The Blind Man's Garden (18 page)

He is facing a graveyard of planes and helicopters, Russian MiGs and Hinds, all resting at odd angles with cockpits slung open and the glass smashed, the tyres ripped and rotted. There are several dozen of them, a swathe of hulks stretching all the way to another ridge half a mile away.

He moves towards a helicopter and looks inside. There is Russian graffiti scratched onto the tarnished walls. Names, sentences, and hearts with initials in them. The interior has been stripped of everything, from the seats to the instrument dials. Each aircraft is little more than a pod or shell, a coffin meant for a giant, and the metal of each must weigh thousands of kilograms. At some point each has had a growth of lichen on it, layer upon thick layer dried now to a crust. He continues to walk in an almost straight line through and between them, climbing in and out of the doors, speaking quietly to himself as he goes, to stop the mind from losing focus. ‘Mikal is free at last. Mikal keeps walking. Mikal hears the sound of his chains. Mikal cannot feel
any
of his fingers. Mikal is not going to die in this metal cemetery. Mikal has probably caused the death of a man. Mikal wants to see Naheed’s face. Mikal wants to live with her in the room in Heer. Mikal must find Jeo.’ After a while he stops and turns around.

He arrives back at the first helicopter gunship and sees that the father and son have attempted to follow him – they’d made it over the ridge but have collapsed once again on this side, one prone, the other supine. He approaches and astonishingly the father raises his wildly trembling arm with the gun towards him once again. The son’s eyes remain closed but even in the state of unconsciousness his body is shaking. Mikal, shivering almost as much as them, frees the weapon from the father’s grip and standing with his feet as wide apart as possible points the barrel at the taut chain. The action is stiff from the cold, an equivalent of his own bone-deep chill, and since he is having to use a hand that has no trigger finger, there is little precision in his aim. He fires into the hard ground twice, powdered granite and the blue smoke of the gun rising very slowly towards his face.

He puts the gun in his pocket and prises loose the one from the son’s rigid fingers too. From the father’s pocket he takes out the brass cigarette lighter. The man stares up at him helplessly, too far gone. Under the darkening blue sky and the already countless stars, and with his feet still bound in chains, Mikal walks up to a MiG.

The MiG is fifteen feet high. He stands under the wing coated densely with the dried lichen and raises his hand and snaps the lighter. The lichen catches on the sixth try and an area of it glows indigo for a moment, then the glimmer spreads sideways and becomes a sheet of scarlet combustion. He steps back: at first it’s only the wing, but then the entire plane becomes sheathed in the bright flame, the tinder-dry lichen flaring abruptly with an explosion of heat. There is a brilliant upwards suck, a one-moment-long vacuum. The machine is on fire from top to bottom, back to front, in about twenty seconds, a burning transparency rushing over the fifty-foot metal shape. A bird made of flames.

He is still cold, his clothing wet, but his hand has become a little steadier and he takes the gun from his pocket and shoots into his chain, shattering the seventh of the thirteen links.

Though they are still lying where they fell, the blood of the other two is beginning to revive also, life returning to their limbs. A great roaring fills the air. Brought out of sleep to find itself in flames, the metal is screaming, and it is as though the plane might take off with the blaze.

‘Come closer,’ he calls over his shoulder.

They rise and slowly walk towards the source of heat, a blast of August temperature in January. Hand’s-breadth pieces of lichen are separating to float up as flakes of blinding light. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the blaze completes itself and the plane starts to creak emptily and smoulders here and there. Fragments of charcoal lie on the ground with bright crimson points worming along their edges.

The scorched metal continues to give off heat and the father and son stand as close to it as they can tolerate. With a wave of the gun Mikal tells them to follow him as he walks over to another plane, flicking open the lighter once again.

They move from hulk to hulk, from one bright roaring platform to the next, the rotor blades of the Hind helicopters burning like fifty-foot-wide gold stars above them, bathing them in light. They leave a crooked wandering path behind them through that necropolis of steel, their clothes steaming.

When it begins to snow, the snowflakes hiss upon encountering the heated metal.

Eventually both Mikal and the son stop shivering, the released river-grit falling away from their dry clothes, but the father himself has lost too much blood and his condition deteriorates, his face pallid, the lips dark.

‘He’ll be fine when we get to the mosque,’ says the son.

Mikal looks at him. ‘I hope so. But I am not coming with you. I have to go my own way.’

‘Please don’t disappear,’ the boy says softly. ‘We’ll be punished by the master.’

Mikal shakes his head. ‘I have to go. Release that tourniquet every fifteen minutes.’

‘We will be beaten if you run away. Already there is the matter of the ruined van.’

‘I can’t help you. I have to go.’

‘He will kill us.’

‘Then don’t go back,’ Mikal says, suddenly full of fury at the world. ‘You disappear too.’

‘We
have
to go back,’ the son shouts. There is an edge of desolation to the voice. ‘Our family is where the master is. If we run away he’ll torture them to find out where we are, to force us out of hiding.’

Mikal looks to the ground, then shakes his head. ‘I can’t.’

Sitting in a half-faint, the father opens his eyes for an instant and points to Mikal’s fingers. ‘Maybe when you touch the Prophet’s cloak, the pain in your wounds will stop.’

Mikal begins to walk away, still shaking his head.

‘How can you abandon fellow Muslims like this? Just help me carry him to the mosque. After that you can leave.’

Mikal stops and looks back.

‘I can’t carry him on my own, you can see that,’ the son says, on the verge of tears. ‘He’ll bleed to death.’

‘All right. You and I will take him to the mosque and then I will leave. And we are not stealing anything.’

*

It’s past midnight when they see the mosque in the far distance, a glass moon shining above it. The sacred building stands on the expanse of blue and white snow, appearing separate and singular like something presented on the palm of the hand. The son was here on a reconnoitring trip last month but the area has been transformed by snow and ice. He whispers, ‘Glory be to Allah who changes His world and then changes it again but Himself changes not.’

The father has been babbling, hallucinating as he begins to die.

‘Run to the mosque and get help,’ the son tells Mikal when the man falls silent; then he lowers his father onto his back and, brushing the snow away from his chest, listens for a heartbeat. In his other hand he holds the torch they’d made with a branch and a torn turban. Although it has stopped snowing the snowflakes lie so thickly on them that almost half of their bodies are invisible.

Mikal shakes the whiteness off his face and clothing, patting himself into visibility, and sets off towards the mosque, at a slow pace – if he runs he grows faint. His mind retains very few impressions during the distance to its giant door. Now and then his two pieces of broken chain catch on something behind him, and thin plates of ice break under his feet when he encounters frozen puddles. He arrives at the mosque door but instead of knocking he convinces himself that there is no harm in lying down for a few minutes of rest. How long he lies there at the foot of the door he doesn’t know, but at one point when he tries to turn his head he discovers that his hair has become locked in ice, and later that the two sections of the ankle chain are also fused with the ground.

He lies looking up at the mosque that has the entire Koran inscribed on its exterior walls, domes and balconies. The calligraphy is said to be there on the interior walls and ceilings too. He watches the facade in the moonlight through half-open eyes and it is as though there has been a rain of ink – every drop that had landed on a surface had formed a word instead of a splash.

He looks at the sky as he sinks into sleep. Arabic is written up there in the cosmos too, he knows. Of the six thousand stars visible to the naked eye, 210 have Arabic names. Aldebaran, the follower. Algol, the ghoul. Arrakis, the dancer. Fomalhaut, the mouth of the fish. Altair, the bird … He falls asleep and there is a city under the stars in an undiscovered country, no lamp in any window. The only light is the constellations and the city’s minarets, each one of which is burning, a tall plume of fire, the flames streaming in the wind now and then. He enters the deserted city knowing that a group of black-clad figures is following him. Though he cannot see them he somehow knows that they have the natural fighting power of mountain lions, and he passes under several burning minarets before pushing open a door and entering a house and some time later he hears his pursuers come in. They spread out through the rooms and they make no attempt to lower their voices, to conceal their search for him. He climbs over the wall into the mosque next door. He picks up a book from a niche and removes a page and crumples it in his hand and then straightens it and places it on the floor. He does this with another page – introducing wrinkles into it and then putting it on the floor beside the first one – and then with another and then another, and eventually with all of them, lit by the light of the burning minaret, moving backwards as he leaves the paper on the floor. If anyone steps on them, he’ll hear it. When the floor around him is lined with the pages, he lies down at the centre of them and closes his eyes – a rectangular clearing, the exact dimensions of a grave.

*

There are moments of faint awareness through the dark. People moving near him. Hands that touch. Candlelight. Eventually he is able to awaken fully and things are called into being. He is on a sheet spread out on the bare floor, no pillow, and he is wearing a dry set of clothes. An aged man is tending to him with a gentle pensiveness, his beard falling to his stomach in two silver divisions.

‘Did you get them out of the snow?’

‘Who?’

‘I left two people outside.’ Mikal sits up slowly and looks around.

‘There’s no one out there.’

‘Maybe you can’t see them because it’s dark.’

‘It’s no longer night. It’s morning.’

The mosque is a ruin, and the man is burning a reed prayer mat and a heap of straw prayer caps to keep him warm. Propped up against the pillars are words that have fallen away from the walls, lines of calligraphy that curve and knot purposefully, collecting force and delight and aura as they go.

He stands up, wrapping the sheet around him as he rises. ‘In which room is the Prophet’s cloak kept?’

The man offers him a piece of bread. ‘The Prophet’s cloak is in Kandahar. What would it be doing here?’

‘I was told it was brought here.’

‘No. It’s always been in Kandahar.’ The man touches his forehead. ‘You are tired. Lie down and rest.’

‘I dreamt I tore pages out of a book of hymns to protect myself.’

The man thinks for a moment. ‘There is a kind of tree whose leaves do not fall,’ he says, ‘and in that it is like an ideal Muslim. But Allah understands if we don’t succeed in being perfect in this imperfect world.’ He smiles at Mikal.

Mikal begins to eat the bread, its core humid and porous. The man tells him that he is from Yemen, a foreigner trapped in Afghanistan. Scattered in various areas of the mosque, Mikal finds others like him, smelling more like wild animals than humans, entire families from Arab countries, destroyed-looking women and children. They have been on the run since October, making various journeys towards places of safety, to find some path back to their homelands. One little girl stands apart from other children, not participating in their activities, and he realises only after a while that she has no arms.

Though still very tired and weak, he opens the door to the south minaret and begins to climb up, looking out through the small recessed windows as he goes, the landscape altering with every turn of the spiral. Emerging into open air at the top, he examines his surroundings, the sky a water stain on paper. He is unable to understand why he was told the mosque contained the cloak, why he was sent on this trip.

Beside him on the facade, an ant is wandering in the shallow trough that forms the word ‘Allah’, carrying a wheat grain in its mouth, trying to climb out of the word but falling back into it again and again.

He turns around to leave and everything slides into place when he notices the large boot print in the snow next to his feet, a quick ray of recognition: the warlord sent him here to be picked up by the Americans. They were
delivering
him.

The Americans pay $5,000 for each suspected terrorist.

He rushes down the spiral – as fast as he is able, the two pieces of chain falling ahead of him and getting under his feet – and asks if they know the warlord who’d been holding him prisoner.

‘Yes,’ the bearded man answers. ‘He was the one who sent all of us to the mosque. He told us to gather here and wait to be taken out of Afghanistan.’

Mikal counts the men and they are twenty-two including him. $5,000 x 22 = $110,000.

And now his hearing picks up the outermost ring of a wave of sounds, something just on the limit of being audible, his heart giving a great leap and then seeming to go still in recoil. There is a questioning stir from everyone and then they too catch the reverberation of American helicopters arriving overhead. Cautiously, Mikal moves towards the mosque door and reaches out his hand to part the panels, but the door is opened suddenly from the other side just then and blinding snowlight fills his eyes and there is a confusion of shouts. Several figures overpower him and he watches the aged gentleman begin to run to the other side of the prayer hall, watches as an American soldier picks up a chair and launches it towards the man across the long space: a clean, effortless arc is described and then the chair connects with the fleeing man’s shoulders and he falls with a sharp cry. Mikal’s hands and feet are fastened with zip-locks and he is carried outside to the big bird with the twin propellers. He hears gunfire from the building and the screams of women and children. They leave him on his stomach beside the machine and go back inside and he watches as one by one the other men are brought out and made to lie on their stomachs beside him.