by Nadeem Aslam
*
David walks around the circular balcony and looks out at the distant peaks in that direction. The city of Jalalabad is flanked to the north by the Hindu Kush and to the south by the White Mountains, the chain standing over Marcus’s house. Looking at a relief map David always feels that if you grabbed Afghanistan at the borders and pulled, so great is the number of hills and mountains here, you’d end up with an area ten times its current size.
Marcus comes and joins him on this side of the minaret, both of them looking towards where his house is. The Buddha is said to have visited this valley to slay the demon Gopala, and Chinese pilgrims have written of the sacred relics once housed in shrines here. A fragment of the Buddha’s skull entirely covered in gold leaf. A stupa erected where he clipped his fingernails. The city resisted the spread of Islam until the tenth century.
‘She spent the night alone in the house,’ Marcus says quietly. ‘I should have gone back.’
‘I am sure she’s fine,’ David replies; he has nothing to base that on but he doesn’t know what else to say. He is in Jalalabad because he is financing a number of schools in the country. He has kept himself in the background, just letting a group of committed and intelligent local people get on with the details. Even the selecting of the name has been left to them and they want Tameer-e-Nau Afghanistan School. Building the New Afghanistan. The branch in this city became operational a fortnight ago, and he is here to see it, spending last night there, the dog in the building next door disturbing his sleep throughout. Before leaving the United States he tried to contact Marcus, and then again repeatedly on entering Afghanistan, but the satellite phone he had left him on one of his previous visits wouldn’t ring.
‘There is no electricity to recharge it,’ Marcus says in reply when he raises the subject now.
‘What about the generator?’
‘It seems too much to turn that on just for the phone.’
Present in his voice is the fear that he would not be understood, would appear contrary. So David touches his sleeve, ‘It’s all right. I worry about you. I won’t lie and say I don’t sometimes wish you would leave Afghanistan, but’ – he raises his hand – ‘I know, it’s your home, and if you weren’t here we would not have been able to learn about this young man.’
It’s minimal, his life, requiring adjustments on a weekly if not daily basis. Once David arrived from the USA to find a camel tied in the orchard for her milk. Once there was a ewe and a lamb. Some ducks, a stand of ripening corn. Items from the house are taken or sent to Kabul’s antique merchants sometimes. Most of the money David forces on him every year is, he’s sure, still around untouched, or has been given to others.
‘Can we see your school from here?’ His skin is dyed to fawn after the decades of strong sunlight and heat, making him look almost like a native of this country, maybe someone from the Nuristan province.
‘Yes. It’s not far from here. Just follow that curved street, then along that road – see those palm trees? It’s the yellow building just beyond them, next to the big white one.’
‘I see it. So great is the love of a male palm tree for the female palm tree, that it always grows leaning at an angle towards it, even if it is in a neighbouring garden. Did you know?’
The city centre down there is full of citrus trees, this valley being famous for its orange blossom, verse makers from across Afghanistan gathering in Jalalabad in mid-April every year for a Poets’ Conference to recite poems dedicated to the blossom.
David rubs his face with his large hands. ‘We have a view of all sides from here, like the Pentagon in Washington, DC.’
‘And the wooden O of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.’
They stare at the mountain range, the blue and white ridges. The air can be very thin on some of those heights. The US Army has discovered that at times the blades of its helicopters cannot find enough purchase to get airborne from there, the machines swaying a few feet off the ground.
Even the air of this country has a story to tell about warfare. It is possible here to lift a piece of bread from a plate and, following it back to its origins, collect a dozen stories concerning war – how it affected the hand that pulled it out of the oven, the hand that kneaded the dough, how war impinged upon the field where the wheat was grown.
PARTICIPATING IN some battle when he was about ten years old, Bihzad had seen a fire break out in the long dried grasses of the meadow where the dead and the dying lay. He remembers feeling ashamed because his pangs of hunger had increased with the smell of roasting meat.
He now opens his eyes onto opium flowers. He moves along the edge of the field, the white-streaked pink blossoms swaying in the late-morning breeze. From Jalalabad up until a moment earlier, he was blindfolded. The man who had uncovered his eyes is now guiding him towards a building beyond the expanse of poppies.
He has been brought here before. It was three days earlier, another journey with the sense of sight disabled. Now too he is delivered from person to person inside the building. At one door there is a coded set of knocks. Three times, pause, twice, then a final twice. It’s been changed since the previous occasion, he notices.
‘So you are clear on all the details?’ says the man who leads him down a dark staircase. ‘You are to drive the truck out of here and park it outside the new school, between the tree with the red flowers and the large signboard that shows the public how to recognise different landmines.’
Bihzad has not been introduced to anyone by name here but, during an unexpected moment of tenderness during the previous visit, he had felt emboldened enough to ask this man if his name was indeed Casa, having overheard one of the others refer to him as that. The man had agreed with a quick almost-soundless ‘Yes’, and then gently grabbed Bihzad’s collar, telling him he mustn’t try to be too clever. Everyone else he has encountered here is dour and tense, exuding unrelenting distrust and hostility.
Now Casa tells him, firmly, ‘Do not deviate from your instructions in any way.’
They enter a room below ground where on a shelf, lit by a small bulb from above, there are two square frames containing the calligraphed names of Allah and Muhammad, peace be upon him. Between them, in a glass box, is a mounted mongoose with its teeth sunk into the edge of a cobra’s hood, the serpent’s black length wrapped three times around the body of its adversary. A figure sits cross-legged on a bed in the dimly lit other side of the room. The Kalashnikov in his lap has a second magazine taped to the first. Casa deferentially presents Bihzad to him and takes a few steps back.
His power and authority within this group is obvious, and he addresses Bihzad in measured tones: ‘You have been shown what to do? You’ll press the button attached to the red wires and get out of the truck and walk away.’
‘It won’t go off while the children are still inside the school, will it?’
‘Do not doubt our word,’ the man says quietly but with an edge to the voice. Earlier Casa had said Bihzad was being given the honour of doing this for Islam and for Afghanistan. ‘Aren’t you troubled that boys are being brainwashed in there,’ Casa asks now, ‘and girls taught to be immodest?’
The man raises a hand towards Casa. A thin blanket is draped on his shoulders, open in the middle as though to expose his pure transparent heart. He must have been writing something earlier because there is ink on his fingers. ‘We have no remote controls, and the timers we have are not very sophisticated either. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had to involve you, would have just left the truck outside that school built and owned by Americans. Someone has to park the vehicle and set the timer going on site. The explosion will happen hours later. You must know that Allah and the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, will be greatly happy with you.’
Bihzad has been told how this operation is just the beginning, a demonstration to attract and obtain help for bigger things. The man in this basement room, once a great fêted warrior, cannot return to his native village, a place Bihzad has overheard being referred to
as Usha. An enemy has appropriated power there, having accepted money and weapons from the Americans at the end of 2001 to help uproot the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But soon this enemy – these men called him a traitor to Islam and Afghanistan – would be made to regret everything, happy though he is for the time being because he has been given a place in the government of the province. A large-scale raid is being planned for Usha, a spectacular offensive to drive out that unbeliever and his American-paid fighters and bodyguards. There will be a war.
The building next to the school was their original target, a warehouse belonging to their great enemy, but they would be delighted to see the school reduced to rubble as well.
Someone from inside the school has informed them, Casa told Bihzad, that the school’s American owner is visiting, staying in the building for a few days. That is why they are keen to go ahead with this operation, unable to wait for the proper equipment to arrive. To kill an American would send out a big message.
Every American who dies here, said Casa, dies with a look of disbelief on his face, disbelief that this faraway and insignificant place had given rise to a people capable of affecting the destiny of someone from a nation as great as his.
The Americans too had blindfolded Bihzad when they took him to their detention centre at the Bagram military base, one of the many prisons they have established here to hold suspected al-Qaeda members. Someone had betrayed him to them in exchange for reward money. Night and day every prisoner cursed those Muslims – the munafikeen! – who had sold them to the Americans for $5,000 each. Though at one level everyone in there was happy because Allah had especially chosen him to suffer for Islam. There wasn’t a speck of dust in that place that didn’t make Bihzad want to scream – apart from anything else there was the constant fear that he might be transferred to Guantanamo Bay – but he had felt very close to Allah during those months, everyone spending every spare minute in prayer, the environment there much more spiritual than anything he has been able to find on the outside. Every day, his life shifting its centre, he slips into worldly longings and wants instead. May Allah forgive him but, the reward so alluring, he has even fantasised once or twice about approaching the Americans and telling them someone innocent in his neighbourhood is a member of al-Qaeda.
His main reason for agreeing to carry out today’s task is the money these people will pay him afterwards.
The smell of disturbed earth is intense around him, this airless sunken chamber.
‘Don’t forget that not only did the Americans imprison you, they caused your sister to die. This is how you’ll repay them,’ says the man. ‘She wasn’t your real sister though, right?’
‘No.’ They had met in an orphanage when they were children and he began calling her sister. He had always treated her as though she was.
From his pocket the man takes a folded piece of paper and hands it to Casa. ‘It’s a statement I have prepared,’ he says. ‘The statement that will be issued to television and radio after the blast. And, you’ll notice, I have decided to give our organisation the same name as the school. Building the New Afghanistan – I approve of what it conveys.’
He invites Bihzad to sit beside him and, taking his hand in his, begins to read aloud verses from the Koran – not always accurately, Bihzad notices. Muhammad, peace be upon him, had appeared in the dreams of many at the Bagram prison. And one night Christ had visited Bihzad, carrying the Koran in his right hand, the Bible in the left. When Bihzad made to kiss his forehead, Christ asked someone, ‘Who is he?’ Upon learning that Bihzad was a prisoner of the Americans, the great prophet came forward and kissed his brow. He apologised for the Christians who had incarcerated Muslims in various locations around the world. Bihzad was shaken awake at that point by the other prisoners: they had been brought out of their sleep by the concentrated fragrance issuing from Bihzad’s forehead. He told them that that was where Christ had placed his lips, and they wiped the scented sweat from his brow and ran it over their own clothes.
‘The desire to rid my country of infidels and traitors,’ the man says upon coming to the end of his recital and releasing Bihzad’s hand, ‘has made a fugitive of me. I would have loved to have carried out this task myself, but I cannot even step outside without fear of being apprehended, cannot even use a phone because the Americans are listening in and could send down a missile.’
Back at ground level, Casa says of him, ‘He skinned alive a Soviet soldier with his own hands before you and I were probably even born. It was done slowly to increase the suffering. They say it took four hours and he was alive for the first two. Apparently some parts are simple like skinning a fruit, others tricky. Around that time he had had his photograph taken whilst shaking Ronald Reagan’s hand, in whose infidel heart Allah in His wisdom had planted a deep hatred of the Soviet Union.’
As they walk out of the building Casa produces a set of keys. Bihzad understands they are for the truck, suddenly terrified more than ever, no strength in any of his muscles. He has to go through with this, he tells himself. Later he’ll go and talk to the Englishman, continue to pretend to be his missing grandson. Nodding sometimes vigorously, sometimes uncertainly, when the old man attempts to jog his memory. I do remember that. No, I have no recollection of that. The aged man must be rich – a doctor. He’d heard about the Englishman a while ago, and sent a message out to him saying he was his grandson Bihzad. He had been told that the missing child had a small scar due to an accident with a candle, and he had duplicated the burn on himself, the flesh taking a month to heal. The name is the only real thing he shares with the lost grandson.
Maybe he’ll get to go to England. A chance at last to make something of his life. Even find love: become someone’s, have someone become his. There was once a girl he had loved, a girl he still thinks about, but because he had no means and no prospects, her family had humiliated him when he brought them his proposal.
The truck is parked, as docile-looking as a cow, against a nearby wall. Bihzad and Casa walk towards it, going past two figures sitting on stationary motorbikes under a mulberry tree. A black pickup van arrives through the entrance gate and Casa raises his hand to stay Bihzad. Men appear from all corners of the building now, the vehicle coming to a stop, and from the back seat an old man is pulled out by the chain around his neck, a look of absolute horror on his face. His hair, beard and clothes dusty, he is led away like a reluctant performing bear, held by that chain, and Casa tells Bihzad that he was an employee with the organisation until his sudden disappearance some years before. A dollar note was found stitched in the lining of the coat he had forgotten to take with him. ‘There is a chance he is an informer, obliging the group to relocate to this farm,’ Casa says as they continue towards the truck. Bihzad knows the punishment for betrayal. With a funnel and a length of tubing they’ll pour acid or boiling water into the man’s rectum. That and much more, and then they’ll slit his throat. Nor would a confession mean freedom – it would just mean they’ll kill him sooner, it would mean less torture.
The motorbikes wake to noisy life, the smell of fumes recognisable in the air within moments. The two riders will guide Bihzad towards the city. And Bihzad understands now – as though the pungent scent has brought the knowledge with it – that he will be followed into the city as well by these armed men, right up to the school, in case he changes his mind and tries to abandon the truck or inform the police.
The men bring the motorbikes over to the truck. They use the trailing ends of their turbans to cover the lower halves of their faces, just the eyes showing, as riders must to avoid the exhaust and dust of traffic. Bihzad climbs in behind the steering wheel, trying to control the rhythm of his breathing. He has been shown how the cushion of the passenger seat can be easily detached and lifted: underneath is the pair of insulated wires leading to the switch he has to throw upon parking the truck outside the school. There is a button he must press after the switch, and then he must walk away from the vehicle.
Casa had demonstrated
and explained everything on the previous visit, sitting on the floor in a back room. Bihzad and Casa – in that interior filled with crates of rocket-propelled grenades, packets of explosives that smelled like almonds, and boxes full of DVDs and CDs depicting jihad as Allah the Almighty saw it and not as the world’s media distorted it – had then talked about their childhoods: the hunger, the refugee camps, the deaths one by one of the adults around them due to various causes, the orphanages, the beatings and worse, the earning of daily bread as beggars or labourers in the bazaars. Neither remembered the date or place of his birth, nor had any firm memory of his mother and father. Pointing to the lengths of blue, green, red and yellow wires that lay around them, Casa said:
‘When I was a child I had knocked over a basket of silk embroidery threads, probably belonging to my mother. That’s the only thing I remember of her. The threads suddenly unspooled along the floor in many brilliant lines and then went out of the open door and down a staircase.’ He fell silent and then said through a sigh, ‘Yes, that’s the only thing I remember.’
Now Casa comes forward and shuts the truck door, sealing Bihzad in.
With the vehicle just beyond biting point, he rolls out of the gate set in the boundary wall of the farmhouse, the wrinkled colour of the thousand poppies now behind him.
The road is lit by the late-morning sun. One of the riders is in front of him and the other he can see in the rear-view mirror. It seems it is of no concern to these people that Bihzad now knows where the farmhouse is situated. On the previous occasion he was picked up at the outskirts of Jalalabad and blindfolded before being brought to the farmhouse, and the procedure was the same again when he was taken back to the edge of the city. But this time they have let him drive out of there with full knowledge of how to find the place again. An additional few moments and everything is perfectly clear to him: the instant he throws the switch the bomb will be armed – and the instant he presses the button the truck will explode. It’s not a timer, but a detonator.