No Space for Further Burials

by Feryal Ali Gauhar

  Only Bulbul does not sleep, despite the relative peace of the night. He comes to me often and wants to speak to me, but I am exhausted from my vigil during the birth, and all I want to do is sleep.

  I shut my eyes and watch the baby’s birth being played out against the inside of my eyelids. I watch my hands tremble as I cut its cord and clear its airways and listen for its breath and the cry which will announce its arrival. I close my eyes tighter, trying desperately to clear my head of everything. I still see things—I hear Hayat’s chanting, Anarguli’s moaning, and I see Noor Jehan take the umbilical chord and bury it in a corner of the room.

  And what about my sister’s baby? What has she named it? It was to be a girl and Carlos had wanted to name her after his mother, Maria, who perished in the desert along the border. Actually, she had lived to make it to the back of the sheriff’s truck, and died on the highway when the truck was tail-ended by a young man talking into his cell phone and not watching the road. It was a Sunday, summer in California, with surfers returning from the beach, the sun clinging to them like the sand they carried in the pockets of their shorts. Maria was in the back of the truck when they were hit. Carlos always said that it was not the impact of the collision that killed her, it was the sight of the many men in uniform with pistols stuffed into the leather belts they wore beneath their bellies that took her last breath from her. As soon as the accident was reported three police cars arrived, sirens blaring and lights flashing. The officers rushed to where the truck was parked, pushed to the side of the road. A fire engine followed almost immediately, and men in helmets and yellow safety jackets climbed out, yelling instructions to the driver. Maria had hit her head on the edge of the truck’s open cabin, but there was no blood, only shock and a mild ache, which could have been the sun in her eyes or the hunger in her belly. Within minutes, there was the sound of three helicopters hovering in the sky. One of them landed fairly close to the sheriff ’s truck. Maria was wheeled to the helicopter in the gurney that the firefighters brought with them. I don’t think she lived to see the inside of the helicopter, I think she just died of the fear that froze the blood inside her and had entered her the day she chose to leave her home across the border in search of a better life.

  Maria talks to me now. She says that Carlos is still in that helicopter, flying those children out to a hospital where their limbs can be stitched back again. She says that the helicopter is taking the longer route home, that it must fly over the jagged peaks of these impossible mountains before finding a flat space to land and disgorge its passengers. I know that one of the passengers is my niece, a small child with her father’s laughter and her mother’s soft brown eyes.

  I do not want to dream anymore. I do not want to dream of a life I have lost forever. I know now that I will always be here, that I have become a part of the process of birth and death, that I have suffered and that my suffering has been acknowledged by strangers who have touched the center of my sorrow and not thought less of me for being an outsider, a stranger, Firangi Amreeki, American Stranger.

  Haji Meer is obsessed with Anarguli’s baby. He keeps staring at the little girl, a thin veil of longing glazing his eyes. Bulbul is annoyed and glares back at him, as if trying to beat him in the blinking game, but Haji Meer is not even aware of Bulbul’s irritation. He continues to gaze at her, whispering something I cannot make out.

  I am afraid that this man will grab the child and throw it into the fire. That is what I expect from a man who abandoned his own daughter. I want to tell Bulbul to protect Sahar Gul as if she was his own, but I am not sure how he will take this advice. I am not sure which way things will swing in this place, and I have learned to shroud my uncertainty in silence.

  Noor Kaka sings a lullaby for the girl he has named. He was given the privilege of reciting the azaan, the call to prayers, into the baby’s ears, calling her into the faith, baptizing her, so to speak. Waris placed several grains of molasses on the baby’s lips to sweeten her life and her words. Sabir unwrapped his turban and offered it to Anarguli as a swaddling sheet for her daughter. Qasim took the cowrie shell that dangled from a safety pin hooked onto his shirt and set it on the baby’s chest. And Bulbul placed his red scarf in Anarguli’s lap, a blanket for the baby.

  Anarguli smiled throughout the giving of gifts. But when she lifted Bulbul’s scarf to wrap around her baby, she suddenly gave way to tears, sobbing hard, her breath catching and her shoulders shaking with unspoken grief. She crumpled into a heap and I was afraid she would suffocate her baby. Noor Jehan leaped forward and reached for the child who was screaming with distress. Bulbul looked at the baby and then at Anarguli and then at the floor. He did not move. I saw the ends of his long fingers twitching and I looked away.

  It is morning now. I am getting used to this routine of taking the metal bucket outside and shoveling snow into it to melt down into water for washing and drinking. It gives me a structure to live by, and it gives me a sense of purpose in this place where nothing makes sense and nothing has a reason.

  Bulbul came with me this morning to shovel the snow into the bucket. I looked at him and smiled. His mouth twitched at the corners as if wanting to return my greeting, but I could see that despite this effort, his eyes were cloaked in sorrow. We shoveled the snow in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts.

  Over these past many days (I have lost count now, and what use is time when there is nothing to measure it against?) I have come to understand what it means to live inside the landscape of one’s own mind, where one can create an entire new world, keeping it secret from others. And I have also come to understand the silence of these people here, locked up in their own stories of loss and love and longing. I do not want to intrude into their thoughts, and have learned that the silence between the words they speak carries more than all the words I have ever spoken.

  Bulbul began speaking after we had carried several buckets to the drums inside the room which used to be my cell. The sun’s rays between noon and sunset fall obliquely into the cell, melting the snow in these drums. We carry the buckets into the kitchen only after the sun has helped us in this task of reclaiming the water. We had made our last trip to the cell when Bulbul pulled at my shirtsleeve and pointed to the charcoal drawing he had scratched onto the wall a long time ago. I could see the outline of the heart and the round face of the girl he had kissed with so much passion the day he came to talk to me, a mug of tea in his hand. I patted Bulbul on his back to acknowledge that I remembered that day, and picked up the bucket to return to the kitchen. Bulbul stopped me, pulling at the bucket and asking me to stay.

  I set the bucket down and looked at Bulbul, waiting for him to tell me what he carried in the recesses of his heart. Bulbul turned away from me and began to speak.

  I love that girl, brother. I love her with all my heart, and I want to embrace her with all my heart, but you saw her tears and you see the child, and you know that I have nothing to offer. How will I look after her, and how will I feed the child, clothe her, buy her books for school, find the money for her dowry? How will I honor Anarguli, how will I make her mine when she still keeps the one she loves in the folds of her heart?

  She did not come here because she is crazy like Gul Agha or Haji Meer or Karim Kuchak. She came here because she had nowhere else to go, like me. And she had no one to love her, also like me, brother.

  Anarguli is from a tribe which believes that the women born in it should live and die according to a strict code of honor. She was one of several daughters born of several mothers, all married to her father, an old fool who had the money to pay for a new bride every few years. Anarguli told me that her father believed it was manly to marry as many wives as one could—it signified prosperity and virility, and was good for the tribe. Of course, it would have been better for the family and the tribe if her father had sired many sons instead of a handful of daughters, one of who would wound him and bring so much disgrace to him.

  Old and ailing, Anarguli’s father had to hi
re a young man to help him with the plowing and the harvesting. Anarguli dared to fall in love with that man, the son of a poor peasant who did not own the land he tilled. She loved him as much as he loved her, and much as they knew that their marriage was an impossibility, they continued to love one another until they decided to honor that love by marrying of their own will.

  Anarguli’s lover asked a friend of his to perform the nikah to solemnize the marriage in the eyes of God. Once that was done he took Anarguli away, wanting to escape from her father and the disgrace that this transgression would bring upon his own family.

  They fled to the city where he got a job as a roadside vendor, selling fruit and vegetables from his cart.

  I saw him often when I was working for the kebab man. He was a pleasant fellow, named after our Prophet, Mohammad. He would let me pick those fruits that customers flung onto the unwanted pile. Sometimes I would take back bruised tomatoes and cucumbers to my mother who made a salad for Gulmina and me. He was a good man, and I will never forget his kindnesses to me.

  I will also never forget the day he died, my brother, the day Anarguli’s father found him and shot him in the crowded bazaar on a morning when my feet hurt so much I thought I should return home early because standing was so painful. But I did not go home that day, or that evening, for Mohammad had been shot, once in his head, several times in his stomach, and twice in his legs. I forgot the pain in my feet and rushed to him, brother, calling his name, shouting at Anarguli’s father to let him be, to leave him alone.

  But it was too late. Mohammad was dying in my arms while the crowd gathered, and I remembered my father when I found him in the field the day of his accident. I looked at Mohammad’s face as he tried to speak to me. I could not understand what he was saying, so I lowered my head to his mouth. He whispered her name to me, and told me where to find her.

  Anarguli’s father was telling the crowd that this was the man who had dishonored him, and that killing him was the only way to reclaim his lost honor. The crowd had nothing to say—they dispersed as suddenly as they had collected, leaving me alone with the limp body of this unfortunate son of a peasant with no land and now, no honor.

  I asked the kebab seller to help me bury Mohammad before sunset. Several people spat on his corpse when the story of his elopement was recounted in the bazaar, each telling more detailed and varied. The kebab man took some money from his pocket and gave it to me. He said he could use all the fruit and vegetables left on Mohammad’s cart, and that I should clean the cart and carry Mohammad’s body on it to the nearest cemetery.

  The tandoor keeper and kebab seller lifted Mohammad’s body onto his cart while I held its wheels, keeping it from sliding on the rotten peels and putrefied fruit that had collected beneath it. I flung my shawl over Mohammad’s body to cover him from the prying eyes of passersby. It was that time when the sun begins to disappear beyond the mountains, and though there was a chill in the air, I did not miss the shawl.

  But I missed Mohammad, and my father, and there was an ache in my heart which was more bitter than the pain that crippled my feet.

  I managed to wheel the cart with Mohammad’s body on it to the cemetery where I paid the keeper to quickly dig a grave before sunset. And then, after offering the fatehah prayers for the departed soul, I rushed through the busy streets to the Deh Mazang area near the university where a settlement of refugees had built shanties for their families. I ran through the lanes looking for the tea stall and the barbershop Mohammad had described to me. I found the shop and asked for the whereabouts of a certain Mahabat Khan, the man who had sheltered Mohammad and Anarguli.

  At first the tea stall owner hesitated to tell me. When I began crying, saying that a young woman’s life was in danger, he pointed to a small wooden door plastered over with cigarette ads. He said that I must be quick, for I may already be too late to save the life of this woman I spoke of.

  I was not too late, brother. I found her on the floor of the courtyard of that small house. There was blood on the brick floor. It was already dark, but the light from the street shone into the darkness of that home. There was no one else there—I called out to her, speaking her name softly, wondering whether she could hear me, whether she was still alive.

  She did not answer me. After waiting for what seemed like a lifetime, I walked toward her and kneeled down to see if she had survived the blow to her head. There was a gash on her head made by a sharp and probably heavy instrument, like an axe. There was so much blood that my shalwar was soaked at the knees where I was kneeling over her. I spoke her name several times until she opened her eyes.

  I do not believe that she could see me then, brother, and it was not because of the darkness or the injury that could have taken her life. She could not see me because she did not want to see the absence of the man she had loved with all her heart.

  I don’t know how Anarguli came to this place, to Tarasmun. She has not spoken to me since I arrived here. But I know that in her eyes she still holds the image of her husband, the father of the child she has given birth to, Sahar Gul, the Rose of Sunrise.

  ten

  I am having those dreams again, and much as I try to shut out the terrible images of maimed and hopelessly injured people, I cannot. It is as if my mind’s eye insists that I see these things over and over again until the limits of its endurance are stretched and I, too, lose my sanity.

  Last night Haji Meer finally did what I had feared. In a sudden lunge he snatched Sahar Gul out of Anarguli’s lap and clutched her close to his chest. Anarguli did not move. She only opened her mouth but no words came out. It was Gul Agha who leaped forward and tried to pry the child out of Haji’s stranglehold. Haji refused to let go and kept repeating the name of his dead daughter: Zarsanga, Zarsanga. His eyes were wide and unblinking, and he glowered at anyone daring to come close, cursing and spitting and kicking. Waris and Sabir joined Gul Agha in his efforts to rescue the baby, and it took all their strength to pin Haji against the wall in order to recover her.

  By the time they managed to loosen Haji’s grip the child had stopped breathing. By some miracle of faith, or perhaps the mere application of skills I learned in that other place I no longer think of, I managed to resuscitate the baby by breathing into its tiny mouth. Anarguli flew at me and pulled at my head, clutching handfuls of hair and biting my shoulders. She was screaming, calling out her husband’s name. I could taste milk on the baby’s mouth and I could smell the urine that soaked its blanket. When it finally took a breath and emitted a long, drawn-out wail, there was an astonishing silence in the room. Anarguli froze again, then reached forward and grabbed the baby. She was confused and kept listening to its heartbeat. Noor Jehan assured her that Sahar Gul was alright, that she had survived her first shock of being born into madness. Anarguli smiled, it was a warm, shy sort of a smile. She looked straight at me and bowed her head and whispered her gratitude.

  And then the laughter came, and the cries of relief, and the tears, and the warm acknowledgment that I was a fellow traveler, that I had suffered like them, and that I wanted to lessen their suffering in whichever way I could.

  Everyone in the kitchen came and shook my hand and Karim Kuchak just wrapped himself around my legs, refusing to let go. He said he would be most faithful to me, most obedient, if only I would teach him the workings of that miracle. And Bulbul—he was the most moved of all. For a while he just stayed still in his corner, watching the little celebration of life being played out before him. After Waris and Sabir and Noor Jehan had thanked me for the hundredth time, after Noor Kaka had blessed me with a prayer and Hayat had chanted some verses over my head, Bulbul came to me and laid his head on my shoulder.

  I did not know what to do when he stayed like that, almost catatonic, for a long time. It had always disgusted me, this contact between men. And I have been wary about Bulbul ever since he grabbed my hand and rolled up his trousers to show me the burn marks on his legs.

  I could hear him breathing; his breath was
warm against my chest. And I could feel his tears against my shirt.

  When the others dispersed into their corners Bulbul shook my hand, then lowered his head and touched his eyes to the back of my hand. He did not speak. My hand was damp with his tears and I could still feel his breath on my chest.

  They have strung him up in the basement with a red scarf. His eyes are holes, his mouth empty of its teeth. A dog chews something pink and wet. It is a man’s tongue. Bulbul’s hands have been tied and trussed up with twine, twisted behind his back. He has no feet—his legs end in stumps and his pants are rolled up to show the black marks on his skin.

  His pants have been peeled away from his hips to reveal the pair of pliers which attach themselves to his testicles.

  Bulbul is still breathing when I find him. He swings slowly from the rafters and hums a song, a lullaby that Noor Jehan used to sing to Qasim:

  Gham de azma de ghare har day

  De ghare har de zre de pasa gerzawema

  The sorrow you feel is the necklace on my neck

  I carry that necklace above my heart

  Haji Meer came to me today, looking down at the brick floor the whole time he sat in front of me. He has been shunned by Gul Agha and the others from the basement, although Noor Jehan still gives him his daily ration of food. But ever since that incident with the baby, Haji has sort of been left on his own. No one bothers to talk to him; in fact, Karim Kuchak and Gul Agha have gone to the extent of skirting around him each time they need to pass by to get to the basement or take the food Noor Jehan dishes out from the cooking fire.

  I was not comfortable when Haji sidled over and sat on his bottom in front of me. He seemed to look around himself all the time, as if he was expecting to see someone pop out from behind him and take him by surprise. But the others just stared at the walls and pretended he didn’t exist.