He was asleep again.
Shireen Nazarova put her book of Farsi poems on the floor and looked to the bed, where he lay. Darkness covered the window in the tiny room, and beyond it, crisp winter air, fields of snow and ice, rocky summits rising like ramparts into a moonless sky. The only light came from the bedside lamp, which cast an amber glow onto his face. She could sit here for hours. All night, if she dared, just gazing at him.
Her soldier.
Sometimes he cried out in his sleep. Words she couldn't understand. Some of them sounded like names. At night they stabbed through her dreams and brought her to the doorway, where she watched him toss and mumble like he wanted to throw off the blankets and get back to his mission, whatever it was.
Slipping off the stool, she crept closer to his mattress. He lay on his back, mouth slightly open. The yellowish light washed away the pallor of his skin, the shadows under his eyes, made him look younger and healthier. And he did look healthier now that the hollows of his cheeks had filled out thanks to Mother's hearty mutton shorbo.
She straightened his pillow and pulled the red wool blanket closer to his chin. He might be cold, she reasoned, even though the fever was almost gone and he had stopped shaking like he had malaria. His blond hair tangled around his face, touched his shoulders. She should brush it for him. He smelled of soap and tea leaves, anise mixed with sweat. A manly smell.
Around her finger she twisted a long black ringlet, one of the two that trailed from underneath her crimson headscarf. A habit when she was near him. Delicately, she stroked a lock of hair from his forehead, as she often did while he slept, feeling her breath tighten at the scar carved through his right eyebrow, ending at the top his cheekbone.
There was so much she wanted to know. So much to learn in a shrinking amount of time.
The memorable morning had happened in early February, almost a month ago. Would she ever forget it? Farshad, her eight-year-old brother, had bounded into the valley, AK bouncing around his neck, shouting that a Russian spy had tried to shoot one of the yaks.
When he was convinced that Farshad wasn't playing a joke, Father had taken the family gun and gone off to investigate.
He came back half an hour later with a blond-haired man slung over his shoulder, unconscious. Found face-down in the snow outside a cave, gripping the barrel of an AK, more dead than alive. Not a Russian, in fact, but a U.S. Marine—declared by the tattoo on his right shoulder. On their side in the war against the terrorists spreading through the region.
Although it didn't matter, Father stressed. When you were sick or wounded you didn't have a "side." You belonged to everyone.
And so he belonged to them, this mysterious stranger. No telling how he had come to be in the Fann Mountains, in their corner of north-western Tajikistan, or what he was doing there. During those early days they weren't even sure if he would live. His breathing was shallow and laboured—tuberculosis, they assumed—and whenever his eyes fluttered open, he was too feverish to speak or make any sense.
Frightened for him, she hovered while Mother sponged his forehead and pressed poultices to his chest to rid his lungs of the infection. Anxious to be of some use, she would sing to him, lullabies she remembered from her childhood, ones she had sung to Farshad when he was a baby. She would have liked to hold his hands, to comfort him as he sweated and shivered, but that would not have been proper.
Two weeks had passed before he woke up. A wonderfully happy day for Father, Mother, and herself. Less so for Farshad, since he had to apologize for almost shooting him.
At last he had a name. Trevor. Sergeant Trevor Grey from a special unit of the U.S. Army. He wanted to leave immediately, but Father insisted that he stay with them. It was decided that as soon as Trevor was well enough to travel, Father would sell some of his yaks and buy a satellite phone so that Trevor could contact the army and go home. Back to America. He had been away for a long time, he said. That was all she knew about his circumstances, all he would say, though she suspected that Father knew a little bit more.
The communication barrier disheartened her. She didn't speak English like Father or play chess like Farshad. But she could spoon-feed him shorbo, hold a cup of tea to his lips, and read to him from Father's small library—poetry, romantic and historical epics, even a few children's books. He would listen, a smile on his face, and she would take care to animate her voice so that he would be transported to the worlds she wanted to share with him, even if he had no idea what she was saying. It was the least she could do. The best she could do.
Today, however, she had made a bigger effort.
"Tell me more of you," she said in painstaking English. "Do you have brother or sister?"
"I have one brother," he answered, speaking very slowly. "Rory. We're twins. He looks just like me." With a note of pride, he added, "I'm ten minutes older."
"You miss?"
He broke their gaze. "Yeah."
Shireen had felt an ache around her heart. Did this brother know where he was? Did he know, she found herself wondering, that Trevor was even alive?
War was a terrible thing and no one could argue that. Then again, what did she know, an eighteen-year-old mountain girl who had left school two years ago, who spent her days tending yaks and would probably end up marrying a dull boy from a neighbouring village? What on Earth could she possibly know about how the world worked? Yet as despicable as war was, she felt a helpless gratitude for whatever chain of events had crossed her path with Trevor's.
She touched his forehead again. Was someone else waiting for him in America—a woman sleepless with worry who had no way of knowing that he slumbered on the floor of a white-washed stone bungalow at the bottom of a valley of the Fanns, while she knelt beside him and listened to his quiet, steady breaths?
She missed his eyes when they were closed. He had the most beautiful eyes, sometimes blue, sometimes as green as hers, with gold flecks close to his irises, like bits of sunshine. Exquisitely shaped lips, too. The tiny mole above his left lip gave her mouth a tingle.
She could kiss it. If she had the nerve.
