The Wasted Vigil (23 page)

Swarms of their Datsun trucks with heavy .50 calibre machine guns, cannons, anti-aircraft guns and multiple-barrelled rocket launchers mounted in the beds—all supplied by Saudi Arabia and the ISI, the lovers of Allah—had swept into Kabul. The former Communist president—who, as the head of the Afghan secret service, had sanctioned and overseen the torture of thousands of Afghans during his time—had sought shelter in the UN compound, thinking it sacrosanct, but five Taliban had just walked in during the night, the guards having fled earlier at the sound of the gunfire from the city limits.

Beating the president and his brother until they were senseless, the Taliban bundled the pair into a pickup and drove to the darkened Presidential Palace. There they castrated him and dragged his body behind a jeep for several rounds of the Palace, and then they shot him dead. The brother was similarly tortured and throttled to death. Just before daybreak Casa’s convoy arrived at the scene and—because it was important to terrorise the inhabitants of the city into submission—he assisted in the hanging up of the two swollen and bloodied cadavers from steel-wire nooses on a traffic post, just a few blocks from the UN compound.

He is about to emerge from the orchard when he sees that the old man and the woman are there a few yards ahead of him. Retreating to a safe distance he watches her face through the branches, the leaves glowing bright from the sun. He feels engulfed in a green fire as he looks at her. Anyone can envision Paradise, can try to clothe the other side with the colours of this world. But whenever during his time as a taxi driver the Western passengers questioned him about the Islamic afterlife, their prurience was an offence to him. He didn’t know a single Muslim whose first thought on hearing the word “Paradise” was
Seventy
-
two virgins.
The trials of the world were so immense and harsh that committing sins was unavoidable, and so on being granted entry into Paradise a believer was first and foremost glad to have been spared Hell.
That
was the first thought, and the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth. Everything else came much later, including the demands of that thing which was the first thing the angels created when Allah asked them to mould Adam out of clay.

Parental figures. Women of Lara’s age are what he looks at most closely when he gets a chance. Avoiding the disturbing faces of the younger ones, thankful when the burkas kept them out of sight during the Taliban regime. A residue from childhood—when he was without any sense of time, when he thought adults had come into being the size they were—there is a faint trace of envy in him even today when he sees a boy accompanied by his mother. Her hand must deliver anaesthetic as well as pain when she slaps the child over a misdemeanour.

He wonders about the magnitude of the sin he is committing by looking at Lara’s face, even though his thoughts are pure. A wish in him to prolong the tenderness he is suddenly experiencing in his breast. A mother. An aunt or older sister or cousin. He tears himself away from the comfort at last and turns back, to find another path towards the lake.

Lara and Marcus are spreading washed clothing onto a rope in the sunlight. There are no pegs so they are using large safety pins instead. If the pomegranates were in season, she thinks, they could have distributed them among the pockets to weigh down the clothes against the wind.

“Do you miss Britain?”

“I think about it, yes. It’s only natural.”

On one of her white sleeves, not fully bleached, one-third of a pale orange-coloured blossom is visible.

“We went almost every year at one point. Zameen knew the Lake District, knew Edinburgh and London nearly as well as she knew Mazar-i-Sharif and the Buddhas of Bamiyan.”

“The Yorkshire moors.”

“The woods full of bluebells.”

“When David and I are gone you’ll be alone here once again.”

“Did you know Turner used sketches he made of the Yorkshire moors when he painted Hannibal’s army crossing the Alps?”

“Do you have family in England?”

“A painting of immense power. A sweep of blackness above the soldiers. The stragglers being picked off by the savage mountain-men . . . The book of his pictures is nailed in the corridor on the second floor. Later when he produced a canvas about the victory at Waterloo, there was no glory to be seen there either. Just the dead bodies lying on the battlefield with wives and sweethearts searching among them. And this was the
winning
side.”

Only now does he lift her hand to his lips. He kisses the fingers, cold from the wet clothing. “Thank you for being worried about me.”

“I’ll go back in a few days no doubt.”

“There is no reason why you can’t come and visit me again.”

She nods.

“And after you have gone back to Russia, David will be alone too.”

She looks at him, seeing his grin, the pulse of benevolence in the face.

He goes to sit on the threshold, and she joins him minutes later, the light filtering through the hanging clothes. She watches him smoke his one cigarette of the day. A bit of tobacco rolled by him in kite paper. They can be pink or blue or white.

“How could a perfume maker smoke?”

“Smokers actually smell better than non-smokers.”

“That’s illogical.” She smiles.

“Not at all. The carbon monoxide in the cigarette blocks the enzyme in the nose that breaks things down—so the smell lingers longer than normal.”

“Next you’ll be telling me there are perfume makers who continue with their profession even after losing their sense of smell.”

“There are such cases.”

She laughs. “Like Beethoven continuing to compose after he lost his hearing.” She looks up into the sky. A cloud appears and dissolves even as she watches—a flimsy wisp, it is gone so thoroughly she finds herself doubting a memory a few moments old. “My Stepan used to smoke. I made him give up.”

“You needn’t feel guilty about David.” He kisses her hand again. “We must live.”

“I wasn’t always like this.”

“Let me imagine.”

“When I was much younger. If I was happy you’d know it, and the same if I was unhappy. Didn’t really believe in silent or passive suffering.”

“The Russian Soul, and all that. Right?”

“Tell me more about Qatrina.”

“For a long time I didn’t know where she was buried. They wouldn’t tell me.”

“You won’t see her again?”

“Neither of us believed in an afterlife. When you are dead you decay and become part of the earth. It is no disrespect to the dead to say that their bodies have been consumed by creatures in the soil. It makes us cherish this life and this world more. That is much better than the talk about eternity and the hereafter. Death is
not
greater than life.”

“I would have liked to have seen the ninety-nine pictures she did.”

“Gone.” He raises his hand towards the sky.

“Why that subject?”

“She represented us humans doing all the things that Allah is supposed to do. Her comment on the non-existence of God. We don’t have souls, we have cells.”

“There is a tradition of the Buddha having ninety-nine names.”

But his mind is elsewhere. “It took me years to locate her when I came back from exile. I looked for her, journeying through deserts and forests, along limestone cliffs and granite boulders. Gul Rasool had abandoned her in the mountains, and she went from place to place. Trying to practise her profession as much as she could. Tired like me of the colour red. Everywhere there was the civil war.” He places the cigarette on a pebble, and rubs his scalp with his fingers. “It then seemed unreal that I had found her, that we two had been overlooked by death and were together in this house once again. During the years of her captivity by Gul Rasool, she said, his fighters in a hashish haze had beaten her for marrying a white man. She’d sneak off to give medical treatment to the villagers whom Rasool and his guerrillas had wounded for not giving food and assistance to them. She used mountain snow as anaesthesia for amputation after battles with the Soviets. Temperatures low enough to freeze battery acid. Similar things had happened to me with Nabi Khan. But we now counted ourselves among the lucky, with dynamite and rockets and grenades exploding all around us. Then one day the civil war stopped and the Taliban arrived in Usha. Nineteen ninety-six.” He shakes his head, looking at her with his light-filled eyes. “But enough of sad things.”

Life in Usha was blasted-out and silent because of the war between Nabi Khan and Gul Rasool, but the Taliban put both of them to flight within days. And now—only hours after gaining control of Usha—they began whipping women in the streets for showing their faces. They banned smoking, music, television, kite flying, ludo, chess, football. There were bonfires of books and videos and audio tapes. They stood on the sides of the roads arresting men who didn’t have beards, taking them to jail until the beards had grown. They ordered shops to close at prayer time, and in the first few hours they nailed a singer of devotional music to the mulberry tree in front of the mosque, for not revealing where he had buried his instruments. Qatrina, on her way to the clinic, tried to intervene and was struck in the face by a young man—so hard she thought he’d shattered her cheekbone—and told to go home and not to venture out from then on. He had raised his hand in the air and held it there for a few seconds instead of bringing it down to slap her. He wasn’t hesitating, he was stalling to give her time to become afraid of the coming blow.

They were mostly poor foot soldiers from primitive and impoverished backgrounds. Vulnerable and easy to control, it didn’t take much effort to work them up into frenzy over what they had been taught to believe as religious truth, and the domination over women was a simple way to organise and embolden them.

They asked for all windows to be painted black so no one would catch a glimpse of a woman. Earning a living was declared inappropriate conduct for females, resulting in arrest for insubordination against Allah’s will. Trying to escape a Taliban beating for exposing her feet, her burka not being long enough, a young woman had in her terror run in front of an oncoming Taliban jeep. She bled to death in front of Marcus’s clinic because—being male—he was not allowed to administer to her. Women became afraid of catching even the smallest of illnesses: left untreated, it could grow and cause death—and Marcus did see a twelve-year-old die of measles.

They had banned schools for girls immediately but later they forbade them even for boys, and no one could do anything. Men walking by averted their eyes and quickened their pace if a woman was being lashed in the street—if they tried to prevent it they would be set upon. It was best to see as little as possible. Afghanistan became a land whose geology was fear instead of rock, where you breathed terror not air.

Despite this monstrous thraldom, however, Qatrina and Marcus continued to see patients of either gender in secret whenever they could.

Visiting a patient’s home one day he noticed in a corner the large wooden chest in which Qatrina had kept the ninety-nine paintings. The chest was among the many things missing from the ruined house by the lake when he returned from exile in Peshawar. On seeing it now Marcus moved towards it and opened it: the paintings were still in there, still beautiful like jewels. She would paint a picture, allow the paper to dry, and then dip it into a tray of water to dissolve away some or all the colour. After it had dried she would paint for a second time and again take away part or the whole of the pigment in the water bath. The process could be repeated as many as ten or twelve times. On occasion she added an amount of colour to the trayful of water before lowering the picture into it, so that the entire composition was suffused by a very pale redness or by a reticent haze of saffron. A sustained shimmer of blue. Layer by layer she would build a complex painting over many weeks.

The man of the house said the pictures belonged to him but Marcus hauled the chest to the door, appalled at the lie, and out there he looked for someone who would help him transport it back to Qatrina at the house. He and the man were arguing in the street when a Taliban vehicle pulled up. The pair were taken to the mosque.

He had no way to prove that the paintings were his and so it was decided that on Friday his hand would be cut off as punishment for theft.

The Taliban did not know how to deal with the pictures—each bore one of Allah’s names in Arabic calligraphy, the Compassionate One, the Immortal One—but the words were surrounded by images not only of flowers and vines but of other living things. Animals, insects and humans. They wanted to tear out these details but couldn’t because the various strokes and curves of the name took up the entire rectangle, reaching into every corner, every angle.

A man slapped Marcus, expressing everyone’s feeling of rage at the quandary the pictures had placed them in, and then they had him taken to a small chamber at the back of the mosque. Jars of the best rose essence had been given by him to be added to the mortar when this extension of the building was under way years earlier, still fragrant. He emerged blinking into daylight two days later, weak with hunger and thirst. It was Friday. He had been handcuffed—the thought with him the previous two days that one steel hoop would just slide off when the hand was amputated—and now they walked him out towards the large crowd gathered at the side of the mosque. A woman in a bloodstained burka was on her knees in the dust at the centre of the circle formed by the crowd. Her hand must have been cut off, there was blood all around her, but then he saw that both her hands were intact where they emerged from the folds—and he recognised the wedding ring on her finger. She was Qatrina and she had actually just carried out an amputation. The blood was that of the victim. There was a scalpel in the dust. She must have collapsed and now, rising to her feet and turning her head, she let out a scream on seeing Marcus, realising what lay ahead. A man came and retrieved the amputated hand of the earlier thief from the ground. He held it above the heads of a cluster of children who laughed and tried to grab it as he encouraged them to leap up higher and higher. He went away with it: according to Muhammad’s instructions the thief was to wear it around his neck for the next few days. The crowd was chanting the Koran. She tried to run away but the black-clad figures barred her way, pointing her towards the block of wood drenched in redness, glistening in the sun. They brought Marcus to the block, which was a round stump cut from a mulberry log. And a man with large hands, fingernails the size of pennies, reached towards him and held his left hand down on the bloody wood. She was screaming defiance, hurling aside the tray on which there was a butcher’s knife and several glass syringes. Lignocaine, he thought, the local anaesthetic. Mixed with adrenaline, to constrict the vessels and reduce blood flow, preventing haemorrhaging. There was a woodworker’s small saw and a rust-speckled pair of scissors.