A Bag of Barley

Abstract

A Bag of Barley Qais Akbar Omar (bio) One night Faiz was having dinner when his wife Gulalay suddenly held her belly and screamed, as if someone had kicked her in the stomach. Faiz gave her a glass of water to drink, but it did not help. He ran to the yard, found a brick, warmed it over the gas stove, wrapped it in a piece of cloth, and set it on Gulalay's belly. 10 minutes later, Gulalay was still crying in pain. Finally, Faiz took the Holy Koran sitting on the windowsill and put it on his wife's chest so the healing powers of the book would cure the pain. Even the Holy Koran could not relieve Gulalay's suffering. Faiz had no choice but to leave their two-year-old son with their neighbor and rush Gulalay to Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital downtown. The long corridor in the hospital was lit with flickering neon lights, and the patients behind the closed doors on both sides were moaning faintly. The whole place smelled like rotten fish and feces combined with the strong stench of chlorine and medicine. There were more flies in the hospital than in any restaurant in Kabul, and they had turned the white walls and the ceilings gray with their droppings. The medical equipment seemed old and worn out. The squeaky metal beds with caved-in mattresses were covered with dirty sheets and they looked uninviting. Faiz took Gulalay to a stuffy room full of flies and laid her in a bed. Three young physicians gathered around her. The first doctor injected Gulalay with yellow liquid, which made her lose consciousness right away. The second one hooked her to an I.V. bag. The third doctor, whose head looked twice as big as everyone else's in the room because of his fluffy hair, tried to find the source of her pain. First, he [End Page 249] said Gulalay's intestines were twisted, then he said her gallbladder was punctured, then he said her colon was blocked. After an hour of probing every inch of Gulalay's body, he was convinced that the pain emanated from her womb. Faiz's skin prickled from shame when he watched the doctor with fluffy hair take off Gulalay's pants, bend down between her legs, insert a medical tool into her private parts, look at the computer screen next to the bed, and talk to the other physicians using words he could not understand. What would his cousins in the village say if they found out strangers were touching and looking into his wife's secluded parts? He pushed the doctors away and covered Gulalay with a white sheet full of yellow stains. "Have some shame and respect!" he jeered at them. "Don't you have wives? What will you do if I look between your wives' legs?" "You are not a doctor, are you?" the physician with fluffy hair retorted with wide eyes, holding a tool that looked like scissors. "No, I'm not." "Then don't you want us to cure your wife?" "I do, but I need to know what is wrong with her." "Her uterus is dangerously inflamed. She may have cancer in her womb, but I'm not entirely certain. If you want a quick result, take her to Pakistan or India. They have the right tools to diagnose her." "Where can a jobless stonemason get the kind of money to go to Pakistan or India?" The doctor with fluffy hair shook his head and left the room. His colleagues followed him. An old janitor was mopping the floor. "If I were you," he said as he leaned on the handle of his broom, "I'd take her to Mullah Malang." The name sounded familiar, but Faiz could not remember when he had heard it. He went on looking blankly at the custodian, whose craggy face and neck carved with many layers of wrinkles reminded him of his father in the village. [End Page 250] "Whenever these medics can't cure a patient," the old man went on, "I tell their families about Mullah Malang." Suddenly, Faiz remembered when he had first...