by Nadeem Aslam
He puts his arms around her and at their touch she tightens her grip on the lapels, thinking it is an attempt at separation. A brief squeal-like sound of protest, until she realises he wishes to hold her. They stand joined like this for two minutes. In the darkness surrounding them, her white clothes seem to glow. Light from the lamp had soaked into them.
Going past the rosemary plant that is said never to grow taller than Christ, she brings him into the house. She knows now from one of his notebooks on perfume that rosemary increases in breadth rather than height after thirty-three years.
He requests with a gesture and she dilutes condensed milk in water and brings it to a boil for him to drink. Through all this they do not say a word. She is still trembling with sorrow. Only when she is in another section of the house to wash the tears off her face does she think of the man who had driven Marcus here. She returns to see him standing beside Marcus. He holds in his earth-covered hands a bottle of whisky. He must have gone off into the night to dig for it the moment he arrived. Like a gold muscle or sinew he pours a measure of it into Marcus’s milk.
*
Past midnight, and all three of them are motionless, her fingers interlaced with Marcus’s where he lies in a bedroom on the ground floor. David in a chair on the other side of the room.
‘A daughter, a wife, a grandson,’ Marcus had been saying earlier. ‘You could say this place took away all I had.’ She was sitting beside him on the bed, as now. ‘I could so easily appear to be one of those unfortunate white men you hear about, who thought too lovingly of the other races and civilisations of the world, who left his own country in the West to set up home among them in the East, and was ruined as a result, paying dearly for his foolish mistake. His life smashed to pieces by the barbarians surrounding him.’
David’s eyes seemed fixed on some random detail in a corner.
‘But, you see, the West was involved in the ruining of this place, in the ruining of my life. There would have been no downfall if this country had been left to itself by those others.’
‘Don’t do this,’ Lara had said quietly. ‘You must try to sleep.’
Now she stands up and turns the small wheel at the side of the lamp, reducing the diameter of light so that darkness appears to take a step closer. A thought she dislikes. ‘I’ll be in the room next door tonight in case you need something. Just on the other side of this wall, I’ll listen for you.’
‘So it is that we make links out of separations,’ he mutters.
Books are stacked high on the bed in the adjoining room, and as she is clearing them David enters and begins to help. They have exchanged only a few words so far, and now too they work in silence.
Through stories we judge our actions before committing them, said the Englishman, and so this was a house of readers, declaring a citizenship of the realm of the mind. She has seen five different editions of The Leopard here, four each of In a Free State and Rustam and Sohrab. Each beloved book has more than one copy – some small with the text crowded into perhaps too few pages, others where the print and the page are both generously proportioned. At first she hadn’t understood but by now she does. Sometimes there is a need to take pleasure in a favourite book for its story line alone, and the smaller editions facilitate this because the eye moves fast along a closely printed page. At other times one wishes to savour language – the rhythm of sentences, the precision with which a given word has been studded into a phrase – and on such occasions the larger size helps to slow one down, pause at each comma. Dawdling within a landscape.
When the bed is free she thanks him, and he glances at her and then she watches him disappear along a darkened corridor, towards the distant painted wall which is covered in the long wash of moonlight from the window, the numerous pinks and reds. The soles of his shoes are worn the way the edges of erasers become rounded with use. As though he walks around correcting his mistakes.
She wonders if his eyes and the quality of his gaze are always those of someone on the verge of sleep – or are they of someone who has not finished waking up?
During the first fever-haunted hours and days, her mind had shimmered with the things she had encountered in this house. They were desert mirages. Phenomena she could not really be sure she had seen. She would separate herself from the sheets and go down the darkened staircase just to check. In the kitchen cinnamon sticks were indeed being stored in a plastic box that had once contained a video cassette. Marcus must have dropped the jar accidentally and then placed the spice in whatever came to hand. It is 1573, she read the summary printed on the box, by the light of a struck match, and Japan is being torn apart by a bloody civil war …
*
Becoming aware of movement during the night she comes out to find David at the kitchen table.
She turns to leave, thinking he might wish to be alone. His back is towards her but the amount of light in the room has increased at her approach, the candle reflecting brightly off her white clothes, the brightness flung up the walls. He turns around.
‘Forgive me, I thought it was Marcus,’ she says.
‘No, it’s me.’
Hesitantly she enters and stands across the table from him and he gestures towards a chair.
‘I thought he needed something,’ she says.
There is no movement from him. To you, insane world, only one reply: I refuse. She thinks of this line from a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva.
‘I am sorry to hear you have been unwell,’ he says. ‘Quite a tough journey you made to get here.’
‘Marcus has been kind. I’ll leave in a few days.’
‘He said you work at the Hermitage. Qatrina made beautiful paintings when she had the time.’
She knows. The bottles for Marcus’s perfumes, and their stoppers, were designed by her, as well as the mazes of calligraphy and flowers to be etched on the glass.
‘Sometimes I shudder at the books up there,’ she says. ‘They are after all a reminder of someone who lost her reason in the face of cruelty. Did you know her well?’
‘I loved her. She was endlessly kind in her personal conduct. But there was something very hard about her intelligence at times. She would not have agreed with what Marcus was saying earlier.’
‘No?’
‘The cause of the destruction of Afghanistan, she said to me towards the end of her life, is the character and society of the Afghans, of Islam. Communism wasn’t the ideal solution to anything but, according to her, her fellow countrymen would have resisted change of any kind.’ He stops, no doubt given pause by his remark about Communism in the presence of a Russian. ‘Whenever Marcus spoke the way he did earlier, she would ask him to remember the circumstances of his father’s death.’
He has opened the outside door and is standing framed within it, looking up at the sky. According to the Afghans each star represents a victim of the wars of the last quarter-century.
‘Did Zameen ever mention to you a Soviet soldier named Benedikt Petrovich?’
‘Not that I recall.’
‘Or someone called Piotr Danilovich?’
‘I’m sorry, no.’ He looks at his wrist watch and switches on the radio, the volume low. ‘I couldn’t sleep so I thought I’d come and wait for the next news bulletin, to see if there have been any developments in Jalalabad.’
It is four-thirty. The radio informs them that the gangs who roam the streets looking for children to kidnap, to harvest their eyes and kidneys, had attempted to drag away several of the half-dead ones from the site of the explosion.
‘Maybe I shouldn’t have started the school,’ he says after switching off the radio. ‘A provocation to the jihadis.’
She doesn’t know what to say.
‘I’ll go back to Jalalabad very early in the morning but I’ll return in the evening. Would you please tell Marcus?’
‘Of course.’
‘Thank you. Goodnight.’
After he has gone up to his room, she sits in the chair, looking out now and then at the si
lhouettes of the trees, the sudden startling bats that appear out of nowhere like flickering ink blots. Quite a tough journey you made to get here. In her room she looks through the sheaf of letters Benedikt sent home from this far country. Princess Marya, learning of her brother’s wound only from the newspapers and having no definite information, was getting ready to go in search of him … When her courage had failed just before an earlier journey to Afghanistan, Lara had encountered this sentence in Tolstoy’s great book and become resolute again. As she is putting the letters back in a pocket within her handbag, her fingers slip through a tear in the lining and touch something. She closes her eyes the moment she pulls out the small cellophane-wrapped sweet into the light. Unable to bear the sight of it. They were loved by her husband, the colour of strawberries. After she made him give up cigarettes he had become addicted to these. She doesn’t know what to do with it now, her breath awry, and then in great hurry she extracts it from the crackling wrapper and places it in her mouth, her teeth working very fast, consuming it, letting it go down into her body.
As in a lyric the moon glitters like a jewel. Through the pane she watches the pomegranate trees, the blossoms and the foliage that would be dripping with dew in the morning.
She had taken with her the gift of a single pomegranate when she went to visit Piotr Danilovich last December, having located him after all the years. When he returned from Afghanistan he had failed to adjust to life, becoming silent like all soldiers who come back from a war. There was a period about which he would speak somewhat vaguely to Lara, but which she knew from other sources to be a time of mental collapse. Now he lived a hundred or so kilometres outside Moscow, in a place known as the House of Ten Thousand Christs.
Bringing with her the crowned, brass-coloured fruit wrapped in black tissue paper, Lara had gone to meet him through the thickly falling snow, to that monastery whose central icon of Christ had been lent at one time to armies, to be carried into battles against the Crimean Tartars. Faith going to war. The Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan had called the rebels dukhi, Russian for ghosts, never knowing when they would arrive, never understanding how they could slip away suddenly, the only explanation being that they had otherworldly assistance.
Piotr Danilovich’s responsibility at the sacred House of Ten Thousand Christs was to repair damaged images, his fingers smeared with resin and ink and pigment, dissolved gold under his fingernails. There was a period during the Soviet rule when the great mosque at Leningrad was turned into a weapons depot. And so wheat was stored at the monastery during the Soviet years, the icons rotting away out of neglect in the back rooms, being eaten by rats.
‘How did you find me?’ he asked.
‘My husband, Stepan Ivanovich, was in the military. One of his friends told me about you, about the story – or rumour – that you had tried to defect with Benedikt but had changed your mind and returned.’
‘You say your husband was in the military. Has he left?’
‘He died this time last year.’
‘So you are the wife of that Stepan Ivanovich.’ His voice remained low throughout her visit and he kept his head very still when he talked.
Three officers had been put on trial for killing prisoners in Chechnya, torturing those suspected of being guerrillas or supporters of the rebellion against the Russian government. Stepan Ivanovich had served as character witness for two of them. If we have in our custody someone who knows where a suitcase full of explosives is planted, set to go off in a few hours, but who refuses to talk, do we not have the right to hurt him into revealing the information – burn him, freeze him? This would have been his line of defence.
‘I am sorry for your loss,’ Piotr said.
She had nodded, looking out at the snow lying in front of the building, then turning to him. With his thinness, and the darkness of his eyes, he seemed to her a figure stepped out of the margins of one of the icons, aged beyond his years.
The pomegranate was on a table close to the fireplace.
She slit it open now. The outer layer of scarlet seeds had been warmed by the flames. The temperature of menstrual blood, of semen just emerged from a man’s body.
‘Afghan fruit vendors would sometimes inject poison into the oranges, melons and pomegranates they sold us Soviet soldiers.’
*
The orchard is a lace of linked greenery around them as Marcus and Lara walk between the trees in the morning. A paw of mist comes down from the mountains above the house.
Marcus inhales the green scents of the spring morning. ‘One year when we visited England there was pollen everywhere, everything coated yellow. A wet April followed by a dry May had caused the pollen cloud to float over to eastern England from Scandinavia. It was thirty years ago but I remember it suddenly now.’
‘Stravinsky in his seventies remembered for the first time the smell of the St Petersburg snow of his childhood.’
‘Is it something distinctive?’
‘Unforgettable. Benedikt mentioned it in one of his letters home.’
There are butterflies in the trees around them. Some have green underwings so that – visible invisible visible invisible – they seem to blink in and out of existence as they fly amid the leaves.
‘Look there, Lara. That tree with pink blossoms.’
She comes and stands beside him. ‘It’s as though lightning struck it.’
‘Qatrina did that. A man from Usha kept making his wife pregnant year after year. The young woman was twenty-two and had had seven children in six years. He never allowed her body to recover, despite warnings and pleadings from Qatrina. When he brought his wife to us for an eighth time, she was almost dead. The tree was small then, a sapling, but still rather robust, and while I was trying to stabilise the woman, Qatrina came out here. In giving vent to her rage she tore the young apricot plant in two. It’s possible she wanted to break off a branch to thrash him.’
They look at it where it is split down the middle. The pink splash-pattern of its flowers.
About five years ago Lara herself had failed yet again to carry a pregnancy to full term. For a Russian woman an abortion was one of the more obvious options when it came to birth control, the men not agreeing to consider any preventative methods themselves, and the ones Lara had had in her youth had damaged her.
‘You mustn’t think badly of Qatrina from what I have just told you.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Women were always dying in repeated childbirth because the husbands didn’t listen – Qatrina had to struggle with the mosques because they said birth control was the West’s attempt at reducing the number of Muslims in the world. And then the Communist regime came and closed down the family planning centres, saying they were an Imperialist conspiracy to detract attention from the real causes of poverty.’
Last month in Usha he overheard a child of about seven say to another, the pair obviously at a loss for something to do, ‘Or shall we go and throw stones at the grave of Qatrina?’ Marcus wishes he hadn’t heard it, had heard it inaccurately.
She used to say she did not want any mention of God at her funeral.
They move towards the tree through the sunlight. Easy to imagine, at such an hour, how Qatrina could have filled notebooks with the colours she found in a square foot of nature. An olive grove outside Jalalabad – grey, white, green. A mallow blossom – red orange, sulphur, yellow bone, red-wine shadow. The mountains above the house – silver, evasive grey, blue, sapphire water. She’d use these notes as reference when painting. Muhammad had said, ‘Verily there are one hundred minus one names of Allah. He who enumerates them would get into Paradise,’ causing Muslims to search them out in the Koran so that a list was compiled. And Qatrina’s life’s work was a series of ninety-nine paintings concerning these names – ‘the Artist’ among them. They are now lost because of the wars.
‘She worked with the patients for longer hours than I did,’ Marcus says. ‘Travelled to remoter areas than I ever contemplated whenever she hear
d about an outbreak or epidemic. But she would at times feel utterly helpless at the state of her country’s people.’
‘I am surprised the tree has survived.’
‘It even produces some fruit, later in the year.’
‘Then I won’t get to taste it. A few more days, at most, is all I’ll spend here.’
‘If you are in no hurry to get back to something, you can stay here longer. And I’ll talk to David so we can accompany you to Kabul airport, we’ll try to walk right up to the plane, when you do decide to go.’ The night she had spent alone in the house has deposited the blue of fearful anxiety under her eyes.
‘There is no need,’ she shakes her head but then murmurs a thanks.
*
For the next three days, David leaves for Jalalabad early each morning, the song of the birds entering his ears like gentle pins, and he returns to the house in the evenings. The electricity generator is actually broken, he discovers, and he takes it to Jalalabad to be mended, the house continuing to live by candle- and lamplight, moving between weakly illuminated pools.
One morning there is a demonstration in Jalalabad, the placards and shouts expressing contempt for the people who had planned and carried out the bombing of the school. Pakistan’s government has denied suggestions that current or former members of its secret service were involved in the crime. Another day, the weeping father of one of the eleven dead children insists the Americans leave Afghanistan because if they had not come the atrocity would not have occurred. And a woman, broken with grief at having lost a girl and a boy, approaches David and wants to know why the Americans had released that criminal from custody. She demands they catch his accomplices and take them away to be slowly tortured to death somewhere.
