Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

Hava hu, hava hu — he hears the call of a jackal from somewhere behind him just as he nears Usha. Or is it the djinn? Up there on the mountains are fronds of shining mist in extreme slow motion.

Before entering Usha he stands listening, looking for possible signs of her. In one of the volumes of paintings in the house, he has seen a jewel-like miniature from the sixteenth century, depicting Jalal in his search for the beautiful and winged Jamal, who encourages his quest by visiting him in the guise of a series of birds, by having him encounter trees on all of whose leaves her name is written, by having him converse with talking flowers and a drum, even kill a hostile member of his own family.

The doctor in Usha hadn’t brought Lara to Marcus’s house when she arrived there because, despite being a man of science, he believes in the djinn and in ghosts.

And now suddenly David knows where Lara has gone — to the physician’s house. He stops to orientate himself. The house, he remembers, has a large board outside it with the doctor’s name and qualifications painted on it, has the tops of several apple trees showing above the enclosure wall. Zameen said that upon visiting England for the first time as a child she was astonished to discover that the two halves of an apple were always symmetrical there.

He goes past the mosque in whose shadow Qatrina had had stones aimed at her. She had to wear the burka while they were killing her. Afterwards, as she lay on the ground, a man had gathered the hem of the burka and tied it into a knot and dragged her away as he would a bundle, and he grinned at his own ingenuity the while, as did the spectators. Blood was draining steadily through the holes of the embroidered eye-grille.

Next to the mosque is the house belonging to a widow. Marcus has told him how she had run off into the desert with her two teenage daughters at the end of 2001, having heard that the Americans were coming to rape and slaughter everyone they saw. Out there the three women had fallen into the hands of a group of Taliban men. The American soldiers arrived just in time to save their lives and honour, leading them back to this house.

Perhaps he has only imagined it but, a hundred yards ahead of him in this narrow lane, there is a movement, a graphite-grey form traversing the darkness at a diagonal. He raises the hand with the flashlight but there is no one at the end of the tunnel bored by the light. His other hand is pressed against a wall and he senses a wetness there — in the curved valley between thumb and forefinger. A swivel of the torch and the Night Letter, the shabnama , pasted onto the side of the house perhaps only minutes ago is revealed, the glue glistening under his light. He stands there reading the text and then turns away. Someone is going around posting these warnings to Americans and their Afghan sympathisers, swearing imminent extermination in the name of Allah. There is another stuck to the house across the lane. In nineteenth-century Montana, the number 3-7-77 would be pasted onto the houses of ‘undesirables’ in the middle of the night. An ultimatum by the Vigilantes to leave town. No one to this day knows what the number stands for and there are many theories. You have three hours, seven minutes and seventy-seven seconds to get out or face violence? Or are they the dimensions of a grave — three feet by seven feet by seventy-seven inches? One of David’s great-uncles was found hanging from a bridge in 1917 with the number pinned to his clothing.

He plays the beam into the next street. Several sheets are revealed on the walls there also.

She is out there, with demonic forces roaming free near her.

The grandson of a watchsmith, he appeals for leniency from the god who decrees the point of no return. The moment the arrow leaves the bow, the moment when sexual climax is unstoppable, the moment when poetic inspiration begins.

*

Casa moves into the shadow of a wall when the clouds slide apart above him, the moon released. In subconscious reassurance he touches the Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, the metal cold to the fingertip. Allah sent down iron, says the Koran, so He in the unseen world may know who supports Him and His messengers .

He uses the last of his fifty sheets to wipe the glue from his hands, crumpling and tossing it onto the water collected in a ditch, making it bounce off his upper arm. All of this without making a single noise. He is a veteran of ambushes that could be called off after three days because someone had just exhaled audibly.

Travelling through the darkened landscape, he and the four others had arrived at the edge of Usha sometime after midnight to post the shabnama . Because the Koran calls upon Muslims to create alarm among non-believers. Three Afghans, a Chechen and an Uzbek — they parked the motorbikes in the shadows, and then spread out through these streets and lanes, a pair going in the direction of Gul Rasool’s house even though there is every possibility that it is protected by landmines, Nabi Khan’s express instructions having been to paste a warning onto the enemy’s front door. ‘The hypocritical West likes him now, despite the fact that he had shot a Western journalist in the 1980s for having written a favourable article about me.’

The moon is bright above him as he moves through the lanes of Usha. The archangel Jibraeel, he knows, had been asked to blot away some of the moon’s brightness with his wings, mankind having petitioned Allah that it was too strong for the nights. The grey markings on the radiant white disc were caused when he pressed his feathers onto it three times.

From shadow to shadow, he walks towards the spot where he is to meet the others to go back to Jalalabad: towards the crumbling stub of a shrine in the cemetery where they left the motorbikes. Enemies surround him here. And they are not just those who carry guns. According to the laws of the jihad the enemy can include the entire supply chain. Those who give them water, those who give them food, those who provide moral encouragement — like journalists who write in defence of their cause. Women too cannot always be innocent. If she prays to God for her husband’s safety in a battle against Muslims, she is above blame. But if she prays for him to kill and triumph over Muslims then she becomes the enemy. If a child carries a message to the enemy fighters, he can be targeted and erased.

*

Lara has decided to ask the dead for directions. Coming to a cemetery, ringed by cypress trees, she has entered it because Muslim graves are orientated in a north — south alignment, ensuring that the face is turned towards Mecca while the feet are pointing away. It’s unlikely that she’ll forget this fact though the bruise on her neck has almost faded.

A bone forest. Most of those lying around her must have met unnatural deaths, been victims of the wars of the last quarter-century.

Marcus’s house is to the south of here, but she finds herself too tired to calculate which direction the south might be, remembering how at times in the dozy heat of a late summer morning she would be unable even to concentrate on picking flowers in a meadow, a task that required concentration because the fresh flowers were mixed in with day-old ones, the pinks and yellows that dotted the swathe of grass behind their dacha. She lowers herself to the ground and leans her head against a tombstone. Her Stepan died at the dacha after testifying on behalf of the officers who stood accused of the torture of Chechen prisoners. Two days after the trial ended, Stepan and Lara had come out to their snowbound dacha on the Gulf of Finland, wishing to repair the fissures of the preceding weeks, Lara’s fury at Stepan’s comments. The couple were there less than a few minutes when Lara — walking down a hallway — heard Stepan talking to someone in the room just ahead of her. She stopped and stood listening.