The Wasted Vigil (16 page)

“You live here by yourselves, the two of you?”

She held out her hand for the drawing.

He listened as she began to speak about her lost parents, and then, his heart breaking, about a young man who as a boy had been so beautiful he had had to be veiled.

“He was shot by the Soviets. I was with him that night, and that was the last time I saw him. I thought he was dead but I have since learned from refugees who have come from Usha that he had actually survived. I don’t know where he is.”

One night when David had been standing above her sleeping form in the darkness, having gained access to her place to see if she was involved with intelligence-gathering or surveillance, he had heard her say a man’s name in her sleep.

It was that of the missing lover, he now realised.

She wanted his help in finding these three, she herself—being a woman—lacking the ability to move as freely in this place.

As he took his leave her little boy moved towards the kitchen area and, thinking himself unobserved, put back onto the shelf the knife he’d kept concealed upon his person during the entire visit; David had seen him pick it up a few moments after his mother opened the door to him.
What have they been through?

A few evenings later as he was leaving the office he noticed that the door to her place was ajar, something unusual for that hour. He stood listening and then went up slowly. He raised his hand and knocked. Spoke her name. And when there was no response he looked in.

She was sitting on the bed with her back towards the door—the kid asleep, hardly any light from a weak lamp on a table. He could hear the sobs clearly.

“Zameen,” he said but she did not turn around. The impression he had had of her was that she was quite self-sufficient and tough: after fire she probably wouldn’t be ashes, she’d be coal. But this was darkness and solitude. The hidden side of the courage required from her daily.

He spoke her name again.

She turned to him but there was no recognition. He could have been the noise of the breeze against the window.

He stayed there until she had exhausted herself and then he watched as she took up a pair of scissors and began to cut herself out of her clothes, ready for sleep but still in a daze, unable to find the correct path for the given destination.

Her clothing fell from her in pieces.

“Zameen,” he said in a half-voice, afraid she might hurt herself.

He stayed where he was until she got into bed in just her white shift, and then he withdrew and spent the night in his office. Only when he heard her lock her door around dawn did he go home to the apartment he rented a few miles away.

Before the month was out he found the man she was looking for, in one of the refugee camps closest to the border with Afghanistan. He was there on an unrelated matter when a likeable person came forward and began to help with the translation because David was experiencing difficulty with certain dialects.

As they talked, it became apparent that his name and details were the ones Zameen had given David regarding her lost lover.

He didn’t tell him she was looking for him.

He arrived back at the Street of Storytellers and before he knew it an entire week had gone by without him having said anything to her either.
I’ll do it this afternoon. I’ll do it tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.
Her son was becoming fond of David, frequently loud with delight around him, the boy who was born under a thorn tree while she was making her way towards Peshawar, and, yes, he had begun to notice signs of attraction in her also. He went back to the refugee camp twice and talked to the young man. It turned out he was a believer in Communism despite the fact that the Soviets were tearing apart his land.

He didn’t know what to do.

I’ll tell her tomorrow.

He came into her place to see the mother and child out on the small wooden balcony. It was raining weakly, a kind of mist that coated everything, and they were leaning towards a nasturtium plant, observing something with great concentration. She waved him to her, the boy immediately leaning against him when he joined them, a rumble of thunder in the far distance. He saw how on each nasturtium leaf the minute dots of moisture joined up until they were recognisably a drop of liquid, balanced perfectly and brightly in the centre of the circular leaf for a while. But then, in a matter of seconds, it became so overgrown that the leaf stalk could not support it: the leaf began to sway and finally tipped the bead to the ground, becoming upright again for the entire process to be repeated.

She smiled at him—presenting this, one of the unasked-for delights of existence, to him.

His conscience ached.

Today let me stay here, I’ll tell her tomorrow.

C
ASA OPENS HIS EYES
to see the giant face suspended above him, the first light of dawn falling gently onto it. He lifts his head off the floor and looks around. He remembers descending the steps in the darkness a few hours earlier, coming to a halt upon seeing the stone object in the centre of this space. A contour of it had caught the edge of the beam from his flashlight. He trained the light on it and saw that it was the face of a Buddha. He approached it and spread his blanket on the ground, with difficulty because his head was numb even though the bleeding was being kept in control with strips he had torn from the blanket. There had been no response to the knocks he had sounded on the doctor’s house in Usha and then he had decided that he must make his way to the cemetery. When he managed to get there the three motorbikes were gone—his companions had had to flee without him. The gun going off in the acacia grove had alerted the inhabitants of Usha to the presence of a thief and then the
shabnama
must have been discovered, the place in an uproar.

He doesn’t know where he dropped his own Kalashnikov. After spreading the blanket on the floor beside the stone head he had unknotted from around his waist the cloth that had been his turban. He lay down under the fabric—it is actually his shroud, everyone always taking theirs with them on arduous operations, to signal their blissful willingness to die.

Five days ago, the man called Bihzad was sent to bomb the school not because Casa and the others were cowards themselves. They knew that a greater mission awaited them, the coming battle for Usha.

He must get up now and find his way back to Jalalabad.

He tries to sit up but as in a bad dream he cannot manage it. He would at the very least like to choose another spot to lie on—somewhere not so close to this idol—but he feels drained of all force, his mind askew.

He lies there aware of the giant features hovering above him in the half-light.

The almost-closed eyes.

The smile.

Lara is half-way down the staircase when she notices the figure. He is asleep pressed up against the painted wall so that a shrub with small yellow flowers is growing out of his left hip, the Buddha’s decapitated head a few yards away from him. She has never been able to find any sign on the stone of the bullet marks that are said to have bled gold. But sometimes she imagines that being nailed to the ceilings in the house had made the books drip brilliance onto the floors in each room.

She takes her eye off the boy only upon gaining the topmost step and then she rushes out into the avenue of Persian lilacs, the avenue of chinaberries. David’s car, always parked here under these trees, is moving towards the lake, taking him to Jalalabad for the day, and she can see Marcus emerging from the kitchen to add a glass to the basket of washed dishes she had left out to dry in the morning sunlight.

David tells the two of them to remain outside and goes into the factory, returning five minutes later.

“He has an injury, a two-inch wound,” he tells them. “Has lost a lot of blood. He says he was attacked by a bandit last night, up in the mountains. He came down the ridges and stumbled in there, probably losing consciousness.”

Lara and Marcus peer down to where he sits immobile against the wall, the side of the head resting against the flowers. He is thin, dust on his face and clothes and hair, and there is a pad of blood-soaked fabric tied to the back of the skull. A red butterfly three-quarters of the way up the wall makes it appear as though a small quantity of his spilled blood has become airborne.

David brings the car back to the factory and then goes down to lead the stranger up into daylight, supporting him by feeding an arm along the back of the ribs at one point but the young man gently uncouples himself.

“I think you should take him to Jalalabad,” says Marcus after he has had a look at the wound, managing to ease off the fabric stiff with caked blood, his hair glued into it. “Have the hospital look at him. He’ll need stitches—one or two.”

The young man sits on the back seat without a word or glance towards anyone, taking a few sips from the sugar-rich tea he has been brought. The back of his shirt is streaked with blood, but he declines with a raised hand when Marcus offers to find a new set of clothing for him. He hands back the cup without lifting his eyes and then settles down and brings his white cloth over himself. His only other communication is the nod when David tells him in Pashto that he is being taken to the city.

They go through Usha, the place subdued this morning because of the
shabnama.
In other villages, the Night Letters tell people to plant opium poppies, a crop forbidden by the new government, but here in Usha, Gul Rasool is a poppy farmer already despite the fact that he is in the government. As in Vietnam, as in the Afghanistan of the 1980s, where the CIA ignored the drug trafficking of the anti-Communist guerrillas it was financing, the activities of Gul Rasool have to be tolerated because he is needed. Last month he was among the dozens of male politicians who had hurled abuse at a woman MP as she spoke in parliament, shouting threats to rape her. Harassed and fearful, she changes her address regularly and owns burkas in eight different colours to avoid being followed.

The Night Letter is from an organisation that chooses to call itself Building the New Muslim—the bombing of the school was carried out by Building the New Afghanistan. It could be the same organisation: if they have found rich backers outside Afghanistan, people who have Islamic goals, they must have asked for the name to be amended. This isn’t about one particular country—it is about the glory and aspirations of Islam. Saladin fought for Allah and for Muhammad and so he won Palestine, but today’s Palestinians are fighting just for land, even if it is their own land, and therefore losing.

The Night Letter is offering a financial reward of two hundred dollars to any inhabitant of Usha who might help in the war they are promising against Gul Rasool for—among other things—having allowed girls to be educated here. Yes, it could be Nabi Khan’s organisation. He must be alive. The money is an unbelievable sum for most ordinary people in Usha and some could be tempted by it, seeing it as a way out of poverty.

The eyes of David’s passenger remain closed throughout most of the journey towards Jalalabad, though he occasionally takes a sip of water, one of those bottles that had landed around Marcus’s house. As soon as they near the city, however, he wants to be let out of the car, suddenly all vigour and purpose, darting looks to his left and right. David tries to reason with him, an exchange lasting many minutes with the car brought to a halt by the side of the road and with David reaching a measured hand back to stay him, telling him a doctor should take a look at his injury.

“I have no money for the doctors because the bandit took everything.”

“The hospital is just around the corner.”

“I must leave.”

Does your mother know you are intent on wasting the blood she made out of her own blood, her own milk?
Someone had said this to him after an injury here in Afghanistan, but it’s too intimate a thing for him to say to this boy.

“I want to leave.”

“Don’t worry about the money.”

He consents eventually and they drive in through the hospital entrance, past the gunmen protecting the building.

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.”