The Last Kestrel

by Jill McGivering

  She bent beside him to look at the third map. His fingers were long, efficient, as they smoothed and marshalled the paper.

  ‘This is the area south of here,’ he was saying. ‘That’s the river. There’s the track we took to the ridge when the offensive started. And the ridge itself.’

  She looked more closely. ‘So tell me,’ she said, ‘where was Jalil found?’

  ‘The turp?’ He turned his head to look at her, his eyes surprised. ‘What makes you so interested in him?’

  ‘I knew him.’

  His eyebrows rose.

  ‘I worked with him. In Kabul.’

  ‘I see.’ He spoke to himself, nodding. ‘That explains it.’

  He bent back over the map. He pointed to a blank stretch of desert about ten kilometres away. ‘I don’t know. Around here, I suppose.’

  South-east of the latest offensive. She judged the distance and the angles of the nearest tracks. It wasn’t as far away as she’d expected.

  ‘I’d like to go.’

  ‘Go?’ He re-rolled the map. ‘There’s nothing to see.’

  ‘Even so.’ She kept her voice firm.

  He levelled the ends. ‘Absolutely not.’ He fastened the map with a paperclip. ‘That’s impossible. Final word.’

  ‘But now you’ve pushed North,’ she said, ‘it must be more secure. That area—’

  ‘I’m not risking my men’s lives,’ he said, ‘on some fool errand.’

  He dropped the map onto the table and turned away from her. His body had tightened. She watched, taking in the tension across his broad shoulders.

  A young officer appeared in the doorway, saw her there and hesitated on the threshold. He coughed. ‘Sir?’

  Mack turned round. His expression was formal, with little trace of the friendliness she’d seen earlier. He motioned her towards the doorway. ‘If you don’t mind?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The officer stepped neatly to one side to let her pass.

  She walked back through the tunnel that ran the length of the house, blinking in the gloom. The pattern of the map was clear in her mind. Jalil, she thought, I’d like to see where you died. She had an absurd image of herself laying a flower on the sand. Stupid, of course. But he’d been a kind friend and a loyal one. She would have liked the chance to say goodbye.

  Two young soldiers careered into the passageway from the bright sunshine beyond and bumped into her, knocking her against the wall. One twisted back, shouting over his shoulder, ‘Sorry, ma’am’, as they ran on. The other lad, ahead, was spluttering with laughter.

  She leaned her head against the brickwork, catching her breath. The mud plaster was warm and soft. A tinny radio was playing a high-pitched song, a man’s voice climbing up and down the scale in Pashto. It reminded her of the bazaars in the cities she’d visited with Jalil, where a babble of music constantly spilled out of every alley, every shop, every café. Beyond the music, there was another noise, of feet shuffling in the dust. She moved forward, peered in round the half-closed door.

  Najib. His hands were raised gracefully above his head, his arms bent, his shoulders gyrating as he waved flexed fingers in the air. He was dancing with one foot extended, sashaying in small steps, his hips undulating to the wailing rhythm of the music. His eyes were closed. He seemed lost. When the song ended, his body slackened, the magic broken. His eyes opened as she clapped.

  ‘Very good,’ she said. ‘Bravo!’

  He beamed shyly, twisted his head away. Then he turned back, gave a slight bow, and gestured her inside.

  ‘Please.’ He reached down to snap off the battered radio. ‘You are most welcome.’ He motioned for her to sit on the mud bricks lined against the walls. ‘You must do me the honour to take tea.’

  She sat cross-legged on a brick as he shook a packet of crackers onto a dusty plate. ‘Your radio?’

  He nodded. ‘We must listen,’ he said. ‘Sometimes the Taliban make announcement.’

  ‘But not on that station.’ She smiled. ‘You’re a dancer then?’

  ‘My father loved music,’ he said. ‘He was a real dancer. Before Taliban, of course.’ He poured a cup of strong green tea from a cracked pot on a tray.

  ‘Did they really stop all music?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He sat opposite her and sipped the tea. ‘You cannot imagine to live without music. How dead the life is.’

  ‘And you think these people support them?’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe. Taliban made things stable. Not like now. That’s what people say.’ He urged her to take a cracker. It tasted stale and slightly damp. He was relaxed, sitting there against the wall. His beard was downy, his eyes proud. ‘Many here say the British, the Americans, are like the Russian army. They are here for some while. They build some clinic but forget we have no doctor. Or open some new school with beautiful walls and forget the teachers have all fled. Then they too will leave.’

  A fly came in from the dark corridor and buzzed between them through the room.

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘I think maybe they are right.’ He spoke into the floor, then looked up at her cautiously, scanning her face for reaction. She sensed that she was the first Westerner to sit with him, share a cup of tea and ask his opinion. In his own country.

  ‘What do your parents feel about you working for the British?’ she said.

  He drained his tea, stared for a moment into the empty cup. ‘My father says it is good that I fight with a dictionary, not a gun.’ He smiled. ‘And my mother, she says: Najib, my son. I have a nice girl for you to marry. Come home at once before she gets too old!’

  She shook the final drops out of her cup into the floor and placed it on the mud brick beside him. ‘Thank you. That was almost as good as the chai Jalil used to make me.’

  He looked pleased. ‘You and Jalil were good friends?’

  ‘We worked together.’ She chose her words with care. ‘And yes, we were friends. I hope so.’ She paused, thinking of him. ‘He was a good man. You must know that.’

  He nodded. ‘They say bad things about him now,’ he said, ‘the soldiers. I don’t like that.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘That he was a traitor. Taking money. Even men who knew him, they say these things.’ He shook his head. ‘It is very wrong.’

  The fly landed on a brick beside her. She watched the sheen on its wings as it walked, cleaned itself. She knew how army gossip worked. Once one person bad-mouthed an outsider, everyone did the same. An Afghan would be an easy target. Someone must have put the word round about Jalil after his death.

  ‘Karam,’ she said. ‘The man who visited the compound earlier. What do you make of him?’

  Najib whistled under his breath. ‘That he is father of those dead children, this is very bad. He is a tough man. A vengeful man. I thought this even the first time I saw him. Now his anger is greater.’

  Ellen looked up sharply. ‘You’ve seen him before?’

  ‘Of course.’ He swallowed, blinking. ‘The army held a big shoura earlier, in Nayullah. He was coming to this shoura and bringing men with him. I went with Major Mack to translate. He is a powerful man in this district.’

  Ellen hunched her shoulders, her mind busy. ‘When was this shoura?’

  Najib considered. ‘Two or three weeks, maybe. Jalil was there too as translator. Before the suicide bomb.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. She got to her feet and put her hand to her heart to say goodbye. ‘Najib, that was wonderful tea.’

  Outside, the light was rich with the fading afternoon heat. Dillon and Moss, their work done, were sitting on a sleeping bag, still stripped to the waist, talking together in low voices. Frank had cleared a flat space in the shade of the wall and was doing press-ups, his biceps hard as rope, his back muscular.

  She sat on a rock and opened her notebook on her lap, then bounced the pen on the blank page and tried to think. So Karam had already been collaborating with the army? She thought of Mack
and his passionate pursuit of hearts and minds. What a shock it must have been to him, to realize they’d killed the children of one of his most powerful regional contacts. No wonder he’d made such a strange concession and told Karam that he and his wife could live under army protection, inside the village.

  But Karam? She thought of his cold stare and his warning that she should stop asking questions. What were his loyalties? His so-called ally had just bombed the home of his brother, killed his children. How could an insult like that go unavenged?

  She twisted the pen in her fingers, clicking the point in and out, and let her thoughts stray to Jalil. She didn’t believe for a minute he’d got mixed up in something underhand. It was so unlike him. He was idealistic, he always had been. If anything, she’d had to battle with him at times to get him to compromise. To slip a guard a bribe to let them through a security gate, instead of enduring a pointless argument with him about their rights.

  She thought of his family, of their love of education, even though their country was poor. His father had been an archivist at Kabul Museum, in the years before the Taliban took power.

  ‘He was a great scholar,’ Jalil had told her. His pride was clear. ‘A man of learning. History and objects of beauty were his passion. His life.’

  He’d been the driving force behind Jalil’s education, using money they couldn’t afford to make sure Jalil had extra tuition and mastered English.

  ‘He wanted very much for me to study in United States,’ Jalil told her. ‘To leave this country. He used to talk very much about this.’

  Ellen had no idea, when he told her this, the first or second time they worked together, how desperately Jalil was still trying to pursue that dream.

  His father had died when Jalil was a young teenager. A chill took him one Kabul winter, when the streets and roofs were thick with snow and the rooms of the houses, with their ill-fitting windows and shoddy doors, were just as icy. Quickly, for lack of medicine, the chill progressed to pneumonia. His final fever broke late one evening when a curfew was in place and his mother was too afraid to take him out through the streets to the hospital. Jalil described that night to her, his face set and angry.

  ‘My father could not breathe,’ he said. He put his hand to his chest and made a frantic gasping sound. ‘Every breath was so much of pain.’ He paused, remembering. ‘What could I do? I didn’t know what to do. I was a boy.’

  His voice faltered. They sat quietly together as she waited for him to continue.

  ‘My mother piled him with blankets. All the blankets in the house. She called me to put more wood into the stove until the heat was blazing. More wood. The room was so hot.’

  She imagined his mother, beside herself, fighting to preserve her husband’s ebbing life.

  ‘It came before dawn,’ he said, ‘the end. Allah took him. Then, at last, he was at peace. In Paradise.’

  He turned his face away from her. She had the sense that he had never spoken to anyone of this before.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Jalil.’ She got up and turned her back to him as he composed himself. He would be embarrassed, she was sure, if she acknowledged his tears. He hadn’t mentioned his father again.

  She shook her head. Jalil hadn’t been tempted by drugs or corruption. She was certain of that. He’d been driven by a strong sense of honour. But he was always careful too about his own safety. She found it hard to believe that he would have left the patrol on his own and struck out into the desert. He must have had a compelling reason.

  A thick shadow fell across the page. She looked up. Dillon, blocking the light, was bending over her.

  ‘Scoff time,’ he said. ‘What you got?’

  ‘Same as you,’ she said, assuming he wanted to barter.

  ‘I’m cookin’ up now.’ He was waiting for something. He put his hand out, pointing at her kit. His expression was all embarrassment. He looked as awkward as a schoolboy. Behind him, Moss was gawping.

  ‘Gimme a rat pack,’ he said. ‘I’ll boil it up with mine. You’re working.’

  She smiled, rummaged in her rucksack for a thick, brown, army-issue sachet. ‘That’s really kind,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No drama,’ he said. ‘You gotta eat.’ He looked down at her notebook. ‘What’re you working on?’

  ‘Just piecing some things together.’ She sighed. ‘You know about that translator who died? Jalil? I want to figure out what happened.’

  His eyes hardened. ‘Him?’

  She took in the abrupt change in his mood. Was this the result of the bad-mouthing Najib had warned her about? ‘You knew him?’

  ‘I was there.’ His lips shrank to a thin line of distaste. ‘Thought he was all right.’

  She watched his face closely. ‘And?’

  ‘Can’t trust any of them. They warned us about that, but him, well, he seemed all right.’

  Moss was straining forward, trying to listen. Ellen could hear the tension in Dillon’s voice. He sounded hurt.

  ‘You were there, then? On that patrol?’

  ‘Course I was.’ He shifted his weight from side to side, his awkwardness growing.

  ‘Why did he leave it?’

  He spat to the side, a silver coin in the sand which slowly sank and disappeared.

  ‘He’d been acting weird. Agitated. Must have had the whole thing planned but we didn’t know that. He got down from the vehicle. Needed a slash or something, that’s all I thought. Next thing we knew, he’d gone. Legged it.’

  ‘And you left him there?’

  He stared at her, his eyes angry, her ration pack dangling forgotten from his hand. ‘We waited,’ he said. ‘Thinking he’d come back.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he didn’t. We drove on a bit further. Can’t go off the track. Too many mines. No sign of him. We’d had reports of enemy in the area.’

  ‘So you drove away?’

  ‘No, we fucking didn’t.’ His eyes were glaring. ‘We turned back. Drove off the track, looking for him. Searched all over. Finally found a shack, some goatherd’s shelter or God knows what. He was lying there, outside, behind it. In a right fucking mess.’

  She nodded, keeping her eyes on his face. He was trembling, his cheeks moist. He was still young. She wondered how many times he’d seen the devastation of a gunshot to the head, the wet fragments of a face he’d known.

  ‘Doesn’t mean that he’d double-crossed you,’ she said gently. ‘Couldn’t it have been—’

  He shook his head. ‘Then explain the cash.’

  ‘Cash?’

  ‘When they found him, he had a great wad of cash stuffed in his mouth. Like a warning.’

  ‘What kind of warning?’

  ‘Not to get greedy. Not to cheat on the boys. Who knows? A message from whoever he’d gone to meet.’

  Ellen kept her voice low and even, trying to keep him talking. ‘But a warning to who? No criminal leaves money behind.’

  Moss had got to his feet, was walking heavily towards them.

  ‘Whatever. Thing is, can’t trust any of them. All on the take.’

  Dillon jumped when Moss slapped his hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Come on, mate,’ said Moss. ‘Gotta eat.’

  Dillon nodded, shrugged. He stared round at the compound, at the camouflage nets draped with drying socks, the lads, stripped to their waists, clambering on the undulating mud roof of the house, erecting some communications structure. His eyes skimmed over it all as if he were struggling to register where he was.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said. He poked a finger into the air as he turned to go, trying to cover his feelings with a show of bravado. ‘You wanna be careful. I’m telling you. You start poking yer nose in, someone’s gonna shut you up.’

  12

  Hasina was lying in the heat when Abdul came. Her leg, propped up on a rock, was softly aching. He sat close by her on the sand and shyly took her hand in his. There was another patient today. A young soldier had collapsed. Voices, low but sharp, penetrated t
he green curtain. Two men had carried him into the compound on a stretcher, his arm hanging loose. Now he lay silently, as helpless as she had been a few days ago. The top of a transparent bag of liquid was just visible above the divide. If she and Abdul spoke quietly, no one would hear them in all the commotion.

  ‘Our son,’ she whispered to him. ‘He’s alive.’ She squeezed his thin hand.

  He frowned. ‘Are you dreaming?’

  ‘I went to the house.’

  ‘How?’ He looked wary.

  ‘They gave me sticks.’ She pointed to them. ‘To walk with.’

  He paused and considered. ‘But why do you say he’s alive?’

  She pulled the battered copy of the Holy Book from beneath her pillow and placed it in his hand. The pages curled at the edges like a child’s hair. The brown bloodstain lay along the side. It flickered and settled again as Abdul leafed through the pages.

  ‘His?’

  ‘Of course. From the foreign woman. But Abdul – ’ she sat forward, breathing in his familiar smell of earth and sweat – ‘she showed me the place. There was no trace of blood. No struggle. Just a straight path through the corn and out the other side.’ She watched his eyes. ‘I think he escaped.’

  Abdul kissed the Qur’an and handed it back to her to conceal. His forehead was crumpled. He sat still, looking at nothing.

  ‘Maybe he found help,’ she said. ‘People would help him. Maybe he’s lying low in the desert. Getting strong again.’

  Abdul sighed. He patted her hand. ‘Maybe,’ he said. His voice had no hope.

  ‘What?’

  He lifted a hand to his face and stroked his beard. ‘He needs help.’ His eyes, when they met hers, were dull with despair. ‘How can I look for him? The soldiers are everywhere. Not even Karam’s friends can rescue him now.’

  His beard had been as fresh as Aref’s when she married him. Little more than a boy’s downy fluff. Now lines ran up and down his cheeks, fissures in rock. He was a good man, she thought. A kind man. But somehow she must find the courage to find Aref for them both.