Iqbal Read online

  I wonder what it’s like down there, I asked myself, and I shivered with fear.

  Stubborn little Alì followed us, and we crawled to the edge of the well. The master’s house seemed dark and forbidding. We knew that Hussain Khan slept like an ox. Some nights his snoring sounded like a thunderstorm, but the mistress … she heard every sound, the slightest rustling, even, I bet, the wing beat of a night bird. We had often seen her in her bathrobe, wandering around in the dark, muttering fiercely as she pried into every corner of the courtyard.

  “And what if they see us?”

  From the edge of the well two leaps would take us to the safety of Hussain’s van. It smelled of gas and burnt oil. From there, however, the way to the iron door that led to the Tomb offered no hiding places, but passed right below one of Hussain’s bedroom windows. I was afraid it would be impossible to sneak by without waking the mistress. She was standing there—I was positive—hidden behind the curtains like a predatory animal, waiting for us to take just one step.

  For a second I thought it would be better to go back, but then I felt ashamed. I turned to look at Salman: He was probably afraid, too, but he knew he had to try first. After all, I was only a girl, right? And Alì was too little.

  He swallowed hard, then whispered, “Here I go.”

  He began to crawl on his elbows and knees, holding the packet of bread in his teeth. He went slowly, his rear end pointed up to the sky so that it seemed anyone could spot him slinking about…. He continued to shift pebbles, and seemed to be making such noise—and then suddenly he disappeared into the shadows. In the few moments of silence between one snore and another, we heard a couple of noises and then a short hiss.

  “Go!” I said to Alì.

  He ran as lightly as a kitten. He was gone in a second.

  Another hiss.

  Well, I said to myself, now it’s your turn.

  I left cover. I had to crawl while holding the bottle of water, which threatened to spill at every movement. I kept telling myself that it wasn’t really very far from the van to the rusty door, just a few meters. Sharp stones cut into my knees. It was dark as dark. Everything seemed so noisy, my dress rustling against the earth, my heartbeats echoing in the night, my labored breathing.

  I was just under the bedroom window. I flattened my body to the ground as close as possible, just my right hand raised to hold the bottle.

  Would I ever reach Iqbal? If I was caught I’d be put in the Tomb, too, with the scorpions and the snakes. I was sure there were snakes, whatever Salman said.

  Finally, I bumped into Salman and All, who were sitting with their backs to the iron door.

  “It took you long enough!”

  “Where’s Karim?”

  We looked around.

  “Karim!” we whispered. “Karim!”

  We saw his tall, skinny figure emerge from the shadows like a ghost. He was dressed in white, and was walking normally, slowly and calmly, with his hands in his pockets. All we needed was to hear him whistle. He looked as though he were walking in the sultan’s gardens.

  “You didn’t really have to put on such a show, you know,” he said.

  “Get down, fool!”

  The heavy iron door was hard to open quietly. Its hinges were all rusty and it was blocked by weeds. We tried to pull it open, and it hardly budged.

  “Pull harder, come on!”

  It moved a few centimeters, then a palm’s width, and then we could smell the damp, heavy stench of the Tomb.

  “Harder!”

  The door turned on its hinges with a terrible squeak that seemed to cut the night in two.

  “Quick!”

  A light went on.

  We stood absolutely still, paralyzed like animals surprised by a hunter. I could feel my legs trembling, uncertain whether to stay or to flee.

  “Run!” a voice shouted in my head. “Run!”

  Salman’s hand blocked my arm.

  “Don’t move!” he hissed.

  The bedroom window opened. A small square of light hit the courtyard. The mistress put her head out, looking first to one side, then to the other.

  She’d see us, she couldn’t not see us.

  “I heard a noise, I tell you; I didn’t dream it. It must be those damn children.”

  We heard a faint grumble from inside the room.

  “You! You wouldn’t even hear a cannon! I’m going out to look,” she said.

  Another grumble, this time longer and angrier.

  The mistress leaned out as far as possible and looked our way with her bleary eyes. We were there, only a few meters away, as visible as if we were in broad daylight, I swear. Visible like fireflies on a bush. I could feel her eyes on me.

  But she didn’t see us. She peered around some more, mumbled, closed the window with a bang, and turned out the light.

  We waited. We waited for what seemed to be an eternity. Eventually my heartbeats slowed down, soothed by the sound of Hussain Khan’s resumed snoring.

  We went down the steep, slippery steps in single file. Our bodies were covered with perspiration. We had to move carefully as we tried to hold on to the slimy, mossy wall. We could hear the sound of metal beneath our feet: The metal ceiling of the Tomb was right below us. We stopped near the grating.

  “Iqbal,” I called quietly. “Iqbal!”

  From his deep pockets, Karim brought out a box of matches. We could see Iqbal in the flickering light of the match. He forced himself up from the corner where he was crouching and came toward us. His lips were split from thirst and the flame of the match bothered his eyes.

  The cistern that we called the Tomb was wide, but so low that anyone standing could touch the grating with the tips of his fingers. I passed the small bottle through the bars to Iqbal. He drank avidly and then poured the rest over his poor face.

  His throat was too dry to let him talk to us, and although we had a million questions to ask him, we couldn’t think of anything to say.

  The sight of him suffering moved and confused me. And I remembered that this was only his first day in the Tomb. Salman was nervous. Karim behaved as if he was just passing by and had nothing to do with anything. Alì pushed his hand through the bars and took Iqbal’s hand.

  “Hold on,” he said. “We’re here now.”

  “Yes,” I said, “we’ll come back every night.”

  “I have to admit you’re pretty brave,” said Salman.

  “The hell we’ll return,” said Karim. “I’m not about to risk anything.”

  “Thanks, friends,” croaked Iqbal. His voice was like a thin wire.

  We went back every night.

  Seven

  Iqbal was released from the Tomb three days later. When we saw him walk across the courtyard on wobbly legs, blinded by the light, his arms covered with angry insect bites, we pitied him, but we were proud, too. We would have liked to cheer and applaud, but Hussain’s grim eyes warned us to keep quiet. The master gave Iqbal a day and a night to rest, and we held back our curiosity and respected his fitful sleep. We took turns watching over him and soothing his pain by sponging him with cool water. We could see that Iqbal would recover quickly, thanks to our nightly visits, the food, the water, and those oranges that Alì had stolen from the garden for him.

  “Brother,” said Salman one morning when Iqbal finally returned to work, “you were really strong. Nobody has ever had the courage to do something like that to Hussain Khan. Do you realize how angry he still is about the carpet? But you were also foolish. What have you gained by destroying the carpet? Three days in the Tomb, that’s all.”

  “You all took risks, coming out at night to help me,’ Iqbal replied. “If the master had discovered you, what would you have gotten out of it?”

  “What has that got to do with anything?” asked Salman. “We did it for you.”

  “Well,” said Iqbal, “and I did it for you, in a certain sense, as well as for me.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It mean
s that this kind of life isn’t right. We should return to our families; we shouldn’t be chained to our looms and forced to work like slaves.”

  “I’d like to go home, too,” I said, “but we can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because … because …,” burst in Salman, “because the master is stronger than us. Because it’s always been like this. Because nobody cares about us.”

  “We’ll find somebody to help us. Out there. There must be someone.”

  “Out there? What’s going on in your head?”

  “I don’t know,” said Iqbal.

  “You got too much heat down in the Tomb, brother.” Salman shook his head. “Everybody’s too scared here.”

  “That’s not true.” Iqbal laughed. “You’re not afraid anymore. Neither are Fatima and little Alì.”

  “I’m not afraid of anybody!” declared Alì, hiding behind my skirt.

  “Even Karim is less frightened than before. Isn’t that true?”

  “Don’t drag me into your dumb plans,” hissed Karim, “and remember anyway, I’m not afraid of anything.”

  “Not even Hussain?”

  “I’m not scared of him,” Karim assured us. “I respect him. It’s different.”

  “I think the others are less frightened, too,” Iqbal said.

  “Back in line! Back in line!” yelled Karim, as he glimpsed the figure of the mistress crossing the courtyard.

  For the next month things went as usual, at least on the surface. The days passed, all seemingly identical, the summer became less torrid, and every now and then we could see heat lightning in the night sky, reminding us that the rains were on their way. One of the older boys left with the master one evening, and we never saw him again. Perhaps Hussain had sold him to someone else, who knows? We were accustomed to this continuous change of faces around us, and we had even learned not to feel very sorry, or at least not to show it.

  A new boy arrived in his place, tall and thin, with a skinny back. You could count his ribs, each one. We immediately named him Twig. After only two days he hurt his hand, which Hussain had to bandage, crying out to heaven, lamenting the bad luck that had pushed him to make such a poor investment. Twig, armed with a broom, was set to cleaning the workshop, the courtyard, and occasionally the master’s house. He went back and forth all day, with his arm in a sling, and he raised more dust than he eliminated.

  That month an attack of dysentery obliged us to use the little place behind the curtain more often than we liked.

  Nothing much out of the ordinary, it seemed.

  But, now that I think about it, there was something different, though with all the work we had to do we didn’t notice it at the time. We worked, as usual. We bore Hussain’s harsh treatment, as usual. Every evening we watched the master take a rag and erase one of the marks on our personal slate and saw the marks remain the same, as usual. But still … the atmosphere inside the workshop had changed.

  Nobody was working exactly as before. After the lunch break we reentered the workshop as slowly as possible, dragging our feet and mumbling. During the interminable afternoon hours our attention was easily distracted. We started talking and sometimes we even laughed. It took a few minutes for the shouts and threats of Hussain Khan to restore an apparent calm. Twig wandered here and there, raising dust and increasing the general confusion.

  One day a loom broke. It was used by Mohammed (the stammering boy from the mountains), and even though Hussein Khan was convinced it had been sabotaged, he had no proof, so he couldn’t send Mohammed to the Tomb to rot for days. At another loom all the threads tangled, and it took hours to get it working again.

  Iqbal was calm. The master had ordered him to begin the carpet again, and he was working carefully and precisely, nimbly and quickly, as though nothing had happened. Hussain Khan kept a constant eye on him. He walked grimly around the workshop, his hands behind his back, and every now and then he turned his head quickly to see what Iqbal was doing. Hussain seemed nervous—it was like he was frightened. And the more the carpet grew, the more nervous and irritable he became. But he didn’t say a word to Iqbal, not a word.

  “Hussain’s afraid I’ll destroy this rug, too,” said Iqbal, “and it’d be a serious loss for him.”

  “You won’t do anything so stupid, will you?” I asked anxiously.

  “Oh, no! I don’t plan on anything like that,” he reassured me.

  By now our evening get-togethers had become routine. We didn’t even wait for the lights to go out in the master’s house. As soon as Hussain locked the door and we heard his footsteps cross the courtyard, we left our beds and sat down in a circle. Twig, who was strange and funny, joined our group, and sometimes so did one or two of the others.

  “We should all run away,” said Twig. “Just think of Hussain’s face! I can’t stand him. He’s almost worse than the master I had before. Let’s become bandits and attack the trucks that come into the city.”

  “Why the trucks?”

  “Because they carry a lot of food.”

  “Forget it,” said Mohammed. “We should escape to the mountains. There the master would never be able to find us.”

  “Yeah, and how did he find you?” Twig asked.

  “Bad luck.”

  We poured out our feelings. But we still feared that nothing would ever change for us. There was a precise rule among us: Never talk about the future. Not a single one of us dared to say “next summer,” or “in a year,” or “when I’m grown up.” Oh yes, we talked about things we’d like to do, and we talked about the day our debt would be canceled. We talked that hope into the ground. But nobody really believed it. It was a sort of litany, a way to feel good. Otherwise what was left to us?

  Iqbal had been the first brave enough to say loud and clear that the debt is never canceled. And he was the only one to talk concretely about the future.

  One night while autumn rains were beating on the roof of the workshop, Iqbal and I sat together. We were always the last two to go to bed. We liked to stay up and talk.

  “Fatima,” he said in a low voice, “next spring you and I are going to go and fly a kite. Remember that, whatever happens.”

  I didn’t say anything. What was there to say? I only sensed he was about to do something rash and I wouldn’t be able to stop him. He was so little, and yet he was so brave.

  I said the only thing I could say: “Please be careful, Iqbal.”

  The next night, in the middle of a thunderstorm, Iqbal managed to squeeze out of the tight little window behind the filthy curtain at the back of the workshop. He ran through the neighbor’s garden, climbed over a wall, and after crossing two more vegetable gardens, he reached the street and disappeared.

  Eight

  There was no news for two days. As soon as Hussain discovered Iqbal’s escape he organized his friends and relatives, who climbed into their Toyota vans to search for the fugitive, swearing as they slid over the muddy roads.

  We waited anxiously. We watched the courtyard gate. Hussain returned with a grim face late in the afternoon, his clothes soaked and his boots all muddied. He came into the workshop, where, heads down, we were all working at our looms.

  “From now on,” he said, “you’ll all work an hour more a day. Every day.”

  He put bars on the little window and Karim had to give him back the keys.

  “You and I will talk about this later,” he said menacingly.

  Karim was terrified.

  Hussain went out again the next day, too, but he came back before the muezzin had called for midday prayers, then shut himself in the house.

  As I worked I thought of Iqbal. Perhaps he had reached home and was embracing his parents. But the master would certainly go there to look and would threaten Iqbal’s father and mother with prison if they didn’t give their son back to him. Maybe he was still hidden somewhere in the city. Where would he sleep? What would he eat?

  He’s smart, I repeated to myself. He’ll manage.

&nb
sp; Then I remembered his promise: In spring you and I will fly a kite.

  I wanted it to be true, but I tried not to delude myself.

  I spoke to little Maria as if she were able to understand and answer back and comfort me.

  “Do you know what a kite is, Maria? Have you ever played with one?”

  Naturally she didn’t answer.

  “It’s wonderful. You run and the kite rises higher and higher in the sky; sometimes it even touches the clouds, and it soars and veers with the wind. You have to be very careful, though. If you let go of the string, you lose the kite and after a while it floats away. It happened to me when I was too young and inexperienced. I was really sorry, and I cried for my lost kite. But at that moment, watching it fly higher and higher until it was swallowed up by the sky, it wasn’t so awful. I thought, Who knows where it’s going?

  The morning of the third day we had just started working at our looms when a neighbor came running in. He and the master moved outside the doorway and the neighbor spoke very fast, gesturing with his hands. He looked scared.

  Hussain and the mistress came into the workshop and told us to leave everything as it was. Then they pushed us across the courtyard, crying, “Quickly! Quickly!” They pulled open the rusty iron door to the Tomb and made us bunch up on the steps.

  “Stay there,” ordered Hussain. “No one dare make a sound!”

  Someone was knocking on the big outside door. I was trapped halfway down the stairs.

  “What’s going on?” I asked the child in front of me.

  “I can’t see very well,” someone whispered, “but the master has gone to open … there are some people. It looks like … a policeman! There are two policemen … and Iqbal’s with them!”

  I elbowed my way up to the top step, where I put my eye to one of the rusty holes in the old door, and it was true. There were two policemen, fat and shiny with enormous black mustaches. They were wearing greasy, wrinkled uniforms, and their bellies hung over their belts, but they were policemen. Iqbal stood between them.

  Hussain acted humble, bowing his head slightly and rubbing his hands together. Next to him the mistress twisted and tortured a corner of her apron.