The Ink Bridge (5 page)

The aid workers in the camp tried to help. But Omed refused. Silence was a wall, a fort. It held his misery from others and it protected him from himself. The foreigners said they could try to contact his family. But it would be of little use. If they were alive why would they come here, without money, to this half-place? It was better if they dreamed of him breathing the air of a new country; of their son, their brother, safe and happy like the Snake had promised. How could Omed live with the shame of his family on his head?

The Poet was still staring at him. His eyes were unearthly blue, the blue of the tiled mosque at Mazar. He was a Pashtun and Omed could not forgive what the Pashtuns had done to his people. But he could not muster hate for this man. He was far different to the hard Talibs that had come to his town.

As a younger man, the Poet had wandered Afghanistan, living as he could in the shrines of saints and gathering the stories of the land. For a while he stayed in the village of Deh-i-Ahangaran, near Bamiyan. Here he had learned to speak Dari nearly as well as his native Pashto.

‘Why do you never talk, grandson?' he had asked soon after Omed had arrived.

Omed had opened his mouth and showed him his mutilated tongue. Since then they had shared a tent for many months. And each day the Poet asked the same question as though it were a riddle for Omed to solve, but his meaning was hidden in cloud.

This day the old man wet his lips slowly. ‘There are other ways to speak,' he said. ‘You must remember that words are our chance at forever.'

Outside the door, whirlwinds of dust whipped between the tents, and the sky squeezed out the palest blue. This was not the sky of home.

‘We are so much the same, grandson, you and me. I feel this,' the Poet continued. ‘Our sin is imagining a better world.'

Omed never understood his tears when they came. But, again, they were hot on his cheeks. The Poet's face cracked open like a boulder touched by lightning. His eyes glittered and his lips parted in a smile. ‘There is a better place than this. And better than the place we know as home.' He rolled his body upright and planted his feet on the ground.

‘What is home anyway?' he said, looking at his toes splayed on the mud floor.

When he spoke again, it was in a whisper. ‘The Russians killed my wife and children. That is where it began. I became a mujaheddin when I believed there was a war worth fighting.

When that war was over there was another to take its place. The joyless feast of killing, on and on. So I sold my rifle and bought myself a book of fine paper and a pen. I turned to words. Now there is nothing left for me in Afghanistan. Nothing but death. We need life around us to live, grandson. We need people who love us and we need words.'

He paused and laid his hands on Omed's knees.

‘We have all lost someone. It becomes a matter of what we do next. Once the grieving is over you need to calm the fire in your mind.'

The poet began to cough. His shoulders jerked and, finally, he spat into a cloth. Then he pressed the tears from his eyes and continued.

‘I wanted to go to Australia, I have a nephew there. He writes to me of the ocean, how warm it is and how salty, and when it touches the shore the waves reach for the sky. In the winters no one dies, there is always food and no one tries to shoot him.

‘I have the money. It is enough, and I have found a way. But I fear I am too old to make the crossing. Look at me. I would never last. If I reached the shore of Australia, the waves would finish me.' He sputtered a laugh that ended in another fit of coughing.

When the coughing ceased, he reached out and placed his hand on Omed's, covering it with the cool sea of his skin, the whirlpools of his knuckles. ‘So I will die here,' he said and swept his arms around him as if the tent walls were invisible and he was showing Omed the makeshift shops and the new mosque they were building from rough-sawn planks and dented ghee tins.

At night it was difficult to sleep. Radios droned; men hunched over them, ears cocked to music that soiled the air with noise. People walked round the camp, smoking and talking to themselves. Omed was scared of the night, because without the colour of day, his world tightened around him. First the dead would come to drink his breath and fill him with poison. Then, he would see his father, a bullet lodged between his shoulder blades, the flesh angry purple around the hole. Zakir's head sliced in two. His mother beaten, eyes hooded with bruises. Leyli, Wasim and Liaquat without food or laughter, fingers raking the soil for roots to boil in soup. The poplar trees were burning, withered corn trampled under boots. And again and again the Buddhas rained stones into the yellow streets.

At night, cold wind entered the tent and clawed at his blankets. Omed would ball up on his stretcher and shiver until the first wheat-stalks of dawn pushed themselves into camp. The days and nights were the same – stretching on like a thousand-acre desert.

And one day it all changed. Omed and the Poet were sitting, as they did often, in the sunshine, on a rock that sat flat on the ground like a gravestone. The Poet had chosen this rock for its view up and over the camp to the mountains far off in the distance. Beyond these mountains, beyond the Khyber Pass, lay Afghanistan.

Omed had taken to joining him in this silent watching, even though it achieved nothing but a stillness of mind that allowed thoughts to creep in like bandits. Occasionally, the Poet would speak, just one word and there it would sit like the very rock beneath them.

Ali was a simpleton. Some said he had always been this way; that he had been brought up among the dogs in his village. Others said that he had been created by the Taliban who had held him for a year when he was a boy, dressed him in silk and made him dance. Either way, it made him a vessel that was easily filled with other people's nonsense. Sometimes it was the mullahs' craziness about jihad and sometimes it was just wild gossip that Ali carted from tent to tent. No one took him seriously.

‘They have blown up America!' he shouted as he strode towards them.

The Poet turned his profile to watch Ali as he approached. His walk was an excited shuffle, a stumbling jog that made the torn hem of his kameez flap.

‘They have blown up America. God is great.'

The Poet spoke. ‘Who has blown up America? And what has it to do with God?'

‘The Arabs have done it. They have killed the enemy.'

‘Wait!' The Poet seemed angry. ‘What has been blown up? The Americans are not our enemy.'

‘The buildings are down. They have destroyed America by crashing planes. This is jihad. God is great!'

‘Silence, you foolish boy. God's work is not war.' He got up and stretched out his legs. ‘Come, Omed, we should go to the bazaar. They have a television there, we can see what is happening.'

They made their way to the main bazaar. The streets were alive with stories. Two planes had crashed into New York. America had fallen. And Ali's words burnt into them.
Allahu
Akbar! God is great!

The television set was in a filthy
chaikhana
. The Poet ordered a tin pot of
chay
and a dish of boiled sweets. They stood at the counter, crowded with the other men. There were two glass towers, black against the sky. Thick smoke belched from one. As they watched, a plane flew into view, banked, and was lost inside the building. Flame tore across the screen. The images of the plane crashing and the buildings burning, then falling were replayed again and again. Omed looked at the Poet. What did this mean? What was happening? He was used to war, the real war that had savaged his life for as long as he could remember. He knew what burning steel and lumps of stone could do to a living person, how much blood there would be, the terror and confusion of noise. He had grown up with the reality of war. But this was new for the Americans. It gave Omed a great sadness. People should not have to know these things.

The Poet was crying. The other men shook their heads at him, smirking behind their fists.
The old man is crazy
, they said.
He is soft. These people are far away. We do not know them.
Why should we cry for them? What have they done for us?

‘We should cry,' the Poet said. ‘Because if we don't we are not human.' He pointed to the screen where people were leaping from the burning buildings to their deaths.

The Punjabi
chaikhana
owner spoke up. ‘This is not a movie we are watching, brothers. This is war. The Americans will come looking for who did this. And if they cannot find him, they will take something else.'

‘What do you know of war?' shouted a small man on crutches.

‘What do I know?' the Punjabi shouted back. ‘I fought for Kashmir. You think Afghans are the only ones who know war. It is all around. And it is no good.' He spat on his own carpet.

‘No good,' repeated the Poet, pulling his cap over his eyes.

And the war did come looking for them. Again. They heard reports that the Americans had flown planes to the caves at Tora Bora and bombed the hills to powder; that they had marched on Kabul; that the the refugees had fled south to Pakistan, crossing the mountains as refugees had done since the Russian times. The camp grew until tent seams burst. Food became scarce and, as it got colder, people died.