The Wasted Vigil (10 page)

The orchard is a lace of linked greenery around them as Marcus and Lara walk between the trees in the morning. A paw of mist comes down from the mountains above the house.

Marcus inhales the green scents of the spring morning. “One year when we visited England there was pollen everywhere, everything coated yellow. A wet April followed by a dry May had caused the pollen cloud to float over to eastern England from Scandinavia. It was thirty years ago but I remember it suddenly now.”

“Stravinsky in his seventies remembered for the first time the smell of the St. Petersburg snow of his childhood.”

“Is it something distinctive?”

“Unforgettable. Benedikt mentioned it in one of his letters home.”

There are butterflies in the trees around them. Some have green under-wings so that—visible invisible visible invisible—they seem to blink in and out of existence as they fly amid the leaves.

“Look there, Lara. That tree with pink blossoms.”

She comes and stands beside him. “It’s as though lightning struck it.”

“Qatrina did that. A man from Usha kept making his wife pregnant year after year. The young woman was twenty-two and had had seven children in six years. He never allowed her body to recover, despite warnings and pleadings from Qatrina. When he brought his wife to us for an eighth time, she was almost dead. The tree was small then, a sapling, but still rather robust, and while I was trying to stabilise the woman, Qatrina came out here. In giving vent to her rage she tore the young apricot plant in two. It’s possible she wanted to break off a branch to thrash him.”

They look at it where it is split down the middle. The pink splashpattern of its flowers.

About five years ago Lara herself had failed yet again to carry a pregnancy to full term. For a Russian woman an abortion was one of the more obvious options when it came to birth control, the men not agreeing to consider any preventative methods themselves, and the ones Lara had had in her youth had damaged her.

“You mustn’t think badly of Qatrina from what I have just told you.”

“Of course not.”

“Women were always dying in repeated childbirth because the husbands didn’t listen—Qatrina had to struggle with the mosques because they said birth control was the West’s attempt at reducing the number of Muslims in the world. And then the Communist regime came and closed down the family planning centres, saying they were an Imperialist conspiracy to detract attention from the real causes of poverty.”

Last month in Usha he overheard a child of about seven say to another, the pair obviously at a loss for something to do, “Or shall we go and throw stones at the grave of Qatrina?” Marcus wishes he hadn’t heard it, had heard it inaccurately.

She used to say she did not want any mention of God at her funeral.

They move towards the tree through the sunlight. Easy to imagine, at such an hour, how Qatrina could have filled notebooks with the colours she found in a square foot of nature. An olive grove outside Jalalabad—
grey, white, green.
A mallow blossom—
red orange, sulphur, yellow bone, red-wine shadow.
The mountains above the house—
silver, evasive grey, blue, sapphire water.
She’d use these notes as reference when painting. Muhammad had said, “Verily there are one hundred minus one names of Allah. He who enumerates them would get into Paradise,” causing Muslims to search them out in the Koran so that a list was compiled. And Qatrina’s life’s work was a series of ninety-nine paintings concerning these names—“the Artist” among them. They are now lost because of the wars.

“She worked with the patients for longer hours than I did,” Marcus says. “Travelled to remoter areas than I ever contemplated whenever she heard about an outbreak or epidemic. But she would at times feel utterly helpless at the state of her country’s people.”

“I am surprised the tree has survived.”

“It even produces some fruit, later in the year.”

“Then I won’t get to taste it. A few more days, at most, is all I’ll spend here.”

“If you are in no hurry to get back to something, you can stay here longer. And I’ll talk to David so we can accompany you to Kabul airport, we’ll try to walk right up to the plane, when you do decide to go.” The night she had spent alone in the house has deposited the blue of fearful anxiety under her eyes.

“There is no need,” she shakes her head but then murmurs a thanks.

For the next three days, David leaves for Jalalabad early each morning, the song of the birds entering his ears like gentle pins, and he returns to the house in the evenings. The electricity generator is actually broken, he discovers, and he takes it to Jalalabad to be mended, the house continuing to live by candle- and lamplight, moving between weakly illuminated pools.

One morning there is a demonstration in Jalalabad, the placards and shouts expressing contempt for the people who had planned and carried out the bombing of the school. Pakistan’s government has denied suggestions that current or former members of its secret service were involved in the crime. Another day, the weeping father of one of the eleven dead children insists the Americans leave Afghanistan because if they had not come the atrocity would not have occurred. And a woman, broken with grief at having lost a girl and a boy, approaches David and wants to know why the Americans had released that criminal from custody. She demands they catch his accomplices and take them away to be slowly tortured to death somewhere.

He sits on the stone steps that descend into the perfume factory. As night arrives he can barely see the Buddha’s head, save for slashes of minimum light that define his hair and mouth. He spreads ambergris onto his hands. His head filling up with sea odour. He discovered a small amount of it in a jar here like a dab of black butter. It is obtained from the insides of sperm whales but the Arabs who peddled it along the Silk Road always disguised its origins, protecting a trade secret. For a long time the Persians believed that it came from a spring beneath the oceans, and the Chinese that it was the spit of dragons.

They are saying that the building next to the school was a warehouse for storing heroin. It belonged to Gul Rasool, the man who is the court of appeal in all matters in Usha. If the intended target was the warehouse, then Nabi Khan must be alive. It must be him, trying to strike a blow against his enemy. But the statement left behind by the suicide bomber had hinted strongly that the school was the target. It had ended with the words
Death to America.

A rumour has also spread that the bombing was carried out by the Americans themselves so that the concept of jihad can be blamed and discredited.

He sits quietly at the table with Lara and Marcus, listening to their talk. Twice during the months he knew her, Zameen woke up screaming from a dream of being assaulted by the Soviet soldier. Memories rising in her like bruises as he held her. A dream of lying lifeless on the floor, the attacker manipulating her body “as when a corpse is washed before burial,” arranging her limbs before beginning. “Of course he committed a crime,” she said, “and if these were normal times I would have liked to have seen him brought to justice. What else can I say? That doesn’t change the fact that I am grateful he helped me escape from the military base. He may have saved my life. When I think of that I hope he’s all right, wherever he is.”

When he is not with the other two inhabitants of the house, David walks through the orchard and the garden, some younger stems as slender as
nai
flutes. One night he builds a fire at the water’s edge. As a young man he had gone to Berkeley for a university interview and, having stood on the roof of the astronomy building and looked out at San Francisco Bay with its sailboats, had made his decision. He bought an ancient twenty-seven-foot boat and for the next four years lived on it in the Berkeley marina. And every time he has visited Marcus, this lake has begged to be paddled on. This time he has brought with him from the United States the basic materials to construct a birch-bark canoe, having contemplated spending a week or so building it here; from a storeroom in the half-ruined school in Jalalabad he brings it all to Usha one day, unloading it into an unused room. Visiting the lakes of the northern United States as a child, in the company of his brother Jonathan and an uncle, he had seen a sea of wild rice engulf an Ojibwa woman seated in a canoe. A slide into harvest: she gently bent the slender stalks that were sticking out of the water’s surface and knocked the grain into her vessel, to sell for twenty-five cents a pound. The last armed conflict between the United States military forces and the Native Americans had taken place right there on Leech Lake in 1898. White officers and troops—and around them in the forest, circling quietly on the icy ground, nineteen Natives with Winchester rifles.

He walks around the house, reacquainting himself with it. The broken painted couples enclose him when he enters the room at the top. On the walls of muted gold, they are either in union or keeping vigils for each other in grove and pavilion. Waiting. On first walking in he has to halt mid-step—seeing the hundreds of coloured fragments arranged on the floor. Initially he is not sure what they mean but circling around them he discovers the vantage from where they do not appear arbitrary and the image is the right way up.

A man and a woman.

“I’ll pick these up. Do you wish to use the room?” Lara has come in.

“Don’t put them away on my account, please. I was just going around the house, reminding myself of things.”

Having removed an oval piece on which the strings of a harp are painted—just a few black lines made as though by ink-dipped twigs—she lets her hand remain some inches off the floor, the limb suspended in the air irresolutely, and then she puts it back and stands up.

They look at each other, and he doesn’t know how to fill the silence and then she withdraws.

He moves towards the windowsill to gaze at that vast sky of Asia, caught between inside and outside.

It was here in this part of the world that David had heard for the first time the call for America’s death. A mob fired by visions of a true Islamic society, shouting, “Kill All Americans!” “President Carter the Dog Must Die!” It was in Islamabad, Pakistan, in November 1979. He was twenty-two.

At the beginning of November a group of protesters in Iran had stormed the American embassy in Tehran, taking forty-nine Americans hostage. And seventeen days later David had arrived in Islamabad, very late in the evening, falling asleep almost immediately in his hotel room owing to the exhaustion of the travel. He had finished college for now and intended to spend the fall months travelling in northern Afghanistan, something he had wanted to do for some years. His plan was to go from Islamabad to Peshawar, and from there—one long road full of twists, veering like a kite’s tail—move on through the Khyber Pass to the city of Jalalabad and then on to Kabul. The languages around him were still many-lettered lumps in his mouth and ears but he was sure he could get by. Seven days a week for eight weeks—he had taken a course in ancient Greek during the summer, discovering suddenly that he had a gift for languages, and he carried with him a copy of the oldest surviving Greek tragedy, the
Persians,
Aeschylus contemplating the East’s grief and shock at finding itself defeated by the West.

While he slept, Saudi national guardsmen encircled the Kaaba, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. A delusional fundamentalist had declared himself the Messiah and, having barricaded himself inside the mosque with his followers a few hours earlier, opened fire on the worshippers. The fanatics—they wanted a purer Islam implemented in Arabia, calling for song, music, film and sports to be banned—had smuggled in their assault rifles and grenades in coffins, the mosque being a common place to bless the dead. The Saudi government did not tell anyone who was responsible for the invasion of the holiest site in Islam, the place every single practising Muslim turned his face to five times a day. Not long after David Town got up on the morning of 21 November, the rumour spread through all the cities of Islam—from country to country, continent to continent—that the killings in the Kaaba were carried out by Americans as a blow against Islam, perhaps in retaliation for the Tehran embassy siege.

He didn’t know about this rumour when he left his hotel. He had to visit the U.S. embassy to be updated on the situation in Afghanistan. The rebellion against the Communist government, begun back in the spring, had now spread to most provinces there.

At a pedestrian crossing he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small notebook to check something. Last night while having dinner at the hotel, he had had a brief conversation with a Pakistani man at the next table. Upon learning of David’s interest in gems, the delightful pedant told him that the Emperor Shah Jahan’s wealth had included 82 pounds of diamonds, 110 pounds of rubies, 275 pounds of emeralds, 55 pounds of jade and 2,000 spinels. David had written it all down, but now, this morning, he wanted to confirm that another detail had been committed to paper: the treasury also contained 4,000 living songbirds.

He glanced at the page and just at that moment the car that had come to a halt to allow him to cross, with its front fender only two feet away from him, jerked forward by six inches. The driver had decided to startle him for sport. He gave the windshield a cursory look and continued without breaking his stride—not in all honesty due to strong nerves, but because he was distracted by the four thousand birds and hadn’t really seen the car move until it had already come to a stop, knew he wasn’t about to be run over.

The car drove away but it was back minutes later, coming to a screeching stop beside him on the sidewalk and disgorging four men. They were friendly, more or less his own age, and they invited him to a nearby teahouse, very pleased to have met an American, asking him how they could migrate to U.S.A. the Beautiful. When he regained consciousness about two hours later, in a back alley, the skin on his head was split open in two places. There were cuts and bruises on the rest of his body too. He had no coherent memory except a faint impression of the car driver’s features filled with malice, of an arm locking onto his neck from behind to choke him. By not reacting how he was meant to when the car jolted forward suddenly, David had obviously caused the driver to lose face with his companions.