The Wasted Vigil (15 page)

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

S
TREET
OF
S
TORYTELLERS

D
AVID 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 office, 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.

His new neighbours in this three-storey building were clean, as was the unoccupied apartment on the level above. One day a few months later, as he was emerging from his office, fifty or so orbs of thread leapt down the steep staircase leading to that upstairs apartment, some stopping but others continuing to bounce past him, going down the next stairwell, leaping over the banister until they had fully uncoiled themselves.

The suspicion was immediate: the young woman who stood in the open door at the top of the stairs was a spy.

The hand in which she held the thread was dyed with henna, indicating the possibility that she had recently attended a wedding.

“Thank you,” she said in English after he had helped her gather the silk filaments.

“What’s your name?”

She stopped and looked back at him from the staircase, then the haughty face brightened into a smile.

“All names are my names,” she said with something like mischievousness and disappeared.

He was in her apartment the next afternoon when she went out with the child. He found nothing in there that suggested subterfuge then or during the searches he carried out on later dates.

Zameen.

A single word.

How easily a person gave his name to another, and yet how restless he was during the few hours when he didn’t know it, finding it out through methods of his own. Discovering for the first time that there could be something magical about someone’s name—a mere word but what power it held, as in a fairy tale. It was after all the first thing one learned about another. A way in, and a possibility.

At the moment of the initial encounter he had been on his way to a meeting with Christopher Palantine, and he thought of her during it. He was then away for several days, vanishing once again into schemes he’d set in motion in and around the teeming city, he and Christopher Palantine both great mavericks of that time and place, a cause of some anxiety to their superiors when they simply became invisible for weeks. But when he returned to the Street of Storytellers he synchronised several appearances at the door of his office just to encounter her, to just see her again. Once when the area plunged into darkness due to power failure, he went up to ask for a matchstick instead of going down into the bazaar. He had known when he began this work that there would be sacrifices. Loneliness was the price they paid for being who they were. And yet as he sat in the light of the lamp lit with her matchstick, he couldn’t help seeing how incomplete his life was. There were houses and establishments in Peshawar he occasionally entered to alleviate solitude, and he had a rendezvous with a certain woman each time he visited the city of Lahore, meeting her for a few hours in Falleti’s, the hotel where Ava Gardner had stayed when she was in Pakistan filming
Bhowani Junction.
But this was different, seemed to be something deeper.

He listened to her feet in the ceiling above him, following her movements.

And then one afternoon he managed to talk to her openly, running into her in the Street at the stall of a cassette vendor. Before engaging in a battle with Soviet soldiers, the Afghans sometimes inserted a blank cassette into a tape recorder to capture the sound of combat. They played these cassettes to themselves later during periods of recreation and leisure, reliving the excitement. They were for sale, the seller beginning to shout out the highlights of each cassette the moment David picked it up:

The ambush at Qala-e Sultan, April two years ago, a little-known battle but . . .

The Dehrawud offensive, October 1983, the sound of helicopters and fighter planes, the screams of the wounded, contains the famous death by torture of a captured Soviet infidel . . .

Battle for Alishang District Centre, August 1981, on three cassettes. The Soviets are made to withdraw in a hurry but they force the elders of the next village to come ask the Mujahidin for the bodies of the dead Soviet soldiers left behind . . .

He recognised the decorative motifs on the henna-dyed left hand that reached towards a cassette at the same time as him and when he looked up he saw that, yes, it was her. The recording was of a mujahidin attack at a newly opened village school, the teachers and everyone associated with it massacred.

“Something like that happened in the place I am from,” she told him in her apartment later. “A place called Usha. It means ‘teardrop.’”

He had attempted to talk to her in the crowded Street but she had shaken her head in fear, telling him in a quick whisper to come up in a few minutes.

“Why only the one hand?” he asked now.

“The henna? It takes a while to dry, I have work to do and my son to look after. That’s why I kept my right hand free. As it is I grabbed the wrong child one day in the chaos outside.” The boy was moving across the floor on his knees, pushing a toy car along.

They stood facing each other, not knowing what to say or do. She bent to clear away the sheets of paper bearing the outlines of foliage, flowers, dragonflies, and vines. They were embroidery patterns and he remembered being told how, just before the First World War, patriotic young Germans had entered the French countryside with butterfly nets, catching specimens and sketching wing patterns to take back to Germany. Encrypted in the designs of the butterfly wings were maps of strategic information, such as the exact locations of bridges and roads.

He picked up one of the sheets and looked at it. The French country people were knowledgeable about their local butterflies and soon realised the drawings were incorrect, exposing the spies before the information could be sent back to headquarters.