Authors: The Sacred Cut
David Hewson
The Sacred Cut
David Hewson
IT
WAS NINE MONTHS NOW SINCE SHE'D SLIPPED OUT OF Iraq, six hundred dollars
in her pocket, knowing instinctively what she needed: men who owned boats and
trucks, men who knew the way to places she'd only dimly heard of and who
could take a little human contraband there for the right price. There'd
been no work, no money at home, not since Saddam's soldiers came from
Baghdad and took her father away, leaving them alone together in the damp, cold
shack that passed as a farm, with its dying crops wilting under the oil smoke
of the fields outside Kirkuk.
She'd
watched the dry, dusty lane that led to their home every day for hours, waiting
for him to come back, wondering when she'd hear that strong, confident
adult voice again, bringing hope and security into their lives. It never
happened. Instead, her mother went slowly crazy as the hope ran out, wailing at
the open door for hours on end, not cleaning anything, not even talking after a
while.
No
one liked crazy people. No one liked the decisions they forced on others. One
day a distant relative came and took both of them away, drove them for hours in
a cart behind an old, stumbling donkey, then left them with an old aunt on the
other side of the plumes of smoke. Just another tin shack, no money, too many
mouths to feed. Her mother was completely silent after that, spent hours with
her arms wrapped around herself, rocking constantly. No one talked to them much
either. They took her to school only every other day: there was too much work
to be done trying to dig a living out of the desiccated fields. Then soldiers
came and the school closed for good. She'd watched as boxes of shells got
shifted into the classrooms, and wondered how she was supposed to learn anything
ever again.
Over
all their lives now, bigger than the oil cloud and blacker too, hung the threat
of war. The men said there'd been one before, when she was tiny. But this
war would be different. This one would end matters, once and for all, make the
Kurds free forever in a new kind of Iraq. They told a lot of lies. Either that
or they just got things wrong. Men were stupid sometimes.
It
was February when the soldiers came to occupy the farm. They were Iraqis. They
behaved the way Iraqi soldiers did around Kurds. When they wanted something to
eat, they came into the house and took it. When they wanted other comforts,
other services, they took them too. She was scared. She was full of an internal
fury too real and violent to share. She wanted to escape from this place, go
somewhere new, anywhere, so long as it was in the West, where life was easier. There
was no point in staying. There'd been gossip when they'd tried to
sell what little produce they had in the neighbouring village one morning. About
how the Iraqis killed the Kurdish men they took, put them down like animals. These
whispered tales of horror turned a key in her head. Her father was dead.
She'd never hear the comforting boom of his voice again. She understood
now why her mother had retreated to some inner hell where no one could reach
her.
So
throughout each long day, as it became more and more dangerous to travel, she
huddled in the corner of the squalid little shack and listened to the
frightened talk around her. About death and war and uncertainty, and always,
always, how more soldiers would come. Peshmurga. Americans. British. Men who
would, she knew, look much the same as the Iraqis when she stared into their
eyes. They would sound different, wear different uniforms, but they were just men,
mortal men, bringing death and chaos along with them, invisible, ghostly
comrades riding in the dun-coloured jeeps.
It
happened on a cold, clear April day. The Iraqis had dug in next to the dank
waters of the dead fish pond, by the puny patch of feeble squash plants,
blackened by oil smog, at the end of their lane. Five men and a big gun pointed
at the sky. They were worse than most: vicious, foul-mouthed, dangerous. Scared
men, too, and she knew why. They had just the one shell, nothing more. They
were sitting there, wondering how to give themselves up before the Americans
came and killed them.
In
the middle of the afternoon she'd watched as an ugly dark plane circled
the farm, like an old metal bird undecided where to lay down its feet. She'd
felt nothing, not even fear for herself. She'd stood outside the shack,
ignoring the screams ordering her to hide, watching the fire streak from the
black bird's belly, race through the beautiful blue sky and wrap itself
around the upright cylinder of the gun before the Iraqis even had a chance to
spit back their single shell.
The
plane sent the soldiers screaming out of their sandbagged home, flames licking
at their contorted bodies. She wanted to see more, wanted to make sure this
memory stayed with her because it was important. So she walked closer, hid in
the stinking outside toilet, looking on through the battered palm thatching as
the soldiers danced and rolled on the ground.
Even
now, nearly a year later, she remembered what she'd thought at that
moment. The sight reminded her of the travelling troupe of clowns who used to
come through the village from time to time, back when her father was alive. One
of her earliest memories was of being in his arms, watching them, almost
hysterical with laughter. Even so, she was aware that there was something wrong
when the clowns returned again and again, something cruel in their humour, in
the way it exaggerated the stupidity and pain of existence and invited their
audience to be amused by it. She had thought about laughing at the soldiers
trying to save themselves from the flames that consumed their bodies. There
were plenty of reasons to. The Kurds hated the Iraqis. The Iraqis hated the
Kurds. Everyone hated the Americans. It was a world defined by hatred and
perhaps that was, in the end, why people laughed, because it made the pain go
away, if only for a little while.
But
she didn't have the time to stare at them, to try to find amusement in
their throes. At that moment Laila was thinking of herself, certain that hatred
was a luxury she'd have to save for later. Somewhere in this moment there
had to be the chance of escape. Of fleeing this dying, parched land where there
was nothing left for her anymore, no love and no hope.
When
the flames died down she walked over to the soldiers. They were dead, contorted
husks now, charred by the fire that had spat at them from the sky. Except for
one. He clung on doggedly, trying to breathe through cracked, ruined lips, each
attempt coming with pained effort. She thought he wouldn't last much
longer. So she slid her hand inside his jacket, staring all the time into his
bright, terrified eyes. He mumbled something, a familiar insult, something
about thieving Kurds. Then her fingers found the envelope and he started to sob
like a child.
This
shocked her. She'd stared at him, affronted, and spoke in good Arabic,
since she made a point of learning as many languages as possible in the old
school which was now gone, books replaced by munitions boxes. "You should
go to God like a man," she told him. "Not a child."
Then
she took everything she could from him--documents, coins, a pen, a watch,
reasoning they would do a dead man no good anyway, and that a world in this
condition could scarcely condemn a petty thief.
He
must have been rich. Maybe a member of the party. He had close to $1,500 in
mixed notes in an envelope. When she checked the other corpses, carefully
prising away the burnt uniforms from the flesh beneath, she found more. Some
were charred but they were dollars, the magical currency, and you could buy
things just by waving the curled, brown sheets at someone. A man at a border
post, say. Or the village elder--and there always was one--who knew
the way out, the way West, where the rich people lived.
SHE
WAS DOWN TO three hundred dollars by the time she got to Istanbul two weeks
later. The city was a strange and beautiful place, one that scared her because
of the hard way people looked into her face whenever she begged in the street.
Most
of her remaining money disappeared with the series of random trucks she took
through Greece, then along the Adriatic coast, through Albania, Montenegro and
Croatia, past a shining spring sea, past lush green fields of vines and
vegetables. And wrecked buildings slowly being brought back to life. She could
speak a little Italian. It was the one European language the school had taught,
simply because it was the only one for which they had the books. She loved the
sound, too, and the pictures on the pages, of a distant city where the streets
and squares had beautiful names, beautiful buildings.
The
locals on the coast knew Italian. It was a language from the West, worth
understanding in the hope its good fortune might touch you one day. She talked
to them a little, knew the signs, understood the looks in some of the old
men's faces. There'd been a war here too.
She
gave the last hundred dollars to a burly German, who drove her over the border
into Italy at Trieste, and left her, two days later, penniless, on the
outskirts of Rome.
The
money hadn't covered everything. Somewhere along the way--she
wasn't sure of the day, it hadn't seemed important to keep track of
the time--she'd turned thirteen. She knew about ways to keep men
happy, and tried to tell herself it was easy when you lay there to think of
something else: poppies waving in the yellow corn, bread baking over burning
wood, pictures of the unknown city now only a few kilometres away, with its
lovely buildings, its wealth, its promise of safety and happiness. And the
sound of her father's voice, singing in the fields. That was the warmest
memory, one that she prayed would never disappear.
And
when it was over, when he'd let her out of the cab on some grim housing
estate in the suburbs, a place of dark, threatening streets--nothing like
the Rome she'd imagined--she'd made a decision. Stealing was
better than this. Stealing allowed her a little personal dignity. It would keep
her alive until... what?
BACK
ON THAT WARM DAY in early summer she hadn't known the answer to that
question. Now, in December, with Rome shivering under a vicious and unexpected
burst of snow, she was no closer to it. Each day was a new battle fought using
the same weapons: keen eyes, agile hands. The charities had thrown her out for
stealing. The street people rejected her because she wouldn't stoop to
the tricks they used--selling themselves, selling dope. She was a world
away from a home that no longer existed, alone in an empty piazza in the heart
of Rome, looking at something that could only be a temple, one almost as old as
some of those back in the place she now struggled to think of as home.
She'd
followed the man all the way from the narrow street near the Spanish Steps,
after she saw him leave a doorway next to a small store selling Gucci. He
looked interesting somehow. The right type. So she'd followed him, and it
wasn't easy. He kept ducking out of the way as if he was hiding too. Then
she lost him again, turned the corner, found herself in the square. The temple
was a kind of sanctuary, she thought.
The
girl stared at the huge doors shut tightly against the freezing blast and
wondered what the place was like inside.
A
sanctuary could be warm. It could have something to steal.
She
walked along to the side of the building, under the shadow of the gigantic
pillars and the curious writing above them, down a low path towards the light
in a narrow side entrance.
The
door was ajar. Snow was dancing around her like a wraith caught in the hushed
breath of a newborn storm. She walked into a small, modern cubicle, which led
into the dark, airy interior beyond, hearing voices. A man and a woman,
foreign, American probably, were making sounds she didn't quite
understand.
She
was cold. She was curious. She slunk into the shadows, somewhat in awe of the
building's size and majesty, slid behind a fluted column, then let her
eyes adjust to the scene in the centre, lit by the moonlight spilling through a
giant, open disc at the highest point of the roof.
Close
by, thrown on a bench, lay a man's coat and jacket. They looked good
quality. There could be any amount of money in there, enough to see her through
until the snow disappeared.
The
two people inside were some distance away. The woman's clothes were
strewn across the geometric stone pattern of the floor. She lay naked in the
very centre of the hall. Quite still now, her arms and legs outstretched in an
odd, artificial manner, as if each limb were pointing to an invisible angle
somewhere in the circular building.
It
was wrong to watch. Laila understood that, but her mind fought to interpret
what was happening in front of her in the icy, airy heart of this strange, dead
place. She thought she had seen everything the world had to offer back in Iraq.
Then something caught the moonlight. Something sharp and silver and terrifying,
a slender line of surgical metal, hovering over the figure on the floor. And
she knew she was mistaken.