Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

He looks up and his heart sinks upon seeing David the American walking towards him.

‘Are you well?’

Casa manoeuvres him away from the large window. ‘I thought you had gone.’

‘Not without seeing if there’s anything else you needed, and we have to pay for your treatment. I went off to attend to a few things.’

‘I thought you had already paid, I thought you had gone.’

From the plastic bag he has with him, the man takes out three new sets of shalwar-kameez. ‘For you. I wasn’t sure about the size but I think they’ll fit.’

Casa takes them from him and just as the man is proffering a sheaf of Afghani banknotes — ‘Do you want to settle the hospital bill yourself?’ — Casa catches sight of the three figures at the other end of the corridor, watching him. His fellow warriors. They pivot away and are gone in the next instant, Casa’s fingers still not fully closed around the money.

They’ve gone to report to Nabi Khan what they have seen, to ask him what should be done. People at the very centre, like Khan, cannot use electronic equipment, made watchful by the bounty on their heads. Only the external circle can be contacted through the cell phones — they would then convey the message verbally to Nabi Khan and bring out his response and instructions. Casa has at most ten minutes before they return to kill him, spray him from their guns. Those standing near by will die also because bullets are blind. He has to think fast, extremely fast. No location in the city is safe for him. They know all possible places where he might hide for a few days to work out what to do.

He feels thirsty all of a sudden, intensely so, as though he has been force-fed thorns. Where is that bottle of water?

‘I am glad you came back,’ he tells David. ‘Would you be kind enough to take me back with you?’

He still has his shroud. No one has commented on it so far — wrapped around his body under his blanket it just looks like an extra layer for warmth — but he must hide it somewhere when they get back to Usha. The stark white cloth is dabbed with a few syllables of his blood from last night. A Saudi Arabian boy had given it to him as a gift, having soaked it in the holy water of the spring in Mecca which burst forth when the infant prophet Ismael struck the ground with his heel, to quench the thirst of his mother, the pair having been abandoned in the desert by his father at Allah’s bidding.

*

David has to negotiate his way into Usha. As a result of the shabnama , armed gunmen have been posted on the road in from Jalalabad. A third of an orchard has been felled and the flowering trees arranged in a barricade, a giant white garland in front of which the men stand with their weapons, the last bees of the day working the blossoms. Gul Rasool was away but has now come back to Usha.

Near by a father is chastising a little boy for playing football, as all that kicking would damage his new shoes.

David had phoned James Palantine earlier today and asked if they could meet. He too was in another province but is making his way towards Usha at Gul Rasool’s request. A group of his men, young Americans like James himself, is here to safeguard Gul Rasool in the meantime.

‘He’ll come and see me here,’ David tells Lara when they arrive. ‘I’ll ask him about Benedikt then.’

They are taking a pillow and a thin mattress and some sheets to the perfume factory for the boy. He is too reserved to enter the house, saying he’ll sleep down there.

David looks at her under the evening sky, the leaf-filtered light from above. All day he had wanted this, had wanted to touch her, but there has been no contact since his return. Marcus always present. There was also the matter of their unexpected guest. And, yes, he must admit, there is a hint within him of shame, of doubt. What makes him think he deserves these moments of gladness amid all this wreckage? Afghanistan will still be there in the morning?

As he and Zameen made love at the apartment in the Street of Storytellers — that thing a woman’s long hair does, when it accidentally comes to lie over the face in crosshatched layers, her features seen through the overlapping gauze! — songs would drift in through the open window, words on the night breeze. He hadn’t at first understood why in these lyrics mundane observations were mentioned in the first verse — a mosquito’s whine, the sound of a twig broom on the courtyard floor — but were coupled in the second verse with expressions of deepest longing. But by then as he smelled the jasmine on her breast, looking into the vertigo-inducing depths of her eyes, he knew that in its obsession the heart responds to everything by echoing back a truth about the lover, by echoing back a truth about love. Everything — everything — reminds you of her. The pomegranate tree has produced its first blossom, a woman would sing on a radio in the bazaar downstairs, and as Zameen sighed in his ear, the singer would add, On the journey towards the beloved, you live by dying at every step .

Slowly he raises his hand and touches Lara’s neck with the back of his fingers as they walk towards the perfume factory.

CASA IS CLIMBING the giant face, using his hands and his toes to seek out holds amid the stone features. The arc of the lip. The nose ledge. The dot between the eyebrows. Reaching the top — which is the side of the head, full of waving locks of hair — he sits beside the horizontal ear, the stone grainy under his palm. The floor is ten feet below him. He looks into the pit of the ear’s whorl and reaches for the flashlight in his pocket. Half a minute later he switches off the beam and sends his fingers in there.

He scrambles down and then goes up the staircase where the oil lantern they had given him burns on the fourth step, emerging into the dark corridor of trees, going past David’s car. He is carrying before him the old bird’s nest he has discovered in the ear. A loose bowl of grass. The bird must have found its way into the factory through one of the many broken windows. Amid the straw and grass blades there is a black feather, a complete diamond-shaped pink rose petal, and bits of brittle moss that he can see. With a tentativeness in his demeanour, trying not to smile, he enters the kitchen and places the woven object on the table where the three of them are sitting. The candle flame giving a lurch in the draught, the light sloshing to one side of the room like liquid. He turns and leaves, a small sound of delight and surprise from Lara behind him.

DAVID MOVES AMONG the shapes in the glasshouse. A sweep of stars above him. The Straw Ribbon, Keh Kishan, is what the Milky Way galaxy is called in Persian. Zameen had told him this.

After the Soviet Army conceded defeat in 1989 — the war had lasted longer than the Second World War — Marcus had returned to Usha and David had gone back to the United States, visiting every few months for the next five years. One night at a function at the Islamabad embassy he ran into Fedalla, who was now a colonel, rich with all the money he had siphoned from the guerrillas. A large house, a harem of cars. He was in a group with ________, David’s mole in the ISI, and was participating drunkenly in a conversation about Afghanistan. How the influx since 1979 of the millions of filthy Afghan refugees had ruined the once beautiful city of Peshawar. Had led to what he termed the ‘Kalashnikovisation’ of his homeland. ‘Look at the shapes of the two countries on a map and you’ll see that Afghanistan rests like a huge burden on poor Pakistan’s back. A bundle of misery.’

As the conversation moved on to the ten thousand bombs that had fallen on the city of Kabul the previous month, the civil war having begun, ________ indicated that he had something to convey to David.