Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

After the gun was fired into the horizontal face it was noticed that a small point of light had materialised in each bullet hole, a softly hesitating sparkle. Over the next few instants, as more and more of the men took notice and stared uncomprehendingly, each of these spots grew in brilliance and acquired a liquid glint. Welling up in the stone wounds, the gold eventually poured out and began to slide down the features very slowly, striping the face, collecting in unevenly spaced pools on the floor.

As though they had come out of a trance, the men in defiant rage sent another dozen bullets into the idol but with the same result. In addition he now seemed to be opening fully his almost shut eyes, the lids chiselled in the stone beginning to rise without sound in what felt like an endless moment.

THE AMERICAN MAN, David Town, is awakened just before sunrise by a muezzin. The first two words of the call to the Muslim prayer are also the Muslim battle cry, he remarks to himself as he lies in the darkness, never having seen the connection before.

The voice is issuing from a minaret three blocks away, dissolving into the air of Jalalabad, the city that surrounds him. He has travelled through most of this country over the decades, his work as a dealer in precious stones bringing him to the amber mines of Kandahar, taking him to Badakshan for the rubies that Marco Polo had written of in his Description of the World . The war-financing emeralds of the Panjshir Valley. He found the River Murghab to be so full of rapids it could have been the Colorado.

He listens to the voice continuing as he falls asleep again. Come to worship , it says, Come to happiness .

An hour later he gets up and walks out to a nearby teahouse. There is a samovar, and bread is being pulled out of the clay oven buried in the ground in the corner. He remembers Marcus Caldwell telling him tea is an ingredient in some perfumes. Maybe it was Zameen, passing on knowledge absorbed from her father. We learn in detail that which is most insistent around us. The desert people make good astronomers.

To the left of him a chakor partridge bites the bars of its cage. They are a gregarious bird, moving in large family groups in the wild, but are kept like this all across Afghanistan. The place becomes more and more busy as daylight increases, the road full of traffic. Vans and lorries, animals and humans. Wrapped in a coarse blanket he occupies a far chair, nodding and saying salam-a-laikam whenever someone new arrives to take a seat near by. He sits with his quiet watchful air. A cap unscrewed from a missile serves as a sugar bowl in this place. He can see the words Death to America and Kill Infidels daubed in Pashto, in two different paints and two different scripts, on a nearby wall. A news hawker enters, a child of six at most, and a man buys a magazine with Osama bin Laden on the cover, photographed as always with the Kalashnikov of a Soviet soldier he had killed here in the 1980s.

*

‘Marcus?’

David, walking back from breakfast, calls out towards the figure on the other side of the narrow lane.

The man with the white beard stops and looks up and then comes to him, taking him into his arms, a long wordless hug. Just a few smeared noises from the throat.

‘I didn’t know you were in the country,’ Marcus says when they separate.

‘Why are you in the city?’

‘I came yesterday. A shopkeeper in Usha, who recently visited Jalalabad, told me about a boy in his twenties who could be … our Bihzad.’ That was the name Zameen had chosen for her son. Bihzad — the great fifteenth century master of Persian miniature painting, born here in what is now Afghanistan, in Herat. ‘David, he remembers a lot of things, remembers her name.’

‘Where is he?’ He looks at Marcus, the eyes that are the eyes of a wounded animal.

‘I met him yesterday. I spent last night with him.’ Marcus points to the minaret with the high domed top in the distance, a brass crescent at its pinnacle. ‘Up there. He makes the call to prayer from up there.’

‘Then I think I heard him at dawn.’

‘We spent almost the entire night talking, or rather I talked. He is a little withdrawn, distant. There was something fraught about him occasionally.’ From his pocket Marcus takes out a key with a cord threaded through its eye. ‘He gave me this. Come, I’ll take you up there.’

‘What about the scar?’ The child had burned himself on a flame.

‘Yes, I saw it.’

‘He’s up there now?’

‘He said he had a few things to do but he’ll be back. I came yesterday morning, thinking I’ll go back on the evening bus but the service was cancelled. So I had to stay.’

‘I’ll drive you back this afternoon.’ A journey along vineyards that produced bunches of grapes the length of his forearm. ‘I was going to come see you in the next few days anyway.’

‘I should have returned as planned. She spent last night alone.’ Marcus stops. ‘David, there is a woman back at the house.’

‘Yes?’

‘She’s Russian.’

He’d kept on walking and is two steps ahead of Marcus, but now he halts. ‘A Russian?’

‘Larissa Petrovna. She says her brother was a soldier who knew Zameen.’

David nods. The older man does not say the Soviet soldier’s name but David hears it in his head anyway. Benedikt Petrovich. The man who fathered Zameen’s child through repeated assault, the child David later called his own son, who it is possible has grown up to be the young man at the top of the minaret over there, the sunlight making the crescent appear as though it’s on fire. At the military base Benedikt Petrovich guarded the room where Zameen was kept, and he unbolted the door night after night and went in to her.

‘David, did Zameen ever talk about a Soviet soldier, about twenty-four years old?’

‘No. Never. So what kind of things does this Bihzad remember?’

A camel goes by with the burnt-out shell of a car fastened upside down to its back, the high metal object lurching at every step.

When David met Zameen, in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, Bihzad was four and was taught to think of David as his father. It was a matter of months after that that Zameen died and the boy disappeared. Lost as he was at such an early age, how surprising it seems that he has managed to carry with him even his name. Holding onto that one possession over the violent chaotic years.

‘He remembers Zameen telling him Qatrina was a doctor, seemed to have forgotten that I was one too, though he knew I had some connection with England. He remembers you, remembers Peshawar — all very vaguely.’

David has looked for him for nearly twenty years, making a number of journeys towards hints of him, always unsure about how much someone can remember from when they were four or five. It must be different for different people. There have been several leads in the past, one or two as compelling as this one, but nothing came of them. He is forty-eight this year, and from among his own early memories the earliest is of experiencing a strong emotion — which he would in later life learn to call love — towards what a set of coloured pencils did on a piece of paper, those brilliant lines and marks with a thin layer of light trembling on them. He always wanted those pencils near. He has calculated that he must have been about three. But he has no personal recollection of something that is said to have occurred at a slightly later age, something that is family legend — of him sinking his teeth into the leg of the doctor who was about to give his brother Jonathan a vaccine shot, Jonathan weeping with fear at the needle.

Marcus unlocks the door at the base of the minaret and they enter in silence, climbing the staircase that spirals upwards at the centre. Most minarets are narrow, merely architectural details these days, but this staircase is wide enough for horses. Half-way up there is a large hole that must have been caused by a stray rocket during one of the many battles the area has seen in the previous decades, one of the many wars. It is as though someone had bitten off the side of the tower.