The Wasted Vigil (5 page)

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.

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.

2

B
UILDING
THE
N
EW

T
HE
A
MERICAN 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 Badakhshan 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 on to 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.