The Wasted Vigil (41 page)

David’s mouth is next to Casa’s ear, and he is whispering something fast. He is hoping to win over his murderer with an embrace.

T
HEY HAVE FALLEN BACKWARDS
onto the earth. Managing to free his right hand from David’s grip, Casa feels along the belt tied to the waist. Through gritted teeth he says something, his face parallel with the sky visible through a gap in the foliage. The last words David hears.

The blast opens a shared grave for them on the ground.

T
EN OR SO BUTTERFLIES
go past Marcus’s knees and they double in number when they begin to fly over the lake’s reflecting surface. The sky has a milky lustre above him, the pale blue of lines ruled on the pages of a child’s exercise book.

He is dragging the canoe to the water’s edge, the various woods of it gleaming in the late-morning sun. The water seems to take it out of his hand, attempting to uncouple it from his grip. He has to make sure his feet don’t slither sideways. It looks raggedy. The ends of the ribs protruding where they haven’t yet been trimmed. It has not been sealed—with that gum sticky to the touch like certain leaf buds before opening—but it floats. Keeping his hand on the prow he walks with it into the water until he is submerged up to the navel, standing on rocks within the water. He lets go and with his one hand tries to lift a heavy rock out of the lake. Failing, he takes a deep breath and crouches. His head is in the liquid now. He manages to work one round stone out of the bed and then slides it up along his thighs, into his lap. Cradling it, he stands up out of the diffused shimmer and then carefully sends the black stone over the edge of the canoe. The bark vessel sinks half an inch deeper into the lake, the water sieving in. This was how the Native Americans stored the canoes when they were not in use, burying them in the water.

He looks towards the house, the balcony of the room where Lara is. He saw her walking from the direction of Usha earlier and took her into the house, helped her upstairs, stopping on the seventh step of the staircase to pick up the book that had become dislodged and landed there. The blood on her clothes was, she said, that of Casa and David. She wouldn’t bathe in the house, rejecting the idea of the drain, and had stood in the lake instead so that all the redness would become part of the roaming water. The sundazzled surface. One year soon after the Soviet Army invaded, the air around the house had turned yellow, thick billows of the colour arriving on the breeze, falling from the sky, every heart fearful at the sight because there had been reports of attacks with chemical weapons. In the end it turned out to be the pollen-rich droppings of a large swarm of wild bees. The colour settled on this water thickly enough for Zameen to be able to write her name in it.

He knows Dunia will never be found. Her face of unstudied nobility. The silent earrings she was still wearing from the time of the Taliban regime, when women would hold up a piece of jewellery and shake it to see if it made a noise. No one will know what happened to her. The talk in Usha will be that she must have run away with a lover. Her father will hold Marcus responsible for her disappearance. Perhaps violence will come from him towards Marcus.

He goes down into that water again, amid the drowned rays of the sun, and brings out another rock. Then another. He does this carefully, imagines the boat tipping and pouring the stones onto him, a landslide of his own making. Now and then he is forced to look towards Usha, the sound of an explosion. Rockets. Gunfire. Street fighting in the sewers and alleys of Usha. He imagines flattened homes, with hands protruding from the rubble as though still trying to grab hold of and stay the rampaging storm. The heroes of East and West are slaughtering each other in the dust of Afghanistan.

Both sides in Homer’s war, when they arrive to collect their dead from the battlefield, weep freely in complete sight of each other. Sick at heart. This is what Marcus wants, the tears of one side fully visible to the other.

Over the next ten minutes the boat sits lower and lower on the water. There are small insects on the lake not far from him like words suspended on the surface of a page. When the water is just three inches from the lip of the canoe he walks away from it, the lake falling from him in dense liquid sheets.

He stands watching it as it takes in an increasing amount of water and eventually disappears. He feels he has driven seventeen nails of various sizes into a book to make it stay on the ceiling.

Nothing but a set of oval ripples is on the surface. They become more and more circular as they travel away from the centre.

10

A
LL
N
AMES
ARE
M
Y
N
AMES

A
BREEZE
comes along the migratory route of birds and enters the orchard. The Buddha’s head slowly rises off the floor in the perfume factory, the first movement it has known for several centuries.

The knitted harness of chains, almost a net, lifts it through the gap in the glass roof and brings it out into the September sunlight, the avenue of Persian lilacs—the chinaberries—thrashing in the wind that is being generated by the aircraft’s two mighty sets of rotor blades. In March there had been flowers but none of them remain, so only the foliage and the clusters of green berries are being dismantled onto the Buddha.

The stone face hangs from the twin-rotored military helicopter. As they hover and then move sideways and gain in height, Marcus looks down and catches glimpses of the head. The features smiling above the suddenly visible vista. His own body—the portion of earthly dust assigned him—feels insubstantial in comparison with all this. The soldiers have strapped him to the metal wall beside a window though they themselves know how to move with confident safety within the hulking machine. The mountains and hills rise and fall on either side of them. Sometimes the shadow of the flying machine is tiny—moving like a gnat along the floor of a deep valley—but at other times it is almost life-size, projected onto the side of a mountain that has suddenly appeared beside them.

“Do you live alone?” one of the soldiers had asked Marcus.

His family and friends are gone. He is alive but has been buried in many graves.

A letter came from Lara in July. The fragments of painted plaster she arranged on the floor in the golden room are still there. Looking at the mosaic after she went back to St. Petersburg, he realised that one piece was missing, the piece on which the faces of the two lovers made contact. She had taken it with her to Russia. That and one of the perforated books. A kinship of wounds. It was
The Golden Fleece
picked at random.
The dead may speak the truth only, even when it discredits themselves.

Rivers and small bright lakes pass under them—pale-yellow light held together by water. Some of the hills down there are dotted with red: the rocks have been daubed to warn that the vicinity hasn’t yet been cleared of landmines.

Marcus and Qatrina had informed the National Museum at Kabul when the head was discovered during the building of the perfume factory decades ago, and they had attempted to take it away but hadn’t managed it. In the end Marcus’s house was officially designated an annexe of Kabul Museum, a dozen or so visitors managing to make it to the house every year to see the colossal Gandhara sculpture. During this summer Marcus has persuaded the Museum to make another attempt to transport the statue to Kabul, most of the priceless collection once housed there having disappeared or been smashed during the wars.

He can see a shepherd resting under a tree in the plains below. His animals have spread themselves out in such a way that they form a living imprint of the tree on the ground, making maximum use of its shadow.

From the folds of one of the hills in the next valley a rocket is fired at the aircraft.

Marcus watches it climb, almost in staggered time, incrementally. Its low speed seems unconnected with the massive tail of white smoke issuing from its rear, hinting at its great weight, at the effort involved in raising it—the many deaths it contains. Then another comes, both of them missing the target.

The American boys around him lower the Buddha onto a low hill, and he too alights. The metal bird rising and veering away to investigate, the soldiers telling him they’d prefer it if he weren’t with them. He watches them disappear towards the possibility of a battle.

He is alone with the smile. Suddenly now it feels perishable, hard stone though it is, without the protecting walls of his perfume factory. He can see all around him, the arid dusty plains, the walls of green or blue but mostly khaki hills, the mountains beyond, and he can hear the sounds of a skirmish from the other side of the nearest hill. He sits in the shade cast by the statue head, his back leaning against the chin, his ear next to the mouth.

The school has remained shut since Dunia’s disappearance but it’s reopening soon.

“Majrooh?”

A man had approached him last week and called him by the name he had taken to be able to marry Qatrina.

“You won’t recognise me, sir, but when I was much younger I used to come to your house to borrow books. Your daughter and I . . .”

Marcus nodded and, encouraged, the man took a step towards him.

“I have come back to Usha to take over the school.” He smiled, and pointing to his motorbike on the other side of the street—a child with an artificial leg was sitting on the back seat—he added, “I was riding past just now and thought I recognised you . . .”

Marcus sets out in search of water, finding a patch of dampness at the base of a hill and knowing how to use the very tips of his fingers to gently persuade the spring to come out into daylight. The water quivers in the curved palm of his hand, as frightened as a small captured lizard. Nabi Khan’s raid on Usha had been unsuccessful but he has promised another in a recent
shabnama.
That day American soldiers engaged in a fire fight near by had got involved and had requested aerial assistance, the giant bombers arriving like lions roaring in the sky. Making the earth shake as they dropped bombs from above. Afghan officials speculate that conservative Saudi Arabians, as well as certain rogue elements within the Pakistani government and military, are financing the attacks. Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world.

The human eye is trained to look for symmetry, so the fact that someone has a missing limb is obvious. Seventeen ordinary citizens of Usha died in the battle that morning in March, and twelve people—including James Palantine—lost their legs or arms. Ringing from Western countries, families and lovers always ask the soldiers about their limbs first, about their hands and feet.

He comes back to the statue and waits.

The stars—one for each life lost during the wars of the previous decades—are out by the time the young men come and lift him out of the landscape. A deep indigo evening. Half a moon with a coloured halo. There is an up-pouring of glow from the land as though in response to the moonlight.

The Buddha is lowered in the grassy field beside the Museum, the building now secured by the British Army. There are three tonnes of Afghan antiquities in a warehouse near Heathrow, reliefs, bowls and sculptures that were illegally removed from Afghanistan at the behest of various warlords and chieftains, waiting to be brought back to these impoverished galleries.

Near by are the two ruined horse carriages once used by the royal family, the insignia and medallions still bright on the otherwise weather-beaten sides and doors of the larger carriage. The six-petalled moulded flower at the very hub of the wheels is surrounded by the words
PETERS & SONS LONDON
arranged in a circle.

A few hours of sleep later, he looks out from the window of the room he has been given inside the museum but he cannot see the stone face.

A dawn made of mist.

When sunlight appears and the soldiers allow him out he walks through the lit haze, feeling his way towards it. He stands looking at the giant lips as though waiting for the answer to a question. Apollo, the lord whose oracle is at Delphi, who neither speaks nor keeps silent but offers hints.

He enters the building and asks if someone would be kind enough to take him to the city centre in a while. He is meeting someone there who could be Zameen’s son.

June 2003–August 2007

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The verse on
“With a Swivel”
is by Yevgeny Vinokurov (tr. Daniel Weissbort,
Post-War Russian Poetry,
Penguin Books, New York, 1974). The poem on
“Tell the earth-thieves”
is “Note on the Terazije Gallows, 1941” by Vasko Popa (
Collected Poems,
Anvil Press Poetry, London, 1997). The italicised line on
“
Night arrives and pulls
”
is from Aamer Hussein’s
Turquoise
(Saqi Books, London, 2002). The two lines that end the section on
“It’s almost dawn”
are a paraphrased couplet by Jigar Moradabadi.
Casabianca,
the poem, is by Felicia Hemans. Mark Bowden’s essay “The Kabul-ki Dance” (
Road Work,
Atlantic Books, London, 2004) informs the paragraphs about the flying sorties over Afghanistan in chapter seven. Another helpful book was
Inside the Jihad
by Omar Nasiri (Basic Books, New York, 2006). The author is grateful to Beatrice Monti della Corte of Santa Maddalena Foundation in Italy, where a section of this book was composed in 2005. Thank you to the Lannan Foundation, Dr. Naeem Hasanie, the gentlemen at ICUK, to Muneeb and Mughees Anwar. A special thanks to Victoria Hobbs and A. M. Heath. And to Salman Rashid—
Khizr
and guide during travels in Afghanistan’s cities. Kathy Anderson. Diana Coglianese. Maya Mavjee in Toronto. To Angus Cargill in London and Sonny Mehta in New York.