The Wasted Vigil

by Nadeem Aslam

  He sits on the stone steps that descend into the perfume factory. As night arrives he can barely see the Buddha’s head, save for slashes of minimum light that define his hair and mouth. He spreads ambergris onto his hands. His head filling up with sea odour. He discovered a small amount of it in a jar here like a dab of black butter. It is obtained from the insides of sperm whales but the Arabs who peddled it along the Silk Road always disguised its origins, protecting a trade secret. For a long time the Persians believed that it came from a spring beneath the oceans, and the Chinese that it was the spit of dragons.

  They are saying that the building next to the school was a warehouse for storing heroin. It belonged to Gul Rasool, the man who is the court of appeal in all matters in Usha. If the intended target was the warehouse, then Nabi Khan must be alive. It must be him, trying to strike a blow against his enemy. But the statement left behind by the suicide bomber had hinted strongly that the school was the target. It had ended with the words Death to America.

  A rumour has also spread that the bombing was carried out by the Americans themselves so that the concept of jihad can be blamed and discredited.

  He sits quietly at the table with Lara and Marcus, listening to their talk. Twice during the months he knew her, Zameen woke up screaming from a dream of being assaulted by the Soviet soldier. Memories rising in her like bruises as he held her. A dream of lying lifeless on the floor, the attacker manipulating her body ‘as when a corpse is washed before burial’, arranging her limbs before beginning. ‘Of course he committed a crime,’ she said, ‘and if these were normal times I would have liked to have seen him brought to justice. What else can I say? That doesn’t change the fact that I am grateful he helped me escape from the military base. He may have saved my life. When I think of that I hope he’s all right, wherever he is.’

  When he is not with the other two inhabitants of the house, David walks through the orchard and the garden, some younger stems as slender as nai flutes. One night he builds a fire at the water’s edge. As a young man he had gone to Berkeley for a university interview and, having stood on the roof of the astronomy building and looked out at San Francisco Bay with its sailboats, had made his decision. He bought an ancient twenty-seven-foot boat and for the next four years lived on it in the Berkeley marina. And every time he has visited Marcus, this lake has begged to be paddled on. This time he has brought with him from the United States the basic materials to construct a birch-bark canoe, having contemplated spending a week or so building it here; from a storeroom in the half-ruined school in Jalalabad he brings it all to Usha one day, unloading it into an unused room. Visiting the lakes of the northern United States as a child, in the company of his brother Jonathan and an uncle, he had seen a sea of wild rice engulf an Ojibwa woman seated in a canoe. A slide into harvest: she gently bent the slender stalks that were sticking out of the water’s surface and knocked the grain into her vessel, to sell for twenty-five cents a pound. The last armed conflict between the United States military forces and the Native Americans had taken place right there on Leech Lake in 1898. White officers and troops – and around them in the forest, circling quietly on the icy ground, nineteen Natives with Winchester rifles.

  He walks around the house, reacquainting himself with it. The broken painted couples enclose him when he enters the room at the top. On the walls of muted gold, they are either in union or keeping vigils for each other in grove and pavilion. Waiting. On first walking in he has to halt mid-step – seeing the hundreds of coloured fragments arranged on the floor. Initially he is not sure what they mean but circling around them he discovers the vantage from where they do not appear arbitrary and the image is the right way up.

  A man and a woman.

  ‘I’ll pick these up. Do you wish to use the room?’ Lara has come in.

  ‘Don’t put them away on my account, please. I was just going around the house, reminding myself of things.’

  Having removed an oval piece on which the strings of a harp are painted – just a few black lines made as though by ink-dipped twigs – she lets her hand remain some inches off the floor, the limb suspended in the air irresolutely, and then she puts it back and stands up.

  They look at each other, and he doesn’t know how to fill the silence and then she withdraws.

  He moves towards the windowsill to gaze at that vast sky of Asia, caught between inside and outside.

  *

  It was here in this part of the world that David had heard for the first time the call for America’s death. A mob fired by visions of a true Islamic society, shouting, ‘Kill All Americans!’, ‘President Carter the Dog Must Die!’ It was in Islamabad, Pakistan, in November 1979. He was twenty-two.

  At the beginning of November a group of protesters in Iran had stormed the American embassy in Tehran, taking forty-nine Americans hostage. And seventeen days later David had arrived in Islamabad, very late in the evening, falling asleep almost immediately in his hotel room owing to the exhaustion of the travel. He had finished college for now and intended to spend the fall months travelling in northern Afghanistan, something he had wanted to do for some years. His plan was to go from Islamabad to Peshawar, and from there – one long road full of twists, veering like a kite’s tail – move on through the Khyber Pass to the city of Jalalabad and then on to Kabul. The languages around him were still many-lettered lumps in his mouth and ears but he was sure he could get by. Seven days a week for eight weeks – he had taken a course in ancient Greek during the summer, discovering suddenly that he had a gift for languages, and he carried with him a copy of the oldest surviving Greek tragedy, the Persians, Aeschylus contemplating the East’s grief and shock at finding itself defeated by the West.

  While he slept, Saudi national guardsmen encircled the Kaaba, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. A delusional fundamentalist had declared himself the Messiah and, having barricaded himself inside the mosque with his followers a few hours earlier, opened fire on the worshippers. The fanatics – they wanted a purer Islam implemented in Arabia, calling for song, music, film and sports to be banned – had smuggled in their assault rifles and grenades in coffins, the mosque being a common place to bless the dead. The Saudi government did not tell anyone who was responsible for the invasion of the holiest site in Islam, the place every single practising Muslim turned his face to five times a day. Not long after David Town got up on the morning of 21 November, the rumour spread through all the cities of Islam – from country to country, continent to continent – that the killings in the Kaaba were carried out by Americans as a blow against Islam, perhaps in retaliation for the Tehran embassy siege.

  He didn’t know about this rumour when he left his hotel. He had to visit the US embassy to be updated on the situation in Afghanistan. The rebellion against the Communist government, begun back in the spring, had now spread to most provinces there.

  At a pedestrian crossing he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small notebook to check something. Last night while having dinner at the hotel, he had had a brief conversation with a Pakistani man at the next table. Upon learning of David’s interest in gems, the delightful pedant told him that the Emperor Shah Jahan’s wealth had included eighty-two pounds of diamonds, 110 pounds of rubies, 275 pounds of emeralds, fifty-five pounds of jade and two thousand spinels. David had written it all down, but now, this morning, he wanted to confirm that another detail had been committed to paper: the treasury also contained four thousand living songbirds.

  He glanced at the page and just at that moment the car that had come to a halt to allow him to cross, with its front fender only two feet away from him, jerked forward by six inches. The driver had decided to startle him for sport. He gave the windshield a cursory look and continued without breaking his stride – not in all honesty due to strong nerves, but because he was distracted by the four thousand birds and hadn’t really seen the car move until it had already come to a stop, knew he wasn’t about to be run over.

  The car drove away b
ut it was back minutes later, coming to a screeching stop beside him on the sidewalk and disgorging four men. They were friendly, more or less his own age, and they invited him to a nearby teahouse, very pleased to have met an American, asking him how they could migrate to USA the Beautiful. When he regained consciousness about two hours later, in a back alley, the skin on his head was split open in two places. There were cuts and bruises on the rest of his body too. He had no coherent memory except a faint impression of the car driver’s features filled with malice, of an arm locking onto his neck from behind to choke him. By not reacting how he was meant to when the car jolted forward suddenly, David had obviously caused the driver to lose face with his companions.

  David thought he’d never encounter this man again, but he would see him only a few hours later under circumstances even more murderous. He’d learn that his name was Fedalla. And, some years from now, he would be one of the first people David would suspect of being involved when Zameen and Bihzad disappeared.

  Blood on his face and clothes like a wild cursive script, he arrived at the US embassy around noon and was admitted when he produced his passport. The nurse had just finished attending to him when buses began pulling up outside the main gate. Hundreds of armed men streamed out in wave upon wave and began jumping over the perimeter fence, firing guns and hurling Molotov cocktails.

  There were six Marines at the embassy but they were not allowed to open fire. They were in any case massively outnumbered. Within minutes, one of them, a twenty-year-old from Long Island, had caught a bullet in the head.

  The rioters were led by a gang of students from the fundamentalist Islamic wing of the city’s university. Inspired by the events in Tehran and the fire-breathing triumph of Ayatollah Khomeini, they had been waiting for a chance to demonstrate their own power.

  David, and 139 embassy personnel and the dying Marine, found themselves behind the steel-reinforced doors of a vault on the third floor as they waited for the Pakistani government to send police or military troops.

  The vault echoed to the sound of a sledgehammer coming down on CIA code equipment that could not be allowed to fall into the hands of the mob, a mob now fifteen thousand strong.

  Around and below them, the building was on fire, the floor of the vault beginning to get intensely hot, the tiles blistering and warping under their feet. The other Marines were still out there but the request from them to open fire was repeatedly denied as it would only incite the riot further. When the ground floor had completely filled with smoke the Marines retreated upstairs to join the others in the vault, dropping tear-gas canisters down each stairwell as they came.

  Despite pleas from the ambassador and the CIA station chief, hour after hour passed without any rescue attempt by the Pakistanis. Giant columns of gasoline-scented smoke issued from the building, visible from miles away – miles away where rioters arriving in government-owned buses were also attacking the American School while children lay cowering in locked rooms.

  The mob at the embassy climbed onto the roof and pounded on the hatch door that led down into the vault. David, looking up at the ceiling, watched it buckle and twist from the blows over the course of an hour, the oxygen running out, many around him fainting or vomiting. But the hatch door held and as the sun set over Islamabad the rioters dissolved away into the darkness.

  From the vault they emerged with the body of the dead Marine. Two Pakistani employees of the embassy lay on the first floor, killed by asphyxiation and then badly burnt. An American airman had been beaten unconscious and left to die in the fire.

  Climbing onto the roof David saw the arrival of a few Pakistani troops at last. They stood around, and David thought he recognised one of them – the young man who had been behind the steering wheel of the car. The photographs that were taken of these moments would later confirm his suspicions. Fedalla. So he was in the army.

  Later that evening David, and most of the others who had feared for their lives in the vault for over five hours, were amazed to learn that President Carter had just telephoned Pakistan’s dictator General Zia and thanked him for his help.

  In the near future, upon joining the CIA, David would know that the explanation for some events existed in another realm, a parallel world that had its own considerations and laws. As he watched Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington accept the gratitude of the United States and claim that Pakistani Army troops had reacted ‘promptly, with dispatch’, he had little idea of the larger things at stake, didn’t know why the United States could not afford to dwell on the issue. Khomeini’s revolution had meant the loss of important listening posts in Iran that had been trained on the Soviet Union. General Zia had accepted a CIA proposal to locate new facilities on Pakistani soil.

  Strange sacrifices were required in that shadow-filled realm, strange compromises. In another month the Soviet Union would invade Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s corrupt and brutal military dictator would become a fêted ally of not just the United States but of most of the Western world, David himself present on a number of occasions where the man was extravagantly celebrated and flattered, his own voice adding to the dishonest chorus.

  ‘LARA CARRIES WITH HER a leaf from the Cosmos Oak that grows in the Kremlin,’ Marcus tells David. ‘Her cosmonaut father was killed when his spacecraft malfunctioned during the return to Earth in 1965.’

  The two men are at the lake, beside the small fire that David has built. Night insects, knees and elbows of finest wire, cross and recross the zone of light around the flames.

  ‘There were rumours he knew while still in orbit that he was doomed, that his death screams during the dive back towards the world were recorded by American monitoring stations.’

  ‘Where is she now? Does she know we are out here?’

  Marcus points to a lit window on the first floor of the house. ‘She knows where we are. I have told her she’ll never be left alone here again. One of us will always be with her.’ Marcus has a rose blossom with him, and he smells its petals from time to time. It is from one of the plants which he has patiently retaught their former elegance.

  David brings more wood for the fire, two sword-length dead branches which he breaks into eight sections, leaning them onto the burning pyramid, at evenly spaced points.

  He looks towards her window. The Cosmos Oak was planted to mark the first manned space flight by Yuri Gagarin, he knows.

  ‘Her father’s last journey had been timed to celebrate a day of International Solidarity,’ Marcus says, ‘and the Kremlin ordered the launch despite the chief designer’s refusal to sign the flight endorsement papers for the reentry vehicle.’

  ‘I remember when we landed on the moon in 1969. Jonathan took me to have what they were calling “moon burgers”. There was a small American flag planted on top of the bun.’ He smiles at the memory. ‘I was about twelve, he must have been eighteen.’

  A few minutes before midnight they walk up to the house to collect Lara – waiting for her by the threshold’s cypress trees until she emerges with a lamp – and then the three of them go to David’s car to listen to the news bulletin. The batteries of the kitchen radio are lifeless due to use and David will have to pick up new ones tomorrow. A night journey, along the curved sequence of Persian lilac trees. Marcus says that when Muhammad’s disciples were leaving his house, he would put his hand out of the door and the light from his palm would light their way home.

  There is a trace of acacia scent in the air as there is the faint presence of Alexander’s name in the word Kandahar, as there is the presence of Ahmed in Anna Akhmatova’s surname, she whose lines Lara had quoted during a conversation yesterday: As if I was drinking my own tears from a stranger’s cupped hands.

  They get in and close the door against the sound of the lake water and the million leaves, against insects hungry for light.

  The news tells them that an angry statement has appeared, purporting to be from those who choreographed the bombing. They wish to point out the hypocrisy of the Americans wh
o condemn this killing of the children but whose president had shaken hands with the people who in the 1980s had blown up a passenger plane just as it took off from Kandahar airport, carrying Afghan schoolchildren bound for indoctrination in the Soviet Union.

  ‘Is that true?’ Lara asks, turning towards David, but he doesn’t answer.

  Apart from that there is nothing about the Jalalabad bombing in the bulletin. Afterwards they sit in the darkness for a while, the various metals and mechanisms of the car cooling around them, Marcus having gone to the house.

  ‘In the States we call them chinaberry trees,’ David tells her as they slowly walk under the Persian lilacs, going towards the lake. ‘The berries are poisonous. My brother and I would dissolve their pulp in a deep slow-moving part of the river and when the fish passed through those waters they’d be stunned. We’d just pick them up with our hands.’

  ‘Marcus told me about your brother.’

  A 180-person military task force scrutinises the hills, fields, and jungles of Vietnam to determine the fate of more than a thousand Americans unaccounted for there. In Vietnam, as well as Laos and Cambodia, witnesses are interviewed, crash sites are excavated, ponds are drained, and bone fragments are sifted from shallow graves.

  Men lost in long-forgotten ambushes.

  Men lost in falling B52 bombers.

  Men last seen alive in the hands of their captors.

  ‘He was twenty. 1971. Last month I was looking at a photo of him from that time. How young he was, how amazingly young we all look at that age!’ Like one of those miniscule new leaves found at the very tip of a branch, the ones that can be crushed into a watery green smear between thumb and forefinger – so unformed, so … resistanceless.