Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

*

In the autumn of 1959, Khrushchev visited New York but he kept delaying his departure back to Moscow. When this aroused suspicion, the Western world’s listening posts in England, Italy, Japan and Turkey set to work and eventually homed in on signals issuing from a rocket launch site within the Soviet Union. Among the signals was the regular beating of a human heart. The heartbeat grew faster as the rocket reached its first staging point, the cosmonaut experiencing the normal reaction of fear and excitement. At the moment the rocket’s second stage should have ignited, all signals ceased abruptly and the tracking devices lost contact. Though the Soviet Union denied it, the owner of the heartbeat had been incinerated in millions of gallons of exploding fuel. It is now believed that important safety checks had been ignored for the Soviet leader to have a triumphal moment while visiting the West — ‘The first human being in space is a citizen of the Soviet Union.’

Lara feels along the darkened wall. Her fingers touch the coldness of the lyre-shaped mirror and then journey over its frame, the warmth in the fingertips releasing the fragrance of the wood.

From the shelf she takes the matchbox and strikes herself a flame. In its brief yellow light she picks up the foot-long narrow box that lies on a higher shelf. Five more seconds — and a star bursts before her eyes, the silver brilliance at the centre of it scorching the retina. She turns around with it in her hands, the room shaking with the light. It is a child’s sparkler: a small amount of — what is it, surely not gunpowder? — moulded onto a stiff wire. She can’t find a candle and has just heard a sound from outside. It’s seventeen minutes past one. She moves towards the window with the white starburst. Her shadow is grey tinted with lapis lazuli and it wavers and shifts from side to side, almost vibrating. As when lightning flashes in a storm, entering a room from two different windows. She stands looking out into the night, the five inches of burning powder almost running out.

‘How do you think that kind old man out there would feel’, she had asked David, stopping him in a corridor, ‘if you were to tell him that his daughter’s death was needed for the secure and singing tomorrows you were arranging for Afghanistan and the world?’

And he had replied, ‘I loved her as much as he did. But Christopher made a mistake.’

He was not innocent but he was not guilty.

She was collateral damage.

‘When you are alone at night and your rage takes over — what face do you give it?’

‘I am also the man who is privileged to have saved many many lives, Lara.’

Everyone in the house came together at dinner but then she had withdrawn into this room with Dunia. Around midnight the girl said she wanted to pray and went downstairs, Casa’s fists sounding on the kitchen door not long after that. He was shouting that the girl was missing, that the electricity had been sabotaged.

There are two possibilities. Either someone from the mosque has taken her, to mete out justice for being immoral. Or — according to David — someone linked with Gul Rasool has, thinking she is involved with the people who put up the shabnama that night.

Marcus is in the kitchen now. And she doesn’t know where David and Casa have gone.

She takes out the two dozen or so lights that remain in the flat cardboard box and ignites them simultaneously. She stops herself from shaking. With all the power in her arm she throws the fragments of lightning out into the blackness, watching the thin silver flares slowly drop towards the ground, illuminating the air, the edges of leaves, the boughs of the rosewood tree that is honoured by the three ring-dove nests. They go out one by one in the garden and are a handful of dead moments, bits of time turned to ash.

*

In the nineteenth century, one of Marcus’s uncles in the North-West Frontier Province was in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. On parade every man of the regiment wore a single red feather at the front of his pith helmet. The regiment had taken part in the successful night attack on the Americans at Paoli in September 1777, the sleeping Americans massacred with swords and bayonets, the place set alight around the screaming wounded. The Americans had vowed vengeance and, in defiance, in order that they should know who had done the deed, the light company stained red the white feathers they wore in their hats, the tradition continuing for a century and more into the future.

He wonders what has stirred this memory as he sits in the kitchen with a small candle, the flame twice as long as the wax. The thought of the red-stained bandage at the back of Casa’s head? Or it may have been the small wound David has received while constructing the canoe. The boy and David had just drifted away from here separately, he and Lara alone in the house.

An ammonite rests on his palm. Zameen had found it during a fossil hunt in the Cotswolds. He can hear her upstairs. Lara. Her eyes must not have stopped looking for signs and indications of her brother ever since she arrived at Usha fifteen days ago. He knows this from his own searches for Qatrina and Zameen and the child Bihzad. And from what David has told him about looking for Jonathan in the Far East. At times he thought he would go mad, interrogating the earth and the landscape, alighting on possible symbols and portents. Always telling himself he wasn’t looking hard enough. Once he jolted himself upright from partial sleep, the book slipping from his grasp and landing on the floor. Among the clues to Orestes’ unknown burial place were

the two winds

that were by strong necessity blowing,

and a place where evil lies upon evil.

With these clues, Lichas had discovered the bones of the hero in the workshop of an ironsmith. The bellows were the two winds. Hammer and anvil, and the iron being wrought, were the evil lying upon evil. This, Lichas imagined, might be so because iron had been discovered to the hurt of man.

Marcus was in Kandahar when he read this, and in the madness of his mad heart he had wandered out into the night looking for a rickshaw or horse carriage to take him to a place where iron was forged.

QUICKLY, in the brief time it would take the believers to recite the last chapter of the Koran, Casa traverses a darkened courtyard inside Gul Rasool’s vast house, going through a plot of land filled with the shells of several dozen cars. There is a weak bulb in an alcove with moths lying around it, each with a few specks of life still in it, the wings damaged on the hot glass. Away from that light there is the absolute darkness. Where is she? He senses the presence of another and comes to a standstill, moving forward only when that second figure mimics his raised hand and he realises it is a dim mirror hanging on a far wall. A dream. But the next moment he is brought back to the present, to the reality of a sound from somewhere near by. A small rustle. He imagines himself to be in the crosshairs of a sniper’s gun. A fly held in a spider’s web.

He shouldn’t have come here.

He is not a good Muslim.

He is not a good Muslim.

Is it any wonder the infidels have taken over the lands of Islam? It’s Allah’s punishment for men like him who have become distracted by earthly matters. Allah will — is about to — smite him. I want to dip my finger in a war wound and spell the name of a hero — this should be his sole preoccupation while the lands of Allah are being invaded by non-believers.

Have they infected him permanently? When yesterday he said he didn’t know what to do with the sounds issuing from the radio, Marcus had told him, ‘You listen to music with your memories, Casa, not your ears.’ Perhaps it is the same with other senses also. You smell, see, touch, and taste with your memory. There have been occasions when he has eaten something sweet and been reminded for the briefest of moments of dynamite, from the time in the al-Qaeda camps when he had been made to recognise various explosives through taste, placing a small amount on the tongue. Certain large flower buds in Marcus’s garden reminded him of bullets. Now he wonders if the girl’s voice will be a component he’ll look for in any piece of music in the future. Many years from now will he be reminded of his experiences in the Englishman’s house — the six rooms, the perfume factory? The two places of safety.