Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

‘No. She was not a spy. Didn’t Christopher think I would have known?’

‘Not necessarily. You would expect a spy to be an expert at deception. Even at the best of times we don’t really know everything about others. Exactly what I have just said about Casa and Dunia.’

He can see the gun through the table’s surface as though it’s glass, not wood. The too terrible thing, the truly monstrous thing, is that in the mayhem of those years he had had to make a number of decisions like these himself. He remembers the scattershot speculations, and the collective urgency to grasp opportunities and exploit advantages, to bring the deadlock with the USSR to an end once and for all. Christopher — according to the best facts he had at his disposal at the time — allowed her to be killed because he thought she posed a danger to the interests of the United States of America …He grips the hair on either side of his head until it begins to hurt. Christopher too had used a bullet to end his life, the pain of the illness too great in the last days.

There is plenty of corruption in the CIA. Christopher was so good at spotting frauds that he discovered before any of his peers that one of the most renowned case officers working in the Latin American division was corrupt — he invented most of his agents and probably pocketed some agents’ pay in diamonds and emeralds. But corruption was certainly low in the Peshawar of the 1980s. And he has lost count of the times he has wished Christopher had allowed Zameen’s execution to go ahead because of money. Yes, Gul Rasool had lured Christopher to the meeting in order to offer him a bribe. If only this were true. David could have shouted at Christopher then, or had him arrested, fired in disgrace, or yes, perhaps even murdered him and taken the punishment — but no, Christopher was honest in that respect. This was not about greed and personal gain.

Buildings in Pittsburgh and Chicago carry the Palantine family name, there are three-storey Upper East Side apartments with Old Masters on the walls, and there are houses in the Hamptons and in DC and Pennsylvania. Christopher’s father helped found the CIA, and there has been a senator in the family of James’s mother for three generations. All this against David’s own ancestors, who had crossed the Atlantic in the mid-eighteenth century more or less as ballast in the ships that had taken American flax seed to Ulster’s linen mills, the human cargo compensating for the buoyancy on the nearly empty return voyage. There is a beloved uncle in Kentucky who charges his customers $10 for a haircut or you can pay him in snakes. But never for a moment had Christopher made him feel that he had an advantage or lead over David because of his background. Respecting his intelligence, his abilities. So no, it wasn’t a case of not caring about the happiness of someone with David’s roots either.

This was about nations and ideals. About carrying the fire.

He looks at James. ‘Was there another reason?’

‘No. I have told you all I know.’

‘Something I can’t help but suspect. There could be another reason why, that day in 1993, he didn’t tell me he had known who she was. Looking at that mile-high column of glass and steel with a tower of smoke inside it, he knew I was finished with the CIA. Knew I wanted none of it any more. But the bomb had exploded minutes earlier. He knew the CIA — the USA — needed me now more than ever. My knowledge, my contacts, my skills.’

‘He always said you could’ve made director.’

‘Could he have kept the truth from me so I’d keep working with him, helping him understand the new threat to our country?’

‘As things turned out you couldn’t go on anyway and gave it up,’ James says, getting up to leave. ‘You shouldn’t have left the team, David. Who knows, certain things — certain events — might not have happened had you been able to bury your personal feelings.’

And from the door he gives a little shrug at David’s stare. ‘I shouldn’t have said that, I’m sorry. But it’s possible. And if it came out as me doubting your patriotism, I am sorry for that too. I am sure Dad would have held himself responsible had he lived another year, definitely, wondering how and where he’d managed to make a mistake, and let’s just say that he would have regretted the fact that you hadn’t stuck around.’

Ornithologists were consulted in the wake of the 2001 attacks because birdsong was heard on a bin Laden video, and David too had volunteered the knowledge of Afghan mountains and cave systems he had accumulated through his gemstone interests. When Moses commanded Aaron to fashion a jewelled breastplate, he remembers thinking to himself, charts and photographs of Afghanistan’s geographical terrain spread before him, with twelve stones representing the twelve tribes of Israel, the fifth stone was lapis lazuli and in all probability it came from this set of caves here … It was his first contact with the CIA for over two years and it was they who now informed him that Christopher Palantine had taken his own life the previous year.

FROM ENTHUSIASM TO IMPOSTURE the step is perilous and slippery … In the golden room David looks up from the heavy book in his right hand, the blood vessel in the wrist pulsing beside the edge of the page. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . Marcus, Lara and the girl are elsewhere in the house, Casa probably in the perfume factory with a lamp at his side. He looks down at the book again, the smell of dust on the paper…. the demon of Socrates affords a memorable instance of how a wise man may deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud. The pulse is usually felt where the radial artery lies near the surface of the skin, on the thumb side of the wrist. Before detaching Marcus’s hand, Qatrina had cut into his flesh and clamped the radial and ulnar arteries, to prevent excessive blood loss. Can the beat of his heart be felt near the end of his forearm now? The book is heavy. In the Texas of the mid-nineteenth century the illiterate Comanche warriors remembered to take away bibles and other books during raids on farms and settlements. They had discovered that paper made an excellent padding for their bison-hide war shields, absorbing a bullet if packed thickly and tightly enough. Someone came across a shield stuffed with the complete history of ancient Rome — its rise, efflorescence and eventual fall to barbarians.

‘WHAT IS IT?’

He shakes his head. In their brief past together, this handful of days, he has told her only the most minimal of details about Zameen’s death, the barest of revelations about his own activities of the 1980s.

‘You have enough on your mind already.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I don’t want to say it out loud.’

He walks to the door and locks it, looking back towards where she stands across the wide room. And returning, he tells her everything. How he met Zameen. The boy she loved, and the Soviet bombing of the refugee camp. How the CIA knew about the raid in advance. His trip to Uzbekistan to deliver weapons and Korans. There seeing the Muslim woman being punished for having taken a lover, and a Russian lover at that. Returning to find Zameen and the child missing, and then discovering how her circumstances had once reduced her to demean herself …

She listens to all this and more. There is no reaction from her even when the generator is switched on by someone out there and the room lights up suddenly. They look around, their eyes unsteady. Two day-blind animals exposed to full sunlight. When his eyes adjust he sees how shaken she is by what he has told her, by what he is telling her. As he continues the room becomes dark again, the generator either switched off for some reason or running out of oil.