Thinner Than Skin (15 page)

And what had he done instead?

The flowers in the box were the exact yellow shade of the butterfly, with the exact wingspan, and exact sheen. The man with the leather palms shut the lid of the box, and closed a half-fist around it. He extended both palms toward Ghafoor and Ghafoor cupped them in his.

I was feeling a little better.

As we prepared to leave, I found myself glancing frequently toward the tents. I noticed how shabby they were, each covered in a thin black sheet secured with sticks. The sheet flapped in the breeze and would surely leak in the rain.

Though I wanted another glimpse of the girl’s mother, I feared it. She was young, younger than me, probably younger than Farhana. She must have borne her first child—the curly-haired boy who brought us the honey—in her early teens.
Her face
. So fierce, so proud. I wanted to talk to her. What I’d say I didn’t know. But I’d developed an incapacity to do anything besides replay the angry glare she’d cast me twice, first when we headed to the lake with her daughter, then when I found the body first. It was absolutely the way I wanted to be looked at.
Damn you
. I wanted to hear it said in her voice.

Then I wanted her to like me.

Earlier today, after returning from the body to my tent, I looked for Irfan. I found him sleeping at the foothill where we’d lounged together while eating honey-dipped pears. He probably hadn’t been
sleeping much, and it was still early, but I shook him awake. I told him he had to go to the family, tell them I was sorry. He shoved me; it was very close to a punch. “Forgiving you is the last thing on anyone’s mind, you fool.”

A fool is absolutely what I wanted to be called.

I couldn’t bear to look at Farhana. She couldn’t bear to look at me. We were settling into the more bearable rhythm of avoiding each other. We were packing our things. At last, after days of listless shock, we had something to do. We threw ourselves into folding away Irfan’s tent (“Let me do it,” she snatched, eyes averted), zipping up his two sleeping bags (“Then let me do this,” I pulled), ensuring the campsite was clean (both of us pacing, gathering imaginary peels and crumbs). Busywork, the mask of the socially impotent. Keep moving, away, except … where to?

We knew we had to head down the glacier back to our cabin to pack up from there and proceed—north or south? The question was growing fat. Many questions were growing even fatter. We waited for someone to make a decision, any decision, casting surreptitious glances at one another when we believed the other wasn’t looking.

One thing was clear: the shores of the lake had grown very small. Our delay had drawn the mountains closer. They loomed over us, warning that no matter where we went, they could follow. And the tribes were also scorning us, though less surreptitiously. Of course they wanted us to leave. But they wouldn’t say it, not to us, though I found out later that they’d said it to Irfan, and he’d had to ask them, much to his disgust, for time for me to heal. “As if you and Farhana hadn’t exploited their hospitality enough.”

Throughout our last day, as we packed—there was hardly anything
to
pack, but we kept the pace, the pace was key—Irfan met with Kiran’s father, and they talked in low, rapid tones. I couldn’t imagine what words Irfan could find. Green eyes, I thought. Eyes like enormous grapes. The mother’s billowing shirt, ferocious glare, meticulously braided hair.
So young
. The baby’s brown hand on the
cold blue neck. She knew I hadn’t wanted her there, in the boat.
Kola
, she said, daring me to take an interest, to know that I was making
her
feel like the intruder.

Somehow I found the courage to join Irfan.

Kiran’s father tilted his head, now in a white turban, and folded his hands behind his back when he saw me. He had small brown eyes, a limp, and a gentle demeanor. He didn’t appear angry or fierce but entirely depleted.

They were also leaving. To bury Kiran down in the plains. They’d migrated to the upper Kaghan Valley with their cattle in April, intending to stay through the summer before returning to the lowlands, where those who’d chosen a more settled way of life cultivated maize, potatoes, and beans. This had been the way for centuries. Their cattle needed to graze in these hills before returning to the plains for the long, merciless winter. But they were cutting the season short to return Kiran to her less transient home, near Balakot, where she’d been born, perhaps like her father Suleiman, and mother Maryam, and both her siblings. It would mean the cattle would starve over winter, or, equally troubling, that they’d spend the remaining summer crossing into fenced-off fields, costing the family hefty fines and possibly even confiscation. But Kiran had to rest.

The rapid murmurs between Irfan and Suleiman involved money. Suleiman’s murmurs were lost to me, but there were more familiar sounds flowing from Irfan’s tongue than I’d bothered to hear till now. I caught Urdu mixed with the Hindko-Gujri hybrid he’d so effectively been using since our arrival, and even a little English, for instance, “crop” and “full enough.” My stomach clenched. Had Kiran understood Farhana and myself on the boat? She’d spent six summers here, around English-speaking visitors to the lake, like us. What had she heard? No, we’d spoken in code. She couldn’t have comprehended us, even if we’d been speaking her very own tongue.

Irfan was saying that there could never be full enough. He was a Muslim, and understood very well that money could never make
up for what had been lost. God was watching, and knew that he would sooner go hungry than presume to suggest otherwise. But the fact was, the family was going to suffer even worse in the coming years if their cattle died, or were confiscated. They had two remaining children to feed.

I understood enough of Suleiman’s reply to know he was insisting God would guide them. He added that if needed, neighboring tribes were there to help. To which Irfan replied that the community was a wonderful source of strength, by the grace of Allah, but there was no harm in accepting help from him, Irfan, who was no stranger to this land. As Suleiman knew, from his many years here, Irfan honored and loved the valley and its people. (Irfan’s voice cracked.) To which Suleiman replied by spitting. To which Irfan turned to me, his face red with rage, “Have you no shame? Leave us.”

I wondered briefly why no one had crept into our tent the very first night, and killed either or both Farhana and me.

Her brother played the flute. Her sister dug in the dust with a stick, swaying her head from side to side. A boy from another tent joined them, lightly keeping beat on a tabla. He had only the left-hand drum. This was the boy drum, the bass. The right-hand drum—the girl, the one that dictates the melody—was missing. The heel of his left hand dug softly into the goatskin, cajoling, and the answer was deep and hollow, a swallowing, a sinking. A return to the water’s depths. The brother blew through the bamboo bansuri as if in a prayer, or a kiss. The sister swayed. It was such a plaintive song, of such astonishing sweetness and hope and lasting farewell, that I bowed my head and wept.

There were tourists up here again, white-skinned and brown-skinned, filming.

On the glacier heading back down to our cabin, Irfan snarled, “If this had happened in America, you’d be in jail. If this had happened to the child of a landlord, you’d be in danger, and in debt.” So that’s why our lives had been spared: herders were disliked in this valley. They were considered outcasts. And now, so were we.

I scarcely noticed Wes and Farhana trudging ahead, or the jeeps skating by, or whether the bus that had fallen into the ravine the day before we made our way up had been removed. I noticed broken Coca-Cola bottles, biscuit wrappers, plastic bottle caps.

I didn’t ask how the conversation between Suleiman and Irfan had ended. I didn’t ask if money had been accepted. Or if, when Suleiman spat, he’d spat at me, or about me. I also didn’t ask how damaging this entire sordid episode had been to Irfan’s relationship with the valley and the communities he’d spent so much time with, bringing clean water to their towns. The question he’d spent most of his working life asking himself—
do they need it
?—had now been answered more brutally than even he might have foreseen. Knowing Irfan, he’d be blaming himself. I dared not speak to him.

Delicate negotiations, I thought. Years and years of delicate negotiations, to build a bedrock of trust. How easily it was spoiled.

An anger began to constrict my lungs.

There was a nagging thought, yes, I could only admit it now, walking back through the gray slush, our footprints ugly in the morning ice. I had no humor for snail-turd imagery, as on my way up. This fury inside me, it was far blacker and thicker than a snail or its turd. It nagged and nagged, though I tried to rub it off like a line of dirt, to tell myself it was only the movement of ice beneath my feet. And then it became a yellow-eyed fish, and I sat on that fish, I said to go down to the bottom of the lake and never again look up at the sun, or rise to the surface, for a sliver of air. But again it appeared, now a mean little fox, racing through the thickest sands of the shiftiest dunes, and I said to never disturb that sand, never kick up soft murky clouds, or shed a hair of that thick, furry tail.

Still my instructions went unheeded! This time it was a seagull, bobbing on a crest of a great, wide ocean, friendly and gay. Follow me! It said, with a flap of its wings. And it happened again, and again, till I had nowhere to hide.

The thought was this:
Did Farhana jump in
?

She was already in the boat when Irfan pulled me up. Did he pull
her
up? I hadn’t had the chance to ask; I hadn’t had the nerve. He might say no, she was already in the boat. That proved nothing. She could have hauled herself up. She had the strength. She was also cold and shivering that day … but how cold? How shivering? Was she as drenched as I? I couldn’t remember. Knowing Irfan, that is hardly what he’d have noticed either. Wes? No. He wouldn’t have seen. I remembered him pacing the beach, muttering something in agitation; no one was thinking clearly.

Irfan might also say that she was a woman: she didn’t need to jump in. Just as she didn’t need to be included in the decision to come to Kaghan—it had been for her sake, that’s what mattered—she didn’t need to risk her life. Had she tried, she could never have made a difference.

But she was a stronger swimmer than me
. And it was her idea. Her damn return! She’d been warned to leave the girl alone. Instead, her meddling had drowned us all.

But so what if she was a stronger swimmer
? Perhaps she didn’t feel strong enough that day. Perhaps it was foolish of me to dive. I could have died. No one wants to die.

I’d fallen behind Irfan on the glacier; I now caught up with him. I asked, my voice shaking, “You have some idea how deep the lake is, don’t you?”

He looked at me as though I’d walked into a mosque with slippers on.

“As deep as Lake Baikal,” he eventually growled, adding, “that’s in Russia.”

“How deep is that?”

“Over a mile.”

I waited, hoping he might add,
There’s no way you could have found her
. Instead, he checked his damn phone. His way of shooing me away.

Why hadn’t I seen Kiran when I dived? Had I waited too long? That horrible gurgling sound I heard in the water—how could I have heard it in the water? Where had I been? Where had Farhana been?

“In the weeks before coming here,” I said to Irfan, catching up with him again, “Farhana started to change her mind. It had been her idea, yet she grew afraid. You know, because of all the bombings and the kidnappings. I started telling you that, you know, before it happened.” I took a deep breath. “But by then, I was the one ready. She wanted me to call it off but I didn’t want to. She’d already made the proposal so she wouldn’t call it off herself. It was the same way she had doubts just before getting in the boat. Do you remember? It was her idea but then she grew afraid. Did you notice?”

The furrow between his brow sank like a chasm as he opened his mouth to speak. Then, changing his mind, he clamped his mouth shut. When the chasm lifted, he asked, “Did you notice the lake this morning?”

“Yes.”

“What did you see?”

“Calm surface. Clear sky. Malika Parbat’s twin peaks could have been etched in the water. As on that day.”

He nodded. “A lake so clear and bright, but hideous underneath. For months after Zulekha’s death—her murder” (I flinched at the word) “—this lake became a mirror of my own world. Then a voice started to tell me to look for a more hospitable truth. Not everything is as hideous as it doesn’t seem. If I believed in God, I’d say the voice was His. I think it was the lake’s.”

Back at the cabin, we took solitary walks. We cloaked ourselves in shades of green, drinking forest smells. Even at night, I sought my
camera. My landscapes of the River Kunhar were cool-headed, as if I’d been the third person in our tent.

Green eyes, green as the leaves of walnut trees, newly shed in the river, before turning black. Green as her bangles, and their incessant chiming.

I never did call my mother from Irfan’s cell.

But I tried to take his advice. I devoted myself to reclothing us, Farhana and myself. I noticed she seemed to be doing the same. At night, we pecked each other quickly on the lips before lights out. When we met in daylight, she’d touch me on the thigh or on my back and the gesture was too deliberate, as if she were trying to recreate a lover she could touch. I’d do the same. I was glad when she followed Wes. She was glad when I followed Irfan. We created phantom foes—the lake, the jinn, the tourists—and phantom friends—each other, Wes, Irfan—but most of all, we created our own doubles. To these we assigned behavior, even roles.

I had dived repeatedly to look for Kiran. So had Farhana.

I had not given up. Neither had Farhana.

I had risked my own life. So had Farhana.

And the entire time, Irfan filled me in on the news. It was the only time he willingly talked to me. Apparently, there were real double agents in our midst, hunting real enemies. I couldn’t have cared less.

I came to think of “him”—this mysterious killer and his double, the accomplice (accomplice to what exactly—a killing in Karachi? So long ago, so far away!)—as some kind of lynx and his shadow. He’d crept down the slopes of Kashmir, kicking up flecks of powdery snow, his footfall a hushed load of velvet, leaping across the crevices of glaciers that might have been growing or receding, this was Pakistan after all, and to a lynx it was all the same. Or he might be a snow leopard from Uzbekistan, lurking low into the new millennium, no longer Soviet or Russian but Central Asian, looking for a skin for his spots. Or a yeti from Tajikistan, slipping into Pakistan from the west, sweeping down to Chitral on a very long
tail, before twisting east through Swat and into Kaghan. Or perhaps I was looking in the wrong direction entirely. Perhaps he’d come up from the south, through desert sands that hid airfields for days, a snake mangled by a cluster bomb, a pheasant dropped by a falcon.