The Blind Man's Garden

by Aslam, Nadeem

  ‘You sing all the time.’

  ‘They are songs not poems.’

  ‘They are the same thing.’

  The next day she had bought him a book of poems by Wamaq Saleem from Urdu Bazaar, verses in which the dove called out in adoration to its lover the cypress tree. It was as though the poet knew nothing of the aeons of separateness that lay between these two things, and between the bulbul and the rose, and between the bee and the lotus blossom, and so the dove called and called, the rose continued to open for the bulbul, and the bee circled and circled and circled the lotuses.

  ‘Will they allow you to receive letters in the prison?’ she asks him now, when he comes away from the bag containing the dollars.

  ‘What are you talking about? I promise you I will come back.’

  ‘What about visitors?’ She is sitting up in bed. ‘Will the Americans allow you to have visitors?’

  He encloses her in his arms. ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘I don’t even know how much a plane ticket to the United States is. It must be thousands of rupees. I’ll never be able to visit you.’

  What woke them was the sound of the rain stopping, the sudden calm in the middle of the night. A silence packed with distances.

  ‘It’ll be just a quick journey,’ he says. ‘Two days there, two days back. Four days – five maximum.’ On a map he has drawn a line from Heer to Megiddo. Taking small buses, avoiding all major stations. A long jagged stroke of ink resembling the constellation of Hydra. And now they speak quietly into each other’s skin. It is in the watches of the night that impressions are strongest and words most eloquent: she thinks of these words from the Koran. His fingers are on the chain around her neck that has little leaves all along its length, a string of foliage. ‘Did you play with your mother’s jewellery when you were a child?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes. I used to wear it as well.’

  She takes it off and puts it around his neck just as the call to the predawn prayers sounds and they remain in each other’s arms, sinning in a time of holiness, and when he gets out of bed she feels for the clasp of the chain, to take it off. ‘Let me wear it,’ he says.

  ‘But it’s a woman’s.’

  ‘I don’t care.’ And then he adds, ‘Isn’t the soul a woman?’ Outside the sun would begin to rise in the bloody reefs of the clouds within the hour and the birds are already looking for light to fly into.

  *

  Tara is mending a broken umbrella. ‘You are leaving?’

  ‘For a few days.’

  She continues to hold his eye.

  ‘A friend needs help.’

  She nods.

  ‘I just wanted to talk to you about Naheed,’ he says. ‘None of us wants her to marry Sharif Sharif, but you mentioned this other man you have found. There is no need for him. Naheed wants to get qualifications and become a teacher –’

  ‘I know what my daughter needs and wants. She can get qualifications after she is married.’

  ‘Yes, she can.’ He looks at his hands. ‘I don’t know what I want to say. I still can’t offer her the kind of life you’d want for her. I could be caught any time and taken away, leaving her on her own once again.’

  She puts the umbrella aside. ‘I stood in your way once, I won’t this time. I suppose when it comes down to it it’s a man’s word that counts. That’s all the security a woman needs. Who cares if the buttons on his shirt don’t match the fabric.’

  ‘I will come back in five days.’

  ‘Then I will be happy to call you my son-in-law.’

  ‘I am sorry I didn’t think of the consequences for you when I suggested to Naheed that we run away before her wedding to Jeo.’

  ‘It would have caused terrible difficulties for me, yes.’

  ‘I am sorry I didn’t think of that.’

  ‘Would you do it again?’

  ‘Wanting to do it is not what I am apologising for here.’

  She appraises him openly. ‘That’s a good reply. Now I am going to be equally honest with you. You let down my daughter once, by not turning up when you said you would. I won’t allow you to disappoint her again. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes. But didn’t you say that her running away would have been bad for you?’

  ‘That’s a matter between me and her, nothing to do with you. As far as you or anyone else is concerned, I am on her side. Don’t you ever disappoint her again.’

  ‘I am sorry I did it once.’

  ‘That’s another good thing to say to me. And you might want to rethink some of the guilt you’ve been carrying around about shooting those Americans.’

  ‘I’ll try. The men I killed had mothers, fathers, probably wives and children. I killed them and must pay for the crime.’

  ‘But there’s no need to be so hard on yourself, at least until perfect order reigns in the world. Life is difficult at times and they goaded you and you were confused. Part of the blame lies with them. Don’t hold yourself to too exacting a standard.’

  ‘That can be an excuse to not hold yourself to any standard at all.’

  ‘That too is true.’

  She tells him to go with Allah and he shoulders the bag and begins to climb down.

  *

  From the bus station he telephones Naheed just to hear her voice and they talk about what they have planned and envisaged for themselves after his return. He whispers a few obscene things to her and she laughs quietly, and then he stands listening to her breath until the money runs out, the sun rising above Heer and the sky changing colour like someone switching from one language to another, and as in a fairy tale he knows that he’ll die if he takes off her chain from around his neck. When he hangs up it is with the bone-deep fear that beauty and loss might be inseparable, but then he thinks of a line from one of Wamaq Saleem’s poems. Love is not consolation, it is light.

  III

  EQUAL SONS

  … how he fell

  From Heaven, they fabl’d, thrown by angry Jove

  Sheer o’re the chrystal Battlements: from Morn

  To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,

  A Summer’s day; and with the setting Sun

  Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star,

  On Lemnos th’ Ægean Ile.

  John Milton

  36

  As the bus nears Megiddo, the conductor and driver talk about a possible paramilitary cordon around the town. Mikal overhears the news that soldiers have been flagging down buses to check the passengers’ papers. Four miles from the outskirts he asks the conductor to let him out. He leaps off into the dust, the afternoon’s heat and intense light coming at him from the metal body of the bus and, as he begins to walk, from all points of the landscape, making him lose his sense of focus several times during the hour and a half it takes him to get to the outer limits of Megiddo. A wind shunting in from the open wild desert to the west. He stops when the yellow house comes into view and he stands looking at it, the material of the shoulder bag going soft in the heat. When he sets off again he has changed direction. Instead of approaching the house by the front door he will go along the riverbank, towards the kitchen at the back. Hidden in the grove of beautiful trees at the water’s edge, he watches the entrance to the kitchen. There is no movement and no sound. There is the imprint of a boot in the expanse of dust between the trees and the kitchen door. Lying on his stomach he listens with his ear pressed to the earth for several minutes. The sound of loose water. He waits the three hours until the sun drops towards the west and the light becomes a rich amber, the birds beginning to return noisily to the trees around him, screaming and ascending as they quarrel about an overloved branch. No one has gone in or come out of the house and at last he moves forward, going past the footprint. He is not sure if he recognises the pattern from his time in American custody.

  The kitchen door creaks open at his touch and the first thing he notes is the spent cartridge on the tiled floor and he enters and walks through the room without a sound, the movements
of the body honed down to the essential, the breath held. The door on the far side of the kitchen looks out onto the inner courtyard of the house and he peers through it, eyes surveying quickly. There is nobody and no light in any of the rooms lining the courtyard. Everywhere there is the red light of the setting sun as though the place is submerged in water-thinned blood.

  He withdraws into the kitchen and lifts the cartridge from the floor and studies it for a long time.

  He had glimpsed the car belonging to Akbar’s brother, parked on the other side of the courtyard, and taking a rag from a shelf he goes out to it at a walking crouch. He tears off the wing mirror from the car’s body, wrapping the cloth around it to muffle the noise, a fast decisive twist like breaking the neck of a rabbit.

  He uses the mirror to inspect the rooms before entering them, sending it in at the end of his arm from each doorway.

  Several walls are scarred with bullets. The phones have no dial tone. He is about to switch on the light but then stops himself. Instead he plugs in the clothes iron and touches its base after ten seconds to see if it is getting warm. It stays cold so the electricity has been cut off.

  The three dogs are missing from the front of the gun factory and as he walks through the long grass mosquitoes appear, abdomens swollen with sucked blood, and he doesn’t know whose blood it might be. Inside the factory, the part of the floor before the furnace is covered with ashes of burnt money. An area the size of six or seven prayer mats. The patterns of ink that had been printed on the banknotes and the words, portraits and landmarks appear grey against the black of the crinkled paper – greys of various tints, depending on the original colour of the ink. Blue-grey. Orange-grey. Green-or red-grey.

  His toes reduce one complete rectangle of blackness to a smear of black dust and as he moves around he is watched by the eye on each dollar bill.

  The kitchen is filled with soft twilight shadows when he returns. He lights a lantern, almost wincing as the flame grows in the glass globe and the amount of light increases around him, as though someone is speaking louder than is prudent. He turns down the flame. The bag with the money has remained hanging from his shoulder. He lifts the terracotta lid of the milk pot to find that the milk has gone bad. He fills a glass with water and stands drinking in the semidarkness. There are chapattis stiff as cardboard in a basket but they can become like that within a day, so he can’t really work out how old they are.

  At last he picks up the lamp and goes to the south wing and he stays in there for the better part of an hour, trying to reconstruct what has occurred there. The metal door at the entrance has been blown off and he sniffs the hinges to determine what explosive was used. The battle seems to have been fiercest here. The room that had contained boxes of leaflets and other literature is completely empty, the glass in the windows smashed, the casements splintered. There have been explosions in several rooms. Rockets, bombs. The soldiers must have thrown in grenades before entering. Shot through doors. He moves through the wing like a sapper, room by room, and only when he unlatches the very last door does he find two of the three Airedales. The bodies have entered rigor mortis. They are lying a few yards apart in the middle of the floor – bootprints join one pool of blood with the other and then walk away towards a window. There is no sign of the third dog.

  Returning to the kitchen he takes one of the dried chapattis and eats it with the curried potatoes and mutton he finds in a bowl in the dead refrigerator, chewing the stiff pieces until they soften. He finds a jar of carrots in sugar syrup and eats them in the dark light, lifting the long red pieces to his mouth two or three at a time, looking out through the window at the river flowing silently under the rising moon, the hatchery of stars in the most distant field of vision.

  Wiping his hands on his trousers he walks into the women’s section. Quietly he calls out to the leopard several times as he goes deep into the inner sanctums. Silence surrounds him in her room and he feels it is the silence of a trap. He is enclosed in an immense thing and he breathes slowly to remain calm, telling himself it shouldn’t matter how deep the water is as long as you can swim.

  He falls asleep on the kitchen floor, using the shoulder bag as a pillow, and wakes several hours later looking up at the dark blue sky. He has no memory of it but sometime in the night he had left the kitchen and come out onto the courtyard and resumed his sleep in the grass and now he lies looking up at the constellations in the warmly burning canopy and he feels the earth pressing up against his spine, sustaining him, lifting him inside the nocturnal space. He is held against the taut trembling solidity of the planet, the enormous living curve of the world under his body.

  Even though it is still night, he walks out of the house through the kitchen door, the bag hanging from his shoulder, the moon casting blades of light on the river’s surface. Going along the water he comes out to the road leading to Megiddo, and halfway along it he takes the narrow path which ends in the yellow flowers. He can smell them as he nears. It feels as though he hasn’t seen them for several months instead of several days. Above him the craters and canyons are clearly visible on the moon’s surface, and in the bluish light he walks through the flowers, still warm from the day’s heat, and on towards the low light-capped hills in the distance, and three-quarters of an hour later he is crouched in the dry bed of a spring, watching the group of dark figures in the distance. He wonders if they are Americans. They are fifty yards away from him across a wide band of gravel. Between them there is a stand of small dark bushes. He moves forwards on elbows, the bag resting in the small of his back. They are moving slowly across the slope of the hill and seem to be searching the network of caves. Looking for terrorists. And suddenly a group of figures emerges from one cave and they run and struggle with the searchers. Each one as angry as a snake in an eagle’s claws. Some of them fall to the ground and the dust blows in the air and the wind brings him their shouts along with Arabic words of praise for Allah, which the apprehended figures utter at each bit of pain and each restraining grip. The Americans, if they are Americans, are completely silent as though their words and sounds are incapable of travelling through the air of this land. Their existence here generates electricity that he can feel on his skin and for a fraction of a second he believes he sees the glittering eyes of a white man in the moonlight. But now he knows that the searchers are Pakistani soldiers because he hears them begin to talk in Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto and Hindko. The prisoners will be handed over to the Americans and the Pakistani army will collect the reward. The Arabs have probably just arrived from Afghanistan and were hoping to join up with their companions who have already escaped to this area. It is even possible that they were on their way to Akbar’s house. Three of them have now run away down the hill towards the valley of flowers and five soldiers go after them, raising dust that shines palely under the moon, passing within twenty feet of where he lies, and they turn and move far out on the slope until they are the smallest of figures in the blue light and then they disappear.

  ‘Get out of here, get out of here,’ he tells himself under his breath.

  By the time he gets back to the house the darkness above him is splintering into light and it is almost dawn and a faint call to prayer is coming from the direction of Megiddo to the north of the house. He wonders if he should go to the mosque and try to glean information from the worshippers, and decides against it because someone could alert the Pakistani military or the Americans to his presence. He falls asleep in Akbar’s room, listening to the muezzin, having locked the door and dragged a table against it – listening to the muezzin and to his own whispers, ‘Get out of here, get out of here.’

  *

  Carrying the snow leopard cub inside his shirt, the American soldier steps across the international boundary line sometime around 3 a.m., leaving Afghanistan’s Paktika Province and entering South Waziristan. The cub’s small head sticks out from the top two undone buttons of the soldier’s kameez. He walks through the night that is full of the schemes of terrorists and
the plots of generals, the mathematics of war. There is a chalky wind and he carries a rucksack on his back and there is a large Thuraya satellite phone in a holster around his waist. Another, smaller satellite phone is concealed in the pocket in the shorts he wears under his trousers, in case he has to relinquish the Thuraya.

  A Special Forces soldier, he found the snow leopard during a raid at a house in the town named Megiddo, and among the things in his rucksack are six of the several dozen tins of cat food he has had shipped from the United States.

  There are night-opening flowers on the cactuses. He walks through the moths that are feeding on them, fluttering audibly around him. These mostly barren hills are being used by terrorists to flee Afghanistan and he is alert as he walks. His younger brother was murdered by a freed prisoner back in January.

  There is no name, but the first finger on each of the prisoner’s hands was missing.

  Walking across an expanse of sand where the prevailing wind has produced corrugated wrinkles, like a broken staircase of white marble, he notes the angle at which he walks relative to the pattern, keeping it constant so as not to lose orientation. The maverick. He told the others in his team that he would be back in twenty-four hours, or would call them if he needs assistance. If he isn’t back within twenty-four hours they will begin to look for him.

  From time to time he makes sure that the leopard is facing his chest because he knows the eyes can be seen from a mile away in the desert.

  Loaded into the memories of both satellite phones are the photographs of the prisoner who killed his brother, taken when he was originally captured. He should never have been freed – he never revealed his name and that should have been indication enough that he was a hardened terrorist, most probably belonging to the upper echelons of al-Qaeda. He should have been taken to Cuba for complete and advanced interrogation. The proof of it being that he shot dead two Americans the instant he was released. A detailed investigation is being carried out into how such a shrewd and astute prisoner, who was clearly a threat to the United States and to peace in this region, was given his freedom.