Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

It was 1986 and the war was entering an unprecedented stage: the secret services of the United States, Great Britain and Pakistan had agreed that guerrilla attacks should be launched inside the Soviet Union itself, in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the states that were the supply routes to the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. This was to be done by Afghan guerrillas, but David had decided he would go with them. As he readied himself to meet up with the group, he was aware of the nightmare that would result if an American spy was captured either in Afghanistan or in the USSR, but he was convinced of his ability to avoid detection. When it came to these matters, in adulthood he had never felt himself surrounded by forces larger than himself.

Outfitted with mortars, boats, and target maps, he and the guerrillas intended to cross the River Oxus and mount sabotage and propaganda operations inside Uzbekistan. They poured diesel over the light-reflecting paintwork of their vehicles so the dust of the roads would stick to them as camouflage. The Soviet Union’s chief cartographers had, at the KGB’s behest, falsified virtually all public maps for almost fifty years. But David and the Afghans were carrying accurate CIA maps of the region. The stars above them were like mirror signals, the rapids of the Oxus giving off a ghostly glow in the darkness, the Arabs having renamed it the ‘Insane River’ when they met it centuries ago.

As well as weapons, they were bringing thousands of Korans in the Uzbek language, a translation the CIA had commissioned from an Uzbek exile living in Germany. Islam had to be encouraged in the USSR, to make the Russian Muslims rebel against Moscow. Five days — and several explosions in key buildings and on vital bridges and roads — later, David saw a woman in a silkworm village being paraded naked through the streets. She cowered as she was beaten by men for having committed adultery, for having taken a Russian lover. The men who were whipping her were part of the clandestine group that David and the Afghan guerrillas met here in Uzbekistan. Her head had been shaved and a green cross was painted on her forehead. The men were laughing — ‘Call out to your lover to come and save you, “Sasha, Sasha, help, help!”’ There was nothing he could do to put an end to her torment — they stopped at his outraged shouts but he knew it was temporary — and he watched as a man moved forward and placed around her neck one of the Korans he had brought.

Just before coming out to Uzbekistan, he had returned from a ten-day visit to Cambodia, his search for Jonathan taking him there. Her joy at seeing him when he returned made her suggest they go to Dean’s. ‘The three of us. Let the world go hang.’ They had tried to keep their affair as secret as possible till then, fearing reprisals against her. As it was, she had lied about Bihzad to the world, never disclosing that technically he was illegitimate, claiming she was a widow whose husband had perished in the war.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

A fountain played in tiers like a jelly mould at Dean’s. She got up from their table and walked over to it. She had told him how every few weeks a man would come along the lake shore in Usha with a basket of crabs which he emptied into the fountain behind the house. The Afghans did not themselves eat these creatures, calling them ‘water spiders’, but were willing to catch them for the doctors in exchange for money or medical treatment. The crabs stayed in the stone basin until required in the kitchen, Zameen approaching the water to lift them out, jabbing competitively at their pincers with a pair of tongs.

‘Who was that?’ he asked distractedly, busy with the child, when she returned. Under an arch he had seen her exchange a few words with someone.

‘Who?’

‘The man you were talking to.’

‘I wasn’t talking to anyone.’ The voice did not waver. The voice in which she had sung Corinthians to him. And now I will show you the most excellent way .

He slowly looked up. Her face was a mask.

‘Okay.’

They continued with the meal. Hadn’t something similar happened before? She had convinced him he was mistaken, but this time he was sure. She was wearing a light-pink tunic patterned with saffron flowers, over narrow white trousers, and combined with a long stole of white chiffon resting on the left shoulder. It was she whom he had seen, even though the light was not clear over there under the arch.

Was it the Communist, had he survived the bombing after all? How will David explain to her that he kept his existence secret from her because he loved her, was afraid of losing her? By now, even to himself, it seemed an incredible thing to have done. In her anger she will turn away from him for ever, never allow him to see Bihzad his son again.

And then suddenly everything became clear. O Christ, she was spying on him. He hadn’t hidden anything from her about his activities. And now suddenly everything became dangerous. If it was someone else he would have known exactly what to do. But she wasn’t someone else.

Dropping her off at the Street of Storytellers, saying he had to do something but would be back in about an hour, he drove back to Dean’s, prowling the corridors to see if the man was still there. Aware of the tight jaw muscles, aware of the handgun under his shirt, his breath loud. He sat until dawn in that arch, then got a bed at Dean’s and woke up around noon. What now? He was meant to cross into Afghanistan in a few hours, to enter Uzbekistan through there. She knew that. Would there be an ambush? He phoned her and said the plan had changed, that he wouldn’t be going to Uzbekistan.

‘I’ll see you in a few hours.’

When he got back from the Uzbekistan excursion nineteen days later he found her apartment empty. He sensed immediately that something was wrong: the silence in the two small rooms seemed deeper than just silence. This was more than mere absence. On the windowsill nine candles had burned all the way down to small coins of wax. Day or night she would light a candle here as indication that it was safe for him to come up, signalling that she wasn’t in the company of Afghan visitors, the women who gathered at the place to embroider.

Her fiercest loyalty had been to these women. The one occasion she quarrelled with David had been over a matter concerning them. One of the women had just lost several relatives in a bombing the previous week. Nineteen names of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins.

‘It looked like the list of guests for a wedding feast,’ Zameen said to David.

‘How is she? Would she be okay?’

She did not answer him, moving around the apartment silently for the next few minutes, attending to various things.

He stood up to leave — it was time for the women to arrive. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I have to be, don’t I?’ she said over her shoulder, the vehemence shocking him. ‘We have to be, don’t we? Just as long as you Americans and Soviets can play your games over there — nothing else matters!’

She turned to face him, glaring from the other side of the room, eyes red and brimming with tears. Daring him to cross over to her.

The candle didn’t burn for a week after that. Then one day it summoned him. One massacre of innocents had driven him away, and another had now caused the reunion. The news that day had been terrible and she needed him. ‘I feel so alone.’

Now David sought these women out, to ask them if they knew where she was. Most of them recoiled or let out apprehensive noises when he approached them. But eventually one of them did prove unafraid. In great desperation and hurry he began to question her about Zameen, asked her if she knew who the man Zameen had denied talking to might have been.