They walk to a room that has a window looking out to the front of the building. A cleric has been brought in, in a van that has a loudspeaker attached to its roof. It has been driven as close to the school as possible. The man is quoting verses of the Koran against harming the innocent. He talks in minutes-long spasms and says that the passages of the Holy Book that do condone jihad have to be read in the context of the times in which they were revealed to Muhammad. ‘A verse in the Koran reads, The nearest in love to the Believers are those who say, “We are Christians.”’ He continues and once Ahmed has endured enough, he orders for the guns to open fire onto the van, onto the sickness of spirit emanating from it, and it drives away very fast towards the nuclear mountain, the tyres skidding and the terrified cleric calling for Allah’s help through the loudspeaker while telling the driver to drive faster.
*
Basie watches Naheed from the other side of the hall, as she and a female teacher take a dozen children at a time to the bathrooms. The children are exhausted and hungry and are not even allowed to drink water. When Basie takes the boys to the bathroom he lets them drink and tells them not to get any drops on their clothes and not to speak about it.
Later she walks towards him in the corridor, becoming more familiar with each step. Her eyes are downcast, and he stares at her until she realises he is looking at her. To begin with there are no words between them during this encounter: it is late afternoon but for some reason it feels dark as though light has rejected the place. Homesick for lost assurances, the children are falling asleep in clusters, the limbs going limp. The hands are holding onto fistfuls of each other’s clothing and the place feels somewhat calmer, almost hushed.
‘How are you?’ he asks eventually.
She nods, barely outlined, the face wearing the great stain of this experience, but unconsumed by the desperation he has seen in others.
‘Did Jeo know about you and Mikal?’
Her gold eyes look at him in silence for a few moments. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘I wonder. Do you think that’s why he went off to Afghanistan?’
She is leaning against a wall. ‘So you know about Mikal and me?’
He nods.
‘Who told you?’
‘You did. Just now.’
‘It was before I was married to Jeo.’
‘OK.’
‘I think he’s alive.’ A sense memory of him pulses in her blood.
‘When this is over we’ll go and search for him.’
She gives a nod and looks around. ‘Basie, where are the Christian, Shia and Ahmadiya people they took away?’ They were thirty or so, and they were removed from the hall with the words, ‘Go out and start digging your graves.’
‘I don’t know.’ Seeing her jaw harden, he adds, ‘You won’t cry, will you?’
She shakes her head.
‘I’ll keep telling myself I must get through this so we can go look for Mikal.’
‘I’ll do that too,’ he says.
She wants to experience a simple feeling – laughing with a neighbour or washing her hands, complaining to the vegetable seller that one of the aubergines he sold yesterday had had a caterpillar in it.
‘Basie, one of the terrorist women –’
‘Don’t say my name.’
She nods, shocked at her mistake. He has thought several times of revealing himself, to induce the terrorists to release the children, but he fears the English teacher who lied about him being absent will be punished. Recovering, she says, ‘One of the women doesn’t agree with all this. I have spoken to her to see if she might be willing to help us, if I and the other women teachers plan something.’
‘What are you doing?’ A hooded figure shouts at them from the other end of the corridor and Naheed quickly walks away towards the bathroom. ‘Who told you you could wander around?’
As Basie turns the corridor to the assembly hall a terrorist appears and touches his shoulder and quickly passes him a handful of sweets, whispering, ‘For the children. I didn’t know we were coming to a school,’ he says. ‘This has nothing to do with me.’
‘You must help me put an end to it.’
‘I have to go.’
Basie grabs him by the arm. ‘Do some of the others feel like you?’
The man tries to free himself and raises his gun towards Basie, perhaps in reflex, perhaps in genuine affront at his audacity.
But Basie refuses to let go. ‘Find me during the night. Come and talk to me when you see I am alone.’ The man wrenches himself free and walks away with a firm-footed pace, the swagger of a street tough.
Michael took Adam to Heaven in a chariot of flames and buried him after his death with the help of the angels Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel. And Basie looks up at him as he enters the hall, thinking of Mikal, alive out there somewhere.
*
Father Mede heard about the siege an hour after it began. He was in his hotel room in Islamabad, waiting for a former pupil and now friend who was arriving on the flight from England with the various medicines his aged body needs to stay functional, some of which he has difficulty acquiring here in Pakistan. Chlorphen-amine, pantoprazole, mebeverine, codeine phosphate, irbesartan, amoxicillin, ezetimibe, metoclopramide, Dicloflex, finasteride, doxazosin … A list as long as a catalogue of Homeric ships. He tried to get back to Heer but was prevented by the authorities. His driver and car vanished and when he tried to arrange a taxi the telephone in his hotel room lost its dial tone. In the lobby, full of policemen, he was told that all phone lines in the hotel were down and would you very kindly return to your room, sir. It was only a few hundred miles away but he might as well have been in Borneo, Adelaide or Rio de Janeiro.
The government obviously did not want a white person being visibly linked with the affair. His frustration had turned to anger and some substance was administered to him through the cup of tea he asked for at noon. He was unconscious for almost thirty-six hours.
Now, 2 a.m, he is on the Grand Trunk Road, being driven towards Heer.
He is being followed by several vehicles that have made no attempt to disguise the pursuit. Their guns, their everywhere eyes. He had woken just after eleven this evening. There were puncture marks on his arms where he must have been injected with further drugs. Demanding to be let out of the hotel, he was told that he was free to go to Heer if he could. His driver and car had then appeared, the driver telling him that the vehicle had been mysteriously towed away and that he was sent from place to place by the authorities as he tried to locate it, that when he arrived at the hotel yesterday evening he was told Father Mede had left.
The public phones he approaches are always occupied, the person engaged in a long conversation, and thirteen times they have been flagged down by police for ‘random’ security checks. There have been seven long detours, four of them ending in culs de sac.
Around four in the morning, as he turns off the Grand Trunk Road towards St Joseph’s a police car cuts him off and he is told that if he tries to go near the building he will be arrested immediately. He sits wordlessly looking out of the car window for several minutes, imagining the rain falling on the frangipani tree that Sofia had sent to be planted outside his office, the flowers large and beautiful like mysteries in a tale. Then he asks the driver to turn around. An hour later he is still trying to gain access to his home or a telephone, encountering repeated roadblocks and obstructions. As he stops at a roadside tea stall someone says that another school on the other side of Heer has been attacked with grenades, bombs and gunfire.
‘But that is a Muslim school,’ Father Mede’s driver says upon hearing the name. ‘Do they really want to destroy all schools, not just the Christian ones?’
‘It must be the commandos rehearsing the storming of St Joseph’s,’ Father Mede tells him. ‘It is the only explanation.’
‘They will kill everyone inside,’ the driver responds, and begins to murmur the verses of the Koran under his breath to avert disaster. And he reassur
es Father Mede. ‘Allah is a friend to the broken-hearted.’
*
On the outskirts of Heer, Kyra opens the back door of the Land Rover and gets in, the saluki jumping in after him.
‘Whose idea was the siege?’ the man behind the steering wheel asks. A sense of massed impending force in the voice.
‘It was suggested by six students and I approved it.’
‘What are their names? I want –’
‘Let me explain,’ Kyra says.
‘I want you to write down the names of all thirty-two people in the building and if you interrupt me again I’ll empty a syringe of mercury in your skull.’
The man hands Kyra a small notebook over his shoulder, without looking back.
‘I hope they are not stupid enough to reveal their faces to anyone. If any civilian has seen them without the hoods, I want that person or persons to be isolated, so they can be eliminated during the raid. Was the school’s guard the only person approached during the planning?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’ll be found in a sack near Muridke in about an hour.’
The man has short hair and precise short sideburns, the nape razored clean and neatly finished, much like Kyra’s own. He wears a sky-blue shalwar kameez made of the fabric KT. Kyra can’t see it but he knows that on the right side under the kameez is a handgun.
He is in the ISI, but not one of its ordinary tens of thousands of agents. He is a lieutenant general, wanted for questioning by the United Nations for supporting the Muslim fighters of Bosnia against the Serbian army in the 1990s. Despite the UN’s ban on supply of arms to the besieged Bosnians, he had successfully airlifted sophisticated anti-tank guided missiles, which had turned the tide in favour of Bosnian Muslims and forced the Serbs to lift the siege.
The Pakistani government has informed the UN that the lieutenant general has ‘lost his memory’ following a recent road accident, and is therefore unable to face any investigations into the matter.
He takes the notebook and quickly glances at what Kyra has written. A man used to getting things done and accustomed to being obeyed, a man who casts a shadow even in darkness.
‘You tell this Ahmed that the building will be stormed late in the morning.’
‘I’ll tell him,’ Kyra says, barely able to contain his rage. The saluki lifts its head from his knee and stands and clambers over to the front, the man reaching out its hand to lovingly stroke its fur.
‘I can’t prevent his capture or death. And you remain free because of your former connection with the army.’
For several moments the man sits in a profound and expectant silence, like a prophet in the depth of receiving a revelation.
‘Now was not the time for such an operation. Do you really think we don’t have plans to undermine the American army in this part of the world, an army made up of homosexuals and women? Just who do you think you are – trying to do something of this magnitude without telling us?’
‘The brothers and relatives of some of the men are being held by the Americans.’
‘What does that do, change every motherfucking thing in the world? Luckily the white man was away.’
They sit in another silence and then the man turns his neck and looks at Kyra for the first time.
‘What are you waiting for? Get out.’
Kyra’s own gun is in exactly the same place, under his clothes, as this man’s.
He steps out and just as he reaches for the front door for the saluki the Land Rover drives off at great speed.
*
Naheed is in the corridor when through the arches she sees Mikal in the grove of crepe myrtles. Blue in the dawn light. He looks at her and then disappears into the fallen rosewood trees by the south wall. Crepe myrtle, Rohan has told her, is among the longest blooming trees known to man, capable of remaining in flower for up to 120 days.
She enters the hall, catching Basie’s eye on the far side. The children and the teachers are asleep, and she leans against a pillar and closes her eyes.
‘Dance,’ the man says, the man with the hood over his head. ‘Dance for me,’ he approaches and places his crazed hands on her shoulders. ‘Like the girls do in the films.’
She takes a step away from him and glances towards where she last saw Basie. But Basie now sits with his foot on the pedal detonator of the bomb. The terrorist had asked him to take his position before coming towards her.
When the hooded man tries to touch her again she sees Basie and some of the teachers look up from their exhausted half-sleep. Basie knows he must keep his foot on the pedal, must accept another insult for the sake of going on living, for the sake of others. There must be a place where it doesn’t happen like this, she thinks as the hooded man pulls her into the triangular space between two cupboards. She is thirsty. Basie is standing up, his foot still pressed on the pedal, his face full of confusion and distress, wanting to come forward but unable to. She calls out to him for help without realising. The hooded figure stops and looks in the direction she has shouted and she knows that by uttering his name she has ended his life as effectively as any bullet.
*
Ahmed sits in the library with his bright knife in his hands. A cold stone has replaced his mind. He has just spoken to Kyra on the phone. The building is to be raided.
Kyra also said that Basie’s car is parked in the alleyway on the side of the school. That he must be among the teachers.
He turns and looks towards the door, all receptors working again. There is a sound of feet running in his direction, and the head of Mecca House comes in, out of breath. Less than a minute earlier Ahmed had sent him to question the teachers one by one, to bring him Basie. Now he comes in and says,
‘We have Father Mede. He has just walked up to one of the small side doors and is knocking. He says he wants the children released in exchange for himself.’
‘Don’t open the door. It’s probably a deception. They are getting ready to storm the school.’ Ahmed walks to the head of the stairs and stops suddenly because two of his men are climbing the steps towards him with the white man between them.
And just then, from the corner of his eye, he sees the soldiers pouring in over the boundary wall.
33
Naheed is carrying a thick book towards the kitchen, the banana leaves crowding the windows. 2 a.m. The house is dark and silent and it is raining and she is unable to sleep. Now and then a flash of lightning makes her think the light from the moon is briefly at her feet.
It is night, and the female relatives of the adults and children who died when the soldiers stormed St Joseph’s must be visiting their graves in secret, carrying umbrellas against the possibility of rain, lamps against the darkness. Her memories of the end are still fragmentary. The terrorists had forced women and children to stand on chairs in front of the windows, to stop the soldiers from shooting into the school from outside. She remembers the fires burning in various places, the escaping hostages shot because they were mistaken for terrorists, an explosion sending the head of an angel through the smoke and flames into the garden. Molten plastic dripping from the burning roof. The sound of a helicopter. Being brought out of her daze by a sharp pain in her scalp, realising that it was a teenager in his death throes unknowingly pulling her hair. At one point she had somehow found herself beside a soldier and, in a daze of his own, he had reached out for the edge of her veil to wipe the blood from his gun. And later she saw some other men wiping their weapons on the soft leaves of the fig tree. Outside there were not enough government vehicles and the wounded were being loaded into private vehicles, the blood-covered limbs hanging out of car boots. And a few hours later, when it was over, the bodies of some of the terrorists were shown to the television cameras, their faces mutilated beyond recognition.
*
She opens the large book on the table, the breath from the page tilting the candle flame. The book is a dictionary of dates and moves through the history of mankind, from the very beginning to the present.
According to the Islamic calendar, it is currently the early fifteenth century. The 1420s. She wonders what was occurring in Christian lands in the early fifteenth century of the Christian era.
1426. The Venetians go to war with Milan. The Duke of Bedford returns to England from France, to mediate in a clash between his brother Gloucester and the Bishop of Winchester.
1427. The Emperor Yeshaq of Ethiopia sends envoys to Aragon in an attempt to form an alliance against the Muslims. The Duke of Bedford resumes the war in France.
1428. The University of Florence begins teaching Greek and Latin literature. Venetian troops under Carmagnola conquer Bergamo and Brescia. The Treaty of Delft ends the conflict between Flanders and England …
When lightning flashes across the pages she looks up, then continues to read. She doesn’t know who these personalities are, is unsure about most of the places too, but they do form a picture of their times in her mind.
… John Wycliffe’s bones are dug up by order of the Council of Constance, burned and thrown into the River Swift.
Faith, the uncorrupted kind, and also souls hooked darkly to the corrupted kind. All the ways of error and glory.
1429. Joan of Arc, a seventeen-year-old shepherdess from Lorraine, has visions. She persuades an officer to provide her with armour and is taken to the Dauphin and liberates Orleans in May.
Naheed turns back to the previous page, to see if things had been better ten years previously. The book tells her that in 1419 an event known as the Defenestration of Prague had occurred, when the followers of the executed Jan Hus had marched on Prague Town Hall to insist on the release of imprisoned preachers. They force their way into the Town Hall and throw Catholic councillors out of the upper windows. John the Fearless is murdered following a turbulent meeting with the Dauphin …
And what of the future? Were things better in Christendom ten years on from 1429? Would things be better for Pakistan and Islam in a decade?
The Blind Man's Garden Page 27