THE BLACK STORM

THE BLACK STORM

Chapter I

Mud smelt like musk before rain in our village, the Leva Kachkai-the Den of Wolves. But before that rain, it smelt musty, the first omen of the storm. The dreaded ‘black-storm’. And the clouds that began to amass on the horizon like a horny dark mountain was the second. The storm was called ‘black’ because it always descended at dusk. From the west. Even descended in broad daylight, the sun would go hide behind the thick smoky clouds. Appeared at dusk or at dawn, the storm always ended in sorrow, the last omen. Never in happiness. Not in my lifetime. Sorrow to our farms, flattening the crops to ground. To our garden; the apples, pears, apricots, herds and huts. But when the storm would pass, everything would fell silent. The storm, as if, would mourn over the mayhem it would cause in her blind rage.

And, that very dusk the storm was from the west and it roared up there in the sky.

Standing calm, none of the goat or sheep went to lick the salt-stone placed in the corner of the kraal. I knew the animals knew the black storm was around the corner. But I did not know what they knew about what was to come before the storm.

The door of the kraal slammed open and my six-years old nephew-Zarack-appeared with a face otherwise red as a ripe apple.

“A wolf took GaeDeen” he cried, and his voice trapped in his throat.

“What?” my face stretched, and my hands around the bucket of water wrapped unknowingly.

I heard what he said but I did not believe what I heard. Sometimes we don’t want to believe in the whisper that speaks into the greatest fears of our lives.

I knew the deep ravine of the far mountain was host to wolves, panthers and bears. And I believed, whenever a goat or a sheep lost its way to the ravine, it never came back. But a wolf attacking a human of our tribe and taking it away was never heard in all the Ten Villages.

“We were wolves and wolves were we” as one of the centuries old legends held this believe. The legend held that the father of our tribe was fed and raised by wolves when his mother had fallen off of a tree and died.

“What are you talking?” I asked Zarack again.

Frozen like a corpse, my hands wrapped around the bucket of water, I still did not believe what he spoke.

Maybe I was not ready to believe the legends were all but lies. Maybe I was numb, and the news beyond my believes and imagined fears. And, my nerves waited for a sorrow after not before the storm. Or maybe the greatest fear of my life was upon me.

“A wolf attacked GaeDeen and took him along” he cried.

“No” I addressed him like he was my uncle and I a child.

“We have the Sacred Pact and you know it very well” I smiled to the point of insanity.

Once, our village was attacked by packs of bears at times when we lived in caves. Their arch-rivals, the wolves, came to help us under a Sacred Pact. We had to vacate the caves for the wolves and the wolves had to secure our village- the Leva Kachkai-against bears and panthers. One of the conditions of the Pact, the one which is practiced to this date, is that our tribe would take the head, feet, intestines and bones of animals slaughtered in a wedding to the ravine to be taken by the wolves. The wolves in return had not to mess with the humans of our tribe.

“It was a wolf, I swear on the Old Mosque” he cried.

My ears rang like the bolt of a gun is pushed back and released.

My senses at once ran to me and I placed the bucket down on the ground. The Sacred Pact and all the legends I had heard in my childhood crashed at once in my mind.

Wolves were animals and we humans, I realized it that moment.

“To where?” I cried.

We both rushed out of the kraal.

“There” he pointed to the end of the garden which opened into the jungle.

I ran towards the jungle but stopped in the middle of the garden. So did Zarack. I ran back to our house and jumped into the underground cellar where the guns hung to the walls.

I picked my gun, the deadliest one in the whole of the Ten Villages, a Kalashnikov. The gun, I had snatched from a young communist Russian soldier the same winter the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

Climbed back, I ran outside of the thicket of the main door of our house.

My legs flew behind me and Zarack trailed after me from behind through the garden.

We both entered the jungle of thick trees of cedars, olives, and apricots.

Desperate, I slowed down amidst the bushes. Splatting each bush with the muzzle of the gun and my left hand, I looked into each tree to find GaeDeen. Into each stone.

I don’t know why but all I could see were two blue eyes anchored into mine. Bathed red in blood. Of the Red soldier when I picked the gun off his hand. Dead.

I realized my crime I had committed three years ago and my right hand trembled.

I saw beneath every bush, beneath every stone, every tree, the blue eyes of GaeDeen but on the smothered face of the young soldier, lying somewhere in the bushes. I realized we don’t realize our crimes unless done the same to us. And that we weep on the sorrows of others not for them but for us. We find our pains in the sorrows of others and weep to mourn our sorrows not theirs. The more I searched, the more blood in my veins slowed, and my right hand trembled hard.

I changed the gun from my right hand to my left, before it fell down.

The soldier I had killed was a Red who had attacked our lands but GaeDeen was my son. A son. As was the soldier a son.

I was about to throw the gun away that I heard a dim shout of GaeDeen.

“Baba” and the clouds crashed into one another suppressing his voice enough to be traced.

I looked around, half dead. 

“Yes” I shouted, and my voice echoed through the surrounding mountains.

My right hand wrapped around the stock of the gun and my feet ran wild into the voice of my son.

We came out of the jungle into the open ground between the jungle and the ravine. The black storm had descended, and it began to rain.

I saw something miles away being dragged in the mouth of an animal, a panther or a black wolf, I could not recognize.

“I will eat you with my teeth” I swore on Quran. “A wolf or a panther.”

Killing a wolf was breaking the Pact, I did not know nothing. All I wanted was to get back my son, at the cost of myself not to speak of a Pact that was already half-shattered.

The gun fell down of my hands and I ran towards the animal for a while.

 I stopped and looked back. Zarack had picked the gun and dragged it along as he was only two years older than GaeDeen.

We reached the bottom of the cliff. I began to climb towards the ravine, felling on my palms and my knees. Several times, my face fell on ground and it began to bleed. I crawled until I reached the rock above which lied a number of deep caves, where would we find our goats and sheep, dead. 

Zarack changed the course and reached the ravine around the huge rock.

I was crawling inside a cave that I heard a howl from a cave to my back.

I came out and crawled into the cave from where the howl came but could not get inside.

The wolf howled again, and I rushed outside of the cave where the gun was with Zarack.

I had two choices.

If I waited, the wolves were to kill my son, the greatest fear of my life. My fear that lived by my side every moment since I killed that blue-eyed Soviet soldier.

If I fired into the cave, I were to kill the wolf, shred the Sacred Pact into pieces and my son too.

I burst the whole magazine into the cave. The cave lightened with the fire of the bullets and a storm followed inside.

I threw the gun away and held my head in my both hands.

The black storm was over and it became silent all around, as if the storm was to mourn the sorrow she had brought in the end.

I raised my mouth to the sky. The sky, which was getting cleared off of the clouds and the stars had appeared.

“I killed a son.”

My voice echoed in the ravine, the surrounding mountains, through the sky to God.

I mourned the dead young blue-eyed Red soldier first time that dusk.

Chapter II

“Baba” I heard my son, toddling off the cave.

The End