Far From My Father's House

by Jill McGivering

  ‘He’ll find us.’ Jamila set down her own bag and pushed into the room to take control. ‘Inshallah.’ She took the bag out of Layla’s hands and upended it. The clothes came out slowly like lumpy dough, covering the cot and cascading to the floor.

  ‘One set each.’ She set aside the fashionable salwar kameez sets and packed two cheap ones, made from rough cotton. One for the mother and one for the girl. ‘That’s all there’s room for.’

  Layla let out a cry and grabbed at a flashy kameez with a neckline dotted with sequins. Jamila hunted round the room and added a warm shawl.

  ‘You forgot Marva’s clothes.’ Layla was pouting.

  Jamila shook her head. She closed the bag and forced round the zip. ‘Hurry. Say goodbye. We must go.’

  Outside, distantly, a boom. Another shell exploded into the hillside. Layla’s hands clenched into fists at her sides, her thin body shaking.

  ‘You don’t mean . . .?’ She looked at Marva, then at her mother and then back at Jamila.

  ‘We’ll leave food,’ Jamila said. ‘Bread and water.’

  ‘But . . . we can’t.’ Layla’s face was white.

  Jamila shook her head. They had no donkey now. The girl couldn’t walk. Ibrahim had gone. No one could carry Marva down the mountain.

  Hamid appeared in the doorway. His face was flushed.

  ‘We’re ready,’ Jamila said.

  Layla started to sob, calling for her baba. Now her mother was crying too. The only calm person was Marva herself. She was sitting still on the cot beside her mother, her hands neatly folded.

  ‘Have you done what you need to?’ Jamila said. ‘We can go?’

  Hamid nodded miserably.

  ‘Then we must leave. I’ll bring the women and join you at the gates.’

  She gathered food for Marva and brought it into the bedroom. A pile of rotis, left from the previous evening and covered with a damp cloth. She sprinkled on a little water to freshen it and added a basket of plums and peaches.

  She moved the bags into the doorway. ‘Come on.’

  Layla was crying into Marva’s neck while her mother looked on miserably.

  ‘You must come,’ Jamila said. ‘They won’t wait.’

  She fastened one arm round the girl’s waist and used the other to unpick Layla’s hand, finger by finger, from Marva’s hair. Layla was hysterical, weeping and struggling. The mother just sat, her mouth twisted and tears running down her face, refusing to help.

  She struggled to move backwards, half-dragging, half-carrying the girl out of the room. Her last sight, as she forced her way through the doorway, trailing girl, bags, a pail and a metal basin, was of Marva, bolt upright on the cot, her arms by her sides and thin legs limp, watching with soft brown eyes as her family left her behind.

  Hamid led the family out through the compound gates. They were caught up at once in the torrent of people flowing down the street, out of the village. Jamila hadn’t left the compound for many days. The sight of so many people made her dizzy. Men were bowed down with sacks and bags. Women were crying, clutching at small children with one hand and steadying luggage on their backs with the other. Goats were bumping and jostling. They squeezed along the narrow ridge of land between the teeming people and the mud walls of the compounds.

  A man tugging a laden donkey knocked into her. She pressed herself against the wall and looked back towards the top of the village. The path was a solid river of people. This is the end, she thought, the end of the life I have known here. She bit her lip and walked on.

  The grounds of the mosque had been turned into a ragamuffin camp. A few scruffy young men were building a defence wall of sandbags. Beyond it, they’d dug a low system of ditches. They were unkempt youngsters with downy beards, dirty clothes and battered weapons. One heckled the crowd as it passed. ‘All of you, leaving this fight today, you’re no better than infidels,’ he shouted. His turban was crooked on his head. ‘May Allah take His revenge on the lot of you! Praise be to Allah!’

  Jamila felt like slapping him. I serve Allah better than you ever will, she thought. And that’s our mosque you’re abusing.

  She reached the road. The landscape opened up ahead of her. Far below, in the valley, the land flattened out. The river was low. Thin channels of water ran along mudflats. It was a view she knew well but it was altered. She looked more carefully. The sun was glinting on sharp metal surfaces down there. Ribbons of tanks and trucks and guns were creeping along the valley towards the mountains.

  The road was solid with trudging figures, curving down the mountainside. At every junction, more families joined the exodus, fleeing hillside villages. Jamila paused, thinking. When the fighting moved higher, surely it would focus on the road.

  Hamid was ahead with his slow-witted son, Adnan, at his side. Their backs were bent under the weight of their belongings. She hitched the straps of her bag more securely on her shoulder and pushed through the crowd, her pail banging against her thigh, to catch up with Hamid.

  ‘Not this way,’ she said, pointing. The road was the obvious way to come down the mountain but not the safest. ‘Maybe we could cut across the fields.’

  Hamid considered, then nodded. They led the family down the first goat track which left the road and headed sharply down the mountain. It was difficult terrain. They had to force their way through orchards and fields and climb down the terraces that separated them.

  Every few minutes the valley shook with a dull thud or low meaty boom. The army had reached the first slopes of the hillside below. The family descended through one field after another, heading blindly along anything which led them downwards.

  Jamila’s breath came in bursts. Her back and face were slippery with sweat. She wiped off her forehead, when she could, with the end of her chador. The path was rugged and she had a sharp pain under her ribs. She longed to sit for a moment and recover but she hid her face and trudged on.

  The wheat fields came to an end. A track led off to one side, skirting the contour of the hillside. A small compound was set in a clearing just beyond the adjoining field. Ahead the ground was rugged and fell away in a steep drop.

  Hamid walked back and forth, looking for a way of getting safely down. The Aunties wiped down their children’s hot faces and gave them water.

  Jamila looked around. Now they’d emerged from the fields, they were on a ridge. They were too exposed. She looked back at the route they’d taken, narrowing her eyes against the sun.

  ‘We should go back a little.’ She tugged at Hamid’s arm. He shook her off. ‘Just to the next ridge.’ She pointed, but he refused to look.

  One of the Aunties cried out. A boy, a podgy three-year-old belonging to Hamid’s second brother’s second wife, had broken free of his mother and was running towards the compound in the clearing. He was giggling, caught up in his own adventure. His mother was running after him, panting across the uneven ground in her sandals. When she was a few yards from him and halfway to the compound, a shot rang out. A moment’s shocked silence. The boy stopped.

  ‘No.’ Adnan waved his hands at the compound. ‘Stop.’

  The mother darted forwards and grabbed the child’s arm. He struggled and cried. She slapped him hard. A second shot. Her arm fell limp. Blood flowered on her shoulder, staining the light cotton of her kameez. The child stared with bulging eyes.

  The young woman’s face blanched. Her strong hand flew to the wound. A third shot. The child clung to her leg and whimpered. Adnan ran towards them, scooped the boy into his arms and rushed back, pushing the woman in front of them.

  Jamila ordered the men to look away. She bit the seam of the woman’s chador and tore it down the weave to assess the damage.

  The bullet had passed right through the shoulder. The hole where it had entered was small and neat, its rim blackened. The flesh around the hole looked almost clean. But on the other side, the bullet had created a sickening mess of tattered skin and muscle as it burst out. Blood was trailing sluggishly from the wound, settlin
g in the hollows of her back and drying along the contours of her skin. Jamila swallowed hard and tried to keep her expression neutral.

  ‘Move your hand.’

  The woman grasped the air and unclasped her hand again. Good.

  ‘You’re fine.’ Jamila thought of the journey ahead. They had to keep moving. ‘Don’t make a fuss.’

  One of the other women rolled her eyes. But it was the only way. Either this woman believed she could make it and kept walking or they left her behind. Jamila pushed a pad of cotton into the large wound and bound it tightly with the torn chador. She bent the young woman’s arm at the elbow and secured it. Her fingers poked out, limp and useless, at her neck. They moved off again, skirting the drop.

  For hours, they walked and stumbled. No one spoke. The only sound in Jamila’s ears was her own thick breathing, the thud of footsteps and the dull boom of artillery. Mortars, shells and volleys of automatic gunshot. It seemed to surround them, growing steadily louder as they neared the fighting.

  By afternoon, they reached the valley bottom. Here the ground was open. They made lengthy detours to avoid the villages, afraid of compounds and the people who might be hiding inside them. The sky had thickened. Clouds cast dark shadows on the ground, hanging over them like vultures. The soles of Jamila’s feet were scratched and bruised. Her sandals sawed the skin between her toes. The pain in her side had become a constant ache. In the valley, the heat was cloying.

  The military machinery constantly rumbled past them. Jeeps with open backs, packed with young soldiers in fatigues. The troops looked wary, suspecting everything and everyone. Jamila thought of the bearded young men in their bunkers in the mountain villages, waiting to fight them.

  As the daylight faded, they followed the river. The mountains were steadily shrinking to foothills as they entered the plains. At night, they huddled together in a wheat field. The children whimpered for food. The adults lay silent. The darkness was deep.

  The young woman with the wounded shoulder was clammy with fever. Adnan took the pail and fetched water from a stream. Jamila soaked her chador and squeezed water into the woman’s mouth.

  Nearby Layla was crying. She and her mother were huddled together, holding themselves apart. Jamila had felt the girl’s anger stabbing at her all day. She didn’t need to ask why. She was grieving for her sister.

  The wheat stalks were brittle. They pricked Jamila’s skin through her clothes as she sat, her legs drawn up under her, full of terror. She was born in this valley and had never left it. This road was drawing her out of the mountains and away from everything she knew. She turned her back on the plains and looked towards home. The crags were raw and beautiful against the sky. The slopes seemed to bend towards her, stretching out their arms to grasp her and pull her home.

  There was a camp. A place with food and shelter and safety. Everyone on the road spoke of it.

  ‘Just a few more miles,’ Jamila told the Aunties. ‘We’ll be there by noon.’

  The young children were weak and listless now. They barely managed to stay on their feet. The young woman, whose shoulder wound was still oozing blood, was faint with fever.

  On this second day, the river path widened to a road. All around them, families, as large and exhausted as their own, were tramping onwards, making their way out of the mountains. A few had carts, piled with belongings. Most had only the things they could carry. It was a ragged column of women, children and the elderly. No one spoke of the missing men.

  The progress of this thickening band of people was slow. Jamila pitied the small groups forced to a halt at the roadside, who sat in the dust with their belongings. Some nursed babies. Others tended the sick. They watched with wide, anxious eyes as the crowd moved past without them.

  Adnan had disappeared in the night. Jamila only noticed when she saw Hamid, his father. The boy had been with them when they all settled down to sleep. She remembered. Now there was no sign of him. Hamid didn’t speak of it but his face was pinched and he carried twice as big a load.

  The low hills gave little shade. The sun cooked Jamila’s hands and face until the skin was raw. One by one, the smallest children staggered and fell and the Uncles strapped them on their backs. Displaced belongings were added to the women’s loads. Other bags and sacks were simply abandoned, making a ragged trail along the side of the road.

  The light started to fail. Their second day was ending. The clouds were shot through with streaks of gold and pink as the sun set. Jamila caught the whisper which rushed through the column of people like a breeze through dry wheat. The camp, it said. Not far to go.

  Fresh hope. Jamila was exhausted but she pressed the Aunties to keep moving, beating them with the idea of the camp. If we hurry, she said, we might make it by nightfall.

  The pace quickened. For an hour or two, they walked eagerly. Then they started to despair. Darkness set in. Toddlers fell asleep on shoulders and backs. The older children walked mechanically like the marching dead, their eyes glazed and fixed. A hungry dog came snarling round them. Its face was lupine. A gash on its shoulder oozed blood and was black with flies. Jamila stooped for stones and drove it away.

  The landscape was changing dramatically as they walked. The river had disappeared. The road was wide and pitted with stones. Even the hills were vanishing. The land flattened out into open countryside with scrubland, fields and squat cement houses.

  Shacks appeared. They buzzed with bright electric lights, clouded with moths. They passed a car repair shop. Its workers laboured, fingers slick with oil, under the propped bonnet of a jeep. A young boy with bare feet stood by them with a lantern.

  Others sold fresh fruit and vegetables and made Jamila think of the bursting orchards they’d left behind. Several served food. Men sat outside at plastic tables, eating, ignoring the passing people. Music blared from speakers. The thick smells of frying meat and onions hung solid in the air and made Jamila’s empty stomach churn.

  A motorbike swung out from the shadows and carved through the crowd. Three cocky young men clung together on its seat. Guns flashed across their laps. They kept pace with the walkers and heckled them.

  ‘Don’t you know the truth about these camps? They’re death camps. Go home. Save yourselves.’

  Jamila heard and was afraid but didn’t raise her head.

  ‘We are your people. We will protect you. If you go to these camps, you will die.’

  They were gone as quickly as they had come, leaving only fumes behind.

  Suddenly, as if from nowhere, there was commotion. Somewhere ahead. Raised voices. The slap of feet breaking into a run. Jamila tensed. News came all at once, crashing around them. The camp. Ahead. Hurry.

  Jamila quickened her pace, hobbling as fast as she could. She urged on the young women around her with promises of food and a chance to rest their ruined feet.

  They left the road. The crowd streamed onto a path across the mudflats. The shacks and fields and local people fell away at once. Darkness closed in. The silence was loud in their ears, broken only by the low scrape of insects in the scrub. Somewhere off to the right, a dog snarled and yelped and quietened.

  A cool wind whipped across Jamila’s face. It brought a desolate smell of foetid vegetation and decay. She tried to see through the bobbing heads, to get a sense of where they were going. Lights gleamed far ahead, reflected by low cloud. They seemed to sit in nothingness.

  The crowd was being funnelled. The sides of the path dropped away to ditches, drainage channels which smelt sour with stagnant water and filth. The people pressed together to keep from falling. They bunched, slowed, jostled.

  Jamila was struggling to make sense of where they were. A range of mountains drew a dark, ragged line against the horizon but beneath them, the mud plains were mired in blackness.

  The lights ahead slowly grew stronger. Shapes formed. Metal gates. The outline of a squat building. Nearer, a chaos of moving people under electric light. Voices. Men with loudhailers shouted orders, telling people to
sit, be patient, wait.

  Families were settling on the mud wherever they found space, sleeping curled against each other, surrounded by belongings. So many people. Hundreds. Jamila looked them over in dismay. Would there be room for so many? What if the camp were full? She hesitated and tried to think. Her own family was all around her. Hamid, walking with the Uncles and boys. The Aunties and the young cousins behind.

  The Auntie who’d been shot was white-faced and feverish. She had barely been able to keep up. Jamila pushed her way to her side and forced her to sit. Her three-year-old son, the cause of the trouble, clung to her side.

  Jamila unknotted the strip of cloth she’d bound round the auntie’s shoulder and tried to ease it off. It was stiff with dried blood and stuck fast to the wound. Jamila examined it, wrapped the end of the cloth round her fingers to get purchase. She counted to three, then ripped it away. The young woman shrieked.

  The wound reopened, bleeding anew where the plugs of dried blood had been torn free. A sickly, metallic smell. Jamila pulled the child towards her. His face was full of fear.

  ‘Close your eyes.’ Jamila dipped her fingers into the fresh blood and smeared it in the boy’s hair, across his forehead, down his face. He wailed, struggling in her arms. She slapped him hard and carried on until his head was daubed.

  ‘Good.’ Jamila was satisfied at last. She wrapped the filthy cloth back round the Auntie’s shoulder wound and dragged her to her feet. The screaming boy she thrust into Hamid’s arms. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘Quickly. Follow me.’ She looked around at the aghast faces. ‘All of you.’

  Jamila led them forwards, picking her way through the legs and bodies. In front of the gates, a group of agitated men had gathered round an official. The man at the centre was young and clean-shaven, a city dweller. He was wearing a bright yellow tabard over his clothes with Western writing on it. He was holding out his hands to the men, trying to calm them as they shouted and pushed. His eyes were weary.

  An engine. Jamila turned. A vehicle was pulling up to one side of the gates. A middle-aged woman climbed out. She was local but she looked well fed and had an air of authority. Jamila ran to her at once. She grasped her arm and hung on. The skin was plump and soft inside the kameez. Another one from the city. The woman twisted, trying to shake her off.