Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

He remembers the rockets falling around him again and again, bursting into giant clusters of hot sparks and metal, setting fire to the straw prayer mats that lined the floors. The heat from one blast leaving the blades of the ceiling fan curled up like a tulip. He had remained where he was asked to remain an hour ago, trembling with terror amid all the acrid smoke and ash and light, his trousers soiled and his ears in pain from the incredible noise like hammer blows, screaming for help but realising no sound would issue from his mouth. He was holding a gun that was older than him, and through all this he kept it aimed at the door as he had been shown.

He walks into the orchard on seeing the kitchen door being opened by David. These foreigners — who is protecting them? They are probably attached to a charity or an aid organisation, cogs in a machinery of kindness. Allah — in His wisdom — has planted these compassionate impulses in the hearts of non-believers, for Muslims to exploit and benefit from.

He had let down his guard when he took the bird’s nest to them last night. He had been looking for a place to keep his shroud and had found the discovery so enthralling that he had wished to share it with another human, the momentary fascination of it making him act out of his true character.

Having studied manuals for weapons and computers, for microprocessors and motherboards, having taken lessons in passport and credit-card forging, and having carefully examined news footage of almost every attack ever mounted on Western targets, he knows the English language. He had helped put together films at the jihadi camps in that language, to be sold in the mosques of European cities after Friday prayers — propaganda and preaching, the Jihad of the Tongue. But he cannot follow these people when they talk amongst themselves, the words coming too fast. If they communicated through written notes, he would, taking whole minutes to decipher a phrase but deciphering it nevertheless, the way he’d made himself expert on cell phones solely by studying the little booklets that came with them, warning Nabi Khan that even if the SIM card is changed, a caller who continues to use the same phone can be traced — by the police, by the Americans. Khan and his people had been told otherwise by the phone sellers, and that had been Casa’s entry into Khan’s inner circle.

The shroud, even rolled up tight, would not fit in the stone ear so he hid it in a far cupboard.

He is startled now to see David emerge from the house with a shroud of his own, then realises it is the skin of a birch tree peeled in one long piece, folded and tied up.

‘It’s the material for making a boat,’ he tells Casa. ‘I am taking it to the lake, I’ll build it there.’

Casa helps him carry to the water’s edge a box of implements and also the long pieces of wood for the vessel’s frame, the sky brightening overhead.

He examines the two antler-handled awls.

‘They are for making holes in the bark. The canoe is sewn together with spruce roots,’ David explains. ‘With these.’ The peeled roots, like thick glistening strings, are in bracelet-size hoops. ‘No nails or screws are used to hold the canoe together.’

He unrolls the birch bark, like a length of stiff cloth about a quarter of an inch thick, one side white, the other a dark gold. There are smaller pieces too but the longest is about fifteen feet long and forty inches wide.

Apparently the canoe is an American Indian thing.

‘And this is for the finer work,’ David says, looking into a bag and bringing out a knife with a blade made out of a straight razor. ‘It’s called a crooked knife — crooked because its handle is crooked not the blade.’ He hands it to Casa. ‘The thumb rests along the bent part of the handle — the native people did not have a vice to clamp their work so they held it in one hand and used the knife with the other.’

Casa grips it as demonstrated.

‘But, Casa, I think you should rest. Go back and lie down, and you should have something to eat. I am sure Marcus is up — I’ll come and join you in a while.’

The missiles that landed in Casa’s jihad training camp were named after an American Indian weapon — Tomahawk. Casa knows other words too like Comanche and Apache and Chinook. First the Americans exterminate the Indians, then name their weapons and warplanes after them. What did those Indians do to make the white Americans respect them?

HE DRINKS THE RED TEA sitting at the table with David and Marcus — on the farthest chair from them, the one nearest the door. Marcus is expressing his worry about the perfume factory being too cold during the night.

‘I don’t know why you didn’t sleep in the house.’

‘You are very kind.’

‘And remind me to find you a prayer mat.’

He is grateful for the gentleness they are displaying towards him, and feels he should convey his gratitude to them — show them somehow that he too is mindful of their well-being.

‘You are from the USA?’ he asks David. ‘You flew here?’

‘Yes.’

‘You should be careful about flying.’

David shrugs. ‘Why?’

‘In case the Jews repeat the attacks of 11 September 2001.’

David gets up suddenly and pours more tea into Marcus’s cup. And the Englishman too becomes somewhat animated, abruptly voluble. ‘Look at the three of us here. Like a William Blake prophecy! America, Europe and Asia.’ He points to the ceiling. ‘I must take down the book one of these days.’

‘My hands are already aching,’ says David. He has spent the last three hours with the canoe — it’s past nine and he is getting ready to go to the city.

‘I’ll help you build it,’ Casa offers.

For the time being they are his only allies, the only people who would try to act if Nabi Khan were to come through this door right now.

Two hours ago he himself was thinking of taking the car, but the fact now is that if he saw someone trying to steal it he would do his best to prevent the theft.

He now asks about the nailed books, and Marcus tells him it had been done by his wife, the unfortunate woman losing her hold on reality in her concluding days. Using her long hair to dust surfaces. He remembers to make appropriately sympathetic noises, though of course being female it must have been easy for her to fall into madness, Muhammad, peace be upon him, saying, ‘Women have less reason than men.’

Marcus has told him he is a Muslim but he must still be vigilant in case the other two try to convert him to Christianity. He walks back to the perfume factory through the sun-heated orchard, a peppermint lizard squiggling away at his approach. Near by a black beetle is trying to maintain a jittery balance on the rim of a tulip blossom, exactly resembling the one that is painted on a wall in the kitchen. Something smells of resin. Something else slow and furry can be glimpsed behind a fern — a striped caterpillar. He hears a flutter and looks up to see a flash of red in a silver-leafed tree. He can’t take the car and disappear towards Kabul or Kandahar because Gul Rasool’s men have cordoned off Usha. They’ll want to know who he is, how he acquired his injury. As he enters the perfume factory, the thought of being close to the idol down there is suddenly a distress to him. Afghanistan is a Muslim country. The entire world has to submit to Islam one day: when the Messiah arrives just before Judgement Day he will issue an invitation for all to become Muslim — those refusing will be eradicated so that the earth is inhabited only by the believers.

The Pharaoh’s wife Asiya and Jesus’s mother Mary are waiting in Heaven to be married to Muhammad, peace be upon him.

Sitting in an alcove before the smiling statue, to catch the sunlight pouring from above, he looks into the notebooks stacked on a shelf half an arm’s length away. Each page filled with what appear to be drawings of constellations but are in fact the chemical formulae of various perfume molecules. Small palaces of tangled geometry. The bindings are the green of grass stains on white cloth, the colour the world appears through night-vision goggles. He had been given a pair of these glasses by someone who had come to the jihad training camp from Chechnya; he had taken them from a dead Russian soldier there and had come to Pakistan with a load of antique carpets to fund the war in his homeland.