The wind hurried through the village as if on its way to somewhere more important. It blew sand over the squatting men and silent women. The lane, where children peeked at the visitors, was of sand. The buildings were of sandstone. The distant mountains seemed to be towers of sand.
A woman holding a baby approached them. Despair was the lonely inhabitant of her eyes, misery the permanent resident in her exhausted face. She might have been any age between fifteen and fifty. She said something to them.
‘She’s hungry,’ Ellie’s translator, Zahir, said. ‘She wants money for food. None of the people here have eaten for two days.’
The woman then pushed her infant towards the three outsiders, and said something in a quiet, sorrowful voice.
‘What’s she saying?’ Ellie asked.
Zahir stared at the woman, then shook his head. The woman said the phrase again.
‘What’s she saying?’ Ellie insisted.
‘She’s saying, “Buy my child”, Zahir muttered. ‘Come on. Let’s go!’
‘Buy my…? Wait! Just… wait. Ask her what her daughter’s name is.’
‘Duit,’ Zahir said, after putting the question to the woman. ‘It means something like hope. She’s six months old.’
Ellie looked around. The eyes of the village males were locked on her. In expectation? In mistrust?
‘Selling a child?’ Ellie said.
‘The woman says her sister has already sold her daughter to a man from Herat for two hundred dollars,’ Zahir replied. ‘He wanted her so she could marry his son when he’s grown. That’s the story, anyhow.’
‘Why does she think I would be interested?’ Ellie asked.
Why indeed? Fifty years of age and married to the job: a war and disaster-area junkie. All those years talking to camera, explaining hostilities, death, suffering. Years of living in hotels, flying from Israel where she was based, to wherever there was a story: Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, now Afghanistan. Living off the wretchedness of war-victims, a carrion creature, single, focused on explaining to weary British tv watchers what was so exceptional about this war compared to the other, similar ones.
A child? The idea of motherhood had sometimes entered her thoughts on sleepless nights when distant guns and rockets popped and peppered outside the hotel. Relationships weren’t for her. The life of an itinerant, well-fed, well-paid, drawn to danger like a dagger to blood: that was fulfilment. She was fulfilled, wasn’t she? But a child? She used to fantasise about getting pregnant by an acquaintance, and retiring to rural Wales, forgetting about dying human beings, just her and her child. No, it was impossible: the practical difficulties, borders, keeping the story hush-hush.
‘I’ve filmed the woman’s offer,’ Joe, the cameraman, said. ‘Might be a suitable short piece. “Degradation following the return of the Taliban.” Okay?’
Ellie was irritated. Just another story to Joe, another item of consumption for viewers. She caressed the child’s cheek, then put some dollars in the woman’s hand. The wind continued to blow as the three witnesses from the west departed.
