The Wasted Vigil (22 page)

Just about here last night—this wall with its painting of a woman on a horse playing a portable harp—he had decided he couldn’t go in to Lara and had continued towards his own room, overwhelmed suddenly by shame and regret—he must be the last thing on her mind in all this disorder. He also wondered how much of the previous night was just her need to feel safe, a desire for security. Perhaps she was in shock. But then he heard the door open behind him.

“I have just phoned James Palantine again,” he tells her now. “He’ll be in Usha tomorrow.”

She nods. Dressed in white.

“You know you have to be prepared for the worst?”

“Yes.” She is looking straight at him, unflinching, then she turns away, busying herself with some objects in an alcove. He brings home newspapers at the end of the day and she is lining the shelves with yesterday’s atrocities and small hopes. Most of her face is out of sight. Just a part of an eyebrow is visible, the dark-brown hairs that are fine like embroidery silk—a bird’s wing in flight.

“It’s my twelfth day as Marcus’s guest.”

“I wish I’d come to the house earlier.”

“Marcus must feel his home is so crowded all of a sudden.”

“He doesn’t mind.”

She turns to look at him and smiles.

He moves towards her but stops and they both look towards the door because someone is going by outside in the corridor. Though there is no need to hide anything from Marcus, they are awkward at the thought of having to reveal this to him.

Marcus had been concerned for him when—Zameen and Bihzad having disappeared from view, the Soviets having been defeated—he went back to the United States, placing telephone calls to Afghanistan, visiting, writing.

Marcus worried that he might be grieving too much for Zameen and the boy, that he wasn’t progressing with his life. Once when David mentioned a girlfriend called Angela, he was very suspicious, saying didn’t you say last time her name was Angelica.

Somewhere along the way he had picked up the ability to endure isolation. There were no lovers, only moments of love. It seemed enough. And also he was young and under the impression that—living as he now did in a secure Western country, a place whose rules he knew—he was more or less in control. But he didn’t yet know the laws of time. He thought he could waste opportunities or let them go by for now and find happiness or something close to it later. That caught up with him suddenly. A shock. Marcus was older and wiser and knew that some things can’t always be guaranteed even in peaceful lands.

When he eventually did marry, Marcus remained distrustful. Wasn’t sure whether he could believe him. The divorce four years later must have confirmed it for Marcus: David had finally decided to wrap up the fiction he had created for him.

·                           ·                           ·

As he drives through Usha he knows its people are dreading the thought that the Night Letter came from Nabi Khan, fearing a return of the days of the civil war, Nabi Khan and Gul Rasool reducing two-thirds of Usha to rubble in the early 1990s, killing a third of its population as they fought for supremacy, five hundred rockets fired into various parts of Usha in a single day. To visit certain streets was to realise that only the sky remained unchanged there.

T
HE
B
UDDHA
, Marcus remembers as he approaches the stone head, had denied the existence of the soul.

It’s mid-morning and the boy is asleep at a distance from the statue, as still as an effigy.

It was here in Afghanistan that the Buddha had received a human face, the earlier representations of him having been symbols—a parasol, a throne, a footprint. A begging bowl. The Greeks in Afghanistan gave him the features of Apollo, the god of knowledge, the god who repented. The only Asian addition to Apollo was a dot on the forehead and the top-knotted locks.

A meeting of continents. When he described the Muslim Paradise, Muhammad in all probability drew on the memories of the Byzantine palaces he had seen during his pre-prophethood days as a travelling merchant.

It seems that the young man has been looking at his old notebooks. Marcus picks one up from the alcove. Qatrina and Zameen and he had loved everything about books. In tissue paper, in cardboard boxes, in paper cups they would locate the scent of stationery, the odour of libraries.

He turns the pages and it all comes back. Cis-3-hexanol smells of cut grass, he recalls with a pang. How can he count the things that are now lost? To him. To this country. Are the forty-seven names by which a lover may address the beloved preserved somewhere? The tablets of etiquette. And the one vital sign, specific to each situation, which exhibits a person’s character and intentions:
My friend had hesitated before entering my house, so I knew I could trust him.
Does anyone recall the blue-black curls and arabesques on the water, the yards of meandering lines, when kohl floated away from the eyes of the women washing their faces at the dawn lake? And is this remembered? As though it were the moon cutting into their sleep, the men of Usha had woken one night to discover pillars of shimmering gold descending on them from the mountain range, a midnight breathing in the air as they stared at the hundred columns of light drawing near, as unnaturally real as a dream—and then the women, for it was they, approached and lifted the fronts of their burkas and revealed that the entire reverse side of each garment was studded with fireflies, one for every square inch of the fabric, the women’s skin flickering. The wives had gone away and captured these specks of frayed light and come back like living lanterns, the fluorescence streaming through the cloth. Their skin reacted provocatively wherever the wing of an insect brushed against it with any firmness, desire entering the hearts of the men at the sight. The husbands had fallen quickly asleep upon returning from the labours of the world a few hours earlier, fatigue bubbling in them like soda, the exhaustion that at times made them resent even having to drag their shadows around. And if there was anger in any of them now at having been abandoned during sleep, they remembered to check their words because they knew that a woman decides who deserves to be called a man.

Does anyone else remember that night?

There are millions of marks of love on the earth, runes and cuneiforms on the water, on the very air. It is the wisdom of a thousand Solomons. The communal script of belonging. The First Text. In a place where not many can read or write, each person’s memory is a fragile repository of song and ceremonies, tales and history, and if he vanishes without passing it on, it’s like the wing of a library burning down.

The boy stirs on the floor. For that’s what he is. A boy. Visiting the West, Marcus was always surprised to read the word “man” being used to describe eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds. They are children, who, even if they may already know much about the world, know nothing about themselves yet. Won’t for many years.

“I thought I’d have a look at your wound,” Marcus tells him when he opens his eyes. “I wonder if we should change the dressing.”

“Why do you have this idol here?” he asks, beginning to unknot the bandage.

“It’s always been here. It is part of Afghanistan’s past.”

He just nods in return. There is a little drowsiness in him, the result of the painkillers.

“For a long time it never bothered anyone, for a very long time.” The Arabs who came to fight the Soviets had called the Afghans “donkeys,” telling them their version of Islam was a corruption, even saying they didn’t know how to pray correctly. They fired rockets into the graves of Afghan saints. “People used to come and work down here, long before you were born. This was a perfume factory.” He recalls the floor heaped with the frilly hills of roses.

“It seems to me,” Casa says, “that only a bad Muslim would remain unconcerned by this thing.” He speaks very quietly so it’s hard to detect if there is ill feeling behind what he is saying.

“The Koran itself says that the race of djinns belonging to Solomon had decorated his cave with statues.”

“Please don’t say such things.” He is visibly pained.

“I am sorry.” Muhammad had personally saved portraits of Jesus, Mary and Abraham from the Kaaba shrine while ordering others to be smashed.

“I thought you said you had converted to Islam.”

“True.”

“Then I don’t understand why you are disrespecting the Holy Book.”

“I wasn’t aware that I was. But I’ll say nothing more on the subject.”

“Thank you.”

At breakfast neither David nor Marcus had known how to react to Casa’s words. Qatrina, of course, would have gently but firmly challenged him. Sometimes it is important to
say
things, she’d claim. And although, yes, Marcus remembers change taking place in him because of what he had heard someone say, some conviction of theirs that was startling to him, he doesn’t wish to argue with the boy now. “I sometimes wonder,” Qatrina once said, “if one shouldn’t let people hear a sentence like, ‘I do not believe in the existence of Allah.’ They’ll be stunned but will go away and think about it. They might have heard about such people but to have it come from a person with a skin, with a mouth and eyes, a person who is standing at the same level as them—that has a different impact altogether. They must see that I am someone whose pulse they could feel if they stretched out their hand and placed it on my neck vein, and yet still I haven’t been struck by lightning because of what I have just said.”

Marcus examines the back of the head in silence and then reties the bandage, their three hands working together, rising and falling. Replace just one carbon atom with one silicon atom in the 1,1-dimethylcyclohexane molecule and the smell goes from eucalyptus to unpleasant. Who knows how the boy ended up with these opinions? What small thing could the others in the world have done differently for a happier outcome, what small mistake was made? Wolves exhibiting strange behaviour—caught in traps and thrashing about, injured by other creatures or by bullets, pups suffering from epilepsy—are attacked and killed by their pack members. But here everyone is human and must try to understand each other’s mystery. Each other’s pain.

He hasn’t said anything about himself except that he is an itinerant labourer from a village in the nearer ridges of the mountain above them.

He thanks Marcus for the bandage and asks if there is anything he can do to repay his kindness. Marcus tells him to just rest.

“Was it a landmine—your hand?”

Marcus shakes his head and stands up to leave.

“Does it hurt?”

“Sometimes.”

“I am sorry. What happened?”

“The Taliban cut it off.”

Casa does not miss a beat. The information not even remotely troubling or unusual to him. “You stole something?”

“Yes.”

“May Allah keep us all on the correct path,” he says and then lies down again.

When Richard the Lionheart displayed brute strength by breaking an iron bar with his sword, Saladin’s delicately sharp scimitar countered it by slicing a silk handkerchief in two. What has been lost is the desire to believe in and take pride in Saladin’s gentleness.

Marcus goes up the stairs, giving the Buddha a last glance—its stone the light-brown colour of an apple moth found in English gardens, having arrived there from Australia.

He emerges into the clean clear morning. The world is apricot light and blue shadows. In sura 27, Solomon laughs on hearing the conversation of two ants—a rare example of humour in the Koran—and there is a third-century Buddhist version of that tale with two butterflies instead of ants. It’s no point sharing with the boy the delightful essential idea that tales can travel, or that two sets of people oceans apart can dream up similar sacred myths.

And yet he can comprehend the believers’ anxiety about pollution—of not wishing to be infected or contaminated by their surroundings. On the flight back from India decades ago—he’d gone to visit the fabled suppliers of perfume raw materials along Bombay’s Muhammad Ali Road—he had discerned Hanuman and Ganesh and Radha in the shapes of the clouds below him, so overwhelming had been the sight of the Hindu gods and goddesses, so strongly had their flying and dancing forms imprinted themselves onto his consciousness. Little wonder Sanskrit poetry celebrated
the beauty of the lifted foot
and
the lotus-stalk waist.
All this hadn’t been there on the way into India. “Pollution” had occurred while he was there.

Iris-root butter from Florence. Lemon. Bulgarian rose. The wood of the Indian
oudh
tree that has been eaten by fungus. These were some of the ingredients he contemplated when he blended the perfume for Zameen—the daughter he has been missing now for longer than he had actually known her.

The sweet-smelling putchuk of Kashmir was used in Europe in 288
BC
as an offering to Apollo.

When a soldier dies his weapon is referred to by his brothers on the battlefield as “the widow.” In addition, Casa remembers being told that he must guard his gun “like his eyes.” Looking for his Kalashnikov, he begins to retrace his path from the night of the
shabnama.
He goes through the orchard, trying to see if his blood is in the dust. Not spilled, but rather given to Allah.

He shouldn’t have said anything to Marcus about the Buddha. He should rein in his words when talking to these people, must try to be pleasant. If he’s banished from here he’d have no safety.

He has to maintain composure. And he must look for his rifle.

“You have been a thought in the mind of Allah from all eternity.” With these words of encouragement the fourteen-year-old Casa and one thousand others had been sent from his madrassa in Pakistan in 1996. To conquer Kabul from the seven warring factions. To take it in the name of One True God. “History is Allah working through man,” they had been told. “You are not new to this: you are taking back what has always been yours.” In the flow of secular Christian time they would have appeared to be just a band of ragged boys, but in the corresponding year of the Islamic calendar—1417—they were warriors who were drawing their swords and throwing the scabbards aside for ever, tightening their clothes to themselves in order to fight unhindered, a continuation of a long line from Muhammad onwards, kings of tomorrow, who hated the carnage they must cause but cause it they must.