The Blind Man's Garden

  ‘So we need to do something about the trees along the south wall,’ he says, returning to the boys. ‘And we must purchase a camcorder – to film the beheadings.’

  24

  Yasmin comes into the assembly hall to find Basie standing amid the paper-wrapped angels. No movement within his body. His head lowered. She bolts the door behind her and walks up to him, making her way through the newspaper shapes. At any given moment we are entangled in all the past of mankind. Our heads encircled by the echo of every word that has ever been spoken. These words were written down in one of his father’s journals. Standing behind him she flattens her body against his, her arms around his waist. A moan comes from him, the most ancient of human conditions, and a shudder of grief that she absorbs into herself, the most ancient of exchanges.

  He turns within the ring of her arms. ‘I want a child.’

  ‘Me too.’

  It is as though he has not heard her. ‘I want a child,’ he repeats, the voice muffled.

  ‘Let’s go home.’

  From the corridor come the sounds of the school having ended for the day, the din and hum of voices, snatches of intense high-pitched conversations. She leads him out into the corridor, into the current of children that parts and converges about them.

  25

  Mikal knows the Americans are about to execute him. What they have said is that he is being set free, but he knows it is a lie. They are about to execute him.

  David Town, the interrogator, has informed him of his freedom through the interpreter. His chains have been removed, they have given him some money, and there is a new set of clothes – a pale blue shalwar kameez with a light jacket whose softness indicates it is quilted with feathers. He is being freed because the warlord who had betrayed him to the Americans has now himself been arrested. David said the warlord was firing on Western soldiers, attacking military convoys and installations, and then picking up random people to hand over to the Americans for reward. ‘He is in custody,’ David said. ‘Being held right here in the brick factory, awaiting transport to Cuba.’

  But Mikal knows that these are lies. It is all preparation for his murder.

  ‘The freed prisoners are always dropped off at the place where they were picked up,’ David tells him as he walks out of the brick factory with him. ‘You are being taken to the mosque where we found you back in January.’ He points to the helicopter on the other side of the compound, the blades churning the dust into djinns. Ready to fly him to the wilderness and a shallow grave.

  Mikal looks up at the sky, feeling lightheaded and exposed to be under it after the prolonged period indoors. ‘Where’s Jeo?’ he asks.

  Although the interpreter translates the question, it is as though David does not hear it. He continues to walk, looking straight ahead.

  ‘Where’s Jeo?’ He turns to the interpreter. ‘Ask him where Jeo is.’

  But again there is no reaction.

  ‘What month is it?’

  ‘April.’

  When they arrive at the edge of the dust being raised by the rotors, David stops. Two white Military Policemen are standing beside the helicopter, inside the churning dust, and David motions Mikal towards them.

  ‘I am not leaving without Jeo.’

  David looks at the two MPs and they advance towards Mikal, one of them taking him by the arm.

  ‘I am not leaving without Jeo.’

  ‘Good luck with the rest of your life,’ David says, extending a hand towards him.

  *

  He looks out of the helicopter window as they begin their descent towards the mosque. No longer winter, the snow and ice are gone. The mosque is on the edge of a lake and the released water is full of movements.

  Mikal knows both the MPs. One of them had put his gloved fingers into his mouth an hour ago to see if he was hiding anything under the tongue. The man wears a battle-dress jacket onto whose sleeves have been stitched cargo pockets taken from a pair of trousers. Over several days of interrogation David had convinced a severely wounded Arab prisoner – his wrists zip-tied to the frame of the gurney as he hallucinated – that this man was his father and they had extracted useful information from him.

  From the beginning of January to April. More than three months during which Mikal was administered intravenous fluids and drugs against his will and was forcibly given enemas in order to keep his body functioning well enough for the interrogations to go on. Questionings from the CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6. Restraint on a swivel chair for long periods, loud music and white noise played to prevent him from sleeping, lowering the temperature in the room until it was unbearable and then throwing water in his face, forcing him to pray to Osama bin Laden, asking him whether Mullah Omar had ever sodomised him. Threats of deportation to countries known for torturing prisoners. ‘After they are through with you, you will never get married you will never have children you will never buy a fucking Toyota.’ Threats made against his family including female members, strip searches and body searches sometimes ten times a day, forced nudity, including in the presence of female personnel, threatening to desecrate the Koran in front of him, placing him in prolonged stress positions, placing him in tight restraint jackets for many days and nights, and in addition to all this there were the times when he was actually beaten for his ‘threatening behaviour’.

  As they touch ground Mikal wonders if his murder will take place inside the ruined mosque, enclosed by the words of the Koran inscribed on the walls. The wind coming off the water has a smell like metal. Are the women and children who were left behind in January, after the men were picked up, still in there?

  The two MPs climb out of the machine with him.

  The three of them walk to where the rotor diameter ends, and there the two men stop, gesturing to Mikal to continue.

  Keeping his eye on the mosque door ahead of him, he takes one step and then another, and then he smells it, the whiff of sulphur that is the unmistakable clue that a bullet has been fired. The noise of the rotors is too great so he doesn’t hear the gunshot. He holds his breath for a pearl diver’s minute. The sulphur intensifies and then he turns around and lifts the pistol from the hip holster of one of the Military Policemen, amazed at the freedom of movement in his unchained arms, amazed that his incomplete hands are now allowing him to place the pistol directly against the man’s throat and effortlessly pull the trigger. The air behind the neck balloons in a red mist. There is a small funnel of shockwave and in a frozen moment he sees himself reflected in the man’s American eyes. Next to Mikal in each eye is the reflection of the sun, the two placed side by side in each intense blue circle. He sees now to his astonishment that he has pulled the trigger a second time and now there is a bloody wound on the man’s breast. He swings the barrel towards the other man and shoots him too, the bullet entering the arm at the elbow and coming out through the wrist. He realises too late – his trigger pulled for the fourth time, the bullet travelling towards the white man’s face at point blank range – that someone is aiming at the helicopter from the mosque, that a hail of metal is coming towards them from the minarets, the sound lagging.

  *

  He is running upwards into the mountain. The slope is abrupt on the east and south but gentle to the north and west. Above him the day is withdrawing from the sky in long lengths of gold and soon he is high enough on the gradient to be able to see the mosque below him, the lake whose water he had crossed in a boat. The helicopter took off without the two fallen bodies. He can see them. The pilot made several attempts to come out to collect them, to capture Mikal, but the firing from the mosque was too intense. Mikal had dropped the pistol and run towards the boat that stood in a patch of reeds and poisonous dog’s mercury at the edge of the lake. No doubt they’ll return soon in greater number to begin their hunt for him.

  If this were summer he would take handfuls of wild rose petals and eat them for the sugar, for the sweet water in them, but in spring there are only the cream white blooms of the wood anemone, his fingers pl
ucking them as he goes, the traces of pink, the faint bitter scent reminiscent of leaf mould and foxes. He fills his pockets with them as he runs. There are mountain villages in Pakistan he has been to where the first wood anemone of each year is sewn into clothing, with the idea that beauty wards off pestilence and plague. Coming to a plateau he sits by a spring and makes a small boat with one of the banknotes the Americans had given him and sets it on the current. He enters a cave but leaves it a few minutes later, having found a collection of passports in a crevice and a list of thirty-three Jewish organisations in New York City. Darkness falls but he continues to move, the overcast sky a slab of unreadable black stone above him and as always the silence of the mountain is physical – a thing, with weight – and there is a wish in him to keep walking, to continue up into the mountain and into the high ice deserts, becoming God’s neighbour.

  Arriving at a small village, twenty single-storey houses around a crooked street, he knocks on the first door. After salutations, he asks the man in Pashto whether he would like to own his clothes.

  The man touches the material of his shalwar kameez but says he has no money.

  Mikal explains that he only wishes to exchange them for another set.

  ‘Is someone pursuing you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you a bandit? A lover who has killed a rival?

  ‘No.’

  The man is suddenly anxious about the possibilities he has raised and closes the door.

  The knock on the next door produces a younger man who agrees readily to Mikal’s proposal, fingering the jacket lovingly, the small logos embroidered on the shoulders and pockets in orange and raspberry thread.

  ‘Why do you want to exchange them?’

  ‘I don’t like the colour.’

  The boy looks at him. ‘Are you an American?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you an American?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know where I can get a visa to live in America?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  Mikal steps into the house and changes into the clothes the boy brings for him. He sees a knife on the floor in the corner. ‘Can I have that?’ he asks.

  The boy picks it up and pulls the six-inch rusty blade out of the brass liners. It is a lockback knife with a cracked deer-antler grip and nickel bolsters. He makes a face, but on sensing that Mikal has some need for it, he erases the expression. ‘I can’t give it to you, it’s very dear to me.’

  ‘I’ll buy it.’

  At the other end of the street he shouts into a window and asks if he can sleep in the stable. An old man’s face appears and then a woman’s beside him, their clothes marbled with grease and grime, and from the stable the goat looks at him with its agate eyes. They are poor like everyone else in the place and they smell of smoke, wax and sweat.

  ‘Where are you going?’ the man asks. ‘Where is your home?’

  ‘I don’t know. I am alone.’

  The woman lifts both her hands to her ears, overcome with despair at being told such a thing, on meeting someone who can believe such a thing. ‘No one is alone on earth,’ she says. ‘No one.’

  They invite him in and he sits with them on the earthen floor of their one-room house. The man tells him that Pakistan is over the mountains, through the cliff passes, and the woman brings him a bowl of milk with a triangle of stiff bread.

  ‘Someone must be waiting for you,’ the man says.

  ‘Listen to me,’ the woman touches the side of his head. ‘You must find your way back. In the past merchants and soldiers would go away for years to other lands. But they returned, to find people waiting for them.’

  ‘I returned after decades and she was here,’ the old man says.

  It is cold in the night and he hears helicopters hovering overhead, real or imagined, and when he wakes in the dawn light the woman is already up and has a fire burning in the corner of the room used as a kitchen, huddling over it in her thin clothes. Mikal crawls out from under the blanket and puts on his boots and walks out to study the morning as it shapes itself out of the darkness rich with gleams.

  When he is ready to leave, after drinking a bowl of tea with them, the man decides to walk with him partway into the mountains, through the corridors of various limestones, often much contorted, and there, over ancient hieroglyphs carved onto calcareous flagstone, he draws Mikal the route to Peshawar, his marks moving over and through the Buddhist writings, between them and incorporating them. Mikal makes him take some of the money before they part.

  Around noon he spends an hour on the edge of a cliff, sharpening the knife. A white lamb’s skull lies in an eagle’s nest just below him on the cliff face. He licks the back of his wrist and tries the blade on the hair. It is sharp but there is nothing to kill. In the evening he scoops out termites from a hollow tree and eats them, spitting out the bitter heads like pips, and has to enter the tree a few moments later on hearing helicopters, the insects climbing onto his face and clothes. Did the boy who wanted to go to America tell them about him?

  He walks all through the night, Venus appearing as the hours go by and moving with him. Lyra, Pegasus, Piscis Austrinus, and all the other constellations that he hasn’t seen since he was captured at the beginning of the year are now pulsing above him, but he cannot read them fully, the shapes tangled, or threadbare like beads missing from a piece of needlework. He has forgotten some of the names, while in other cases it is the shapes and locations associated with the remembered names that he cannot recall.

  From the faintly rotting corpse of a jackal he extracts the bones with the knife, cracking them open to suck out the marrow sealed inside, still without taint. He had gained some weight from the food the Americans had fed him at the prison but now he is exhausted. At dawn he falls onto his side with his eyes closed, lying on feldspar grit and stiff clay at a river’s edge. At noon he sees a rabbit in the meadow twenty feet ahead of him. He stops walking and puts two fingers to his teeth and whistles and the rabbit freezes. He takes the knife from his pocket and opens it and he watches as the blade slices the tips of the long grass on its way towards the animal. Catching the sparks from a struck rock onto a piece of dry moss, he builds a fire and roasts the skinned rabbit, eating every last morsel, not knowing if his mutilated hands will allow him the same luck again.

  They don’t. He fails several times and the next day in despair he picks up a snake by its tail and, like a whip, slams the head against the rock under which it had been sheltering. And then once again to be sure. Severing the head he peels back the skin, a mute sheath of nibs, and pulls it downwards to separate it from the body. The guts are pulled out along with the skin, leaving the meat. He traps one end between a splice in a stick and wraps the length in a spiral around the stick and ties the other end with stalks and roasts the snake over an open flame.

  The journey to Pakistan takes him eight days, staying away from villages, stealing from an orchard, a planted field, nests, staying away from humans because he knows the Americans are looking for him. This time they’ll lock him away for the rest of his life. In Cuba or in America itself. Or he could get the death penalty. When he climbs down out of the mountains at the outskirts of Peshawar, a storm overtaking him in a hail of ice, he hasn’t eaten in two days and he is running a constant body temperature that must be 106.

  *

  He is still trapped, the cage is just bigger. On several occasions he stands with the receiver of a payphone in his hand but cannot dial in case the Americans are following him. When he leaves after the call, they will trace the number. They will go to Heer and take away Basie, Yasmin, Rohan, Tara and Naheed, to put them in the cages in the brick factory. He makes several haphazard journeys into surrounding towns, within the coronet of mountains and hills that surrounds Peshawar. Getting into a bus without asking the destination, he disembarks halfway and changes direction, or continues in the same direction but on the next bus. When he is convinced at last that there is nobody behind him, in a small
town thirty miles outside Peshawar, he breaks into a place called Look Seventeen Beauty Parlour and from there dials the number of Basie and Yasmin’s house. No one picks up. He rings Rohan’s house and Yasmin answers, her voice like electricity through him. Hearing her and not being able to respond makes her feel further away than she is. He is an exile in his own homeland, his eyes filled with uncrossable distances. What ghosts must feel. He hangs up and stands there, shaking from the fever. The interrogators at the brick factory had said one day that the woman screaming in the next room was Naheed. Was he told that or is he just imagining it? He knows he must go to Heer to see if they have captured Naheed. And I still have to find Jeo.

  *

  He opens his eyes and sees Akbar’s.

  For a moment he thinks he is back in one of the cages. But then he sits up and recognises the place where he had taken shelter – the cramped windowless space under the mosque in Coppersmiths’ Bazaar in Peshawar, where the torn copies of the Koran are kept.

  ‘Are you talking much nowadays?’ Akbar smiles.

  He tries to speak but his throat hurts. His flesh is burning, the earthen floor under him damp with sweat.