by Nadeem Aslam
‘Do you have family in England?’
‘A painting of immense power. A sweep of blackness above the soldiers. The stragglers being picked off by the savage mountain-men … The book of his pictures is nailed in the corridor on the second floor. Later when he produced a canvas about the victory at Waterloo, there was no glory to be seen there either. Just the dead bodies lying on the battlefield with wives and sweethearts searching among them. And this was the winning side.’
Only now does he lift her hand to his lips. He kisses the fingers, cold from the wet clothing. ‘Thank you for being worried about me.’
‘I’ll go back in a few days no doubt.’
‘There is no reason why you can’t come and visit me again.’
She nods.
‘And after you have gone back to Russia, David will be alone too.’
She looks at him, seeing his grin, the pulse of benevolence in the face.
He goes to sit on the threshold, and she joins him minutes later, the light filtering through the hanging clothes. She watches him smoke his one cigarette of the day. A bit of tobacco rolled by him in kite paper. They can be pink or blue or white.
‘How could a perfume maker smoke?’
‘Smokers actually smell better than non-smokers.’
‘That’s illogical.’ She smiles.
‘Not at all. The carbon monoxide in the cigarette blocks the enzyme in the nose that breaks things down – so the smell lingers longer than normal.’
‘Next you’ll be telling me there are perfume makers who continue with their profession even after losing their sense of smell.’
‘There are such cases.’
She laughs. ‘Like Beethoven continuing to compose after he lost his hearing.’ She looks up into the sky. A cloud appears and dissolves even as she watches – a flimsy wisp, it is gone so thoroughly she finds herself doubting a memory a few moments old. ‘My Stepan used to smoke. I made him give up.’
‘You needn’t feel guilty about David.’ He kisses her hand again. ‘We must live.’
‘I wasn’t always like this.’
‘Let me imagine.’
‘When I was much younger. If I was happy you’d know it, and the same if I was unhappy. Didn’t really believe in silent or passive suffering.’
‘The Russian Soul, and all that. Right?’
‘Tell me more about Qatrina.’
‘For a long time I didn’t know where she was buried. They wouldn’t tell me.’
‘You won’t see her again?’
‘Neither of us believed in an afterlife. When you are dead you decay and become part of the earth. It is no disrespect to the dead to say that their bodies have been consumed by creatures in the soil. It makes us cherish this life and this world more. That is much better than the talk about eternity and the hereafter. Death is not greater than life.’
‘I would have liked to have seen the ninety-nine pictures she did.’
‘Gone.’ He raises his hand towards the sky.
‘Why that subject?’
‘She represented us humans doing all the things that Allah is supposed to do. Her comment on the non-existence of God. We don’t have souls, we have cells.’
‘There is a tradition of the Buddha having ninety-nine names.’
But his mind is elsewhere. ‘It took me years to locate her when I came back from exile. I looked for her, journeying through deserts and forests, along limestone cliffs and granite boulders. Gul Rasool had abandoned her in the mountains, and she went from place to place. Trying to practise her profession as much as she could. Tired like me of the colour red. Everywhere there was the civil war.’ He places the cigarette on a pebble, and rubs his scalp with his fingers. ‘It then seemed unreal that I had found her, that we two had been overlooked by death and were together in this house once again. During the years of her captivity by Gul Rasool, she said, his fighters in a hashish haze had beaten her for marrying a white man. She’d sneak off to give medical treatment to the villagers whom Rasool and his guerrillas had wounded for not giving food and assistance to them. She used mountain snow as anaesthesia for amputation after battles with the Soviets. Temperatures low enough to freeze battery acid. Similar things had happened to me with Nabi Khan. But we now counted ourselves among the lucky, with dynamite and rockets and grenades exploding all around us. Then one day the civil war stopped and the Taliban arrived in Usha. 1996.’ He shakes his head, looking at her with his light-filled eyes. ‘But enough of sad things.’
*
Life in Usha was blasted-out and silent because of the war between Nabi Khan and Gul Rasool, but the Taliban put both of them to flight within days. And now – only hours after gaining control of Usha – they began whipping women in the streets for showing their faces. They banned smoking, music, television, kite flying, ludo, chess, football. There were bonfires of books and videos and audio tapes. They stood on the sides of the roads arresting men who didn’t have beards, taking them to jail until the beards had grown. They ordered shops to close at prayer time, and in the first few hours they nailed a singer of devotional music to the mulberry tree in front of the mosque, for not revealing where he had buried his instruments. Qatrina, on her way to the clinic, tried to intervene and was struck in the face by a young man – so hard she thought he’d shattered her cheekbone – and told to go home and not to venture out from then on. He had raised his hand in the air and held it there for a few seconds instead of bringing it down to slap her. He wasn’t hesitating, he was stalling to give her time to become afraid of the coming blow.
They were mostly poor foot soldiers from primitive and impoverished backgrounds. Vulnerable and easy to control, it didn’t take much effort to work them up into frenzy over what they had been taught to believe as religious truth, and the domination over women was a simple way to organise and embolden them.
They asked for all windows to be painted black so no one would catch a glimpse of a woman. Earning a living was declared inappropriate conduct for females, resulting in arrest for insubordination against Allah’s will. Trying to escape a Taliban beating for exposing her feet, her burka not being long enough, a young woman had in her terror run in front of an oncoming Taliban jeep. She bled to death in front of Marcus’s clinic because – being male – he was not allowed to administer to her. Women became afraid of catching even the smallest of illnesses: left untreated, it could grow and cause death – and Marcus did see a twelve-year-old die of measles.
They had banned schools for girls immediately but later they forbade them even for boys, and no one could do anything. Men walking by averted their eyes and quickened their pace if a woman was being lashed in the street – if they tried to prevent it they would be set upon. It was best to see as little as possible. Afghanistan became a land whose geology was fear instead of rock, where you breathed terror not air.
Despite this monstrous thraldom, however, Qatrina and Marcus continued to see patients of either gender in secret whenever they could.
Visiting a patient’s home one day he noticed in a corner the large wooden chest in which Qatrina had kept the ninety-nine paintings. The chest was among the many things missing from the ruined house by the lake when he returned from exile in Peshawar. On seeing it now Marcus moved towards it and opened it: the paintings were still in there, still beautiful like jewels. She would paint a picture, allow the paper to dry, and then dip it into a tray of water to dissolve away some or all the colour. After it had dried she would paint for a second time and again take away part or the whole of the pigment in the water bath. The process could be repeated as many as ten or twelve times. On occasion she added an amount of colour to the trayful of water before lowering the picture into it, so that the entire composition was suffused by a very pale redness or by a reticent haze of saffron. A sustained shimmer of blue. Layer by layer she would build a complex painting over many weeks.
The man of the house said the pictures belonged to him but Marcus hauled the chest to the door, appalled at the lie, and out ther
e he looked for someone who would help him transport it back to Qatrina at the house. He and the man were arguing in the street when a Taliban vehicle pulled up. The pair were taken to the mosque.
He had no way to prove that the paintings were his and so it was decided that on Friday his hand would be cut off as punishment for theft.
The Taliban did not know how to deal with the pictures – each bore one of Allah’s names in Arabic calligraphy, the Compassionate One, the Immortal One – but the words were surrounded by images not only of flowers and vines but of other living things. Animals, insects and humans. They wanted to tear out these details but couldn’t because the various strokes and curves of the name took up the entire rectangle, reaching into every corner, every angle.
A man slapped Marcus, expressing everyone’s feeling of rage at the quandary the pictures had placed them in, and then they had him taken to a small chamber at the back of the mosque. Jars of the best rose essence had been given by him to be added to the mortar when this extension of the building was under way years earlier, still fragrant. He emerged blinking into daylight two days later, weak with hunger and thirst. It was Friday. He had been handcuffed – the thought with him the previous two days that one steel hoop would just slide off when the hand was amputated – and now they walked him out towards the large crowd gathered at the side of the mosque. A woman in a bloodstained burka was on her knees in the dust at the centre of the circle formed by the crowd. Her hand must have been cut off, there was blood all around her, but then he saw that both her hands were intact where they emerged from the folds – and he recognised the wedding ring on her finger. She was Qatrina and she had actually just carried out an amputation. The blood was that of the victim. There was a scalpel in the dust. She must have collapsed and now, rising to her feet and turning her head, she let out a scream on seeing Marcus, realising what lay ahead. A man came and retrieved the amputated hand of the earlier thief from the ground. He held it above the heads of a cluster of children who laughed and tried to grab it as he encouraged them to leap up higher and higher. He went away with it: according to Muhammad’s instructions the thief was to wear it around his neck for the next few days. The crowd was chanting the Koran. She tried to run away but the black-clad figures barred her way, pointing her towards the block of wood drenched in redness, glistening in the sun. They brought Marcus to the block, which was a round stump cut from a mulberry log. And a man with large hands, fingernails the size of pennies, reached towards him and held his left hand down on the bloody wood. She was screaming defiance, hurling aside the tray on which there was a butcher’s knife and several glass syringes. Lignocaine, he thought, the local anaesthetic. Mixed with adrenalin, to constrict the vessels and reduce blood flow, preventing haemorrhaging. There was a woodworker’s small saw and a rust-speckled pair of scissors.
They now held a gun to her head – ‘Do it!’ – so that Marcus had to plead with her to go ahead, knowing they would kill her without thought. He picked up the scalpel and pushed it into her hands, tried to close her fingers around it. But she kept saying no, enraging them with her defiance, shaming them in front of the crowd. She lifted her burka and looked into the eyes of the boy in front of her. The crowd suddenly silent.
‘Go ahead and kill me. I said I am not going to do it.’
She stood to full height.
She had told Marcus how, when she was a girl, some women in her family had shuddered as she became taller with each passing year, her height too immodest for a woman, a portent of catastrophe. Her growing body seemed intent on rebellion because this was the country where the term ‘white eyes’ was used to reprimand a female child or young woman by implying she let the whites of her eyes show, rather than keeping them lowered in deference, as befits a woman or someone of inferior status.
Seconds ticked by.
The gun was taken off her head and moved to Marcus’s temple.
‘Do it, or we’ll kill him.’
When the blade came towards him he stretched his fingers to touch her palm. The last act his hand performed for him.
*
In the months that followed they entered a different geography of the mind altogether. She would not speak, or couldn’t, kept her face to the walls, to the shadows. In any room she rushed towards corners. Or she wandered off into the burning noonday sun until he found her, fully expecting her eyes to have evaporated from their sockets in all that heat. In the orchard she feinted at pomegranate blossoms thinking they were live coals, fireflowers. His own wound was full of terrible pain, the pain he had to stifle so as not to terrify her, though he could have howled for entire days. The hand was missing but it still hurt as though he had closed the absent fingers around a scorpion, around shards of glass. The cut muscles, the bones, were not healing properly and he had to go to Jalalabad for treatment, relying on people’s kindness to provide a measure of care and safety for Qatrina. At times she was oblivious to him, but at other times, watching him leave, she stretched her arms towards him through the bars of the window – a song of lamentation issuing from a lyre’s strings. Twice he had to go to the hospitals in Kabul, the city where plans were being made to make the non-Muslim inhabitants – a few Sikhs and Hindus, a handful of Jews – wear clothes of a specific colour, to make sure their lesser status was immediately apparent on the street. It was a different city once. Two decades ago a group of laughing college girls had discovered that the white car parked on Flower Street belonged to Wamaq Saleem – the great Pakistani poet who was visiting Afghanistan to give a recital of his poems – and they had covered it entirely with lipstick kisses.
Returning from a week-long stay at the hospital in Kabul, Marcus found all the books in the house nailed to the ceilings.
THE HIGH GRASS REACHES UP to his pelvis as Casa makes his way towards the lake, the seed heads brushing his hands. Two o’clock in the afternoon.
A roof of sparrows goes by overhead. To save ammunition he would always shoot only when there was a chance of taking two birds at once – aiming at the point where the flight paths were to cross.
He cannot be sure if he took this route to the factory that night. If he dropped the Kalashnikov in a damp or wet place he’ll have to wipe off the water from inside it and reoil the entire mechanism, a task that will take several hours, if he is lucky enough to locate some oil, that is. Walking around, trying to remember, he is put in mind of the time he had practised laying minefields at the al-Qaeda training camp. As the procedure allowed no carelessness, everything was mapped out beforehand with precise co-ordinates: a few days later he would have to come back and find the mines as part of the training. An inattentive holy warrior could be killed by a mine he had laid himself.
He changes direction on seeing the small flock of demoiselle cranes on the lake’s edge. Grey and black, with white ear-tufts and crimson eyes. One of them raises its wings a little in order to close them more comfortably. Several were kept at one of the madrassas in Pakistan as they are better than watchdogs in warning of intruders. The ground delves under his feet and the cranes are obscured from view behind the wall of grass as he walks towards them.
He stops on seeing them. They are perfectly still, looking at him. Three white men, young like him but bigger, one of them without a shirt so that slabs of muscle stand exposed. A couple are armed with third-generation Glock 22s. Then an Afghan man appears and joins them.
‘Who are you?’ the Afghan asks. He is holding Casa’s rifle.
Casa points towards Marcus’s house back there, not taking his eyes off the whites, one of whom has his finger on the trigger though the weapon hangs down beside his leg.
‘The old doctor’s house?’
He gives a nod, trying not to look at the Kalashnikov, betraying recognition.
The questioner turns to the other three and, huddling, says something in English to them. A tense glance directed towards him from time to time.
Casa asks the Afghan – the West’s running dog – who his companions are but
gets no answer. He repeats the question but it is as though they are incapable of hearing him. They now motion for him to follow as they begin to walk out of the river of grass, and in turning away the half-naked man reveals that he has a life-size tattoo of a Glock handgun at the small of his back, just to the left of his spine’s base. Only the tilting grip and part of the trigger are showing, the muzzle hidden beyond the waistband of his trousers – as it would be if a weapon were kept there.
One of the whites hangs back so that he is behind Casa as they emerge onto the path.
With the Afghan translating, the white men want to know how he got his injury.
‘A bandit. Are they American?’
A tribe’s greatness is known by how mighty its enemy is, the clerics at the madrassas would say, telling them they must plan to inflict pain on America.
And now the whites want to know why he is interested in their nationality.
‘No reason.’
He wonders what images the two other white men have inked on their bodies. A serrated knife at the ankle? A .44 Magnum along the side of the ribs, resting as though in an invisible holster – with the grip just under the armpit and the tip of the barrel touching the hipbone?
They want him to show them the palms of his hands.
They know they should be looking for Kalashnikov calluses.
At least they are not negroes or women.
He crosses his arms under the thin blanket wrapped around his body.
Proud as Satan, the one without the shirt watches him narrowly, looking as though about to move forwards and raise a hand towards the blanket, Casa taking an embattled step back, his fingers curling into the slippery hot palms.
The edge of the blanket is woven into fine mosaic-like shapes. He is the mosque these Americans wish to bomb.
He is perfectly innocent – how do they know otherwise? – and yet they are behaving like this towards him. Every Muslim should be told what his fate would be if his sword hand fails. This is his country, but the sense of entitlement he detects in their eyes brings home to him the full extent of the peril and challenge faced by Islam.
