Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

*

It’s almost dawn and Lara has been here at the table with a book, surrounded by the painted vistas and processions on the wall, for many hours. Marcus is in an armchair in the next room, in a state of alert exhaustion no doubt, like her. She can see part of his body next to the plum blossom printed on the chair’s fabric. Can see part of his lengthy comet-like beard. ‘This land and its killing epochs,’ he had been saying earlier. ‘The Soviet invasion took away Zameen, the Taliban era swallowed up Qatrina. I fear that this new war will take someone else away.’

She had gone to sit on the floor beside him. Her head on his lap.

‘You have to go away, Marcus. Go far away from this place.’

‘I live here.’

‘It’s called waiting.’

‘Do you think?’

In both of them there was a wish to conserve energy so it was a whispered exchange. A drowsiness, and little or no inflection behind the words. He began stroking her hair but soon stopped even that, the hand just resting there.

‘I am waiting for my grandson, yes. All this’ — the hand was lifted a fraction off her head because he probably wished to wave it around the room, the house, what she thinks of as the ruin of golden Islam, a destroyed markaz perhaps and a ‘Zone of Peace’ with him as the Sufi — ‘is his and must be passed on to him. Having all of you here has made it even more clear to me that this is my life and my home. I don’t just live here because I don’t have an alternative.’

‘I inherited everything of Stepan’s. But I want nothing to do with it, the wealth he left. I don’t really want to know the methods by which it was accumulated. You could buy a trainload of Siberian timber for one dollar during the financial crash of 1993. No, I don’t want it. Who would?’

‘Me.’

‘As children we heard a story about the tin-based Russian currency. How one particularly cold winter, when temperatures fell below minus eighty-six degrees, the nation’s entire coinage had turned to white powder, as tin does under such conditions. I am sure the story is untrue, but I don’t want to touch what Stepan has left me, I will let it turn to dust. I have come to hate money.’

‘Not me.’

She had straightened at that, shocked even within her tiredness. ‘I can’t believe what I am hearing. You wish you had money?’

‘A vast amount of it. Why not? It could be used to build schools and hospitals, parks and libraries and community centres. I am not saying the only way to save someone is through money, or that life should be reduced to quantities of wealth. The rich have this idea that they have paid off their debt to the world by becoming rich. No, I am talking about the difference between greed and need. And not just this country, there is a world out there that I would try to help.’

She had felt ashamed. ‘You are good.’ It all depends on how big you think your family is . The words of her mother.

‘I didn’t say that to imply you were being self-centred.’ He cupped her face in both his hands. Or got as close to doing it as was possible for him. He attempted it and she understood the attempt. If the left hand was missing — well then, it was missing.

The touch of his hand was tough in some places, fine in others. A gatepost weathered by departures.

He said, ‘You must go back and take charge of these matters intelligently. You must delve deeper into Stepan’s death, try to discover what your country’s government and your country’s army is doing.’

‘I am too weakened, Marcus.’

‘You are going to let them go unchallenged?’

‘They are very strong.’

‘Then you’ll fail. But so what? At least you will have tried. The goal is to have a goal, honesty the striving for honesty.’

A dependable clarity dissolved out from him. An aura. It was as though she had been able to make out each of the pages her mother thought she was filling her notebooks with in her last days.

Now she rises and drinks a few gulps of water, which after the thirst feel immensely pure. It is like being a bowl of dew.

From the orchard she looks out at the lake. During the night she had gone down the path towards Usha several times, always turning back because of fear, but starting out again later, covering this time a distance greater or shorter than earlier. At the dacha they had hurt Stepan to make her reveal herself. She had heard his screams from the hiding place where she sat whimpering. And so, during the course of the night that is ending, she kept hearing Dunia’s voice, calling to her.

Now she moves along the path again, trying to gather her nerves as she goes. The sky above her is still dark but there are many hints of light, almost everything visible. A sound like a shower of broken glass and she looks to her left, into the trees that are populated by the djinn, catching sight of the peacock just before it disappears with its waterfall-like tail. The retractable trim of long feathers on each wing was glowing with the reddish orange of rust-covered knives. She enters the contained and muffled solitude of the trees, the silence so heavy it is as though her ears have been sealed. Here could be another explanation for the painted rooms of Marcus’s house: it could have been built to provide an education to the djinn about what it means to be human. Each interior a classroom, the djinn moving upwards within the building as their knowledge increased sense by sense, arriving finally at the topmost golden space.

She notices small birds flitting around and above her. Bee-eaters, parakeets, orioles and goldfinches, who received their red faces when they tried to remove the crown of thorns from Christ’s head. They are too many and too different for it to seem natural. It’s as though the door to an aviary has been left open somewhere. Minutes later, lost and unable to find a way out onto the path, she is leaning against a tree when she becomes aware of an intense fragrance. There is no arrival or gradual rise in intensity — it is there suddenly like music released. There is movement beside her, the faintest of stirrings. She turns her head and sees the ten figures, bowing in two rows towards Allah. All their attention on their Maker. They are not aware of her even though she is only two metres away from the end of the second row. This beautiful brown-skinned boy is little more than fourteen. How close she is to the pulsating energy field that this innocent-looking child exists within, the grand realm of spiritual events in which his real life occurs, Muhammad and Gabriel more real to his passioning eye than she.

He has Pakistani features and colouring. Recruited from a religious school for this cause? Terrorist groups in that country buy and sell boys as young as twelve for suicide missions. Once they receive training they can be barred from returning to their families, becoming virtual prisoners. The groups have been known to accept ‘ransom’ for their release, justifying it by saying that neither the boys nor their training had come cheap.

Or is he doing this willingly? In the months to come his mother or father, sister or brother, would be scouring this land for some word of him.

Hundreds of Russian mothers wait along Chechnya’s border with Russia, women of advancing years who have decided to come and discover the fates of their conscripted sons, brought there by the news that his military card has been found or a locket with his name on it. They move from town to town and search the train carriages heaped with the dead boys, looking for a birthmark or asking one another if eye colour is the same in death as in life, untangling one boy from the press of the hundred others and pulling him out, already unrecognisable, bitten by dogs and rats or cut to pieces.

A few birds are singing in the branches overhead. The song much more powerful than the fragile body of the singer.