They all knew. They all knew that Khader had left me in there. But it was okay. Khader didn’t owe me anything. He wasn’t the one who put me there. He didn’t have to get me out. And he did, in the end: he did get me out of jail in the end, and he did save my life. It was just that I’d taken so many beatings, and other men had taken beatings for me, trying to get a message out to him … and even if we’d succeeded, even if we’d managed to get a message to him, Khader would’ve ignored it, and left me there, until he was ready to act. It was just that all the hope had been so empty, so meaningless. And if you prove to a man how vain his hope is, how vain his hoping was, you kill the bright, believing part of him that wants to be loved.
‘You wanted to be sure that … that I’d be … so grateful to you. So you … you left me there. Was that it?’
‘No, Lin. It was just unfortunate, just your kismet at that time. I had an arrangement with Madame Zhou. She was helping us to meet with the politicians, and get favours from one of the generals from Pakistan. He was a … contact … of hers. He was, in truth, Karla’s special client. She was the one who first brought him, that Pakistani general, to Madame Zhou. And it was a critical connection. He was critically important to my plans. And she was so very angry with you, Madame Zhou, that nothing less than prison would satisfy her. She wanted to have you killed in there. As soon as my work was done, at the earliest day, I sent your friend Vikram for you. You must believe me when I tell you that I never wanted to hurt you. I like you. I—’
He stopped suddenly because I put my hand on the holster at my hip. Khaled, Ahmed, and Nazeer tensed at once and raised their hands, but they were too far away to reach me in a single springing leap, and they knew it.
‘If you don’t turn around and walk away now, Khader, I swear to God, I swear to God, I’ll do something that’ll finish us both. I don’t care what happens to me, just so long as I don’t have to look at you, or speak to you, or listen to you, ever again.’
Nazeer took a slow, almost casual step, and stood in front of Khader, shielding him with his body.
‘I swear to God, Khader. Right now, I don’t care much if I live or die.’
‘But, we’re leaving now, for Chaman, when the snow clears,’ Khader replied, and it was the only time I ever heard his voice waver and falter.
‘I mean it. I’m not going with you. I’m staying here. I’ll go on my own. Or I’ll stay here. It doesn’t matter. Just … get … the fuck … out of my sight. It’s making me sick to my stomach to look at you!’
He stood his ground a moment more, and I could feel the urge to take the gun out and shoot him: an urge that was drowning me in cold, shivering waves of revulsion and rage.
‘You must know this,’ he said at last, ‘whatever wrong I have done, I did for the right reasons. I never did more to you than I thought you could bear. And you should know, you must know, that I always felt for you as if you were my friend, and my beloved son.’
‘And you should know this,’ I answered him, the snow thickening on my hair and shoulders. ‘I hate you with the whole of my heart, Khader. All your wisdom, that’s just what it comes down to, isn’t it? Putting hate in people. You asked me what my cause is. The only cause I’ve got is my own freedom. And right now that means being free of you, forever.’
His face was stiff with cold. Snow had settled on his moustache and beard, and it was impossible to read his expression. But his golden eyes gleamed through the grey-white mist, and the old love was in them still. Then he turned, and he was gone. The others turned with him, and I was alone in the storm with my hand frozen and trembling on the holster. I snapped the safety clip off, pulled the Stechkin out, and cocked it quickly and expertly, just as he’d taught me. I held it at my side, pointed at the ground.
The minutes passed—the killing minutes, when I might’ve gone after him and killed him, and myself. And I tried to drop the gun then, but it wouldn’t fall from my numbed and icy fingers. I tried to prise the gun free with my left hand, but all my fingers were so cramped that I gave it up. And in the whirling white snow-dome that my world had become I lifted my arms to the white rain, as I once had done beneath the warm rain in Prabaker’s village. And I was alone.
When I’d climbed the wall of the prison all those years before, it was as if I’d climbed a wall on the rim of the world. When I slid down to freedom I lost the whole world that I knew, and all the love it held. In Bombay I’d tried, without realising it, to make a new world of loving that could resemble the lost one, and even replace it. Khader was my father. Prabaker and Abdullah were my brothers. Karla was my lover. And then, one by one, they were all lost. Another whole world was lost.
A clear thought came to me, unbidden, and surging in my mind like the spoken words of a poem. I knew why Khaled Ansari was so determined to help Habib. I suddenly knew with perfect understanding what Khaled was really trying to do. He’s trying to save himself, I said, more than once, feeling my numb lips tremble with the words, but hearing them in my head. And I knew, as I said the words and thought them, that I didn’t hate Khader or Karla: that I couldn’t hate them.
I don’t know why my heart changed so suddenly and so completely. It might’ve been the gun in my hand—the power it gave me to take life, or let it be—and the instincts, from my deepest nature, that had prevented me from using it. It might’ve been the fact of losing Khaderbhai. For, as he walked away from me, I knew in my blood—the blood I could smell in the thick, white air, the blood I could taste in my mouth—that it was over. Whatever the reason, the change moved through me like monsoon rain in the steel bazaar, and left no trace of the swirling, murderous hate I’d felt only moments before.
I was still angry that I’d put so much of a son’s love into Khader, and that my soul, against the wishes of my conscious mind, had begged for his love. I was angry that he’d considered me expendable, to be used as a means to achieve his ends. And I was enraged that he’d taken away the one thing in my whole life—my work as the slum doctor—that might’ve redeemed me, in my own mind if nowhere else, and might’ve gone some way to balance all the wrong I’d done. Even that little good had been polluted and defiled. The anger in me was as hard and heavy as a basalt hearthstone, and I knew it would take years to wear down, but I couldn’t hate them.
They’d lied to me and betrayed me, leaving jagged edges where all my trust had been, and I didn’t like or respect or admire them any more, but still I loved them. I had no choice. I understood that, perfectly, standing in the white wilderness of snow. You can’t kill love. You can’t even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can’t kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it’s a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.
Afterwards, when the snow cleared, I stood a little apart from Khaled to watch Khaderbhai and Nazeer and their men leave the camp with the horses. The great Khan, the mafia don, my father, sat straight-backed in his saddle. He held his standard, furled about the lance in his hand. And he never once looked back.
My decision to separate myself from Khaderbhai and to stay with Khaled and the others in the camp had increased the danger for me. I was far more vulnerable without the Khan than I was in his company. It was reasonable to assume, watching him leave, that I wouldn’t make it back to Pakistan. I even said those words to myself: I’m not gonna make it … I’m not gonna make it…
But it wasn’t fear that I felt as lord Abdel Khader Khan rode into the light-consuming snow. I accepted my fate, and even welcomed it. At last, I thought, I’m gonna get what I deserve. Somehow, that thought left me clean and clear. What I felt, instead of fear, was hope that he would live. It was over, and finished, and I never wanted to see him again; but as I watched him ride into that valley of w
hite shadows I hoped he would live. I prayed he would be safe. I prayed my heartbreak into him, and I loved him. I loved him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
MEN WAGE WARS for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women. Sooner or later, the other causes and compelling reasons drown in blood and lose their meaning. Sooner or later, death and survival clog the senses. Sooner or later, surviving is the only logic, and dying is the only voice and vision. Then, when best friends die screaming, and good men maddened with pain and fury lose their minds in the bloody pit, when all the fairness and justice and beauty in the world is blown away with arms and legs and heads of brothers and sons and fathers, then, what makes men fight on, and die, and keep on dying, year after year, is the will to protect the land and the women.
You know that’s true when you listen to them, in the hours before they go into battle. They talk about home, and they talk about the women they love. And you know it’s true when you watch them die. If he’s near the earth or on the earth in the last moments, a dying man reaches out for it, to squeeze a grasp of soil in his hand. If he can, he’ll raise his head to look at the mountain, the valley, or the plain. If he’s a long way from home, he’ll think about it, and he’ll talk about it. He’ll talk about his village, or his home town, or the city where he grew up. The land matters, at the end. And at the very last, he won’t scream of causes. At the very last, he’ll murmur or he’ll cry out the name of a sister or a daughter or a lover or a mother, even as he speaks the name of his God. The end mirrors the beginning. In the end, it’s a woman, and a city.
Three days after Khaderbhai left the camp, three days after I watched him ride away from us through the soft new snow, sentries at the southern lookout on the Kandahar side of the camp shouted that men were approaching. We rushed to the southern edge to see a lumpy confusion of shapes, perhaps two or three human figures, struggling up the steep slope. Several of us reached for binoculars in the same instant and trained them on the spot. I made out one man crawling, inching his way up the slope on his knees, and dragging two prone figures. After a few moments of study I recognised the powerful shoulders, the bowed legs, and the distinctive grey-blue fatigues. I handed the binoculars to Khaled Ansari and bounded over the edge in a sliding run.
‘It’s Nazeer!’ I shouted. ‘I think it’s Nazeer!’
I was one of the first to reach him. He was face down in the snow, and he was breathing hard. His legs were pushing against the snow, seeking purchase, and his hands were locked in wraps of clothing at the throats of two men. He’d dragged them to that spot on their backs, one in each hand. It was impossible to guess how far he’d come, but it looked to be a long way, most of it uphill. The man in Nazeer’s left hand, nearest to me, was Ahmed Zadeh. He was alive, but seemed to be badly wounded. The other man was Abdel Khader Khan. He was dead.
It took three of us to wrench Nazeer’s fingers from the clothes. He was so exhausted and so cold that he couldn’t speak. His mouth opened and closed, but the voice was a long, unsteady croak. Two men seized the shoulders of his clothes and dragged him back up to the camp. I pulled open Khader’s clothes at the chest, hoping to revive him, but when I put my hand on his body the skin was ice-cold and stiffened and woody. He’d been dead for many hours, perhaps more than a day. The body was rigid. The arms and legs were bent a little at the elbows and knees, and the hands were curled into claws. His face, however, was serene and unblemished beneath its thin shroud of snow. His eyes and his mouth were closed as if in a peaceful sleep, and he was so gently dead that my heart refused to believe him gone.
When Khaled Ansari shook my shoulder, I came to the moment as if from a dream, although I knew that I’d been awake for the whole of the time since the sentries had first given us the alarm. I was kneeling in the snow, against Khader’s body, and cradling the handsome head in my arms, against my chest, but I had no recollection of doing it. Ahmed Zadeh was gone. Men had dragged him back to the camp. Khaled, Mahmoud, and I dragged and half-carried Khader’s body back with us and into the big cave.
I joined a group of three men who were working on Ahmed Zadeh. The Algerian’s clothes were stiff with frozen blood around the middle, below the chest. Piece by piece we cut them away, and just as we reached the torn, minced, bloody wounds on his raw skin, he opened his eyes to look at us.
‘I’m wounded …’ he said in French, then Arabic, then English.
‘Yes, mate,’ I answered him, meeting his eyes. I tried a little smile, but it felt numb and awkward, and I’m sure he drew little comfort from it.
There were at least three wounds, but it was difficult to be sure. His abdomen had been ripped open with a vicious, gouging tear that might’ve been caused by shrapnel from a mortar shell. For all that I could tell, the piece of metal could’ve been inside him, nudging up against his spine. There were other gaping wounds in his thigh and groin. He’d lost so much blood that his flesh was curled and grey around the wounds. I couldn’t begin to guess what damage had been done to his stomach and other internal organs. There was a strong smell of urine and other wastes and fluids. That he’d survived so long was a miracle. It seemed that the cold alone had kept him alive. But the clock was ticking on him: he had hours or only minutes to live, and there was nothing I could do for him.
‘It is very bad?’
‘Yes, mate,’ I answered him, and I couldn’t help it—my voice broke as I said it. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’
I wish now that I didn’t say it. Of the hundred things that I wish I’d never said or done in my wicked life, that little quirk of honesty is right up there, near the top of the list. I hadn’t realised how much the hope of being rescued had held him up. And then, with those words of mine, I watched him fall backward into the black lake. The colour left his skin, and the small tension of will that had kept his skin taut collapsed, with little twitches of quivering surrender, from his jaw to his knees. I wanted to prepare an injection of morphine for him, but I knew that I was watching him die, and I couldn’t bring myself to take my hand from his.
His eyes cleared, and he looked around him at the cave walls as if seeing them for the first time. Mahmoud and Khaled were on one side of him. I knelt on the other. He looked into our faces. His eyes were starting from their sockets with fear. It was the desolate terror of a man who knows that fate has abandoned him, and death’s already inside, stretching and swelling and filling up the life-space that used to be his. It was a look I came to know too well in the weeks that followed, and in the years beyond. But there, on that day, it was new to me, and I felt my scalp tighten with a fear that mimed his.
‘It should have been donkeys,’ he rasped.
‘What?’
‘Khader should have used donkeys. I told him that from the beginning. You heard me. You all heard me.’
‘Yes, mate.’
‘Donkeys … on this kind of job. I grew up in the mountains. I know the mountains.’
‘Yes, mate.’
‘It should have been donkeys.’
‘Yes,’ I said again, not knowing how to respond.
‘But he was too proud, Khader Khan. He wanted to feel … the moment … the returning hero … for his people. He wanted to bring horses to them … so many fine horses.’
He stopped talking, choked by a little series of grunting gasps that began in his wounded stomach, and thumped upwards into his stuttering chest. A trickle of dark fluid, blood and bile, dribbled from his nose and the corner of his mouth. He seemed not to notice.
‘For that, only, we went back to Pakistan in the wrong direction. For that, to deliver those horses to his people, we went to die.’
He closed his eyes, moaning in pain, but then just as quickly opened them again.
‘If not for those horses … we would have gone east, toward the border, direct toward the border. It was … it was his pride, do you see?’
I looked up, exchanging a glance with Khaled and Mahmoud. Khaled met my eye, but then shifted his gaze quickly to c
oncentrate on his dying friend. Mahmoud held my stare until we both nodded. It was a gesture so subtle that it would’ve been imperceptible to an observer, but we both knew what we’d acknowledged and what we’d agreed upon with that little nod. It was true. It was pride that had brought the great man to his end. And strange as it may seem to someone else, it was only then, understanding the pride in his fall, that I began to truly accept that Khaderbhai was gone, and to feel the gaping, hollow sense of his death.
Ahmed talked for a while longer. He told us the name of his village, and he gave us directions for how to find it in relation to the nearest big city. He told us about his father and mother, about his sisters and brothers. He wanted us to let them know that he’d died thinking of them. And he did, that brave, laughing Algerian, who’d always looked as though he was searching for a friend in a crowd of strangers: he did die with his mother’s love on his lips. And the name of God escaped with his last breath.
We were freezing, chilled to the bones by the stillness we’d assumed while Ahmed lay dying. Other men took over the task of cleaning his body according to the rituals of Muslim burial. Khaled, Mahmoud, and I checked on Nazeer. He wasn’t wounded, but he was so utterly and crushingly exhausted that his sleep resembled that of a man in a coma. His mouth was open, and his eyes were slitted to show the whites within. He was warm, and he seemed to be recovering from his ordeal. We left him, and examined the body of our dead Khan.
A single bullet had entered Khader’s side, below the ribs, and seemed to have travelled directly to his heart. There was no exit wound, but there was extensive blood coagulation and bruising on the left side of his chest. The bullet fired by Russian AK-74s in those years had a hollow tip. The steel core of the bullet was weighted towards the rear, causing it to tumble. It crashed and ripped its way into a body, rather than simply piercing it. Such ammunition was banned under international law, but almost every one of the Afghans who was killed in battle bore the terrible wounds of those brutal bullets. So it was with our Khan. The bullet had smashed its way through his body. The gaping, jagged wound in his side had left a streak of bruising across his chest that ended in a blue-black lotus over his heart.
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