Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I am looking for my daughter.’ His mouth crushed against the floor. ‘A young woman named Zameen.’

The pressure of the boot slowly eased off his head.

‘I have reason to believe she lives here,’ he continued.

‘What’s your name?’ he was asked, in American-accented English this time.

‘Marcus Caldwell.’ He sat up. The man had been leaning down towards him and now straightened, his face moving through a rectangle of light from the open window. Marcus saw that he was a young Caucasian. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is David Town,’ the American said and switched on the light. ‘Zameen has told me all about you, about Qatrina.’

David would never reveal anything about the activities hidden behind his gem business, and Marcus knew not to ask, having guessed more or less immediately that he was in espionage. He now said he had been away for a period and had recently returned to find no trace of Zameen and her son here.

‘I know where she is. She has a child?’

‘Where is she?’

‘Are you the father?’

‘Where is she?’

Marcus told him where he thought she was, accepting the younger man’s scepticism that the clue had been provided by perfume.

They eventually learned that since the day of Marcus’s visit, Nabi Khan had carried out a raid on Gul Rasool’s mansion in University Town. There were regular pitched battles between rival warlords in Peshawar’s streets, car bombs and assassinations, missiles and rocket-propelled grenades fired into buildings and crowds. Nabi Khan had carried away several of Gul Rasool’s women and children during the attack, to be exploited or sold, Bihzad among them. Several people had died, including Zameen.

All this knowledge was incremental, years in the acquiring.

Marcus smells now the few molecules of the perfume that still inhabit the fibres of the white card, Virgil open on his lap. Qatrina had designed the container — a map of the world and the word Zameen acid-etched onto the glass. The space inside him seems to expand when the fragrance enters him.

Stamen and flint and petal and river moss. Afghanistani women, in the songs they sing, do not desire Allah’s Paradise after death, wishing instead to become streams and grasses, the breeze and the dust. The soil placed upon them in the grave, they sing, they’ll take as their lover.

The nail had gone through the card. A hole the size of a cell in a beehive. He puts it back in the Aeneid .

LARA TURNS THE PAGES of the atlas until she holds the United States of America in her hands. Milk is a river in Montana, lit by her candle. Heart is a river in North Dakota. Rifle, Dinosaur, Delhi. These are towns in Colorado. Antlers. Two Medicine. Twentynine Palms. Talking about Usha, Teardrop, the lake outside this window, he had said a lake named Tear of the Clouds is the source of the Hudson River. She searches for it now. New York City. Marcus has told her that David was there in 1993 when Muslim terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center for the first time. Oldland, Montana, was where he was born in 1957.

She follows him with her fingertip: to university in California and then back to Montana. One grandfather was a watchsmith, the child David coming into contact with gemstones through him. The father — originally a farmer’s son — had been encouraged by his schoolteachers to apply to Harvard, and the mother was a doctor’s secretary and eventually a nurse, rolling her hair into the car window so it would jolt her awake if she fell asleep during the long commute to the nursing school. As he spoke, had she detected something like satisfaction in him? A contentment at how his family had been given the chances to improve themselves over the decades and generations, slowly and patiently encouraged to thrive by America in American sunlight?

She looks up, at the possibility of a sound from Marcus’s room, fully alert. She inclines her head for the best angle, recalling the aunt who when attending the Mariinsky Theatre always sat high up at the back of the house, saying the acoustics were better up there even if she couldn’t make out the expressions of the singers or the details of the costumes.

Nothing but silence from the other side of this wall where Muhammad sits dressed in Islam’s green with his hand plunged into a clay pitcher of water — consolidating and expanding the Islamic empire by sealing a deal with a woman.

She has noticed how Marcus tries to hide his missing hand. She wonders if ‘hide’ is still the correct word. She releases her mind into this small consideration. Can you hide something that is not there to begin with? He is trying to hide the fact of his missing hand.

She closes the atlas and moves towards her bed. These are the rooms where Qatrina had lost her reason, Marcus having to tell her there was no need to be afraid just because the bar of red soap was producing white lather. Benedikt and Lara’s own mother, someone who graduated from the Philological Faculty of Leningrad University and had worked as an engineer and a translator, was declared schizophrenic and confined for six years to a psychiatric hospital prison where drug treatment was administered. She was a civil rights activist and was arrested in 1969 for participating in a demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Lara and Benedikt, their father already consumed in fire above the planet, were billeted with various relatives from then on, some as powerless as them, others well connected — in these houses even the brooms were softer. But nothing could be done, no network of influence and protection available, when Benedikt was summoned by the army.

To be sent to the feared war against ghosts in Afghanistan.

To become a ghost himself.

CYANIDE CAN BE EXTRACTED from apricots, Casa knows. He had distilled it at a jihad training camp, injected it into the bodies of creatures. The memory comes to him as he walks past a flowering tree at the edge of a street in Jalalabad city centre, the flowers still not finished emptying themselves of scent this late in the afternoon. An ant travels up the trunk at the speed of a spark along a fuse wire.

Pencils. Lemons. Corn syrup. Dye. As he walks through the street he knows he could fabricate explosives from many things on the carts and in the shops around him. Sugar. Coffee. Paint. He even knows how to make a bomb out of his urine.

Three international military patrol vehicles go by containing khaki-clad soldiers, a clamorous knot developing in the traffic because all others have to make way for them. There are women and blacks among the soldiers, an attempt, Nabi Khan says, by the USA-led Western world to humiliate Muslims by having sows and apes be their new monarchs.

Word has come that the explosion outside the school has delighted the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the covert grouping of Pakistani military officers led by Fedalla. They have promised further help.

Casa himself has never attended a school, just various religious institutions. Attached to a number of which there was a military training camp. At about ten he had wanted permission to fight in Bosnia but he was told it was too far for someone so young. And the response was the same at eleven when he wanted to pursue martyrdom in Chechnya. By then he had been holding a Kalashnikov for three years. He knew the finger on the trigger was steadier during exhalation as opposed to during inhalation. He knew how to strip and clean the rifle blindfolded, and he could do it in sixty seconds. He had fired it from moving vehicles and had fired it in the darkness, had fired it after running for an hour to simulate the banging heartbeat of a battle. He was proud of the fact that it was a Soviet gun. The Koran told of Daud, the raw youth with no weapons or armour who had used Jaloot’s own sword to slay him, Jaloot the giant whom the Christians call Goliath, having felled him with a sling first; and so the Afghans had used captured Soviet weapons as the instruments of the evil Godless empire’s own destruction. The Koran being a guidance for all time, this method continues to be relevant. Of the sixty-six Tomahawk missiles fired at Afghanistan’s training camps in the 1990s, across thousands of miles from an American warship in the Arabian Sea, a number had failed to detonate — and these had been sold by al-Qaeda to the Chinese for millions of dollars.