At Risk

27

This is a strange country,” said Faraj Mansoor, ejecting the five-round magazine of the PSS into his hand and placing it carefully on the table. “It is very different from the place of my imagination.”

The woman who had borrowed the name of Lucy Wharmby was peeling potatoes, stropping the blade in fast efficient sweeps so that the strips of peel curled damply over her left hand. “It’s not all like this,” she said. “It’s not all so exposed and bleak…”

He waited for her to finish. Outside, the sun still cast its pale glaze over the sea, but the wind was whipping at the wave caps, lifting them into a fine spray.

“I think the country makes the people,” he said eventually, checking the action of the PSS before slapping back the magazine. “And I think that I understand the British better for seeing their country.”

“It’s a cold country,” she said. “My childhood was spent in a cold flat with thin walls, listening to my parents arguing.”

Pocketing the handgun, he tightened his belt. “What were they arguing about?”

“I was never quite sure at the time. My father was a university lecturer at a place called Keele. It was a good job for him, and I think he wanted my mother to become more involved in the life of the university.”

“And she didn’t want to?”

“She had never wanted to move there from London. She didn’t like the place and she didn’t make any effort to get to know the people. She ended up having treatment for depression.”

Faraj frowned. “What were her beliefs?”

“She believed in… books and films and holidays in Italy and having her friends round to dinner.”

“And your father? What did he believe in?”

“He believed in himself. He believed in his career, and in the importance of his work, and in the approval of his colleagues.” She reached for a kitchen knife, and began quartering the potatoes with short, angry strokes of the blade. “Later, when my mother’s depression became serious, he believed that he had the right to sleep with his students.”

Faraj looked up. “Did your mother know?”

“She found out soon enough. She wasn’t stupid.”

“And you? Did you know?”

“I guessed. They sent me away to school in Wales.” She wiped her hair from her eyes with the back of her hand. “That’s very different countryside from this. There are hills, and even one or two you might call mountains.”

He looked at her, his head inclined. “You’re smiling. That’s the first time I’ve seen you smile.”

The smile and the knife hand froze.

“You were happy there? At this school in the hills that were almost mountains?”

She shrugged. “I suppose I was. I’ve never thought about it… in those terms.”

Unbidden, a memory rose before her, a memory she had not revisited for some years. It had been her friend Megan who had discovered the magic mushrooms growing in the pine woods behind the school. Hundreds of them, clustered on the rotted logs on the pine-needled forest floor. Megan-at fifteen already a formidable biochemist, particularly with reference to Class A narcotics-had recognised them immediately.

The following day, as the school permitted and indeed encouraged them to, the two friends had signed themselves out of classes in favour of a nature ramble. Armed with a tin sandwich box and a bottle of diluted orange squash, they had hurried to the woods, downed a half-dozen mushrooms each, spread out a groundsheet, and settled themselves down to wait for the psychotropic toxins in the mushrooms to take effect.

For at least half an hour nothing had happened, and then she had begun to feel simultaneously nauseous and fearful. Control of her reactions seemed to be sliding away from her; her limbs and her heaving stomach were no longer her own. And then suddenly the fear lifted and it was as if she was drowning in sensation. The sounds of the forest, previously a barely audible chorus of distant birdsong, shifting branches and insect twitterings, were amplified to levels of almost unbearable intensity. The muted pricking of the light through the pine branches, meanwhile, became a phalanx of rainbow spears. Her nose, throat and lungs seemed to fill with the sharp turpentine-scented resin of the pine. After a time-minutes perhaps, but maybe hours-these heightened sensations had begun to shape themselves into a kind of sublime architecture. She seemed to be wandering through a vast and constantly evolving vista of cloud-topped ziggurats, hanging gardens and dizzying colonnades. She seemed to be both inside and outside of herself, a spectator of her own progress through this strange, exotic realm. Afterwards, with the vision’s slow dissolution, she had felt an intense melancholy, and when she had tried to discuss the experience with Megan that evening, she had been unable to find the right words.

Deep inside herself, however, she had known that the images she had seen were not accidental, but meant. They were a sign-a glimpse of the celestial. They had confirmed her in her path, and in her determination.

“Yes,” she said, “I was happy there.”

“So how did it end?” he asked. “Your parents’ tale?”

“Divorce. The family smashed. Nothing unusual.” Lifting the handle of the kitchen knife between two fingers, she dropped it so that its point stuck into the wet chopping board. “And your parents?”

Walking across the room Faraj picked up one of the cheap tumblers on the table, examined it absently, and replaced it. Then, as if shrugging off the Western culture that he had assumed with the clothes she had bought him, he sank to his haunches.

“My parents were Tajiks, from Dushanbe. My father was a fighter, a lieutenant of Ahmed Shah Massoud.”

“The Lion of Panjshir.”

“Just so. May he live for ever. As a young man my father had been a teacher. He spoke French and a little English, which he learned from the British and American soldiers who came to fight with the mujahidin. I went to a good school in Dushanbe and then, when I was fourteen, we moved to Afghanistan, following Massoud, and I went to one of the English-language schools in Kabul. My father hoped that I would not have to live the life that he had lived, my mother’s family had a little money, and both saw education as the means of my betterment. Their dream was for me to become an administrator or government official.”

“What happened?”

“In ’96 the Taliban came. They had money from the United States and from Saudi Arabia, and they laid siege to Kabul. We managed to escape from the bombardment at night, and my father went north to rejoin Massoud. I wanted to go with him but he sent me south with my mother and my younger sister towards the border country. We had hoped to enter Pakistan from there, to escape the Taliban altogether, but many others had had the same idea, and after months of wandering we finally settled with other displaced Tajiks and Pathans opposed to the Taliban in a village named Daranj, east of Kandahar.”

“What did you do there?”

“We dreamed of leaving. Of finding a better life in Pakistan.”

Falling silent, he appeared to sink into a reverie. His eyes were open but his expression was blank. Finally he seemed to rouse himself. “In the end, it became clear that there was no way that we could legally cross the border. We could have found a way through-there were couriers who would take you over the mountains for a price-but we had no wish to be stateless refugees. We considered ourselves better than that.

“After several years of nonstop warfare my father returned. He had been wounded, and he could no longer fight. With him, though, was a man. A man whom my father had persuaded to take me with him, across the border to Pakistan. A man of influence, who would enroll me in one of the madrassahs-the Islamic colleges-in Peshawar.”

“And this is what happened?”

“This is what happened. I bade goodbye to my parents and my sister, and together with this man I crossed the border at Chaman and journeyed north. A week later we were in Mardan, northeast of Peshawar, and I was taken to the madrassah. As at the border, I was admitted without question.”

“So who was this man? This man of such influence?”

He smiled and shook his head. “So many questions, so little time. What would you have done with your life, had things been otherwise?”

“They were never otherwise,” she replied. “For me, there was never any other path.”