Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

‘We are lost,’ Mikal says, pointing to the stars. ‘I told him an hour ago but he wouldn’t listen. We haven’t been going in the right direction for some time.’ He gets out of the van with his bag over his shoulder and Jeo watches him talk to the driver, gesturing at the sky and at the maps. Jeo goes out to join them as do the others, each wrapped in a blanket against the cold air, their several flashlights revealing that they are in the remains of a very extensive iron foundry, the surface of the hills for many hundreds of yards covered with the ruins of ancient furnaces made of soapstone, indestructible in the fire, for the smelting of iron ore. Relics of the departed Buddhist races of these lands. The ground strewn with small cubes of iron pyrites. And as they stand there surrounded by the strange earth and the strange sky, Jeo hears what he has never heard before, the awful crump of tank shells, explosions and gunfire in the far distance.

‘Do you hear it?’

‘Yes,’ Mikal replies.

‘It’s a battle, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s the world,’ one of the other men says. ‘The world sounds like this all the time, we just don’t hear it. Then sometimes in some places we do.’

There is a string of massive impacts and suddenly he is unable to glance at a spot of earth without imagining pieces of metal speeding towards it, large and small and of all shapes. The moon has long since disappeared but the stars are so many that they are still casting shadows within the roofless ruin, and now everything has fallen silent and from very high overhead he hears the slender calls of birds moving eastwards in faint calligraphy-like lines and strokes, thousands of them amid all the smouldering silver.

‘Before we go, we need to refill our water bottles,’ the driver says. He points to Mikal and Jeo. ‘We passed a spring a few minutes back. Take the empty bottles from the truck and fill them. Follow the tracks the jeep made in the dust and you will avoid the landmines.’

‘I’ll go on my own,’ says Mikal.

‘No, take your friend. We’ll wait here for you.’

‘I said I’ll go alone,’ Mikal says, with surprising firmness in the voice. ‘I want Jeo to stay here with you.’

The driver walks up to him and grabs him by the lapels with his large thick-wristed hands, Mikal almost losing his balance. They both stand glaring at each other in silent opposition and then just as suddenly the man releases him. ‘Do as you are told.’

Jeo takes Mikal’s sleeve in a light grip. ‘I’ll come with you.’

*

They take the two gallon bottles and walk back along the tyre marks through the pebbles and fragments of quartz, primitive limestone and mica, but fail to locate the spring. Just as they are about to abandon the search, however, the sound of falling water reaches them from the other side of a gorge, accessed through clay slates and traprock. They climb down into another geological age and walk towards the water through the scar of a dried riverbed, dwarfed between boulders lying where they had fallen ten thousand years ago.

‘Make sure you fill it to the very top,’ Mikal says as Jeo holds one of the bottles under the vertical trickle of water falling from a hill spur, a rope of thin silk that breaks at the merest contact. ‘You’d hear it sloshing a mile off otherwise.’

His feet sunk in muddy earth, Jeo is tightening the cap back on when he becomes aware of a figure in black sitting on the ground just ten yards away. The man is perfectly motionless with his back to them, but there is no prayer mat under him and he is facing in the wrong direction, otherwise Jeo would have thought of him as someone at prayer.

Keeping the flashlight trained on his back they slowly walk towards him. The small stones that cover the ground shine in the beam of light as if wrapped in foil. They approach through all that moon debris and Mikal clears his throat to alert the stranger. They walk to his front and see that a piece of cardboard is held in place on his chest by the broken-off tip of a spear, driven into him between the fifth and sixth ribs.

Jeo withdraws the spear and blood jets out of the wound onto the lap.

‘I thought the dead didn’t bleed,’ Mikal says, taking a step backwards.

‘They don’t. The right side of the heart holds liquid blood after death — the spear must have punctured it.’

He hands the freed cardboard sign to Mikal, who knows Pashto.

‘It says, This is what happens to those who betray Allah’s beloved Taliban.’

Mikal runs the torch into the darkness around them, along the strata of the hills aligned northwest to southwest. ‘We should go.’

Jeo takes off his blanket and covers the dead man with it and stands up. ‘We’ll say a prayer for him later.’

They get back with the water to find that the three vans have driven off. On the dusty ground — that sends up a puff at the lightest step — the imprints of the tyres stretch away into the darkness, and they stand wordlessly beside each other for some minutes.

‘All my things were in the truck,’ Jeo says. ‘The satellite phone, the bag of medical supplies, my clothes.’

Mikal still has his rucksack strapped to his back and he is looking up at the stars, examining their positions. And all the while, over the ridge, the battles are continuing.

‘Something happened and they had to drive off in a hurry. They’ll come back for us.’

‘They are not coming back.’

Jeo looks at Mikal. ‘What do you mean?’

‘They wanted to leave us here, that’s why they insisted you go with me.’ He looks into the darkness while he speaks as if addressing the night. ‘I think we’ve been exchanged for weapons. Or were we sold for money? The Taliban need soldiers, reinforcements, and I think we are two of them.’

‘You were talking about this back in Heer. You are wrong.’

‘I think we should get as far away from here as possible. Someone is coming to pick us up and take us to a battlefield.’

‘You want to walk out into the night? Are you trying to get me killed?’

‘What?’

‘Are you trying to get me killed?’

Jeo grabs the torch from him and looks into the darkness with its raw glare and then at his face. ‘Why are you really here? Why did you decide to come with me suddenly?’

‘Have you lost your mind?’

Jeo moves forward and puts his hand on the rucksack. ‘Give me the maps.’

Mikal steps away from him, whipping around. ‘Let me get them,’ he says. Taking the bag off and plunging his hands in there with his back to Jeo. Jeo spends his week at the medical school in Lahore and comes home at the weekend — do Mikal and Naheed meet in his absence?

‘They know I am not a fighter,’ Jeo says quietly as Mikal hands him the maps.

‘They’ll make you fight, Jeo. They’ve paid for you. We have to get away from here as fast as we can.’

*

In the darkness thirty minutes away they find a cave and they send in the beam of light ahead of them, onto the curved walls of rock in which sharply polished pieces of a mineral are embedded, reflecting their eyes and fragments of their faces all the way up to the ceiling — a stirring awake of deep yellow and deep red wherever the torchlight lands. There is a powerfully heightened sense that the two of them have been imprisoned in the mountain and are now moving around inside it.

Jeo gathers an armful of dusty wood and Mikal collects the dried-up swallow droppings from the back of the cave. Taking the spark-mechanism of a dead cigarette lighter from his pocket, he starts a fire and they rub their hands before the flames, run them up and down on their clothing to gather the soaked heat while their reflections look at them from the other side of the mountain.