A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie

allowed herself to be directed into the other room. It didn’t take long to understand what he was telling her – a bird had built its nest in the ceiling fan; the tiny chirping sounds which she had taken for a cricket emanated from it. If she switched on the fan it would be a massacre. The gardener, now standing outside this second room, presented her with the bracelet and placed his hands together in supplication.
    She pressed her thumb against one of the speckled fragments which crumbled into fine powder. The gardener looked as if he might cry. Here was a gentler world, where the large tragedies of a military hospital didn’t erode compassion for the tiniest of creatures.
    Don’t worry; I’d rather melt in a puddle than harm them, she said, and though they didn’t speak the same language he understood the tone of her voice, and touched his hand to his forehead.
    She walked back into the bedroom where the ceiling fan was rotating briskly – after sharing a hostel room with four other nurses, the space between these four walls was more than sufficient. Tying the coral bracelet around her wrist, she was grateful to be allowed this moment of largesse.
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    Stepping from the cool waters of the bath, she walked directly to the bed, pulling a loose Turkish robe over her head without drying off. Air from the ceiling fan rippled across cotton and wet limbs as she lay down; the curtains were carefully drawn but the window ajar so she could hear water burble from the garden hose into the flower beds just outside. Everything spoke to her of pleasure. She tried to hold herself in that shadow-place between sleep and waking where the mind drifts, excavating – Tahsin Bey was there with her, his thumbs splitting a silver fig in two, purple flesh beneath metallic skin.
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    The next morning Viv stepped out into a breeze which originated from two bearers snapping a tablecloth in the air, dark hands on white cloth. She had come out to see the sun rising from behind the mountains but haze smeared the sky and her presence clearly disturbed the hotel staff’s early morning preparations. One of the bearers apologised – for what? Being visible? Somewhere a rooster crowed, a dog barked in response. If Mary were here they’d return to the familiar, but still amusing, topic of dogs’ accents. The rolled ‘r’s in the bark of a poodle, the guttural growl of an Alsatian. And why was it that everything unacceptable in a man – slobbering enthusiasm, predictability, simple-mindedness – was so charming in a dog? She felt a pug’s disdain, and knew it wasn’t really Mary whose company she was missing.
    She sat down at a table beneath a pine tree, picked up a pen and tried to think of what to write which would please Papa. When Mrs Spencer presented, as a fait accompli, Viv’s trip to Peshawar all his visible anger turned towards his wife, and what Viv had received instead was his bafflement. Why? he kept saying, wanting to understand, failing to do so, being wounded by that failure. Every day Viv thought of going down to breakfast and saying, I’ll return to the hospital – but then she thought of the boy with the sandy hair and the blue eyes and stopped herself. So she left with a promise: she’d be back in London by Christmas, and if the war was still on she would return to her nursing duties. Her mother sighed and shook her head when she heard that, but didn’t say anything about it.
    One of the bearers brushed leaves and seed-pods off the starched white tablecloth, brought her breakfast, and sent a young boy to stand behind her with a large fan in his tiny fist. In his turban and waistcoat he reminded her of the monkey similarly dressed at an Arabian Nights party in England two summers ago. The monkey held a Japanese fan which it swept up and down the length of its body in a manner so vulgar – head thrown back, legs spread apart – that Mary