Born Under a Million Shadows Read online

  After finishing our meal, and after Philippe had pretty much drunk his own body weight in alcohol, all six of us moved from the table to settle on the long cushions in the other half of the room. James brought with him two bottles of red wine and sat close to Rachel, who looked as pleased as a boy who’d just been given a bike for Christmas. Georgie and May placed themselves on either side of me, like bodyguards. Georgie was just being Georgie, but May, I think, saw me differently now and I wondered whether she would have tried to adopt me if my mother hadn’t survived.

  For the next half hour the Frenchman continued to bore us with stories about himself, but unlike at the dinner table, James didn’t seem to mind anymore, nodding now and again as he leaned back on the cushions, slumping closer to Rachel’s side. I thought they looked nice together.

  When Philippe began a new story about his time in a place called Sudan, Rachel took the chance to escape. Getting to her feet, she apologized for the interruption and asked for directions to the toilet. As she left, Philippe continued with his talk about something called solar energy. I really had no idea what he was going on about, and I had no interest in trying to find out either. As nobody else interrupted him, I guessed they felt the same way.

  When Rachel didn’t return from the bathroom for a full ten minutes, Georgie also took the chance to get away from Philippe and went to look for her—and that’s when the party pretty much ended.

  “Rachel’s leaving,” Georgie said quietly, having popped her head around the door a few seconds later. James got to his feet, and we followed him.

  In the clear light of the hallway we found Rachel pulling on her coat. The mask of makeup that had hidden her face had been washed away, leaving her skin pink. It looked like she had been crying. I looked at Georgie, not sure what was going on, and she pointed to the light and the mirror and made a face full of shock. I remembered then about Rachel getting ready in the dark and realized it must have been the first time she had seen her made-up face properly when she went to the bathroom. I felt quite sorry for her. She hadn’t looked that bad in the candlelight.

  Pulling her gloves on, Rachel hurriedly thanked Georgie and May for inviting her to the party, pretending she needed to go because she didn’t feel well.

  “Rachel, stay a while longer, you may feel better in a minute or two,” James tried, but as he spoke she hardly looked at him, her eyes darting quickly to the door as if she couldn’t run away fast enough.

  “No, really, I must go,” she insisted, and as her gaze finally met his, her cheeks turned from pink to red and small tears came to blur her eyes.

  Georgie gave her a hug, and before James walked her to the gate May also moved to embrace her. As she headed back into the living room, I could tell from May’s face that she felt ashamed about the jokes she’d made earlier.

  Once Rachel had left the house and jumped into the front seat of the car that was waiting for her, nobody seemed to be in the mood to party anymore, only to drink. And as another bottle of wine was magically brought out from the kitchen, this was my cue, apparently, to go to bed. Taking me by the hand, Georgie led me upstairs and into James’s room.

  “Well, that was a bit of a disaster, wasn’t it?” she said, coming over to sit on my bed.

  “The food was good,” I stated, wanting to rescue something from the night to make her feel better.

  “Yes, the food was good, you’re right. As always.”

  Leaning forward, Georgie placed a kiss on my cheek before whispering, “Happy New Year, Fawad. I hope all your wishes come true this year.” Then she got up and switched off the light.

  As she closed the door behind her I offered a quick prayer to my God, asking Him to help make Georgie’s dreams come true too.

  In my head, behind my eyes, there was a storm of color; ugly rips breaking up the sky I saw there, flashing clouds of black and red, fighting for space in giant, greedy swirls. I felt the anger of the world wrap itself around the wind and I ran for a bush to take cover, but I struggled to reach it in time and the night tore it away before I got there, so I ran from the hill, tumbling through the long grass as I lost my feet, rolling through blades grown black in the dark. I knew I had to get away, but my hands were caught and I couldn’t free them until the light came to carry me away to the valley.

  High in the sky I saw eagles circling above me, swooping in pairs to a pocket of brown lying on the ground. I got to my feet and saw I was wearing Rachel’s gloves.

  Slowly I walked toward the brown, and as I drew close I recognized it as a dead thing. I thought it was a sheep at first, but as I walked nearer I realized it was too large, and now there was Georgie knelt near, holding the goat comb she carried. She was stroking the dead thing’s hair and smiling, so I smiled back.

  “You want to help?” she asked.

  “Okay.” I smiled.

  But as I leaned closer to comb the dead thing I saw long black hair covering its back and I grew afraid.

  “Go on,” Georgie encouraged, so I leaned forward and parted the hair. It covered a woman’s face, and it was the face of my mother.

  Throwing the comb to the floor, I backed away.

  “Don’t leave me, son,” she cried.

  She was crawling toward me on her hands and knees. Her fingers reached for me, but they were rotten and black and the buzz of flies hung around them, feeding off her sickness. She jumped for me, and I screamed.

  It was pitch-black in the room, and I could hear James snoring in the dark beside me. The lights were off, and the generator stood silent.

  I needed water, but I was too scared to get out of bed. My mother’s face was still strong in my mind, and it was so cold I could see my own breath. My eyes felt sticky with sleep, and my throat had turned tight as if my body was trying to strangle me.

  I needed water.

  “James?” My voice sounded weak, as if it was traveling from another place. “James?”

  When he gave no answer I grabbed the knife that was stuck in the board on my side of the wall and slipped out from under the blanket. I put on my plastic slippers and walked to the door.

  Outside our room everything was covered in night, creating fuzzy black shapes that knew I was afraid. I reached out with my feet, found the stairs, and moved slowly toward the kitchen, now helped by a faint light that broke through the blackness and came from the candles still burning in the living room. The tiny flames turned the air red where the light crept through the sides of the door. It was a flickering, dancing light that pulsed with the sound of voices coming from the other side. And as I half listened my heart quickened because I knew it was wrong.

  I watched my hands reach out and push the door open.

  “No, you drunken idiot. I told you, not here!”

  She was struggling, and he was on top of her, holding her down, his hands too strong, his body too heavy. It was crushing her.

  “Come on, stop fucking around; you said you wanted this.”

  The voice was thick, heavy, but I heard it, like I’d heard it before, and I saw him pressing her arms into the cushions as the flames danced around them, turning them both orange; him fighting to control her, his body on top of hers, light licking at his feet and revealing the terrible black of his eyes and the white of hers as they both turned to look.

  Around me, the air turned to screams. It sounded like hell in my ears as it pushed through the hate and the fear, burning like fire in my blood. Then the anger burst from my mouth with the howl of a million animals, and because I couldn’t let it happen again, not a second time, not this time, I ran forward and raised my hand, feeling the knife sink into softness as I slammed myself hard against him.

  Still the screams kept coming, tearing at my head.

  I kicked my legs at the air around me, trying to break free of the noise and the fear, but now there were more screams and they were different from mine, and I saw the flames laughing and the shape of a thousand terrors surrounded me and then she was upon me and she forced the fire to
leave, bringing her arms to catch me, smothering me in her smell.

  In the chaos of my mind I recognized Georgie and I melted into her flesh as she took my head into her body and I let her breathe her love into me. She was telling me not to worry, and I felt the warmth of her hands press on my hair, and it felt good, but in the distance somewhere around us I heard a man shouting.

  “He stabbed me in the ass! The little shit stabbed me in the fucking ass!”

  The accent was French.

  9

  I DON’T THINK I’m particularly special. I’m not amazingly beautiful, but I’m not Jahid-ugly either. I’m not the biggest brain in my class, but neither am I dumb as a donkey. I’m not the fastest runner; I don’t tell the best jokes; I’m not the best fighter; and though I know I’ve seen things that maybe a boy my age shouldn’t have seen, even that doesn’t make me particularly special.

  My father was killed, my brothers are dead, and my sister is missing. But in Afghanistan, that’s a big “so what?”

  Spandi’s mother died in childbirth, the sister she was trying to deliver died with her, and from the age of two Spandi never felt his mother’s warmth again or the comfort of her love. He doesn’t even have a photograph to remember her by, just a picture in his head that fades with every year he grows taller.

  Jamilla’s parents are both alive, but their house has become terrorized by drugs. Sometime in the past her dad went to work with the poppy, and he fell under its spell as he licked the resin from his fingers during the harvest. Now he is hungry for the drug, day and night, while the rest of his family just remains hungry. And even though he stays away from the home for days on end, he always returns eventually, looking for money; and when he can’t find any money he visits his fists on the head of his wife as well as Jamilla and her two older sisters.

  Meanwhile the orphanages of Kabul are filled with children whose parents have been lost and killed.

  So none of us is particularly special. We just carry with us different versions of the same story.

  However, when I woke up the morning after the night came to haunt me, I opened my eyes to see May and Georgie sharing the bed next to me while James was wrapped in a blanket snoring on the floor by my side, and I did at last feel in some way special.

  So I was really sorry when seconds later I touched the mattress under me and realized I’d wet the bed.

  10

  JALALABAD IS THE capital of Nangarhar Province in the east of Afghanistan, and for more years than anyone can remember Kabul’s rich have come to this city to escape the biting cold of winter.

  Georgie and I, however, had simply come to escape.

  With my mother’s illness still keeping her at Homeira’s house and my recent attack on Philippe, it was decided I needed a break.

  “He was only play-fighting with May,” Georgie explained as we worked our way through the seven sisters, the snow-topped mountains that took us away from the capital and into the warm valleys of the east. “He wasn’t really trying to hurt her.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Yes, Fawad, I am.”

  Although the pictures in my head told me a different story, everything was so muddy in there right now I couldn’t be clear of anything anymore, and if Georgie said it was so, then I guess it must have been.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I didn’t realize.”

  “There’s no need to apologize,” she continued, ruffling my hair. “How could you have known? Philippe had drunk far too much, and so had May. But I promise you, they are really very good friends, and they would never hurt each other. And maybe May and James and I are all to blame for what happened, not you. We should have been more sensible with you, Fawad, what with your mother being away. So, we’re sorry too. We didn’t think.”

  Georgie pulled me into her side, which felt a little bony, and held me there for as long as the journey allowed. The rest of the time we were thrown around the back of the car like two bees in a jar as the city road crumbled and turned into rocks.

  The journey from Kabul to Jalalabad was pretty interesting, and if my thoughts hadn’t been so busy with miseries pouring in from the night before, and if my head hadn’t kept smacking against the window with the force of the drive, I guess I would have enjoyed it tremendously because it took us through the pictures of a million painters and a million more stories. For four hours we traveled beyond the giant mountains that guarded the Kabul River; past the command post where the warlord Zardad kept a soldier chained up as a dog, feeding him on the testicles of his enemies; over the small bridge where four foreign journalists were murdered in 2001; down into Surobi and past its shimmering lake; along gentle bends hugged by brilliant green fields, overtaking kuchis and camels and dark clouds of fat-bottomed sheep; back along the river toward the fish restaurants of Durunta; and through the Russian-built tunnel that skirted a dam and led us to Jalalabad.

  It was my first proper trip out of Kabul—holidays not being that common among people who can hardly feed themselves—and the ever-changing views were more than amazing, but I was simply too upset to take any pleasure in them. The fact was, I felt truly sorry and deeply ashamed about what I’d done to Philippe, and I knew that his view of Afghan hospitality would have changed quite a lot now that one of us had stabbed him in the ass.

  It was unforgivable, really.

  May had told me the next day that Philippe had gone to see the surgeons at the Italian Emergency Hospital in Shahr-e Naw, where they had sewed a row of stitches into the wound. He also had to have something called “a tetanus jab.”

  James, on the other hand, had spent much of the day laughing.

  When we arrived in Jalalabad it was late afternoon, and we drove straight into the heart of the city, which, unlike the winter gray of Kabul, was still glowing yellow in dusty sunshine. There were more donkeys and carts crowding the streets than in the capital, and the place crawled with tiny tuk-tuks, Pakistani-style buggies painted blue and decorated with wildly colorful pictures of flowers and women’s eyes.

  Beeping and pushing our way through the traffic, we eventually slipped into a side road, a beaten track leading to the front doors of about ten high-walled houses. Halfway down we stopped at Haji Khan’s place, a large white mansion set in a garden of green that could easily have been home to King Mohammad Zahir Shah, if he still had any money.

  As our Land Cruiser pulled into the drive, we found Ismerai already waiting for us on the steps of the house. He was talking into a mobile phone that he clicked shut as we jumped out of our vehicle, and after greeting us with warm handshakes and big smiles he took us inside.

  The sight that filled my eyes almost blinded me. Through two large wooden doors, outside of which waited a number of sandals, a massive hall appeared with eight white leather sofas facing one another in rows of four. Georgie sat on one of them and pulled off her boots. I’d kicked my own shoes away at the door, which was the proper thing to do, but Georgie’s boots were complicated. At the back of the hallway a giant staircase grew from the ground, going off in two directions to meet up again on the top floor. Upstairs, beyond a fence of wooden balconies, I could see a number of doors leading to a number of rooms. A small man no bigger than a child grabbed our bags and disappeared up there. Back downstairs, to the left of the hallway was a raised floor glinting with a golden carpet and long lapis-blue cushions. Relaxing on them were four brown men in brown pakols and brown patus. They were watching a wide-screen television and seemed quite at home.

  As we entered the house and made our way to the TV area, all the men stood up and offered their hands to Georgie in welcome. She obviously knew them, and they seemed happy to see her, gently scolding her for having stayed away too long. They then waved at her to sit down, offering her the position of honored guest on the cushion farthest from the door. I followed her to the end of the room and sat down nearby, but not too close because I wasn’t a baby and I wanted the men to see that.

  As green tea arrived, joined by gl
ass plates of green raisins, pistachios, almonds, and papered sweets, Ismerai came to sit with us. The other guests settled closer to the television, even though the sound had now gone.

  Away from our house and the protection of its walls, Ismerai acted differently with Georgie, much more formally. I knew this was largely due to the other men being in the room. Despite all the years Georgie and Ismerai had been friends, they were friends in Afghanistan and therefore there were rules to follow, which mainly involved not being too friendly with women, foreign or not. The fact was, laughing and joking with women didn’t look good, it looked weak, and it was probably only one step away from finding pleasure in the bracelet-jangling swirls of Afghanistan’s dancing boys.

  But although I wasn’t that surprised by Ismerai’s behavior—he was a Pashtun after all—I was a little amazed to see the change in Georgie. She was terrible for teasing Ismerai when he came to our house, but now she was quiet and respectful, and she didn’t speak again with the other men unless they looked over to invite her into their conversation, which they didn’t really.

  In our culture, a woman is usually permitted to sit only with the men she is related to. Georgie’s presence was tolerated only because she was a foreigner. If she hadn’t come from England, she’d have been hidden in the back of the house with the rest of the women.

  Haji Khan was in Shinwar, Ismerai told us. “The signal doesn’t work well in the mountains.” He apologized to Georgie with a shy smile, looking at her silent mobile phone as he did so.

  Georgie shrugged as if she didn’t care, and I almost believed her. “I’m just grateful you invited us over,” she replied, “especially at such short notice.”

  As she spoke I suddenly realized she must have called Ismerai that morning when I wasn’t listening, and the knowledge of it made my cheeks burn with added shame because now everyone must know what I’d done, even my friends living half a world away in Jalalabad.