‘You have my answer.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Aunt Fatima said they had imprisoned and tortured you.’
Mikal looks away.
‘You should want to lick his blood. He’s your enemy.’
‘Not like that, he’s not.’
‘He’d do the same to you.’
‘Then that makes me better than him.’
And with that he lies down again. ‘Now I want to go back to sleep. I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow.’
The boy switches off the flashlight and Mikal hears him leave in the darkness. He gets up and bolts the door, looking out through the window and seeing the man of the house beside the garage door with the deer rifle. He tries to stay awake, his fear breeding images out of the dark, djinns and nightgrowths, but he falls asleep at some point. Either Jeo or Basie asks him if he is certain that he hadn’t wanted to shoot the two Americans by the lake – wondering if he had killed them intentionally – but the questioner disappears before he can answer. When he wakes the sun has risen and it is six o’clock and he stands up immediately. He passes the son in the corridor. The mark of bitter thoughts is on his brow and he neither returns Mikal’s greeting nor looks at him. There is a poppy bruise on the temple where Mikal’s gun connected last night – it is either not serious or he has left it untreated because he doesn’t wish to signal any weakness to Mikal. Almost everyone seems to be awake. Smells come from the kitchen, the women making parathas, churning lassi and frying eggs, murmuring as they work, it being too early to speak loudly, words disrupting the pure pleasure of living.
The main door of the house is still locked. The man is still there outside the garage, now with the snow leopard cub on his lap, the clear golden sunlight flickering on the pattern of the fur. The rifle leans against the chair.
Mikal walks out to him. The man puts a hand in his pocket and brings out shattered pieces of a satellite phone, large silver shards and fragments of broken plastic and torn sections of microcircuitry.
‘We discovered this on him. In the shorts he wears under his shalwar.’
‘I didn’t think to look there,’ Mikal says quietly.
‘I thought it best to destroy it.’ The man throws the pieces on the ground before him and sits looking at them like a soothsayer reading the future in the pebbles he has scattered. ‘We have cleaned him,’ he says, ‘taken him to the bathroom.’
‘What?’
‘Well, he soiled himself. So we had to change his clothes. He put up a great struggle.’
‘Give me the key.’
‘He’s fine. Go in and eat.’
‘Give me the key, uncle.’
‘Go in and eat.’
Mikal nods but doesn’t move.
‘I need to make a phone call,’ he tells the man eventually.
‘I have hidden the phone in case someone tries to call out. I’ll connect it for you after breakfast.’
‘Thank you.’ He imagines them at the house in Heer, the breeze and scents in the garden, the scratch of the broom as it sweeps fallen leaves from a red path. Naheed wiping the dew off the mirror above the outside sink, the flowers hanging overhead. Before the science of botany was established just three hundred years ago, he remembers Rohan telling him and Jeo when they were children, flowers in their infinite variety and lack of human order were said to be proof of God’s existence.
The young men watch him from a distance, from various corners of the house, gathering in groups here and there and withdrawing, and he makes sure not to meet anyone’s eye. As he eats Fatima tells him that the school will open at eight thirty and that the teachers should begin to arrive around eight.
At seven forty-five Fatima’s sister puts on her burka and her husband unlocks the main door and she goes out to the school to position herself outside the gate, to wait for the arrival of the English-speaking teacher.
Mikal enters the garage and approaches the back of the pickup and lifts the tarpaulin flap. The soldier, blindfolded, senses someone’s presence and moves his head. His arm is in plaster and is nestling in a triangular sling of white muslin that was once a flour sack. He is wearing a new set of shalwar kameez and there is a large saffron and black bruise on his forehead. Mikal feels he is watching him through the blindfold, perhaps through the round naked discolouration above the eyes. The street is just on the other side of the garage and from it comes the chatter of the schoolchildren arriving for a day of learning.
He hears the front door being opened and looks out of the garage to see Fatima’s sister coming in with another, much slimmer figure. Her burka is tighter than the older woman’s, with long clean lines, and she has a leather handbag slung over her shoulder and her feet make clicking noises he hasn’t heard from the women in this house. Sturdy and purposeful, as opposed to the maternal and domestic shuffling that comes from the others. He watches them disappear towards the kitchen.
Five minutes later the man comes out to Mikal. ‘The girl knows English but refuses to speak to the American. She’s too afraid. She says they’ll cut off her tongue, or she’ll be killed outright.’
‘Can’t you persuade her?’
‘We are trying.’
‘What happened to his forehead?’
‘I told you. He struggled when we were cleaning him. Threw us around everywhere and got tangled up in the chains.’
‘I thought it might have something to do with what’s written on his back.’
‘It isn’t. But I’ll tell you one thing. He’ll pay for that piece of poetry if he is caught by someone out there.’
The man goes back into the house and returns a few minutes later. ‘She’s terrified. She is about to leave.’
Mikal steps out of the garage to see the girl hurrying across the courtyard, sobbing loudly inside her black burka. He moves towards her with one arm extended and says, ‘Sister, listen –’
But she gives a squeal at his approach and he stops.
The father unlocks the door and just as the girl steps out two of the servants make a dash for it and leave the house, pushing the man aside. High-pitched screams and shouts come from outside as the two escaping men crash into children. The man of the house scrambles up and locks the door once again.
Everyone is stunned.
‘They are afraid the Americans will raid the house and carry them off,’ says one of the other servants.
‘They will tell everyone in the bazaar,’ the son says. ‘In half an hour every man in Allah-Vasi whose honour, faith and manhood is still intact is going to descend on this house.’ He comes forward and strikes Mikal hard on the face. ‘Get out of here. Go.’
The father doesn’t say anything or reprimand the boy.
‘I’ll take him away.’ Mikal nods. ‘I’ll leave.’
Taking a cigarette lighter from his pocket and flicking it alight the son begins to burn a piece of paper with it. Only too late does Mikal realise that it is the American soldier’s blood chit.
‘We don’t want you bringing the Americans into this area,’ the son says, letting go as the flame creeps towards his fingertips. The last small piece of whiteness falls to the ground with the flame still attached. It is ash by the time it lands. ‘We are keeping the Kalashnikov and the bullet-proof vest and the dollars,’ he adds. ‘The tarpaulin isn’t cheap.’
‘You can keep the pistol for your protection, and also his food,’ the father says.
‘I want the snow leopard too,’ says the son.
‘The cub is mine,’ Mikal says as vigorously as he can.
The father looks at the son. Then at Mikal. ‘You can take the cub with you.’
Mikal turns to leave the room.
‘You said you needed to make a phone call,’ says the father. He points to a door. ‘The phone is through there.’
There is no answer from Heer. Mikal hangs up and dials a second time but again no one picks up.
Five minutes later he is easing the pickup out of th
e garage, the father walking beside the vehicle.
‘Where will you go?’ Fatima appears on the veranda.
‘I don’t know. I think I’ll go to Megiddo. Hide him in the house and go to the school there and try to find a teacher who speaks English.’
‘Just leave him in the desert and move on,’ the man says. ‘Go home. Do what other young men do, watch films and apply for jobs and quarrel with your sisters.’
‘He knows what happened to Salomi and to Akbar’s brother.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Fatima says.
‘No,’ says her brother-in-law, raising his hand in the air.
‘That’s not a good idea,’ Mikal says gently.
‘If I am in the vehicle with you, there will be less chance of you being harassed. They’ll respect a woman.’
‘Fatima,’ her brother-in-law says. ‘If they find out who he’s got tied up in the back, it’s not going to matter who he has sitting with him in the front.’
The leopard is curled up in his lap, yawning to show its pale pink tongue, the thick tail twitching in the air. Mikal has a large lunch tied up in a cloth on the passenger seat, along with three Nestlé bottles filled with tap water. There is a bottle of dark brown bitter-smelling oil for the American’s arm, though when he is supposed to rub it on he doesn’t know, since the plaster cast should stay on for days.
‘Be careful,’ the man says with feeling, just before letting him out.
‘Thank you, uncle. And I am sorry.’
‘I was thinking of letting them deal with him during the night. To save you from yourself.’
‘I know.’
‘Maybe I should do it right now.’
‘I’d better go, uncle.’
‘Fine. Stay off the road. Go through the desert and keep the Pahari hills on your right. It’ll take longer but it’s the safer way. When the road floods people often cut through the desert so it can be done. I have done it myself. And now I am beginning to think you should wait till nightfall.’
‘No. I need to end this as soon as possible so I can go back to Heer.’
Children are walking towards the school, and at the crossroads at the end of the street he stops to let a dozen of them pass. A boy, carrying a bag of books twice the size of his torso, reacts to the sound of chains coming from the other side of the tarpaulin and thumps Mikal’s door. ‘What’s in the back?’
Mikal sits with his arm out of the window.
‘Is it a calf or a goat?’
‘It’s my brother. It’s his wedding day but he doesn’t want to get married, so I have tied him up and am taking him to the bride’s house.’
*
Noon finds him in a burning plain, the bare crust of the earth enclosed by the rim of hills which the sun illuminates while blinding the onlooker. He keeps a constant watch behind him in the rearview mirror in case he is being followed. To the west of him a pall of dust travels horizontally along the ground and then curves upwards obeying some law of wind he doesn’t know, and the hills are pale in the stark light, standing with cruel dignity and grandeur, and the wheels of the pickup crunch over the desert floor, the heat coming in gusts as though the rocks are breathing. It is a reminder that, in contradiction to the Koran, there are some places on earth over which man has no dominion. He drives into the terraceland of low hills eroded by the wind and drives through a pass in the blazing light, looking again and again at the temperature gauge. Soon it is displaying hot, too hot, and he imagines coolant bubbling out of the top of the radiator header tank, the vehicle overheating.
He halts in the shadowed lee of a cliff east of the pass and gets out into the searing wind, the river of heat rushing through the stone channel, and in the flow there are stinging specks of dust and mica. When he lifts the tarpaulin flap at the tailgate, the American’s blindfolded head moves instantly in his direction. The man is drenched in sweat and his skin is red, which is what must happen to white people in the heat, he thinks. The red is thick as paint. The cast on the arm is perfectly dry now, a translucent white in the dimness. Mikal removes the blindfold and gives him water, dropping a purification tablet into the bottle beforehand. Afterwards he walks back to the river he drove past a few minutes ago, a precise serpentine curve of water through the landscape. At his approach, a pair of lapwings flees black white black white over the surface, and he stands with his feet in the water, watching them. The river is warm and he feels as though there are two iron hoops at his ankles. He walks into it fully clothed with the leopard on his shoulder, the simple uncomplicated gravity of the creature a relief to him. He lifts silver drops onto the fur with his hands. The sunlight floating on the surface around him in half-molten ingots. He sits down among the reeds that are dead to the root, and then he fills the plastic bottle and comes back to the American. He holds the man’s head steady with one hand and begins to trickle water onto him, taking care not to wet the cast, and the man blinks and Mikal wipes the wet hair away from the bruise on the forehead and he blinks and looks up at Mikal and Mikal cups his hands under the jaw to catch the falling water and pours it back up onto the head to cool him. He expels drops from the eyebrows by running the tips of his thumbs over them. Then he stands looking at him.
The man seems fascinated by his missing fingers.
He visits the river four times and when he is finished the American is drenched, the chains and the corrugated bed of the pickup glistening. The air undulates with heat, a killing flood. He sits at the tailgate with the leopard in his lap, as motionless as a toy, feeling his clothes dry by the minute, feeling the American’s eyes on him. There are clay nests of swallows high on the tilting face of the cliff. Now and then the American makes a move and there is a clink of chains and Mikal looks towards him. The white man’s eyes are a doorway to another world, to a mind shaped by different rules, a different way of life. What kind of a man is he? Is he well spoken, a union of strength and delicacy? Is he in love with someone or is he oblivious? Does he, like Mikal, have a brother?
He opens a tin of food for the cub and places it in front of it and then feeds the American. Afterwards he takes a chapatti and a piece of mutton from the napkin and eats his lunch. The clothes cool his skin as they dry, the shade beginning to feel as good as a rainfall. Now and then the man looks out past Mikal into the heat as though he has heard someone or something. Or he stares fixedly at one spot on the tarpaulin as though someone is standing just on the other side. Sitting wrapped in the chains in the crosslegged position, the good arm bound to the side of him. He seems to doze and after a while so does Mikal. He rouses occasionally and looks at the tide of the cliff’s shadow as it revises itself with the sun’s movement. Telling himself he’ll continue when the jagline reaches that scrubby bush, that striped rock, that cleft in the earth.
Eventually he gets up and removes a hubcap and fills it from the river and puts it on the passenger seat and places the leopard cub in it.
He sets off across the valley, the sun standing perfectly motionless in the sky. There is grass here and there and it is golden in the sun and in a distant clump of it he sees a black jackal and for a second he mistakes it for the missing Airedale.
An hour later he drives out of the barren valley and begins to climb through the hills. Thin grass and sparse acacias. He lowers his speed when, ahead of him, beside boulders the colour of raw sugar striated with blue, he sees an emaciated man and woman sitting in the dust, with a thin black goat wearing the sole of a rubber slipper around its neck to ward off the evil eye. They tell him they are refugees from the fighting in Afghanistan. Their daughter has died in a bombing raid. ‘They are still fighting,’ the woman says. ‘Her death didn’t shame any of them.’ And then she asks Mikal if he has any jasmine perfume. ‘The goat won’t let us milk it unless we wear the perfume our daughter used to wear when she milked it.’ Mikal shares some of his food with them.
‘Why have you stopped here?’ he asks.
‘They charge money to let the refugees pass.’
‘Who?’
The man waves his hand in the direction Mikal is going. ‘The tribal lords of this area. They have set up a toll on the road. Do you have money to pay them, to pass through?’
There were no tolls on the road when he left Megiddo yesterday.
They entrust him to Allah’s protecting power and he leaves.
After journeying through the high rolling desert for half an hour he gets out and climbs to a ridge – going up an incline of thick gravel that lies like wheat escaping from a torn sack – and looks out onto the other side. A quarter-mile ahead of him is the road that he should have taken, and on it he sees a toll booth. A crudely made wooden shed. He immediately drops to the ground. Raising his head thirty seconds later he sees a vehicle coming in his direction, a trail of dust connecting it to the toll booth. Change of any kind is obvious in spare terrain and they have seen him.
‘Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast,’ he tells himself.
He turns and is off the ridge in five leaps. Getting back behind the wheel he realises there is nowhere for him to hide and with the vehicle in reverse he crashes into the bushes as fast as he can go, now looking at the wing mirror, now in front, the water sloshing out of the leopard’s hubcap. He takes the pistol out of his waistband and holds it in his left hand and continues until the low-lying stand of mesquite he had seen earlier comes into view. He backs into it, the branches thrashing hectically against the side. The other vehicle comes into view and two men get out a few yards from where he was, looking up at the ridge, one of them with binoculars. After five minutes they get back in and drive off towards the toll booth.
An hour from sunset and he is in a small south-facing valley, sitting among the rocks beside a pool that has small blue flowers growing at its edges. The pickup is on a ridge ten feet directly above him, the door on the driver’s side open. He has driven in several directions and met culs de sac again and again. He is very hungry and he sits with the leopard in his arms, the creature testing the air with its nose. He walks up to the bush five yards away, the branches full of yellow berries as though hundreds of dots have been made with a thick piece of coloured chalk. Letting their thin blood run from the corners of his mouth he begins to pick and eat them, and as he stands chewing he looks towards the pickup. In the palm of his hand he collects berries for the American and climbs up to the pickup and lifts the tarpaulin flap.
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