Nadeem Aslam - The Blind Man's Garden

‘In the morning I will ask them for a gun and I want you to learn how to fire it.’

‘No.’

‘Jeo. I am not going to shoot anyone either if I can help it. I just want you to memorise how the gun works and keep it with you.’

‘When the attackers see a gun in my hand they’ll think I am the enemy.’

‘They are not going to be that discerning. You saw how these Taliban treat them. They will not leave even a sparrow alive in this place.’

*

Mikal awakens with the sense that someone is looking at him through the darkness. They are sharing the sleeping quarters with a group of young men, the mattresses greasy and infested. A hand has brushed his face, perhaps a fingernail has come into contact with a metal button on his coat. He was using his rucksack as a pillow and now realises that it is missing. He puts his hand into his pocket and brings out the flashlight. Muffling its light by cupping a palm over the glass, he raises it in the air, a glowing stone in his hand. Sending a spray of light over the sleeping bodies. Jeo isn’t in the room.

He steps out into the night, being tracked by the moon as he walks across the vast courtyard, keeping the flashlight’s beam turned to the ground as much as possible. The area enclosed by the fort walls is the size of a neighbourhood — there are stables, plots of corn and wheat, and there is a stream and a rose garden. ‘Jeo?’ he whispers repeatedly. He tries the door handles of the trucks parked near the gate but all of them are locked, the metal freezing to his fingertips. One stable is filled to the rafters with weaponry — grenades, rockets and firearms, crates of ammunition, anything made for killing, even Lee Enfield rifles with dates stamped on the bayonets — 1913 — from the time that the British were contesting the area. He washes his face from the stream to remain focused. Walking back through the rose garden he finds a letter torn in half — written a year ago by a woman in the village below, addressed to the United Nations, saying she’s a teacher and is in Hell, it is my 197th letter over the past five years, please help us … He looks up into the darkness above the world and orients himself by locating Cassiopeia in the north and the two fused diamonds of Orion to the west, staring as if the secret design of the world will be revealed to him. To the east is the planet Venus.

‘Jeo?’

The Angel of Death is said to have no ears, to stop him from hearing anyone’s pleas.

‘Yes.’

Mikal locates him with the light. ‘Do you have my bag?’

‘No. I thought you went away with it somewhere.’

‘It’s gone.’

‘You are an accursed liar.’ The voice comes out of the black air.

Two men with Kalashnikovs appear before them. ‘What are you doing out here?’ The words issue on gleaming vapour.

‘We couldn’t sleep.’

The men come forward. They are in Pakistani dress but one of them is clearly an Uzbek. He says to Mikal, in Punjabi, ‘We asked you if you had any maps and you said you didn’t. We found them in your bag just now.’

‘They are his, not mine. You asked me not him.’

‘I gave them to him for safekeeping,’ Jeo says.

‘Do you — either of you — have any money?’

‘Just a small amount to get by.’

‘No dollars?’

‘No. No dollars.’

‘You are an accursed liar.’

The other says, ‘What are you doing out here in the middle of the night? If you were in our place wouldn’t you think you were spying for the Americans?’

‘We just came out here to talk. We did not want to disturb the sleepers.’

‘Why are you looking up? Are you expecting American planes? Why didn’t you want us to have the maps? Your brothers and sisters are being murdered all across Afghanistan as we speak and you are too selfish to help.’

‘That is not true,’ Jeo says. ‘We are here because we want to help.’

‘Selfish people like you are the reason Islam is in the state it is.’

‘Just give me one map and you can keep the rest.’

‘People who don’t want to make sacrifices,’ the Uzbek says contemptuously. ‘Now go back in and don’t come back out again.’

They return to their mattresses, not stirring until just before dawn when in the bitter cold everyone walks to the mosque to say their prayers, and as the sun rises the fighters begin their exercises with cries of ‘God is great!’ at every exertion, firing bullets into telephone directories of Pakistani cities soaked in water, proof that the Taliban were supported and funded by the Pakistani government and military, and then, exactly what Mikal has been expecting, the Taliban announce that an informer from the village has just sent news of an imminent attack on the fort.

*

Evacuating is an impossibility since the paths out of the fort have been blocked. Out there is the gathering of half a dozen villages from the surrounding area, a flash of bayonets in an unbroken circle around the base of the hill.

There is a day moon composed of white ash in the sky.

Mikal feels the whole mass of the war bearing down on them with nothing but their bodies and selves to hold it at bay. He needs the spare bullets for his Beretta and must look for his rucksack, asking around and almost breaking into a run as he moves from location to location. The fort was used in the 1980s by Soviet soldiers to torture and imprison the population, and there is graffiti in Russian on several walls. Someone told Mikal yesterday that there is a skeleton chained to the wall in an underground chamber, making him think of his father in Lahore Fort.

‘Your friend Jeo was also asking about the rucksack just now,’ one man tells him, opening the door to the arsenal Mikal saw last night — the weapons are soon piled up under a mulberry tree, clusters of them dragged zigzagging across the dust so that they leave a wide trail. He stands still for a few moments, looking at it, trying to bring clarity into his mind. And then as he hurries forward he remembers following the adder-like trace that a holy man had left in the streets — a fakir, a traveller. Mikal was about eight years old and he had overheard someone say that the holy man had a certain resemblance to his father, with his head of a sad and wise lion. As penitence for a grave transgression in the past, the mendicant wandered around Pakistan with massive lengths of chain wound about his body, dripping in loops from his neck and wrists, and trailing behind him from his ankles, and Mikal had set out to look for him, following the trail of him for miles, but unable to find him. It was the first time he had strayed from home, Basie and his mother frantic in the painted rooms.

‘Half these boys are not soldiers,’ Mikal says to a Taliban leader. ‘They’d be better off lying low.’

‘They will be better off but not our cause,’ the man says. ‘Everyone has to fight.’ And he adds with finality, ‘Allah has plans that includes this.’

*

His mind fails to locate intimations of a higher order behind any aspect of this place, a site all the more crude for its distance from the real world, a cold and barren frontierland of life.

From the weapons under the mulberry tree — the sun has broken the chill of the various metals and a butterfly has appeared to collect warmth from a trigger guard — he picks up two Chinese Type 56 SMGs and begins to look for Jeo. The mulberry leaves — with their outlines composed of many sudden curves — have always made him want to draw them. No wonder Jeo’s mother couldn’t resist making paintings of them.

In the sleeping quarters he places one of the guns on the floor and examines the other, looking up when Jeo appears in the doorway.

‘Pick it up,’ he points at the SMG at his feet. ‘I’ll make sure you don’t have to use it. I’ll do whatever I can. But if there is no alternative I want you to know what to do.’