The Blind Man's Garden

36

As the bus nears Megiddo, the conductor and driver talk about a possible paramilitary cordon around the town. Mikal overhears the news that soldiers have been flagging down buses to check the passengers’ papers. Four miles from the outskirts he asks the conductor to let him out. He leaps off into the dust, the afternoon’s heat and intense light coming at him from the metal body of the bus and, as he begins to walk, from all points of the landscape, making him lose his sense of focus several times during the hour and a half it takes him to get to the outer limits of Megiddo. A wind shunting in from the open wild desert to the west. He stops when the yellow house comes into view and he stands looking at it, the material of the shoulder bag going soft in the heat. When he sets off again he has changed direction. Instead of approaching the house by the front door he will go along the riverbank, towards the kitchen at the back. Hidden in the grove of beautiful trees at the water’s edge, he watches the entrance to the kitchen. There is no movement and no sound. There is the imprint of a boot in the expanse of dust between the trees and the kitchen door. Lying on his stomach he listens with his ear pressed to the earth for several minutes. The sound of loose water. He waits the three hours until the sun drops towards the west and the light becomes a rich amber, the birds beginning to return noisily to the trees around him, screaming and ascending as they quarrel about an overloved branch. No one has gone in or come out of the house and at last he moves forward, going past the footprint. He is not sure if he recognises the pattern from his time in American custody.

The kitchen door creaks open at his touch and the first thing he notes is the spent cartridge on the tiled floor and he enters and walks through the room without a sound, the movements of the body honed down to the essential, the breath held. The door on the far side of the kitchen looks out onto the inner courtyard of the house and he peers through it, eyes surveying quickly. There is nobody and no light in any of the rooms lining the courtyard. Everywhere there is the red light of the setting sun as though the place is submerged in water-thinned blood.

He withdraws into the kitchen and lifts the cartridge from the floor and studies it for a long time.

He had glimpsed the car belonging to Akbar’s brother, parked on the other side of the courtyard, and taking a rag from a shelf he goes out to it at a walking crouch. He tears off the wing mirror from the car’s body, wrapping the cloth around it to muffle the noise, a fast decisive twist like breaking the neck of a rabbit.

He uses the mirror to inspect the rooms before entering them, sending it in at the end of his arm from each doorway.

Several walls are scarred with bullets. The phones have no dial tone. He is about to switch on the light but then stops himself. Instead he plugs in the clothes iron and touches its base after ten seconds to see if it is getting warm. It stays cold so the electricity has been cut off.

The three dogs are missing from the front of the gun factory and as he walks through the long grass mosquitoes appear, abdomens swollen with sucked blood, and he doesn’t know whose blood it might be. Inside the factory, the part of the floor before the furnace is covered with ashes of burnt money. An area the size of six or seven prayer mats. The patterns of ink that had been printed on the banknotes and the words, portraits and landmarks appear grey against the black of the crinkled paper — greys of various tints, depending on the original colour of the ink. Blue-grey. Orange-grey. Green-or red-grey.

His toes reduce one complete rectangle of blackness to a smear of black dust and as he moves around he is watched by the eye on each dollar bill.

The kitchen is filled with soft twilight shadows when he returns. He lights a lantern, almost wincing as the flame grows in the glass globe and the amount of light increases around him, as though someone is speaking louder than is prudent. He turns down the flame. The bag with the money has remained hanging from his shoulder. He lifts the terracotta lid of the milk pot to find that the milk has gone bad. He fills a glass with water and stands drinking in the semidarkness. There are chapattis stiff as cardboard in a basket but they can become like that within a day, so he can’t really work out how old they are.

At last he picks up the lamp and goes to the south wing and he stays in there for the better part of an hour, trying to reconstruct what has occurred there. The metal door at the entrance has been blown off and he sniffs the hinges to determine what explosive was used. The battle seems to have been fiercest here. The room that had contained boxes of leaflets and other literature is completely empty, the glass in the windows smashed, the casements splintered. There have been explosions in several rooms. Rockets, bombs. The soldiers must have thrown in grenades before entering. Shot through doors. He moves through the wing like a sapper, room by room, and only when he unlatches the very last door does he find two of the three Airedales. The bodies have entered rigor mortis. They are lying a few yards apart in the middle of the floor — bootprints join one pool of blood with the other and then walk away towards a window. There is no sign of the third dog.

Returning to the kitchen he takes one of the dried chapattis and eats it with the curried potatoes and mutton he finds in a bowl in the dead refrigerator, chewing the stiff pieces until they soften. He finds a jar of carrots in sugar syrup and eats them in the dark light, lifting the long red pieces to his mouth two or three at a time, looking out through the window at the river flowing silently under the rising moon, the hatchery of stars in the most distant field of vision.

Wiping his hands on his trousers he walks into the women’s section. Quietly he calls out to the leopard several times as he goes deep into the inner sanctums. Silence surrounds him in her room and he feels it is the silence of a trap. He is enclosed in an immense thing and he breathes slowly to remain calm, telling himself it shouldn’t matter how deep the water is as long as you can swim.

He falls asleep on the kitchen floor, using the shoulder bag as a pillow, and wakes several hours later looking up at the dark blue sky. He has no memory of it but sometime in the night he had left the kitchen and come out onto the courtyard and resumed his sleep in the grass and now he lies looking up at the constellations in the warmly burning canopy and he feels the earth pressing up against his spine, sustaining him, lifting him inside the nocturnal space. He is held against the taut trembling solidity of the planet, the enormous living curve of the world under his body.

Even though it is still night, he walks out of the house through the kitchen door, the bag hanging from his shoulder, the moon casting blades of light on the river’s surface. Going along the water he comes out to the road leading to Megiddo, and halfway along it he takes the narrow path which ends in the yellow flowers. He can smell them as he nears. It feels as though he hasn’t seen them for several months instead of several days. Above him the craters and canyons are clearly visible on the moon’s surface, and in the bluish light he walks through the flowers, still warm from the day’s heat, and on towards the low light-capped hills in the distance, and three-quarters of an hour later he is crouched in the dry bed of a spring, watching the group of dark figures in the distance. He wonders if they are Americans. They are fifty yards away from him across a wide band of gravel. Between them there is a stand of small dark bushes. He moves forwards on elbows, the bag resting in the small of his back. They are moving slowly across the slope of the hill and seem to be searching the network of caves. Looking for terrorists. And suddenly a group of figures emerges from one cave and they run and struggle with the searchers. Each one as angry as a snake in an eagle’s claws. Some of them fall to the ground and the dust blows in the air and the wind brings him their shouts along with Arabic words of praise for Allah, which the apprehended figures utter at each bit of pain and each restraining grip. The Americans, if they are Americans, are completely silent as though their words and sounds are incapable of travelling through the air of this land. Their existence here generates electricity that he can feel on his skin and for a fraction of a second he believes he sees the glittering eyes of a white man in the moonlight. But now he knows that the searchers are Pakistani soldiers because he hears them begin to talk in Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto and Hindko. The prisoners will be handed over to the Americans and the Pakistani army will collect the reward. The Arabs have probably just arrived from Afghanistan and were hoping to join up with their companions who have already escaped to this area. It is even possible that they were on their way to Akbar’s house. Three of them have now run away down the hill towards the valley of flowers and five soldiers go after them, raising dust that shines palely under the moon, passing within twenty feet of where he lies, and they turn and move far out on the slope until they are the smallest of figures in the blue light and then they disappear.

‘Get out of here, get out of here,’ he tells himself under his breath.

By the time he gets back to the house the darkness above him is splintering into light and it is almost dawn and a faint call to prayer is coming from the direction of Megiddo to the north of the house. He wonders if he should go to the mosque and try to glean information from the worshippers, and decides against it because someone could alert the Pakistani military or the Americans to his presence. He falls asleep in Akbar’s room, listening to the muezzin, having locked the door and dragged a table against it — listening to the muezzin and to his own whispers, ‘Get out of here, get out of here.’

*

Carrying the snow leopard cub inside his shirt, the American soldier steps across the international boundary line sometime around 3 a.m., leaving Afghanistan’s Paktika Province and entering South Waziristan. The cub’s small head sticks out from the top two undone buttons of the soldier’s kameez. He walks through the night that is full of the schemes of terrorists and the plots of generals, the mathematics of war. There is a chalky wind and he carries a rucksack on his back and there is a large Thuraya satellite phone in a holster around his waist. Another, smaller satellite phone is concealed in the pocket in the shorts he wears under his trousers, in case he has to relinquish the Thuraya.

A Special Forces soldier, he found the snow leopard during a raid at a house in the town named Megiddo, and among the things in his rucksack are six of the several dozen tins of cat food he has had shipped from the United States.

There are night-opening flowers on the cactuses. He walks through the moths that are feeding on them, fluttering audibly around him. These mostly barren hills are being used by terrorists to flee Afghanistan and he is alert as he walks. His younger brother was murdered by a freed prisoner back in January.

There is no name, but the first finger on each of the prisoner’s hands was missing.

Walking across an expanse of sand where the prevailing wind has produced corrugated wrinkles, like a broken staircase of white marble, he notes the angle at which he walks relative to the pattern, keeping it constant so as not to lose orientation. The maverick. He told the others in his team that he would be back in twenty-four hours, or would call them if he needs assistance. If he isn’t back within twenty-four hours they will begin to look for him.

From time to time he makes sure that the leopard is facing his chest because he knows the eyes can be seen from a mile away in the desert.

Loaded into the memories of both satellite phones are the photographs of the prisoner who killed his brother, taken when he was originally captured. He should never have been freed — he never revealed his name and that should have been indication enough that he was a hardened terrorist, most probably belonging to the upper echelons of al-Qaeda. He should have been taken to Cuba for complete and advanced interrogation. The proof of it being that he shot dead two Americans the instant he was released. A detailed investigation is being carried out into how such a shrewd and astute prisoner, who was clearly a threat to the United States and to peace in this region, was given his freedom.

But it is difficult to be sure. The innocent and the guilty both weep in the interrogation rooms, leaving wet spots on the material of the jumpsuits as they wipe large tears on their shoulders. ‘I swear to Allah on my heart and limbs …’ ‘I swear to Allah on my mother’s grave …’

He stops and looks around as he comes to a river, to make sure he is travelling in the right direction. Most rivers in South Waziristan flow from west to south, he knows, and he remembers his brother’s paranoia about crossing streams or rivers in Afghanistan, having heard stories about plastic Russian mines still flowing in the currents. But this is Pakistan.

There are American military bases in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Hungary, Bosnia, Tajikistan, Croatia, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia — a base in each vicinity, ready to mobilise and put down possible threats. And it is no longer a case of American happiness, American freedom, American interests, the American way of life. Now it is about the survival of America itself.

He is navigating by the stars as he walks, picking a new constellation every twenty minutes as the old one shifts direction with the earth’s rotation. Hercules. Ophiuchus. He wonders if among them there is a spirit or god or goddess that walks the battlefield, collecting the last words of the dying, enumerating every drop of spilled blood.

What were his brother’s last words?

Careful even when boisterous, as a Military Policeman his brother had never violated the rules, had in fact intervened one afternoon when an interrogator forgot himself during a session and made physical contact with the prisoner — grabbing the jumpsuit and shaking the kid. Most of the prisoners are so thin, small and undernourished that there is constant fear that one of them will die from the strictness of even the normal regime. He has yet to shed a tear over his brother’s murder, willing the fact of the departure out of his mind as best he can, existing in the unexamined haze, stopping himself whenever he hears himself humming the song his brother had loved, taught to him by their mother.

*

Mikal is ravenous when he wakes after just two hours of sleep. The sun is up. Taking four eggs from the refrigerator he cooks them and carries the frying pan out to the riverbank, watching the water as he eats, a warm wind coming from the desert. He washes the pan and puts it back on the shelf and looks at his wristwatch. The woman who came to cook at the house every day lives a mile upriver, but it is too early to pay her a visit. He digs a hole and then goes into the south wing and wraps the two dogs in a bedsheet and carries them out. Rather than break the stiff limbs he widens the hole he has dug.

The bag with the dollars has stayed at his side at all times, but now he places it in the wardrobe in Akbar’s room, arranging clothes around and on top until nothing can be seen. He is about to lock the wardrobe when he stops. Guns have been combined with keys, with knives, forks and spoons, and in Akbar’s father’s room there is a steel chest made to contain valuables which has a percussion pistol mounted inside it. If the lid is opened without setting a special catch, the pistol fires. This is where he deposits the bag. Afterwards he looks at his wristwatch once again and walks out of the house and goes along the riverbank.

A man is sitting on the cook’s veranda reading a newspaper. He is in his fifties, with untidy pewter stubble and an Adam’s apple as pronounced as his nose. He looks up and examines Mikal.

‘Uncle, my name is Mikal. I am Akbar’s friend,’ he says and nods over his shoulder. ‘From the house.’

The man doesn’t answer for a while. Then he calls into the house. ‘Fatima.’

The woman appears at the door with one hand shading her eyes. Then she comes forward wiping her hands on her veil and stands beside the man. She has recognised Mikal.

‘Have you just come from the house?’ the man asks.

‘Yes, I spent the night there.’

The woman gasps.

They tell him about the ten-hour firefight. The army cordoning off a zone around the house. The assault included paramilitary forces from the Frontier Corps and Waziristan Scouts. This was Pakistan’s first ever operation against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, under pressure from America. Members of the security forces as well as Chechen, Uzbek and Arab militants were killed. Many foreigners fled into the desert and the hills.

‘All this was three nights ago,’ the woman says. ‘No one has gone there since.’

‘So you don’t know where everyone is. Akbar’s brother … and sister.’

They both shake their heads and since there is nothing else to say he turns to go.

‘Come back for lunch,’ the woman says.

‘Thank you, I will,’ he says.

‘Will you bring my rosary? It has green and white beads and is hanging on a nail near the—’

‘I have seen it.’

Arriving back he undoes the catch and opens the steel chest to see that the money is still there. He stands looking at it, his fingertips playing with Naheed’s chain at his neck.

Half an hour later he is on the narrow path that leads to the yellow flowers. He walks through the field and on towards the hills. The western face of the range is composed of thick beds of Miocene rock, dipping west. On the eastern aspect several rocks of older formations appear under the Miocene and form a bold escarpment of white stone, which has given its name to the range. He climbs to the site where Akbar’s father had died in the crashed pickup. Thin beds of lignite, of Jurassic limestone, and nothing but sections of broken glass and green flakes on the boulder where the paintwork had scraped against it.

‘You son of a bitch,’ someone says behind him quietly.

He turns to see him squatting on the ground ten yards away. The man Salomi was betrothed to, the man he had met in the room with the boxes of books and other texts.

‘What are you doing here?’ the man asks.

‘I could ask you the same question.’

‘Are you alone?’ The man looks around. He brings his eyes back to Mikal and puts his AK-47 over his shoulder and stands up. He wears the same shalwar kameez he was wearing the day Mikal saw him last, now filthy with dust and grime.

‘How much money do you have?’

‘Just a few rupees,’ Mikal says.

‘You son of a bitch.’

He will give the dollars either to Akbar’s brother or to Salomi, not him.

‘What are you doing out here?’ the man asks.

‘I am looking for one of the Airedales. It ran away.’

‘Where have you been for the past several days?’

‘I should leave,’ Mikal says and turns around.

‘I asked you where have you been.’

‘I had to go away for a while.’

‘Just before the raid took place.’

‘What are you trying to say?’

The man spits in the dust. ‘I want the rupees in your pockets.’

‘I need them myself.’

The man lifts the rifle. ‘I wasn’t asking.’

Mikal takes out the money and the man gestures for it to be dropped.

‘Where is the bag with the American money Akbar gave you?’

‘It’s at the house.’

‘Bring it here tonight.’

‘Are Akbar’s brother and sister here too, hiding with you?’

‘What concern is that of yours?’ The man holds a pointed silence, then adds, ‘I saw the dog.’ He gestures towards a boulder ten yards away. Mikal walks up to it but there is nothing there. He rounds the curve and after a while he comes back. ‘That’s a jackal.’

‘I know. The dog killed it.’

‘Couldn’t you have warned me before sending me over there?’

The man doesn’t say anything, his eyes half closed against the glare of the sun. ‘Be here with the money at midnight.’

*

When he arrives for lunch he tells them he’ll be leaving tomorrow. And also that he would like to leave a bag with them, to be given to Akbar or any member of his family should they return. The couple tell him that a friend stopped by an hour ago and brought some news.

‘Someone saw Salomi in the hills,’ the man says.

‘Whereabouts?’

‘It wasn’t Salomi,’ the woman says. ‘It was her ghost. Her ghost was seen.’

‘Fatima,’ the man says in consternation.

‘Let me tell him,’ she says. ‘He fought in a war. No one believes in ghosts more than soldiers.’

‘It’s nothing but talk,’ her husband says to Mikal. ‘Salomi has either been captured by the Americans, or she has gone away with the al-Qaeda people and joined the jihad. A woman’s anonymity is an asset to those people. She could deliver messages in her burka.’

*

Since he is now without rupees he will take a few dollars out of the bag and exchange them in the bazaar in Megiddo. Going there is a risk but there is no alternative. He’ll also find a telephone there and talk to Naheed, tell her that he will begin the return journey tomorrow.

He falls asleep in Akbar’s room, using the pillow that is embroidered with verses of the Koran, meant to banish nightmares. Waking after sundown he opens the steel chest and sees that the bag is missing.

He is instantly desperate.

He examines the floor for blood and looks at the opposite wall for a possible bullet scar, sniffs the pistol within the chest to see if it has fired. He even goes back to Akbar’s wardrobe where he had originally concealed the bag, and pulls out the clothes in severe dismay, separating them one by one, and then looks under the bed and behind the armchair.

In the yellow light from the lantern in his hand he feels himself being watched.

From the gun factory he takes a hammer, a pair of wire-cutters, a flathead screwdriver and a crosshead screwdriver and walks towards the car whose wing mirror he tore off last night. He smashes the window and gets in and pounds the flathead screwdriver into the ignition and turns it like a key but the car remains dead. He unscrews the panels of the steering column to expose the wires running inside it, letting the freed screws fall onto the floor. Cutting the red wires, he strips their ends and connects them by twisting them together. Then he cuts the starter wires: he touches the exposed ends and there are five blue sparks of varying sizes and a sputter and the vehicle comes to life. Lastly he unlocks the steering by jamming the flathead screwdriver in the slot between the top of the steering column and the wheel.

Past caring, he drives out of the front gate, which he hasn’t approached since he arrived.

He travels haphazardly into the hills and then into the surrounding desert, the darkness so complete his eyes hurt as they try to see, a darkness resembling the black room in the American prison. Eventually the moon coins out and its light stretches in a white haze on the curves and plains of the desert. One by one the hills to the west offer their slopes to the moon in a pale glowing union, rising up out of the shadows. At midnight he returns to where he was supposed to bring the dollars but no one meets him and now he begins to shout the man’s name in all directions. He stands listening — nothing but wind and windborne echoes — and time no longer feels human to him, stretching and contracting, as unsettled as liquid. 1 a.m. and he is searching for her and her ghost and for the bag with the dollars and talking to himself, standing on the broken land at the edge of the desert, a flashlight in his right hand, remembering a story about a soldier who enters a night forest where the spirit of his dead lover is said to roam, transformed into a rapacious beast.

*

At the house he picks up the dead telephone and dials his parents’ number in Heer, remembering it from the days of his childhood, and stands listening in the darkness, imagining the faraway painted room. Then he dials Rohan’s house and talks to Naheed for almost an hour.

*

Two mock suns rise with the real sun, one on either side. His body a wreckage after only an hour’s sleep, he opens his eyes and in a half-awakened state watches his hands on the bedsheet, the missing fingers making him think for a moment he’s disappearing slowly. He sits up in alarm.

He walks to the steel chest but the money is still missing, and he wonders with stabs of shame and bafflement if the cook and her husband have stolen it.

The husband is on the veranda when Mikal arrives, reading the same newspaper as the first time he visited, newspapers being difficult to obtain in Waziristan. ‘Have you come to say goodbye?’

He shakes his head.

‘I thought you said you were leaving today.’

He stands there without words and says after a while, ‘I need to find some work to earn the fare back. I think I’ll go into Megiddo.’

‘How much do you need? We can give it to you.’

‘Thank you, uncle, but I’d rather earn it.’ He can see that they are anything but wealthy.

‘You could run an errand for me,’ the man says. ‘It’ll save me a trip. You need to deliver some scrap metal to Sara. It’s a small town about thirty-five miles—’

‘I know it. Akbar mentioned it once.’

‘I’ll give you directions. You take my pickup with the metal loaded onto the back. It should take about three hours to get there. Three hours back.’

‘I can do that. I need to get a little more sleep first.’

‘You can leave after lunch. You’ll be able to get back before sunset. I wouldn’t advise you to be out there after nightfall.’ The man folds the newspaper, his fingers full of ink. ‘This just sums it up,’ he says. ‘You have to wash your hands after reading this country’s newspaper.’

Mikal looks at the pages. To see if there’s any news of Father Mede. But the country has moved on to other crises. Carnage at the US Consulate in Karachi is the headline in three-inch-tall letters. A truck with a fertiliser bomb, being driven by a suicide bomber, was detonated outside the building, killing twelve people and injuring fifty-one — all Pakistanis.

Enraged Mob Beats Suspected Thief to Death …

Illegal Pakistani Migrants Drown Off Italian Coast …

Senator Defends Burying Alive of Women Who Dishonour Their Menfolk …

‘We levelled it,’ US Army Major General Franklin Hegenbeck said, speaking of the destruction of three villages in the Shaikot Valley in Afghanistan. ‘There was nobody left, just dirt and dust.’ …

He puts down the newspaper and watches the river sparkling under the three suns. This time tomorrow I’ll be on my way towards Heer, he thinks.

‘It’s a bad omen,’ the man says, of the sun and the two sundogs. Going through a grove of pomegranate and henna trees, he is leading Mikal to the back of the house. Mikal enters a wooden shed and finds himself looking at a mass of chains piled up as high as his waist. This is the metal he has to transport.

He approaches silently and drops to his haunches before the heap, touching it gently.

‘What’s wrong?’ the man asks from the shed door.

Mikal shakes his head, snatches of memory flowing through him.

‘They belonged to a mendicant who wandered all over the place,’ the man says.

‘I know,’ Mikal says after a while. He lifts the hoops that had attached the chains to the man’s wrists. There is the hoop for the neck. ‘Where did you get them? Where is the fakir?’

‘He was found dead by the roadside.’

Mikal stands up, letting the strands fall from his fingers, and looks at the man with distress.

‘The first time I ran away from home was to meet him. I followed his trail in the dust but couldn’t catch up.’

‘Well. Now you have found him. Or some of him. He appeared in the bazaar here and the al-Qaeda Arabs became enraged and abused him. Saying how dare he pretend to intercede with Allah on Muslims’ behalf. They beat him but people intervened, knowing how pious he was, but the next day the body was discovered.’

‘He wouldn’t have been able to run,’ Mikal says under his breath. Bullet cartridges are caught in the links of the chains like little gold fish in a net.

‘No. The chains were so heavy and so long he was having to drag them along with both hands. They trailed behind him for several yards. Some say he just vanished from inside the chains. They were the only thing that fell to the ground.’

‘I thought he was my father.’

They drag the coils out through the trees to the pickup. He drops the vehicle’s tailgate and climbs up onto the bed and pulls a fistful of the chains after him and the man begins to feed the rest to him very fast as Mikal walks backwards along the bed.

He was seen in Mecca once, never having left Pakistan physically, and several times he was seen in various parts of Pakistan simultaneously.

‘Fatima is reading a chapter of the Koran to comfort his soul,’ the man says, a little out of breath, once the chains are up on the bed and Mikal has jumped down. ‘When she finishes she’ll make us breakfast. There is only one town between here and Sara. It’s called Allah-Vasi. And that is where Fatima’s sister lives. She might want to go with you. You can drop her off, move on to Sara, and then pick her up on the way back.’

*

The sun and the sundogs follow the pickup across the sky, as he travels through open desert, an expanse of nothingness with low hills in the distance. There is not much traffic on the road but he examines each vehicle that passes him, in case someone is following him. Hasn’t he seen that man on the motorcycle before? He is half an hour from Sara when a loud screeching noise causes him to pull over. He gets out and opens the bonnet to see the shredded auxiliary belt. What remains of it is hanging off the alternator pulley, fouling the timing-belt cover, and a diesel injector feed pipe has become disconnected, spilling liquid.

He looks at the thin road, the rocks and boulders giving off heat like mirrors. An hour passes and nobody comes along and he sits on the driver’s seat with the door open, his legs hanging out, watching the dust djinns spinning across the desert floor, the interior smelling of the foodstuffs Fatima had brought as a gift for her family in several jars and baskets. He is sure the mendicant’s chains are hot to the touch.

It is another hour before a truck appears in the distance, the driver agreeing to tow him to the nearest mechanic’s shop, telling him during the journey that his cousin died fighting in Afghanistan last autumn and that his brother is in American custody in Cuba.

But by half past six in the evening the mechanics have still not finished with the repairs. Mikal realises he won’t be able to leave for Heer tomorrow morning: he’ll probably have to spend the night at Fatima’s sister’s house in Allah-Vasi after delivering the chains.

From the pickup he takes out the two empty bottles of Nestlé mineral water and fills them from the tap. ‘Can I make a call?’ he asks the owner of the mechanic’s shop, pointing to the grime-coated telephone sitting inside a cage meant for a bird. The little door has a padlock on it to prevent just anyone from using the instrument. ‘I’ll pay for it.’ Fatima’s husband has given him a few rupees for tea and a meal on the road.

Naheed answers on the fifth ring.

‘Are you on your way back?’ she asks.

‘I was hoping to leave tomorrow morning and be in Heer late the day after tomorrow. But now it looks difficult.’

Nothing from her. And he knows something is terribly wrong. ‘What is it?’ he says.

‘Sharif Sharif wants to marry me.’

‘I know that.’

‘He wants to marry me as soon as possible. This week. In a few days. Just a quick ceremony with a cleric and two witnesses.’

‘How did this happen?’

‘Father went to see him, to tell him that my agreement with him didn’t mean anything, and he became enraged. He is demanding what is his.’

‘He can’t marry you forcibly.’

‘He seems to think so. And Mother doesn’t wish to get the police involved.’

‘I am coming.’

‘Father says he will not accept a single rupee from me if I marry him. He says, “I don’t want my eyes and I don’t want to have a home if it’ll come at the expense of your happiness. I’d rather be a homeless blind beggar.”’

‘I am coming.’

He hangs up and stands there in a daze for a few moments. The mechanic comes and tells him the pickup is ready. So happy is the man with his patching job that he asks Mikal’s permission to sign the engine with a screwdriver.

Dusk will fall soon after seven. It’s six fifty when Mikal sets off towards Sara to deliver the chains. The sinking of the sun dissolves all hardness from the landscape, the mineral brilliance of the hills increasing for a short period. In the setting sun he watches a cloud as white as snow, a bright scarlet cloud, a green cloud edged with yellow like a dying leaf, a pale blue and a bronze cloud. But soon the sky above him is deep blue and the stars have appeared. He leaves the road that winds between the hills and begins to guide himself by the constellations through the open desert, hoping to travel in a straight line. In a hurry to drop off the chains.

Within half an hour the desert has surrendered itself completely to darkness. When he sees the shape lying on the ground ahead, he applies the brakes with as much force as he can, the tyres screeching on the gypsum and sun-split shale. He waits for the dust raised in front of the windscreen to settle, the beams of the headlights boring into it, and then sits looking out, suspended at the very edge of his senses, his heart thumping. After a while he gets out. He stands motionless beside the vehicle’s open door and then moves closer to one of the headlights, to be clearly visible. He undoes the buttons at his neck and wrists and takes off his shirt very slowly, performing each action emphatically. Remembering Tara’s words about encountering djinns.

He throws the shirt sideways. Peeling off his skin.

He crouches and takes off his shoes and steps out of them and, again very clearly, kicks them aside.

Then he steps out of his trousers and throws them away from himself too.

Stars are falling across the expanse of the sky above him, innumerable and random, and, naked, wearing nothing but Naheed’s necklace, he moves forwards with great deliberation. The headlights are reaching the figure lying on the ground and he is halfway there when he sees that it is a white man, sees the face. His pale skin and yellow-gold hair brilliant in the headlights. He is lying on his side, unconscious or dead, eyes closed and the right arm bloody.

Mikal stands still, breathing silently, and is about to take a step towards him when there is a movement in one of the hands.

He backs away and rushes towards the pickup, almost at a run. Collecting his clothes he begins to dress as fast as he can, looking around. If there is one there could be more. He glances up at the sky for Chinook helicopters and for fighter jets, a coursing of adrenalin in his veins. Someone will soon appear out of the darkness, he knows. He climbs into the pickup, wishing only to be out of there as quickly as possible, but just as the headlights swing away from the American soldier the snow leopard cub raises its head from behind the man’s shoulder.

Carefully he brings the headlights back onto the white man, the daunting impenetrability of the face, onto the snow leopard’s glowing eyes. The markings on the fur look as though the creature is in khaki camouflage.

He climbs out and calls to it but it doesn’t come, the head turned sideways as it stares into the night with eyes full of a green and ancient calm. Watchfully Mikal draws near and with his arm at full stretch lifts it by the scruff of its neck, noticing the small increase in heaviness from the last time he picked it up. How many days ago? He runs his eyes onto the white man’s body, the khaki shalwar kameez he is wearing. He walks around him in a wide circle unable to comprehend fully what he is seeing. He is much bigger than Mikal and looks to be five or six years older, though Mikal doesn’t know how good he is at judging a white person’s age. Moving closer, he places his hand on the chest to feel for the heartbeat but he’s wearing a bullet-proof vest under the kameez. Mikal checks the pulse instead. The right arm is bleeding, the upper bone broken above the elbow, and the blood is warm on Mikal’s fingers.

He looks for weapons. There is a folding-stock AK-47 slung over the shoulder and a 9 mm pistol strapped to the right thigh in a holster. There is another pistol in the small of his back. In the flank pocket of the kameez he finds two hundred dollars and a set of cards with English writing on them. There is a ‘blood chit’ to be used in case of capture — it’s in Pashto and English, and offers a cash reward to anyone who gives assistance to an American soldier in distress. Next he opens the man’s rucksack and finds a spare magazine for the AK-47, enough Meals, Ready-to-Eat for five days, a water bottle and water purification tablets. Small heavy cans with pictures of cats on them. He checks for a laptop computer. He extracts the large satellite phone from its holster and smashes it under his heels and then pulverises it completely with a rock.

The man is bull-necked and his body is hard, containing muscles full of health in every place. Hands like a stonemason’s. He must be either a Special Forces soldier or a CIA paramilitary officer, thinks Mikal. He looks for a digital camera like the one on which they had shown him pictures of the women, after his capture at the mosque back in January, but there isn’t one.

He looks at the dizzying height of the constellations and the stars, the thin millions of them stretching as far as the eye can see, southwards, northwards, eastwards, westwards, and he looks around the flat desert with its iron ore that is smelted by the Waziri tribes, the stone hills and the coralline beds and the waiting world. No sound except the pickup’s idling engine. He takes the rucksack and the guns and puts them in the footwell on the passenger’s side, placing the cub on the passenger seat itself. Getting behind the steering wheel, he swings the pickup around and puts it in reverse, backing it slowly towards the soldier, using his own footprints running from under the pickup to steer by. He stops when he is just a yard or so away from where the American lies. He alights to examine the distance and then gets back in and carefully reverses again until he is only half a yard from the soldier.

He gets out and stands looking at the face taking a dim red glow from the taillights. He looks at the bed of the pickup. The chains look like the heaped entrails of a slaughtered metal beast. Some of the links are covered in rust, prayers that have gone unanswered for decades. He drops the tailgate and begins the process of lifting the man up onto the bed. At first he braces himself and tries to lift the soldier the obvious way, with one arm under his knees, the other under his armpits, careful of balance and with fine elastic adjustments of his body — but he is too heavy. Out of breath, his sides caving in and out, he props the man in a sitting position against the tailgate, the legs sticking out like a doll’s, and climbs up onto the bed and leans down and hooks his hands under the armpits. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if the man regains consciousness. Gathering all his strength into his arms he begins to pull the man up in swift and single-purposed hauls, unerring and untiring. Most of all he doesn’t wish to jostle the injuries too much, in case the pain brings the body out of sleep. He is sweating by the time he has transferred the man onto the bed. He lies stretched out beside him like a sibling, noisily sucking in the night air, the dead weight of the white man’s arm thrown over his stomach. Finally he rises, pulling free the looseness of his shirt caught under the American. The flashlight held in his teeth, a beam of radiance shooting from his mouth, he begins to separate the loops of the chains, identifying the neck, ankle and wrist rings. One bracelet is lying at the top of the heap of chains but he can’t find the other and has to send his arm deep into the tangled loops. He fastens the neck hoop around the man’s throat, removing the key once the lock clicks shut. He puts one of the wrist bands on the good wrist. The pickup’s bed is ten feet long and six wide, and above the bed is a six-foot-tall rectangular framework of pipes, for a tarpaulin cover to be draped and fitted over it. He passes several chains through the base of the pipe frame on either side of the American, so that he is secured to the pickup’s body. He will be able to manoeuvre himself into a sitting position but will not be able to stand up.

He climbs down.

He is sure he is being watched but he can see no one in the featureless night. He walks around to the front and takes out a bottle of water and returns and climbs back onto the bed. As he uncaps the bottle he rehearses out loud the question he will put to the man, preparing his voice for the venture. ‘Vere iz gurl? Vere iz gurl? Vere iz gurl?’

Moving closer to him he takes the man’s head in one arm, the dust-covered face turned up, and gently opens the mouth and eases the two rows of teeth apart, feeling his breath on his fingers, and begins to pour in a thin strand of water. The swallowing function is asleep and the mouth fills up to the brim and the water slides out from the corners. Then it catches the back of the throat, a column of bubbles rising through the water that fills the mouth, and the alarmed mind wakes the body. The man splutters and then opens his eyes, struggling powerfully as he tries to sit up. He blinks in the light of the torch in Mikal’s teeth. Mikal leaps away and the water drips from the bottle onto the bed of the pickup with a musical ringing. A loud half groan, half roar escapes the man as he feels the pain of his injury but even then he is so strong that his pulling at the chains can make the pickup rock slightly, twisting in confusion and then anger. It’s as though above his shouting mouth his eyes are shouting too, contributing to the sound. Mikal fears the soldering of the pipe frame will give, tearing it off the sides of the bed. And he hasn’t looked at Mikal beyond the initial eye contact. Mikal thought there was no need to secure the injured arm and the man tries more than once to lift it — failing and giving out an agonised bellow through gritted teeth each time.

Mikal stands at the tailgate, his torch shining into the man’s golden hair and the face glistening wet where water has washed away the dust. The eyes are green with splinters of brown in them.

‘Vere iz gurl?’ he says after a while.

The man has stopped struggling and sits gasping, the half ton of chains shifting around his muscles, but Mikal’s question remains unanswered.

Mikal looks at the sky. It’s almost nine o’clock and he is drenched in sweat. He knows some of these soldiers understand Urdu and Pashto, so he puts the question to him in both those languages, but to no avail. He climbs down and goes to the passenger seat and returns with the leopard cub. Standing at the tailgate he holds the cub out towards the man and says, ‘Vere hiz gurl?’

The American doesn’t look at him, examining the chains and the pipe frame intently. Mikal might as well not be here.

The stars move in the hot desert air and have a look of completeness to them, in comparison to the materials scattered about him here on earth, unassembled. When he sends the beam of the flashlight into the darkness the hills look like petrified clouds, ledges of hardened vapour.

The leopard calls out and he notices that its whistle has deepened from a songbird to an eagle. He sees the soldier lick water from his lips but when he moves forward with the bottle the man begins to struggle again, the eyes that needle and dare and challenge and threaten him.

Mikal gets back into the pickup, and with the heavy softness of the cub in his lap he begins to drive. ‘What have they been feeding you?’ he says, stroking the fur on the leopard’s head with one hand after they have been driving for five minutes, his breathing and heartbeat settling at last, the air from the window drying his clothes and skin. ‘Didn’t take you very long to become friendly with him, I see …’ He is still astonished at the power the animal’s eyes have over him, the gaze captivating within an instant, a radiant dreamlike effect on his mind. And then he begins to talk to it in a constant stream. ‘Are you going to say something to me? It’s probably beneath you to consort with someone like me these days. You’ve probably forgotten your own language by now, haven’t you? …’ As he drives he switches on the flashlight for a few moments to look through the glass window located behind his head. The soldier sits facing the other way and doesn’t react to the light that falls onto his shoulder. The chains won’t allow him to reach the glass of the window. ‘Don’t worry,’ Mikal tells the cub. ‘I am not going to hurt your new friend. I noticed there was a school next to Fatima’s sister’s house. One of the teachers will probably know English. That’s where I am taking him.’

Raising dust, the pickup moves through the night. A flock of ghostly storks crosses his vision at one point with light pulsing on their wings as on a river, their throats rippling with language that he hears over the engine, the voices whipping the black air. He is moving through wild terrain and during one long stretch between two endless hills it seems as if he is standing still. Every now and then he drives onto the road, the tar melted from the day’s heat, then drives back onto rough ground — travelling in a straight line as much as possible. Around ten thirty he sees a roadside mosque half a mile ahead, a single light bulb shining over its door. In all probability it will be deserted at this hour and he will drive past but still he wishes he had a tarpaulin to put over the framework. Just as he approaches the mosque he looks back and sees that the American is slumped over. He brakes and gets out and runs to the back. The eyes are closed. He climbs onto the bed and moves forwards, ready to feel the pulse, to push aside the chains and thrust his hand under the Kevlar armour and check for the heartbeat, but the man stirs and sits upright.

Mikal backs away. The inscription on the mosque’s lintel reads, I have no refuge in the world other than Thy threshold, there is no protection for my head other than this door. Just then a bearded man appears at the mosque entrance, holding an ablution pot in his right hand. The door is green as is the dome on the roof, the same colour as the pickup. The cleric approaches but stops when he sees the man in chains, dumbstruck.

‘I thought he’d fainted,’ Mikal says.

‘That’s a white man.’

‘Yes.’

‘What are you up to?’

‘I found him in the desert.’

‘Is he a soldier? An American?’

‘I think so. His arm is broken. I am taking him to Allah-Vasi. I didn’t think anyone would be up at this hour in the mosque.’

‘I am performing an overnight reading of the Koran. Just came out to get some water.’

‘You don’t know anyone who speaks English, do you?’

‘No.’ It’s probably the truth, though people have been beaten for knowing English, suspected of being American informers.

‘Why are you taking him to Allah-Vasi?’

‘I am hoping to find someone who speaks English there. He can ask the American if he knows anything about my friend and his family.’

The cleric’s face conceals nothing, a soul with no secrets, and he says, ‘I have never seen a real white person. During the First World War they were here. They used biplanes to drop bombs on us. The planes were considered a cowardice. Killing while being out of reach.’ Then he says, ‘If anyone sees him do you know what will happen?’

‘I am hoping to drive through the darkness.’

‘He had something to do with the disappearance of your friend?’

‘I don’t know. I think so.’

‘If someone sees him they’ll cut off his head … and yours too probably, for not doing it yourself. Did you say his arm is broken?’

‘Do you know how to set bones?’ Jeo would have, he thinks with a pang.

‘Yes. But we shouldn’t stand here on the road. I don’t want to be seen tending to an American out in the open. They’ll shoot me too. I know people who don’t want to even look at a picture of them.’ The man turns to go back into the mosque. ‘Bring your vehicle to the back of the building. I’ll see if I can find some splints.’

‘And I would appreciate it if you could let me have an old sheet to cover him during the journey to Allah-Vasi. A burlap sack or something.’

Mikal brings the pickup to the back of the building to a dry river bed or a torrent that drains the hills in the rainy season, its limestone pebbles containing fossils. And the desert beyond is a dark wasteland of silence. With the water bottle he climbs up, holding it out as he moves forwards a step at a time. He unscrews the sky-blue cap with his teeth. The man is still. Mikal crouches and puts the bottle to the man’s mouth and begins slowly to pour water into his mouth. The eyes have stopped moving, trained firmly on Mikal. Then he begins to swallow. When the bottle is empty Mikal steps away and the man watches him, breathing deeply.

Some minutes later, the bearded man emerges from the mosque with a sheet, a fistful of wooden splints and strips of torn cloth to be used as binding. He hands Mikal the sheet and he opens it to see that it’s large enough to cover the soldier.

‘He’ll struggle while we set the arm but he won’t be able to free himself,’ Mikal tells the cleric.

‘Look at the size of his hands. If he gets loose he’ll snap your neck like a twig.’

‘Why are you doing the all-night reading of the Koran? Has something happened?’

‘My son is a cleric at a mosque not far away. He says the door to his mosque refused to open yesterday, not allowing anyone in. Allah is expressing His anger over some matter. Someone has committed an unconscionable deed in the vicinity and until he is forgiven the door won’t open.’ The man has tears in his eyes and he slowly wipes them away with his hands, ancient fingers doing ancient work. ‘It’s a catastrophe. No one knows what crime or sin lies behind the prohibition.’

The moment Mikal and the bearded man climb onto the bed, the American begins to struggle against his chains, thrashing inside the coils. The cleric stops fearfully but Mikal moves forward to demonstrate that the American has been rendered harmless by the chains. He rolls up the sleeve of the broken arm and the bearded man feels for the fractures. The American has not stopped growling with anger, the features of the face contorted in Mikal’s flashlight with spit seething between the lips. To inspect the shoulder bones for signs of harm, the old man loosens the collar of the American’s kameez and unfastens the front of the Kevlar vest. He is looking down the back, feeling with his fingertips, when he suddenly cries out in horror. ‘Allah, I seek refuge in You!’ When Mikal looks at the man’s back he too cannot help but catch his breath. There is a large tattoo on the skin:

The word covers the entire space between the shoulder blades, and they stand looking at it, the American continuing to struggle. It says ‘Infidel’.

But it is not in English, which would have meant that he had had it done for himself, or for others like him in his own country. It is in the Urdu and Pashto script so it is meant for people here. He is taunting. Boasting. I am proud to be an infidel, to be this thing you hate.

The cleric throws the splints away into the darkness. ‘Get him out of my sight.’

‘Please don’t tell anyone.’

‘Get that beast away from here.’ The man climbs down off the bed, shaking with rage. ‘They want to wound not only our flesh but our very souls.’

Mikal turns away rather than endure the man’s eyes. ‘I’ll leave. I’ll leave. Right this instant. But please don’t tell anyone.’

When he is behind the steering wheel the old man comes to his window and stands looking at him, as if looking for an answer. There is a confused pity in the cleric’s eyes too — why has the white man condemned himself in such a manner, daring to mark himself with the sign of His disapproval? Just before Mikal drives away the man says, ‘The West has dared to ask itself the question, What begins after God?’

*

Midnight, and he is moving through the hills with his eyes on a storm to the east, troubled flashes of brightness in the black sky, the dark shapes of the Pahari hills becoming visible for a moment and then disappearing and then the sound of thunder reaches him, strokes of lightning as fragile as filaments in a bulb. He enters a low pass in the westernmost spur of the Paharis and continues into the open desert. Once he sees the lights of an oncoming truck in the distance where the road cuts through the night. Half an hour later he passes through the last low cones of hills on that ground cracked like clay and after another half hour they are on the outskirts of Allah-Vasi. Before entering the town he gets out and covers the American with the cleric’s sheet. He removes the 9 mm pistol from the rucksack and conceals it in the waistband of his trousers. But then, feeling loath, he puts it back in the rucksack.

Running east to west, a street turns off at right angles to the main road, descending and becoming a wide earthen path, and he drives along it towards where Fatima’s sister lives. It’s almost 1 a.m. As he drives on slowly the dead silence of the night is broken by the roused dogs in various houses. He continues eastward until he recognises the door at which he had dropped off Fatima and he cuts the engine and sits looking at the house, the dogs continuing their din. He studies the school building next door, the arch above the gate carrying a saying of the Prophet. Seek knowledge. Even if you have to travel to China. He pushes the American’s rucksack deep under the passenger seat and gets out and makes sure the soldier is still covered with the bedsheet and then knocks on the large door to the house.

As he waits he puts the 9 mm back under his waistband.

It’s several minutes before someone answers from the other side of the door, asking curt, suspicious questions, and he identifies himself and eventually they let him in. The man of the house, Fatima’s brother-in-law, is holding a deer rifle and with him is his son, a young man a few years older than Mikal. Anxious to go back to sleep the son walks away immediately, leaving the father to deal with the inconsiderate, untimely guest. The father tells Mikal to bring the van in through the door and park it at the edge of the courtyard.

Mikal gets out holding the snow leopard and — looking around him, letting a breath go — says to the father who has just finished securing the door, ‘Uncle, I need to tell you something.’ The dogs in the neighbouring houses are still barking. Taking the man to the back of the pickup he pulls away the sheet in one swift movement to reveal the American sitting bowed in the mass of chains. Before the man can say anything there is a great howling from behind them, and when Mikal turns he sees that the son and five or six other young men are coming across the courtyard at great speed.

‘No, no, no, no,’ Mikal says under his breath.

He places his left hand on the low wall that encloses the pickup’s bed and vaults onto the bed, the cub held in the other hand. Reaching under his shirt he snatches the pistol from his waistband and kneels in front of the American, facing the oncoming men. The father has raised his hands to stay his son. Mikal looks over his shoulder to see that the American is sitting stock still behind him but with his eyes lit up intensely. The father moves towards his son who stops a yard away from him, and the other young men stop behind him. The father is physically a giant and has parental authority over the boy, but then suddenly the son lunges towards the pickup, scrabbling in the dirt of the courtyard, and in the skirmish Mikal hears the tearing of a shirt and he keeps the arm with the pistol fully extended, wondering if he would be able to pull the trigger, and then he notices that one of the other young men has gone around the pickup and is moving towards the American from that direction. There is nothing else for Mikal to do but fall back onto the American, to keep everything in sight, their two heads almost touching, feeling the mendicant’s chains dig in his back, swinging the gun first in one direction and then the other. Shouts and glaring eyes and a spiralling pandemonium.

They have encircled the pickup, and Mikal is leaning hard against the American, for now unmindful of the broken arm, the 9 mm keeping them at bay, trembling electrically with fear and his heart hammering. A wooden pole has appeared in someone’s hand and an attempt is being made to snag a loop of the chain with it.

The son has a large fixed-blade knife with a clip point and he swings it at Mikal and Mikal turns and catches him richly on the side of the head with the butt of the pistol. Some of the young men are servants or retainers of the family and although they circle and snarl they cannot go against the master’s wishes. But the others are on full attack so they must be cousins within the family.

Two other elderly men have appeared from the house. They call the young men by name and those who have been called stop and look back. The master of the house is still struggling with his son, who has half climbed over the side of the pickup, breathing heavily, his face distorted and mouth slobbering as the father puts him in an armlock. He pulls him off and stands holding him, the knife flashing in the hand.

‘O Allah!’ says the father. ‘O Allah, I seek refuge in You!’

With hands raised threateningly and other displays of rage and authority, the two elderly men have subdued the cousins. The father pushes the son away from the pickup. ‘I want you to control yourself,’ he says.

‘All right.’

‘All right what? All right, you dog? All right, you wretch?’

‘All right, Father.’

The man stands with his hands on his hips, catching his breath. Then he turns to Mikal. ‘Start talking, boy.’

‘I was hoping to spend the night here before moving on.’

‘You just thought I would let you do that with him sitting in the back?’

‘I was about to tell you everything, but then they came and wanted to start a war.’

‘What did you think would happen when someone saw him?’

‘I didn’t know what else to do, uncle.’

‘What do you mean start a war?’ the son shouts. ‘We are already at war.’

‘I know that.’

‘They killed my brother last November.’ The son points at the American with the knife.

‘If you know we are at war,’ says the father, ‘tell me what you are doing with that man?’

‘I discovered him in the desert. I would have left him there but then I saw that he had the snow leopard. The cub belonged to Akbar’s sister.’ He gestures towards the house. ‘The people Aunt Fatima works for. So this man has probably been into Akbar’s house in Megiddo. I need to find someone who can ask him a few things.’

The man considers the information. Behind him the younger men are pacing, their jaws working with wrath.

The man turns to them. ‘Everyone go back to the house. Ghulam, make sure no one leaves the house. No one.’

Turning back to Mikal he says, ‘Nobody here speaks English.’

‘I thought one of the teachers at the school might.’

The man thinks for a few moments. ‘You’re right. One of them can.’

Only now does Mikal realise that he is still leaning against the American. He pulls away and stands up and climbs off the bed.

‘The English-speaking teacher lives on the other side of town. Someone could go and bring her here,’ the man says, ‘but I don’t think it can be done right now.’

‘No.’ Mikal nods in agreement.

‘We have to wait until morning. I’d rather not go knocking on people’s doors in the middle of the night. Anyway she won’t want to come at this time. Her family will want to know where we want to take her.’

‘If word got out she’d spoken to an American who knows what might happen to her.’ Mikal looks at the man. ‘I am sorry for involving you in this.’

‘If word gets out I had an American in my house who knows what will happen to me? And to the rest of my family. The whole town is full of Taliban and al-Qaeda.’

‘I am sorry. Maybe I should leave right now.’

‘Why would you think I meant that?’ the man says. ‘You’re here now. We need to work out what to do next. I think we should wait until morning, and when it’s time for the school to start, the teacher will arrive and we can bring her here without anyone knowing.’

‘I won’t be able to leave here till well into the morning?’

‘It seems that way.’

‘I have to go back to Heer as soon as possible.’

‘Where is that?’

‘It’s the place I am from. In Punjab.’

‘Call them in the morning and tell them you’ll be late. And what are you going to do with the American once he has answered your questions?’

‘I haven’t thought that far ahead.’ Mikal leans against the pickup door.

The man’s eyes examine him closely. ‘When was the last time you ate?’

‘I am just tired.’

‘I’ll wake the women, if they aren’t already up. Come in and they’ll feed you. Just listen to those dogs.’

‘Uncle, his arm is broken.’

The man stands looking at the American. ‘I’ll get Ghulam to set it. You come in.’

‘I think we should feed him too.’

‘What does he eat? We don’t have anything special.’

‘I have food for him.’

He takes out the rucksack and looks at the MREs. Unzipping a small pocket in the rucksack’s lining he takes out the blood chit and unfolds it. There is a phone number. He stands looking at it and then puts it back in the pocket and turns around to face the man. ‘I’ll stay out here with him. I don’t want to leave him on his own.’ He thinks of the son’s thick steel knife, the broad six-inch blade. It must be a fighting weapon because a strip of brass is inlaid at its back to catch an opponent’s blade, an upper guard that bends forward to provide protection to the owner’s hand during parries.

‘We’ll put him in the garage at the back of the house and lock the garage door,’ the man says. ‘You come and eat and afterwards you can feed him.’

*

‘He had the cub?’ Fatima asks. She and her sister are awake, preparing a meal for him. Mutton and peas are being heated in a pan. She spoons it onto a plate. He hears men’s voices from the other side of the wall, raised in argument as Fatima brings him a chapatti in a chintz cloth.

‘Yes.’

‘He must know what happened at the house.’

He nods and she goes back to the stove. ‘His fellow soldiers are probably looking for him,’ she says. ‘Do you think they could track you here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘The leopard’s grown a little,’ she says.

‘He has, hasn’t he.’

‘Are you sure it’s the same one?’

‘I checked. The dark spot on the inside of the left ear.’

As he begins to eat Fatima’s sister asks, ‘Will you let the American go eventually?’

‘There is a contact number in his rucksack,’ Mikal says.

‘I don’t want American soldiers near my home,’ the sister says. ‘They have killed one of my sons already.’

‘I’ll call them when I am far away from here.’

‘I don’t want you endangering my family,’ the woman says. ‘What if he brings other soldiers back here to arrest us and carry us all away?’

‘It won’t come to that. I’ll take him far away from here, he won’t be able to find his way back.’

‘For all we know they are following him right now,’ the woman says. ‘I’d go out there with the rifle right now if I thought his countrymen would invade my home to rescue him. They’ll kill us all.’

Mikal is sure that a similar discussion is taking place in the other room.

‘I promise I won’t involve you any further. And I am sorry about your son.’

The woman suddenly hides her face behind her hands and begins to weep, her shoulders and head bowed. Mikal stops chewing. Shocked, he becomes still as he listens to her. And then — just as suddenly — she absorbs her grief back into herself and stands upright. ‘How many chapattis will you eat?’ she asks, her voice uneven.

‘I have enough here.’

Fatima looks at him and then touches her sister’s back. ‘He’ll need two more at least.’

‘It’s not a problem.’

‘Thank you,’ Mikal says.

After he has eaten he goes out to the garage and sees that they have fitted a tarpaulin over the frame of the pickup’s bed. The back is now perfectly enclosed. A box of tough taut cloth. In places it is as resistant to the touch as plywood.

He lifts the flap above the tailgate and looks in to see that a strip of black cloth has been tied over the white man’s eyes. He opens the MRE with his teeth and sits down beside the soldier, mixing the chemicals in the sachets to heat up the sealed large piece of meat. Talking so he will know it’s him, touching the food to the white man’s lips until he opens his mouth. He tells the soldier he has eaten an American MRE in Peshawar where they were on sale for some reason, telling him how he has eaten shark meat on the edge of the Arabian Sea, a bird of prey, a butterfly.

‘If you can understand what I am saying please answer me. I beg you.’

The man of the house appears at the tailgate with a padlock and stands watching him.

When the MRE is finished he stands up and leaves and the man locks the garage.

‘Is there another key?’

‘No,’ the man says.

‘You’ll make sure no one gets out of the house during the night and informs the rest of the town?’

‘It’s a matter of our safety too,’ the man says. ‘We are just as concerned. Now go into the house and sleep. Fatima is making up a bed for you.’

*

Jeo and Basie come to him while he is asleep. He wakes up some time later unable to recall the details of the dream, lying there in the darkness of the room with his eyes open, and eventually he remembers that he had asked Jeo and Basie what it was like being dead. He struggles to recall the answer, and he is drifting back to sleep when a hand touches him in the darkness. He sits up just as a flashlight comes on in the room. It’s one of the cousins, standing beside his bed.

‘Would you sell him to us? I have been sent to ask you how much you’d take for him.’

‘He’s not for sale.’

‘In cash.’

‘I said he’s not for sale.’

The boy looks at him and nods. ‘We thought we’d better ask.’

‘You have my answer.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Aunt Fatima said they had imprisoned and tortured you.’

Mikal looks away.

‘You should want to lick his blood. He’s your enemy.’

‘Not like that, he’s not.’

‘He’d do the same to you.’

‘Then that makes me better than him.’

And with that he lies down again. ‘Now I want to go back to sleep. I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow.’

The boy switches off the flashlight and Mikal hears him leave in the darkness. He gets up and bolts the door, looking out through the window and seeing the man of the house beside the garage door with the deer rifle. He tries to stay awake, his fear breeding images out of the dark, djinns and nightgrowths, but he falls asleep at some point. Either Jeo or Basie asks him if he is certain that he hadn’t wanted to shoot the two Americans by the lake — wondering if he had killed them intentionally — but the questioner disappears before he can answer. When he wakes the sun has risen and it is six o’clock and he stands up immediately. He passes the son in the corridor. The mark of bitter thoughts is on his brow and he neither returns Mikal’s greeting nor looks at him. There is a poppy bruise on the temple where Mikal’s gun connected last night — it is either not serious or he has left it untreated because he doesn’t wish to signal any weakness to Mikal. Almost everyone seems to be awake. Smells come from the kitchen, the women making parathas, churning lassi and frying eggs, murmuring as they work, it being too early to speak loudly, words disrupting the pure pleasure of living.

The main door of the house is still locked. The man is still there outside the garage, now with the snow leopard cub on his lap, the clear golden sunlight flickering on the pattern of the fur. The rifle leans against the chair.

Mikal walks out to him. The man puts a hand in his pocket and brings out shattered pieces of a satellite phone, large silver shards and fragments of broken plastic and torn sections of microcircuitry.

‘We discovered this on him. In the shorts he wears under his shalwar.’

‘I didn’t think to look there,’ Mikal says quietly.

‘I thought it best to destroy it.’ The man throws the pieces on the ground before him and sits looking at them like a soothsayer reading the future in the pebbles he has scattered. ‘We have cleaned him,’ he says, ‘taken him to the bathroom.’

‘What?’

‘Well, he soiled himself. So we had to change his clothes. He put up a great struggle.’

‘Give me the key.’

‘He’s fine. Go in and eat.’

‘Give me the key, uncle.’

‘Go in and eat.’

Mikal nods but doesn’t move.

‘I need to make a phone call,’ he tells the man eventually.

‘I have hidden the phone in case someone tries to call out. I’ll connect it for you after breakfast.’

‘Thank you.’ He imagines them at the house in Heer, the breeze and scents in the garden, the scratch of the broom as it sweeps fallen leaves from a red path. Naheed wiping the dew off the mirror above the outside sink, the flowers hanging overhead. Before the science of botany was established just three hundred years ago, he remembers Rohan telling him and Jeo when they were children, flowers in their infinite variety and lack of human order were said to be proof of God’s existence.

The young men watch him from a distance, from various corners of the house, gathering in groups here and there and withdrawing, and he makes sure not to meet anyone’s eye. As he eats Fatima tells him that the school will open at eight thirty and that the teachers should begin to arrive around eight.

At seven forty-five Fatima’s sister puts on her burka and her husband unlocks the main door and she goes out to the school to position herself outside the gate, to wait for the arrival of the English-speaking teacher.

Mikal enters the garage and approaches the back of the pickup and lifts the tarpaulin flap. The soldier, blindfolded, senses someone’s presence and moves his head. His arm is in plaster and is nestling in a triangular sling of white muslin that was once a flour sack. He is wearing a new set of shalwar kameez and there is a large saffron and black bruise on his forehead. Mikal feels he is watching him through the blindfold, perhaps through the round naked discolouration above the eyes. The street is just on the other side of the garage and from it comes the chatter of the schoolchildren arriving for a day of learning.

He hears the front door being opened and looks out of the garage to see Fatima’s sister coming in with another, much slimmer figure. Her burka is tighter than the older woman’s, with long clean lines, and she has a leather handbag slung over her shoulder and her feet make clicking noises he hasn’t heard from the women in this house. Sturdy and purposeful, as opposed to the maternal and domestic shuffling that comes from the others. He watches them disappear towards the kitchen.

Five minutes later the man comes out to Mikal. ‘The girl knows English but refuses to speak to the American. She’s too afraid. She says they’ll cut off her tongue, or she’ll be killed outright.’

‘Can’t you persuade her?’

‘We are trying.’

‘What happened to his forehead?’

‘I told you. He struggled when we were cleaning him. Threw us around everywhere and got tangled up in the chains.’

‘I thought it might have something to do with what’s written on his back.’

‘It isn’t. But I’ll tell you one thing. He’ll pay for that piece of poetry if he is caught by someone out there.’

The man goes back into the house and returns a few minutes later. ‘She’s terrified. She is about to leave.’

Mikal steps out of the garage to see the girl hurrying across the courtyard, sobbing loudly inside her black burka. He moves towards her with one arm extended and says, ‘Sister, listen —’

But she gives a squeal at his approach and he stops.

The father unlocks the door and just as the girl steps out two of the servants make a dash for it and leave the house, pushing the man aside. High-pitched screams and shouts come from outside as the two escaping men crash into children. The man of the house scrambles up and locks the door once again.

Everyone is stunned.

‘They are afraid the Americans will raid the house and carry them off,’ says one of the other servants.

‘They will tell everyone in the bazaar,’ the son says. ‘In half an hour every man in Allah-Vasi whose honour, faith and manhood is still intact is going to descend on this house.’ He comes forward and strikes Mikal hard on the face. ‘Get out of here. Go.’

The father doesn’t say anything or reprimand the boy.

‘I’ll take him away.’ Mikal nods. ‘I’ll leave.’

Taking a cigarette lighter from his pocket and flicking it alight the son begins to burn a piece of paper with it. Only too late does Mikal realise that it is the American soldier’s blood chit.

‘We don’t want you bringing the Americans into this area,’ the son says, letting go as the flame creeps towards his fingertips. The last small piece of whiteness falls to the ground with the flame still attached. It is ash by the time it lands. ‘We are keeping the Kalashnikov and the bullet-proof vest and the dollars,’ he adds. ‘The tarpaulin isn’t cheap.’

‘You can keep the pistol for your protection, and also his food,’ the father says.

‘I want the snow leopard too,’ says the son.

‘The cub is mine,’ Mikal says as vigorously as he can.

The father looks at the son. Then at Mikal. ‘You can take the cub with you.’

Mikal turns to leave the room.

‘You said you needed to make a phone call,’ says the father. He points to a door. ‘The phone is through there.’

There is no answer from Heer. Mikal hangs up and dials a second time but again no one picks up.

Five minutes later he is easing the pickup out of the garage, the father walking beside the vehicle.

‘Where will you go?’ Fatima appears on the veranda.

‘I don’t know. I think I’ll go to Megiddo. Hide him in the house and go to the school there and try to find a teacher who speaks English.’

‘Just leave him in the desert and move on,’ the man says. ‘Go home. Do what other young men do, watch films and apply for jobs and quarrel with your sisters.’

‘He knows what happened to Salomi and to Akbar’s brother.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Fatima says.

‘No,’ says her brother-in-law, raising his hand in the air.

‘That’s not a good idea,’ Mikal says gently.

‘If I am in the vehicle with you, there will be less chance of you being harassed. They’ll respect a woman.’

‘Fatima,’ her brother-in-law says. ‘If they find out who he’s got tied up in the back, it’s not going to matter who he has sitting with him in the front.’

The leopard is curled up in his lap, yawning to show its pale pink tongue, the thick tail twitching in the air. Mikal has a large lunch tied up in a cloth on the passenger seat, along with three Nestlé bottles filled with tap water. There is a bottle of dark brown bitter-smelling oil for the American’s arm, though when he is supposed to rub it on he doesn’t know, since the plaster cast should stay on for days.

‘Be careful,’ the man says with feeling, just before letting him out.

‘Thank you, uncle. And I am sorry.’

‘I was thinking of letting them deal with him during the night. To save you from yourself.’

‘I know.’

‘Maybe I should do it right now.’

‘I’d better go, uncle.’

‘Fine. Stay off the road. Go through the desert and keep the Pahari hills on your right. It’ll take longer but it’s the safer way. When the road floods people often cut through the desert so it can be done. I have done it myself. And now I am beginning to think you should wait till nightfall.’

‘No. I need to end this as soon as possible so I can go back to Heer.’

Children are walking towards the school, and at the crossroads at the end of the street he stops to let a dozen of them pass. A boy, carrying a bag of books twice the size of his torso, reacts to the sound of chains coming from the other side of the tarpaulin and thumps Mikal’s door. ‘What’s in the back?’

Mikal sits with his arm out of the window.

‘Is it a calf or a goat?’

‘It’s my brother. It’s his wedding day but he doesn’t want to get married, so I have tied him up and am taking him to the bride’s house.’

*

Noon finds him in a burning plain, the bare crust of the earth enclosed by the rim of hills which the sun illuminates while blinding the onlooker. He keeps a constant watch behind him in the rearview mirror in case he is being followed. To the west of him a pall of dust travels horizontally along the ground and then curves upwards obeying some law of wind he doesn’t know, and the hills are pale in the stark light, standing with cruel dignity and grandeur, and the wheels of the pickup crunch over the desert floor, the heat coming in gusts as though the rocks are breathing. It is a reminder that, in contradiction to the Koran, there are some places on earth over which man has no dominion. He drives into the terraceland of low hills eroded by the wind and drives through a pass in the blazing light, looking again and again at the temperature gauge. Soon it is displaying hot, too hot, and he imagines coolant bubbling out of the top of the radiator header tank, the vehicle overheating.

He halts in the shadowed lee of a cliff east of the pass and gets out into the searing wind, the river of heat rushing through the stone channel, and in the flow there are stinging specks of dust and mica. When he lifts the tarpaulin flap at the tailgate, the American’s blindfolded head moves instantly in his direction. The man is drenched in sweat and his skin is red, which is what must happen to white people in the heat, he thinks. The red is thick as paint. The cast on the arm is perfectly dry now, a translucent white in the dimness. Mikal removes the blindfold and gives him water, dropping a purification tablet into the bottle beforehand. Afterwards he walks back to the river he drove past a few minutes ago, a precise serpentine curve of water through the landscape. At his approach, a pair of lapwings flees black white black white over the surface, and he stands with his feet in the water, watching them. The river is warm and he feels as though there are two iron hoops at his ankles. He walks into it fully clothed with the leopard on his shoulder, the simple uncomplicated gravity of the creature a relief to him. He lifts silver drops onto the fur with his hands. The sunlight floating on the surface around him in half-molten ingots. He sits down among the reeds that are dead to the root, and then he fills the plastic bottle and comes back to the American. He holds the man’s head steady with one hand and begins to trickle water onto him, taking care not to wet the cast, and the man blinks and Mikal wipes the wet hair away from the bruise on the forehead and he blinks and looks up at Mikal and Mikal cups his hands under the jaw to catch the falling water and pours it back up onto the head to cool him. He expels drops from the eyebrows by running the tips of his thumbs over them. Then he stands looking at him.

The man seems fascinated by his missing fingers.

He visits the river four times and when he is finished the American is drenched, the chains and the corrugated bed of the pickup glistening. The air undulates with heat, a killing flood. He sits at the tailgate with the leopard in his lap, as motionless as a toy, feeling his clothes dry by the minute, feeling the American’s eyes on him. There are clay nests of swallows high on the tilting face of the cliff. Now and then the American makes a move and there is a clink of chains and Mikal looks towards him. The white man’s eyes are a doorway to another world, to a mind shaped by different rules, a different way of life. What kind of a man is he? Is he well spoken, a union of strength and delicacy? Is he in love with someone or is he oblivious? Does he, like Mikal, have a brother?

He opens a tin of food for the cub and places it in front of it and then feeds the American. Afterwards he takes a chapatti and a piece of mutton from the napkin and eats his lunch. The clothes cool his skin as they dry, the shade beginning to feel as good as a rainfall. Now and then the man looks out past Mikal into the heat as though he has heard someone or something. Or he stares fixedly at one spot on the tarpaulin as though someone is standing just on the other side. Sitting wrapped in the chains in the crosslegged position, the good arm bound to the side of him. He seems to doze and after a while so does Mikal. He rouses occasionally and looks at the tide of the cliff’s shadow as it revises itself with the sun’s movement. Telling himself he’ll continue when the jagline reaches that scrubby bush, that striped rock, that cleft in the earth.

Eventually he gets up and removes a hubcap and fills it from the river and puts it on the passenger seat and places the leopard cub in it.

He sets off across the valley, the sun standing perfectly motionless in the sky. There is grass here and there and it is golden in the sun and in a distant clump of it he sees a black jackal and for a second he mistakes it for the missing Airedale.

An hour later he drives out of the barren valley and begins to climb through the hills. Thin grass and sparse acacias. He lowers his speed when, ahead of him, beside boulders the colour of raw sugar striated with blue, he sees an emaciated man and woman sitting in the dust, with a thin black goat wearing the sole of a rubber slipper around its neck to ward off the evil eye. They tell him they are refugees from the fighting in Afghanistan. Their daughter has died in a bombing raid. ‘They are still fighting,’ the woman says. ‘Her death didn’t shame any of them.’ And then she asks Mikal if he has any jasmine perfume. ‘The goat won’t let us milk it unless we wear the perfume our daughter used to wear when she milked it.’ Mikal shares some of his food with them.

‘Why have you stopped here?’ he asks.

‘They charge money to let the refugees pass.’

‘Who?’

The man waves his hand in the direction Mikal is going. ‘The tribal lords of this area. They have set up a toll on the road. Do you have money to pay them, to pass through?’

There were no tolls on the road when he left Megiddo yesterday.

They entrust him to Allah’s protecting power and he leaves.

After journeying through the high rolling desert for half an hour he gets out and climbs to a ridge — going up an incline of thick gravel that lies like wheat escaping from a torn sack — and looks out onto the other side. A quarter-mile ahead of him is the road that he should have taken, and on it he sees a toll booth. A crudely made wooden shed. He immediately drops to the ground. Raising his head thirty seconds later he sees a vehicle coming in his direction, a trail of dust connecting it to the toll booth. Change of any kind is obvious in spare terrain and they have seen him.

‘Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast,’ he tells himself.

He turns and is off the ridge in five leaps. Getting back behind the wheel he realises there is nowhere for him to hide and with the vehicle in reverse he crashes into the bushes as fast as he can go, now looking at the wing mirror, now in front, the water sloshing out of the leopard’s hubcap. He takes the pistol out of his waistband and holds it in his left hand and continues until the low-lying stand of mesquite he had seen earlier comes into view. He backs into it, the branches thrashing hectically against the side. The other vehicle comes into view and two men get out a few yards from where he was, looking up at the ridge, one of them with binoculars. After five minutes they get back in and drive off towards the toll booth.

An hour from sunset and he is in a small south-facing valley, sitting among the rocks beside a pool that has small blue flowers growing at its edges. The pickup is on a ridge ten feet directly above him, the door on the driver’s side open. He has driven in several directions and met culs de sac again and again. He is very hungry and he sits with the leopard in his arms, the creature testing the air with its nose. He walks up to the bush five yards away, the branches full of yellow berries as though hundreds of dots have been made with a thick piece of coloured chalk. Letting their thin blood run from the corners of his mouth he begins to pick and eat them, and as he stands chewing he looks towards the pickup. In the palm of his hand he collects berries for the American and climbs up to the pickup and lifts the tarpaulin flap.

The first thing he sees is that the man is standing up. His left leg is free of the chain. Then he sees that the uninjured right arm is free as well. He sees the hand gripping the knife owned by Fatima’s nephew. All that holds the man captive is the chain attached to the right leg and the one attached to the neck ring.

He stands square to Mikal, a cold reptile calculation in his eyes. The skin is raw on the ankle of the freed foot where he has pulled it out of the ring.

Mikal takes in air with great movements of his lungs, his eyes on the man. There is a notch at the bottom of the knife’s blade, near the hilt, and he knows it is called the Quetta Notch, meant for stripping sinew, repairing rope nets. He raises his hand to his mouth and begins to eat the berries without taking his eyes off the American. The leopard is in his other hand and madly he wonders why the animal’s heartbeat has remained steady unlike his own. He backs away from the tailgate, letting go of the flap, and sprints to the front. He can feel the American turning on the other side of the tarpaulin to keep pace with him, feeling the green and brown gaze through the cloth. He arrives at the open door a second after he hears the sound of breaking glass: the American has broken the long window behind the driver’s seat, and is now looking at Mikal through it. The 9 mm is in the hollow between the two seats and Mikal is not sure if the man knows it’s there, not sure if he can see it through the broken opening. Is his arm long enough to reach in and grab it?

Once again they hold each other’s eyes, breathing fast. He resists the urge to measure the distance between the glass window and the pistol with a quick glance — not wanting to alert the man to the gun’s presence. He reaches in just as the American swings the dagger through the window at his arm. The blade cuts through his sleeve without making contact with flesh, just as Mikal closes his fingers around the pistol.

He lifts it and brings it out and is now bending down to release the cub onto the ground. Lifting the flap at the tailgate he stands looking at him, the American with the knife raised in the air and eyes burning.

Mikal points the gun at the hand with the knife. He jabs the barrel and flicks the barrel towards the floor to indicate that the American should drop the knife. He does it three more times. Then he does it with his free hand: he has no index finger to point with, but he hopes the gesture is understood.

The man stands there.

‘Do you think I am joking?’ Mikal says as he climbs in, letting the flap drop behind him, and moves a step closer and pulls the trigger. The shot rings out across the desert as the bullet goes through the tarpaulin. He points at the dagger again and the man drops it at his feet. Mikal would have to move close to pick it up. ‘Kick it over.’ He makes a motion with his feet but the man watches him without obeying.

Mikal repeats the motion and jabs the air with the gun again and it’s then that he hears a voice from the other side of the tarpaulin. The American too hears it and looks to his left.

The sunlight from the bullet hole is like a brilliant lance in the enclosed space, dust floating in it in coloured hints and sparks.

Out there several other voices join the first one and Mikal slowly backs away towards the tailgate, hiding the gun in his waistband as he lifts the flap and climbs out to find himself facing a group of two dozen or so men, women and children. A loose gaggle of families, all on foot, some of the children naked, a few of them on their knees beside the pickup’s back wheel, talking to the leopard cub hiding under the vehicle.

‘We heard a shot,’ says a man, curiosity playing on his face amongst the points of perspiration. He has a large birdwing moustache, and a thin vertical line is shaved under the nose to keep the two halves of the moustache separate.

‘That was the pickup backfiring,’ Mikal tells him.

They are pilgrims from a village in the western Paharis, journeying overland to a sacred site for a blessing, and they tell him that they have been travelling for a week and that three more days lie before them, unless it rains in which case they’ll have to slow down. Mikal doesn’t know what to do as he listens, feeling adrift in confusion. He looks around. A man is peering in through the open front door. Mikal walks past him and gently closes the door, a quick glance towards the shattered window but there’s nothing to be seen there. Just the toothed line of glass along the rim. Filled with terror, he expects the tarpaulin to be slit with the dagger any time. ‘What kind of a shrine is it?’ he asks the man who spoke first.

‘It is the grave of a Taliban soldier,’ the man says. ‘A source of great energy in the ground.’

‘He was a great warrior and his grave is twenty foot long,’ a boy of about thirteen says. ‘The Americans killed him.’ He is carrying a basket covered with cloth on his head. The man motions towards the basket — which Mikal assumes is full of provisions — but when the man removes the cloth he sees that it contains hand grenades. ‘To be blessed at the shrine,’ the boy says. ‘Then we take it to Afghanistan and throw them at the invaders.’

Mikal doesn’t know how to extract himself from the situation. The pilgrim women seem about to set up camp beside the pickup. Preparing to make cooking fires. He wonders if he could just take his leave and drive away — but knows the American would reach in with the dagger and attack him.

‘They killed two of my sons,’ one man says. ‘The Americans. They are worse than Genghis and Halagu Khan.’

‘I am sorry,’ Mikal says.

‘Thank you.’ The man leans forward to give Mikal an embrace, a prolonged one to convey the strength of emotions. Afterwards he points to the canvas-covered back of the pickup. ‘Will you and your family eat with us?’

‘We have already eaten.’

‘The shrine is near Allah-Vasi. If you are going the same way maybe our women and children could ride in the back of the pickup.’

‘I am going in the other direction.’

Some children are stamping on the ground in the dust a few yards away. It is probably a scorpion or a snakeling.

‘It’s boxthorn,’ the man says.

Mikal nods. The despised plant. The Prophet Muhammad said, In the Final Fight between the Muslims and Jews, when a Jew hides behind a rock or a tree, it will say, ‘O Muslim, O Servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ All the trees will do this except the boxthorn, because it is the tree of the Jews.

‘I saw a nest of snakes here earlier,’ Mikal says, at last struck by inspiration. ‘Kraits.’ And it works. The word spreads through the group and immediately everyone gets ready to move on, the children being called closer in alarm, instructions given. Mikal bends down and scoops the leopard cub out from under the pickup and watches the pilgrims gather into a tight knot again. A small wizened woman goes past him, her face carved with deep wrinkles like tree bark, her eyes rheumy and her hair dyed a deep orange with henna. She stops and looks at him and says, ‘The Americans can take over this entire land.’ She pauses for breath and her head nods gently as though she is listening to a story. ‘They can have complete dominion as long as they promise to exterminate every man from it.’ She spits in the dust and adds: ‘They are a curse.’ And then she walks on to join the group. Mikal watches them leave, watches as a man breaks away and comes partway back to him. ‘Is there anything you’d like us to pray for at the shrine?’

Mikal shakes his head. ‘Just pray for the whole world.’

*

There wasn’t a single clink of the chains during the entire time he conversed with the pilgrims but now it starts up again, loud and constant. The man is standing up, working the dagger into the link of a chain when Mikal climbs in. He stops when Mikal raises the gun. Mikal makes him drop the dagger once again and with the gun pointed he leans forward and reaches out blindly — his eyes fixed on the American’s face — picks up the dagger and climbs out into the open.

He stands looking at the sunset. He goes to the front and reaches in without giving the broken window even a single glance and lifts a bottle of water and unscrews the cap and takes half a dozen deep gulps. He puts the dagger under the seat. He goes around to the back and studies the American who is standing exactly where he last saw him.

‘If he was angry with you before, wait till he discovers you stole his knife,’ he says.

The man looks at him.

‘Yes, I’m talking to you. And you broke the glass window in the pickup owned by his aunt’s husband.’

Tightening his grip on the 9 mm he climbs onto the bed and gestures for him to sit down, and then moves closer with his eye fixed on the free uninjured arm, beginning the process of securing him again, locking the ring around the free ankle. He gestures for him to put the wrist of the good arm into the ring and he obeys. Then he selects another chain loop and wraps it around the arm and the body three times so he won’t be able to reach in through the broken opening, going under the sling, and around the back. He ties the two feet together, winding a length of chain up the shins, not stopping until it is just under the knees. At some point the soldier decides not to make it easy for Mikal. Refusing to move, becoming a dead weight. Energetically passive. Mikal might as well be wrestling with a rock. He knows about these soldiers, their skills in using lethal force in complex and ambiguous conditions, the years of preparation. ‘Let’s show some care with the cast,’ Mikal says to him. ‘They’ll break Ghulam’s arm for putting it on yours.’ After he is fully bound up again, Mikal says, ‘We are almost there. I just need to find a way to bypass the toll booth and then we’ll be back in Megiddo.’ And he adds, ‘We’d better hope Fatima’s nephew isn’t waiting for us there.’

He can see the great helpless rage on his face, the eyes filled with detestation as he inhales long noisy draughts of air. The American soldiers are not allowed to go more than ten kilometres into Waziristan or Pakistan — so he is clearly used to doing things his own way.

‘Vere iz gurl vere iz gurl vere iz gurrl,’ Mikal murmurs to himself as he climbs out. He is shocked that night has fallen, taken aback that he has done everything in the darkness. There is the almost electronic noise of the insects. The moon is out and its light is falling undiluted onto the pale vastness around him. It is as though snow has fallen on the desert.

*

It’s past midnight when he concedes that there is no way to circumvent the toll booth. Leaving the pickup behind, he walks out onto the ledge above the road and squats and examines the land to the east, to the west and north, the road cutting through it. They have placed pieces of wood on the road outside the booth and set them on fire. When the wind changes he can smell the tar of the road burning.

He comes back and gets into the pickup, lowers his forehead onto the steering wheel and closes his eyes for a few seconds. Sleep overpowers him and he dreams that the American soldier has disappeared from the back of the pickup, the sloughed-off chains lying there on the bed. In the dream he panics that he will be attacked by the soldier from any direction and he stands paralysed in the darkness. Then he sees the American, sleepwalking, and he watches as the man approaches and gets into the back of the pickup and carefully begins to rechain himself.

He awakens from the dream but remains in the same position, brow touching the steering wheel, and it’s a while before he realises that he can hear a melody. He raises his head. He switches on the flashlight and looks in through the broken opening to see that the soldier is singing to himself. He gets out and stands looking at him from the tailgate, listening to the song shining in the darkness, a sudden Paradise of sound. The man doesn’t stop or meet Mikal’s gaze, the rapt concentration on his face unchanging as he forms the English words which at one moment seem to be an ecstasy of praise for everything he knows — he, Mikal, everything all humans know in fact — and in the next moment a lament, by turns tender and bloody, a weapon forged out of the steel of woe stabbing at him from the very heart of suffering. Mikal wants to cut open the words with a razor and examine their insides, their secret colours, and he doesn’t want to move for fear of breaking the spell and after a while he begins to recognise a few phrases that recur, and after a while he feels that there is nothing else at all in the wide hills and desert but that song and its careful singing and its subtle colours of permanence, the unafraid resonance connecting the two of them across the heat-thinned air.

*

What he decides to do. He will take the soldier off the pickup, still in chains, and hide him somewhere in the landscape. Then he himself will drive up to the toll booth — let them examine the pickup if they want. Moving on he’ll park the vehicle, and return on foot through the hills to the place where he left the American. Bring him back to the pickup and drive on.

He is not sure whether he should wait till dawn to do all this, sleep for a few hours and reconsider everything freshly. He sits thinking, one hand on the leopard, the ribcage rising and falling softly with each precious breath. Tomorrow will be yet another day without him beginning his journey to Heer. He wonders whether he should tie the cub next to the American, because they might want to confiscate it.

With no warning a blazing jewel appears from the darkness, holding itself almost stationary before his eyes for a moment. A pinch of humble dust, the firefly goes by outside and he watches it making its weightless turns for as long as he can. He looks away from the miraculous sight and back at the American, wondering if there are fireflies in his country. Looking through the broken window between them he is suddenly overwhelmed, not by any emotion he knows, suddenly feeling himself unequal to so wide a chase, so remorseless a life. He is shocked to find himself close to weeping, a few initial sobs escaping. He wipes the tears but can’t stop and he covers his face with his incomplete hands and weeps loudly, uncontrollably. He reaches out a hand and places it on the man’s shoulder and, his mouth full of failed words, tells him about Naheed, the sidelong gold of her look, and about Jeo, and about his incarceration by the Americans and by the warlord who mutilated his hands and sold him to the Americans for $5,000. About Rohan’s blindness. About the death of Basie.

‘I am sorry I killed your countrymen.’

The American is trying to look over his shoulder, or is looking at the hand with the missing finger on his shoulder. All these things are painful for him to know and he wonders how the man would feel about them if he understood them. And so he stops. Not wanting to hurt him more than he has to. Emotions disrupting thoughts, he withdraws his hand eventually and sits facing the front for some minutes.

*

He drives onto the road half a mile from the toll booth, the speed low, looking to either side of him with a flashlight in search of a location where he might leave the American and the leopard. A wind is carrying the dust from this side of the road to the other, low over the tarmac. When he rounds a curve and sees a toll booth located ten yards ahead of him, it’s too late to turn back. He hadn’t been able to see this booth from the ledge. A small bulb is lit outside it and the man sitting on a chair outside has risen on seeing Mikal. He is waving for him to stop.

He should have known there would be more than one booth. The entire area is a patchwork of clans, full of rivalries even though descended from a common ancestor who had met Muhammad in Arabia and had been charged by him to take Islam back to Waziristan.

The toll booth is actually a well-built square room of plywood, with a corrugated-iron roof. A gleaming black Corolla station wagon and a Pajero are parked beside it. Mikal lifts the dozing cub from his lap and places it at the base of the passenger seat as fast as he can and covers it with a rag and brings the vehicle to a stop. The man’s beard is awry, his eyes blinking in the headlights. He is holding a tired-looking red rose and has an ancient.45 automatic slung at full cock on a belt at his right hip. Behind him the door to the room is open and Mikal can see a number of sleeping figures. The man’s eyes take inventory of everything about Mikal.

‘Get out of the vehicle. What’s your name?’

‘Mikal. I am on my way to Megiddo.’

‘Come out. What’s in the back?’

‘My mother and sister and my wife,’ Mikal says as he climbs down, closing the door behind him swiftly.

The man sniffs the petals of the rose, spinning the flower very slowly under his nostrils. ‘Where are you going with them at this hour?’

‘We were meant to be home several hours ago but the pickup broke down.’

The man nods. ‘How many are there? Tell them to come out.’

‘They’re asleep.’

The man swears under his breath and walks to the tailgate and kicks it several times. ‘Wake up.’ The noise certainly wakes his companions in the room, one of whom utters a curse, another a threat, a third an insult. One stumbles to the door, loosely carrying a Kalashnikov, and after looking around with eyes screwed up, and assessing that there is nothing untoward about the situation, he calls his companion a ‘dirty infidel’ and goes back inside. The man with the rose returns to Mikal.

Mikal reaches into his pocket. ‘I am very sorry for having troubled you. How much do I owe you?’

‘Give me a hundred and go,’ the man says, holding out the palm of the hand that has the blossom pinched between the tip of the thumb and first finger. He raises himself on his toes and casts a casual glance through the driver’s window.

Mikal decides he’ll give him 110; but the man is now leaning into the window for a closer look at something. Mikal knows it’s the leopard, and the man confirms it by opening the door and picking up the cub — he turns and stands facing Mikal.

‘Is this yours?’

‘Yes. Here’s one hundred and ten. I am very sorry to have troubled you.’

‘How much do you want for it?’

‘I can’t sell it.’

‘Why not?’

He studies the man, the cub quivering in his hands. ‘It’s not mine to sell. It’s my sister’s.’

‘The sister in the back?’ the man says. ‘Wake her up.’ He turns his head at an angle and spits on the ground without taking his eyes off Mikal.

‘Actually it belongs to my father.’ Mikal reaches out but the man makes no move to relinquish the cub. There are sleepy murmurs from the booth, muffled protests that the transaction is taking too long, the sound of this conversation interfering with rest.

‘Where is your father?’ There is a note of menace in the voice now. ‘Why did you say it was your sister’s?’

‘It belongs to my whole family. I said what I said because I am tired. It’s been a long day.’

‘They are sound sleepers,’ the man points to the back of the pickup. Mikal proffers the money again, giving a quick glance to the automatic at the man’s hip. ‘Here is what I owe.’

The man looks deeply at him. ‘Is the necklace around your neck your sister’s too?’

Mikal wasn’t aware that it had revealed itself. A small section of it is lying over his collar and he covers it up, sending it below the neckline just as the man reaches into the pickup and takes out the ignition key. His eyes are full of mystery and black silence. It seems that all human relations are to be weighed anew at this site. ‘Wait here,’ he says, handing the leopard cub to Mikal. ‘And I want them out of the back and lined up here in thirty seconds.’ He turns and walks towards the room, switching on the light in there, shouting at the others to get up.

It takes Mikal five seconds to reach the door of the room and another five to pull it shut with a bang and secure the bolt. The men shout and rattle the door but he is already in the pickup, taking the spare key from the glove compartment and starting the engine. By the twentieth second there are several yards between him and the toll booth, the tyres speeding up, but he knows it won’t take much to break down the door.

Ahead on the road he already sees the original toll booth he had been trying to avoid, the pile of wood burning across the road, a Pajero parked outside it. Without slowing down he tears through the flames, brilliant cinders spraying into the night. He hears a gunshot or perhaps it is something in the fire, a knot exploding in a log. Not knowing when he took it out of the waistband, he is holding his gun in his hand. The leopard is clamped between his thighs and the jangle and clatter of chains comes from the back of the pickup and the road winds through the night and it isn’t long before he sees a trail of dust raised by the vehicle that is following him, perhaps a mile and a half behind him, the dust glowing faintly in the moonlight the way mist marks the path of a river, and he sees the funnels of two headlights and cannot believe the speed at which they are gaining. He hears the flat reports that long-barrelled guns give over open ground, one bullet shattering the mirror on the passenger’s side. And in his own mirror he sees another set of headlights moving across the open desert floor in a pale hovering of raw dust, coming at him at a diagonal. Somewhere ahead is the Wolf River. After crossing the bridge he would be only twenty minutes away from Megiddo.

Sweat is soaking through his clothes. Rounding the corner of the second-to-last hill, he brings the pickup to a sideways halt in the middle of the road. Ahead of him the bridge over the river is burning with flames as tall as electricity poles. He gets out and stands looking at it, pieces of wood falling into the water twenty feet below. The ground seems to shake with the force of the fire, as though the dead are making room for him down there — a vision of Allah’s left side on the Day of Judgement.

He takes the tarpaulin off the frame, undoing the straps that fasten it to the metal. The American, exposed, looks at the fire in astonishment. Mikal drags the tarpaulin towards where the ground slopes towards a gravel bar at the edge of the river, and walks into the river with the heavy cloth until he is up to his waist in the moving water, pushing the folds of the tarpaulin under with both his hands. He looks up towards the bridge — calculating how many of its wooden planks are gone. The burning pieces fall and hiss as they meet the red-lit water. By sitting down and dipping his head below the surface he drenches himself completely, and then walks out of the river dragging the soaked tarpaulin behind him, twice as heavy as before.

He comes up the slope and the American begins to struggle wildly against the chains when he sees him appear with the waterlogged cloth, fully comprehending what Mikal has in mind. The man twists with his teeth gritted and then screams the English word Mikal does understand, ‘No! No! No! No! No!’ feet scrabbling against the metal bed, running sideways. Mikal hurls the tarpaulin onto him like a fisherman’s net, dripping golden drops, losing his balance from the swing for a moment, and then climbing up after it, making sure that the man is entirely covered. He leaps off the bed and gets in behind the steering wheel, putting the cub under his wet shirt. Working the steering wheel as fast as he can he aims the pickup into the mouth of the fire. I thought of your beauty and this arrow made of a wild thought is in my marrow. The words Naheed had quoted.

He enters the blind lethal power of a hundred suns and the American hasn’t stopped shouting or struggling under the tarpaulin and the tyres judder as they go over the burning planks, the thickets of flame pressed against the vehicle, twisting in their own hot wind and the fire has a sound too, the roar of a primordial beast, the sound of the river fading within it, but as he progresses across the bridge it returns, the flame suddenly silent, and the phenomenon repeats itself as he moves forward, the blunt needles of the cub’s paws digging into his skin, the heat becoming unbearable and soon he realises that he is saying Naheed’s name, calling out to her in desperation, because he has to get across, because the bridge is the bridge between the innermost part of him and the American’s, something that can’t be consumed or rendered meaningless even by fire, a bridge to his parents and Basie, to a world where Jeo is still alive and where Tara never went to prison, to the white-hot core of the fire, the flash that took away Rohan’s sight. He won’t let them catch the American soldier, and at that moment he loves the American soldier, and he loves the two he killed, and he loves the dead girl who wore jasmine, so much so that he feels his heart will not bear the weight of it and will kill him before the fire kills him. The pickup lurches from side to side as the planks break under it. The flames reach in when the windshield blackens before his eyes and then cracks with a shear of light, and he no longer knows if he is moving in a horizontal line or falling through the air vertically with the vehicle covered in flames. But then suddenly he is on the other side. He stops and opens the door and, dropping the cub onto the ground, struggles back onto the bed of the pickup, feeling as though he is doing it with extreme slowness. He coughs the smoke out of his lungs. Catches a glimpse of the burning tyres as he goes, the blistered paintwork.

The tarpaulin is on fire here and there in coin-sized patches and he rips it off the American, revealing him and his chains. Long fronds of steam are attached to them, taking fresh shapes with each new second, the sling and plaster cast smouldering a fevered red in one place.

The man gasping for breath. Mikal smothers the fire on the plaster and touches the chains to see if they are hot and then wipes the sweat and condensation from the American’s eyes with both hands. When he climbs down he sees the group of men ten feet away from the pickup, the hostile spirits of unfamiliar places, lit by the burning bridge. More than a dozen guns are pointed at him and at the American, and one of the men is holding the cub. He is as large and strong as the American. Mikal stands watching them with his hands placed on top of his head, all the exhaustions of his life catching up with him.

*

The room they are put into has the odour of dust. A hood has been placed over the American’s head, his chains removed. Mikal gave them the keys and several of the men climbed onto the pickup’s bed. Instead of freeing the American completely from the chains they unlocked the strands that bound him to the pickup and carried him down like a metal effigy, a chainmailed knight.

He doesn’t know where they are — Waziristan or Afghanistan. The wrists of both of them are tied behind their backs.

They travelled through the darkness until the modest birds of the desert had appeared in the young air, and the sun climbed in long lengths of gold, scarlet and silver, and begun to burn without diminishing, and it was midmorning by the time they arrived at a small village and drove through its central street full of rolling dust, past the mosque, the few shops, a dozen children and almost as many dogs running behind their truck. The truck stopped at the gate of the largest house on the other side of the village and one of the men from the back leapt out and opened the gate and the truck drove through into a large courtyard filled with towering she-date palms in flower.

They left them here in the room and went away. Mikal had refused to answer their questions concerning the American and had watched them puzzle over the situation. Should they release Mikal? He had after all captured the American and put him in chains. But what lay behind Mikal’s ambivalence, almost tenderness, towards the soldier?

Mikal looks at him in the semidarkness. The cloth bag over the head. The singed cast on the arm. The fabric of the shalwar kameez that is minutely wrinkled from where Mikal had wound the chains about him.

It is an underground room and the floor is of large unglazed clay tiles, badly out of line, like the walls. There is a high glassless window from which a shaft of light barely reaches the floor, most of it dissolving in the darkness above their heads. He sleeps in dreamless exhaustion and wakes some time later when the door at the top of the stairs opens. An old man is climbing down very slowly. He comes and stands looking at Mikal and the American. It is obvious that he doesn’t see very well. The silhouettes of several children have appeared at the door at the top of the stairs and the man walks to the lowest step and raises his antler-like hands, shouts at them and they scatter. He is small and dark and Mikal suddenly has a feeling that the smell of dust and soil is coming from him. As though in old age he has decided to slowly revert back to what humans are made of.

‘Do you want something to eat?’ he asks Mikal quietly.

Mikal nods. ‘What about the white man?’

The man’s black eyes look at the cloaked head. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ He takes a step closer to Mikal.

‘Did you catch him deliberately? To claim the bounty offered by that Arab guerrilla?’

‘No.’

‘Who are you?’ the man says.

It is hot in the room and he can see the drops of sweat on the man’s abraded brow.

Mikal shakes his head.

They remain silent.

‘I am looking for some people,’ Mikal says. ‘I think they have been taken away by’ — he nods towards the American — ‘his people.’

‘Westerners.’

‘Yes.’

‘Westerners,’ the old man says in his raspy voice.

‘Yes.’

‘What is your name?’

‘Mikal.’

The old man says the name in silence to himself. ‘Who are your people?’

‘You wouldn’t know. I am not from Waziristan.’

The man thinks. ‘You caught him yesterday? It was a day with three suns.’

‘There was a sun and two sundogs, one on either side, yes.’

‘It’s mentioned in great and ancient books.’

Mikal nods. He’d read about sundogs in his astronomy books.

The man looks at the American. ‘I fought against Westerners when they were here in the 1930s.’ He closes his eyes and opens them again. In the weak light the eyes betray nothing. He seems to be studying the shadows in the room.

‘I myself was held captive by the Americans,’ Mikal says. ‘I didn’t really know what they wanted from me. I am afraid of what they might be doing to the people they have picked up.’

‘We can’t know what the Westerners want,’ the old man says. ‘To know what they want you have to eat what they eat, wear what they wear, breathe the air they breathe. You have to be born where they are born.’

‘I am not sure. You mentioned books. We can learn things from books.’

‘No one from here can know what the Westerners know,’ the man says. ‘The Westerners are unknowable to us. The divide is too great, too final. It’s like asking what the dead or the unborn know.’

The man reaches out a trembling hand in the partial light and wipes the sweat off Mikal’s brow. He is shocked to find it cold. Hard and bloodless.

‘Is this your place?’ Mikal asks. ‘What will happen to us, me and him?’

‘I am just a servant. They will decide tonight. They have sent for all the leaders of the surrounding tribes.’

The man turns to go.

‘I need to make a phone call,’ Mikal says, realising how absurd it sounds as he says it. ‘I need to tell someone that I am coming back, need to tell her not to lose heart.’

‘Is she your love?’

‘Yes, but she might have to marry someone else.’

The man’s nod is a reminder that certain things will persist in the world. He nods and then continues towards the stairs.

The sunlight from the high window has become dark yellow when the old man returns and reaches behind Mikal and slowly unbinds his hands. ‘I have been told to bring you out. They want to talk to you.’

Mikal follows the old man up the stairs and they go out into the large courtyard. Somewhere nearby a cow has just been slaughtered. Several men cross their path with tubs full of glistening meat — one is holding a set of bloody knives, another is dragging an enormous rear leg, the hoof scoring a line on the packed earth of the courtyard. The singed pickup has been brought here from the riverbank and sits propped on stacks of bricks in one corner, its charred tyres taken off. Two boys appear — they must be children of servants because their clothes are dirty and their hair matted, the teeth already yellow — and they walk at a distance behind Mikal and the old man, their words coming to Mikal. ‘He single-handedly caught the American, who killed fifty dear Muslims and cut out their hearts …’ ‘The American will be released into the hills tomorrow and hunted with dogs …’ ‘The American stole his uncle’s pickup and he gave chase and caught him …’ The old man turns around and his mere glance is enough to make the boys vanish, and then Mikal and the old man go along a veranda that is being washed and wiped with a rag by three small children.

They enter a room. It is the house of a very rich family, the doors tall with great brass hinges, the ceilings four times as high as the doors. Sitting in the room on a large overstuffed sofa is the hale-looking man with the eagle’s profile Mikal remembers from the burning bridge. He had made to shoot off the American’s chains until Mikal gave him the keys. He is in his early thirties, a bandolier full of rifle bullets crossing his torso at a diagonal, a pistol in a holster of tooled black leather under the armpit. He is holding the dagger. On the table in front of him there is a halfeaten meal, a newspaper and a plastic vase full of plastic flowers. He glances briefly at Mikal and then goes back to contemplating the dagger.

‘What is your name?’ he asks without looking up. The floor at his feet is glistening in wet arcs, some small, others wide, depending on the length of the children’s arms.

‘I think I’ve told you that already,’ Mikal says.

The man raises his head and stares at him. Then he puts the dagger on the newspaper. Even his small gestures are expansive, referring to and taking in his entire mansion.

‘Tell me about the American.’

‘There’s nothing to tell. I found him in the desert.’

‘Why didn’t you kill him the moment you saw him? Don’t you know they are at war with us?’

‘Where’s the leopard cub?’

‘Tell me,’ the man leans forward and says, ‘have you heard of a lady called Madeleine? No? In 1996, this lady named Albright Madeleine, the US ambassador to the United Nations, was asked on television how she felt about the fact that five hundred thousand Iraqi children had died as a result of US economic sanctions. Do you know what she said? She said that it was “a very hard choice” but “we think the price is worth it”. These are her exact words. How do you feel about that?’

‘How do you think I feel about that? And I would take your love for children more seriously if you didn’t have children cleaning your floors.’

The man watches him for a while, then says, ‘Do you think having them clean floors is as bad as starving them to death?’

‘That is not what I said.’

The man waves him away. ‘I have decided to let you go.’

‘I am not leaving without the American soldier or the cub.’

There is a laugh of mockery.

The old servant touches Mikal’s arm but Mikal doesn’t acknowledge it. ‘I am not leaving.’

The man stands up.

‘You are used to giving orders, aren’t you?’ Mikal says.

‘It’s worse than you think. I’m used to being obeyed.’

*

Mikal stands outside the house all afternoon, the sun burning above him, hearing sounds from the other side of the tall gate, the watchman conversing with someone now and then. The gate is opened when a vehicle arrives and the watchman gives him a glance before closing the gate again.

‘Is it true the American violated and then murdered the woman you love?’ he asks Mikal from the other side.

‘No.’

Just as the sun is setting he begins to walk away from the house. He walks into the street that passes through the village, the shops selling rice and cooking oil, threads and buttons, children’s sweets, gram flour, rice husk to feed horses or scrub cooking pots. He asks if there is a public telephone he might use but there is none. He buys a mango, the vendor telling him that it is the same variety that Alexander the Great had tasted, and he eats it with the skin on as he continues along the street. He encounters himself in the darkness at the back of a shop, halts, and realises it’s a mirror. He sits down to rest on the other side of the street, where the fields begin, and watches a convoy of vehicles move towards the house at the other end. He sits listening to the call to prayer issuing from the minaret — the concentric circles of sound expanding in the air, making it seem that this is the very centre of the earth. The call rising from the core of the planet. But then it ends abruptly halfway through, something suddenly going wrong with the loudspeaker. He goes into the mosque and washes the dust and sweat off his face and then stands in a row with the others to say his prayers. Afterwards he sits on the mat and tries to ask questions about the owners of the large house. He walks out of the mosque and buys food from a teahouse, flies spinning around the place like marbles swirled in a jar, and he feeds the bones from his meat to a street dog, talking to it in words and whistles, much to the displeasure of the owner and the other diners. He asks them questions about the family that owns the house. At around ten in the evening, as he sits smoking a cigarette at the edge of the emptying street, listening to the music of the crickets, he sees the old man in the distance.

Mikal stands up and walks towards him.

‘I have come to ask you to leave for your own good,’ the man says. ‘They have seen that you are still here and they want to bring you back to the house.’

‘I’ll come.’

‘No. I am here to warn you. You should leave.’

‘I can’t.’

‘If I steal the leopard for you, will you leave?’

‘No. Not just the leopard.’

‘Go,’ the man says. ‘If they catch you they won’t release you again.’

He stands there, shaking his head. ‘Have they done anything to him?’

‘I don’t know. I told you I am only a servant.’ Just then he sees a giant in a black turban walking towards the two of them.

‘He has come to fetch you,’ the old man says. ‘Run away. Go.’

‘No,’ Mikal says, walking towards the man in the distance.

*

He emerges from the house two hours later and walks into the hills, feeling himself to be an addition to the ghost-life of the night, the thousand desert stars above him, each of them blinking alone. The dark air is warm around him and his feet crush the scent from a fragrant hill plant as he climbs upwards. Looking back now and then at the village lights receding behind him, nothing eventually except the bulb at the tip of the mosque’s minaret. And then that too disappears. An hour later in a valley sculpted of rock he lies down at the edge of a stream, the trees pale as paper around him. Sleeping close to the ground, the insulted earth, he enters a nightmare … Or perhaps it is a confusion of dream and memory of what he saw a few hours ago …

Around two he wakes and realises that a beam of light passing over his face has roused him, a shaft of gluey brightness. He rolls over on his stomach and watches the four vehicles containing Americans. They pass within yards of him. Commandos or task-force soldiers or intelligence collectors. After they are gone he gets up and begins to walk back to the village as fast as he can, breaking into a run until a stitch appears at his side, letting it dissolve and then running again. During sleep he has clenched his hands in anguish and two of his nails are bloody. He passes through the dark abandoned street, whistling when a pair of dogs begin to roar at him, and they fall silent immediately. He approaches the large house from the rear and is on the roof within five minutes, climbing onto the water tank and leaping down. He goes along the wide raw-brick expanse of the roof. Climbs a set of open banister-less stairs onto a lower roof. The courtyard below is scattered about with squares and rectangles of pale light, the date trees dark, and he crosses it weaving from shadow to shadow. He pushes open the kitchen door and reaching into the tandoor finds a lump of coal and puts it in his pocket. He turns and is about to walk out when he hears a sound.

‘I knew you’d come back,’ the old man says. A core of light with blurred edges flicks on and reveals him standing in the far corner with the leopard cub. He comes forward and hands Mikal a key, the leopard and finally the flashlight. ‘The key is to the room where he is. I have also unlocked the gate. You can just walk out.’

‘Why are you doing this?’

‘My son is in American custody. If I am kind to him maybe they’ll be kind to him.’

‘I wonder if that’s how it works.’

‘Where will you take him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He won’t be able to walk very far.’

‘Can you get me the keys to one of the cars?’

‘They’ll hear the engine.’

‘Yes.’ He switches off the flashlight and walks towards the kitchen door.

‘Do you feel your amputated fingers?’ the man asks him through the darkness.

‘Sometimes.’

‘Then it’s a sign that Afterlife exists.’

*

With the piece of coal Mikal begins to draw a jeep on the floor. The American watches him. On the bonnet he draws a large American flag. He points to the drawing and then upwards beyond the stairs.

*

Just as they leave the gate, a light comes on behind them and someone shouts. The American is leaning on him, the weight making Mikal feel like he is wearing the chains. In the darkness he keeps his eyes on the light at the minaret’s tip. They enter the street and when they come to the mosque he motions for the American to sit down behind the stand of canna lilies planted along the shadowed front step. Putting his feet into alcoves and mouldings on the facade, he scales the wall, his two damaged nails leaving small red smears as he goes. He leaps into the courtyard on the other side and opens the door to let in the American. He locks the door again and bends down to unlace the American’s boots and take them off. Against the wall behind them is the plank of wood on which the dead are bathed. He takes off his own shoes and then both of them enter the sacred building, the weave of the reed prayer mats shifting under their feet. Entering the main prayer hall he bolts the door behind them and walks to the cupboard beside the mimbar pulpit and opens it. Inside is the equipment that allows the muezzin to call the faithful to prayer — the ancient amplifier and the steel microphone shaped like the head of a golf club. He hears people gathering at the mosque’s front door, someone asking for a ladder to be brought, a rope.

Mikal switches on the amplifier — several small red lights becoming illuminated — and gestures towards the microphone. ‘Call out to them,’ he says in Pashto. ‘Call them. Tell them where to come and find you. Tell them to come to the mosque.’ Perhaps he should draw the picture of the jeep with the American flag again, but the American seems to grasp the idea immediately and nods.

There is no knowing if the Americans Mikal saw are within hearing range, but there is no alternative. When and if the Americans come there will be a fierce gunfight. The white man begins to speak but they hear nothing from the minaret, no echo of his words outside, no amplification. Mikal twists the volume button up to maximum but it makes no difference. Then he remembers how, earlier in the evening, the call to prayer had ended abruptly only partway through.

The American has stopped speaking and is bending down to examine the wire that emerges from the back of the amplifier, leaves the cupboard and climbs up to a transom window located near the ceiling, going out and connecting to the loudspeaker at the tip of the minaret. He points to a six-inch gap where the wire has melted away due to a power surge.

Mikal stands looking at it, the sounds outside the door getting louder. There are footsteps in the courtyard, that susurration of the reed prayer mats. Reaching behind his neck he undoes the clasp of the necklace. With two quick twists he splices it into the gap in the amplifier’s wire, completing the circuit.

The American takes up the microphone again and the room fills immediately with the sound of his breath magnified ten, twenty, thirty times. It seems to put swords in the air. The minaret, meant to invite the faithful to offer prayer and praise to the Almighty, is summoning unbelievers, to arrive and desecrate His house. The words spread through the darkness and over the clay shale and hills and flatlands, the bouldered desert that had watched the arrival of humans many centuries ago, and that has witnessed the shedding of older blood, prophets and lovers, pilgrims and warners.

*

It takes fifteen minutes for the Special Forces soldiers to arrive at the mosque, and the schoolbus-sized Chinook helicopter appears overhead a further ten minutes later, the blades whumping. ‘American hostage!’ the white man shouts through the locked door of the prayer hall. ‘American hostage! American hostage!’ He had kept talking via the mosque’s loudspeaker for a full seven minutes, summoning his countrymen, guiding them. But then the loudspeaker had stopped working. The heat of the electricity had melted the necklace.

Mikal stands beside the American with his back pressed against the wall, and the cub cheeping its distress in the crook of his elbow. He is thinking of Naheed, near whom what mattered was whether he was good or bad — not strong or weak, not favoured by God or cursed. The commandos are coming closer and closer to the prayer hall, blowing their way in with explosives through walls and doors.

‘American hostage, open the door and approach me on your left with your hands in the air and lie down on the ground!’

The white man takes Mikal firmly by the wrist and unlatches the door.

*

Under heavy fire, the American soldier is half dragged, half carried out of the mosque by the commandos. Through the blur of English and Pashto shouts and the screams of the wounded, and the flare and smoke of explosions, he is hurried to a dimly outlined cornfield behind the building where the helicopter has landed. The commandos tell him they will go back and attempt to look for the boy with the leopard cub. When exactly in the confusion and carnage his wrist slipped out of his grip, he doesn’t know. And it is too soon to know whose face it was that he saw, with a red knot on the upper part of the forehead and several lines running down from it to spread out over the features, as though someone tried to draw a branch of coral on the skin. Later he will try to bring order to the various memory fragments, slide them correctly into a sequence. For now the Chinook is rising into the air, above the blink of muzzle flashes, and some of the soldiers are leaning out and firing downwards, the mosque getting smaller and smaller, and then the helicopter swings away from the violence of war and the building disappears completely, nothing but stars shining in the final blackness, each marking a place where a soul and all the mysteries living in it might flourish, perennial with the earth.

37

It is still dark above Pakistan, and in the distances the sky and the ground can be distinguished only with difficulty. Three-quarters of an hour before sunrise, a few luminous bands of orange appear above the eastern horizon — light compressed yet breathing at the very edge of the world. Then it disappears and there is greyness, followed by moments of growing blue light. The sun when it comes up is a surprise — the world appearing once more, the usual rules seeming to apply.

Naheed stands on the dew-covered path, her face serious.

‘What are you doing?’ he had asked her last week, before he left for Waziristan. She was spreading paint onto the petals of a flower, making its yellow more vivid. She was using Sofia’s paintbox and one of her thin brushes.

‘Next year when this plant blooms again, Father will be completely blind,’ she had told him. ‘So I want to make sure he can see it today.’

The brush had travelled along the outline of the petals carefully one last time, and then she had washed the yellow paint off the soft bristles and begun to add small points of red inside the flower’s throat.

He had walked into Sofia’s room and located another paintbox and brush and had clambered up pillars and tree trunks, painting the flowers above her, disappearing from sight now and then, using rainwater pooled in the crevices of the bark, the drops collected on the leaves, or his own saliva when no other liquid was nearby, the creases in his lips as filled with colour as the lines he drew on some of the petals, the roses and the crepe myrtle, the drab blossoms of the music tree that grow straight out of the trunk, the thorny pink cassia. He met birds in the canopies, exploding flocks of them as he leant down into the Rangoon creeper with the white-loaded brush, humming.

*

She breathes the dawn air, thinking of the moment he will return pale with road dust and with her necklace at his throat. Damaged and scarred, he is still perfect and she sees why the gods might wish to use human beings as instruments.