Red Birds

by Mohammed Hanif

  I was waiting for him to open the door so that I could walk through it and guide him to the point where our mission would begin. To show him that there were voices coming out of the Hangar. I could smell frying butter and other food smells. We have to mount surveillance and find a way to get into the Hangar. If we don’t go to the Hangar how can we find out where Bro Ali went? I had the information, I had a plan, not a set-in-stone plan, but a pretty rational plan, but was Momo listening?

  He was listening, alright; to his own raging hormones.

  He was more interested in the Lady. He is consumed by Lady Flowerbody. He thinks he can seduce her; even worse, he believes he’ll allow her to seduce him. He also believes he can get her to invest in his new business venture and help him find information about Bro Ali. The eternal human folly, looking for sex and salvation in the same person. That’s what boys do. He pretends that he doesn’t care, but is consumed by thoughts of her all day long. Showing that you care means admitting that you have a weakness. We are not afraid of showing that we care. And nobody has ever called me weak. I want to tell Momo that God promised an interesting world. He never promised a fair world. He definitely never promised a two-for-the-price-of-one world.

  Hovering around the jeep Momo suddenly remembered something and went back inside the house. I followed him, reluctantly because it could be a trick. I could smell a faint whiff of trick. Tricks smell like onions. This house always smells of tricks. Everybody doing something for the other person because it’s for their own good. The air in this house is like a thick onion soup.

  And as he stepped inside it grew stronger and I didn’t follow him in as I normally would. He was expecting me to come in. I know Momo’s deceits. Like most things in life I can smell them but I can’t stop them. I turned back to the jeep and waited on the passenger’s seat side from where I usually get in. Momo came back, took the steering. The jeep coughed, Momo didn’t even look towards me. The jeep lurched. I knew this was the end. But I know I can’t give up.

  So I run. And since I run with a limp I don’t expect to catch up with the jeep. Even if I didn’t have the limp you can’t really keep pace with that Cherokee monster. My hind leg is almost healed but it still hurts. I have found a way to put my paws on the ground so it hurts less. This is what life is all about; you live and learn to manage your pain. I know he has abandoned me for the day. But I have to appear optimistic. I cannot be seen to abandon him.

  I don’t blame him. It’s not about loyalty, it’s about his out-of-control urges. He thinks he is headed for an amorous rendezvous. Lady Flowerbody thinks she is meeting her lab rat. He believes she has designs on him, that old myth about older woman hankering after young boys that middle-aged men have cultivated for centuries. She needs to study him for her report. He thinks he can score some dollars and lose his virginity in her experienced hands. Of course, the boy pretends that his life is all about business and Bro Ali, but go on, have a sniff, he smells of lust on the verge of self-combustion.

  Delusions smell of synthetic vinegar.

  He thinks all it takes is a trip to the bush to realize all one’s teenage fantasies. You go into that bush as a free man – or as a free dog in my case – but you come out a slave, a slave to your own recurring desire. And in these teen years the desire recurs a lot. I can’t go into details about my own exploits but just remember that when they call me Mutt the Rutt they are not praising my intellectual capabilities. People who boast of their sexual exploits usually have bad teeth and shrivelled testicles.

  You would think Momo was in the middle of planning an expedition to bring his brother back. He is also in deep mourning. Can you have tears in your eyes and fire in your loins simultaneously?

  These are some of the questions that the Lady should be working on. Instead she is interested in studying the effects of bombing, mild drugs and extreme flirtation on young Muslim minds. I am glad she has no interest in the minds of middle-aged reformed Mutts with fried brains. It’s not my job to criticize well-fed do-gooders but I can tell you a thing or two about what goes on in the bush. It should stay in the bush but there are lessons that young Muslim minds can learn. And the first one is that depression and sexual depravity are indeed first cousins.

  Momo is the victim of his own hormonal imbalance; I am mere collateral damage. He has left me here with the smell of sadness so overwhelming that I could be in a salt mine. It’s Mother Dear’s time for morning tea and tears. And her rosary.

  What a way to spend the third worst day of your life, watching a sad woman making her afternoon tea and working the rosary with the passion of a teenage boy self-pleasuring. Ellie has sneaked into the kitchen. I suspect he is trying to make tea. That man is trying to go native.

  Why do they drink tea? Maybe for the same reason I sometimes eat grass and then throw up? At least I am cleansing my own digestive system. What is their excuse? Why do they put that black dust in milk and boil it? You might as well slurp the milk. Not that I would know what it tastes like. OK, I did take a sip or two when Mother Dear left her mug on the floor. I was exiled for a whole week. ‘This is not a family dog and I won’t have him gulping tea that is meant for my sons.’ She repeated that for one whole week. She is such a family person. Look where her family has got her. One son gone, the other one out of control, running around the bush in the hope of humping a lady twice his age and stealing her money, and a husband who has brought that very lady friend home. But in her grief our Mother Dear is as stubborn as those lizards on their ceilings. Those are poison, those lizards, I had one as a little afternoon snack a while ago, its tail kept dancing even after I had gulped down the rest of it. I was sick for two days.

  Sometimes Momo is not afraid of showing his soft side but ends up betraying his hard edges. During my exile after my first drink of tea Momo kept bringing me food, usually a slice of dried bread. Not even a whiff of butter. Momo thinks putting a bone in his pocket is not hygienic. That boy really has a free-floating concept of hygiene.

  Like most people he is ready to pay lip service to his duty to his family by which he usually means Mother Dear. And this woman has got nothing but sadness as her family value system and, be fair for a moment, can there be a more useful family member than this humble Mutt? How many times have I saved this house from the plague of cats? How many smelly rats have been dispatched to rat hell with these teeth? But a few sips of that disgusting tea and I am not family. And who is family? The boy who is not even here. But that boy is family and will remain family.

  I am Mutt and I can excrete gold and spout Rumi but I will remain Mutt.

  I am having these melancholic thoughts sitting on the street, trying to shoo away the flies. These are the real nemesis. I have taken on a pack of deranged cats, avoided the butcher’s bad moods, I even hope to outlive Mother Dear’s misery, but you can’t win against these pesky flies. They are like a manifestation of God’s irritation with His own creation. So I have no doubt that when I am dead and gone my cadaver will be covered with these flies, and if I get a burial, as I hope to after all that I have done for the family, they will manage to sneak into my grave as well.

  I doze off fighting these little pests, and when I wake up evening is approaching. A walk around the compound for evening inspection and what do I see: Lady Flowerbody is sneaking into that deserter Ellie’s shack. When they decided to put him up in this plastic cubicle next to the main gate, I had a pang of nostalgia, the place was my own personal love in a past life. I thought this boiled cabbage would use it for some higher calling. But he is using it for the same purpose I used it for. Momo has deserted me for a rendezvous with her. And now it seems she has deserted Momo for a world-class deserter. It’s not just cheating in the traditional sense but a grand circle of treason.

  I don’t intend to present myself as some kind of infallible character but increasingly I am coming to the conclusion that I might have more moral fibre than this whole family put together.

  That’s why Momo runs away from me, he do
esn’t want to confront the sad truth about Bro Ali. You are embarking on a mission to save your brother, you ditch your second in command for a few moments of humping. And when he returns, he doesn’t smell of any humping, only the frivolous rot of small talk. I should know. What a shame. Now I feel bad for him. The boy deserves a hug, if not shameless humping.

  And this is only the third worst day of my life. There was another day. Oh that really was the worst day of my life.

  CHAPTER 18

  Ellie

  At night the stars are ridiculously low, as if trying to come closer to see if they can hear anything in this silence. I dream of a giant simulator, its sole purpose simulating herb gardens. As if there are not enough gardeners in the world. And this simulated garden is a geeky little patch, with herbs and inverted cactuses. Was I supposed to learn something, turn this desert into a vast herb garden?Did I fly 637 sorties, drop a few thousand tons of the smartest bombs, so that in the end I could shovel shit or whatever it is that you have to shovel to keep those herbs alive and cactuses inverted? I try to remember if I’ve ever taken a gardening course. They planned one once, but too many officers volunteered. Central Command don’t like it when too many people want to do the same thing. Apparently this kind of thing was called mutiny once, a bad bit of history that Central Command don’t like to remember. In my dream Colonel Slatter is standing on my head and shouting, dig Ellie dig. I am ignoring him and digging calmly as if I am digging of my own accord and Colonel Slatter is providing a drumbeat for my voluntary actions. I dig and dig into this garden and my shovel hits something hard. I put aside my shovel and dig out the earth with my hands, my fingers touch a smooth surface, I clear up the surface and it’s a baby’s head; the little bugger is giggling away.

  I wake up in horror.

  One thing they never teach you in Desert Survival: in the desert the morning comes too early. First there is a distant call for prayer, a bit more hurried and stilted than I had heard in movies and in my ‘Sensitivity Towards Religious Rituals’ module. I had heard it so many times in our training that I had actually started liking it. It seems the person calling out to the people has been dragged out of bed and wants to get back to sleep. I pull the duvet around my head tightly as if trying to steel myself against the allure of Allah. There is a special sub-module on the potential side effects of hearing Azan while in captivity. We were told about the magical qualities of this call for prayer, we were told real-life tales about how staunch disbelievers, militant atheists and at least one Jehovah’s Witness had found themselves mesmerized and forced into the embrace of their captors’ faith. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, heard it and converted to Islam. It was never made clear whether the conversion took place right there on the moon or after he returned to earth. Just imagine, you are the first ever human being to step on the moon and what’s the first thing you hear? You don’t hear a song about the moon, or stars or star-spangled banner, but you hear what I am hearing now: Prayer is better than sleep, oh yeah, prayer is better than sleep.

  But I am sleepy and no desert god is going to convince me otherwise. We were told in our module that you can take local brews and local lovers but don’t try the poison of native religious practices. Don’t shove your Jesus in other people’s faces either, we were told, we’ve already got that covered. The more ridiculous a religious practice, the more respect you must show towards it.

  Now that time has come to put my training into practice I realize how ridiculous our fear of conversion to another faith was. I have survived heat and hunger and a bully little saviour boy, I am not really in danger of being taken in by a plea to pray to a desert god when the stars are still shining. I slip the duvet from my head and take in the view.

  I am surprised that it is still night, proper night with stars hung low, as if straining towards me to say hi. I look out and see that the call for morning prayer has stirred the refugee community, but not everyone is rushing to pray. Some have started collecting their goats and herding them towards the main gate, others are probably hugging their wives or their concubines tightly in their sleep. Some are off to collect firewood for their morning tea, others are fiddling with and cursing their malfunctioning gas cylinders. One of the women is abusing her husband loudly because he is still busy drinking from a bottle. He in turn is protesting meekly, ‘Let me finish this, then I’ll go, there is still half an hour before morning prayer.’ It is a cacophony of voices and smudges of bright colours and smoke rising from a thousand clay ovens. It’s pitch dark and they are already busy making breakfast.

  Some people, it seems, are going for their morning prayers, shadows rushing to answer the call of their creator. Others are making their way towards the edge of the desert and disappearing behind the shrub that defies the elements.

  I observe all this activity and wonder about the sanity of a culture where people start doing stuff at a time of day when stars are still burning bright, when you can’t even see the next person’s face properly.

  I was having an argument with myself the night before and the argument had gone on for such a long time that I had drifted into sleep.

  I had been trying to argue with Momo in my head and trying to answer that silly, existential question: What am I doing here? Why don’t we first establish what I am not doing here. I have not bombed this place; that is plain and simple for anyone to see. The Hangar is intact. So is this refugee camp, more or less. Maybe Colonel Slatter had tried to bomb it and ended up with the same fate as me. Maybe Major Stratford had bombed it; definitely Major Stratford, not in the current campaign, but definitely in the last campaign. Maybe there were others who had bombed this place. Other Americans. Maybe the odd French pilot.

  I just followed my orders. I flew my mission.

  I might have done some bad things but I didn’t do anything to these people. I’m doing my job for fuck’s sake. Since when did doing your job become a crime against humanity? Don’t fuck with my head. Fuck the makers of zero-zero ejection seats that don’t eject. Fuck Martin-Baker. Don’t fuck with my head. Let me get some sleep.

  Someone tugs at my duvet and without thinking I cling to it. I am an over-sleeper. My St Moritz childhood has taught me that the real sleep, the deepest and the sweetest sleep, only comes when it’s already morning and someone is trying to wake you up or the alarm is about to go off. I was often told by Cath that I was the kind of man who would fly eight thousand miles to take out a target any time of the day but couldn’t be expected to get out of his bed to meet the FedEx guy at the door.

  Here and now I am aware that the world around me has an advantage over me. Not only have they lived for generations in the same place, they have managed to become refugees in their own land, they have woken up before the sun has shown its hopeful face and they’re already busy scheming about what to do with the rest of their day. They’re cracking their breakfast eggs and bowing before their god and I am drifting back to sweet oblivion.

  The tugging on my duvet is accompanied by birdsong.

  Suddenly I am wide awake, I am ready to leave this bed, ready to follow this song, this voice into a new day, to a new destination, even if it leads me to morning prayers and to an angry Arab god.

  I pull the duvet from my face. ‘Yes.’

  Lady Flowerbody stands close to my feet, a yellow plastic bucket in one hand, the other trying to pull the duvet off me.

  ‘I am off to milk the goats,’ she says, as if sharing some intimate routine with me. ‘But first I need to count my duvets and put them away. Sometimes they disappear after sunrise. This place is full of thieves.’

  I sit up, startled. I am an officer waking up at the crack of dawn in a new place and my duvet is needed elsewhere.

  And suddenly the light changes and I see a smudge of orange in the sky, the sun struggling to pull off its own duvet, and I realize why they call her Flowerbody. Even at dawn, her eyes shine, the curls around her face are as dark as the night, and beyond that I can’t see her face. But it is her ac
cent that shocks; she speaks as if she is speaking to someone she has been expecting. She stands above me, pulls the duvet off and starts to roll it, and speaks with a European accent, softened Ds, and abrupt Rs.

  ‘I don’t think they know who you really are,’ she says.

  If I wasn’t sitting in a bed, under low stars, I might have thought I was still lost in the desert, here’s another mirage to consider. But I feel she’ll take me out of here. She’ll take me on a journey. She’ll take me home. Here’s somebody who knows who I am. She can see beyond, she can see that I’m more than just a lost American soldier.

  ‘I think they are keeping you here for a purpose,’ she says. ‘Don’t forget that.’

  CHAPTER 19

  Momo

  One good thing about field scholars like Lady Flowerbody is that after they have asked you about your innermost feelings they give you a Cadbury Mini. They also thank you for your cooperation, for your time. Time my ass, I want to tell them, time is all I got. They used to say time is money. They were right. My time is gonna make you money. One day that’s gonna change.

  Another good thing about field scholars is that when they give you that Cadbury with fake milk, fake sugar and fake chocolate (yes, the wrapper is real) they themselves retreat into their offices and eat real chocolate that is at least seventy per cent pure. It’s supposed to be good for your heart, it lowers your blood pressure and tastes like life, bitter and sweet, crunchy and soft at the same time.

  Pure chocolate is not what I am looking for in Lady Flowerbody’s shack, I am looking for information on her real mission. She goes around the Camp all day, her clipboard in her hand, asking everyone, how do you feel? What kind of researcher wants to know so much about feelings? Why does she think anybody is gonna tell her about their real feelings? And what exactly are her own feelings about all these fake feelings that she keeps collecting?