Kiss the Dust Read online

  Quickly she opened her drawers and got out her jewellery, a couple of lovely silk scarves Leila had given her, and a make-up set she’d bought in Sulaimaniya a few weeks ago. Then she ran her finger along the backs of her schoolbooks. She’d leave English made Easy behind without any regrets at all, but she could hardly bear to look at the others. A few weeks ago, she’d wished like anything she wasn’t in the middle of exams. She’d thought she never wanted to sit another test again as long as she lived. But now that she really wasn’t going to, it all seemed quite different. She’d have given anything to have gone back to school with all the others tomorrow. The thought of no more homework, no more maths, no more Mrs Avan, no more history, and science and geography made her feel confused, almost light headed. She couldn’t imagine what she was going to do all day long.

  ‘Tara! Tara!’ Hero was calling.

  ‘In here!’ Tara shouted back.

  She heard Hero’s feet pattering down the corridor, then saw her face appear round the door.

  ‘What do you want?’ said Tara. The last thing she wanted was Hero pulling her things round at the moment.

  ‘I want . . .’ Hero said vaguely, not knowing how to answer.

  ‘Well, go and play with something,’ said Tara, turning her back.

  ‘I want a biscuit!’ said Hero triumphantly. ‘I want a biscuit, want a . . .’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Tara. ‘I’ll get you one.’ She followed Hero out of the room and down the corridor to the kitchen. She was opening the food cupboard when the doorbell rang.

  ‘There’s a man there,’ said Hero.

  ‘What? How do you know?’

  ‘He was there before.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I wanted a biscuit. You never said about the man.’

  ‘Quick,’ said Tara, grabbing a packet of biscuits and shoving it into Hero’s hand. ‘Go and watch your cartoon video.’

  The doorbell rang again.

  ‘Hurry up!’ said Tara desperately, giving Hero a little push. ‘Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck.’

  She shut the family sitting-room door and hurried towards the front door. Daya had said they wouldn’t come on a Friday. It might just be somebody ordinary. She tried to peer through the frosted glass panel in the front door. There were two tall dark shapes standing outside.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she called.

  A strange man’s voice answered.

  ‘Open up. I wish to speak to Mr Soran.’

  ‘He’s not here,’ said Tara. Her heart had begun to thump uncomfortably hard. This didn’t sound like a friend or a neighbour.

  ‘Where’s Mr Soran?’

  Tara found she could think wonderfully clearly and quickly. She remembered every word that Mr Mahmoud from Baba’s office had said.

  ‘He’s in Baghdad,’ she said, making her voice sound as normal as she possibly could.

  She heard the two men talking together in low voices.

  ‘Why hasn’t he taken his car?’

  ‘They’ve been snooping round the back,’ thought Tara. She could hear music coming from the sitting room. Hero’s cartoon was starting.

  Stay in there, please, Hero, she thought urgently. Aloud she said, ‘He’s getting a new car. He’s gone to Baghdad to fetch it. He’s sold our old one.’

  The men didn’t seem to hear.

  ‘Open the door!’ one said roughly. ‘We’ll wait for him inside.’

  ‘I – I can’t,’ said Tara, hoping she could still keep one jump ahead. ‘My mother’s taken the keys of the house with her.’

  ‘Where’s your mother? Why isn’t she at home?’

  ‘She’s gone into town.’

  ‘What’s her business in town?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think – I think she’s handing over the papers to the lawyer, something to do with the car.’

  She jumped back with a shock as one of the men loudly rattled on the door handle, trying to open it.

  ‘Locked,’ she heard him grunt. ‘The kid’s telling the truth. The woman was seen going into the lawyer’s house. Nothing we can do now but wait.’

  Tara watched their fuzzy shapes retreat out of the garden gate. She ran to a window and peeped out. A long sleek grey car was pulled up at the end of the road, under the shade of a tree. The two men walked down the road to it, and got in. Tara watched and waited but it didn’t drive away.

  The next half an hour until her mother came home seemed to last a century. Luckily, Teriska Khan came in the back way, out of sight of the waiting car. She went pale when Tara pointed it out to her. Together, they peered through the net curtains at it. It was a few hundred yards away, but they could clearly see a third man handing something into it from the outside. It looked like a tray of food.

  ‘That’s it then,’ said Teriska Khan. ‘My mother was right. I was an idiot not to leave yesterday. Go next door, Tara, and ask Mrs Amina if we can leave from the back entrance to Haji Feisal’s house. She knows we’re going today. She promised to do anything she could for us, and to look after the house and keep the keys until we . . . if ever . . .’ she didn’t finish her sentence.

  ‘But they’ll see me,’ said Tara.

  ‘Go over the garden wall, at that place where the oleander comes right down low, like you used to when you and Leila were little,’ said Teriska Khan. ‘Ask Leila to run out and find a taxi to come to the back gate, then come back and help me with the bags. Are they moving yet? No, look, they’re eating. Hurry up, Tara. And take Hero with you.’

  Tara felt as if every nerve in her body was tingling. She had never been so alive before. She ran into the sitting room. A new cartoon was just starting. Tara snapped the TV off. Hero let out a wail.

  ‘Please, not now,’ begged Tara. ‘No tantrums just now. You’ve just got to do what I say.’

  Hero looked up at her and kicked her feet defiantly. Tara made her voice sound as bright and enticing as she could.

  ‘I’ve got a treat for you.’

  Hero stopped kicking.

  ‘We’re going next door to see Auntie Amina. Leila’ll give you a cake, I expect.’

  ‘Leila!’ Hero jumped up, pleased.

  ‘And we’re going to climb over the wall.’

  ‘No, no! Not the wall! The gate!’

  ‘It’s all right, Hero, the dog’s chained up. He won’t bite you. Come on! Hurry!’

  Hero ran ahead to the back door, but then she darted round Tara and back to the sitting room again.

  ‘My rabbit!’ she said.

  ‘There’s no time for that! Quick!’ Tara’s voice dropped its coaxing tone. She was starting to feel panicky. She tried to catch Hero, but missed, and Hero dodged round and snatched up her blue floppy-eared rabbit from where she’d thrown it down on the sitting-room cushions.

  Tara bundled her out of the house, skirted round the wall of the garden to the shade of the oleander tree and lifted her up.

  Mrs Amina, Leila’s mother, was standing at her kitchen door. She took in the situation at once, took Hero out of Tara’s arms, and gave her a hand over the wall.

  ‘We need a taxi right now!’ panted Tara. ‘They’re down at the end of the street in a car. They’re eating, but they might be here any minute.’

  Leila came out of the house too.

  ‘You’ll never get a taxi at this time of day,’ she said.

  Tara dropped Hero’s hand. All her clear-headedness had drained away. She couldn’t think any more.

  ‘What’ll we do?’ she wailed.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ said Mrs Amina.

  ‘She’s getting the bags, locking up – I don’t know.’

  Mrs Amina ran to her kitchen window.

  ‘Quick, Tara, the car’s moving. It’s coming down the road. Call your mother to leave the bags and get over here at once. I’ll get your stuff to you later if I can. I’ll drive you myself. Quick!’

  Tara raced back to the wall. Teriska Khan was at the back door, fussing over a bag. Tara called t
o catch her attention. Teriska Khan looked up. Tara mimed the men in the car, coming down the road. Teriska Khan pulled the door shut behind her, turned the key, picked up the two biggest bags and raced to the oleander tree. Then she ran back for the others.

  ‘Leave them! Leave them, Daya!’ hissed Tara. ‘They’ll get you!’

  As Teriska Khan reached the shade of the oleander, she started at the sound of a car door slamming outside the front gate of the house. Tara leaned over, took the bags from her one by one, and lifted them over the wall. Her hands were so sweaty she nearly couldn’t hold on to the handles.

  ‘Leave them, Daya, never mind the bags! Just climb!’ she whispered.

  ‘Can’t,’ panted Teriska Khan. ‘If we leave them here they’ll know Mrs Amina helped us. There’s the samovar. I can’t leave that behind! Take my hand, Tara, quick!’

  She scrambled over the wall and dropped down panting on the other side. Mrs Amina had already run to the car with the first load of bags. Tara and Leila raced to the carport with the others. Teriska Khan scooped up Hero, and jumped into the car.

  Luckily, Leila’s father, Haji Feisal usually parked his car round the back of the house and drove it out into a side street, which was out of sight of the road at the front of Kak Soran’s house. Mrs Amina jumped into the driver’s seat, switched on the engine, and clashed into first gear. The car jerked forwards and the passengers were flung backwards, as the car bolted out into the street.

  ‘Goodbye, Leila,’ Tara mouthed through the window, but she only had time to catch a last glimpse of Leila as the car gathered speed. She craned her neck round but all she could see was the white garden wall of her old home, the pretty round arch over the gateway smothered with clusters of scarlet bougainvillea, dazzlingly bright in the strong sunlight.

  ‘I didn’t know you could drive,’ said Teriska Khan, shutting her eyes as Mrs Amina swerved round the corner so wide she nearly knocked over the old fruit seller, who was squatting as usual by the side of the road.

  ‘I’ve had four lessons so far,’ said Mrs Amina through clenched teeth.

  ‘Daya! What about Granny?’ said Tara suddenly.

  ‘She’s going on to Uncle Dilshad’s after Friday prayer,’ said Teriska Khan. ‘She said she’d phone before she tried to come back to the house. She thought we might have to go in a hurry.’

  ‘But I didn’t say goodbye to her!’ said Tara miserably.

  Teriska Khan didn’t answer. She was too busy clutching at the side of her seat as Mrs Amina swung across the road to avoid a truck, which was bearing down on them, hooting fiercely.

  ‘Can you drop us at the bus station?’ she said faintly. ‘We’ll get a taxi there.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Mrs Amina, turning to look at Teriska Khan for so long that Teriska Khan had to restrain herself from grabbing hold of the steering wheel.

  ‘Now, don’t look so worried, my dear. I’ll keep an eye on the house and everything for you. It’ll all be safe with me.’

  8

  It was three or four years since Tara had come to the mountains, and she’d never been there in the springtime before. They’d often come before the war, when she was little. In the summer holidays, when it got so blisteringly hot in Sulaimaniya that the tarmac melted on the road, Kak Soran would pile the whole of his family into the car and drive them up to the old house he still owned in the village, where his grandfather had been born.

  Tara loved these holidays. She was vaguely related to half the village children, and they all used to play together. They’d spent hours squatting on the ground, making wonderful walls and ditches in the mud, and they’d scrambled around and outside the village wherever they liked, through the close-packed lanes, in and out of each other’s houses which were stacked up in tiers against the hillside, and over the rough, rocky terrain outside keeping an eye open for scorpions.

  Mrs Amina dropped them on the edge of Sulaimaniya, quickly said goodbye, and jumped back into the driving seat with understandable relief.

  Teriska Khan coughed to clear the lump in her throat.

  ‘I never thought she was so fond of us,’ she said, closing her eyes to avoid witnessing Mrs Amina being crushed to death in what seemed like an inevitable collision with a bus. ‘She’s taken an awful risk.’ She opened her eyes. Mrs Amina had miraculously scraped past the bus and was disappearing down the road in a burst of exhaust fumes.

  ‘So did we when we got into her car,’ said Tara. ‘Did you see the way she took that last corner?’

  ‘Don’t be ungrateful, darling,’ said Teriska Khan, signalling to a hovering taxi driver. ‘She probably saved our lives.’

  The journey took hours and hours but Tara enjoyed it all the same. She kept remembering things. That was the bend in the road where they’d once had a puncture. It had taken ages to fix. And over there they often used to stop for a picnic. She and Ashti had found a couple of baby tortoises once, just beyond those rocks.

  But at the same time, as the taxi ground its way up and round the tortuous winding road, she knew in the back of her mind that something awful was happening. They were leaving home. They might never be able to go back again. She might have seen Leila and all her friends for the last time. The problem was, she couldn’t really believe it. The taxi and the road and Daya and Hero all seemed too ordinary, too familiar.

  In one way though it wasn’t familiar. The countryside looked much nicer in the spring than in the summer, when she was used to seeing it. The high peaks were still white with snow, but the fields on the lower slopes, which by July were always bare and brown and dusty, were covered with fresh green growth at this time of year. In the valleys, the streams were full of clear clean water, and there were orchards of almond and apricot trees covered with beautiful clouds of blossom. When they passed a flock of sheep, herded by a couple of elderly turbaned Kurds, Tara could see dozens of leggy, woolly lambs.

  This is it, what it’s all about. Kurdistan, she thought. She’d only been a kid when she’d been here before. She’d never even noticed how beautiful it all was.

  Would I die for Kurdistan, like that boy? she thought, and shivered.

  ‘Look at that blossom, Daya,’ she said, to break the silence.

  Teriska Khan only grunted. She was hugging her samovar, too anxious to talk, in case they might be held up at a police checkpoint. By the time she’d looked in the direction of the blossom, she couldn’t have seen much anyway through the dancing fringe of blue pompoms that the taxi driver had fixed above the windscreen.

  It was lovely arriving at the old village house, almost like the first night of a childhood holiday. They got there just as the sun was disappearing below a high snow-capped peak. The road didn’t go up as far as the village and they had to walk the last few hundred yards to the closely packed, flat-roofed houses which clung to the steep hillside. They were standing where the taxi had dropped them, wondering how they could carry all their bags and bundles, when Hero suddenly yelled,

  ‘Baba! It’s my Baba!’

  Tara looked up. A man was running down the hillside to meet them. It took Tara a moment to recognize him. He was wearing baggy striped trousers, a huge cummerbund and a loose-sleeved shirt, and had a turban tied round his head. It was Kak Soran all right but he looked younger and fitter than he did in his usual western-style suit.

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ said Teriska Khan. She sat down on a suitcase for a moment, and Tara thought she must be feeling funny, but a minute later she got up, took a bundle in one arm and a bag in the other, and started up the winding path.

  Tara went after her, sniffing the air. She’d forgotten this lovely fresh mountain smell, mixed with a homely whiff of woodsmoke from the evening fires on which everyone’s suppers were being cooked.

  She’d forgotten the sounds of the mountains too. The air was so clear you could hear the smallest noise for miles. Even from this distance she could hear people talking and laughing in their houses in the village, and the clinking of pots and pans. At ho
me, sounds like that were buried under a general sludgy noise of traffic, and machinery, and the humming of things like air-conditioning. Here, the only mechanical sound was the drone of the taxi, disappearing into the distance.

  Hero was running ahead up the rough stony path, holding her rabbit by one leg, but she suddenly stopped and screeched with fright. A huge white bird with long red dangling legs was flapping over her head. Tara laughed.

  ‘It’s a stork,’ she said. ‘Look, he’s got a nest on that roof over there.’

  The stork landed awkwardly on its nest, settled itself down, then laid its neck along its back, lifted up its long beak and clacked it open and shut with a deafening clatter. Hero grabbed hold of Tara’s leg and clung to it as if she was a baby monkey.

  ‘He’s only old Haji Laqlaq,’ said Tara impatiently, taking her hand and pulling her along. ‘He’s a Haji because he flies off to Mecca every summer, and Laqlaq because of the noise he makes. Come on, don’t be silly! Look, Baba’s waiting for you!’

  Tara had always loved night-time in the village house. There wasn’t a separate bedroom. At bedtime they had to drag out the thick quilts and solidly stuffed pillows that were piled up against the wall and lay them out on the beaten earth floor. The whole family slept together, in a row.

  Tara used to lie looking up at the bare wooden rafters that supported the roof, and count the knots in the gnarled old wood till Baba put the oil lamp out, and then usually the fresh mountain air, and the way she’d been running about all day made her so sleepy, that she’d turn her head over on the bright print pillow and fall asleep at once.

  But tonight she lay awake for a long time, listening to the sounds outside. An owl hooted in the old walnut tree outside the courtyard. A dog barked at the other end of the village. Somewhere, miles up the cold air, an aeroplane was buzzing.

  It wasn’t the sounds that were keeping her awake though. She couldn’t get out of her mind the sight of Leila, standing at the gate where they’d always met on the way to school. Then, when Leila faded, all she could see was the scarlet bougainvillea against the white garden wall, with the sun blazing on it. The sinister grey car and the two shadowy men were lurking somewhere at the edge of her mind, but they seemed to belong to a dream world, or a film she’d once seen long ago. She could hardly believe all that had happened.