by Tamim Ansary
He felt his way around the room, looking for something to stand on, but the room was completely featureless except for a hole in one corner and the smell told him not to stick his hand in there.
He returned to the slits, jumped, and got his fingertips lodged in the opening, then tried to pull himself up, but his fingers slid off the wet stone. He jumped again and managed to thrust four fingers of each hand deep enough into one slit to hang his weight from them. He pulled his bruised body up, letting his feet drag against the stone, up and up—but just before his eyes came level with the slit, the top of his head bumped against the ceiling. An instant later his fingers slipped out and he crashed to the floor again.
He lay panting and aching: what good would it even do to look through the slits? He couldn’t escape that way. He couldn’t get any useful information from the view. Still, there was nothing else to do in that empty cell, no other goal to set, nothing else to try, so he went back to work. This time, when he pulled himself up, he tilted his head sideways and got one gratifying glimpse through the slender aperture. The wall was thick and the slit was deeper than he could reach through with his arm, but at least it gave him a bug’s eye view of the yard outside: gravel and dirt a few fingers above ground level. His cell was mostly below the earth, as he had feared, but not entirely.
He had now achieved the only thing there was to achieve in that cell. He had nothing else to look forward to unless his jailers planned to bring him food. His cell door looked like a solid block of wood, unpunctured by any window or porthole, but feeling along its surface, he found a shutter so snug in its frame the crack was barely palpable. It did not budge to his push. It must be bolted on the outside. No doubt, the jailers communicated with prisoners through this shutter. They could push food through the hole without opening the door.
Ibrahim put his ear to the crack, tapped the wood, and spoke loudly. “Sheikh-sahib. Are you awake? It’s Ibrahim. I’m in the next cell.”
A voice answered, and though it was muffled by wood and stone and distance, Ibrahim could make out the words clearly. “Salaam aleikum, Ibrahim-jan-i-shireen.”
Peace be upon you, Ibrahim dear-and-sweet! The words flowed over him like warm honey! “Thanks be to Allah , you sound strong. Sheikh-sahib, I’m ashamed.”
“You have no cause for shame.”
“I betrayed you. I am so ashamed—”
“You could never have stopped them from taking me away, but you’ve come for me now, dear one, reckless of your own safety.”
“That’s not it, Sheikh-sahib. Not all of it. I have to tell you—”
“About your new friend. Tell me about your new friend.”
Ibrahim was forced to pause. “Do you mean the hat merchant? Shamsuddin is a good man. He’s been very good to us.”
“Before the seven rosebushes give up their petals your new friend will open the door for you.”
“What? Rosebushes? Open what door, Malang-sahib? What friend?”
“Then at last your yearning will end and you will see water.”
Ibrahim’s heart was jumping. “Water?” His father’s cryptic last words had been: Now at last I will see water. He had raised himself slightly, uttered those words, and then died. “What do you mean by water, Sheikh-sahib?”
“The water that turns into wine when Love does the pouring. You have yielded to our Friend, Ibrahim. You have yielded at last. You belong to God now. Do you see?”
Ibrahim knew what answer he should give. He knew he ought to feel his impotent captivity now transforming into something luminous, submission to a power mightier than his jailers. “Yes,” he said hopefully, “I do in a way. I think I see.” Oh, he knew what to feel, if only he could… “Perhaps I see.”
“Tell me what you see.” The malang’s quiet voice carried as if in a well. Ibrahim did not even need to press his ear to the wood. Perhaps his ears were adjusting to the silence, as his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. “What can you see, Ibrahim-jan?”
“From here, you mean?”
“From where you are,” the malang whispered. “What can you see?”
“Not a thing.”
“Nothing at all? Are you quite sure?”
“There isn’t much light, but in any case there isn’t much to see.”
“Where is the light coming from?”
“From two thin slits in the wall. Why are you asking, Malang-sahib?”
“I am teaching you to see.” Suddenly his voice boomed out, sending a shudder right to Ibrahim’s bones. “Prisoners!” he trumpeted. “What do you see?”
At once a tumultuous chorus of voices broke out! Where were all these people? Where? “We see walls, malang-sahib! We see stone!” the prisoners shouted.
Malang-sahib! So they knew him. Elation spouted in Ibrahim. This cell block wasn’t empty. People surrounded him, all of them prisoners to be sure, but people! “We see stone,” they all babbled. “We see walls! Stones and walls, malang sahib.”
“And you, Hajji Ibrahim?” The malang’s voice came through the wall like light passing through water. “Do you really mean to tell me you see … nothing?”
“No! I didn’t understand your question,” Ibrahim cried out. “I see what the others see. Walls and stones.” Then he realized, “And I see the light coming through those two thin windows. . And earlier….through those windows I saw a yard. I saw gravel.”
“What else?”
“Nothing, just dust particles floating in the light. I see them now. And drops of moisture. I see my own breath. I see…an insect flying—but what of it, Sheikh-sahib? What should this mean to me? What are you teaching me? I don’t understand!”
The malang made no answer. The entire prison had fallen silent. Ibrahim bent his head to the door and pressed his ear to the wood. The noiselessness made him think about the grave. Suddenly he doubted the voices he had heard a moment ago. Where did all that shouting come from? It must have been coming from his own mind. It was all inside his head. He and the malang were alone in here. Now that doubt had taken root in him, it swelled. Was anyone else here? Even the malang? The silence from next door felt deeper than a mere absence of noise, deeper and more frightening. It came to him that he had dreamed it all: the malang, the journey to Kabul. Perhaps even Char Bagh and Khadija, perhaps his son Ahmad, his precious daughters, Soraya, his entire life—perhaps none of it existed. Perhaps this was his life: alone in a black cell. This was where he had always been and would always be.
He shook away the creeping horror. “Malang-jan? Are you there?” His voice sounded lonely and small. “Speak to me! I’m so frightened! Are you there?”
“I am here. I will always be as close as your jugular.”
Ibrahim took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. “What can you see from your cell? Can you see the courtyard?”
“I don’t see the courtyard,” the malang declared.
“What do you see, then?” Perhaps there was something better to be seen from the neighboring cell. “Do you see flowers? I passed a garden on the way in. Do you see the garden? Or horses perhaps! Do you see horses?”
“I don’t see gardens. I don’t see flowers. I don’t see horses.”
“Only walls then? Stone walls? Is that all you see?”
“I don’t see stone,” said the malang. “I don’t see walls.”
A thrill came creeping up inside Ibrahim. “What do you see, Malang-sahib?”
“I see God. I see only God.” The malang’s voice dissolved the darkness. “Everywhere I look, I see only God.”
Then he began to sing, and the melody that issued from his throat had an eerie beauty unlike anything Ibrahim had ever heard. The moment the song began, he knew the malang was singing his masterpiece and that he must write it down—but he had no pen, no ink, no paper—and he could not see anything. It was either too dark or too blindingly bright, he didn’t know which. The malang was singing his masterpiece, and he could not write it down. He uttered a frantic cry that obscured a few words
of the song. He remembered then what the malang had said to him on the hillside in Char Bagh that day, when he first told Ibrahim to write down everything he sang. If it’s dark and there is neither stick nor soil but only stones, do not scruple to open a vein and write my song with blood. The malang had foreseen this moment and given precise instructions to cover it. Ibrahim felt in his pockets for a knife, but of course they would never have let him keep a knife. Minutes of the malang’s precious song had already leaked into oblivion. How could Ibrahim open a vein? He searched the floor with blind fingertips, looking for anything sharp but found only a straw, too weak to break his skin. So he lifted his arm to his mouth and bit through the flesh. He tasted salt and felt a warm liquid flowing over his skin. He had ink.
The malang had already sung so many verses, and even the echoes of those words had died away, but he was still singing, there was still song to record. Ibrahim dipped the straw into his blood and began to scratch words out on stones, unable to see what he was writing, weeping as he wrote, not from pain or sorrow, but from some other nameless emotion. His head swam. Consciousness was draining out of him. Showers of dusty starlight erupted around his head, blinding him to his own fingers, and still the malang’s song ran through his heart and out of his fingertips onto the stones of that prison cell. He saw a whole river of light somewhere up ahead, the light he had craved to bathe in all his life. He reached for it, but it receded. He reached again, but it receded further. The light turned dark and he was falling. He woke up lying on the floor, knowing only that time had passed and his head was pounding and he had failed to break through. He had failed again.
Voices sounded in the corridor outside his prison cell.
34
How could he even see his cell door? He glanced around and saw dusty light streaming through those two high slits. The sun must be on that side, hanging close to the horizon; but was it sunset or sunrise? Was it the same day or the next?
The bolt scraped in its cylinder. Ibrahim struggled to sit up. His lips tasted of salty mud. On the wall next to the door, he saw the words he had scratched out with his blood, but they were just reddish-brown smears. He dragged himself to the wall and found that he had made no intelligible marks except in one place, where his imagination could connect the broken smears and allow him to guess at what the words must have been: only God.
Then his cell door opened, and a prison guard stepped inside, holding a torch. “Come on.”
“Where?”
The guard shrugged. “The higher-ups want to see you.” Two more guards waited in the corridor. They marched Ibrahim upstairs to that original interrogation room. Dozens of candles filled the room with steady yellow light: an aroma of warm wax permeated the underlying whiff of dank stone.
An Engrayzee in a dark blue coat sat behind a table, a pen in one hand, a notebook before him, a stone inkwell at his elbow. He was writing in his notebook, but when Ibrahim entered, he looked up. This was a handsome man radiating animal vigor, radiating a maturity that has forgotten childhood and knows nothing yet of old age. His brown hair curled slightly. Above his shaved chin and short pretty mouth perched a moustache with curled tips. His eyelashes were long, and they too curled at the ends.
A nod from this Engrayzee sent the guards fading back to the entrance, where they stood in stolid silence. The Engrayzee leaned out of his seat to extend a hand, a courtesy that surprised Ibrahim. He didn’t want to shake this foreigner’s hand, but he pressed his palm to his chest politely. “Sekandar Boornus,” said the Engrayzee in fluent Farsi. “What is your name, sir?”
Iskandar Boornus—the name jolted Ibrahim: here was the devil himself! But Ibrahim’s temperament would not let him answer courtesy with discourtesy. “I am Hajji Malik Ibrahim of Char Bagh,” he answered softly.
The Engrayzee pointed to a bench. “Please be seated, Hajji-sahib. I’m sorry I can’t offer you a more comfortable seat.” He clapped his small hands and the sound rang out like gunshot. “Tea for our guest!” He turned back to Ibrahim: “You had a difficult night, they tell me. I apologize for the misunderstanding. I thought you and I might sort things out.”
“Sort what things out?” Ibrahim mastered the urge to armor himself in visible resentment, hoping to convey a menacing self-control by speaking softly. “I came to this place to make inquiries, that’s all. Polite inquiries about a man kidnapped from our village. I came here without sword or gun or anger in my heart. Tell me, Mr. Boornus—in your country—how do you speak with a man who asks respectful questions and asks politely? Do you tie his hands behind his back? Is it your custom to beat him the way that your men—”
“My men?”
“Men in your pay, I presume. These Afghans, these Hindus—these vermin who dragged me into your prison—how long have I been in this place? Can you at least tell me that? I don’t know what my traveling companions are thinking. Are they searching for me, did they go home? Or did they come looking for me here? Were they flung—”
“Please.” The Engrayzee lifted his hand. “You have met with some injustice, certainly, but not at my hands. The men who arrested you work for his royal highness Shah Shuja—the king of your country. He has responsibilities to his subjects. Disorder threatens everyone, and there have been crimes, you know—attacks, murders. His Highness is under pressure to find the criminals and bring them to justice. If he fails in this duty, many innocent people will be hurt. Security comes first, I’m sure we all agree. That said, I believe you’re innocent. That’s what I want to explore. Yesterday, some officials acted hastily. Unnecessary actions were taken, necessary questions went unasked. Let us start over, you and I, and let us speak frankly. If you tell me what I need to know, I may be able to persuade the king’s officials to release you. You say a man was kidnapped from your village, a malang of some sort. Tell me about him. What is his actual name?”
“Men call him Malang-i-Mussafir.”
“God-Intoxicated Wanderer. Yes, I know. But does he have an ordinary name like other men? Mahmood? Asghar? Anything like that?”
“We respect him too much to address him by name. I call him Sheikh-sahib. He is my teacher and master. You will never understand.”
“Sheikh, you say. You consider him a Sufi, then?”
“What I consider him is beside the point. He is what he is, Engrayzee: the vessel of Allah’s grace, the channel of His compassionate light. You who worship idols and do not seek union with the One cannot possibly understand.”
“Don’t be so sure,” said Boornus. He considered Ibrahim thoughtfully. “How long have you known the sheikh? Was he born in your village?”
“No,” said Ibrahim. “He came to us last spring.”
“Where was he before that?”
Ibrahim colored under his black beard. Where had the malang come from? he He didn’t know. It embarrassed him not to know, his embarrassment irritated him, and the irritation made him resent this Engrayzee all the more. “It doesn’t matter where he came from, only where he’s taking me.”
“I see.” Boornus opened his notebook, dipped his pen, and scribbled something. Ibrahim craned to look at the words but didn’t recognize this type of lettering. Apparently, letters that worked well enough for both Arabic and Farsi weren’t good enough for Engrayzee. “To sum up,” said Boornus. “You don’t know where he came from, who his people are, or what name his parents gave him. Could he have come from the north?”
“Why not? North, south, east, or west!”
“North of the Amu River, perhaps?”
“Of course, anywhere, I said. What’s your question? Nothing is beyond the sheikh.”
“He’s had a great many visitors, I hear?”
“His fame has spread, yes. Everybody longs for his blessings except you who put him in chains, tear his flesh, bruise his eyes, but someday, sahib, even you—yes, even you will brag to your grandchildren that you saw him. ‘I was this close, you’ll say, this close to the Malang of Char Bagh,’ you will tell them. ‘I heard his song,’
you will say. Years from now you’ll realize that you heard it and valued it at nothing, and then you will curse yourself and wish that you could live your life again.”
Boornus nodded solemnly, made some notes, and took up his interrogation again. “What can you tell me about his visitors? What manner of men were they? Did any of them come from the north?”
Again this obsessive interest in the north. “From everywhere!” Ibrahim retorted impatiently. “Don’t you understand a thing? The sheikh has devotees everywhere!”
“But including the north? Be specific. Did Russians ever visit him?”
Now it was Ibrahim‘s turn to study his interrogator through narrowed eyes. Clearly the man had some enemy in the north, and he seemed to think Malang-sahib was in league with him. “What is a Russian?” he asked. “Some type of Uzbek?”
“No, a Russian would be a white man like me.”
Ibrahim sliced him with a cynical laugh. “No one like you came to see Malang-sahib! Only Muslims! No Engrayzee.”
“Actually, Russians are not Engrayzee. Some may have swarthy skin like yours. How would you know if a particular pilgrim was a Muslim? If he dressed like an Afghan, would you know that he was really a Russian?”
“I wouldn’t know a Russian, no matter how he dressed. I’ve never heard of this tribe. A man can’t know every tribe, there are so many. Everyone came is all I know: big and little, pale and dark. Malang-sahib never asked if someone was Sunni or Shi’a. Even you could have visited him, Engrayzee, if you had come. Our malang is not your enemy, Mister Boornus. Our malang is a friend of God’s, and so he is the friend of every man.”
“Did anyone spend time with him alone?”
Ibrahim saw where this was going, and he suspected the correct answer was not the true one. “No,” he said unflinchingly. “I am Malang-sahib’s scribe and he insists that I stay by his side all the time so that I can write down what he says if he starts singing.”
