Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

No, all this was the Soviet Union’s fault because … because … He could not complete the thought. He had before and he would later but not just then.

The henna blossoms had completely faded from her hand, but she had two mirror-image birthmarks on her shoulder and thigh. And the distinguishing mark on Bihzad’s body was the three-quarter-inch burn just above the waist on the left side, one of those windowsill candles having fallen on him one day.

What would become of the child in this place? As they emerged from Uzbekistan into Afghanistan, he and the Afghan warriors had been ambushed by the Soviets and had lost three men. It was discovered that an orphan boy and girl from a nearby village, shepherds, had guided the Soviets across the hills towards them in exchange for food. David awoke the next day to find his companions drinking tea under the bough from which the lifeless bodies of the two very young children were hanging.

Days passed in the search, and then one evening he came back — exhausted as a firefighter — to see that her apartment had been broken into, the door half-open. He slipped into the darkness and stood listening. In the room about the sense of touch in Usha, she had told him, there was a master archer who could put out a candle with an arrow blindfolded, by focusing on the heat from the flame.

‘I am looking for my daughter,’ said the man he pinned to the floor, the gun at the ready. ‘A young woman named Zameen.’

David bent closer to the figure and lifted his foot off the head. The father from England? From Canterbury, the town that produced the saint venerated as the protector of secular clergy. The Englishman was sitting up now, his face moving through a rectangle of light from the open window. After revealing to him that Zameen had become a mother, David told him he wasn’t the father, that she hadn’t told him about the child’s paternity. He should leave it up to her to reveal as much or as little about Benedikt to Marcus as she preferred.

He told David he had sensed her presence at the house belonging to someone called Gul Rasool, that she had signalled to him by breaking the perfume bottle.

David didn’t want to approach Gul Rasool and mention that it was Marcus who had told him about Zameen being at his place, putting Marcus in danger. Gul Rasool’s car was eventually rammed off a deserted road outside Peshawar. Almost three years had passed by now, two previous attempts to apprehend him having proven unsuccessful. Now Gul Rasool was pulled out of the mangled vehicle and brought to the ruins of a mosque in a wilderness. He was interrogated with David present but out of sight, looking down through filigree on an upper storey.

All this based on something as evanescent as perfume. But he couldn’t think what else to do.

The mosque’s dome — tiled with blue fragments — had fallen to the ground and was like a giant cracked bowl in which the rain had collected to the brim. When the water moved, the Koranic calligraphy amid the mosaics writhed like a nest of black vipers. With the help of that water, among other things, Gul Rasool was made to talk.

It was just a case of turning one of those trick bottles the right way up — the information just poured out of the man.

Gul Rasool said he had been in one of the shops at the Street of Storytellers when the bicycle bomb had gone off near by and then he had seen Zameen, her head and face uncovered because she had come out in a hurry at the sound of the explosion to look for her son. Gul Rasool recognised the young woman instantly as the daughter of the two doctors from Usha, the Englishman and Qatrina, having seen her any number of times in Usha, Qatrina even carrying a photograph of her when she accompanied Gul Rasool into the battlefields.

He lost Zameen in the crowd of the bazaar, but then saw her face briefly in an upstairs window, lighting a candle.

The vigil she was maintaining for David.

Gul Rasool knocked on the door and, telling her he had a message from her father, brought her to his house.

So Zameen was there when Marcus visited.

David heard all this standing behind the panel of cement lace. A set of elaborate ruses had been invented to get at Rasool’s knowledge about Zameen indirectly, letting him think the interrogators were interested in completely different matters. Nor could they let him see David in case Rasool later saw him in Marcus’s company.

Gul Rasool revealed that Nabi Khan had staged an attack on his mansion in University Town, a raid during which he carried off among other things the group of women and children he kept for pleasure. Zameen and Bihzad among them.

Soon after that day David learned this to be partial truth. Only Bihzad was abducted by Khan — some of the others, including Zameen, had remained in Rasool’s captivity. Despite their best efforts and forethought, the men who had questioned Rasool at the ruined mosque had had to become specific about the women and children, and Rasool must have guessed that they were the reason why he was being interrogated. No longer wishing to be held responsible for any of them, he had said they were all taken away by Khan.

The child’s fate has remained a mystery to this day. He hasn’t been able to obtain an opportunity to talk to Nabi Khan, these warlords always disappearing into battles, into various hiding places and retreats. He has put out feelers and sent messages through intermediaries but without success. People tell him the boy had probably been sold or given away, jettisoned as Khan and his guerrillas moved from place to place. They are probably right.

Compared with this, how quickly it was, after that day behind the cement filigree, that he found out Zameen’s fate. About what happened to her as she remained in Rasool’s custody without her son. About what Rasool made her do in exchange for the promise that he would help her reunite with Bihzad.

And following the trail of her murderers, David would realise, he had been stepping on his own footprints.

CASA WALKS DOWN the cold hospital corridor. His reflection caught glasslike in the just-wiped floor. The smell of medicines in the air. It is late afternoon, his stitches in place at last, and he has just borrowed a phone to call for his companions to come and collect him from here. He is glad he had managed to persuade the American to leave some hours ago, his kindness an embarrassment and confusion for him. As they approached Jalalabad he was afraid of being taken to another nearby hospital, a place where there was a chance someone would recognise him as one of the twelve wounded fighters who had been delivered there in December 2001, their bodies smashed in various places, the nurses letting out terrified gasps when they were rushed to the X-ray room and it was revealed that they all carried pistols and knives and had grenades tied to their bodies. Wild with wrath and pain, four were Arabs, three Uzbeks, one Uighur Muslim from China, one Chechen, and the rest were Afghans, and they had warned that they would pull the pins on their grenades if they felt threatened or caught a glimpse of a foreigner.

He looks at the black plastic Casio on his wrist, the digital numbers startling themselves onwards second by second.

They should be here any minute. His other fear as they approached Jalalabad was that someone would see him in the company of the white man. The attack Nabi Khan has planned for Usha is too important for even the smallest of risks. There are dreams of putting together a large militia with the help of the ISI, using Usha as a base. If they have cause to doubt Casa’s loyalty they will torture him. Though he knows nothing beyond the vaguest details, not even the exact date. There is every chance they would execute him out of hand.

Through the window at the end of the corridor he looks out at the road, touching his bandages absently, the long white strips encircling his head. When he was about six and living in a refugee camp in Pakistan, some women upon arrival from Afghanistan would pull out lace that had been wound around their limbs and torsos under the clothes. Smugglers’ apprentices, they would step away from the miles of looped softness they had just shed, and the boys would then go into the room to gather them up. They could feel the warmth of the women’s bodies still in them, lingering in the haze of colour. The older boys would occasionally pocket one — for, he now knows, moments of arousal later.