by Nadeem Aslam
His new neighbours in this three-storey building were clean, as was the unoccupied apartment on the level above. One day a few months later, as he was emerging from his office, fifty or so orbs of thread leapt down the steep staircase leading to that upstairs apartment, some stopping but others continuing to bounce past him, going down the next stairwell, leaping over the banister until they had fully uncoiled themselves.
The suspicion was immediate: the young woman who stood in the open door at the top of the stairs was a spy.
The hand in which she held the thread was dyed with henna, indicating the possibility that she had recently attended a wedding.
‘Thank you,’ she said in English after he had helped her gather the silk filaments.
‘What’s your name?’
She stopped and looked back at him from the staircase, then the haughty face brightened into a smile.
‘All names are my names,’ she said with something like mischievousness and disappeared.
He was in her apartment the next afternoon when she went out with the child. He found nothing in there that suggested subterfuge then or during the searches he carried out on later dates.
Zameen.
A single word.
How easily a person gave his name to another, and yet how restless he was during the few hours when he didn’t know it, finding it out through methods of his own. Discovering for the first time that there could be something magical about someone’s name – a mere word but what power it held, as in a fairy tale. It was after all the first thing one learned about another. A way in, and a possibility.
At the moment of the initial encounter he had been on his way to a meeting with Christopher Palantine, and he thought of her during it. He was then away for several days, vanishing once again into schemes he’d set in motion in and around the teeming city, he and Christopher Palantine both great mavericks of that time and place, a cause of some anxiety to their superiors when they simply became invisible for weeks. But when he returned to the Street of Storytellers he synchronised several appearances at the door of his office just to encounter her, to just see her again. Once when the area plunged into darkness due to power failure, he went up to ask for a matchstick instead of going down into the bazaar. He had known when he began this work that there would be sacrifices. Loneliness was the price they paid for being who they were. And yet as he sat in the light of the lamp lit with her matchstick, he couldn’t help seeing how incomplete his life was. There were houses and establishments in Peshawar he occasionally entered to alleviate solitude, and he had a rendezvous with a certain woman each time he visited the city of Lahore, meeting her for a few hours in Falleti’s, the hotel where Ava Gardner had stayed when she was in Pakistan filming Bhowani Junction. But this was different, seemed to be something deeper.
He listened to her feet in the ceiling above him, following her movements.
And then one afternoon he managed to talk to her openly, running into her in the Street at the stall of a cassette vendor. Before engaging in a battle with Soviet soldiers, the Afghans sometimes inserted a blank cassette into a tape recorder to capture the sound of combat. They played these cassettes to themselves later during periods of recreation and leisure, reliving the excitement. They were for sale, the seller beginning to shout out the highlights of each cassette the moment David picked it up:
The ambush at Qala-e Sultan, April two years ago, a little-known battle but …
The Dehrawud offensive, October 1983, the sound of helicopters and fighter planes, the screams of the wounded, contains the famous death by torture of a captured Soviet infidel …
Battle for Alishang District Centre, August 1981, on three cassettes. The Soviets are made to withdraw in a hurry but they force the elders of the next village to come ask the Mujahidin for the bodies of the dead Soviet soldiers left behind …
He recognised the decorative motifs on the henna-dyed left hand that reached towards a cassette at the same time as him and when he looked up he saw that, yes, it was her. The recording was of a mujahidin attack at a newly opened village school, the teachers and everyone associated with it massacred.
‘Something like that happened in the place I am from,’ she told him in her apartment later. ‘A place called Usha. It means “teardrop”.’
He had attempted to talk to her in the crowded Street but she had shaken her head in fear, telling him in a quick whisper to come up in a few minutes.
‘Why only the one hand?’ he asked now.
‘The henna? It takes a while to dry, I have work to do and my son to look after. That’s why I kept my right hand free. As it is I grabbed the wrong child one day in the chaos outside.’ The boy was moving across the floor on his knees, pushing a toy car along.
They stood facing each other, not knowing what to say or do. She bent to clear away the sheets of paper bearing the outlines of foliage, flowers, dragonflies, and vines. They were embroidery patterns and he remembered being told how, just before the First World War, patriotic young Germans had entered the French countryside with butterfly nets, catching specimens and sketching wing patterns to take back to Germany. Encrypted in the designs of the butterfly wings were maps of strategic information, such as the exact locations of bridges and roads.
He picked up one of the sheets and looked at it. The French country people were knowledgeable about their local butterflies and soon realised the drawings were incorrect, exposing the spies before the information could be sent back to headquarters.
‘You live here by yourselves, the two of you?’
She held out her hand for the drawing.
He listened as she began to speak about her lost parents, and then, his heart breaking, about a young man who as a boy had been so beautiful he had had to be veiled.
‘He was shot by the Soviets. I was with him that night, and that was the last time I saw him. I thought he was dead but I have since learned from refugees who have come from Usha that he had actually survived. I don’t know where he is.’
One night when David had been standing above her sleeping form in the darkness, having gained access to her place to see if she was involved with intelligence-gathering or surveillance, he had heard her say a man’s name in her sleep.
It was that of the missing lover, he now realised.
She wanted his help in finding these three, she herself – being a woman – lacking the ability to move as freely in this place.
As he took his leave her little boy moved towards the kitchen area and, thinking himself unobserved, put back onto the shelf the knife he’d kept concealed upon his person during the entire visit; David had seen him pick it up a few moments after his mother opened the door to him. What have they been through?
A few evenings later as he was leaving the office he noticed that the door to her place was ajar, something unusual for that hour. He stood listening and then went up slowly. He raised his hand and knocked. Spoke her name. And when there was no response he looked in.
She was sitting on the bed with her back towards the door – the kid asleep, hardly any light from a weak lamp on a table. He could hear the sobs clearly.
‘Zameen,’ he said but she did not turn around. The impression he had had of her was that she was quite self-sufficient and tough: after fire she probably wouldn’t be ashes, she’d be coal. But this was darkness and solitude. The hidden side of the courage required from her daily.
He spoke her name again.
She turned to him but there was no recognition. He could have been the noise of the breeze against the window.
He stayed there until she had exhausted herself and then he watched as she took up a pair of scissors and began to cut herself out of her clothes, ready for sleep but still in a daze, unable to find the correct path for the given destination.
Her clothing fell from her in pieces.
‘Zameen,’ he said in a half-voice, afraid she might hurt herself.
He stayed where he was until she got into bed in just her white shif
t, and then he withdrew and spent the night in his office. Only when he heard her lock her door around dawn did he go home to the apartment he rented a few miles away.
Before the month was out he found the man she was looking for, in one of the refugee camps closest to the border with Afghanistan. He was there on an unrelated matter when a likeable person came forward and began to help with the translation because David was experiencing difficulty with certain dialects.
As they talked, it became apparent that his name and details were the ones Zameen had given David regarding her lost lover.
He didn’t tell him she was looking for him.
He arrived back at the Street of Storytellers and before he knew it an entire week had gone by without him having said anything to her either. I’ll do it this afternoon. I’ll do it tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Her son was becoming fond of David, frequently loud with delight around him, the boy who was born under a thorn tree while she was making her way towards Peshawar, and, yes, he had begun to notice signs of attraction in her also. He went back to the refugee camp twice and talked to the young man. It turned out he was a believer in Communism despite the fact that the Soviets were tearing apart his land.
He didn’t know what to do.
I’ll tell her tomorrow.
He came into her place to see the mother and child out on the small wooden balcony. It was raining weakly, a kind of mist that coated everything, and they were leaning towards a nasturtium plant, observing something with great concentration. She waved him to her, the boy immediately leaning against him when he joined them, a rumble of thunder in the far distance. He saw how on each nasturtium leaf the minute dots of moisture joined up until they were recognisably a drop of liquid, balanced perfectly and brightly in the centre of the circular leaf for a while. But then, in a matter of seconds, it became so overgrown that the leaf stalk could not support it: the leaf began to sway and finally tipped the bead to the ground, becoming upright again for the entire process to be repeated.
She smiled at him – presenting this, one of the unasked-for delights of existence, to him.
His conscience ached.
Today let me stay here, I’ll tell her tomorrow.
CASA OPENS HIS EYES to see the giant face suspended above him, the first light of dawn falling gently onto it. He lifts his head off the floor and looks around. He remembers descending the steps in the darkness a few hours earlier, coming to a halt upon seeing the stone object in the centre of this space. A contour of it had caught the edge of the beam from his flashlight. He trained the light on it and saw that it was the face of a Buddha. He approached it and spread his blanket on the ground, with difficulty because his head was numb even though the bleeding was being kept in control with strips he had torn from the blanket. There had been no response to the knocks he had sounded on the doctor’s house in Usha and then he had decided that he must make his way to the cemetery. When he managed to get there the three motorbikes were gone – his companions had had to flee without him. The gun going off in the acacia grove had alerted the inhabitants of Usha to the presence of a thief and then the shabnama must have been discovered, the place in an uproar.
He doesn’t know where he dropped his own Kalashnikov. After spreading the blanket on the floor beside the stone head he had unknotted from around his waist the cloth that had been his turban. He lay down under the fabric – it is actually his shroud, everyone always taking theirs with them on arduous operations, to signal their blissful willingness to die.
Five days ago, the man called Bihzad was sent to bomb the school not because Casa and the others were cowards themselves. They knew that a greater mission awaited them, the coming battle for Usha.
He must get up now and find his way back to Jalalabad.
He tries to sit up but as in a bad dream he cannot manage it. He would at the very least like to choose another spot to lie on – somewhere not so close to this idol – but he feels drained of all force, his mind askew.
He lies there aware of the giant features hovering above him in the half-light.
The almost-closed eyes.
The smile.
*
Lara is half-way down the staircase when she notices the figure. He is asleep pressed up against the painted wall so that a shrub with small yellow flowers is growing out of his left hip, the Buddha’s decapitated head a few yards away from him. She has never been able to find any sign on the stone of the bullet marks that are said to have bled gold. But sometimes she imagines that being nailed to the ceilings in the house had made the books drip brilliance onto the floors in each room.
She takes her eye off the boy only upon gaining the topmost step and then she rushes out into the avenue of Persian lilacs, the avenue of chinaberries. David’s car, always parked here under these trees, is moving towards the lake, taking him to Jalalabad for the day, and she can see Marcus emerging from the kitchen to add a glass to the basket of washed dishes she had left out to dry in the morning sunlight.
David tells the two of them to remain outside and goes into the factory, returning five minutes later.
‘He has an injury, a two-inch wound,’ he tells them. ‘Has lost a lot of blood. He says he was attacked by a bandit last night, up in the mountains. He came down the ridges and stumbled in there, probably losing consciousness.’
Lara and Marcus peer down to where he sits immobile against the wall, the side of the head resting against the flowers. He is thin, dust on his face and clothes and hair, and there is a pad of blood-soaked fabric tied to the back of the skull. A red butterfly three-quarters of the way up the wall makes it appear as though a small quantity of his spilled blood has become airborne.
David brings the car back to the factory and then goes down to lead the stranger up into daylight, supporting him by feeding an arm along the back of the ribs at one point but the young man gently uncouples himself.
‘I think you should take him to Jalalabad,’ says Marcus after he has had a look at the wound, managing to ease off the fabric stiff with caked blood, his hair glued into it. ‘Have the hospital look at him. He’ll need stitches – one or two.’
The young man sits on the back seat without a word or glance towards anyone, taking a few sips from the sugar-rich tea he has been brought. The back of his shirt is streaked with blood, but he declines with a raised hand when Marcus offers to find a new set of clothing for him. He hands back the cup without lifting his eyes and then settles down and brings his white cloth over himself. His only other communication is the nod when David tells him in Pashto that he is being taken to the city.
*
They go through Usha, the place subdued this morning because of the shabnama. In other villages, the Night Letters tell people to plant opium poppies, a crop forbidden by the new government, but here in Usha, Gul Rasool is a poppy farmer already despite the fact that he is in the government. As in Vietnam, as in the Afghanistan of the 1980s, where the CIA ignored the drug trafficking of the anti-Communist guerrillas it was financing, the activities of Gul Rasool have to be tolerated because he is needed. Last month he was among the dozens of male politicians who had hurled abuse at a woman MP as she spoke in parliament, shouting threats to rape her. Harassed and fearful, she changes her address regularly and owns burkas in eight different colours to avoid being followed.
The Night Letter is from an organisation that chooses to call itself Building the New Muslim – the bombing of the school was carried out by Building the New Afghanistan. It could be the same organisation: if they have found rich backers outside Afghanistan, people who have Islamic goals, they must have asked for the name to be amended. This isn’t about one particular country – it is about the glory and aspirations of Islam. Saladin fought for Allah and for Muhammad and so he won Palestine, but today’s Palestinians are fighting just for land, even if it is their own land, and therefore losing.
The Night Letter is offering a financial reward of two hundred dollars to any inhabitant of Usha who might help in the war
they are promising against Gul Rasool for – among other things – having allowed girls to be educated here. Yes, it could be Nabi Khan’s organisation. He must be alive. The money is an unbelievable sum for most ordinary people in Usha and some could be tempted by it, seeing it as a way out of poverty.
The eyes of David’s passenger remain closed throughout most of the journey towards Jalalabad, though he occasionally takes a sip of water, one of those bottles that had landed around Marcus’s house. As soon as they near the city, however, he wants to be let out of the car, suddenly all vigour and purpose, darting looks to his left and right. David tries to reason with him, an exchange lasting many minutes with the car brought to a halt by the side of the road and with David reaching a measured hand back to stay him, telling him a doctor should take a look at his injury.
‘I have no money for the doctors because the bandit took everything.’
‘The hospital is just around the corner.’
‘I must leave.’
Does your mother know you are intent on wasting the blood she made out of her own blood, her own milk? Someone had said this to him after an injury here in Afghanistan, but it’s too intimate a thing for him to say to this boy.
‘I want to leave.’
‘Don’t worry about the money.’
He consents eventually and they drive in through the hospital entrance, past the gunmen protecting the building.
