Red Birds

by Mohammed Hanif

  The wind brings louder moans. I go down on my elbows and start to crawl up. It’s good to crawl anyway, I tell myself. Soldiers faced with hidden enemies always crawl. I don’t know what awaits me on the other side of the hill.

  I reach for my dagger and am quite surprised to find out that my hand is fully functional and steady. I can feel no life below my torso though. Is this how people die, from the toes up? Lower half lifeless and upper half wielding a dagger, raring for one last fight. The brain is the last thing to die, I remember. Probably better to crash and burn, where your skull explodes first. What good is the brain if your legs and pecker aren’t working? I am not really worried about my pecker. It was a potential water tap which has dried up, I am not going to get any sustenance from down there. I hold the dagger steady with both hands and I crawl up and up where lurks either a saviour who will deliver me of my misery or an enemy who will deliver me of my misery.

  ‘Fucking mutt,’ I say when I reach the top and spot a medium-sized poodle lying on its side with her face turned to the sky. She is howling at the sky.

  I look up in the sky to see what is troubling this mutt; there is nothing but the mad bloody Arab in the sky being his furious self. And although I have never really seen an Arab, let alone an Arab god, and I have also never seen anyone in labour (except for women in the movies, with their parted legs, pushing, screaming), for some reason I believe that the mutt is going through labour; its agony not caused by heat and homelessness but something more primal. I am about to witness a birth. I look at my dagger and think this should come in handy. I know that you have to cut a cord after birth. This is my purpose. This is why I have been wandering the desert for such a long time. I move closer and the mutt recoils, a typical sign of a wild animal in birth pangs. She has probably walked away from her community to give birth in the desert, like those women who wandered into the desert and gave birth to ancient Arab prophets. Women are forced out into the desert so that they can give birth to prophets. That was the history, that was how civilization was born. At least, Arab civilization. I can’t remember anything useful about this from my ‘Cultural Sensitivity Towards Tribals’ module.

  I bend down to have a closer look at her. She looks into my eyes and, failing to understand my friendly intentions, yelps at me again, but this time a subdued, helpless protest, maybe tinkered with the hope that this tall creature who is bending over her and smelling of rotting beef jerky might be here to help her. I wish someone would take a picture: ‘Lost American officer helping a lost mutt give birth’. I have seen one on the homepage of Stars and Stripes where a marine was putting a bandage on a baby donkey. I put my right hand under her head and she lets me, but as I move my other hand towards her belly she yelps violently and tries to drag herself away from me. This monster is here to steal my babies, she is probably thinking.

  But then I notice two things: one of her hind legs is twisted at an odd angle; also that she’s a male. I see a smear of blood on the sand and realize that this unfortunate creature isn’t here to give birth but has broken a leg.

  ‘Lost American officer helping a puppy with broken leg’; not like helping a lost bitch give birth but still a compelling headline.

  I can’t decide for a few moments whether this is a good sign or another curse. Is this pretty mutt with a broken leg my saviour angel or has he been sent to test my resolve? Am I supposed to nurture him back to health and then look for a way to escape this desert, or just eat him up bit by bit while looking for a way to escape this desert? I look into his eyes again and feel a surge of energy. Your chances of survival increase substantially if you find a fellow traveller. Although, when they came up with the fellow traveller theory, they probably meant a fellow soldier, a native guide, a casual acquaintance from a wrecked ship, a native informer who has been found out and expelled from the community by the other natives; they probably didn’t devote much thinking to how a lame stray dog could come to lighten your burden.

  I have already made too many educated guesses and every single one of them has left me more famished. I put my right hand under the mutt’s head and look at its moist eyes, its dried-up little tongue, a little wet patch that it has made on the sand during our introductions, a clear sign that this injured little animal still contains fluids, soft flesh, still moist, innards brimming with juices, a promise of life in short. An injured promise but a promise nevertheless. I hold his head firmly and pin it to the sand, and with my other hand reach for my dagger, which is secure and ready in a leather sheath just above my boot.

  I find myself on my knees clutching onto sand for support. There was no warning: one minute I am plodding up the hillock, like a determined warrior (admittedly, with heavy feet and tongue hanging out, but I was walking with a purpose); next moment I am on my knees panting. I see a dab of red colour spreading on the sand. I am bleeding, hell I am bleeding, I think, and then a flutter of wings and a shiny little bird emerges from the sands and takes flight. My hands flail in the air to capture it but it shoots like an arrow into the air and is soon a little red dot on the horizon, dissolving into nothingness in the sky.

  CHAPTER 8

  Momo

  The bombs stopped falling soon after Bro Ali went to the Hangar and never came back. Did he refuse to give them any more targets? Did he single-handedly end the war? It’s unlikely, but if anybody could, it was him. Some people think a bit of peace and quiet is a good thing, others wonder where their salary has gone. Bro Ali taught me many things. You’re gonna ask what kind of skill set you need to live in a fugee camp. You need a ration card and of course you need some serviceable English to convince the foreign do-gooders who used to run the Camp that you are at least half human. If you are well off you might need to learn how to milk a goat or at least have the ability to tell when a goat doesn’t want to be milked. Bro Ali was a man of science, just like I am a man of commerce. He tried to teach me to build a transistor radio with shiny components and copper wires he brought from the Hangar.

  The only transmission we could receive was crackly boleros from some country on the other side of the earth. I had no interest in home-made transistors and volunteer informers. I told him I love transistors, I love boleros; I promised that I was gonna grow up and set up a transistor-making factory, that I was gonna import a guitar from Argentina and learn to sing boleros.

  He would disappear at night with his transistor, just going for a walk to clear my head. Every time he went out to clear his head, a plane would appear in the sky. He was sending them signals. He was on a mission to clear our area of evil guys. You can’t mix business with politics. He was doing it because he believed in his cause. First he was helping the people in the Hangar clear the area of our own bad guys. And then he decided to clear the area of the bad guys who were taking out the bad guys. He never thought all this clearing out was gonna leave a big hole in our lives.

  What I really wanted him to teach me was how to pick locks. It took some convincing on my part but he relented. Yes, you do need that little crooked wire, but more than that you need steady hands. Your heartbeat needs to sync with the movement of your fingers and yes, steady breathing always helps.

  ‘If you are going to grow up and become a thief just like them, you better learn to pick a lock properly.’ Bro Ali was joking of course but it hurt. He went around picking targets for the people at the Hangar but I never called him a traitor. And I want to pick a little lock to take what’s rightfully mine and I become a thief.

  Lady Flowerbody’s locker is a basic job. Sometimes you pick a lock just because it’s there. To stay in practice. You never know when you might need to pick your own handcuffs. Right now I just need a cursory look at her credentials, a background check on where she comes from, what she’ll bring to my team.

  She has also called me for a preliminary interview or an assessment as she puts it. I should know about what she wants to know.

  We shall see who is gonna interview who.

  Holiday pictures. A safari, a demen
ted-looking elephant trying too hard to please the visitors who seem quite pleased with themselves in a cage mounted on a jeep. Some invoices. She is on a $120-per-day contract. Five-day working week. Expenses must be filed with receipts. She’s a service provider like me but she pretends she has been doing God’s work. A full box of nail-polish remover. I suspect she abuses her stash. There is a pouch of tobacco, large rolling papers, a lump of brown gooey stuff, a stack of dark chocolates in shiny gold wrappers. She is the one with a teenager’s drawer and she wants to study my teenage mind.

  By the time my first session with her comes up, I am ready for her. She is here to research my trauma. I intend to take her into the very heart of trauma and do some research of my own.

  There is no reason to take along a professional junketeer on my mission, but she has the power to distract and I am gonna need someone like her in my team. We are not planning a traditional raid, we cannot afford to start open warfare, and all the talk of guerrilla warfare may sound romantic – hit and run, a thousand little cuts, poke them in the eye and hide – but where you gonna hide in a desert? Also this place may look poorer than Afghanistan, and more violent than Sudan, but thank God there is no ideology at stake. Not for them, not for us. They bomb us because they assume we are related to bad Arabs. We steal from them because that’s all we can do. They take our boys because they think that’s all we have. And to lure the boys they sent out their tallest soldiers, their shiniest vehicles.

  It looked awesome, the way they came out of the Hangar, an armoured car in front, a soldier standing on it, gun cocked, visor on the helmet lowered, their radio crackling. They always looked straight ahead, as if nothing on their left or right interested them. Behind the armoured car came a water tanker, and behind the water tanker another armoured car, another soldier standing behind a gun talking on the radio to Headquarters. That’s Americans going to get their water supply from the pond at the edge of the desert. And they flew two flags on every vehicle as if they were not getting three thousand litres of contaminated water but conquering some big castle. And the children would run after them, waving, wanting to shake hands, hoping to get a joyride. Not gonna lie, I also joined the idiots in the chase the first time I saw the awesome convoy. Bro Ali spotted me and thrashed me proper. ‘I can understand the urge to ride in a big vehicle but we have our own jeep,’ Bro Ali whacked me as soon as the convoy was out of sight. ‘But you never let me drive,’ I managed some tears. If you make Bro Ali feel bad, he is gonna let you do what you want. He started to teach me to drive and I never chased the convoy with the idiots again.

  It was jobs, jobs, jobs after that. The boy who sat on my left and the boy who sat on my right in my class, both got work. Cleaning up, clearing kitchens and bathrooms; they got rubber gloves, they got to keep those rubber gloves. They got paid in new crisp notes. Sometimes they were sent off into the desert to lay mines, they got extra money for that.

  Making some moolah and thanking our creator is the only ideology that works here.

  We gonna go in like debt collectors. And in that kind of situation it’s good to have a well-dressed, nice-smelling, vaguely European-accented lady on your team.

  The lady in question has set up her shop in a little tent, an iron table covered with newspapers, notebook ready. She is in business.

  I pour water from a red plastic jug into a white paper cup, look at the time on my watch only to make a guess about how long it takes her to roll out the letters PTSD. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. First they bomb us from the skies, then they work hard to cure our stress. But when she finally mentions it she abbreviates, and rolls it around her tongue and makes it sound like a promise I made a long time ago and that I must not forget.

  But right now we are going through the pleasantries that every researcher scholar who comes this way goes through with his or her subject. I have been the subject of many studies since I was eleven. ‘Growing Pains in Conflict Zones’. ‘Tribal Cultures Get IT’. Even ‘Reiki For War Survivors’. I am a good subject. She is the doctor in the white coat, I am the lab rat quivering in my cage but showing healthy curiosity towards my tormentor. I have done this before. They all come from somewhere. I am gonna ask her before she asks me.

  ‘How was Tanzania?’ I ask, taking a non-sip from the paper cup. In two years of do-gooders having come and gone I have learnt that it helps to hold on to something while listening to their fairy tales. She lifts her head from the file and I notice that the bluish tint in her hair is not so shiny, her thin lips are made slightly fuller with the creative use of lipstick, and the mole above her upper lip seems to change colour according to her mood. I remind myself to look into her eyes or keep my eyes on the mole – you look below the neck and they start thinking you are just another horny teenager. I am not gonna fall for that old tit trap.

  I have heard they have nice spas in Tanzania, where you can eat and drink all you want and then get three men to massage you simultaneously. Always good for the skin. Soul benefits too. It’s an all-inclusive package. One day I’ll build one here too. We’ll throw in a goat milk detox and they’ll all come rushing. But right now there is other business to take care of.

  ‘It was nice, relaxing. I like being close to nature.’ She doesn’t consider this place nature, maybe because there is no spa.

  She is businesslike, making it clear that we are here to discuss my issues, like how I am coping with peace after years of conflict. I am the Young Muslim Mind that will pay for her six-handed massages and her toned skin. She is here to learn from me, as she has said.

  I get PTSD, she gets a per diem in US dollars.

  ‘Safari?’ I take a sip of water and it doesn’t taste of metal like the water at home. She has a stash of bottled water somewhere. I am gonna save the world but let me first ensure there is enough Perrier.

  She lifts her head from her file and I imagine she is trying to decipher her own handwritten questions. ‘I started out as a family therapist but my focus is on conflict areas. I have worked with real soldiers coming back from real battles but I can tell you that domestic battlefields are so much nastier, everyone comes out a loser. And all you have is kiddie pictures to show for it. And that’s my current focus.’

  I have Bro Ali’s pictures but I am not gonna show her. I am not giving my family secrets to some visiting surveyor.

  I want to tell her about the technicolour happy dreams that I have been having. Bro Ali and me jump from a tall building on gliders, we land softly, we walk on the streets with white fluffy angel wings; there is snow but we don’t feel cold. There is something about her glowing skin that makes me think about wild animals in Tanzania, where she was probably asking teenage waiters about their inner lives. She is the type who would demand socio-political insights in return for generous tips.

  ‘Sometimes I think this is what we have achieved,’ I hold up my paper cup. ‘We used to drink wine from our enemy’s skull. Now we drink purified water from paper cups made by cutting down trees.’ She looks relieved. I think I have given her a glimpse into my young, troubled Muslim mind. She closes her file and bends forward to listen. I am a student of history. Linking up my own condition with some imagined medieval trivia helps you live in these parts. It makes my mild depression feel like a part of the great march of the humanity through millennia. Here is a cheerful thought: one in every two hundred men is linked to Genghis Khan through a direct bloodline. I am probably his great-great-grandson. Would Grandfather Genghis submit to questions about his mental health?

  History can wait, I’m gonna address the economy first. You know how much she is getting paid, $120 dollars for a day. OK, I am probably myself getting four dollars in subsidized food, but I am a survivor of the most useless war in the history of wars. Even our conquerors have abandoned us. What has she done for the country? Gone on a safari and spa holiday to Tanzania? As a businessman you always have to see if you are gonna get your money’s worth. I could use $120 as seed money for setting up my Scorpions Racing Circuit.
I can feel jealousy creeping up. It’s never a good thing in business meetings.

  ‘This is good,’ she says. ‘Go on, tell me more about what you have been thinking about civilization. Let’s start with what’s on your mind.’ My young Muslim mind is wondering what kind of noise she makes when she reaches the point of sexual gratification. Father once brought home an old copy of a book called Cosmopolitan. It had nothing about how to build supply chains but a very long essay on 6o Paths to Orgasm. My mind is capable of thinking many things at the same time. I am never gonna be that single-track-mind kind of guy who thinks of girls while driving and vice versa.

  I can think of countries where one could get three seventeen-year-olds, keep them all night, and buy them all a hamburger and a beer for $120. Late nights on Nat Geo are more educational than you think. If you can’t tell a girl who gets $120 a day to find out how you feel, who can you tell? But I am not gonna tell her about my true feelings.

  ‘Was there a real safari?’ I ask. She seems dismayed, as if she was still in Tanzania and I was a native refusing to give her directions to the nearest lions’ sanctuary.

  I notice her patient, benevolent demeanour, ballpoint in her left hand moving in short bursts. I suspect she is doing her expense accounts.

  ‘I am not sure if I asked you but why did you choose Tanzania?’

  She explains patiently: she likes the wild, she likes being close to nature, she has read a Scottish writer who has set a very moving detective story in Tanzania.

  I try to imagine a world where people read a book by a writer about a place where the writer has never been and then decide to go there to study young minds. We live in that world. Not much different from the white men (and women, but mostly men) who flew halfway around the world to bomb us because they believe even if we are not bad Arabs we must be up to something.

  ‘I think we should talk about you.’