by Nadeem Aslam
Leaving him in the waiting room for the doctor to arrive, David comes out of the building to stand under the pine trees, the Asian magpies in the branches, the crested larks. There is no breeze but a lavender bush is in constant movement due to the bees that land on or fly off the thin stalks. A small boy approaches him with a fan of Pashto, Dari, and English books for sale – 101 Best Romantic Text Messages as well as a volume entitled The CrUSAders, and also Mein Kampf translated as Jihadi.
When he sees boys like these he sometimes finds himself wondering if they are Bihzad, forgetting that time has passed, Bihzad grown up out there somewhere.
The border with Pakistan is just three hours in the eastern direction. Continue through the twenty-three miles of the Khyber Pass and you arrive at Peshawar. The Street of Storytellers.
Where he had met and fallen in love with her and she with him.
He now knows how places become sacred.
‘Where is the boy’s father?’ he asked her. The kid who had won every arm-wrestling competition with David in recent weeks.
She shook her head, and he knew not to proceed. More than a month had gone by since he met her but sometimes he felt he was still little more than a neighbour. And for almost two weeks now he had known that the man she really longed for was only a few miles away in a refugee camp.
‘Who pays for this place?’
‘An aid agency. They pay for me to be here so women from the refugee camps can come here and embroider in secret.’ The work he thought might be something to do with spying. ‘It’s secret because we fear the fundamentalists who have constructed mosque upon mosque in the refugee camps and have forbidden work and education to women, so much so that a woman in possession of silk thread is branded a wanton, it being the Western aid organisations that began the embroidery scheme to give war widows a chance to earn a livelihood. The fundamentalists tell them they must beg in the streets – that this is Allah’s way of using them to test who is charitable and who isn’t – or send their little boys out to be labourers in the bazaars. We have to be very careful in case the women are followed here by them.’
Imagining her loneliness, he had felt wretched, but the man she wanted in her life – the Communist – would only add to her difficulties, he was sure. He decided to visit him for the final time to ask him as openly as possible about his plans and prospects.
‘I don’t care if Communism has failed in Russia,’ he told David. ‘It remains the best hope for a country like Afghanistan. Never mind food, some people in my country can’t afford poison to kill themselves. There’s no other way we can put an end to the feudal lords and the ignorant mullahs who rule us with their power and money, opening their mouths either to lie or to abuse.’
‘You don’t know what you are talking about. Communism has killed millions upon millions of people …’
‘Let’s just wait until it has killed a few thousand more – the bloodsuckers who control the place I am from – then I’ll be happy to denounce it.’
People like these had to be told that Communism wasn’t the only way to end inequality. ‘We don’t have that kind of people – the priests and landlords – in the United States either …’
‘Then why are your people actually supporting them here, giving them money and weapons?’
As he talked to David he was keeping his voice low: around them were victims of Communism, and David could not imagine what they would do if they heard him talk in that manner. In 1917, one of David’s great-uncles, a copper miner sympathetic to the far-left Industrial Workers of the World, had made known to everyone his opinions about America’s recent entry into the war. He’d call President Woodrow Wilson ‘a lying tyrant’ and denounce US soldiers as ‘scabs in uniform’, unmindful of the fact that the state of Montana, in the grip of patriotic fever, was increasingly intolerant of dissent. During the course of one September night, a small group of masked men grabbed him from his house and left him hanging for all to see at daybreak. A piece of paper with the number of the Montana Vigilantes of the nineteenth century, 3-7-77, was pinned to his body, with the initials of four other men threatened with the same fate.
No, David could not allow this man and his misguidedness to endanger Zameen and the boy.
He could see that the man’s ardour was genuine, but it was directed at falsehoods. David had learnt as much as he could about his great-uncle’s death and had decided that – an outrage and a crime though his hanging was – he could not agree with the man’s views. They would have resulted in the United States becoming entangled in the barbed coils of revolution, like the rest of the countries that had adopted Communism and its offshoots. Revolutions that eventually devoured their children and turned half the planet into a prison. They were the early years of the century and he admired the optimism of people like his distant relative, was even proud to have such a person in his bloodline, someone who cared about equality and justice. But at the opposite end of the century, the consequences were there for all those who wanted to see them. In David’s time, an end to inequality and injustice meant having to contain and undo those outcomes.
‘Just wait until the Soviets are defeated,’ David said. ‘Then we’ll help you Afghans sweep away the landlords and mullahs.’
‘The Soviets are helping us now. Building roads, hospitals, dams – which your people keep destroying.’
They weren’t building anything. It was all either thirdrate or just for show, and either way they were billing Afghanistan millions for it.
‘The Soviets are flying thousands of our children to Moscow to be given free education. If I had a child I’d send him happily.’ And he said that he and a small group of like-minded young men and women had come together and were planning to journey back to Kabul in a few weeks’ time, to offer their services to the Communist regime.
David walked away from him.
And then the next afternoon, Christopher Palantine informed him that the Soviet military would be carrying out an air attack on the refugee camp where the young man lived. The refugee camps of Peshawar were the hub of the anti-Soviet guerrillas, where commanders and warriors came to regroup and recuperate after fighting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. Tested beyond endurance, the Soviets had violated Pakistani air space to bomb the camps many times before – and that afternoon they would be doing it again.
He and Zameen had kissed for the first time last night, standing in the dark wooden staircase that led to her door, and it was she who had initiated it.
Having learned of the bombing raid in advance, Christopher said, from a mole inside Afghanistan’s spy agency, the CIA had arranged for journalists and television cameras from several major cities of the Western and Muslim world to be present in Peshawar, so that the news and images of the carnage would spread around the world.
He sat under a massive tree with Christopher Palantine, in a saint’s shrine not far from the Street of the Storytellers, the holy man’s grave covered in a lively skin of tiles. He knew there was not enough time to get to the refugee camp and warn the man. So he sat there with his friend and watched the huge crowd in the courtyard before him. They were mostly women. The shrines of the Muslim saints were places journeyed to more by women than men, Zameen had told him, their despair greater, their lacks more essential and urgent. They would come from various places in the land and stay for days around a sacred grave, their saint often the only person in this life they could question with impunity and even accuse of neglect in the language and manner of a wronged lover.
When he got back to his office a note had been slipped under the door. Only he knows how he managed to get to that camp within the sixty or so minutes that remained before the arrival of the Soviet jets. The note, from Zameen, said she’d received word that the boy from her teenage years was living in that refugee camp and she was going there to meet him.
He got there before her, watching her arrive and then leading her and the child away from the site. The place was of course a furnace, smoke issuing fr
om it in enraged billows as though demons had been set free by the bombing. All paths to the part of the camp where the man had his room were impassable, row upon row of burning homes. Leading them away from the deaths of the innocents, he looked over his shoulder. The civilised world would see this and condemn Soviet brutality, Moscow made to rethink its policies.
*
That night David became her lover and within days she was half his world.
*
He watched her pour water onto her shoulder when she bathed, the water spreading in a thin layer on her skin and then breaking up into shapes that resembled countries and islands, resembled continents. She lifted her hair, revealing the length of her neck, and said she and her school friends had been shocked when the prince climbed up the rope of Rapunzel’s hair. ‘We had all read Ferdowsi’s Book of Kings. When the daughter of the ruler of Kabul lets down her hair from a high window, her suitor Zal is unable to bear the thought of using it as a substitute rope.’
The only part of him that seemed alive was where the two of them came into contact. There was no way of identifying many of the bodies after the bombing but it was certain that no one who lived in the bombed part could have survived. And yet initially he remained afraid that the other man would turn up, recognise David and expose his deception. He had already asked her to marry him. They would keep looking for Qatrina and Marcus. And when the Soviets were defeated and Afghanistan was at peace – and her parents were back in the house over there in Teardrop – David, Zameen and Bihzad would move to the United States.
She said her father’s sense of smell was so acute he could discern a word written with colourless perfume on a sheet of paper.
The CIA required that he declare anyone with whom he had regular contact for more than six months. Soon that period was about to pass and he would have to mention her in the report he filed, though he had swept her place and knew there was no need to put her to the trouble of being under an investigation. The Agency also made the recruits sign a paper saying they wouldn’t mention to their spouses the true nature of their work, but he didn’t know of anyone who didn’t tell everything to his wife or husband – easier than having to explain those late-night meetings with agents.
It was 1986 and the war was entering an unprecedented stage: the secret services of the United States, Great Britain and Pakistan had agreed that guerrilla attacks should be launched inside the Soviet Union itself, in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the states that were the supply routes to the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. This was to be done by Afghan guerrillas, but David had decided he would go with them. As he readied himself to meet up with the group, he was aware of the nightmare that would result if an American spy was captured either in Afghanistan or in the USSR, but he was convinced of his ability to avoid detection. When it came to these matters, in adulthood he had never felt himself surrounded by forces larger than himself.
Outfitted with mortars, boats, and target maps, he and the guerrillas intended to cross the River Oxus and mount sabotage and propaganda operations inside Uzbekistan. They poured diesel over the light-reflecting paintwork of their vehicles so the dust of the roads would stick to them as camouflage. The Soviet Union’s chief cartographers had, at the KGB’s behest, falsified virtually all public maps for almost fifty years. But David and the Afghans were carrying accurate CIA maps of the region. The stars above them were like mirror signals, the rapids of the Oxus giving off a ghostly glow in the darkness, the Arabs having renamed it the ‘Insane River’ when they met it centuries ago.
As well as weapons, they were bringing thousands of Korans in the Uzbek language, a translation the CIA had commissioned from an Uzbek exile living in Germany. Islam had to be encouraged in the USSR, to make the Russian Muslims rebel against Moscow. Five days – and several explosions in key buildings and on vital bridges and roads – later, David saw a woman in a silkworm village being paraded naked through the streets. She cowered as she was beaten by men for having committed adultery, for having taken a Russian lover. The men who were whipping her were part of the clandestine group that David and the Afghan guerrillas met here in Uzbekistan. Her head had been shaved and a green cross was painted on her forehead. The men were laughing – ‘Call out to your lover to come and save you, “Sasha, Sasha, help, help!”’ There was nothing he could do to put an end to her torment – they stopped at his outraged shouts but he knew it was temporary – and he watched as a man moved forward and placed around her neck one of the Korans he had brought.
Just before coming out to Uzbekistan, he had returned from a ten-day visit to Cambodia, his search for Jonathan taking him there. Her joy at seeing him when he returned made her suggest they go to Dean’s. ‘The three of us. Let the world go hang.’ They had tried to keep their affair as secret as possible till then, fearing reprisals against her. As it was, she had lied about Bihzad to the world, never disclosing that technically he was illegitimate, claiming she was a widow whose husband had perished in the war.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
A fountain played in tiers like a jelly mould at Dean’s. She got up from their table and walked over to it. She had told him how every few weeks a man would come along the lake shore in Usha with a basket of crabs which he emptied into the fountain behind the house. The Afghans did not themselves eat these creatures, calling them ‘water spiders’, but were willing to catch them for the doctors in exchange for money or medical treatment. The crabs stayed in the stone basin until required in the kitchen, Zameen approaching the water to lift them out, jabbing competitively at their pincers with a pair of tongs.
‘Who was that?’ he asked distractedly, busy with the child, when she returned. Under an arch he had seen her exchange a few words with someone.
‘Who?’
‘The man you were talking to.’
‘I wasn’t talking to anyone.’ The voice did not waver. The voice in which she had sung Corinthians to him. And now I will show you the most excellent way.
He slowly looked up. Her face was a mask.
‘Okay.’
They continued with the meal. Hadn’t something similar happened before? She had convinced him he was mistaken, but this time he was sure. She was wearing a light-pink tunic patterned with saffron flowers, over narrow white trousers, and combined with a long stole of white chiffon resting on the left shoulder. It was she whom he had seen, even though the light was not clear over there under the arch.
Was it the Communist, had he survived the bombing after all? How will David explain to her that he kept his existence secret from her because he loved her, was afraid of losing her? By now, even to himself, it seemed an incredible thing to have done. In her anger she will turn away from him for ever, never allow him to see Bihzad his son again.
And then suddenly everything became clear. O Christ, she was spying on him. He hadn’t hidden anything from her about his activities. And now suddenly everything became dangerous. If it was someone else he would have known exactly what to do. But she wasn’t someone else.
Dropping her off at the Street of Storytellers, saying he had to do something but would be back in about an hour, he drove back to Dean’s, prowling the corridors to see if the man was still there. Aware of the tight jaw muscles, aware of the handgun under his shirt, his breath loud. He sat until dawn in that arch, then got a bed at Dean’s and woke up around noon. What now? He was meant to cross into Afghanistan in a few hours, to enter Uzbekistan through there. She knew that. Would there be an ambush? He phoned her and said the plan had changed, that he wouldn’t be going to Uzbekistan.
‘I’ll see you in a few hours.’
When he got back from the Uzbekistan excursion nineteen days later he found her apartment empty. He sensed immediately that something was wrong: the silence in the two small rooms seemed deeper than just silence. This was more than mere absence. On the windowsill nine candles had burned all the way down to small coins of wax. Day or night she would light a candle here as indication th
at it was safe for him to come up, signalling that she wasn’t in the company of Afghan visitors, the women who gathered at the place to embroider.
Her fiercest loyalty had been to these women. The one occasion she quarrelled with David had been over a matter concerning them. One of the women had just lost several relatives in a bombing the previous week. Nineteen names of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins.
‘It looked like the list of guests for a wedding feast,’ Zameen said to David.
‘How is she? Would she be okay?’
She did not answer him, moving around the apartment silently for the next few minutes, attending to various things.
He stood up to leave – it was time for the women to arrive. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I have to be, don’t I?’ she said over her shoulder, the vehemence shocking him. ‘We have to be, don’t we? Just as long as you Americans and Soviets can play your games over there – nothing else matters!’
She turned to face him, glaring from the other side of the room, eyes red and brimming with tears. Daring him to cross over to her.
The candle didn’t burn for a week after that. Then one day it summoned him. One massacre of innocents had driven him away, and another had now caused the reunion. The news that day had been terrible and she needed him. ‘I feel so alone.’
Now David sought these women out, to ask them if they knew where she was. Most of them recoiled or let out apprehensive noises when he approached them. But eventually one of them did prove unafraid. In great desperation and hurry he began to question her about Zameen, asked her if she knew who the man Zameen had denied talking to might have been.
‘I knew her very well, sir,’ the woman said. ‘So I can tell you that there is only one possibility why she could have lied to you. The newborn Bihzad was close to death when she arrived with him from Afghanistan. There is supposed to be healthcare for everyone in the refugee camps but the Pakistanis are corrupt. And the camps were ruled by warlords who wouldn’t do anything until she registered with one of their parties – the more members each party has the more money they can get from you Americans. She needed to have a card made before they would even look at him and he was dying, she needed money to save him … Can you guess, sir, how she obtained the funds? I’d rather not say it out loud.’