Kiss the Dust Read online

  A week later she almost ran into a string of mules, with dozens of curiously shaped crates and bundles loaded on to their backs, being driven up a little-used track about half a mile away from the village. No one else was about. All the villagers were down in the fields further down the hillside. She slipped behind a clump of scrubby oak trees to watch without being seen. The two men driving the mules seemed to be unusually careful and nervous in case the mules slipped, or broke away from the path. They kept calling out warnings to each other in low voices, then one or other of them would dart forward to stop one of the mules’ slim hooves stumbling on a stone, and they’d catch it by the strap round its head and steady it.

  A day or two after she’d seen the mules, Tara was sitting in the courtyard trying to copy Teriska Khan, who was rolling up a tasty stuffing into vine leaves with flicks of her fingers. It looked easy but it wasn’t.

  ‘It’s no good! Mine just don’t come out right,’ Tara said in disgust, putting down a leaf that had torn itself in half.

  ‘It’s just a knack,’ Teriska Khan said. ‘Keep trying. You’ll get it.’

  Tara was the first to hear the drone of an aeroplane overhead. She looked up, wondering where it was coming from, but before she could say anything, Teriska Khan had jumped up, spilling the vine leaves off her lap, and grabbed Hero, who was swinging on a low branch of the tree in the corner of the courtyard.

  ‘Quick! Get inside!’ she yelled to Tara, running for the house. Tara jumped up and tried to follow, but she still wasn’t really used to her long flowing dress, and she tripped over her skirt and fell sprawling on the ground.

  The plane roared overhead. Tara covered her head with her hands and pressed herself into the dust. Seconds later the plane had gone and the sound began to die away. She looked up cautiously, half expecting another to hurtle past, but the sky was empty. Then she heard someone laughing behind her.

  ‘What’s the matter with you? Don’t tell me you’re scared! That was only a reconnaissance plane. The bombers come in much lower!’

  ‘Ashti!’ Tara scrambled to her feet. ‘What are you doing here? Where have you been all this time?’

  Ashti had a rifle slung over his shoulder. He slipped it off and held it by its strap, so that it dangled carelessly from his hand.

  Tara couldn’t take her eyes off him. He looked completely different. For one thing he seemed to have grown at least a couple of inches since she’d last seen him. He was sunburnt. He looked sort of harder, and more muscular, and years and years older. She felt a bit shy of him.

  ‘Military business, my dear,’ he said in a grand manner. He sounded like Uncle Rostam. ‘Not for the ears of little girls.’

  Even though he was her older brother and she was supposed to treat him with respect, Tara wasn’t going to stand for that. She nearly said something indignant, but then she stopped herself. She knew a better way to deal with Ashti. She shrugged, and turned round as if she was about to walk off.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ she said carelessly. ‘Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.’

  His sunburnt face cracked open into a grin, and he suddenly looked like the old Ashti again.

  ‘Well, if you must know, we’ve ambushed an ammunition convoy. It was fantastic! You should have seen Rostam. He took the most incredible risks. There’s no one like him. He’s a hero!’

  ‘You’ve captured a load of ammunition?’ said Tara, feeling as though the pieces of a jigsaw were falling into place. ‘When?’

  ‘Last week. Why?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I suppose they’re hiding it somewhere?’

  ‘Of course we are! But that’s not for you to know about. No one’s got any idea that we’ve got ammo stashed around here.’

  Tara smiled. Ashti had always been hopeless at keeping secrets. It was just like him to blurt it all out.

  ‘Are you sure nobody knows?’

  ‘Quite sure! And they’d better not find out! I shouldn’t have said anything to you, even though you’re only a girl. It’s absolutely top secret. If you talk about it, I’ll murder you. Even up here, there are government spies all over the place!’

  ‘Well,’ said Tara, feeling pleased with herself at having got it all out of him, ‘I don’t know about spies but there are vine leaves all over the place. I’d better pick them up and give them a good wash. We’re supposed to be having stuffed vine leaves for lunch but when Daya sees you I expect she’ll rush off and kill a chicken or something.’

  10

  Summer, 1984

  Spring turned into early summer so fast you could almost watch it happening. The blossom fell off the trees and each flower left behind a tiny green bubble that would soon start swelling up into a fruit. The water in the streams had been brimming up to the tops of their banks since the heavy winter rain, but now it was beginning to go down, and soon it would be back to its usual summer trickle. Haji Laqlaq, with a nestful of baby storks to feed, was hard at work from dawn to dusk, hunting for a constant supply of frogs and insects.

  Time didn’t seem to be passing very fast to Tara. She was lonely. She was beginning to feel sorry she’d been so hasty with Baji Rezan and the other village women. They’d got the message that she didn’t want to be friendly and they were quite happy to ignore her in return.

  Even Ghazal wasn’t all that welcoming any more. She said ‘Hello’ to Tara whenever she met her, but she didn’t stop for a chat, and Tara, feeling left out, would be almost envious as she watched Ghazal go off to the washing pool with her friends, holding Naman balanced on her hip.

  Tara would hear voices and bursts of laughter float up from behind the oleander trees and she’d wince, feeling sure they were talking about her and laughing at her.

  She felt worst in the afternoons when the women didn’t all go off to the fields. Sometimes they got together in one of their houses, usually Baji Rezan’s, and she’d let them persuade her to tell them stories as they sat doing their sewing. Tara didn’t feel welcome at these sessions, but she couldn’t help overhearing some of what went on. Baji Rezan’s voice was loud and rasping and it easily reached as far as Kak Soran’s house, only a few yards away.

  Baji Rezan always started with the traditional formula, which came out in a kind of sing-song rhythm.

  ‘When there was and there wasn’t, there was nothing but God,’ she’d chant, and then she was off. Her stories were the good old-fashioned Kurdish ones about princesses and dragons, magic, and heroes and heroines falling in love. Tara could tell she told them brilliantly because the women never seemed to want to leave, and stayed as late as they could so that they had to rush through cooking the supper. Tara never heard more than tantalizing snatches, and she tried to persuade herself that she didn’t care.

  Ashti and Kak Soran kept coming and going from the village. Sometimes they’d be away for days at a time. Sometimes they’d spend the evening talking with other men until late, and then roll themselves into their quilts to sleep with the rest of the family, but when Teriska Khan got up to open the shutters when it got light, Tara would see that they’d already gone.

  Once, Rostam came. He made a terrific stir. The men all crowded round to talk to him. It was easy to see how much they admired him. The women wouldn’t talk openly to him of course, but Tara knew, from the muffled gigglings and rustlings she could hear behind half-opened doors that most of them were having a good look. Rostam obviously enjoyed it all. He walked with a swagger, living up to his reputation as a fighter of fantastic daring.

  The next day he’d gone. He just disappeared silently in the night. Tara couldn’t help preening herself a little in front of Ghazal. She mightn’t be very popular in the village, but at least she had a national hero for an uncle.

  Even though everyone talked about the war all the time, life still had to go on as usual. It was the busiest time for the farmers. The vegetables were sprouting and had to be weeded and watered all the time. The summer wheat and barley had to be sown. There was quite a lot of damage caused by w
inter snows and frost to paths and irrigation channels and all that had to be repaired.

  Every now and then there’d be a bit of real news, reports of a bombing, or a pesh murga raid on a garrison of government troops, or stories of a government informer who’d been caught and shot. There were terrible accounts of whole towns turned to rubble and entire hillsides set on fire in government bombing raids. In spite of all the work that needed doing in the fields, the men would be away from home half the time, and the women would wait in agony to hear if they’d been wounded or killed.

  No one bothered to keep worrying news away from Tara now. It would have been silly to try anyway. Living more or less in one room as they were now, everyone always knew everything at once. It wasn’t like the big house in Sulaimaniya, where Daya and Baba had been able to be on their own whenever they wanted to.

  Tara could hardly take in the awful things everyone was talking about. The numbers of dead and the names of villages blown to pieces somehow didn’t mean anything. It was like listening to the radio or watching the news on TV. It all seemed to be happening to other people, a long way away. And it was hard to believe that they were in immediate danger when things seemed so normal, and everyone was busy with their ordinary springtime work.

  Perhaps that was why, when the bombers came, she was taken completely by surprise.

  It was late in the afternoon. The sun was already going down behind the mountains. Where it still shone, it made all the colours look brilliant and intense, but the shadows were getting longer so fast you could almost see them moving. Tara had gone up to the spring for a pot of water, and she was coming down the hill on her way home again when she heard the roar of aircraft. She looked up. There were four of them, wicked black darts shooting across the golden sky. They were flying so low they had to gain height to skim over the tops of the hills. They were already out of sight when Tara heard two distant thuds, that echoed from hillside to hillside. She looked across the valley. A spurt of smoke with an orange flame in the middle was shooting up from a village on the other side.

  Tara didn’t hang around to see if the bombers had found their target. She ran down the hillside, water from her full pot spilling down her dress. Teriska Khan was already at the gate of the courtyard looking out for her, holding Hero by the hand.

  ‘Quick!’ she said. ‘We’ve got to get to the cave!’

  ‘But they’ve gone,’ said Tara, putting her pot down.

  ‘They’ll be back,’ said Teriska Khan over her shoulder. ‘Follow me!’ And she started running down the track that led around the shoulder of the hill to a small cave, which went back quite a long way into the rock.

  They were only halfway there when the roar came again. This time the planes weren’t little black arrows on the far side of the valley but thundering, screaming pieces of machinery, hurtling directly overhead, and the falling bombs didn’t land with a distant crump, but with shattering explosions that filled the air with suffocating smoke and deadly flying debris.

  It was over so quickly that Tara hardly knew what had happened. When the first explosion came she felt something hit her on the back of the head. She was knocked over and must have blacked out for a moment or two, but she opened her eyes almost at once and tried to struggle back on to her feet. She could only just manage to sit up. Her legs seemed to have turned to water. People were rushing past her shouting to each other, pushing and shoving to get to the cave. Behind her, from the smoking village, she could hear injured people screaming. Daya and Hero had raced on. They were out of sight already. She had to follow them! She tried to stand up again, but she felt all muzzy and confused. Her legs just didn’t seem to be working, and for a moment she thought she was going to faint.

  Then she felt someone grabbing her arm and hauling her to her feet.

  ‘Come on, love,’ said a rasping voice. It was Baji Rezan.

  ‘It’s – it’s my head. I can’t walk,’ whispered Tara.

  Baji Rezan put her arm round her and half carried, half dragged her down the path. But they’d only managed to stagger a few yards when the terrifying roar came again. A single plane had got behind the main squadron. It skimmed over the nearest hilltop. The stream of people trying to run away were cruelly lit up by the very last rays of the sun. The pilot saw his chance and veered a little to drop his deadly load right on top of them. The plane was going so fast that most of the bombs went wide, but one landed a bit further down the path in front of Tara and Baji Rezan. All of a sudden there was nothing but a mass of dust and smoke hanging over the road where only a few seconds before there’d been a dozen or more people.

  Tara shut her eyes and fell against Baji Rezan, who practically lifted her up. But a minute or two later, Baji Rezan skidded on the path. Tara looked down. What she saw made her stomach heave and she was nearly sick. The ground was spattered with blood. She’d nearly tripped over something. She forced herself to look at it once, quickly, then she turned her eyes away. It was an arm with a pulpy raw stump lying by itself right in front of them.

  Tara felt everything start to go black again.

  ‘You go on,’ she managed to say. ‘I can’t move.’

  Baji Rezan didn’t say anything. She just grunted, grabbed Tara round the waist and heaved her up and over her shoulder as if she’d been a sack of grain.

  The blackness came and went for a few more minutes, then Baji Rezan put her down, and Tara found she could just about stand up in spite of the thundering pain in her head. She looked round. They were outside the cave.

  Tara had always thought that the cave was quite big. She’d been a little way into it before, but she’d never gone very far because she was afraid of snakes. Now she saw that it was actually quite small, much too small anyway to hold all the people who were trying to cram themselves into it.

  Tara would never have thought there were so many people in the village. There seemed to be hundreds, all shouting and pushing and trying to force their way in. She saw Teriska Khan wildly gesticulating to a woman who was already in the cave, asking her in sign language to get Hero in. The woman seemed to understand, and reached over people’s heads. Teriska Khan passed Hero in, and she disappeared into the crowd somewhere at the back of the cave.

  Tara didn’t even try to get herself in. There was no point. There’d be no room, and she hadn’t got any strength left to push. Anyway, it didn’t seem to matter any more. She couldn’t seem to understand what was going on. She just wanted not to faint. She sat down and put her head down between her knees. Her whole skull and neck felt battered. She put her hand up and gingerly felt around. It came away sticky with blood. She turned her head cautiously, looking for Daya. She couldn’t see her anywhere. There were too many scrambling, frantic people.

  Suddenly, overhead, the dreadful screaming roar came again. The bombers were back. The people outside the cave flinched away from the noise, huddling uselessly together on the ground.

  I’m going to die, thought Tara. I’m going to die now.

  All around she heard people screaming. The sound wasn’t even drowned out by the vicious roar of exploding bombs and the crackle and boom of what sounded like a million shells going off somewhere further down the hillside. After a while, she realized she was screaming herself.

  She stopped all of a sudden because the breath was knocked out of her. Baji Rezan had thrown herself on top of her, spreading her arms and body out like a mother hen covering up a chick. Her sharp knee dug into Tara’s thigh, and one of her buttons scratched Tara’s cheek.

  After what seemed like an hour but was actually less than a minute, Baji Rezan picked herself up.

  ‘Come on, get up,’ she said, sounding incredibly calm. ‘They’ve gone. They won’t come back today. They’ve got what they came for. Look.’

  She was pointing down the hillside. Tara looked. About half a mile away, a huge roaring fire was billowing up from the ground, explosions still shooting out from its centre. It was throwing rolls of flame and thick curls of choking black s
moke up into the sky.

  ‘There goes all the ammunition,’ said Baji Rezan. ‘I never thought they’d find it.’

  ‘Did you know about it?’ said Tara, surprised.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Baji Rezan. ‘What do you take me for?’

  Tara suddenly wanted to cry. She flung her arms round Baji Rezan’s sinewy neck and pressed her face into her shoulder. The sharp button scratched her again, but she didn’t care.

  ‘You saved me!’ she said unsteadily.

  Baji Rezan gave her a generous hug.

  ‘You’re a good girl,’ she said. ‘You’ll do all right.’

  ‘You’re like my Granny,’ Tara said, crying properly now. Baji Rezan stood up.

  ‘I must find Ghazal,’ she said.

  Tara tried to stop herself crying but found she couldn’t so she just let the sobs come and the tears roll down her cheeks. She was still sitting on the ground. People were running around her in all directions, shouting and yelling. Babies were screaming. Injured people were groaning. Some were still inside the cave in case the bombers came back, but some were already racing down to the stream for water to put out the fires that were getting a hold on village houses. No one even bothered to think about-trying to tackle the blazing ammunition dump. It was burning fiercely, and explosions were still going off in the middle of it. Its flames were lighting up the now almost dark hillside. The people scurrying up and down the path were silhouetted against its orange glare, and they looked like black insects.

  Tara was still dizzy. She was only vaguely aware of the commotion going on all round.

  ‘I’m alive,’ she said aloud.