‘Thank you.’ The man leans forward to give Mikal an embrace, a prolonged one to convey the strength of emotions. Afterwards he points to the canvas-covered back of the pickup. ‘Will you and your family eat with us?’
‘We have already eaten.’
‘The shrine is near Allah-Vasi. If you are going the same way maybe our women and children could ride in the back of the pickup.’
‘I am going in the other direction.’
Some children are stamping on the ground in the dust a few yards away. It is probably a scorpion or a snakeling.
‘It’s boxthorn,’ the man says.
Mikal nods. The despised plant. The Prophet Muhammad said,
In the Final Fight between the Muslims and Jews, when a Jew hides behind a rock or a tree, it will say, ‘O Muslim, O Servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ All the trees will do this except the boxthorn, because it is the tree of the Jews.
‘I saw a nest of snakes here earlier,’ Mikal says, at last struck by inspiration. ‘Kraits.’ And it works. The word spreads through the group and immediately everyone gets ready to move on, the children being called closer in alarm, instructions given. Mikal bends down and scoops the leopard cub out from under the pickup and watches the pilgrims gather into a tight knot again. A small wizened woman goes past him, her face carved with deep wrinkles like tree bark, her eyes rheumy and her hair dyed a deep orange with henna. She stops and looks at him and says, ‘The Americans can take over this entire land.’ She pauses for breath and her head nods gently as though she is listening to a story. ‘They can have complete dominion as long as they promise to exterminate every man from it.’ She spits in the dust and adds: ‘They are a curse.’ And then she walks on to join the group. Mikal watches them leave, watches as a man breaks away and comes partway back to him. ‘Is there anything you’d like us to pray for at the shrine?’
Mikal shakes his head. ‘Just pray for the whole world.’
*
There wasn’t a single clink of the chains during the entire time he conversed with the pilgrims but now it starts up again, loud and constant. The man is standing up, working the dagger into the link of a chain when Mikal climbs in. He stops when Mikal raises the gun. Mikal makes him drop the dagger once again and with the gun pointed he leans forward and reaches out blindly – his eyes fixed on the American’s face – picks up the dagger and climbs out into the open.
He stands looking at the sunset. He goes to the front and reaches in without giving the broken window even a single glance and lifts a bottle of water and unscrews the cap and takes half a dozen deep gulps. He puts the dagger under the seat. He goes around to the back and studies the American who is standing exactly where he last saw him.
‘If he was angry with you before, wait till he discovers you stole his knife,’ he says.
The man looks at him.
‘Yes, I’m talking to you.
And
you broke the glass window in the pickup owned by his aunt’s husband.’
Tightening his grip on the 9 mm he climbs onto the bed and gestures for him to sit down, and then moves closer with his eye fixed on the free uninjured arm, beginning the process of securing him again, locking the ring around the free ankle. He gestures for him to put the wrist of the good arm into the ring and he obeys. Then he selects another chain loop and wraps it around the arm and the body three times so he won’t be able to reach in through the broken opening, going under the sling, and around the back. He ties the two feet together, winding a length of chain up the shins, not stopping until it is just under the knees. At some point the soldier decides not to make it easy for Mikal. Refusing to move, becoming a dead weight. Energetically passive. Mikal might as well be wrestling with a rock. He knows about these soldiers, their skills in using lethal force in complex and ambiguous conditions, the years of preparation. ‘Let’s show some care with the cast,’ Mikal says to him. ‘They’ll break Ghulam’s arm for putting it on yours.’ After he is fully bound up again, Mikal says, ‘We are almost there. I just need to find a way to bypass the toll booth and then we’ll be back in Megiddo.’ And he adds, ‘We’d better hope Fatima’s nephew isn’t waiting for us there.’
He can see the great helpless rage on his face, the eyes filled with detestation as he inhales long noisy draughts of air. The American soldiers are not allowed to go more than ten kilometres into Waziristan or Pakistan – so he is clearly used to doing things his own way.
‘Vere iz gurl vere iz gurl vere iz gurrl,’ Mikal murmurs to himself as he climbs out. He is shocked that night has fallen, taken aback that he has done everything in the darkness. There is the almost electronic noise of the insects. The moon is out and its light is falling undiluted onto the pale vastness around him. It is as though snow has fallen on the desert.
*
It’s past midnight when he concedes that there is no way to circumvent the toll booth. Leaving the pickup behind, he walks out onto the ledge above the road and squats and examines the land to the east, to the west and north, the road cutting through it. They have placed pieces of wood on the road outside the booth and set them on fire. When the wind changes he can smell the tar of the road burning.
He comes back and gets into the pickup, lowers his forehead onto the steering wheel and closes his eyes for a few seconds. Sleep overpowers him and he dreams that the American soldier has disappeared from the back of the pickup, the sloughed-off chains lying there on the bed. In the dream he panics that he will be attacked by the soldier from any direction and he stands paralysed in the darkness. Then he sees the American, sleepwalking, and he watches as the man approaches and gets into the back of the pickup and carefully begins to rechain himself.
He awakens from the dream but remains in the same position, brow touching the steering wheel, and it’s a while before he realises that he can hear a melody. He raises his head. He switches on the flashlight and looks in through the broken opening to see that the soldier is singing to himself. He gets out and stands looking at him from the tailgate, listening to the song shining in the darkness, a sudden Paradise of sound. The man doesn’t stop or meet Mikal’s gaze, the rapt concentration on his face unchanging as he forms the English words which at one moment seem to be an ecstasy of praise for everything he knows – he, Mikal, everything all humans know in fact – and in the next moment a lament, by turns tender and bloody, a weapon forged out of the steel of woe stabbing at him from the very heart of suffering. Mikal wants to cut open the words with a razor and examine their insides, their secret colours, and he doesn’t want to move for fear of breaking the spell and after a while he begins to recognise a few phrases that recur, and after a while he feels that there is nothing else at all in the wide hills and desert but that song and its careful singing and its subtle colours of permanence, the unafraid resonance connecting the two of them across the heat-thinned air.
*
What he decides to do. He will take the soldier off the pickup, still in chains, and hide him somewhere in the landscape. Then he himself will drive up to the toll booth – let them examine the pickup if they want. Moving on he’ll park the vehicle, and return on foot through the hills to the place where he left the American. Bring him back to the pickup and drive on.
He is not sure whether he should wait till dawn to do all this, sleep for a few hours and reconsider everything freshly. He sits thinking, one hand on the leopard, the ribcage rising and falling softly with each precious breath. Tomorrow will be yet another day without him beginning his journey to Heer. He wonders whether he should tie the cub next to the American, because they might want to confiscate it.
With no warning a blazing jewel appears from the darkness, holding itself almost stationary before his eyes for a moment. A pinch of humble dust, the firefly goes by outside and he watches it making its weightless turns for as long as he can. He looks away from the miraculous sight and back at the American, wondering if there are fireflies in his country. Looking through the broken window between them he is suddenly overwhelmed, not by any emotion he knows, suddenly feeling himself unequal to so wide a chase, so remorseless a life. He is shocked to find himself close to weeping, a few initial sobs escaping. He wipes the tears but can’t stop and he covers his face with his incomplete hands and weeps loudly, uncontrollably. He reaches out a hand and places it on the man’s shoulder and, his mouth full of failed words, tells him about Naheed, the sidelong gold of her look, and about Jeo, and about his incarceration by the Americans and by the warlord who mutilated his hands and sold him to the Americans for $5,000. About Rohan’s blindness. About the death of Basie.
‘I am sorry I killed your countrymen.’
The American is trying to look over his shoulder, or is looking at the hand with the missing finger on his shoulder. All these things are painful for him to know and he wonders how the man would feel about them if he understood them. And so he stops. Not wanting to hurt him more than he has to. Emotions disrupting thoughts, he withdraws his hand eventually and sits facing the front for some minutes.
*
He drives onto the road half a mile from the toll booth, the speed low, looking to either side of him with a flashlight in search of a location where he might leave the American and the leopard. A wind is carrying the dust from this side of the road to the other, low over the tarmac. When he rounds a curve and sees a toll booth located ten yards ahead of him, it’s too late to turn back. He hadn’t been able to see this booth from the ledge. A small bulb is lit outside it and the man sitting on a chair outside has risen on seeing Mikal. He is waving for him to stop.
He should have known there would be more than one booth. The entire area is a patchwork of clans, full of rivalries even though descended from a common ancestor who had met Muhammad in Arabia and had been charged by him to take Islam back to Waziristan.
The toll booth is actually a well-built square room of plywood, with a corrugated-iron roof. A gleaming black Corolla station wagon and a Pajero are parked beside it. Mikal lifts the dozing cub from his lap and places it at the base of the passenger seat as fast as he can and covers it with a rag and brings the vehicle to a stop. The man’s beard is awry, his eyes blinking in the headlights. He is holding a tired-looking red rose and has an ancient .45 automatic slung at full cock on a belt at his right hip. Behind him the door to the room is open and Mikal can see a number of sleeping figures. The man’s eyes take inventory of everything about Mikal.
‘Get out of the vehicle. What’s your name?’
‘Mikal. I am on my way to Megiddo.’
‘Come out. What’s in the back?’
‘My mother and sister and my wife,’ Mikal says as he climbs down, closing the door behind him swiftly.
The man sniffs the petals of the rose, spinning the flower very slowly under his nostrils. ‘Where are you going with them at this hour?’
‘We were meant to be home several hours ago but the pickup broke down.’
The man nods. ‘How many are there? Tell them to come out.’
‘They’re asleep.’
The man swears under his breath and walks to the tailgate and kicks it several times. ‘Wake up.’ The noise certainly wakes his companions in the room, one of whom utters a curse, another a threat, a third an insult. One stumbles to the door, loosely carrying a Kalashnikov, and after looking around with eyes screwed up, and assessing that there is nothing untoward about the situation, he calls his companion a ‘dirty infidel’ and goes back inside. The man with the rose returns to Mikal.
Mikal reaches into his pocket. ‘I am very sorry for having troubled you. How much do I owe you?’
‘Give me a hundred and go,’ the man says, holding out the palm of the hand that has the blossom pinched between the tip of the thumb and first finger. He raises himself on his toes and casts a casual glance through the driver’s window.
Mikal decides he’ll give him 110; but the man is now leaning into the window for a closer look at something. Mikal knows it’s the leopard, and the man confirms it by opening the door and picking up the cub – he turns and stands facing Mikal.
‘Is this yours?’
‘Yes. Here’s one hundred and ten. I am very sorry to have troubled you.’
‘How much do you want for it?’
‘I can’t sell it.’
‘Why not?’
He studies the man, the cub quivering in his hands. ‘It’s not mine to sell. It’s my sister’s.’
‘The sister in the back?’ the man says. ‘Wake her up.’ He turns his head at an angle and spits on the ground without taking his eyes off Mikal.
‘Actually it belongs to my father.’ Mikal reaches out but the man makes no move to relinquish the cub. There are sleepy murmurs from the booth, muffled protests that the transaction is taking too long, the sound of this conversation interfering with rest.
‘Where is your father?’ There is a note of menace in the voice now. ‘Why did you say it was your sister’s?’
‘It belongs to my whole family. I said what I said because I am tired. It’s been a long day.’
‘They are sound sleepers,’ the man points to the back of the pickup. Mikal proffers the money again, giving a quick glance to the automatic at the man’s hip. ‘Here is what I owe.’
The man looks deeply at him. ‘Is the necklace around your neck your sister’s too?’
Mikal wasn’t aware that it had revealed itself. A small section of it is lying over his collar and he covers it up, sending it below the neckline just as the man reaches into the pickup and takes out the ignition key. His eyes are full of mystery and black silence. It seems that all human relations are to be weighed anew at this site. ‘Wait here,’ he says, handing the leopard cub to Mikal. ‘And I want them out of the back and lined up here in thirty seconds.’ He turns and walks towards the room, switching on the light in there, shouting at the others to get up.
It takes Mikal five seconds to reach the door of the room and another five to pull it shut with a bang and secure the bolt. The men shout and rattle the door but he is already in the pickup, taking the spare key from the glove compartment and starting the engine. By the twentieth second there are several yards between him and the toll booth, the tyres speeding up, but he knows it won’t take much to break down the door.