Nazeer and Suleiman put their hands under Khaled’s arms, and lifted him gently from the corpse. He accepted the help momentarily, but then he shrugged them off and knelt beside the body. Habib’s pattu shawl was rucked up around his chest. Khaled pulled something from the front of the dead man’s flak jacket. It was metal, two pieces of metal, hanging from Habib’s neck on leather thongs. Jalalaad rushed forward and snatched them. They were the souvenir fragments of the tank that he and Hanif and Juma had destroyed; the pieces that his friends had worn around their necks.
Khaled stood and turned and walked slowly away from the killing. I put my hand on his shoulder as he passed me, and walked with him. Behind me there was a howl of rage as Jalalaad attacked Habib’s corpse with the butt of his Kalashnikov. I looked over my shoulder to see the mad eyes of the lunatic crushed beneath the rise and smashing fall of the weapon. And in one of those perversities of the pitying heart, I found myself feeling sorry for Habib. I’d wanted to kill him myself, more than once, and I knew that I was glad he was dead, but my heart was so sorry for him in that moment that I grieved as if he was a friend.
And when the men finally dragged Jalalaad away, there was nothing left: nothing but blood and snow and hair and shattered bone where the life and the tortured mind had been.
Khaled returned to our cave. He was muttering something in Arabic. His eyes were radiant, filled with a vision that illuminated him, and put an almost frightening resolve in the set of his scarred features.
At the cave, he removed the belt around his waist that held his canteen. He let it slip to the ground. He lifted the cartridge belt over his head from his shoulder and let that too fall. Next he rummaged through his pockets, emptying them of their contents one by one until there was nothing on him but the clothes he wore. At his feet were his false passports, his money, his letters, his wallet, his weapons, his jewellery, and even the bruised, wrinkle-eared photos of his long-dead family.
‘What’s he saying?’ I asked Mahmoud desperately. I’d spent the last four weeks avoiding Khaled’s eye and coldly rejecting his friendship. Suddenly, I was unbearably afraid that I was going to lose him; that I’d already lost him.
‘It is the Koran,’ Mahmoud replied in a whisper. ‘He is telling Suras from the Koran.’
Khaled left the cave and walked to the edge of the compound. I ran to stop him, and pushed him back with both hands. He allowed the shove, and then came on toward me again. I threw my arms around him and dragged him back a few paces. He didn’t resist me. He stared directly ahead at that infuriating vision only he could see while he chanted the hypnotically poetic verses of the Koran. And when I let him go, he continued his walk out of the camp.
‘Help me!’ I shouted. ‘Can’t you see? He’s going! He’s going out there!’
Mahmoud, Nazeer, and Suleiman came forward but, instead of helping me to restrain Khaled, they grasped my arms and gently prised them away from him. Khaled immediately began to walk forward. I wrestled myself free, and rushed to stop him again. I shouted at him and slapped at his face to waken him to the danger. He didn’t resist and he didn’t react. I felt the tears hot on my cold face, stinging in the cracks that split my frozen lips. I felt the sobbing in my chest like a river rappling and rolling against worn and rounded rocks, on and on and on. I held him tight, with one arm around his neck and the other around his waist, my hands locked together at his back.
Nazeer, even as thin and weakened as he’d become in those weeks, was too strong for me. His steel hands grabbed at my wrists and peeled them away from Khaled. Mahmoud and Suleiman helped him to hold me back as I struggled and reached out to grab Khaled’s jacket. And then we watched him walk from the camp into the winter that one way or another had ruined or killed us all.
‘Didn’t you see it?’ Mahmoud asked me when he was gone. ‘Didn’t you see his face?’
‘Yes, I saw it, I saw it,’ I sobbed, staggering back to the cave to fall into the crumpled cell of my misery.
I lay there for hours unsleeping, filthy, starving, angry, and broken-hearted. And I might’ve died there-some pain, sometimes, leaves you without legs or arms-but the smell of food brought me round. The men had decided that they couldn’t wait to cook the last of the rotting meat. They’d boiled it in a pot during those hours, fanning the smoke away continuously and concealing the flame with blankets.
