Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

She takes her eye off the boy only upon gaining the topmost step and then she rushes out into the avenue of Persian lilacs, the avenue of chinaberries. David’s car, always parked here under these trees, is moving towards the lake, taking him to Jalalabad for the day, and she can see Marcus emerging from the kitchen to add a glass to the basket of washed dishes she had left out to dry in the morning sunlight.

David tells the two of them to remain outside and goes into the factory, returning five minutes later.

‘He has an injury, a two-inch wound,’ he tells them. ‘Has lost a lot of blood. He says he was attacked by a bandit last night, up in the mountains. He came down the ridges and stumbled in there, probably losing consciousness.’

Lara and Marcus peer down to where he sits immobile against the wall, the side of the head resting against the flowers. He is thin, dust on his face and clothes and hair, and there is a pad of blood-soaked fabric tied to the back of the skull. A red butterfly three-quarters of the way up the wall makes it appear as though a small quantity of his spilled blood has become airborne.

David brings the car back to the factory and then goes down to lead the stranger up into daylight, supporting him by feeding an arm along the back of the ribs at one point but the young man gently uncouples himself.

‘I think you should take him to Jalalabad,’ says Marcus after he has had a look at the wound, managing to ease off the fabric stiff with caked blood, his hair glued into it. ‘Have the hospital look at him. He’ll need stitches — one or two.’

The young man sits on the back seat without a word or glance towards anyone, taking a few sips from the sugar-rich tea he has been brought. The back of his shirt is streaked with blood, but he declines with a raised hand when Marcus offers to find a new set of clothing for him. He hands back the cup without lifting his eyes and then settles down and brings his white cloth over himself. His only other communication is the nod when David tells him in Pashto that he is being taken to the city.

*

They go through Usha, the place subdued this morning because of the shabnama . In other villages, the Night Letters tell people to plant opium poppies, a crop forbidden by the new government, but here in Usha, Gul Rasool is a poppy farmer already despite the fact that he is in the government. As in Vietnam, as in the Afghanistan of the 1980s, where the CIA ignored the drug trafficking of the anti-Communist guerrillas it was financing, the activities of Gul Rasool have to be tolerated because he is needed. Last month he was among the dozens of male politicians who had hurled abuse at a woman MP as she spoke in parliament, shouting threats to rape her. Harassed and fearful, she changes her address regularly and owns burkas in eight different colours to avoid being followed.

The Night Letter is from an organisation that chooses to call itself Building the New Muslim — the bombing of the school was carried out by Building the New Afghanistan. It could be the same organisation: if they have found rich backers outside Afghanistan, people who have Islamic goals, they must have asked for the name to be amended. This isn’t about one particular country — it is about the glory and aspirations of Islam. Saladin fought for Allah and for Muhammad and so he won Palestine, but today’s Palestinians are fighting just for land, even if it is their own land, and therefore losing.

The Night Letter is offering a financial reward of two hundred dollars to any inhabitant of Usha who might help in the war they are promising against Gul Rasool for — among other things — having allowed girls to be educated here. Yes, it could be Nabi Khan’s organisation. He must be alive. The money is an unbelievable sum for most ordinary people in Usha and some could be tempted by it, seeing it as a way out of poverty.

The eyes of David’s passenger remain closed throughout most of the journey towards Jalalabad, though he occasionally takes a sip of water, one of those bottles that had landed around Marcus’s house. As soon as they near the city, however, he wants to be let out of the car, suddenly all vigour and purpose, darting looks to his left and right. David tries to reason with him, an exchange lasting many minutes with the car brought to a halt by the side of the road and with David reaching a measured hand back to stay him, telling him a doctor should take a look at his injury.

‘I have no money for the doctors because the bandit took everything.’

‘The hospital is just around the corner.’

‘I must leave.’

Does your mother know you are intent on wasting the blood she made out of her own blood, her own milk? Someone had said this to him after an injury here in Afghanistan, but it’s too intimate a thing for him to say to this boy.

‘I want to leave.’

‘Don’t worry about the money.’

He consents eventually and they drive in through the hospital entrance, past the gunmen protecting the building.

Leaving him in the waiting room for the doctor to arrive, David comes out of the building to stand under the pine trees, the Asian magpies in the branches, the crested larks. There is no breeze but a lavender bush is in constant movement due to the bees that land on or fly off the thin stalks. A small boy approaches him with a fan of Pashto, Dari, and English books for sale — 101 Best Romantic Text Messages as well as a volume entitled The CrUSAders, and also Mein Kampf translated as Jihadi .

When he sees boys like these he sometimes finds himself wondering if they are Bihzad, forgetting that time has passed, Bihzad grown up out there somewhere.

The border with Pakistan is just three hours in the eastern direction. Continue through the twenty-three miles of the Khyber Pass and you arrive at Peshawar. The Street of Storytellers.

Where he had met and fallen in love with her and she with him.

He now knows how places become sacred.

‘Where is the boy’s father?’ he asked her. The kid who had won every arm-wrestling competition with David in recent weeks.

She shook her head, and he knew not to proceed. More than a month had gone by since he met her but sometimes he felt he was still little more than a neighbour. And for almost two weeks now he had known that the man she really longed for was only a few miles away in a refugee camp.

‘Who pays for this place?’

‘An aid agency. They pay for me to be here so women from the refugee camps can come here and embroider in secret.’ The work he thought might be something to do with spying. ‘It’s secret because we fear the fundamentalists who have constructed mosque upon mosque in the refugee camps and have forbidden work and education to women, so much so that a woman in possession of silk thread is branded a wanton, it being the Western aid organisations that began the embroidery scheme to give war widows a chance to earn a livelihood. The fundamentalists tell them they must beg in the streets — that this is Allah’s way of using them to test who is charitable and who isn’t — or send their little boys out to be labourers in the bazaars. We have to be very careful in case the women are followed here by them.’

Imagining her loneliness, he had felt wretched, but the man she wanted in her life — the Communist — would only add to her difficulties, he was sure. He decided to visit him for the final time to ask him as openly as possible about his plans and prospects.

‘I don’t care if Communism has failed in Russia,’ he told David. ‘It remains the best hope for a country like Afghanistan. Never mind food, some people in my country can’t afford poison to kill themselves. There’s no other way we can put an end to the feudal lords and the ignorant mullahs who rule us with their power and money, opening their mouths either to lie or to abuse.’