Authors: Nadeem Aslam
“H
ELLO
, D
AVID
.”
James has returned to the house. The first cold stars of dusk were visible singly and the sky still blue only minutes ago, it seems, but night descends fast in the East. The birds were still airborne but then suddenly their sounds disappeared as the darkness sealed their way.
“I thought I’d come and see how everything was.”
“Come in. Stay.”
“I must go back soon, though. We have to stay ready for the assault promised in the Night Letter, stay sharp especially during these hours of darkness.”
A quarter-century of warfare: a period during which some vultures in Afghanistan have developed a taste for human flesh—whenever there was a dead animal with a human corpse next to it they’d ignore the animal.
Lara has forgotten a cup of tea on the table and David has been intermittently sipping the cooling liquid.
“Did you know C-4 explosive smells like lemons?” James says, indicating the cup. “Where is everyone?”
“I think Casa is out there . . .”
“I have been thinking about him.”
David looks into his face for a moment then lets his gaze slide off. “There’s nothing to think about. Marcus, if he can, takes in people who are in need. He arrived a few nights ago.”
“The night the
shabnama
was posted?”
American fears are huge.
“I understand the need to be vigilant, James, but . . .”
“I am sorry, it’s just that he has a wound on his head and several of the alarm guns around Gul Rasool’s house had gone off the night of the
shabnama.
”
“I am aware of all that. But let’s leave him alone, he’s doing just fine.”
David has gone to stand at the threshold. Between two cypresses is stretched a spider’s half-completed web like a story left unfinished by the storyteller. James joins him and they walk out into the garden, slowly beginning to circle the house as they talk. Entering and then emerging from the orchard.
“I didn’t mean anything much by what I said about him. But this is how al-Qaeda sleeper cells operate in the States. They are like ghosts in front of you, unseen . . .”
“James.”
“Of course, you know.”
Some of these al-Qaeda men may marry into American families and have perfect camouflage as law-abiding citizens, living inconspicuously near the scene of their future operations.
Regretting the harsh tone, he smiles at James. “In 1953, listening devices were found in the beak of the eagle in the great seal of the United States at the Moscow embassy.”
“There you go.” The younger man laughs. “Al-Qaeda hiding in the mouth of the Golden Eagle. It’s simple—use the laws, freedoms and loopholes of the most liberal nations on the planet to help finance and direct one of the most violent international terrorism groups in the world. They want to do to the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore what they did to the Buddhas of Bamiyan.”
“Do you know about the rumours in Usha concerning that girl we have staying here with us?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.” The cranes are there at the lake’s edge; he sees them in his mind’s eye, heads drawn back like the hammers of guns.
“This afternoon in his Friday sermon the cleric denounced her as a—”He throws up his hands. “Apparently she has a secret lover who was seen outside her house one night—on the night of the
shabnama.
People are full of anger and disgust at her.”
“She’ll be safe here.”
“Good. Who knows what they’ll do to her if they get their hands on her? Make sure to lock the windows and doors at night. We’ll also keep an eye on this place.”
What would they do to her? Christopher said he was shocked in the early years at what the Afghan guerrillas were prepared to do, at how brutal they were, what complete disregard they had for life. The United States and the CIA had wanted courage, but the guerrillas had given them cruelty. “Yes, we are using their bravery to our advantage,” he would say, “but I would not suggest half the things they are doing, am disgusted by a third.”
They have completed a circumambulation and are now back at the kitchen door, light arrowing out into the darkness from it. Before entering David looks back into the gathering darkness, into the rustles and other sounds of foliage. The breeze. Or are people advancing towards the house from several directions, as when the king is under threat on a chessboard?
“I have to tell you that Gul Rasool thinks the girl might be involved with the people who put up the Night Letter. It could have been them outside her house that night.” And seeing the look on David’s face, he leans back in his chair and looks around. “He was just wondering, that’s all.” He nods towards the photograph on the shelf and, in a changed tone, more considered, says, “So your Zameen grew up in this house.”
“I miss your father, you know, James. Missed him back then too, and you and your mother.”
“If we catch Nabi Khan I won’t forget to ask him about what happened to your son. Bihzad.”
“So he told you everything.”
“Over the years, yes. He never talked much, as you know. Was hardly ever there with us, the work keeping him away. He talked constantly about wanting to see you during his last days but there was no finding you. You were in the will, but that had been there for a very long time. After the doctors said there was no hope and we brought him home to die, he wanted one of your photographs framed and placed on the bedside table next to the pictures of the rest of us. He could never deal with the fact that”—he lowers his voice further and looks towards the corridor, towards the door to the garden—“he had to let the woman be put to death by Gul Rasool, but he said that at the time he saw no alternative. He thought she was working for the Soviets.”
David lifts the spoon out of the cup and places it on the table. “What?”
“She was working for the . . . I thought Dad had discussed it all with you. You don’t
know
this?”
“Discussed what with me?”
“He thought she was a spy for the Communists. That she was lying to you.”
“Christopher told me he thought she was just someone who had been sent by Gul Rasool to plant a device to kill him. He told me at the World Trade Center in 1993 that he didn’t know who she was, that that was why he allowed her death to take place.”
“No, he knew exactly who she was, knew she had a relationship with you for some months. Her behaviour aroused suspicion, so he assigned someone to watch her—he never doubted your own loyalty, not for a minute—and eventually he had her followed. She regularly met a Communist. A young Afghan man. When Gul Rasool wanted to kill her that day Dad was just . . . relieved she’d be out of the way. Relieved or glad, whatever’s the word.”
“He said had he known she was the woman I loved he would have done everything in his power to save her.”
There is a pistol taped to the underside of the kitchen table. An act of precaution by him.
“I am sorry, I thought you knew all this.” The young man has an intense stare now, the pupils almost vibrating as he looks at David.
“He lied to me.”
“I thought you knew all this.”
“Who was the man she met, the Communist?” Though of course he knows the answer.
“It was the man she loved before she met you.”
The man David thought had died in the Soviet bombing raid on the refugee camp.
“An investigation into him was already under way when Zameen died—why was she meeting him? He was questioned after her death. He said they had once been in love but that she was now with another man. He didn’t know anything about you—not even your name, certainly not your nationality. She wouldn’t tell him. He supposed she saw him in secret so the new guy wouldn’t think she still had feelings for him. She helped him financially a few times. They were both from the same place, here, Usha, and she felt connected to him because of all that she had lost. She was not a spy after all. But Dad didn’t find that out until after she died and the Communist was picked up for questioning.”
“No. She was
not
a spy. Didn’t Christopher think I would have known?”
“Not necessarily. You would expect a spy to be an expert at deception. Even at the best of times we don’t really know everything about others. Exactly what I have just said about Casa and Dunia.”
He can see the gun through the table’s surface as though it’s glass, not wood. The too terrible thing, the truly monstrous thing, is that in the mayhem of those years he had had to make a number of decisions like these himself. He remembers the scattershot speculations, and the collective urgency to grasp opportunities and exploit advantages, to bring the deadlock with the USSR to an end once and for all.
Christopher—according to the best facts he had at his disposal at the time—allowed her to be killed because he thought she posed a danger to the interests of the United States of America . . .
He grips the hair on either side of his head until it begins to hurt. Christopher too had used a bullet to end his life, the pain of the illness too great in the last days.
There is plenty of corruption in the CIA. Christopher was so good at spotting frauds that he discovered before any of his peers that one of the most renowned case officers working in the Latin American division was corrupt—he invented most of his agents and probably pocketed some agents’ pay in diamonds and emeralds. But corruption was certainly low in the Peshawar of the 1980s. And he has lost count of the times he has wished Christopher had allowed Zameen’s execution to go ahead because of money. Yes, Gul Rasool had lured Christopher to the meeting in order to offer him a bribe. If only this were true. David could have shouted at Christopher then, or had him arrested, fired in disgrace, or yes, perhaps even murdered him and taken the punishment—but no, Christopher was honest in that respect. This was not about greed and personal gain.
Buildings in Pittsburgh and Chicago carry the Palantine family name, there are three-storey Upper East Side apartments with Old Masters on the walls, and there are houses in the Hamptons and in D.C. and Pennsylvania. Christopher’s father helped found the CIA, and there has been a senator in the family of James’s mother for three generations. All this against David’s own ancestors, who had crossed the Atlantic in the mid-eighteenth century more or less as ballast in the ships that had taken American flax seed to Ulster’s linen mills, the human cargo compensating for the buoyancy on the nearly empty return voyage. There is a beloved uncle in Kentucky who charges his customers $10 for a haircut or you can pay him in snakes. But never for a moment had Christopher made him feel that he had an advantage or lead over David because of his background. Respecting his intelligence, his abilities. So no, it wasn’t a case of not caring about the happiness of someone with David’s roots either.
This was about nations and ideals. About carrying the fire.
He looks at James. “Was there another reason?”
“No. I have told you all I know.”
“Something I can’t help but suspect. There could be another reason why, that day in 1993, he didn’t tell me he had known who she was. Looking at that mile-high column of glass and steel with a tower of smoke inside it, he knew I was finished with the CIA. Knew I wanted none of it any more. But the bomb had exploded minutes earlier. He knew the CIA—the U.S.A.—needed me now more than ever. My knowledge, my contacts, my skills.”
“He always said you could’ve made director.”
“Could he have kept the truth from me so I’d keep working with him, helping him understand the new threat to our country?”
“As things turned out you couldn’t go on anyway and gave it up,” James says, getting up to leave. “You shouldn’t have left the team, David. Who knows, certain things—certain events—might not have happened had you been able to bury your personal feelings.”
And from the door he gives a little shrug at David’s stare. “I shouldn’t have said that, I’m sorry. But it’s possible. And if it came out as me doubting your patriotism, I am sorry for that too. I am sure Dad would have held himself responsible had he lived another year, definitely, wondering how and where he’d managed to make a mistake, and let’s just say that he would have regretted the fact that you hadn’t stuck around.”
Ornithologists were consulted in the wake of the 2001 attacks because birdsong was heard on a bin Laden video, and David too had volunteered the knowledge of Afghan mountains and cave systems he had accumulated through his gemstone interests.
When Moses commanded Aaron to fashion a jewelled breastplate,
he remembers thinking to himself, charts and photographs of Afghanistan’s geographical terrain spread before him,
with twelve stones representing the twelve tribes of Israel, the fifth stone was lapis lazuli and in all probability it came from this set of caves here . . .
It was his first contact with the CIA for over two years and it was they who now informed him that Christopher Palantine had taken his own life the previous year.
F
ROM ENTHUSIASM
to imposture the step is perilous and slippery . . .
In the golden room David looks up from the heavy book in his right hand, the blood vessel in the wrist pulsing beside the edge of the page.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Marcus, Lara and the girl are elsewhere in the house, Casa probably in the perfume factory with a lamp at his side. He looks down at the book again, the smell of dust on the paper. . . .
the demon of Socrates affords a memorable instance of how a wise man may deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud.
The pulse is usually felt where the radial artery lies near the surface of the skin, on the thumb side of the wrist. Before detaching Marcus’s hand, Qatrina had cut into his flesh and clamped the radial and ulnar arteries, to prevent excessive blood loss. Can the beat of his heart be felt near the end of his forearm now? The book is heavy. In the Texas of the mid-nineteenth century the illiterate Comanche warriors remembered to take away Bibles and other books during raids on farms and settlements. They had discovered that paper made an excellent padding for their bison-hide war shields, absorbing a bullet if packed thickly and tightly enough. Someone came across a shield stuffed with the complete history of ancient Rome—its rise, efflorescence and eventual fall to barbarians.