Again and again the pain plunged him into oblivion and a fresh burst of gunfire pulled him out. Then there was silence, and he waited for the darkness to claim him but there was only fire racing along his face, licking deep into his eye-socket. An ant climbed a blade of grass and his laboured breath blew it off in the direction of the stream, a few feet away, unreachable; the sun that made the fire burn more fiercely on his face turned playful as it dipped into the balm of the water. I will die here, Qayyum thought, and waited for Allah or his family or the mountains of Peshawar to take hold of his heart. But there was only the fire, and the blood drowning his eye and the stench of dead men. Was he the only man alive, or were there others like him who knew the gunners would find them if they twitched a limb?
Perhaps he was dead already, and this was hell. The eternal fires, yes. It must have happened just as they ascended the slopes — the Germans were right on the other side of it, just over the crest of the hill. But the first round of bullets must have killed him and flung him into this devil-made world in which men had to run across a field without cover, stumbling over the corpses of their brothers, and when the tattered remnants of one division reached the enemy lines on the slope across the field, a yellow mist entered their bodies and made them fall, foam at their mouths. Cover your nose and mouth, the order came, swift and useless; if they’d had their turbans they would have wound them around their faces but there were only the balaclavas. Qayyum remembered the handkerchief in his pocket, the one Captain Dalmohy had instructed him to dip into the buckets of liquid they passed, and he held it up against his face even as he watched the breeze move the yellow mist eastward. So this wasn’t hell. The mist would have leapt into his lungs if it were.
The emerald green of the grass turned to pine green; the sun sank entirely into the water. His hand had gone to sleep but he was afraid to shake it awake even though the numbness was moving up his arm. There had been a sepoy sitting upright in the field as men advanced around him, one arm ending at the wrist. Qayyum picked up the severed hand he’d almost trodden on, and passed it to the man who thanked him, very politely, and tried to join the hand in place. I think there’s a piece missing. Can you look? he said, and died. Qayyum had forgotten this, though it had happened only hours earlier.
Qayyum tried to pray, but the Merciful, the Beneficent, had abandoned this field and the men within it. Something was moving along the ground, a heavy weight; a starving animal, wolf or jackal, with its belly pressed against the ground, smelling meat; a German with a knife between his teeth. Grass flattened, the thing entered the space between Qayyum and the stream. Any movement was pain, any movement was target practice to the gunners. And then a whisper, his name.
— Kalam, stay there. They’ll shoot you.
— Lance-Naik, sir. Shut up.
One afternoon in the Street of Money Changers, Qayyum and his brother Najeeb had stumbled on an object in the road — a dead rabbit with its lips sewn together, foam at its mouth. A man walked past a hundred cruelties in Peshawar every day, and nothing about the rabbit made him slow his stride, but Najeeb knelt on the street and carefully cut away the thread, the animal’s fur-and-mud-caked head in his palm. When Qayyum put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, Najeeb looked up and asked, Do you think its family was near by and it tried to call out to them? As if that were the real reason for distress, not the needle lancing the animal’s lips, the hand which would have stopped the breath at its nose. Oh Allah, the cruelty of the world. How had Najeeb known this terror, this loneliness of dying alone? Kalam’s hand clasped his ankle and he felt tears dislodge the blood in his eye, which he couldn’t touch without feeling as if he was wiping off his whole face.
— Don’t leave me.
— Brainless Pashtun, do you think I came all this way just to smell your socks?
Time had never moved more slowly than in those minutes — or was it hours? — in which Kalam inched himself along the ground until his face was level with Qayyum’s, and he could see what the fire had done.
— Tell me. How bad is it?
— Don’t worry, Yousuf, all Zuleikhas will still want to seduce you and so will the Potiphars.
— Kalam, don’t joke.
— It’s this or tears. Just be patient, we’ll retreat when it’s dark.
— The sun has gone.
— My friend, you’ve forgotten the moon, large and white as your Frenchwoman’s breast and climbing through the sky. Still a few more hours. But I’m here, don’t worry. Your Kalam is here.
The end of his sentence disappeared in gunfire. Qayyum’s body jerked in anticipation of the bullets that would rip through him, but Kalam had a hand on his chest, telling him to hold still, the gunners were aiming at something else. You stay still too, Qayyum said, but Kalam braced on his elbows and used them as a pivot for his arms, the rest of his body motionless as — again and again — he lowered his palms into the stream and slowly, hardly spilling a drop, brought them to Qayyum’s parched mouth, washed the blood from his face and tried to clean the mess that was his eye. With the stink of blood all around, the only light in the world came from those cupped palms, the shifting water within them.
May — June 1915
— I’m sorry, no, it won’t recover like a knife-cut on your arm. We must remove it.
The Indian doctor stepped back and switched off a torch which Qayyum didn’t realise he’d been holding. When the doctor patted his shoulder and moved to the next bed, the white-skinned woman, grey-haired, and with lines all around her mouth, stayed to replace his bandages, her touch impersonal in a way he’d never imagined a woman’s touch could be. Where was it they had brought him? Brighton, they said, but all he knew of it was the pebbled beach, the damp smell of the ambulance, and then this place, this page out of a book of djinn stories into which they’d carried him. Everything ever seen or imagined painted upon its walls, its ceilings — dragons and trees and birds and men from Tashkent or Farghana like those in the Street of Storytellers. Such colour, such richness. More than a single eye could hold. He was floating above it all, beside the gilded dragons on the leather canopy of the ceiling. England had made the pain stop. But the woman was speaking to him, he must return to the bed to hear what she was saying.
— We’ll fit you up with a glass eye, and you’ll be breaking hearts again in no time.
— I don’t want to break hearts.
— Oh, love.
He didn’t know why she looked at him in that way, or what a woman was doing among all these men but when she said ‘love’ in that sad tone of voice he understood, even through the glow of painlessness, that he was maimed now, a partial man, and from here on he would never be admired, only pitied.
He used to be a man who climbed trees just to see the view from the top, one who entered a new city and sought out its densest alleys, a man who strode towards clamour. Now he couldn’t think of a branch without imagining the tip of it entering his remaining eye. Everything everywhere was a threat. Every branch, every ball arcing through the air, every gust of wind, every sharp sound, every darkened room, every night, every day. The elbows of a woman; her sudden movements towards him in desire; her hands searching his face for those expressions that only revealed themselves in the dark. He traced the skin around his bandaged eye. Who was he now, this man who saw proximity as danger?
A warning, brother, if you see me walking through the streets, stay far from me. What I want I will have — women or men, wine or gold. A blade through the heart of anyone who tries to stop me. This is how it is when a man walks into hell and survives it. When you return to Peshawar, tell my father he was right. I should have stayed in the orchards.