*
He is running upwards into the mountain. The slope is abrupt on the east and south but gentle to the north and west. Above him the day is withdrawing from the sky in long lengths of gold and soon he is high enough on the gradient to be able to see the mosque below him, the lake whose water he had crossed in a boat. The helicopter took off without the two fallen bodies. He can see them. The pilot made several attempts to come out to collect them, to capture Mikal, but the firing from the mosque was too intense. Mikal had dropped the pistol and run towards the boat that stood in a patch of reeds and poisonous dog’s mercury at the edge of the lake. No doubt they’ll return soon in greater number to begin their hunt for him.
If this were summer he would take handfuls of wild rose petals and eat them for the sugar, for the sweet water in them, but in spring there are only the cream white blooms of the wood anemone, his fingers plucking them as he goes, the traces of pink, the faint bitter scent reminiscent of leaf mould and foxes. He fills his pockets with them as he runs. There are mountain villages in Pakistan he has been to where the first wood anemone of each year is sewn into clothing, with the idea that beauty wards off pestilence and plague. Coming to a plateau he sits by a spring and makes a small boat with one of the banknotes the Americans had given him and sets it on the current. He enters a cave but leaves it a few minutes later, having found a collection of passports in a crevice and a list of thirty-three Jewish organisations in New York City. Darkness falls but he continues to move, the overcast sky a slab of unreadable black stone above him and as always the silence of the mountain is physical – a thing, with weight – and there is a wish in him to keep walking, to continue up into the mountain and into the high ice deserts, becoming God’s neighbour.
Arriving at a small village, twenty single-storey houses around a crooked street, he knocks on the first door. After salutations, he asks the man in Pashto whether he would like to own his clothes.
The man touches the material of his shalwar kameez but says he has no money.
Mikal explains that he only wishes to exchange them for another set.
‘Is someone pursuing you?’
‘No.’
‘Are you a bandit? A lover who has killed a rival?
‘No.’
The man is suddenly anxious about the possibilities he has raised and closes the door.
The knock on the next door produces a younger man who agrees readily to Mikal’s proposal, fingering the jacket lovingly, the small logos embroidered on the shoulders and pockets in orange and raspberry thread.
‘Why do you want to exchange them?’
‘I don’t like the colour.’
The boy looks at him. ‘Are you an American?’
‘What?’
‘Are you an American?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know where I can get a visa to live in America?’
‘No, I don’t.’
Mikal steps into the house and changes into the clothes the boy brings for him. He sees a knife on the floor in the corner. ‘Can I have that?’ he asks.
The boy picks it up and pulls the six-inch rusty blade out of the brass liners. It is a lockback knife with a cracked deer-antler grip and nickel bolsters. He makes a face, but on sensing that Mikal has some need for it, he erases the expression. ‘I can’t give it to you, it’s very dear to me.’
‘I’ll buy it.’
At the other end of the street he shouts into a window and asks if he can sleep in the stable. An old man’s face appears and then a woman’s beside him, their clothes marbled with grease and grime, and from the stable the goat looks at him with its agate eyes. They are poor like everyone else in the place and they smell of smoke, wax and sweat.
‘Where are you going?’ the man asks. ‘Where is your home?’
‘I don’t know. I am alone.’
The woman lifts both her hands to her ears, overcome with despair at being told such a thing, on meeting someone who can believe such a thing. ‘No one is alone on earth,’ she says. ‘No one.’
They invite him in and he sits with them on the earthen floor of their one-room house. The man tells him that Pakistan is over the mountains, through the cliff passes, and the woman brings him a bowl of milk with a triangle of stiff bread.
‘Someone must be waiting for you,’ the man says.
‘Listen to me,’ the woman touches the side of his head. ‘You must find your way back. In the past merchants and soldiers would go away for years to other lands. But they returned, to find people waiting for them.’
‘I returned after decades and she was here,’ the old man says.
It is cold in the night and he hears helicopters hovering overhead, real or imagined, and when he wakes in the dawn light the woman is already up and has a fire burning in the corner of the room used as a kitchen, huddling over it in her thin clothes. Mikal crawls out from under the blanket and puts on his boots and walks out to study the morning as it shapes itself out of the darkness rich with gleams.
When he is ready to leave, after drinking a bowl of tea with them, the man decides to walk with him partway into the mountains, through the corridors of various limestones, often much contorted, and there, over ancient hieroglyphs carved onto calcareous flagstone, he draws Mikal the route to Peshawar, his marks moving over and through the Buddhist writings, between them and incorporating them. Mikal makes him take some of the money before they part.
Around noon he spends an hour on the edge of a cliff, sharpening the knife. A white lamb’s skull lies in an eagle’s nest just below him on the cliff face. He licks the back of his wrist and tries the blade on the hair. It is sharp but there is nothing to kill. In the evening he scoops out termites from a hollow tree and eats them, spitting out the bitter heads like pips, and has to enter the tree a few moments later on hearing helicopters, the insects climbing onto his face and clothes. Did the boy who wanted to go to America tell them about him?
He walks all through the night, Venus appearing as the hours go by and moving with him. Lyra, Pegasus, Piscis Austrinus, and all the other constellations that he hasn’t seen since he was captured at the beginning of the year are now pulsing above him, but he cannot read them fully, the shapes tangled, or threadbare like beads missing from a piece of needlework. He has forgotten some of the names, while in other cases it is the shapes and locations associated with the remembered names that he cannot recall.
From the faintly rotting corpse of a jackal he extracts the bones with the knife, cracking them open to suck out the marrow sealed inside, still without taint. He had gained some weight from the food the Americans had fed him at the prison but now he is exhausted. At dawn he falls onto his side with his eyes closed, lying on feldspar grit and stiff clay at a river’s edge. At noon he sees a rabbit in the meadow twenty feet ahead of him. He stops walking and puts two fingers to his teeth and whistles and the rabbit freezes. He takes the knife from his pocket and opens it and he watches as the blade slices the tips of the long grass on its way towards the animal. Catching the sparks from a struck rock onto a piece of dry moss, he builds a fire and roasts the skinned rabbit, eating every last morsel, not knowing if his mutilated hands will allow him the same luck again.
They don’t. He fails several times and the next day in despair he picks up a snake by its tail and, like a whip, slams the head against the rock under which it had been sheltering. And then once again to be sure. Severing the head he peels back the skin, a mute sheath of nibs, and pulls it downwards to separate it from the body. The guts are pulled out along with the skin, leaving the meat. He traps one end between a splice in a stick and wraps the length in a spiral around the stick and ties the other end with stalks and roasts the snake over an open flame.
The journey to Pakistan takes him eight days, staying away from villages, stealing from an orchard, a planted field, nests, staying away from humans because he knows the Americans are looking for him. This time they’ll lock him away for the rest of his life. In Cuba or in America itself. Or he could get the death penalty. When he climbs down out of the mountains at the outskirts of Peshawar, a storm overtaking him in a hail of ice, he hasn’t eaten in two days and he is running a constant body temperature that must be 106.
*
He is still trapped, the cage is just bigger. On several occasions he stands with the receiver of a payphone in his hand but cannot dial in case the Americans are following him. When he leaves after the call, they will trace the number. They will go to Heer and take away Basie, Yasmin, Rohan, Tara and Naheed, to put them in the cages in the brick factory. He makes several haphazard journeys into surrounding towns, within the coronet of mountains and hills that surrounds Peshawar. Getting into a bus without asking the destination, he disembarks halfway and changes direction, or continues in the same direction but on the next bus. When he is convinced at last that there is nobody behind him, in a small town thirty miles outside Peshawar, he breaks into a place called Look Seventeen Beauty Parlour and from there dials the number of Basie and Yasmin’s house. No one picks up. He rings Rohan’s house and Yasmin answers, her voice like electricity through him. Hearing her and not being able to respond makes her feel further away than she is. He is an exile in his own homeland, his eyes filled with uncrossable distances. What ghosts must feel. He hangs up and stands there, shaking from the fever. The interrogators at the brick factory had said one day that the woman screaming in the next room was Naheed. Was he told that or is he just imagining it? He knows he must go to Heer to see if they have captured Naheed.
And I still have to find Jeo
.
*
He opens his eyes and sees Akbar’s.
For a moment he thinks he is back in one of the cages. But then he sits up and recognises the place where he had taken shelter – the cramped windowless space under the mosque in Coppersmiths’ Bazaar in Peshawar, where the torn copies of the Koran are kept.
‘Are you talking much nowadays?’ Akbar smiles.
He tries to speak but his throat hurts. His flesh is burning, the earthen floor under him damp with sweat.
‘The Americans let you go too?’ Akbar says.
Mikal nods.
For now
.
‘I saw you from the other side of the bazaar. You were on the roof.’
‘I was trying to find the constellations,’ he says. He raises his trembling hand and places it on Akbar’s. ‘I don’t remember you telling me you were from Peshawar.’
‘I am not. Just visiting.’
Mikal lies down again. ‘What time is it?’
‘Three.’
‘Day or night?’
They talk for a few minutes, Mikal telling him about shooting the two Military Policemen, and though Akbar wishes to know the details he is too weak to continue, is exhausted from the few words he has spoken, lowering his head onto the wet pillow of Koranic pages and closing his eyes, lost between several worlds.
*
He senses daylight and there are movements and words near him. From time to time there is a bitter taste in the mouth, or a needle punctures his arm, after which the darkness returns. Eventually he manages to keep his eyes open long enough to see a girl standing beside him and he does not wish to breathe or blink for fear of breaking the spell, just remaining there on the very edge of inhabited time. She wears a white shalwar kameez, the sleeves coming down to her wrists, her fingers pale as porcelain.
Over several drowsy moments the details assemble into a complete picture – the room is large and clean and the walls are whitewashed. There is a tree outside the window whose foliage grows in seven-leafed fans.
She is supervising an older woman, who appears to be a servant but is respectfully addressed, and is pressing a piece of ice wrapped in flowered cloth onto Mikal’s forehead. The moment the girl notices that he has regained consciousness she pulls her veil down onto her fine-boned face and withdraws from the room in utter silence. The grey-haired older woman continues to tend to him until Akbar enters, and then she too leaves.
‘I’ve brought you a visitor,’ Akbar says, holding a snow leopard cub pressed against his chin, the fur so soft there are furrows in it from the boy’s breathing.
‘How long have I been asleep?’
‘Five days. And I think the word is unconscious.’
‘Five days,’ he whispers. ‘This is your home?’
Akbar nods and places the animal on his chest and Mikal sits up and cradles it. The pads are like pink-grey raspberries attached to the undersides of its paws, and the fur has dark markings that look as though another cub with sooty paws has walked all over it.
‘It’s about three weeks old. My sister sent it in for you. In October, her husband and my twin brother and I went to fight the Western armies in Afghanistan. They were both martyred.’
Mikal remembers Akbar telling him at the brick factory that he had had nothing to do with fighting, that he was a taxi driver and the Americans had captured him in Jalalabad on false information.
He gets up and walks to the door and looks out, suddenly untired, desiring movement. The cub is pure innocent trust as it clings to him.
The house is painted yellow, and is located in a dense grove of trees, all the same kind. One of them grows in Rohan’s garden in Heer, its small green-white flowers filling the winter evenings with a rich smell. Rohan had planted it because its wood is used for making writing tablets.
‘It used to be a clinic,’ Akbar says, as they walk in the grove, the sun falling through the sieve of leaves here and there. ‘A small hospital, owned by a doctor in the 1930s. He planted these trees. He was famous in the region for providing wooden noses to the women whose real ones had been cut off by their families. The wood of these trees was used for carving the new noses.’
‘Where am I?’
‘South Waziristan. The clinic was abandoned when it was discovered that it had links with English missionaries.’
The new pale leaves stand out against the darker foliage brightly.
‘I won’t ask you your name,’ Akbar says. ‘I know you’ll tell me when you are ready.’