A God in Every Stone (10 page)

– I’m sorry, I’m laughing at myself. Did you learn English at school?

– The Army.

Until now the Englishwoman’s gaze had been remote, as if she were trying too hard to pretend there was nothing of particular interest in Qayyum’s face, but now she looked directly at the permanently closed eyelid.

– Mesopotamia or France?

– France. Belgium.

– Ypres?

His nod was brief, asking for the conversation to go no further. The Englishwoman stood up, rolled down the blinds, and for a time there was quiet and fragrance and shade. When she spoke again, her voice was different.

– There were ferocious arguments in London when it became known an Indian division was being deployed to France. But the old military men who had served in India insisted the loyalty of the Indian troops to the Crown was beyond question.

Beyond question. It wasn’t a phrase Qayyum knew. Beyond question. If question was the Allied line, the loyalty of Indian troops was somewhere beyond, all the way across the field without cover and up the slope where the German gunners waited.

He stepped out of the compartment, into the corridor.

The light coming through the gaping compartment door turned harsh. Viv looked out through the open doorway, through the windows on the far side of the carriage. A barren plain scattered with slate, and rock the same reddish colour as the distant hills. As if young giants had gouged them out from the hillsides and hurled them into the plains in competitions of strength. The games continuing on through the centuries. How had the landscape altered so dramatically? But when she lifted a corner of the blind the view to the north was as before – the Cophen River and fertile ground; sugar-cane fields and orchards; beyond, the terraced tops of hills dotted with the domes of ancient stupas.

At last, she had the solitude she’d yearned for since leaving London as companion to an aged spinster on her way to Karachi. Finding someone in need of a travel companion had been her mother’s idea – a way of ensuring a facade of propriety to Viv’s journey, at least until Karachi where she and old Miss Adamson had said goodbye without very much regret on the part of either, and Viv had boarded the train. Now, it was an enormous luxury to look upon the Peshawar Valley without distraction, imagining Tahsin Bey beside her, exclaiming along with her at every new sight. It wasn’t just Miss Adamson she’d had to rid herself of to achieve this but also the woman from Norfolk and her daughter in the compartment at the other end of the carriage. When she had entered the compartment the woman had taken one look at her – the V-shaped neckline which was an inch beneath the base of her throat, the short skirt, the flesh-coloured stockings, and most of all the short ‘Castle Bob’ hairstyle which Viv had daringly acquired during the sea-voyage – and conclusions had hurled themselves viciously across the carriage. In two directions, if Viv was honest. At least she was prepared to despise the laced and hooped creature silently – but the other woman had decided to embark on a lecture to her daughter, a bored child of no more than ten, about the importance of a woman’s dress in maintaining standards in the Empire. Viv fled, finding refuge in a compartment which had appeared empty when she had looked in. It was only when she entered that she saw the man, lying down with his hands behind his head, and thought, oh God, that’s beautiful. A statue of Herakles brought to life – broad-shouldered and crinkle-haired, every bone chiselled. More like a Greek hero of antiquity than any Greek she’d ever seen. But then the man woke up and turned his head towards her and – God forgive her – her heart had been struck with a cold joy: this was the Monophthalmus, the single-eyed man of India of whom Scylax had written.

Even though it was solitude she had come in search of, from the first instant she’d seen the Pathan raise a hand to his eyeless eye, fingertips barely skimming the gashes around it as if he couldn’t bear the touch of his own skin, she found herself wanting to say something to him. She had treated enough men who’d lost an eye to understand why the other eye was so chapped and reddened – this great, strong man, reduced to panicking over every speck of grit that might threaten what sight remained.

What did you think you were doing it for? was what she really wanted to ask the man who had lost his eye at Ypres. Was it loyalty to the Empire or something more mundane – travel in a second-class compartment, a pension, the promise of progressing through the ranks? She leaned forward towards the open door, watching the man, trying to imagine what she might say to him. The only sentence which came to mind was, Have you tried a glass eye? But if she said that the man would realise that his closed eyelid forced her to imagine the emptied cave within. She shuddered, remembering too much what she was trying to forget, and turned her attention back to the view.

The landscape coalesced as they approached Peshawar, the outside world a rush of fruit trees. Unexpectedly, Qayyum felt a generosity – or no, it was close to the obligations of a host – towards the Englishwoman who had been sketching every crumbling old structure the train had passed.

– Peshawar. You want to see?

The Englishwoman stepped into the corridor.

– Bala Hisar.

Qayyum pointed towards the elevated fort which cast its shadow over the Walled City. The monuments all seemed closer to each other when viewed through one eye, so he saw Peshawar as accordioned, all breathing space pressed out of it.

– The City Walls. Gor Khatri. Mahabat Khan Mosque.

His fingertip touched the window as he pointed out each landmark, and faint dots appeared. A constellation in a sky of dust.

– And the excavation site: Shahji-ki-Dheri. Where the archaeologists dig. Do you know where it is?

– No. Why do the English dig for old, broken things?

– We like to find history.

– Why?

– I don’t know.

He used to think it was humility, this readiness of the English to acknowledge ignorance. But he had come to understand it was the exact opposite – to be English was to move through the world with no need to impress or convince. Was this so because they had an empire, or did they have an empire because this was so? A shadow passed across the window, turning it into a mirror. Qayyum swung away and returned to the compartment, slapping the sliding door to one side. He didn’t know what it was that was making him so angry. There was too much time and space in these days without routine, without the company of men waking and sleeping and eating at the same time as him, his life their lives. Even in Brighton he’d had that. But now, no escape from it – he was a Pashtun who had left his tribe behind in a gas cloud, in a trench, in the sightline of a thousand machine guns.

He didn’t realise the train had stopped, or that he was sitting with his head in his hands, until he heard the flint strike. The Englishwoman was sitting across from him, a long thin tube in her mouth with a cigarette at its end. She held out a silver case to Qayyum; the cigarettes inside it thinner than any he’d seen before.

– Turkish.

He took it, grateful for anything that would allow him to stay here for a few more minutes, leaving the outside outside.

– How old are you, she asked. Nineteen? Twenty?

– Twenty-one.

– If I may speak to you with the wisdom of twenty-three? Things change very rapidly; this is just the beginning.

She seemed to recognise that the words were meaningless, and when she spoke again her tone was more sober.

– At any rate, you’re home now.

– The emperor Babur said if a blind man walks across India he will know when he reaches Peshawar by the smell of its flowers.

They finished their cigarettes in silence. When he stood up to leave she rose, too, and held out an ungloved hand. He shook it, hoping his expression didn’t reveal his discomfort at her touch, more intimate than the ministrations of the nurses. He wanted to tell her his name but she might think he expected this sympathy between them to continue once they disembarked, and so he hoisted his knapsack onto his shoulders and left without another word.

July–August 1915

Viv stepped off the train into the humid afternoon. In the time it had taken to smoke the cigarette all the other passengers had exited the platform, and now the Pathan too was striding away, so there was no one to see her turn in a circle on her heels, arms up in the air to embrace the world in the manner of Tahsin Bey when surrounded by beauty. The mountains, oh everywhere, the mountains! Dark green, almost black, mountains; blue mountains; rose-coloured mountains; and away in the distance, snow-topped mountains. Twenty-five hundred years ago Scylax came through those mountains, and saw the Peshawar Valley – this stretch of earth on which she now stood. The word ‘Ours' made its way to her lips.

While revolving she had been vaguely aware of a movement on the platform, which now revealed itself to be a Pathan boy, his hair crinkled like the one-eyed man's and the Greek-influenced early Gandhara Buddhas', his almond-shaped eyes open wide in bewilderment at the spinning Englishwoman. Viv reached into her pocket and flicked a coin at the boy who caught it deftly.

– Dean's Hotel?

– Across the road. I can take you there, mem-sahib.

The view from the train had already told her that the railway tracks sliced Peshawar in two, separating the Walled City from the Cantonment. As she followed the boy out of the station it was the Cantonment they entered, with its landscape of wide roads, tree-lined avenues, church spires. Almost an English village, if not for the grand buildings set down in its midst. She pointed to the red structure set just back from the road, with its four rooftop cupolas which simultaneously represented India and the Crown, and felt it some kind of triumph when the boy identified it as the Museum.

– You've been inside?

– No. It's for the English.

– Indians aren't allowed into the Museum?

– We are allowed. But –

He raised his hands in the air, palms up, expressing the pointlessness of the Museum in his life.

– What's your tribe?

– My grandfather's people were Yusufzai.

– I've been reading about you. Your ancestors fought Alexander, at Peukelaotis.

– Pew . . . ?

– You don't know who Alexander was, do you?

– An Englishman?

She shook her head. What was the cure for amnesiacs without curiosity? The young boy crossed the road, moving with the unhurried, unfaltering steps which marked those who were natives of the sun, and Viv followed. Together they walked up a long driveway with carefully tended gardens on either side which led to the pleasing simplicity of Dean's Hotel – a whitewashed barracks-like structure which promised tranquillity and tall glasses of iced drinks. It had been recommended by a Mr and Mrs Forbes of Peshawar who Mrs Spencer had found through her cousin the Bishop, recently returned to England after more than twenty years in India. They would be more than happy to welcome Miss Spencer to Peshawar and introduce her to the close-knit British society there, the Forbeses said via telegram, though during the summer most people were in Simla. It had been a relief to discover that the watchful eyes of an aged English couple who had the Bishop's stamp of approval was all that Mrs Spencer had meant when she promised to find Viv a ‘conventional situation' in Peshawar. The truth was, the war had sloughed off so many rules that no one seemed to know any more what counted as unacceptable behaviour in women.

Viv turned the pocket of her linen jacket inside out, wriggled her fingers through the hole in the pocket lining and fished out a coin. The boy held up the coin she had already given him, and shook his head sternly at the offer of a second one, as though Viv was in danger of breaching a moral code.

– Do you know how far it is to Shahji-ki-Dheri?

– I can take you. Tomorrow morning, early?

The boy squinted up at the sun as he said it, but Viv suspected the answer actually meant he had no idea where Shahji-ki-Dheri was. Even so, the ground was rocking and her head pounding from the sun's glare magnified by the train window, and she certainly wasn't about to head out to a site right away. Yes, she said, and waved goodbye, certain she wouldn't see him again.

 

Her rooms were spacious and pleasingly modern, with electric ceiling-fans. She barely had time to notice this before there was a rapid knocking on the bedroom window, drawing her attention to a man in the flower beds holding up something which looked like a bracelet strung with red coral. She touched her wrist, thought of emerald seaweed, before opening the window. The bracelet was a length of string with jewel-like fragments threaded through it, pale burgundy speckled with dark burgundy, the pieces suggesting an entirety the size of a grape. The man – he must be the gardener, there was a basket and pair of shears near his feet – shook the string to make the fragments sway and pressed his thumb and forefinger together at the tips to indicate tiny beaks. Pointing in the direction of the second room, he made a revolving gesture with his finger and shook his head sadly.

Uncomprehending, she allowed herself to be directed into the other room. It didn't take long to understand what he was telling her – a bird had built its nest in the ceiling fan; the tiny chirping sounds which she had taken for a cricket emanated from it. If she switched on the fan it would be a massacre. The gardener, now standing outside this second room, presented her with the bracelet and placed his hands together in supplication.