Far From My Father’s House. Jill McGivering

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СКАЧАТЬ was lying twisted on one side. Her eyes were closed. Her cheekbones and chin protruded, sharp and angular under a thin coating of flesh.

      Britta lowered her voice. ‘As well as medical problems, we have also the trauma. Many of these people have seen terrible things.’

      ‘In the fighting?’

      ‘Of course. But also before it, in their lives under the Taliban. The violence and the terror.’

      The young woman’s legs were curled up into her body. Her fists made tight balls at her chin.

      ‘What can you do?’

      ‘Not so much.’ Britta stood for a moment, looking down at the young woman. ‘We simply don’t have the capacity.’ She seemed hollowed out, eaten by exhaustion. Ellen sensed eyes pulling at Britta from all around, a soft, relentless tug of need.

      ‘Is there somewhere we could go?’ Ellen nodded towards the back of the ward. ‘To talk.’

      At the end of the tent, a canvas flap covered an exit. Britta held it back and they passed through. The area beyond was partitioned by hessian walls into a series of small rooms the size of cells. The clicks and whirrs of the ward were muted.

      The first room had been converted into a makeshift office. A table in one corner was piled with files and papers and a battered laptop. The space around it was dominated by piles of roughly stacked cardboard boxes. Ellen moved inside to look at them. Each box was identified by a printed sheet of numbers and a barcode.

      She turned to ask Britta about them. A short, stocky woman in her thirties appeared right behind her, blocking the entrance. She was holding a metal basin in her hand and, like Britta, she wore a buttoned white coat. Her skin was dark and her hair completely covered by a neatly folded and pinned hijab. She stared at Ellen.

      ‘How can I be helping you?’ Her accent was clipped. Her eyes, a deep brown, were overshadowed by thick black eyebrows which almost met above her nose.

      ‘It’s OK, Fatima.’ Britta’s mild voice rose from behind her. ‘This is Ellen. She’s with me.’

      Fatima looked again at Ellen, opened her mouth as if to speak, then hesitated and closed it again. Ellen stepped forwards and offered her hand. Fatima’s fingers were stubby and strong.

      ‘I’ve just arrived,’ Ellen said. ‘I’m a journalist, with News-World.’

      ‘I am Fatima, chief nurse here.’

      Britta squashed between them into the small room. ‘My right-hand woman.’ She put her hand on Fatima’s shoulder. ‘Fatima is from Egypt. I am from Denmark. We are mini-United Nations here, isn’t it?’

      Fatima looked up at Britta, allowed herself a half-smile, then nodded to Ellen and turned on her heel, pushing past the canvas curtain back into the ward. Britta waited until the canvas had fallen back into place.

      ‘We are both a little nervous.’ She steered Ellen further forwards to the final cell at the end of the row. It too was partly filled with stacked boxes. Beyond them a stretcher was lying on top of a trestle. The stretcher bore the long, lumpen shape of a woman’s body which was loosely covered with a sheet. The sunlight, pressing in through the canvas, touched the surface of the cloth, giving it a luminous sheen.

      ‘We are only just here and already this is our fourth death. When you came, I was just filling the paperwork.’

      ‘I’m so sorry.’

      The stretcher was narrow. One arm had fallen free and hung loose down the side. The hand was slightly curled as if it were groping blindly for something even in death. The skin of the fingers was slightly yellowed, the fingernails ragged and etched with dirt.

      ‘What was the cause?’

      ‘Typhoid. Many of them came off the mountain with fever and diarrhoea. In cramped living conditions like this, typhoid spreads quickly. We have antibiotics,’ Britta sighed, ‘but sometimes it’s already too late.’

      ‘Are they being vaccinated?’

      ‘We try.’ She clasped her hands in front of her. ‘Hygiene conditions here are very bad. Water contamination will become worse soon, when the rains come.’

      Ellen stood for a moment, looking at the covered body. Britta turned and withdrew. Ellen followed her out through the back of the tent, blinking in the full glare of the sun. She adjusted her headscarf, tugging it forwards to shade her forehead and feeling the prick of sweat in her hair.

      Britta was standing quite still outside, her arms by her sides. She had turned away from the tent towards the mountains. Her shoulders were tight with tension. If she lets every death affect her like this, Ellen thought, she’ll drown.

      Ellen pulled a bottle of water from her bag and drank. The mountains in the distance were stark but beautiful, a row of teeth biting into the landscape. They seemed more dignified than the dirty mudflats in front of them which were already filling with tents and makeshift shelters. The air rang with the toc-toc-toc of men banging in stakes for tent ropes and sticks which could form a rough frame for stretched sheets of plastic. The dry air crackled with static. Soon the torrent of the monsoon would break. When it did, this whole basin would flood. Disease would spread quickly. Including typhoid.

      Britta turned to face Ellen. She wore a falsely cheerful smile. ‘Because of the Taliban, we couldn’t reach these people in the mountains. Now we can give vaccinations.’

      She paused and the smile faltered. She’s still young, Ellen thought. She needs to harden if she’s going to survive in a place like this.

      Britta tried again. ‘And maybe the girls can go back to school.’

      Ellen thought about the crowded ward and the exhausted new arrivals sitting patiently outside the gates, waiting for help.

      ‘At the moment,’ she said, ‘what are you short of?’

      Britta spread her hands. ‘For so many people?’ she said. ‘Everything.’

      Chapter 5

      After the day of the picnic, Baba and the Uncles didn’t let any of us, girls or women, leave the compound at all. Not even to go to school or to fetch water. The boys were ordered to take the pails instead. No one would tell me what was going on outside.

      Baba still went to teach at the school each day but when he came back, his face was drawn and his mouth hard and when I sat beside him with my school books and asked him questions, he looked past me into the empty air.

      In the evenings, all the women, young and old, were sent off to bed and the men dragged the low wooden charpoys across the yard and sat together, talking in low voices. I heard the scrape of matches and smelt bitter smoke as the men lit hand-rolled cigarettes. The tips glowed red in the darkness. A hunting bird out on the mountainside gave a low cry. Cicadas screeched in the grass. Somewhere, far away, a man’s voice spluttered and whistled on a badly tuned radio set.

      Before all this, I liked to listen to the men’s voices when they gathered to talk. Even when I lay on my cot away from the window, falling backwards into sleep, I could hear them as they made plans for the planting season or for harvest.

      But СКАЧАТЬ