by Nadeem Aslam
Global Strategies Group is a British mercenary company that guards the US embassy in Kabul, and other Western firms provide security all across the country. But David has just been reading about Americans – one-time CIA contractors, or former Special Forces soldiers – who have set up private prisons in Afghanistan.
He is not sure what James’s arrangement with Gul Rasool is. He was among the Special Forces teams – the élite stealth operators whose very existence is denied by the US government – who began hunting for al-Qaeda here in the wake of September 11.
‘Are you still in the army?’
‘I am still doing what I can for my country and the world.’
‘Have you heard about these guys who are going around abducting and torturing Afghans to get information about al-Qaeda and Taliban soldiers? Keeping them in private prisons?’
James looks at him. ‘We have to be careful not to use words like “torture” in these countries. It can be inflammatory. When these people hear that word they think of people being raped to death, of limbs being cut off, of six-inch nails being driven into people’s heads – that is what the word means here normally. A cold room is not torture. Withholding painkillers from someone with an injury is not torture.’
Marcus, holding something in his one hand, has appeared on the path from the house and is walking towards their car, Casa a few feet behind him.
‘We have a new kind of enemy, David. They are allowed to read the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, as their religious and human right. But have you read it? They don’t need jihadi literature – they’ve got the Koran. Almost every other page is a call to arms, a call to slaughter us infidels.’
James watches Marcus drawing near, and now he indicates Casa with a nod: ‘Is he the one my men had a run-in with yesterday?’
‘Yes. That’s Casa.’
‘Sorry about that. But these are strange times. The Pakistanis just helped foil a plot to blow up ten airplanes above the Atlantic. Of course they used torture – they are more straightforward than us – but thousands of lives were saved.’
David himself had had Gul Rasool tortured. And what didn’t he think of doing at one time to Nabi Khan, to make him reveal where Bihzad was.
‘Who are your men?’
‘Two started out in the FBI, one was a Marine, one was in the paramilitary unit of the CIA. The closest things to the robot soldiers the Pentagon has dreamed of for thirty years, from before I was born.’
Robot soldiers will not become hungry, they will not be afraid, they will not forget their orders, they will not care if the soldier next to them has been shot. But it’s impossible to teach them to distinguish friend from foe, plainclothes combatant from bystander.
‘Look what Casa found in the ground just now.’ Marcus has arrived and handed David a photograph of Zameen.
‘This is my daughter,’ he says to James who gives the image a quick glance.
David introduces them and they shake hands.
‘Won’t you come in?’ asks the Englishman.
‘I am in a hurry, sir. Another time.’
Casa has taken a few steps away from them, and then he wanders away towards the lake, stopping to bend down to smell a wild flower. Muhammad used amber, musk and civet as perfume, and spent more money on fragrances than on food. Days later, people would know he had been in a room.
‘What a noise the cranes are making!’ says Marcus. ‘There used to be many more, James, especially on the far shore. They have been passing through here for millions of years, but the war in Afghanistan – all that flying metal in the air, the bullets and planes – and then the war in Chechnya, has meant that they get lost easily, trying to change their paths.’
Marcus takes back the photograph and turns away towards the house, James assuring him he’ll visit again soon.
‘You’re building a canoe,’ James says as they walk towards the lake. ‘Remember ours?’
‘Of course. Do you know who she was, the girl in the photograph?’
‘You were my uncle, David, and then suddenly you broke off all contact. I asked Dad why, and when I was old enough he told me, bit by bit over the years.’
‘I am sorry.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘So then you must also know that Gul Rasool, the man you are protecting, had tried to kill your father. He had sent Zameen to plant the device.’
The young man nods.
‘Make sure he doesn’t find out whose son you are.’
‘Yes. But we need his help right now in fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Dad would understand perfectly. My own feelings are irrelevant when it comes to these things.’ And he adds after a pause, ‘I am not finished with him yet anyway. He too would have paid for everything by the time all this is over.’
‘I am here if you need to ask anything.’
‘Who is that guy, by the way?’ James has been watching Casa, who is busy with the canoe a few yards ahead of them.
‘He’s a labourer. He’s staying here for a while.’
James shakes his head. ‘It’s such a difficult situation. Why must the United States be the only one asked to uphold the highest standards? No one in the world is innocent but these Muslims say they are. They insist the seven hundred Jews who were taken prisoner after the Battle of the Trench were rightfully and legitimately massacred by their Muhammad. So until everyone admits that they are capable of cruelty – and not define their cruelty as just – there will be problems.’
When they draw near, Casa doesn’t look up.
‘Watch this, David. What’s his name – Casa?’ There hasn’t been a shared language between the warring sides since the Civil War, so he switches to Pashto:
‘Do you think, my dear friend Casa, that everyone on the planet will become a Muslim when the Islamic Messiah appears just before Judgement Day, and that those who refuse will be put to the sword?’
Casa straightens.
‘I have never heard that before,’ he replies. ‘You’ve been misinformed about Islam.’
AT THE HERMITAGE in St Petersburg, Lara said, glue made from the swim bladders of sturgeons was brushed onto strips of tissue and these were pressed onto van Eyck’s Annunciation when its wooden backing had had to be removed. When the glue dried and fastened itself onto the picture’s surface – onto the angel with his almost neon peacock wings, and the anxious girl – the wood it had been painted on was chipped away carefully with chisels. Leaving nothing but that layer of paint stuck to the tissue paper. It could now be transferred to canvas, the tissue with the sturgeon glue then dissolved or peeled off from the front. And playfully Lara had suggested some days ago that that was what they should do to the walls in Marcus’s house. Transfer these images onto canvas or paper, stick large sheets of tissue dipped in some gentle glue.
‘Imagine the bricks and the stones have vanished and just the pictures stand – a paper lantern the size and shape of a house.’
Marcus smiles at the thought as he swabs the wall with a wet cloth, clearing away the mud from a painted balcony. There is a girl with a red-and-gold scarf tied over her eyes. Tonight she must have a tryst in the darkness so she’s practising going around the house blindfolded during the daylight hours.
On the gusts of wind he can hear James Palantine and David talking down there by the lake. Would there be more fighting between Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan soon? Caught between the two, the ordinary people of Usha have always done their best to survive. Each time there is an atrocity, they go to the house of the murdered party and say that indeed an unjust thing has been done; then they go to the house of the murderers and say that it was indeed an unfortunate thing to have happened.
The hatred between them extends into the past for over a hundred years, innumerable deaths and crimes on both sides since then, because the right to bloody vengeance is demanded by malehood, sanctified by tribal codes, and recognised by the Koran. Believers, retaliation is decreed to you in bloodshed – a free man for a free man, a slave for a slave, a female
for a female.
The abhorrence, passed down through years and decades and generations, began in 1865 when a woman ancestor of Gul Rasool, named Malalai, had temporarily found herself as the head of the tribe at the age of sixteen, the men around her having perished in an epidemic. The only males that remained alive were either little boys here in Usha or grown men away on the pilgrimage to Arabia, the journey taking several months in those days.
Malalai’s new position was regarded as sinister in Usha, people doubting if a woman could ever be counted on to take correct decisions, the cleric at the mosque wondering if Abraham’s wife would have been prepared to cut their son’s throat at Allah’s bidding.
After the cleric refused to acknowledge her requests for an audience, Malalai – hidden in a veil – went to the mosque. The man was incensed when reminded by her that the Queen of Sheba – a female ruler of a state! – was mentioned in the Koran. But he countered it by saying the Queen of Sheba was most probably not a human being, that she was half-djinn and had goat’s legs.
His attitude was menacing and so she did not have the courage to remind him that Solomon was aware of the rumours about the Queen of Sheba, and that he had had crystal strewn across the floor when she arrived to meet him. She thought it was spilled water and she lifted the hem of her gown to reveal human feet.
Subtly, Malalai continued to govern her tribe from behind the walls of the large house. After all it was Khadija – the brilliant well-connected forty-year-old business-woman – who had discovered Muhammad, peace be upon him. Khadija had given the poorly educated twenty-five-year-old shepherd gainful employment for the first time in his life, and was the first to believe him when he claimed Gabriel had visited him to announce his prophethood.
One afternoon, when the sun was at its most powerful, a maid woke Malalai and informed her that a traveller was at the door, asking if he might be loaned a mat and the shade of a tree to say his prayers. Those on the road were exempt from worship – not for nothing were Allah is ever disposed to mercy the very last words of the Koran – so she was deeply impressed by the traveller’s devotion. She had him shown into the men’s quarters, and told the servants to point out to him the niche where the family Koran was kept so that, after he had humbled himself before Allah, he may recite a few passages for the recently deceased members of the household, for the safe return of the pilgrims from Mecca.
And later the sixteen-year-old, finding herself drawn to the stranger’s voice, ended up sitting just outside the room where he read the holy words, the head of her sleeping baby son resting on her knee. After the recital, seeing as he was a traveller, she began to ask him questions from the other side of the door: Whether it was true that the earth was indeed round. Whether it was true that night did not fall simultaneously across the entire world.
With two servants holding up a curtain between them, she accompanied the traveller into the bamboo grove within the walled enclosure of the large house. The sun was setting and it was cooler now. He regaled her with stories of his travels: how in Baghdad he had come across a treatise on Prophet Muhammad’s slippers, peace be upon him; how he had seen Mother Eve’s hundred-foot-long grave in Jeddah; how Noah’s father, Lam, was buried right here in a forty-eight-foot-long grave near Jalalabad – he’d appeared in a dream to Sultan Ghazni in the eleventh century, expressing regret that his resting place lay unhonoured and forgotten; following the instructions given to him in the dream, the Sultan arrived at a place within this valley and plunged his sword into the ground, from where a red fountain emerged, and there he built a shrine visited and revered to this day.
The bamboos stirred their leaves in the breeze around them, and that was where they were found by the returning pilgrims an hour or so later: she had been overpowered by the man, and the stabbed servants were lying unconscious near by.
He fled. She told them it was rape but no one believed her. The cleric at the mosque demanding she produce – as Islamic law required of a violated woman – four witnesses who must be male and must be Muslim to confirm that she had not consented. This was Allah’s commandment and could not be questioned.
The servants fortunately did not die, and they corroborated that they had been attacked – but one of them was female and the other, though male, was a Turkoman unbeliever so his testimony was void. Women and infidels were forever plotting against the Muslim manhood. In any case Malalai and her lover could easily have harmed the servants as a ruse in case they were discovered.
With an axe she entered the bamboo grove one night and – despite the fact that her body was bruised and her collarbone was cracked from the beatings she had received during the previous days – tried to fell the trees. She managed to flatten six before she was discovered and stopped. She would not explain what she was doing, but whenever she had the opportunity she went in there with axes and saws – and once even a small knife – to hack at the bamboos. They knew she had lost her mind when she revealed that she planned to construct flutes out of the bamboo stems. The grove had witnessed her assault, it knew she was innocent, and sooner or later there would be found a flute that would speak with a human voice – announcing the truth of that afternoon to the world around her.
The traveller, an investigation revealed shortly, was in fact a man from within Usha, an ancestor of Nabi Khan, a feud beginning between the two houses that would continue through the years and decades.
Malalai herself, sitting surrounded by piles of discarded flutes – they had all remained silent about what they had seen – was eventually sent out of Afghanistan to a far shore of the family, to the Waziristan tribal belt, the area that would one day become part of Pakistan, and where Marcus’s father was killed in the 1930s.
*
The centuries-old Buddhist paintings on the walls of many of Afghanistan’s caves were covered in mud to prevent them from being damaged by Muslim invaders, white circles pockmarking the ceilings where soldiers and hunters had delighted in using the images for target practice. The memory of visiting the caves with Qatrina and Zameen was where Marcus got the idea of coating the walls of this house. In the city of Herat lives the only living Afghan artist to have been trained in the style of Bihzad, and he was summoned to the governor’s building when the Taliban took Herat: he had laboured for seven years in the building, lovingly painting the intricate scenes recreating the classical glory of his city. He was made to watch stunned with grief as the walls were completely painted over.
The water in the bowl is a deep brown now, mud from a square foot of the wall transferred to it. He replaces it with clean water, looking out of a window when he hears the sound of an Apache helicopter in the sky. He returns to the wall and continues the work. Like Marcus’s father, Malalai died in the 1930s. But she was eighty, unlike his father, and she had spent most of her life as little more than a servant, someone abused and worthy of contempt because of that event in her distant past.
A series of aerial assaults by the British was under way in Waziristan at that time, and she died because her masters dragged her from her bed one night, dressed her in men’s clothing, and tied her to a post in an open field – to be able to say in the morning that the British were flying around in aeroplanes murdering innocents.
The masters had kidnapped a Sikh girl from India, and despite conferences with the British administrators, and their increasingly ominous threats, had failed to hand her back. At first plainly denying any knowledge of the matter, the kidnappers refused to attend the meetings altogether eventually, becoming belligerent and saying no government had the right to prevent them from abducting infidels – the girls and boys for pleasure, the men to be forcibly circumcised and converted to Islam – or from raiding into India and Afghanistan. All this was a way of life to them, an expression of freedom, as was the shooting of government officials and the patrolling soldiers.
Malalai, tied to the ground in crouching position, could not scream because her mouth had been gagged. There was no one to come to her aid in any c
ase. She had soiled her clothing with terror, knowing that with the arrival of dawn the air raid would begin, if jackals and wolves and the djinn hadn’t consumed her by then. She was little more than carrion.
The British had recently begun to use aerial bombardment in the Frontier to curtail some of the tribal wildness, and though there was much outrage at the League of Nations, and in the world press, the bombing was not indiscriminate. Leaflets, printed on white paper, had been dropped from an aircraft all across the tribe’s land nine days earlier, warning that aerial proscription against the tribe would result in a week unless the Sikh girl and her kidnapper and a fine of a hundred rifles materialised. The leaflets – a sheaf of them had landed around Malalai when she was fetching water from the well – also defined a safe area, an enclave big enough to hold all the people of the tribe with their flocks, but not big enough to graze the flock or live comfortably in.
Twenty-four hours before the aerial raid, thousands more leaflets were dropped, these on red paper as a last warning. Once the allotted time passed, anyone caught outside the enclave was to be attacked from above with machine-gun fire and twenty-pound bombs, though no buildings were to be targeted unless seen to be used for hostile purposes. Animals sent out to graze were also killed, the corpses attracting wolves and vultures.
The tribes in the neighbouring areas had been warned not to shelter outlaws or join in the fight. But it was clear to the kidnappers that the other tribes had to be persuaded to do just that. That was when it was decided that Malalai should be taken to the forbidden zone during the night, her mouth silenced.
LARA OPENS THE BOOK and begins to read.
I think that all people – those living,
those who have lived
And those who are still to live – are alive now.
I should like to take that subject to pieces,