The Blind Man's Garden (33 page)

Killing the Pope. Killing the American President. Blowing up a dozen airliners simultaneously. Assassinations in Pakistan and the Philippines. Bombings in Iran and India among other countries. Attacks on consulates in Pakistan and Thailand. There is a drawing of a crude device for delivering anthrax, and in another box he finds gas masks and the final volume of an eleven-volume ‘encyclopaedia’ on modern weapons, including notes on where to source high explosives, like RDX and Semtex,
that can be used in shaped charges to compress the nuclear core in an implosion-type nuclear device
. A map shows the location of a synagogue in Tunis. Nuclear power plants in Western lands. Sports stadiums.

A sense of defilement runs in his body. They want the birth of a new world, and will take death and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it until that birth results.

‘I too was in a military prison like you and Akbar,’ he hears someone say behind him.

He turns around. ‘I was sent to give you this,’ he says quickly and holds out the gun towards the man. He is an Arab, young but with a large beard.

‘When they released you, they took you back to the mosque beside the lake, and they took Akbar back to Jalalabad. Am I right? Guess what happened to my brother.’

Mikal just wishes to leave.

‘He was captured during the exodus of Arabs after Kabul fell on 13 November, so Kabul is where they should have returned him. Instead they flew him to an unknown city and put him on a bus that took seven hours to reach its destination. He couldn’t speak the language, had no money or identification, and it was a while before he learned that he was in the country of Albania. No one believes his story, no one believes he was captured.’ He shakes his head pityingly.

Mikal gives him the gun and he turns it in his hand, holds it at various distances from his body. He gestures with it at the boxes. ‘If you find anything of interest in there you may take it.’ He smiles and adds, ‘The scholar’s ink is holier than the martyr’s blood, as they say.’

‘I was just curious.’

‘You killed two Americans. Single-handedly.’

Mikal points to the door. ‘I have to go.’ He wishes he could pick up a telephone and dial Basie’s number in Heer.

‘I must shake the hand that did the blessed deed.’ The man gives what must be his happiest smile. ‘We have the right to kill four million Americans, two million of them children. And to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. No?’

Mikal looks at the proffered hand. ‘I have a better idea,’ he says. He lets a few seconds pass for all sediment in the room to settle, to be able to speak into clear air. Looking directly into the man’s eyes, he says what he wishes to say.

*

All day he searches for Akbar but cannot locate him.

*

The moon rises almost vertically, growing smaller as it ascends.

Entering her room he places the cub on the floor, watches it disappear through the curtained arch on the other side. There is a short leaf-like rustle from the other side.

She parts the curtain and looks at him, the animal in her hands. Astoundingly she is standing in a pile of loose banknotes. Every inch of the wide floor on the other side of the curtain is heaped with dollars and rials, pounds and rupees. It is a large room and the crumpled rectangles of paper are up to her shins in places. The surface of the bed is a large white square marooned in money, a chair submerged up to the seat. A spray of blue plastic lilies sprouts close to her, the vase itself unseen.

‘I am to be married.’

He doesn’t have to ask who the bridegroom is. Al-Qaeda terrorists often cement relationships with the tribes by marrying the daughters and sisters of their hosts.

‘Within the next few weeks.’

‘I leave for my visit to Heer in the morning.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘I don’t know what’s waiting for me there. It could be dangerous.’

‘I don’t care.’

He shakes his head. ‘I will be quick. I’ll come back and then we’ll leave.’

She picks up the leopard from among the banknotes, responding to its calls of unease. It opens its mouth and the whistle comes after a few seconds of silent effort, and is followed by a silence before the mouth is closed.

‘Your father doesn’t approve of this match. Am I right?’

‘Yes. It was my brothers’ idea.’

*

The house is in darkness. Beyond the earth’s curve, beyond its weather, the high distances are blank. The tops of the palatial trees silhouetted against it. In his pocket is the envelope of money Akbar has given him for the journey to Heer. He lies on the wall fully clothed and concentrates on sounds like a blind man. He gets up and climbs down into the courtyard. He walks through the trees to Akbar’s room but the bed is empty. He knows he must disclose the father’s betrayal to the son – but how severe will be the consequences?

He returns to the wall but comes down again after what must be an hour according to the stars and walks to the kitchen.

Akbar is at the window, his arms crossed on the sill. Mikal goes to stand beside him and Akbar drapes his arm familially around his shoulder.

‘What are you looking at?’ Mikal asks.

‘There is nothing to look at. It’s night.’

He turns his face towards the boy. ‘Akbar, what’s the matter?’

He still won’t answer. After a while he takes his arm away from Mikal’s shoulder. ‘I heard what happened in the south wing. Why did you say that to a man as great as him?’

‘Akbar, are you weeping?’ Mikal asks.

He shakes his head. ‘Why did you do it?’

‘Why are you weeping, Akbar?’

He wipes his eyes on his sleeve. ‘It had to be done.’

‘What had to be done?’

‘Dishonour has to be paid for.’ He takes Mikal’s arm. ‘Come with me.’

He stands firm. ‘Why?’

‘Come with me.’

They drive out of the house, moving through the darkness, the dust of their wake sidling into the thorn bushes on either side of the car. Mikal’s heart lurches as they turn onto the small path towards the yellow field, the hills in the distance. On the other side of the hills are wild and barren plains, stretching widely away mile upon mile towards Afghanistan. Akbar drives to the centre of the field and says, ‘Let’s stop here for a while.’ Insects – different with each minute – come out of the night and fall around the headlights. Moths like golden-winged machineries. And Akbar is talking frantically about America and the West. Did you know what they did in Vietnam, did you know what happened in Bosnia, did you know, did you know, did you know. There are sallies of breeze in the flowers, the thousand sounds of the night, and the clouds lift and the countless white flames of the sky emerge.

‘Akbar, why are we here?’

‘Did the Americans ever ask you to collaborate with them?’ Akbar asks. ‘Did they say they would let you go if you spied on al-Qaeda and the Taliban for them?’

‘No. We have had this discussion already.’

‘The Malaysian boy three cages away from us was almost definitely turned into a double agent and sent back to Malaysia to spy on al-Qaeda. At the brick factory they gave him ice cream, pizza and apple pies and showed him movies.’

‘Akbar. What are we doing here?’

He looks at the dashboard clock and moves the car forwards through the flowers, towards the hills. Ahead of them their headlights illuminate the father’s Datsun. Stationary on the hillside. Mikal raises his arms and places his hands on top of his head. ‘Oh God.’ The vehicle’s front – on the passenger side – is crushed against a boulder. Akbar stops the car ten yards from the collision site and they sit looking out. At the moment of impact the driver had been thrown out of the driving seat and through the windshield.

‘Oh God.’ He is grateful eyes are incapable of seeing souls.

‘Do you remember you told me the fuse of the headlights can be replaced with a twenty-two-calibre bullet? The bullet heats up and fires itself as if from a gun.’

*

Akbar spends almost an hour looking for him, calling out in the darkness, Mikal having turned away from him and run into the bandit hills, and he stays hidden with his revulsion, the cold fury and confusion. He watches Akbar get into the car and drive away at last. His mind uncentring, he wanders in the darkness and sees a stream flowing upwards at dawn, but realises it is flowing downwards after all when he looks again, the sky full of quivering incidents of daybreak, the light slipping on the hillsides, inventing colours.

Early morning – and he walks out of the hills into Megiddo’s bazaar and buys a cup of tea and then enters a shop and asks for four aspirin tablets, swallowing them with water from a tap on the outside wall, but they are chalk and he spits them out and stands looking at the shop. In another shop across the street he waits for his turn behind schoolchildren buying sweets and small booklets containing
mantar
spells to help them pass exams. After swallowing the aspirin he leans against the pillar that serves as a bus stop and waits to begin the journey to Heer, while a small child with a very solemn expression – as if visited by something terrible – comes up to him and tries to sell him two bent iron nails.

32

On the second afternoon of the siege, Rohan, Yasmin and Tara are standing in the crowd looking towards St Joseph’s, the chaos and fear out here no doubt matched by the chaos and fear inside the building, the interplay of glances, no one knowing how to drain the event of its power. They are under a tarpaulin that someone has spread from a silk-cotton tree and the tip of the fibreglass nuclear monument. The terrorists opened fire from the building soon after the siege began, to force everyone away, and this is the safest distance. And here they stand and listen and watch, face to face with this demon onto which sacred Arabic verses have been painted to make it blend in with the rest of their religion.

There is a dust-edged wind.

Yesterday all schools and colleges in and around Heer had closed at the news of St Joseph’s, in case it was a co-ordinated attack on several institutions.

‘Has there been any change?’ Rohan asks, his head bent as he stands. Because of the wind the trees around them sound as though things are crashing into them.

‘No, brother-ji,’ Tara says.

He sense the two women on either side of him, full of that care beyond exhaustion that makes every woman in the world a heroine.

A large concentration of army, police and other emergency services have established a cordon around the school and the area has acquired the look of a zone of infection.

Tara’s eyes are tired from the wait and search for Naheed, the endless night hours spent looking for her in her mind, to think where she might be. Now she hopes she might see Naheed among the people gathered around her, raising herself on tiptoe to look over shoulders every few minutes. Her knees no longer ache and to her it is evidence of the love Allah feels towards her, giving her a new pain but balancing it by easing another one.

At 11 a.m. yesterday, two and a half hours after it was shut, the school gate had opened.

‘I think the siege is ending,’ Tara had said and she had immediately turned her face to the sky in gratitude.

‘It’s Basie,’ Yasmin said, moving through the crowd for a clearer and closer view.

Yasmin and Tara had watched as a soldier approached Basie and talked to him and received a piece of paper from his hand, with several people shouting, ‘Run towards us,’ at Basie.

He had turned and gone back inside and the gate had closed. Five minutes later they heard that the paper in Basie’s hand was a list of the terrorists’ demands. Folded within it was another sheet that was said to be a message to the entire planet.

‘They want Father Mede to come to the school,’ Yasmin told Rohan and Tara. ‘The note says, “If Mede presents himself to us we will release all children under thirteen years of age, except the Shias, Christians and Ahmadiyas.”’

But Father Mede has not been heard from since the siege began.

*

The phone lines into the school have been severed by the terrorists. The number of the satellite phone Ahmed carries was given out with the list of demands, and now he stands in the library, talking to the commissioner, reiterating his demands, telling him once again that there will be no need to send in food for the children, because the children have all announced a hunger strike in sympathy with the hostage takers’ cause. He hangs up with the warning, ‘Do not try to storm the building.’

He stands still for a few moments.

The library has been trashed, the books full of Western knowledge pulled out of the shelves and thrown onto the floor, the page upon page loud with lies about the story of the world, nothing but the blood-soaked abstractions of the so-called civilised world. As ephemeral to him as the Pyramids because they are un-Islamic and unjust.

He hasn’t slept for two days. The floor-to-ceiling windows of the library are draped in trumpet vine, thick clusters of orange flowers hanging from the tendrils, full of bees and glistening black ants, and a plaque informs the children that the plant was
originally named after the Abbé Jean-Paul Bignon who was Louis XIV’s librarian,
and that
its wood when cut transversely is marked with a cross
. All the pupils at this school are too young and impressionable to be taught anything but the Koran and the sayings of Muhammad. At his feet are dictionaries containing all the many meanings of the rose, and the seventeen words Urdu has for rain, and they are a blasphemy because they do not refer to Allah anywhere, just as the science books don’t. Why not say that two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom come together
if Allah wills
to form a molecule of water? Through his speeding mind runs the text of the statement he has sent out with his list of demands. His outrage transmuted into language, the pain fixed into durable words.
This is a message from the warriors of Islam to all the world’s Infidels, Crusaders, Jews, and their operatives in the Muslim Kinhood. We are the followers of Allah’s mission and let it be known that that mission is the spreading of the truth, not killing people. Peace not war. We ourselves are victims of murder, massacre and incarceration. The West’s invasion of Afghanistan – the only true Islamic country in the world – is an unprecedented global crime, and our brothers and sisters and children are being killed as we write this, abducted and taken away to be tortured. Jihad is obligatory under these circumstances, as it is for taking back Spain, Sicily, Hungary, Cyprus, Ethiopia and
Russia, and for the restoration of Islamic rule over
all
parts of India
… These are not mere words. Out there is the truth of them played out with living figures, taking on dimensions through his energy and force, and he stands with his forehead pressed against a wall, his head rolling from side to side as he tries to breathe with a regular rhythm.