Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

‘You don’t recognise me, Stepan Ivanovich. I was hoping you would.’

‘I have never met you. What are you doing in my house?’

‘People always said my brother and I looked alike, so I thought you might guess from the resemblance. You see, you have seen my brother’s face.’

‘Have I met your brother? What is his name?’

‘You never met him either. You just saw photographs of him. He was abducted by the military to force me to come out of hiding, to make me go back to Chechnya from Afghanistan. Please stay where you are. I am telling you nicely, but my four friends here won’t be as polite if I give them the signal.’

A breeze in the cypress trees and she opens her eyes. A rustle. The night has entered its second half, she is sure. She’ll stay here till daybreak, shoulder pressed against the marble slab. At the touch of the stone she experiences a sensation from childhood — a drawing that has been filled in with coloured pencils, the paper feeling slightly silky. All the colour is down there.

‘Lara.’

David has approached and is extending a hand towards her, pulling her upright and away from the magnet of the tombstone. The day Stepan died had become the first day of the rest of her life. She had only a handful of new memories until she came to Marcus’s house. Over the months she had just stepped away from everyone, coming back to St Petersburg from Moscow, where she had moved on marrying Stepan. She desired no real communication with anyone, entire days going by without her speaking to even one person.

‘Come on, I’ll take you home,’ he says.

The wind picks up grains of dust from the ground and then releases them.

‘I couldn’t bring the car because I thought the engine would wake Marcus.’ His voice is low in the darkness, bringing energy and focus to her mind with his talk of practical matters.

‘How did you know I was missing?’

‘I couldn’t sleep. Came down and the front door was unlocked. You should have brought your phone.’

In the absence of the electricity generator he charges the phones with his car battery.

‘And why not bring a light, Lara?’

‘It broke.’

‘I was on my way to the doctor’s house but then saw you sitting here. The white glow of your clothes.’

‘We have to go back the way I came, so we can take home the broken lamp.’

‘Okay.’ And as they leave Usha behind, he says, ‘We are almost half-way there.’

‘Benedikt had great difficulty trying to commit the English alphabet to memory as a child. During recitals the letter M would always come as a relief to him, indicating he was almost half-way there.’

She stops. ‘David, tell me what the three gentlemen said.’

She takes in what the visitors had claimed about the leaf from the Cosmos Oak, listens to David’s reasons for keeping the information from her.

‘So Gul Rasool might know about Benedikt’s fate?’

‘It’s a possibility. We thought we’d check first, we didn’t want to alarm or distress you needlessly. I am sorry.’

Approaching the house, she goes through the garden while he remains beside the lake, the sky on fire with the stars. Later, sitting with a dying candle at the kitchen table, she hears him enter the house from a side door, through the room that had been the doctors’ surgery. When it overflowed the patients could be found in the orchard, lying under the trees, the drip hooked to a flowering branch overhead. Marcus said it would have been appropriate if the room dedicated to touch had been turned into the surgery but that was too high up for the infirm to climb.

She goes up to his room to ask for a candle.

She is there inside its light a while later when she looks up and sees him standing against a blue and red section of the kitchen wall. In a tale she had read in childhood there was an enchanted lamp in whose light you saw what the owner of the lamp wished you to see. I’ll make you think of me .

Her hand reaches out and douses the candle he had given her.

Mind torn by contending emotions, she takes a step towards the wall in the perfect darkness, to find out.

*

Casa is going through a stand of acacia trees when he hears a small sweet-edged noise. Coming to a standstill, he lets his hearing pierce the darkness. The noise is like metal coming into contact with something, giving a small ring. A blade or iron nail. He becomes still and parts his lips slightly — a hunter’s trick to increase the sharpness of hearing. The world is full of homeless ghosts, and it is said that by the time a house has a roof on it, it has a ghost in it. He switches on his flashlight, sending its gaze — and his own alongside it — out into the night. He sees the gun pointed at him in the high grass and weeds. There are others, he now sees, ranged in a circle around him, each a black grasshopper the length of his arm.

They are flintlock guns, resting on foot-high tripods in the undergrowth, concealed in the foliage. He identifies the tripwire stretching across his path. Two more steps in the darkness and his foot would have landed on it. The gun that this taut wire is attached to would have swivelled on the tripod and fired into his shin.

The entire grove is crisscrossed by these lengths of wire. Each gun has three of them fastened to its trigger, the central coming at it from the base of the tree directly in front, and the other two reaching it diagonally. To kill jackals or wolves or wild boar, or to maim thieves. These things were first employed during the times when there was a British presence in these parts.

He raises a foot and places it carefully on the wire before him, just holding it there for a few seconds before starting to release the weight onto the metal filament. The branches and leaves of the acacia trees are moved by a sudden breeze just then. It passes and the trees are still again, as though the angel of death had flown down into the grove.

He continues to press downwards with his foot until, to his left, a gun turns towards him like a magnetised needle inside a compass. With extreme caution he lifts the foot off, suddenly aware of the weight of his limbs. A Russian PMD6 mine — just 250 grams of TNT in a cheap wooden box with a detonator — could blow off your legs. Someone he knew had stepped on one, and as Casa had braced himself to lift him onto his shoulders, he had learned at the upward swing that the man had become shockingly lighter.

Knees raised high, he goes over the wire but then stops. What is that noise, the small metallic chime? It has never really stopped, some variation of it always present in his hearing. He looks up with the beam — the light separating into shards of seven colours on his eyelashes — and sees the dagger hanging from a cord fifteen feet above him, gently swaying. There are others, dozens of them, and they flash in the canopies when the wind sends them towards the rays of moonlight pouring through the leaves. When one of them occasionally meets a branch it makes a noise.

A second trap.

A moth has appeared, as soft-looking as a pinch of rabbit fur, attracted by his light. He still hasn’t worked out how the second trap will be activated when his weight sets off some buried mechanism. The blades are released in unison all through the grove as though they are pieces from a mirror shattering overhead. One of them almost enters his flesh, cutting through the thin blanket wrapped around his body. There is a gust of wind, powerful enough that had it been daytime the bees in the grove would have been thrown off their flight paths.

When he moves forward to avoid the falling knife, he loses his balance and ends up on his knee in shock, his turban falling into the grass. He continues forward because of momentum so that his hand snags the tripwire attached to one of the guns. The result is a blinding flash and an explosion. The hot ball of lead shoots out in a shower of sparks and grazes the back of his skull, tearing off skin and tissue, the dry grass bursting into a line of flames towards him.