Читать книгу Far From My Father’s House - Jill McGivering - Страница 11

Chapter 8

Ellen sat at the overcrowded desk in the small office at the back of the women’s ward and looked over her notes. Britta had already given her a lot of information; the first deaths from typhoid and the threat of more. That was vivid and a strong top line. She had general detail too, about eye infections, skin diseases and the chronic malnourishment which seemed to affect most of the women who’d fled from the mountains. She underlined one of Britta’s quotes. Behind her, a fly was buzzing, banging against the inside of the tent.

It was a start but it wasn’t much. She needed drama. She needed personal stories. First-hand accounts of life under the Taliban and the terrifying flight. Ellen clicked the end of her pen in and out with her thumb. She was weighed down by the dull ache in her limbs, her bruised face. It was almost one o’clock. The sun was fierce, beating down on the canvas around her and setting it alight with a white glow. The air conditioning unit hummed and coughed in the corner but the air inside was stale and thick with heat.

Fatima came through from the ward and started slightly when she saw Ellen. Britta had been called away to a staff emergency meeting organized by Frank. For now, if Ellen needed help, she was reliant on Fatima. She didn’t have high hopes.

Fatima took a plastic box out of the fridge and set it on the table. She gave Ellen a quick, tense glance. ‘You have got lunch?’

‘Actually, I have. Thank you.’ The Islamabad guesthouse staff had handed her a packed lunch when she checked out. That seemed a long time ago. She dug the battered cardboard box out of her bag and opened it up. It didn’t look appetizing. Cold French fries in a clutch of silver foil, a sliced cucumber and tomato in another piece of foil, a hard-boiled egg, a peach and a plum.

Fatima didn’t reply. She seemed pleased that she wasn’t obliged to feed Ellen. She pulled up a stool and sat down at the desk, clearing a space amongst the papers and files. She unclipped the lid of her lunch box and drew out a plastic spoon, a cheap white serviette and a small pink carton. Rose-flavoured milk, the packet read. Most delicious.

Fatima used the serviette to polish the spoon, then unfolded it completely and placed it over her lap. The paper was so thin it was almost transparent. The lunch box was full of cold fried rice and vegetables. The leftovers, Ellen thought, from last night’s meal.

The shy local assistant, all elbows and knees, brought them both sweet milky tea in chipped enamel cups and then withdrew. Ellen sensed that it was a well-rehearsed routine. The breeze from the ceiling fan rippled the surface of the tea and thickened it into skin.

Ellen banged her hard-boiled egg against the table edge so she could shell it. The pungent smell rose.

‘Fatima, I need to hire a translator. I’d pay, of course. I wondered, is there anyone . . .?’

‘Speaking Pashto and also English?’ Fatima shrugged, spooning her lunch into her mouth with deft movements. She spoke as she ate, her free hand politely shielding her mouth. ‘That is difficult matter.’

‘Yes, but even so, there must be . . .’

‘No.’ Fatima lifted her hand to bat away the fly.

There was a short silence. Ellen ate the pieces of salad and chewed a few cold French fries. They were streaky with congealed fat. Fatima’s brown eyes were fixed on her food. She was frowning slightly, her thick eyebrows almost merging over her nose. Her hijab was immaculately pinned, covering her hair completely. She’s a long way from Egypt, Ellen thought, watching her. A long way from home.

A high-pitched mechanical jingle sounded outside as a truck reversed. Male shouts. A blaring horn. The rhythmical bang of a fist on metal, guiding the driver backwards.

‘For how many days you will be here?’ Fatima spoke through her food, without looking up.

‘I don’t know yet. Three or four.’

‘You’re staying in which place?’

‘They’ve booked me into The Swan.’

‘Of course. It is the best.’ She lifted her eyes for a second and gave Ellen a short, hard glance, as if to add: And the most expensive.

‘What about you?’

Fatima snorted slightly. ‘I am on local contract. I stay in a small guesthouse in Peshawar.’ She raised her spoon and pointed to her hijab. ‘I am Muslim lady. It is more safe here for me.’

Ellen didn’t reply. She chewed the last of her hard-boiled egg and wrapped the foil around the remaining cold fries. Fatima was trying hard to save face. But Ellen knew that anyone who worked with Westerners was a target, whether they were Muslim or not. If she was in a small guesthouse, it was simply to save money.

‘All your family is at home then, in Egypt?’

‘Cairo.’ Fatima scraped up another mouthful of food and chewed.

‘Are you married?’

‘I am widow. My husband is died. I have two babies.’

Ellen nodded, sensing an opening at last. ‘Boys or girls?’

Fatima inclined her head, still eating. ‘One is boy, one is girl.’

‘That’s wonderful, Fatima. How old are they?’

Fatima paused for a moment, as if considering the turn the conversation was taking. A stray grain of rice stuck to the corner of her lips. The tip of her tongue slid out and drew it into her mouth. She looked over to Ellen for a second and her eyes were uncertain. Finally, she set down her spoon, cleaned her fingers carefully on her napkin and reached down into her bag to bring out a purse. She extracted two small photographs and pushed them across the table.

They were school pictures, posed against a bright blue background. Ellen wiped her own fingers on a tissue and picked them up. One showed a girl of about eight or nine with a large nose, her hair neatly clipped in place. The other was a boy of about five, his brown eyes shy in front of the camera. His black hair was cropped close.

‘You must be very proud.’

Fatima broke into a smile. For a moment, her whole face was transformed, warm and relaxed. Then she straightened out her mouth again and the old stiffness returned.

When Ellen handed back the pictures, Fatima held them for a while and carried on studying them. ‘They are good children. They learn well, thanks be to God.’ She studied them a moment longer, then slipped them back into her purse.

Ellen bit into the peach. ‘You must miss them.’

‘They are with my sister. They are very obedient. I earn enough money to send them to a good school.’

‘That’s important.’

Fatima wiped off her spoon, placed it back in the plastic box and clipped on the lid. There was still rice inside. Enough for her evening meal, perhaps.

‘And you?’ said Fatima. ‘You have children?’

‘No.’ Ellen found herself looking down, wiping peach juice from her chin, aware of Fatima’s eyes. She thought of Frank with his crumpled clothes and tousled hair. ‘I’m not married.’

Fatima scraped back her stool and got to her feet. ‘Work.’ The plastic spoon rattled in the box as she placed it back in the fridge. As she passed Ellen again, on her way back to the ward, she stooped and said in a low voice: ‘I advise you to be careful. The Taliban has spying men everywhere.’

Without a translator, there wasn’t much more Ellen could do on the ward. She pulled her scarf forwards, tucked away stray strands of hair, and set off into the camp.

Outside, a fresh truck of supplies was being unloaded. Powdered milk for babies. High-protein biscuits. A group of men in shiny tabards had formed a chain, passing boxes from one to the other, grunting with exertion.

She walked through to an open area beyond the unloading bay. A few listless guards in baggy uniforms were standing around, guns held loosely across their chests. Pakistani aid workers were sitting in lines on the ground, processing the stacks of newly arrived supplies. She wrote some notes. The men were shaking the contents out into a heap on the earth, then rummaging through them and sorting them into piles for distribution.

A second cluster of workers was compiling starter kits, one for each family. A set of basic commodities, designed to feed five people for several days. Ellen bent down to see. Small tins of cooking oil. Bags of salt. Modest sacks of rice. Plastic screw-top containers for water. Vacuum-packed blankets. She weighed the rice in her hand. The rations seemed so meagre, barely enough to live on. If people felt they were starving, she thought, it would be hard to keep order in the camp. Hard to protect the weak. She thought of the listless elderly woman waiting outside the gates and the small girl lying motionless in her lap.

Further away, penned in by a rope and under the supervision of several armed guards, were about fifty dishevelled people. The men and women were queuing separately, the women with children balanced on hips and clinging to their trailing hands. They stood in silence without shade from the sun, waiting in the hope that some sort of distribution would eventually begin. Their faces were blank with resignation, their shoulders bowed. These were people who were already becoming accustomed to waiting for a long time in the hope of a little.

The Pakistani supervisor saw her watching and stepped across. He was a short man with glasses, plump with health and affluence. His clothes were neatly pressed and his trainers gleamed white in the dust.

He looked down at her notebook and pen. ‘Madam, you are journalist?’

‘How did you guess?’

‘On account of your pen and writing and the fact you are a Western lady here.’ His voice was theatrical and without irony. ‘Our camp is providing each and every thing.’ He waved a hand over the supplies. ‘Not only eatables. All things – necessities for the family.’

He was smiling through crowded, crooked teeth. A man itching to be interviewed.

‘Ellen Thomas, NewsWorld.’ She managed to smile back. ‘You’re doing such good work here. It must be very difficult.’

‘Madam, it is so difficult.’ He puffed out his chest. ‘We are working, all of the day and night also.’

Ellen nodded sympathetically. ‘Are the workers local people?’

‘Most are local, yes, madam. From Peshawar itself.’

Her camera was in a side pocket of her bag. He made an elaborate show of modesty when she brought it out, flapping his hand in front of his face as if he were not worthy. ‘Please, madam. I am doing my duty. That is all.’

‘Would you mind? I’d love a picture.’ She framed it with her open hand. ‘With the workers in the background.’

He wagged his head, turning pink with pleasure. The guards standing near him turned to gawp. He picked up a sack of rice and a blanket sealed in polythene and posed with them in his hands, adopting a sad but thoughtful expression for the photographs. She wrote down his name, title and email address and promised to send him a copy.

By now he was overwhelmed with pride. ‘When life goes out of gear,’ he said, ‘here all the people can find succour. Until and unless normalcy is restored.’

She thanked him again, thinking, You’d never let your own family end up here. You’re too well connected.

As she turned to go, she hesitated and turned back as if she’d just remembered something. ‘I don’t suppose you could possibly help me.’

He beamed. ‘Anything, madam.’ He pointed down at the supplies. ‘Some eatables, maybe?’

‘Actually, I need someone to help me translate.’

His eyes lost a little of their sparkle.

‘Just for an hour or so,’ she went on. ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

He clapped his hands and shouted to a thin young man who was standing with a clipboard, ticking off boxes as they were processed. He came scuttling across, his eyes anxious. His boss laid a paternal hand on his shoulder.

‘Ali will be helping you, nah? He’s very good fellow.’

She handed Ali a bottle of water from her bag and opened a second for herself. The heat was intense. The sun was beating on the dried mud, splitting into white shards wherever it struck glass or plastic.

Ali explained the layout of the camp. She tried to draw a diagram in her notebook as they walked, to get her bearings. The main facilities were clustered close to the gates. The brick building with the broken flagpole was the administration block and storeroom. That must be where Frank was holding his meeting. Beside it stood the two large tents which served as segregated male and female medical wards and a third which doubled up as shelter and office space for the aid workers. Nearby was the mud circle of the unloading bay, large enough for the trucks, with their brightly painted metalwork, to reverse and turn.

The rest of the camp was low and sprawling, a formless expanse of row upon row of shelters stretching across the open landscape, dwarfed by the distant mountains. Those erected in the rows nearest the gate were proper tents; large sheets of off-white canvas, stretched over a central wooden spine, then swooped low to the ground on either side. They made her think of a child’s drawing of birds in flight.

One tent was open at the front, the flaps tied back to let air circulate. A heavy, rusting bicycle was propped on one side. Two chickens, tethered to a stick, pecked at the dirt. Several pairs of tattered shoes, big and small, were piled nearby.

Ellen looked into the gloom. A young man was lying listlessly on a low wooden bed. The charpoy was the only piece of furniture in there and dominated the space. The sunlight pressed through the canvas, dappled on his body. Two young children were heaped against him, sleeping. A pair of eyes glinted. She looked more closely. A young woman, the wife, was sitting to one side in the shadows, her shoulders hunched.

‘Could we speak to these people?’ she asked Ali.

He looked embarrassed. ‘They are from a village,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so . . . that they’ll allow it.’

Ellen crouched down and smiled at the woman. She gazed cautiously back.

‘It’ll be OK,’ she said over her shoulder to Ali. ‘Would you ask this lady—’

But Ali had already moved on. Ellen was beginning to wonder if he’d had any personal contact at all with the people he was helping to feed. She got to her feet again and followed him down the narrow paths which ran between the rows of tents.

The smells of sewerage, unwashed bodies and sweating plastic stirred so many memories. People were endlessly different but there was a dreary uniformity about relief camps which always depressed her. The overcrowded shelters. The squalor. The endless queues of people, patiently waiting for handouts in the misery of heat or rain.

It was more than a decade since she’d first covered a refugee crisis. That was in East Timor. Tens of thousands of people had fled fighting and were huddled inside camps, too frightened of the Indonesian militias to go home. It had been one of her first big stories.

Tension had still been high. She’d driven into the camps with an older journalist. Both of them wanted eyewitness accounts of the recent violence. It had been a new experience for her and an intense one. The poor conditions, the threatening young men wielding guns, the families, cowed and afraid, desperate for food and clean water. She’d felt like a champion of the people, filing impassioned reports to London and railing against her editors when the pieces she’d filed were hacked down.

‘Three hundred words.’ She was outraged. ‘That’s all they used. Can you believe these guys?’

Her fellow journalist, more cynical, had laughed. ‘War’s like sex,’ he said. ‘The first time, it seems like a big deal. Then you get over it.’

She looked around now at the camp. Two young girls with matted hair were rolling together on the ground, shrieking and tickling each other. A toddler sat beside them in the dust. He had the severed arm of a doll in his hand and was sucking on its plastic fingers. His nostrils were black with a moustache of flies.

Her colleague all those years ago had been wrong. She still cared. She would force London to pay attention to what was happening here. That was her job. Frank was feeding them and giving them clean water. The least she could do was write about them. But to make an impact, she needed stronger material.

Her clothes were sticking to her back, her arms, her neck and the cut above her eye was throbbing. She lifted the bottle of water to her lips and drank, then stood, thinking, and inhaled the faint smell of plastic. Two young boys careered onto the path from between the tents. They skidded to a sudden halt when they saw her. Their clothes were filthy, mouths and noses encrusted with dirt. They turned, their eyes following her uncertainly as she walked on, looking for Ali.

The further she moved from the entrance gates, the poorer the shelters became. The off-white canvas soon ran out and was replaced by makeshift structures made from salvage and imagination. Faded grain sacks, torn open, were tied with twine round knobbly sticks. Torn sheets of plastic sweated in the heat. Pieces of brown cardboard, which had clearly once been aid boxes, had been bent round to form screens from the sun.

Smoke was rising. She walked towards it. Three women were crouched together on their haunches outside a shelter. A grandmother and two daughters-in-law perhaps. They’d built a small fire inside a triangle of mud bricks. One of the daughters was poking it with a stick. A battered metal kettle was perched on top and a row of tin cups stood by, waiting. The grandmother had a fan, stiffly plaited straw nailed to a rounded stick. She was fanning herself energetically to keep off clouds of flies.

The young woman who was tending the fire lowered her head and blew on it, scattering sparks. There was a sickly stench. Ellen looked round. The women were just by a row of latrines. The toilets were simple wood frames, raised a foot or so off the ground on bricks and nailed round with hessian for privacy. It was clear where the women had found bricks for their fire.

The grandmother saw Ellen and lifted a hand to greet her. She said something in Pashto and laughed and three isolated, stained teeth showed in her mouth. Ellen put her hand on her heart: Salaam Alaikum.

The old lady patted the ground beside her. A daughter shuffled along to make a place. When Ellen sat down, the grandmother fanned her with such enthusiasm that droplets of sweat flew off her arm, speckling Ellen’s shoulders and neck.

The kettle rocked as it boiled. The daughter wrapped the end of her chador round her hand and poured out sugary milky tea. Ellen took the plum from her bag and broke it into pieces, coating her fingers in juice. The flesh was mushy and heady with sweetness and they sucked on it noisily, smiling round at each other. When she lifted her fingers to her nose, the rich smell of the plum juice blocked out everything else.

She was sitting there amongst the women, drinking tea, when Ali found her. He walked right past at first, then did a double take and stopped dead. He looked so shocked at the sight of her, tucked in with the village women, that she had to bite her lip to stop herself from laughing. It was pointless, she could tell at once, to ask him to join them and translate. From now on, she would have to fend for herself.

Later, she started back through the camp on her own. The aid trucks were just coming into view when she heard a noise, a stifled cry, off to one side between the rows of tents. She turned to look. A thin figure. A man. Leaning against a wooden strut down the back of a shelter. He was bowed as if in pain. His shoulders were trembling, his face low and hidden in his hands.

She stepped off the main path and approached him cautiously.

‘Ab caisse hai?’ How are you?

He stiffened but didn’t reply. He was wearing a salwar kameez which might once have been cream but was now streaked grey with dirt. A round tribal hat was tipped forwards on his head.

She tried again, a little louder: ‘Ab tik hai?’ Are you OK?

He raised his head. His face was long and thin and lined with anxiety. His pointed beard was almost entirely white. Thin wire spectacles sat on the bridge of a pinched nose. They were lopsided, their spindly arms hooked around his ears. His myopic eyes, light in colour, were watery and anguished.

She stepped closer. ‘Do you speak English?’

He squirmed, embarrassed, and turned away.

She groped for the right words: ‘Ab English bol suk—’

He turned back to her and interrupted, with a hint of defiance: ‘I know English.’

Her eyes fell to his hands which were sticking out from the sleeves of his shabby kameez. They were raw with burns. The flesh was bloated and blistered, scored through with pink creases. ‘You need a doctor.’ She pointed to them. ‘Let me have a look.’

‘You are doctor?’ He looked at her with suspicion.

‘I’m a journalist. My name is Ellen. I can take you to a doctor.’

He shook his head and sighed. He held up his damaged hands and considered them with sad detachment, as if they belonged to another man.

‘Madam,’ he said at last, ‘this is not important.’ He lifted off his spectacles with slow, clumsy fingers and wiped his wet eyes on his sleeve.

When he’d replaced his spectacles, he turned his shoulder and she sensed that he was about to walk away. She moved closer at once. He mustn’t. This was the first refugee she’d found who had some English. There couldn’t be many here. She spoke in a rush, trying to use her questions to pin him in place.

‘Tell me. Please. Have you just arrived? Where did you come from? What happened to you?’

He drew himself to his full height. ‘I am schoolteacher. My name is Ibrahim. I hail from the mountains. From Mutaire.’

‘Ibrahim.’ She bowed her head to show respect. His pale eyes seemed utterly exhausted. In a camp bursting with large families, he seemed, like her, to be all alone. She reached out and handed him her bottle of water. He drank it, shyly at first, then urgently. There was a narrow strip of shade running along the edge of the shelters. She sat down in it, practically at his feet, and raised her face to him. ‘If you talk to me,’ she said, ‘maybe I can help.’

A shift in the light made her look past him. A young man had stopped on the path and was watching them both. He was a broad-shouldered teenager with a downy beard. She expected him to move on when she stared pointedly back. He didn’t. He stood his ground. She pulled her headscarf forwards to conceal her hair and forehead. When she looked again, he had disappeared.

Ibrahim had decided to trust her. He lowered himself and sat a small distance away. He crossed his legs under his long kameez and stared at the mud.

‘So Ibrahim-ji,’ she said. ‘Tell me.’

When his words finally started to flow, they came out in a torrent, only just intelligible. ‘My family. My daughters. My old daughter, she cannot walk. How can they come down from the mountain? But so much fighting is there. That’s what they say. The army. The Taliban also.’

He put his head in his hands and his shoulders shook. Ellen leant forwards. ‘Hush,’ she said. ‘Ibrahim. Let me help you.’

Finally he became quiet and blew his nose noisily on his kameez. Behind his spectacles, his eyes were red rimmed.

She listened to the soft gulp of his breathing, the rattle of moisture in his throat. ‘What happened in your village, Ibrahim?’

‘Mutaire is high in the mountains,’ he said, ‘part of the Valley District. Two days walk from here.’

His knees trembled as he spoke, making their cotton tent judder. ‘They came some time ago and everything changed.’

‘Who came?’

‘Them,’ he said again. When he raised his eyes, they seemed angry. ‘The Taliban. Their commander, he is named Mohammed Bul Gourn.’

‘How did things change?’

He shook his head. ‘Every day, they were holding religious courts. Accusing some fellow with cut beard. Some fellow who was listening to music.’ He lowered his voice to a whisper, forcing her to lean in close to him. ‘All night we heard screams.’ He paused to remember. ‘In the morning we woke to find bodies. Our own people.’ His face contorted with horror. ‘Hanged, sometimes. Or beheaded. The stones all around red and sticky with blood.’

He sat in silence for a moment. Ellen prompted him softly, ‘And then what happened?’

‘All this we suffered and did nothing,’ he said. ‘But then they burnt down the school. My school.’ He looked her full in the face, outraged. ‘Fifteen years I am teaching there. Young men in our village who can read and write and do sums, I am the man who taught them.

‘Late in the night, I heard fire. I ran through the darkness of the village towards the school. The classroom was already blazing. I ran inside. The door was ringed in red with fire. The paint was burning on the wood, flames were curling through the air towards me. When I pulled at the handle, it was so hot, my skin stuck to the metal. The whole door fell on top of me. I couldn’t breathe. I just grabbed as many books as I could, carrying them outside, rushing, rushing.’

He put his burnt hand to his face. ‘The cleaner’s boy found me. Lying on the grass. The school was finished.’

She imagined the school blazing in the pitch darkness and the angry schoolteacher risking his life for books. ‘Is that why you left?’

‘I came to Peshawar to get help. To beg the army to come to the valley to save our families and our village.’

‘And you came here, to the camp?’

He tutted. ‘Not at first. I went to many places for many days, trying to get help. To the army cantonments. To the mosques. To the police stations. Finally I saw one police captain. He told me the soldiers are already going to fight. Bombs are dropping. Everyone is fleeing.’ His face crumpled again and he gave a shuddering breath, composing himself. ‘Everyone is leaving. That’s what they are saying. Carrying whatsoever they can. Every brother and uncle and cousin is there in the selfsame boat. Women and children also.’ He gestured around at the camp. His face was sorrowful. ‘But my daughters? My wives? They have not left the valley once in their lives. It is not our custom.’

Ellen calculated. ‘Where do you think they are?’

‘I don’t know.’ He gave a shrug of despair. ‘I heard about these new camps for affectees. Now I am searching, walking one to another. Searching everywhere in case they come.’

Ellen reached towards him, and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Maybe I can help, Ibrahim. There must be registers at the camps. We’ll find your family.’

He opened his mouth to speak but his lips trembled and he clamped it shut and sat, his mouth in a rigid line, his hand clutching her arm with the grip of a falling man.