LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      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.

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