by Nadeem Aslam
He feels as though his heart is clamped in someone’s fist. And when, at a gentle curve in the road, his shadow begins to inch towards the passenger seat, the feeling intensifies. He experiences this dread whenever he is in an area not yet swept for landmines – wanting always to pull his shadow closer to him, thinking the weight of it is enough to set off whatever death-dealing device is hidden there.
He has no choice, and nothing but Allah’s compassion to see him through this. Perhaps he should swerve and try to disappear down a side street, try to dismantle the bomb.
He wishes the road and landscape would stop unwinding before him, wishes it were only a painted screen to arrive at and burst through to the other side, emerging into another kinder realm. Just some place that is not this Hell. To ask for Paradise would require someone less humble. But the truck continues its journey, bearing down on the city in the distance.
DAVID WALKS OUT of the minaret of the good djinn. Marcus is asleep up there surrounded by the millennia-old mountain vista.
He must go back to the school, to take care of some paperwork. His car is parked under a chinar plane tree within the school’s enclosure wall. He’ll bring it here and then, having met Bihzad, drive with Marcus to Usha. From the foliage of the chinar trees in a miniature painting, said Zameen, it is possible to tell if it was painted in the Herat of the late fifteenth century. Distinctive serrations and ways of colouring.
David will have to carefully question the young man to see if he is who he claims to be.
Bihzad Benediktovich Veslovsky.
There is a faint continuous rumble from the sky above the street. An unmanned Predator drone collecting intelligence on behalf of the CIA, he thinks, or a fighter jet the Special Forces have summoned, calling down a missile strike on a hiding place of insurgents. The information that selects the target isn’t always without its faults, he knows. In Usha at the end of 2001, the house of the warlord Nabi Khan was reduced to rubble from the air, everything and everyone inside a hundred-yard radius was charred, but later it turned out that he had not been in the vicinity. His rival, Gul Rasool, had lied to the Americans just to see the building decimated, to have as many of Nabi Khan’s relatives and associates killed as possible. Gul Rasool now has a position in the ministry of reconstruction and development, installed as the chief power in Usha. Nabi Khan is at large, though there have been rumours of his death, rumours of him having moved to Iraq to fight the Americans there. Both men are little short of bandits and the cruellest of barbarians, seeing all of life’s problems in terms of injured self-esteem, their places in infamy well earned.
He makes his way through the press of bodies in the bazaar, the bustle of any of these Asian cities. The orange-blossom air. A little girl goes by, walking possibly towards the day when she will disappear behind the burka, her face never to be seen again. Perhaps nowhere is the Mona Lisa loved more than here in Asia, and he remembers Zameen telling him that on seeing it for the first time as a child she had wondered what that black line was, high on Mona Lisa’s forehead. It was, of course, the edge of her veil. Zameen was seeing the picture in a poor reproduction that missed the thin gossamer fabric covering the head. At that age, she said, it didn’t occur to her that women in the West could wear veils.
Instead of going towards the school he has taken a short detour and entered this bazaar, looking for a place that sells satellite phones. With the landline to Marcus’s house rotted away, David has decided he’ll buy a phone for Larissa Petrovna which she must keep with her while she is here.
He stands at a crossroads and looks around, suddenly finding himself lost, surrounded by noise and talk. The men and women of Afghanistan share between them a store of tales so extensive, so rich and ancient, that it has been said it is unrivalled by any other land. Alexander passed through here in 329 BC with thirty thousand troops, and so now a man selling what look like centuries-old Greek coins approaches David. The years of war and civil war have emptied this country’s museums. One 190-carat diamond in the sceptre of Russia’s Catherine, bought by her from an Armenian gem merchant, was first the eye of a god in a temple in India, and so it is that no one can be certain where most of Afghanistan’s looted treasures have ended up.
He turns and goes back along the street, thinking of how a long time ago, when they were both schoolchildren, his brother Jonathan had asked him to make his way out of a maze in a puzzle book. Only when he failed was it revealed that by drawing a small line in black ink across the correct path, Jonathan had mischievously blocked the only way out. Bringing him nothing but dead ends.
*
With a smile Marcus raises a hand when he realises that Bihzad is – that Bihzad was – the driver of the vehicle that has just gone past him. He hopes he has been quick enough, that the greeting can be seen in the rear-view mirror. The boy’s apparel is patched and dirty, his mouth full of crooked teeth, but he is young and, as Qatrina once said, two things make everyone appear beautiful: youth and the light of the moon.
Marcus is walking towards the school. He woke up in the minaret and found David gone, but he knows where he must be.
Bihzad’s truck is going in the same direction as him. The hand of a traffic controller, at some intersection located further up, has released a flood of vehicles just ahead, and now Marcus’s view of the truck has become obstructed, though he can see the school building.
He cannot stop thinking of Lara. The thought of her alone in the house last night. A night of stone. He sees in his mind the pitch-dark surroundings, the lake filled with the blackest ink, and the shiver of pale candlelight in one window, sees her figure dressed in white, which is all she has worn since she came. The set of clothes she was wearing when she dropped the rest into bleach is the only one with colour, and that she has folded away out of sight.
It was a mistake for him to have come here yesterday. Could this have waited until she had gone back to Russia? The children’s game of hangman – where one has to guess a word letter by letter, each wrong guess meaning that a friend draws a scaffold and then a noose and then a person suspended from that noose – has always terrified Marcus, the idea that every time one makes a wrong choice someone else gets closer to disaster, to death.
The traffic has thinned and he sees that Bihzad’s vehicle is stationary outside the school building. Perhaps he has seen Marcus and is waiting for him to catch up. He quickens his pace, going past the cluster of palm trees David had pointed to from the minaret, the loud chatter of birds coming to him from the fronds. For the next fraction of a second it is as though the truck is in fact the picture of a truck, a photograph printed on flimsy paper, and that the rays of the sun have been concentrated onto it with a magnifying glass. And then the ground falls away from his feet and a light as hard as the sun in a mirror fills his vision. The tar on a part of the road below him has caught fire. Soon they will feed you the entire world. The explosion has created static and a spark leaps from his thumb towards a smoking fragment of metal flying past him. Then he is on the ground. Beside him has landed a child’s wooden leg, in flames, the leather straps burning with a different intensity than the wood, than the bright blood-seeping flesh of the severed thigh that is still attached. A woman in a burka on fire crosses his vision. He hears nothing and then slowly, as he gets to his feet in the midst of this war of the end of the world, scream soldered onto scream. He thinks the silence was the result of momentary deafness but the survivors had in all probability needed time to comprehend fully what had just taken place. The souls will need longer still, he knows, and they may not begin their howls for months and years.
ONLY IN THE EARLY EVENING do Marcus and David leave Jalalabad for Usha, journeying under the first constellations.
David had heard the truck explode from a mile away. Elsewhere he would have thought it was thunder, but in this country he knew what it was, what it had to be.
At the site he found Marcus and gathered him into his arms amid all the black smoke. There were no injuries on hi
m, just a few grazes to the skin. A woman carried a severed hand up to them and had to be told that Marcus had lost his own years before today. David went deeper into the soft black talcum of the smoke, to learn all he could about the event. Around him the word ‘fate’ was being used in reference to the chance passers-by who had been killed along with the staff and children. Fate – it is the nearest available word when the name of the destroyer or the destroying thing is not known.
When Marcus told him he had seen Bihzad at the wheel of the truck, David had gone to the police. The boy’s house was searched and they learnt that he had spent time in captivity, under suspicion of being al-Qaeda. The story of his sister’s death last year also came to light. A sister in possession of a love letter: while the brother was giving her the beating he thought she deserved for being shameless, she had escaped from his grip and run off into a field near a former Taliban weapons depot that the United States had repeatedly struck in 2001 with cluster bombs, some of which had failed to explode and still lay undisturbed – in that field and also elsewhere within the already mine-laden cities and countryside.
David and Marcus were also told by the neighbours that Bihzad was in no way related to doctors or Englishmen of any kind. Though he grew up in various orphanages and madrassas, his lineage was known to everyone – both his parents were Afghans and had died in the Soviet bombing of a refugee caravan back in the 1980s.
The statement from the terrorists appeared after four hours, the group calling itself Tameer-e-Nau. David and Marcus listen to the words as they are repeated on the radio during the journey towards Usha:
A passionate servant of Allah has carried out a glorious act in Jalalabad. He wrote this declaration personally to be read after his death. We have hundreds more young men like him, lovers of Muhammad, peace be upon him, who are willing and eager to give their lives in this jihad against the infidels …
Scarcely anything can be seen in the deepening darkness outside. David thinks of night as a creature that licks objects into oblivion.
We regret the loss of the children’s lives. But those children were already worse than dead because they were being taught to forget Islam in that American-funded school. They were bound for Hell but because of our actions have now become flowers of Paradise …
David remembers how back in the 1980s, when the Salang Tunnel to the north of Kabul was an important supply route for the Soviet Army, there were several plans by the US-backed guerrillas to blow it up. But because the tunnel was of such key importance, the Soviets guarded it day and night and nothing was ever allowed to obstruct the traffic inside it – you couldn’t just park a truck full of explosives in the middle and then walk out, having set the timer going. The only possible way of collapsing the tunnel was for someone to blow themselves up in there. The Afghans were appalled when the Americans suggested this to them. No one volunteered because suicide was a sin. The path would not fork at the moment of the explosion, sending the bomber to Paradise, the infidels to Hell. No, the Afghans told the Americans then, it would deliver both parties to Allah’s Inferno.
The statement now continues:
The blameless Muslim adults who have died are like the blameless Muslims who died in the attacks on the Twin Towers: Allah has sent them to Paradise …
The age David is, in the middle years of his life, he is equally responsible for the young and the old. Those above him and those below. As he drives he places a hand on Marcus’s arm to transmit comfort. The bones of the Englishman are thin under the weight of his palm.
It was in the Pakistani city of Peshawar that he had met Zameen, when he was twenty-seven years old, a dealer in gems. Someone who knew by heart the co-ordinates of where to locate various stones. Spinel: 34° 26’N, 64° 14’E. Emerald: 35° 24’59”N, 69° 45’39”E. Someone who knew that Kublai Khan had paid as much as 170,000 ting for Afghan rubies. And that the world’s earliest known spinel was discovered in a Buddhist tomb near Kabul in 101 BC.
In Peshawar a ruby had suddenly materialised at his feet one day at dusk. He leaned closer because of the lack of light and saw that it was a sphere of embroidery silk. There were others around him. Emeralds. Sapphires. Opals. They had leapt out of the door at the top of a staircase a few yards from him, unravelling as they came in a waterfall and then a river of loveliness. A young woman stood there holding the other end of the red filament that was in his hand, and for a few seconds they had remained linked by it, looking at each other.
Pure distilled life, a beautiful child behind her was stretching his body in a high-armed yawn, his shirt rising up to reveal his navel.
CASA IS FOLDING a sheet of paper in half. In the light of the lantern resting on the ground near by, the paper is bright in his hands. He is swift though careful. A series of ten folds – some small, others spanning the entire length of the sheet – and the plane is ready. Gripping it between his forefinger and thumb, he walks towards a clearing. He releases the plane a few times into the air to test its arc. After a number of adjustments, he walks to another section of this disused expanse of land behind his home.
He raises the small white plane above his head and puts his other hand into his breast pocket. He strikes the match against the bark of a nearby tree without looking, introducing a smell of smoke into the air, and brings the fire to the aeroplane’s tail. The flame touches it almost caressingly and the white paper ignites.
He releases the burning shape, watching it glide along the low tree branches.
He walks away then, travelling in the opposite direction to the airborne fire, turning around only when he is fifteen or so yards from where he was, his eyes all intensity and seriousness. The plane – or what remains of it – comes to rest precisely where he had wanted it, and the surrounding dry grass begins to burn. The flames grow quickly in size and strength. He covers his ears and the ground erupts in an explosion, a fountain of earth or a small cypress tree rising seven feet into the air. The stones and the larger pieces of soil fall back immediately but particles of finer dust float sideways, slowly drifting with the breeze.
He had found the mine thirty minutes ago, had immediately warned the others in the surrounding houses against venturing out, telling women to make sure all the children were in, and then set to work. It was from the time of the Soviets. Perhaps as old as he was. He dripped petrol onto the grass above it. After an early childhood spent in the company of bird-stunning catapults, and the later years with various guns in the jihad training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan, he knew he could make the paper plane land on the target precisely. At several locations around him are planes whose trajectory he had been unable to hone, those that had looped or corkscrewed away towards this or that high branch.
Once he had seen a mine detonating in a grove of pomegranate trees with such force that the skin of every fruit on every branch had cracked, the red seed spilling out.
He enters the small brick building he shares with seven others, mostly taxi drivers – like he used to be – or day labourers who work in the centre of the city not far away. After the US invasion, he – someone with links to the Taliban and al-Qaeda – had begun to drive taxis, first in Kabul and then here in Jalalabad. One day he took a passenger to a poppy farm beyond the northern outskirts of the city and ended up being introduced to the people there, Nabi Khan’s men, and he has been with them since.
Even though he wishes to take off his shirt and enter his bed, he performs his ablutions and begins to wait for the time to say the night prayer. Today was a long day and he is tired, but Nabi Khan’s organisation has achieved all it hoped. A message had come from Pakistan that if they could arrange this spectacle – the proposal had been sent to Peshawar last month – then they’d have funding and support for other greater missions, culminating in the eventual taking of Usha, Nabi Khan’s home base somewhere to the south of the city. Though nothing was made explicit, the message that came down the Khyber Pass from Pakistan was from a former Pakistani Army officer by the name of Fedalla. He h
ad been at the ISI, the Pakistani spy agency, but when Afghanistan was attacked in 2001, he had resigned in protest because the Pakistani government had chosen to side with the Americans instead of the Taliban. Some say he had not resigned but had been forced to leave. When the Taliban were uprooted he had smiled and said that the Americans should not exult: ‘The war hasn’t ended. The real war is about to begin.’ He is renegade, they say, a rogue. He and other like-minded individuals in Pakistan are indispensable in the jihad against the Americans and their Afghan supporters. The message he had sent ended with an exhortation not to lose heart, never to give up the struggle against Islam’s enemies:
When Nimrod built a pyre to burn Allah’s prophet Ibrahim, the hoopoe carried water in its beak and released it onto the flames from above. An onlooker, some Dick Cheney of his time, asked the hoopoe whether it thought the two drops of water would put out the mighty blaze. ‘I don’t know,’ replied the bird. ‘All I know is that when Allah makes a list of those who built this fire and those who tried to put it out, I want my name to be in the second column.’
Casa listens to the muezzin and spreads the prayer mat on the floor. Night has fallen and the call to the last prayer of the day has begun to issue from the minarets. The mechanism of the Islamic world functioning with precision.
3
Out of Separations
THE SOUND OF AN APPROACHING VEHICLE brings Lara to a window. A tree quivers and shakes in the glass pane, its leaves outlined in bright light against the sky. Walking away from the book she has been reading and the lamp that burns in an alcove beside her chair, she emerges from the house to meet the Englishman in the darkness. She stops upon drawing near and, burying her face in her hands, begins to weep silently. She hears him cover the distance between them. Placing her face on his chest she releases the sobs, her hands clutching the lapels of his jacket, the fabric drenched in smoke. When he did not return yesterday she was certain he had died somewhere. The long hours of imagining the absolute worst, too afraid to approach the radio.