by Nadeem Aslam
The fire is out when they arrive at the lake, just an exhalation of the red embers and a column of smoke that changes direction every few instants.
‘I read somewhere that there once existed in Burma a ruby so large and vivid that when the king placed it in a bowl of milk, the milk turned red.’ She is blowing into the fire while he looks for pieces of wood that might be lying around.
‘The watch my father gave Jonathan when he left for Vietnam had a tiny spinel inside it, attached to one of the plates that held the mechanism. He said it was from Afghanistan. That was one of the reasons I came to this country, all those years ago. Always wanted to visit Afghanistan because of that small jewel. And then of course the Soviet Union invaded and my interest deepened.’ He’d visit Afghanistan’s gem mines even during its Soviet occupation when no Americans were permitted. Slipping in from Pakistan and out again without leaving an official footprint anywhere.
‘You helped the anti-Soviet guerrillas, the dukhi? Yes?’
Nothing from him. The sound of the wood splitting as the fire comes back to life. The water swaying.
‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘The two empires hated each other. I know that when Soviet troops entered Afghanistan, the reaction in the United States was, “We now have the chance to give the Soviets their Vietnam.” Revenge.’
But he is shaking his head. ‘It’s possible that everyone else was fighting the Soviets for the wrong reasons, was mercenary or dishonest, faking enthusiasm due to this or that greed. Even wanting revenge, yes. But I never doubted that my own reasons were good, genuine.’
Just as it doesn’t matter to a person when he is in a hall of mirrors – he himself knows he is the one who is real. The confusion is for the onlookers.
He says: ‘How I feel about the mayhem I helped unleash, how I live with that, is a separate matter, but my opposition to the principles behind the Soviet Union is still there when I look – my opposition to what the Soviet empire did to those who lived in it, those who were born in it.’
MARCUS TAKES DOWN Virgil from the shelf. On the cover is a painting of Aeneas fleeing the burning destruction of Troy. The great broken heart of the city in the background. Aeneas is accompanied by his young son – a path to the future – and is carrying his aged father over his shoulder – the reminder of the past. The old man clutches the statues of the household gods in his right hand, and because the other hand is out of sight in the folds of his cloak, absent beyond the wrist, Marcus thinks for a moment of himself. If so, then David is Aeneas – he had offered to carry Marcus up the tall minaret in Jalalabad. The little boy, is he Bihzad?
He opens the book to the contents page and lets his eye slide down the list of chapters, moving deeper into the story rung by rung, Aeneas establishing an empire but along the way losing his soul. A flicker in Marcus’s eye: something slides out from between the pages and falls onto the floor. It is one of the pieces of absorbent white card on which he tested perfumes. He raises it to his face and convinces himself that it smells of Zameen, however faintly, of the fragrance he had blended especially for her.
After being forced to accompany Nabi Khan into battle, to tend to his wounded soldiers, he had ended up in the refugee camps in Peshawar, surrounded by millions of other traumatised Afghans, displaced by the rebellion against the Soviets. He didn’t know where Qatrina was, hadn’t seen her since Gul Rasool took her with him into his battles. Then one day in 1986 he discovered where in Peshawar Gul Rasool was based: he was living in a mansion in the wealthy University Town area of the city with his family and band of fighters. The blossom sitting heavy as flocks of white birds on the branches, Nabi Khan also lived near by in that area wreathed by magnolia trees, as did other tribal leaders and warlords, holy warriors all, all made rich by the hundreds of millions of dollars pouring into the jihad. Marcus went to see Gul Rasool to ask where Qatrina was, and towards the end of their conversation he felt a sweet strong stab from somewhere. Thinking back sequentially, moment by moment, he connected it to the faint sound of glass shattering in the room next door. Outside he had to lean against a palm tree for support – a vial of Zameen’s scent had been broken behind the thick mahogany door. She was letting him know she was there.
He couldn’t have asked Gul Rasool anything about the women in the house and now didn’t know how to proceed. The scent was a message from her – a call, a prompt. Through one of the servants in the house he discovered that a young woman had recently been brought there, that she was from the Street of the Storytellers in the centre of Peshawar.
Marcus went to the fabled Street and, after an hour or so of questions and answers with the locals amid the manic activity and noise, climbed two flights of dark stairs, finding himself at a small flat. Almost in tears he knocked several times and then forced his way in, suddenly past caring. Only a short while later he heard someone follow him in. He placed his hands and an ear against the wall. Feeling along it over many minutes, as though trying to locate the heart of a live organism. He silenced his breathing as much as possible and resisted the scrape of fabric and skin against the wall. Then suddenly he was overpowered and pinned to the floor with a foot on the side of his face. He strained up to see a gun pointed at his temple, the metal gleaming even in the small amount of light coming in through the window.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I am looking for my daughter.’ His mouth crushed against the floor. ‘A young woman named Zameen.’
The pressure of the boot slowly eased off his head.
‘I have reason to believe she lives here,’ he continued.
‘What’s your name?’ he was asked, in American-accented English this time.
‘Marcus Caldwell.’ He sat up. The man had been leaning down towards him and now straightened, his face moving through a rectangle of light from the open window. Marcus saw that he was a young Caucasian. ‘Who are you?’
‘My name is David Town,’ the American said and switched on the light. ‘Zameen has told me all about you, about Qatrina.’
David would never reveal anything about the activities hidden behind his gem business, and Marcus knew not to ask, having guessed more or less immediately that he was in espionage. He now said he had been away for a period and had recently returned to find no trace of Zameen and her son here.
‘I know where she is. She has a child?’
‘Where is she?’
‘Are you the father?’
‘Where is she?’
Marcus told him where he thought she was, accepting the younger man’s scepticism that the clue had been provided by perfume.
They eventually learned that since the day of Marcus’s visit, Nabi Khan had carried out a raid on Gul Rasool’s mansion in University Town. There were regular pitched battles between rival warlords in Peshawar’s streets, car bombs and assassinations, missiles and rocket-propelled grenades fired into buildings and crowds. Nabi Khan had carried away several of Gul Rasool’s women and children during the attack, to be exploited or sold, Bihzad among them. Several people had died, including Zameen.
All this knowledge was incremental, years in the acquiring.
Marcus smells now the few molecules of the perfume that still inhabit the fibres of the white card, Virgil open on his lap. Qatrina had designed the container – a map of the world and the word Zameen acid-etched onto the glass. The space inside him seems to expand when the fragrance enters him.
Stamen and flint and petal and river moss. Afghanistani women, in the songs they sing, do not desire Allah’s Paradise after death, wishing instead to become streams and grasses, the breeze and the dust. The soil placed upon them in the grave, they sing, they’ll take as their lover.
The nail had gone through the card. A hole the size of a cell in a beehive. He puts it back in the Aeneid.
LARA TURNS THE PAGES of the atlas until she holds the United States of America in her hands. Milk is a river in Montana, lit by her candle. Heart is a river in North Dakota. Rifle, Dinosaur, Delhi. These
are towns in Colorado. Antlers. Two Medicine. Twentynine Palms. Talking about Usha, Teardrop, the lake outside this window, he had said a lake named Tear of the Clouds is the source of the Hudson River. She searches for it now. New York City. Marcus has told her that David was there in 1993 when Muslim terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center for the first time. Oldland, Montana, was where he was born in 1957.
She follows him with her fingertip: to university in California and then back to Montana. One grandfather was a watchsmith, the child David coming into contact with gemstones through him. The father – originally a farmer’s son – had been encouraged by his schoolteachers to apply to Harvard, and the mother was a doctor’s secretary and eventually a nurse, rolling her hair into the car window so it would jolt her awake if she fell asleep during the long commute to the nursing school. As he spoke, had she detected something like satisfaction in him? A contentment at how his family had been given the chances to improve themselves over the decades and generations, slowly and patiently encouraged to thrive by America in American sunlight?
She looks up, at the possibility of a sound from Marcus’s room, fully alert. She inclines her head for the best angle, recalling the aunt who when attending the Mariinsky Theatre always sat high up at the back of the house, saying the acoustics were better up there even if she couldn’t make out the expressions of the singers or the details of the costumes.
Nothing but silence from the other side of this wall where Muhammad sits dressed in Islam’s green with his hand plunged into a clay pitcher of water – consolidating and expanding the Islamic empire by sealing a deal with a woman.
She has noticed how Marcus tries to hide his missing hand. She wonders if ‘hide’ is still the correct word. She releases her mind into this small consideration. Can you hide something that is not there to begin with? He is trying to hide the fact of his missing hand.
She closes the atlas and moves towards her bed. These are the rooms where Qatrina had lost her reason, Marcus having to tell her there was no need to be afraid just because the bar of red soap was producing white lather. Benedikt and Lara’s own mother, someone who graduated from the Philological Faculty of Leningrad University and had worked as an engineer and a translator, was declared schizophrenic and confined for six years to a psychiatric hospital prison where drug treatment was administered. She was a civil rights activist and was arrested in 1969 for participating in a demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Lara and Benedikt, their father already consumed in fire above the planet, were billeted with various relatives from then on, some as powerless as them, others well connected – in these houses even the brooms were softer. But nothing could be done, no network of influence and protection available, when Benedikt was summoned by the army.
To be sent to the feared war against ghosts in Afghanistan.
To become a ghost himself.
4
Night Letter
CYANIDE CAN BE EXTRACTED from apricots, Casa knows. He had distilled it at a jihad training camp, injected it into the bodies of creatures. The memory comes to him as he walks past a flowering tree at the edge of a street in Jalalabad city centre, the flowers still not finished emptying themselves of scent this late in the afternoon. An ant travels up the trunk at the speed of a spark along a fuse wire.
Pencils. Lemons. Corn syrup. Dye. As he walks through the street he knows he could fabricate explosives from many things on the carts and in the shops around him. Sugar. Coffee. Paint. He even knows how to make a bomb out of his urine.
Three international military patrol vehicles go by containing khaki-clad soldiers, a clamorous knot developing in the traffic because all others have to make way for them. There are women and blacks among the soldiers, an attempt, Nabi Khan says, by the USA-led Western world to humiliate Muslims by having sows and apes be their new monarchs.
Word has come that the explosion outside the school has delighted the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the covert grouping of Pakistani military officers led by Fedalla. They have promised further help.
Casa himself has never attended a school, just various religious institutions. Attached to a number of which there was a military training camp. At about ten he had wanted permission to fight in Bosnia but he was told it was too far for someone so young. And the response was the same at eleven when he wanted to pursue martyrdom in Chechnya. By then he had been holding a Kalashnikov for three years. He knew the finger on the trigger was steadier during exhalation as opposed to during inhalation. He knew how to strip and clean the rifle blindfolded, and he could do it in sixty seconds. He had fired it from moving vehicles and had fired it in the darkness, had fired it after running for an hour to simulate the banging heartbeat of a battle. He was proud of the fact that it was a Soviet gun. The Koran told of Daud, the raw youth with no weapons or armour who had used Jaloot’s own sword to slay him, Jaloot the giant whom the Christians call Goliath, having felled him with a sling first; and so the Afghans had used captured Soviet weapons as the instruments of the evil Godless empire’s own destruction. The Koran being a guidance for all time, this method continues to be relevant. Of the sixty-six Tomahawk missiles fired at Afghanistan’s training camps in the 1990s, across thousands of miles from an American warship in the Arabian Sea, a number had failed to detonate – and these had been sold by al-Qaeda to the Chinese for millions of dollars.
Casa was present at a camp at the exact moment the missiles landed. He had been bowing before Allah and had just raised his forehead from the prayer mat. The needle of the small compass fitted at the head of the mat – to allow the faithful to always find the direction of Mecca – had started to spin at great speed just as it did in lightning storms. He was severely injured but Allah had spared his life, having better plans for him.
Because no true Muslim should shrink from killing in cold blood, his jihad training had included slitting the throats of sheep and horses while reciting the verse from the holy Koran which gives permission to massacre prisoners of war: It is not for the Prophet to have captives until he has spread fear of slaughter in the land. In the laboratories of the camps, stocked with labelled drums of various acids, acetones, cellulose, wood composite and aluminium powder, he had learned to mix methyl nitrate, had hit a small drop of it with a hammer to see it shatter the hammer. He blew up a car with a sack of fertiliser and ammonium nitrate fuel oil, the burning chassis travelling in an arc through the air to land a hundred yards away. He crumbled a boulder with twenty pounds of US-made C-4, and, for comparison, others with C-1, C-2, and C-3, and also with Czech Semtex. He knew the Americans were trying to get back from the Afghans the Semtex they had supplied for use in the Soviet jihad, so dangerous was the substance. During all this he chanted the sacred words of the Koran. I will instil terror in the hearts of the Infidels, strike off their heads, and strike off from them every fingertip.
The faces of women are on display around him but he keeps his eyes off them as he walks. Nowadays he doesn’t think of such matters but at one time he had dreamed of a wife, preferably one of the thousands upon thousands of Bosnian women who had been raped by the Serbs, many of them becoming pregnant so that the Bosnian men banished them. These men couldn’t contemplate raising a child who was half enemy. But Casa and his brothers at the camps and madrassas had felt it their duty to marry these women, and raise their children to become jihadis, who could go on to slaughter the Serbs whose blood they shared.
He arrives at the crossroads where someone is to pick him up. To take him to Nabi Khan at the poppy farm. There they’ll get ready and wait. Tonight, under cover of darkness, he and four others are going to Usha.
IN CITY OF GOD St Augustine records his belief that the peacock’s flesh has the God-given property of resisting putrefaction after death. Marcus withdraws his hand from deep within the bird’s breast, having plunged the scissors into the topiary figure to snip at a branch. He is in the shattered glasshouse to the west of the house, most of its panes missing. The candle flame sh
udders as he turns around, suddenly aware of the three men standing at the lake’s edge. He walks to the house where Lara sits reading by lamp at the kitchen table.
‘Stay in here, Lara,’ he says to her without stepping in. ‘But could I please have the light for a moment?’
She stands up perhaps too fast. In a moment of vertigo she has experienced before with the books in this house, she feels as though the things printed on the paper would drain away through the hole in the centre of the page. From the door she sees him disappear along the curved path, catching the last hint of his greyed blue jacket amid the rustle of the long grasses.
She is in darkness. She switches on the cell phone she brought with her from St Petersburg, though there is no signal for it here. In the silver haze of its light she goes out and moves along the path until she can see him in the distance, talking to the three figures near the tree split in two by Qatrina’s despondent love for her countrymen.
She stands there and then David arrives from his day in Jalalabad, the beams of the car scattering on the low foliage. He gets out and joins the group, a voice from there drifting towards her whenever the wind spins around – she realises she has begun to recognise the voices of these two men.
‘The doctor in Usha is away for a few days,’ David walks up and tells her. ‘One of the old men out there got injured last week but the wound he thought was healing is suddenly giving him trouble today. He’s hoping Marcus can help.’
They will not come into the house, she knows, afraid of the ghost of the perfume maker’s daughter. Of the Buddha, the suffering stone that had bled gold, that had been granted life by bullets.
‘I’ll get more light, to make it easier for Marcus.’
When she had appeared at Usha and asked for Marcus, she was mistakenly brought to the current doctor’s house, and his young daughter – the teacher at the one-roomed school Gul Rasool has permitted in Usha to please the United States – had lovingly taken charge of her. Before leaving for Russia she intends to visit the girl.
