by Nadeem Aslam
‘Nothing personal? You are holding a flame to his eye.’
‘It’s not between him and me. It’s between them and us.’
They don’t need to watch jihadi DVDs to become radicalised: they’ll just watch the evening news on the TV – with things like these being reported.
‘And when I say us I include the majority of the Afghanistanis, who want to get shot of sons of bitches like these. I include the majority of the world, not just Americans.’
‘Have you any idea how much damage you have done us by your actions here tonight?’
‘None, if you keep quiet about it.’
To the side of him Casa makes a lunge towards the open door. David hears sounds of a scuffle from out there. If he had died they would have buried him somewhere under cover of darkness? No one would have been any the wiser.
‘Tell them to let him go,’ he tells James.
‘No. He could run off and warn Nabi Khan. And I want to know what else he knows.’
‘You know all this is illegal?’
‘Illegal? This is war, David. You’ve been looking into the wrong law books. These are battlefield decisions.’
‘Tell them to let him go. You do not have the authority to do this.’
‘Suddenly you are an angel.’
‘Whatever I did or did not do, I was an employee of the government of the United States.’
‘How do you know I am not?’
‘I intend to find out. This is not over.’
He looks at the others. The long thick veins on the arms of the one holding the blowtorch are like cables or tubes that feed the blowtorch, the instrument a part of him. And David sees that on his white T-shirt is printed the sonogram image of a few-weeks-old foetus. A black rectangle filled with grainy strokes. His future child back in the United States, no doubt.
He turns and leaves the room with James following. Casa is on the ground out there, in the rectangle of light falling from the door. And when they release him and James moves forward to lift him to his feet, Casa makes to stab him in the face with the canoe maker’s awl he has produced from the folds of his clothing, the barb as thick as a porcupine quill moving past James’s shoulder. James wrenches it out of the weak grip and steps away.
‘They are the children of the devil. They have no choice but to spread destruction in the world.’
‘He is the child of a human, which means he has a choice and he can change.’
James throws the spike into the darkness. ‘Just look around you, David. Look at the devastation all around you. These people have reduced their own country to rubble and now they want to destroy ours.’
‘Where’s the girl, James?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘She’s missing.’
‘Wasn’t us. Must be the fellow countrymen of this man, the people you are so keen to protect. Do you know what is probably being done to her by them right now?’
When Lara said she was very brave to have taken on the responsibility of the school, the girl had replied, ‘I pretend I don’t exist. It’s easier to be courageous that way.’ As Zameen used to say at the Street of Storytellers.
Casa has stood up and begun to stagger away, trailing that bit of rope.
David now moves in front of James to block direct access to Casa, just in case. There are only a few inches of space between their faces, the eyes staring at each other. The gap widens as David backs away in Casa’s direction. ‘This is not over,’ he says firmly.
Like lightning arriving a few beats before the roll of thunder, James’s face tenses and his eyes flash and then the noise of his rage comes out. ‘We are not responsible for this. If he is half-blind or if he dies of his wounds – it’s not our fault. And those hundreds who died by chance in our bombing raids, and those who are being held in Guantanamo and in other prisons – none of it is our fault. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and their Islam are answerable for all that. We are just defending ourselves against them. This is not over? You bet.’
David turns his back to him and looks for Casa. His ruined face. The water in the eye gone, the colour too turned to smoke and ash in the cindered socket. He glances around but there is no sign of him. Occasionally when he is in Asia he visits the site where Zameen’s death took place, on the outskirts of Peshawar, around where she possibly lies buried. The first time he went he felt her presence there, a hint of her like an unevenness in a sheet of glass. Has she been accompanying him since, the unanchored dead? Before leaving he had bent down and picked up a handful of earth from the ground and closed his fingers around it and he took it with him to the USA. This is among the few things that can be said about love with any confidence. It is small enough to be contained within the heart but, pulled thin, it would drape the entire world.
*
It’s almost dawn and Lara has been here at the table with a book, surrounded by the painted vistas and processions on the wall, for many hours. Marcus is in an armchair in the next room, in a state of alert exhaustion no doubt, like her. She can see part of his body next to the plum blossom printed on the chair’s fabric. Can see part of his lengthy comet-like beard. ‘This land and its killing epochs,’ he had been saying earlier. ‘The Soviet invasion took away Zameen, the Taliban era swallowed up Qatrina. I fear that this new war will take someone else away.’
She had gone to sit on the floor beside him. Her head on his lap.
‘You have to go away, Marcus. Go far away from this place.’
‘I live here.’
‘It’s called waiting.’
‘Do you think?’
In both of them there was a wish to conserve energy so it was a whispered exchange. A drowsiness, and little or no inflection behind the words. He began stroking her hair but soon stopped even that, the hand just resting there.
‘I am waiting for my grandson, yes. All this’ – the hand was lifted a fraction off her head because he probably wished to wave it around the room, the house, what she thinks of as the ruin of golden Islam, a destroyed markaz perhaps and a ‘Zone of Peace’ with him as the Sufi – ‘is his and must be passed on to him. Having all of you here has made it even more clear to me that this is my life and my home. I don’t just live here because I don’t have an alternative.’
‘I inherited everything of Stepan’s. But I want nothing to do with it, the wealth he left. I don’t really want to know the methods by which it was accumulated. You could buy a trainload of Siberian timber for one dollar during the financial crash of 1993. No, I don’t want it. Who would?’
‘Me.’
‘As children we heard a story about the tin-based Russian currency. How one particularly cold winter, when temperatures fell below minus eighty-six degrees, the nation’s entire coinage had turned to white powder, as tin does under such conditions. I am sure the story is untrue, but I don’t want to touch what Stepan has left me, I will let it turn to dust. I have come to hate money.’
‘Not me.’
She had straightened at that, shocked even within her tiredness. ‘I can’t believe what I am hearing. You wish you had money?’
‘A vast amount of it. Why not? It could be used to build schools and hospitals, parks and libraries and community centres. I am not saying the only way to save someone is through money, or that life should be reduced to quantities of wealth. The rich have this idea that they have paid off their debt to the world by becoming rich. No, I am talking about the difference between greed and need. And not just this country, there is a world out there that I would try to help.’
She had felt ashamed. ‘You are good.’ It all depends on how big you think your family is. The words of her mother.
‘I didn’t say that to imply you were being self-centred.’ He cupped her face in both his hands. Or got as close to doing it as was possible for him. He attempted it and she understood the attempt. If the left hand was missing – well then, it was missing.
The touch of his hand was tough in some places, fine in others. A gatepost weathe
red by departures.
He said, ‘You must go back and take charge of these matters intelligently. You must delve deeper into Stepan’s death, try to discover what your country’s government and your country’s army is doing.’
‘I am too weakened, Marcus.’
‘You are going to let them go unchallenged?’
‘They are very strong.’
‘Then you’ll fail. But so what? At least you will have tried. The goal is to have a goal, honesty the striving for honesty.’
A dependable clarity dissolved out from him. An aura. It was as though she had been able to make out each of the pages her mother thought she was filling her notebooks with in her last days.
Now she rises and drinks a few gulps of water, which after the thirst feel immensely pure. It is like being a bowl of dew.
From the orchard she looks out at the lake. During the night she had gone down the path towards Usha several times, always turning back because of fear, but starting out again later, covering this time a distance greater or shorter than earlier. At the dacha they had hurt Stepan to make her reveal herself. She had heard his screams from the hiding place where she sat whimpering. And so, during the course of the night that is ending, she kept hearing Dunia’s voice, calling to her.
Now she moves along the path again, trying to gather her nerves as she goes. The sky above her is still dark but there are many hints of light, almost everything visible. A sound like a shower of broken glass and she looks to her left, into the trees that are populated by the djinn, catching sight of the peacock just before it disappears with its waterfall-like tail. The retractable trim of long feathers on each wing was glowing with the reddish orange of rust-covered knives. She enters the contained and muffled solitude of the trees, the silence so heavy it is as though her ears have been sealed. Here could be another explanation for the painted rooms of Marcus’s house: it could have been built to provide an education to the djinn about what it means to be human. Each interior a classroom, the djinn moving upwards within the building as their knowledge increased sense by sense, arriving finally at the topmost golden space.
She notices small birds flitting around and above her. Bee-eaters, parakeets, orioles and goldfinches, who received their red faces when they tried to remove the crown of thorns from Christ’s head. They are too many and too different for it to seem natural. It’s as though the door to an aviary has been left open somewhere. Minutes later, lost and unable to find a way out onto the path, she is leaning against a tree when she becomes aware of an intense fragrance. There is no arrival or gradual rise in intensity – it is there suddenly like music released. There is movement beside her, the faintest of stirrings. She turns her head and sees the ten figures, bowing in two rows towards Allah. All their attention on their Maker. They are not aware of her even though she is only two metres away from the end of the second row. This beautiful brown-skinned boy is little more than fourteen. How close she is to the pulsating energy field that this innocent-looking child exists within, the grand realm of spiritual events in which his real life occurs, Muhammad and Gabriel more real to his passioning eye than she.
He has Pakistani features and colouring. Recruited from a religious school for this cause? Terrorist groups in that country buy and sell boys as young as twelve for suicide missions. Once they receive training they can be barred from returning to their families, becoming virtual prisoners. The groups have been known to accept ‘ransom’ for their release, justifying it by saying that neither the boys nor their training had come cheap.
Or is he doing this willingly? In the months to come his mother or father, sister or brother, would be scouring this land for some word of him.
Hundreds of Russian mothers wait along Chechnya’s border with Russia, women of advancing years who have decided to come and discover the fates of their conscripted sons, brought there by the news that his military card has been found or a locket with his name on it. They move from town to town and search the train carriages heaped with the dead boys, looking for a birthmark or asking one another if eye colour is the same in death as in life, untangling one boy from the press of the hundred others and pulling him out, already unrecognisable, bitten by dogs and rats or cut to pieces.
A few birds are singing in the branches overhead. The song much more powerful than the fragile body of the singer.
In America they would have to face the east in order to say their prayers, and so, David said, the early Muslims in America were thought to be worshippers of the sun and the moon.
They have straightened in unison – it’s like opening a child’s pop-up book – and are now standing up, hands folded neatly on the stomachs, on the suicide belts, faces lowered in obedience. Today is the day of reckoning promised in the shabnama. There is a slope in front of them where the tall grass is tiger-striped with paths. They must have come down through there to perform this final act of worship before going on to meet Allah, and other battalions must be elsewhere around Usha.
How long, she wonders, before they finish and see her? They’ll perform the two motions that are the last acts of the Muslim prayer: the head is rolled first to the right, then to the left. Allah, I wish well-being and peace for all those on this side. And, Allah, I wish well-being and peace for all those on this side. She had seen Casa and Dunia do this at the house.
She is sure they can hear the noise her heart is making. She steps sideways, the support of the tree disappearing from along her spine. And she takes a step back. The corner of her eye is fixed on them and now she sees David at the other end of the rows. He hasn’t seen her: he is moving towards the back row, eyes fixed on the third boy along from his end.
Casa.
David inches forward and comes to stand directly behind Casa, carefully raises his right hand towards the boy’s waist and his left towards the head. As the other boys move forward to bow again, David clamps shut Casa’s mouth and with the other arm fastens the boy’s arms to his sides. A tight grip. He lifts him out of the rank just as the others fall to their knees and then make their bodies foetally compact on the ground. The combined rustle of the others’ clothing hides any noise that the two of them have made. Why is Casa’s eye bandaged? she wonders. David drags the struggling boy away from the two bowing lines of the death squad, away into the trees, managing to raise him off his feet so the thudding cannot alert the others – their ears so close to the ground in their prostration. Her hands are wet with the tears she has wiped off her face, her vision slipping in and out of focus. Their clothing has drenched the air with perfume here. Jihad handbooks warn terrorists not to wear fragrances in airports, as it gives them away as devout Muslims. They have, of course, become aware of the disturbance, reacting as though in a dream, unable and unwilling to interrupt their prayer. By religious decree they are not even allowed to look sideways until the act of worship is complete. But in ones and twos around the gap that Casa has left behind, they come out of their trance, look back, see her, see David and Casa in that terrible embrace. All this takes place in a matter of seconds but to her it seems so slow that buds could appear and break into blossom and then wither around her. Coins of the realm and the names of cities could change. Governments and empires fall.
David’s mouth is next to Casa’s ear, and he is whispering something fast.
He is hoping to win over his murderer with an embrace.
THEY HAVE FALLEN BACKWARDS onto the earth. Managing to free his right hand from David’s grip, Casa feels along the belt tied to the waist. Through gritted teeth he says something, his face parallel with the sky visible through a gap in the foliage. The last words David hears.
The blast opens a shared grave for them on the ground.
TEN OR SO BUTTERFLIES go past Marcus’s knees and they double in number when they begin to fly over the lake’s reflecting surface. The sky has a milky lustre above him, the pale blue of lines ruled on the pages of a child’s exercise book.
He is dragging the canoe to the water’s edge, the var
ious woods of it gleaming in the late-morning sun. The water seems to take it out of his hand, attempting to uncouple it from his grip. He has to make sure his feet don’t slither sideways. It looks raggedy. The ends of the ribs protruding where they haven’t yet been trimmed. It has not been sealed – with that gum sticky to the touch like certain leaf buds before opening – but it floats. Keeping his hand on the prow he walks with it into the water until he is submerged up to the navel, standing on rocks within the water. He lets go and with his one hand tries to lift a heavy rock out of the lake. Failing, he takes a deep breath and crouches. His head is in the liquid now. He manages to work one round stone out of the bed and then slides it up along his thighs, into his lap. Cradling it, he stands up out of the diffused shimmer and then carefully sends the black stone over the edge of the canoe. The bark vessel sinks half an inch deeper into the lake, the water sieving in. This was how the Native Americans stored the canoes when they were not in use, burying them in the water.
He looks towards the house, the balcony of the room where Lara is. He saw her walking from the direction of Usha earlier and took her into the house, helped her upstairs, stopping on the seventh step of the staircase to pick up the book that had become dislodged and landed there. The blood on her clothes was, she said, that of Casa and David. She wouldn’t bathe in the house, rejecting the idea of the drain, and had stood in the lake instead so that all the redness would become part of the roaming water. The sun-dazzled surface. One year soon after the Soviet Army invaded, the air around the house had turned yellow, thick billows of the colour arriving on the breeze, falling from the sky, every heart fearful at the sight because there had been reports of attacks with chemical weapons. In the end it turned out to be the pollen-rich droppings of a large swarm of wild bees. The colour settled on this water thickly enough for Zameen to be able to write her name in it.
