by Nadeem Aslam
For a moment she wondered if the helicopter pilot knew Benedikt, wondered if by chance the two Soviet men had ever met.
The three sleeping children. The butterflies would blow off a foot or a hand and half a face, maiming rather than killing, though the long distance which had to be traversed to reach a medical facility would ensure that the victim died of blood loss, gangrene or simply shock. Of the three children sleeping outside the burka the first two died instantly, the third she managed to take with her some way towards Pakistan but he too succumbed to his injuries eventually. She had no strength to bury him, the ground being too hard, but still she knew it must be attempted. A branch, a bone – looking for something to dig with she saw the flashing of water in the distance. Drawing near she discovered that hundreds of mirror fragments of various sizes had been placed on a man’s corpse, to stop it from being eaten by vultures. The birds perched a few yards away but were frightened off by their own reflections whenever they drew any closer. They flapped their wings as they sat, as though fanning away the stench rising from the decaying flesh. She lifted some of the shards and placed the dead boy beside the original body. After rearranging the pieces to cover them both, the death embrace, she continued towards Pakistan. For food she had nothing beyond a pouch of almonds, an onion, some honey tilting in a jar. Bihzad and the fragrance her only other possessions. Empty-handed as a ghost otherwise.
THE DAY HASN’T YET fully begun – the flowers are sunk in dew and the lake is lit by the morning star – but Casa and David are already beside their bark boat. A blue greyness is still the chief presence around them. David wonders if he should name the canoe after John Ledyard, the first citizen of the independent United States to explore the lands of Islam, visiting the Middle East in 1773.
It weighs less than fifty pounds. Its base is a fine equilibrium between flatness and curvature so that, even though on the ground, it turns on a dime, an indication of the ease with which it would spin and change direction on water. It seems creaturely now, alive under their fingers, restive as a child being dressed or being given a haircut. The task ahead of them now is the putting in of sheathing – the thin strips of wood which line the inside, overlapping like the feathers of a bird – and then the ribs. As they work their concentration is so great at times that the other man simply vanishes from view, ceasing to exist.
The Ledyard?
In a letter written from Egypt, days before his death, John Ledyard had asked his friend Thomas Jefferson to take all those wondrous descriptions of the East – Homer, Thucydides, Savary – and burn them, advising him against ever visiting Egypt.
‘What do you think we should name it, Casa?’
But he just shrugs in return. Looking around, as though for the bird whose song with its small piercing explosions is coming to them.
David isn’t sure who the first Muslims in the Americas were. When the Spanish brought the very first African slaves to the New World in 1501 they sought to ensure that they were not Muslims. These Spanish Catholics had a particular dread of the Native Indians converting to Islam. One reason was that if African Muslims – who knew about horses – converted the Indians and then taught them equine skills, much of the Spaniards’ military advantage would be lost. Let the Indians keep thinking that horse and rider were a single animal which came apart at times to move independently.
And yet only a decade earlier Muslims were the rulers of Spain. When Islamic Spain was extinguished in 1492, Christopher Columbus was months away from his discovery of the New World. Western Christians, not Muslims, would discover North and South America and the great oceans that bind the planet. There would never be a Caliphate of New York.
No wonder Muslims still weep for their Spain. The thought of it is a solace to them, but that too is a tragedy. It’s as though England still harboured designs on America.
They work accompanied by the transistor radio, by the sound of frogs from the water, or the whistling wing-joints of a demoiselle crane flying by overhead. Casa is diligent but of course there is no romance in him towards the canoe as there is in David. ‘Can a motor be fixed to this boat, at the back?’ he asks, looking at the paddle as something frivolous.
‘Theoretically, yes.’
‘Good,’ he nods approvingly, reaching across him for the knife. At times Casa stands or kneels extremely close to David, but David knows that whereas in the West the distance between people is usually an arm’s length, here it can be half that. He knows no threat is implied. At gatherings, the Westerners who have yet to learn this can be seen backing away from the person they are talking to, who in turn reads this as rejection.
Casa handles tools expertly and with grace, with perhaps a certain delight, and is an efficient mover in any given area. Of course the Afghan ingenuity with all things mechanical is a myth, encouraged by the United States and the West during the war against the Soviets. Most of the rebels were peasants who had little or no military expertise. They came from villages in distant pathless mountains and, contrary to historical romances, were not natural guerrillas or warriors. They needed training in weapons and technology, they who were still afraid of eclipses and thought communications satellites circling the night skies were in fact stars being moved from here to there by Allah. A mortar crew would fire off its ammunition without first fusing the mortar bombs. They knew little about camouflage or maps and would smash a radio in frustration when it stopped working because the batteries had run out. For amusement they took shots at fireflies, and they played with their weapons until bits broke off. Small arms were fired haphazardly, with the firer keeping his eyes firmly shut. They cut a fuel pipeline with an axe and then set it alight, tried to break open unexploded bombs with a pistol or a hammer. Thousands of men, women and children fell victim to the Afghans’ own incompetence and lack of technical knowledge. There were commanders who didn’t capture a single town from the Soviets after a decade’s fighting.
Afghanistan was known as the Graveyard of Empires, yes, but these and other appellations of ferocity were thought up by British historians attempting to explain the end of the First Anglo–Afghan War of the nineteenth century, the most notorious defeat in British history. During the 1980s male Western journalists enthusiastically revived and embraced these martial stereotypes, to the satisfaction of agencies like the CIA.
‘What do you think of the Bliss?’ David asks Casa. ‘There was an American called Daniel Bliss who gave the Arab world its first modern college, in 1866, in Beirut …’
*
Casa can tell when a bird is flying out of fright. A useful indicator of danger. And in a training camp in the jungles of Pakistani-occupied Kashmir he had learned to tell if a snake was near him: by listening to monkeys in the tree canopies – snakes attacked these monkeys so frequently that there was a word for it in their language now, a specific sound telling all others to look down because he has appeared. In that camp operated by the Pakistani military and the ISI he had even witnessed a peacock mating with a peahen, which is – given all the extravagance of the mating dance – an intensely private event, so mysterious that some people believe the peahen is impregnated through tears she drinks from the male bird’s face. So now he only half-listens to David’s words, paying attention more to his surroundings.
As with monkeys and snakes, the Americans have learnt words like ‘jihad’, ‘al-Qaeda’, ‘taliban’, ‘madrassa’.
And in their cunning they know them well enough to be able to undermine Islam, to turn ordinary Muslims against the holy warriors. Instead of saying ‘jihadis’, the newspapers and radio are being advised to employ the word ‘irhabis’, which means ‘terrorists’. Instead of ‘jihad’, they are being told to use ‘hirabah’ – ‘unholy war’. Instead of ‘mujahidin’, it’s ‘mufsidoon’ – ‘the mayhem makers’.
He straightens and stretches his back, taking a moment’s break from the work, wiping the sweat off his brow. Walking to the water’s edge, he removes his shirt and splashes water onto his torso.
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br /> ‘How did you get the scar on your side?’ David asks when he returns, buttoning up the shirt.
‘Accident.’
During the previous days the two have talked only when Casa has initiated a conversation. He gives quick answers if David ever makes an enquiry, feeling safe only when information about him is concealed. Already he has made the mistake of showing Dunia his calluses. But he won’t succumb to her again.
When David asked if his name was short for Kasam, he had said no. The man hadn’t guessed the real name, so a yes wouldn’t have mattered, but it was important to make these people think their every instinct and independent idea about him was inaccurate. He will tell them what to think. ‘It’s short for Qaisar actually.’
Now he pretends not to hear because David is asking, ‘What kind of accident was it?’
One of the Tomahawks the Americans had sent into the jihad training camp had caused a sheet of corrugated metal to fly into his waist where he was bowing in prayer. The heat of the explosion had sterilised the metal just before it entered him – it was glowing, the entire width and length of it, a vibrating white-red – so there was no immediate infection but the wound had festered later, the stitches coming apart during a training expedition into remote mountains. With the hospital a week away, they had laid him on his side, scratched off onto the wound the ignitable powder from the heads of five hundred matchsticks and lit it, a method of cauterising that has left a disfigurement the size of a hand on his flank.
The look on David’s face is intense and yet, paradoxically, unfocused. Casa feels his thoughts are being read.
He wishes the man would take his eyes off him.
‘How old are you, Casa? Twenty-one, twenty-two …?’
‘Yes.’
Perhaps his hostile confusion has seeped into his tone because David lowers his head now and goes back to work.
He remains standing, looking at the carved seat of the canoe – bone-like, smooth to the touch. David had had it made in Jalalabad and Casa had weighed it in his hands many times, testing the heft. It has been fitted in already but he could pull it out without much difficulty. The first blood spilled in Islam was with a camel’s jawbone, the idolaters had interrupted the Muslims’ prayer and blessed Saad of Zuhrah had wounded one of them with the nearest thing within reach.
David is still bent to his task, the back of his head vulnerable.
If the man is so keen to mark the coming together of the United States and the lands of Islam he could name the boat the Guantanamo. If it’s the celebration of heroes that is on his mind, how about the Osama or the ISI?
The voices of the two women – Dunia and the Russian – have begun to drift towards him from the direction of the orchard, and he tries to hide his alarm at that too. The landmine. But nothing can be done, so he continues ladling hot water down each wooden rib – the tough bands that have been soaking in the lake for two days – until it is supple enough and then bends it with his hands, and his feet, to put into the canoe. David said the bottom has to be more flat than circular, more circular than flat, or the craft would be tippy. The ribs will be left in overnight to stretch and shape the bark: tomorrow they’ll be taken out for a short time, have their ends trimmed to precision, and be put back in permanently.
He needs that landmine. He will not allow anyone to capture him. Bihzad said that while he was at the Bagram military prison he had tried to kill himself by chewing on an artery in his arm – becoming desperate one night after learning that, back in December 2002, two prisoners there had been beaten to death by their American captors.
The Bagram.
Last night in the glasshouse when he had opened the book entitled Bihzad, he had found it to be full of coloured pictures. It was like Marcus’s house. He had spent almost two hours looking at them and reading the accompanying texts until the battery in the flashlight had gone out like someone blinded. They seemed to be some of the most beautiful things he had ever seen, despite the fact that, against Allah’s wishes, they depicted animals and humans. Rustam, the grandson of the king of Kabul, avenged his own impending death in one picture: dressed in his tiger skin, and gored by the lances that had been planted upright at the bottom of a deep pit, he called out to his brother who had set this trap for him. ‘Throw me my bow at least so I won’t be eaten by lions.’ Overcome by mercy, the brother did what he was asked so that Rustam sent forth an arrow and shot him through the tree trunk behind which he was standing. To Rustam’s arrow, the thick-boled tree was as flimsy as the bark that is this boat.
The breeze swings and carries to him the sound of the two women again. The landmine is the pit he has dug and lined with spears. He wills the two women away from it. Asks help from Allah.
David has stopped talking because the news is being broadcast on the radio.
Casa always switches it off when the news finishes and music or discussion comes on air, telling David it is to preserve the batteries, but really because these songs and seven varieties of opinion are like stings to him, the Taliban having banned such frivolities during their regime.
How keen everyone is to make this world their home, forgetting its impermanence. It’s like trying to see and name constellations in a fireworks display.
The signs of Allah are there but they refuse to see it. After he came back from the moon and was touring the various countries of the world, Neil Armstrong had suddenly stopped in a bazaar one day, his face ashen, and asked what the sound issuing from a nearby minaret was. On being told that it was the Muslim call to prayer, he began to shed tears and told them he had heard that sound while on the moon, that it had haunted him ever since. He converted to Islam straight away.
‘David, could you please come to the house for a minute?’ Marcus has appeared and is beckoning with his one hand.
‘Give me a minute. We’d like to finish as much of the ribbing today as possible. We’ll seal it with the gum tomorrow evening and be on the water by early morning the day after.’
‘It’s rather urgent,’ says the Englishman and the tone of his voice makes David look towards him.
‘Right now?’
‘Yes.’
Casa stays behind for a while but then follows them, standing on the threshold beside the cypress trees and looking into the kitchen where the four others have gathered.
‘We thought we should tell you, David,’ Marcus is saying.
‘And you have no idea who it was who knocked on your window?’ David asks the girl.
Dunia shakes her head. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you anything but the thought of going back to Usha frightens me.’
‘There is no question of that,’ David says, and Marcus agrees:
‘Yes, you must stay here until your father comes back from Kabul.’
Lara and David exchange a few sentences in English. Marcus joins in and concludes in Pashto: ‘I am sure there was no one at her window – they just made that up.’
‘They want to shut down the school, that’s all.’ Dunia’s words are almost a whisper. ‘I haven’t told anyone this but I did hear someone knock on the window that night, the night of the wicked shabnama.’
Casa remains at the door for a few more minutes, declining the invitation to enter and take a chair.
He steps away and slowly goes back to the water, walking past the spot from where Marcus had yesterday dug out a small idol, saying it was of the Christian saint who protects doctors and who had painted a picture of Jesus’ mother from life. Emerging from the glasshouse last night, after having spent the previous hours looking at the Bihzad book, Casa had dropped the book into the now-empty hole and filled it up, throwing the earth in with the sideways movements of his feet, tamping it all down until it was firm, telling himself that when the time is right he’ll burn down the animals and birds in the glasshouse too.
THE LATE-MORNING SUN is coming in and illuminating the wall beside Marcus’s chair. A spray of pale orange blossoms and grey foliage, the petals and the leaves more or less the sam
e size. He has seen chintz for Afghan women’s dresses that has a design of mobile phones interspersed with hibiscus and frangipani flowers. Lara and the young girl are in the adjoining room now, he can hear them talking as he lowers himself into the chair. For a girl from this land, Dunia has long bones. Some of Qatrina’s relatives would insist her parents starve her when she was growing up, withhold meat and eggs and milk from her, lest she became too tall for a woman.
He looks up at the ceiling. Both Qatrina and he had been concerned that they didn’t really know how the world worked, the various mechanisms of it. Nor did they know much about the many disciplines that allowed the exercise of the imagination. They had trained as doctors but there was a residual shortcoming to their knowledge and they felt they must now teach themselves about history and religions, about paintings and music. So they had slowly collected books, becoming readers. Learning about ancient and modern events. About the best fiction and poetry.
How Gul Bakaoli and Taj ul Maluk were captured and imprisoned by the djinn.
What Xerxes, riding his chariot over a bridge of boats from Asia to Europe, had said.
The immense power of the druids was the weakness of the Celtic polity, Julius Caesar had written in his memoirs. No nation that is ruled by priests drawing their authority from supernatural sanctions is capable of true progress.
Aware of these gaps in their own earlier knowledge, Marcus has never really been convinced that the members of the terrorist team that carried out the 2001 attacks were educated men in the real sense. Most of them had a university education but that education wasn’t in history or literature or politics. At his university in Germany, Muhammad Atta had refused to shake hands with the professor who supervised his dissertation, because she was a woman. When it came down to it the terrorists’ opinions and beliefs were as devoid of nuances as Casa’s seem to be. Viewing the world in very stark terms.
There is even a joke about it in Arabic. In Egypt they say the extremist Muslim Brotherhood is really the Engineering Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood itself is aware of this and has tried to recruit students from the literature, politics and sociology departments of the universities but without any luck.
