Authors: Nadeem Aslam
“In which room did Zameen’s ghost appear the day the Taliban came?”
“The one about sight.”
The blind and the seeing are not equal
reads the inscription above that entrance, a quote from the Koran in elegant long-tailed lettering.
A blue rectangle of the ceiling stands revealed wherever a book is missing above her. They look like openings onto the afternoon sky. It was to prevent a haunting that in certain parts of Russia a dead body was carried to the church through an open window, or even through a specially cut hole in the roof. The idea was to confuse the dead person’s spirit, making it more difficult for the ghost to find its way back home.
Earlier David had received a call to say that the Jalalabad police have found the head of Bihzad at last, flung into a drainage ditch in the bombing. The young man who thought he was on his way to Paradise. To commemorate the baptism of Christ in the River Jordan, the Tsar—accompanied by the entire court and the leading churchmen—would emerge from the Hermitage on 6 January every year, descend the steps of the Jordan Staircase, and walk out onto the frozen Neva. A hole would have been cut through the ice, and Tsar and Metropolitan would bless the water. Children were then baptised in the icy river. What amazed the visitors from other lands was the reaction of the parents if ever a child slipped from the numbed hands of the holy men, never to be seen again. They refused to grieve because the child had gone to Heaven.
Stepan knew someone who had lost a distant relative in that manner.
Stepan.
It’s almost as though David is listening to her thoughts. “How soon after meeting Stepan did you know you loved him?”
She slowly turns her face away from him.
“I don’t think I married him out of love.” Very quietly. Looking at the wall where a horse and rider have been freed by Marcus from their mud layers beside the bed. The entire horseman except the left hand has been made visible, as though Marcus had forgotten that a person’s left arm continues beyond that wrist.
“Stepan pursued me. A small part of me was flattered, but I said no to him many times. I agreed eventually because . . .” Her eyes are still determinedly refusing his. “How wrong it seems when I say it out loud . . . A secret seen in the full light of day.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“Would you mind not looking at me right now?”
“Sure.”
“You can’t know how bad things were for me, because of my mother’s past, and because of Benedikt’s defection. I married Stepan, the handsome and well-connected army officer, because I thought he could bring me security. I thought my ill and ageing mother would no longer be harassed by the state because she would soon be his mother-in-law. That he would help me get to the truth about Benedikt. Oh, I am so sorry . . .”
An apology to the universe, to her better self, to Stepan.
She is sitting up now, forehead placed on the raised knees. She shakes her head, continues to shake it until she is able to speak again, construct her ever-precise sentences—the singsong voice, the soft
t
and the slightly rolled
r.
“It was a bad time. I just couldn’t see my way through clearly. On the other hand, a quarter of the official world were his father’s friends. They had known him from the time when he was a baby. They attended parties at the former palaces of the aristocracy. Had stories of borrowing porcelain and paintings from the collections of the tsars for a function at home.”
“Why did you keep saying no at the beginning?”
“I was falling in love with someone else at the time. But in the end I controlled myself and buried my feelings—deeper than the place from where they dig out your gems for you . . . With him, unlike with Stepan, I had known in a minute—in a minute—that he was someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. For a long time after rejecting him for Stepan my breast felt like there was a deep wound inside it. But through it all I did my best to pretend to be in love with Stepan . . . Oh I am so sorry . . .”
“I can understand your reasons.”
“People marry every day, I said to myself. It should happen once or twice every century if the purpose of marriage was to find your soul’s mate. I kept telling myself my personal happiness was not important—that I should do this to help my mother, to find my missing brother.”
From the table beside the bed she picks up the little origami shape she had folded some days ago, before David’s arrival. She turns it in her hands, something material to concentrate on.
“As the years passed I came to love Stepan more than my life. You ask why I kept saying no. It was partly because I thought it would be bad for him to be associated with me, with us. I thought it would harm him professionally.”
“So you weren’t completely selfish.”
Folding and refolding the paper for over a minute, she had fashioned the origami piece—a shape and a procedure that had lain unremarked-upon in her mind since her Leningrad schooldays.
“And did things get better because of his connections?”
“Suddenly everything was easy. It was shocking. It would make me so angry inside. I am here because of his friends in the army, because he and they began inquiries about Benedikt. But, no, to me what I did remains unforgivable. Other people managed—why couldn’t I?”
“Your country made you feel guilty for not being able to fly. They put so much unreasonable pressure on you, so many unreasonable demands. Of course you couldn’t cope and looked for a way out.”
“I wonder how much of it is to do with my country. Maybe it’s who I am.”
“There’s no way of knowing such things.”
“I knew beforehand he wanted to be a father. I kept from him my suspicions that it might be difficult for me to conceive. There were rumours that the state had had me poisoned—I had suddenly fallen ill some years earlier, during the time I was being loud in trying to find information about Benedikt. Now I was too terrified to go to the doctors, in case they confirmed my fears. I decided I would just hope for the best. In the end I did tell him, two weeks before the wedding. He said he didn’t care about anything as long as I was his wife. But he did accuse me of deception in later years.”
She places the origami on the table. Four small hoods, hinged together, to be worn on the tips of the fingers. It’s a way for children to tell fortunes, the possibilities hidden under four triangular flaps, one of which you are asked to choose. When she made it sitting beside the Buddha, she had turned over each of the flaps even though she knew nothing was written under any of them.
“We can never know how different we could have been,” David says, holding her close. “This one life is all we have.”
The afternoon is continuing out there. A faint melody from a stringed instrument drifts down from Marcus’s room. In picturing what the instrument might look like she recalls the small watercolour of a Persian lutenist in the Hermitage. Marcus said he sometimes sees music as a companion, almost a physical presence.
Pointing to a portrait on the wall he said Ziryab of Andalusia had added the fifth string to the lute in the ninth century and pioneered the use of eagles’ talons as plectra.
David’s hipbone is like a warm stone against her thigh. A sensation she has not received since Stepan’s death two Decembers ago. She had stepped away from everyone, a sleepwalker in a fog, the world ceasing to exist. On many levels she had lived Stepan’s life for so long—moving to a new city upon marrying him—and she was only slightly surprised that the withdrawal didn’t prove more difficult now. She didn’t announce her arrival back in St. Petersburg to most of her friends and acquaintances, just letting the darkness increase as the months went by.
But there
was
a world out there. And she was jolted awake to it, to her responsibility to it, when her mother died surrounded by a dozen notebooks’ worth of thoughts, all addressed to her. Lara could not be contacted because she hardly ever answered the telephone now or responded to the knock on the door, seldom opened a letter, not wishing to be told
You’ll love again.
When her mother died in her sixth-floor flat the first problem for the neighbours was to get the body to the morgue. In the new Russia the men who drive the mortuary vans demand substantial bribes, don’t come for days after being called, and sometimes don’t come at all. There were stories that in the tower blocks of the very poor the despairing relatives or neighbours simply threw the corpse out of the high windows. There are always bodies in the Russian winter snow in these areas. This did not happen to Lara’s mother but there was no loved one in attendance when she was buried, and when by chance Lara arrived for a visit at her mother’s flat a fortnight later she found her notebooks scattered on the pavement. Only the first page in each was filled. The rest were blank. She hadn’t turned over a new page, had written and drawn on the same one repeatedly so that the feelings and ideas were juxtaposed onto each other, indecipherable, the way a book of glass would be, the eye having access to its depth through the overlapping layers of contents.
As the weeks passed Lara re-established contact with the friends from her youth, reaching out tentatively, reminiscing about those early days when the most important thing for them was owning a perfect smile. “They say the lips should rest on the line where the teeth meet the gums. And the whiteness of the teeth should match the whiteness of the eyes exactly.” How incredible it seems that until her teens she had ridden in a car only a handful of times. She remembers the thrill, the smell of petrol on a hot Leningrad day, her beloved city with its islands and palaces and its leap-and-plunge arches, its justly loved white nights. There was the garden where Casanova and Catherine had met and talked about sculpture, and there were the cinemas where the ticket seller would for a few roubles extra sell a boy the seat next to a pretty girl.
Her dear Russia. The first boy she kissed at fifteen, the beautiful Mitya, meeting him when his mother called her in out of the street and asked to be shown how to arrange salad on a dish in a pleasing manner: the woman was giving a party and thought Lara, being young, would know about such modern and stylish things. Just called her in out of the street! Pulling her out of the pattern her life had made in the city till then. The sudden rush of blood to the head when Benedikt showed Lara and her friends that a song being played on the radio could be taped, captured on a cassette; until then they had thought you could only record music from LPs, something that cost money. But this was free and it was an electrifying discovery. Back then when everything lay ahead. A life of possibilities and discoveries. Oh the wonder of looking for the first time into one of those mirrors that magnified your face!
As they grew older they discovered that the library copy of
Spartacus
was missing half its pages. They learned that in the past the word “demos”—the root of “democracy”—had to be excised from a book on Greek antiquities, and that according to some books certain Roman emperors had not been “killed” but had “died”—so as not to encourage among the Soviet populace the idea of the liquidation of unwanted leaders. And, yes, Tatyana Ulitskaya’s father climbed into a bottle of vodka every night and began to swim circles in it, swallowing a layer of liquid with each lap so that he was found in the morning lying prone on dry glass. And, yes, while many of them couldn’t imagine being able to exist away from Russia, some had dreamed of moving to the West, dreamed of ease, even riches—the dollar trees that would sprout from the palms of their hands once they got there, producing golden fruit they’d store in bank vaults.
But whatever any of them thought, one thing was always certain: even though they suffered, and had to struggle at times to bring meaning and even the most basic dignity into their existence, and even though in their search for justice and truthfulness they were beaten down and met with disappointment again and again—their lives were not available for use as an illustration. Theirs were not stories that could be read as an affirmation of another system.
I
N THE ORCHARD
Casa is in danger of being engulfed by flames. Mid-prayer, he has rearranged his blanket around him, flinging the loose end over the shoulder, so that one corner has draped itself on the lamp burning on the ground beside him. Just to the left of where he sits on the prayer mat. His eyes closed and head bowed, he has little idea of the change in the quantity of light in his vicinity. The light around a person in prayer is uniform in any case, Allah dispatching angels to hold a four-cornered canopy of rays above him for the duration.
Dunia reclines against the trunk of the tree, hands folded at the spine to cushion the roughness of the bark. Dusk. If she moves forward to pull the thin fabric off the scorching glass and metal she might despoil his worship, introducing a worldly element into his act of contemplation. Perhaps he is aware of the possible fire and deems it trivial. An eventuality he can control.
She’ll keep watch over him. Only ten steps separate them, sufficient for her to lunge and slap away the beginning of any flame.
A girl surrounded by red flowering trees.
Her mother died in a Katyusha rocket attack carried out by the Soviets when she was still a child and she has learned that the weapon was named after a wartime Russian song, Katyusha the girl who stood forlorn in an orchard full of apple and pear blossom, longing for the return of the soldier lover.
He will guard the land of dear homeland . . .
“There is a crescendo in the third line of each stanza,” Lara said when she asked her about it, “so it must have seemed fitting to name the rocket after it. Why do you ask?”
The mountains soar above the orchard. There are villages in the folds of some of those heights, amid the stone dust and ice glitter, and her father loves to say his prayers up there whenever he visits them. She imagines it’s because he feels more aware of Allah up there. They are quite a large and obvious handprint of His.
Casa finishes and she watches him pull the blanket away from the lamp, a strand of smoke just beginning from it. On seeing her he brings the prayer mat to her. All his life is in his glances, making her understand why the first gesture by which a formerly living body is declared a corpse is the closing of the eyes.