Akram's War Read online

  For Sahar, Zain, Iman and Zakariya

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Prologue

  Grace stood directly before the memorial steps. A slow wind buffeted her bare legs and the cold of the tarmac had seeped through the thin soles of her shoes, spreading upwards until her legs felt like stone. The memorial had three steps on each of its four sides, leading to a square plinth several feet high, and above that, as though reaching for the heavens, stood a tall grey cross. One simple wreath decorated the base of the plinth, surrounded by red paper poppies stirring gently in the breeze. Her gaze shifted down a granite face carved in relief; towards the bottom of a long list it stopped at PRIVATE A. HARTLEY, THE QUEEN’S OWN YEOMANRY, 2003. She clenched her teeth and closed her eyes, feeling a renewed blast of damp air against her cheeks.

  At precisely nine that morning, Grace had telephoned the social worker who was to bring her daughter Britney and supervise their contact. Nervously, Grace had suggested a change of venue, hoping the voice at the other end of the telephone wouldn’t object. For two hours on the second Sunday of each month Britney was brought to her at McDonald’s, the only place the social worker could think of that was reliably public and warm. The woman had been brusque, complaining that she would have to find a winter overcoat and provide breakfast for the child before they left the home. Before Grace could go into a long, rehearsed soliloquy of her reasons for the alteration, there was a deep sigh at the other end and the call was terminated.

  Grace had arrived early, the chill slowly freezing her face into an expressionless mask with a brim of stinging ice settling on her lower eyelids. She had witnessed a white coach pull up. From it the members of a military band had alighted. After putting out a trestle table, bread rolls and a large urn from which steam rose, they had quietly breakfasted standing. Then from cellophane wrapping they had pulled out splendidly bemedalled tunics in hues of brown and green and black, pulled them on snugly over their fleshy girths, and it seemed to Grace that with each brass button fastened the men and women stood further towards full extension. Finally, as though to affirm a sort of confident power, peaked caps with polished badges were squeezed onto heads.

  The band had tuned their instruments, the sharp notes mixing with the voices and footsteps of the gathering crowd. Afterwards the band members had filtered through the growing assembly, trading jokes and laughter and pressing hymn sheets into waiting hands.

  Stepping away from the memorial, Grace looked around, her spine as erect as anyone’s there present, and searched expectantly among the crowd. She observed the purposeful stride of young men in uniform, some with their girlfriends or wives and children. She saw elderly men propped on walking sticks or sitting in wheelchairs, behind them stoical women, their heads wrapped in silk scarves. Brass instruments and buttons glittered in the cold sunshine, and shiny medals and colourful ribbons dangled off chests; the emblems these people carried, she thought, to them they represent life.

  However, among a shifting focus of stiffened backs in ceremonial dress and peaked caps gazing poignantly upwards, Grace did not see the particular peaked cap she was looking for. She was troubled. Here, a solitary brown face should be easy to spot – so where was he? He had said he would be at the ceremony. She hardly knew him, had only met him in the early hours of the morning, and had slept for some of their time together. But still, the thought of introducing him to Britney, as she knew she would, filled her with tense anticipation. Fleetingly she pictured the three of them standing before the cross like witnesses bound by some solemn oath.

  The band sergeant issued a sharp order, followed by a crack of boots as some stood to attention. Immediately, the assembly, both civilian and military, removed their hats, tucking them under an arm or holding them solemnly at the waist.

  The call of a bugle started up. Its lingering, spaced notes left goosebumps on the nape of Grace’s neck and somehow made her feel important. She realized that if the notes were for Adrian Hartley then they also belonged to her.

  With the last note of the bugle still ringing in her ears, there followed a silence broken only by the occasional muffled cough and, once only, the cry of a baby. The silence amplified the sound of the wind and she thought about Adrian Hartley, suddenly grateful that in a profound way, one she had discovered only hours earlier, he had left her with something that she might use: hope.

  She had hardly slept and had woken with a fog of fatigue circling her head, and that morning she had forgotten to take her pills. While she wasn’t entirely convinced that everything had changed overnight, for once – if only for today – she felt part of something, although she couldn’t articulate what it was. She listened intently as a prayer was read.

  Ever-living God, we remember. . .

  The words seemed to pass through her like an instruction written in electrical current, and she vowed that now she had missed her dose she’d give it a week and see how she felt.

  . . . from the storm of war into the peace of your presence. . .

  Grace felt a small squeeze of her hand and turned away from the cross. ‘Hey,’ she whispered. Her heart leapt like cold steel in her chest and a grin spread across her face. Taking half a step backwards to accommodate the short space between herself and the girl, she stared lovingly into her daughter’s eyes.

  Britney’s hair had grown, the wind picking at fine blond filaments across her brow. Her cheeks, suffused with cold pink, momentarily trembled and then, screwing up her face as though deep in thought, she said, ‘I’m cold. Why are we here, Grace?’ Her voice too seemed to have changed, her words articulate with a confident glottal stop.

  The social worker held the girl with an arm around her shoulders. Britney shook free of her chaperone. She retrieved a poppy from her coat pocket and held it out towards her mother.

  The prayer concluded: Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

  Grace swallowed hard and checked her tears. ‘Amen.’ She took the poppy and reached for her daughter’s hand, feeling the small fist curl into her own.

  Britney seemed to be searching for words. Anxiously the child tucked the loose hair on her forehead into a woolly hat and cocked her head up at the social worker as though seeking permission. Then, addressing Grace, she said slowly, ‘Mum.’

  Grace felt a surge of pride. Mum. There it was. She was Mum. Again. For two brief hours: Mum. She tasted the word in her mouth.

  As conductor, the sergeant major threw his hands into the air, summoning a short triumphant chord from the horn section that punctured the cold atmosphere. The remainder of the band raised their instruments to their lips and the crowd seemed to brace itself.

  ‘What now, Mum?’

  Grace bent down and whispered, ‘Do you still like to sing?’ She enjoyed saying that. It seemed like a connection between the two of them, however small.

  Britney nodded, a bashful smile quivering on her lips.

  Grace looked down at the hymn sheet clutched in her fingers. The paper flapped in the breeze. Summoning what seemed to Grace the sort of mother’s voice the social worker might approve of, she said, ‘Now, my love, now we sing a hymn.’

  1

  I am Akram Khan, formerly Sergeant Khan of the Queen’s Own Yeomanry, and in a short number of hours, at a place not far from here, loaded and enabled, I will
submit.

  My wife Azra sleeps in our bed, a white linen sheet pulled tightly around the bony geometry of her figure. Her thin hand, curled into a fist, is wrapped in the sheet, her wrist weighted with gold bangles. In profile, her nose is studded with a pinprick of gold. I lie next to her, every muscle contracted towards a knot in my gut, and although our bodies at their nearest point are merely an inch apart, I am careful not to touch her. I lie as though trapped, perfectly still under a shared sheet. When Allah wills it, and soon He will, it will be my time for eternal sleep, my conclusion. As I pass into the hereafter the brothers will wrap me in a shroud of linen, and they will chant the names of Allah as they lower my remains into the earth. And over my body they will heave a single slab of stone.

  For Azra the membranous sheet is protection against my efforts to consummate our marriage. I have tried. For a time my hands were hopeful: brushing against her shoulders, playing with a loose strand of her hair, twisting it around a digit as tightly as I dared; when feeling bold my fingers would trace the bony contours of her spine. In the cold house, listening to the rain lash against the bedroom window and feeling lonelier than I imagined possible, again and again I would try.

  The strength of my want surprised me. Even as I trembled, perspired, clutched myself to still my jerking muscles, the sensation felt decent. Later, shamed by her and branded a failure, a humiliation tempered only by the cumulative incantation of a thousand Bismillahs, I abandoned my earthly desires and accepted the inch or so between us. She snores lightly, contentedly, still a virgin.

  She is not for me. Not in this life. I tell myself: I am saving my pleasures for when I am dead.

  It is time to make ready, and carefully I swing my feet to the floor. A bullet fired from close range has left me with titanium and gristle for a knee joint. Below it I have no feeling, and I move awkwardly, trying not to wake her. I make it to the door and take one last look at Azra. She has turned away, her long black hair falling across the pillow, one knee bent up to her chest, stretching the sheet taut. By day my bedfellow covers herself in a black burqa that, save for a rectangular screen through which she sees, completely enfolds her body. She says the burqa is to conceal her from the lustful eyes of men. I say that her virtue is a strange game.

  The narrow hallway is dark, and with the help of a walking stick that I leave by the door, I carefully place each step, keeping to the edges to avoid creaky floorboards. My fingertips brush against the wall for orientation and balance. I hear a faint rumble as the last train from Birmingham slows, ready for a last draw of breath as it pulls into Rowley Regis station, its great energy transmitting through the house.

  The railway came first, then factories and workers’ houses, small damp houses like the one I have lived in my entire civilian life. In the early days the voice of our street was the echo of great steam-powered hammers and bubbling fires of molten steel, and to us this was regular and bucolic, as birdsong might have been for others. It was a disembodied noise, one I heard but could not see, shielded as it was by high perimeter walls. Children would assemble as the factory gates drew open at the changing of shifts, hoping that their fatigued and oil-stained fathers would buy them a pop on the short walk home. But more than that, we gathered for an opportunistic glimpse through a gap in the gates, of giant hammers and spitting fire.

  The carpet is threadbare underfoot and the wall rough and crackly beneath my fingertips, and it startles me that there is knowledge here I have yet to acquire, and that the house has silently aged, sagged and worn. I hear a gentle sound of stretching bedsprings as my mother or father turns in their sleep. Reaching blindly into the room I pull at a light cord, then take a sideways stride into the loo and ease the door closed. A small extractor fan cut into the window picks up speed and settles into a constant rhythm. The overhead light blinks, casting the movement of my limbs in slow motion.

  I look into the mirror on the small cabinet above the sink and clutch my beard. Abruptly the flicker flatlines to a thin fluorescent beam. My beard is thick and densely black. It has grown to just beyond the length of one fist and is immediately recognizable from a distance. It marks me as one who has rejected the vanity of the infidel. One who has chosen. I release the hot tap. Pipes rumble as though summoning strength from distant corners of the house. A jet of water issues, becoming scalding; as it meets the cold parabola of the sink it generates steam. I turn it off and watch it glut.

  From the cabinet I select a small pair of scissors, a disposable razor and a can of shaving foam, placing each item on the porcelain ledge between the taps. I pinch at a tuft of beard and take a swipe at it with scissors – a sinful thing. Out in the street I hear a cat cry and then all is silent save for the mash of the scissor blades. Short clumps of hair collect on my palm stretched below. I whisper a short prayer, ‘Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim’, a consolation for my loss.

  About prayer I am superstitious, and superstition is a magic not permitted to the believer. Although we are born perfect, few of us remain in that state, and it is enough to reach out, to strive, to hope for forgiveness. At night I leave a gap in the curtains, and the very moment I awaken, raising my head from the pillow, I catch a piece of morning sky and whisper, ‘Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim.’ It is like saying hello to Allah, and every new scene seems to warrant it. A thousand times a day, maybe more – tucking into breakfast, pulling my trousers over my bad knee, leaving the house, sidestepping a crack in the pavement, seeing someone I know or don’t know, putting a fruit to my nose, watching a bent old lady crossing the street, washing my hands or rubbing my sore knee. Remembering Allah lends a kindness to each scene, slows down our fast lives, so that even the little things are lived in a state of suspended grace. And the more I say the Bismillah, the more it seems necessary. It is instinctive, important. It reminds me of the vastness of I, a mobile dot under the spread diaphragm of a ceaseless heaven.

  I snip carefully around the vermilion border of my lips where brown skin meets pink flesh. Between my fingertips the hair feels thick and wiry. It is densely black, glossy from the application of palm oil scented with sandalwood and something else, something eastern and exotic, an oud, a pleasant odour, something like night-blooming jasmine, a scent that keenly fills the air wherever a group of brothers assembles.

  Brothers: drawn from distant corners of the world and merged in Cradley Heath. United beyond blood and flesh, the strongest of brotherhoods falling under the cast of Allah’s love. Brothers at the mosque, and afterwards brothers walking hand in hand and arm in arm, brothers brimming with excited thoughts as we repair to the Kashmiri Karahi House and Sweet Shop. Brothers who, before a word is said, upon the instructions of Brother Mustafa (our first-in-command) scan the sparsely furnished kebab shop, sweep memory for the slightest change in the walls, look underneath green plastic tables and chairs, patrol behind a counter at the far end, and unscrew, inspect and replace a solitary pendant light bulb.

  Under a dim fluorescent light at the Karahi House the brothers and I (although I no longer wear three stripes, clearly I am second-in-command) feel safe. We talk about martyrdom and search each other’s eyes for the difference between doubt and sincerity.

  ‘What would it be like?’ Second-in-command.

  ‘Who will go first?’ First-in-command.

  ‘Will Allah greet us personally?’ That could be any one of the brothers, lightly swaying to a scene secured under clamped eyelids.

  And, although no one will say it out loud, we are each picturing voluptuous houris, their bodies stretching against the slippery silk of the most exotic garments – and we each struggle to hide that thought from our brothers.

  ‘Boom. Boom.’ That’s Ali, the Karahi House proprietor. He is a joker and speaks carelessly as though to shame us. ‘I can see ladies dancing in your eyes.’ A spatula in one hand gesticulates lewdly while with the other he flips lamb chops on a sizzling grill. ‘Their feet, garlanded in silver anklets, dancing on your filthy souls.’ Oily spice fills the room.

>   Carefully I drop the hair into a plastic Ziploc bag retrieved from my pyjama pocket. The uneven crop of close-cut bristle now reveals something of my former face. I have a square jaw, full lips, and eyes a girl once described as gentle. When it mattered to me, I considered myself handsome. It flashes across my mind that before I shave it all off I could groom myself something fashionable. A goatee, perhaps? Just for a minute, to see what it would look like. But those thoughts are the diversions of Beelzebub, a temptation to infidelity, and to compensate I whisper a quick Bismillah. Staring into the mirror, I allow myself a small smile. A smile in recognition of the unfortunate fact that we can never be truly faithful to Allah, that within my weak mind there is still resistance, rebellion.

  I shake my head vigorously as though it will scatter those thoughts, and with the razor I cut neat tracks into what remains of my beard, dispersing shaving foam thick with black hair under the running tap. The skin underneath is smooth and stretched taut like a canvas over my chin. Already I feel colder without the beard. My face itches and burns and I rub and press at it as though kneading dough, leaving behind short-lived, thumb-shaped welts. The image staring back at me is boyish: it is the vanity of the infidel and reminds me of my earlier self, of a time before belief in the one and true God. That there was a time before belief seems hardly possible, and I turn my eyes away.

  I rub in a splash of Cologne, gritting my teeth as it stings. It has been a long time since I felt that particular pleasurable pain.

  My gaze tilts upwards, squinting through a small rectangular window to the marbled black sky, imagining the hazy horizon, the join between sky and land that determines the end of the visible world. A scene that Allah will illuminate at dawn. ‘Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim.’

  I concentrate my eyes into the distance, connecting with what I cannot see, the great invisible being just beyond. I am barely conscious that I am standing before Allah. I see through the clouds to a crescent moon. As I concentrate harder, I view a colourful scene of an orchard with round bushy trees of a wonderful brightness, the likes of which I have never before seen. Bulbous red pomegranates grow on the trees, and in the air is the scent of sandalwood and jasmine and roses. A stream flows across the foreground. On its golden waters glides a wooden barge propelled by a fisherman punting with a long pole. In the background, as though painted in, are the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas, places colder and more isolated than man could ever stand. As I now look down, out from this dizzying height, a wind spurs like sharp knives at my face, and as my arms waver for balance I open my mouth for one final breath of thin, giddy air.