Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

Zameen and the other young girls of Usha had kissed the adolescent through the veil, his mouth the mouth of a doll for them.

Now he was older — eighteen years of age, the delicacy of the features beginning to coarsen into handsomeness — and was truly loved by her. He came regularly to her house to borrow books and she saw him frequently in Usha, writing in his notebooks — sometimes very rapidly as though using a quill whose top end was on fire, but slowly at other times, as carefully as an embroiderer intent on delighting a sultan. In the beginning she was too timid to say anything to him and had consoled herself with what Muhammad had said about those who died of secret love — that they would be granted immediate admission to Paradise as martyrs — but a fortnight ago she had revealed her feelings to him. What she hadn’t known was that when he shyly removed his cap in her presence it was so she could see him better.

Now, in a dark grove of trees near the lake, she shook as they tried to think of something to do. They were sure the next day the news would come that one of the cleric’s older wives had vanished, and then in a few weeks he would marry a young girl.

‘She was still alive.’

‘I heard her too. We must go back.’

They went past the burnt remains of the school that the Communist regime had opened in Usha last month. The first one in the area, Zameen herself being a boarder in Jalalabad, coming home at the end of the week. Following the sermons from the mosque, and with the active involvement of the members of the two rich landowning families — whose wealth and lands the Communists promised to distribute among the deprived and unfortunate majority of Usha — the teachers and their families had been savagely massacred a week ago and thrown into the lake, the poor of Usha doing their worst to announce their loyalty to the landowners and to Allah — their only protectors. They had wanted to kill Zameen’s lover too, because he was always reading and a young man who spent that much time with books had to be a Communist. He had managed to flee, revealing himself to Zameen only tonight with that sparrow peck on her window.

Now they led each other back to the djinn’s lair, but despite an hour and more of searching they were unable to locate the burial site.

Neither of them knew that during their search Usha had filled up with soldiers. Among the murdered teachers had been the Soviet headmaster of the school and his young family. And tonight the Soviets had retaliated.

Zameen was holding the boy’s hand in the thinning darkness at the end of the night when she felt her arm being suddenly tugged downwards, and only then did she realise that he had been shot, the sound of the gun also reaching her now. The Soviet soldiers surrounded her and took her to Usha where the cleric confirmed her identity to them with a nod. She saw the mud on the hem of his trousers.

The mosque was among the first places the soldiers had visited upon entering Usha, rightfully suspecting it of being the possible centre of the resistance, and the cleric — just back from interring his wife — had provided them with a list of names to save his own life. This was a chance for him to eliminate the two lovers also, to make sure what they had seen would go no further. He said Zameen and the boy had participated in the massacre, that they were among the people who had marched through the streets carrying the severed heads of the school’s staff, the headmaster’s wife and three fair-haired children among them.

LARA STANDS in a corner of the abraded golden room at the top of the house, considering with her serious eyes the expanse of empty floor lying before her. A candle burns in a far alcove. Beside her is a cardboard box and she dips her hand into it without looking. She brings out a piece of plaster on which a set of lips is painted. Taking five steps, she lowers herself into a crouching position and places the smile on the floor.

The hand entering the box again, she brings out this time a painted sprig of foliage. She looks around and decides where this fragment should be placed. A distance of two feet from the dark red mouth.

There is coloured dust on her fingers as though pollen.

Next comes a section from a woman’s ribboned hair. She consults her imagination — the outline of the picture she is trying to construct — and then positions the piece on the floor accordingly. Marcus must have saved these from when the room was attacked, the strafing of guns tearing out these details from the walls. How carefully he has washed away the mud even from these fragments. Moving backwards and forwards she positions further pieces. Some are as large as her hand. One has half a face on it, a beauty mark on one cyclamen cheek. There is a whole moth in flight, wings patterned like a backgammon board.

From the candle comes the smell of burning wax and a twisting line of smoke. The image on the floor develops section by section. It is a kind of afterlife she is constructing for all those who have been obliterated from the walls. A young man and a woman made out of the ruins of the dozens in this interior.

He should have brown eyes, she tells herself, and she exchanges them, moving the green irises to the girl’s face. Now suddenly he seems disbelieving. A lover is always amazed.

She takes out another fragment and looks at it — a black tulip, a rare flower native to northern Afghanistan. She closes her fist around it until it hurts. In the spring of 1980 a Soviet lieutenant had died holding this blossom, having picked it moments before a sniper’s bullet found him. A comrade threaded it into his collar and he came home with it on his chest. Later in the war the large transport planes flying dead soldiers home took the name of Black Tulips, this flower becoming a symbol of death in the Soviet Union.

This is her third time in Afghanistan. Over months and years she tracked down soldiers who knew her brother, gathering vague clues, and then planned a trip. The number of Soviet soldiers still missing here is 311 but that could be one of Moscow’s lies, just as the true figure of the dead is closer to fifty thousand, four times the official number. It was said that the general who supervised the initial invasion had shot himself soon afterwards, but for the first several years of the war the Soviet Union would all but deny any casualties. When the dead multiplied, the relatives were discouraged from holding funerals and no mention of Afghanistan was made when occasionally a soldier’s death was reported in the newspapers — he simply died whilst doing his International Duty . When losses could no longer be denied or stifled it was judged best to make them fantastically heroic, and so wounded Soviet soldiers kept blowing themselves up with grenades in order to take thirty Afghan rebels with them. Lara didn’t know at the beginning but Benedikt hadn’t died or gone missing in battle — he had defected. Lara herself was under great suspicion as a result of what her brother had done, if things weren’t bad enough already because of the activities and opinions of their mother. They wouldn’t even tell Lara where in Afghanistan he had been based at the time of his disappearance. Later, as the years progressed and the Soviet Union began to be dismantled, they continued to tell lies or sent her from person to person to exhaust and frustrate her.

But by now a part of the story is clear. Benedikt was with another soldier when he defected, a seventeen-year-old. They both ran away from their military base together but Piotr Danilovich eventually lost courage and went back before he could be missed. He was the last Russian person to have seen Benedikt. By tracking down Piotr Danilovich she has managed to collect Benedikt’s last known movements. Their plan, he said, was to simply walk into the nearest Afghan village in the middle of the night carrying weapons stolen from the base to present to the Afghans as a sign of good faith. Thieves of food, of medicine, of the photographs of sweethearts — every soldier had some skill when it came to picking locks; and so Benedikt was to get the guns from the armoury while Piotr Danilovich went into the bedroom of one of the officers, a colonel. In Afghanistan there were deserts whose names conveyed everything about them. Dasht-e-Margo , Desert of Death. Sar-o-Tar, Empty Desolation. Dasht-e-Jahanum , Desert of Hell. And a few months earlier in one such desert, where the temperature had gone beyond fifty degrees, and on the dunes the spiders stitched together sand grains with their silk to make sheets to shelter under, the colonel had come upon an ancient skeleton with a mass of gems scattered on either side of the spinal column, where the stomach would have been. On the night of the desertion, Benedikt sent Piotr Danilovich to the colonel’s room — he was to find and swallow these gemstones. When he couldn’t get into the safe, he made his way through the darkness to where, having successfully stolen seven Kalashnikovs, Benedikt had emerged from the armoury and run into the colonel. The man was in all probability on his way to help himself to some weapons, Piotr Danilovich told Lara years later, to sell to the Afghan enemy. Piotr watched from the shadows as Benedikt and Colonel Rostov stood looking at each other in silence.