A God in Every Stone (18 page)

I know the stories of men from twenty-five hundred years ago, but I’ll never know what happens to you.

November 1915

Every day Qayyum waited for another messenger in the bloodstained uniform of the 40th to approach him. The first messenger had been preparation; the second would be the call to action. It was unthinkable for a lance-naik of the 40th to go to the Ottoman Empire to tell soldiers their loyalties didn’t lie with their regiment; but it was even more unthinkable for Qayyum to deny Kalam again. Every day he twisted in his snare, waiting and waiting, but by the time the days had shortened into November he came to believe that Kalam, who loved him well enough to want the power to make him suffer but too well to prolong that suffering, had chosen in the end to allow him to live his life without wrenching him in two.

It was a strange disappointment the day he reached that conclusion. So is this it, he thought, this is my life. His father had stayed home again that day – the cold that had seeped into his bones from decades of sitting outdoors in Peshawar’s winters made the onset of winter an increasing tribulation each year – and Qayyum sat at the desk with the buffalo-horn thinking, this is my inheritance, this is for ever, until the cold or the heat or the boredom kills me.

A woman sat down on the stool across from Qayyum. He wondered if she had a husband or son in the Army – in the last few months he’d lost count of the women who had come to him saying they’d heard he had been at war and would he help them in writing their letters. It wasn’t just a scribe they wanted but someone who might understand their husbands’ lives. Should I tell him his father is dead? Will it make him sad if I say I want him to come home quickly? Forgive me but please be honest; is it true that white women come into the soldiers’ barracks?

These women made him think, for the first time in a long while, of the girls who had been part of the neighbourhood games during his childhood, all of whom disappeared from view when they came to a certain age. In the first few days after their retreat some of them would send messages out with their younger sisters, such as, even with a burqa on I can still run faster than you; and sometimes a window shutter would open for a few seconds and some object of uncertain significance would fly out – a hairclip, an apple with a startled face carved onto it, a blank piece of paper balled up. But eventually all communication stopped. Now, if Qayyum were ever walking past the home of one of his childhood playmates and a figure in a burqa stepped out he wouldn’t even wonder if it was her. Even if it was, she’d be so different she might as well be another person. Boys grew into men as a sapling grows into a tree, but girls became women as a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. His sisters most of all; they were nothing but flapping wings.

But the woman who had sat down did not flap her wings, did not ask about the Army, or even tell him who the letter was for. She only wanted him to write what she dictated with the care of someone who didn’t want the letter-writer to mistranscribe a single word.

Don’t apologise for the danger you put me in by sending that message. It has been the only light in my days. When my daughter is old enough for marriage I will send her to your house for protection.

He tried to keep the curiosity away from his face, as his father was skilled at doing. It was impossible to know very much about the woman from the sound of her voice except that she was young. He asked what address he should put on the envelope and she said there was no need for that. Taking the letter, she walked away, and turned into the Street of Storytellers. The unexpected figure of an Englishwoman with a pith-helmet on her head and clothes which revealed almost her entire arms and part of her legs followed after her. Even here, even in Peshawar, there were different rules for the English. No, especially here.

How he missed Kalam who would mock him for sitting under a tree, sighing about his buffalo-horn inheritance, while an Englishwoman walked through the Walled City as if she had more right to it than any man of Peshawar.

The plum orchard looked incomplete without fruit hanging heavy from the trees. Time here didn’t move in the sluggish way of the Walled City where days moved predictably through the minor variations which separated them. Walking the length of the orchard he realised he didn’t know where he might find Kalam’s father, or which of the adjoining fields belonged to him. He shouted out a greeting but there was no response, so he cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, Kalam! knowing that a father is more likely to hear his absent son’s name than any other sound in the world.

He repeated the call, again and again, and finally a man appeared, Kalam’s angled jawline attached to an otherwise unfamiliar face.

– Why are you calling my son?

– Khan Sahib, I’m Qayyum. Kalam’s friend from the 40th. I’ve come to ask if you’ve had any news from him.

– So you’re Qayyum. Khan Sahib? You didn’t teach my son any of your manners.

The man’s mouth twisted into a smile which was also Kalam. He walked up to Qayyum and pulled him into an embrace so fierce, so passionate it could only mean one thing; Qayyum sagged against the older man who kept him arms around him, holding him upright.

Had he been here a minute, an hour? He was on the grass, a dampness from the morning’s winter rain soaking through his clothes, all the way up to his collar, or was that the tears? He held up his hand, blotting out most of the other man’s face so there was only that jawline, blurred with age. Kalam’s father sat down next to him and patted his back as if he were a child in need of comfort.

– Son, the old man said, my son.

– What happened? The English?

– An old family feud. Kalam’s cousin stuck a knife in him and left him to bleed to death.

Blood and foam around the rabbit’s mouth, its eyes wide. The sweetness of rage, here it came, flooding his veins, as Kalam’s father jabbed a finger into his side to show where the knife had entered.

– You know who it was? Who did it? Qayyum asked.

– Yes. Why?

Before I didn’t know why I was here, but now every German I kill will be the man who did this to you. Those were the last words Kalam had said in his ear before the ambulance took him away. Qayyum stood up, pulled on the low-hanging branch of the tree, and looked around. That endless night beside the stream, Kalam had spoken to him of the life that lay before each of them – one in the Walled City, one in the orchards. You’ll visit me when the air is ripe with plums and every breath you take has a sweetness to it, he’d said. Somehow, in the middle of all that horror, he had allowed Qayyum to see a gentle future: two ageing men, sitting under a tree, occasionally bringing out a faded memory of the 40th Pathans. Kalam – his cynical smile, his hopeful eyes.

– I will avenge his death.

– You’ll kill his killer?

– Yes.

– And his brothers will kill you.

– They can try.

– How many brothers do you have?

– One.

– How old is he?

– Twelve.

– When they come for you they’ll kill him too.

– It’s nothing to do with him.

– In their place, I’d cut his throat before he’s old enough to seek revenge.

Kalam’s father stood up, stretching. A man who understood the rules of the world and had long since ceased to be surprised or dismayed by them.

– Think about it for a few days.

They had buried him on the barren hillside, that boy of orchards and streams. Even in death, a deserter was a fugitive. Qayyum walked in the icy waters adjoining the plum orchard, the current pulling at his ankles.

–
Ina lillahi wa inna illayhi rajiun
.

We belong to Allah, and to Allah we return.

At Vipers, when the German gunners shot Afroze who chose to cry out his grief knowing the consequences rather than bear the death of a beloved in silence, a whisper burbled across the field:
Ina lillahi wa inna illayhi rajiun
. The men of the 40th, not all of them Muslim, whispered the words for the two dead men, and the prayer would have reached the gunners as wind on water or the sighs of ghosts. Kalam’s hand on Qayyum’s chest, muffling his heartbeat so the sound of it wouldn’t reach the Germans.

–
Ina lillahi wa inna illayhi rajiun.

Hands still cupped in prayer, he bent to the stream, filled his palms with water and poured it over his head. Again and again.

–
Ina lillahi wa inna illayhi rajiun.

It was all he could do that night to walk through the Walled City instead of huddle in a quiet alley with memories for company. Near home, he heard a half-cry, more terrifying in the abruptness of its ending than in its tone, and didn’t look round to see if it came from a human or animal. Even when he had two functioning eyes and a fearlessness that was almost a belief in immortality he’d known better than to make the troubles of Peshawar’s nights his own. Opening the door beside the cobbler’s shop, where a single candle illuminated Hari Das stitching a sole onto a shoe with a thick needle, he made his way up the steps. He heard the shouts when he was halfway up, and ran the last few steps, wrenching the door open at the top. At one end of the room his sisters huddled together to form a protective circle around Najeeb, while his mother ripped pages out of a book and threw fistfuls of paper at her youngest child. A scrap landed on a burning candle and the flame ran up the paper, briefly extending its reach to illuminate his father who was standing with his back pressed to a wall.

– Enough.

Qayyum put a hand on his mother’s wrist and took the book out of her hand. It was a ruled exercise book, with symbols all over the pages which included letters of the English alphabet.

– Ask your brother, go on, ask him what he’s been doing when we thought he was with the maulvi.

– Let him be. I know he goes to read in Shalimar Bagh; I told him it was all right. Leave his books alone.

– Read in Shalimar Bagh? Read in Shalimar Bagh?

She snatched the book and slapped Qayyum’s shoulder with it, the sound of the cover smacking his flesh more shocking than the force of the blow.

– Every afternoon he goes into the house of a young, unmarried Englishwoman and doesn’t come out for hours. Everyone in this neighbourhood knows it, they’ve known it for weeks. Tell him!

She gestured at her eldest daughter, who should have been at her in-laws’ house preparing dinner for the family but had obviously come here just to drip venom into their mother’s ear, and now had her arms around Najeeb as though she thought it was possible to be both bayonet and shield. She kissed Najeeb’s hair, which conveniently kept her from responding to her mother, whose gesture became one of dismissal.

– You ask Najeeb what she wants with him, his mother said to Qayyum. Go on, ask him. I’m getting nothing but lies.

– It’s not a lie! Najeeb said. Lala, please, she teaches me Classics. Explain it to our mother.

But their mother didn’t even look at Qayyum, reserving the full power of her fury for her younger son.

– What is this English word, this ‘Classics’? What is she teaching you, what have you been doing there?

Qayyum looked at his brother, who had broken out of his sister’s embrace and was picking up the pieces of paper from the floor, his jaw tightly clenched when Qayyum expected to see him crying. Qayyum kneeled on the ground beside him, and put his hand on Najeeb’s chin, tilting his face up. Soft hair was beginning to appear above his lip; why hadn’t he noticed earlier that the boy wasn’t entirely a boy any longer?

– I told you to stay away from Englishwomen.

He expected a look of betrayal, not this one of disdain.

– You don’t know anything about her.

– I don’t have to. I knew her men.

– Lala, please. You can come with me to my lessons, come and meet her and you’ll see; she isn’t like anyone else. Please don’t make me stop our lessons. Our mother will listen to you if you tell her. It doesn’t have to mean something bad when Englishwomen talk to us.

Qayyum rested his hand on his brother’s shoulder. Najeeb was in that time between boy and man, lurching from one to the other in the space of a single moment. And what would happen in one such moment if the boy looked on a young unmarried Englishwoman with a man’s eyes? What if an Englishman thought he caught the boy looking on one of his women in that way? Not even a Victoria Cross could give a Pashtun the right to deserve an Englishwoman’s attention.

–You must do what our mother says.

He stood up, and turned away so he wouldn’t have to watch Najeeb’s face as his mother told him that she would walk with him to the mosque every day after lunch, and stay there until his lessons were finished, and walk him straight home. On another day, in another time, Qayyum might have had the words, the thoughts, to be his brother’s champion, but Kalam was dead and his ghost pressed its mouth to Qayyum’s ear. Najeeb’s tears – they had started now – were those of a child who has yet to understand the world won’t shape itself to his will.

When they sat down to eat, Najeeb didn’t take his accustomed position but sat on his brother’s right-hand side where Qayyum couldn’t see him.