Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

David quickly rubs away the drawing with his hand, avoiding her eye, while Marcus pretends busyness, the face determinedly turned away from her.

‘They are just talking about a visit to Russia,’ Marcus says to her at last. ‘The Afghans are great travellers. Farming the valleys of California or journeying across the Australian deserts for trade.’

‘There is more than one Giovanni Khan in the Italian villages that their fathers saw in the battle heat of the Second World War,’ David adds; and, turning to Marcus, says, ‘Now, we must try to persuade him to keep the paper in the layers of the bandage and not in the wound itself …’

She can’t help but feel shut out. There is a profound uneasiness around them. Even the air and light feel different to her, and after standing at the edge of the group for a while she walks back to the house. Not sure what has just happened.

*

She is silent and subdued all evening, and retires to her room earlier than usual.

‘Do we tell her what the men said, David?’

‘She knows we are keeping something from her.’

One of the three men had said that Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan had all those years ago fought over the possession of a Soviet soldier. And that the soldier, named Benedikt, had had a leaf in his pocket. But his companions — contradicting him and offering alternatives — had made Marcus and David uncertain about every detail.

‘Did Benedikt bring a leaf with him?’

Marcus nods. ‘I think she mentioned it.’

Marcus is sitting against the painted lyre on the wall and it appears as though the instrument is strapped to his back, its frame showing on either side of his body, the curled ends protruding above his shoulders.

‘We have to tell her, David. That is why she is here, to know the truth about him.’

‘Let’s try to find out a little more on our own first. There is no need to worry her if it isn’t true.’

And if the truth is too terrible? David has allowed Marcus to believe that Zameen died at Gul Rasool’s villa in Peshawar, during a raid by Nabi Khan. That was what David was told originally. But the real facts — when he came upon them later, years later — weren’t something he could have revealed to Marcus.

‘Do you think Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan killed him, David?’

‘No, that’s not what they said. The two had just fought over him — probably over his pistol though they themselves had huge arsenals by then. They just needed an excuse to clash.’ Ancient tribal rivalries.

They are in the kitchen, David sitting on the doorsill, the moths feeding near by on the small blossoms that grow at the base of the cypress trees.

The candle stub goes out with a hiss. No light except the stars now, the moon not yet up. Each star is a drop of transparent nectar, just large enough to fill a moth’s stomach.

‘Is it possible Benedikt ended up in a Western country? Looking for him, she says, she came into contact with the parents of a soldier who did manage to make his way to America. They distrusted the letters he wrote to them from Chicago, convinced they had been written by the CIA.’

‘And the letters they sent him, he must have thought were dictated by the KGB.’

‘On American trains and buses he took snapshots of children and sent them for his sister’s little girl in Moscow.’

There was disagreement between the three men about what kind of leaf it was. One of them said he had heard it was a dried flower. Another that the soldier’s name was Ivan, was Nikolai. The fate some captured Soviet soldiers and defectors met at the hands of the Afghan warriors like Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan was horrifying. To save bullets they were buried alive. Or repeatedly hurled from a roof until dead. Thrown off mountainsides, nothing remaining of them but bones at the base of a cliff after the wolves had been at them. Many of these conscripts were mere children and the beautiful ones were raped and traded between persons, for a good knife or a bad gun, before being shot in disgust by an owner somewhere down the line. The Afghans could remain suspicious of the loyalty of the defecting Soviets and refuse to give them guns, and so, dead weight, they would be executed when a major offensive drew near. And given the chance the rebels of today would do all that and more to American soldiers, to the enemy cities and towns of their bodies.

*

Two a.m. and Lara steps out of the house quietly, not lighting the lamp until after she has gone some distance along the lake’s edge, in case a particle of light or a scrap of smoke alerts David or Marcus. She had felt distraught all evening and now the feeling has spilled over into something like determination, perhaps defiance. If they won’t tell her what the three visitors said earlier, she’ll go to Usha and try to find out for herself. The doctor’s daughter in Usha will help, help her locate the men who visited Marcus earlier. She is quite certain she will remember how to find the house where the father and daughter live. A house with apple trees in the courtyard. A nocturnal insect occasionally decides to accompany her then disappears back into the night. To the right of her is the lake. When they wished to end their lives, Afghanistan’s women often chose water instead of the noose or the knife in the breast. It was a final assertion of dignity, one last proclamation of their humanity. Why choose ropes or blades, the things used by men to overpower and kill animals?

She stumbles and the glass globe of the lamp, lit a moment ago like a jar of honey, is lost, the flame disappearing into fumes of oil and hot glass. She stands so still she imagines that even the flow of blood inside her body has been suspended, but then she forces herself to continue, arriving at Usha’s outermost house and then on into the maze of lanes towards the dark centre. She realises soon that she is lost and in a panic she turns back, her breath jagged, wondering how to align herself. A mosque, she knows, has a niche pointing towards the west, the direction of Mecca. Perhaps she should present herself at the biggest house in Usha, Gul Rasool’s mansion, and ask for help there.

When Marcus was away and she was alone in the house, she had looked out at dawn and seen a dog crossing the space between two trees with a bird in its mouth, the small head swinging from the limp neck, the hide on the animal’s snout corrugating in a snarl when it caught sight of her at the corner of its eye. She’d only just woken up and later wasn’t sure she had seen the disturbing sight. She now tells herself she is only imagining the low canine growl from somewhere up ahead. The mastiffs here are wolf battlers. The Afghan hounds can kill leopards.

The religion of Islam at its core does not believe in the study of science, does not believe the world runs along rational and predictable laws. Allah destroys the world each night and creates it again at dawn, a new reality that may or may not match the old one of yesterday, the Muslim clerics demanding a ban even on weather forecasts since only He can decide such a thing according to His will. And so in the darkness Lara feels as though she is buried alive under the ruins of the universe, under the weight of the extinguished and smashed suns and moons.

*

David plunges into waist-high grass in his hurry to reach Usha, to find Lara, his body scoring a deep black trench in the mass of grass blades silver-lit by the moon, the beam of the flashlight swinging wildly in the night. The sun provides heat because it is made of fire, and given the chill tonight it is possible to believe that the moon is carved from ice. He has cancelled the fears of landmines from his thinking. He remembers going out into the night with the Afghan rebels in the 1980s as they planted landmines along roads frequented by Soviet tanks, the explosion a few hours later tearing the turret off a T72 and hurling it and the gun several yards away, the thick heavy steel of the hull perforated like a colander. He had watched the rebels open up an unexploded Soviet bomb found in a field of wheat, a thousand-pounder, and extract the half-ton of explosive from it, using it to increase the power of the Chinese mine.