by Nadeem Aslam
It’s hard to appreciate the beauty of a place when you doubt its very validity.
The moon spills its light onto him, a clarity that seems to belong to the beginning of day, rather than the early part of night. Rules are being drawn up in America for space tourism and it is recommended that the tourist companies consult Homeland Security’s no-fly list to make sure no terrorists ever get into space. ‘So these Westerners intend to keep enraging us Muslims,’ one of the Afghans had said in Pashto when he learned about this, ‘if they think terrorism will exist in the future too.’ Well, today they are angry at wrongs done to them two centuries ago. Who knows when their long memories and their addiction to brooding on ancient wounds are going to disappear?
James pretends to them that he has only minimal knowledge of their language, to let them think they can talk in it freely amongst themselves in his presence.
Within the vast walled compound of Gul Rasool’s house is an overgrown lot containing beat-up old Russian cars. Volgas, Zhigulis, Moskviches. Dating from the time of the Soviets, when both Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan had proved adept at kidnapping and murdering Communists. Each to this day claims that the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan with the specific purpose of killing just him.
He goes down the corridor towards Gul Rasool’s rooms, to ask him about the Soviet soldier who had had an oak leaf upon his person, and tomorrow he’ll convey the answer to David. Visiting them at the house should give him another chance to examine that young man they’ve got living with them. If a person’s gestures and comportment speak of the work he does, then this Casa is no labourer, as he is said to be.
A caged chakor partridge hangs in the corridor. When he had pointed out to the Afghans back there that loneliness and captivity had driven the unfortunate bird insane – it sits rocking its head back and forth all day – they were astounded. He was unable to see it, they said in English, calling him a ‘secular soulless Westerner’ in Pashto, but the bird was in fact praising Allah, the way Muslim children keep time when they read the Koran in madrassas and mosques.
They need education, these people, or they’ll go on being cruel without realising it.
The response to this is frequently: ‘They are like this because the Western powers favour rotten despots, who keep their people in ignorance and darkness.’ Yes, the United States is openly friendly towards the Saudi royals: probably the most corrupt family in human history, their kingdom a place where, to pick just one example from a long and repulsive list, hundreds of criminals – women and children among them – are publicly beheaded every single year. But here’s the thing. Does anyone really think that if tomorrow the Saudis suspended these barbaric practices the USA would withdraw its support from the kingdom? In fact it would be a cause of delight for the Americans. The savage practices are older than the US support for the Saudi rulers. They are older than the United States itself!
And the people who want to replace the Saudi government these days don’t want an end to this barbarism: they want to extend public beheadings and whipping, and the cutting off of hands and feet, to other countries. To the rest of the planet.
DAVID FILLS A GLASS with water in the darkness but instead of drinking it he sets it on a shelf. Something has erupted inside his breast. He lowers himself into a chair and begins to weep, silently to begin with but allowing the sounds to escape as first one minute passes and then another. His face contorted and on fire in the effort to keep the sounds to a minimum, the shoulders jolting.
A sorrow the size of the sky.
This has been the principal weather of his soul for a long time.
He stands up when at last the grief subsides and moves towards the glass of water. Qatrina said another explanation for tears is that the body needs to get rid of the trace elements that cause stress, expelling certain metals from the system.
His eyelashes wet, he stills himself when he sees the figure enter the room through the window that stands open to the orchard, sees the black shape leap down from the sill.
*
Casa enters the three a.m. darkness of the house, the sky outside full of charred clouds. He knows he is being watched by the eyes of the creatures and figures painted on the walls as he moves along the unlit hallway. He can sense her presence in these interiors, the scent from her blue veil. Miles away during these very moments his companions are most probably becoming acquainted with intimacy. A few hours earlier he had said the day’s last prayers on his blanket, not waiting for her to free the mat. Since she began using it he hasn’t been able to concentrate on his worship on the prayer mat: his feet were where hers had been, his forehead coming to rest where hers was moments earlier. Her breath and scent were in the velvet nap and in the cypress trees depicted in the centre, their tips bent to signal that they too were bowing before Allah.
On his way into the house just now he passed it hanging on a low limb of the mulberry tree. She must have left it there for him to use for the pre-dawn prayers in a few hours.
Just before dinner she told her hosts she would prefer it if they didn’t drink wine in her presence, saying the idea and smell of it made her nauseous. The poised ease of her manner had surprised him. Was it really this easy for someone to let others know of his feelings and thoughts? He himself always has to hide things. And then during the meal her candour had actually shocked him: she told them that a part of her is glad America was attacked in 2001, because had it not been for that Afghanistan would still be suffering under the Taliban. Though he hid his own anger about this slandering of the Allah-loving Taliban, he was concerned the others would react with open hostility to the American part of her statement. Kind though they were, having agreed with unconcerned shrugs to her request about the wine, they had to be supporters of the USA. But their reaction to her comment was even more unexpected. They seemed to give it serious consideration – Marcus with his head bowed and eyes closed, the hair of his head and beard as white as smoke from an incense stick – and they even seemed to understand her position.
Suddenly, yet again, he had been inundated. Feeling tired of walking the endless road of his life, of absorbing the body blows as and when they were dealt and staggering on.
He doesn’t even know his own name, doesn’t even know how he ended up in the orphanages and madrassas. A nameless child becomes a ghost, he had been told once, because no one without a name can get a firm enough foothold in the next world. It roams the world, making itself visible to the living in order to be addressed in some way – The Long-haired One, The One who has Green Eyes – but humans run away from ghosts and won’t address them.
But then he was jolted back to himself. He had heard this seductive rubbish about ghosts from one of the people in attendance at a saint’s mausoleum. He had gone there to reconnoitre: places like these were contrary to the pure form of Islam and had to be destroyed. And later that week he had helped set fire to the building, after showering it with rockets first.
And so as the evening progressed it became more and more difficult for him to bear her words. Not for nothing had Omar, the second caliph of Islam, said, ‘Adopt opinions opposite to those of women – there is great merit in such opposition,’ with Ali the fourth caliph maintaining, ‘Never ask a woman her advice because it is worthless.’
When David got up during the meal and switched on the radio, the news was that of a martyrdom bombing in Kandahar and of the latest statement issued by the estimable Osama bin Laden. And she had said, ‘These suicide bombings don’t further the cause of Islam as he claims – they save him and his followers from death, from being handed over to the USA for reward. He is being protected by people who are promised millions of dollars in exchange for him. It is in his interest to keep making and releasing these tapes, to make sure people don’t forget about him and his so-called jihad. The moment the Muslim world says, “Osama who?” is the moment that terrorises him.’ Adding, ‘Stability is the insecticide he fears.’
He had controlled himself then and also late
r when she said she knew any number of Afghans who loathed Pakistan for having inflicted the Taliban on their country.
And to think that she was passing on such opinions to helpless young children at the school where she taught. Preparing her pupils for an eternity in Hell. She is no doubt immensely proud of her diplomas and certificates, not seeing them for what they are, pieces of paper that say she can function well in Satan’s world.
Now he walks under the nailed-up books, a reminder of the feeble-mindedness of women, and silently climbs the stairs. As he opens the glass door onto the landing he remembers that above the door handle on a yellow taxi in Kabul and Jalalabad is always written the word –
– advice for all those who reach towards it with their hand: Gently. How far away that other life seems now. Impossible to get back to, Nabi Khan’s men on the look-out for him. The radio said earlier that yet another man has been hanged as a spy, by a band of rebels in Kunar province this time, because a USAID identity card was found on his person. Dunia thinks Casa is a labourer but she would scorn a taxi driver as well, wouldn’t she? Someone like him will never be good enough for a girl like her. He wonders if she knows what it’s like to be slapped. She must have seen Western women behave in unvirtuous manner on televisions and films and decided to emulate them. And, undone by her proximity, he had incriminated himself by uttering those words to her in the garden, by showing her his distinctively callused palms. He places his hand in his pocket now and withdraws the flashlight, having arrived at the door to Marcus’s room. He knows where David is, an exact thirteen steps behind him. The American has been trailing him closely through the house. He switches on the flashlight and climbs onto the shelving unit outside Marcus’s room, moving the circle of light onto the various volumes for a few quick seconds. He flicks it off and in the darkness raises his hand towards the book that says Bihzad on the cover. He had seen it during the day and he has been curious about it since. The boy who was sent to his death in Islam’s name by Nabi Khan in Jalalabad had had that name. Working the tips of his fingers between the book’s boards and the wood of the ceiling, he prises it off and makes his way back to that open window on the ground floor, going past David who withdraws into an alcove at his approach.
*
David climbs the staircase leading to the roof of the house. At times he had been within touching distance. What Marcus’s house lacked, he had thought then, was a room dedicated to the sixth sense. Something that allowed you to identify a fragrance that wasn’t there. A third eye and a third ear, the second skin, the second mouth.
Only three yards away from him in that deep-blue darkness, he had held his breath as the boy approached the door behind which the two women were asleep. But he had just gone past it, moving along the corridor.
He’d come for a picture book. It was the volume Zameen had craved during her exile in Peshawar. Now he looks down from the roof. He sees Casa emerge from the house in a hurried skulk, holding the big book under his arm. Like a wolf in a fairytale stealing an infant, running on hind legs into the forest, he sees him enter the large glasshouse. His flashlight comes on. During earlier times there had been topiary animals and birds at various locations around the house, trained by Marcus himself. After years of war and absence they outgrew their shapes, though Marcus brought some of them back when the war with the Soviet Union was over. Later the Taliban came and they would have destroyed them definitely, for being representations of living things, had he not transferred them to pots and dragged them into the glasshouse one by one, letting them outgrow themselves safely in there. The ammonite and the panther died from shock but others reverted to being undisciplined shrubs. He told David that he thought of them, the creatures, as hiding for safety in that foliage.
Drought has killed them but they continue to stand dead in their pots, the sap petrifying in the veins. On occasion Marcus still goes in and clips them, trying to remember the long-ago shapes lost in the brown dry twigs and the brittle leaves.
Through the dusty panes he can see Casa in there, holding the yellow light in one hand, the book in the other. There is half a grizzly bear near him. A hoopoe in flight, also unfinished, the untrimmed mass of branches making it seem it is flying while on fire. There is a flamingo. In his journal the Emperor Babur recorded seeing thousands of them in Afghanistan in 1504.
8
The Caliphate of New York
MUHAMMAD ASKED MUSLIMS not to do anything untoward in the vicinity of orchards, as that would offend the angels who are appointed by Allah to protect fruit trees, keeping foraging creatures at bay.
David looks onto the orchard from the highest room in the house, his arms folded on the window sill as he leans out into the breeze. The array of flowers ghostly at five a.m. He’s just come out of sleep, having had the dream again. Someone, David can never see the face, walks away from him in a rainstorm. At the moment of separation the falling of each raindrop comes to a halt, each sphere of water hanging in the air. A perpetual and sorrowful present tense for him. But the departed figure has cleared a corridor through all that suspended grey and silver water. David enters this strange tunnel and begins the journey at the end of which lies a meeting. He awakens always before he can arrive.
He looks towards the glasshouse. When he went to bed Casa was still in there with the book, but he’s gone now. He must be asleep in the perfume factory, down there where women and men used to work at one time, amid night-blooming night-dying jasmine. Cyclamen. Ginger and rose and cardamom. Coming from Usha and descending the stairs, going down a layer into their country’s past.
The mountain range above the house is faintly luminous, dawn not far away.
Back in 1981 Zameen and Benedikt – having escaped from the Soviet military base – had hidden in an orchard during an hour like this. With the first rays of the sun the branches above Zameen had burst into flower. Benedikt would never find his way back to her now. Zameen said she had continued to make her way towards Usha on her own. She hid herself as she neared the house, seeing armed strangers in the vicinity, the flowerbeds trampled. The resistance fighters had taken over the building, but where were her parents? She waited all day and went forward only when the sun vanished. She descended into the perfume factory, and she stopped at the fourth step up from the floor when her foot landed on an object. She leaned down to investigate. A gun. She sent out her arm in an arc and discovered that there were many more. In fact the entire floor of the factory was covered thickly with them, a heap of weapons that – like a flood – submerged one of the Buddha’s eyes, one nostril, and a third of the mouth. She stumbled as she walked on the piled-up guns and went past the stone head. In a far corner, digging through all that metal death as silently as she could, she managed to open a cupboard – taking out the small bottle of the perfume that her father had blended for her. A glass world in her hands.
She went to the graveyard in Usha but among the new mounds she couldn’t see the grave of the beloved boy who had been shot the night she was apprehended by the Soviet soldiers.
Bihzad was born more dead than alive seven months later, under a thorn tree as she was making her way towards Pakistan. She had discovered she was carrying Benedikt’s child during the initial stages of this journey that took her from village to village, a time of slow progress during which she was accompanied by other refugees, the number varying, some picked off by Soviet fire from above, some by cholera or exhaustion or the heat. Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan. In their own country the land wanted to strike them dead and so did the sky, and everyone wanted to get to a refugee camp in Pakistan where their suffering would come to an end at last. Scouts who guided refugees to Pakistan – across desert, river, stone, across bandit territory, wolf territory – demanded money she did not have. She gave birth prematurely inside the blue tepee of a burka, planting a long stick in the earth and draping the cloak over it, opening it wide and weighing down the edges with rocks. If the tree above had been shorter she would have detached its long thorns to pin th
e hem to the ground. Smoke from the candle escaped through the embroidered eye-grille and disappeared into the dead branches of the tree. At that stage of her travel there were no adults with her, only three children who remained on the other side of the tent that night, falling asleep as the darkness increased. She had found one of them a month ago wandering half-mad through the wilderness, having run away from the refugee caravan that had contained his family – he was ten and wanted to go back home to his village and fight the jihad against the Soviets.
Two hours or so after Bihzad was born she heard the helicopters pass overhead. She managed to move her body and look out of the pleated cone. In the darkness something landed on her brow and bounced off. There was a noise of many small objects landing close to her. It was as though someone were throwing pebbles or large twigs in her direction. She lifted the candle out into the night and in the two moments it took for a gust of wind to extinguish it she saw that a butterfly mine was lying directly in front of her, dropped by the helicopters, saw that the sleeping children were covered with them. She could imagine how the night was full of others that were still descending. The Soviets had designed them especially for use in this war. Made of green plastic and shaped like butterflies or sycamore seeds, with a wing to allow them to spin to earth slowly. The Soviets were known to have dropped mines disguised as actual toys onto villages – dolls and colouring pens, bright plastic wristwatches. Things designed to attract children. They fell from the air into houses and streets and the result was meant to encourage parents to vacate a village, a place where children were no longer safe. These villages harboured guerrillas and had to be emptied any which way. And hundreds of thousands of the green butterfly mines were being used to hinder guerrilla passage to and from Pakistan.
