The Blind Man's Garden

by Aslam, Nadeem

  But it is difficult to be sure. The innocent and the guilty both weep in the interrogation rooms, leaving wet spots on the material of the jumpsuits as they wipe large tears on their shoulders. ‘I swear to Allah on my heart and limbs …’ ‘I swear to Allah on my mother’s grave …’

  He stops and looks around as he comes to a river, to make sure he is travelling in the right direction. Most rivers in South Waziristan flow from west to south, he knows, and he remembers his brother’s paranoia about crossing streams or rivers in Afghanistan, having heard stories about plastic Russian mines still flowing in the currents. But this is Pakistan.

  There are American military bases in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Hungary, Bosnia, Tajikistan, Croatia, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia – a base in each vicinity, ready to mobilise and put down possible threats. And it is no longer a case of American happiness, American freedom, American interests, the American way of life. Now it is about the survival of America itself.

  He is navigating by the stars as he walks, picking a new constellation every twenty minutes as the old one shifts direction with the earth’s rotation. Hercules. Ophiuchus. He wonders if among them there is a spirit or god or goddess that walks the battlefield, collecting the last words of the dying, enumerating every drop of spilled blood.

  What were his brother’s last words?

  Careful even when boisterous, as a Military Policeman his brother had never violated the rules, had in fact intervened one afternoon when an interrogator forgot himself during a session and made physical contact with the prisoner – grabbing the jumpsuit and shaking the kid. Most of the prisoners are so thin, small and undernourished that there is constant fear that one of them will die from the strictness of even the normal regime. He has yet to shed a tear over his brother’s murder, willing the fact of the departure out of his mind as best he can, existing in the unexamined haze, stopping himself whenever he hears himself humming the song his brother had loved, taught to him by their mother.

  *

  Mikal is ravenous when he wakes after just two hours of sleep. The sun is up. Taking four eggs from the refrigerator he cooks them and carries the frying pan out to the riverbank, watching the water as he eats, a warm wind coming from the desert. He washes the pan and puts it back on the shelf and looks at his wristwatch. The woman who came to cook at the house every day lives a mile upriver, but it is too early to pay her a visit. He digs a hole and then goes into the south wing and wraps the two dogs in a bedsheet and carries them out. Rather than break the stiff limbs he widens the hole he has dug.

  The bag with the dollars has stayed at his side at all times, but now he places it in the wardrobe in Akbar’s room, arranging clothes around and on top until nothing can be seen. He is about to lock the wardrobe when he stops. Guns have been combined with keys, with knives, forks and spoons, and in Akbar’s father’s room there is a steel chest made to contain valuables which has a percussion pistol mounted inside it. If the lid is opened without setting a special catch, the pistol fires. This is where he deposits the bag. Afterwards he looks at his wristwatch once again and walks out of the house and goes along the riverbank.

  A man is sitting on the cook’s veranda reading a newspaper. He is in his fifties, with untidy pewter stubble and an Adam’s apple as pronounced as his nose. He looks up and examines Mikal.

  ‘Uncle, my name is Mikal. I am Akbar’s friend,’ he says and nods over his shoulder. ‘From the house.’

  The man doesn’t answer for a while. Then he calls into the house. ‘Fatima.’

  The woman appears at the door with one hand shading her eyes. Then she comes forward wiping her hands on her veil and stands beside the man. She has recognised Mikal.

  ‘Have you just come from the house?’ the man asks.

  ‘Yes, I spent the night there.’

  The woman gasps.

  They tell him about the ten-hour firefight. The army cordoning off a zone around the house. The assault included paramilitary forces from the Frontier Corps and Waziristan Scouts. This was Pakistan’s first ever operation against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, under pressure from America. Members of the security forces as well as Chechen, Uzbek and Arab militants were killed. Many foreigners fled into the desert and the hills.

  ‘All this was three nights ago,’ the woman says. ‘No one has gone there since.’

  ‘So you don’t know where everyone is. Akbar’s brother … and sister.’

  They both shake their heads and since there is nothing else to say he turns to go.

  ‘Come back for lunch,’ the woman says.

  ‘Thank you, I will,’ he says.

  ‘Will you bring my rosary? It has green and white beads and is hanging on a nail near the—’

  ‘I have seen it.’

  Arriving back he undoes the catch and opens the steel chest to see that the money is still there. He stands looking at it, his fingertips playing with Naheed’s chain at his neck.

  Half an hour later he is on the narrow path that leads to the yellow flowers. He walks through the field and on towards the hills. The western face of the range is composed of thick beds of Miocene rock, dipping west. On the eastern aspect several rocks of older formations appear under the Miocene and form a bold escarpment of white stone, which has given its name to the range. He climbs to the site where Akbar’s father had died in the crashed pickup. Thin beds of lignite, of Jurassic limestone, and nothing but sections of broken glass and green flakes on the boulder where the paintwork had scraped against it.

  ‘You son of a bitch,’ someone says behind him quietly.

  He turns to see him squatting on the ground ten yards away. The man Salomi was betrothed to, the man he had met in the room with the boxes of books and other texts.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ the man asks.

  ‘I could ask you the same question.’

  ‘Are you alone?’ The man looks around. He brings his eyes back to Mikal and puts his AK-47 over his shoulder and stands up. He wears the same shalwar kameez he was wearing the day Mikal saw him last, now filthy with dust and grime.

  ‘How much money do you have?’

  ‘Just a few rupees,’ Mikal says.

  ‘You son of a bitch.’

  He will give the dollars either to Akbar’s brother or to Salomi, not him.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ the man asks.

  ‘I am looking for one of the Airedales. It ran away.’

  ‘Where have you been for the past several days?’

  ‘I should leave,’ Mikal says and turns around.

  ‘I asked you where have you been.’

  ‘I had to go away for a while.’

  ‘Just before the raid took place.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  The man spits in the dust. ‘I want the rupees in your pockets.’

  ‘I need them myself.’

  The man lifts the rifle. ‘I wasn’t asking.’

  Mikal takes out the money and the man gestures for it to be dropped.

  ‘Where is the bag with the American money Akbar gave you?’

  ‘It’s at the house.’

  ‘Bring it here tonight.’

  ‘Are Akbar’s brother and sister here too, hiding with you?’

  ‘What concern is that of yours?’ The man holds a pointed silence, then adds, ‘I saw the dog.’ He gestures towards a boulder ten yards away. Mikal walks up to it but there is nothing there. He rounds the curve and after a while he comes back. ‘That’s a jackal.’

  ‘I know. The dog killed it.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have warned me before sending me over there?’

  The man doesn’t say anything, his eyes half closed against the glare of the sun. ‘Be here with the money at midnight.’

  *

  When he arrives for lunch he tells them he’ll be leaving tomorrow. And also that he would like to leave a bag with th
em, to be given to Akbar or any member of his family should they return. The couple tell him that a friend stopped by an hour ago and brought some news.

  ‘Someone saw Salomi in the hills,’ the man says.

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘It wasn’t Salomi,’ the woman says. ‘It was her ghost. Her ghost was seen.’

  ‘Fatima,’ the man says in consternation.

  ‘Let me tell him,’ she says. ‘He fought in a war. No one believes in ghosts more than soldiers.’

  ‘It’s nothing but talk,’ her husband says to Mikal. ‘Salomi has either been captured by the Americans, or she has gone away with the al-Qaeda people and joined the jihad. A woman’s anonymity is an asset to those people. She could deliver messages in her burka.’

  *

  Since he is now without rupees he will take a few dollars out of the bag and exchange them in the bazaar in Megiddo. Going there is a risk but there is no alternative. He’ll also find a telephone there and talk to Naheed, tell her that he will begin the return journey tomorrow.

  He falls asleep in Akbar’s room, using the pillow that is embroidered with verses of the Koran, meant to banish nightmares. Waking after sundown he opens the steel chest and sees that the bag is missing.

  He is instantly desperate.

  He examines the floor for blood and looks at the opposite wall for a possible bullet scar, sniffs the pistol within the chest to see if it has fired. He even goes back to Akbar’s wardrobe where he had originally concealed the bag, and pulls out the clothes in severe dismay, separating them one by one, and then looks under the bed and behind the armchair.

  In the yellow light from the lantern in his hand he feels himself being watched.

  From the gun factory he takes a hammer, a pair of wire-cutters, a flathead screwdriver and a crosshead screwdriver and walks towards the car whose wing mirror he tore off last night. He smashes the window and gets in and pounds the flathead screwdriver into the ignition and turns it like a key but the car remains dead. He unscrews the panels of the steering column to expose the wires running inside it, letting the freed screws fall onto the floor. Cutting the red wires, he strips their ends and connects them by twisting them together. Then he cuts the starter wires: he touches the exposed ends and there are five blue sparks of varying sizes and a sputter and the vehicle comes to life. Lastly he unlocks the steering by jamming the flathead screwdriver in the slot between the top of the steering column and the wheel.

  Past caring, he drives out of the front gate, which he hasn’t approached since he arrived.

  He travels haphazardly into the hills and then into the surrounding desert, the darkness so complete his eyes hurt as they try to see, a darkness resembling the black room in the American prison. Eventually the moon coins out and its light stretches in a white haze on the curves and plains of the desert. One by one the hills to the west offer their slopes to the moon in a pale glowing union, rising up out of the shadows. At midnight he returns to where he was supposed to bring the dollars but no one meets him and now he begins to shout the man’s name in all directions. He stands listening – nothing but wind and windborne echoes – and time no longer feels human to him, stretching and contracting, as unsettled as liquid. 1 a.m. and he is searching for her and her ghost and for the bag with the dollars and talking to himself, standing on the broken land at the edge of the desert, a flashlight in his right hand, remembering a story about a soldier who enters a night forest where the spirit of his dead lover is said to roam, transformed into a rapacious beast.

  *

  At the house he picks up the dead telephone and dials his parents’ number in Heer, remembering it from the days of his childhood, and stands listening in the darkness, imagining the faraway painted room. Then he dials Rohan’s house and talks to Naheed for almost an hour.

  *

  Two mock suns rise with the real sun, one on either side. His body a wreckage after only an hour’s sleep, he opens his eyes and in a half-awakened state watches his hands on the bedsheet, the missing fingers making him think for a moment he’s disappearing slowly. He sits up in alarm.

  He walks to the steel chest but the money is still missing, and he wonders with stabs of shame and bafflement if the cook and her husband have stolen it.

  The husband is on the veranda when Mikal arrives, reading the same newspaper as the first time he visited, newspapers being difficult to obtain in Waziristan. ‘Have you come to say goodbye?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘I thought you said you were leaving today.’

  He stands there without words and says after a while, ‘I need to find some work to earn the fare back. I think I’ll go into Megiddo.’

  ‘How much do you need? We can give it to you.’

  ‘Thank you, uncle, but I’d rather earn it.’ He can see that they are anything but wealthy.

  ‘You could run an errand for me,’ the man says. ‘It’ll save me a trip. You need to deliver some scrap metal to Sara. It’s a small town about thirty-five miles—’

  ‘I know it. Akbar mentioned it once.’

  ‘I’ll give you directions. You take my pickup with the metal loaded onto the back. It should take about three hours to get there. Three hours back.’

  ‘I can do that. I need to get a little more sleep first.’

  ‘You can leave after lunch. You’ll be able to get back before sunset. I wouldn’t advise you to be out there after nightfall.’ The man folds the newspaper, his fingers full of ink. ‘This just sums it up,’ he says. ‘You have to wash your hands after reading this country’s newspaper.’

  Mikal looks at the pages. To see if there’s any news of Father Mede. But the country has moved on to other crises. Carnage at the US Consulate in Karachi is the headline in three-inch-tall letters. A truck with a fertiliser bomb, being driven by a suicide bomber, was detonated outside the building, killing twelve people and injuring fifty-one – all Pakistanis.

  Enraged Mob Beats Suspected Thief to Death …

  Illegal Pakistani Migrants Drown Off Italian Coast …

  Senator Defends Burying Alive of Women Who Dishonour Their Menfolk …

  ‘We levelled it,’ US Army Major General Franklin Hegenbeck said, speaking of the destruction of three villages in the Shaikot Valley in Afghanistan. ‘There was nobody left, just dirt and dust.’ …

  He puts down the newspaper and watches the river sparkling under the three suns. This time tomorrow I’ll be on my way towards Heer, he thinks.

  ‘It’s a bad omen,’ the man says, of the sun and the two sundogs. Going through a grove of pomegranate and henna trees, he is leading Mikal to the back of the house. Mikal enters a wooden shed and finds himself looking at a mass of chains piled up as high as his waist. This is the metal he has to transport.

  He approaches silently and drops to his haunches before the heap, touching it gently.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ the man asks from the shed door.

  Mikal shakes his head, snatches of memory flowing through him.

  ‘They belonged to a mendicant who wandered all over the place,’ the man says.

  ‘I know,’ Mikal says after a while. He lifts the hoops that had attached the chains to the man’s wrists. There is the hoop for the neck. ‘Where did you get them? Where is the fakir?’

  ‘He was found dead by the roadside.’

  Mikal stands up, letting the strands fall from his fingers, and looks at the man with distress.

  ‘The first time I ran away from home was to meet him. I followed his trail in the dust but couldn’t catch up.’

  ‘Well. Now you have found him. Or some of him. He appeared in the bazaar here and the al-Qaeda Arabs became enraged and abused him. Saying how dare he pretend to intercede with Allah on Muslims’ behalf. They beat him but people intervened, knowing how pious he was, but the next day the body was discovered.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have been able to run,’ Mikal says under his breath. Bullet cartridges are caught in the links of the chains like lit
tle gold fish in a net.

  ‘No. The chains were so heavy and so long he was having to drag them along with both hands. They trailed behind him for several yards. Some say he just vanished from inside the chains. They were the only thing that fell to the ground.’

  ‘I thought he was my father.’

  They drag the coils out through the trees to the pickup. He drops the vehicle’s tailgate and climbs up onto the bed and pulls a fistful of the chains after him and the man begins to feed the rest to him very fast as Mikal walks backwards along the bed.

  He was seen in Mecca once, never having left Pakistan physically, and several times he was seen in various parts of Pakistan simultaneously.

  ‘Fatima is reading a chapter of the Koran to comfort his soul,’ the man says, a little out of breath, once the chains are up on the bed and Mikal has jumped down. ‘When she finishes she’ll make us breakfast. There is only one town between here and Sara. It’s called Allah-Vasi. And that is where Fatima’s sister lives. She might want to go with you. You can drop her off, move on to Sara, and then pick her up on the way back.’

  *

  The sun and the sundogs follow the pickup across the sky, as he travels through open desert, an expanse of nothingness with low hills in the distance. There is not much traffic on the road but he examines each vehicle that passes him, in case someone is following him. Hasn’t he seen that man on the motorcycle before? He is half an hour from Sara when a loud screeching noise causes him to pull over. He gets out and opens the bonnet to see the shredded auxiliary belt. What remains of it is hanging off the alternator pulley, fouling the timing-belt cover, and a diesel injector feed pipe has become disconnected, spilling liquid.

  He looks at the thin road, the rocks and boulders giving off heat like mirrors. An hour passes and nobody comes along and he sits on the driver’s seat with the door open, his legs hanging out, watching the dust djinns spinning across the desert floor, the interior smelling of the foodstuffs Fatima had brought as a gift for her family in several jars and baskets. He is sure the mendicant’s chains are hot to the touch.