Authors: Nadeem Aslam
David climbs the staircase leading to the roof of the house. At times he had been within touching distance. What Marcus’s house lacked, he had thought then, was a room dedicated to the sixth sense. Something that allowed you to identify a fragrance that wasn’t there. A third eye and a third ear, the second skin, the second mouth.
Only three yards away from him in that deep-blue darkness, he had held his breath as the boy approached the door behind which the two women were asleep. But he had just gone past it, moving along the corridor.
He’d come for a picture book. It was the volume Zameen had craved during her exile in Peshawar. Now he looks down from the roof. He sees Casa emerge from the house in a hurried skulk, holding the big book under his arm. Like a wolf in a fairytale stealing an infant, running on hind legs into the forest, he sees him enter the large glasshouse. His flashlight comes on. During earlier times there had been topiary animals and birds at various locations around the house, trained by Marcus himself. After years of war and absence they outgrew their shapes, though Marcus brought some of them back when the war with the Soviet Union was over. Later the Taliban came and they would have destroyed them definitely, for being representations of living things, had he not transferred them to pots and dragged them into the glasshouse one by one, letting them outgrow themselves safely in there. The ammonite and the panther died from shock but others reverted to being undisciplined shrubs. He told David that he thought of them, the creatures, as hiding for safety in that foliage.
Drought has killed them but they continue to stand dead in their pots, the sap petrifying in the veins. On occasion Marcus still goes in and clips them, trying to remember the long-ago shapes lost in the brown dry twigs and the brittle leaves.
Through the dusty panes he can see Casa in there, holding the yellow light in one hand, the book in the other. There is half a grizzly bear near him. A hoopoe in flight, also unfinished, the untrimmed mass of branches making it seem it is flying while on fire. There is a flamingo. In his journal the Emperor Babur recorded seeing thousands of them in Afghanistan in 1504.
8
THE
C
ALIPHATE
OF
N
EW
Y
ORK
M
UHAMMAD ASKED
M
USLIMS
not to do anything untoward in the vicinity of orchards, as that would offend the angels who are appointed by Allah to protect fruit trees, keeping foraging creatures at bay.
David looks onto the orchard from the highest room in the house, his arms folded on the windowsill as he leans out into the breeze. The array of flowers ghostly at five a.m. He’s just come out of sleep, having had the dream again. Someone, David can never see the face, walks away from him in a rainstorm. At the moment of separation the falling of each raindrop comes to a halt, each sphere of water hanging in the air. A perpetual and sorrowful present tense for him. But the departed figure has cleared a corridor through all that suspended grey and silver water. David enters this strange tunnel and begins the journey at the end of which lies a meeting. He awakens always before he can arrive.
He looks towards the glasshouse. When he went to bed Casa was still in there with the book, but he’s gone now. He must be asleep in the perfume factory, down there where women and men used to work at one time, amid night-blooming night-dying jasmine. Cyclamen. Ginger and rose and cardamom. Coming from Usha and descending the stairs, going down a layer into their country’s past.
The mountain range above the house is faintly luminous, dawn not far away.
Back in 1981 Zameen and Benedikt—having escaped from the Soviet military base—had hidden in an orchard during an hour like this. With the first rays of the sun the branches above Zameen had burst into flower. Benedikt would never find his way back to her now. Zameen said she had continued to make her way towards Usha on her own. She hid herself as she neared the house, seeing armed strangers in the vicinity, the flowerbeds trampled. The resistance fighters had taken over the building, but where were her parents? She waited all day and went forward only when the sun vanished. She descended into the perfume factory, and she stopped at the fourth step up from the floor when her foot landed on an object. She leaned down to investigate. A gun. She sent out her arm in an arc and discovered that there were many more. In fact the entire floor of the factory was covered thickly with them, a heap of weapons that—like a flood—submerged one of the Buddha’s eyes, one nostril, and a third of the mouth. She stumbled as she walked on the piled-up guns and went past the stone head. In a far corner, digging through all that metal death as silently as she could, she managed to open a cupboard—taking out the small bottle of the perfume that her father had blended for her. A glass world in her hands.
She went to the graveyard in Usha but among the new mounds she couldn’t see the grave of the beloved boy who had been shot the night she was apprehended by the Soviet soldiers.
Bihzad was born more dead than alive seven months later, under a thorn tree as she was making her way towards Pakistan. She had discovered she was carrying Benedikt’s child during the initial stages of this journey that took her from village to village, a time of slow progress during which she was accompanied by other refugees, the number varying, some picked off by Soviet fire from above, some by cholera or exhaustion or the heat. Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan. In their own country the land wanted to strike them dead and so did the sky, and everyone wanted to get to a refugee camp in Pakistan where their suffering would come to an end at last. Scouts who guided refugees to Pakistan—across desert, river, stone, across bandit territory, wolf territory—demanded money she did not have. She gave birth prematurely inside the blue tepee of a burka, planting a long stick in the earth and draping the cloak over it, opening it wide and weighing down the edges with rocks. If the tree above had been shorter she would have detached its long thorns to pin the hem to the ground. Smoke from the candle escaped through the embroidered eye-grille and disappeared into the dead branches of the tree. At that stage of her travel there were no adults with her, only three children who remained on the other side of the tent that night, falling asleep as the darkness increased. She had found one of them a month ago wandering half-mad through the wilderness, having run away from the refugee caravan that had contained his family—he was ten and wanted to go back home to his village and fight the jihad against the Soviets.
Two hours or so after Bihzad was born she heard the helicopters pass overhead. She managed to move her body and look out of the pleated cone. In the darkness something landed on her brow and bounced off. There was a noise of many small objects landing close to her. It was as though someone were throwing pebbles or large twigs in her direction. She lifted the candle out into the night and in the two moments it took for a gust of wind to extinguish it she saw that a butterfly mine was lying directly in front of her, dropped by the helicopters, saw that the sleeping children were covered with them. She could imagine how the night was full of others that were still descending. The Soviets had designed them especially for use in this war. Made of green plastic and shaped like butterflies or sycamore seeds, with a wing to allow them to spin to earth slowly. The Soviets were known to have dropped mines disguised as actual toys onto villages—dolls and colouring pens, bright plastic wrist-watches. Things designed to attract children. They fell from the air into houses and streets and the result was meant to encourage parents to vacate a village, a place where children were no longer safe. These villages harboured guerrillas and had to be emptied any which way. And hundreds of thousands of the green butterfly mines were being used to hinder guerrilla passage to and from Pakistan.
For a moment she wondered if the helicopter pilot knew Benedikt, wondered if by chance the two Soviet men had ever met.
The three sleeping children. The butterflies would blow off a foot or a hand and half a face, maiming rather than killing, though the long distance which had to be traversed to reach a medical facility would ensure that the victim died of blood loss, gangrene or simply shock. Of the three children sleeping outside the burka the first two died instantly, the third she managed to take with her some way towards Pakistan but he too succumbed to his injuries eventually. She had no strength to bury him, the ground being too hard, but still she knew it must be attempted. A branch, a bone—looking for something to dig with she saw the flashing of water in the distance. Drawing near she discovered that hundreds of mirror fragments of various sizes had been placed on a man’s corpse, to stop it from being eaten by vultures. The birds perched a few yards away but were frightened off by their own reflections whenever they drew any closer. They flapped their wings as they sat, as though fanning away the stench rising from the decaying flesh. She lifted some of the shards and placed the dead boy beside the original body. After rearranging the pieces to cover them both, the death embrace, she continued towards Pakistan. For food she had nothing beyond a pouch of almonds, an onion, some honey tilting in a jar. Bihzad and the fragrance her only other possessions. Empty-handed as a ghost otherwise.
T
HE DAY HASN’T YET
fully begun—the flowers are sunk in dew and the lake is lit by the morning star—but Casa and David are already beside their bark boat. A blue greyness is still the chief presence around them. David wonders if he should name the canoe after John Ledyard, the first citizen of the independent United States to explore the lands of Islam, visiting the Middle East in 1773.
It weighs less than fifty pounds. Its base is a fine equilibrium between flatness and curvature so that, even though on the ground, it turns on a dime, an indication of the ease with which it would spin and change direction on water. It seems creaturely now, alive under their fingers, restive as a child being dressed or being given a haircut. The task ahead of them now is the putting in of sheathing—the thin strips of wood which line the inside, overlapping like the feathers of a bird—and then the ribs. As they work their concentration is so great at times that the other man simply vanishes from view, ceasing to exist.
The
Ledyard
?
In a letter written from Egypt, days before his death, John Ledyard had asked his friend Thomas Jefferson to take all those wondrous descriptions of the East—Homer, Thucydides, Savary—and burn them, advising him against ever visiting Egypt.
“What do you think we should name it, Casa?”
But he just shrugs in return. Looking around, as though for the bird whose song with its small piercing explosions is coming to them.
David isn’t sure who the first Muslims in the Americas were. When the Spanish brought the very first African slaves to the New World in 1501 they sought to ensure that they were not Muslims. These Spanish Catholics had a particular dread of the Native Indians converting to Islam. One reason was that if African Muslims—who knew about horses—converted the Indians and then taught them equine skills, much of the Spaniards’ military advantage would be lost. Let the Indians keep thinking that horse and rider were a single animal which came apart at times to move independently.
And yet only a decade earlier Muslims were the rulers of Spain. When Islamic Spain was extinguished in 1492, Christopher Columbus was months away from his discovery of the New World. Western Christians, not Muslims, would discover North and South America and the great oceans that bind the planet. There would never be a Caliphate of New York.
No wonder Muslims still weep for their Spain. The thought of it is a solace to them, but that too is a tragedy. It’s as though England still harboured designs on America.
They work accompanied by the transistor radio, by the sound of frogs from the water, or the whistling wing-joints of a demoiselle crane flying by overhead. Casa is diligent but of course there is no romance in him towards the canoe as there is in David. “Can a motor be fixed to this boat, at the back?” he asks, looking at the paddle as something frivolous.
“Theoretically, yes.”
“Good.” He nods approvingly, reaching across him for the knife. At times Casa stands or kneels extremely close to David, but David knows that whereas in the West the distance between people is usually an arm’s length, here it can be half that. He knows no threat is implied. At gatherings, the Westerners who have yet to learn this can be seen backing away from the person they are talking to, who in turn reads this as rejection.
Casa handles tools expertly and with grace, with perhaps a certain delight, and is an efficient mover in any given area. Of course the Afghan ingenuity with all things mechanical is a myth, encouraged by the United States and the West during the war against the Soviets. Most of the rebels were peasants who had little or no military expertise. They came from villages in distant pathless mountains and, contrary to historical romances, were not natural guerrillas or warriors. They needed training in weapons and technology, they who were still afraid of eclipses and thought communications satellites circling the night skies were in fact stars being moved from here to there by Allah. A mortar crew would fire off its ammunition without first fusing the mortar bombs. They knew little about camouflage or maps and would smash a radio in frustration when it stopped working because the batteries had run out. For amusement they took shots at fireflies, and they played with their weapons until bits broke off. Small arms were fired haphazardly, with the firer keeping his eyes firmly shut. They cut a fuel pipeline with an axe and then set it alight, tried to break open unexploded bombs with a pistol or a hammer. Thousands of men, women and children fell victim to the Afghans’ own incompetence and lack of technical knowledge. There were commanders who didn’t capture a single town from the Soviets after a decade’s fighting.