I Am Pilgrim (16 page)

His mother knew that was true and, while it explained his recent silence, she couldn’t help but think there was something else about the decision she didn’t understand.

She stared at her only boy – every month looking more like his father and making her love him all

the more deeply for it – trying to will him to tell her everything, but he just looked up and met her gaze, unwavering.

‘I’m sixteen in two weeks,’ he said, ‘but I still need your permission to get a passport. I want to go to Pakistan for a month.’

She said nothing, too shocked – Pakistan? Where did that come from?

‘It’s during the long summer vacation, so it won’t affect my studies,’ he continued coolly. ‘Outside Quetta there’s a famous
madrassah
– a religious school – that has a perfect course for young men starting out. The imam tells me it will set the high standard for the rest of my career.’

His mother nodded; she could almost hear the blind man saying it. What would he know about her

son? The boy was tall and strong, surprisingly athletic, and she doubted that a life of religious study would ever satisfy him. ‘Even if I agreed – how could we afford it?’ she asked, opting for the most

reasonable-sounding objection first.

‘The course is free,’ he said, ‘and the imam has offered to pay the air fare. Other members of the

mosque have said they’ll write to friends to arrange accommodation.’

She bit her lip – she should have anticipated something like that. ‘When would you leave?’ she asked.

‘Ten days,’ he replied, daring her to say it was too soon.

‘When?!’

‘Ten days,’ he repeated, knowing she had heard well enough.

It took her a moment to stop her heart’s wild tattoo. Only then could she try to address her fear that if she didn’t help him it might open a gulf which might never be healed.

‘What do you say?’ he asked, the tone aggressive enough for her to understand the answer he expected.

‘I’d never stand in the way of such an honourable ambition,’ she said at last. ‘But of course I have concerns of my own, so it depends on meeting with the imam and making sure I’m satisfied with the

arrangements.’

He smiled pleasantly as he got to his feet. ‘No problem. He’s expecting your call.’

Two days later, reassured by her meeting, she signed the application for an expedited passport, and

that afternoon he went to the office of Pakistan Air and bought his ticket.

By then his mother had realized he would be away for his birthday and, in the flurry of packing and

shopping, she and the girls took on one extra burden – organizing a surprise birthday celebration for the day of his departure. It was a poorly kept secret, but he seemed to play along, feigning not to notice the extra food being brought in and the invitations going out to his school and the mosque.

By 4 a.m. on the day of the party, however, he was already awake and fully dressed. Silently he slid into his sisters’ room and stood at the end of their beds. They were exhausted, having stayed up until midnight completing the preparations, and neither of them stirred.

He looked at their lovely faces sailing quietly across the dark oceans of sleep, and perhaps it was

only then he realized how much he loved them. But this was no time for weakness, and he tucked a

copy of a Qur ’an inscribed with his name under their pillows and kissed them one last time.

With a heart heavier than he could have imagined, he made his way down the hall and opened the door into his mother ’s room. She was asleep on her side, facing him, lit by a soft glow spilling from a night-light in her bathroom.

Unknown to any of them, he had returned to the airline office three days earlier and changed his

ticket to a 6 a.m. flight. Ever since seeing his mother in the mall, he had masked his feelings, but he wasn’t sure he could continue to suppress them during the emotional turmoil of what only he knew

would be a farewell party. He had told them he would be home in a month, but that wasn’t true. In reality, he had no idea if they would ever see each other again.

Looking at his mother now, he knew there was no easy way. Growing up in the desert, he had only

ever seen fog once in his life. Early one morning, his father had woken him and they had watched a

wall of white vapour, otherworldly, roll towards them across the Red Sea. Now the memories came

towards him like that: her belly growing large with one of his sisters, his father hitting her hard across the mouth for disobedience, her lovely face dancing with laughter at one of his jokes. The rolling mass of human emotion – hope to despair, childish love to bitter disappointment – wrapped its strange tendrils around him until he was lost in its white, shifting universe.

He would have remained adrift in tearful remembrance except for a distant
muezzin
calling the faithful to prayer. It meant dawn was breaking and he was already running late. He moved to the bed

and bent close to the woman’s face, feeling her sleeping breath gentle on his cheek. They say that when men are dying in battle their fingers nearly always twist into the soil, trying to hold on to the earth and all the pain and love it holds.

The boy didn’t realize it but, had he looked down, he would have seen his fingers wrapping tight

into the coverlet of his mother ’s bed. As he kissed her forehead he murmured a single word, something he had never said to her before: he spoke her name, as if she were his child.

He pulled himself to his feet and backed out of the door, keeping his eyes on her for as long as possible. Quickly he grabbed his backpack, emerged into the new day and ran fast down the path lest

the tears overwhelm him and make his feet follow his heart and turn him back.

At the far end of the street, as arranged, a car was waiting. Inside were the imam and two leading

members of the Muslim Brotherhood. They greeted him as he scrambled into the back seat, the driver

slipped the vehicle into gear and it sped off to drop him at the airport.

His mother woke two hours later, rising early to finish the arrangements for the party. In the kitchen she found a letter addressed to her. As she started reading it she felt as if cold water was rising up from the floor and crushing her lower body. She felt her legs go from under her, and she only just managed to find a chair before she fell.

He told her in simple prose about seeing her in the mall with her shame in full flower, of how he

was certain his sisters were complicit in her behaviour and that his only ambition had been to protect the women, exactly as his father would have wanted.

As she read on, two pages in his best handwriting, she was taught a lesson many other parents have

learned – it’s usually your children who wound you the most ferociously.

Finally she came to the last paragraph and realized she had been completely deceived by the imam.

What she read destroyed the last strands of her tenuous control and she fell into a chasm of loss and guilt and terrible fear.

Her son wrote that he was going to Quetta but there was no famous
madrassah
there, just a different type of camp hidden in the high mountains. There he would undergo six weeks’ basic training before

being taken along an old smugglers’ route and over the border into the battlefield.

He said he had never had any intention of following a religious life. Like any truly devout Muslim, he was going to Afghanistan – to wage
jihad
against the Soviet invaders who were killing the children of Islam.

Chapter Six

DURING THE NINE years of the Afghan war, over a million people died. The Saracen wasn’t one of them – a fact which, given what he did later, would make most people question if not God’s existence then at least His common sense.

After crossing the border, the Saracen fought the Soviets for two years until, one cold February night – eighteen years old and grown tall and hard – he stood on a ridge and looked down on a road

that stretched all the way to Europe.

Behind him a crescent moon cast its light across serried ranks of peaks and crags where another

ten thousand battle-hardened
mujahideen
were also standing like sentinels.

All of them had seen remarkable things – how fast a Russian prisoner can dance when doused with

gasoline and set on fire, what their own dead looked like with their genitals hacked off and stuffed in their mouths – but on this, a night of a million stars, they might as well have been standing on the fifth ring of Saturn watching the Imperial Starfleet fly past. Nobody had seen anything like it.

For forty miles along the wide valley below – and according to reports on the Afghan military radio, for a hundred miles beyond that – the two-lane blacktop was packed with low-loaders, trucks,

and tank transporters. Every few miles fires were burning, lighting up the night like some Christo version of funeral pyres. As vehicles drew alongside the fires, the soldiers riding shotgun would toss out surplus material: snow suits, ration boxes, tents, first-aid kits.

Now and again ammunition or flares would go in by mistake, sending the men on the vehicles diving, lighting up the sky like dismal fireworks, throwing one of the largest convoys ever seen on

earth into blinding moments of sharp relief. The vehicles were heading towards the Amu Darya river

and the border with Uzbekistan: the huge Soviet 40th Army – the army of the Afghan occupation –

was pulling out, defeated.

The Saracen, along with the other
mujahideen
, knew exactly why the Soviets had lost. It wasn’t because of the rebels’ courage or Moscow’s determination to fight the wrong war. No, it was because

the Soviets were without God: it was the
mujahideens’ faith
that had brought them victory.

‘
Allahu Akbar!
’ a voice called from the top of one of the highest pinnacles. ‘God is great.’ Ten thousand other voices took it up, shouting in reverence, listening to it echo. ‘
Allahu Akbar!
’ – on and on it went, raining down on the Soviets as they ran for home. Afghanistan, the graveyard of so many

empires, had claimed another victim.

Two weeks afterwards, twenty heavily armed men rode on horseback into the snow-swept village

where the Saracen was camped with other battle-scarred foreign fighters.

The leader of the visitors was called Abdul Mohammad Khan and, even in a time of giants, he was

a legend. In his forties when the Soviets invaded, he took his clan to war, was led into a trap by two

‘military advisers’ from another tribe, captured in a wild firefight and tortured in a Kabul prison to the point where even the Russian guards were sickened. He escaped during a bloody prison uprising

and, holding his body together more by willpower than with bandages, made his way back to his mountain stronghold.

Six months later, his health partly restored, he fulfilled the ambition which had sustained him throughout the hours of pummelling and electrodes in Kabul – his fighters captured alive the two men who had betrayed him. He didn’t torture them. Blocks of heavy steel were strapped to their backs, and

they were laid naked – face up – in large moulds. Unable to stand, they thrashed with their arms and legs as they watched liquid concrete being poured into the moulds.

Once it had covered their bodies and faces just enough to drown them, the concrete was stopped and allowed to set. The outline of their thrashing limbs and screaming faces were now captured for

ever in the stone – a grotesque bas-relief.

The blocks containing the entombed men and their eternal attempt to escape were set in the wall of

the fortress’s luxurious meeting room, available for the enlightenment of anyone who came to visit

Lord Abdul Mohammad Khan. Nobody ever betrayed him again.

When he arrived at the freezing village with his military escort, he had already – as a warlord without peer and a deeply devout man of faith – appointed himself governor of the province. It was in that capacity he was travelling through his huge domain in order to thank the foreign fighters for their help and to arrange their repatriation.

Throughout that long journey there was one man more than any other he wanted to meet. For two

years he had heard stories of the Saracen, who had campaigned throughout the mountains with a forty-pound Blowpipe missile system on his back and an AK-47 over his shoulder.

In the years of war which had followed the first Soviet tanks across the Afghan border, the Russians had lost over three hundred and twenty helicopters. Three of them, all fearsome Hind gunships, were

taken out by the young Arab and his Blowpipe – two in the very worst months of the war and one in

the last week of the conflict. By any standard it was a remarkable achievement.

Abdul Khan – limping for ever thanks to his stay in what the Soviets affectionately called the Kabul Sports Club, his haggard and handsome face never far from a smile even when he was turning men

into concrete sculptures – held court before the assembled men and listened to their requests for everything from medical treatment to travel expenses. Only the Saracen – standing at the back – said nothing, wanted nothing, and the warlord admired him even more.

After everyone had eaten dinner together in the village’s communal kitchen, the governor motioned for the Saracen to join him alone in an alcove near the roaring fire. With the wind whipping up the valleys and howling all the way to China, the flurries of snow piling in drifts against the huddled houses, Abdul Khan served the tea himself and said he had heard that the young man was a