Abigail – The Avenging Agent: The agent appears again by Rose Fox

burial or have
a tombstone mark their resting place with their name.
                He pondered for a second whether
this would also be his fate.  He could not have guessed how right he was. 
    Abdul was a member of the Kurdish
underground, who lived in Turkey.  His heart had grown numb to the horrors, and
the sight of the carnage beneath his feet did not affect his pace, but he was
careful to respect the dignity of the bodies. Every piece of fabric or dusty
rag signified another corpse, and he took care to walk around them.
                The truth was that, like
many others before him, he had already come to terms with the fact so many
people had died in their attempts to achieve Kurdish independence.  He had no
doubt that thousands more would die.  He knew there was no other way, nor would
there ever be. Since all who opposed the Turkish or Iraqi army shared a common
fate  - to be killed or die, and there was no option of capture or imprisonment. 
                Even the army they were
fighting against preferred its soldiers to die rather than, God forbid, be
taken prisoner by the Kurdish fighters.  In the view of the military,
unnecessary death was much more honorable than surrender or capture by the
Kurdish Underground.  That was the reason no one cared about these slaughtered
Kurds, who lay here under the Turkish sun.
                It seemed to Abdul that he
heard a baby crying.  He stopped, frozen to the spot and listened.  It was
quiet but then, he heard the sound again.  Yes, he heard a baby crying.
                Abdul gazed around,
searching among the many dead bodies.  The crying burst out from right beneath
him and he kneeled down, cleared away branches and stones and discovered some
dirty checkered fabric.  A dust-covered infant stretched out his tiny arm and
rested it on the breast of his dead mother and tried to suck it.  He released
the dark nipple and gaped as he emitted a thin, high-pitched sob.
                Abdul tried to pick up the
infant, but the dead woman gripped him like a vice.  He had to struggle to
release the baby’s arm and leg from her lifeless fingers, which were like a
fossilized spring that had lost its flexibility. He found a stick in the sand
and used it to release her grip and picked up the recently born infant.  The
baby was naked, and Abdul pulled the fabric that covered the dead mother out of
the sand and wrapped her orphaned child in it.  Gold embroidery glinted from the
ends of the collar of the torn garment and Abdul stopped to examine it.  The artistic
gold embroidery on the fabric led Abdul to think that perhaps, it had some
distinctive mark that could be identified.  He laid the child on the ground,
dug around the body of the woman and released the fabric that had enwrapped
both of them.
                The infant was hungry,
something even Abdul could recognize from the sucking of his toothless gums. 
The babe tried to suck Abdul’s dirty fingers, and he held him to his chest and
studied him from close up.  His tiny hands embraced his neck and aroused an
instinct in him that he did not know he possessed.  The sweet smell of the small
body, its softness, and the silky curls made Abdul open the buttons of his
shirt and press the infant close to his perspiring chest and embrace him.
                He folded the embroidered
cloth and put it under his arm and, with broad strides, made his way back to
his family’s tent.  He gave the orphaned child to his wife, Nazim, who embraced
him and rested him on the rounding belly of her new pregnancy and extricated a
breast that was always full of milk.  She was currently nursing her older
child, who was still less than a year old.
                Their new baby daughter arrived
almost three months later, and Nazim transferred the orphaned nameless adopted
child to the care of her mother, the amazing and wise Nana