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Andaleeb (I)

             Some time after the terrorist attack, the father of the young woman - the girl with the deep eyes and soft smile – talked to me about her.  His “Nightingale of Death”, as he called her. As a hardened foreign correspondent, I observed that there was no pride in those eyes. Staring aimlessly at the paintings on the tiled floor, his thoughts were lost inside them.  Beside him, a TV - the same one that had announced the tragedy – continued to transmit the usual insipid trite.  
 
- I told her to eat something – he tells me, with shoulders drooping heavily like those of a beaten man.
 
             As I reconstructed that morning for all the anonymous witnesses, I allowed myself to be guided by the imagination of my pen.  Andaleeb had woken up, forgetting that she was about to scatter the earth with dead people. It is said that time goes by slowly during your last hours. Maybe that’s why the young woman needed a few seconds to feel the lump that was closing in on her stomach. She faked a smile. Today was the happiest day of her life.
 
             Next to the makeshift mattress where she slept lay her dress and headscarf, folded carefully into a little pile of sky-blue pleats. And there, hidden within a world of deceit, lay the Book with all the Answers. That weapon of paper gave her a reassuring feeling of righteousness that made the lump disappear, but only for a second.  The book that held all the answers: the remedy for any doubt; the book that erased every disconcerting thought. She knew that even the blood that she was about to shed would already have been written in that book’s pages.
 
             When she tried to stand up, her legs seemed wobbly, as if they were made of dough. Trembling, they seemed incapable of supporting the body of a young martyr. “It’s the sign of weakness”, she told herself. “It must be hunger”.  She had spent the entire evening at the mosque, losing her soul amongst her prayers as she waited for the sun to set.  With soft caresses and whispered songs she had prepared her best clothes. Satisfied with the greatness of her plans and looking forward to her imminent celebration, she hadn’t felt the need to eat all day. Now she was feeling weak, and that weakness could jeopardise her plans of a glorious death. “A soldier must be practical”, she thought, but dismissed the thought, and the lump returned soon again.  
 
             There were no mirrors in the bedroom. Her young brother was asleep beside her on the thin mattress on the floor, clutching a toy gun. Andaleeb’s smile grew a little wider, this time more effortlessly, while she softly stoked the messy hair of the child. She had never needed a mirror to get dressed. She had been getting dressed in the darkness all her life, covering her body with sheets or blankets, hiding every hint of the maturing twenty year-old body from her brother. But that morning she needed more time than usual. Not because of her unusually clumsy fingers, but because she didn’t want to wear her plain old squared patterned dress for such a special occasion. But what would Assef think if he noticed her uncontrollable, swelling pride? What would he think if he realised that her indulgence in that pride could possibly ruin their carefully laid plans?