Kamila Shamsie - A God in Every Stone

The hammering on the door became more insistent and the beautiful girl walked past the men and down the hallway. Despite the whispered protest of the grey-haired woman almost half the men in the room stood up and tiptoed into the hallway so they could hear what happened when the girl opened the door and spoke in English.

— What can I do for you gentlemen?

— We need to search your premises.

— Men only enter here if they pay. Although. . so many of you? All the girls will be exhausted by the end of the day.

— We’re looking for. .

— I know what you’re looking for.

It was impossible to know what she did next; perhaps the words, their tone of power, understood even by the men in the hallway who didn’t know English, were enough; the English officer said nothing more, and before the girl had returned to the hallway the soldiers could be heard marching away. One of the men caught the girl’s sleeve as she passed by him.

— She’s not working, the grey-haired woman said sharply.

— I’ll pay double.

— Your people called for a strike. Well, we’re observing the strike here.

— Triple, then.

The grey-haired woman looked around the room at all the men.

— Triple for everyone, she said.

The men — save the one who went with the girl — returned to the seating area, and were silent now, not looking at each other. Shortly afterwards a few of the women, painted for business, entered the room and one by one men stood up and followed them into the rooms which led onto the street. Like this, over the next few minutes, more than half the men vacated the room. Qayyum, looking around at those who remained, wondered how many sought their pleasure from other men, how many stayed away from courtesans for reasons of morality or fidelity, and how many were hoping that a better option might enter the room. When the next group of women walked in their number included the one he’d been waiting for, who he visited almost exclusively because years of going to her made their relationship something more than transactional, and he smiled to see her ignore the other men and jerk her head in his direction, instructing him to follow her.

They entered her room, and he sat on the bed, watching as she turned her back to him and removed her shalwar; it was both moving and arousing, as always, this facsimile of modesty. He took off his own shalwar, folded it neatly, and placed it on the foot of the bed, hearing her familiar laugh at his military fastidiousness.

— There used to be that girl here, the English one. What happened to her?

— A knife in the heart. Some say it was an Englishman, some say it was a Pashtun. Some say it was the woman whose room was across the street from her, but it’s men who stick knives into the hearts of women who make them weak.

— Who was her father?

She had him in her hand, though he was ready before she touched him, when she answered:

— A man like you.

He caught her forearms and would have pushed her away, but she either mistook his intention or deliberately ignored it, and then it was too late, he was a man like all the other men who came here, and the women, all of them behind the curtained doorways, knew it.

Finally, the space between one bullet and the next widened far enough for the men to leave. They were silent exiting the Street of Courtesans so there would be no need to acknowledge where they had been, what they had done, while their brothers were dying. They knew they should return to the Street of Storytellers to retrieve the dead bodies, but most of them had wives and children at home who would be worrying about them, and it was Qayyum alone who walked directly towards the site of the massacre, knowing Najeeb would have been at the Museum all day, and was unlikely to be able to return home until the soldiers returned to their barracks.

Two cats crouched beside an unexpected rivulet snaking down the street towards Qayyum, their tongues lapping at it in tandem. He thought the scent of blood was in his nostrils, until he saw the colour of the water. It wasn’t necessary to understand it to know some other horror was taking place. He followed the watery blood through streets where the silence was so unnerving he was almost grateful when it was fractured by a crack of gunfire, sporadic bursts of Inqilaab Zindabad and the cries of mourners from homes where sons and husbands had returned as corpses. As he approached the Street of Storytellers, the rivulet widened, or the alleys narrowed; either way, he had no choice but to step through the warm liquid, thicker than water as in the English expression.

The Street of Storytellers was in flood. Water raced down its length, carrying debris along with it — shoes, planks, cloth, a half-eaten apple. A crow swooped down onto something shiny, wet its beak, and flew up with a panicked beating of wings. Firemen hosed water onto the street as the cavalry stood guard over them.

Where were the dead, the wounded? He was up to his ankles in water now; no blood, just water.

He saw a man approach the troops stationed beside the closed doors of Kabuli Gate, hands raised above his head; Return home! came the order and the man backed away. So, no one would enter or exit the Walled City tonight. Najeeb would have to spend the night in the Museum, and in the meantime his brother would try to understand what had happened here, how all the bodies had disappeared so quickly.

On the balcony of the carpet-seller’s house, located at the corner of the Street of Storytellers and an alley, three men stood like gods in judgement. One of the men was pointing to something on the street; the second man, elbows resting on the balcony, covered his eyes with his hands. The third man, in a bright green kameez, stood slightly apart, his posture revealing nothing. All the other balconies on the street were empty — those three men were the only witnesses he could see.

Qayyum ducked back into the alley, cut across the smaller side streets, twice hiding in doorways to avoid soldiers, and finally emerged into the alley with the doorway to the carpet-seller’s house. He was raising his hand to knock on the door when someone pushed it open and a man with a bloodied shirt walked out.

— Were you shot?

The man looked confused by Qayyum’s question for a moment, then glanced down at his shirt and shook his head.

— It’s not my blood, the man said. Did she give you water?

— Who?

— The girl.

— Which girl?

But before he received an answer a young man in a red-brown kameez walked out of the house, his features in disarray. Qayyum knew all the Khudai Khidmatgar in Peshawar, and this man was not one of them.

— Where did you leave her? the young man asked the blood-shirted man, who responded in a tone weary with sadness.

— I’m telling you, they took the bodies away.

— I want to see where she was.

— All right. Come, I’ll show you.

The two men walked onto the Street of Storytellers and Qayyum pushed open the door to the carpet-seller’s house and entered. Everything here spoke of prosperity. He was on the first-floor landing when a woman’s voice called out from behind a door which was slightly ajar.

— Come inside. Don’t try to escape — I have a gun.

His instinct was to run, but it would be ridiculous to survive the English troops only to be shot by a woman. Qayyum pushed the door open with his foot and stood in the doorway with hands raised above his head. The shuttered room was vast, carpeted end to end, and lit with electric lamps. At the far end stood an uncovered woman in a green kameez, pointing a pistol at Qayyum.

— Come closer.

Qayyum looked down at his wet sandals, which squelched as he shifted his weight. He lifted a foot out of his sandal and — standing on one leg — dried it as effectively as possible against his shalwar, before repeating the procedure with the other foot. He wished he wasn’t so aware that the woman — just a few years past girlhood but impossible to mistake for a girl — had green eyes and long, unbound hair, and was tall enough and beautiful enough to be part-djinn. He stepped from carpet to carpet as he approached her, his bare feet treading on a startled deer, a parrot’s beak. Two-thirds of the way into the room, he stopped, his eyes trying to look over her shoulder or to the left of her ear but unable to keep from sliding back to her face, which had light reddish smears around the hairline. So he looked up to the ceiling instead — a mosaic of intersecting stars and circles, with pieces of mirrorwork which captured the carpet patterns and made them part of the ceiling’s intricate geometry. But when the woman spoke it was impossible to look anywhere but at her.