Red Birds

by Mohammed Hanif

  Mostly I sniff. If one has the reputation of a sage it’s because of the olfactory senses and not the sharpness of one’s molars.

  I can tell what things smell of. Today, for example, my existence smells of an empty-headed, unloved cat. Not that I am complaining. Although I have reason to. Nothing to sniff here but my own broken and bloodied leg. Nobody comes to this part of the desert on a picnic. You come here to die of shame.

  I am what they call stoic of nature but sometimes I bark and howl. But do these people listen? This place is in shambles because nobody believes in premonitions anymore, nobody listens to clear and well-articulated warnings.

  The day Momo’s older sibling was sent away with much fanfare I howled myself hoarse. I begged, I pleaded, I yelped and I barked as if the Camp was about to be overrun by a bunch of foul-smelling cats.

  If you prefer cats, I congratulate you; you can put this aside and go play with your grooming kit. I have dealt with many in my time, I have nothing to say on the subject. I congratulate you, you have made a life-positive choice, you have made a choice that will make the world a safer place.

  Well done and woof off.

  Leave me alone to contemplate my miserable existence.

  When they took him away I refused to cry. Crying is for sissies. I refused to behave like a heartbroken princess. I refused to be part of the send-off for Momo’s brother when they dressed him up in a white shirt and black overalls in the hope that he’ll become a man and bring home a washing machine and a microwave. All they got was tears. Everyone in their own corner with their own tears. An entire United Nations of the teary-eyed.

  You would think those touched by tragedy would become kind-hearted. No. They become teary-eyed and cruel.

  It was difficult to leave home but I decided to withdraw from that heartless household, where they hark on about your loyalty but never appreciate your intellect. What am I doing here? In the middle of this desert, not a leaf to shade me, neither human nor canine company, just the occasional scorpion consumed by its own quest for invincibility. Did I lose my way? Did I want a bit of solitude? Did I get tired of being best friends with folks who not only call me Mutt but have finally started to treat me like one? What is the point of looking for a single catalytic incident when, as the poet says (I respect poetry but it’s not for me, so I am always paraphrasing), an accident doesn’t happen in the moment it happens, for years before the accident Father Time is nudging you towards it. And what happened to me was not an accident by any stretch of the imagination, it was an assault, simple and brutal. By my own mentor and best friend and self-styled, so-called owner, Momo.

  It’s a well-known fact that those under assault from outsiders take it out on their own. The opium eater gets kicked in the bazaar and since he can’t hit back, he comes home and kicks his kids. Big, rich nations get a bloody nose in far-off countries and start slashing the milk money for poor babies at home. You can’t bring an enemy plane down with a stone, but you can smash your neighbour’s window.

  There was something about the unexpectedness of the assault, the sheer viciousness of it that shook me. I have taken a few beatings in my life so let’s not write me down as a quitter. But when you take a brutal blow to the back, you say, excuse my foul language, forgive my bad breath, but woof this Camp. A curse on this already cursed house. Let’s take to the desert. What is the worst that can happen? I’ll starve to death. I’ll roast under the sun. Better than limping in these desolate streets for the rest of my life. Are these streets desolate, you ask? You haven’t seen desolation. When good citizens like me, sons of the soil, start abandoning their ancestral abodes, you should know there is no hope left.

  God left this place a long time ago, and I don’t harbour any delusions about my own role on this earth but I can imagine what he must have felt. He had had enough. I have had a bit more than that.

  On my way out I looked at the desolation one last time. With its plastic blue roofs huddled together the place looks and smells like a giant Portaloo. That servant of God sells deceased chicken, he steals from people and saves it for Allah. Those scrap dealers with their lust for all things shiny, the pillars of the local economy, are a pair of morons. Doctor sits in his own wasteland, he believes everyone should grow their own vegetables. Nobody ever asks him where the proteins will come from.

  I am from the times when there were houses instead of this Camp, when there was no war and Doctor wasn’t a doctor, only a farmer with an interest in herbs. He could grow stuff with a few drops of water. When the bombs began to fall and the first ambulance arrived I dragged Doctor right into it, I looked for the survivors and Doctor hauled them into the ambulance. He started to travel in the ambulance with real doctors and nurses and maybe learnt a thing or two: how to stop people from choking on their own blood or tying that knot on a limb that might just save it. And after the real medics went back everyone started calling him Doctor. He can deliver babies and set bones but he is not happy being a doctor. He wants to go back to being a farmer. It could only happen in this Camp: a farmer becomes a doctor but is not happy. He can rid people of their pains but he would rather grow turnips.

  Others loitering around the square are drunks and concubines, men pimping their wives for half a bottle of moonshine, wives smashing those same bottles on their buyers’ heads and then everyone threatening everyone else with hellfire. We were the only tightly knit, upright family in the Camp and look what happened to us. OK, the older boy did a bit of target spotting for those people in the Hangar who smell like boiled cabbage, but you don’t get to own a big jeep by being pacifists.

  The jeep was leading a small convoy of Americans on their way to get their water supply. Apparently they had everything they needed in the Hangar except water. The jeep was followed by an armoured car with a gun mounted on the top and a very alert American soldier standing behind it. The jeep broke down in the middle of the square and the Americans had got all kinds of helmets and guns and radios but they hadn’t got the one thing they needed: a technician to fix the broken jeep. Urgent messages crackled on their wireless sets, their antennae quivered like an excited Mutt tail. Bro Ali stepped forward and said may I? They had three guns pointed at him, as if he was not a teenager offering to help but a highway robber. Bro Ali pointed to the bonnet of the jeep and moved forward carefully. His head and upper body disappeared into the jeep’s engine, his legs dangling in the air. After a few moments he shouted, OK try now. The jeep shuddered for a moment and then the engine was running. The guns were lowered, Bro Ali emerged trying to suppress a smile of utter satisfaction.

  ‘Thank you, young man,’ the tall guy in the helmet said. ‘How’d you like to drive one of these babies?’

  Bro Ali was shy, he mumbled something about school. Father Dear stepped forward and sealed our fate. ‘But he can work after school, he is very good with machines.’

  Father Dear became Mr Fix It for the people at the Hangar, their logistics man, their local guy. He procured goats for them, and when they asked for local help, he got them boy labourers, boys on daily wages who were sent off to do small jobs, fixing broken barbed wires and filling up sandbags to make more bunkers. Sometimes the boys didn’t come back, but those were busy times and nobody took much notice.

  This place was something back then. Life had some meaning. Don’t get me wrong, I am an out and out pacifist, but I miss the time when those white cabbages in uniform from the Hangar used to drive through the Camp and we used to have falling bombs. Those whistles, those sirens, those blasts, all that whoosh, whoosh, whoosh used to scare the Mutt-shit out of me. It was terrifying. But later, after everything that could explode had exploded, there would be calm. And much rubble to jump over, burnt flesh to be sniffed; there were search parties to be led to the people under the rubble who would be cursing everyone on this earth. One saved lives. One got a biscuit as a reward. Life was good. It had a purpose. There was terror but after that there was life to be sniffed out and saved or funerals to hang out at, wh
ere you could smell rose water over the freshly dug earth and feel sad. The smell of rose water is the smell of sudden death after a well-lived life.

  Have they run out of bombs?

  There has not been a bomb since Momo’s older sibling wore the black overall and his mother hugged him about a hundred times and he was sent off. The Americans say he went missing. They used to say he went up into the mountains on a mission and is still there. Now they say nothing. Momo says his father sold him to the Americans at the Hangar because he was very good at sending signals to the planes telling them where to bomb. If you are cooperating with the people who destroy your houses, it can have tragic results. But one has to say that he was good at that, our Bro Ali. But what if he refused to tell them where to bomb after they hired him? He would have had his reasons. And Bro Ali was stubborn as a Mutt’s tail. Once he stole Father Dear’s files just for fun and when Father Dear beat him black and blue he refused to say a word. How is a Mutt supposed to know the truth about these things? But you don’t sell your sons even if you are being paid in dollars. Even if your son is a brat. Even if your son is asking for it.

  But they believe in big theories. They can’t believe that someone might go off of their own accord and then might not want to come back. Whatever modest intelligence I had I shared with Momo and look where it got me. A mangled leg. The desert. Distant sounds of metal cracking in the sky. What is going on up there? There was such a din last night that for a moment I thought those happy days of night raids were back. But it lasted only for a few seconds and then there was silence.

  And it’s the middle of the day now. Not a leaf for shade. Even the lizards have gone into hiding. My only companions here are stupid scorpions looking for other scorpions to fight or make scorpion love to.

  So maybe I lost my way. Maybe I decided that there is only so much that this Mutt can take. But here I am missing that desolate place that I have left behind forever. It always irritated me when Momo called me a drama queen. It implied lack of intelligence on my part, as if I had let my emotional self override my rational being, or as if I was creating a scene to get attention. And here I am feeling nostalgic about falling bombs. And about those who call you their best friend ever and then plunge a dagger in your back.

  Yes, you can call me sentimental.

  Is it possible they really have run out of bombs?

  Like they ran out of salt.

  Before the second worst day of my life, before the worst day of my life, there were the best days of my life.

  Sometimes between dropping bombs they used to drop these slabs of salt, pink hewn and white, and they floated down tied to little umbrellas. The good thing about them was they didn’t make any noise, no alarms went off, nothing burnt, no houses collapsed, there was nothing to sniff, nothing to save. Only a lot of excited cattle to deal with. This salt bombing was supposed to be some humanitarian plot to help us animals. Apparently if animals lick salt they don’t catch all those nasty diseases that spread because of the rotting human flesh. And all the so-called animals rushed to this falling manna. Nobody obviously considers Mutts animals or that we might also need a dose of salt; I never thought I had that need. But then curiosity is essential for the brainy dog, I also needed to know what the ruckus was about, so I would sneak in. Trust me, I have been there: when goats or cows were licking salt they were so absorbed that they would not kick or head butt you. So I could sneak in between their legs and take a lick. But more than licking I loved looking at those salt slabs, they seemed to hide pink treasures, as if somebody had mined jewel-laden rocks and thrown them around the desert. After every three licks a cow would look up to check if there was more falling from the sky or maybe just to make sure that no one up there was looking down. And then they’d look down at their hoofs and in this heavenly salt-induced kindness they would lick me too. Oh that breath. It was horrible and smelled of the memory of calves forcibly taken away when still suckling and the foul smell of all that milk stolen by humans. You can’t tell them, listen big mama, hold your tongue, it’s my job to lick.

  As I ran out of the Camp one last time I could smell grief wafting out of the stoves in people’s houses. Someone was sent, someone didn’t come back. There is a school uniform shirt, pressed and waiting in the cupboard, a deflated football, half-finished drawings of pitchers and crows on the walls. The boys who have gone for a bit, the boys who will come back soon.

  There is no going back for me. There is nothing to lick but sand. I can smell hunger approaching me. Yes, someone even hungrier than me is walking towards me. Imagine. I try to bury my head in the sand. It’s not possible. The atrocities they have committed with the language. My head is on the sand. My fractured leg hurts.

  But what is really broken here is my heart.

  CHAPTER 4

  Ellie

  On the sixth day I come across the first signs of habitation. I find a copper bowl half buried in what must have once been a stream. It is caked in mud. I clean it carefully with the sleeve of my flying suit, at the bottom it reveals some oriental calligraphy. I wish I had taken that basic Arabic or Persian or modern Pashto course they were offering instead of the guerrilla gardening module that I went for.

  I look up and look around with renewed hope.

  In six days I haven’t seen one sign of life. If the goat-fuckers had shot me down they would be all over the place trying to hunt me down. Or maybe they just like shooting people down and have no interest in capturing and torturing them, they see no point in getting information from them or making their videos. Nihilistic resistance is the worst kind of enemy; it was all the rage, we were taught in our Cultural Sensitivity 101. Colonel Slatter had laid out the foundations: We used to have art for art’s sake; now we have war for the sake of war. No lands captured, no slaves taken, no mass rapes, fuck their oil wells, ignore their mineral deposits. You can outsource mass rape. War has been condensed to carpet-bombing followed by dry rations and craft classes for the refugees. People who had not left their little hamlets for centuries, goatherds who believed in nothing but grassy fields and folk music, women who had never walked beyond the village well, now they could all go and live in UN tents, eat exotic food donated by USAID and burp after drinking fizzy drinks.

  The progress, the old kind, was too slow; you couldn’t make a modern civilization out of screwing sheep. You couldn’t wait for the roads to arrive, for tourist resorts to be built. If the world has to end, as it must – there are no exceptions now, everyone from the Jesus-is-knocking-on-your front-door nuts to the earth-is-hotting-up-and-we-are-all-going-to-get-roasted freaks agrees – things must quicken, interventions must take place. You can’t give them drip irrigation and tent schools and hope for them to become civilized and accomplish the next millennium goals. Where’s the thrill in that? What is the point of denying human nature when it will always be about taking over your neighbour’s house and screwing his young wife. Give these men on camelbacks rocket launchers and see them arrive in the new millennium with a bang. They don’t even need an ideology. Or any elaborate training. A rocket launcher doesn’t require you to have the ability to aim. Get it on your shoulder and shoot.

  It’s Colonel Slatter speaking in my head. The Colonel had taken off after I had dithered and never came back. Still listed as Missing in Action. MIA my ass. Now here I am living up to the tradition. Your zoomie goes down, you follow his path. I wonder if maybe Colonel Slatter survived his crash and now roams the desert, terrorizing goatherds. When you start talking to your dead comrades, you are about to join them.

  Wake up.

  The wind picks up speed, sand around me slowly starts to lift and hover; the beginning of a storm, or just a gentle breeze, I can’t tell. There is a lot that I can’t tell about this place. It had all made sense on the Desert Survival Course, you can mark your escape route by picking out the direction in which the sand swirls. I pick up my binoculars and take a look. I see a flag fluttering in the distance. Maybe I’ve got something in my eye, I rub t
hem, open them again and see a red blur. I can’t tell if the red patch is in my eye or is out there in the desert.

  The desert fills your eyes. Your eyes become desert. I’ve got used to it by now. A bird. No, it isn’t a bird. Depending on the time of day I keep seeing things that turn out to not be what they were. Mirages. We had discussed them in our ‘Introduction to Cultural Sensitivity’ module in Advanced Desert Survival. At first I had thought they were talking about the Mirage fighters, those French contraptions that were handsome beasts, like most things French, but completely useless in a real war, like most things French. But this mirage, Colonel Slatter, said was like sand blinging, sand pretending to be not sand, sand playing its oldest tricks, sand which from a distance looks like water and you motherfuckers run towards it and by the time you get there, there is no water, just some more sand. And you have already wasted a lot of water within your body and now you are dying just because you saw sand that you thought was a water body.

  Don’t do that. Don’t. Even if you are sure that what you are seeing is not just a body of water but a proper oasis, with those Arab trees and a lush pond, and topless chicks in transparent veils and shimmering pants beckoning you. Even if you can count those ladies, even if you can see through their harem pants, don’t run. Wait and contemplate. Your water-starved little brain is playing tricks on you. But if you find the spectacle too real, then walk slowly. Shut your eyes and open them again. Think of the children. Think of all the dying children in all the wars in the world. If you are not careful, if you don’t watch your step, you are about to become one of them. And nobody is going to feel sorry for you because you are not really a child. If you get closer and still believe in what you see then either you are already a zombie or on the way to becoming one. You should be glad if you are already a zombie, because you are not going to like what comes next. You are going to wish that you were dead. Not dead in the whining I-wish-I-was-dead sense but, like, for real, because you are going to get so much pain from those shimmering beauties that don’t exist and that you insist on running towards. It’s called a mirage; there’s a fucking reason. It’s a French word, what good can come of it.