Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

David had slipped into his apartment to check for listening devices: any number of people could have wished to spy on him — the KGB, Pakistan’s ISI, the Saudi Arabian spy agency, or the KGB-trained Afghan intelligence service that at the height of the conflict would swell to thirty thousand professionals and a hundred thousand paid informers, maintaining secret bases in Peshawar, Islamabad, Karachi, and Quetta. The jihad was at its fiercest then and had anyone wished to gain access to a conversation taking place in David’s office, it would have been a case of just piercing the wall in the poet’s apartment with a silenced drill and inserting a microphone.

He found the apartment to be free of any devices but before the month was over its occupant had vanished: while the poet was out one afternoon a five-year-old girl with her throat slit was discovered at his place. A crowd baying for blood descended on the apartment and the man was never seen again.

David learned from ________, his own source within Pakistan’s ISI, that a Pakistani intelligence officer had ordered a child to be picked up from the streets of Peshawar, brought to the poet’s place, and killed there. The mob and the police were then sent in to discover the crime. The intelligence officer wanted the place empty so he could install a tenant able and willing to spy on David.

‘So it was Fedalla who did it?’ Christopher Palantine said when David told him.

‘Yes. He was among the ones I suspected.’

Five years had passed since Fedalla and his friends had assaulted David in Islamabad, and David had recognised him when he ran into him at a meeting with the Pakistani military personnel not long after coming to Peshawar with the CIA. Back in 1979 Fedalla had been a senior captain aching to make major, which he now was, heavier in both face and body. David waited for his chance and then confronted him but Fedalla denied all knowledge and memory of the assault in Islamabad.

‘You have to move out of the Jewellers Bazaar fast,’ Christopher told David.

David acquired premises in the nearby Street of Storytellers, the street that in ancient times was the camping ground for caravans and military adventurers, storytellers reciting ballads of love and war to the amassed wayfarers and soldiers. It extended from east to west in the heart of the city, and in April 1930 British soldiers had massacred a crowd of unarmed protesters there, a defining moment in the struggle to drive the British out of India. When the protesters at the front were felled by shots, those behind had come forward and exposed themselves to the bullets, committing suicide in all but name, as many as twenty bullets entering some bodies. The massacre continued from eleven in the morning till five in the afternoon, court martial awaiting the soldiers who refused to pull the trigger.

His new neighbours in this three-storey building were clean, as was the unoccupied apartment on the level above. One day a few months later, as he was emerging from his office, fifty or so orbs of thread leapt down the steep staircase leading to that upstairs apartment, some stopping but others continuing to bounce past him, going down the next stairwell, leaping over the banister until they had fully uncoiled themselves.

The suspicion was immediate: the young woman who stood in the open door at the top of the stairs was a spy.

The hand in which she held the thread was dyed with henna, indicating the possibility that she had recently attended a wedding.

‘Thank you,’ she said in English after he had helped her gather the silk filaments.

‘What’s your name?’

She stopped and looked back at him from the staircase, then the haughty face brightened into a smile.

‘All names are my names,’ she said with something like mischievousness and disappeared.

He was in her apartment the next afternoon when she went out with the child. He found nothing in there that suggested subterfuge then or during the searches he carried out on later dates.

Zameen.

A single word.

How easily a person gave his name to another, and yet how restless he was during the few hours when he didn’t know it, finding it out through methods of his own. Discovering for the first time that there could be something magical about someone’s name — a mere word but what power it held, as in a fairy tale. It was after all the first thing one learned about another. A way in, and a possibility.

At the moment of the initial encounter he had been on his way to a meeting with Christopher Palantine, and he thought of her during it. He was then away for several days, vanishing once again into schemes he’d set in motion in and around the teeming city, he and Christopher Palantine both great mavericks of that time and place, a cause of some anxiety to their superiors when they simply became invisible for weeks. But when he returned to the Street of Storytellers he synchronised several appearances at the door of his office just to encounter her, to just see her again. Once when the area plunged into darkness due to power failure, he went up to ask for a matchstick instead of going down into the bazaar. He had known when he began this work that there would be sacrifices. Loneliness was the price they paid for being who they were. And yet as he sat in the light of the lamp lit with her matchstick, he couldn’t help seeing how incomplete his life was. There were houses and establishments in Peshawar he occasionally entered to alleviate solitude, and he had a rendezvous with a certain woman each time he visited the city of Lahore, meeting her for a few hours in Falleti’s, the hotel where Ava Gardner had stayed when she was in Pakistan filming Bhowani Junction . But this was different, seemed to be something deeper.

He listened to her feet in the ceiling above him, following her movements.

And then one afternoon he managed to talk to her openly, running into her in the Street at the stall of a cassette vendor. Before engaging in a battle with Soviet soldiers, the Afghans sometimes inserted a blank cassette into a tape recorder to capture the sound of combat. They played these cassettes to themselves later during periods of recreation and leisure, reliving the excitement. They were for sale, the seller beginning to shout out the highlights of each cassette the moment David picked it up:

The ambush at Qala-e Sultan, April two years ago, a little-known battle but …

The Dehrawud offensive, October 1983, the sound of helicopters and fighter planes, the screams of the wounded, contains the famous death by torture of a captured Soviet infidel …

Battle for Alishang District Centre, August 1981, on three cassettes. The Soviets are made to withdraw in a hurry but they force the elders of the next village to come ask the Mujahidin for the bodies of the dead Soviet soldiers left behind …

He recognised the decorative motifs on the henna-dyed left hand that reached towards a cassette at the same time as him and when he looked up he saw that, yes, it was her. The recording was of a mujahidin attack at a newly opened village school, the teachers and everyone associated with it massacred.

‘Something like that happened in the place I am from,’ she told him in her apartment later. ‘A place called Usha. It means “teardrop”.’

He had attempted to talk to her in the crowded Street but she had shaken her head in fear, telling him in a quick whisper to come up in a few minutes.

‘Why only the one hand?’ he asked now.

‘The henna? It takes a while to dry, I have work to do and my son to look after. That’s why I kept my right hand free. As it is I grabbed the wrong child one day in the chaos outside.’ The boy was moving across the floor on his knees, pushing a toy car along.