Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

At the very least they would hold her down and mutilate her face, cut the shame permanently into her features.

She has always tried to be careful, aware that when a woman ventures out of the house she must, upon returning, account for every single step she has taken since leaving the front door.

She cancelled classes today — the other two teachers, both nineteen-year-old girls, had been kept at home by their parents due to warnings from the mosque. Yesterday she went to the homes of her pupils to reassure the parents but a number of them abused her and one even pushed her out of the house. She spent this morning looking up at every flicker in her field of vision. Turned around at every noise. Thinking it might be someone come to punish her, and punish her severely, for having an illicit lover. The thought of Marcus had occurred to her then: she must go to him and stay there — a fugitive from injustice. Others could make up lies about her activities to slander her, could break in tonight to plant evidence. Or they could pretend they have caught her in a compromising situation with a man. But her father, when he returns, would have no doubts when Marcus vouches for her movements at least from this point onwards.

Her father had tried to talk her out of becoming a schoolteacher, saying it was too dangerous. ‘I know things have to change but why do you have to be the one to change them?’ The legitimate fears of a parent. But she had won him over. ‘The bullet that has hit us Muslims today left the gun centuries ago, when we let the clergy decide that knowledge and education were not important.’

With her eyes still closed she lowers her hand to the floor and touches its solidity. Women in Usha have always felt that they could sink into the earth any time. The strata beneath the surface are as insubstantial as the transparent layers of water that form the lake.

‘I’LL ASK GUL RASOOL,’ James Palantine says after being told by David about the three old men who had visited the house. About what they had said concerning the Soviet soldier and the leaf from the Cosmos Oak.

On the lake the demoiselle cranes are in full uproar at the dust raised by James’s car. Those in the second year are beginning their courting displays and all day they have been leaping, airing their wings, flicking pebbles. But, adolescents, they won’t get a chance to breed successfully till the third or fourth year.

Consulting his watch, David had walked out onto the path that runs along the lake’s edge, to see James arriving punctually.

Christopher had said he would have named him after David had he been born after the two of them met.

When he went to see the family after Christopher’s death in 2000, David had thought that recognition would just have to be left to James — not sure how the features of the boy he last saw many years ago would have altered with time. But he had recognised the young man immediately. He had come forward and embraced David, something he wasn’t expecting.

And he’d done the same just now, getting out of the car and holding out his arms to initiate a hug.

‘So you’ve seen the Night Letter?’

‘It could be just bravado,’ James nods. ‘Or there may be an attack. But we are prepared.’

‘I hear Gul Rasool has acquired a pig, a boar, which he intends to bury with Nabi Khan.’

‘Gul Rasool is convinced the shabnama came from him.’

‘I have a feeling it’s him too.’

He remembers this young man as a sandy-haired boy, to whom one morning during a visit to the family he gave the twenty dollars he’d been asked to bring to school. Contribution towards some drive or fund. The child came home in the afternoon and said there’d been a mix-up and the money wasn’t needed after all. ‘So what did you do with the twenty dollars?’ ‘I told you it wasn’t needed. I threw it in the trashcan.’

Now David asks, ‘There’s a bounty on Nabi Khan, isn’t there?’

‘A very small one — but he can lead us to more important fugitives. I would love to have the opportunity to talk to Nabi Khan. Find out what he’s got under his fingernails.’

David tries to decipher the impression on the face. Christopher was always hard to read and so it seems is David himself, people always complaining that upon meeting him you feel it’s you who is shaking hands with him, not he with you.

Global Strategies Group is a British mercenary company that guards the US embassy in Kabul, and other Western firms provide security all across the country. But David has just been reading about Americans — one-time CIA contractors, or former Special Forces soldiers — who have set up private prisons in Afghanistan.

He is not sure what James’s arrangement with Gul Rasool is. He was among the Special Forces teams — the élite stealth operators whose very existence is denied by the US government — who began hunting for al-Qaeda here in the wake of September 11.

‘Are you still in the army?’

‘I am still doing what I can for my country and the world.’

‘Have you heard about these guys who are going around abducting and torturing Afghans to get information about al-Qaeda and Taliban soldiers? Keeping them in private prisons?’

James looks at him. ‘We have to be careful not to use words like “torture” in these countries. It can be inflammatory. When these people hear that word they think of people being raped to death, of limbs being cut off, of six-inch nails being driven into people’s heads — that is what the word means here normally. A cold room is not torture. Withholding painkillers from someone with an injury is not torture.’

Marcus, holding something in his one hand, has appeared on the path from the house and is walking towards their car, Casa a few feet behind him.

‘We have a new kind of enemy, David. They are allowed to read the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, as their religious and human right. But have you read it? They don’t need jihadi literature — they’ve got the Koran. Almost every other page is a call to arms, a call to slaughter us infidels.’

James watches Marcus drawing near, and now he indicates Casa with a nod: ‘Is he the one my men had a run-in with yesterday?’

‘Yes. That’s Casa.’

‘Sorry about that. But these are strange times. The Pakistanis just helped foil a plot to blow up ten airplanes above the Atlantic. Of course they used torture — they are more straightforward than us — but thousands of lives were saved.’

David himself had had Gul Rasool tortured. And what didn’t he think of doing at one time to Nabi Khan, to make him reveal where Bihzad was.

‘Who are your men?’

‘Two started out in the FBI, one was a Marine, one was in the paramilitary unit of the CIA. The closest things to the robot soldiers the Pentagon has dreamed of for thirty years, from before I was born.’

Robot soldiers will not become hungry, they will not be afraid, they will not forget their orders, they will not care if the soldier next to them has been shot. But it’s impossible to teach them to distinguish friend from foe, plainclothes combatant from bystander.

‘Look what Casa found in the ground just now.’ Marcus has arrived and handed David a photograph of Zameen.

‘This is my daughter,’ he says to James who gives the image a quick glance.

David introduces them and they shake hands.

‘Won’t you come in?’ asks the Englishman.

‘I am in a hurry, sir. Another time.’

Casa has taken a few steps away from them, and then he wanders away towards the lake, stopping to bend down to smell a wild flower. Muhammad used amber, musk and civet as perfume, and spent more money on fragrances than on food. Days later, people would know he had been in a room.