Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

That was where she died several days after the stoning. A man at the mosque was sent to see her, to ask if she would beg Allah’s forgiveness for a lifetime of sin. She wouldn’t respond to him. But as she sat there she sometimes raised her burka and pursed her swollen lips and spat out something white into a corner. Maggots had developed in her nasal cavity and were dropping into her mouth.

SHE PICKS UP A BOOK from the table and begins to look through it. It is twenty minutes to midnight. She is sitting on a torn pink divan with David lying half-asleep beside her. She stops at an illustration of a youth tied to the back of a wild-seeming horse, stretched out naked along the beast’s spine. The horse he is fastened to is racing through a night forest, the hooves plunged into thick foliage. A moment from the verse of Byron. Its dark eye glaring, the horse has its teeth bared in fury or terror at the six black wolves chasing it. There is very little light. She begins to read the lines printed on the page opposite the image. The helpless boy is Mazeppa, a Polish noble who had become involved with another man’s wife, and it was his punishment to have been tied to the back of the wild horse and set loose.

The paths of minor planets. More and more these days Lara’s interest is caught by personalities and events on the edges of wars, by lives that have yet to arrive at one of history’s conflicts, or those that have moved away from the conflagration — the details of lives being lived with a major battle occurring just over the horizon, or on the mountain above them.

The horse had been captured in the Ukraine and it returned there, carrying the boy half-dead from hunger and thirst, from exposure and fatigue. A warlord named Mazeppa did exist in reality, someone who as an adult distinguished himself in several expeditions against the Tartars, his bravery causing the Tsar to make him the prince of the Ukraine.

She returns the book to the table. She lowers her own face to his to awaken him or to sink into sleep beside him. Whichever comes first.

DO MOTHS DROWN THEMSELVES in still bodies of water on clear nights? It must happen occasionally. Their mistaking the membrane-thin image floating on a calm surface for the moon itself, the two as identical as a pair of coins from the same mint.

In the room on the highest level of the house, Marcus is thinking, perhaps dreaming, about a night desert he had traversed in search of Qatrina one year, a journey that brought him to a town where she was supposed to be.

Only twenty-nine years in the entire human history had been without warfare, and now here he was too, travelling between episodes of a rapacious civil war. Once there was tracer fire from a night battle in the distance: the swaying lines of brilliant white points that were the glowing ‘fire shells’ — they had been interspersed with the lead bullets to let the gunmen know where the shots were going.

There was a flat clay bowl before him at chest level during the journey across the desert, the disc of the moon caught in the small quantity of water. He had been advised never to lose the reflection and by the end of the night he would reach the next small town in the desert. He stood still and kept his eyes on the bowl in his raised hands — taking a step when the moon was about to slip out, never allowing it to. He feared he would trip on a rock or an irregularity in the terrain as he moved forwards or sideways without seeing, that he would splash the water onto the ground. His slow overall progress matched the moon’s pace across the sky.

Now and then, he thought he would go insane because he could not find the reflection — it had vanished completely from his hands — and he shouted desolately, breaking into short haphazard runs in the pale darkness because he failed to locate the place where the bright likeness had left the bowl. There could not be even a few moments’ lack of concentration.

In case of a fall he would puncture a blood vessel, he reassured himself, and collect the dark liquid from within himself to rebuild the strange compass. He set the bowl on the ground and detached several thorns from a cactus for use in such an emergency, securing the large needles on the fabric of his shirt. Sar-e rahyat bashinum ta biyai. Tora mehman konom har chand bekhahi … He sang out loudly against the darkness. Until you come I will sit on your path. I will make you my guest whatever the cost …

The song like brocade in his skull.

He saw the first houses on the horizon just as the sun was beginning to rise, his rigidly positioned arms tired from lack of circulation and filled with pain as though he had been carrying not a handful of water but something heavier, as though a long summer had passed since he picked up the bowl at the beginning of the night, a summer that had transformed a weightless flower into a large fruit.

He placed the water carefully on a ledge of rock and continued unassisted towards the half-ruined town, crossing a damaged bridge over a river that had small ferns growing along its bank like a trimming of lace at the edge of a garment. He had pulled out the cactus needles from his shirt and placed them one by one beside the bowl of water. Perhaps the next person was also undertaking his journey because of love and would appreciate the vein-opening thorns should the need arise. All those who love know exactly the limit they are prepared to go to. They know exactly what is required.

She wasn’t there and he had to continue onwards to another town. He was waiting at the bus stop in the rocket-scarred central street when he found himself walking back to the bowl he had left behind as a gift. Under the morning sky the water was milky blue as though the hard pill of the moon had dissolved at last, its pigment dispersed. He drank the two sips of water, lowering them into his body. He managed to get back just in time to climb onto the roof of the bus, the metal body punctured by bullets. A man in search of a woman.

WITH A SWIVEL, James Palantine leaves the surface and enters the body of the lake, arms opening a diagonal path for him towards the depth. The water heals itself above him.

Within the lake’s bowl, he imagines himself in a flooded amphitheatre. His gaze is calmer in this subdued light, after the sun’s play on the constantly moving ripples of the surface. The word is ‘scintillation’; he remembers David telling him this when he was a child, his father’s gem-merchant friend. A word used by jewellers for the light that leaps restlessly from facet to facet on a precious stone.

He is not alone as he travels through the layers of water. His two companions and he are converging towards a point on the sloping side of the bed. In Usha it is said that a crate of bottled water might lie snagged on something at the bottom of this lake.

And here, swimming into the depths, James and his friends have found it.

They could be gem miners themselves, he thinks, as they work away the mud and rotted matter. A funnel of yolk-coloured light shining down from each of the three foreheads. They can run a mile in four minutes, a normal soldier needing about seven, and for the time being they aren’t having to fight the water for every second they are in it — the buoyancy that is intent on expelling them. Great forces are present here, waiting to reveal themselves if provoked, in this seemingly contented stillness. When he joined the Special Forces, military psychologists had subjected him to a regime of techniques in case he was ever captured by enemy states. Sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures, isolation, religious and sexual humiliation, and the procedure of simulated drowning known as waterboarding. Following the 2001 attacks, the CIA, lacking in-house interrogators for the captured terrorists, had hired a group of outside contractors; the military psychologists who had trained James but who were now retired were part of that group.