Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

‘I knew her very well, sir,’ the woman said. ‘So I can tell you that there is only one possibility why she could have lied to you. The newborn Bihzad was close to death when she arrived with him from Afghanistan. There is supposed to be healthcare for everyone in the refugee camps but the Pakistanis are corrupt. And the camps were ruled by warlords who wouldn’t do anything until she registered with one of their parties — the more members each party has the more money they can get from you Americans. She needed to have a card made before they would even look at him and he was dying, she needed money to save him … Can you guess, sir, how she obtained the funds? I’d rather not say it out loud.’

Yes.

‘She had to do it for about three months. There was no alternative, you must understand. After she gave up she was sometimes accosted by her former … clients.’

He sat still, trying to absorb the information.

That night he dreamt of her face full of disappointment at him, perhaps even contempt. The face that had laughed at his impatience with jazz and had told him Tolstoy smelled of cypress wood. The face that had expressed the purest of joys when he found for her a volume of paintings by the Persian master Bihzad, a book her parents had owned but which she had been unable to find in the Peshawar bookstores.

But where was she now? He sat in the apartment where nothing, it seemed, had been disturbed. While he was making his way towards Uzbekistan, she had lit the candles: he’d told her the journey had been cancelled and she must have thought he was avoiding her, that he had somehow found out about what she had had to do to save her child. He was staying away until he discovered what he felt about the information. Trying to see if he could unlove her.

There was no sign of a break-in. The raw jewels Bihzad liked to play with were still here — two sapphires and two emeralds, like someone with blue eyes staring into someone’s green eyes. Her books were stacked high in the corner, old stories that came to an end on the last page but hurled their wisdom and judgement decades and centuries into the future, there into the midst of them all. As was everything else, except the bottle of the pale-gold perfume she always kept with her, her father having composed it for her. Maybe Fedalla and the ISI slit her and the boy’s throats so they could acquire the apartment for someone who would spy on him. A snake-oil vendor always sat not far from their building, with a large thorn-tailed lizard sitting untethered among the bottles of his wares, the fact that it never made a bid for freedom always a surprise to David until he was told that its spine had been broken by its master. From him David learned that while he was away there had been an explosion just across the road. A bicycle bomb had gone off. David himself had taught the rebels how to rig these up, to kill Soviet soldiers in Kabul and Kandahar, in Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif.

He kept hearing her voice.

If I speak with the tongues of men and angels,

but have not love,

I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge,

and if I have a faith that can move mountains,

but have not love, I am nothing.

She’d told him how she had left the refugee camp where she had been living and come to the Street of Storytellers: the cleric from Usha had these years later found his way to Peshawar, staring thunderstruck at her when he saw her one day in a lane that came out of the camp. This site was particularly sacred to Peshawar’s few Hindu citizens because here a banyan and a peepal tree grew side by side, their roots entwined to signify the coming together of the body and the soul. And Zameen had gone out there on hearing that the people from the camp’s newest mosque had attacked the two trees with axes. The CIA didn’t care what the religious affiliation of the warriors was — wanting the funds to go to those who fought the Soviet soldiers the hardest — but the Pakistanis made absolutely sure the funds provided by the United States and Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world were channelled only to the Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas, who went on to assassinate the moderate clerics and warlords. Zameen retreated after she recognised the cleric supervising the mutilation of the sacred trees. Within months he had had seven women murdered for being prostitutes. Five were in the camp but two were in the city of Peshawar itself because he was linking up with Pakistani extremists. He was arrested once and confessed to killing two sinful women but walked free after one month. His patrons had paid off the relatives of the killed women and therefore he had been reprieved under Islamic law. He scrutinised the inhabitants of the camp for moral laxity, calling down Allah’s wrath on them through his Friday sermons, and Zameen knew he would focus on her fully some day soon. The city’s police and the magistracy seemed to enjoy or approve of what he and people like him were doing because soon after each murder, each beating or arson attack, the eyewitnesses recanted their earlier statements due either to threat or inducement.

Zameen began receiving visitors from the new mosque, who asked her to prove that her son was legitimate. She was planning to flee to another camp but then, fortunately, she heard about the aid agency that needed someone to mind and live in an apartment in the city.

Maybe she has been driven out of her apartment in the Street of Storytellers too.

‘Sasha, Sasha, help, help!’

‘David, David, help, help!’ He couldn’t shut these words out of his mind. A peepal leaf blew in on the wind one afternoon and over the coming days it lay there, became more and more shrivelled and sickly brown, its veins prominent. To him, nightmarishly, it was like a real person dying.

What did they, the Americans, really know about such parts of the world, of the layer upon layer of savagery that made them up? They had arrived in these places without realising how fragile were the defences that most people had erected against cruelty and degradation here. Conducting a life with the light from a firefly.

He now entered fully the hell that was the Afghan refugee camps ringed around the city, searching for the pair of them among the three million people. Children screamed on seeing this white man, thinking he was a Soviet soldier. He was sure he would know her by her shadow alone but panic spread through him at the thought of Bihzad. Each day he grew up more and more, becoming unrecognisable. He couldn’t rest because the boy had to be found soon. Some parent birds, he knew, would not recognise a fledgling if it fell out of the nest because they hadn’t seen it from that particular angle, only in the nest. And Zameen had told him about the demoiselle cranes that landed on the lake beside her house in Usha, on their migration to and from Siberia each year: how the young lost their high-pitched calls in the first twelve months of life so the parents simply did not respond to them. Unseen though still beside them.

He saw the years stretching ahead of him, the decades of not knowing where the brutal improbabilities of war had taken the mother and child. One of the fears of a CIA case officer in Peshawar was kidnap by the Afghanistani secret service or the KGB, but David didn’t care as he moved through the camps, the clerics of the mosque shouting from the minarets that while the USSR was a prison, and the USA a whorehouse, Islam was the answer. Music had been banned in several camps for two or more years now.

One evening he stood to watch a pair of children, participants in a game of hide-and-seek that was in progress in a street of hovels. They were crouching next to an open sewer that spilled black matter, their eyes trained on the door from which the seeker was probably to emerge, the smell of cooking smoke and bread floating in the evening air. David watched as the two children sprang to their feet and grabbed the little boy who had just appeared in the door, chewing, having just finished a meal. They marched him to a corner and then quickly, before David could believe what he was seeing, or react, a finger was inserted into the overpowered little boy’s throat, the vomit emerging and being caught in the hands of the two assailants, who then began to eat the still-undigested food. The little boy stumbled away dazed and fell, his eyes bright with liquid even in the dusk. And David was hurrying through the four-foot-wide ‘street’, trying to find a way out of the maze. He had helped create all this.