Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

‘Then as now, you say?’

‘Yes. Only the dead have seen the end of war. Gul Rasool is the sole power in Usha now, and Nabi Khan is out there somewhere plotting to unseat him.’

She looks at the moon caught in a windowpane, great in size and brightness both. It seems that to shatter it would be to flood this room and then the entire garden and orchard with luminous liquid. In the 1950s, when the Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in the space race, the US Air Force had asked scientists to plan a nuclear explosion on the moon. People would see a bright flash, and clouds of debris would probably also be visible. Higher than they would be on Earth because of the difference in gravity. She knows from the tales of her cosmonaut father, someone who fell towards Earth in a burning machine, that Moscow had also had the idea of a nuclear blast. Yes, after such a demonstration who wouldn’t cower beneath a nuclear-armed Soviet moon, a nuclear-armed American moon? It never happened but she wonders if the terrorists didn’t come close to something like it in 2001, an enormous spectacle seen by the entire world, planting awe and shock in every heart.

She leans against the wall and closes her eyes.

Even if she hadn’t fallen ill she would have considered asking Marcus for a short refuge when she met him, letting a portion of her weight onto another, being held. While almost everyone else gave it to understand that shame must accompany failure, because you obviously weren’t wise or strong or brave enough to have prevented a derailment of your life, Marcus seemed one of those few humans who lent dignity to everything their gaze landed on. Like a saint entering your life through a dream. To him she would have admitted that the years have left her bewildered by life.

In the topmost room she looks at the fragments she had arranged on the floor. The two lovers summon up an army of ghostly lovers, the man embodying every other man, the woman symbolising every other woman, all imperilled.

*

In Usha they know Marcus Caldwell by his Muslim name. He believes in no god but had converted to Islam to marry Qatrina, to silence any objection. Like him she would have been satisfied with a non-religious ceremony, indifferent to the idea of supreme beings and their holy messengers, but she had agreed on condition that a woman perform the rites. ‘We have to help change things,’ she said. ‘Nowhere does the Koran state that only men may conduct the wedding.’

These days, Marcus seldom says more than a few words to anyone in Usha, communicating in the bazaar with just nods and gestures as much as he can and then leaving. He knows he is not the only casualty in this place. Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone’s life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble. Some are trapped near the surface while others find themselves entombed deeper down, pinned under tons of smashed masonry and shattered beams from where their cries cannot be heard by anyone on the surface, only — and inconsequentially — by those around them.

Yes, he knows he is not the only one who is suffering but he cannot be sure who among the inhabitants of Usha had been present the day Qatrina was put to death by the Taliban. A public spectacle after the Friday prayers, the stoning of a sixty-one-year-old adulteress. A rain of bricks and rocks, her punishment for living in sin, the thirty-nine-year marriage to Marcus void in the eyes of the Taliban because the ceremony had been conducted by a female. A microphone had been placed close to her for her screams to be heard clearly by everyone.

He began to avoid the light of the sun, keeping to the hours of darkness as much as possible. He took every clock and watch in the house and put them away in a drawer. At first the ticking was amplified entreatingly by the wood but one by one they all came to a standstill, as though suffocated. In this way he removed the sense and measurement of time from his surroundings. He knocked onto its side the pedestal bearing the sundial in the garden. A time of deepest darkness. The numerals painted on the sundial might as well have been dates engraved on a tombstone. The food in the cupboards ran out and he had nothing to eat. The entire world it seemed had fought in this country, had made mistakes in this country, but mistakes had consequences and he didn’t know who to blame for those consequences. Afghanistan itself, Russia, the United States, Britain, Arabia, Pakistan? One day he thought of capturing a bulbul that had flown into the house. In the end he knew he could never eat anything he had heard sing.

He recalled the desolation that used to occasionally overpower his mother, a sadness at whose very centre lay his father’s death. Marcus’s father was a doctor in the Afghan frontier and was murdered by a tribesman in 1934, a few months before his birth. The motive for the killing was never established though the killer had a son who had recently declared an interest in Christianity. The family had tried starving him, but when it didn’t have an effect the father tied a grenade to the son and threatened to pull the pin if he did not renew his vow of faith in Islam. Having murdered his son this way, he set out to take revenge on the doctors at the missionary hospital where the boy had come into contact with ideas that made an unbeliever of him. No attempt at conversion was made at the hospital but a chapter from the Gospels was indeed read in the wards every night.

Marcus’s mother continued as a nurse in the heart of the British Empire’s most turbulent province, returning to England only when Marcus was five years old. Kabul, Kandahar, Peshawar, Quetta — some of the earliest words he heard were the names of these cities of Asia. And he visited them during the years of his young adulthood, meeting the stately Qatrina in Kabul and continuing the friendship and romance when she moved to London to study medicine. Coming to live with her beside the lake near Usha, thirty miles from the city of Jalalabad, the city that sent its narcissus into the snow-bound Februaries of Kabul four hours away.

Flour and other basics. That red tea. Kerosene for the lamp. He rarely goes into Usha now, left alone by them all, his first reaction that of mild incredulity whenever someone approaches him. They can see me. And then this week a man drew near and told him about Lara, told him about a woman who was waiting for him two streets away, having come on the daily bus from Jalalabad the day before. They can see me. Some aspect of this he had sensed in the woman he was brought to, her inwardness so intense she could scarcely bring herself to speak or meet another’s eye. She stood up and smiled at him weakly. He saw the unslept eyes, the blue-black neck. The tiredness and the large bruise were physical but they seemed connected with her spirit somewhere.

He picked up her suitcase and they began the journey to his house. There were no words during the walk along the lake’s rim. Later he discovered that the clothes in the suitcase were damp. She explained that during her long journey towards him she had seen a girl raise a fire in front of a house and heat a basin of water to bleach some fabric. After she had finished and was about to pour away the leftover liquid, Lara had moved forward and asked if she could submerge her own three spare sets of clothes into it. Wanting that white suddenly, that blankness. The sole ornament on her now was a necklace of very fine beads like a row of eggs laid along the collarbones by insects.

*

Her gaze on the Buddha’s giant face, Lara sits on the lowest step of the staircase in the perfume factory. She looks at the features of the beautiful young man. He feels vulnerable and intimate, as if facing someone in bed.

Dressed in black, the Taliban that day in March 2001 were preparing to dynamite the head when one of them had contemptuously fired a round of bullets into the stone face smiling to itself. In some versions of the events of that day, a ghost had appeared in Marcus’s house to put the sinister malevolent figures to flight. But others insist it was the occurrence down here in the perfume factory. They carried Qatrina away with them, to her eventual public execution, and would have taken Marcus also if not for what happened here.