Refuge

by N G Osborne

  “I shouldn’t have brought him with me.”

  “Yeah and I should’ve taken that gig in Tokyo rather than coming to this gem of a city, but it’s all water under the bridge. Once you’ve visited your guy, you need to write down your version of events and fax it to your boss.”

  “It won’t make a difference. I broke so many rules, I’m sure to be canned.”

  “I don’t give a fuck. Just do it, okay?”

  The traffic slows, and Ivor lays on the horn.

  “So you see any mujahideen while you were out there?” Ivor says.

  “Except for the border guards, nothing.”

  “How about training camps?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You know a smaller version of an army base‌—‌low slung huts, obstacle courses, shooting ranges that sort of thing.”

  “There was one a few miles off the main road.”

  “Anyone there?”

  Charlie looks out the window. A gaggle of pedestrians surrounds a young girl lying contorted on the road; blood pools around her head. A woman in a burqa is screaming hysterically, pointing at a car with a bashed in windscreen.

  “So was there?” Ivor says.

  “No.”

  “You sure? Nobody?”

  “Jesus, Ivor, what did I just say?”

  “Cool, just wanted to be sure.”

  Charlie lights a cigarette, and they drive the rest of the way to the hospital in silence. Ivor pulls up at its front entrance.

  “Don’t be long,” he says, “I gotta be at a meeting across town.”

  Charlie nods and walks in the main entrance. He finds the nurses’ station, and a nurse gives him Wali’s room number. Charlie heads down a corridor past an orderly pushing a cart filled with bloody, soiled sheets. The smell of metal and shit lingers in his nostrils. He finds Wali’s room and takes a deep breath.

  Get it together. This is not about you.

  He enters the room and calls out Wali’s name. Wali doesn’t respond. Charlie walks over and sees Wali’s eyes are closed.

  “And you are?” a voice says.

  Charlie turns to see a young Pakistani doctor standing there.

  “Charlie, I’m a friend.”

  “I’m Doctor Halim, I operated on Wali last night. I wish I could have saved his left foot but there was nothing else to do.”

  “He in a coma?”

  “No, I don’t believe so, it’s most likely the amount of medication he’s under. We will reduce that soon.”

  “How long will he be here?”

  “Four weeks, six at most.”

  “That all?”

  “It never ceases to amaze me how resilient the human body is. There will be complications, of course, but within a month it’s more a question of rehabilitation. From there on he’ll need his family more than anything else.”

  “He has no family.”

  “Well that will certainly make it harder.”

  Charlie turns. Wali has a contented smile on his lips as if he doesn’t have a care in the world.

  “I’ll make sure he’s taken care of,” Charlie says.

  “That’s quite a commitment.”

  “It’s the least I can do.”

  Charlie lays a hand on Wali’s shoulder. He wants to say something profound, something that shows how much he cares but words fail him.

  Charlie walks out past a rogue’s gallery of limbless patients. They stare at him like zombies in a cheap horror flick. Out front he hears a car horn, and Ivor pulls up beside him. He gets in and asks Ivor to drop him at the UNMAPA offices. When they get there, Ivor scribbles something on a piece of paper and hands it to Charlie.

  “There’s a party at this general’s house tonight,” Ivor says.

  “Thanks but I’m not up for parties right now.”

  “Trust me, there’s nothing worse you can do than dwell on this shit. Elma will be there.”

  “So?”

  “Come on, buddy, I saw the Dutch books on your desk. Don’t think it’s gonna work, but I sure as hell respect the enterprise.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Ivor smirks.

  “Sure you don’t.”

  Charlie steps out of the SUV, and Ivor tears out of the compound. Charlie crumples up the piece of paper and tosses it into a nearby trash can.

  TWENTY-THREE

  NOOR SITS ON the unused bed in Bushra’s room and studies her Dutch grammar book. Bushra retreated to the bathroom a couple of hours ago and still hasn’t emerged. If it weren’t for the occasional turn of the hot water tap Noor might begin to fear she’d drowned.

  They hadn’t left after all. After her conversation with Elma, Noor’s argument for doing so had seemed specious at best, and her father, on learning that Charlie had arrived home early, had felt it best to wait and thank him for his kind hospitality. And wait they had. Past seven in the evening, past eight, past nine, until her father had announced that he was retiring, and they could thank Charlie in the morning. Though Noor would never admit, she’d been relieved. The idea of searching out a cockroach ridden hostel at this late hour filled her with dread.

  Noor hears tires crunch on the gravel outside and slips off the bed. She pulls back the curtain and sees the light of a motorcycle extinguish. Noor steps away and catches her reflection in the mahogany standing mirror. In this venerable antique her shalwar kameez seems shabbier than ever.

  You know you must go and apologize, a voice inside her says.

  For what?

  How about your inability to offer Charlie comfort in his time of need.

  She grimaces and does up the top button of her kameez. Downstairs she heads through the library into the sitting room. She smells cigarette smoke wafting in through the open verandah doors and makes her way outside. At the far end Charlie is sitting in one of the rocking chairs, a cigarette in one hand, a bottle of beer in the other.

  “Mr. Matthews,” she says.

  He looks up at her as though she were a ghost.

  “So you were here,” he says.

  “We all are.”

  Charlie goes back to staring out at the garden.

  “We can leave if you wish.”

  “No‌—‌just surprised you came that’s all.”

  “We’ve had a lovely time, thank you.”

  “Good.”

  Noor waits for him to say something more, but he ventures nothing further. She sits down in the other rocking chair and looks off into the garden.

  Apologize, the voice inside her says, but she finds herself incapable of doing so‌—‌at least personally.

  “I was sorry to hear what happened to your colleague,” she says.

  Charlie takes a long swig from his beer bottle.

  “I’m not going to soften this for you, his recovery’s going to be long and painful. However if I’ve learnt one thing from living in the camps it’s that he can still have a fulfilling life.”

  “Could you live without your legs?” Charlie says.

  “I know I would survive.”

  Noor feels his eyes fall on her. She continues to peer out into the darkness.

  “I don’t know if my father mentioned this,” she says, “but my mother was killed when I was eleven. One moment she was sitting right there beside me, the next she was gone, gone so quickly that I never even told her how much I loved her. That’s what’s so strange about life. You go on these long stretches where nothing extraordinary happens, where each day feels so similar to the last that it’s impossible to tell them apart. Then in the blink of an eye your whole universe is turned upside down, and everything you believed in is shaken to its core. I’ve often wondered why God does this, it seems so cruel, and the only answer I’ve been able to come up with is that these hardships somehow allow you to have a deeper, more profound sense of yourself.”

  Charlie puts down his bottle. In the garden hut, Noor can hear Mukhtar and Rasul chatting. Mukhtar lets out a hearty chuckle, and
Noor sees it as her cue to leave.

  “My mom died when I was fourteen,” Charlie says. “Breast cancer.”

  Noor waits.

  “I was at school when the hospital called, they said I should get there as soon as possible. When I did my mom looked fine. I suppose you wouldn’t have said that if you were meeting her for the first time, but I guess I’d gotten used to the way she looked. I stopped worrying, but then she got real intense, told me to always lead the life I wanted to live, and I suddenly realized she was about to die.

  “She asked me to sing ‘My Sweet Lord’ when I was young she’d sing it to me to put me to sleep, and so I started singing it louder and louder, thinking if I didn’t stop that she’d never leave me. And then I felt this hand on my shoulder. It was Maggie, one of the nurses. ‘I’m sorry Charlie,’ she said. ‘She’s gone’.”

  Noor looks over at Charlie. A single tear is winding its way down his cheek.

  “After they’d done what they had to do, they left me alone with her, and I felt this incredible urge to draw her. It was my last chance. I had a sketch pad in my satchel, and I became so absorbed I had no idea how much time passed. I heard the door open and looked up to see my Dad there, his tie still done up like he was there to meet a client. He stared down at me with disgust. ‘Give her some respect, she’s dead,’ he said. He ripped the pad away, and asked for a moment alone with her. That was it, he didn’t hug me or anything like that. So I waited in the corridor, and five minutes later he came out and said we were going. I told him I’d left my homework in the room, and I ran back in and searched for my sketch pad. I found it in the trash. I shoved it in my satchel and went over to my mom. I begged her to tell me what to do, but she said nothing. I’ve never felt more alone.”

  Charlie wipes his cheeks with the bottom of his t-shirt. Noor castigates herself for thinking the sketch in his room was of a lover.

  Why do I think the worst of people?

  “From what my boss told me today,” Charlie says, “I’ll be on my way home by the end of the week.”

  “They blame you for what happened?”

  “They have every right to. Point is if you want to stay a little longer, you should.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “I thought it was part of the Pashtun code not to turn down hospitality.”

  Or refuge.

  “Thank you,” she says, “that’s very kind of you.”

  Noor stands.

  “Good night, Charlie.”

  “Night, Noor.”

  Noor makes her way back down the verandah. She realizes that she just called Charlie by his first name.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ELMA CIRCULATES THROUGH the crowded bungalow and feels eyes all over her; the smartly dressed Pakistani officers with their neat mustaches and crisp uniforms, the immaculately dressed Pakistani bureaucrats in their starch white collarless jackets and shalwar kameez, the Western diplomats in their Savile Row suits and ties, and the more slovenly cadre of Western aid workers with their rumpled jackets and scuffed shoes, as if both should be taken as a sign of their altruism. For years she has feasted off such attention, but now she’s beginning to feel wearied by it all.

  She enters a small sitting room and finds Ivor there, chatting with a group of whisky drinking Pakistani officers. They stop talking and look her way. She recognizes one of them, General Faisal, the commander of the Frontier Force Regiment and a notorious groper. His gaze drifts towards her breasts, and she turns to leave. Ivor’s at her side before she’s even at the door.

  Great.

  “Not happy to see me,” he says.

  “I’m just looking for someone.”

  “Your new boyfriend from the New Yorker?”

  Elma swivels on him. Ivor doesn’t bother to wipe the smirk from his face.

  “Why do you persist in spreading malicious rumors about me?” she says.

  “Trust me I don’t give a fuck how you choose to get ahead, hey we’ve all got to do what we gotta do, but the truth’s a funny thing, Elma, it always gets out in the end.”

  “I never had an affair with the Interior Minister.”

  “Yeah, and you weren’t banging dear old Raymond either, were you?”

  “Fuck you, Ivor.”

  Elma marches towards the patio doors.

  “I read his article, least the preliminary draft,” Ivor says. “Those hotel fax machines, they’re just too tempting not to bug.”

  Elma can’t help but turn back. Ivor walks up. He gets so close she can feel his warm breath on her cheek.

  “I don’t know why you never chose to sleep with me,” he says. “I could be so much more useful to you than anyone else around here. That job at the UNDP you’re so desperate to get, you think the Agency couldn’t swing that for you?”

  Elma stares Ivor down. The idea of being in this weasel’s debt makes her skin crawl. Ivor sighs.

  “Fine, do it the hard way.”

  “The article, Ivor, what did it say?”

  Ivor sucks on his straw.

  “The guy’s got a major hard on for you‌—‌made you out to be a cross between Mother Theresa and Margaret Thatcher.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a compliment.”

  “The way he writes it, it is. Compassion crossed with steely resolve. Hell by the time I finished it I was ready to vote you UN Secretary General.”

  Despite it all, Elma can’t help but feel a visceral thrill. She does her best to maintain a composed demeanor.

  “You and me, we’re not that different,” Ivor says.

  Elma snorts.

  “You want to save lives, and despite what you might think, so do I.”

  “American lives,” she says.

  “Sure, I’ll concede the point, but whether you like it or not it’s a similar impulse.”

  “I don’t believe in screwing people over to achieve my goals.”

  “No, but I know you’ll pretty much do anything else. I had our European office check you out‌—‌where you were born, where you went to school, who your friends were‌—‌which teacher was your lover.”

  Elma feels a chill run up her spine.

  He can’t know.

  “Mr. Hiddink still has no clue he has a son, does he? And from what I can tell your brother, Isaac, doesn’t know you’re his mother either? Quite the sacrifice your mom made there. Why she do it? My guess is she was damned if some philandering Dutchman was going to screw up your life the way one had screwed hers. Am I close?”

  Elma feels dizzy. She looks around and imagines everyone in the room to be looking at her. She staggers towards the patio doors.

  “Don’t worry,” Ivor says, “your secret’s safe with me.”

  She keeps on going. The manicured garden is brimming with guests. She spies an empty bench at the far end and winds her way over to it. She closes her eyes and takes a series of deep breaths.

  For the last five months of her pregnancy, her mother had kept Elma home with ‘lupus’ and had even worn a pillow to work to make her colleagues think it was she who was expecting. Fifteen years ago she’d been petrified that someone would discover her secret, but as the years had passed she’d become less and less concerned. The fabrication had been so complete that of late Elma had even stopped thinking of Isaac as her son.

  And now this.

  She feels the urge to vomit.

  “Elma,” she hears someone say.

  She opens her eyes to see Rod standing there in a safari jacket. He gives her a concerned look, and she straightens up.

  “You okay?” he says.

  “Yeah, just one of those days.”

  “I hear you. You mind if I take a load off?”

  She shakes her head, and he sits down beside her. They gaze out at the partygoers.

  “I don’t know how you can do your job,” he says. “I’ve never come across a bigger group of self-satisfied bastards in my life.”

  “I guess you just have to remember who you�
�re doing it for. If you don’t get this lot on your side you’ll achieve nothing.”

  “No scholarships for Noor.”

  “Exactly.”

  She watches Ivor worm his way through the crowd. He looks her way and raises his glass. She turns towards Rod.

  “I don’t know if you have time, in fact it’s probably silly even to ask, but I have to visit one of our projects in the Hunza Valley for a couple of days. It doesn’t involve Afghan refugees, but I’m really proud of what we’ve done up there; it’s such a poor area but it’s so beautiful especially in the autumn when the leaves are turning. I promise, you’ve never seen mountains so tall, rivers so blue—”

  “Elma, stop, you don’t need to sell me. I’d love to come.”

  Elma blushes. All she wants to do is to wrap her arms around him and sink into his embrace. But she won’t. And she won’t go home with him tonight either. There’s no way she’d want to give Ivor the satisfaction. She looks back out at the party and wishes she was anywhere but here.

  Don’t worry. In New York, it’ll be different.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “OKAY, I WANT to start off by offering you all an apology. Ever since I got here I haven’t taken this job seriously, so I get why you haven’t either.”

  Charlie looks at the faces of his Afghan recruits. They stare back at him without any hint of emotion.

  “But things are going to change from now on. First off, I’m going to be here at eight every morning and I expect you to be too.”

  Charlie hears a couple of grumbles. The only teenage recruit in the group sticks up his hand.

  “Mansoor,” Charlie says.

  “I live in Baghbanan. Rahmahullah, Mohammad Khan also too.”

  “That a problem?”

  “It long way away.”

  “I’m sorry but you’ll just have to get up earlier.”

  Mansoor glowers at him.

  “Secondly, we’re going to stay each day until we’ve completed whatever task we set out to do, even if that means going home after dark.”

  Jawad, a refugee in a checkered sweater, raises his hand. Charlie nods at him.

  “I have job at night,” Jawad says.

  “Again I’m sorry, but you’ve got to choose. It’s either this or that.”