by Nadeem Aslam
‘You don’t recognise me, Stepan Ivanovich. I was hoping you would.’
‘I have never met you. What are you doing in my house?’
‘People always said my brother and I looked alike, so I thought you might guess from the resemblance. You see, you have seen my brother’s face.’
‘Have I met your brother? What is his name?’
‘You never met him either. You just saw photographs of him. He was abducted by the military to force me to come out of hiding, to make me go back to Chechnya from Afghanistan. Please stay where you are. I am telling you nicely, but my four friends here won’t be as polite if I give them the signal.’
A breeze in the cypress trees and she opens her eyes. A rustle. The night has entered its second half, she is sure. She’ll stay here till daybreak, shoulder pressed against the marble slab. At the touch of the stone she experiences a sensation from childhood – a drawing that has been filled in with coloured pencils, the paper feeling slightly silky. All the colour is down there.
‘Lara.’
David has approached and is extending a hand towards her, pulling her upright and away from the magnet of the tombstone. The day Stepan died had become the first day of the rest of her life. She had only a handful of new memories until she came to Marcus’s house. Over the months she had just stepped away from everyone, coming back to St Petersburg from Moscow, where she had moved on marrying Stepan. She desired no real communication with anyone, entire days going by without her speaking to even one person.
‘Come on, I’ll take you home,’ he says.
The wind picks up grains of dust from the ground and then releases them.
‘I couldn’t bring the car because I thought the engine would wake Marcus.’ His voice is low in the darkness, bringing energy and focus to her mind with his talk of practical matters.
‘How did you know I was missing?’
‘I couldn’t sleep. Came down and the front door was unlocked. You should have brought your phone.’
In the absence of the electricity generator he charges the phones with his car battery.
‘And why not bring a light, Lara?’
‘It broke.’
‘I was on my way to the doctor’s house but then saw you sitting here. The white glow of your clothes.’
‘We have to go back the way I came, so we can take home the broken lamp.’
‘Okay.’ And as they leave Usha behind, he says, ‘We are almost half-way there.’
‘Benedikt had great difficulty trying to commit the English alphabet to memory as a child. During recitals the letter M would always come as a relief to him, indicating he was almost half-way there.’
She stops. ‘David, tell me what the three gentlemen said.’
She takes in what the visitors had claimed about the leaf from the Cosmos Oak, listens to David’s reasons for keeping the information from her.
‘So Gul Rasool might know about Benedikt’s fate?’
‘It’s a possibility. We thought we’d check first, we didn’t want to alarm or distress you needlessly. I am sorry.’
Approaching the house, she goes through the garden while he remains beside the lake, the sky on fire with the stars. Later, sitting with a dying candle at the kitchen table, she hears him enter the house from a side door, through the room that had been the doctors’ surgery. When it overflowed the patients could be found in the orchard, lying under the trees, the drip hooked to a flowering branch overhead. Marcus said it would have been appropriate if the room dedicated to touch had been turned into the surgery but that was too high up for the infirm to climb.
She goes up to his room to ask for a candle.
She is there inside its light a while later when she looks up and sees him standing against a blue and red section of the kitchen wall. In a tale she had read in childhood there was an enchanted lamp in whose light you saw what the owner of the lamp wished you to see. I’ll make you think of me.
Her hand reaches out and douses the candle he had given her.
Mind torn by contending emotions, she takes a step towards the wall in the perfect darkness, to find out.
*
Casa is going through a stand of acacia trees when he hears a small sweet-edged noise. Coming to a standstill, he lets his hearing pierce the darkness. The noise is like metal coming into contact with something, giving a small ring. A blade or iron nail. He becomes still and parts his lips slightly – a hunter’s trick to increase the sharpness of hearing. The world is full of homeless ghosts, and it is said that by the time a house has a roof on it, it has a ghost in it. He switches on his flashlight, sending its gaze – and his own alongside it – out into the night. He sees the gun pointed at him in the high grass and weeds. There are others, he now sees, ranged in a circle around him, each a black grasshopper the length of his arm.
They are flintlock guns, resting on foot-high tripods in the undergrowth, concealed in the foliage. He identifies the tripwire stretching across his path. Two more steps in the darkness and his foot would have landed on it. The gun that this taut wire is attached to would have swivelled on the tripod and fired into his shin.
The entire grove is crisscrossed by these lengths of wire. Each gun has three of them fastened to its trigger, the central coming at it from the base of the tree directly in front, and the other two reaching it diagonally. To kill jackals or wolves or wild boar, or to maim thieves. These things were first employed during the times when there was a British presence in these parts.
He raises a foot and places it carefully on the wire before him, just holding it there for a few seconds before starting to release the weight onto the metal filament. The branches and leaves of the acacia trees are moved by a sudden breeze just then. It passes and the trees are still again, as though the angel of death had flown down into the grove.
He continues to press downwards with his foot until, to his left, a gun turns towards him like a magnetised needle inside a compass. With extreme caution he lifts the foot off, suddenly aware of the weight of his limbs. A Russian PMD6 mine – just 250 grams of TNT in a cheap wooden box with a detonator – could blow off your legs. Someone he knew had stepped on one, and as Casa had braced himself to lift him onto his shoulders, he had learned at the upward swing that the man had become shockingly lighter.
Knees raised high, he goes over the wire but then stops. What is that noise, the small metallic chime? It has never really stopped, some variation of it always present in his hearing. He looks up with the beam – the light separating into shards of seven colours on his eyelashes – and sees the dagger hanging from a cord fifteen feet above him, gently swaying. There are others, dozens of them, and they flash in the canopies when the wind sends them towards the rays of moonlight pouring through the leaves. When one of them occasionally meets a branch it makes a noise.
A second trap.
A moth has appeared, as soft-looking as a pinch of rabbit fur, attracted by his light. He still hasn’t worked out how the second trap will be activated when his weight sets off some buried mechanism. The blades are released in unison all through the grove as though they are pieces from a mirror shattering overhead. One of them almost enters his flesh, cutting through the thin blanket wrapped around his body. There is a gust of wind, powerful enough that had it been daytime the bees in the grove would have been thrown off their flight paths.
When he moves forward to avoid the falling knife, he loses his balance and ends up on his knee in shock, his turban falling into the grass. He continues forward because of momentum so that his hand snags the tripwire attached to one of the guns. The result is a blinding flash and an explosion. The hot ball of lead shoots out in a shower of sparks and grazes the back of his skull, tearing off skin and tissue, the dry grass bursting into a line of flames towards him.
*
Lara’s eyes are open in the darkness as she lies beside David, his hand on her rib. She feels a measure of safety here against him, though her mind is at the dacha with Stepan in the gr
ip of his killers.
‘Who’s that out there? You said you were here alone, that your wife was back in Moscow.’
She had slipped away then, leaving the corridor and rushing upstairs to hide. They began to hurt Stepan, so that his cries would force her to reveal herself.
‘Just like my brother was tortured to call me back to Chechnya.’
Of course she presented herself to them, unable to bear it any longer, Stepan’s mouth hoarse from shouting at her to stay where she was – to run away into the snow and ice outside – and then just from screaming.
*
There are tough calluses on many areas of his skin as though part of his body is shell. He can survive this. Under the white lantern moon he runs down the alley away from the acacia grove, casting a long sharpened shadow before him. He feels the night itself had come alive to attack him back there, the air clotting into predator muscle, into bone and razor. The noise of the guns going off will bring men who will give chase. He is not sure whether the sounds he can hear are his own thoughts or something outside him. With one hand he is holding a fold of his blanket to the back of his head to staunch the blood flow, his fingers wet. Allah is on his side. We have created the human being in the throes of loss. But does he think no one is watching over him? Haven’t We made for him two eyes, a tongue, and two lips? And guided him to two places of safety in distress? He must find somewhere to tend to the wound, mustn’t lose focus. His blood bellowing in his ears. Two places of safety. He is very cold as though his skeleton is made of ice. Now suddenly he knows where he must go: towards the house that belongs to a doctor – he had pasted a shabnama on the metal signboard outside it. He’ll go and ask for – or demand – help with his injury. As he runs his head spins. The peripheries of his soul don’t feel bound within his body.
*
‘How big is the Cosmos Oak?’
‘Say that again. My mind was elsewhere.’
‘Nothing.’
David is standing at the window.
We and others like us will never stop until we have covered ourselves in glory by reaching Jerusalem and blowing up the White House, says the Night Letter.
He has dressed, and she is sitting on the bed wrapped in a sheet, hugging herself with the fingers that had gently slid into his hair earlier, when they were both searching for themselves in each other.
When he touched her he felt it was not in the present. He was as though a ghost, watching himself place his hand on her shoulder, his mouth on her thigh. Either a ghost or a memory. He is not young enough to believe that a moment can be seized, no longer a child who looked at the hundred clocks in his grandfather’s workshop without seeing that the hands were moving like scythes.
‘I’ll see today if I can find James Palantine and talk to him,’ he tells her, moving towards the door. ‘He’ll talk to Gul Rasool to find out about Benedikt.’
‘Who is James Palantine?’
‘His father, Christopher, was someone I knew, though I know him too. He is friends with Gul Rasool – an “associate” is probably a better word. He is responsible for Gul Rasool’s security. I knew Christopher Palantine back in the 1980s in Peshawar.’
‘When you were in espionage?’
A hesitation.
Both Christopher and he were. He thinks of the CIA’s motto. From the Gospel of John: And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.
He opens the door and leaves. Outside the wind rustles in the trees as though trying to speak someone’s name.
5
Street of Storytellers
DAVID HAS HEARD it said that no other war in human history was fought with the help of as many spies. When the Soviet Army crossed the River Oxus into Afghanistan in December 1979, secret agents from around the world began to congregate in the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar. It now became the prime staging area for the jihad against the Soviet invaders, rivalling East Berlin as the spy capital of the world by 1984.
By then seventeen thousand Soviet soldiers had been killed, and David had been living in the city for two years. Because it was once the second home of Buddhism, the city could count Lotus Land among its almost forgotten names, the peepal tree under which the Enlightened One was said to have preached continuing to grow in a quiet square.
The City of Flowers.
The City of Grain.
It was transformed into a city filled with conjecture, with unprovable suspicions and frenzied distrust. Everyone’s nerves were raw and everyone had something hidden going on. For most of its history it was one of the main trading centres linked to the Silk Road, and now the United States was sending arms into Afghanistan through here. Wherever David looked he could find evidence of the war in which those weapons were being used. Makeshift ambulances filled with the wounded and the dying raced through the mountain passes towards Peshawar, carrying at times children who had been set alight by Soviet soldiers to make the parents reveal the hiding places of guerrillas. Dentists filled cavities with shotgun pellets in Peshawar.
Having trained with the CIA, David now had an office in the Jewellers Bazaar, his interest in gems an ideal façade. He had met Christopher Palantine during the Islamabad embassy siege back in 1979, when Christopher had put forward the possibility that he might like to answer a few questions upon returning from his forthcoming trip to Afghanistan. To gain information about the Soviet Union, the CIA had been known even to question the pilgrims who arrived in Mecca from the central Asian republics, the Saudi Arabian government allowing this because of the abhorrence it felt for Communism. And David too had agreed readily to Christopher’s request. By the time his sentient life began, a hatred and fear of Communism was in the air an American child breathed, and it could have remained as just subconscious animosity, but there was the matter of Jonathan’s death. The Soviet Union had supported Vietnamese guerrillas and had thus played a role in the disappearance and probable death of his brother. He was fourteen years old when the news came that Jonathan was missing presumed dead. Even the festive occasions would now be sad ones because Jonathan wasn’t there, and everything reminded David of him. He wept into the crook of his arm standing in front of the house: as soon as they reached the age of twelve, both he and Jonathan were allowed in the mornings to take the car out of the garage and down this very driveway while their father collected his coat and briefcase. As the days passed without further news of Jonathan, his father gently began to ask him whether he would be able to control his tears – the two of them had to give strength to their mother. But a fire of immense intensity burned inside his young body. Having trapped a coyote in the woods one day he began to hit it with a club. Who gives a fuck if this is wrong. He needed release, and, as though he wished to obliterate the evidence of what he had done, he continued to beat the animal long after it was dead. And for the rest of my life I am going to do everything I can to fuck up the Reds.
But that was then. By the time he came to Peshawar as an employee of the CIA, his opposition to Communism was the result of study and contemplation. Not something that grew out of a personal wound.
He was in Peshawar as a believer.
*
An almost blind white-haired poet lived in the apartment next to David’s office in the Jewellers Bazaar in 1984, having fled death threats from both the Communists and the Islamic guerrillas in Kabul some months earlier. For most of the day he sat cross-legged on a threadbare rug on the floor, surrounded by books. A god of immutable stone, the entire earth his plinth.
David had slipped into his apartment to check for listening devices: any number of people could have wished to spy on him – the KGB, Pakistan’s ISI, the Saudi Arabian spy agency, or the KGB-trained Afghan intelligence service that at the height of the conflict would swell to thirty thousand professionals and a hundred thousand paid informers, maintaining secret bases in Peshawar, Islamabad, Karachi, and Quetta. The jihad was at its fiercest then and had anyone wished to gain access to a conversation taking place in David’s offic
e, it would have been a case of just piercing the wall in the poet’s apartment with a silenced drill and inserting a microphone.
He found the apartment to be free of any devices but before the month was over its occupant had vanished: while the poet was out one afternoon a five-year-old girl with her throat slit was discovered at his place. A crowd baying for blood descended on the apartment and the man was never seen again.
David learned from ________, his own source within Pakistan’s ISI, that a Pakistani intelligence officer had ordered a child to be picked up from the streets of Peshawar, brought to the poet’s place, and killed there. The mob and the police were then sent in to discover the crime. The intelligence officer wanted the place empty so he could install a tenant able and willing to spy on David.
‘So it was Fedalla who did it?’ Christopher Palantine said when David told him.
‘Yes. He was among the ones I suspected.’
Five years had passed since Fedalla and his friends had assaulted David in Islamabad, and David had recognised him when he ran into him at a meeting with the Pakistani military personnel not long after coming to Peshawar with the CIA. Back in 1979 Fedalla had been a senior captain aching to make major, which he now was, heavier in both face and body. David waited for his chance and then confronted him but Fedalla denied all knowledge and memory of the assault in Islamabad.
‘You have to move out of the Jewellers Bazaar fast,’ Christopher told David.
David acquired premises in the nearby Street of Storytellers, the street that in ancient times was the camping ground for caravans and military adventurers, storytellers reciting ballads of love and war to the amassed wayfarers and soldiers. It extended from east to west in the heart of the city, and in April 1930 British soldiers had massacred a crowd of unarmed protesters there, a defining moment in the struggle to drive the British out of India. When the protesters at the front were felled by shots, those behind had come forward and exposed themselves to the bullets, committing suicide in all but name, as many as twenty bullets entering some bodies. The massacre continued from eleven in the morning till five in the afternoon, court martial awaiting the soldiers who refused to pull the trigger.