‘No. I need to end this as soon as possible so I can go back to Heer.’
Children are walking towards the school, and at the crossroads at the end of the street he stops to let a dozen of them pass. A boy, carrying a bag of books twice the size of his torso, reacts to the sound of chains coming from the other side of the tarpaulin and thumps Mikal’s door. ‘What’s in the back?’
Mikal sits with his arm out of the window.
‘Is it a calf or a goat?’
‘It’s my brother. It’s his wedding day but he doesn’t want to get married, so I have tied him up and am taking him to the bride’s house.’
*
Noon finds him in a burning plain, the bare crust of the earth enclosed by the rim of hills which the sun illuminates while blinding the onlooker. He keeps a constant watch behind him in the rearview mirror in case he is being followed. To the west of him a pall of dust travels horizontally along the ground and then curves upwards obeying some law of wind he doesn’t know, and the hills are pale in the stark light, standing with cruel dignity and grandeur, and the wheels of the pickup crunch over the desert floor, the heat coming in gusts as though the rocks are breathing. It is a reminder that, in contradiction to the Koran, there are some places on earth over which man has no dominion. He drives into the terraceland of low hills eroded by the wind and drives through a pass in the blazing light, looking again and again at the temperature gauge. Soon it is displaying hot, too hot, and he imagines coolant bubbling out of the top of the radiator header tank, the vehicle overheating.
He halts in the shadowed lee of a cliff east of the pass and gets out into the searing wind, the river of heat rushing through the stone channel, and in the flow there are stinging specks of dust and mica. When he lifts the tarpaulin flap at the tailgate, the American’s blindfolded head moves instantly in his direction. The man is drenched in sweat and his skin is red, which is what must happen to white people in the heat, he thinks. The red is thick as paint. The cast on the arm is perfectly dry now, a translucent white in the dimness. Mikal removes the blindfold and gives him water, dropping a purification tablet into the bottle beforehand. Afterwards he walks back to the river he drove past a few minutes ago, a precise serpentine curve of water through the landscape. At his approach, a pair of lapwings flees black white black white over the surface, and he stands with his feet in the water, watching them. The river is warm and he feels as though there are two iron hoops at his ankles. He walks into it fully clothed with the leopard on his shoulder, the simple uncomplicated gravity of the creature a relief to him. He lifts silver drops onto the fur with his hands. The sunlight floating on the surface around him in half-molten ingots. He sits down among the reeds that are dead to the root, and then he fills the plastic bottle and comes back to the American. He holds the man’s head steady with one hand and begins to trickle water onto him, taking care not to wet the cast, and the man blinks and Mikal wipes the wet hair away from the bruise on the forehead and he blinks and looks up at Mikal and Mikal cups his hands under the jaw to catch the falling water and pours it back up onto the head to cool him. He expels drops from the eyebrows by running the tips of his thumbs over them. Then he stands looking at him.
The man seems fascinated by his missing fingers.
He visits the river four times and when he is finished the American is drenched, the chains and the corrugated bed of the pickup glistening. The air undulates with heat, a killing flood. He sits at the tailgate with the leopard in his lap, as motionless as a toy, feeling his clothes dry by the minute, feeling the American’s eyes on him. There are clay nests of swallows high on the tilting face of the cliff. Now and then the American makes a move and there is a clink of chains and Mikal looks towards him. The white man’s eyes are a doorway to another world, to a mind shaped by different rules, a different way of life. What kind of a man is he? Is he well spoken, a union of strength and delicacy? Is he in love with someone or is he oblivious? Does he, like Mikal, have a brother?
He opens a tin of food for the cub and places it in front of it and then feeds the American. Afterwards he takes a chapatti and a piece of mutton from the napkin and eats his lunch. The clothes cool his skin as they dry, the shade beginning to feel as good as a rainfall. Now and then the man looks out past Mikal into the heat as though he has heard someone or something. Or he stares fixedly at one spot on the tarpaulin as though someone is standing just on the other side. Sitting wrapped in the chains in the crosslegged position, the good arm bound to the side of him. He seems to doze and after a while so does Mikal. He rouses occasionally and looks at the tide of the cliff’s shadow as it revises itself with the sun’s movement. Telling himself he’ll continue when the jagline reaches that scrubby bush, that striped rock, that cleft in the earth.
Eventually he gets up and removes a hubcap and fills it from the river and puts it on the passenger seat and places the leopard cub in it.
He sets off across the valley, the sun standing perfectly motionless in the sky. There is grass here and there and it is golden in the sun and in a distant clump of it he sees a black jackal and for a second he mistakes it for the missing Airedale.
An hour later he drives out of the barren valley and begins to climb through the hills. Thin grass and sparse acacias. He lowers his speed when, ahead of him, beside boulders the colour of raw sugar striated with blue, he sees an emaciated man and woman sitting in the dust, with a thin black goat wearing the sole of a rubber slipper around its neck to ward off the evil eye. They tell him they are refugees from the fighting in Afghanistan. Their daughter has died in a bombing raid. ‘They are still fighting,’ the woman says. ‘Her death didn’t shame any of them.’ And then she asks Mikal if he has any jasmine perfume. ‘The goat won’t let us milk it unless we wear the perfume our daughter used to wear when she milked it.’ Mikal shares some of his food with them.
‘Why have you stopped here?’ he asks.
‘They charge money to let the refugees pass.’
‘Who?’
The man waves his hand in the direction Mikal is going. ‘The tribal lords of this area. They have set up a toll on the road. Do you have money to pay them, to pass through?’
There were no tolls on the road when he left Megiddo yesterday.
They entrust him to Allah’s protecting power and he leaves.
After journeying through the high rolling desert for half an hour he gets out and climbs to a ridge – going up an incline of thick gravel that lies like wheat escaping from a torn sack – and looks out onto the other side. A quarter-mile ahead of him is the road that he should have taken, and on it he sees a toll booth. A crudely made wooden shed. He immediately drops to the ground. Raising his head thirty seconds later he sees a vehicle coming in his direction, a trail of dust connecting it to the toll booth. Change of any kind is obvious in spare terrain and they have seen him.
‘Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast,’ he tells himself.
He turns and is off the ridge in five leaps. Getting back behind the wheel he realises there is nowhere for him to hide and with the vehicle in reverse he crashes into the bushes as fast as he can go, now looking at the wing mirror, now in front, the water sloshing out of the leopard’s hubcap. He takes the pistol out of his waistband and holds it in his left hand and continues until the low-lying stand of mesquite he had seen earlier comes into view. He backs into it, the branches thrashing hectically against the side. The other vehicle comes into view and two men get out a few yards from where he was, looking up at the ridge, one of them with binoculars. After five minutes they get back in and drive off towards the toll booth.
An hour from sunset and he is in a small south-facing valley, sitting among the rocks beside a pool that has small blue flowers growing at its edges. The pickup is on a ridge ten feet directly above him, the door on the driver’s side open. He has driven in several directions and met culs de sac again and again. He is very hungry and he sits with the leopard in his arms, the creature testing the air with its nose. He walks up to the bush five yards away, the branches full of yellow berries as though hundreds of dots have been made with a thick piece of coloured chalk. Letting their thin blood run from the corners of his mouth he begins to pick and eat them, and as he stands chewing he looks towards the pickup. In the palm of his hand he collects berries for the American and climbs up to the pickup and lifts the tarpaulin flap.
The first thing he sees is that the man is standing up. His left leg is free of the chain. Then he sees that the uninjured right arm is free as well. He sees the hand gripping the knife owned by Fatima’s nephew. All that holds the man captive is the chain attached to the right leg and the one attached to the neck ring.
He stands square to Mikal, a cold reptile calculation in his eyes. The skin is raw on the ankle of the freed foot where he has pulled it out of the ring.
Mikal takes in air with great movements of his lungs, his eyes on the man. There is a notch at the bottom of the knife’s blade, near the hilt, and he knows it is called the Quetta Notch, meant for stripping sinew, repairing rope nets. He raises his hand to his mouth and begins to eat the berries without taking his eyes off the American. The leopard is in his other hand and madly he wonders why the animal’s heartbeat has remained steady unlike his own. He backs away from the tailgate, letting go of the flap, and sprints to the front. He can feel the American turning on the other side of the tarpaulin to keep pace with him, feeling the green and brown gaze through the cloth. He arrives at the open door a second after he hears the sound of breaking glass: the American has broken the long window behind the driver’s seat, and is now looking at Mikal through it. The 9 mm is in the hollow between the two seats and Mikal is not sure if the man knows it’s there, not sure if he can see it through the broken opening. Is his arm long enough to reach in and grab it?
Once again they hold each other’s eyes, breathing fast. He resists the urge to measure the distance between the glass window and the pistol with a quick glance – not wanting to alert the man to the gun’s presence. He reaches in just as the American swings the dagger through the window at his arm. The blade cuts through his sleeve without making contact with flesh, just as Mikal closes his fingers around the pistol.
He lifts it and brings it out and is now bending down to release the cub onto the ground. Lifting the flap at the tailgate he stands looking at him, the American with the knife raised in the air and eyes burning.
Mikal points the gun at the hand with the knife. He jabs the barrel and flicks the barrel towards the floor to indicate that the American should drop the knife. He does it three more times. Then he does it with his free hand: he has no index finger to point with, but he hopes the gesture is understood.
The man stands there.
‘Do you think I am joking?’ Mikal says as he climbs in, letting the flap drop behind him, and moves a step closer and pulls the trigger. The shot rings out across the desert as the bullet goes through the tarpaulin. He points at the dagger again and the man drops it at his feet. Mikal would have to move close to pick it up. ‘Kick it over.’ He makes a motion with his feet but the man watches him without obeying.
Mikal repeats the motion and jabs the air with the gun again and it’s then that he hears a voice from the other side of the tarpaulin. The American too hears it and looks to his left.
The sunlight from the bullet hole is like a brilliant lance in the enclosed space, dust floating in it in coloured hints and sparks.
Out there several other voices join the first one and Mikal slowly backs away towards the tailgate, hiding the gun in his waistband as he lifts the flap and climbs out to find himself facing a group of two dozen or so men, women and children. A loose gaggle of families, all on foot, some of the children naked, a few of them on their knees beside the pickup’s back wheel, talking to the leopard cub hiding under the vehicle.
‘We heard a shot,’ says a man, curiosity playing on his face amongst the points of perspiration. He has a large birdwing moustache, and a thin vertical line is shaved under the nose to keep the two halves of the moustache separate.
‘That was the pickup backfiring,’ Mikal tells him.
They are pilgrims from a village in the western Paharis, journeying overland to a sacred site for a blessing, and they tell him that they have been travelling for a week and that three more days lie before them, unless it rains in which case they’ll have to slow down. Mikal doesn’t know what to do as he listens, feeling adrift in confusion. He looks around. A man is peering in through the open front door. Mikal walks past him and gently closes the door, a quick glance towards the shattered window but there’s nothing to be seen there. Just the toothed line of glass along the rim. Filled with terror, he expects the tarpaulin to be slit with the dagger any time. ‘What kind of a shrine is it?’ he asks the man who spoke first.
‘It is the grave of a Taliban soldier,’ the man says. ‘A source of great energy in the ground.’
‘He was a great warrior and his grave is twenty foot long,’ a boy of about thirteen says. ‘The Americans killed him.’ He is carrying a basket covered with cloth on his head. The man motions towards the basket – which Mikal assumes is full of provisions – but when the man removes the cloth he sees that it contains hand grenades. ‘To be blessed at the shrine,’ the boy says. ‘Then we take it to Afghanistan and throw them at the invaders.’
Mikal doesn’t know how to extract himself from the situation. The pilgrim women seem about to set up camp beside the pickup. Preparing to make cooking fires. He wonders if he could just take his leave and drive away – but knows the American would reach in with the dagger and attack him.
‘They killed two of my sons,’ one man says. ‘The Americans. They are worse than Genghis and Halagu Khan.’
‘I am sorry,’ Mikal says.