Refugees (9 page)

The burqa-clad figure was hazy in the dark. As he hurried toward her, he saw that she stood a head shorter than Maryam. “Who are you?” Johar asked.

“Shh.” The woman pulled him inside. “It's

Ramila.” “Ramila, what happened? Where did they go?”

“Soldiers took your aunt.” Ramila's eyes, through the burqa's opening, had a stunned look. “They're searching for you too, Johar. You must leave!”

“But my aunt, my cousin—” A catch in Johar's throat would not let him continue.

“Come.” Ramila lit an oil lamp and motioned Johar to a corner where a sleeping child lay curled on a quilt, stalk doll in hand.

“Bija!” Johar leaned over and hugged his little cousin. “Jazakullah, Ramila.”

“I was taking her to help me sort the vegetables when the soldiers came for your aunt,” said Ramila. “Before they could capture us too, we ran and hid here.” She knelt down
next to Bija and stroked her head. “I gave her my old doll to calm her.” Ramila gazed at him. “I can keep her with me, Johar, until it's safe for your return.”

Johar couldn't concentrate on Ramila's words. As glad as he was to see Bija's tiny chest rising and falling, he knew Maryam might be in great trouble. If only he knew where she was. If only he'd been with her, she would not have been alone when soldiers came.

Bija was waking. Johar swept her up in his pattu. “Ramila, was there any clue as to where the soldiers would take my aunt?”

“No, Johar. But I heard them inquire of your whereabouts when they came near the shed. The soldiers will be back for you. You must go!” Ramila gathered supplies and pushed them into his hands.

Johar hesitated. “I must find my aunt.”

“They will hold her in jail for a time, but they won't kill her. Go before the soldiers carry you off,” she insisted.

Johar remembered the old plan, the family plan they'd hoped they'd never have to follow. “When you see Maryam, tell her we will ride south, over the Pakistani border, to the camp where her friend once went—the camp Suryast in Pakistan—where Bija can be safe. Tell her we'll wait for her there. Tell her I love her.”

Ramila held her arms out. “I can look after Bija.”

“Bija must come with me,” Johar answered. “I promised my aunt.”

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. No one would harm his cousin. He would make sure of it.

Ramila lowered her arms to her sides. “Asalaam alaikum. Safe travels, Johar.”

“Alaikum asalaam, Ramila.”

Bija clung to his shoulders as he ran back to Maryam's. Johar had memorized each of her hiding places, and went to them now: gathering the spindle behind the false wall, the knitting needles stuck inside straw, the wool in a false ceiling, a trampled Rabi'a book from under the floor. He moved them to his own hiding places: an extra pouch in his pack, a pocket under his pattu, the inside hems of the quilt. The donkey would carry only the essentials, for he could not bring attention to the cargo.

Johar hurried down a deserted path toward the temple of Sorkh Kowtal. He knew this winding trail well. That old crater hole had been his playground; this ruined hut had been a fairy-tale bazaar where he'd sold imaginary crafts to his friends. Mixed with his fear was a powerful nostalgia for these things of his past, which he might not see again. If he made it tonight to the southern trade road leading to Charikar, he would feel safer. Johar quieted Bija's hungry fussing with a heel of bread that Ramila had given him, and pressed her close to warm her.

As the hovels on the outskirts of Baghlan receded and bushes gave way to camel thorn, Johar imagined he heard his father's murmur from the fog-laden sky: “Follow the dried riverbed if need be,
and speak up.
” Speak up? The poetry of the dead was sometimes murky, as the heavens were tonight.

“Speak up,” a voice demanded from the clearing. Johar jerked to attention. Bija began to howl.

In his confusion Johar had led them to a checkpoint guard. “Foul, foul hell,” he hissed under his breath.

“I said halt! What business has kept you past curfew?” ordered a black-turbaned Talib, emerging from the
shadows. His small eyes were set inward, like knots on trees. “Why are you travelling the roads so late? Where are you from and what is your destination?” Johar had a momentary urge to spur his donkey on, but yielded when the guard raised his Kalashnikov toward Johar, and two other men stepped from the shadows. Johar draped the pattu over Bija to conceal her.

“I'm from Baghlan, sahib. I travel to see my uncle in Charikar.” Not exactly a truth, but the first story Johar's panicked mind could summon. His uncle Tilo
had
lived in Charikar but was far from there now.

“Jor.” Bija tugged on Johar's shalwar, restless. “Play.” Johar's heart pounded as he raised the pattu higher to muffle her words.

The guard lowered the machine gun to his side and strode close. “Turn back. We cannot guarantee your safety.” Curious, the younger guards followed closely behind.

Johar breathed slowly—in, out, in—as if by calming himself he could make the men lose interest. “I'll be fine,” Johar assured the beady-eyed guard. He snapped the donkey's reins to go. Bija poked him in the side, and he jerked with discomfort.

The man raised his gun once more. “I said halt! Dismount.” He leveled it to Johar's brow. Johar understood then that it wasn't a matter of ensuring his safety at all. The old guard's eyes fixed on the lump that was Bija. “Smuggling, eh?” His knotted eyes grew shiny with interest as he drew close to Johar, who now stood beside the donkey. Johar gripped Bija, still under the pattu, close to his chest. The others leaned in, suddenly interested at the prospect of smuggled goods.

What if they take Bija?
worried Johar. If he'd had the
nerve to own a gun like other boys, Johar could have blown these bullies to dust.

The guard, smelling of grilled meat, grabbed Johar's pattu and yanked it open.

“A child!” The man spat on the ground, then began to rifle through Johar's clothing. Bija yelped and clung to her cousin, her doll clutched in one hand, the cloth of Johar's vest in the other.

The younger guards left to interrogate an incoming group at the checkpoint. The beady-eyed man began to search one side of the donkey's pack. Johar prayed the man would not feel the wool sewn into the borders of the quilts. The guard unearthed a pan, Ramila's keshmesh, and some bread. “This is all?” he asked. Johar nodded.

Then the man moved to the other side of the donkey. He reached into the folds of the saddle pack and pulled out Johar's English dictionary and the Rabi'a book. This was bad, very bad! The guard thumbed through both with a frown. “Nothing else, eh? Then what are these books? These are not Quran. This poetry, this Ingleesi, is good for a jail sentence!” He hurled the books to the ground.

Bija began to whimper. She balled her free hand into a fist and held it in front of her eyes, as if to protect herself from the guard's sharp tone.

The man's gaze settled on Bija. “Yes, good for a jail sentence along with that doll.” He ripped the stalk doll from Bija's fingers and crushed it under his heel. Bija howled as if he'd plunged a scimitar through her chest. “No images of people will be tolerated. It was
decreed.
”

Johar knew then that the beady-eyed guard would snatch Bija and torture him without a flicker of remorse. What would happen after? Johar could hardly bear to
think. He would rot in prison much longer than a woman, even a teacher, and Aunt Maryam might never know what had become of them. Johar's mind snapped precariously from one dark imagining to another as the younger guards argued with a new arrival at the checkpoint.

The guard began to bind Johar's hands.

Johar spoke loudly, urgently, to project over Bija's weeping. “Sahib, I may have
one
thing for you—if you let us pass.”

“Eh?” The guard's eyes shone with greed. He loosened the strap. “What is it, boy? Quickly, now.”

Johar unrolled the waistband of his kameez. “Your feet will be cold soon. Snow is coming to this pass, no?”

“Snow, yes.” The guard picked up an oil lantern. He screwed up his eyes in the dim glow to examine the objects Johar held. “Boy, what is it?”

“Socks. For you.”

“Bah! You expect to bribe your way with these rags?” The guard grabbed them. “Go now,” he grumbled, motioning forward with the lantern. “Be off with you, and don't come back here.”

“Many thanks, sahib.” Johar spurred the donkey to action just in time to avoid the younger Talibs, who had finished their other interrogations and now approached.

Johar hurried the donkey down the road, murky except for star haze softening the fog on a hut here, a bit of brush there. Bija mourned her doll and continued to cry hopeless tears for the next hour.

There were few on the path this late. The occasional truck rumbled by with goods for the bazaars. Lone men with heavy eyes limped by, bundles and rifles hanging from their shoulders, and a family passed on two donkeys, both loaded with piles of blankets and sleeping children.

Bija finally cried herself to sleep. Johar kissed her dirtstained face and wrapped her tighter against the chill. Far from the town and in the stony pit of night, he heard hyena howls and the scurrying of weasels. Johar kept on past his endurance. He must create as much distance as possible between himself and those who hunted him. Where was his brother now, and would Daq worry about Johar, as Johar had about him? At least Daq was strong and could take care of himself. Aunt Maryam's welfare worried Johar more. Would she be let free to travel south through the Khyber Pass to Camp Suryast? Would Daq? Camp Suryast was rumored to be huge. Even if by some miracle they all made it there, it would be like three lizards searching for one another in a desert.

Khushhal's poem sifted like a breeze through the sagging canopies of Johar's despair:
I parted with them at Khwarrah with sad heart. Love's troubles are like fire, Khush-hal, what though the flame be hidden, its smoke is seen.

Johar prevailed almost until dawn, when he tied the donkey to a tree and dropped beside it. He and Bija went to sleep in quilts by its base as the wind fluttered the leaves above.

Johar dreamed they were passengers in a truck piled with ripe melons, grapes, speckled plums, and pomegranates. Grape juice dripped down Bija's chin as she gobbled. Johar stuffed melon in his mouth and was laughing, laughing, laughing.

He awoke with a start. Sweat beaded his pounding head. He cupped his hand to shade his eyes from the sun and heard Bija's sharp cries of thirst and hunger: “Aab! Naan!” His belly ached for the same. He would need twice the food to feed his cousin. How would he ever survive?

Bija's cries mixed with a woman's guttural moans. Johar
spun around. In his exhaustion last night they had dropped without regard. The fluttering last night was a sea of flags in a makeshift graveyard. Each flag stood to honor a dead person. The plane tree under which they had slept was covered by devotional tacks—every tack denoted a prayer. The woman was hunched over a freshly dug grave, and she rocked back and forth, clutching her head as she moaned. Her child, a girl in a dusty hijab, slightly older than Bija, worked at digging a hole near her mother, all the while reciting a singsong verse between watery coughs.

Bija paused from her tears to observe the girl, then swung back around and pulled on Johar's sleeve. “Naan, Jor!”

Johar retrieved their modest food bag and offered Bija a piece of bread with one precious dab of honey. Bija chewed it hungrily. The mourner's child got up and ran to Johar's side, coughing. She stared at the bread with black-currant eyes. Johar placed a piece in her hands as well.

After morning ablutions, Johar dotted another piece of bread with honey and savored it with the tiny bites he'd seen Aunt Maryam take. He leaned back, not yet ready to journey on, and turned his face to the sky. Such a blue it was, a lapis blue like Maryam's earrings. A sheer light filtered onto the mountains ahead, lending them the delicacy of pastel parchment.

Bija's face poked into his as she leaned on his crossed legs. “Jor, doll,” she murmured miserably. She had not forgotten.

Johar stumbled up and dusted himself off. He searched for objects in the sand, while the woman's low moaning duetted with Bija's high cries. Johar cracked off dry twigs from a shrub and made a stick figure. Next he rescued a bit
of torn flag from the sand and with it fashioned a skirt. He tied the skirt with a strand of mulberry-hued wool he fetched from his pack.

When Bija looked up from wiping tears on their quilt, she gasped with surprise as he held out her gift. “Dolly!” she shouted. Bija ran to the girl in the dusty hijab and showed it off proudly. Johar was already crafting another one for her.

As the girls chuckled and squealed with their dolls, the mother paused from her mourning to raise her head. Johar couldn't see the curve of her mouth under her burqa, but he knew she smiled from the way her dark eyes crinkled through the eye grating.

He leaned back once more, gazing at the flags, ragged in the wind, and imagined that this was a day after all wars were over, when the land was safe and brother was not torn from brother. He could almost imagine it here, in this humble place of death where souls were honored by a bouquet of flags set lovingly in the sand.

L
ucky's Coffee on Sixth Avenue and Eighteenth Street was a reliable spot for Dawn and Jude to set up shop. People went in grouchy, then paraded out with coffee and a bagel in their bellies, apparently guilty enough that they'd eaten and the street kids hadn't to throw money their way. Dawn made sure to be friendly with all the vendors, and they welcomed the crowds that her music attracted. If Dawn and Jude worked all morning, they could each pocket around twenty-five dollars. The hat was set up on the pavement with Dawn's sign propped in front—Need Money for Food— that she had drawn with Sander's purple markers and taped to the cardboard back of her award for musicianship.

Usually Dawn's morning medley was Ian Anderson's fast-paced “Thick as a Brick,” some breathy Radiohead, the
vibrant Telemann. When she played she would slip into an altered state, caught in the music's passion, her body supple yet straight, her eyes directed toward the sky. Jude would dance his spacey jig, all elastic arms and slithering body mirroring her flute's crescendos and dips like the snake in a charmer's lure. His long hair would thrash around his charismatic smile.