Читать книгу Pluviophile - Yusuf Saadi - Страница 11

I set up my apparatus on the wooden table: voice recorder, open notebook, Sharpie pen and sharpened pencil. Across from me the woman and her son sat on rickety chairs. I clicked the recorder on; its light blinked beside the teacup that steamed between us. The house’s front door was half-open, sunlight wandering in shyly across the floor over the mountain chert I had dragged in. From outside, female Pashto voices I did not understand and children playing skiffle songs with metal debris and whistling folk tunes. I asked the son if he attended school. He looked at the voice recorder’s red light, its cyclops eye, and inquired whether this was part of the interview. He sat straight as if at a business meeting, his face clean-shaven except two hairs above his lip that he must have missed with his razor. His tensed forearms on the table were pale as mine. I told him to relax. The aroma of basmati rice from the stove warmed the air and a fly buzzed around our ears. I have to make sure I say the right thing, he said. His English was immaculate. His mother pushed the teacup toward me with thin, lightly wrinkled fingers, and shone a smile that meant drink. I study literature in the university, the son said. I came back to be with my family after it happened. He looked down. I sipped the tea. Then I began the interview, and the son [His name’s Waheed. Maybe fit that in the article?] translated for his mother. Our family moved into the mountains to be closer to God, she said. I looked up to the stone ceiling and asked if she still felt God up here after what had happened. She said, God was not in the sky, but in here, and touched her chest. In the mountains it’s quiet enough to hear him. The daughter [I can’t remember her name—maybe don’t mention her at all] brought me a plate of rice and placed it delicately on the table beside the teacup. The son apologized for not having any forks. I asked the mother what it felt like. The son, his back still straight, continued to translate for his mother. She said it was like a wind that makes people disappear, until sons and daughters are only names and words. She waved her hands as she talked. Sometimes the disappeared exist in the songs we sing. If they’re fortunate, their names are printed in the newspaper where they live for a day, maybe two. But mostly they simply disappear. [Maybe, here, add reference to more commonly known disappeared people? Chileans under Pinochet?] I asked her if she ever thought of leaving, that perhaps God wasn’t in the mountains as she suspected. She said, we cannot afford to disbelieve in God. We will pray for better lives. We will feed our children shrapnel. We will teach them to dance to the sound of bombs. The sunlight ventured further in the house, touching the mother’s bare toes underneath the table. The other villagers told me many were burned alive, I said. What do you remember about the fire? The mother closed her eyes as her son translated my question. She said, Our families were carried to the sky in those heaps of black ash. They will come back down to visit us as mountain snow in the winter, and the snowflakes will melt in our palms [It’s unclear here if the son poeticized the translation]. I sipped my tea. I turned the recorder off. The boy relaxed his shoulders and asked if it was over, asked if he could see the article when it was published. I told him I would try, though I didn’t know how much space the newspaper would allot me.