Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

They stood facing each other, not knowing what to say or do. She bent to clear away the sheets of paper bearing the outlines of foliage, flowers, dragonflies, and vines. They were embroidery patterns and he remembered being told how, just before the First World War, patriotic young Germans had entered the French countryside with butterfly nets, catching specimens and sketching wing patterns to take back to Germany. Encrypted in the designs of the butterfly wings were maps of strategic information, such as the exact locations of bridges and roads.

He picked up one of the sheets and looked at it. The French country people were knowledgeable about their local butterflies and soon realised the drawings were incorrect, exposing the spies before the information could be sent back to headquarters.

‘You live here by yourselves, the two of you?’

She held out her hand for the drawing.

He listened as she began to speak about her lost parents, and then, his heart breaking, about a young man who as a boy had been so beautiful he had had to be veiled.

‘He was shot by the Soviets. I was with him that night, and that was the last time I saw him. I thought he was dead but I have since learned from refugees who have come from Usha that he had actually survived. I don’t know where he is.’

One night when David had been standing above her sleeping form in the darkness, having gained access to her place to see if she was involved with intelligence-gathering or surveillance, he had heard her say a man’s name in her sleep.

It was that of the missing lover, he now realised.

She wanted his help in finding these three, she herself — being a woman — lacking the ability to move as freely in this place.

As he took his leave her little boy moved towards the kitchen area and, thinking himself unobserved, put back onto the shelf the knife he’d kept concealed upon his person during the entire visit; David had seen him pick it up a few moments after his mother opened the door to him. What have they been through?

A few evenings later as he was leaving the office he noticed that the door to her place was ajar, something unusual for that hour. He stood listening and then went up slowly. He raised his hand and knocked. Spoke her name. And when there was no response he looked in.

She was sitting on the bed with her back towards the door — the kid asleep, hardly any light from a weak lamp on a table. He could hear the sobs clearly.

‘Zameen,’ he said but she did not turn around. The impression he had had of her was that she was quite self-sufficient and tough: after fire she probably wouldn’t be ashes, she’d be coal. But this was darkness and solitude. The hidden side of the courage required from her daily.

He spoke her name again.

She turned to him but there was no recognition. He could have been the noise of the breeze against the window.

He stayed there until she had exhausted herself and then he watched as she took up a pair of scissors and began to cut herself out of her clothes, ready for sleep but still in a daze, unable to find the correct path for the given destination.

Her clothing fell from her in pieces.

‘Zameen,’ he said in a half-voice, afraid she might hurt herself.

He stayed where he was until she got into bed in just her white shift, and then he withdrew and spent the night in his office. Only when he heard her lock her door around dawn did he go home to the apartment he rented a few miles away.

Before the month was out he found the man she was looking for, in one of the refugee camps closest to the border with Afghanistan. He was there on an unrelated matter when a likeable person came forward and began to help with the translation because David was experiencing difficulty with certain dialects.

As they talked, it became apparent that his name and details were the ones Zameen had given David regarding her lost lover.

He didn’t tell him she was looking for him.

He arrived back at the Street of Storytellers and before he knew it an entire week had gone by without him having said anything to her either. I’ll do it this afternoon. I’ll do it tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Her son was becoming fond of David, frequently loud with delight around him, the boy who was born under a thorn tree while she was making her way towards Peshawar, and, yes, he had begun to notice signs of attraction in her also. He went back to the refugee camp twice and talked to the young man. It turned out he was a believer in Communism despite the fact that the Soviets were tearing apart his land.

He didn’t know what to do.

I’ll tell her tomorrow.

He came into her place to see the mother and child out on the small wooden balcony. It was raining weakly, a kind of mist that coated everything, and they were leaning towards a nasturtium plant, observing something with great concentration. She waved him to her, the boy immediately leaning against him when he joined them, a rumble of thunder in the far distance. He saw how on each nasturtium leaf the minute dots of moisture joined up until they were recognisably a drop of liquid, balanced perfectly and brightly in the centre of the circular leaf for a while. But then, in a matter of seconds, it became so overgrown that the leaf stalk could not support it: the leaf began to sway and finally tipped the bead to the ground, becoming upright again for the entire process to be repeated.

She smiled at him — presenting this, one of the unasked-for delights of existence, to him.

His conscience ached.

Today let me stay here, I’ll tell her tomorrow.

CASA OPENS HIS EYES to see the giant face suspended above him, the first light of dawn falling gently onto it. He lifts his head off the floor and looks around. He remembers descending the steps in the darkness a few hours earlier, coming to a halt upon seeing the stone object in the centre of this space. A contour of it had caught the edge of the beam from his flashlight. He trained the light on it and saw that it was the face of a Buddha. He approached it and spread his blanket on the ground, with difficulty because his head was numb even though the bleeding was being kept in control with strips he had torn from the blanket. There had been no response to the knocks he had sounded on the doctor’s house in Usha and then he had decided that he must make his way to the cemetery. When he managed to get there the three motorbikes were gone — his companions had had to flee without him. The gun going off in the acacia grove had alerted the inhabitants of Usha to the presence of a thief and then the shabnama must have been discovered, the place in an uproar.

He doesn’t know where he dropped his own Kalashnikov. After spreading the blanket on the floor beside the stone head he had unknotted from around his waist the cloth that had been his turban. He lay down under the fabric — it is actually his shroud, everyone always taking theirs with them on arduous operations, to signal their blissful willingness to die.

Five days ago, the man called Bihzad was sent to bomb the school not because Casa and the others were cowards themselves. They knew that a greater mission awaited them, the coming battle for Usha.

He must get up now and find his way back to Jalalabad.

He tries to sit up but as in a bad dream he cannot manage it. He would at the very least like to choose another spot to lie on — somewhere not so close to this idol — but he feels drained of all force, his mind askew.

He lies there aware of the giant features hovering above him in the half-light.

The almost-closed eyes.

The smile.

*

Lara is half-way down the staircase when she notices the figure. He is asleep pressed up against the painted wall so that a shrub with small yellow flowers is growing out of his left hip, the Buddha’s decapitated head a few yards away from him. She has never been able to find any sign on the stone of the bullet marks that are said to have bled gold. But sometimes she imagines that being nailed to the ceilings in the house had made the books drip brilliance onto the floors in each room.