Thinner Than Skin (23 page)

“I should look for her in the forest.”

“She is fine.”

Maryam did not move.

“You know where Fergana is?”

“You know I do not.”

“The Chinese took it before the Russians could, calling the horses by many names. Horses from heaven. Horses that sweat gold, even blood. But they could never tame even one.”

Maryam took a deep breath, pleased that the fury she held in a knot did not scatter again. For today, Ghafoor’s words lacked some honey.

“… Then came the Arabs, who fought the Chinese and won, and Islam spread through all of Central Asia. So did the horses that sweat gold and blood. The Arabs sold them to the Chinese they had defeated.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

He made a face, looking at her without any trace of a smile. She remembered the rumor. He was keeping the company of hard men now. And even harder women. She wanted to know about them. Not horses. She already knew about horses.

“I have come to see you at great risk to myself,” he said, still with that sour face.

Was she supposed to be grateful?

She thought of Suleiman again, and the gratitude she felt toward him when he took care of Jumanah. Why could he not have looked after Jumanah
and
Kiran? Why did men always expect gratitude for the smallest gesture, when their largest, most catastrophic mistakes were irreversible? Why did women always bestow it?

“Bukhara, Tashkent, Samarkand, Fergana,” he continued, impetuously. “The people there are proud, Maryam. They are nomads like us, with centuries of power. They defeated the Chinese. They built the Mughal Empire that conquered India. They defeated the Russians. They did not let themselves become enslaved by fines, or by troops.”

By loss? She wanted to ask. Did they let themselves become enslaved by loss?

“Why are the convoys here?” he kept on. “To find a killer? There is no killer! They want us. Our way of life. Our horses. Our children. Our freedom. They want to
own
us. It is happening to the east, in Kashmir and in Turkestan. To the south, in Waziristan. To the west, in Afghanistan. If not the Russians, it is the Chinese. If not the Chinese, Indians. If not Indians, Americans. And Pakistanis? Traitors who send people to
their
prisons! If they do not send us there, look what they do to us here, killing our sheep, fencing the land, looting our forests, insulting our women. They know nothing of us, the way
we
work the land. The way
you
do, Maryam. They cannot see your hands. Look at your hands!” He took a sudden step forward and before she knew to stop him, he had grabbed her hand. “Look how cut and bruised they are! They will not leave us alone!”

Maryam quickly pulled her hand away and took two steps back, into the wall. She had never seen him like this. He always liked to toss words at her, it was true, long, foreign words, flaunting his travels, his worldliness. But it was done to impress. Now she was unsure what the purpose was. Before, even when he swaggered, he retained a certain poise, one that was different from her husband’s. Suleiman’s poise stemmed from years of enduring pain and humility; Ghafoor’s, from rejecting pain and humility. But now she did not know what he was rejecting, or enduring.

He was glaring at her, as if to gauge whether or not to continue.

If she had to guess, she might say his swagger was filled with fear.

Still glaring.

Yes, he was afraid. Like her.

Something he had said made the upper lid of her right eye flicker. It made her want to say, with a scorn wrapped in the play their previous encounters had always known,
You care more for jewels and money. You do not work the land anymore, so what do you care?
But she held her peace, burying the thought in her chest,
where so many others were locked, including this one she might also have shared in the past: she preferred his stories of gypsy women with pinched waists, and of rare cloth made of the hearts of flowers, to tales of conquests and prisons.

Perhaps she could steer him back there again. First, she ought to calm him.

She cleared her throat. “Will you stay for lunch?”

He frowned. “I am leaving soon.”

“You just arrived.”

“I have been waiting nearly a week to speak with you.”

She nodded, a little embarrassed.

“There is something I need to know before I go.”

She looked up.

“Which one killed her?”

The question startled her. She took another step back but there was nowhere left to go.

“Which one, Maryam?”

“They all did.” The sickness rose in her again. He was like Namasha, pulling her down into the whirlpool of her grief, when she had hoped he would save her from it.

“Are you going to do something or are you going to be just like the rest—throw your hands up to God and say it was His will?”

“What would you have me do?”

“When you see them, what do you
want
to do?”

“I do not see them,” she whispered. It was a lie. She had seen him, not too long ago, at the graves. That friend of Irfan’s, the one who was always looking sideways. She had noticed him on the road, when she went to the market to look for her son. And she had wanted to do something, anything, to rid herself of the anger he planted in her breast.

Ghafoor waited. Now he was more composed than she. Inadvertently, she had calmed him with her sorrow.

“It was not all of them,” she said at last. “One of them, the smallest one, he speaks to us. He is kind. And one is American.”

“We cannot touch him.”

“And one is a woman.”

“We cannot touch her.”

There it was again, she could feel it rise, a taste so foul she had to spit, there on the floor of her hut. “It was
her
idea!” There were tears in her eyes, hot, furious tears.

“What about the fourth?”

“Did you not hear what I said? It was
her
idea.”

He shook his head. “We cannot touch her. She is with the American.”

“Then why ask me, if you already know about them? I thought you came for
me
!”

“I did. What about the fourth?”

The one who followed me, she was about to say, but hesitated. The one who gazed upon Kiran when the lake gave her back. The one who killed
and
blasphemed. What was he doing at the graves? She had heard that he was rummaging around for a secret shrine.
Her
shrine. Did he
want
to sink deeper and deeper into hell? Well, it could never be a hell as deep as hers, and anyway, he would never find it! She had ended up following him to the graves; it was the only thing she could think to do. And as she stood there, watching him, something about the way he crouched, gazing at the stones with the horses and the ducks, something about it was too familiar. She had seen him before.
Before
he had come to the lake. How could it be? The back of that head, the width of those shoulders, the length of the spine, even the shirt—she had seen it! She could not say when. But as she stood watching him, it seemed to her that he was trapped. And she had always known he would be. And he was very afraid. Everyone around her was afraid.

Ghafoor snapped his fingers, the way he would do when she was younger, trying to pull her back to himself. “What about the fourth?” he said a third time.

“I do not know,” she formulated her thoughts slowly into words. “He is—strange.”

“Strange—how?”

“
She
is the one who feels no remorse.”

“The small one, he has been in touch with your husband.”

She nodded. “He wants to pay. My husband does not want payment.”

“But your brother feels differently.”

“So he does.”

He nodded. “They have struck a bargain. God is all merciful, and with His help, we will find the just rate.” He looked away from her then.

“What are you going to do?”

“They are heading north.”

“I do not care where they go, if they fall off the edge of all worlds.”

As soon as the words were spoken, before Maryam unfolded a picture so clear it was as though a window had opened, a lake had stilled. Though Maryam could not see him, she could see the peak on which he lay trapped. The one who had followed her. The one she had followed. The one she had seen before. She could not see him, but she knew it was him, surrounded not by small headstones in a graveyard but by vast knife-edged stones on a precipice she had never seen before. The precipice was shaped like a glistening fang, in a place where snow was born and ice never melted. He was trapped. He was very afraid.

Ghafoor was smiling, honey in his eyes, finally. “At last I see her, the Maryam I used to know.”

She looked down. The picture of the man on the mountain vanished.

And now Ghafoor’s voice was low and sweet, as on the morning he had brought her the yellow flower. “Live up to your name, Maryam Zamani. Do not try to walk around this stone, or walk across it. You will only hurt more. It is an obstacle. It has to be removed.” She looked up. “You will not worry.”

As he continued, she thought, his words are a silken thread. A thread the color of fire. And fire will warm the pieces of me. But
remember: more than warmth, I want justice.

“There are those who are walking toward a wall,” he kept on. “All we have to do is drive them forward. All we have to do is escort them. And you, Maryam, all you have to do is will it. Your mother would have done no less. And you are your mother’s child. As Kiran is yours. I am the legs, but you are the will.”

Aside from his finger, she had never touched him. Nor had she pulled the flesh around his knuckles with her tongue and teeth for the garlic tint of honey even once since her marriage. Nor would she.

She walked him to the curtain.

While stepping outside, he turned back to face her, and she saw that both the fear and the honey were gone. “They ride under the open skies, Maryam, these men and women of the steppe. Just as we do. And, like us, they are not foolish enough to point at the sun or the moon or the stars. They do not point at what gives them life. They only point at what takes it away.”

She held his gaze. If he took her hand now she might not pull away.

“This morning I looked at loi tara with your eyes, Maryam. I also looked up at girgiti. You are not waking up early, your husband tells me. You are in too much pain. So I looked at those six stars in your place, and in Kiran’s place. Six stars, for her six years. What did they want with her, those people who know nothing of our stars?”

When he left, Maryam nailed the curtain shut. Then she fell to her knees.

She let it come, the animal sounds that lunged from her throat with more anguish than a horse impaled on a fence. There was a puncture wound to her chest, and no amount of pressure with her palm—or smacking, or beating—could stop the bleeding. It seemed only one thought might begin to offer some relief, to fill the hole widening inside her breath. The thought was this. The part of her she had lost—and kept on losing, every hour of every day, it never
stopped, the hole was growing so
big
, despite how fast she filled it with this thought—this part of her wanted him, Ghafoor, to do the worst thing his hard friends from the north had taught him. The
absolute
worst. She smacked the heel of her palm against the dirt floor—oh,
this
was relief! The way the wrist began to
give
! Again! Again!—she would go to the shrine this evening—May the goddess be with her! May the horns of her bulls clap their consent!—she would sacrifice a lamb
and
her wrist—Again! Again!—she would pray for the worst, the worst, the worst.

I was beginning to wonder if this was a mistake. Perhaps Irfan had been right. From Kaghan we ought to have headed south, not north. My doubt stemmed from a series of events encountered after our stop at the glacier, each causing further delays.

First, soon after crossing Babusar Pass, our jeep broke down and we ended up staying at a hotel. Once again Irfan and I shared a room. I slept poorly and each time I awoke, instead of Irfan, I saw Farhana lying beside me. In the morning, Wes informed us that Farhana was unwell. It was commonly known that the gas pressure at these heights was too low for boiling lentils, yet she’d ordered them the previous night and of course had spent it running to the toilet. According to Irfan the delay was necessary for a third reason, something to do with the “indemnity” agreed to with Maryam’s family. When I asked to know more, he said “we’re waiting for someone,” and returned to his phone.

So we waited. The town we were stuck in afforded a glimpse of the real Naked Mountain, whose phantom lookalike we’d seen from the lake. There he loomed, shimmering at 8,126 meters, a bold and cocky devil also known as Killer Mountain. He’d killed thirty-one
climbers before finally conceding to one man at his summit; he’d killed another thirty-one since. I wondered about the Queen’s melt, down below. I wondered how the lake appeared today.

We finally left the next morning, in another jeep, with a different driver. Beside me, Irfan remained edgy, while beside him, Farhana reclined in the seat, sweating and pale. Despite her weakness, I thought I saw a smile lurking around her mouth. She seemed to be the only one who felt us advancing forward.
Leave it behind
was to be the essence of any truce between us, and we all seemed to understand this, even if we didn’t all agree. As we ascended higher into the mountains, wheeling the Frontier firmly to our backs, it was as if we were the ones standing still while the edge of the world flew by. We were on the Karakoram Highway, a stretch of road that cut through the tallest peaks, creating passes within passes, rolling in conjunction with the Indus River that carved the gorges dropping inches from our jeep. I attempted a smile. Yes, we can rise above our mistakes! I doubt the smile or the sentiment would have convinced even a goat.

For starters, she and I could be sharing a room.

But I wasn’t going to dwell on that now.

The mountain was following us. If at one bend he disappeared, at the next, he rose again. Naked Mountain, swaggering flame of Queen of the Mountains. The mountain that had cursed us at the lake. The mountain that moved. To bid him farewell, as though we needed his blessings to go on, after a few kilometers we left the jeep again, though we had only just piled in. Below us raged the dark, silty Indus; above, a thin necklace of purple-gray clouds. There was a rumbling in the distance as we followed Irfan and Nur Shah, the new driver, toward a cluster of rocks.

The rocks were scratched with inscriptions of horses, as on the graves in Kaghan, and with a nimbus of winged figures—fairies, perhaps, or, according to Nur Shah, shamans. His fingerprints mixing with those who came before him, he also decoded battle scenes left by warriors from the steppe, incense bowls scratched by
Buddhist monks, and, a few feet away, an ancient script. Thousands of codes were said to remain hidden in the rocks, perhaps meant for those who’d yet to cross the mountains or ford the Indus, in which the people of Chilas had at one time ridden dinghies, panning for gold.

“There is no gold left,” concluded Nur Shah, turning away from the glyphs to view the west face of Nanga Parbat, as he pierced and shredded his crown of clouds. Perhaps it was only the altitude, but I was suddenly incapable of gauging where I stood in relation to him—forward or backward, west or east? I shook my head to clear it.

“What happened here?” said Wes, turning back to the glyphs.

In my vertiginous state, the glyphs were a welcome anchor. The floating in the sky—or in my head—began to still. I realized that the figure scratched on the rock before me had been defaced.

Nur Shah’s face drooped as he shook his head. “You know the times. People think if you draw a new line across an old one, you can remake the past.”

“We’ll lose even more glyphs to China’s development projects than to mad men crying jihad,” said Irfan. And the three of them talked about the plan to expand this road and connect it all the way to the deep-sea port of Gwadar on Pakistan’s southern coast, the construction of which was largely funded by China. The Chinese premier had even inaugurated the opening of the port this spring. The extended road would secure China’s trade route from Central Asia down to Gwadar and on to the rest of the world.

“Some believe it will give us work. But when the work is done?” lamented Nur Shah. “What will become of us, without our homes? Without our past?”

The clouds were now at Naked Mountain’s waist, like a belt. Farhana looked up as the belt began to peel away. “Let’s go,” she said.

“Not yet,” Irfan replied.

“What are we waiting for?”

“Him.”

A motorcycle halted beside our jeep, and a figure rolled off the seat with a bag swung over his shoulder.

“Who’s that?” we asked.

“Our armed escort.”

I laughed. “
That
?”

“I wouldn’t laugh if I were you. He’s a relative of Maryam’s, he’s from Kaghan, and he’s coming with us. Now we’re ready.”

I’m sure I climbed into the jeep with an open mouth.

We were packed inside again, six of us now. The escort sat in the boot. When I looked back at his friend riding away on the motorcycle, I saw Naked Mountain, his jagged torso hovering just beyond my shoulder, following the bend of the road.

We were entering disputed territory. Wes and Farhana had to register at every checkpoint. It was a repeat of the inspections on the road to Kaghan, except here there were even more. At least we were in a private vehicle and wouldn’t trouble an entire bus with the stops. But if before Farhana had been testy and Wes congenial, now it was the opposite. Perhaps she was making him sleep on the floor.

After the first stop, on returning to our jeep, Wes faced us from the passenger seat. “We
are
in Kashmir?”

“Yes,” answered Irfan.

“We’ve left Pakistan?”

“In a sense.”

“And yet you don’t need a visa? It’s us who are checked, by Pakistani soldiers.”

“It’s for your own safety,” said Irfan.

“Yeah, you said that already.”

After a while, he added, “So, will this ever be part of Pakistan?”

“We can hope. But not till India holds a plebiscite in Kashmir.”

“It won’t happen. Your country’s wasting itself on a war you lost long ago.”

“That is not how we see it.”

“India has a lot of friends.”

“It has the most important one.” After a heavy beat, Irfan added, “Though it’s us who fight its wars.”

It was the first time Irfan had let himself be provoked, at least in my presence. They continued arguing, Wes saying, “It’s a democracy,” and Irfan insisting, “Third-world military dictators are especially popular with free-world
democracies
.”

Nur Shah, who till our stop at the petroglyphs had been quiet, now turned his attention to me. “First time?”

“No, I’ve been here before.”

“It’s my first time,” said Farhana.

He said, in English, “Welcome.”

It was not something we’d heard in Kaghan Valley.

“Where are you going, after Gilgit?” he asked, in Urdu again.

In a mix of Urdu and English Farhana told him she’d come to study glaciers. He seemed unsurprised. “People come here for all reasons,” he declared. He then asked if she knew that 25 percent of the Karakorams were under ice.

She laughed. “Of course I know.”

“There are
thousands
of glaciers,” he said.

“Well, hundreds.”

“I can take you.”

“Thank you.”

“But not to Siachen.”

She kept laughing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her so gay.

Nur Shah knew not only glaciers. He knew stories and, at least at first, how to share them to dissipate the tension in the jeep. Originally from Hunza, he’d moved to Gilgit soon after the Karakoram Highway was built and claimed that, as a child, he was “best of friends” with the grandson of the Mir of Hunza. This Mir had famously joined the struggle for the creation of Pakistan, and, according to Nur Shah, it was the Mir’s unique way of training his men that won us independence from Hindustan.

The Mir’s way was indeed unique. The officers of the Eskimo Force had to plunge their hands in the icy Hunza River for hours at a time and wade through ice sheets without shoes. “They had skin as thick as a glacier,” he looked at Farhana. Perhaps each time he made her laugh, he counted additional rupees. “It was an old technique,” he continued. “Before the freedom fight, it toughened men for raiding caravans passing from Kashmir to Yarkand. You know Yarkand? In Chinese Turkestan? On the Silk Road?”

Farhana smiled.

“The Hunzakuts would walk on ice to reach the highest mountaintops, then pounce down on the enemy on the Silk Road and take his food and weapons. Later, they used the same skill to pounce down on soldiers in Kargil.”

Farhana stifled a yawn.

Still the driver continued. “In Kargil, the Eskimo Force joined up with the Ibex Force. You know the Ibex Force?”

“No,” said Farhana.

“The Tiger Force?”

“No.”

“You do not know the Tiger Force—sahib?” He looked at me.

“No.”

“They would advance while growling like tigers, keeping the Indian Force away.”

Farhana started laughing.

“Millions of men growling is nothing to laugh about, baji,” Nur Shah said softly.

“And what did the Ibex Force do?” she cleared her throat.

“It hopped.”

Before she could laugh again Irfan motioned to her to stop. He whispered that it would be very rude to insult what was a well-documented strategy, and a source of pride.

She whispered back, “Do we need your permission to laugh now?”

Nur Shah whispered, “Many Pakistanis do not know their own history.”

From the boot of the jeep, we heard a cough. Our man from Kaghan, Maryam’s relative. He’d been so silent since joining us I’d almost forgotten him. Next to me Irfan whispered in English that this was the “concession” he’d made Maryam’s family, in addition to the payment, in order for us to proceed peacefully on our journey after Kiran’s death. He added, “You’ve no idea how lengthy the monetary negotiations were. Agreeing on the escort was the easy part.” I would have to ask him for details later.

As Nur Shah continued to recount stories in praise of Hunzakuts, the escort muttered what sounded a lot like,
Tell this son-of-an-owl to shut up
. He sat hunched over an automatic weapon, knocking his head into the roof each time we hit a pothole, which was often. Irfan patted his shoulder and the man made a sound a tiger might make as he stifled a growl. If a million men were to growl like him, it might well encourage an army’s retreat.

It was raining when we arrived in Gilgit, the largest town we’d seen since leaving Islamabad over a week ago. It was crowded, and the army was everywhere, in part to contain the not infrequent Shia–Sunni squabbles that erupted here.

In our hotel room, Irfan told me that our escort’s black mood had in part to do with his distaste for the Shias of Gilgit, though differences transcended lines of sect. No matter how settled they might be today, the Gujjars who likely came down from the Central Asian steppe thousands of years ago would always be considered
grazers
.

“So why did he come?”

“He has work.”

“What work?”

“Trade. What else have people ever done here?”

We took turns in the shower (hot, thankfully) before joining Wes at the restaurant. Farhana had gone for a walk, with the driver, in the rain.

Wes had already ordered food. Wet hair lay flat across his forehead and a line of moisture trickled down his temple. Irfan and I had dried our hair vigorously with towels before stepping into the chilly evening. It was a difference I’d noted to Farhana once, soon after we’d met. Pakistanis avoided combining wet hair with cold air, believing it a recipe for sickness. Americans didn’t. Farhana didn’t.

Whether he was courting a cold or not, with the arrival of the meal of spinach, mutton korma, and pilau, Wes’s spirits revived. “Simple and great,” he announced to the three waiters who topped his glass of water after every sip, proffered fresh naan before the one on his plate could grow cold, and apologized when his napkin fell off his lap.

The naan came wrapped in newspaper written in a script that was neither English nor Urdu. I asked one of our waiters where it was from.

“That is Kazakh,” he said.

“You can read it?”

He shook his head and laughed, adding, “But I can sometimes hear it.”

Irfan was looking over his shoulder at the table next to us.

I’d also noticed them: our escort, talking to two men who kept looking at us, one with dark eyes, the other blue. Our waiters seemed disconcerted by the trio.

Irfan asked the waiters if the men were speaking their language, Shina.

All three shook their heads.

“Kazakh?”

“It is possible,” said the first waiter, before listening more intently. “The men are speaking a Turkic language. It could be any. Kazakh, Uzbek. No, I do not think Uzbek. They could also be Uyghurs. From China. They all come here for business and speak each other’s tongues.” After a longer pause, he added, with some disdain, “We have seen that man before. The one who came with you.”

“He is not liked?” asked Irfan.

“He does not like us.” He looked away.

Our escort snapped his fingers and the youngest waiter was told to answer. It seemed to me that they were all keeping their distance to avoid serving the table.

After a while, the eldest waiter continued, “Nomads have a way of finding each other. It is strange. Their bonds.”

I waited. “And?”

The old man scratched his beard. “The two men over at that end,” he lifted his chin, “I am sure now. One is a Uyghur merchant.” I tried to look back discreetly but the man had shifted; my view was blocked by our escort. “The other is a cattle breeder.”