved school. He left the village at once, his beard singed and his hands raw with burns, to seek help in the valley.