by Nadeem Aslam
Yes.
‘She had to do it for about three months. There was no alternative, you must understand. After she gave up she was sometimes accosted by her former … clients.’
He sat still, trying to absorb the information.
That night he dreamt of her face full of disappointment at him, perhaps even contempt. The face that had laughed at his impatience with jazz and had told him Tolstoy smelled of cypress wood. The face that had expressed the purest of joys when he found for her a volume of paintings by the Persian master Bihzad, a book her parents had owned but which she had been unable to find in the Peshawar bookstores.
But where was she now? He sat in the apartment where nothing, it seemed, had been disturbed. While he was making his way towards Uzbekistan, she had lit the candles: he’d told her the journey had been cancelled and she must have thought he was avoiding her, that he had somehow found out about what she had had to do to save her child. He was staying away until he discovered what he felt about the information. Trying to see if he could unlove her.
There was no sign of a break-in. The raw jewels Bihzad liked to play with were still here – two sapphires and two emeralds, like someone with blue eyes staring into someone’s green eyes. Her books were stacked high in the corner, old stories that came to an end on the last page but hurled their wisdom and judgement decades and centuries into the future, there into the midst of them all. As was everything else, except the bottle of the pale-gold perfume she always kept with her, her father having composed it for her. Maybe Fedalla and the ISI slit her and the boy’s throats so they could acquire the apartment for someone who would spy on him. A snake-oil vendor always sat not far from their building, with a large thorn-tailed lizard sitting untethered among the bottles of his wares, the fact that it never made a bid for freedom always a surprise to David until he was told that its spine had been broken by its master. From him David learned that while he was away there had been an explosion just across the road. A bicycle bomb had gone off. David himself had taught the rebels how to rig these up, to kill Soviet soldiers in Kabul and Kandahar, in Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif.
He kept hearing her voice.
If I speak with the tongues of men and angels,
but have not love,
I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have a faith that can move mountains,
but have not love, I am nothing.
She’d told him how she had left the refugee camp where she had been living and come to the Street of Storytellers: the cleric from Usha had these years later found his way to Peshawar, staring thunderstruck at her when he saw her one day in a lane that came out of the camp. This site was particularly sacred to Peshawar’s few Hindu citizens because here a banyan and a peepal tree grew side by side, their roots entwined to signify the coming together of the body and the soul. And Zameen had gone out there on hearing that the people from the camp’s newest mosque had attacked the two trees with axes. The CIA didn’t care what the religious affiliation of the warriors was – wanting the funds to go to those who fought the Soviet soldiers the hardest – but the Pakistanis made absolutely sure the funds provided by the United States and Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world were channelled only to the Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas, who went on to assassinate the moderate clerics and warlords. Zameen retreated after she recognised the cleric supervising the mutilation of the sacred trees. Within months he had had seven women murdered for being prostitutes. Five were in the camp but two were in the city of Peshawar itself because he was linking up with Pakistani extremists. He was arrested once and confessed to killing two sinful women but walked free after one month. His patrons had paid off the relatives of the killed women and therefore he had been reprieved under Islamic law. He scrutinised the inhabitants of the camp for moral laxity, calling down Allah’s wrath on them through his Friday sermons, and Zameen knew he would focus on her fully some day soon. The city’s police and the magistracy seemed to enjoy or approve of what he and people like him were doing because soon after each murder, each beating or arson attack, the eyewitnesses recanted their earlier statements due either to threat or inducement.
Zameen began receiving visitors from the new mosque, who asked her to prove that her son was legitimate. She was planning to flee to another camp but then, fortunately, she heard about the aid agency that needed someone to mind and live in an apartment in the city.
Maybe she has been driven out of her apartment in the Street of Storytellers too.
‘Sasha, Sasha, help, help!’
‘David, David, help, help!’ He couldn’t shut these words out of his mind. A peepal leaf blew in on the wind one afternoon and over the coming days it lay there, became more and more shrivelled and sickly brown, its veins prominent. To him, nightmarishly, it was like a real person dying.
What did they, the Americans, really know about such parts of the world, of the layer upon layer of savagery that made them up? They had arrived in these places without realising how fragile were the defences that most people had erected against cruelty and degradation here. Conducting a life with the light from a firefly.
He now entered fully the hell that was the Afghan refugee camps ringed around the city, searching for the pair of them among the three million people. Children screamed on seeing this white man, thinking he was a Soviet soldier. He was sure he would know her by her shadow alone but panic spread through him at the thought of Bihzad. Each day he grew up more and more, becoming unrecognisable. He couldn’t rest because the boy had to be found soon. Some parent birds, he knew, would not recognise a fledgling if it fell out of the nest because they hadn’t seen it from that particular angle, only in the nest. And Zameen had told him about the demoiselle cranes that landed on the lake beside her house in Usha, on their migration to and from Siberia each year: how the young lost their high-pitched calls in the first twelve months of life so the parents simply did not respond to them. Unseen though still beside them.
He saw the years stretching ahead of him, the decades of not knowing where the brutal improbabilities of war had taken the mother and child. One of the fears of a CIA case officer in Peshawar was kidnap by the Afghanistani secret service or the KGB, but David didn’t care as he moved through the camps, the clerics of the mosque shouting from the minarets that while the USSR was a prison, and the USA a whorehouse, Islam was the answer. Music had been banned in several camps for two or more years now.
One evening he stood to watch a pair of children, participants in a game of hide-and-seek that was in progress in a street of hovels. They were crouching next to an open sewer that spilled black matter, their eyes trained on the door from which the seeker was probably to emerge, the smell of cooking smoke and bread floating in the evening air. David watched as the two children sprang to their feet and grabbed the little boy who had just appeared in the door, chewing, having just finished a meal. They marched him to a corner and then quickly, before David could believe what he was seeing, or react, a finger was inserted into the overpowered little boy’s throat, the vomit emerging and being caught in the hands of the two assailants, who then began to eat the still-undigested food. The little boy stumbled away dazed and fell, his eyes bright with liquid even in the dusk. And David was hurrying through the four-foot-wide ‘street’, trying to find a way out of the maze. He had helped create all this.
No, all this was the Soviet Union’s fault because … because … He could not complete the thought. He had before and he would later but not just then.
The henna blossoms had completely faded from her hand, but she had two mirror-image birthmarks on her shoulder and thigh. And the distinguishing mark on Bihzad’s body was the three-quarter-inch burn just above the waist on the left side, one of those windowsill candles having fallen on him one day.
What would become of the child in this place? As they emerged from Uzbekistan into Afghanistan,
he and the Afghan warriors had been ambushed by the Soviets and had lost three men. It was discovered that an orphan boy and girl from a nearby village, shepherds, had guided the Soviets across the hills towards them in exchange for food. David awoke the next day to find his companions drinking tea under the bough from which the lifeless bodies of the two very young children were hanging.
Days passed in the search, and then one evening he came back – exhausted as a firefighter – to see that her apartment had been broken into, the door half-open. He slipped into the darkness and stood listening. In the room about the sense of touch in Usha, she had told him, there was a master archer who could put out a candle with an arrow blindfolded, by focusing on the heat from the flame.
‘I am looking for my daughter,’ said the man he pinned to the floor, the gun at the ready. ‘A young woman named Zameen.’
David bent closer to the figure and lifted his foot off the head. The father from England? From Canterbury, the town that produced the saint venerated as the protector of secular clergy. The Englishman was sitting up now, his face moving through a rectangle of light from the open window. After revealing to him that Zameen had become a mother, David told him he wasn’t the father, that she hadn’t told him about the child’s paternity. He should leave it up to her to reveal as much or as little about Benedikt to Marcus as she preferred.
He told David he had sensed her presence at the house belonging to someone called Gul Rasool, that she had signalled to him by breaking the perfume bottle.
David didn’t want to approach Gul Rasool and mention that it was Marcus who had told him about Zameen being at his place, putting Marcus in danger. Gul Rasool’s car was eventually rammed off a deserted road outside Peshawar. Almost three years had passed by now, two previous attempts to apprehend him having proven unsuccessful. Now Gul Rasool was pulled out of the mangled vehicle and brought to the ruins of a mosque in a wilderness. He was interrogated with David present but out of sight, looking down through filigree on an upper storey.
All this based on something as evanescent as perfume. But he couldn’t think what else to do.
The mosque’s dome – tiled with blue fragments – had fallen to the ground and was like a giant cracked bowl in which the rain had collected to the brim. When the water moved, the Koranic calligraphy amid the mosaics writhed like a nest of black vipers. With the help of that water, among other things, Gul Rasool was made to talk.
It was just a case of turning one of those trick bottles the right way up – the information just poured out of the man.
Gul Rasool said he had been in one of the shops at the Street of Storytellers when the bicycle bomb had gone off near by and then he had seen Zameen, her head and face uncovered because she had come out in a hurry at the sound of the explosion to look for her son. Gul Rasool recognised the young woman instantly as the daughter of the two doctors from Usha, the Englishman and Qatrina, having seen her any number of times in Usha, Qatrina even carrying a photograph of her when she accompanied Gul Rasool into the battlefields.
He lost Zameen in the crowd of the bazaar, but then saw her face briefly in an upstairs window, lighting a candle.
The vigil she was maintaining for David.
Gul Rasool knocked on the door and, telling her he had a message from her father, brought her to his house.
So Zameen was there when Marcus visited.
David heard all this standing behind the panel of cement lace. A set of elaborate ruses had been invented to get at Rasool’s knowledge about Zameen indirectly, letting him think the interrogators were interested in completely different matters. Nor could they let him see David in case Rasool later saw him in Marcus’s company.
Gul Rasool revealed that Nabi Khan had staged an attack on his mansion in University Town, a raid during which he carried off among other things the group of women and children he kept for pleasure. Zameen and Bihzad among them.
Soon after that day David learned this to be partial truth. Only Bihzad was abducted by Khan – some of the others, including Zameen, had remained in Rasool’s captivity. Despite their best efforts and forethought, the men who had questioned Rasool at the ruined mosque had had to become specific about the women and children, and Rasool must have guessed that they were the reason why he was being interrogated. No longer wishing to be held responsible for any of them, he had said they were all taken away by Khan.
The child’s fate has remained a mystery to this day. He hasn’t been able to obtain an opportunity to talk to Nabi Khan, these warlords always disappearing into battles, into various hiding places and retreats. He has put out feelers and sent messages through intermediaries but without success. People tell him the boy had probably been sold or given away, jettisoned as Khan and his guerrillas moved from place to place. They are probably right.
Compared with this, how quickly it was, after that day behind the cement filigree, that he found out Zameen’s fate. About what happened to her as she remained in Rasool’s custody without her son. About what Rasool made her do in exchange for the promise that he would help her reunite with Bihzad.
And following the trail of her murderers, David would realise, he had been stepping on his own footprints.
CASA WALKS DOWN the cold hospital corridor. His reflection caught glasslike in the just-wiped floor. The smell of medicines in the air. It is late afternoon, his stitches in place at last, and he has just borrowed a phone to call for his companions to come and collect him from here. He is glad he had managed to persuade the American to leave some hours ago, his kindness an embarrassment and confusion for him. As they approached Jalalabad he was afraid of being taken to another nearby hospital, a place where there was a chance someone would recognise him as one of the twelve wounded fighters who had been delivered there in December 2001, their bodies smashed in various places, the nurses letting out terrified gasps when they were rushed to the X-ray room and it was revealed that they all carried pistols and knives and had grenades tied to their bodies. Wild with wrath and pain, four were Arabs, three Uzbeks, one Uighur Muslim from China, one Chechen, and the rest were Afghans, and they had warned that they would pull the pins on their grenades if they felt threatened or caught a glimpse of a foreigner.
He looks at the black plastic Casio on his wrist, the digital numbers startling themselves onwards second by second.
They should be here any minute. His other fear as they approached Jalalabad was that someone would see him in the company of the white man. The attack Nabi Khan has planned for Usha is too important for even the smallest of risks. There are dreams of putting together a large militia with the help of the ISI, using Usha as a base. If they have cause to doubt Casa’s loyalty they will torture him. Though he knows nothing beyond the vaguest details, not even the exact date. There is every chance they would execute him out of hand.
Through the window at the end of the corridor he looks out at the road, touching his bandages absently, the long white strips encircling his head. When he was about six and living in a refugee camp in Pakistan, some women upon arrival from Afghanistan would pull out lace that had been wound around their limbs and torsos under the clothes. Smugglers’ apprentices, they would step away from the miles of looped softness they had just shed, and the boys would then go into the room to gather them up. They could feel the warmth of the women’s bodies still in them, lingering in the haze of colour. The older boys would occasionally pocket one – for, he now knows, moments of arousal later.
He looks up and his heart sinks upon seeing David the American walking towards him.
‘Are you well?’
Casa manoeuvres him away from the large window. ‘I thought you had gone.’
‘Not without seeing if there’s anything else you needed, and we have to pay for your treatment. I went off to attend to a few things.’
‘I thought you had already paid, I thought you had gone.’
From the plastic bag he has with him, the man takes out three new sets of shalwar-kameez. ‘For you. I
wasn’t sure about the size but I think they’ll fit.’
Casa takes them from him and just as the man is proffering a sheaf of Afghani banknotes – ‘Do you want to settle the hospital bill yourself?’ – Casa catches sight of the three figures at the other end of the corridor, watching him. His fellow warriors. They pivot away and are gone in the next instant, Casa’s fingers still not fully closed around the money.
They’ve gone to report to Nabi Khan what they have seen, to ask him what should be done. People at the very centre, like Khan, cannot use electronic equipment, made watchful by the bounty on their heads. Only the external circle can be contacted through the cell phones – they would then convey the message verbally to Nabi Khan and bring out his response and instructions. Casa has at most ten minutes before they return to kill him, spray him from their guns. Those standing near by will die also because bullets are blind. He has to think fast, extremely fast. No location in the city is safe for him. They know all possible places where he might hide for a few days to work out what to do.
He feels thirsty all of a sudden, intensely so, as though he has been force-fed thorns. Where is that bottle of water?
‘I am glad you came back,’ he tells David. ‘Would you be kind enough to take me back with you?’
He still has his shroud. No one has commented on it so far – wrapped around his body under his blanket it just looks like an extra layer for warmth – but he must hide it somewhere when they get back to Usha. The stark white cloth is dabbed with a few syllables of his blood from last night. A Saudi Arabian boy had given it to him as a gift, having soaked it in the holy water of the spring in Mecca which burst forth when the infant prophet Ismael struck the ground with his heel, to quench the thirst of his mother, the pair having been abandoned in the desert by his father at Allah’s bidding.
