Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

Casa is holding the long beam-like pieces — the inwales and the outwales, to be pegged with the dowels along the rim of the boat — and Marcus, after remarking on the brightness of the wood, says:

‘Mary is said to have beaten the child Jesus for weaving sunbeams into a bridge and drowning three boys. They had refused to play with him because of his lowly origin. He cursed the willow tree from which the switch was made and that is why the willow tree rots easily.’

Casa smiles through this unneeded reference to Christianity. Muslims revere Jesus Christ — peace be upon him — but that Jesus bears no resemblance to the one today’s Christians follow. They have perverted the Bible, adding and subtracting stories, suppressing certain sayings of Jesus — like Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword — and before the world ends the Muslims will ensure no memory of the false Jesus remains in the world. ‘Today’s Christians don’t want us to know this,’ Casa was told at the martyrdom training camp, ‘but the God we share with them approves of our methods.’ Yes, he knows. He knows how the helpless and debased Samson — who is Shamaun in Arabic — had asked for strength from God. Then Samson called to the Lord and said, ‘O Lord God, remember me, I pray Thee, and strengthen me, I pray Thee, only this once, O God, that I may be avenged …’ And with that he grasped the two middle pillars upon which rested the temple where he was being disgraced and humiliated, and he leaned his weight upon them — his right hand on the one, his left hand on the other. Saying, let me die with the Philistines, he toppled the two pillars and brought the massive building crashing down, killing himself and three thousand others, an act of which God obviously approved because He must have given Samson the strength he had asked for.

‘The chest in which Qatrina kept the ninety-nine paintings of the names of Allah was made of willow,’ says the Englishman. ‘Each picture rolled up and fastened with a wide ribbon of Chinese silk.’

Casa had seen women wearing Chinese silk during his days as a taxi driver. He’d take young American soldiers to the Great Wall of China, the clandestine house of pleasure that opened in Kabul after the Taliban were obliterated. No Afghans were allowed into the establishment, the white men emerging from there sometimes with women on their arms, the shimmering colours of their dresses like bright wrapping paper around a child’s toffee.

He himself has been touched by a woman only five times in his entire life, mostly the nurses handling him at hospitals. Certainly there has never ever been anything of his own volition. The state of affairs is similar among those who intend to carry out Nabi Khan’s imminent martyrdom attacks in Usha. And since Allah says that no one must die a virgin, Nabi Khan had arranged for them to know intimacy for the first and last time in this life. It was to have happened tomorrow night.

‘I don’t know what became of the paintings,’ Marcus is saying. ‘I see them in my memory, though. For me that is possession enough. She painted on the chest the berry tree that grows above Allah’s throne according to the Koran.’

‘How long will the canoe take to construct?’ Casa asks David.

‘You and I, we’ll have it on the water in a few days.’

David made a start this morning. The white side of the bark was almost luminous in the lake’s water where it was left to soak. He had lifted it out, as well as all the smaller pieces, and brought them dripping to the dry land. And placing that largest piece on the ground, the white side up, he had laid onto it the twelve-foot leaf-like shape that he had fashioned out of plywood — the shape the base of the canoe is going to be.

Now he and Casa get to work — silently on the whole, except for a grunt now and then, and with the million-year-old gaze of the demoiselles watching them from far away.

David had collected large stones from along the lake’s shore, some of them covered in brilliant patches of moss, and these are weighing down the plywood leaf.

The main piece of bark is only slightly wider than the widest point of the plywood leaf, so they’ll have to use extra pieces at the sides, sewing them on with the lengths of spruce roots soaked in hot water for flexibility, using the antler-handled awls to make holes for the rows of double stitches.

The excess bark has been bent upwards around the plywood template and stakes have been driven along the outline to keep it folded up.

They are doing this in the shade because the sun would dry out the bark, and they are pouring hot water from a bucket — set on a fire near by — to ensure the bark remains workable.

David tells Casa that this type of boat had been in use for at least fourteen thousand years, that torches would be fastened to the canoes when they were taken out by the Native Americans for night fishing on the lakes of North America.

*

It is an awakening when the generator is installed.

Casa and David work on the bark boat until the sun sets, the gradual disappearance of light in a vast show of overlapping reds above them, sweeping in evenly spaced bands. Then they lift the generator out of the back of the car. And, working together by candlelight for half an hour, they set it going.

Casa tries not to get swept up in everyone’s obvious delight. Like transparent eggs, David has brought boxes of bulbs which Casa fits into the socket in each room, putting chairs or stools on tables to gain the heights, someone always holding the column of furniture for his safety. He takes out the dead bulbs and examines them closely. If the filament is broken — as opposed to burnt away completely — he can manoeuvre the two ends into meeting again, snagging the coils together so that the current can flow through once more.

Suddenly the house is lit up with radiant electricity. It’s as though they had trapped daylight a few hours earlier and have now brought it into the house, hanging a cage from a hook in every room.

It is his first time in the deeper interiors of the house. When the switch is thrown, light shoots out of the bulb and slams into the walls but then it is as though the walls are glowing from within. They also seem to take a step towards him. Colour. He stands inhaling it. Marcus points out various details to him, his talk confusing him, making him feel at times that he doesn’t know much about Islam let alone other religions, that he knows little about Afghanistan let alone the world.

Arriving at the room at the top, however, as he stands in the middle looking around, all he can think of is annihilation.

Fragments of plaster are arranged in the centre of the floor, depicting two lovers with their arms around each other, Marcus carefully removing four pieces for the four legs of the table, so Casa can rise towards the fixture in the ceiling, towering above the image. He stands in a daze: the indecent images on the walls seeming to swell and recede with each thump of his heart.

He had told Nabi Khan that for tomorrow night’s necessity they must be given an adult female.

The lilies stretching their jaws, the smaller blossoms hanging in triangular grape-like clusters from high vines — he does like these painted details, he must admit. But the rest. If all this is what is meant by the word ‘culture’, then culture is not permitted in Islam. So it is that the Devil has the temerity to say to Allah, ‘I have added colour to Adam’s story,’ and — the senses undermining faith at every turn — no wonder the Saudi fighters want all the mosques here in Asia painted white inside and out, like the ones in their desert homeland.

Music issues from a tape recorder in a stone alcove while he sits in the kitchen with Lara and Marcus, helping them peel boiled potatoes. He gets up and half-fills a glass of water and brings it to the table — for them to dip their fingertips into from time to time because the potatoes are scalding hot. His own Kalashnikov was the authentic article, but there were Pakistani-made copies that heated up when they were fired, obliging a warrior to dip his hand into a puddle during battles.