Yasmina Khadra - The Swallows of Kabul

The Goliath erases his dusty drawings with a forceful gesture and rises to his feet. After casting a baleful glance at the legless man, he steps over the low wall and moves off toward a tent encampment. The others remain silent until he disappears from sight, then feverishly gather around the man in the wheelbarrow.

“In any case, we all know his story by heart,” says an emaciated one-armed man. “He was getting to his accident, but he was going the long way around.”

“He was a great warrior,” his neighbor reminds him.

“True, but he lost his eye in an accident, not in battle. And besides, I frankly wonder what side he was fighting on, if his dead stank. Tamreez is right. We’re all veterans. We lost hundreds of friends. They died in our arms or before our eyes, and not a single one stank. . ”

Tamreez fidgets in his box, adjusts the pillow under his knees — which are bound up in strips of rubber — and looks toward the group of tents, as though he fears the Goliath may return. “I lost my legs, half of my teeth, and my hair, but my memory survived intact. I remember every detail as if it were yesterday. It was the middle of the summer, and that year the heat was so bad, it drove the crows to suicide. You could see them climbing higher and higher in the sky, and then they’d let themselves drop down like anvils, with their wings pressed against their sides and their beaks pointing straight down. That’s the truth — I swear it on the Holy Book. We spread out our underwear on the rocks, and they were so hot, you could hear the lice popping. It was the worst summer I ever saw. We had let our guard down, because we were positive that none of those white-arses would venture outside of their camp with the sun beating down like that. But the Russian brutes spotted our position with the help of a satellite or something of that sort. If a helicopter or a plane had flown over our hideout, we would’ve cleared out in a minute. But we saw nothing in the sky. Everything was totally calm, in all directions. We were in our hole, about to have lunch, when the shell came down. A dead-center bull’s-eye, in the right place at the right time. Boom! I was caught in a geyser of fire and earth, and that’s all I remember. When I came to, I was lying in pieces under a huge rock. My hands were all bloody; my clothes were torn and black from the smoke. I didn’t understand right away. Then I saw a leg lying on the ground next to me. I didn’t for a minute think it was mine. I felt nothing, I wasn’t suffering at all. I was just a little groggy.”

Suddenly, he turns his face toward the top of the minaret and opens his eyes wide. His lips tremble; frantic spasms convulse his cheeks. He cups his hands as if to collect water from a fountain. When he begins to speak again, his voice quavers in his throat. “And that’s when I saw him. The same way I see you. It’s true — I swear on the Holy Book it’s true. He was up in the blue sky, flying around in circles. His wings were so white, their reflection lit up the inside of the cave. He kept on flying, round and round. I was inside a circle of absolute silence — I couldn’t hear the cries of the wounded or the explosions around me — but I heard his wings. They beat the air majestically and made a silky, swishing sound. It was a magical vision. . ”

The one-armed man asks in great agitation, “Did he come down close to you?”

“Yes,” says Tamreez. “He came all the way down to me. He was in tears. His face was crimson and shining like a star.”

“It was the angel of death,” his neighbor declares. “It couldn’t have been anything else. He always shows himself like that to the truly brave. Did he say anything to you?”

“I don’t remember. He folded his wings around my body, but I pushed him away.”

“Poor fool!” someone cries out. “You shouldn’t have resisted him. The angel would have taken you straight to Paradise, and you wouldn’t be where you are now, moldering in your wheelbarrow.”

Atiq figures he’s heard enough and decides to refresh his mind elsewhere. By dint of endless elaboration or unvarying repetition, according to the narrators’ propensities, the stories told by the men who survived the war are well on the way to becoming genuine tall tales. Atiq sincerely thinks that the mullahs should put a stop to this. But most of all, he thinks that he can’t keep walking the streets indefinitely. For a while now, he’s been trying to flee his own reality, the one he can neither elaborate nor recount, certainly not to the insensitive, obtuse Mirza Shah, who’s so ready to reproach people for the smattering of conscience they have left. Besides, Atiq’s angry with himself for having confided in Mirza. For a glass of tea he didn’t even drink! He’s angry with himself for shirking his responsibilities, for having been foolish enough to believe that the best way to resolve a problem is to turn your back on it. His wife is sick. Is that her fault? Has he forgotten the sacrifices she made for him after his platoon, defeated by the Communist troops, left him for dead in a wasted village? How she hid him and nursed him for weeks on end? How she transported him on the back of a mule, through hostile territory in snowy weather, all the way to Peshawar? Now that she needs him, he shamelessly flees from her side, running to left and right behind anything that seems likely to take his mind off her.

But everything comes to an end, including this day. Night has fallen. People are going back home; the homeless are returning to their burrows. And the Taliban thugs often shoot at suspicious shadows without warning. Atiq thinks that he, too, ought to go home, where he’ll find his wife in the same condition as when he left her, which is to say sick and distraught. He takes a street lined with piles of rubble, stops next to a ruin, puts an arm against the only wall left standing, plants himself fairly solidly on his haunches, rests his chin on one shoulder, and stays like that. Here and there in the darkness, where a few dim lights halfheartedly expose themselves, he hears infants crying. Their wails pierce his skull like a blade. A woman protests against the unruliness of her offspring, and a male voice quickly silences her.

Atiq straightens his neck, then his spine, and looks up at the thousands of constellations twinkling in the sky. Something like a sob constricts his throat. He has to squeeze his fists bloodless to keep from collapsing. He’s tired, tired of going in circles, running after wisps of smoke, tired of these dull days trampling him down from morning till night. He can’t figure out why he has survived two consecutive decades of ambushes, air raids, and explosive devices that turned the bodies of dozens of people around him into pulp, sparing neither women nor children, neither villages nor flocks, and all to wind up like this, vegetating in a dark, inhospitable world, in a completely disoriented city studded with scaffolds and haunted by doddering human wreckage — a city that mistreats him, damages him, day after day, night after night, whether he’s in the company of some wretch condemned to die and awaiting her fate in his stinking jail or watching over his tormented wife, doomed to an even crueler death.

“La hawla.” He sighs. “Lord, if this is a test you’re giving me, give me also the strength to overcome it.”

Striking his hands together, he mumbles a few verses from the Qur’an and turns for home.

WHEN ATIQ OPENS the door of his house, the first thing that catches his attention is the lighted hurricane lamp. Usually at such an hour, Musarrat is in bed and all the rooms are plunged in darkness. He notices the empty pallet, the blankets neatly spread out over the mattress, the pillows propped against the wall, just as he likes them. He cocks an ear: no moaning, no sound whatsoever. He retraces his steps, observes the basins, upside down and drying on the floor, and the dishes, gleaming in their proper place. His curiosity is aroused; for months now, Musarrat has done little in the way of housework. Wasted by her illness, she spends most of her time whimpering, huddled around the pain tearing at her insides. To signal his return, Atiq coughs into his hand. A curtain is drawn aside, and Musarrat shows herself at last, haggard, crumpled, but on her feet. She can’t prevent her hand from clutching the doorway for support, however, and Atiq can sense that she’s battling with all her remaining strength to remain upright, as if her dignity depends on her success. He puts two fingers on his chin and raises an eyebrow, making no effort to conceal his surprise.