Authors: Nadeem Aslam
F
OR A LONG TIME
before Lara came to the house the kitchen was Marcus’s living quarters. There was no electricity so the refrigerator was used as a clean white cupboard to store clothes. He seldom visited the other interiors, the doors fastened, a muffled thud indicating that a book had detached itself from the ceiling. Qatrina and he had built up this collection over the decades and it contained the known and unknown masterpieces in several languages. Up there Priam begged Achilles for the mutilated body of his son Hector. And Antigone wished to give her brother the correct burial, finding unbearable the thought of him being
left unwept, unsepulchred.
He went on a journey whenever he received word about a young man somewhere who could possibly be his lost grandson. Though he feared there was no hope of locating someone whose face you had never seen, whose face you didn’t know. The last excursion was to a city in the south of the country during the Taliban regime, and like the other times it was fruitless. There he saw an abandoned and locked-up school for girls into which, he was told, every book to be found in the city had been thrown on Taliban orders. When he put his ear to the keyhole he could hear the sound of worms eating the millions of pages.
While Marcus was digging in the garden one afternoon last month, the sunlight falling deeper into the small pit inch by inch, his implement struck something hard. He pulled out the cassette player wrapped in canvas, interred there during the time of the Taliban. He tried to remember where he had buried the cassettes. Sound fossils! There is hunger that declares itself only while it is being satisfied, and so for the next dozen hours he listened to music without pause, cassettes on every surface around him.
A recording he himself had made two decades ago—of the long lifting notes from the throat of a red-vented bulbul, the bird known as Asia’s nightingale—was followed by Bach and then American jazz.
“Duke Ellington visited Afghanistan,” he would tell Lara when she came to the house. “He performed in Kabul in 1963.”
“The year of my birth.”
“And my daughter’s.”
He worked in the garden, or, book in hand, sat on the threshold where there grew five cypress trees as tall as a house fire, or he wetted a small piece of cloth in warm water and carefully lifted away the earth smeared onto the men and women on the walls, layer by patient layer, taking three hours to uncover the arm entwined around the stem of a small-blossom-laden tree. A red vein in a petal, like a mild thrill. Rubbing off the thick crust from the woman’s wristband he discovered an emerald painted underneath. He felt like a gem miner. He thought about David Town, the American dealer in gemstones his daughter had loved in the months before she died. He wondered how long it had been since David last visited him.
Carrying a lantern in his only hand, he went along the path enclosed within the Persian lilac trees. The perfume factory he had built soon after buying the house was in that direction, women and men coming from Usha to work there, harvesting the acre of flowers from the adjoining fields. It now stood disused and he let himself in, his feet rustling the dry leaves on the floor. Crossing the small office he carefully began to descend the long staircase that was a funnel of trapped warmth.
The factory had to be below ground for the coolness and the softer light to help preserve the ingredients. And soon after the digging work began, they had encountered a large boulder, an indentation at the top of the mass the first thing to come into view, a hollow no bigger than the clay bowls in which Marcus cultivated the ferns of Nuristan. As they worked away the earth, a slender ridge was found snaking around the small depression, and then they saw that the whole was in fact a large human ear. Continuing downwards and around the mass, they understood that they were excavating the head of a great Buddha, lying on its side. Vertically it measured ten feet from one ear to the other. Horizontally it was fifteen feet from the topknot to the decapitated neck.
A face from another time.
Though he knew that this province was one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the Buddhist world from the second to the seventh centuries ad—over a thousand Buddhist
stupas
in the area echoing to the incantations of monks back then—Marcus would never learn when this particular statue had been buried or why. Too heavy to move, he decided to continue with his plans for the factory with the head in it. It lay on the floor and into the wide rectangular space that they cleared around it they constructed work stations and storage areas and shelving.
Eyes two-thirds closed in meditation. The smile of serenity. The large dot between the eyebrows, perfectly circular like a guitar’s round mouth. The head covered entirely in the incised ripples of hair. Marcus journeyed around him now, his sleeve absorbing warmth from the hot glass of the lantern. A stone stillness. He wondered if the rest of the body was buried near by, whole or fragmented.
The place was dusty. In the air lit by the bud of flame there were countless motes as though fur dislodged from a clash of moths. Under the staircase there were cages in which Nepalese civet cats were once kept—three ferocious blue-and-white felines the buttery secretions scraped from whose perineal glands were a prized fixative for perfume.
Bracing his arm against the stone mouth he bent down to retrieve a small vial of glass from the floor. So much destruction and yet this had survived. A four-line poem in Dari was etched on it. He removed the stopper the size of a lark skull and sniffed it, remembering that containers discovered in Egyptian tombs were still fragrant after three thousand years.
Where was Zameen on the night the Soviet soldiers came to the house? Marcus wouldn’t know the answer to this question until he met David Town many years later.
She would disappear from Marcus’s life but enter David’s at a point farther down the line, and then, time moving on, David would meet Marcus.
How stories travel—what mouths and what minds they end up in.
The girl had slipped out of the house in the darkness when a pebble was thrown against her windowpane, the sound like a bird’s beak accidentally striking the glass. A boy in the garden. She went with him along the lake, towards Usha. She was unafraid of the djinn, Marcus and Qatrina having taught her to quietly disregard the many rumours about that place—quietly, undemonstratively, because Marcus with his outsider’s nerves did not wish to injure anyone’s sensibilities.
Just the previous week a man was said to have trapped a green bee-eater and taken it to his bride, but the pious girl who was versed in all seven branches of Islamic knowledge had veiled her face immediately, exclaiming that that was no way for an honourable husband to behave, bringing a stranger into the presence of his wife. She explained that the bird was in fact a human male who had been given his current form by the djinn.
Zameen and the boy were in the demon-strewn expanse of trees when they saw the cleric of the Usha mosque, a torch burning beside him. He was a powerfully built man in his late thirties who had four wives, the maximum simultaneous number allowed to a Muslim. His back was towards Zameen and the boy, and they were about to change direction when he looked over his shoulder. Later she would think the perfume she was wearing on her skin had reached him. But the disturbed soil from the grave he was digging must have released much stronger odours. Their eyes met, and then the two young lovers turned and hurried away, ran, unsure of whether or not they were being pursued.
They knew what he was doing, because he had done it before.
Soon after buying their house, Marcus and Qatrina had learned that the myth of the djinn was only a decade or so old, dating from around the time the cleric’s eldest wife—a woman in her forties who had pulled him out of poverty—had vanished. That was when he began insisting that the area around the lake was a nest of malevolent beings, forbidding anyone from venturing there. He married a thirteen-year-old within a month of the disappearance. His insistence proved to be a great problem for Marcus and Qatrina, who would have liked their home to serve as their surgery and clinic. But virtually nobody from Usha, no matter how ill, was willing to brave the journey because the spiritual leader had forbidden it. Qatrina and Marcus had to acquire two small rooms in Usha and drove there every morning. The cleric was to prove just as intractable when Marcus began thinking about the perfume factory, but he changed his mind when Marcus offered to produce the
sat-kash
rose perfume for him: the extract of the best blossoms was distilled seven consecutive times to produce this, and the very few people who could afford it took it with them to Arabia to sprinkle on Muhammad’s grave. An immense honour. The cleric agreed to issue talismans to the workers of the perfume factory, to protect them on their journey towards Marcus’s house, providing they kept to the one main path along the lake. Later he began to issue them to the very desperately ill also, warning them in no uncertain terms that they must not stray.
All her life, Zameen had heard Marcus and Qatrina air various theories about the djinn, but it was always obvious to them that the missing wife was interred there.
And now Zameen herself had proof.
The two of them emerged on the path along the lake, the water so placid tonight it could have reflected even the thinnest of the moon’s fourteen faces. Seeking reassurance, she stretched her hand in the darkness until it was pressed against the boy’s face. At one time there would have been thin silk between the palm of her hand and his features. So great had been his beauty a few years ago that, fearing abduction, his parents had confined him to the house. A second Joseph, a second Yusuf, he was draped in diaphanous material if ever he was allowed into the street. There had been several attempts to seize him, the house shaken by the ferocity and the organised nature of some of the assaults.
Zameen and the other young girls of Usha had kissed the adolescent through the veil, his mouth the mouth of a doll for them.
Now he was older—eighteen years of age, the delicacy of the features beginning to coarsen into handsomeness—and was truly loved by her. He came regularly to her house to borrow books and she saw him frequently in Usha, writing in his notebooks—sometimes very rapidly as though using a quill whose top end was on fire, but slowly at other times, as carefully as an embroiderer intent on delighting a sultan. In the beginning she was too timid to say anything to him and had consoled herself with what Muhammad had said about those who died of secret love—that they would be granted immediate admission to Paradise as martyrs—but a fortnight ago she had revealed her feelings to him. What she hadn’t known was that when he shyly removed his cap in her presence it was so she could see him better.
Now, in a dark grove of trees near the lake, she shook as they tried to think of something to do. They were sure the next day the news would come that one of the cleric’s older wives had vanished, and then in a few weeks he would marry a young girl.
“She was still alive.”
“I heard her too. We must go back.”
They went past the burnt remains of the school that the Communist regime had opened in Usha last month. The first one in the area, Zameen herself being a boarder in Jalalabad, coming home at the end of the week. Following the sermons from the mosque, and with the active involvement of the members of the two rich landowning families—whose wealth and lands the Communists promised to distribute among the deprived and unfortunate majority of Usha—the teachers and their families had been savagely massacred a week ago and thrown into the lake, the poor of Usha doing their worst to announce their loyalty to the landowners and to Allah—their only protectors. They had wanted to kill Zameen’s lover too, because he was always reading and a young man who spent that much time with books had to be a Communist. He had managed to flee, revealing himself to Zameen only tonight with that sparrow peck on her window.
Now they led each other back to the djinn’s lair, but despite an hour and more of searching they were unable to locate the burial site.
Neither of them knew that during their search Usha had filled up with soldiers. Among the murdered teachers had been the Soviet headmaster of the school and his young family. And tonight the Soviets had retaliated.
Zameen was holding the boy’s hand in the thinning darkness at the end of the night when she felt her arm being suddenly tugged downwards, and only then did she realise that he had been shot, the sound of the gun also reaching her now. The Soviet soldiers surrounded her and took her to Usha where the cleric confirmed her identity to them with a nod. She saw the mud on the hem of his trousers.
The mosque was among the first places the soldiers had visited upon entering Usha, rightfully suspecting it of being the possible centre of the resistance, and the cleric—just back from interring his wife—had provided them with a list of names to save his own life. This was a chance for him to eliminate the two lovers also, to make sure what they had seen would go no further. He said Zameen and the boy had participated in the massacre, that they were among the people who had marched through the streets carrying the severed heads of the school’s staff, the headmaster’s wife and three fair-haired children among them.
L
ARA STANDS
in a corner of the abraded golden room at the top of the house, considering with her serious eyes the expanse of empty floor lying before her. A candle burns in a far alcove. Beside her is a cardboard box and she dips her hand into it without looking. She brings out a piece of plaster on which a set of lips is painted. Taking five steps, she lowers herself into a crouching position and places the smile on the floor.
The hand entering the box again, she brings out this time a painted sprig of foliage. She looks around and decides where this fragment should be placed. A distance of two feet from the dark red mouth.
There is coloured dust on her fingers as though pollen.