Furnace (17 page)

Well well, the old man murmured. Eberdeen is where we cry from originally, ken, so it’s nae too bad. He nodded towards the boy. The loon here was born at Forester Hill. The infirmary,
ken?

Oh really? she said, brightening, but Ahmed noted that she didn’t mention she sometimes worked there.

Three dark pigeons appeared over the roof line and landed, scuffling for position on the slope of the gable.

Wildies, said Ahmed, and as he spoke a sudden fat drop of rain plashed on the left lens of his spectacles. In a moment the air was filled with the quick ticking of water striking the rooftops
and ground around them. Bowing their heads like pilgrims they filed indoors.

Two days passed before the bird returned and Ahmed had all but given up on it. He was standing on the back step, smoking in the sunshine, enjoying what felt like the first
truly warm morning of the year, when it flapped down, clumsily, to its usual place under the feeder. It could hardly stand now and half-hopped, half-lurched from seed to seed.

Slowly, Ahmed stubbed out his cigarette, edged indoors and found the white tub of corn and grain left behind by the old man. Shaking it with the same slow rhythm the grandfather had used he
advanced on the bird, crouched low, murmuring self-consciously: coom on; coom on. The bird stopped its feeding to observe him. Gently, he reached into the tub and scattered an offering of grain.
There was a long, still pause, then it hopped lopsidedly forward, pecking at the seeds, almost within reach. Coom on, he urged, and rested the tub on the grass between his knees, freeing his
sweating hands. He lunged, but without conviction, and the bird escaped easily to the roof of the house.

Ahmed straightened and turned towards the kitchen window. Rana was standing behind it, frowning anxiously. Don’t watch me, he said, loud enough for it to carry through the glass. She
turned away and busied herself at the washbasin.
Just grab it
, he thought with some bitterness, though he knew his nerve had failed him. At the last instant he had flinched back from
contact, hadnt closed his hands as if for the kill but had jerked them forward, uselessly, as if shooing it away. It was the injured leg, he reasoned to himself. Part of him was fearful of damaging
it further. But he knew that really he had dreaded the prospect of contact. He had never handled a bird before and had always, even as a boy, hated the sensation of an insect or any other living
thing cupped in his hands. The frantic batting of a trapped moth on his palms repulsed him and always lingered on the nerve endings long after he had disposed of it under Ranas watchful eye. It was
a petty but somehow shameful weakness that he liked to think Rana was completely ignorant of.

The sun, almost at its full height now, was unseasonably warm. Ahmed sighed and with his sleeve wiped the sweat from his forehead. The bird seemed calm again and unlikely to fly off, at least.
It watched him from the safety of the gable.

As he entered the kitchen, Rana said: You’ll need to be quicker than that.

Ignoring her, he took a chair from underneath the dining table and carried it outdoors. He collected the tub of grain from where he’d left it on the lawn and sat on the chair facing the
bird, the sun beating on the back of his neck.

After a while, from the garden next door came the sound of a door opening and children’s voices, a boy’s and a girl’s, spilling into the mild air. Home for their lunch, thought
Ahmed, and found the idea oddly calming. Soon, the
pok
of a tennis ball on concrete punctuated their conversation. Their accents were too broad and their chatter too quick and muffled for
Ahmed to follow much more than a few phrases. Then the father, home too for some reason, warned them to move away from there, now and they bickered a little over who should move where. A sudden
stink of drains – puzzling – wafted to Ahmed. An opened manhole, maybe. An unblocked gutter? The smell faded again and the father spoke more cheerfully to the children, teasing them about something
before going inside and thumping the door shut behind him. Ahmed frowned, but the bird seemed not to notice. Soon the boy and girl were quarrelling again.
One more time
, the boy warned, in a
cross, shrill voice,
one more time…

After a hurried lunch Ahmed saw Rana off to the college and then returned to his vigil. The children from next door were back at school – they had passed him, hurrying and giggling at some
shared joke as he closed the front door behind Rana – and the garden was peaceful. Perhaps because of that, the bird was feeding again and reachable.

This time there was no mistake. A trail of corn and grain brought the bird almost into his lap where he knelt, patient, for several long, uncomfortable minutes. He was better balanced this time,
and all the force of his will directed the simple, smooth movement that pinned the creature under his trembling, wet hands. One wing he managed to clamp tight to the body, the other had already
sprung open for flight and now projected at an odd, quivering angle. He hugged the body close to his chest, trapping it there, while he adjusted his grasp and folded the wing flat again. Then,
still kneeling, a cold wetness chilling his knees from the soft ground, he stared at the bird and took stock, elated and a little stunned by his success, his sudden mastery. There was no resistance
from the thing in his hands: a faint warmth reached his fingers from beneath the flattened spines of its feathers but no quiver of panic or struggle. His first flush of triumph ebbed away and Ahmed
wondered at the creature’s apathy. Upending it, he inspected its crippled leg. Still there was no reaction, no twist of the neck to find and stab at his fingers. Ahmed could make nothing of
the balled foot. Other than being curled unnaturally tight, the sharp pink toes looked healthy enough. The plastic leg-ring looked secure but not constricting. Righting the bird again he rose
painfully to his feet.

Indoors, he lowered the bird into the Fed-Ex carton and half-secured the lid, folding the cardboard tabs loosely enough to allow a narrow view of the white head and nape bobbing and shifting in
the dark of the box. He watched the bird for a while, again struck by its calm acceptance, then left it alone to call the old man.

There was no reply and no answering machine. When Rana arrived home he tried again, and again every hour or so throughout the evening but each time the phone rang on without reply.

Leave it, Rana said at last, exasperated. You can try again tomorrow.

Where is the old fool? said Ahmed.

It’s late now, come to bed, she said, her calmness irritating him even more.

You go. I’m checking the bird, he snapped.

Deep into the night after hours of restless, dream-filled sleep, Ahmed was woken by rain battering at the window. He lay hunched, his shoulders knotted and aching, listening to
its loud, gusting fall. The warm, summery promise of the day before seemed absurdly distant, a memory of another season altogether, another country. His chest, like his shoulders, was painfully
tight and his pyjamas, wet with night-sweat, clung to his arms and thighs like bandages. Twisting to lie flat on his back he gasped and stared up into the dark. He put a hand to his heart and with
his fingertips massaged the hollow of bone there. Rana was snoring gently at his side but no part of her body touched his. Time passed so quickly here, he thought, season to season in a kind of
windswept turmoil. And his work progressed so slowly. His mouth was parched.

He had been dreaming about the holding centre where, after entering the country, they’d been separated and held for a day and a night while their stories and papers were checked and
cross-checked. At the time, still dislocated by long travel, he had accepted it all with tired resignation. The officials had been cold but not aggressive and when he wasn’t being questioned
he’d been allowed to kill time playing chess, rustily, with a glum, middle-aged, overweight, Algerian doctor. The Algerian claimed to have been invited to a medical conference in London which
had begun and ended during his detention, but beyond that complained very little. Privately, Ahmed hadn’t believed him: his pale suit had been shabby and his teeth were very bad, though he
played chess well enough to beat Ahmed easily in every game and had, impressively, guessed at heart disease in his family after just a casual inspection of Ahmed’s clumsy, overlong fingers as
he moved the chess pieces. It had occurred briefly to Ahmed to test the man’s story himself, but then he had thought, what difference did it make to him? He had enjoyed his brooding, gloomy
company; had been fascinated by him, in fact.

You know, my friend, the Algerian had said, inexplicably using English instead of Arabic or even French, you know the latest research in my field shows that the heart doesn’t simply wear
out with age. He’d glanced again at Ahmed’s hands. The cells of it, they are triggered at some point, you understand, and they cease to renew themselves. They simply cease. That is the
truth. He’d paused to play his move. And the other vital organs, too, he’d added, and gestured vaguely at his own rounded trunk. They are trying to explain this finding, he’d
said. But they are scientists so it makes no sense to them how a living, beating thing of muscle, without thought or feeling, can somehow choose to stop living. How? he’d asked in mock
amazement. Then he had wagged a curved, fleshy finger at Ahmed. But it’s no mystery, my friend. He had widened his puffy, baleful eyes, fixing Ahmed with his gaze. Allah chooses, he had said.
The will, and the hand, and the eye, they are disobedient. But the
heart
, he had finished triumphantly, even in its cells –
that
is obedient.

Ahmed had smiled and nodded, not knowing what to say.

The first dreams he’d had of the holding centre all involved the Algerian and had left Ahmed feeling thoughtful and sometimes confused, but with no strong emotions. In them, the doctor was
garrulous but cryptic and Ahmed’s dream self quickly became tangled in long, intense dialogues, the trailing ends of which lingered on as teasing, surreal puzzles after waking.

This night’s dream had been different, and darker, though Ahmed could remember very few of its details. The Algerian had been there to begin with, but had been replaced by, or had become,
some kind of interrogator. Ahmed could remember none of his accusations and questions, but knew they had filled him with humiliation and rage.

To calm himself, he tried to fix his mind on the bird and the satisfaction of capturing it, but that too seemed to lead him only into a web of weakness and defeat. He saw it dazed under the rain
and felt again its unnatural, deathly lack of fear when trapped in his hands. Even a spider, even a mindless fly would have struggled more.

Rana groaned at his side and suddenly it occured to Ahmed that the accuser in his dream had been the bird’s owner, the old man. He strained to recall more details but nothing came. Instead
he found his thoughts drifting to the old man’s brother, whoever and wherever he was, awake like him, maybe, flat on his back in the dark with his butchered, makeshift heart. He moved his
palm from his chest and breathed deeply, closing his eyes. Where the weight of his hand had been a vague pressure remained as if a great, shadowy finger had found him out and pinned him there. He
was sweating again and knew he had to move. Rana woke briefly as he slid from the bed and he heard her murmur her older sister’s name. Then she was lost again in sleep and Ahmed padded
quietly out of the bedroom.

In the kitchen he made himself a strong black coffee and lit a cigarette. Part of him expected the bird to be dead and he shrank back from checking its flimsy coffin. Instead,
he opened the back door and finished his cigarette whilst staring out into the garden. Somewhere in the darkness gulls were quarrelling. The earlier rain had passed over but the wind was still
squalling and in the east a faint bar of light revealed the underbellies of rank upon rank of rolling storm clouds. From one of the back bedrooms of the house next door an electric light shone but
there was no other sign of life and the weak, cold glow was cheerless and somehow unwholesome. The coffee was bitter but warming and he drained the last of it before tossing away his cigarette butt
and stepping back inside.

Now, finally, he went to the box and eased open the lid. The delicate pale head was already cocked to meet him with a wakeful stare. Its eye, just a few inches away now, regarded him, but
without feeling or intelligence, Ahmed was sure. It glittered with life but was hard and depthless; just a tiny, bright black mirror. A soft tremor of sound seemed to ripple in the bird’s
throat, but so briefly Ahmed wondered if he’d imagined it. Turning its head from him it tapped with its beak at the cardboard wall in front of it, but without urgency. Was it standing, or
sitting to protect its injured leg? The walls were too tight to its body for him to see. In the gloom of the cramped box the colourless head dipped and swayed.

New rain was spattering at the kitchen window and above him Ahmed could hear Rana moving on the upstairs boards, awake and anxious, dressing to search him out. His fingers were cold and
cumbersome and he fumbled to fold the lid.

It was midday, end of August, and for one last time I was riding the Amtrak north out of New England. I had a letter I needed to write, things that needed to be said, and I was
thinking I’d have more chance if the guy two seats back would just shut the hell up a while and let me think straight, let me hear what I was trying to say. He’d wandered into the
carriage an hour before – a skinny, thirty-something red-head with a scrap of beard, dressed loose and carrying an army stores pack like he should be hiking some trail, not riding the Boston
to Burlington commuter line. He made his way to the seat behind me where the young girl was sleeping and joined her. When she woke he started talking in his low, sleepy monotone, hardly waiting to
hear her answers.

Where I live, he was saying now, we get trains passing through maybe once, maybe twice a week. Way up country, that’s the way it is. It’s pretty lonesome. But pretty peaceful, too.
He paused. I guess it’s both.