The Last Kestrel

by Jill McGivering

  She and Jalil had sat, cross-legged, on dusty floors while one family after another had told them their troubles. The lack of work here in Afghanistan. The hostility from neighbours who’d stayed and endured the fighting and despised them for having left.

  They had both been subdued and exhausted as they drove back, Jalil in the front of the battered car beside the local driver, Ellen stretched out across the back seat, her hair itchy and hot under her headscarf. Dust rose in clouds along the roadside as the driver weaved his way past overladen trucks and cars. He was aggressive, leaning on his horn, eager to be home. The sun was low and falling, a brilliant orange ball setting fire to the jagged mountains that ran along the road.

  The driver braked sharply and swerved, pulling in. He and Jalil exchanged a word or two. The car came to a halt in front of a row of shacks, selling pyramids of unevenly shaped oranges and pomegranates and soft drinks. The driver jumped out of the car and went across to one.

  ‘Please. One minute.’ Jalil twisted round to her in the back, holding up a finger to denote the minute and jumped out too, pursuing the driver. His face was tight.

  Ellen tried again to press down the lopsided lock on her door, which had stuck at half-mast. The road was busy. Passing trucks and lumbering buses blew dust into her face through the cracks round the window and set the car rocking on the road. She was hungry and thirsty. She thought about arriving back at the guesthouse, pulling off her dusty clothes and having a warm shower. They served wine in the basement bar. Poor-quality wine that guaranteed a headache. After her shower, she would go down there, order bread and hummus and a salad and let her senses be numbed by that cheap—

  A sharp knock on the window, inches from her face, made her jump. A man, a dark shape in the gloom. His flat metal ring clattered on the glass. His face came low to the window, fogging it with his breath as he peered in. A thick dark beard and bushy eyebrows gave volume to a thin face. A flash of dirty teeth. She took hold of the inside handle and pulled the door taut. Useless, she knew, if he decided to jerk it open and the lock didn’t hold. But what else could she do? Her headscarf slipped back on her head. His eyes were on her face.

  The driver’s door opened with a stirring of dust and air. For a second, she was relieved. Thank God. He’s back. Let’s go. Then she saw the head and broad shoulders pushing inside, the greasy hair of a stranger, and heard the scrape of fingernails against plastic as hands ransacked the inside of the car. A voice, raised, shouted something close to her ear. The intruder lifted his head, poked it to one side, his cheek level with the broken headrest of the front seat, and stared at her. He hesitated for a moment, taking her in, then smiled. She glimpsed the flash of light on metal and looked down to see a gun in his hand. Her mind was trying to process it, even as she waited to be shot. Not an AK-47, some part of her brain was deciding. She couldn’t see quite what…

  The man at her door was rattling the handle, trying to get in. The car rocked. Shouting. Footsteps, figures running. The intruder was suddenly retreating, twisting his neck back to see, scrambling to get out. A blow fell. Another. The car jerked. The dark shape at her door moved, letting in light.

  Now the driver was falling into his seat, his hands trembling too hard to fit the keys in the ignition. She heard the jitter of metal as he scraped and failed, then tried again. A man fell sideways across the bonnet. His face, staring, pressed against the windscreen, squashing the flesh of his cheek. His eyes were open, stunned and unseeing. A trickle of blood smeared on the glass. Jalil pulled him off the car and there was a thud as the man hit the ground. Jalil was running round the front of the car and wrenching open the car door, jumping into his seat. He was shouting at the driver. The key found its slot and the engine started. They jerked forward into the road.

  No one spoke as they drove back to Kabul. Ellen sat with her arms crossed, trying to hold her body and stop it from shaking. She felt sick. Images of the men’s faces, of the gun, blurred her vision. The driver drove slowly, staying in lane, afraid to overtake anything. When he changed gear, his hand trembled on the gear stick. Jalil was rigid, his neck stiff with tension.

  It was dark by the time they reached the guesthouse. The guards came out to them, guns dangling from their shoulders, and shone torches in their faces before they opened up the metal gates. Her legs buckled as she stepped out into the compound.

  ‘Jalil,’ she said. She hesitated. She wanted to invite him inside, into light and safety. But it was an overpriced place, designed for Western businessmen, aid workers and correspondents. He seemed uncomfortable there.

  He got out of the car and stood in front of her in the darkness. Shame-faced.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He didn’t look her in the eye. ‘These people.’

  ‘Of course.’ She didn’t know what to say. She wanted to touch him, to pat him on the shoulder or take his hand and comfort him, but any such gesture, she knew, would only embarrass him more. She hesitated.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I will come at nine o’clock?’

  ‘Nine o’clock.’ She nodded.

  Jalil leaned towards her and added in a whisper: ‘I will find a better driver. I am very sorry.’

  He got back into the car, slammed the door and they reversed out into the dark road.

  It was only the following day, in proper light, that she saw the bruising around his eye and the cut down the side of his face. I should say something, she thought. I should thank him. But he seemed determined not to discuss what had happened and, as the day passed, it began to seem too late.

  Now he’s dead, she thought, and it really is too late. She lifted her hands to her face and rubbed them heavily down her cheeks. Her stomach was twisted with shame. She looked out across the valley.

  Halfway down the hillside, a heavy brown bird flashed with sunlight. Its tail was fanned, its broad wings proud. It was hovering over the corn, straining to keep its stillness in the currents of air. She sat and watched it until it finally swooped and disappeared. Then she turned her attention to work, picked up the photograph album, wiped the dust from its cover with her sleeve and opened it out across her knee.

  When she arrived back at the compound, Najib was waiting for her. His face was crumpled with anxiety.

  ‘He is here,’ he said, ‘with his wife.’

  He pointed to the medics’ makeshift field hospital which had sprung up in one corner. Camouflage nets and ground sheets had been hung round for privacy but the dark, low shape of a man was visible, squatting on his haunches by a figure on the ground. Even from this distance, she could sense their stillness together. His head was bowed towards his wife, his body tense. They’d found each other. She was no longer alone.

  ‘How long’s he been there?’

  Najib shrugged. ‘Twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘They are whispering, whispering.’ He stamped his feet and looked self-important. ‘Major Mack wants to speak to them,’ he said. ‘I will translate.’

  Ellen sat on a flat stone against the wall and opened her notebook. She started to write a description of the bombed house and its contents before the details began to fade from her mind.

  ‘The children are not theirs.’

  She looked up. Najib had lit a cigarette and was quietly smoking.

  ‘Not theirs?’

  ‘The dead children, they are not theirs.’

  He drew on his cigarette, blew out smoke.

  ‘He said that?’

  Najib nodded. ‘After the burying. They are his older brother’s children.’

  Ellen considered this. ‘So where’s his older brother?’

  Najib shrugged. A wasp was buzzing round them, close to their heads.

  ‘He doesn’t know,’ he said. ‘Everyone is fled.’

  Ellen looked at him. ‘It’s his wife, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s his wife.’

  She stared at him. Something wasn’t right. This story smelt crooked.

  ‘What do you make of them?’ she said. ‘Of the family?’
<
br />   ‘Something strange.’

  ‘What do you mean? Strange?’

  Najib paused before he spoke. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. Another pause. ‘I don’t trust them. They are hard people.’

  ‘We just dropped a bomb on them.’

  ‘That is true.’ Najib finished his cigarette. Instead of screwing it into the dust with his boot, the way a soldier would, he walked over to the wall, stubbed out the sparks and crushed the end in his hand. He sat next to Ellen.

  ‘My father was taken by the Taliban,’ said Najib. ‘He was a teacher. A good teacher. Someone accused him. They said he was irreligious. That he was teaching wrong things. He was picked up one day, on his way to the university, by the Ministry of Vice.’

  Ellen leaned forward to listen. Najib’s voice was barely more than a whisper.

  ‘We waited long time,’ Najib said. ‘Painful waiting without word. My mother couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. It was too dangerous to go to the ministry to ask for him. I was just a boy. What could I do?’

  Najib fell silent again.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘He crawled back to us in the night,’ he said. ‘More than a month afterwards. Both his legs were broken. He was so thin, so weak, it had taken him half the night to reach us.’ He paused. ‘His face was so bruised, I didn’t recognize him. He lay in bed for many months before he could live again. He is crippled, of course.’

  ‘Was it your father who taught you English?’

  ‘Yes. He taught me many things. Including English.’

  Ellen nodded. ‘He must be proud of you.’ Every Afghan family she met had suffered loss.

  ‘I will make him proud.’ Najib smiled. ‘Isn’t that what you are taught, when you learn about Afghan people? That we are very proud?’ He spread his hands, still smiling, as if to say he admitted that this was so. ‘That is why I hate Taliban, because of my father.’ He paused. ‘But these people,’ he gestured back towards the medics’ corner. ‘I do not think they feel like this. I do not feel they hate Taliban. That is why I cannot trust them.’

  Ellen let the silence settle. Najib was feeling nervously in his pockets, looking perhaps for more cigarettes.

  ‘I think we have a friend in common,’ she said.

  He looked up.

  ‘Jalil.’

  He reacted at once. A sadness came into his face, mixed with something darker, with fearfulness.

  ‘I saw his family in Kabul,’ she said. ‘Jalil used to translate for me.’

  He nodded but he had turned his eyes away from her, towards the ground.

  She waited, judging his silence. ‘His sister said you were friends. You and Jalil.’

  ‘We talked,’ he said. ‘He liked to talk about going to America. To study. His dream.’

  Najib found another cigarette and lit it. They sat together as he smoked, the acrid smell of his tobacco heavy in the air. She wondered how much Jalil had told him. Her face felt suddenly hot.

  ‘He didn’t have the money,’ she said. ‘That’s why he took this job.’

  ‘Of course.’ Najib drew on his cigarette, kicked the toe of his boot against the ground. ‘The money is important.’

  ‘Tell me, Najib. What happened?’

  Najib sat on the ground beside her and stared at the sand as he began to talk. He kept his voice low, speaking hastily, as if he were afraid of being overheard. His words came to her scented with his cheap Afghan cigarette.

  ‘He became worried,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it was. Something he knew. He was usually a happy person. But a few days before it happened, he changed very much. He wouldn’t tell me. I knew there was something. But he told me it was better that I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you think it was?’

  Najib drew on his cigarette, looked around cautiously. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I think it was about the suicide bombing. In Nayullah. When we heard news of it, he was angry. I mean, of course, we were all angry. But his anger was something else. Something different. Bitter.’

  Outside the compound, a convoy of heavy vehicles crashed past, proof that the engineers had strengthened the bridge. The roar enveloped them and they were both coated, even at this distance, in a light film of dust. Ellen waited for the noise to subside, then spoke again. ‘Was he mixed up in anything? Drugs? Bad friends?’

  Najib looked at her sadly. ‘Jalil! I thought you knew him?’

  ‘Did he tell you anything else?’

  ‘He was going to leave. After the bombing, he told me he was leaving soon and going back to Kabul. He didn’t care if he couldn’t find another work, that’s what he said. He couldn’t stay here.’

  Ellen leaned in towards him. ‘Why?’

  ‘Not his safety.’ Najib looked up, realizing he might have been misunderstood. ‘He wasn’t worried about himself. He was brave.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he was.’

  ‘And he liked the soldiers. He was always fooling around with them, playing football. And he very much liked Major Mack. He is like a father to me, he used to say. He has the heart of an Afghan.’ Najib lifted his elbow and rubbed his eyes.

  Ellen smiled. From Jalil, she knew, this was high praise.

  ‘I don’t know what happened.’ Najib looked close to tears. ‘He went out with the men that day and then he disappeared. They found him dead. Tied up like an animal. Shot through the head.’

  He got suddenly to his feet, pressed his cigarette into spilled strands and wiped down his face with the palm of his hand. Mack was approaching across the compound, spraying sand. He gave Najib a curt nod and Najib ran towards him, falling into line at his heel. The two men set off together to the medics’ corner.

  She sat quietly, looking after them and thinking, breathing in the fragments of Afghan tobacco in the air around her, until it had dispersed completely into the desert air. It was the same cheap brand that Jalil used to smoke.

  Moss, Dillon and young Hancock had set their mess tins to boil and were rifling through their ration packs. They didn’t look up as she settled beside them, got her own kit out, lit the burner and started to heat some water.

  ‘Torta-wotsit with three cheeses,’ Moss was saying, waving a foil packet. ‘Tastes like dog shit, doesn’t it?’

  Dillon pulled it out of his hand. ‘Thank you, Jamie Oliver. Gimme that.’ He handed Moss a pack from his own rations. ‘Spag bol. More your style.’

  ‘More like pie and chips and a pint, mate.’

  Ellen pulled out a vacuum pack of meatballs in tomato sauce and put it to boil. She squeezed synthetic cheese from a tube onto brown biscuits and rubbed them together to spread it. Her hands were black with dirt. She could feel Dillon watching her out of the corner of his eye. ‘Are we still living the dream?’ she said.

  ‘Bloody right.’ He grinned. ‘Happy days. You signing up?’

  Hancock sniggered, his head down.

  ‘Bit old,’ said Ellen. ‘But thanks anyway.’

  Moss was bent over his mess tin, prodding the sachet with his knife. ‘Fucking sand,’ he said. ‘Fucking everywhere.’

  ‘Language,’ said Dillon. ‘Ladies present.’

  Ellen bit into a biscuit. The cheese tasted of chemicals. What could possibly have upset Jalil so much? He needed the job. He knew as well as anyone how scarce work was in Kabul. By Afghan standards, this job was dangerous but it was very well paid. The rest of the family depended on it. She thought about Jalil, about the kinds of thing that made him angry. He had strong principles. It would have to be something he found offensive or insulting to cause him to walk away from his duty to his family.

  ‘Why haven’t they put up a fight?’ she said. ‘The Taliban?’

  Hancock looked round at the others. Moss, focused on his food, ignored her. Dillon shrugged. ‘Dunno,’ he said. He didn’t look at her.

  ‘An offensive like this, taking villages they’ve held for years. It’s a real slap in the face.’

  Dillon nodded. ‘Well cheeky.’ He
and Moss were both fishing their hot foil packets out now, cutting them open and digging into them with plastic spoons. Steam rose round their faces. They ate hungrily, the packets up against their mouths as they spooned in the mush.

  Ellen tried again, half thinking aloud. ‘So where’s the response?’

  Dillon made a face through his food. ‘Dunno,’ he said. He pointed to her mess tin, now boiling hard. ‘Don’t leave it too long,’ he said, ‘or it tastes like crap.’

  Mack finally re-emerged. He strode across the compound to the house and disappeared inside. Ellen spooned meatballs into her mouth; they were thick and tasteless but hot. She made a mug of tea with the boiling water and went back to her place against the wall to drink it. Her questions made the lads uncomfortable. The atmosphere had cooled.

  It took her until mid-afternoon to get permission to talk to the Afghan woman. She was sleeping, the medics kept saying. Her husband’s visit had tired her. She was still drowsy from the sedatives. Her leg wound? Nothing serious. Now it was clean, it should heal well.

  She and Najib sat in the sand and waited. Najib spelt out the woman’s name in her notebook in neat, sloping capitals: HASINA.

  ‘Age?’

  He wrinkled his nose. ‘Maybe forty? Forty-five?’

  ‘We’ll ask her.’

  ‘She won’t know.’ He jabbed her page with his finger. ‘Write forty.’

  Hasina was lying on a bedroll, a folded blanket under her head, a drip in her arm. Her headscarf was veiling her head and neck. Ellen knelt down beside her. The green eyes glared up at her, large and defiant.

  ‘Tell her I’m a journalist, not a soldier,’ said Ellen. ‘I want to write about what happened to her. What happened to her family.’

  She looked Hasina over as Najib translated. The dust that had coated her face and neck had been washed off and her skin smelt of disinfectant. Her lips were again pink with blood.

  ‘What was she doing in the house, when the soldiers came? Why hadn’t she left?’