Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

For a moment she wondered if the helicopter pilot knew Benedikt, wondered if by chance the two Soviet men had ever met.

The three sleeping children. The butterflies would blow off a foot or a hand and half a face, maiming rather than killing, though the long distance which had to be traversed to reach a medical facility would ensure that the victim died of blood loss, gangrene or simply shock. Of the three children sleeping outside the burka the first two died instantly, the third she managed to take with her some way towards Pakistan but he too succumbed to his injuries eventually. She had no strength to bury him, the ground being too hard, but still she knew it must be attempted. A branch, a bone — looking for something to dig with she saw the flashing of water in the distance. Drawing near she discovered that hundreds of mirror fragments of various sizes had been placed on a man’s corpse, to stop it from being eaten by vultures. The birds perched a few yards away but were frightened off by their own reflections whenever they drew any closer. They flapped their wings as they sat, as though fanning away the stench rising from the decaying flesh. She lifted some of the shards and placed the dead boy beside the original body. After rearranging the pieces to cover them both, the death embrace, she continued towards Pakistan. For food she had nothing beyond a pouch of almonds, an onion, some honey tilting in a jar. Bihzad and the fragrance her only other possessions. Empty-handed as a ghost otherwise.

THE DAY HASN’T YET fully begun — the flowers are sunk in dew and the lake is lit by the morning star — but Casa and David are already beside their bark boat. A blue greyness is still the chief presence around them. David wonders if he should name the canoe after John Ledyard, the first citizen of the independent United States to explore the lands of Islam, visiting the Middle East in 1773.

It weighs less than fifty pounds. Its base is a fine equilibrium between flatness and curvature so that, even though on the ground, it turns on a dime, an indication of the ease with which it would spin and change direction on water. It seems creaturely now, alive under their fingers, restive as a child being dressed or being given a haircut. The task ahead of them now is the putting in of sheathing — the thin strips of wood which line the inside, overlapping like the feathers of a bird — and then the ribs. As they work their concentration is so great at times that the other man simply vanishes from view, ceasing to exist.

The Ledyard ?

In a letter written from Egypt, days before his death, John Ledyard had asked his friend Thomas Jefferson to take all those wondrous descriptions of the East — Homer, Thucydides, Savary — and burn them, advising him against ever visiting Egypt.

‘What do you think we should name it, Casa?’

But he just shrugs in return. Looking around, as though for the bird whose song with its small piercing explosions is coming to them.

David isn’t sure who the first Muslims in the Americas were. When the Spanish brought the very first African slaves to the New World in 1501 they sought to ensure that they were not Muslims. These Spanish Catholics had a particular dread of the Native Indians converting to Islam. One reason was that if African Muslims — who knew about horses — converted the Indians and then taught them equine skills, much of the Spaniards’ military advantage would be lost. Let the Indians keep thinking that horse and rider were a single animal which came apart at times to move independently.

And yet only a decade earlier Muslims were the rulers of Spain. When Islamic Spain was extinguished in 1492, Christopher Columbus was months away from his discovery of the New World. Western Christians, not Muslims, would discover North and South America and the great oceans that bind the planet. There would never be a Caliphate of New York.

No wonder Muslims still weep for their Spain. The thought of it is a solace to them, but that too is a tragedy. It’s as though England still harboured designs on America.

They work accompanied by the transistor radio, by the sound of frogs from the water, or the whistling wing-joints of a demoiselle crane flying by overhead. Casa is diligent but of course there is no romance in him towards the canoe as there is in David. ‘Can a motor be fixed to this boat, at the back?’ he asks, looking at the paddle as something frivolous.

‘Theoretically, yes.’

‘Good,’ he nods approvingly, reaching across him for the knife. At times Casa stands or kneels extremely close to David, but David knows that whereas in the West the distance between people is usually an arm’s length, here it can be half that. He knows no threat is implied. At gatherings, the Westerners who have yet to learn this can be seen backing away from the person they are talking to, who in turn reads this as rejection.

Casa handles tools expertly and with grace, with perhaps a certain delight, and is an efficient mover in any given area. Of course the Afghan ingenuity with all things mechanical is a myth, encouraged by the United States and the West during the war against the Soviets. Most of the rebels were peasants who had little or no military expertise. They came from villages in distant pathless mountains and, contrary to historical romances, were not natural guerrillas or warriors. They needed training in weapons and technology, they who were still afraid of eclipses and thought communications satellites circling the night skies were in fact stars being moved from here to there by Allah. A mortar crew would fire off its ammunition without first fusing the mortar bombs. They knew little about camouflage or maps and would smash a radio in frustration when it stopped working because the batteries had run out. For amusement they took shots at fireflies, and they played with their weapons until bits broke off. Small arms were fired haphazardly, with the firer keeping his eyes firmly shut. They cut a fuel pipeline with an axe and then set it alight, tried to break open unexploded bombs with a pistol or a hammer. Thousands of men, women and children fell victim to the Afghans’ own incompetence and lack of technical knowledge. There were commanders who didn’t capture a single town from the Soviets after a decade’s fighting.

Afghanistan was known as the Graveyard of Empires, yes, but these and other appellations of ferocity were thought up by British historians attempting to explain the end of the First Anglo — Afghan War of the nineteenth century, the most notorious defeat in British history. During the 1980s male Western journalists enthusiastically revived and embraced these martial stereotypes, to the satisfaction of agencies like the CIA.

‘What do you think of the Bliss ?’ David asks Casa. ‘There was an American called Daniel Bliss who gave the Arab world its first modern college, in 1866, in Beirut …’

*

Casa can tell when a bird is flying out of fright. A useful indicator of danger. And in a training camp in the jungles of Pakistani-occupied Kashmir he had learned to tell if a snake was near him: by listening to monkeys in the tree canopies — snakes attacked these monkeys so frequently that there was a word for it in their language now, a specific sound telling all others to look down because he has appeared . In that camp operated by the Pakistani military and the ISI he had even witnessed a peacock mating with a peahen, which is — given all the extravagance of the mating dance — an intensely private event, so mysterious that some people believe the peahen is impregnated through tears she drinks from the male bird’s face. So now he only half-listens to David’s words, paying attention more to his surroundings.

As with monkeys and snakes, the Americans have learnt words like ‘jihad’, ‘al-Qaeda’, ‘taliban’, ‘madrassa’.