Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

In America they would have to face the east in order to say their prayers, and so, David said, the early Muslims in America were thought to be worshippers of the sun and the moon.

They have straightened in unison — it’s like opening a child’s pop-up book — and are now standing up, hands folded neatly on the stomachs, on the suicide belts, faces lowered in obedience. Today is the day of reckoning promised in the shabnama . There is a slope in front of them where the tall grass is tiger-striped with paths. They must have come down through there to perform this final act of worship before going on to meet Allah, and other battalions must be elsewhere around Usha.

How long, she wonders, before they finish and see her? They’ll perform the two motions that are the last acts of the Muslim prayer: the head is rolled first to the right, then to the left. Allah, I wish well-being and peace for all those on this side. And, Allah, I wish well-being and peace for all those on this side . She had seen Casa and Dunia do this at the house.

She is sure they can hear the noise her heart is making. She steps sideways, the support of the tree disappearing from along her spine. And she takes a step back. The corner of her eye is fixed on them and now she sees David at the other end of the rows. He hasn’t seen her: he is moving towards the back row, eyes fixed on the third boy along from his end.

Casa.

David inches forward and comes to stand directly behind Casa, carefully raises his right hand towards the boy’s waist and his left towards the head. As the other boys move forward to bow again, David clamps shut Casa’s mouth and with the other arm fastens the boy’s arms to his sides. A tight grip. He lifts him out of the rank just as the others fall to their knees and then make their bodies foetally compact on the ground. The combined rustle of the others’ clothing hides any noise that the two of them have made. Why is Casa’s eye bandaged? she wonders. David drags the struggling boy away from the two bowing lines of the death squad, away into the trees, managing to raise him off his feet so the thudding cannot alert the others — their ears so close to the ground in their prostration. Her hands are wet with the tears she has wiped off her face, her vision slipping in and out of focus. Their clothing has drenched the air with perfume here. Jihad handbooks warn terrorists not to wear fragrances in airports, as it gives them away as devout Muslims. They have, of course, become aware of the disturbance, reacting as though in a dream, unable and unwilling to interrupt their prayer. By religious decree they are not even allowed to look sideways until the act of worship is complete. But in ones and twos around the gap that Casa has left behind, they come out of their trance, look back, see her, see David and Casa in that terrible embrace. All this takes place in a matter of seconds but to her it seems so slow that buds could appear and break into blossom and then wither around her. Coins of the realm and the names of cities could change. Governments and empires fall.

David’s mouth is next to Casa’s ear, and he is whispering something fast.

He is hoping to win over his murderer with an embrace.

THEY HAVE FALLEN BACKWARDS onto the earth. Managing to free his right hand from David’s grip, Casa feels along the belt tied to the waist. Through gritted teeth he says something, his face parallel with the sky visible through a gap in the foliage. The last words David hears.

The blast opens a shared grave for them on the ground.

TEN OR SO BUTTERFLIES go past Marcus’s knees and they double in number when they begin to fly over the lake’s reflecting surface. The sky has a milky lustre above him, the pale blue of lines ruled on the pages of a child’s exercise book.

He is dragging the canoe to the water’s edge, the various woods of it gleaming in the late-morning sun. The water seems to take it out of his hand, attempting to uncouple it from his grip. He has to make sure his feet don’t slither sideways. It looks raggedy. The ends of the ribs protruding where they haven’t yet been trimmed. It has not been sealed — with that gum sticky to the touch like certain leaf buds before opening — but it floats. Keeping his hand on the prow he walks with it into the water until he is submerged up to the navel, standing on rocks within the water. He lets go and with his one hand tries to lift a heavy rock out of the lake. Failing, he takes a deep breath and crouches. His head is in the liquid now. He manages to work one round stone out of the bed and then slides it up along his thighs, into his lap. Cradling it, he stands up out of the diffused shimmer and then carefully sends the black stone over the edge of the canoe. The bark vessel sinks half an inch deeper into the lake, the water sieving in. This was how the Native Americans stored the canoes when they were not in use, burying them in the water.

He looks towards the house, the balcony of the room where Lara is. He saw her walking from the direction of Usha earlier and took her into the house, helped her upstairs, stopping on the seventh step of the staircase to pick up the book that had become dislodged and landed there. The blood on her clothes was, she said, that of Casa and David. She wouldn’t bathe in the house, rejecting the idea of the drain, and had stood in the lake instead so that all the redness would become part of the roaming water. The sun-dazzled surface. One year soon after the Soviet Army invaded, the air around the house had turned yellow, thick billows of the colour arriving on the breeze, falling from the sky, every heart fearful at the sight because there had been reports of attacks with chemical weapons. In the end it turned out to be the pollen-rich droppings of a large swarm of wild bees. The colour settled on this water thickly enough for Zameen to be able to write her name in it.

He knows Dunia will never be found. Her face of unstudied nobility. The silent earrings she was still wearing from the time of the Taliban regime, when women would hold up a piece of jewellery and shake it to see if it made a noise. No one will know what happened to her. The talk in Usha will be that she must have run away with a lover. Her father will hold Marcus responsible for her disappearance. Perhaps violence will come from him towards Marcus.

He goes down into that water again, amid the drowned rays of the sun, and brings out another rock. Then another. He does this carefully, imagines the boat tipping and pouring the stones onto him, a landslide of his own making. Now and then he is forced to look towards Usha, the sound of an explosion. Rockets. Gunfire. Street fighting in the sewers and alleys of Usha. He imagines flattened homes, with hands protruding from the rubble as though still trying to grab hold of and stay the rampaging storm. The heroes of East and West are slaughtering each other in the dust of Afghanistan.

Both sides in Homer’s war, when they arrive to collect their dead from the battlefield, weep freely in complete sight of each other. Sick at heart. This is what Marcus wants, the tears of one side fully visible to the other.

Over the next ten minutes the boat sits lower and lower on the water. There are small insects on the lake not far from him like words suspended on the surface of a page. When the water is just three inches from the lip of the canoe he walks away from it, the lake falling from him in dense liquid sheets.

He stands watching it as it takes in an increasing amount of water and eventually disappears. He feels he has driven seventeen nails of various sizes into a book to make it stay on the ceiling.

Nothing but a set of oval ripples is on the surface. They become more and more circular as they travel away from the centre.