The Long Road From Kandahar, page 15
In those old gone days the roaming tribal people do not think or know of other worlds. The tribes are so many the earth seem to belong to them. They harm no one and keep to their own customs and rules. These peoples have lived same life for centuries.
But when the Britisher Empire comes to end this flow of peoples through international borders begin to be questioned by the government. First. It is the Pawindah tribe, the’ foot’ people. They are challenged one day as they cross the Afghan/Pakistan border. The government do not want the tribes to be free, to only answer to themselves. They see the flow of tribes across the borders as defiance and threat. They wish all tribes now to be answerable to government called The State.
This day my father speak of, the Kharot tribe start moving from the highlands same as always. But they hear a rumour from a friendly soldier from one of the outlying forts. This rumour it begin to spread like a whisper in the grass. No tribes will be able to pass over the Afghan/Pakistan border without papers of identity.
No one believe this thing is true and the Kharot tribe make for Kakar Khorasan, the same point that they always cross the border.
There are thousands of them all travelling together but they are broken into Kirri or Clans, like in Scotland. Each have their own a leader. Wives, chickens, childrens, tents, dogs, flocks of sheeps, many hundreds of camels.
On second day of march the tribe stop to rest. They peg black tents into the ground and sit around their fires. Smoke rises into night air. The women are anxious about these rumours spreading everywhere.
The men they talk among themselves. It is impossible for them to produce papers. How can they do this thing? They never have no birth certificates, no papers, no identity, just belonging to their tribe. They never go inside any government building to say who they are. They are roaming peoples.
Next morning the tribe move onwards, and they are meet by friendly soldiers from the fort. The soldiers tell them to please not to proceed but to go back for they have orders not to let any tribe to cross the border. But the Kharot peoples cannot go back. These hundreds of people cannot return to the mountains, winter is upon them and they will all die.
They do not listen to soldiers. They move on believing in strength of numbers. Indeed, they are bewildered that any persons could truly wish to stop them to cross to safe valleys. Besides, they have no choice with their long caravans full of their womens and childrens.
More soldiers meet them at the Kakar Khorasan crossing. Again, they are warned to go back. Soldiers tell them if they try to cross border they will have to shoot because they cannot disobey orders.
The soldiers beg the Kharots please to turn their caravan round and warn those coming behind that they can no longer cross the border. These soldiers they do not want to shoot the Kharot peoples.
But the first Kirri of the caravan of Kharots stand firm. The men of tribe come to decision. Everyman women and childrens will hold the Holy Koran aloft above their heads and storm the border. They are great in number and Allah will protect them.
They rush forward, all these thousands of peoples, believing all will be well and they will safely reach the other side. The soldiers open fire on the Kharot tribe. All are mown down in moments from the fierce fire of the soldiers who must obey their orders. All die. Scattered across the dry earth. Many hundreds of bodies of men, womens, childrens and beasts. It is massacre. They say the soldiers weep.
Every tribe coming after see or hear of this terrible thing. It is end of Nomad tribes of Pakistan and Afghanistan. All borders are patrolled forever more. No tribe is free to roam the earth as he will. No man can travel freely in their own lands again.
Today, many peoples still cross Afghan/Pakistan border back and forth, secretly. But for old tribes of West Frontier their lives of freedom and much happiness far away from all governments and rulers end forever. Their roaming way of life it vanish.
While Raza read, the whole class listened in hushed silence. No one shuffled or moved. Raza held the room. When he finished there was an intake of breath, a pause, then Mr Dominic and the whole class held their hands up and clapped him. Raza looked up, startled, to find a sea of smiling faces. He glanced at Finn. ‘Wow! Raz, brilliant!’ Finn looked as pleased as if he had written the piece himself.
As Raza stood, a small, embarrassed figure in front of his class, he suddenly thought how proud Baba would be of him at this moment. His school friends had listened enrapt to a world they had not known even existed. For a moment, he had brought the roaming tribes of Pakistan alive and made the tragedy of their end, live again. He had wept as he wrote, for the vanished tribes, for his lost home. Standing in front of his classmates, Raza hoped they might understand that his beautiful country held much more than constant violence. Perhaps, now, they would see mountains and lakes, apricot orchards and almond blossom scattering the dry land where ordinary people prayed for peace.
Raza sat down abruptly. It was his first taste of acceptance; of being good enough; of being part of this world whilst staying firmly bound to his own.
Dearest Finn,
It is the early hours of the morning and I have just come off guard duty. (Officers have to do guard duty out here!) I spend these nights in a Sangar – a concrete tower with firing windows. I look out over the main road that is clustered by buildings and a graveyard full of small fluttering green flags on poles.
I like this quiet time as it gives me time away from the hub of darkened rooms and computer screens to think. I watch the locals waking up and heading for work through binoculars.
It has been raining here so the Pashtuns are wrapped up in thin blanket cloaks, all in natural colours. Their way of life and their clothes in this part of the world can have hardly changed in 200 years …
It was good to speak to you this weekend. Glad you were able to talk to Hanna and Izzy. They sound fine, don’t they? I managed to speak to them both. Izzy is the same bouncy little girl she ever was!
As soon as my leave is confirmed I will let you know. I’m sorry I can’t be back for Christmas, but I need to stay with the boys. All being well we will be together for New Year, but you know enough about army life to understand nothing is a given. I must finish for now; the sun is coming up and I will celebrate one day closer to coming home with a flask of tea. Delphi says you are being amazing considering the circumstances and upheavals of our lives at the moment. I am very proud of you, Finn.
You take care. More soon.
Love you lots, Ben xxx
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
It was Remembrance Sunday. It was the one time of the year that Delphi accompanied Ian and Finn to church. The death toll of soldiers in Afghanistan was relentless and the sermon reflected the sombre mood of the country. The visiting priest had been an army padre and he spoke movingly about fear and the sacrifice of war. At the church door Delphi thanked him. She had been touched by his account of his war in the Falklands. Delphi told him she had a son out in Afghanistan. The priest had taken her hand and said quietly, ‘The difference, my dear, is that your son is in a war where the enemy is unseen and everywhere … We at least knew who and where our enemy lay …’
As Ian, Delphi, and Finn followed the possession to the Cenotaph on the prom, a cruel wind whipped at them from an icy, leaden sea. The silence was followed by a lone bugler playing out of tune. Finn stood shivering as the priest’s voice was whipped away to the screech of seagulls. Ian guided them both home; his arms firmly around their shoulders, instilling, as only he could, his quiet, reassuring presence in their lives.
They stumbled gratefully inside the house to where the smell of roast lamb wafted to them from the kitchen. Finn ran straight upstairs for his phone to see if Ben had messaged him. Delphi went to the kitchen.
Ian poured her a drink. Delphi was sleeping badly. Ian heard her wandering the house or climbing upstairs to her studio at night. Ben had had many difficult postings and dangerous moments, especially in Iraq, but Delphi had weathered these with outward calm and pragmatism.
This time the relentless parade of coffins returning from Afghanistan and passing through a hushed English Wootton Bassett village was affecting the whole country and unnerving Delphi. The added stress of Hanna leaving when she was most needed by Finn had upset her more than she admitted.
Ian was unable to banish the creeping feeling that Ben had done more than his bit in violent conflicts. It was time he left the army, before his luck began to run out.
He was concerned about Finn too. The boy said little about his anxiety for Ben when he came home at the weekends, but he watched every news bulletin with obsessional concentration. As the weeks passed, he had begun to develop an unhealthy compulsion to check the news for anything on the war in Afghanistan. It was like a talisman for him, if he watched the breaking news, nothing bad could happen to Ben.
When Delphi told Finn that she would rather he did not repeatedly watch news items about dead or injured soldiers, Finn had got upset.
He told her that he could not watch the news at school because he was doing prep at 6 p.m. The 10 p.m. news was too late, and Mr Dominic monitored the television in the games room.
‘I need to know what’s going on, Delphi. It’s my dad out there and Mr Dominic restricts the use of our computers and what we can watch at school …’
And so he should. Delphi thought. The war in Afghanistan was becoming a morbid obsession and Delphi and Ian tried to engineer it so that they were playing games or eating at main news bulletins. Ian had developed an avid interest in watching rugby or football or searching for old films that could deflect Finn.
That evening when Ian drove Finn back to school, Delphi sat at her desk with its cracked jars filled with paintbrushes and stared at her painting of birds in an exotic garden of her imagination. Something was off-kilter. Something was missing. She sighed and looked away at her Christmas list. Her next exhibition was at the end of the month. After that she would concentrate single-mindedly on Christmas.
She tried to banish the notion that this family Christmas was pivotal, that everyone’s happiness depended on her. She knew that she could only facilitate, not take responsibility for Ben or Hanna’s lives.
Each morning she meditated, trying to relinquish attachment or hope to an outcome that she had no control to determine. But the little nag of anxiety would not leave her. In theory, it all sounded wonderful. Hanna, Izzy, and Finn, all here together under one roof with the dazzle and excitement of Christmas for the children. But Hanna was not the easiest person to be closeted up with. Even if Ben did make it for New Year, he would be unable to leave the grimness of Afghanistan entirely behind him. He would still be locked in with his men, impatient of trivia, preoccupied, and often unapproachable. He would have an insatiable need to go off on his own, or to fish silently with Ian. He and Hanna would have to play out their difficulties here, in view of children and parents, and it wasn’t ideal. Delphi knew that Ben wanted, with all his heart, to fly into a big happy family New Year with those he loved; for everything to be hunky-dory, for all to be well. But she was afraid that his expectations of himself, and his ability to cope with so much hope and good will, might not be sustainable.
When Ben phoned her there was a creeping disillusion in his voice she had never heard before. With Hanna so far away, in every sense, he wrote Delphi more blueys than he had for a long time. He had lost four soldiers to death or injury in a month and his distress was evident. He would write to her in the early hours of the morning when he came off guard duty.
Vivid letters of a world glimpsed through a Sangar window as he watched a red, dusty morning in Afghanistan begin; his binoculars scanning a deceptively bucolic scene while a heavy and light machine gun lay by his side.
Afghans are a beautiful warrior race, he wrote. The men are striking, bearded, and angular. They ride to work early on their bicycles, eight to ten people on a tricycle, motorbike, even tractors. We have to keep a beady eye on what they carry. Even an innocent black umbrella needs closer scrutiny. In a way, guard duty is the most peaceful part of my day, as I get time to reflect …
Finn, Delphi knew, also had high expectations of Christmas. It was obvious that he longed to see Izzy again and to have his parents together in this house, with her and Ian as safe referees. And Hanna, what were her plans now she was back in Finland? What decisions might Hanna have come to in Ben’s absence? A brief New Year together was too short, and beautiful Hanna had the power to wound both Ben and Finn and deprive one little girl of growing up with a father and brother she adored …
Delphi stood up abruptly and lit a candle in front of her Buddha. She must stop these negative thoughts. They were affecting Ian, her work, her very being. Natural fear was one thing, giving in to morbid, self-defeating thoughts were quite another. The future was impossible to determine or predict and it was pointless of her to even try.
Finn lay in the dark as Raza and the other boys in the room slept.
On Remembrance Sunday in Germany the army church was always packed with people. A lone bugler would play ‘The Last Post’ and ‘Reveille’ from a balcony. It used to make him shiver. Everyone would go on to the mess for a Families Curry Lunch. It would last for hours. There would be a roaring log fire and they would stay on and play games with neighbouring families. Finn liked those lunches and the feeling of being part of something.
In the dark, after lights out, Finn would take himself back to the empty army quarter in Germany. He thought of the house just as they had left it, as it was when they all lived there. He walked through the rooms still full of their possessions. Full of the four of them who were no longer there. The fridge still had those stupid magnets on the door. Scattered mail lay on the kitchen table with the blue china salt and pepper and Izzy’s colouring books.
The plants on the windowsill drooped, like they always did when they were away. The folding doors between the dining and sitting room lay open. The big dark table and heavy dining chairs lay one end. The silver regimental statue stood in the middle, with the silver candlestick that had once been Delphi’s.
Silver and glass were still on the sideboard. Finn loved to see the table formally laid for dinner parties, glowing with silver cutlery and glass and candles, especially at Christmas.
Hanna could make the house look like fairyland. In Finland they put ice candles on the top of gateways so people could find their way home in the winter. She used to put them on their gatepost and light them and everyone would stop and admire their flickering light.
Finn wandered through the house in his head noticing things he never bothered about when he lived there. The sitting room always had to be tidy in case people came, but behind the sofa was a plastic box of Izzy’s toys and dolls. The sofa and chairs were not army furniture. They were Hanna’s choice, Scandinavian and made of light wood. The sitting room and the dining room always looked as if they belonged to two different worlds. Hanna’s world. Ben’s world.
Finn floated himself upstairs and down the long corridor. Hanna and Ben’s room. He looked through the door. The bed was neatly made. Hanna had left small pots of stuff on her dressing table. The wardrobe was slightly open, and Finn could see the edge of her red dress, the one he really liked. The one that made Ben say ‘Wow!’ when she wore it. The edge of her red dress made him sad. Would she come back for it? Ben’s cufflinks and his old gold watch were still there on the chest of drawers. Finn closed the door and crossed the landing into Izzy’s room.
It was as if she had left the room for just a minute. Toys and dolls were scattered across the floor. Her bed lay crumpled from her sitting and jumping on it. The fairy lights round her bed were still lit. Her doll’s house lay open and her tiny towelling dressing gown still hung on a hook on the door. Finn could hear the sound of her laughing, smell her hair and the baby soap on her skin …
He had a powerful feeling that if he could only concentrate hard on everyone being back in this house, he could change things back to how they once were.
He walked slowly to his own room and stopped at the door. For some reason he was afraid to go in. His bed, his desk, his books and games lay just as he’d left them. Finn stood looking in, longing to step inside and be the boy who lived here with Ben and Hanna and Izzy. But he could not take himself over the threshold. His imagination refused to let him back. Like in a dream, when your legs are moving but you are staying in the same place. Finn, troubled, half dreaming, believed that if he moved back inside his room in that silent and empty army quarter, he might be trapped there alone in a time that had passed. He would cease to be the Finn he was now, lying next to Raz in this bed in a school dormitory.
Raza was not sleeping either. He was listening to Finn toss and turn. Finn had come back to school unusually quiet. He had not joined in with the Sunday evening chat and toast and hot cocoa with Mr and Mrs Dominic. Raza saw Finn was sad, but he did not know how to best comfort him. Finn was away somewhere in his head with his Baba. Raza knew what that felt like. He sat up and felt for the huge shawl Zamir had given him that lay over his bed. He padded across the cold floor and placed it like an eiderdown gently over Finn, smoothing it over him. Finn stopped tossing and turning and was still. Raza kept his hand for a moment on Finn’s shoulder, then went back to bed and lay in the dark listening out for Finn until he heard him breathing deeply in sleep.
Ian lay on his back listening to Delphi moving about in her studio above him. He wished he could say, ‘Come on, old thing, everything’s going to be fine.’ But he could not. Ian did not believe in any particular god, certainly not the humourless, thunderous, droning Scottish Presbyterian God of his childhood. He had not however ruled out some higher power akin to Delphi’s belief in Karma.
