Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“It was my birthday and he missed me getting my presents and the party. He came back late after everyone was gone and he was too tired to do anything.”

The aeai beckons her into the kitchen and in three steps down three months pass, for it is a dark autumn night and women prepare the iftar to celebrate the end of that day’s Ramadan fast. Najia follows the trays of food into the dining room. In that year her father’s friends, the ones from the hospital and the ones in uniforms, gather often in the house of a Ramadan evening, talking of dangerous students and radical clerics who would take them all back to the Middle Ages and the unrest and the strikes and arrests. Then they notice the little girl standing by the end of the table with the bowl of rice and they stop their talk to smile and ruffle her hair and press their faces too close to hers. Suddenly the smell of tomato rice is overpowering. A pain like a knife stabbed in the side of her head makes Najia lose hold of the rice dish. She cries out. No one hears. Her father’s friends talk on. The rice dish cannot fall. This is memory. She hears words she cannot remember.

“…will clamp down on the mullahs.”

“…moving funds to offshore banks. London’s looking good, they understand us over there.”

“…your name’s going to be high on any of their lists.”

“…Masoud won’t stand for that from them.”

“…you know about tipping points? It’s this American mathematical thing, don’t knock it. Basically, you never know it’s going until it’s too late to stop it.”

“…Masoud will never let it get to that stage.”

“…I’d be seriously looking if I were you, I mean you’ve got a wife, little Najia there.”

The hand reaches out to ruffle her softly curled black hair. The world whips away and she is standing in her Mammoths!™ pyjamas by the half-open living-room door.

“What did you do to me?” she asks the aeai, a presence behind her more felt than seen. “I heard things I’d forgotten for years, for most of my life.”

“Hyperstimulation of the olfactory epithelium. Most effective at evoking a buried memory trace. Smell is the most potent activator of memories.”

“The tomato rice. how did you know?” Najia is whispering though her memory-parents cannot hear her, can only play out their foreshadowed roles.

“Memory is what I am made of,” says the aeai and Najia gasps and doubles to another migraine attack as the remembered scent of orange-flower water throws her into the past. She pushes open the door’s light-filled crack. Her mother and father look up from the lamp-lit table. As she remembers, the clock reads eleven. As she remembers, they ask her what’s the matter, can’t you sleep, what’s wrong, treasure? As she remembers she says it’s the helicopters. As she has forgotten, on the lacquered coffee table, under the row of her father’s diplomas and qualifications and memberships of learned bodies framed on the wall, is a piece of black velvet the size of a colouring book. Scattered across the velvet like stars, so bright, so brilliant in the light from the reading lamp that Najia cannot understand how she ever forgot this sight, is a constellation of diamonds.

The facets unfold her, wheel her forward in time like a shard in a kaleidoscope.

It is winter. The apricot trees stand bare; dry snow, sharp as grit, lies drifted grudgingly against the water-stained white wall. The mountains seem close enough to radiate cold. She remembers her house as the last in the unit. At her gate the streets ended and bare wasteland stretched unbroken to the hills. Beyond the wall was desert, nothing. The last house in Kabul. In every season the wind would scream across the great plain and break on the first vertical object it found. She never remembers a single apricot from the trees. She stands there in her fur hooded duffel with her Wellington boots and her mittens on a string up her sleeve because last night like every night she heard noise in the garden and she had looked out but it was not the soldiers or the bad students but her father digging in the soft soil among the fruit trees. Now she stands on that slight mound of fresh dug earth with the gardening trowel in her hand. Her father is at work at the hospital helping women have babies. Her mother is watching an Indian television soap opera translated into Pashtun. Everyone says it is very silly and a waste of time and obviously Indian but they watch it anyway. She goes down on her knees in her ribby winter tights and starts to dig. Down down, twist and shovel, then the green enamelled blade rasps on metal. She scrapes around and pulls out the thing her father has buried. When she wrestles it out she almost drops the soft, shapeless thing, thinking it is a dead cat. Then she understands what she has found: the black bag. The other black bag, for the special visits. She reaches for the silver clasps.

In Najia Askarzadah’s memory her mother’s scream from the kitchen door ends it. After that come broken recalls of shouting, angry voices, punishment, pain, and, soon after, the midnight flight through the streets of Kabul lying on the back seat where the streetlights strobe overhead one flash two flash three flash four. In the aeai’s virtual childhood the scream tapers off into a stabbing scent of winter, of cold and steel and dead things dried out that almost blinds her. And Najia Askarzadah remembers. She remembers opening the bag. Her mother flying across the patio scattering the plastic chairs that lived out there in every season . She remembers looking inside. Her mother shouting her name but she does not look up there are toys inside, shiny metal toys, dark rubber toys . She remembers lifting the stainless steel things into the winter sunlight in her mittened hands: the speculum, the curved suture needle, the curettage spoon, the hypodermics and the tubes of gel, the electrodes, the stubby ridged rubber of the electric truncheon. Her mother hauling her away by her furry hood, smacking the metal things the rubber things away from her, throwing her away across the path, the frost-hardened gravel ripping her ribbed tights, grazing her knees .

The fine-boned branches of the apricot trees mesh and fold Najia Askarzadah into another memory not her own. She has never been to this green-floored corridor of concrete blocks but she knows it existed. It is a true illusion. It is a corridor that you might see in a hospital but it does not have the smell of a hospital. It has a hospital’s big translucent swinging doors; the paint is chipped off the metal edges suggesting frequent passage but there is only Najia Askarzadah on the green corridor. Frigid air blows through the louvered windows along one side, down the other are named and numbered doors. Najia passes through one set of flapping doors, two, three. With every set, a noise grows a little louder, the noise of a sobbing woman, a woman past the end of everything where no shame or dignity remains. Najia walks towards the shrieking. She passes a hospital trolley abandoned by a door. The trolley has straps for ankles, wrists, waist. Neck. Najia passes through the final set of doors. The sobbing rises to a sharp keening. It emanates from the last door on the left. Najia pushes it open against the sturdy spring.

The table takes up the centre of the room and the woman takes up the centre of the table. A recorder hooked to an overhead microphone sits on the table beside her head. The woman is naked and her hands and feet are lashed to rings at the corners of the table. She is pulled taut into a spread eagle. Her breasts, inner thighs and shaved pubis are pocked with cigarette burns. A shiny chromed speculum opens her vagina to Najia Askarzadah. A man in a doctor’s coat and green plastic apron sits by her feet. He finishes smothering contact gel over a stubby electric truncheon, dilates the speculum to its maximum and slides the baton between the steel lips. The woman’s screams become incomprehensible. The man sighs, looks round once at his daughter, raises his eyebrows in greeting, and presses the firing stud.