The Wasted Vigil

by Nadeem Aslam

  ‘He thought she was a spy for the Communists. That she was lying to you.’

  ‘Christopher told me he thought she was just someone who had been sent by Gul Rasool to plant a device to kill him. He told me at the World Trade Center in 1993 that he didn’t know who she was, that that was why he allowed her death to take place.’

  ‘No, he knew exactly who she was, knew she had a relationship with you for some months. Her behaviour aroused suspicion, so he assigned someone to watch her – he never doubted your own loyalty, not for a minute – and eventually he had her followed. She regularly met a Communist. A young Afghan man. When Gul Rasool wanted to kill her that day Dad was just … relieved she’d be out of the way. Relieved or glad, whatever’s the word.’

  ‘He said had he known she was the woman I loved he would have done everything in his power to save her.’

  There is a pistol taped to the underside of the kitchen table. An act of precaution by him.

  ‘I am sorry, I thought you knew all this.’ The young man has an intense stare now, the pupils almost vibrating as he looks at David.

  ‘He lied to me.’

  ‘I thought you knew all this.’

  ‘Who was the man she met, the Communist?’ Though of course he knows the answer.

  ‘It was the man she loved before she met you.’

  The man David thought had died in the Soviet bombing raid on the refugee camp.

  ‘An investigation into him was already under way when Zameen died – why was she meeting him? He was questioned after her death. He said they had once been in love but that she was now with another man. He didn’t know anything about you – not even your name, certainly not your nationality. She wouldn’t tell him. He supposed she saw him in secret so the new guy wouldn’t think she still had feelings for him. She helped him financially a few times. They were both from the same place, here, Usha, and she felt connected to him because of all that she had lost. She was not a spy after all. But Dad didn’t find that out until after she died and the Communist was picked up for questioning.’

  ‘No. She was not a spy. Didn’t Christopher think I would have known?’

  ‘Not necessarily. You would expect a spy to be an expert at deception. Even at the best of times we don’t really know everything about others. Exactly what I have just said about Casa and Dunia.’

  He can see the gun through the table’s surface as though it’s glass, not wood. The too terrible thing, the truly monstrous thing, is that in the mayhem of those years he had had to make a number of decisions like these himself. He remembers the scattershot speculations, and the collective urgency to grasp opportunities and exploit advantages, to bring the deadlock with the USSR to an end once and for all. Christopher – according to the best facts he had at his disposal at the time – allowed her to be killed because he thought she posed a danger to the interests of the United States of America …He grips the hair on either side of his head until it begins to hurt. Christopher too had used a bullet to end his life, the pain of the illness too great in the last days.

  There is plenty of corruption in the CIA. Christopher was so good at spotting frauds that he discovered before any of his peers that one of the most renowned case officers working in the Latin American division was corrupt – he invented most of his agents and probably pocketed some agents’ pay in diamonds and emeralds. But corruption was certainly low in the Peshawar of the 1980s. And he has lost count of the times he has wished Christopher had allowed Zameen’s execution to go ahead because of money. Yes, Gul Rasool had lured Christopher to the meeting in order to offer him a bribe. If only this were true. David could have shouted at Christopher then, or had him arrested, fired in disgrace, or yes, perhaps even murdered him and taken the punishment – but no, Christopher was honest in that respect. This was not about greed and personal gain.

  Buildings in Pittsburgh and Chicago carry the Palantine family name, there are three-storey Upper East Side apartments with Old Masters on the walls, and there are houses in the Hamptons and in DC and Pennsylvania. Christopher’s father helped found the CIA, and there has been a senator in the family of James’s mother for three generations. All this against David’s own ancestors, who had crossed the Atlantic in the mid-eighteenth century more or less as ballast in the ships that had taken American flax seed to Ulster’s linen mills, the human cargo compensating for the buoyancy on the nearly empty return voyage. There is a beloved uncle in Kentucky who charges his customers $10 for a haircut or you can pay him in snakes. But never for a moment had Christopher made him feel that he had an advantage or lead over David because of his background. Respecting his intelligence, his abilities. So no, it wasn’t a case of not caring about the happiness of someone with David’s roots either.

  This was about nations and ideals. About carrying the fire.

  He looks at James. ‘Was there another reason?’

  ‘No. I have told you all I know.’

  ‘Something I can’t help but suspect. There could be another reason why, that day in 1993, he didn’t tell me he had known who she was. Looking at that mile-high column of glass and steel with a tower of smoke inside it, he knew I was finished with the CIA. Knew I wanted none of it any more. But the bomb had exploded minutes earlier. He knew the CIA – the USA – needed me now more than ever. My knowledge, my contacts, my skills.’

  ‘He always said you could’ve made director.’

  ‘Could he have kept the truth from me so I’d keep working with him, helping him understand the new threat to our country?’

  ‘As things turned out you couldn’t go on anyway and gave it up,’ James says, getting up to leave. ‘You shouldn’t have left the team, David. Who knows, certain things – certain events – might not have happened had you been able to bury your personal feelings.’

  And from the door he gives a little shrug at David’s stare. ‘I shouldn’t have said that, I’m sorry. But it’s possible. And if it came out as me doubting your patriotism, I am sorry for that too. I am sure Dad would have held himself responsible had he lived another year, definitely, wondering how and where he’d managed to make a mistake, and let’s just say that he would have regretted the fact that you hadn’t stuck around.’

  Ornithologists were consulted in the wake of the 2001 attacks because birdsong was heard on a bin Laden video, and David too had volunteered the knowledge of Afghan mountains and cave systems he had accumulated through his gemstone interests. When Moses commanded Aaron to fashion a jewelled breastplate, he remembers thinking to himself, charts and photographs of Afghanistan’s geographical terrain spread before him, with twelve stones representing the twelve tribes of Israel, the fifth stone was lapis lazuli and in all probability it came from this set of caves here … It was his first contact with the CIA for over two years and it was they who now informed him that Christopher Palantine had taken his own life the previous year.

  FROM ENTHUSIASM TO IMPOSTURE the step is perilous and slippery … In the golden room David looks up from the heavy book in his right hand, the blood vessel in the wrist pulsing beside the edge of the page. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Marcus, Lara and the girl are elsewhere in the house, Casa probably in the perfume factory with a lamp at his side. He looks down at the book again, the smell of dust on the paper…. the demon of Socrates affords a memorable instance of how a wise man may deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud. The pulse is usually felt where the radial artery lies near the surface of the skin, on the thumb side of the wrist. Before detaching Marcus’s hand, Qatrina had cut into his flesh and clamped the radial and ulnar arteries, to prevent excessive blood loss. Can the beat of his heart be felt near the end of his forearm now? The book is heavy. In the Texas of the mid-nineteenth century the illiterate Comanche warriors remembered to take away bibles and other books during raids on farms and settlements. They had discovered that paper made an excellent
padding for their bison-hide war shields, absorbing a bullet if packed thickly and tightly enough. Someone came across a shield stuffed with the complete history of ancient Rome – its rise, efflorescence and eventual fall to barbarians.

  ‘WHAT IS IT?’

  He shakes his head. In their brief past together, this handful of days, he has told her only the most minimal of details about Zameen’s death, the barest of revelations about his own activities of the 1980s.

  ‘You have enough on your mind already.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I don’t want to say it out loud.’

  He walks to the door and locks it, looking back towards where she stands across the wide room. And returning, he tells her everything. How he met Zameen. The boy she loved, and the Soviet bombing of the refugee camp. How the CIA knew about the raid in advance. His trip to Uzbekistan to deliver weapons and Korans. There seeing the Muslim woman being punished for having taken a lover, and a Russian lover at that. Returning to find Zameen and the child missing, and then discovering how her circumstances had once reduced her to demean herself …

  She listens to all this and more. There is no reaction from her even when the generator is switched on by someone out there and the room lights up suddenly. They look around, their eyes unsteady. Two day-blind animals exposed to full sunlight. When his eyes adjust he sees how shaken she is by what he has told her, by what he is telling her. As he continues the room becomes dark again, the generator either switched off for some reason or running out of oil.

  ‘The CIA knew about the raid on the camp where her lover was?’ she asks through the lightless air.

  ‘Yes. Days in advance. I myself found out about it only a short while before, though.’

  ‘They knew hundreds of people were going to die and didn’t warn them. Had you known in advance, you still wouldn’t have alerted those defenceless people. Of course.’

  He doesn’t answer at first but then remembers that he is supposed to be confessing everything.

  ‘We were letting those men, women and children die to expose the brutality of the Soviets. We were saving the future generations of Afghanistan and the world from Communism.’

  ‘I am not arguing with you. But really, I can’t ignore the fact that nobody asked them if they wanted to sacrifice their lives. For all I know probably all of them would have willingly gone to their deaths to secure a better future for their land, for the world. But no one asked them.’

  ‘The Soviets would have carried out the raid whether or not we knew about it.’

  ‘But you did know about it. That’s what I am interested in. God, I had conversations of this type with Stepan … When it came to what he called his nation, his tribe, he too suffered from a kind of blindness: he saw what he wanted to. “You think your principles are higher than reality,” he’d say to me.’

  ‘It makes no difference that I knew.’

  She seems to be elsewhere, nothing but silence from her, and then she says, ‘You have spent your whole life believing such untrue things. Don’t you know how alone you are, David? We are most alone when we are with the myths.’

  ‘America is not a myth.’

  And you can’t compare me to Stepan, he wants to add but doesn’t because the bluntness would be painful for her. He was the servant of monsters and barbarians, of a system that was an abomination.

  ‘Believe me, I am not defending Soviet Communism. My father died at its hands and my mother ended up in an insane asylum because of it, my brother was torn to pieces … I remember how a dissident had asked for his legal rights while being interrogated and the KGB thug had said with a pained look on his face, “Please – we are having a serious discussion here.”’

  She is on the other side of a barrier now, a branching river of ice suspended in the air between them.

  ‘You let that boy die, Zameen’s lover … He lived but not because of you. Doesn’t it trouble you?’

  ‘Of that I am guilty – yes, and I am ashamed that I was that person. I thought she would leave me for him.’

  ‘If you were better than him she wouldn’t have. You should have given her the chance to make up her mind.’

  ‘As it was, she did choose me.’

  Minutes of silence later he sees her walk towards the door, hears her turn the key. To go away and look for light, leaving him to the shadows.

  ‘I wonder about forgiveness,’ he says quietly, moving to a chair. ‘Whether it’s ever a possibility in certain cases.’

  She stops, an indistinct shape surrounded by darkness. She comes back to him, advancing and leaning close over him. Her hand moves through the air and comes to rest on the lower half of his face. He can’t understand what she is doing – telling him not to speak further on the matter? – but whatever it is, he is soon unable to breathe under that hand. Then he realises that that is actually what she is trying to do. Blocking his nose, his mouth, clamping them shut. He could free himself from the grip easily, could manoeuvre his bottom lip out from under the edge of her hand to take in a gulp of air, but he does not want to struggle against her, against this, wants to be here for ever.

  A minute passes, perhaps an eternity, his lungs beginning to burn.

  Then she releases him and straightens, looking down as he swallows large gasps of air.

  She walks back to the door and before leaving the room she says:

  ‘The forgiveness of the weak is the air you strong ones breathe, David. Didn’t you know? You don’t see it but you felt it just then. They allow you to go on living.’

  THE BEAUTY OF THE ROSE is considered a medicine. Healing through sight, through the act of looking with all veils swept aside. Marcus had said this to Casa when he gave him the prayer mat, a row of the blossoms depicted along the base of it.

  It’s not there on the mulberry branch where Dunia has been leaving it after she herself has finished with it. He stands looking at its absence. The house is locked. It’s past midnight and they’ve gone to bed.

  The generator had stopped working suddenly earlier tonight so there was only candlelight at dinner. For some reason David hadn’t eaten anything and had sat with them only for a while, and silently, and when Casa suggested they should investigate the generator he said it can be left until tomorrow.

  The house is in darkness. Allah has sent her here so he can possess her. It is His command that he do this, then go and find a way of becoming a martyr. When he walks around the dark house he discovers an open weakly illuminated window on the north side on the ground floor. Looking in he becomes aware that something is wrong. It is an instinct long before it is a full sentence in his head. A candle has almost burnt itself to the height of half an inch on a stack of books. The flame squat and blue-tipped. There is a careless ruck in the prayer mat near by. As though a serpent sleeps underneath.

  One of Dunia’s earrings lies between the prayer mat and the window. They had carried her out through here.

  They must have disturbed her at prayer, while she was unguarded, when the difference between this world and the next is slowly wiped out.

  He climbs in.

  This house is unhinging him, asking him to look into mirrors he shouldn’t. Allah does not wish him to have any ties. Three-and-a-bit days living with them is enough, these people whose very existence is and should be a provocation – to think that he has spent time under the same roof as a Russian, the butchers of Afghanistan, the butchers of Chechnya! – and it is an effort to remain silent all the time. He should steal the keys to David’s car and leave. The Americans know him now – if they stop him he’ll say he’s running an errand, that someone has fallen ill.

  He wants to go back to the state of war. For the clarity it brings.

  If she is blameless Allah Himself will find a way to save her. Nothing is beyond Him. Casa has heard how a group of the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters had become trapped here in Usha towards the end of 2001, when the American soldiers were going from house to house, smashing open any door they wished to i
n their hunt. All escape routes were blocked but then suddenly, out of the room where the fighters stood more or less cornered, ten iron nails had flown out and swerved into the street. Each was six inches long and verses of the Koran written on small pieces of paper had been tied with thread to the head of each. The sharp tips pointing along the direction of travel, the nails continued in a straight line through the moonlight, the rays glinting off the grey iron, took a corner to the left and then to the left again in order to enter the next street, increasing in speed as they approached their targets. Without sound they came and, shattering through the night-vision goggles, lodged themselves into the eyes of the five American soldiers who were keeping guard there, blocking the path to safety.

  The miracles of Allah.

  Now he goes deeper into the house and finds a lamp and then returns and exits the house and goes to the wooden kiosk that houses the generator. Several of the cables have been cut, he sees. Quick strokes with a blade. The thin copper wires within the rubber insulation shining like insect eyes as they catch the lamp’s light. He presses the lever and raises the glass shield of the lamp and blows out the flame. He steps out and stands with his back pressed to the kiosk’s door, looking deep into the surrounding darkness.

  *

  In the autumn of 1959, Khrushchev visited New York but he kept delaying his departure back to Moscow. When this aroused suspicion, the Western world’s listening posts in England, Italy, Japan and Turkey set to work and eventually homed in on signals issuing from a rocket launch site within the Soviet Union. Among the signals was the regular beating of a human heart. The heartbeat grew faster as the rocket reached its first staging point, the cosmonaut experiencing the normal reaction of fear and excitement. At the moment the rocket’s second stage should have ignited, all signals ceased abruptly and the tracking devices lost contact. Though the Soviet Union denied it, the owner of the heartbeat had been incinerated in millions of gallons of exploding fuel. It is now believed that important safety checks had been ignored for the Soviet leader to have a triumphal moment while visiting the West – ‘The first human being in space is a citizen of the Soviet Union.’