The Wasted Vigil

by Nadeem Aslam

  Lara feels along the darkened wall. Her fingers touch the coldness of the lyre-shaped mirror and then journey over its frame, the warmth in the fingertips releasing the fragrance of the wood.

  From the shelf she takes the matchbox and strikes herself a flame. In its brief yellow light she picks up the foot-long narrow box that lies on a higher shelf. Five more seconds – and a star bursts before her eyes, the silver brilliance at the centre of it scorching the retina. She turns around with it in her hands, the room shaking with the light. It is a child’s sparkler: a small amount of – what is it, surely not gunpowder? – moulded onto a stiff wire. She can’t find a candle and has just heard a sound from outside. It’s seventeen minutes past one. She moves towards the window with the white starburst. Her shadow is grey tinted with lapis lazuli and it wavers and shifts from side to side, almost vibrating. As when lightning flashes in a storm, entering a room from two different windows. She stands looking out into the night, the five inches of burning powder almost running out.

  ‘How do you think that kind old man out there would feel’, she had asked David, stopping him in a corridor, ‘if you were to tell him that his daughter’s death was needed for the secure and singing tomorrows you were arranging for Afghanistan and the world?’

  And he had replied, ‘I loved her as much as he did. But Christopher made a mistake.’

  He was not innocent but he was not guilty.

  She was collateral damage.

  ‘When you are alone at night and your rage takes over – what face do you give it?’

  ‘I am also the man who is privileged to have saved many many lives, Lara.’

  Everyone in the house came together at dinner but then she had withdrawn into this room with Dunia. Around midnight the girl said she wanted to pray and went downstairs, Casa’s fists sounding on the kitchen door not long after that. He was shouting that the girl was missing, that the electricity had been sabotaged.

  There are two possibilities. Either someone from the mosque has taken her, to mete out justice for being immoral. Or – according to David – someone linked with Gul Rasool has, thinking she is involved with the people who put up the shabnama that night.

  Marcus is in the kitchen now. And she doesn’t know where David and Casa have gone.

  She takes out the two dozen or so lights that remain in the flat cardboard box and ignites them simultaneously. She stops herself from shaking. With all the power in her arm she throws the fragments of lightning out into the blackness, watching the thin silver flares slowly drop towards the ground, illuminating the air, the edges of leaves, the boughs of the rosewood tree that is honoured by the three ring-dove nests. They go out one by one in the garden and are a handful of dead moments, bits of time turned to ash.

  *

  In the nineteenth century, one of Marcus’s uncles in the North-West Frontier Province was in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. On parade every man of the regiment wore a single red feather at the front of his pith helmet. The regiment had taken part in the successful night attack on the Americans at Paoli in September 1777, the sleeping Americans massacred with swords and bayonets, the place set alight around the screaming wounded. The Americans had vowed vengeance and, in defiance, in order that they should know who had done the deed, the light company stained red the white feathers they wore in their hats, the tradition continuing for a century and more into the future.

  He wonders what has stirred this memory as he sits in the kitchen with a small candle, the flame twice as long as the wax. The thought of the red-stained bandage at the back of Casa’s head? Or it may have been the small wound David has received while constructing the canoe. The boy and David had just drifted away from here separately, he and Lara alone in the house.

  An ammonite rests on his palm. Zameen had found it during a fossil hunt in the Cotswolds. He can hear her upstairs. Lara. Her eyes must not have stopped looking for signs and indications of her brother ever since she arrived at Usha fifteen days ago. He knows this from his own searches for Qatrina and Zameen and the child Bihzad. And from what David has told him about looking for Jonathan in the Far East. At times he thought he would go mad, interrogating the earth and the landscape, alighting on possible symbols and portents. Always telling himself he wasn’t looking hard enough. Once he jolted himself upright from partial sleep, the book slipping from his grasp and landing on the floor. Among the clues to Orestes’ unknown burial place were

  the two winds

  that were by strong necessity blowing,

  and a place where evil lies upon evil.

  With these clues, Lichas had discovered the bones of the hero in the workshop of an ironsmith. The bellows were the two winds. Hammer and anvil, and the iron being wrought, were the evil lying upon evil. This, Lichas imagined, might be so because iron had been discovered to the hurt of man.

  Marcus was in Kandahar when he read this, and in the madness of his mad heart he had wandered out into the night looking for a rickshaw or horse carriage to take him to a place where iron was forged.

  9

  The Wasted Vigil

  QUICKLY, in the brief time it would take the believers to recite the last chapter of the Koran, Casa traverses a darkened courtyard inside Gul Rasool’s vast house, going through a plot of land filled with the shells of several dozen cars. There is a weak bulb in an alcove with moths lying around it, each with a few specks of life still in it, the wings damaged on the hot glass. Away from that light there is the absolute darkness. Where is she? He senses the presence of another and comes to a standstill, moving forward only when that second figure mimics his raised hand and he realises it is a dim mirror hanging on a far wall. A dream. But the next moment he is brought back to the present, to the reality of a sound from somewhere near by. A small rustle. He imagines himself to be in the crosshairs of a sniper’s gun. A fly held in a spider’s web.

  He shouldn’t have come here.

  He is not a good Muslim.

  He is not a good Muslim.

  Is it any wonder the infidels have taken over the lands of Islam? It’s Allah’s punishment for men like him who have become distracted by earthly matters. Allah will – is about to – smite him. I want to dip my finger in a war wound and spell the name of a hero – this should be his sole preoccupation while the lands of Allah are being invaded by non-believers.

  Have they infected him permanently? When yesterday he said he didn’t know what to do with the sounds issuing from the radio, Marcus had told him, ‘You listen to music with your memories, Casa, not your ears.’ Perhaps it is the same with other senses also. You smell, see, touch, and taste with your memory. There have been occasions when he has eaten something sweet and been reminded for the briefest of moments of dynamite, from the time in the al-Qaeda camps when he had been made to recognise various explosives through taste, placing a small amount on the tongue. Certain large flower buds in Marcus’s garden reminded him of bullets. Now he wonders if the girl’s voice will be a component he’ll look for in any piece of music in the future. Many years from now will he be reminded of his experiences in the Englishman’s house – the six rooms, the perfume factory? The two places of safety.

  He presses the button on the side of his flashlight and sends the thick ray into the air of the room he had entered a moment ago. Held within the light’s circle, the bird’s head remains motionless, though its eyes are open. Perhaps peacocks don’t close their eyes when they sleep. He lets the light flow down the body, leaving the diademed head and arriving at the blue and green tail. A quiver full of stiff jewelled arrows. As though the heat from the beam has brought it to life, the creature now sends a shiver into the long feathers, and the head flickeringly turns to look at him when he brings the beam back up. The bird has been resting in a deep niche and now stands up, making Casa think it is about to step onto the rod of silver light issuing from his hand. The diameter of light when he moves it around the room reveals other smaller birds, asleep on perches, on dead branches and dozens
of wire swings. Every colour is represented, and there are various shapes of beak, various lengths of tail. Eyes like pearls. Some are mistaken by him at first glance for toys – the carved and moulded objects banned by the Taliban. As a child at the madrassa he had learned to whistle, much to the displeasure of the teachers who saw it as a kind of music, his mouth a sinful musical instrument they wanted to but could not find any way of destroying. Though he himself had no wish to be separated from the newly acquired skill, he became careful about when and where he practised it after repeated warnings to desist – imitating bird calls, the rhythm of the Koranic verses, the call to prayer. Inevitably he was caught and they sewed his lips together with needle and thread for four days.

  He touches the scar on his upper lip. The place she had touched.

  He knows why these birds are here. Gul Rasool, he has heard from Nabi Khan, keeps falcons and likes to feed them on the meat of elegant birds, enjoys seeing them tear into and scatter the brilliant feathers. Paying a high price to the owner if a bird is particularly beautiful. At one time there were three hundred falcons and a hundred thousand white doves to feed them.

  At the brief sound of a chain he moves towards the far corner and finds a large wild boar tethered to the wall there. He had hunted them in the villages around Peshawar, lying in wait all night for them to raid the peanut fields, the eyes glowing amber in the darkness. The beast turns its thick neck and looks at him. Gauging the length of the chain, he maintains a distance of just over two and half feet from it. The memory coming to him of the times when, from the forests around an al-Qaeda training camp, he would capture jackals and yellow-gazed lynx and hare, and bring them to the camp laboratory where they died strange deaths in gas chambers.

  Now there is another noise and he turns to see that the peacock is jumping out of its high niche and onto a log on the aviary floor. It disappears from the circle of light, Casa not following it because something else has caught his attention. There, behind a log, is an octagonal box with crescent-shaped brass handles on its sides. It is covered in white streaks because of the birds, but he can see that the Paradisal tree under which the throne of Allah is to be found is painted on it. The box in which the Englishman said his wife had kept her paintings? He opens the lid and finds the rolled-up tubes of paper, each held together by dusty, rotting Chinese silk. The box – its eight sides echoing the shape of the Throne – is filled to the brim with them, perhaps all ninety-nine names of Allah are still in here, discarded amid logs and branches and various useless items in the corner. With the light in his mouth he unrolls a picture. The All Seeing. He carefully puts it back, and as the tubes shift he sees that something else is also in there, an object of different dimensions. The hundredth name? A landmine detonating at this range would kill him certainly. It’s something spherical wrapped in a dark torn shirt, and when he sees that it is a man’s head he lets it drop in shock, the desiccated skin, the empty eye sockets, the dried-up nerves and blood vessels issuing from the torn neck, falling towards the floor out of the light beam. He is not sure whether he has let out a sound, a shout, but the torch is still there in his mouth, directed now at the wall, now at the ceiling, as he loses his balance and falls backwards, dust motes floating in the bright shaft. Somewhere in the darkness near him is that parchment-like face pasted onto the skull, the lips pulled back to reveal blackened teeth. Adrenalin still in him, he propels himself backwards with his feet, knees rising and falling, to be as far away as possible. With his back against the wall he manages to bring order into his breathing. The shirt is a Soviet soldier’s. He recognises it from the many bloodstained ones that can be found for sale in the bazaars of Peshawar and Kabul. He has heard how in the 1980s, convoys of ten-ton trucks filled with automatic rifles, with machine guns and grenade launchers, bought secretly by the United States, would come into Peshawar daily from the Arabian Sea docks of Karachi, and then move on towards the Afghan interior. In return, bloody fur hats and Red Star badges taken from dead Soviet soldiers were taken out of Afghanistan on mules for sale in Peshawar. When the Afghan guerrillas returned a prisoner to the Soviets in exchange for one of their own, they axed off his right hand so he would not be able to fight again, and these trophies too could be found in the bazaars.

  He has often wished he had been alive back then, to be able to kill a Soviet soldier. But, he reminds himself on those occasions, I am alive now and able to kill Americans, infidels all.

  The shirt is still in his hands. It’s just the front panel really, a rag black with blood, the sleeves ripped away, most of the back too, the collar hanging off. Throwing it sideways into a corner he moves towards the three steps that lead out of this room. They are made of rough wooden planks and each board had tried to make a different noise underfoot when he came in. He steps out without making a sound to find James Palantine and three other Americans looking at him. One of the Kalashnikovs is his. He had written onto its strap the verse from the Koran which lavishes praise on iron, the metal of swords and warfare.

  *

  The cloud is thickening above David as though someone wishes to hinder his progress by hiding his surroundings from him, by cancelling the meagre light from the thin moon. There’s barely a landmark for him as he drives towards Usha, the path firing a spray of pebbles at the car. Cloud cover and fog banks are to be some of the weapons the United States plans to use in the wars of the future, a summoning of hailstorms and lightning strikes against the enemy on the ground, the owning of the weather. Monsoon clouds above Laos and Cambodia were drenched with chemicals during the Vietnam War in order to prolong the rainy season, rendering Vietcong supply lines impassable.

  He parks the car some way before Gul Rasool’s house and gets out and stands looking at the building from a distance. Those guarding it will make themselves known any moment. He can feel the weight of their eyes on him.

  Who has her? Dunia told Lara that a man had come forward two days ago to claim to the people of Usha that she had once tried to seduce him. And yet it had been she who had rebuffed him after he, a toymaker, had attempted to gain her love with a doll he had sold her, a figure moulded from clay in which he had added his semen.

  He walks along the high wall, towards the door behind which a light burns, showing through chinks, and he shouts out his name when he is told to halt.

  ‘I am here to see James,’ he tells the American man in the group that has gathered before him.

  ‘That’s far enough. He called you?’ This young man was at the house during the day, pulling down books while standing on a bridge of rope.

  David moves towards that door, taking the others with him, their weapons drawn. He pushes at the door but it won’t yield so he slams into it with his shoulder.

  ‘Wait. I am getting James on the phone for you.’

  But David is already through the door.

  Casa is on his back on the floor in the centre of the room, his legs being held by an Afghan man, his chest pinned down by the knees of an American who also grips his hands. Another American, beside Casa’s head, is holding a blowtorch, its blue jet directed into Casa’s left eye. This young man straightens up on seeing David, and just then James comes in through a door on the far side of the room. Casa’s mouth is open in a twisted soundless scream, that eye erupting black blood. The boy with the blowtorch stands up with a glance towards James, the blue fang-like flame briefly touching Casa’s hair so that a patch of it catches fire with a crackle. It goes out by itself, reduced to wandering scarlet points. The smoke rising threadily into the air.

  And now suddenly the other two have released Casa, and Casa rises, covering with one hand the absent eye, but he cannot stand up and, lurching sideways, hits a wall after three faltering steps.

  James, the features perfectly composed after the briefest of initial frowns, walks towards David and stands facing him.

  The blowtorch, still on, would explode were David to fire a bullet into it.

  No words from anyone until David says, ‘Tell the
m not to go near him.’

  ‘Put the gun away, David.’

  ‘Did you fucking hear me?’ His voice like a canine’s bark.

  Casa is bowed on the floor, as he has seen him many times during prayers, but this is pain and a groan is now coming from him. There is a short length of rope tied to one of his ankles.

  James, without turning around, flicks his head to the right and the men move to that side of the room. His jaw muscles working. Holding David’s gaze he says, ‘He confessed he is with Nabi Khan.’

  ‘Bring that thing near me and I’ll confess to that.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t, and neither would I. And he came up with Nabi Khan’s name by himself. We didn’t suggest it.’ He takes a step towards David. ‘He can bring us to Nabi Khan – and Khan will tell you where your son is. Think about it.’

  ‘You think you are going to get away with this.’

  ‘He told us the exact details of the raid that was promised in the Night Letter. The exact date. It’s next week – next Thursday. He said Nabi Khan wants to take his time with the attack, that he had said, “We mustn’t rush history.”’

  ‘James, are you listening to me? I am going to have you all arrested for this.’

  ‘Gul Rasool is in the government,’ one of the Americans says.

  ‘He’s not in the United States government.’ He feels faint as though someone has decanted a pitcher of blood from his body.

  ‘He’s in the government the US installed here,’ says the Afghan who’d been holding Casa.

  James raises a hand to silence his companions. ‘I did what needed to be done, David. These people have been trained in how to survive interrogation techniques. For some of them true jihad starts at capture. So we have to be extreme, go beyond their trained endurance. I am just searching for our country’s enemies, David. It’s nothing personal against this man.’