Authors: Nadeem Aslam
“W
HAT IS IT
?”
He shakes his head. In their brief past together, this handful of days, he has told her only the most minimal of details about Zameen’s death, the barest of revelations about his own activities of the 1980s.
“You have enough on your mind already.”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t want to say it out loud.”
He walks to the door and locks it, looking back towards where she stands across the wide room. And returning, he tells her everything. How he met Zameen. The boy she loved, and the Soviet bombing of the refugee camp. How the CIA knew about the raid in advance. His trip to Uzbekistan to deliver weapons and Korans. There seeing the Muslim woman being punished for having taken a lover, and a Russian lover at that. Returning to find Zameen and the child missing, and then discovering how her circumstances had once reduced her to demean herself . . .
She listens to all this and more. There is no reaction from her even when the generator is switched on by someone out there and the room lights up suddenly. They look around, their eyes unsteady. Two day-blind animals exposed to full sunlight. When his eyes adjust he sees how shaken she is by what he has told her, by what he is telling her. As he continues the room becomes dark again, the generator either switched off for some reason or running out of oil.
“The CIA knew about the raid on the camp where her lover was?” she asks through the lightless air.
“Yes. Days in advance. I myself found out about it only a short while before, though.”
“They knew hundreds of people were going to die and didn’t warn them. Had you known in advance, you still wouldn’t have alerted those defenceless people. Of course.”
He doesn’t answer at first but then remembers that he is supposed to be confessing everything.
“We were letting those men, women and children die to expose the brutality of the Soviets. We were saving the future generations of Afghanistan and the world from Communism.”
“I am not arguing with you. But really, I can’t ignore the fact that nobody asked them if they wanted to sacrifice their lives. For all I know probably all of them would have willingly gone to their deaths to secure a better future for their land, for the world. But no one asked them.”
“The Soviets would have carried out the raid whether or not we knew about it.”
“But you
did
know about it. That’s what I am interested in. God, I had conversations of this type with Stepan . . . When it came to what he called his nation, his tribe, he too suffered from a kind of blindness: he saw what he wanted to. ‘You think your principles are higher than reality,’ he’d say to me.”
“It makes no difference that I knew.”
She seems to be elsewhere, nothing but silence from her, and then she says, “You have spent your whole life believing such untrue things. Don’t you know how alone you are, David? We are most alone when we are with the myths.”
“America is not a myth.”
And you can’t compare me to Stepan,
he wants to add but doesn’t because the bluntness would be painful for her.
He was the servant of monsters and barbarians, of a system that was an abomination.
“Believe me, I am not defending Soviet Communism. My father died at its hands and my mother ended up in an insane asylum because of it, my brother was torn to pieces . . . I remember how a dissident had asked for his legal rights while being interrogated and the KGB thug had said with a pained look on his face, ‘Please—we are having a serious discussion here.’ ”
She is on the other side of a barrier now, a branching river of ice suspended in the air between them.
“You let that boy die, Zameen’s lover . . . He lived but not because of you. Doesn’t it trouble you?”
“Of that I am guilty—yes, and I am ashamed that I was that person. I thought she would leave me for him.”
“If you were better than him she wouldn’t have. You should have given her the chance to make up her mind.”
“As it was, she
did
choose me.”
Minutes of silence later he sees her walk towards the door, hears her turn the key. To go away and look for light, leaving him to the shadows.
“I wonder about forgiveness,” he says quietly, moving to a chair. “Whether it’s ever a possibility in certain cases.”
She stops, an indistinct shape surrounded by darkness. She comes back to him, advancing and leaning close over him. Her hand moves through the air and comes to rest on the lower half of his face. He can’t understand what she is doing—telling him not to speak further on the matter?—but whatever it is, he is soon unable to breathe under that hand. Then he realises that that is actually what she is trying to do. Blocking his nose, his mouth, clamping them shut. He could free himself from the grip easily, could manoeuvre his bottom lip out from under the edge of her hand to take in a gulp of air, but he does not want to struggle against her, against this, wants to be here for ever.
A minute passes, perhaps an eternity, his lungs beginning to burn.
Then she releases him and straightens, looking down as he swallows large gasps of air.
She walks back to the door and before leaving the room she says:
“The forgiveness of the weak is the air you strong ones breathe, David. Didn’t you know? You don’t see it but you felt it just then. They
allow
you to go on living.”
T
HE BEAUTY OF THE ROSE
is considered a medicine. Healing through sight, through the act of looking with all veils swept aside. Marcus had said this to Casa when he gave him the prayer mat, a row of the blossoms depicted along the base of it.
It’s not there on the mulberry branch where Dunia has been leaving it after she herself has finished with it. He stands looking at its absence. The house is locked. It’s past midnight and they’ve gone to bed.
The generator had stopped working suddenly earlier tonight so there was only candlelight at dinner. For some reason David hadn’t eaten anything and had sat with them only for a while, and silently, and when Casa suggested they should investigate the generator he said it can be left until tomorrow.
The house is in darkness. Allah has sent her here so he can possess her. It is His command that he do this, then go and find a way of becoming a martyr. When he walks around the dark house he discovers an open weakly illuminated window on the north side on the ground floor. Looking in he becomes aware that something is wrong. It is an instinct long before it is a full sentence in his head. A candle has almost burnt itself to the height of half an inch on a stack of books. The flame squat and blue-tipped. There is a careless ruck in the prayer mat near by. As though a serpent sleeps underneath.
One of Dunia’s earrings lies between the prayer mat and the window. They had carried her out through here.
They must have disturbed her at prayer, while she was unguarded, when the difference between this world and the next is slowly wiped out.
He climbs in.
This house is unhinging him, asking him to look into mirrors he shouldn’t. Allah does not wish him to have any ties. Three-and-a-bit days living with them is enough, these people whose very existence is and should be a provocation—to think that he has spent time under the same roof as a Russian, the butchers of Afghanistan, the butchers of Chechnya!—and it is an effort to remain silent all the time. He should steal the keys to David’s car and leave. The Americans know him now—if they stop him he’ll say he’s running an errand, that someone has fallen ill.
He wants to go back to the state of war. For the clarity it brings.
If she is blameless Allah Himself will find a way to save her. Nothing is beyond Him. Casa has heard how a group of the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters had become trapped here in Usha towards the end of 2001, when the American soldiers were going from house to house, smashing open any door they wished to in their hunt. All escape routes were blocked but then suddenly, out of the room where the fighters stood more or less cornered, ten iron nails had flown out and swerved into the street. Each was six inches long and verses of the Koran written on small pieces of paper had been tied with thread to the head of each. The sharp tips pointing along the direction of travel, the nails continued in a straight line through the moonlight, the rays glinting off the grey iron, took a corner to the left and then to the left again in order to enter the next street, increasing in speed as they approached their targets. Without sound they came and, shattering through the night-vision goggles, lodged themselves into the eyes of the five American soldiers who were keeping guard there, blocking the path to safety.
The miracles of Allah.
Now he goes deeper into the house and finds a lamp and then returns and exits the house and goes to the wooden kiosk that houses the generator. Several of the cables have been cut, he sees. Quick strokes with a blade. The thin copper wires within the rubber insulation shining like insect eyes as they catch the lamp’s light. He presses the lever and raises the glass shield of the lamp and blows out the flame. He steps out and stands with his back pressed to the kiosk’s door, looking deep into the surrounding darkness.
In the autumn of 1959, Khrushchev visited New York but he kept delaying his departure back to Moscow. When this aroused suspicion, the Western world’s listening posts in England, Italy, Japan and Turkey set to work and eventually homed in on signals issuing from a rocket launch site within the Soviet Union. Among the signals was the regular beating of a human heart. The heartbeat grew faster as the rocket reached its first staging point, the cosmonaut experiencing the normal reaction of fear and excitement. At the moment the rocket’s second stage should have ignited, all signals ceased abruptly and the tracking devices lost contact. Though the Soviet Union denied it, the owner of the heartbeat had been incinerated in millions of gallons of exploding fuel. It is now believed that important safety checks had been ignored for the Soviet leader to have a triumphal moment while visiting the West—“The first human being in space is a citizen of the Soviet Union.”
Lara feels along the darkened wall. Her fingers touch the coldness of the lyre-shaped mirror and then journey over its frame, the warmth in the fingertips releasing the fragrance of the wood.
From the shelf she takes the matchbox and strikes herself a flame. In its brief yellow light she picks up the foot-long narrow box that lies on a higher shelf. Five more seconds—and a star bursts before her eyes, the silver brilliance at the centre of it scorching the retina. She turns around with it in her hands, the room shaking with the light. It is a child’s sparkler: a small amount of—what is it, surely not gunpowder?—moulded onto a stiff wire. She can’t find a candle and has just heard a sound from outside. It’s seventeen minutes past one. She moves towards the window with the white starburst. Her shadow is grey tinted with lapis lazuli and it wavers and shifts from side to side, almost vibrating. As when lightning flashes in a storm, entering a room from two different windows. She stands looking out into the night, the five inches of burning powder almost running out.
“How do you think that kind old man out there would feel,” she had asked David, stopping him in a corridor, “if you were to tell him that his daughter’s death was needed for the secure and singing tomorrows you were arranging for Afghanistan and the world?”
And he had replied, “I loved her as much as he did. But Christopher made a mistake.”
He was not innocent but he was not guilty.
She was collateral damage.
“When you are alone at night and your rage takes over—what face do you give it?”
“I am also the man who is privileged to have saved many many lives, Lara.”
Everyone in the house came together at dinner but then she had withdrawn into this room with Dunia. Around midnight the girl said she wanted to pray and went downstairs, Casa’s fists sounding on the kitchen door not long after that. He was shouting that the girl was missing, that the electricity had been sabotaged.
There are two possibilities. Either someone from the mosque has taken her, to mete out justice for being immoral. Or—according to David—someone linked with Gul Rasool has, thinking she is involved with the people who put up the
shabnama
that night.
Marcus is in the kitchen now. And she doesn’t know where David and Casa have gone.
She takes out the two dozen or so lights that remain in the flat cardboard box and ignites them simultaneously. She stops herself from shaking. With all the power in her arm she throws the fragments of lightning out into the blackness, watching the thin silver flares slowly drop towards the ground, illuminating the air, the edges of leaves, the boughs of the rosewood tree that is honoured by the three ring-dove nests. They go out one by one in the garden and are a handful of dead moments, bits of time turned to ash.
In the nineteenth century, one of Marcus’s uncles in the North-West Frontier Province was in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. On parade every man of the regiment wore a single red feather at the front of his pith helmet. The regiment had taken part in the successful night attack on the Americans at Paoli in September 1777, the sleeping Americans massacred with swords and bayonets, the place set alight around the screaming wounded. The Americans had vowed vengeance and, in defiance, in order that they should know who had done the deed, the light company stained red the white feathers they wore in their hats, the tradition continuing for a century and more into the future.
He wonders what has stirred this memory as he sits in the kitchen with a small candle, the flame twice as long as the wax. The thought of the red-stained bandage at the back of Casa’s head? Or it may have been the small wound David has received while constructing the canoe. The boy and David had just drifted away from here separately, he and Lara alone in the house.
An ammonite rests on his palm. Zameen had found it during a fossil hunt in the Cotswolds. He can hear her upstairs. Lara. Her eyes must not have stopped looking for signs and indications of her brother ever since she arrived at Usha fifteen days ago. He knows this from his own searches for Qatrina and Zameen and the child Bihzad. And from what David has told him about looking for Jonathan in the Far East. At times he thought he would go mad, interrogating the earth and the landscape, alighting on possible symbols and portents. Always telling himself he wasn’t looking hard enough. Once he jolted himself upright from partial sleep, the book slipping from his grasp and landing on the floor. Among the clues to Orestes’ unknown burial place were