The Wasted Vigil (29 page)

Malalai’s new position was regarded as sinister in Usha, people doubting if a woman could ever be counted on to take correct decisions, the cleric at the mosque wondering if Abraham’s
wife
would have been prepared to cut their son’s throat at Allah’s bidding.

After the cleric refused to acknowledge her requests for an audience, Malalai—hidden in a veil—went to the mosque. The man was incensed when reminded by her that the Queen of Sheba—a female ruler of a state!—was mentioned in the Koran. But he countered it by saying the Queen of Sheba was most probably not a human being, that she was half-djinn and had goat’s legs.

His attitude was menacing and so she did not have the courage to remind him that Solomon was aware of the rumours about the Queen of Sheba, and that he had had crystal strewn across the floor when she arrived to meet him. She thought it was spilled water and she lifted the hem of her gown to reveal human feet.

Subtly, Malalai continued to govern her tribe from behind the walls of the large house. After all it was Khadija—the brilliant well-connected forty-year-old businesswoman—who had discovered Muhammad, peace be upon him. Khadija had given the poorly educated twenty-five-year-old shepherd gainful employment for the first time in his life, and was the first to believe him when he claimed Gabriel had visited him to announce his prophethood.

One afternoon, when the sun was at its most powerful, a maid woke Malalai and informed her that a traveller was at the door, asking if he might be loaned a mat and the shade of a tree to say his prayers. Those on the road were exempt from worship—not for nothing were
Allah is ever disposed to mercy
the very last words of the Koran—so she was deeply impressed by the traveller’s devotion. She had him shown into the men’s quarters, and told the servants to point out to him the niche where the family Koran was kept so that, after he had humbled himself before Allah, he may recite a few passages for the recently deceased members of the household, for the safe return of the pilgrims from Mecca.

And later the sixteen-year-old, finding herself drawn to the stranger’s voice, ended up sitting just outside the room where he read the holy words, the head of her sleeping baby son resting on her knee. After the recital, seeing as he was a traveller, she began to ask him questions from the other side of the door: Whether it was true that the earth was indeed round. Whether it was true that night did not fall simultaneously across the entire world.

With two servants holding up a curtain between them, she accompanied the traveller into the bamboo grove within the walled enclosure of the large house. The sun was setting and it was cooler now. He regaled her with stories of his travels: how in Baghdad he had come across a treatise on Prophet Muhammad’s slippers, peace be upon him; how he had seen Mother Eve’s hundred-foot-long grave in Jeddah; how Noah’s father, Lam, was buried right here in a forty-eight-foot-long grave near Jalalabad—he’d appeared in a dream to Sultan Ghazni in the eleventh century, expressing regret that his resting place lay unhonoured and forgotten; following the instructions given to him in the dream, the Sultan arrived at a place within this valley and plunged his sword into the ground, from where a red fountain emerged, and there he built a shrine visited and revered to this day.

The bamboos stirred their leaves in the breeze around them, and that was where they were found by the returning pilgrims an hour or so later: she had been overpowered by the man, and the stabbed servants were lying unconscious near by.

He fled. She told them it was rape but no one believed her. The cleric at the mosque demanding she produce—as Islamic law required of a violated woman—four witnesses who must be male and must be Muslim to confirm that she had not consented. This was Allah’s commandment and could not be questioned.

The servants fortunately did not die, and they corroborated that they had been attacked—but one of them was female and the other, though male, was a Turkoman unbeliever so his testimony was void. Women and infidels were forever plotting against the Muslim manhood. In any case Malalai and her lover could easily have harmed the servants as a ruse in case they were discovered.

With an axe she entered the bamboo grove one night and—despite the fact that her body was bruised and her collarbone was cracked from the beatings she had received during the previous days—tried to fell the trees. She managed to flatten six before she was discovered and stopped. She would not explain what she was doing, but whenever she had the opportunity she went in there with axes and saws—and once even a small knife—to hack at the bamboos. They knew she had lost her mind when she revealed that she planned to construct flutes out of the bamboo stems. The grove had witnessed her assault,
it
knew she was innocent, and sooner or later there would be found a flute that would speak with a human voice—announcing the truth of that afternoon to the world around her.

The traveller, an investigation revealed shortly, was in fact a man from within Usha, an ancestor of Nabi Khan, a feud beginning between the two houses that would continue through the years and decades.

Malalai herself, sitting surrounded by piles of discarded flutes—they had all remained silent about what they had seen—was eventually sent out of Afghanistan to a far shore of the family, to the Waziristan tribal belt, the area that would one day become part of Pakistan, and where Marcus’s father was killed in the 1930s.

The centuries-old Buddhist paintings on the walls of many of Afghanistan’s caves were covered in mud to prevent them from being damaged by Muslim invaders, white circles pockmarking the ceilings where soldiers and hunters had delighted in using the images for target practice. The memory of visiting the caves with Qatrina and Zameen was where Marcus got the idea of coating the walls of this house. In the city of Herat lives the only living Afghan artist to have been trained in the style of Bihzad, and he was summoned to the governor’s building when the Taliban took Herat: he had laboured for seven years in the building, lovingly painting the intricate scenes re-creating the classical glory of his city. He was made to watch stunned with grief as the walls were completely painted over.

The water in the bowl is a deep brown now, mud from a square foot of the wall transferred to it. He replaces it with clean water, looking out of a window when he hears the sound of an Apache helicopter in the sky. He returns to the wall and continues the work. Like Marcus’s father, Malalai died in the 1930s. But she was eighty, unlike his father, and she had spent most of her life as little more than a servant, someone abused and worthy of contempt because of that event in her distant past.

A series of aerial assaults by the British was under way in Waziristan at that time, and she died because her masters dragged her from her bed one night, dressed her in men’s clothing, and tied her to a post in an open field—to be able to say in the morning that the British were flying around in aeroplanes murdering innocents.

The masters had kidnapped a Sikh girl from India, and despite conferences with the British administrators, and their increasingly ominous threats, had failed to hand her back. At first plainly denying any knowledge of the matter, the kidnappers refused to attend the meetings altogether eventually, becoming belligerent and saying no government had the right to prevent them from abducting infidels—the girls and boys for pleasure, the men to be forcibly circumcised and converted to Islam—or from raiding into India and Afghanistan. All this was a way of life to them, an expression of freedom, as was the shooting of government officials and the patrolling soldiers.

Malalai, tied to the ground in crouching position, could not scream because her mouth had been gagged. There was no one to come to her aid in any case. She had soiled her clothing with terror, knowing that with the arrival of dawn the air raid would begin, if jackals and wolves and the djinn hadn’t consumed her by then. She was little more than carrion.

The British had recently begun to use aerial bombardment in the Frontier to curtail some of the tribal wildness, and though there was much outrage at the League of Nations, and in the world press, the bombing was not indiscriminate. Leaflets, printed on white paper, had been dropped from an aircraft all across the tribe’s land nine days earlier, warning that aerial proscription against the tribe would result in a week unless the Sikh girl and her kidnapper and a fine of a hundred rifles materialised. The leaflets—a sheaf of them had landed around Malalai when she was fetching water from the well—also defined a safe area, an enclave big enough to hold all the people of the tribe with their flocks, but not big enough to graze the flock or live comfortably in.

Twenty-four hours before the aerial raid, thousands more leaflets were dropped, these on red paper as a last warning. Once the allotted time passed, anyone caught outside the enclave was to be attacked from above with machine-gun fire and twenty-pound bombs, though no buildings were to be targeted unless seen to be used for hostile purposes. Animals sent out to graze were also killed, the corpses attracting wolves and vultures.

The tribes in the neighbouring areas had been warned not to shelter outlaws or join in the fight. But it was clear to the kidnappers that the other tribes had to be persuaded to do just that. That was when it was decided that Malalai should be taken to the forbidden zone during the night, her mouth silenced.

L
ARA OPENS THE BOOK
and begins to read.

I think that all people—those living,
those who have lived
And those who are still to live—are alive now.
I should like to take that subject to pieces,
Like a soldier dismantling his rifle.

It is the translation of a Russian poem she knows. The letter
a
in the word “alive” is missing—taken away by the iron nail—but the eye supplies it from memory.

She is in the room at the top which is filled with smeared velvet-like light at this hour. The mosaic she had assembled of the two lovers is still here, beside her chair. She lowers her arm when she hears David enter the room, feeling suddenly that it contains no strength, and she puts the book face down on the fragments, imagining for a moment the pages becoming slightly coated with the coloured dust of the plaster.

“Lara?”

She can’t look towards him.

“I just spoke to James Palantine. He’ll make inquiries with Gul Rasool.”

And he adds: “I can tell him to forget about the whole thing if you wish.” She looks up to see him pointing towards the phone in his pocket, the thing that never stops ringing when he is not in Jalalabad, echoing off the walls.

“No, I’d like to find out. You would want to know if it was Jonathan, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

She stands up and goes to sit on the bed, and he joins her.

“As I grew older my face began to resemble Jonathan’s. At nineteen I looked like his photographs when he was nineteen. It was like they’d buried him in the mirror. If they buried him at all, that is.”

This intimacy between them. The moments when any third person becomes a stranger and to talk seems pointless. But they are talking anyway, their voices low, as they do during the nights, he asking her if he can come see her in Russia, whether she would visit him in the United States. There is still a tentativeness on her side, but these are in any case the initial days. He’ll wait.

Her head is on his upper arm, and she turns sideways to see his face as he talks.

He has told her how last year he remembered something from his childhood for the first time. He and Jonathan were watching a programme about African wildlife on TV. Their mother was in the room also. The elephants had to set off in search of water because there was a great drought and they risked death if they remained. But one of them had just had a calf that couldn’t even stand up properly, let alone walk. The mother kept trying to get the infant onto its feet, pulling it up with the hook of her trunk, propping it against her leg. The rest of the herd was already a mile away in the distance, and Jonathan and he were both shouting at the screen, for the dumb animal to abandon the calf and race towards the others. Their mother became a little involved too, looking over her spectacles at the screen, telling them not to be heartless. “But she’s going to die if she doesn’t go!” they told her. She didn’t have an alternative but she didn’t want the calf abandoned. It took some time but, prodding and lifting, the elephant did manage to get the calf to walk and they set off together in the direction the rest of the herd had gone. And to think that he and Jonathan—a stunned and shamed silence descending on them now—were going to let the calf die in the burning desert. A few minutes later he found Jonathan, who was about thirteen, weeping in the bedroom.

·                           ·                           ·

A small restless bird alights on the window sill—its tail and wings and head each shifting into three different positions in little more than an instant—then flies away.

At dawn she had wished him to see her in her one set of coloured garments. She entered the tunic and then her hands disappeared under it to tie the drawstring of her trousers at the navel. She looked down to distribute the pleats evenly around the two legs. She wore the clothes for a few minutes and then carefully put them away. It was as though she had draped herself with some images from the walls in this house. Her face altering against all the hues on the tunic. Her mouth a rich aroused ruby.

Now, beside him, she wears nothing but the thin necklace of beads. Over the previous days the most fleeting contact with her has come as a sinuous discovery. Zameen had taught him about the eroticisation of jewels and ornaments here in the East. Gold. Ivory. Emerald. Even the roadside aluminium and glass. All this against the glory of a woman’s bare skin. It is there on the paintings on the wall in this room, as well as in countless statues of temple dancers and goddesses with waist chains and bangles, with jewelled pendants resting between breasts. Brides are covered in jewellery and there is a sexual connection with the night to come. The poetry of these lands is aware of this.
Night arrives and pulls off flowers from the jasmine grove. As when a groom helps his bride take off her ornaments in the bed chamber.