The Ink Bridge (4 page)

‘But I am good man. You have heard this, no?'

Omed nodded.
Of course
. Anything.

‘And because of this I will do a very big favour. I know one man. He is smuggler but he will be leave tonight from Kabul road. You must meet him and give to him this.' Abu the Turk went to a tin on a shelf and pulled a slip of paper from it. On the paper was printed a small inked picture of an animal he had never seen before, like a long-tailed goat walking on its hind legs. Omed pushed it deep into his pocket and got up to leave. Abu the Turk caught him by the sleeve of his jacket.

‘Many have left, boy, but who has returned? Think on this. Maybe death is better.'

Omed shook off the man's hand and opened the door.

‘By the old Russian tank, Kabul road,' Abu called after him.

‘They call me the Snake,' he said, shining his torch up to his misshapen head. ‘Because of this.' He slipped his tongue from between his lips. It was blue and forked at the tip. There was a strong smell on his clothes that Omed recognised as opium smoke. His father had warned him of these men who slept in a cracked shell of a house, smoking poppy paste in turns from a sheet of foil. Of course it had made him want to see it for himself.

Once he had gone there with Zakir, and together they had squinted through the boarded windows into the dim room. There were three men inside. One was lying on a cot and groaning, the frame of his body bent at wrong angles, his tongue pushing at his lips. Another smiled like an idiot at the ceiling. But the third man, he looked directly at them.

‘Come inside, little brothers,' he wheezed, beckoning with a fistful of sticks. They had run. But Omed remembered the smell.

One of the Snake's pupils was tiny, no bigger than a poppy seed, the other as large and dark as a pomegranate's. He showed Omed the short-bladed knife tucked into his belt and the blunt-snouted handgun in his coat pocket.

‘To stop bad men,' he said, patting it. As he laughed, his forked tongue sprayed spittle.

He led Omed to a truck parked behind the abandoned tank. The moon was like a
naan
ripped in half and in its light Omed could see the tray, framed with crooked wood and covered with a dirty sheet, patched and torn in places. Through the open mouth under this frame, the red glow of a cigarette burned.

‘Don't be afraid,' the Snake said, pushing him towards the truck. ‘This way to freedom.'

He laughed again. A hand reached down and grabbed Omed's. It pulled him off the ground and into the truck. Then, without notice, the engine growled into life and the truck jerked forwards. The far off lights of Bamiyan shrank to pinpricks and were swallowed by the night. It was as if the stars themselves had been snuffed.

Omed's nose stung with cold. He wanted to sleep, but the road was rough and the wooden bench grew harder and harder. The faces of the people next to him were swathed in shadow but he could hear them talking, whispering as if they were being listened to.

After an hour, the truck groaned to a halt and the Snake got out. Omed pushed the cloth aside. He could see the outline of Shahr-e Zohak — the City of the Serpent-head King. Suddenly, a bearded face loomed up from the shadows. The tip of a Kalashnikov pressed against the bridge of Omed's nose. He closed his eyes and pictured his table at home, the chipped cups and yellow glow of the lamp. He pictured the Buddhas, the faltering sway of the poplars, he could taste Anwar's bread in his mouth and hear the sighing breath of Wasim asleep in their room; then his shouting,
I
HATE
you!
, Zakir's torn body, his father's blood, the slain Dragon. He pictured his mother crying over his memory. She would never view the body. It would be dumped in the river like a donkey's carcass.

He opened his eyes and looked into those of his executioner. The man stared back and spat at the ground. Then the Snake came to the back of the truck and tucked a fat roll of money under the gunman's rifle strap. The man turned away.

They drove on. No one spoke. Not even a whisper.

They reached Kabul as morning came. The air was filled with dust and smoke and the sound of the muezzin, calling the faithful. They kept on driving, forgotten by God.

Kabul was full of broken buildings and rubbish. Dazed goats stumbled around the streets, chewing on plastic bags. Sewage flowed from houses and onto the streets. Flies hummed into the truck, drunk on human waste, and crawled in noses and mouths. People moved as though they were in a dream, carrying dirty water, suitcases, plastic limbs, guns. Omed saw a dog with three legs being axed to death by a boy, and piles of books on fire. Open jeeps roared past with Talib, beards, rifles, cuts for eyes. The Dragon's groan could be heard under toppled slabs of concrete, in the call of rifle fire, his pain could be seen on the twisted face of a mother cradling her broken child. The Dragon was dying and only in its death throes could it atone for its violence and stupidity.

The truck bumped through the streets of Kabul, stopping only once more for the payment of bribes. It was night again when it reached the border of Pakistan.

The Snake ordered everyone from the truck. Omed could see the checkpoint ahead – a faint glow with the shadows of trucks and buses moving past like ghost ships.

‘You must go through alone,' hissed the Snake. ‘I will meet you on the other side.'

There were over twenty men, women and children standing in the dark and no one said a word. Everyone watched like sheep as he jumped into his truck.

But Omed was not going to be left alone on the road. He ran back and, pulling the door open, grabbed the Snake's arm. The Snake went for his knife with his other hand. In the dull glow of the cabin's light Omed could see the Snake snarl, his front teeth rotten and black.

‘Freedom is that way,' he said and pointed to the border with his blade. He leant forward and pushed Omed out of the cab and into the dirt.

Omed had nothing. He crossed into Pakistan with only the clothes on his back.

THE CANVAS OF OMED'S TENT flapped. The winds were getting cooler, a sign that winter approached. When he had first arrived, it was summer and Omed had never known such heat. In Bamiyan the summers kissed the back of your hand. In Pakistan the sun roared and bit.

Out of the door, he could see the dust-riddled camp coming to life. He didn't know if he had the energy to get out of bed. Today would be the same as yesterday – a series of watery meals and then the waiting. For what, he did not know.

He was between worlds – without family, without money to move towards freedom, without the promise of safety to return to. His life had been cut in two and he was caught in the chasm the sword had made down the Dragon's back.

He rolled over and saw the old man in the next bed staring at him. He was called the Poet of Kandahar.

The old man's skin was yellow and thin, like the best parchment. His hair was white and he had a fine, curved nose. A pair of hands were gathered at the top of his blanket like two birds – the veins and blotches written in some old, lost language.

There were calluses on his thumb and forefinger and often he would quote poetry, snatching from the sky phrases in fine Persian. The Poet's words could fold like smoke in the air between them. Omed would close his eyes and try to block them out, but they were so beautiful that they fell like drifts of leaves inside him.

Others had learnt to keep their distance from Omed. They thought he was mad, with a ripped scar of a tongue and his wild eyes. Omed was glad of the silence. Words were at the heart of his misfortune. They had killed his father.

Omed's father had been a scribe. He had typed English words for villagers, filling in forms and writing letters for those with far-off family. The work had grown less and less and then finally, like an old well, it had dried completely.

His old black typewriter was missing the letter ‘e' and the words were chopped in strange places so that for years Omed would think of English as a language with many gaps. At times he could still picture his father crouched over that machine with its clicks like the noise of scissors slicing the air, or a cricket's song as he pulled the paper free. Those papers swarmed with letters, lines of ants, nose to tail, left to right. The gapped words he would come to later, handwriting ‘e' after ‘e' until the code was complete.

Copies, he would make with carbon paper, coated on one side with ink. Omed would often come across his blue fingerprints on teacups or on the corners of a book. In these smudges, he had lived in their home long after he died.

His father had believed in words, in their power to heal. He was working on a translation of local legends, and of poems and songs. Their lives had been busy with the strange mutterings of English stories, Persian and Greek legends. Odysseus did battle with the Cyclops between the evening meal and the creaking silence of bedtime. Winnie the Pooh lived in the Hundred Acre Wood, but also in the dusty mountains and landmined fields, and beneath the cupped wood of the kitchen table. As he sipped tea from a flowered cup, his elbows resting in the hollows that had formed there, he would tell of Majnun and his love for the fair Leyli that ended in madness and despair.

That low table had been a place of magic and Omed would lie beneath it and imagine himself in those storybook lands. With his eyes shut, the characters would leap about.

When he was six, he had smuggled their kitchen knife under the table and carved his name up on the sky of his storybook world:
Omed
, in fine Dari script and then in English.

When the Taliban arrived they had told his father that the Qur'an was the only book that was needed. Sharia was the only law and it was swift and merciless. Amputations, stonings, beatings, executions.

His father had been a writer, a thinker of dangerous thoughts. But who would imagine that a thought, that stories or words, could be so dangerous they would get you killed. Omed understood it was his words, raging and rebellious, that had angered the Taliban more than his punches and kicks.