Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

Parental figures. Women of Lara’s age are what he looks at most closely when he gets a chance. Avoiding the disturbing faces of the younger ones, thankful when the burkas kept them out of sight during the Taliban regime. A residue from childhood — when he was without any sense of time, when he thought adults had come into being the size they were — there is a faint trace of envy in him even today when he sees a boy accompanied by his mother. Her hand must deliver anaesthetic as well as pain when she slaps the child over a misdemeanour.

He wonders about the magnitude of the sin he is committing by looking at Lara’s face, even though his thoughts are pure. A wish in him to prolong the tenderness he is suddenly experiencing in his breast. A mother. An aunt or older sister or cousin. He tears himself away from the comfort at last and turns back, to find another path towards the lake.

*

Lara and Marcus are spreading washed clothing onto a rope in the sunlight. There are no pegs so they are using large safety pins instead. If the pomegranates were in season, she thinks, they could have distributed them among the pockets to weigh down the clothes against the wind.

‘Do you miss Britain?’

‘I think about it, yes. It’s only natural.’

On one of her white sleeves, not fully bleached, one-third of a pale orange-coloured blossom is visible.

‘We went almost every year at one point. Zameen knew the Lake District, knew Edinburgh and London nearly as well as she knew Mazar-i-Sharif and the Buddhas of Bamiyan.’

‘The Yorkshire moors.’

‘The woods full of bluebells.’

‘When David and I are gone you’ll be alone here once again.’

‘Did you know Turner used sketches he made of the Yorkshire moors when he painted Hannibal’s army crossing the Alps?’

‘Do you have family in England?’

‘A painting of immense power. A sweep of blackness above the soldiers. The stragglers being picked off by the savage mountain-men … The book of his pictures is nailed in the corridor on the second floor. Later when he produced a canvas about the victory at Waterloo, there was no glory to be seen there either. Just the dead bodies lying on the battlefield with wives and sweethearts searching among them. And this was the winning side.’

Only now does he lift her hand to his lips. He kisses the fingers, cold from the wet clothing. ‘Thank you for being worried about me.’

‘I’ll go back in a few days no doubt.’

‘There is no reason why you can’t come and visit me again.’

She nods.

‘And after you have gone back to Russia, David will be alone too.’

She looks at him, seeing his grin, the pulse of benevolence in the face.

He goes to sit on the threshold, and she joins him minutes later, the light filtering through the hanging clothes. She watches him smoke his one cigarette of the day. A bit of tobacco rolled by him in kite paper. They can be pink or blue or white.

‘How could a perfume maker smoke?’

‘Smokers actually smell better than non-smokers.’

‘That’s illogical.’ She smiles.

‘Not at all. The carbon monoxide in the cigarette blocks the enzyme in the nose that breaks things down — so the smell lingers longer than normal.’

‘Next you’ll be telling me there are perfume makers who continue with their profession even after losing their sense of smell.’

‘There are such cases.’

She laughs. ‘Like Beethoven continuing to compose after he lost his hearing.’ She looks up into the sky. A cloud appears and dissolves even as she watches — a flimsy wisp, it is gone so thoroughly she finds herself doubting a memory a few moments old. ‘My Stepan used to smoke. I made him give up.’

‘You needn’t feel guilty about David.’ He kisses her hand again. ‘We must live.’

‘I wasn’t always like this.’

‘Let me imagine.’

‘When I was much younger. If I was happy you’d know it, and the same if I was unhappy. Didn’t really believe in silent or passive suffering.’

‘The Russian Soul, and all that. Right?’

‘Tell me more about Qatrina.’

‘For a long time I didn’t know where she was buried. They wouldn’t tell me.’

‘You won’t see her again?’

‘Neither of us believed in an afterlife. When you are dead you decay and become part of the earth. It is no disrespect to the dead to say that their bodies have been consumed by creatures in the soil. It makes us cherish this life and this world more. That is much better than the talk about eternity and the hereafter. Death is not greater than life.’

‘I would have liked to have seen the ninety-nine pictures she did.’

‘Gone.’ He raises his hand towards the sky.

‘Why that subject?’

‘She represented us humans doing all the things that Allah is supposed to do. Her comment on the non-existence of God. We don’t have souls, we have cells.’

‘There is a tradition of the Buddha having ninety-nine names.’

But his mind is elsewhere. ‘It took me years to locate her when I came back from exile. I looked for her, journeying through deserts and forests, along limestone cliffs and granite boulders. Gul Rasool had abandoned her in the mountains, and she went from place to place. Trying to practise her profession as much as she could. Tired like me of the colour red. Everywhere there was the civil war.’ He places the cigarette on a pebble, and rubs his scalp with his fingers. ‘It then seemed unreal that I had found her, that we two had been overlooked by death and were together in this house once again. During the years of her captivity by Gul Rasool, she said, his fighters in a hashish haze had beaten her for marrying a white man. She’d sneak off to give medical treatment to the villagers whom Rasool and his guerrillas had wounded for not giving food and assistance to them. She used mountain snow as anaesthesia for amputation after battles with the Soviets. Temperatures low enough to freeze battery acid. Similar things had happened to me with Nabi Khan. But we now counted ourselves among the lucky, with dynamite and rockets and grenades exploding all around us. Then one day the civil war stopped and the Taliban arrived in Usha. 1996.’ He shakes his head, looking at her with his light-filled eyes. ‘But enough of sad things.’

*

Life in Usha was blasted-out and silent because of the war between Nabi Khan and Gul Rasool, but the Taliban put both of them to flight within days. And now — only hours after gaining control of Usha — they began whipping women in the streets for showing their faces. They banned smoking, music, television, kite flying, ludo, chess, football. There were bonfires of books and videos and audio tapes. They stood on the sides of the roads arresting men who didn’t have beards, taking them to jail until the beards had grown. They ordered shops to close at prayer time, and in the first few hours they nailed a singer of devotional music to the mulberry tree in front of the mosque, for not revealing where he had buried his instruments. Qatrina, on her way to the clinic, tried to intervene and was struck in the face by a young man — so hard she thought he’d shattered her cheekbone — and told to go home and not to venture out from then on. He had raised his hand in the air and held it there for a few seconds instead of bringing it down to slap her. He wasn’t hesitating, he was stalling to give her time to become afraid of the coming blow.

They were mostly poor foot soldiers from primitive and impoverished backgrounds. Vulnerable and easy to control, it didn’t take much effort to work them up into frenzy over what they had been taught to believe as religious truth, and the domination over women was a simple way to organise and embolden them.