by Nadeem Aslam
‘A Muslim?’
‘Yes. Ibraheem Lankan.’
‘His name was Abraham Lincoln.’
‘He wasn’t a Muslim?’
‘Who told you he was?’
He just shakes his head and looks away.
The edges of the lake are green with the high grass of March, the air above the jade and gold water alive with insects. ‘I’ll take you out to the other side of the lake when the canoe is built,’ David had told Marcus. The boat the family had once owned has been eaten away by insects. It lies under the jacaranda tree, covered by its weightless blossom. The wood almost hollow, brittle as cinnamon sticks or dried-up orange peel. Asking David to remain near by, Marcus has attempted to swim in the lake but the missing hand, he says, makes him feel like a bird trying to get airborne with one of its wings clipped. So he remains in the shallows, the beard running in milky streaks over his chest.
A trickle of blood flows out from the base of David’s thumb and slides onto Casa’s wrist. Casa had become distracted and let the blade slip, sending it into David’s flesh, the small sound of pain alerting him to the wound.
On the path beside the lake and then along the high wall of the house that is covered with a vine like a child’s directionless scrawl – a young woman has arrived on foot from Usha, Casa’s eyes following her before she disappears towards the front door.
David looks up from the cut in his skin and follows his gaze, catching the last of the bright veil. A bowl of turquoise liquid flung into the air.
The distraction, the fascination, is short-lived however – the young man has averted his eyes. David read somewhere that if a Muslim doesn’t look at a beautiful woman here on earth, Allah will allow him to possess her in Paradise.
‘What was that?’
But he seems abashed, having been caught displaying emotion. ‘Nothing,’ he says somewhat icily, his eyebrows gathered.
‘Shall we go and see who she is?’
‘Who?’
To not know anything about women is a sign of decency in these lands. Muslim scholars to this day debate the permissibility of a second ‘deliberate’ glance as opposed to the first ‘inadvertent’ one.
David resists the temptation to say more.
The boy is serious and brisk, with his own sense of the maladroit, but untested virtue is no virtue at all, and it seems clear to David that his ideas have never been put to the test.
*
Almost as tall as a harp, the girl leans against the painted wall.
Marcus is preparing tea, and Lara sits at the kitchen table looking at Dunia, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of the doctor in Usha, the young teacher who is in charge of the small school. Thirteen days ago one of her pupils had tied the string of beads around Lara’s neck while she was waiting for Marcus at the doctor’s house.
‘Today is the anniversary of a saint, so there’s no school. I thought I’d come see you before you went back to Russia.’
Lara touches the beads, the token of a child’s affection. Something is there in children and the young that makes them trust others. The horrors of life haven’t yet perfected their aim. At times this seems to hold true even here in Afghanistan, in this land torn as though by God’s own hatred. The young everywhere, she suspects, would prefer to live in houses that consist only of doors. And Lara had detected it in Marcus also, in the way he welcomed her into his house, though he has seen the worst that life can offer. With him it’s not due to age, it’s his character.
Dunia takes the cup from Marcus with a smile. There is a dish containing dry white mulberries. Four years earlier when the doctor had arrived from Kabul to take over the practice here, the girl’s trimmed hair could have caused a scandal, but the situation was contained with the lie that she had had typhoid recently, that the hair had fallen out but was now in the process of growing back.
‘Before I was born,’ she tells Lara, ‘an aunt of mine used to work at the perfume factory out there. My father says the money she brought home as wages used to be fragrant.’
‘Has your father returned from his trip to Kabul?’ Marcus asks.
‘No. The day after tomorrow.’
‘He took your brother with him?’
Lara knows about the brother, the young man who stole objects from the house to feed his addiction to heroin, trying to take off his sister’s bangles while she slept.
The girl nods. ‘They say a new clinic has opened there. He could hardly walk when they left. I wished he would stand up straight, as correctly as possible, because I didn’t want Satan to make fun of Allah’s creations.’
‘I hope he’ll make a full recovery.’ Marcus places his hand on her head, an Asian elder person’s gesture of love towards someone young.
Casa enters at this point and greets them all courteously. Lara notices how Dunia’s self seems to withdraw, vacating the room and disappearing into her body. Her face slightly lowered. Women in this country are still anxious even though the Taliban are gone.
He says he has arrived to ask for a pair of scissors. ‘Something strong enough to snip this.’ He indicates the small piece of birch bark that he has brought with him like a letter.
‘I thought you were managing perfectly well with the blades and things you already have out there,’ Marcus says, ‘but let’s see if I can find something.’ He produces an old pair of scissors whose cutting edges are uneven because Qatrina used it to clip the nibs of pens for calligraphy.
When Dunia asks Lara – not him – about the bark, in a tentative lowered voice, he moves forward and places it before Lara, the gold-like side upwards. ‘I am building a boat.’
‘Birch bark.’ There is something experimental about the girl’s smile. ‘They found rolled-up pieces of it here in this region, stored in clay jars. The oldest known Buddhist texts were written on them.’ She has been looking at Casa but now – suddenly remembering herself – turns her face to Lara and Marcus.
‘The discourses of the Buddha,’ Marcus nods. ‘Among them the Rhinoceros Horn Sutra. The clay jars preserved them otherwise they would have rotted away over the two thousand years.’
‘I didn’t know they were that old,’ says Dunia.
‘Yes. Around the time of Christ. A long time before Muhammad.’
The boy takes the scissors from his hand and turns towards the door.
*
The roots of several trees have grown around a television set. The Englishman at some point must have tried to unearth it but then abandoned the effort, unable to unclasp the woody fingers that can still be seen gripping the half-buried machine. Casa goes past this small ditch in the orchard. Casa and others would sometimes watch Hollywood action movies at the training camps, searching for ideas and inspiration. The burning exploding American cities were their dreams made real on the screen, though later when he was alone the unearthly beauty of some of the actresses and actors would fill him with a disturbing and shameful pain.
The thought comes to him that tonight at Nabi Khan’s farm he would have known intimacy with a woman for the first time.
‘You said you have made one of these canoes before?’ he asks David, returning with the scissors and resuming work.
‘I built one with my brother when I was young. And later also with James, the son of a friend, when he was a boy. Do you have a brother, Casa?’
‘I have no family.’
‘The war with the Soviets?’
‘Probably.’
‘I am sorry.’
‘It wasn’t your fault … Now I must go and say my prayers …’ It’s still early for worship but he needs to be alone. Who is she? Gul Rasool has sent her to the house to spy on him, he is sure, the Americans from yesterday having told Rasool of their encounter.
Tan butterflies rise up briefly from the muddy edge to allow him to pass and then come down again to settle in slightly different places, as though the letters of a word had been rearranged to spell a new word.
Behind him the radio is on at the lake. A j
ail being expanded has been bombed by the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in the neighbouring province. And the driver of a tanker supplying fuel to the NATO forces has been found butchered. The Americans have asked the Pakistani government to control the spread of what they call militant Islam within its borders – as though you can treat the government of a country as a friend but its people as an enemy.
As though, along with mere bodies, you can bomb ideas out of existence too. They have sent a few arrows towards the sky and think they have killed Allah.
As he passes the mulberry tree with its tiers of strong leaves there is a muffled noise from the ground, from the patch of grass where his foot has just landed. He freezes, then slowly shifts his weight onto the other leg, beginning to say in his head the verse of the Koran the believers must recite at the moment of death. Perhaps he felt it instead of hearing it, he is not sure. It is as though two adjacent rooms in Marcus’s house have had their common wall removed, the combining of two senses.
He takes a shovel from the glasshouse and begins to dig down. The implement is made of the beaten scrap metal of Soviet planes – faint Cyrillic script is visible at the back. He stops when the plastic sheet comes into view and uses his hands to brush away the earth. It’s a thin flat rectangle held in place by fibrous roots. Making a small tear in the plastic accidentally, he rips it all off in frustration. A young woman’s face is looking up at him from the pit, the glass in the frame shattered in two places by his weight.
He brings the image out – blowing away two coffin cutters, as woodlice are sometimes referred to in Afghanistan – and overcome with revulsion drops it back into the pit. Allah forbids photography. The only exception to this a Muslim must reluctantly make in today’s world is the photo needed for a passport: to go on the pilgrimage in Mecca, or to cross borders for the purposes of jihad. He drops a handful of soil onto her and then turns around, having heard Marcus approach.
‘What did you find?’
He quickly pulls the image from the hole, letting the dry soil slide down the glass, and, smiling, stands up. He carries it towards Marcus who tells him the photograph is of his daughter.
It’s like a large stone thrown at his breast when he looks up and sees that the girl Dunia is standing at a high window. If she has been there for a few minutes she must have seen him discover and then begin to rebury the photograph.
She is looking directly at him. Their eyes meet briefly and then she turns away.
THE RHINOCEROS HORN SUTRA advocates the merit of asceticism for pursuing enlightenment, as opposed to being a householder or living in a community of monks and nuns. Almost all the verses end with the admonition for seekers to wander alone, like a rhinoceros.
The perils of communal life. The benefits of solitude.
Dunia sits in an armchair in a half-revealed interior. They have persuaded her – she has let them think they have persuaded her – that she should spend the entire day here, stay for lunch and for the evening meal.
She has just said her prayers. When she turned around after finishing, she saw Casa sitting just outside the room. He pointed towards the prayer mat to indicate that he was waiting for it to be free so he could offer his own prayers. Walking away wordlessly when she handed it to him. Perhaps not hearing the apology she murmured for having delayed him.
She closes her eyes against the daylight.
Tomorrow is Friday so there is no school – but in fact classes won’t be held the day after either. As there have been none today. The cleric at the mosque has publicly accused her of being dissolute, and the school has been forcibly shut down. It is said that the night the shabnama appeared, a man was seen knocking on the window of her room. She doesn’t know who he was, but it’s the chance the cleric had long been praying for, to uproot the school. He had started a rumour about her which she had disregarded but a group of dog-headed thugs from the mosque had arrived at the school the day before yesterday to tell her they will not tolerate its continuing presence in Usha.
Last month the cleric – he is the son of the old cleric, the one banished from Usha for having killed two of his wives – had expressed the wish to marry her, take her as his third wife, but both her father and she had turned him down. Perhaps this is his revenge.
This cleric’s mother was the first woman his father killed – accidentally during a beating because she would not consent to him taking another wife. But after secretly burying her near the lake and spreading the story about the djinn, he realised he had got away with it: so the next murder was deliberate.
He could have just divorced that woman. It’s not as though Allah in his inscrutable wisdom has made it difficult for a man to divorce his wife: he just says the words ‘I divorce thee’ three times and all connections are severed. But the new wife the cleric had wanted to replace her with was her younger sister: her family would not have given him her hand in marriage had he thrown out the older woman. By killing her and saying she had run away from him, he actually placed them under obligation, to supply the substitute.
Dunia defied the people at the mosque yesterday and held classes as usual, but at dawn today she found a bowl placed in the centre of the courtyard of her house. Someone had broken in during the night. She approached it and saw that it was filled with water and held a single bullet. Her own face reflected on the surface was a warning – a shot in the head.
The Americans want a school here, and therefore so does Gul Rasool, and the cleric and his cohorts have had to put up with it so far – both boys and girls are taught at the school and the cleric often tells the people at the mosque that ‘three million bastards are born in Britain every year because of mixed education’ – but now they have invented or been handed this excuse. To paint her as shameless and to have the doors of the school locked until a replacement can be found for her. A small victory for the time being.
At the very least they would hold her down and mutilate her face, cut the shame permanently into her features.
She has always tried to be careful, aware that when a woman ventures out of the house she must, upon returning, account for every single step she has taken since leaving the front door.
She cancelled classes today – the other two teachers, both nineteen-year-old girls, had been kept at home by their parents due to warnings from the mosque. Yesterday she went to the homes of her pupils to reassure the parents but a number of them abused her and one even pushed her out of the house. She spent this morning looking up at every flicker in her field of vision. Turned around at every noise. Thinking it might be someone come to punish her, and punish her severely, for having an illicit lover. The thought of Marcus had occurred to her then: she must go to him and stay there – a fugitive from injustice. Others could make up lies about her activities to slander her, could break in tonight to plant evidence. Or they could pretend they have caught her in a compromising situation with a man. But her father, when he returns, would have no doubts when Marcus vouches for her movements at least from this point onwards.
Her father had tried to talk her out of becoming a schoolteacher, saying it was too dangerous. ‘I know things have to change but why do you have to be the one to change them?’ The legitimate fears of a parent. But she had won him over. ‘The bullet that has hit us Muslims today left the gun centuries ago, when we let the clergy decide that knowledge and education were not important.’
With her eyes still closed she lowers her hand to the floor and touches its solidity. Women in Usha have always felt that they could sink into the earth any time. The strata beneath the surface are as insubstantial as the transparent layers of water that form the lake.
‘I’LL ASK GUL RASOOL,’ James Palantine says after being told by David about the three old men who had visited the house. About what they had said concerning the Soviet soldier and the leaf from the Cosmos Oak.
On the lake the demoiselle cranes are in full uproar at the dust raised by James’s car. Those in the second year are beginning their courting displays and all
day they have been leaping, airing their wings, flicking pebbles. But, adolescents, they won’t get a chance to breed successfully till the third or fourth year.
Consulting his watch, David had walked out onto the path that runs along the lake’s edge, to see James arriving punctually.
Christopher had said he would have named him after David had he been born after the two of them met.
When he went to see the family after Christopher’s death in 2000, David had thought that recognition would just have to be left to James – not sure how the features of the boy he last saw many years ago would have altered with time. But he had recognised the young man immediately. He had come forward and embraced David, something he wasn’t expecting.
And he’d done the same just now, getting out of the car and holding out his arms to initiate a hug.
‘So you’ve seen the Night Letter?’
‘It could be just bravado,’ James nods. ‘Or there may be an attack. But we are prepared.’
‘I hear Gul Rasool has acquired a pig, a boar, which he intends to bury with Nabi Khan.’
‘Gul Rasool is convinced the shabnama came from him.’
‘I have a feeling it’s him too.’
He remembers this young man as a sandy-haired boy, to whom one morning during a visit to the family he gave the twenty dollars he’d been asked to bring to school. Contribution towards some drive or fund. The child came home in the afternoon and said there’d been a mix-up and the money wasn’t needed after all. ‘So what did you do with the twenty dollars?’ ‘I told you it wasn’t needed. I threw it in the trashcan.’
Now David asks, ‘There’s a bounty on Nabi Khan, isn’t there?’
‘A very small one – but he can lead us to more important fugitives. I would love to have the opportunity to talk to Nabi Khan. Find out what he’s got under his fingernails.’
David tries to decipher the impression on the face. Christopher was always hard to read and so it seems is David himself, people always complaining that upon meeting him you feel it’s you who is shaking hands with him, not he with you.
