The Last Kestrel

by Jill McGivering

  Ellen reached out to pat his arm. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I was wrong. I didn’t—’

  ‘Then he ended my job.’ Najib’s eyes were desperate. ‘I need my job. For money.’

  The heat and silence sat heavily between them. The sides of the gully rose steeply, pointing to the sky.

  ‘I was trying to get back to Kabul,’ he went on. ‘From Nayullah. In a cheap way. A truck driver, maybe. But no one had place. Then I heard about the Major. I thought if it is true about his dying, then maybe, inshallah, I can get back my job?’

  Ellen nodded slowly. ‘Maybe.’

  He got to his feet and stretched his limbs. The colour was coming back into his face. He looked theatrically round the gully, then stooped over her and whispered. ‘I followed you,’ he said, ‘because you are alone and that’s dangerous. He is coming.’

  She stared. ‘Who is?’

  ‘Him.’ His eyes were large and fearful. ‘Karam-jan.’

  She crawled into the narrow squeeze of passage, leading Najib into the earth. He was so close behind her that his breath fell hot on her legs. The fetid stink of the bunker reached into the tunnel to meet her.

  Aref was on his back on the floor in the darkness, his eyes closed. The light from her torch was weak, the batteries fading. She cursed and shook it. When she put her hand on his forehead, the skin was hot and moist. His eyes fluttered in the light, opened but didn’t focus, then fell closed again. His breath, coming in slight wheezes, was rancid.

  She sat with his head and shoulders propped up against her side and forced him to take water, a little at a time. His clothes were filthy, soiled with his own dirt, his face streaked with grime. As she tended him, Najib settled against the far wall with his legs drawn up under him and watched with narrowed eyes.

  ‘He’s Hasina’s son,’ she said. ‘She brought me here.’

  Aref spluttered and started to choke.

  ‘They are not good people.’ Najib’s disapproval was clear. ‘Why are you helping him?’

  Ellen took the bottle from Aref’s lips. She lifted his shoulders and waited for his coughing to subside. ‘Because if I don’t,’ she said simply, ‘he will die.’

  Najib didn’t speak. He was hunched, uncertain.

  ‘I don’t think the soldiers will come out here to get him,’ she said. ‘Given all that’s happened. Not a good time to ask.’

  Aref had settled again and she put the bottle back against his lips.

  ‘But if I get him there. If I physically take him to the compound. I think then, they’d treat him. They’d have to.’ She looked at his pallor. His wrists and arms were pitifully thin, the bones as narrow and brittle as a bird’s. ‘It’s his only hope.’

  Najib lifted his scarf to his face again and covered his nose and mouth. She didn’t need to ask why. The stench was overpowering.

  ‘Now tell me,’ she said. ‘What’s this about Karam?’

  Najib studied his fingers for a moment, then, staring at the earth floor, began to speak.

  ‘I was in the bazaar,’ he said, ‘looking for a driver who was heading north. Some boy came to me. Some ragged boy, doing work. He told me to go with him. A man had sent him to fetch me.

  ‘I thought it was a driver. A man who’d heard I needed to go to Kabul and could help. So I went with the boy, through the narrow lanes into a small shop. A jewellery shop. And he was sitting there. Karam-jan. Big new rings on his fingers. Drinking chai.’

  Ellen pictured Karam, his broad thighs squashed into a cheap chair, his expansive belly flowing over his groin, an excited shopkeeper fussing round him with snacks and chai and trays of jewels while a ceiling fan ground the air above them.

  ‘How did he know you were in Nayullah?’

  ‘How do people know?’ He sighed. ‘Some people talk and other people listen.’

  ‘And what did he want?’

  Najib grimaced. ‘He had heard these rumours about killing in the Britishers’ camp. He asked me: is it true that Major Mack is killed? I said: I don’t know. He said: was he killed by a lady, an Afghan lady? I said: that is what men in the bazaar are saying.’

  He lifted his head quickly to look at Ellen, then, when their eyes met, pulled his away, back to the floor. ‘He asked me about you.’

  She smelt his fear and felt her own insides contract with it. She bent over Aref and busied herself with wiping his cheeks, his mouth. Why is he asking about me? I have heard you are a powerful person, he’d told her. I have heard your writing is respected by important people. Was he frightened that word would get out in Afghanistan that he’d collaborated with the foreign infidels?

  ‘He’d heard you had come back here,’ Najib went on. ‘He wanted to know why.’

  ‘And you think he’s coming to find me?’

  Najib swallowed. ‘I think so.’

  He crawled forward towards her and lifted Aref sideways, out of her lap and into his own arms. ‘If you do this,’ he said, ‘then it is my duty to help you.’ He shrugged. ‘Besides, it is right for an Afghan to tend his brother.’

  Ellen handed him the bottle of water and watched as he forced open Aref’s mouth. His hands were firm and gentle. He had warned her about the villagers from the start, she thought. Maybe his instincts had been right.

  They stayed for several hours in the bunker, taking it in turns to care for Aref, trying to build back a little of his strength before they moved him. He slept shallowly, his body limp against them. The torch beam had faded to dim now and they sat mostly in darkness. The blackness pressed itself hard against Ellen’s face and into her head. She let her eyes fall closed and tried to imagine she was outside, free and in daylight.

  In the darkness, her thoughts found images of Mack. His broad shoulders outlined against the sun as he bent over her. His wry smile. His masculine scent and the heat rising from his bulky thigh against hers when they sat together. His physical presence. Already cold and starting to decay.

  She shifted her back against the bunker wall, trying to find comfort. How did she write about him now? Did she paint him as a hero, as the army would? Or did she disgrace him? Denounce him as ruthless? She shook her head. Both were true. Both were also half-truths.

  ‘He killed him, didn’t he?’

  Najib’s voice was soft in the darkness. His words seemed to come from inside her head. She kept her eyes closed and didn’t answer.

  ‘Major Mack. He killed Jalil. Didn’t he?’

  She paused, and when she spoke her voice was weary. ‘Yes.’

  Najib let out a long, slow sigh. ‘I thought he would kill me too.’

  She didn’t speak. She was beginning to realize how few of the facts she could expose. No one in the army knew what he’d done. No one would believe it. Discredit a dead hero? The army’s top brass would destroy her. Worse than that, she’d never get the allegations past the magazine’s lawyers. Already, knowing this, she was shamed by her own sense of failure and of collusion.

  ‘What will you do?’ Najib said. ‘How will you tell people the truth?’

  She opened her eyes and darkness flooded her senses.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. She thought of Mack’s face, tight with anger, when she accused him. ‘I can’t prove a thing.’

  Silence. She felt Najib’s distress as another ache in her body. Soon, she thought, they would have to go. Somehow they must lift Aref between them. They must get him out of this place into the light and carry him back to the compound. She sat, exhausted, against the dry earth and tried to gather her strength.

  They needed to leave. She knew that. Just by moving Aref, they would exhaust him, perhaps even kill him. But they had no choice. His need for medical attention was critical. Every hour mattered.

  She put her hands to her face and pressed her eyes into her palms. Her hands smelt of dirt and decay. She was afraid. She was frightened of leaving the dark safety of the earth and venturing out again into the open desert where Karam was prowling.

  27

  They trussed
Aref like an animal. He lay, insensible, his eyes closed, as they wound his clothes tightly round him and tied them firmly with a cotton strip. They worked in darkness, feeling their way round his body, conserving the dying torch. In the small space, the rising stench was overwhelming. From time to time, Najib’s hands disappeared and low choking noises broke from him as he retched. Silence. Then his hands again joined hers.

  Ellen pictured the form of a skeleton as she straightened him out, feeling the raised ribs and jutting hips. His trousers were stiff with dried filth. She scraped her hands against the bunker walls to wipe it off her fingertips and swallowed back the bile in her throat.

  Inside the tunnel, he stuck fast. Ellen had gone first, crawling backwards, fighting panic in the face of the enclosing earth. She was making progress by wedging her hands in Aref’s armpits and tugging him after her, inch by inch. Najib, invisible to her on the other side, was pushing. They had only moved a few yards when he stopped moving. She heaved at his shoulders, her hands digging into his muscle for purchase. His head flopped heavily to one side, his face turned to the earth.

  She pulled until she ached, then lay, exhausted, her cheek pressed sideways in the dirt of the tunnel floor, and wept. I could just crawl backwards to the light and leave him here, she thought. Her sense of the tonnes of crushing land on top of her squeezed the breath from her body. She closed her eyes, screwed her hands into fists and tried to stop the fluttering in her chest. I could crawl backwards and leave. Aref is already close to death. He won’t suffer. But what about Najib? He would never survive. She imagined him being buried alive, his escape blocked by Aref’s swelling corpse.

  She wiped the mucus from her face, spat out dirt and began to scrabble at the earth pressing round Aref’s shoulders. Slivers of buried wood and stone pierced her nails and fingertips. Her ears were filled with her own straining. Earth pattered down and she brushed it off Aref’s cheek and chin in the darkness.

  She heaved again, her hands slippery with sweat and mud. She could hear Najib’s low grunting as he pushed Aref’s braced legs. Finally, with a flurry of falling earth, Aref – cork-like – came popping out of the constriction, his head and shoulders crashing into her head in a sudden rush. Please God, she thought, as they fell to moving him again towards the bright hot light of the midday sun. Don’t let him die before we get him back.

  Once they were outside, their progress was torturous. Najib hoisted Aref into a sitting position and pitched him onto his back. Aref’s head and shoulders dangled from Najib’s neck across one shoulder and his legs hung down from the other. Bowed down by the weight, Najib could barely move. He shuffled forward a short step at a time, panting hard. Ellen guided him up the steep slope and out onto the open ground. The strong light after the darkness spiked their vision. Najib’s shirt was soaked through with sweat.

  They were too exhausted to speak. The first time Najib stumbled and fell, he lay motionless, collapsed on his side. Aref, a weight round his neck, pinned him to the ground. She rolled Aref off him into the corn. His face in the daylight was waxy and pallid, his eyes lifeless. Maybe we should just leave him, she thought, then felt ashamed. Najib, hunched on his side, his head turned away from her to the corn, seemed just as defeated. Maybe, she thought, he was thinking the same.

  They rested and then tried again. This time Najib struggled to walk backwards, grasping Aref’s wrists. Ellen, facing him, lifted Aref’s ankles. His body sagged between them, swinging lightly as they moved.

  Ellen was shaking with exertion and fear. They were conspicuous, noisy as they crashed through the dry corn, an easy target for anyone who wanted to hunt them down. The compound seemed an impossible distance away. Her scarf had slipped down to her shoulders and the sun sat heavy on her head. Sweat was running down her arms and making her palms itchy and slippery. It penetrated the broken skin on her face and stung her cuts. She was parched, thinking constantly of water. Imagining its soft silky passage through her mouth, across her tongue, down her throat.

  At the far side of the cornfield, as they were about to step into open desert, they stopped again to rest. Ellen snapped the dry corn and bent it over in clumps to give Aref’s face dappled shade. Najib lay on his back, his eyes closed, panting. This can’t go on, she thought. We won’t make it. Aref’s nose and cheeks were already blackening with flies. She sat in silence, too exhausted to brush them away, and stared without seeing into the light.

  The engine erupted suddenly in the stillness and grew as the truck turned a corner and accelerated along the rough track. She knew it at once. Karam’s battered pickup, chugging with the graceless-ness of a tractor. Najib, hearing it too, sat up. She put her finger to her lips. Stay here, she mouthed. Najib looked so much older. His face was drawn, his eyes dull with fatigue. She patted the air, gesturing to him to wait, then crawled forward on her hands and knees through the jungle of corn.

  The truck approached their hiding place. He was sitting forward, peering through the dusty windscreen, one arm draped across the top of the steering wheel, the other invisible by his side. On his gun, she thought. She imagined it propped beside him. There was tension in his face. His eyes, narrowed and sharp, were scanning the land in front of him. His white beard fell in waves from his chin. She shrank down, pressing her body flat to the earth.

  He passed her. Further down the road, still in sight, the pickup slowed and drew to a halt in a cloud of brown dust. He sat motionless, a solid shape in the cab. Her heart thumped in her chest. He knows, she thought. It’s as if he can smell me. Her eyes were fixed on him. She held her breath, waiting for him to move. Nothing. The silence settled as she watched. The sun was glancing off the metal roof in shafts.

  After some time, the engine coughed again into life. Karam twisted in his seat, turning to look back over his shoulder. He ran the pickup slowly backwards, kicking up fresh dirt. She crouched flat. Her breath came in short bursts. He stopped a few yards from her and switched off the engine.

  The metal scraped as he opened the battered door and stepped down. The light sprayed off the gun in the cab. He straightened his hat and flexed his knee, leaning his foot back against the bright, hot metalwork of the truck. It sighed and shifted on its wheels. He was settling himself there in full view, waiting.

  She thought of Aref, semi-conscious in the corn behind her, and of Najib crouched there too. He mustn’t find them. She steeled herself, afraid to move, then got abruptly to her feet. She revealed herself at once, stepping out into the track in front of him. He looked up at her and smiled without humour.

  ‘I thought you would come here,’ he said. ‘I was slow to think of it the last time. The boy must be hiding near. I am right. Why else would you come here alone?’

  She stood quietly, feeling the tremble in her knees. He was still leaning back against the pickup but his legs were tense, as if he were ready to push away from it and spring forward. He spread his thick fingers with slow deliberation and cracked the knuckles, one by one.

  ‘Your countryman Mack. People are saying he had a very bad accident. Very bad.’ He looked past her, into the corn, his eyes hungry. ‘The boy was supposed to do it. Not her.’

  Ellen thought of Hasina, moving quietly across the sand in the darkness, a bundle clasped to her chest. So it had been Karam who’d given Hasina the gun. Who wanted Mack dead more than Karam, still full of anger and grief for his lost children?

  ‘She was a decent woman,’ Ellen said. ‘All she wanted was to save her son.’

  He shrugged. ‘Martyrdom is not a woman’s path. I didn’t ask that. But, inshallah, in Paradise she will be blessed.’

  He pressed himself forward onto the soles of both feet and took a step towards her. Ellen’s eyes strayed to the open scrubland on the far side of the road. Somewhere here, Mack had waited, arms wide, and talked her safely out of the minefield. Somewhere here. She said: ‘Why have you come back?’

  ‘For the boy,’ he said. He was still peering past her, looking low into the corn, his eyes sharp
. ‘He is a fool, but he is my fool now.’

  She didn’t dare turn and follow his gaze. Instead she walked further out into the road towards the open desert. Ahead, the dust was trampled, scuffed by military boots. She tried to see exactly where Mack and the soldiers had stood.

  In the distance, the shattered remnants of the dead dog swarmed with flies. I can’t fight him, she was thinking. Her mind was tumbling, trying to think how to survive.

  ‘The boy is all alone now,’ he was saying. ‘Without me, he cannot survive. Take me to him. For his mother’s sake.’

  His movements were deliberate as he followed her. She had reached the edge of the scrub now, her eyes on the ground. I will not put Aref into your hands, she thought. I will protect him. But I need time.

  ‘His mother wanted him to escape all this,’ she said. ‘To have a better life.’

  ‘What do you know?’ He shrugged. ‘I was right about the Major, wasn’t I? A man who cares nothing for the lives of Afghan people and everything for his own kind. A tribesman. I understood that.’

  He had shifted his weight, turning his shoulder to watch her as she backed away from him along the edge of the track. His face was all suspicion. Her eyes, reading the dust, fell suddenly on a neat triangle of stones. It was one of her marks, a sign of safe ground. She swallowed, blood pumping in her ears, and looked quickly away.

  ‘And Jalil?’

  He grunted. ‘The traitor?’ He shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘He took their money. He knew the danger.’

  The low vacant scrub reached out across the desert to her right, studded with forgotten mines. Allah will decide, Karam had said to her, when he had sent her into the minefield the first time. Now she must ask Him to decide again.

  ‘What will you do with Aref?’

  ‘He is a boy with no brains, no guts.’ He grimaced. ‘Just like his father. But he may be useful.’