In the Orchard, the Swallows

By Peter Hobbs

This tale of innocence and corruption in Pakistan is “a beautiful, often painful, journey of a young man’s doomed yearning for love” (The Guardian).
 
During a village wedding in Pakistan, a boy risks speaking to the beautiful daughter of a powerful local politician. As night falls, the two meet in his father’s orchard, inadvertently falling asleep as they wait for the light of dawn to reveal the orchard’s beauty, naive to the dangers posed by their innocent mistake.
 
As first light approaches, and the girl’s father realizes the young couple’s mutual attraction, he has the boy sent to prison without explanation or the benefit of a trial. Fifteen years later, the boy—now a man—is released without a word. Bereft of family and weakened from years of abuse, he collapses on the side of the road and is taken in by a kindly scholar. As time passes, the man recovers enough to take daily walks to his father’s now abandoned orchard, where he last saw his young beloved among the trees, beneath soaring, fluttering swallows . . .
 
In clear, crystalline prose, this novel reveals the ability of the human spirit to conquer the random cruelties of life, and how the power of love and hope, once known, can never truly be extinguished.
 
“Hobbs’ prose is spare, clean, and lyrical, giving In the Orchard, the Swallows a timeless feeling; however, the markers of the Afghan war and the changes in the landscape remind the reader that this story is very contemporary.” —Booklist
 
“A perfectly cut jewel of a book.” —The Financial Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781609451936

Peter Hobbs

PETER HOBBS grew up in Cornwall and Yorkshire, and now lives in London. He is the award-winning author of two novels, The Short Day Dying and In the Orchard, the Swallows, as well as a collection of short stories, I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a writer-in-residence for the literacy charity First Story.

Book preview

THE ORCHARD

It is cold, despite the woollen shawl I have borrowed from Abbas. Beneath its weight my flesh is too sparse, the skin stretched tightly over bones. I have been climbing for a long time—it was dark when I left—but I cannot walk quickly enough to get the heat to rise in my blood. My shivering grows violent and my teeth rattle uncontrollably, the sound echoing in my head. The cold causes my neck to ache and my jaw to stiffen.

The air, though, is blissful and clear. It brings the ragged mountains close, chisels their details finely to my eye. The peaks are yellow in the early sun. Later, the sunlight will climb down from the mountains and descend this road into the valley below, restoring the colours that were lost to the pale washed night.

This walk exhausts me still. I am close to staggering when I arrive, my legs almost gone beneath me. After all the years away they have not readjusted to the mountains, and I can feel every step of the climb still in them. My breath comes heavily.

In the rose dawn light I greet the trees. Trace with my eyes their untidy forms. I imagined them for so long, summoning them up in the darkness when they were lost to me, and each morning now it is an acute pleasure to return to them. They are in blossom, their branches arrayed in scarlet and white.

To one side, as I circle the orchard, is the corn field. The crop has begun to emerge from the earth, ragged lines of green forming against the dark soil. I wonder if it will grow as tall as I remember it. I move around the furthest edge of the trees, following the low stone border until I reach its end, beside the largest tree. Here, I will wait. I press my palm against its bark, then turn to rest my back against it as I ease to the ground. My sandals slide forwards, and the feel of the cold dust on my feet is extraordinary; it runs as smoothly as water over my skin. Among the folds of my shawl I find the paper bag I have brought, and I take some of yesterday’s bread from it, nibbling slowly at its edge.

The birds have woken and there are swallows in the orchard, carving arcing paths between the trees. Below them a fine layer of mist clings to the ground. Pomegran­ates are hardy plants, and the trees are showing little damage from the winter frosts, though they are growing wild and have not been pruned for some time, or else the pruning has been done inexpertly. The trees are growing old, and the orchard has not been renewed as it should; no new cuttings have been taken and planted. Still, they grow vigorously. Sprouting roots have been left unchecked, blurring what were once carefully trained trees into the wild bushes they long to be. The fruit will suffer for it. If I had the tools I would be tempted to tend to them, but they are no longer my own trees to tend. It is better that I do not touch them.

From where I sit I am able to look down over the valley. Can follow the thread of the road, cutting down the mountainside along its dusty ridge. At its far end, not yet visible in the light, is the town, your old home. There, at least, the market will still be waking into life. Here, all is peaceful.

I gather my breath. I try to imagine the weakness in my legs bleeding out into the dirt, being replaced by some vitality which ekes from the tree into my back. I wait as long as I am able, until the sun has found the road above and the skyline begins to glow bright, the mountain-tops white and blinding. The light will reach me soon. But I cannot stay to see it. In a few moments, before the evidence of life begins to show in the small house through the trees, before the farmer comes to his orchard and finds me here, I will stand and brush the sand from my shalwar, stretch once again to ease the aches in my muscles and joints, and begin the slow journey home.

ABBAS

I see I have written home, though the home I am staying in is not my own. It belongs to a man named Abbas. I am not sure how to describe him for you. He is not family, and yet I cannot call him my landlord, because I do not pay him any rent. If I said that he was my saviour, it would not be an exaggeration, but I will come to that story in time, and so for the moment I will simply say that he is my host.

His house is larger than the one I grew up in. It sits on the edge of a small village, some distance north and west of town, a few miles from the orchard. From the road it looks small, the simple sandy wall suggesting nothing more than a farmer’s cottage. But the impression is deceptive, and the building is more extensive than it appears. Inside there are bedrooms for both Abbas and his daughter, Alifa. She is ten, the same age my youngest sister was when I last saw her, though it is clear I am some way yet from earning the right to be treated as a brother. I am patient in my efforts. There is a kitchen, and then beside that another small room which seems once to have been a larder, but which has been given over to me, a bed brought in and placed against the cool mud of the wall. And there is a study, its walls lined with books, its floor thick with overlapping carpets. Abbas spends much of the days there, when he is home, reading or writing. The house is filled with plants. Everywhere there are flashes of green. I can taste them in the air. The carpets and furniture throughout are simple, but clearly of a finer quality than I am accustomed to.

Behind the home is a walled garden, with a small terrace. There is a table, and two chairs, and beside them a tall electric fan, its green paint half given over to rust. I have not seen it in use, and do not think it has been working for some time, but it looks at home nonetheless, as though it has been forgotten, and in the process has gradually achieved the status of somehow belonging there, becoming its own ornament. But the garden, too, I will tell you about in time.

I remember waking here on my first day, lying on a charpoy, feeling the rough cords of the bed beneath my back softened by sheets. A doctor stood at my bedside. I did not know where I was. The walls of the strange larder seemed to slant in above me, though I realised later that it was just my dizziness. I felt a terrible weakness in my body, a buzzing in my arms and legs as though they were filled with insects. I was dressed in a shalwar kameez several sizes too large—though when Abbas tells the story, he has it that it was I who was several sizes too small.

He must have paid for the doctor to come, though he will not speak of the cost, when I ask him. The doctor listened briefly to my story and asked about my symptoms. I was so dehydrated I could hardly speak. When they tried to give me water my body would not keep it down. He left for me two plastic bottles of an oily, salted liquid to drink when I could. And he gave me pills, antibiotics, sour lozenges the size and shape of almonds. Even as it knew how much I needed them, my body tried to reject them, as it purged almost everything from it in those days. I wonder if there was something in me that did not want to return from illness. Something that preferred to remain latched closely to it, resigned to circle down into the darkness, to be consumed.

Before he left the doctor massaged my limbs, a tight circled grip travelling along them.

‘It will help the circulation,’ he said.

His hands fitted completely around my thin arms,

Reviews for In the Orchard, the Swallows

[seven.stories.press · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

More an extended prose poem than a novel, this slim volume offers a heart-wrenching account of young love, unthinkable sadness, and haunting questions that may never be answered.

[edwinbcn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In the orchard, the swallows is not just a simple love story, although just such a simple love story forms the basis of this cruel tale. In the orchard, the swallows is a modern Romeo and Juliet set in modern time in Pakistan. Not death, but spiritual death separates the lovers. The young man thrown into prison, which he barely survives, to be forgotten, cut off from the world, his love, and father, who dies during his imprisonment. Upon his release, he is nursed back, taken into the home by an old man. Recovering, pensively, he writes this heart-rending account of life in a note-book. His cruel experience is transient, while love, cruelty, human nature, and nature are for ever.In the orchard, the swallows contains beautiful descriptions of nature, the orchard, and the soothing presence of the swallows, perhaps a symbol of homeliness. Some parts of the book consist of telling, or lamenting monologues, which are a little bit overbearing. The setting in Pakistan is a bit estranging, but apparently rendered quite convincingly and true.

[viccavalli · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel affirms the human need to hold fast to the possibility of love and beauty against the overwhelming forces of circumstance and history, which like a tidal wave threaten the human heart with annihilation. The few minutes of nectar-like bliss the narrator experiences with Saba are like seeds planted in the narrator's soul, and these seeds will come to fruition as the gift of the text itself to Saba, regardless of her reality.

[heatherlinc · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This short novel was basically an extended letter from the protagonist to his forbidden sweetheart, Saba. After fifteen years of imprisonment, illness, abuse and torture, the young slowly starts to recover, and in a small garden he writes to his beloved about the present and the years that have separated them. Each day he visits his family's old orchard where he finds peace and contentment.I loved Abbas, the poet, who took the young man in and tended to his physical and emotional injuries. His gentleness and kindness played a key role in the healing process."In the Orchard, the Swallows" was a gentle, heart-breaking story about love, survival and the human condition. The last chapter, especially, was absolutely beautiful.

[ccyynn-75710 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is a love poem.

I stay clear of love stories. I grew up watching old black and white movies, and reading books like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and Rebecca, and falling in love over and over again. In my imagination I was always in love.

I don't think that I am really so different now, but love itself is very different: much broader, yet much more precise, and not at all related to the tangled relationship of two individuals.

I've wondered at this distaste of mine, at the undeniable feeling of boredom that arises when I am faced with what are called "love stories" in books. (I don't mind seeing some romantic movies to pass the time, but the thought of reading a book whose plot is focused on "love achieved" feels like a punishment.) When does "believing in love" become an exercise in the "suspension of disbelief"?

This beautiful book is a tender rendition of a young man's doomed love for a young woman. They have but moments together, when they are still children, but the penalty for these moments is severe. They are separated, and the young man's life is forever altered. His tale, written in the first-person, is a love affair with his memory of this very young love. It has kept him alive. And his voice is cautious and sad, but hopeful, too, as he writes.

It's a love letter, a record of change (changes in our bodies, our spirits, our wounds and recovery, our home, our hopes, our country), and a farewell. I am touched by the tenderness of this author's imagination. In writing this, he expresses a love that is simpler than the convoluted dramas we know too well. Perhaps it's an imagined love, which they all seem to be, abiding within my modern cynicism, yet entirely believable in its simplicity. Maybe my early reading created this desire in me to make love an uncomplicated thing. So that with this book, I was able to rest in its beauty, as I do in a poem.

A sweet, sad book, that I am very glad to have read. This review is not worthy of Peter Hobbs's short and fluid work of beauty. The changing landscape, the fragrant orchard of pomegranates and swallows, the skies and dusty path, the brilliant example of Abbas, the kind scholar, and even of the child Alifa, in her imperious and likely terrible destiny, will stay with me. They are not filled-in characters, but vignettes in what a life would look like from the view of a hopeful person looking in, from the outside, seeing what he (she) wants to see, and finding that his love of love (life) informs his vision. A vision of what life (love) is, and what it could be.

[proustitute_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Abandoned.

I am obviously a fan of poetic novels, so I was eager to read this when reviews cited its poetic style and how psychologically resonant the interior life, musings, and grief of the narrator were rendered.

I found the latter to be the book's strength; however, I could no longer read after the midway point due to what felt like trite and contrived prose. The pacing and style felt almost as if the book were directed to young adult audiences, and that's not a genre I read at all.

Perhaps Ali Smith's praise for this novel set my expectations too high. Perhaps I'm just not in a sappy, love-lost kind of mood.