She leans close to kiss her daughter's forehead. “That is only the beginning of the story.”
The girl in the hospital bed nodded. “I would like to hear the end.”
“You need your rest. The doctor said that you-”
“Oh, please mother! Please don't stop!” the girl tried to sit up, something like real alarm flashing in her eyes. The little girl, sickly and pale. Dying. “Please tell me the rest of the story.”
* * *
“What is the matter, Grandmother? Why are you crying?”
“Forgive me. I was thinking about my daughter.”
“Ahlem?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to her?”
“She was very sick.”
“And she died.”
“Yes.”
“You must miss her.”
“Every day I miss her.”
“How old was she?”
“She was your age, when she died.”
“I think about dying sometimes. What it would be like. Do you know...?”
“I do not know. No one really knows. But I do not fear it any more.”
“I'm very afraid, Grandma.”
“There is nothing to fear in death, child. Death is an end to fear, to grief. It is only for those left behind to fear. And to grieve. In death there is no pain. It is only the leaving of the body. We must all abandon these shells one day.”
“But I'm not ready, Grandma.”
* * *
The old woman is asleep beside you. Her cheek rests on your shoulder. The rubber lip of the window is growing a black mold. The windows are laced with iron. Like prison windows.
The coat wrapped around you shifted sometime in the night. Your bare legs hang out over the edge of the seat, dangling and cold and exposed.
The sharp-featured guard is staring at you. His mouth is curled in a gruesome smile. He leans against the seat across the aisle, and he watches you. He watches all of you. Good morning little girl.
You blush and you pull on your damp clothing. Shame and fear and a cold skirt. You won't look at him. If you ignore him then he will disappear, he will go up in a puff of smoke. You pull on your shirt and the wet cloth tangles about your head. For a moment you are blind and you are sure that he will step closer and touch you, touch your bare skin. You wriggle the shirt down in a panic and when you push your head through the hole there is nobody standing there in the aisle. You are alone.
The air in the train car is cool, like the inside of an underground cavern. Way down, far below the earth. You are so very cold.
The sun oozes across the sky. Faint heat is coming through the glass. You press your nose to the window and ache for summer. The golden fields shimmer in a rising light. Old red barns like picture postcards standing against a blue sky.
The train stops for water at a lonely filling station. The silver tower glistens. Steam rises in pale white clouds.
The fear lapses to a dreadful boredom. People are trying to stretch their legs and their sore backs. They wander occasionally from seat to seat. The guards seem not to care any longer; they watch with bemused indifference. The prisoners ponder escape openly. You realize that if they thought there was any chance of success then they would whisper, and your fear returns.
The train is still taking on water when they bring you food. A thin gruel and a hunk of bread to sop it up with. Somehow you did not realized until now how hungry you are. It has been almost a whole day since you last ate.
You always ate well at the school. Breakfasts of sausage and eggs – real eggs fresh from the hen-house. Coffee sometimes. Those luxuries became harder and harder to come by as time passed, and you felt guilty every time you sat down at that table and knew that your parents were living on scraps and emergency rations. Not guilty enough to refuse the food though. Never that guilty. You ate with the other girls, listening to their chatting and gossiping. Their laughing. As though nothing was wrong.
The other students never seemed to like you; they avoided sitting next to you. None of them looked like you; they were all pale as lace, their hair long and straight. The way they looked at you made you feel dirty. Dark skin, dark hair. Nobody ever said anything, just looked. Whenever something bad happened, something stolen or broken, the teachers would always ask you about it first. They expected it to be you. There was only one girl who treated you almost like a friend. Her with her messy brown hair and white skin and green eyes. She explained it to you one day, like it was the most obvious thing in the world: you are not as good as we are, you don't deserve to be here with us. She said it with no malice, as though stating an obvious and commonly known fact.
You try picking the weevils out of your bread, but this proves to be impossible. You can feel them wriggling in your mouth as you chew. You start to throw up, but you are so hungry that you swallow it back down. You force yourself to eat every last crumb and dribble. You feel more hungry when you finish eating than you did when you started. You wonder how long it will be before you are fed again.
Fed. That word. Fed. Chilling word. You are already starting to think of yourself as an animal, a piece of luggage. You decide to get up and move about the train car. Anything to feel like you are still living. Still thinking for yourself. You wander from seat to seat; there are many empty seats still. The train car is about ten feet wide and fifty feet long, you think. Nobody pays you any attention.
The two old men are talking about likely troop deployments. They seem to think that if the enemy breaks through then they will liberate all of the people on the train. You find this hard to understand. You think: but the enemy will kill us! You've seen the posters, the grotesque faces leering down from every wall. Those are an inhuman people, cruel and savage monsters with pointed teeth and wicked long fingernails and beaded eyes. The enemy will kill us all.
But you are the outsider now. You wonder if there are new posters up already with ugly pictures of people like you, people like your parents. The -- will kill us all, they might say. That word.
The man Jamil with the broken mouth is speaking to his companion. He tells her to be brave, be strong. He says her name, Mahrukh. He tells her that he loves her.
She sees you. Her face lights up. “The little girl,” she says, “the little girl is safe!”
Jamil says, “Are you well, child?”
You tell him that you are hungry.
“Here,” the man, “take the rest of my bread. I'm full anyway.” The woman gazes at him, her eyes full of love.
You wander away down the car, gnawing on your crust. There are many unfamiliar faces.
You see a man with a thick black beard who stops talking as soon as he see you and says that you would be safer if you were sitting down.
You see a woman with sharp and defiant eyes who has taken off her shawl and stretched it between her knees. She is writing on it with a little pencil. The words are very faint on the cream-colored cloth. You ask her what she is writing, and she says that it is a poem.
“What's it about?” you ask. You knew a few girls at school who wrote poetry. Treacly stuff about getting married to soldiers, mostly. There was one, though, a pale girl named Jocelyn who wrote the most beautiful sonnets. About ivy climbing the stone walls of the empty stables, about a man coming home from the front lines with one of his arms blown off. The teachers called it ghoulish and unpatriotic and forbade Jocelyn from sharing it with anyone. You always wished that you could make something like that.
The woman looks at you. “It's about this train,” she says.
“Will you read it to me?”
She hesitates, clutching the shawl to herself. “Ask me again tonight, child. I'll read it when it's done, alright?”
“Okay.” But you do not leave.
The woman studies your face. Her fingers curl tight into the shawl. The pencil trembles in her fingers. She puts it in her mouth and it trembles there as well. She takes it out and asks if you would like to hear the first lines of her poem at least.
You tell her that you would like that very much.
She clears her throat and reads. Two lines, the words spare and cold and without love.
You're confused by it. Isn't poetry supposed to rhyme? Isn't it supposed to be beautiful? The woman sees your expression and blushes a little. “Well, I'm still working on it,” she says. You tell her that you like it very much and she smiles. She has such a pretty smile. She reminds you of your brother who always smiled such a bright smile.
There comes a ferocious whistling. The train churns back into motion, pulling back down the track and leaving the water-tower behind. You press yourself against the window, your knees up on the seat, and you look back. The tower stands against the sky, all alone like a silver island in oceans of golden grass.
You remember running with your brother in fields like that. The two of you together at your uncle's house in the country, your aunt dead six days past. We have come to help, your mother says. God takes care of me now, your uncle says, smiling a sad smile. Your brother runs through the fields and you laugh and you scream with joy and you catch bugs and butterflies and scatter the heads of dandelions. To be in the virgin world. You collapse together into the golden grass and he takes your hand and says that he loves you. We will be best friends forever, he says. You ask him what it means that auntie is dead and he smiles and shakes his head.
Your uncle says that she is with God now, says it beaten down and broken, held together only by something invisible. Your mother and father do not believe in God. You don't yet know what you believe, but you think that it is a beautiful thing to think of your auntie in the arms of a great shinning figure, a great sexless ageless formless colorless light. The sun above you is burning in the sky so hot and round and vast and warm on your face. You feel so happy that you want to cry. You hug your brother as hard as you can. He laughs. He says the two of us are going to be together forever.
You stayed there three weeks. The war started on the day that you came home. Returning to the city, to that rumbling belching smoking metal din. Everybody was rushing around and shouting and there were cobalt blue army trucks rushing down the streets and policemen on every corner waving their arms and people crying and screaming and it felt like the end of the world. Not the beginning of something, but the end. Your parents were afraid, and you were helpless.
That was two years ago.
Nothing bad ever happened. You heard about people dying in the war, but that seemed normal somehow. That was just war. Wars had happened before, you'd read about them. Nothing bad happened, just a fear living under your skin. You tried not to believe in bad things. But now you are on this train and you don't know where you're going and you think that something terrible is going to happen when you arrive and now you have no choice but to believe.
The train shakes.
The soldier with the drooping face sits down in the seat beside you. You flinch, trying not to look at him. His uniform is rumpled and smoky, his fingers tobacco stained. His whole body seems to sag. He says, “I never wanted to be part of this, not any of it. You understand that, don't you?”
You look at him. He looks too miserable to be frightening. You remember his name. Rudolph Harris. If not for his army uniform, he would look like a postman or a worker at the deli counter. He would look like any aging man drinking out of a paper-bag bottle and scratching at a few day's growth on his chin. His hair is thin across the crown, his beard patchy and itching. He has dirty hands and dirty teeth, but his eyes are soft.
“I never volunteered, is what I'm saying,” he says, and he seems to be pleading with you, “I didn't ask for this. We just do what we're told, you understand? Was your father in the army? Your brother, maybe?”
You shake your head.
He sighs and pushes oily hair over his bald spot. “My father owned a bicycle shop when I was a boy.” He stops, and seems to think better of going on. “I've never had anything against you people. I mean...” He pinches his nose. It is dripping. “I haven't got... I'm not... My father was a simple man. I am a simple man. I don't concern myself with any of this, I just don't. I follow orders.”
“What's going to happen to us?” you ask. It is the only question that seems worth asking, the question which nobody will answer.
Private Harris shakes his head. “I don't know. I don't. I've heard some things. I don't ask. There are places where you'll go. You'll be safe there. Separate. It will be better for us all, you'll see.”
“But where are we going?”
He frowns deeply. “There's a train station. A big one. I'll get off there. And Private Burton. They'll take you on from there.”
“They?” Your voice is very small.
“They'll bring you the rest of the way,” he says.
You feel yourself shrinking down into your seat. You know instinctively that “they” must be more of those men in red from the train station. Their hooked noses like hunting raptors, their pale faces and their black-gloved hands. They who had looked at you like you were a dirty thing.
“Will they take me to my parents?” you ask, and immediately wish that you hadn't. You don't want to hear the answer, because you don't know which answer would be worse, a yes or a no.
The man shrugs. He is about the stand up when he stops. It is as though a thought has spontaneously occurred. He looks back down at you. “What's your name?” he asks.
You think of the old woman. You wonder what happened to her daughter. “Ahlem,” you answer.
He shakes his head and smiles, as if to say: you people have such strange names. He returns to his post.
You look back out the window. Behind you, in low whispers, there are plans being formed. You wonder how much longer it is before you reach the big train station in the city. One more day? Two?
You stare out the window at the new day. It feels as though you have been on this train for a very long time. Riding on this awful tide.
* * *
The mountains grow larger in the window. Yesterday they seemed so far away. You will be in the city soon, you saw the evening glow of it last night before the blackout curtains went up.
The train rocks, it shakes. It continues, always continues. The smoke smears out behind you in an endless ribbon. Riding on a train is like dreaming, a state of perpetual sleep, of perpetual wakefulness.
Hours pass and nothing happens. The world goes by on and on. They feed you but it is never enough to quiet the ache of hunger. People talk in weary voices. They are all simply waiting for the journey to be over. The terror is being smothered under an expanse of simple boredom.
The old man Tamir is sitting across the aisle. His soft white hair is like tufts of milkweed behind his ears. The old woman has her eyes fixed on him. Grandmother, you call her. She looks at him fondly as his chin slumps to his chest, his hands clutch the armrests, his breath snores softly from his lips.
Grandmother watches him and smiles. She speaks, but she seems to be speaking beyond you. You wonder if she is talking to her daughter.
“I was so young when I fell in love with him. Just a girl! Seventeen years old. Can you believe that I was ever so young? I hardly remember what it was, to be so full of life. I'd never been in love before. I was too busy studying to bother with men. Did I tell you that I'm a teacher? History. I teach history.”
Taught history, you think, but do not say. You do not need to say it. You can see from her face that she is thinking the same thing.
The mountains are very close now.
“He showed me one of his radios. He built them, big expensive radio sets. It was all very new back then, I'd never even seen one. It was so beautiful. Not just a machine... Polished cherry-wood, brass dials gleaming.” Grandmother smiles. She settles back into her seat. She looks at the old man across the aisle and her face is so soft and loving and kind that you want to cry.
“He turned on the radio. It was such gorgeous music! A waltz. We danced a waltz right there in his tiny little apartment. We danced and danced
and looked at each other. Just looked.” Her mouth curves happily. Her eyes are shut. She is submerged in the glow of memory.
The train moves under the shadow of the mountains.
* * *
Private Harris leans back against the door at the end of the train car. He looks out the window, and then back at you. He sees you looking at the mountains. “There's a tunnel,” he says, “Nearly a mile long of darkness. Don't be frightened.”
He has come this way before. You wonder why. Are there other trains like this one? How many people are they taking? How many cargo cars full of coffins? Maybe he was riding the train for another reason. Soldiers ride on trains all the time, you know that.
When they showed the silent filmstrip before the movie you saw dozens of bright-faced young men hanging out of the windows of trains, waving to mothers and sweethearts crying on the platform while the train bore them relentlessly away. Carried off somewhere, never to return. Boys hanging out the windows and smiling, rifles on their backs.
The windows on this train do not open. Private Harris has a pack of cigarettes in his hand, pulled out of his pocket and ready, matchbook between the fingers. He looks at Private Burton. They exchange a nod, then they switch places. Private Harris steps out onto the little platform behind the passenger car. You can see him through the window as he lights the match.
Private Burton is looking at you. His lips are pulled back from his crooked teeth. He seems to come to a decision. He reaches for you. You shrink away, but he wraps his fingers around your wrist so quickly that you cannot avoid him. He drags you up onto your feet in the corridor and presses himself close to you. “Don't scream.” He speaks through his teeth. You look back. A few of the passengers on the train are watching you, but their looks are idle and distracted. They don't seem to care. Grandmother is sleeping, her face so peaceful. She doesn't even notice when Burton pulls you away. His grip is so tight that you think your bones might break. Your skin might tear. Your body crushed and spilling open. You wince, you swallow your tears. You want to scream, but you are afraid. Burton killed a girl for making noise, you saw it with your own eyes. You heard the sounds. You sat beside her for hours. You smelled her body decay.