by Nadeem Aslam
Just then David’s car appears from the direction of Usha. Casa takes an additional few backward steps to be out of the force field of these persons, who are turning back to look at the approaching vehicle. They are in the middle of the path so must move to the verge. Two on one side, two on the other – Casa remaining where he is at first but then walking to the border extremely carefully as though he is on a tightrope, looking straight ahead. Light is being sieved through a tree on the left, and whenever an insect flies through a ray the sun ignites its wings briefly. David stops the car and exchanges a few words with the Americans – they seem to know each other. He opens the door on the passenger’s side and asks Casa to get in but he doesn’t move, his eyes two live coals where he’s trying to hold back tears. Rage and humiliation, a fury many centuries deep.
The West wants unconditional love; failing that, unconditional surrender. Not realising that that privilege is Islam’s.
‘What did they say to you?’ asks David when the car moves forward.
He just shakes his head and they sit without words for the few minutes it takes them to get to the house. Soon after he stopped being a taxi driver and joined Nabi Khan’s group, Khan had sent him to a martyrdom training camp – to give it its correct title, and not ‘suicide’ training camp as the Westerners and their servants here would call it. And but for the fact that he and Khan are probably estranged now, he would happily carry out the mission he had prepared for.
These days they keep saying, Why do the Muslims become suicide bombers? They must be animals, there are no human explanations for their actions. But does no one remember what happened on board flight United 93? A group of Americans – ‘civilised’ people, not ‘barbarians’ – discovered that their lives, their country, their land, their cities, their traditions, their customs, their religion, their families, their friends, their fellow countrymen, their past, their present, their future, were under attack, and they decided to risk their lives – and eventually gave up their lives – to prevent the other side from succeeding. He is not wrong when he thinks that that is a lot like what the Muslim martyrdom bombers are doing.
*
Marcus sniffs one of the smaller pieces of birch bark. He identifies it as Betula papyrifera, saying it could grow up to eighty feet high with a two-foot diameter. In the United States cedar would be used for the gunwales, and for the ribs and sheathing. Eastern white cedar – Thuja occidentalis. Ideal for building a canoe as it is easy to split and resistant to disease.
There is a large tin and Lara helps him take off its lid. ‘Spruce gum, for waterproofing the entire thing,’ David says. ‘It’ll be softened with this’: he picks up another container – ‘bear fat.’ These two, and the bark and the spruce roots, are the things he has brought from the United States; the rest – the wood for the gunwales, the sheathing, the three thwarts, the finger-long dowels – he has acquired here in Afghanistan.
‘My brother and I dug up spruce roots from an abandoned Christmas-tree plantation when we built ours. The ground was covered in a sheet of moss and we’d grab hold of a root and lift it – it would just rip itself free through the soft moss, yards ahead of us. It was like a creature was attached to the other end, racing away.’
Casa is holding the long beam-like pieces – the inwales and the outwales, to be pegged with the dowels along the rim of the boat – and Marcus, after remarking on the brightness of the wood, says:
‘Mary is said to have beaten the child Jesus for weaving sunbeams into a bridge and drowning three boys. They had refused to play with him because of his lowly origin. He cursed the willow tree from which the switch was made and that is why the willow tree rots easily.’
Casa smiles through this unneeded reference to Christianity. Muslims revere Jesus Christ – peace be upon him – but that Jesus bears no resemblance to the one today’s Christians follow. They have perverted the Bible, adding and subtracting stories, suppressing certain sayings of Jesus – like Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword – and before the world ends the Muslims will ensure no memory of the false Jesus remains in the world. ‘Today’s Christians don’t want us to know this,’ Casa was told at the martyrdom training camp, ‘but the God we share with them approves of our methods.’ Yes, he knows. He knows how the helpless and debased Samson – who is Shamaun in Arabic – had asked for strength from God. Then Samson called to the Lord and said, ‘O Lord God, remember me, I pray Thee, and strengthen me, I pray Thee, only this once, O God, that I may be avenged …’ And with that he grasped the two middle pillars upon which rested the temple where he was being disgraced and humiliated, and he leaned his weight upon them – his right hand on the one, his left hand on the other. Saying, let me die with the Philistines, he toppled the two pillars and brought the massive building crashing down, killing himself and three thousand others, an act of which God obviously approved because He must have given Samson the strength he had asked for.
‘The chest in which Qatrina kept the ninety-nine paintings of the names of Allah was made of willow,’ says the Englishman. ‘Each picture rolled up and fastened with a wide ribbon of Chinese silk.’
Casa had seen women wearing Chinese silk during his days as a taxi driver. He’d take young American soldiers to the Great Wall of China, the clandestine house of pleasure that opened in Kabul after the Taliban were obliterated. No Afghans were allowed into the establishment, the white men emerging from there sometimes with women on their arms, the shimmering colours of their dresses like bright wrapping paper around a child’s toffee.
He himself has been touched by a woman only five times in his entire life, mostly the nurses handling him at hospitals. Certainly there has never ever been anything of his own volition. The state of affairs is similar among those who intend to carry out Nabi Khan’s imminent martyrdom attacks in Usha. And since Allah says that no one must die a virgin, Nabi Khan had arranged for them to know intimacy for the first and last time in this life. It was to have happened tomorrow night.
‘I don’t know what became of the paintings,’ Marcus is saying. ‘I see them in my memory, though. For me that is possession enough. She painted on the chest the berry tree that grows above Allah’s throne according to the Koran.’
‘How long will the canoe take to construct?’ Casa asks David.
‘You and I, we’ll have it on the water in a few days.’
David made a start this morning. The white side of the bark was almost luminous in the lake’s water where it was left to soak. He had lifted it out, as well as all the smaller pieces, and brought them dripping to the dry land. And placing that largest piece on the ground, the white side up, he had laid onto it the twelve-foot leaf-like shape that he had fashioned out of plywood – the shape the base of the canoe is going to be.
Now he and Casa get to work – silently on the whole, except for a grunt now and then, and with the million-year-old gaze of the demoiselles watching them from far away.
David had collected large stones from along the lake’s shore, some of them covered in brilliant patches of moss, and these are weighing down the plywood leaf.
The main piece of bark is only slightly wider than the widest point of the plywood leaf, so they’ll have to use extra pieces at the sides, sewing them on with the lengths of spruce roots soaked in hot water for flexibility, using the antler-handled awls to make holes for the rows of double stitches.
The excess bark has been bent upwards around the plywood template and stakes have been driven along the outline to keep it folded up.
They are doing this in the shade because the sun would dry out the bark, and they are pouring hot water from a bucket – set on a fire near by – to ensure the bark remains workable.
David tells Casa that this type of boat had been in use for at least fourteen thousand years, that torches would be fastened to the canoes when they were taken out by the Native Americans for night fishing on the lakes of North America.
*
&
nbsp; It is an awakening when the generator is installed.
Casa and David work on the bark boat until the sun sets, the gradual disappearance of light in a vast show of overlapping reds above them, sweeping in evenly spaced bands. Then they lift the generator out of the back of the car. And, working together by candlelight for half an hour, they set it going.
Casa tries not to get swept up in everyone’s obvious delight. Like transparent eggs, David has brought boxes of bulbs which Casa fits into the socket in each room, putting chairs or stools on tables to gain the heights, someone always holding the column of furniture for his safety. He takes out the dead bulbs and examines them closely. If the filament is broken – as opposed to burnt away completely – he can manoeuvre the two ends into meeting again, snagging the coils together so that the current can flow through once more.
Suddenly the house is lit up with radiant electricity. It’s as though they had trapped daylight a few hours earlier and have now brought it into the house, hanging a cage from a hook in every room.
It is his first time in the deeper interiors of the house. When the switch is thrown, light shoots out of the bulb and slams into the walls but then it is as though the walls are glowing from within. They also seem to take a step towards him. Colour. He stands inhaling it. Marcus points out various details to him, his talk confusing him, making him feel at times that he doesn’t know much about Islam let alone other religions, that he knows little about Afghanistan let alone the world.
Arriving at the room at the top, however, as he stands in the middle looking around, all he can think of is annihilation.
Fragments of plaster are arranged in the centre of the floor, depicting two lovers with their arms around each other, Marcus carefully removing four pieces for the four legs of the table, so Casa can rise towards the fixture in the ceiling, towering above the image. He stands in a daze: the indecent images on the walls seeming to swell and recede with each thump of his heart.
He had told Nabi Khan that for tomorrow night’s necessity they must be given an adult female.
The lilies stretching their jaws, the smaller blossoms hanging in triangular grape-like clusters from high vines – he does like these painted details, he must admit. But the rest. If all this is what is meant by the word ‘culture’, then culture is not permitted in Islam. So it is that the Devil has the temerity to say to Allah, ‘I have added colour to Adam’s story,’ and – the senses undermining faith at every turn – no wonder the Saudi fighters want all the mosques here in Asia painted white inside and out, like the ones in their desert homeland.
Music issues from a tape recorder in a stone alcove while he sits in the kitchen with Lara and Marcus, helping them peel boiled potatoes. He gets up and half-fills a glass of water and brings it to the table – for them to dip their fingertips into from time to time because the potatoes are scalding hot. His own Kalashnikov was the authentic article, but there were Pakistani-made copies that heated up when they were fired, obliging a warrior to dip his hand into a puddle during battles.
He wonders what kind of instrument produces the sounds they are listening to.
He doesn’t flinch when David comes in with a bottle of wine and uncorks it and puts it on the window sill, next to the bowl of water in which there is a fountain pen that Marcus had been cleaning earlier in the day, taking it apart like a rifle.
Before opening the dark-green bottle David asks Casa if he’d mind their drinking it and he shakes his head and smiles. The smell of alcohol reaches him within a minute. That such things are for sale in the cities of a Muslim country.
They weren’t until the West routed the Taliban.
Marcus says that in the year 988 when Prince Vladimir was casting around for a religion for the people of Rus he rejected Islam because he knew about its prohibition on alcohol. As though Casa wants to hear it. Perhaps if Russia had been a Muslim country it would not have given birth to the misfortune of Communism. As a child he had wanted to fight in Chechnya because he knew Communism and equality were a direct rebellion against Islam. The Koran clearly states in sura 16 that:
To some Muslims Allah has given more than He has to other Muslims. Those who are so favoured will not allow their slaves an equal share in what they have. Would they deny Allah’s goodness?
Marcus, who had claimed he was a Muslim, sits drinking wine at dinner. There is indeed no limit to the cunning of the infidels. He deceived the trusting and amenable Muslims of this land just to marry a woman, but at heart he is still a non-believer. No wonder Allah punished him by deranging her, by taking away his hand.
The food bitter in the mouth, he finishes the meal in silence and quickly, and then, clearing away his plate, leaves for the perfume factory, declining their invitation to stay. Walking through the orchard he passes the large aloe vera plant whose thick serrated fingers Marcus slices up with a blade every day, extracting the pulp for Lara’s neck. His head is spinning from the scent of alcohol. He drops to his knees close to the saw-edged plant, putting the lantern on the ground and waiting for the wave of nausea to pass. His left hand is in a mane of wild grass and some irregularity in the blades makes him look at them. He lifts the lamp with the other hand and is suddenly clear-headed. The half-green grass conceals a massive landmine. It is only two or so yards from the aloe plant. He withdraws the left hand slowly and stands up. He must calculate, see how this object can be used to his best advantage. He pinches the corner of his mouth between incisors as he stands thinking. A vision in his mind of the Englishman bleeding to death here. One whole sura of the Koran is dedicated to the hypocrites. They use their faith as a disguise … Evil is what they do …
He imagines laying out the Englishman before the stone idol’s head and filling up the entire perfume factory with earth, interring them both.
After Marcus is eliminated he could take possession of the house? But what about the other two?
He continues towards the factory, the sky the darkest of blues above him, almost black, the colour he imagines each of their three souls would be if it were stretched thin and nailed to the corners of the sky. Containing just a few scattered points of light.
He goes down into the factory but, unable to jettison the thought of alcohol from his mind, the smell of it still inhabiting his nose, rushes back up and vomits as neatly as a cat in the darkness, shivering, squatting beside the tall tough stems of a weed. The various components of his soul rebel at the memory of having been so close to the forbidden repulsive liquid.
The cold air hits him now. It’s as though he has taken off a metal hat.
He knows he must prevent Marcus and the others from ever venturing near the mine. He cannot bring himself to care about what happens to them, but it’s important that the mine remain intact, to be at his disposal if ever those Americans threaten him again. He’ll lure them to it. It’s his only weapon.
*
‘I read somewhere’, says Lara, ‘that when Muslims conquered Persia they burnt the libraries as instructed by Omar, the second caliph.’
‘That story is probably invented,’ Marcus says. ‘But it was invented by Muslims to justify later book burnings.’
‘When the thousands of manuscripts were set alight, the gold used in the illuminations had melted and flowed out. It’s odd that they invented this detail too.’
‘To make the myth appear convincing, yes.’
Holding a bamboo shaft at either end, they are on their way to the second storey, have been moving through the house to bring down books.
‘When in the seventh century’, says Marcus, ‘the Arabs conquered Persia, Khorasmia, Syria and Egypt, these were rich and sophisticated societies. The ignorant desert Arabs exchanged gold for silver when they entered Persia and made themselves ill by seasoning their food with camphor. One can only wonder, Qatrina would say, at what these lands could have been had they not been set back by the arrival of Islam. In Khorasmia the Arabs killed everyone who could read their own language. Only Arabic was allowed.’
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He has stopped on the landing and is touching the tip of the bamboo to a thick volume on the ceiling, brown leather stamped with gold filigree.
‘But time moved on and the two peoples changed each other. Eventually it would be the Muslims who’d keep the philosophy of Aristotle alive for the Europeans through the Dark Ages.’
She thinks he is slightly drunk. Lets him talk, following him wherever he goes. Perhaps it’s ebullience brought on by all this light. Or it could just be the company. They are stirring in each other memories of other times.
David has gone outside, saying he remembers burying wine under the silk-cotton tree one year. She enters an unlit room to look for him through the window. Over half the world’s mine dogs are here in Afghanistan.
In this room there is a wall of moonlight at this hour. Something like a flock of hummingbirds sweeps across it. Mites hide in the nostrils of hummingbirds, the Englishman has told her, and when perfume begins to drift over their bodies they know the bird has arrived at a blossom – they climb down and begin to consume the pollen and nectar.
‘He’ll be back soon,’ Marcus says from the door.
She nods and joins him.
‘Were you always interested in perfume?’
‘The factory? I started it to give the women of Usha a chance to earn money. Qatrina wanted them to know they could have an independent wage. And this valley has always been known for its flowers. Later when I went to a perfume factory during a visit to Paris, with its large laboratories full of test tubes and pipettes, I told them that my own creations were just a matter of experimenting, of putting things together to see what happened. They laughed, “But that’s how we all do it, it’s all random – don’t be fooled by the fancy equipment.”’
They are sitting next to each other on the stairs.
‘I think I hear David. I should go to bed.’
