A God in Every Stone (7 page)

The band followed up the ‘Marseillaise’ with their regimental song, ‘Zakhmi Dil’, all the men joining in, including most of the English officers. Kalam turned to Qayyum, arms spread in resignation as he sang the opening words on a platform in rural France where the Pashto language might never have been heard before: There’s a boy across the river / With a bottom like a peach / But alas! I cannot swim. When the song ended the Frenchman, for whom none of the officers had provided a translation, declared,
Magnifique!
And the woman rested both elbows on the back of a bench and leaned forward, looking straight at Qayyum.
Magnifique,
she echoed.

Embarrassed at himself for wondering if she wasn’t talking about the song, Qayyum looked away and around the platform; how proud they were – Punjabis, Dogras, Pashtuns, all! – to be received with such warmth by these strangers. The generosity of the Frenchman was all it had taken to allow them to set aside the disgruntlement they had been carrying around since Marseilles, where they were told they had to give up their turbans and drab-and-green regimental wear in favour of balaclavas and badly fitting, prickly uniforms of grey that were better suited to the climate. And their guns, too, had been taken away because they weren’t right for the French ammunition; the new rifles were unfamiliar, the weight, the shape of them not yet a natural extension of the soldiers’ bodies.

But a few minutes later, in the storage room where the smell of coffee beans soon fused with an even earthier scent, the French girl showed Qayyum how quickly an unknown body could become joined to yours. He was tentative until that became impossible. His only previous experience had been in Kowloon, the night before the 40th shipped off to France, with a woman who didn’t pretend he was giving her anything she wanted other than the money he’d been told to place on the table before they started. That had been less troubling in some way than the responses of this girl who seemed to derive pleasure from things that made him worry he was hurting her. Would a Pashtun woman react this way? he wondered, almost as soon as it was over, the thought making him feel ashamed both for himself and the French girl who kissed him on the mouth and said something he couldn’t understand. It was only then he realised they hadn’t said a word to each other, and when he spoke to her in his broken English she shook her head and laughed. He had assumed all white people could understand each other’s language in the way all the Indians in the Army had at least one tongue in common.

Kalam was watching for him when he stepped out of the storage room, his expression mocking, slightly hurt.

– Watch out, brother. You are too much in love with these people already.

– Salute your officers, Sepoy.

– Yes, sir, Lance-Naik, sir!

His salute was so sharp it meant to draw blood. Qayyum – his promotion from sepoy just days old – dismissed him with a lazy wave of his hand, refusing to take the challenge. Yes, he was in love with these people, this world. The shame had passed as quickly as it had occurred, and he drew himself up to his full height as the train whistled its arrival, understanding at that moment what it was to be a man – the wonder, the beauty of it.

They arrived in Ouderdom in the rain, Kalam hobbling on the ankle he had twisted when he slipped on a slick cobblestone. The fall had been a bad one, and Qayyum fell out to help him up, putting Kalam’s arm around his own shoulders, prepared to support him for as long as they needed to keep marching. But a Belgian woman came out of her house and put salve on Kalam’s ankle, bound his foot in a bandage and disappeared back inside without a word. Kalam had felt shamed by that and hadn’t said a word since, except to tell Qayyum that he could walk on his own feet.

But now Kalam looked up across the farmland and smiled – there, walking across the field, were men whose faces were known to the 40th, not personally but in the set of their features, their expression. The soldiers of the Lahore Division, the first of the Indian Army to arrive in France. Above the howl of the wind a voice called out in Pashto, What took you so long? Too many peach bottoms distracting you along the way?

– We thought we’d give you some chance at glory before taking it all for ourselves!

Kalam, restored to good humour. Qayyum looked around at the men of the 40th grinning, name-calling. Not just the Pashtuns, but also the Dogras, the Punjabis. Brothers recognising brothers with a jolt of love, a shot of competition. What Qayyum felt on seeing battalion after battalion of Indian soldiers bivouacked on the farmland was something quite different – a deep, inexplicable relief.

The havildar-naik of 57th Wilde’s Rifle fell into step with Qayyum as he walked across the moonlit stretch of grass. No sound except that of snoring soldiers and the call of a solitary nightbird.

– Worrying about tomorrow, Lance-Naik?

– Sir, no, sir.

– I don’t want to be ‘sir’ just now. Mohammad Khan Afridi, from Landi Kotal.

– Qayyum Gul. Peshawar.

– Do you think one day they’ll tell stories about us in the Street of Storytellers?

The Afridi lit a cigarette, handed it to Qayyum, and lit another one for himself. Qayyum’s shoes squeaked on the wet grass as he rocked back on his heels, blowing smoke up into the air, watching the ghostly trail of it ascend and dissipate.

– Did you hear about the 5th Light Infantry? the Afridi asked.

– No, sir. What? Are they here also?

– No, Singapore. On trial for mutiny. Not all of them, but many.

– Pashtuns?

– Pashtuns and Rajput Muslims. They heard a rumour they would be sent to Turkey to fight fellow Muslims, so they mutinied. Killed their officers.

Qayyum swore loudly, and the older man nodded his head, held the tip of his cigarette against an oak leaf and burned a circle into it. The smell carried a hint of winter fires.

– They join an army which fights fellow Pashtuns in the tribal areas, but they’ll mutiny at the thought of taking up arms against Turks. That’s our people for you, Lance-Naik.

Qayyum shook his head, looked over the encampment. At 5.30 tomorrow morning they’d be on the march again. He cleared his throat, moistened his lips.

– What’s it really like? Fighting the Germans?

– Go and sleep now, Lance-Naik. Dream of Peshawar. That’s an order. You’ll have the answer to your question tomorrow, at Vipers.

Again and again the pain plunged him into oblivion and a fresh burst of gunfire pulled him out. Then there was silence, and he waited for the darkness to claim him but there was only fire racing along his face, licking deep into his eye-socket. An ant climbed a blade of grass and his laboured breath blew it off in the direction of the stream, a few feet away, unreachable; the sun that made the fire burn more fiercely on his face turned playful as it dipped into the balm of the water. I will die here, Qayyum thought, and waited for Allah or his family or the mountains of Peshawar to take hold of his heart. But there was only the fire, and the blood drowning his eye and the stench of dead men. Was he the only man alive, or were there others like him who knew the gunners would find them if they twitched a limb?

Perhaps he was dead already, and this was hell. The eternal fires, yes. It must have happened just as they ascended the slopes – the Germans were right on the other side of it, just over the crest of the hill. But the first round of bullets must have killed him and flung him into this devil-made world in which men had to run across a field without cover, stumbling over the corpses of their brothers, and when the tattered remnants of one division reached the enemy lines on the slope across the field, a yellow mist entered their bodies and made them fall, foam at their mouths. Cover your nose and mouth, the order came, swift and useless; if they’d had their turbans they would have wound them around their faces but there were only the balaclavas. Qayyum remembered the handkerchief in his pocket, the one Captain Dalmohy had instructed him to dip into the buckets of liquid they passed, and he held it up against his face even as he watched the breeze move the yellow mist eastward. So this wasn’t hell. The mist would have leapt into his lungs if it were.

The emerald green of the grass turned to pine green; the sun sank entirely into the water. His hand had gone to sleep but he was afraid to shake it awake even though the numbness was moving up his arm. There had been a sepoy sitting upright in the field as men advanced around him, one arm ending at the wrist. Qayyum picked up the severed hand he’d almost trodden on, and passed it to the man who thanked him, very politely, and tried to join the hand in place. I think there’s a piece missing. Can you look? he said, and died. Qayyum had forgotten this, though it had happened only hours earlier.

Qayyum tried to pray, but the Merciful, the Beneficent, had abandoned this field and the men within it. Something was moving along the ground, a heavy weight; a starving animal, wolf or jackal, with its belly pressed against the ground, smelling meat; a German with a knife between his teeth. Grass flattened, the thing entered the space between Qayyum and the stream. Any movement was pain, any movement was target practice to the gunners. And then a whisper, his name.

– Kalam, stay there. They’ll shoot you.

– Lance-Naik, sir. Shut up.

One afternoon in the Street of Money Changers, Qayyum and his brother Najeeb had stumbled on an object in the road – a dead rabbit with its lips sewn together, foam at its mouth. A man walked past a hundred cruelties in Peshawar every day, and nothing about the rabbit made him slow his stride, but Najeeb knelt on the street and carefully cut away the thread, the animal’s fur-and-mud-caked head in his palm. When Qayyum put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, Najeeb looked up and asked, Do you think its family was near by and it tried to call out to them? As if that were the real reason for distress, not the needle lancing the animal’s lips, the hand which would have stopped the breath at its nose. Oh Allah, the cruelty of the world. How had Najeeb known this terror, this loneliness of dying alone? Kalam’s hand clasped his ankle and he felt tears dislodge the blood in his eye, which he couldn’t touch without feeling as if he were wiping off his whole face.

– Don’t leave me.

– Brainless Pashtun, do you think I came all this way just to smell your socks?

Time had never moved more slowly than in those minutes – or was it hours? – in which Kalam inched himself along the ground until his face was level with Qayyum’s, and he could see what the fire had done.

– Tell me. How bad is it?

– Don’t worry, Yousuf, all Zuleikhas will still want to seduce you and so will the Potiphars.

– Kalam, don’t joke.

– It’s this or tears. Just be patient, we’ll retreat when it’s dark.

– The sun has gone.

– My friend, you’ve forgotten the moon, large and white as your Frenchwoman’s breast and climbing through the sky. Still a few more hours. But I’m here, don’t worry. Your Kalam is here.

The end of his sentence disappeared in gunfire. Qayyum’s body jerked in anticipation of the bullets that would rip through him, but Kalam had a hand on his chest, telling him to hold still, the gunners were aiming at something else. You stay still too, Qayyum said, but Kalam braced on his elbows and used them as a pivot for his arms, the rest of his body motionless as – again and again – he lowered his palms into the stream and slowly, hardly spilling a drop, brought them to Qayyum’s parched mouth, washed the blood from his face and tried to clean the mess that was his eye. With the stink of blood all around, the only light in the world came from those cupped palms, the shifting water within them.

May–June 1915

– I'm sorry, no, it won't recover like a knife-cut on your arm. We must remove it.

The Indian doctor stepped back and switched off a torch which Qayyum hadn't realised he'd been holding. When the doctor patted his shoulder and moved to the next bed, the white-skinned woman, grey-haired, and with lines all around her mouth, stayed to replace his bandages, her touch impersonal in a way he'd never known a woman's touch could be. Where was it they had brought him? Brighton, they said, but all he knew of it was the pebbled beach, the damp smell of the ambulance, and then this place, this page out of a book of djinn stories into which they'd carried him. Everything ever seen or imagined painted upon its walls, its ceilings – dragons and trees and birds and men from Tashkent or Farghana like those in the Street of Storytellers. Such colour, such richness. More than a single eye could hold. He was floating above it all, beside the gilded dragons on the leather canopy of the ceiling. England had made the pain stop. But the woman was speaking to him, he must return to the bed to hear what she was saying.

– We'll fit you up with a glass eye, and you'll be breaking hearts again in no time.

– I don't want to break hearts.

– Oh, love.

He didn't know why she looked at him in that way, or what a woman was doing among all these men but when she said ‘love' in that sad tone of voice he understood, even through the glow of painlessness, that he was maimed now, a partial man, and from here on he would never be admired, only pitied.

 

He used to be a man who climbed trees just to see the view from the top, one who entered a new city and sought out its densest alleys, a man who strode towards clamour. Now he couldn't think of a branch without imagining the tip of it entering his remaining eye. Everything everywhere was a threat. Every branch, every ball arcing through the air, every gust of wind, every sharp sound, every darkened room, every night, every day. The elbows of a woman; her sudden movements towards him in desire; her hands searching his face for those expressions that only revealed themselves in the dark. He traced the skin around his bandaged eye. Who was he now, this man who saw proximity as danger?