Nadeem Aslam - The Wasted Vigil

At the very top is the landing and then a door opens onto a balcony that runs around the minaret, a circular terrace just under the dome, exposed to the sunlight at this hour.

‘Does he actually live up here?’ They passed a cotton mattress on the landing. A small tin trunk stood open to reveal things for making tea. Powdered milk spilling from a twist of newspaper headlines. And out here there is evidence on the floor of a small fire of splintered wood, of burnt thorn and twig. There is a cot for sitting, its ropes frayed. He thinks of the summer months with their dust storms, palls of them rising up and burying the city for twenty minutes each time.

‘This area is without electricity at dawn so they can’t use the loudspeaker to make the call to prayer. Someone has to come up here and do it physically. He does that, but he actually lives somewhere else.’ He points to the east. ‘In that neighbourhood.’

They are standing on the balcony, looking at the city below. Above them is a roof of corrugated iron on which the claws of pigeons can be heard.

‘He said they used to give lessons in the Koran to the djinn up here, a long time ago. They came to the mosque down there at first but their presence was too overwhelming for humans, a child or two fainting with awe. So this minaret was built for them to walk up to without being seen or felt by humans. Bihzad says no one wants to be the muezzin, afraid in case the effect of the djinn still lingers.’

‘What does he look like? And when will he be back?’

‘Around noon. I told him I must go back home before night falls.’

David nods. ‘So this Russian woman — Larissa Petrovna, you said her name is.’

‘Lara. She’ll go back in a few days. She won’t say much but she lost her husband two years ago and is obviously in a time of darkness. She keeps apologising for being a burden on me even though it’s not a problem in the least. She is an art historian at the Hermitage in St Petersburg. You are sure Zameen never mentioned a Soviet soldier named Benedikt?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘You’ll meet her. But you haven’t told me what you are doing here. Listen to the birds, David, their wing beats.’ He is sitting on the cot, his back against the wall. ‘It feels strange to be away from the house after so long. I look at this ceiling and for a second expect to see books nailed up there.’

David looks at the panorama of the city while listening to him, the mountain range in the hazy distance.

‘The large book of Bihzad’s paintings had required three nails to stay in place on the ceiling. Such brutality had to be inflicted on it to prevent it from being burned to ashes — and here was a man so subtle he painted with a brush that ended in a single hair picked from a squirrel’s throat.’

David’s first concern is Marcus: how much has his Russian visitor told him about her brother’s assaults on Zameen? The shock would be devastating to him, but how much does she know herself? Zameen had hidden nothing from David but he has always been careful not to reveal too much to Marcus — or to Qatrina when she was alive. Qatrina who died in 2001, the long-ago spring of 2001 when the United States believed itself to be at peace, believed itself to be safe and immune from all this.

The Englishman’s eyes are closed now, the birds coming and going on the roof.

Zameen told him how she heard the door open that night, heard Benedikt enter the room in the darkness. Strangely he didn’t approach her bed as he had done over the previous nine occasions. He closed the door behind him but didn’t bolt it. A chain, hanging from a ring on the wall beside her wooden bed, was attached to an iron band around her wrist, so she couldn’t rush for the open door. His breath was rapid and shallow as though he’d been running. He whispered her name and struck a matchstick alight. Speaking in English, a language he knew brokenly from his mother, he said he was defecting and that she must go with him, said he had made it out of the base safely earlier tonight but had turned back for her.

When during his assaults she had wanted to scream but had been unable to, her hands — out of humiliation and rage — had flown at him, raking his skin, but now she listened, looking at his face in the yellow light which soon ran out.

‘Here is the key for your wrist.’ She heard something land by her feet. Like a raindrop on a leaf. He drew closer. One time he had fallen asleep beside her for a few seconds after the act and she had heard that breathing stretch much deeper.

She did not move towards the key, shaking her head even though it was dark. And so he lit another match and told her that Rostov lay bleeding out there and that she must know she would be drained of blood to save him. ‘Don’t make me go and kill him.’ There was pleading in the whispered voice, as when, his thirst quenched, he sometimes asked her to forgive him for what he had just done. During the daylight hours he was ashamed of what he did to her, but again and again in the darkness he found himself approaching her, ready to subdue, dizzy and almost sick with longing and desire and power.

Picking up the key she released her hand from the chain.

Out there, after an hour’s running through the darkness, they came to another soldier, another defector. Zameen persuaded them that they must go to Usha, but Piotr Danilovich left them soon after they set out. From within the darkness of an orchard, the flowers and the perfume of apricot trees, Zameen and Benedikt watched the small group of soldiers from the Soviet base arrive to look for them. After they had gone and the two of them were thinking of continuing towards Usha, they became aware of another possible danger, another set of voices close by. It was dark but the sky was beginning to lighten in the east, a few very faint lazuli strokes. The sound and movement of the Soviet soldiers must have attracted people from the nearby village, or perhaps they had been here among the apricot trees all along and had stilled themselves earlier. To avoid Soviet gunships many farmers went to work in their fields and orchards only at night, accompanied by small lamps.

Benedikt told her to wait as he went forward on his elbows to investigate, raising himself to a crouching position and then disappearing from view. She would never see him again or know what happened to him, what kind of life he walked into, what kind of death. The orchard was vast, and there were many others around it, but he had said he would find her easily because somehow they had ended up within a clump of three trees that were the only ones among the hundreds that were not in flower. She curled herself in the high grass and perhaps fell asleep beside the stolen Kalashnikovs. When next her mind focused, the voices out there had grown in number and dawn had arrived, and now she saw, as though hallucinating, that the branches above her had blossomed with the first rays of the sun, the late buds opening at last, hatching white-pink scraps against the clear blue of the sky.

*

David walks around the circular balcony and looks out at the distant peaks in that direction. The city of Jalalabad is flanked to the north by the Hindu Kush and to the south by the White Mountains, the chain standing over Marcus’s house. Looking at a relief map David always feels that if you grabbed Afghanistan at the borders and pulled, so great is the number of hills and mountains here, you’d end up with an area ten times its current size.

Marcus comes and joins him on this side of the minaret, both of them looking towards where his house is. The Buddha is said to have visited this valley to slay the demon Gopala, and Chinese pilgrims have written of the sacred relics once housed in shrines here. A fragment of the Buddha’s skull entirely covered in gold leaf. A stupa erected where he clipped his fingernails. The city resisted the spread of Islam until the tenth century.