by Nadeem Aslam
He recalled the desolation that used to occasionally overpower his mother, a sadness at whose very centre lay his father’s death. Marcus’s father was a doctor in the Afghan frontier and was murdered by a tribesman in 1934, a few months before his birth. The motive for the killing was never established though the killer had a son who had recently declared an interest in Christianity. The family had tried starving him, but when it didn’t have an effect the father tied a grenade to the son and threatened to pull the pin if he did not renew his vow of faith in Islam. Having murdered his son this way, he set out to take revenge on the doctors at the missionary hospital where the boy had come into contact with ideas that made an unbeliever of him. No attempt at conversion was made at the hospital but a chapter from the Gospels was indeed read in the wards every night.
Marcus’s mother continued as a nurse in the heart of the British Empire’s most turbulent province, returning to England only when Marcus was five years old. Kabul, Kandahar, Peshawar, Quetta – some of the earliest words he heard were the names of these cities of Asia. And he visited them during the years of his young adulthood, meeting the stately Qatrina in Kabul and continuing the friendship and romance when she moved to London to study medicine. Coming to live with her beside the lake near Usha, thirty miles from the city of Jalalabad, the city that sent its narcissus into the snow-bound Februaries of Kabul four hours away.
Flour and other basics. That red tea. Kerosene for the lamp. He rarely goes into Usha now, left alone by them all, his first reaction that of mild incredulity whenever someone approaches him. They can see me. And then this week a man drew near and told him about Lara, told him about a woman who was waiting for him two streets away, having come on the daily bus from Jalalabad the day before. They can see me. Some aspect of this he had sensed in the woman he was brought to, her inwardness so intense she could scarcely bring herself to speak or meet another’s eye. She stood up and smiled at him weakly. He saw the unslept eyes, the blue-black neck. The tiredness and the large bruise were physical but they seemed connected with her spirit somewhere.
He picked up her suitcase and they began the journey to his house. There were no words during the walk along the lake’s rim. Later he discovered that the clothes in the suitcase were damp. She explained that during her long journey towards him she had seen a girl raise a fire in front of a house and heat a basin of water to bleach some fabric. After she had finished and was about to pour away the leftover liquid, Lara had moved forward and asked if she could submerge her own three spare sets of clothes into it. Wanting that white suddenly, that blankness. The sole ornament on her now was a necklace of very fine beads like a row of eggs laid along the collarbones by insects.
*
Her gaze on the Buddha’s giant face, Lara sits on the lowest step of the staircase in the perfume factory. She looks at the features of the beautiful young man. He feels vulnerable and intimate, as if facing someone in bed.
Dressed in black, the Taliban that day in March 2001 were preparing to dynamite the head when one of them had contemptuously fired a round of bullets into the stone face smiling to itself. In some versions of the events of that day, a ghost had appeared in Marcus’s house to put the sinister malevolent figures to flight. But others insist it was the occurrence down here in the perfume factory. They carried Qatrina away with them, to her eventual public execution, and would have taken Marcus also if not for what happened here.
After the gun was fired into the horizontal face it was noticed that a small point of light had materialised in each bullet hole, a softly hesitating sparkle. Over the next few instants, as more and more of the men took notice and stared uncomprehendingly, each of these spots grew in brilliance and acquired a liquid glint. Welling up in the stone wounds, the gold eventually poured out and began to slide down the features very slowly, striping the face, collecting in unevenly spaced pools on the floor.
As though they had come out of a trance, the men in defiant rage sent another dozen bullets into the idol but with the same result. In addition he now seemed to be opening fully his almost shut eyes, the lids chiselled in the stone beginning to rise without sound in what felt like an endless moment.
2
Building the New
THE AMERICAN MAN, David Town, is awakened just before sunrise by a muezzin. The first two words of the call to the Muslim prayer are also the Muslim battle cry, he remarks to himself as he lies in the darkness, never having seen the connection before.
The voice is issuing from a minaret three blocks away, dissolving into the air of Jalalabad, the city that surrounds him. He has travelled through most of this country over the decades, his work as a dealer in precious stones bringing him to the amber mines of Kandahar, taking him to Badakshan for the rubies that Marco Polo had written of in his Description of the World. The war-financing emeralds of the Panjshir Valley. He found the River Murghab to be so full of rapids it could have been the Colorado.
He listens to the voice continuing as he falls asleep again. Come to worship, it says, Come to happiness.
An hour later he gets up and walks out to a nearby teahouse. There is a samovar, and bread is being pulled out of the clay oven buried in the ground in the corner. He remembers Marcus Caldwell telling him tea is an ingredient in some perfumes. Maybe it was Zameen, passing on knowledge absorbed from her father. We learn in detail that which is most insistent around us. The desert people make good astronomers.
To the left of him a chakor partridge bites the bars of its cage. They are a gregarious bird, moving in large family groups in the wild, but are kept like this all across Afghanistan. The place becomes more and more busy as daylight increases, the road full of traffic. Vans and lorries, animals and humans. Wrapped in a coarse blanket he occupies a far chair, nodding and saying salam-a-laikam whenever someone new arrives to take a seat near by. He sits with his quiet watchful air. A cap unscrewed from a missile serves as a sugar bowl in this place. He can see the words Death to America and Kill Infidels daubed in Pashto, in two different paints and two different scripts, on a nearby wall. A news hawker enters, a child of six at most, and a man buys a magazine with Osama bin Laden on the cover, photographed as always with the Kalashnikov of a Soviet soldier he had killed here in the 1980s.
*
‘Marcus?’
David, walking back from breakfast, calls out towards the figure on the other side of the narrow lane.
The man with the white beard stops and looks up and then comes to him, taking him into his arms, a long wordless hug. Just a few smeared noises from the throat.
‘I didn’t know you were in the country,’ Marcus says when they separate.
‘Why are you in the city?’
‘I came yesterday. A shopkeeper in Usha, who recently visited Jalalabad, told me about a boy in his twenties who could be … our Bihzad.’ That was the name Zameen had chosen for her son. Bihzad – the great fifteenth century master of Persian miniature painting, born here in what is now Afghanistan, in Herat. ‘David, he remembers a lot of things, remembers her name.’
‘Where is he?’ He looks at Marcus, the eyes that are the eyes of a wounded animal.
‘I met him yesterday. I spent last night with him.’ Marcus points to the minaret with the high domed top in the distance, a brass crescent at its pinnacle. ‘Up there. He makes the call to prayer from up there.’
‘Then I think I heard him at dawn.’
‘We spent almost the entire night talking, or rather I talked. He is a little withdrawn, distant. There was something fraught about him occasionally.’ From his pocket Marcus takes out a key with a cord threaded through its eye. ‘He gave me this. Come, I’ll take you up there.’
‘What about the scar?’ The child had burned himself on a flame.
‘Yes, I saw it.’
‘He’s up there now?’
‘He said he had a few things to do but he’ll be back. I came yesterday morning, thinking I’ll go back on the evening bus but the service was cancelled. S
o I had to stay.’
‘I’ll drive you back this afternoon.’ A journey along vineyards that produced bunches of grapes the length of his forearm. ‘I was going to come see you in the next few days anyway.’
‘I should have returned as planned. She spent last night alone.’ Marcus stops. ‘David, there is a woman back at the house.’
‘Yes?’
‘She’s Russian.’
He’d kept on walking and is two steps ahead of Marcus, but now he halts. ‘A Russian?’
‘Larissa Petrovna. She says her brother was a soldier who knew Zameen.’
David nods. The older man does not say the Soviet soldier’s name but David hears it in his head anyway. Benedikt Petrovich. The man who fathered Zameen’s child through repeated assault, the child David later called his own son, who it is possible has grown up to be the young man at the top of the minaret over there, the sunlight making the crescent appear as though it’s on fire. At the military base Benedikt Petrovich guarded the room where Zameen was kept, and he unbolted the door night after night and went in to her.
‘David, did Zameen ever talk about a Soviet soldier, about twenty-four years old?’
‘No. Never. So what kind of things does this Bihzad remember?’
A camel goes by with the burnt-out shell of a car fastened upside down to its back, the high metal object lurching at every step.
When David met Zameen, in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, Bihzad was four and was taught to think of David as his father. It was a matter of months after that that Zameen died and the boy disappeared. Lost as he was at such an early age, how surprising it seems that he has managed to carry with him even his name. Holding onto that one possession over the violent chaotic years.
‘He remembers Zameen telling him Qatrina was a doctor, seemed to have forgotten that I was one too, though he knew I had some connection with England. He remembers you, remembers Peshawar – all very vaguely.’
David has looked for him for nearly twenty years, making a number of journeys towards hints of him, always unsure about how much someone can remember from when they were four or five. It must be different for different people. There have been several leads in the past, one or two as compelling as this one, but nothing came of them. He is forty-eight this year, and from among his own early memories the earliest is of experiencing a strong emotion – which he would in later life learn to call love – towards what a set of coloured pencils did on a piece of paper, those brilliant lines and marks with a thin layer of light trembling on them. He always wanted those pencils near. He has calculated that he must have been about three. But he has no personal recollection of something that is said to have occurred at a slightly later age, something that is family legend – of him sinking his teeth into the leg of the doctor who was about to give his brother Jonathan a vaccine shot, Jonathan weeping with fear at the needle.
Marcus unlocks the door at the base of the minaret and they enter in silence, climbing the staircase that spirals upwards at the centre. Most minarets are narrow, merely architectural details these days, but this staircase is wide enough for horses. Half-way up there is a large hole that must have been caused by a stray rocket during one of the many battles the area has seen in the previous decades, one of the many wars. It is as though someone had bitten off the side of the tower.
At the very top is the landing and then a door opens onto a balcony that runs around the minaret, a circular terrace just under the dome, exposed to the sunlight at this hour.
‘Does he actually live up here?’ They passed a cotton mattress on the landing. A small tin trunk stood open to reveal things for making tea. Powdered milk spilling from a twist of newspaper headlines. And out here there is evidence on the floor of a small fire of splintered wood, of burnt thorn and twig. There is a cot for sitting, its ropes frayed. He thinks of the summer months with their dust storms, palls of them rising up and burying the city for twenty minutes each time.
‘This area is without electricity at dawn so they can’t use the loudspeaker to make the call to prayer. Someone has to come up here and do it physically. He does that, but he actually lives somewhere else.’ He points to the east. ‘In that neighbourhood.’
They are standing on the balcony, looking at the city below. Above them is a roof of corrugated iron on which the claws of pigeons can be heard.
‘He said they used to give lessons in the Koran to the djinn up here, a long time ago. They came to the mosque down there at first but their presence was too overwhelming for humans, a child or two fainting with awe. So this minaret was built for them to walk up to without being seen or felt by humans. Bihzad says no one wants to be the muezzin, afraid in case the effect of the djinn still lingers.’
‘What does he look like? And when will he be back?’
‘Around noon. I told him I must go back home before night falls.’
David nods. ‘So this Russian woman – Larissa Petrovna, you said her name is.’
‘Lara. She’ll go back in a few days. She won’t say much but she lost her husband two years ago and is obviously in a time of darkness. She keeps apologising for being a burden on me even though it’s not a problem in the least. She is an art historian at the Hermitage in St Petersburg. You are sure Zameen never mentioned a Soviet soldier named Benedikt?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘You’ll meet her. But you haven’t told me what you are doing here. Listen to the birds, David, their wing beats.’ He is sitting on the cot, his back against the wall. ‘It feels strange to be away from the house after so long. I look at this ceiling and for a second expect to see books nailed up there.’
David looks at the panorama of the city while listening to him, the mountain range in the hazy distance.
‘The large book of Bihzad’s paintings had required three nails to stay in place on the ceiling. Such brutality had to be inflicted on it to prevent it from being burned to ashes – and here was a man so subtle he painted with a brush that ended in a single hair picked from a squirrel’s throat.’
David’s first concern is Marcus: how much has his Russian visitor told him about her brother’s assaults on Zameen? The shock would be devastating to him, but how much does she know herself? Zameen had hidden nothing from David but he has always been careful not to reveal too much to Marcus – or to Qatrina when she was alive. Qatrina who died in 2001, the long-ago spring of 2001 when the United States believed itself to be at peace, believed itself to be safe and immune from all this.
The Englishman’s eyes are closed now, the birds coming and going on the roof.
Zameen told him how she heard the door open that night, heard Benedikt enter the room in the darkness. Strangely he didn’t approach her bed as he had done over the previous nine occasions. He closed the door behind him but didn’t bolt it. A chain, hanging from a ring on the wall beside her wooden bed, was attached to an iron band around her wrist, so she couldn’t rush for the open door. His breath was rapid and shallow as though he’d been running. He whispered her name and struck a matchstick alight. Speaking in English, a language he knew brokenly from his mother, he said he was defecting and that she must go with him, said he had made it out of the base safely earlier tonight but had turned back for her.
When during his assaults she had wanted to scream but had been unable to, her hands – out of humiliation and rage – had flown at him, raking his skin, but now she listened, looking at his face in the yellow light which soon ran out.
‘Here is the key for your wrist.’ She heard something land by her feet. Like a raindrop on a leaf. He drew closer. One time he had fallen asleep beside her for a few seconds after the act and she had heard that breathing stretch much deeper.
She did not move towards the key, shaking her head even though it was dark. And so he lit another match and told her that Rostov lay bleeding out there and that she must know she would be drained of blood to save him. ‘Don’t make me go and kill him.’ There was pleading in the whispered voice, as when, his thir
st quenched, he sometimes asked her to forgive him for what he had just done. During the daylight hours he was ashamed of what he did to her, but again and again in the darkness he found himself approaching her, ready to subdue, dizzy and almost sick with longing and desire and power.
Picking up the key she released her hand from the chain.
Out there, after an hour’s running through the darkness, they came to another soldier, another defector. Zameen persuaded them that they must go to Usha, but Piotr Danilovich left them soon after they set out. From within the darkness of an orchard, the flowers and the perfume of apricot trees, Zameen and Benedikt watched the small group of soldiers from the Soviet base arrive to look for them. After they had gone and the two of them were thinking of continuing towards Usha, they became aware of another possible danger, another set of voices close by. It was dark but the sky was beginning to lighten in the east, a few very faint lazuli strokes. The sound and movement of the Soviet soldiers must have attracted people from the nearby village, or perhaps they had been here among the apricot trees all along and had stilled themselves earlier. To avoid Soviet gunships many farmers went to work in their fields and orchards only at night, accompanied by small lamps.
Benedikt told her to wait as he went forward on his elbows to investigate, raising himself to a crouching position and then disappearing from view. She would never see him again or know what happened to him, what kind of life he walked into, what kind of death. The orchard was vast, and there were many others around it, but he had said he would find her easily because somehow they had ended up within a clump of three trees that were the only ones among the hundreds that were not in flower. She curled herself in the high grass and perhaps fell asleep beside the stolen Kalashnikovs. When next her mind focused, the voices out there had grown in number and dawn had arrived, and now she saw, as though hallucinating, that the branches above her had blossomed with the first rays of the sun, the late buds opening at last, hatching white-pink scraps against the clear blue of the sky.