My Accidental Jihad by Krista Bremer

Author:Krista Bremer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2014-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

13 Rage

Adel and Fauziya wrestled the bucket seats of their rusty hatchback forward so Ismail and I could fold ourselves into the back, knees to chest, on a bench seat with foam padding bursting from torn vinyl seams. We were on our way to the desert mountain village where my brother-in-law’s Berber family lived. There were no seat belts and none of the three young children in the car—my daughter, my niece, and my nephew—had seats anyway. Instead they clambered from lap to lap as we drove: small bodies tumbling from the back to the front, tiny hands grasping the steering wheel for balance, feet teetering across the emergency brake as if it were a balancing beam, cheeks pressing up against each dusty window. It was like taking a road trip with three feral cats.

For two hours, we drove on a two-lane road that cut through an endless arid landscape and then climbed a steep mountain pass. We had to shout to hear one another over the whining of the children and the car’s overtaxed engine, which buzzed like a fat, low-flying mosquito in our ears and rattled the car’s tinny doors and floorboards. In a tiny cluster of homes in the middle of nowhere, my brother-in-law swerved off the road and parked in a ditch beside a house built into the side of a mountain.

A round-faced woman with a bright smile welcomed us at the door, a small child clutching at her skirt and peeking out from behind her broad hips. Somewhere behind her, animated voices bounced off bare walls. She led us down a dark hallway to a narrow, crowded room with only one high window on its far side. Beneath the window, seated on a floor cushion as if it were a throne, sat the family patriarch, holding court over a circle of men. A separate, noisier circle of women and children filled the other half of the room. The only piece of furniture was a seventies-era television with rabbit ear antennae that towered over us on a wooden stand, its volume turned all the way down.

When I turned to find my seat among the women, I saw that the room contained one more piece of furniture: flush against the back wall was a narrow metal hospital bed on rusty wheels. A white sheet concealed the bony outline of a skeletal figure. Her wizened face stared unblinking toward the ceiling: sunken cheeks, gaping mouth, unseeing eyes as pale and washed out as the blue-white desert sky. She looked like a corpse—but then air wheezed from her lungs with a high-pitched whine that sounded like a leaky balloon. This was my brother-in-law’s dying grandmother.

Never in my life had I seen anyone this close to death—and certainly not in a bed placed like a buffet table along the wall of a crowded party. This woman looked like she belonged in an intensive care unit, under twenty-four-hour supervision by medical staff, with machines to monitor each labored breath and frail heartbeat.

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