22. Carl
22. Carl
Caroline died of a single wound to the chest and abdomen.
Two patrols had left the camp that morning. The first patrol, the one Caroline was in, came across a policeman washing at a stream in preparation for prayer. They mistook him for a Taliban fighter and fired a warning shot.
It’s impossible to know why they took that first shot, other than to say things can look very different when your nerves are strung out sky high.
Did the policeman jerk forward, as if reaching for something?
Did he stumble with nerves?
Was he reaching for his clothes or a weapon?
A second patrol, looking down at the very same scene from a different vantage spot, heard the warning shot and assumed they were under fire.
They fired back, killing the soldier who had fired the warning shot.
And Caroline.
Like the rest of us, Jobbo just couldn’t believe it.
He couldn’t bring himself to go and see her body in the morgue, but he couldn’t bear the thought of her being alone.
‘I’ve got this,’ I told him. ‘I’ll stay with her until they fly her home.’
‘I will too,’ Assami said, stepping forward. ‘It will be my honour.’
He took a step closer to Jobbo, bowed his head and put his hand over his heart. ‘Your Caroline, she was such a wonderful woman. It will truly be my honour.’
Jobbo looked up at him, his face streaked with tears, and nodded.
‘She did not deserve this,’ Assami went on. ‘And neither do you, my friend.’
The sergeant who opened the door to us both at the morgue couldn’t have been kinder, but a chill ran through me when he led us through to a spartan white room with a couple of gurneys and a wall of cabinets.
Staring at them, I felt a terrible weight of grief inside me. All those ghosts. All those devastated families waiting for them back home.
The sergeant nodded to a label on a cabinet at the bottom right, and pulled over a couple of chairs for us to sit on.
‘I’ll leave you to it.’ He withdrew quietly.
Assami started to pray and, angry as I was with God right then, the sound of him chanting was comforting. It felt good to know that, even in death, one of us had Caroline’s back.
After a while, he stopped.
He took my hand in his. ‘I am praying to the angels,’ he said.
‘What angels?’ I asked, suddenly curious to know.
Maybe the angels in his world would make more sense to me than the ones in mine.
He smiled. ‘The Questioning Angels, Munkar and Nakir. They come to the grave to interrogate the person who has died, to see if they have led a good life.’ He shook his head. ‘But I do not think Caroline will suffer the interrogation in the grave. She has led a good life.’
‘If there are angels, how can they have let this happen to her?’ I asked bitterly.
‘I cannot answer that for you, my friend,’ Assami said, and he bowed his head again in prayer.
I cried then. I couldn’t help it.
Because Caroline had led a good life. But life hadn’t been good to her.
And death had come far, far too soon.