Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

‘Lara?’

She can’t look towards him.

‘I just spoke to James Palantine. He’ll make inquiries with Gul Rasool.’

And he adds: ‘I can tell him to forget about the whole thing if you wish.’ She looks up to see him pointing towards the phone in his pocket, the thing that never stops ringing when he is not in Jalalabad, echoing off the walls.

‘No, I’d like to find out. You would want to know if it was Jonathan, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

She stands up and goes to sit on the bed, and he joins her.

‘As I grew older my face began to resemble Jonathan’s. At nineteen I looked like his photographs when he was nineteen. It was like they’d buried him in the mirror. If they buried him at all, that is.’

This intimacy between them. The moments when any third person becomes a stranger and to talk seems pointless. But they are talking anyway, their voices low, as they do during the nights, he asking her if he can come see her in Russia, whether she would visit him in the United States. There is still a tentativeness on her side, but these are in any case the initial days. He’ll wait.

Her head is on his upper arm, and she turns sideways to see his face as he talks.

He has told her how last year he remembered something from his childhood for the first time. He and Jonathan were watching a programme about African wildlife on TV. Their mother was in the room also. The elephants had to set off in search of water because there was a great drought and they risked death if they remained. But one of them had just had a calf that couldn’t even stand up properly, let alone walk. The mother kept trying to get the infant onto its feet, pulling it up with the hook of her trunk, propping it against her leg. The rest of the herd was already a mile away in the distance, and Jonathan and he were both shouting at the screen, for the dumb animal to abandon the calf and race towards the others. Their mother became a little involved too, looking over her spectacles at the screen, telling them not to be heartless. ‘But she’s going to die if she doesn’t go!’ they told her. She didn’t have an alternative but she didn’t want the calf abandoned. It took some time but, prodding and lifting, the elephant did manage to get the calf to walk and they set off together in the direction the rest of the herd had gone. And to think that he and Jonathan — a stunned and shamed silence descending on them now — were going to let the calf die in the burning desert. A few minutes later he found Jonathan, who was about thirteen, weeping in the bedroom.

*

A small restless bird alights on the window sill — its tail and wings and head each shifting into three different positions in little more than an instant — then flies away.

At dawn she had wished him to see her in her one set of coloured garments. She entered the tunic and then her hands disappeared under it to tie the drawstring of her trousers at the navel. She looked down to distribute the pleats evenly around the two legs. She wore the clothes for a few minutes and then carefully put them away. It was as though she had draped herself with some images from the walls in this house. Her face altering against all the hues on the tunic. Her mouth a rich aroused ruby.

Now, beside him, she wears nothing but the thin necklace of beads. Over the previous days the most fleeting contact with her has come as a sinuous discovery. Zameen had taught him about the eroticisation of jewels and ornaments here in the East. Gold. Ivory. Emerald. Even the roadside aluminium and glass. All this against the glory of a woman’s bare skin. It is there on the paintings on the wall in this room, as well as in countless statues of temple dancers and goddesses with waist chains and bangles, with jewelled pendants resting between breasts. Brides are covered in jewellery and there is a sexual connection with the night to come. The poetry of these lands is aware of this. Night arrives and pulls off flowers from the jasmine grove. As when a groom helps his bride take off her ornaments in the bed chamber .

*

‘In which room did Zameen’s ghost appear the day the Taliban came?’

‘The one about sight.’

The blind and the seeing are not equal reads the inscription above that entrance, a quote from the Koran in elegant long-tailed lettering.

A blue rectangle of the ceiling stands revealed wherever a book is missing above her. They look like openings onto the afternoon sky. It was to prevent a haunting that in certain parts of Russia a dead body was carried to the church through an open window, or even through a specially cut hole in the roof. The idea was to confuse the dead person’s spirit, making it more difficult for the ghost to find its way back home.

Earlier David had received a call to say that the Jalalabad police have found the head of Bihzad at last, flung into a drainage ditch in the bombing. The young man who thought he was on his way to Paradise. To commemorate the baptism of Christ in the River Jordan, the Tsar — accompanied by the entire court and the leading churchmen — would emerge from the Hermitage on 6 January every year, descend the steps of the Jordan Staircase, and walk out onto the frozen Neva. A hole would have been cut through the ice, and Tsar and Metropolitan would bless the water. Children were then baptised in the icy river. What amazed the visitors from other lands was the reaction of the parents if ever a child slipped from the numbed hands of the holy men, never to be seen again. They refused to grieve because the child had gone to Heaven.

Stepan knew someone who had lost a distant relative in that manner.

Stepan.

It’s almost as though David is listening to her thoughts. ‘How soon after meeting Stepan did you know you loved him?’

She slowly turns her face away from him.

‘I don’t think I married him out of love.’ Very quietly. Looking at the wall where a horse and rider have been freed by Marcus from their mud layers beside the bed. The entire horseman except the left hand has been made visible, as though Marcus had forgotten that a person’s left arm continues beyond that wrist.

‘Stepan pursued me. A small part of me was flattered, but I said no to him many times. I agreed eventually because …’ Her eyes are still determinedly refusing his. ‘How wrong it seems when I say it out loud … A secret seen in the full light of day.’

‘You don’t have to tell me.’

‘Would you mind not looking at me right now?’

‘Sure.’

‘You can’t know how bad things were for me, because of my mother’s past, and because of Benedikt’s defection. I married Stepan, the handsome and well-connected army officer, because I thought he could bring me security. I thought my ill and ageing mother would no longer be harassed by the state because she would soon be his mother-in-law. That he would help me get to the truth about Benedikt. Oh, I am so sorry …’

An apology to the universe, to her better self, to Stepan.

She is sitting up now, forehead placed on the raised knees. She shakes her head, continues to shake it until she is able to speak again, construct her ever-precise sentences — the singsong voice, the soft t and the slightly rolled r .

‘It was a bad time. I just couldn’t see my way through clearly. On the other hand, a quarter of the official world were his father’s friends. They had known him from the time when he was a baby. They attended parties at the former palaces of the aristocracy. Had stories of borrowing porcelain and paintings from the collections of the tsars for a function at home.’

‘Why did you keep saying no at the beginning?’

‘I was falling in love with someone else at the time. But in the end I controlled myself and buried my feelings — deeper than the place from where they dig out your gems for you …With him, unlike with Stepan, I had known in a minute — in a minute — that he was someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. For a long time after rejecting him for Stepan my breast felt like there was a deep wound inside it. But through it all I did my best to pretend to be in love with Stepan … Oh I am so sorry …’