The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon (8 page)

‘We’ve drafted the statement. It will be released a quarter of an hour before – none of the stations will even see it until afterwards, but that’s how we’ll do it,’ she says, speaking to Hayat with her face turned away from him and towards the smokers. ‘There are three questions for you, will you have a look?’

Hayat takes his eyes off her. When she speaks to him in the classroom he is supposed to seem detached from her, to keep his eyes on his notebooks and papers.

But he always drifts. He finds himself looking back at her. At her long neck, at her unpolished fingers that are always flecked with ink stains, at the silver thread she wears on her left wrist.

‘One is simply not possible,’ he replies, furrowing his brows at the first pencilled question. ‘There isn’t enough time to get Nasir out, even on a motorcycle. He’ll have to go under.’ Hayat doesn’t look at Nasir, keeping guard at the windowsill. ‘Unless you delay the release of the statement by a couple of hours to give us time.’

‘No,’ she replies swiftly, her head bent over her duplicate fake exam papers. She moves closer to Hayat so that she hears
him in her left ear. ‘We don’t operate like that. We give them fair warning.’

Hayat sees her hesitate.

She doesn’t want to give it. It comes as a flash of impatience in her eyes.

‘Good,’ Hayat says, looking at her. ‘We’re not like those animals who attacked the school van yesterday.’

‘They’re not animals,’ she says coldly. ‘They are fighters. This is a war.’ She moves away from him before he can say another word.

Hayat knows that to argue with her is futile but he cannot stop himself. ‘But they are killing children. They knew that could happen.’ Hayat looks around the room; no one says anything. She pretends she does not hear him. Nasir smokes silently. He does not participate in the discussion. ‘Children.’ Hayat repeats the word. Nothing. She keeps her eyes on the paper, waiting for him to carry on.

‘The second question …’ continues Hayat, looking down and circling words on his paper with a fountain pen he takes off one of the unfamiliar young men sitting on the floor – there are too many of them, too many hunchbacks sitting on the floor taking up space – ‘is done already. Should everything go smoothly, we will have people in Chitral by evening as part of the cover. His cousins, we said. Nasir is visiting his maternal cousins for the Eid weekend. The Chitralis are fine to go with that.’

She tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She speaks to the boys at the desks.

‘When can we talk to his family?’

One of the boys straightens, sitting up as he sees her swivel her attention to him. Nasir has become an abstraction. She doesn’t use his name to spare him the difficulty of hearing a discussion he no longer has any part in.

A voice comes from a hunchback on the floor instead. ‘The
better the operation, the later we have to put off the meeting with the family – to keep Nasir safe, they’ll be watching every movement of the house, the family, the driveway, the phones. Hayat?’

They are the liaisons.

The hunchbacks will get money and basics to Nasir’s family while he is gone. Nothing extravagant – some candles and gas lamps, because they’ll have their electricity turned off once the military pinpoints where the hit came from. An old Nokia telephone to keep in touch with their relatives and friends is standard for when the military has the electricity turned back on so that the landline can be tapped. A small transistor radio, some money to tide them over while their eldest is gone.

Hayat doesn’t speak to the liaisons. What has to happen to a movement before it lets in people like this? Spectators, they just sit and watch, ask banal questions, and keep notes on the members. Hayat remembers comrades, men who had devoted their lives to the cause of Mir Ali, abandoning their careers, money and families. Those men sat at desks all night and smoked and typed leaflets and posters and articles. They recited poetry because no one heard them when they used their own words. Those men, men like Balach, were the first to be destroyed. Now this is all the movement has left.

He feels entitled to his condescension. Hayat is, it is widely acknowledged, a superior operator in the Mir Ali underground. He has moved weapons, even heavy artillery, under the eyes of the military, taking rocket launchers through the very checkpoints they were to target. He has lured young military cadets to their death.

Posing as a young father frantic over a car accident that had harmed his pregnant wife, Hayat dragged the men off their posts and towards the bends and pins in the roads behind the forest. They had been persuaded to help him move the car, trusting his nervous navigation to take them to the scene of
the supposed accident only to find themselves gagged and bound and taken as valuable prisoners.

Hayat has an honest face. Even those who do not know him, who have only chanced upon him at the university climbing the stairs to the dark tower where the students meet after hours, or upon his motorbike, even they understand there is something special about the boy with the hair that curls at the nape of his neck.

People believe him; they believe Hayat’s sincerity before they have any reason to.

None of the other men in the underground have this particular power. They look contorted by rage, made ugly by vengeance. Their hearts are too corroded to present any other face. But not Hayat. He lives in the camouflage of his belief and carries out his services to his homeland without question.

He is a true soldier. You never see him coming.

Hayat looks at the hunchbacks on the floor. Their hair is unwashed, he notices. Purposely dishevelled. Too obvious. Hayat runs his fingers once more through his own hair and directs his answer to her. ‘Yes, nothing if he’s alive. Not for two months at least.’

She walks to the window and takes a cigarette from one of the smokers’ crumpled packs before turning to Nasir for a light.

Women don’t smoke in public; she is breaking form, bringing notice to the window.

‘We’ll take care of everyone, don’t worry.’

Nasir smiles, but keeps his eyes on the campus below them, on the truck of finely suited and booted military police doing their early morning rounds.

‘The rest of you should go,’ she says quickly. The young men stand and the hunchbacks straighten their trousers and gather up their papers and their bags.

‘Hayat, will you stay?’ She looks at him, not around him or past him. Her green eyes are lined with thick lashes, long and curled at the ends. She has a beauty mark in her eye, a point of divergence from her iris – a wisp of dark brown that sneaks out into the clear white of her eyes and then, finding no room, retreats into the background.

She has broken cover. Now she stands with Nasir at the window, close enough so that his arms graze her waist and so that if she turns her head she can close herself into the crook of his collarbone. She will have to stand at the window with him for a few minutes, lingering suggestively, but she will leave with Hayat as per the instructions somewhere between the three questions on his exam sheet.

Hayat leans back in his chair. He is looking back at her too, not at her hair held up with a crossbow of pencils, not at her hands.

‘I’m right here, Samarra,’ he says, looking at the beauty mark encased in her eye.

There is a silence cast over the house. Sikandar knocks and rings the bell but neither sound breaks through to the living. He walks into the house and quietly down the corridor, which leads visitors into a large, crowded sitting room, its walls decorated by Koranic calligraphy in bronze and golden paint.

Glass ashtrays piled up with half-smoked cigarettes are scattered around vases holding bright plastic flowers. There are men sitting on damask sofas, speaking quietly to each other and exhaling smoke into the air.

Sikandar nods at each of the men, hello hello I’m sorry I’m sorry. He doesn’t know who to condole with, so he meets everyone’s eyes and touches his hand to his heart, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

He does not want to disturb the mourners and ask who placed the distressed phone call, so he walks around the house listening for his wife’s voice.

There are children, sitting placidly on the carpet of what must have been a receiving area for guests and less familiar visitors, picking at tamarind seeds placed before them to aid in counting off the prayers for the dead. The children look blankly at Sikandar. A little girl breaks into tears.

There are servants and bearers carrying jugs of lukewarm water on trays, their own eyes red and bleary, more from exhaustion from unbroken hours of mourning than from actual grief, Sikandar thinks. A pair of elderly women sit in two large leather armchairs in front of the staircase, rocking back and forth, mumbling
ayats
for the recently deceased.

There is no one in charge, it seems to Sikandar, who has little time and even less patience to spare. No mullah leading the prayers, no screaming women to meet those coming to pay their respects.

Sikandar pulls his mobile phone out of his jacket pocket to search for the number that called and demanded that he come to this address and remove his wife, and as he does so one of the servant girls, her old
dupatta
pulled tightly across her forehead, touches Sikandar on his shoulder. She has a fair, sad, moon-shaped face. ‘
Ma pasay raza
,’ she says – follow me – and she climbs the stairs, two at a time, turning her head only to make sure Sikandar is behind her.

Sikandar wants to protest. He wants to ask the servant girl with the moon-shaped face if it is proper for him to be upstairs, in the family section of the house, on his own – a stranger – in the middle of this first day of Eid, in the middle of this house’s most private moment.

He feels like an intruder. He
is
an intruder. The very worst kind. He is gatecrashing a death. Sikandar opens and closes his mouth, but in the end keeps quiet. It would be best to get all this over with. He follows the girl to the top of the staircase. She pauses, holding onto the banister.

‘She’s in there.’ She points to the door past the large television set, sweeping her hands like a broom, ushering Sikandar inside.

‘We didn’t know what to say, we couldn’t stop her. The family was so upset, so upset. Maybe it was a blessing that someone came from afar to take this burden off their hands.’ The girl with the moon-shaped face stammers and stops, timing her words to Sikandar’s footsteps.

Sikandar can’t hear the girl any more. His heart pounds as he turns the door handle and lets himself into a cool tiled room. All the bulbs are switched on and it takes a second for
his eyes to adjust to the light. Mina is sitting on the floor of the bathroom, next to the wide-open shower space, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows.

A young man is standing next to her, pressed against the shower’s glass door, sobbing. There is a body on the floor of the shower, pale and stiff. Sikandar can only see hairless legs past his wife’s frame as she moves dreamily between a sponge and a bucket of water. Mina is washing the dead boy’s body. She has taken over the duty of preparing the dead stranger for burial.

‘Mina,’ Sikandar whispers.

She doesn’t hear him.

‘He was a child,’ the young man whimpers between gulps for air. ‘He was a child. They bombed the road his school van was on, his class van on their way to the governor’s house to perform an Eid presentation.’ He claws his hands across his face, wiping away tears that mingle with spit as he draws his fingers across his lips. ‘The bastards thought it was a government car. It was a van filled with children. They saw heat with their sensors. It was packed heat: there were children inside. They fired an RPG into it. They didn’t look at the day’s visitors’ sheet. They would have known, but they didn’t know, they just fired.’

Sikandar looks at Mina; she is oblivious to the man – the boy’s brother or his father or his uncle – standing over her. She is unaware of her husband trying to withdraw her from her task. Sikandar remembers Hayat mentioning the attack at the kitchen table last night. ‘Have you seen? Have you seen what it has come to?’ Hayat said, pushing the evening edition of the newspaper across the table. He blinked quickly as he spoke. ‘Children. It’s always children now.’ Sikandar paused over his plate. He looked up at Hayat, whose agitation he did not recognize. ‘Always,
ror
?’ Hayat put down his glass. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stood up.

Sikandar had become too sensitive; maybe as much as his
wife, he worried sometimes. Sikandar was glad she hadn’t been at the kitchen table. Hayat and Mina might have been kindred spirits once. At one time they had been each other’s favourites. Sikandar remembers how in the days after their marriage, Hayat used to greet Mina every morning by drumming his palm and fingers on the kitchen table, welcoming her with song. Mina would laugh and clap her hands with glee as her younger brother-in-law improvised the table-top music.

Hayat had been so kind to Mina when she was a new bride. He did everything he could to make her feel at home and embrace her into the family. For her part, Mina had doted on Hayat as if he had been her own brother. Now Sikandar feels himself increasingly isolated from their tempers and moods. None of them are the same any more. Everyone has slowly broken down over the past year.

Sikandar no longer has the heart to read the news. He walks away from television newscasts, which are on a twenty-four-hour loop, and from kitchen-table discussions on the violence. It’s too much. It’s every day, all day. The violence has started to follow you home.

‘Mina, come.’

Sikandar pushes his wife’s hair off her face, but she ignores him and raises an elbow to her fringe, like a barricade, to stop her hair from falling in front of her eyes.

She sings to the boy, reciting Rahman Baba’s poetry to him in a soft voice as she washes his knees gently with the sponge, preparing him as if he were going to say his prayers.

I thought I could wake up this sleeping country with my cries, but still they sleep as if in a dream.

Mina bathes the dead boy tenderly, stopping her recitations of poetry only to murmur the
fateha
prayer over his head. She
switches her tongue, moving from Pashto to Arabic, her breath blowing across the boy’s face from his left ear to his right ear, so both the devils and the angels who follow him will hear the prayer and not stand in the way of his ascension.

‘Mina, please come.’

Sikandar reaches down and grabs hold of her elbows. He will carry her off the bathroom floor if he has to. He wishes she would look up at him and acknowledge the madness of the two of them standing in suds up to their ankles in a stranger’s tiled bathroom, washing the joints of a dead child.

Mina pushes her husband back.

‘I’m not finished.’

‘I’m not finished,’ she says again to the boy’s relative.

‘Mrs Mina heard about Habib and came to us, she came to help us,’ the grown man says to Sikandar, almost pleading with him not to take her away. He was so caught in his grief – he had been unable to wash Habib, his fourteen-year-old nephew, his elder sister’s only son – that he had not heard the rush of voices through the house that wanted Mrs Mina removed.

She had been asking her usual questions. Where was the boy when his body was found? Where had he been going? Was there any official paperwork that notified the family of the details of what had caused their son’s death? Was there any sign that the boy wanted to die, that he had chased his own death?

The young man hadn’t heard Mina ask any of those questions. He had been in the bathroom, cowering over the boy he had watched playing cricket as a child, over the same legs that had carried Habib to his uncle, who had then hoisted him above his head, turning them both into a giant that strode across the cricket pitch as they pretended to be one of the gargantuan Australians who dominated that year’s 20–20 matches. He couldn’t do it, he couldn’t wash those legs. He couldn’t
clean the knuckles on Habib’s hand, his soft unworked hands, or bring himself to wash behind the prepubescent boy’s ears. Mrs Mina found him in the bathroom, standing over the boy as the family waited for the clean body to be carried down the stairs and towards the graveyard.

She dropped to the floor, rolled up her sleeves, tied back her hair and began to wash the body.

The young man was anxiously grateful, but he could not leave his post. He did not want to fail his sister, who had been sedated by a doctor. He didn’t want to forgo his last hour with the boy whose birth he had witnessed, himself not much older than the corpse now being bathed in front of him. He wasn’t ready to part with Mina either, not yet.

‘Mina.’

‘Hmm?’

‘We have to leave.’

But Mina will not desert Habib and his right to poetry.

I thought I could wake up this sleeping country with my cries …