by Nadeem Aslam
The mosque was among the first places the soldiers had visited upon entering Usha, rightfully suspecting it of being the possible centre of the resistance, and the cleric – just back from interring his wife – had provided them with a list of names to save his own life. This was a chance for him to eliminate the two lovers also, to make sure what they had seen would go no further. He said Zameen and the boy had participated in the massacre, that they were among the people who had marched through the streets carrying the severed heads of the school’s staff, the headmaster’s wife and three fair-haired children among them.
LARA STANDS in a corner of the abraded golden room at the top of the house, considering with her serious eyes the expanse of empty floor lying before her. A candle burns in a far alcove. Beside her is a cardboard box and she dips her hand into it without looking. She brings out a piece of plaster on which a set of lips is painted. Taking five steps, she lowers herself into a crouching position and places the smile on the floor.
The hand entering the box again, she brings out this time a painted sprig of foliage. She looks around and decides where this fragment should be placed. A distance of two feet from the dark red mouth.
There is coloured dust on her fingers as though pollen.
Next comes a section from a woman’s ribboned hair. She consults her imagination – the outline of the picture she is trying to construct – and then positions the piece on the floor accordingly. Marcus must have saved these from when the room was attacked, the strafing of guns tearing out these details from the walls. How carefully he has washed away the mud even from these fragments. Moving backwards and forwards she positions further pieces. Some are as large as her hand. One has half a face on it, a beauty mark on one cyclamen cheek. There is a whole moth in flight, wings patterned like a backgammon board.
From the candle comes the smell of burning wax and a twisting line of smoke. The image on the floor develops section by section. It is a kind of afterlife she is constructing for all those who have been obliterated from the walls. A young man and a woman made out of the ruins of the dozens in this interior.
He should have brown eyes, she tells herself, and she exchanges them, moving the green irises to the girl’s face. Now suddenly he seems disbelieving. A lover is always amazed.
She takes out another fragment and looks at it – a black tulip, a rare flower native to northern Afghanistan. She closes her fist around it until it hurts. In the spring of 1980 a Soviet lieutenant had died holding this blossom, having picked it moments before a sniper’s bullet found him. A comrade threaded it into his collar and he came home with it on his chest. Later in the war the large transport planes flying dead soldiers home took the name of Black Tulips, this flower becoming a symbol of death in the Soviet Union.
This is her third time in Afghanistan. Over months and years she tracked down soldiers who knew her brother, gathering vague clues, and then planned a trip. The number of Soviet soldiers still missing here is 311 but that could be one of Moscow’s lies, just as the true figure of the dead is closer to fifty thousand, four times the official number. It was said that the general who supervised the initial invasion had shot himself soon afterwards, but for the first several years of the war the Soviet Union would all but deny any casualties. When the dead multiplied, the relatives were discouraged from holding funerals and no mention of Afghanistan was made when occasionally a soldier’s death was reported in the newspapers – he simply died whilst doing his International Duty. When losses could no longer be denied or stifled it was judged best to make them fantastically heroic, and so wounded Soviet soldiers kept blowing themselves up with grenades in order to take thirty Afghan rebels with them. Lara didn’t know at the beginning but Benedikt hadn’t died or gone missing in battle – he had defected. Lara herself was under great suspicion as a result of what her brother had done, if things weren’t bad enough already because of the activities and opinions of their mother. They wouldn’t even tell Lara where in Afghanistan he had been based at the time of his disappearance. Later, as the years progressed and the Soviet Union began to be dismantled, they continued to tell lies or sent her from person to person to exhaust and frustrate her.
But by now a part of the story is clear. Benedikt was with another soldier when he defected, a seventeen-year-old. They both ran away from their military base together but Piotr Danilovich eventually lost courage and went back before he could be missed. He was the last Russian person to have seen Benedikt. By tracking down Piotr Danilovich she has managed to collect Benedikt’s last known movements. Their plan, he said, was to simply walk into the nearest Afghan village in the middle of the night carrying weapons stolen from the base to present to the Afghans as a sign of good faith. Thieves of food, of medicine, of the photographs of sweethearts – every soldier had some skill when it came to picking locks; and so Benedikt was to get the guns from the armoury while Piotr Danilovich went into the bedroom of one of the officers, a colonel. In Afghanistan there were deserts whose names conveyed everything about them. Dasht-e-Margo, Desert of Death. Sar-o-Tar, Empty Desolation. Dasht-e-Jahanum, Desert of Hell. And a few months earlier in one such desert, where the temperature had gone beyond fifty degrees, and on the dunes the spiders stitched together sand grains with their silk to make sheets to shelter under, the colonel had come upon an ancient skeleton with a mass of gems scattered on either side of the spinal column, where the stomach would have been. On the night of the desertion, Benedikt sent Piotr Danilovich to the colonel’s room – he was to find and swallow these gemstones. When he couldn’t get into the safe, he made his way through the darkness to where, having successfully stolen seven Kalashnikovs, Benedikt had emerged from the armoury and run into the colonel. The man was in all probability on his way to help himself to some weapons, Piotr Danilovich told Lara years later, to sell to the Afghan enemy. Piotr watched from the shadows as Benedikt and Colonel Rostov stood looking at each other in silence.
Always hungry, always ill, the weak Soviet antibiotics of little use if ever they were to be had, many soldiers had thought of and talked about deserting, about defecting – an arc of movement in their minds, from Afghanistan to a country in western Europe, perhaps even the United States of America. They had been conscripted and sent out here and they drank antifreeze to escape from life for a few hours or left shoe polish to melt in sunlight and then filtered it through bread to obtain a sip of intoxicant. There were stories about what the Afghan rebels did to captured Soviet soldiers, loathing them as much for being non-Muslim as for being invaders – they who in trying to wipe out one Dashaka machine gun, or a journalist from the West, would literally flatten an entire village. Having dreamt that they had fallen into the clutches of the Afghans, the soldiers sometimes woke up screaming and were unable to fall asleep again for hours. Pillows of thorn. But there were other stories about how the Afghans welcomed defectors, especially if they agreed to convert to Islam.
Time slowed down around them as Benedikt and Rostov faced each other, Piotr watching from the darkness. Rostov had sold a ZPU-1 anti-aircraft gun to an Afghan warlord recently, writing it off as lost in combat, but he had begun to suspect that one of the captains at the base intended to expose him, and so he had ordered the captain and two other men chosen at random – Benedikt and Piotr Danilovich – to carry out a dawn reconnaissance mission in a nearby area, an area notorious as a hive of the most dangerous guerrillas. It was to be tomorrow. And although for safety reasons it was customary to take two vehicles, Rostov insisted the three of them take only one. Benedikt and Piotr had dreamed about desertion often but tonight was truly their last chance.
Piotr watched as Benedikt lowered the Kalashnikovs from his shoulders, time accelerating now. A forward lurch of Benedikt’s body towards Rostov. Piotr would tell Lara that he felt the slam of the body, saying he knew it was packed solid with fury at the abuse and drunken humiliation suffered by all the young soldiers at the hands of the officers. The blade moved back and forth three times. Twice in the
stomach, and then again in the ribs. The man fell onto his side on the ground, one arm pinned under him, the other raised half-way in the air, the wet index finger trembling.
When Piotr and Benedikt were more than a mile from their military base, running towards the village they knew lay ahead in the darkness, Benedikt had stopped suddenly. ‘We have to go back.’ And he wouldn’t take another step, just shook his head when Piotr asked him to forget about the gemstones.
‘No, not the jewels. We have to go back for the girl.’
‘No.’
‘She’ll die.’
‘Better her than me.’
‘Most of Rostov’s blood is on my clothes. He was alive when we left him so we either go back to make sure he is dead or we get the girl. They’ll kill her in trying to save him.’
Death by exsanguination. The Soviet Army would kill prisoners by draining them of blood whenever transfusions were required for its battle-wounded soldiers.
The girl, Zameen her name was, had not provided any information regarding the rebellion after she was captured, though others had been made to talk successfully, and then it was discovered that Rostov and she had the same rare blood type. She was separated from the other prisoners. On one occasion Rostov even took her with him when he visited another city in case he sustained a serious injury there.
Benedikt led Piotr to a small wooden bridge and told him to wait underneath it, and, astonishingly, he was back with the girl in just over two hours. Rostov, he said, had dragged himself into the armoury, smearing red on the floor as he went, and though he was still alive at the end of that path of blood Benedikt had gone to the small room where Zameen was kept.
She was as dazed as she had always been – she had not uttered a word or made a sound since her capture – but now she spoke, startling them, saying Piotr and Benedikt must change the direction of their journey. She said she would take them to a place called Usha and then a little further beyond that to the house of her parents. Piotr was certain she was leading them into a trap – a month ago three Soviet soldiers were found hanging cut up in a butcher’s shop. The time he had spent alone in the darkness had altered him, when he had felt like a castaway on a vast black ocean, fears accumulating around him. Now terrified, he wanted to go back to the base. He arrived just before Rostov was discovered, and he was among the soldiers who were sent out into the night to hunt for Benedikt and the girl – but they were not to be found.
*
The breeze rustles through the branches of the silk-cotton tree. Lara has heard this sound captured on the recording of the bird that Marcus had made in this garden decades ago.
Another few days and then she’ll leave, another few days of sitting beside his aged form as they both drink the bright red tea he loves, a vague smile occasionally on his lips when he glances up from a page to tell her something. A Prospero on his island.
The mountain range looms above the house. On those quartz and feldspar heights at the end of 2001, American soldiers had ceremonially buried a piece of debris taken from the ruins of the World Trade Center, after the terrorists up there had either been slaughtered or been made to flee. Before these soldiers flew out to attack Afghanistan, the US secretary of defense told them they had been ‘commissioned by history’.
We sharpened the bones of your victim and made a dagger to kill you, and here now we lay the weapon to rest.
No. Perhaps something sacred is meant to grow out of the fragment of rubble. She thinks of the Church of the Resurrection on the banks of Griboyedov Canal in St Petersburg. It is known also as the Saviour of the Spilled Blood, built as it was on the spot where a bomb thrown by a member of the People’s Will revolutionary movement had mortally wounded Alexander II in 1881. The canal was narrowed so the altar could stand exactly where the royal blood had stained the pavement.
Always like a distant ache within her is the thought of landmines, so she cannot bring herself to go too far into the garden. She has seen single shoes being sold in Afghanistan’s shops.
She goes back into the house. Dusk, the hour between the butterfly and the moth. Standing in the dark kitchen she drinks water from a glass. She places the glass on the table and remains still, listening to her breath.
She has told him everything she knows about Zameen and Benedikt, all that Piotr Danilovich related to her.
‘Did they come to this house?’ she asked. ‘They were on their way here at the point where Piotr Danilovich’s story breaks off.’
‘Qatrina and I were not here at that time – the house was taken over by others,’ he replied, looking at her. The bereaved glance. ‘I don’t know if she brought him here. I had gone to a village to the west of here, where a battle between the Soviet Army and the rebels had left almost a hundred civilians wounded. Women and children mostly. The Cold War was cold only for the rich and privileged places of the planet. Qatrina remained here while I was away. There was no knowing when a doctor would be needed here. I returned to find her missing and was told that she had been taken away by the warlord Gul Rasool, the man from Usha who was one of the resistance leaders in this area. He wanted her to accompany his men into battle to treat the wounded. Nabi Khan, the other resistance leader from here, a great rival and enemy of Gul Rasool then as now, had the same idea soon enough and came to get me. There was nothing left here, no one in the house.’
‘Then as now, you say?’
‘Yes. Only the dead have seen the end of war. Gul Rasool is the sole power in Usha now, and Nabi Khan is out there somewhere plotting to unseat him.’
She looks at the moon caught in a windowpane, great in size and brightness both. It seems that to shatter it would be to flood this room and then the entire garden and orchard with luminous liquid. In the 1950s, when the Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in the space race, the US Air Force had asked scientists to plan a nuclear explosion on the moon. People would see a bright flash, and clouds of debris would probably also be visible. Higher than they would be on Earth because of the difference in gravity. She knows from the tales of her cosmonaut father, someone who fell towards Earth in a burning machine, that Moscow had also had the idea of a nuclear blast. Yes, after such a demonstration who wouldn’t cower beneath a nuclear-armed Soviet moon, a nuclear-armed American moon? It never happened but she wonders if the terrorists didn’t come close to something like it in 2001, an enormous spectacle seen by the entire world, planting awe and shock in every heart.
She leans against the wall and closes her eyes.
Even if she hadn’t fallen ill she would have considered asking Marcus for a short refuge when she met him, letting a portion of her weight onto another, being held. While almost everyone else gave it to understand that shame must accompany failure, because you obviously weren’t wise or strong or brave enough to have prevented a derailment of your life, Marcus seemed one of those few humans who lent dignity to everything their gaze landed on. Like a saint entering your life through a dream. To him she would have admitted that the years have left her bewildered by life.
In the topmost room she looks at the fragments she had arranged on the floor. The two lovers summon up an army of ghostly lovers, the man embodying every other man, the woman symbolising every other woman, all imperilled.
*
In Usha they know Marcus Caldwell by his Muslim name. He believes in no god but had converted to Islam to marry Qatrina, to silence any objection. Like him she would have been satisfied with a non-religious ceremony, indifferent to the idea of supreme beings and their holy messengers, but she had agreed on condition that a woman perform the rites. ‘We have to help change things,’ she said. ‘Nowhere does the Koran state that only men may conduct the wedding.’
These days, Marcus seldom says more than a few words to anyone in Usha, communicating in the bazaar with just nods and gestures as much as he can and then leaving. He knows he is not the only casualty in this place. Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone’s life now lies broken at different levels within the rubb
le. Some are trapped near the surface while others find themselves entombed deeper down, pinned under tons of smashed masonry and shattered beams from where their cries cannot be heard by anyone on the surface, only – and inconsequentially – by those around them.
Yes, he knows he is not the only one who is suffering but he cannot be sure who among the inhabitants of Usha had been present the day Qatrina was put to death by the Taliban. A public spectacle after the Friday prayers, the stoning of a sixty-one-year-old adulteress. A rain of bricks and rocks, her punishment for living in sin, the thirty-nine-year marriage to Marcus void in the eyes of the Taliban because the ceremony had been conducted by a female. A microphone had been placed close to her for her screams to be heard clearly by everyone.
He began to avoid the light of the sun, keeping to the hours of darkness as much as possible. He took every clock and watch in the house and put them away in a drawer. At first the ticking was amplified entreatingly by the wood but one by one they all came to a standstill, as though suffocated. In this way he removed the sense and measurement of time from his surroundings. He knocked onto its side the pedestal bearing the sundial in the garden. A time of deepest darkness. The numerals painted on the sundial might as well have been dates engraved on a tombstone. The food in the cupboards ran out and he had nothing to eat. The entire world it seemed had fought in this country, had made mistakes in this country, but mistakes had consequences and he didn’t know who to blame for those consequences. Afghanistan itself, Russia, the United States, Britain, Arabia, Pakistan? One day he thought of capturing a bulbul that had flown into the house. In the end he knew he could never eat anything he had heard sing.
