Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

‘Back in 1986,’ David was told when they met the next day, ‘Christopher Palantine had arranged to meet Gul Rasool at a location outside Peshawar. Rasool was selling missiles supplied by the CIA to the Iranians. Christopher had the evidence and wanted to confront him, but when he arrived early he saw a young woman planting a bomb there. Rasool had lured him there because Christopher had to be eliminated, couldn’t be allowed to expose Rasool and have his CIA funding stopped. Christopher accused Rasool of trying to kill him when he and his men arrived, but he said, “Would I turn up here myself if I had sent her?” He had her shot then and there to prove she wasn’t anything to do with him. But he was more than an hour late, so it could have been him. And we actually now know that it was. Definitely.’

For some unknown reason David dreaded the moment the young woman’s name would be spoken. All names are my names .

‘She could have been sent to eliminate Christopher by the KGB or the Afghan secret service.’

‘That was one of Christopher’s initial suspicions. Fedalla, who has heard of the incident from somewhere, was telling us about it last night, convinced she had been sent by you, by the CIA. And Fedalla was in awe that the CIA allowed one of its own to be killed. He said it is such cunning and resolve that has turned your country into a superpower. That the Pakistani secret service cares too much about its people, cares too much about civilians to be truly effective.’

‘What was her name?’

‘I don’t know. But she pleaded to be let go, telling Christopher she couldn’t disclose who had sent her because then she wouldn’t be able to see her son again. Obviously too afraid of Rasool.’

The very next day David flew to New York City and telephoned Christopher Palantine and asked to see him.

Christopher was already there at the restaurant when he arrived and took his seat almost wordlessly, his silence cutting off Christopher’s words of pleasure at seeing him after such a long period. Friends who loved each other like brothers.

All David could do was stare at him. A cold February noon outside.

‘What is it?’

David took out Zameen’s photograph from his pocket and reaching his arm across the table placed it before him, swerving it in the air so that it was the right way round for the other man.

Christopher looked at the image and then lifted it off the tablecloth, and his hands disappeared below the table with it, the neutral expression not leaving his features. Perfect composure. They were after all spies, committed to their dark profession, their conversations laced with phrases like ‘plausible deniability’ and ‘I can’t tell you how I know that’ and ‘we never had this discussion’. Such words were spoken so often in Peshawar that they could be plucked out of the city’s dirty air.

There followed moments of chilling merciless disbelief as David had his answer. No language was needed. As confirmation there now came the sound of the photograph being torn up under the table. Three long rips that must have divided the rectangle of paper into narrow strips; these were gathered together and there were three shorter, thicker rips that must have carved the whole thing up into sixteen small squares. David remembered her telling him how someone from the mosque in the refugee camp — believing her child was illegitimate — had broken into her trunk and drawn a large dagger on her mirror as warning. She had lifted it out and seen the weapon superimposed onto her face.

David leaned back against his chair and closed his eyes, suddenly drained, Christopher’s stare still fixed on him.

He wanted to cry out, the noise a raised welt in the air.

‘It’s over, Christopher,’ he managed to say. ‘I am finished.’ Homer used the same word, keimai , for Patroclus lying dead in battle as for Achilles falling beside his body in grief. And later when Thetis came to comfort her son, the poet had her take his head between her hands — the gesture of the chief mourner in the funeral of a dead man.

It was then, just after 12.17 p.m. that February afternoon in 1993, that the thirteen-hundred-pound bomb exploded a block away in the underground garage of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

It was a yellow Ryder truck, parked there by a graduate of one of the training camps set up in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. The explosion was meant to release cyanide gas into the building but the heat burned it away. And one tower was supposed to fall into the other — the terrorists had hoped to kill a quarter of a million people.

The ground shook. Some fragments of the woman’s image scattered from Christopher’s hands. They had almost arranged to meet at the Windows on the World, 106 floors directly above the bomb.

They rushed out into the street now. There were flakes of snow in the air, floating like sparse bits of airborne glass, mixing with the smoke. People from all directions were running towards the site — soon there were doctors, ambulances, police cars, bystanders, groups of workmen from a nearby construction site, one of them wearing an IRA — FREEDOM FIGHTERS T-shirt. Sirens and cries and shouts.

He could have been up there, the elevators and the electricity having failed, smoke pouring up through the Tower towards him. And he felt as though he was, with devastation all around him and the howling depth outside.

‘They are here,’ he murmured to Christopher in the shocked recognition of inevitability.

He saw himself clearly, making his way down the black stairwells, and the deeper he went the greater the number of wounded and disorientated people who joined him like shades in Hell, the darkness and smoke increasing. Wherever you may be, death shall overtake you, though you may put yourself in lofty towers, said the Koran.

They are here.

Cops with flashlights were guiding people out as they neared the giant hole at the bottom.

Christopher dragged him away into a doorway. ‘Who was she?’

But he was still up there with them.

‘Who was she, David?’

‘I loved her.’

‘I didn’t know who she was or I wouldn’t have allowed her to die.’

‘Where are her remains?’

‘I don’t know. I doubt if anyone does.’

The workers digging the foundations of these buildings years ago had found ancient cannonballs and bombs, a ship’s anchor of a design not made after 1750, and one small gold-rimmed teacup made of china but still intact, with two birds painted on it.

He left Christopher and walked away.

The cleric who had inspired the attack — he lived and preached across the Hudson in Jersey City, having sought asylum in the United States — had called on Muslims to assail the West in revenge for the centuries of humiliation and subjugation, ‘cut off the transportation of their cities, tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air, or land’. The bomb resulted in more hospital casualties than any event in American history since the Civil War. And what did his life resemble from that point onwards? He became fundamentally inconsolable. It was like missing a step on the stairs or losing one’s balance for a moment — that sensation extended to hours to days to years.

*

He looks towards the window of Lara’s room, as yet unlit. Midnight, and she is still with Marcus. No one has ever mentioned — anywhere — the dust-and-ash-covered sparrow that a man leaned down and gently stroked on September 11, the bird sitting stunned on a sidewalk an hour or so after the Towers collapsed. It is one of his most vivid memories of that day’s television, but no one remembers seeing it. Perhaps he remembers it because he has since read that Muhammad Atta’s nickname as a child was Bulbul.