by Nadeem Aslam
*
David has to negotiate his way into Usha. As a result of the shabnama, armed gunmen have been posted on the road in from Jalalabad. A third of an orchard has been felled and the flowering trees arranged in a barricade, a giant white garland in front of which the men stand with their weapons, the last bees of the day working the blossoms. Gul Rasool was away but has now come back to Usha.
Near by a father is chastising a little boy for playing football, as all that kicking would damage his new shoes.
David had phoned James Palantine earlier today and asked if they could meet. He too was in another province but is making his way towards Usha at Gul Rasool’s request. A group of his men, young Americans like James himself, is here to safeguard Gul Rasool in the meantime.
‘He’ll come and see me here,’ David tells Lara when they arrive. ‘I’ll ask him about Benedikt then.’
They are taking a pillow and a thin mattress and some sheets to the perfume factory for the boy. He is too reserved to enter the house, saying he’ll sleep down there.
David looks at her under the evening sky, the leaf-filtered light from above. All day he had wanted this, had wanted to touch her, but there has been no contact since his return. Marcus always present. There was also the matter of their unexpected guest. And, yes, he must admit, there is a hint within him of shame, of doubt. What makes him think he deserves these moments of gladness amid all this wreckage? Afghanistan will still be there in the morning?
As he and Zameen made love at the apartment in the Street of Storytellers – that thing a woman’s long hair does, when it accidentally comes to lie over the face in crosshatched layers, her features seen through the overlapping gauze! – songs would drift in through the open window, words on the night breeze. He hadn’t at first understood why in these lyrics mundane observations were mentioned in the first verse – a mosquito’s whine, the sound of a twig broom on the courtyard floor – but were coupled in the second verse with expressions of deepest longing. But by then as he smelled the jasmine on her breast, looking into the vertigo-inducing depths of her eyes, he knew that in its obsession the heart responds to everything by echoing back a truth about the lover, by echoing back a truth about love. Everything – everything – reminds you of her. The pomegranate tree has produced its first blossom, a woman would sing on a radio in the bazaar downstairs, and as Zameen sighed in his ear, the singer would add, On the journey towards the beloved, you live by dying at every step.
Slowly he raises his hand and touches Lara’s neck with the back of his fingers as they walk towards the perfume factory.
CASA IS CLIMBING the giant face, using his hands and his toes to seek out holds amid the stone features. The arc of the lip. The nose ledge. The dot between the eyebrows. Reaching the top – which is the side of the head, full of waving locks of hair – he sits beside the horizontal ear, the stone grainy under his palm. The floor is ten feet below him. He looks into the pit of the ear’s whorl and reaches for the flashlight in his pocket. Half a minute later he switches off the beam and sends his fingers in there.
He scrambles down and then goes up the staircase where the oil lantern they had given him burns on the fourth step, emerging into the dark corridor of trees, going past David’s car. He is carrying before him the old bird’s nest he has discovered in the ear. A loose bowl of grass. The bird must have found its way into the factory through one of the many broken windows. Amid the straw and grass blades there is a black feather, a complete diamond-shaped pink rose petal, and bits of brittle moss that he can see. With a tentativeness in his demeanour, trying not to smile, he enters the kitchen and places the woven object on the table where the three of them are sitting. The candle flame giving a lurch in the draught, the light sloshing to one side of the room like liquid. He turns and leaves, a small sound of delight and surprise from Lara behind him.
DAVID MOVES AMONG the shapes in the glasshouse. A sweep of stars above him. The Straw Ribbon, Keh Kishan, is what the Milky Way galaxy is called in Persian. Zameen had told him this.
After the Soviet Army conceded defeat in 1989 – the war had lasted longer than the Second World War – Marcus had returned to Usha and David had gone back to the United States, visiting every few months for the next five years. One night at a function at the Islamabad embassy he ran into Fedalla, who was now a colonel, rich with all the money he had siphoned from the guerrillas. A large house, a harem of cars. He was in a group with ________, David’s mole in the ISI, and was participating drunkenly in a conversation about Afghanistan. How the influx since 1979 of the millions of filthy Afghan refugees had ruined the once beautiful city of Peshawar. Had led to what he termed the ‘Kalashnikovisation’ of his homeland. ‘Look at the shapes of the two countries on a map and you’ll see that Afghanistan rests like a huge burden on poor Pakistan’s back. A bundle of misery.’
As the conversation moved on to the ten thousand bombs that had fallen on the city of Kabul the previous month, the civil war having begun, ________ indicated that he had something to convey to David.
‘Back in 1986,’ David was told when they met the next day, ‘Christopher Palantine had arranged to meet Gul Rasool at a location outside Peshawar. Rasool was selling missiles supplied by the CIA to the Iranians. Christopher had the evidence and wanted to confront him, but when he arrived early he saw a young woman planting a bomb there. Rasool had lured him there because Christopher had to be eliminated, couldn’t be allowed to expose Rasool and have his CIA funding stopped. Christopher accused Rasool of trying to kill him when he and his men arrived, but he said, “Would I turn up here myself if I had sent her?” He had her shot then and there to prove she wasn’t anything to do with him. But he was more than an hour late, so it could have been him. And we actually now know that it was. Definitely.’
For some unknown reason David dreaded the moment the young woman’s name would be spoken. All names are my names.
‘She could have been sent to eliminate Christopher by the KGB or the Afghan secret service.’
‘That was one of Christopher’s initial suspicions. Fedalla, who has heard of the incident from somewhere, was telling us about it last night, convinced she had been sent by you, by the CIA. And Fedalla was in awe that the CIA allowed one of its own to be killed. He said it is such cunning and resolve that has turned your country into a superpower. That the Pakistani secret service cares too much about its people, cares too much about civilians to be truly effective.’
‘What was her name?’
‘I don’t know. But she pleaded to be let go, telling Christopher she couldn’t disclose who had sent her because then she wouldn’t be able to see her son again. Obviously too afraid of Rasool.’
The very next day David flew to New York City and telephoned Christopher Palantine and asked to see him.
Christopher was already there at the restaurant when he arrived and took his seat almost wordlessly, his silence cutting off Christopher’s words of pleasure at seeing him after such a long period. Friends who loved each other like brothers.
All David could do was stare at him. A cold February noon outside.
‘What is it?’
David took out Zameen’s photograph from his pocket and reaching his arm across the table placed it before him, swerving it in the air so that it was the right way round for the other man.
Christopher looked at the image and then lifted it off the tablecloth, and his hands disappeared below the table with it, the neutral expression not leaving his features. Perfect composure. They were after all spies, committed to their dark profession, their conversations laced with phrases like ‘plausible deniability’ and ‘I can’t tell you how I know that’ and ‘we never had this discussion’. Such words were spoken so often in Peshawar that they could be plucked out of the city’s dirty air.
There followed moments of chilling merciless disbelief as David had his answer. No language was needed. As confirmation there now came the sound of the photograph being torn up under the table. T
hree long rips that must have divided the rectangle of paper into narrow strips; these were gathered together and there were three shorter, thicker rips that must have carved the whole thing up into sixteen small squares. David remembered her telling him how someone from the mosque in the refugee camp – believing her child was illegitimate – had broken into her trunk and drawn a large dagger on her mirror as warning. She had lifted it out and seen the weapon superimposed onto her face.
David leaned back against his chair and closed his eyes, suddenly drained, Christopher’s stare still fixed on him.
He wanted to cry out, the noise a raised welt in the air.
‘It’s over, Christopher,’ he managed to say. ‘I am finished.’ Homer used the same word, keimai, for Patroclus lying dead in battle as for Achilles falling beside his body in grief. And later when Thetis came to comfort her son, the poet had her take his head between her hands – the gesture of the chief mourner in the funeral of a dead man.
It was then, just after 12.17 p.m. that February afternoon in 1993, that the thirteen-hundred-pound bomb exploded a block away in the underground garage of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
It was a yellow Ryder truck, parked there by a graduate of one of the training camps set up in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. The explosion was meant to release cyanide gas into the building but the heat burned it away. And one tower was supposed to fall into the other – the terrorists had hoped to kill a quarter of a million people.
The ground shook. Some fragments of the woman’s image scattered from Christopher’s hands. They had almost arranged to meet at the Windows on the World, 106 floors directly above the bomb.
They rushed out into the street now. There were flakes of snow in the air, floating like sparse bits of airborne glass, mixing with the smoke. People from all directions were running towards the site – soon there were doctors, ambulances, police cars, bystanders, groups of workmen from a nearby construction site, one of them wearing an IRA – FREEDOM FIGHTERS T-shirt. Sirens and cries and shouts.
He could have been up there, the elevators and the electricity having failed, smoke pouring up through the Tower towards him. And he felt as though he was, with devastation all around him and the howling depth outside.
‘They are here,’ he murmured to Christopher in the shocked recognition of inevitability.
He saw himself clearly, making his way down the black stairwells, and the deeper he went the greater the number of wounded and disorientated people who joined him like shades in Hell, the darkness and smoke increasing. Wherever you may be, death shall overtake you, though you may put yourself in lofty towers, said the Koran.
They are here.
Cops with flashlights were guiding people out as they neared the giant hole at the bottom.
Christopher dragged him away into a doorway. ‘Who was she?’
But he was still up there with them.
‘Who was she, David?’
‘I loved her.’
‘I didn’t know who she was or I wouldn’t have allowed her to die.’
‘Where are her remains?’
‘I don’t know. I doubt if anyone does.’
The workers digging the foundations of these buildings years ago had found ancient cannonballs and bombs, a ship’s anchor of a design not made after 1750, and one small gold-rimmed teacup made of china but still intact, with two birds painted on it.
He left Christopher and walked away.
The cleric who had inspired the attack – he lived and preached across the Hudson in Jersey City, having sought asylum in the United States – had called on Muslims to assail the West in revenge for the centuries of humiliation and subjugation, ‘cut off the transportation of their cities, tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air, or land’. The bomb resulted in more hospital casualties than any event in American history since the Civil War. And what did his life resemble from that point onwards? He became fundamentally inconsolable. It was like missing a step on the stairs or losing one’s balance for a moment – that sensation extended to hours to days to years.
*
He looks towards the window of Lara’s room, as yet unlit. Midnight, and she is still with Marcus. No one has ever mentioned – anywhere – the dust-and-ash-covered sparrow that a man leaned down and gently stroked on September 11, the bird sitting stunned on a sidewalk an hour or so after the Towers collapsed. It is one of his most vivid memories of that day’s television, but no one remembers seeing it. Perhaps he remembers it because he has since read that Muhammad Atta’s nickname as a child was Bulbul.
*
David didn’t want to retaliate against Gul Rasool – for killing Zameen, and for lying about her to his men during torture. Too sickened and exhausted, and also because it could have jeopardised Marcus’s safety.
And now Gul Rasool is a US ally, James Palantine providing him with security. James must know that Rasool had once wanted to kill his father. In the wake of the 2001 attacks, Gul Rasool was the only one who was around to help root out the Taliban from Usha, to help capture al-Qaeda terrorists, and to keep them at bay, the United States paying him handsomely for his support. The first CIA team that arrived in Afghanistan soon after the attacks, to persuade warlords and tribal leaders, had brought five million dollars with them. It was spent within forty days. Ten million more was flown in by helicopter: piles of money as high as children – four cardboard boxes kept in a corner of a safe house, with someone sleeping on them as a precaution against theft.
Originally the idea of asking Gul Rasool was resisted, Nabi Khan’s name being put forward instead. But when Gul Rasool heard of it, he put together a death squad to assassinate Nabi Khan. Khan – who, also scenting money, had dispatched his own men to kill Gul Rasool – was the first to be wounded and was therefore unable to fight with the Americans.
*
David watches as the light comes on gently in Lara’s room, can visualise the candle flame stretching itself to full height. He wonders what news James Palantine would bring for Lara. He hadn’t seen the boy for years when he contacted the family after hearing of Christopher’s death. He enters the house, going past the bird’s nest on the shelf, and walks down the dark green floor of the hallway.
BOOK TWO
6
Casabianca
THE YEAR 1798 was a disaster for Islam. Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion that year of Egypt – the very centre of the Muslim world – was the symbolic moment when the standard of leadership passed on to the West. From that point on, Western armies and Western capital overran the lands of the Muslims.
And Casa got his name from a poem about a boy who died in 1798 at the Battle of the Nile. Giocante Casabianca. The twelve-year-old son of a French admiral. He was on board the L’Orient, the principal ship of the fleet that carried Bonaparte and his army to Egypt. Cannon fire set the L’Orient ablaze and further shooting meant the blaze could not be put out, but Giocante Casabianca remained on the burning deck, unwilling to abandon the post without his father’s permission. The flames consuming the sail and shroud above him.
He call’d aloud – ‘Say, Father, say
If yet my task is done!’
The father was close to death below and did not have the strength to raise his voice. When the ship’s powder magazines eventually exploded, the blast was so large it was felt fifteen miles away in Alexandria.
One day in 1988, the six-year-old Casa, known then only by the generic ‘little boy’, had exhibited similar valour and obedience, and one of the adults around him had laughed and called him Casabianca.
Casa would meet that man again in his teens and remind him of the matter. The man would remember it well – he said he’d learned about Giocante Casabianca through a poem at school – but the man would then become angry. He had begun his education at an expensive Western-style school but, because the family circumstances had deteriorated, h
e was taken out of there and sent to a free Islamic one, and he now believed in the primacy and supremacy of Muslims above all. He said that even back then, only minutes after referring to the brave faithful six-year-old boy as Casabianca, he had become maddened by the thought that he had been required to learn Western history at one point in his life, along with fictional stories where the principal characters could easily be Christian or Hindu. Not minor characters, not villains – but the heroes! Regardless of his bitter fury, the name he gave the little boy had stuck, shortened to Casa.
The full story of the boy whose name had become his has slipped out of Casa’s mind. Only a few vague impressions remaining.
‘Speak, father!’ once again he cried,
‘If I may yet be gone!’
*
He rises in the perfume factory just before dawn, the thought materialising in him instantly that he should do his best not to stay here for too long. Nabi Khan and his men are coming to Usha soon.
At the lake he performs his ablutions, the water so still it is as though it has been smoothed by hand, and says his prayers on a boulder, using his blanket as a prayer mat.
He sits wrapped in it afterwards and looks around as the sky starts to brighten above him, the white vapour rising from the lake looking like airborne milk. Under his breath he reads the verses one is supposed to read at the start of day.
O Allah I ask You for whatever good this day may hold
And I take refuge in You from whatever evil it may hold
