The Wasted Vigil

1. The Great Buddha

HER MIND is a haunted house.

The woman named Lara looks up at an imagined noise. Folding away the letter she has been rereading, she moves towards the window with its high view of the garden. Out there the dawn sky is filling up with light though a few of last night’s stars are still visible.

She turns after a while and crosses over to the circular mirror leaning against the far wall. Bringing it to the centre of the room she places it face up on the floor, gently, soundlessly, a kindness towards her host who is asleep in an adjoining room. In the mirror she ignores her own image, examining the reflection of the ceiling instead, lit by the pale early light.

The mirror is large — if it was water she could dive and disappear into it without touching the sides. On the wide ceiling are hundreds of books, each held in place by an iron nail hammered through it. A spike driven through the pages of history, a spike through the pages of love, a spike through the sacred. Kneeling on the dusty floor at the mirror’s edge she tries to read the titles. The words are reversed but that is easier than looking up for entire minutes would be.

There is no sound except her own slow breathing and, from outside, the breeze trailing its rippling robes through the overgrown garden.

She slides the mirror along the floor as though visiting another section of a library.

The books are all up there, the large ones as well as those that are no thicker than the walls of the human heart. Occasionally one of them falls by itself in an interior because its hold has weakened, or it may be brought down when desired with the judicious tapping of a bamboo pole.

A native of the faraway St Petersburg, what a long journey she has made to be here, this land that Alexander the Great had passed through on his unicorn, an area of fabled orchards and thick mulberry forests, of pomegranates that appear in the border decorations of Persian manuscripts written one thousand years ago.

Her host’s name is Marcus Caldwell, an Englishman who has spent most of his life here in Afghanistan, having married an Afghan woman. He is seventy years old and his white beard and deliberate movements recall a prophet, a prophet in wreckage. She hasn’t been here for many days so there is hesitancy in her still regarding Marcus’s missing left hand. The skin cup he could make with the palms of his hands is broken in half. She had asked late one evening, delicately, but he seemed unwilling to be drawn on the subject. In any case no explanations are needed in this country. It would be no surprise if the trees and vines of Afghanistan suspended their growth one day, fearful that if their roots were to lengthen they might come into contact with a landmine buried near by.

She lifts her hand to her face and inhales the scent of sandalwood deposited onto the fingers by the mirror’s frame. The wood of a living sandal tree has no fragrance, Marcus said the other day, the perfume materialising only after the cutting down.

Like the soul vacating the body after death, she thinks.

*

Marcus is aware of her presence regardless of where she is in the house. She fell ill almost immediately upon arrival four days ago, succumbing to the various exhaustions of her journey towards him, and he has cared for her since then, having been utterly alone before that for many months. From the descriptions she had been given of him, she said out of her fever the first afternoon, she had expected an ascetic dressed in bark and leaf and accompanied by a deer of the wilderness.

She said that a quarter of a century ago her brother had entered Afghanistan as a soldier with the Soviet Army, and that he was one of the ones who never returned home. She has visited Afghanistan twice before in the intervening decades but there has been proof neither of life nor of death, until perhaps now. She is here this time because she has learnt that Marcus’s daughter might have known the young Soviet man.

He told her his daughter, Zameen, was no longer alive.

‘Did she ever mention anything?’ she asked.

‘She was taken from this house in 1980, when she was seventeen years old. I never saw her again.’

‘Did anyone else?’

‘She died in 1986, I believe. She had become a mother by then — a little boy who disappeared around the time she died. She and an American man were in love, and I know all this from him.’

This was on the first day. She then drifted into a long sleep.

From the various plants in the garden he derived an ointment for the deeply bruised base of her neck, the skin there almost black above the right shoulder, as though some of the world’s darkness had attempted to enter her there. He wished pomegranates were in season as their liquid is a great antiseptic. When the bus broke down during the journey, she said, all passengers had disembarked and she had found herself falling asleep on a verge. There then came three blows to her body with a tyre iron in quick succession, the disbelief and pain making her cry out. She was lying down with her feet pointed towards the west, towards the adored city of Mecca a thousand miles away, a disrespect she was unaware of, and one of the passengers had taken it upon himself to correct and punish her.

Her real mistake was to have chosen to travel swaddled up like the women from this country, thinking it would be safer. Perhaps if her face had been somewhat exposed, the colour of her hair visible, she would have been forgiven as a foreigner. Everyone, on the other hand, had the right to make an example of an unwise Afghan woman, even a boy young enough to be her son.

Marcus opens a book. The early morning light is entering at a low angle from the window. The fibres of the page throw their elongated shadows across the words, so much so that they make the text difficult to read. He tilts the page to make it catch the light evenly, the texture of the paper disappearing.

Within the pages he finds a small pressed leaf, perfect but for a flake missing at the centre as though chewed off by a silkworm. The hole runs all the way through the pages also, where he had pulled out the iron nail to gain access to the words.

He has given her only the purest water when she has been thirsty. This country has always been a hub of things moving from one point of the compass to another, religion and myth, works of art, caravans of bundled Chinese silk flowing past camels loaded with glass from ancient Rome or pearls from the Gulf. The ogre whose activities created one of Afghanistan’s deserts was slain by Aristotle. And now Comanche helicopters bring sizeable crates of bottled water for America’s Special Forces teams that are operating in the region, the hunt for terrorists continuing out there. Caches of this water are unloaded at various agreed locations in the hills and deserts, but two winters ago a consignment must have broken its netting — it fell from the sky and came apart in an explosion close to Marcus’s house, a blast at whose core lay water not fire, the noise bringing him to the window to find the side of the house dripping wet and hundreds of the gleaming transparent bottles floating on the lake in front of the house. A moment later another roped bundle landed on the lake and sank out of sight. Perhaps it broke up and released the bottles, or did it catch on something down there and is still being held? Water buried inside water. He skimmed many of the bottles from the surface before they could disperse and found others over the coming days and weeks, split or whole, scattered in the long grasses of his neglected orchard.

He lowers his pale blue eyes to the book.

It is a poet’s diwan, the most noble of matters, dealt with in the most noble of words. As always the first two pages of verse are enclosed within illuminated borders, an intricate embroidery in ink. Last night she clipped his fingernails, which he normally just files off on any available abrasive surface. When she leaves she should take a volume from the impaled library. Perhaps everyone who comes here should be given one so that no matter where they are in the world they can recognise each other. Kin. A fellowship of wounds. They are intensely solitary here. The house stands on the edge of a small lake; and though damaged in the wars, it still conveys the impression of being finely carved, the impression of being weightless. At the back is the half-circle formed by the overgrown garden and orchard. Shifting zones of birdsong, of scent. A path lined with Persian lilac trees curves away out of sight, the branches still hung with last year’s berries, avoided by birds as they are toxic.

The ground begins to rise back there gradually until it reaches the sky. The broad chalk line of permanent snow up there, thirteen thousand feet high, is the mighty range of mountains containing the cave labyrinths of Tora Bora.

At the front of the house, a mile along the edge of the lake, is the village that takes its name from the lake. Usha. Teardrop. Thirty miles farther is the city of Jalalabad. Because Lara is Russian, Marcus’s immediate fear regarding her illness was that she had been fed a poison during the hours she had spent waiting for him in Usha, her country having precipitated much of present-day Afghanistan’s destruction by invading in 1979.

*

In the darkness soon after four a.m. one night, Lara had got out of bed. Accompanied by candlelight she went into the various rooms of the house, moving under that sheath of books, needing movement after the countless hours of being still. She avoided the room where Marcus was but entered others, looking, enclosed within the sphere of yellow light from the flame in her hand. Somewhere very far away a muezzin had begun the call to the prayers of dawn, defined by Islam as the moment when a black thread can just be distinguished from a white one without artificial light.

When enough light began to enter the house, she placed mirrors on the floor to look at the books overhead, though not all of them had been nailed with the titles facing out, and any number of them were in languages she did not possess.

Some years ago, at a point when the Taliban could have raided the house any day, Marcus’s wife had nailed the books overhead in these rooms and corridors. Original thought was heresy to the Taliban and they would have burned the books. And this was the only way that suggested itself to the woman, she whose mental deterioration was complete by then, to save them, to put them out of harm’s reach.

Lara imagined stretching a fishing net at waist level, imagined going to the room directly above and banging her feet until all the books were dislodged and caught without further harm in the net. Marcus said the deep rumble of the B52s had shaken loose every book from one side of a corridor when Tora Bora began to be bombed day and night up there in 2001. The intermittent rain in the whole house had intensified during those weeks in fact.

The Englishman said he had bought the house more than forty years ago, just before he married his wife Qatrina, who like him was a doctor. ‘I used to say she brought me Afghanistan in her dowry,’ he said. The house was built by an old master calligrapher and painter in the last years of the nineteenth century. He belonged to what was almost the final generation of Muslim artists to be trained in the style of the incomparable Bihzad. When the six-roomed building was complete, the master — who had painted images on the walls of each room — brought to it the woman he wished to make his companion for life. Beginning on the ground floor, each of the first five rooms was dedicated to one of the five senses, and as the courtship slowly progressed over the following weeks, the couple went from one to the next.

The first was dedicated to the sense of sight, and on the walls, among other things, Subha in a dancerly gesture presented her eye to a rogue in the forest.

Allah created through the spoken word, read the inscription above the door that led to the interior about hearing. Here the walls showed singers and musical gatherings, a lute with a songbird sitting on its neck — teaching perhaps, perhaps learning.

From there they moved to the faculty of smell, where angels bent down towards the feet of humans, to ascertain from the odour whether these feet had ever walked towards a mosque. Others leaned towards bellies, to check for fasting during the holy month of Ramadan.

In the room about the sense of touch, there was a likeness of Muhammad with his hand plunged in a jar. He was someone who would not shake hands with women, so in order to make a pact he would put his hand in a vessel containing water and withdraw it, and then the woman would put her hand into the water.

Then it was on to taste, and from that room they ascended to the highest place in the house: it contained and combined all that had gone before — an interior dedicated to love, the ultimate human wonder, and that was where she said yes.

The imagery was there on the walls still but, out of fear of the Taliban, all depictions of living things had been smeared with mud by Marcus. Even an ant on a pebble had been daubed. It was as though all life had been returned to dust. Consolation of a kind could be had from the fact that most of the rest of the images had survived — the inanimate things, the trees and the skies, the streams. And since the demise of the Taliban, Marcus had begun slowly to remove the swirled covering of mud. The highest room stands completely revealed now.

Marcus took Lara to one corner and pointed to the foliage painted there. When she looked closely she saw that a chameleon was sitting perfectly camouflaged on a leaf. She leaned closer to that lovely fiction and touched it. ‘The Taliban would even burn a treasured family letter because the stamp showed a butterfly,’ said Marcus. ‘But I missed this, and so did they.’

Roaming the house at night, her shadow trembling in accordance with the candle flame, Lara had entered the topmost room. The walls were originally a delicate faded gold, painted with scenes of lovers either in an embrace or travelling towards each other through forest and meadow. They were badly damaged by bullets. When the Taliban came to the house they had proceeded to annihilate anything they considered unIslamic within it. What they had heard about this room had enraged them the most. This they wanted to blow up, even though the lovers had been made to disappear behind a veil of earth by Marcus.

Lara’s eyes moved across the shattered skin of the walls, the light picking up hints of gold here and there. This country was one of the greatest tragedies of the age. Torn to pieces by the many hands of war, by the various hatreds and failings of the world. Two million deaths over the past quarter-century. Several of the lovers on the walls were on their own because of the obliterating impact of the bullets — nothing but a gash or a terrible ripping away where the corresponding man or woman used to be. A shredded limb, a lost eye.

A sound originating in one of the other rooms startled her where she stood, her heart speeding up at the possibilities.

It was not a thief, she reassured herself, nor a Taliban fighter looking for somewhere to hide. Nor an Arab, Pakistani, Uzbek, Chechen, Indonesian terrorist — seed sprouted from the blood-soaked soil of Muslim countries. On the run since the autumn of 2001, al-Qaeda appeared to be regrouping, to kidnap foreigners, organise suicide bombings, and behead those it deemed traitors, those it suspected of informing the Americans.

‘What fool drew this?’ the Tsar had demanded to know of a fortress that a student at the Academy of Military Engineering in St Petersburg had drawn inadvertently without doors. The young man was Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lara wished this house was similarly devoid of entrances as she slowly moved along the corridor, the drops of molten wax sliding down the side of the red candle in her hand.

No one came near the house, Marcus had told her, because the area around the lake is said to contain the djinn. Lake wind, mountain wind, orchard wind collide in the vicinity, but to the Muslims the air is also lastingly alive with the good and bad invisible tribes of the universe. If that was not sufficient, a ghost said to be that of his daughter Zameen had appeared in one of the rooms the day the Taliban came here, the apparition putting them to flight.

After the sound, she was aware of the completeness of the night’s silence.

Perhaps Marcus, fumbling, had dropped an object. The word ‘lame’ described what happened when a foot or leg became damaged or was missing, but she could think of no specific term for when an arm or hand became unavailable, though the body was just as out of balance.

She entered a room and stopped when she saw the book that had detached itself from the ceiling and fallen with the thump she had heard. The disturbed dust of the floor was still in movement around it.

She picked it up and, setting the candle down, wrested out the nail. Opening the book on the floor she began to read, sitting chin-on-knee beside it.

Tell the earth-thieves

To plant no more orchards of death

Beneath this star of ours

Or the fruit will eat them up.

In the garden Marcus opens his eyes, feeling as though someone has drawn near and blocked his sunlight, but there is no one. Letters and messages, and visits, are received from the departed. And so occasionally, and for a fraction of a second, it is not strange to expect such a thing from those who have died. It lasts the shortest of durations and then the mind recalls the facts, remembers that some absences are more absolute than others.

It was in the darkness of the night, in 1980, that the band of Soviet soldiers had broken into the house to pick up Zameen. The cold touch of a gun at his temple was what awoke Marcus. The darkness was cross-hatched with the silver beams of several flashlights. Qatrina, beside him, came out of her sleep on hearing his sounds of confusion. In those initial moments of perplexity she thought this might be a repeat of what had happened the previous week, when a patient was brought to the house in the middle of the night, the victim of a Soviet chemical weapon from the day before, his body already rotting when he was discovered in a field an hour after the attack, his fingers still looped with the rosary he had been holding. He must have been in unimaginable pain, and though he couldn’t speak the stare from him was so strong it verged on sound.

The couple were not allowed to switch on the light but there appeared to be about ten soldiers. From their voices Marcus could tell they were in their teens or early twenties. He wondered if they were deserters, frightened young boys running away from the Soviet Army, running away from the Soviet Union. People from East Germany, even from as far away as Cuba, came to Kabul and then defected to the West. His mind was jolted out of this consideration when they asked for his daughter by name.

Qatrina’s grip on his forearm tightened. There had been reports of Soviet soldiers landing their helicopter to abduct a girl and flying away with her, parents or lovers following the trail of her clothing across the landscape and finally coming across her naked bone-punctured body, where she had been thrown out of the helicopter after the men had been sated.

Two of the soldiers could speak a broken Pashto and they were asking for Zameen and would give no explanation as to how they knew her or why they had come for her. There followed moments of rancour and violence towards Marcus and Qatrina. The men had searched the house before waking them, and had been unable to locate the girl.

A soldier stayed with them while the others spread out through the house once again, their voices low: it was a time of war and they always had to be alert to the possible presence of rebels near by. Some were searching the garden and the orchard, others Marcus’s perfume factory which stood beyond the garden, a voice drifting up now and then. There was great urgency in them, and Marcus thought of the night the previous year when the Soviet Army had entered Kabul, the Spetsnaz commandos running through the corridors of the Presidential Palace looking for the president, whom they immediately put to death when they found him.

Marcus and Qatrina managed to engage the Pashto-speaking soldier in a conversation.

‘Your daughter is sympathetic to the insurgency. Her name is on the list we have been given by an insider.’

‘There must be some mistake,’ Marcus said through the cut mouth.

‘Then where is she at this hour? We are here as part of a big operation in Usha tonight, to capture those who attacked the school earlier this month. We’ll make them pay for the twenty-seven lives we lost.’

The sun was beginning to rise outside when someone came in and said Zameen had been apprehended.

The lapis lazuli of their land was always desired by the world, brushed by Cleopatra onto her eyelids, employed by Michelangelo to paint the blues on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and, from the look of certain sections of the sky above Marcus and Qatrina as they came out into the garden, it could have been Afghanistan’s heights that were mined for lapis lazuli, not its depths.

The couple searched their surroundings and then went into Usha, trying to understand what had happened.

Hours later, as dusk began to fall, Qatrina stood beside an acacia tree, holding with both hands the clothesline tied around the trunk. Marcus thought it was for balance, but then saw that the section of the rope between her hands was tinted indigo, where one of Zameen’s dresses had once seeped colour into it, the dress she must have been wearing when they captured her because it was missing from her room.

He led her back to the house, the perfume from the acacia clinging to her. The djinn were supposed to live in the scent of acacia blossom, making themselves visible only to the young in order to entrap them in otherworldly love.

FOR A LONG TIME before Lara came to the house the kitchen was Marcus’s living quarters. There was no electricity so the refrigerator was used as a clean white cupboard to store clothes. He seldom visited the other interiors, the doors fastened, a muffled thud indicating that a book had detached itself from the ceiling. Qatrina and he had built up this collection over the decades and it contained the known and unknown masterpieces in several languages. Up there Priam begged Achilles for the mutilated body of his son Hector. And Antigone wished to give her brother the correct burial, finding unbearable the thought of him being left unwept, unsepulchred.

He went on a journey whenever he received word about a young man somewhere who could possibly be his lost grandson. Though he feared there was no hope of locating someone whose face you had never seen, whose face you didn’t know. The last excursion was to a city in the south of the country during the Taliban regime, and like the other times it was fruitless. There he saw an abandoned and locked-up school for girls into which, he was told, every book to be found in the city had been thrown on Taliban orders. When he put his ear to the keyhole he could hear the sound of worms eating the millions of pages.

*

While Marcus was digging in the garden one afternoon last month, the sunlight falling deeper into the small pit inch by inch, his implement struck something hard. He pulled out the cassette player wrapped in canvas, interred there during the time of the Taliban. He tried to remember where he had buried the cassettes. Sound fossils! There is hunger that declares itself only while it is being satisfied, and so for the next dozen hours he listened to music without pause, cassettes on every surface around him.

A recording he himself had made two decades ago — of the long lifting notes from the throat of a red-vented bulbul, the bird known as Asia’s nightingale — was followed by Bach and then American jazz.

‘Duke Ellington visited Afghanistan,’ he would tell Lara when she came to the house. ‘He performed in Kabul in 1963.’

‘The year of my birth.’

‘And my daughter’s.’

He worked in the garden, or, book in hand, sat on the threshold where there grew five cypress trees as tall as a house fire, or he wetted a small piece of cloth in warm water and carefully lifted away the earth smeared onto the men and women on the walls, layer by patient layer, taking three hours to uncover the arm entwined around the stem of a small-blossom-laden tree. A red vein in a petal, like a mild thrill. Rubbing off the thick crust from the woman’s wristband he discovered an emerald painted underneath. He felt like a gem miner. He thought about David Town, the American dealer in gemstones his daughter had loved in the months before she died. He wondered how long it had been since David last visited him.

Carrying a lantern in his only hand, he went along the path enclosed within the Persian lilac trees. The perfume factory he had built soon after buying the house was in that direction, women and men coming from Usha to work there, harvesting the acre of flowers from the adjoining fields. It now stood disused and he let himself in, his feet rustling the dry leaves on the floor. Crossing the small office he carefully began to descend the long staircase that was a funnel of trapped warmth.

The factory had to be below ground for the coolness and the softer light to help preserve the ingredients. And soon after the digging work began, they had encountered a large boulder, an indentation at the top of the mass the first thing to come into view, a hollow no bigger than the clay bowls in which Marcus cultivated the ferns of Nuristan. As they worked away the earth, a slender ridge was found snaking around the small depression, and then they saw that the whole was in fact a large human ear. Continuing downwards and around the mass, they understood that they were excavating the head of a great Buddha, lying on its side. Vertically it measured ten feet from one ear to the other. Horizontally it was fifteen feet from the topknot to the decapitated neck.

A face from another time.

Though he knew that this province was one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the Buddhist world from the second to the seventh centuries AD — over a thousand Buddhist stupas in the area echoing to the incantations of monks back then — Marcus would never learn when this particular statue had been buried or why. Too heavy to move, he decided to continue with his plans for the factory with the head in it. It lay on the floor and into the wide rectangular space that they cleared around it they constructed work stations and storage areas and shelving.

Eyes two-thirds closed in meditation. The smile of serenity. The large dot between the eyebrows, perfectly circular like a guitar’s round mouth. The head covered entirely in the incised ripples of hair. Marcus journeyed around him now, his sleeve absorbing warmth from the hot glass of the lantern. A stone stillness. He wondered if the rest of the body was buried near by, whole or fragmented.

The place was dusty. In the air lit by the bud of flame there were countless motes as though fur dislodged from a clash of moths. Under the staircase there were cages in which Nepalese civet cats were once kept — three ferocious blue-and-white felines, the buttery secretions scraped from whose perineal glands were a prized fixative for perfume.

Bracing his arm against the stone mouth he bent down to retrieve a small vial of glass from the floor. So much destruction and yet this had survived. A four-line poem in Dari was etched on it. He removed the stopper the size of a lark skull and sniffed it, remembering that containers discovered in Egyptian tombs were still fragrant after three thousand years.

*

Where was Zameen on the night the Soviet soldiers came to the house? Marcus wouldn’t know the answer to this question until he met David Town many years later.

She would disappear from Marcus’s life but enter David’s at a point farther down the line, and then, time moving on, David would meet Marcus. How stories travel — what mouths and what minds they end up in.

The girl had slipped out of the house in the darkness when a pebble was thrown against her window pane, the sound like a bird’s beak accidentally striking the glass. A boy in the garden. She went with him along the lake, towards Usha. She was unafraid of the djinn, Marcus and Qatrina having taught her to quietly disregard the many rumours about that place — quietly, undemonstratively, because Marcus with his outsider’s nerves did not wish to injure anyone’s sensibilities.

Just the previous week a man was said to have trapped a green bee-eater and taken it to his bride, but the pious girl who was versed in all seven branches of Islamic knowledge had veiled her face immediately, exclaiming that that was no way for an honourable husband to behave, bringing a stranger into the presence of his wife. She explained that the bird was in fact a human male who had been given his current form by the djinn.

Zameen and the boy were in the demon-strewn expanse of trees when they saw the cleric of the Usha mosque, a torch burning beside him. He was a powerfully built man in his late thirties who had four wives, the maximum simultaneous number allowed to a Muslim. His back was towards Zameen and the boy, and they were about to change direction when he looked over his shoulder. Later she would think the perfume she was wearing on her skin had reached him. But the disturbed soil from the grave he was digging must have released much stronger odours. Their eyes met, and then the two young lovers turned and hurried away, ran, unsure of whether or not they were being pursued.

They knew what he was doing, because he had done it before.

Soon after buying their house, Marcus and Qatrina had learned that the myth of the djinn was only a decade or so old, dating from around the time the cleric’s eldest wife — a woman in her forties who had pulled him out of poverty — had vanished. That was when he began insisting that the area around the lake was a nest of malevolent beings, forbidding anyone from venturing there. He married a thirteen-year-old within a month of the disappearance. His insistence proved to be a great problem for Marcus and Qatrina who would have liked their home to serve as their surgery and clinic. But virtually nobody from Usha, no matter how ill, was willing to brave the journey because the spiritual leader had forbidden it. Qatrina and Marcus had to acquire two small rooms in Usha and drove there every morning. The cleric was to prove just as intractable when Marcus began thinking about the perfume factory, but he changed his mind when Marcus offered to produce the sat-kash rose perfume for him: the extract of the best blossoms was distilled seven consecutive times to produce this, and the very few people who could afford it took it with them to Arabia to sprinkle on Muhammad’s grave. An immense honour. The cleric agreed to issue talismans to the workers of the perfume factory, to protect them on their journey towards Marcus’s house, providing they kept to the one main path along the lake. Later he began to issue them to the very desperately ill also, warning them in no uncertain terms that they must not stray.

All her life, Zameen had heard Marcus and Qatrina air various theories about the djinn, but it was always obvious to them that the missing wife was interred there.

And now Zameen herself had proof.

The two of them emerged on the path along the lake, the water so placid tonight it could have reflected even the thinnest of the moon’s fourteen faces. Seeking reassurance, she stretched her hand in the darkness until it was pressed against the boy’s face. At one time there would have been thin silk between the palm of her hand and his features. So great had been his beauty a few years ago that, fearing abduction, his parents had confined him to the house. A second Joseph, a second Yusuf, he was draped in diaphanous material if ever he was allowed into the street. There had been several attempts to seize him, the house shaken by the ferocity and the organised nature of some of the assaults.

Zameen and the other young girls of Usha had kissed the adolescent through the veil, his mouth the mouth of a doll for them.

Now he was older — eighteen years of age, the delicacy of the features beginning to coarsen into handsomeness — and was truly loved by her. He came regularly to her house to borrow books and she saw him frequently in Usha, writing in his notebooks — sometimes very rapidly as though using a quill whose top end was on fire, but slowly at other times, as carefully as an embroiderer intent on delighting a sultan. In the beginning she was too timid to say anything to him and had consoled herself with what Muhammad had said about those who died of secret love — that they would be granted immediate admission to Paradise as martyrs — but a fortnight ago she had revealed her feelings to him. What she hadn’t known was that when he shyly removed his cap in her presence it was so she could see him better.

Now, in a dark grove of trees near the lake, she shook as they tried to think of something to do. They were sure the next day the news would come that one of the cleric’s older wives had vanished, and then in a few weeks he would marry a young girl.

‘She was still alive.’

‘I heard her too. We must go back.’

They went past the burnt remains of the school that the Communist regime had opened in Usha last month. The first one in the area, Zameen herself being a boarder in Jalalabad, coming home at the end of the week. Following the sermons from the mosque, and with the active involvement of the members of the two rich landowning families — whose wealth and lands the Communists promised to distribute among the deprived and unfortunate majority of Usha — the teachers and their families had been savagely massacred a week ago and thrown into the lake, the poor of Usha doing their worst to announce their loyalty to the landowners and to Allah — their only protectors. They had wanted to kill Zameen’s lover too, because he was always reading and a young man who spent that much time with books had to be a Communist. He had managed to flee, revealing himself to Zameen only tonight with that sparrow peck on her window.

Now they led each other back to the djinn’s lair, but despite an hour and more of searching they were unable to locate the burial site.

Neither of them knew that during their search Usha had filled up with soldiers. Among the murdered teachers had been the Soviet headmaster of the school and his young family. And tonight the Soviets had retaliated.

Zameen was holding the boy’s hand in the thinning darkness at the end of the night when she felt her arm being suddenly tugged downwards, and only then did she realise that he had been shot, the sound of the gun also reaching her now. The Soviet soldiers surrounded her and took her to Usha where the cleric confirmed her identity to them with a nod. She saw the mud on the hem of his trousers.

The mosque was among the first places the soldiers had visited upon entering Usha, rightfully suspecting it of being the possible centre of the resistance, and the cleric — just back from interring his wife — had provided them with a list of names to save his own life. This was a chance for him to eliminate the two lovers also, to make sure what they had seen would go no further. He said Zameen and the boy had participated in the massacre, that they were among the people who had marched through the streets carrying the severed heads of the school’s staff, the headmaster’s wife and three fair-haired children among them.

LARA STANDS in a corner of the abraded golden room at the top of the house, considering with her serious eyes the expanse of empty floor lying before her. A candle burns in a far alcove. Beside her is a cardboard box and she dips her hand into it without looking. She brings out a piece of plaster on which a set of lips is painted. Taking five steps, she lowers herself into a crouching position and places the smile on the floor.

The hand entering the box again, she brings out this time a painted sprig of foliage. She looks around and decides where this fragment should be placed. A distance of two feet from the dark red mouth.

There is coloured dust on her fingers as though pollen.

Next comes a section from a woman’s ribboned hair. She consults her imagination — the outline of the picture she is trying to construct — and then positions the piece on the floor accordingly. Marcus must have saved these from when the room was attacked, the strafing of guns tearing out these details from the walls. How carefully he has washed away the mud even from these fragments. Moving backwards and forwards she positions further pieces. Some are as large as her hand. One has half a face on it, a beauty mark on one cyclamen cheek. There is a whole moth in flight, wings patterned like a backgammon board.

From the candle comes the smell of burning wax and a twisting line of smoke. The image on the floor develops section by section. It is a kind of afterlife she is constructing for all those who have been obliterated from the walls. A young man and a woman made out of the ruins of the dozens in this interior.

He should have brown eyes, she tells herself, and she exchanges them, moving the green irises to the girl’s face. Now suddenly he seems disbelieving. A lover is always amazed.

She takes out another fragment and looks at it — a black tulip, a rare flower native to northern Afghanistan. She closes her fist around it until it hurts. In the spring of 1980 a Soviet lieutenant had died holding this blossom, having picked it moments before a sniper’s bullet found him. A comrade threaded it into his collar and he came home with it on his chest. Later in the war the large transport planes flying dead soldiers home took the name of Black Tulips, this flower becoming a symbol of death in the Soviet Union.

This is her third time in Afghanistan. Over months and years she tracked down soldiers who knew her brother, gathering vague clues, and then planned a trip. The number of Soviet soldiers still missing here is 311 but that could be one of Moscow’s lies, just as the true figure of the dead is closer to fifty thousand, four times the official number. It was said that the general who supervised the initial invasion had shot himself soon afterwards, but for the first several years of the war the Soviet Union would all but deny any casualties. When the dead multiplied, the relatives were discouraged from holding funerals and no mention of Afghanistan was made when occasionally a soldier’s death was reported in the newspapers — he simply died whilst doing his International Duty. When losses could no longer be denied or stifled it was judged best to make them fantastically heroic, and so wounded Soviet soldiers kept blowing themselves up with grenades in order to take thirty Afghan rebels with them. Lara didn’t know at the beginning but Benedikt hadn’t died or gone missing in battle — he had defected. Lara herself was under great suspicion as a result of what her brother had done, if things weren’t bad enough already because of the activities and opinions of their mother. They wouldn’t even tell Lara where in Afghanistan he had been based at the time of his disappearance. Later, as the years progressed and the Soviet Union began to be dismantled, they continued to tell lies or sent her from person to person to exhaust and frustrate her.

But by now a part of the story is clear. Benedikt was with another soldier when he defected, a seventeen-year-old. They both ran away from their military base together but Piotr Danilovich eventually lost courage and went back before he could be missed. He was the last Russian person to have seen Benedikt. By tracking down Piotr Danilovich she has managed to collect Benedikt’s last known movements. Their plan, he said, was to simply walk into the nearest Afghan village in the middle of the night carrying weapons stolen from the base to present to the Afghans as a sign of good faith. Thieves of food, of medicine, of the photographs of sweethearts — every soldier had some skill when it came to picking locks; and so Benedikt was to get the guns from the armoury while Piotr Danilovich went into the bedroom of one of the officers, a colonel. In Afghanistan there were deserts whose names conveyed everything about them. Dasht-e-Margo, Desert of Death. Sar-o-Tar, Empty Desolation. Dasht-e-Jahanum, Desert of Hell. And a few months earlier in one such desert, where the temperature had gone beyond fifty degrees, and on the dunes the spiders stitched together sand grains with their silk to make sheets to shelter under, the colonel had come upon an ancient skeleton with a mass of gems scattered on either side of the spinal column, where the stomach would have been. On the night of the desertion, Benedikt sent Piotr Danilovich to the colonel’s room — he was to find and swallow these gemstones. When he couldn’t get into the safe, he made his way through the darkness to where, having successfully stolen seven Kalashnikovs, Benedikt had emerged from the armoury and run into the colonel. The man was in all probability on his way to help himself to some weapons, Piotr Danilovich told Lara years later, to sell to the Afghan enemy. Piotr watched from the shadows as Benedikt and Colonel Rostov stood looking at each other in silence.

Always hungry, always ill, the weak Soviet antibiotics of little use if ever they were to be had, many soldiers had thought of and talked about deserting, about defecting — an arc of movement in their minds, from Afghanistan to a country in western Europe, perhaps even the United States of America. They had been conscripted and sent out here and they drank antifreeze to escape from life for a few hours or left shoe polish to melt in sunlight and then filtered it through bread to obtain a sip of intoxicant. There were stories about what the Afghan rebels did to captured Soviet soldiers, loathing them as much for being non-Muslim as for being invaders — they who in trying to wipe out one Dashaka machine gun, or a journalist from the West, would literally flatten an entire village. Having dreamt that they had fallen into the clutches of the Afghans, the soldiers sometimes woke up screaming and were unable to fall asleep again for hours. Pillows of thorn. But there were other stories about how the Afghans welcomed defectors, especially if they agreed to convert to Islam.

Time slowed down around them as Benedikt and Rostov faced each other, Piotr watching from the darkness. Rostov had sold a ZPU-1 anti-aircraft gun to an Afghan warlord recently, writing it off as lost in combat, but he had begun to suspect that one of the captains at the base intended to expose him, and so he had ordered the captain and two other men chosen at random — Benedikt and Piotr Danilovich — to carry out a dawn reconnaissance mission in a nearby area, an area notorious as a hive of the most dangerous guerrillas. It was to be tomorrow. And although for safety reasons it was customary to take two vehicles, Rostov insisted the three of them take only one. Benedikt and Piotr had dreamed about desertion often but tonight was truly their last chance.

Piotr watched as Benedikt lowered the Kalashnikovs from his shoulders, time accelerating now. A forward lurch of Benedikt’s body towards Rostov. Piotr would tell Lara that he felt the slam of the body, saying he knew it was packed solid with fury at the abuse and drunken humiliation suffered by all the young soldiers at the hands of the officers. The blade moved back and forth three times. Twice in the stomach, and then again in the ribs. The man fell onto his side on the ground, one arm pinned under him, the other raised half-way in the air, the wet index finger trembling.

When Piotr and Benedikt were more than a mile from their military base, running towards the village they knew lay ahead in the darkness, Benedikt had stopped suddenly. ‘We have to go back.’ And he wouldn’t take another step, just shook his head when Piotr asked him to forget about the gemstones.

‘No, not the jewels. We have to go back for the girl.’

‘No.’

‘She’ll die.’

‘Better her than me.’

‘Most of Rostov’s blood is on my clothes. He was alive when we left him so we either go back to make sure he is dead or we get the girl. They’ll kill her in trying to save him.’

Death by exsanguination. The Soviet Army would kill prisoners by draining them of blood whenever transfusions were required for its battle-wounded soldiers.

The girl, Zameen her name was, had not provided any information regarding the rebellion after she was captured, though others had been made to talk successfully, and then it was discovered that Rostov and she had the same rare blood type. She was separated from the other prisoners. On one occasion Rostov even took her with him when he visited another city in case he sustained a serious injury there.

Benedikt led Piotr to a small wooden bridge and told him to wait underneath it, and, astonishingly, he was back with the girl in just over two hours. Rostov, he said, had dragged himself into the armoury, smearing red on the floor as he went, and though he was still alive at the end of that path of blood Benedikt had gone to the small room where Zameen was kept.

She was as dazed as she had always been — she had not uttered a word or made a sound since her capture — but now she spoke, startling them, saying Piotr and Benedikt must change the direction of their journey. She said she would take them to a place called Usha and then a little further beyond that to the house of her parents. Piotr was certain she was leading them into a trap — a month ago three Soviet soldiers were found hanging cut up in a butcher’s shop. The time he had spent alone in the darkness had altered him, when he had felt like a castaway on a vast black ocean, fears accumulating around him. Now terrified, he wanted to go back to the base. He arrived just before Rostov was discovered, and he was among the soldiers who were sent out into the night to hunt for Benedikt and the girl — but they were not to be found.

*

The breeze rustles through the branches of the silk-cotton tree. Lara has heard this sound captured on the recording of the bird that Marcus had made in this garden decades ago.

Another few days and then she’ll leave, another few days of sitting beside his aged form as they both drink the bright red tea he loves, a vague smile occasionally on his lips when he glances up from a page to tell her something. A Prospero on his island.

The mountain range looms above the house. On those quartz and feldspar heights at the end of 2001, American soldiers had ceremonially buried a piece of debris taken from the ruins of the World Trade Center, after the terrorists up there had either been slaughtered or been made to flee. Before these soldiers flew out to attack Afghanistan, the US secretary of defense told them they had been ‘commissioned by history’.

We sharpened the bones of your victim and made a dagger to kill you, and here now we lay the weapon to rest.

No. Perhaps something sacred is meant to grow out of the fragment of rubble. She thinks of the Church of the Resurrection on the banks of Griboyedov Canal in St Petersburg. It is known also as the Saviour of the Spilled Blood, built as it was on the spot where a bomb thrown by a member of the People’s Will revolutionary movement had mortally wounded Alexander II in 1881. The canal was narrowed so the altar could stand exactly where the royal blood had stained the pavement.

Always like a distant ache within her is the thought of landmines, so she cannot bring herself to go too far into the garden. She has seen single shoes being sold in Afghanistan’s shops.

She goes back into the house. Dusk, the hour between the butterfly and the moth. Standing in the dark kitchen she drinks water from a glass. She places the glass on the table and remains still, listening to her breath.

She has told him everything she knows about Zameen and Benedikt, all that Piotr Danilovich related to her.

‘Did they come to this house?’ she asked. ‘They were on their way here at the point where Piotr Danilovich’s story breaks off.’

‘Qatrina and I were not here at that time — the house was taken over by others,’ he replied, looking at her. The bereaved glance. ‘I don’t know if she brought him here. I had gone to a village to the west of here, where a battle between the Soviet Army and the rebels had left almost a hundred civilians wounded. Women and children mostly. The Cold War was cold only for the rich and privileged places of the planet. Qatrina remained here while I was away. There was no knowing when a doctor would be needed here. I returned to find her missing and was told that she had been taken away by the warlord Gul Rasool, the man from Usha who was one of the resistance leaders in this area. He wanted her to accompany his men into battle to treat the wounded. Nabi Khan, the other resistance leader from here, a great rival and enemy of Gul Rasool then as now, had the same idea soon enough and came to get me. There was nothing left here, no one in the house.’

‘Then as now, you say?’

‘Yes. Only the dead have seen the end of war. Gul Rasool is the sole power in Usha now, and Nabi Khan is out there somewhere plotting to unseat him.’

She looks at the moon caught in a windowpane, great in size and brightness both. It seems that to shatter it would be to flood this room and then the entire garden and orchard with luminous liquid. In the 1950s, when the Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in the space race, the US Air Force had asked scientists to plan a nuclear explosion on the moon. People would see a bright flash, and clouds of debris would probably also be visible. Higher than they would be on Earth because of the difference in gravity. She knows from the tales of her cosmonaut father, someone who fell towards Earth in a burning machine, that Moscow had also had the idea of a nuclear blast. Yes, after such a demonstration who wouldn’t cower beneath a nuclear-armed Soviet moon, a nuclear-armed American moon? It never happened but she wonders if the terrorists didn’t come close to something like it in 2001, an enormous spectacle seen by the entire world, planting awe and shock in every heart.

She leans against the wall and closes her eyes.

Even if she hadn’t fallen ill she would have considered asking Marcus for a short refuge when she met him, letting a portion of her weight onto another, being held. While almost everyone else gave it to understand that shame must accompany failure, because you obviously weren’t wise or strong or brave enough to have prevented a derailment of your life, Marcus seemed one of those few humans who lent dignity to everything their gaze landed on. Like a saint entering your life through a dream. To him she would have admitted that the years have left her bewildered by life.

In the topmost room she looks at the fragments she had arranged on the floor. The two lovers summon up an army of ghostly lovers, the man embodying every other man, the woman symbolising every other woman, all imperilled.

*

In Usha they know Marcus Caldwell by his Muslim name. He believes in no god but had converted to Islam to marry Qatrina, to silence any objection. Like him she would have been satisfied with a non-religious ceremony, indifferent to the idea of supreme beings and their holy messengers, but she had agreed on condition that a woman perform the rites. ‘We have to help change things,’ she said. ‘Nowhere does the Koran state that only men may conduct the wedding.’

These days, Marcus seldom says more than a few words to anyone in Usha, communicating in the bazaar with just nods and gestures as much as he can and then leaving. He knows he is not the only casualty in this place. Afghanistan had collapsed and everyone’s life now lies broken at different levels within the rubble. Some are trapped near the surface while others find themselves entombed deeper down, pinned under tons of smashed masonry and shattered beams from where their cries cannot be heard by anyone on the surface, only — and inconsequentially — by those around them.

Yes, he knows he is not the only one who is suffering but he cannot be sure who among the inhabitants of Usha had been present the day Qatrina was put to death by the Taliban. A public spectacle after the Friday prayers, the stoning of a sixty-one-year-old adulteress. A rain of bricks and rocks, her punishment for living in sin, the thirty-nine-year marriage to Marcus void in the eyes of the Taliban because the ceremony had been conducted by a female. A microphone had been placed close to her for her screams to be heard clearly by everyone.

He began to avoid the light of the sun, keeping to the hours of darkness as much as possible. He took every clock and watch in the house and put them away in a drawer. At first the ticking was amplified entreatingly by the wood but one by one they all came to a standstill, as though suffocated. In this way he removed the sense and measurement of time from his surroundings. He knocked onto its side the pedestal bearing the sundial in the garden. A time of deepest darkness. The numerals painted on the sundial might as well have been dates engraved on a tombstone. The food in the cupboards ran out and he had nothing to eat. The entire world it seemed had fought in this country, had made mistakes in this country, but mistakes had consequences and he didn’t know who to blame for those consequences. Afghanistan itself, Russia, the United States, Britain, Arabia, Pakistan? One day he thought of capturing a bulbul that had flown into the house. In the end he knew he could never eat anything he had heard sing.

He recalled the desolation that used to occasionally overpower his mother, a sadness at whose very centre lay his father’s death. Marcus’s father was a doctor in the Afghan frontier and was murdered by a tribesman in 1934, a few months before his birth. The motive for the killing was never established though the killer had a son who had recently declared an interest in Christianity. The family had tried starving him, but when it didn’t have an effect the father tied a grenade to the son and threatened to pull the pin if he did not renew his vow of faith in Islam. Having murdered his son this way, he set out to take revenge on the doctors at the missionary hospital where the boy had come into contact with ideas that made an unbeliever of him. No attempt at conversion was made at the hospital but a chapter from the Gospels was indeed read in the wards every night.

Marcus’s mother continued as a nurse in the heart of the British Empire’s most turbulent province, returning to England only when Marcus was five years old. Kabul, Kandahar, Peshawar, Quetta — some of the earliest words he heard were the names of these cities of Asia. And he visited them during the years of his young adulthood, meeting the stately Qatrina in Kabul and continuing the friendship and romance when she moved to London to study medicine. Coming to live with her beside the lake near Usha, thirty miles from the city of Jalalabad, the city that sent its narcissus into the snow-bound Februaries of Kabul four hours away.

Flour and other basics. That red tea. Kerosene for the lamp. He rarely goes into Usha now, left alone by them all, his first reaction that of mild incredulity whenever someone approaches him. They can see me. And then this week a man drew near and told him about Lara, told him about a woman who was waiting for him two streets away, having come on the daily bus from Jalalabad the day before. They can see me. Some aspect of this he had sensed in the woman he was brought to, her inwardness so intense she could scarcely bring herself to speak or meet another’s eye. She stood up and smiled at him weakly. He saw the unslept eyes, the blue-black neck. The tiredness and the large bruise were physical but they seemed connected with her spirit somewhere.

He picked up her suitcase and they began the journey to his house. There were no words during the walk along the lake’s rim. Later he discovered that the clothes in the suitcase were damp. She explained that during her long journey towards him she had seen a girl raise a fire in front of a house and heat a basin of water to bleach some fabric. After she had finished and was about to pour away the leftover liquid, Lara had moved forward and asked if she could submerge her own three spare sets of clothes into it. Wanting that white suddenly, that blankness. The sole ornament on her now was a necklace of very fine beads like a row of eggs laid along the collarbones by insects.

*

Her gaze on the Buddha’s giant face, Lara sits on the lowest step of the staircase in the perfume factory. She looks at the features of the beautiful young man. He feels vulnerable and intimate, as if facing someone in bed.

Dressed in black, the Taliban that day in March 2001 were preparing to dynamite the head when one of them had contemptuously fired a round of bullets into the stone face smiling to itself. In some versions of the events of that day, a ghost had appeared in Marcus’s house to put the sinister malevolent figures to flight. But others insist it was the occurrence down here in the perfume factory. They carried Qatrina away with them, to her eventual public execution, and would have taken Marcus also if not for what happened here.

After the gun was fired into the horizontal face it was noticed that a small point of light had materialised in each bullet hole, a softly hesitating sparkle. Over the next few instants, as more and more of the men took notice and stared uncomprehendingly, each of these spots grew in brilliance and acquired a liquid glint. Welling up in the stone wounds, the gold eventually poured out and began to slide down the features very slowly, striping the face, collecting in unevenly spaced pools on the floor.

As though they had come out of a trance, the men in defiant rage sent another dozen bullets into the idol but with the same result. In addition he now seemed to be opening fully his almost shut eyes, the lids chiselled in the stone beginning to rise without sound in what felt like an endless moment.

2. Building the New

THE AMERICAN MAN, David Town, is awakened just before sunrise by a muezzin. The first two words of the call to the Muslim prayer are also the Muslim battle cry, he remarks to himself as he lies in the darkness, never having seen the connection before.

The voice is issuing from a minaret three blocks away, dissolving into the air of Jalalabad, the city that surrounds him. He has travelled through most of this country over the decades, his work as a dealer in precious stones bringing him to the amber mines of Kandahar, taking him to Badakshan for the rubies that Marco Polo had written of in his Description of the World. The war-financing emeralds of the Panjshir Valley. He found the River Murghab to be so full of rapids it could have been the Colorado.

He listens to the voice continuing as he falls asleep again. Come to worship, it says, Come to happiness.

An hour later he gets up and walks out to a nearby teahouse. There is a samovar, and bread is being pulled out of the clay oven buried in the ground in the corner. He remembers Marcus Caldwell telling him tea is an ingredient in some perfumes. Maybe it was Zameen, passing on knowledge absorbed from her father. We learn in detail that which is most insistent around us. The desert people make good astronomers.

To the left of him a chakor partridge bites the bars of its cage. They are a gregarious bird, moving in large family groups in the wild, but are kept like this all across Afghanistan. The place becomes more and more busy as daylight increases, the road full of traffic. Vans and lorries, animals and humans. Wrapped in a coarse blanket he occupies a far chair, nodding and saying salam-a-laikam whenever someone new arrives to take a seat near by. He sits with his quiet watchful air. A cap unscrewed from a missile serves as a sugar bowl in this place. He can see the words Death to America and Kill Infidels daubed in Pashto, in two different paints and two different scripts, on a nearby wall. A news hawker enters, a child of six at most, and a man buys a magazine with Osama bin Laden on the cover, photographed as always with the Kalashnikov of a Soviet soldier he had killed here in the 1980s.

*

‘Marcus?’

David, walking back from breakfast, calls out towards the figure on the other side of the narrow lane.

The man with the white beard stops and looks up and then comes to him, taking him into his arms, a long wordless hug. Just a few smeared noises from the throat.

‘I didn’t know you were in the country,’ Marcus says when they separate.

‘Why are you in the city?’

‘I came yesterday. A shopkeeper in Usha, who recently visited Jalalabad, told me about a boy in his twenties who could be … our Bihzad.’ That was the name Zameen had chosen for her son. Bihzad — the great fifteenth century master of Persian miniature painting, born here in what is now Afghanistan, in Herat. ‘David, he remembers a lot of things, remembers her name.’

‘Where is he?’ He looks at Marcus, the eyes that are the eyes of a wounded animal.

‘I met him yesterday. I spent last night with him.’ Marcus points to the minaret with the high domed top in the distance, a brass crescent at its pinnacle. ‘Up there. He makes the call to prayer from up there.’

‘Then I think I heard him at dawn.’

‘We spent almost the entire night talking, or rather I talked. He is a little withdrawn, distant. There was something fraught about him occasionally.’ From his pocket Marcus takes out a key with a cord threaded through its eye. ‘He gave me this. Come, I’ll take you up there.’

‘What about the scar?’ The child had burned himself on a flame.

‘Yes, I saw it.’

‘He’s up there now?’

‘He said he had a few things to do but he’ll be back. I came yesterday morning, thinking I’ll go back on the evening bus but the service was cancelled. So I had to stay.’

‘I’ll drive you back this afternoon.’ A journey along vineyards that produced bunches of grapes the length of his forearm. ‘I was going to come see you in the next few days anyway.’

‘I should have returned as planned. She spent last night alone.’ Marcus stops. ‘David, there is a woman back at the house.’

‘Yes?’

‘She’s Russian.’

He’d kept on walking and is two steps ahead of Marcus, but now he halts. ‘A Russian?’

‘Larissa Petrovna. She says her brother was a soldier who knew Zameen.’

David nods. The older man does not say the Soviet soldier’s name but David hears it in his head anyway. Benedikt Petrovich. The man who fathered Zameen’s child through repeated assault, the child David later called his own son, who it is possible has grown up to be the young man at the top of the minaret over there, the sunlight making the crescent appear as though it’s on fire. At the military base Benedikt Petrovich guarded the room where Zameen was kept, and he unbolted the door night after night and went in to her.

‘David, did Zameen ever talk about a Soviet soldier, about twenty-four years old?’

‘No. Never. So what kind of things does this Bihzad remember?’

A camel goes by with the burnt-out shell of a car fastened upside down to its back, the high metal object lurching at every step.

When David met Zameen, in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, Bihzad was four and was taught to think of David as his father. It was a matter of months after that that Zameen died and the boy disappeared. Lost as he was at such an early age, how surprising it seems that he has managed to carry with him even his name. Holding onto that one possession over the violent chaotic years.

‘He remembers Zameen telling him Qatrina was a doctor, seemed to have forgotten that I was one too, though he knew I had some connection with England. He remembers you, remembers Peshawar — all very vaguely.’

David has looked for him for nearly twenty years, making a number of journeys towards hints of him, always unsure about how much someone can remember from when they were four or five. It must be different for different people. There have been several leads in the past, one or two as compelling as this one, but nothing came of them. He is forty-eight this year, and from among his own early memories the earliest is of experiencing a strong emotion — which he would in later life learn to call love — towards what a set of coloured pencils did on a piece of paper, those brilliant lines and marks with a thin layer of light trembling on them. He always wanted those pencils near. He has calculated that he must have been about three. But he has no personal recollection of something that is said to have occurred at a slightly later age, something that is family legend — of him sinking his teeth into the leg of the doctor who was about to give his brother Jonathan a vaccine shot, Jonathan weeping with fear at the needle.

Marcus unlocks the door at the base of the minaret and they enter in silence, climbing the staircase that spirals upwards at the centre. Most minarets are narrow, merely architectural details these days, but this staircase is wide enough for horses. Half-way up there is a large hole that must have been caused by a stray rocket during one of the many battles the area has seen in the previous decades, one of the many wars. It is as though someone had bitten off the side of the tower.

At the very top is the landing and then a door opens onto a balcony that runs around the minaret, a circular terrace just under the dome, exposed to the sunlight at this hour.

‘Does he actually live up here?’ They passed a cotton mattress on the landing. A small tin trunk stood open to reveal things for making tea. Powdered milk spilling from a twist of newspaper headlines. And out here there is evidence on the floor of a small fire of splintered wood, of burnt thorn and twig. There is a cot for sitting, its ropes frayed. He thinks of the summer months with their dust storms, palls of them rising up and burying the city for twenty minutes each time.

‘This area is without electricity at dawn so they can’t use the loudspeaker to make the call to prayer. Someone has to come up here and do it physically. He does that, but he actually lives somewhere else.’ He points to the east. ‘In that neighbourhood.’

They are standing on the balcony, looking at the city below. Above them is a roof of corrugated iron on which the claws of pigeons can be heard.

‘He said they used to give lessons in the Koran to the djinn up here, a long time ago. They came to the mosque down there at first but their presence was too overwhelming for humans, a child or two fainting with awe. So this minaret was built for them to walk up to without being seen or felt by humans. Bihzad says no one wants to be the muezzin, afraid in case the effect of the djinn still lingers.’

‘What does he look like? And when will he be back?’

‘Around noon. I told him I must go back home before night falls.’

David nods. ‘So this Russian woman — Larissa Petrovna, you said her name is.’

‘Lara. She’ll go back in a few days. She won’t say much but she lost her husband two years ago and is obviously in a time of darkness. She keeps apologising for being a burden on me even though it’s not a problem in the least. She is an art historian at the Hermitage in St Petersburg. You are sure Zameen never mentioned a Soviet soldier named Benedikt?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘You’ll meet her. But you haven’t told me what you are doing here. Listen to the birds, David, their wing beats.’ He is sitting on the cot, his back against the wall. ‘It feels strange to be away from the house after so long. I look at this ceiling and for a second expect to see books nailed up there.’

David looks at the panorama of the city while listening to him, the mountain range in the hazy distance.

‘The large book of Bihzad’s paintings had required three nails to stay in place on the ceiling. Such brutality had to be inflicted on it to prevent it from being burned to ashes — and here was a man so subtle he painted with a brush that ended in a single hair picked from a squirrel’s throat.’

David’s first concern is Marcus: how much has his Russian visitor told him about her brother’s assaults on Zameen? The shock would be devastating to him, but how much does she know herself? Zameen had hidden nothing from David but he has always been careful not to reveal too much to Marcus — or to Qatrina when she was alive. Qatrina who died in 2001, the long-ago spring of 2001 when the United States believed itself to be at peace, believed itself to be safe and immune from all this.

The Englishman’s eyes are closed now, the birds coming and going on the roof.

Zameen told him how she heard the door open that night, heard Benedikt enter the room in the darkness. Strangely he didn’t approach her bed as he had done over the previous nine occasions. He closed the door behind him but didn’t bolt it. A chain, hanging from a ring on the wall beside her wooden bed, was attached to an iron band around her wrist, so she couldn’t rush for the open door. His breath was rapid and shallow as though he’d been running. He whispered her name and struck a matchstick alight. Speaking in English, a language he knew brokenly from his mother, he said he was defecting and that she must go with him, said he had made it out of the base safely earlier tonight but had turned back for her.

When during his assaults she had wanted to scream but had been unable to, her hands — out of humiliation and rage — had flown at him, raking his skin, but now she listened, looking at his face in the yellow light which soon ran out.

‘Here is the key for your wrist.’ She heard something land by her feet. Like a raindrop on a leaf. He drew closer. One time he had fallen asleep beside her for a few seconds after the act and she had heard that breathing stretch much deeper.

She did not move towards the key, shaking her head even though it was dark. And so he lit another match and told her that Rostov lay bleeding out there and that she must know she would be drained of blood to save him. ‘Don’t make me go and kill him.’ There was pleading in the whispered voice, as when, his thirst quenched, he sometimes asked her to forgive him for what he had just done. During the daylight hours he was ashamed of what he did to her, but again and again in the darkness he found himself approaching her, ready to subdue, dizzy and almost sick with longing and desire and power.

Picking up the key she released her hand from the chain.

Out there, after an hour’s running through the darkness, they came to another soldier, another defector. Zameen persuaded them that they must go to Usha, but Piotr Danilovich left them soon after they set out. From within the darkness of an orchard, the flowers and the perfume of apricot trees, Zameen and Benedikt watched the small group of soldiers from the Soviet base arrive to look for them. After they had gone and the two of them were thinking of continuing towards Usha, they became aware of another possible danger, another set of voices close by. It was dark but the sky was beginning to lighten in the east, a few very faint lazuli strokes. The sound and movement of the Soviet soldiers must have attracted people from the nearby village, or perhaps they had been here among the apricot trees all along and had stilled themselves earlier. To avoid Soviet gunships many farmers went to work in their fields and orchards only at night, accompanied by small lamps.

Benedikt told her to wait as he went forward on his elbows to investigate, raising himself to a crouching position and then disappearing from view. She would never see him again or know what happened to him, what kind of life he walked into, what kind of death. The orchard was vast, and there were many others around it, but he had said he would find her easily because somehow they had ended up within a clump of three trees that were the only ones among the hundreds that were not in flower. She curled herself in the high grass and perhaps fell asleep beside the stolen Kalashnikovs. When next her mind focused, the voices out there had grown in number and dawn had arrived, and now she saw, as though hallucinating, that the branches above her had blossomed with the first rays of the sun, the late buds opening at last, hatching white-pink scraps against the clear blue of the sky.

*

David walks around the circular balcony and looks out at the distant peaks in that direction. The city of Jalalabad is flanked to the north by the Hindu Kush and to the south by the White Mountains, the chain standing over Marcus’s house. Looking at a relief map David always feels that if you grabbed Afghanistan at the borders and pulled, so great is the number of hills and mountains here, you’d end up with an area ten times its current size.

Marcus comes and joins him on this side of the minaret, both of them looking towards where his house is. The Buddha is said to have visited this valley to slay the demon Gopala, and Chinese pilgrims have written of the sacred relics once housed in shrines here. A fragment of the Buddha’s skull entirely covered in gold leaf. A stupa erected where he clipped his fingernails. The city resisted the spread of Islam until the tenth century.

‘She spent the night alone in the house,’ Marcus says quietly. ‘I should have gone back.’

‘I am sure she’s fine,’ David replies; he has nothing to base that on but he doesn’t know what else to say. He is in Jalalabad because he is financing a number of schools in the country. He has kept himself in the background, just letting a group of committed and intelligent local people get on with the details. Even the selecting of the name has been left to them and they want Tameer-e-Nau Afghanistan School. Building the New Afghanistan. The branch in this city became operational a fortnight ago, and he is here to see it, spending last night there, the dog in the building next door disturbing his sleep throughout. Before leaving the United States he tried to contact Marcus, and then again repeatedly on entering Afghanistan, but the satellite phone he had left him on one of his previous visits wouldn’t ring.

‘There is no electricity to recharge it,’ Marcus says in reply when he raises the subject now.

‘What about the generator?’

‘It seems too much to turn that on just for the phone.’

Present in his voice is the fear that he would not be understood, would appear contrary. So David touches his sleeve, ‘It’s all right. I worry about you. I won’t lie and say I don’t sometimes wish you would leave Afghanistan, but’ — he raises his hand — ‘I know, it’s your home, and if you weren’t here we would not have been able to learn about this young man.’

It’s minimal, his life, requiring adjustments on a weekly if not daily basis. Once David arrived from the USA to find a camel tied in the orchard for her milk. Once there was a ewe and a lamb. Some ducks, a stand of ripening corn. Items from the house are taken or sent to Kabul’s antique merchants sometimes. Most of the money David forces on him every year is, he’s sure, still around untouched, or has been given to others.

‘Can we see your school from here?’ His skin is dyed to fawn after the decades of strong sunlight and heat, making him look almost like a native of this country, maybe someone from the Nuristan province.

‘Yes. It’s not far from here. Just follow that curved street, then along that road — see those palm trees? It’s the yellow building just beyond them, next to the big white one.’

‘I see it. So great is the love of a male palm tree for the female palm tree, that it always grows leaning at an angle towards it, even if it is in a neighbouring garden. Did you know?’

The city centre down there is full of citrus trees, this valley being famous for its orange blossom, verse makers from across Afghanistan gathering in Jalalabad in mid-April every year for a Poets’ Conference to recite poems dedicated to the blossom.

David rubs his face with his large hands. ‘We have a view of all sides from here, like the Pentagon in Washington, DC.’

‘And the wooden O of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.’

They stare at the mountain range, the blue and white ridges. The air can be very thin on some of those heights. The US Army has discovered that at times the blades of its helicopters cannot find enough purchase to get airborne from there, the machines swaying a few feet off the ground.

Even the air of this country has a story to tell about warfare. It is possible here to lift a piece of bread from a plate and, following it back to its origins, collect a dozen stories concerning war — how it affected the hand that pulled it out of the oven, the hand that kneaded the dough, how war impinged upon the field where the wheat was grown.

PARTICIPATING IN some battle when he was about ten years old, Bihzad had seen a fire break out in the long dried grasses of the meadow where the dead and the dying lay. He remembers feeling ashamed because his pangs of hunger had increased with the smell of roasting meat.

He now opens his eyes onto opium flowers. He moves along the edge of the field, the white-streaked pink blossoms swaying in the late-morning breeze. From Jalalabad up until a moment earlier, he was blindfolded. The man who had uncovered his eyes is now guiding him towards a building beyond the expanse of poppies.

He has been brought here before. It was three days earlier, another journey with the sense of sight disabled. Now too he is delivered from person to person inside the building. At one door there is a coded set of knocks. Three times, pause, twice, then a final twice. It’s been changed since the previous occasion, he notices.

‘So you are clear on all the details?’ says the man who leads him down a dark staircase. ‘You are to drive the truck out of here and park it outside the new school, between the tree with the red flowers and the large signboard that shows the public how to recognise different landmines.’

Bihzad has not been introduced to anyone by name here but, during an unexpected moment of tenderness during the previous visit, he had felt emboldened enough to ask this man if his name was indeed Casa, having overheard one of the others refer to him as that. The man had agreed with a quick almost-soundless ‘Yes’, and then gently grabbed Bihzad’s collar, telling him he mustn’t try to be too clever. Everyone else he has encountered here is dour and tense, exuding unrelenting distrust and hostility.

Now Casa tells him, firmly, ‘Do not deviate from your instructions in any way.’

They enter a room below ground where on a shelf, lit by a small bulb from above, there are two square frames containing the calligraphed names of Allah and Muhammad, peace be upon him. Between them, in a glass box, is a mounted mongoose with its teeth sunk into the edge of a cobra’s hood, the serpent’s black length wrapped three times around the body of its adversary. A figure sits cross-legged on a bed in the dimly lit other side of the room. The Kalashnikov in his lap has a second magazine taped to the first. Casa deferentially presents Bihzad to him and takes a few steps back.

His power and authority within this group is obvious, and he addresses Bihzad in measured tones: ‘You have been shown what to do? You’ll press the button attached to the red wires and get out of the truck and walk away.’

‘It won’t go off while the children are still inside the school, will it?’

‘Do not doubt our word,’ the man says quietly but with an edge to the voice. Earlier Casa had said Bihzad was being given the honour of doing this for Islam and for Afghanistan. ‘Aren’t you troubled that boys are being brainwashed in there,’ Casa asks now, ‘and girls taught to be immodest?’

The man raises a hand towards Casa. A thin blanket is draped on his shoulders, open in the middle as though to expose his pure transparent heart. He must have been writing something earlier because there is ink on his fingers. ‘We have no remote controls, and the timers we have are not very sophisticated either. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had to involve you, would have just left the truck outside that school built and owned by Americans. Someone has to park the vehicle and set the timer going on site. The explosion will happen hours later. You must know that Allah and the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, will be greatly happy with you.’

Bihzad has been told how this operation is just the beginning, a demonstration to attract and obtain help for bigger things. The man in this basement room, once a great fêted warrior, cannot return to his native village, a place Bihzad has overheard being referred to as Usha. An enemy has appropriated power there, having accepted money and weapons from the Americans at the end of 2001 to help uproot the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But soon this enemy — these men called him a traitor to Islam and Afghanistan — would be made to regret everything, happy though he is for the time being because he has been given a place in the government of the province. A large-scale raid is being planned for Usha, a spectacular offensive to drive out that unbeliever and his American-paid fighters and bodyguards. There will be a war.

The building next to the school was their original target, a warehouse belonging to their great enemy, but they would be delighted to see the school reduced to rubble as well.

Someone from inside the school has informed them, Casa told Bihzad, that the school’s American owner is visiting, staying in the building for a few days. That is why they are keen to go ahead with this operation, unable to wait for the proper equipment to arrive. To kill an American would send out a big message.

Every American who dies here, said Casa, dies with a look of disbelief on his face, disbelief that this faraway and insignificant place had given rise to a people capable of affecting the destiny of someone from a nation as great as his.

The Americans too had blindfolded Bihzad when they took him to their detention centre at the Bagram military base, one of the many prisons they have established here to hold suspected al-Qaeda members. Someone had betrayed him to them in exchange for reward money. Night and day every prisoner cursed those Muslims — the munafikeen! — who had sold them to the Americans for $5,000 each. Though at one level everyone in there was happy because Allah had especially chosen him to suffer for Islam. There wasn’t a speck of dust in that place that didn’t make Bihzad want to scream — apart from anything else there was the constant fear that he might be transferred to Guantanamo Bay — but he had felt very close to Allah during those months, everyone spending every spare minute in prayer, the environment there much more spiritual than anything he has been able to find on the outside. Every day, his life shifting its centre, he slips into worldly longings and wants instead. May Allah forgive him but, the reward so alluring, he has even fantasised once or twice about approaching the Americans and telling them someone innocent in his neighbourhood is a member of al-Qaeda.

His main reason for agreeing to carry out today’s task is the money these people will pay him afterwards.

The smell of disturbed earth is intense around him, this airless sunken chamber.

‘Don’t forget that not only did the Americans imprison you, they caused your sister to die. This is how you’ll repay them,’ says the man. ‘She wasn’t your real sister though, right?’

‘No.’ They had met in an orphanage when they were children and he began calling her sister. He had always treated her as though she was.

From his pocket the man takes a folded piece of paper and hands it to Casa. ‘It’s a statement I have prepared,’ he says. ‘The statement that will be issued to television and radio after the blast. And, you’ll notice, I have decided to give our organisation the same name as the school. Building the New Afghanistan — I approve of what it conveys.’

He invites Bihzad to sit beside him and, taking his hand in his, begins to read aloud verses from the Koran — not always accurately, Bihzad notices. Muhammad, peace be upon him, had appeared in the dreams of many at the Bagram prison. And one night Christ had visited Bihzad, carrying the Koran in his right hand, the Bible in the left. When Bihzad made to kiss his forehead, Christ asked someone, ‘Who is he?’ Upon learning that Bihzad was a prisoner of the Americans, the great prophet came forward and kissed his brow. He apologised for the Christians who had incarcerated Muslims in various locations around the world. Bihzad was shaken awake at that point by the other prisoners: they had been brought out of their sleep by the concentrated fragrance issuing from Bihzad’s forehead. He told them that that was where Christ had placed his lips, and they wiped the scented sweat from his brow and ran it over their own clothes.

‘The desire to rid my country of infidels and traitors,’ the man says upon coming to the end of his recital and releasing Bihzad’s hand, ‘has made a fugitive of me. I would have loved to have carried out this task myself, but I cannot even step outside without fear of being apprehended, cannot even use a phone because the Americans are listening in and could send down a missile.’

Back at ground level, Casa says of him, ‘He skinned alive a Soviet soldier with his own hands before you and I were probably even born. It was done slowly to increase the suffering. They say it took four hours and he was alive for the first two. Apparently some parts are simple like skinning a fruit, others tricky. Around that time he had had his photograph taken whilst shaking Ronald Reagan’s hand, in whose infidel heart Allah in His wisdom had planted a deep hatred of the Soviet Union.’

As they walk out of the building Casa produces a set of keys. Bihzad understands they are for the truck, suddenly terrified more than ever, no strength in any of his muscles. He has to go through with this, he tells himself. Later he’ll go and talk to the Englishman, continue to pretend to be his missing grandson. Nodding sometimes vigorously, sometimes uncertainly, when the old man attempts to jog his memory. I do remember that. No, I have no recollection of that. The aged man must be rich — a doctor. He’d heard about the Englishman a while ago, and sent a message out to him saying he was his grandson Bihzad. He had been told that the missing child had a small scar due to an accident with a candle, and he had duplicated the burn on himself, the flesh taking a month to heal. The name is the only real thing he shares with the lost grandson.

Maybe he’ll get to go to England. A chance at last to make something of his life. Even find love: become someone’s, have someone become his. There was once a girl he had loved, a girl he still thinks about, but because he had no means and no prospects, her family had humiliated him when he brought them his proposal.

The truck is parked, as docile-looking as a cow, against a nearby wall. Bihzad and Casa walk towards it, going past two figures sitting on stationary motorbikes under a mulberry tree. A black pickup van arrives through the entrance gate and Casa raises his hand to stay Bihzad. Men appear from all corners of the building now, the vehicle coming to a stop, and from the back seat an old man is pulled out by the chain around his neck, a look of absolute horror on his face. His hair, beard and clothes dusty, he is led away like a reluctant performing bear, held by that chain, and Casa tells Bihzad that he was an employee with the organisation until his sudden disappearance some years before. A dollar note was found stitched in the lining of the coat he had forgotten to take with him. ‘There is a chance he is an informer, obliging the group to relocate to this farm,’ Casa says as they continue towards the truck. Bihzad knows the punishment for betrayal. With a funnel and a length of tubing they’ll pour acid or boiling water into the man’s rectum. That and much more, and then they’ll slit his throat. Nor would a confession mean freedom — it would just mean they’ll kill him sooner, it would mean less torture.

The motorbikes wake to noisy life, the smell of fumes recognisable in the air within moments. The two riders will guide Bihzad towards the city. And Bihzad understands now — as though the pungent scent has brought the knowledge with it — that he will be followed into the city as well by these armed men, right up to the school, in case he changes his mind and tries to abandon the truck or inform the police.

The men bring the motorbikes over to the truck. They use the trailing ends of their turbans to cover the lower halves of their faces, just the eyes showing, as riders must to avoid the exhaust and dust of traffic. Bihzad climbs in behind the steering wheel, trying to control the rhythm of his breathing. He has been shown how the cushion of the passenger seat can be easily detached and lifted: underneath is the pair of insulated wires leading to the switch he has to throw upon parking the truck outside the school. There is a button he must press after the switch, and then he must walk away from the vehicle.

Casa had demonstrated and explained everything on the previous visit, sitting on the floor in a back room. Bihzad and Casa — in that interior filled with crates of rocket-propelled grenades, packets of explosives that smelled like almonds, and boxes full of DVDs and CDs depicting jihad as Allah the Almighty saw it and not as the world’s media distorted it — had then talked about their childhoods: the hunger, the refugee camps, the deaths one by one of the adults around them due to various causes, the orphanages, the beatings and worse, the earning of daily bread as beggars or labourers in the bazaars. Neither remembered the date or place of his birth, nor had any firm memory of his mother and father. Pointing to the lengths of blue, green, red and yellow wires that lay around them, Casa said:

‘When I was a child I had knocked over a basket of silk embroidery threads, probably belonging to my mother. That’s the only thing I remember of her. The threads suddenly unspooled along the floor in many brilliant lines and then went out of the open door and down a staircase.’ He fell silent and then said through a sigh, ‘Yes, that’s the only thing I remember.’

Now Casa comes forward and shuts the truck door, sealing Bihzad in.

With the vehicle just beyond biting point, he rolls out of the gate set in the boundary wall of the farmhouse, the wrinkled colour of the thousand poppies now behind him.

The road is lit by the late-morning sun. One of the riders is in front of him and the other he can see in the rear-view mirror. It seems it is of no concern to these people that Bihzad now knows where the farmhouse is situated. On the previous occasion he was picked up at the outskirts of Jalalabad and blindfolded before being brought to the farmhouse, and the procedure was the same again when he was taken back to the edge of the city. But this time they have let him drive out of there with full knowledge of how to find the place again. An additional few moments and everything is perfectly clear to him: the instant he throws the switch the bomb will be armed — and the instant he presses the button the truck will explode. It’s not a timer, but a detonator.

He feels as though his heart is clamped in someone’s fist. And when, at a gentle curve in the road, his shadow begins to inch towards the passenger seat, the feeling intensifies. He experiences this dread whenever he is in an area not yet swept for landmines — wanting always to pull his shadow closer to him, thinking the weight of it is enough to set off whatever death-dealing device is hidden there.

He has no choice, and nothing but Allah’s compassion to see him through this. Perhaps he should swerve and try to disappear down a side street, try to dismantle the bomb.

He wishes the road and landscape would stop unwinding before him, wishes it were only a painted screen to arrive at and burst through to the other side, emerging into another kinder realm. Just some place that is not this Hell. To ask for Paradise would require someone less humble. But the truck continues its journey, bearing down on the city in the distance.

DAVID WALKS OUT of the minaret of the good djinn. Marcus is asleep up there surrounded by the millennia-old mountain vista.

He must go back to the school, to take care of some paperwork. His car is parked under a chinar plane tree within the school’s enclosure wall. He’ll bring it here and then, having met Bihzad, drive with Marcus to Usha. From the foliage of the chinar trees in a miniature painting, said Zameen, it is possible to tell if it was painted in the Herat of the late fifteenth century. Distinctive serrations and ways of colouring.

David will have to carefully question the young man to see if he is who he claims to be.

Bihzad Benediktovich Veslovsky.

There is a faint continuous rumble from the sky above the street. An unmanned Predator drone collecting intelligence on behalf of the CIA, he thinks, or a fighter jet the Special Forces have summoned, calling down a missile strike on a hiding place of insurgents. The information that selects the target isn’t always without its faults, he knows. In Usha at the end of 2001, the house of the warlord Nabi Khan was reduced to rubble from the air, everything and everyone inside a hundred-yard radius was charred, but later it turned out that he had not been in the vicinity. His rival, Gul Rasool, had lied to the Americans just to see the building decimated, to have as many of Nabi Khan’s relatives and associates killed as possible. Gul Rasool now has a position in the ministry of reconstruction and development, installed as the chief power in Usha. Nabi Khan is at large, though there have been rumours of his death, rumours of him having moved to Iraq to fight the Americans there. Both men are little short of bandits and the cruellest of barbarians, seeing all of life’s problems in terms of injured self-esteem, their places in infamy well earned.

He makes his way through the press of bodies in the bazaar, the bustle of any of these Asian cities. The orange-blossom air. A little girl goes by, walking possibly towards the day when she will disappear behind the burka, her face never to be seen again. Perhaps nowhere is the Mona Lisa loved more than here in Asia, and he remembers Zameen telling him that on seeing it for the first time as a child she had wondered what that black line was, high on Mona Lisa’s forehead. It was, of course, the edge of her veil. Zameen was seeing the picture in a poor reproduction that missed the thin gossamer fabric covering the head. At that age, she said, it didn’t occur to her that women in the West could wear veils.

Instead of going towards the school he has taken a short detour and entered this bazaar, looking for a place that sells satellite phones. With the landline to Marcus’s house rotted away, David has decided he’ll buy a phone for Larissa Petrovna which she must keep with her while she is here.

He stands at a crossroads and looks around, suddenly finding himself lost, surrounded by noise and talk. The men and women of Afghanistan share between them a store of tales so extensive, so rich and ancient, that it has been said it is unrivalled by any other land. Alexander passed through here in 329 BC with thirty thousand troops, and so now a man selling what look like centuries-old Greek coins approaches David. The years of war and civil war have emptied this country’s museums. One 190-carat diamond in the sceptre of Russia’s Catherine, bought by her from an Armenian gem merchant, was first the eye of a god in a temple in India, and so it is that no one can be certain where most of Afghanistan’s looted treasures have ended up.

He turns and goes back along the street, thinking of how a long time ago, when they were both schoolchildren, his brother Jonathan had asked him to make his way out of a maze in a puzzle book. Only when he failed was it revealed that by drawing a small line in black ink across the correct path, Jonathan had mischievously blocked the only way out. Bringing him nothing but dead ends.

*

With a smile Marcus raises a hand when he realises that Bihzad is — that Bihzad was — the driver of the vehicle that has just gone past him. He hopes he has been quick enough, that the greeting can be seen in the rear-view mirror. The boy’s apparel is patched and dirty, his mouth full of crooked teeth, but he is young and, as Qatrina once said, two things make everyone appear beautiful: youth and the light of the moon.

Marcus is walking towards the school. He woke up in the minaret and found David gone, but he knows where he must be.

Bihzad’s truck is going in the same direction as him. The hand of a traffic controller, at some intersection located further up, has released a flood of vehicles just ahead, and now Marcus’s view of the truck has become obstructed, though he can see the school building.

He cannot stop thinking of Lara. The thought of her alone in the house last night. A night of stone. He sees in his mind the pitch-dark surroundings, the lake filled with the blackest ink, and the shiver of pale candlelight in one window, sees her figure dressed in white, which is all she has worn since she came. The set of clothes she was wearing when she dropped the rest into bleach is the only one with colour, and that she has folded away out of sight.

It was a mistake for him to have come here yesterday. Could this have waited until she had gone back to Russia? The children’s game of hangman — where one has to guess a word letter by letter, each wrong guess meaning that a friend draws a scaffold and then a noose and then a person suspended from that noose — has always terrified Marcus, the idea that every time one makes a wrong choice someone else gets closer to disaster, to death.

The traffic has thinned and he sees that Bihzad’s vehicle is stationary outside the school building. Perhaps he has seen Marcus and is waiting for him to catch up. He quickens his pace, going past the cluster of palm trees David had pointed to from the minaret, the loud chatter of birds coming to him from the fronds. For the next fraction of a second it is as though the truck is in fact the picture of a truck, a photograph printed on flimsy paper, and that the rays of the sun have been concentrated onto it with a magnifying glass. And then the ground falls away from his feet and a light as hard as the sun in a mirror fills his vision. The tar on a part of the road below him has caught fire. Soon they will feed you the entire world. The explosion has created static and a spark leaps from his thumb towards a smoking fragment of metal flying past him. Then he is on the ground. Beside him has landed a child’s wooden leg, in flames, the leather straps burning with a different intensity than the wood, than the bright blood-seeping flesh of the severed thigh that is still attached. A woman in a burka on fire crosses his vision. He hears nothing and then slowly, as he gets to his feet in the midst of this war of the end of the world, scream soldered onto scream. He thinks the silence was the result of momentary deafness but the survivors had in all probability needed time to comprehend fully what had just taken place. The souls will need longer still, he knows, and they may not begin their howls for months and years.

ONLY IN THE EARLY EVENING do Marcus and David leave Jalalabad for Usha, journeying under the first constellations.

David had heard the truck explode from a mile away. Elsewhere he would have thought it was thunder, but in this country he knew what it was, what it had to be.

At the site he found Marcus and gathered him into his arms amid all the black smoke. There were no injuries on him, just a few grazes to the skin. A woman carried a severed hand up to them and had to be told that Marcus had lost his own years before today. David went deeper into the soft black talcum of the smoke, to learn all he could about the event. Around him the word ‘fate’ was being used in reference to the chance passers-by who had been killed along with the staff and children. Fate — it is the nearest available word when the name of the destroyer or the destroying thing is not known.

When Marcus told him he had seen Bihzad at the wheel of the truck, David had gone to the police. The boy’s house was searched and they learnt that he had spent time in captivity, under suspicion of being al-Qaeda. The story of his sister’s death last year also came to light. A sister in possession of a love letter: while the brother was giving her the beating he thought she deserved for being shameless, she had escaped from his grip and run off into a field near a former Taliban weapons depot that the United States had repeatedly struck in 2001 with cluster bombs, some of which had failed to explode and still lay undisturbed — in that field and also elsewhere within the already mine-laden cities and countryside.

David and Marcus were also told by the neighbours that Bihzad was in no way related to doctors or Englishmen of any kind. Though he grew up in various orphanages and madrassas, his lineage was known to everyone — both his parents were Afghans and had died in the Soviet bombing of a refugee caravan back in the 1980s.

The statement from the terrorists appeared after four hours, the group calling itself Tameer-e-Nau. David and Marcus listen to the words as they are repeated on the radio during the journey towards Usha:

A passionate servant of Allah has carried out a glorious act in Jalalabad. He wrote this declaration personally to be read after his death. We have hundreds more young men like him, lovers of Muhammad, peace be upon him, who are willing and eager to give their lives in this jihad against the infidels …

Scarcely anything can be seen in the deepening darkness outside. David thinks of night as a creature that licks objects into oblivion.

We regret the loss of the children’s lives. But those children were already worse than dead because they were being taught to forget Islam in that American-funded school. They were bound for Hell but because of our actions have now become flowers of Paradise …

David remembers how back in the 1980s, when the Salang Tunnel to the north of Kabul was an important supply route for the Soviet Army, there were several plans by the US-backed guerrillas to blow it up. But because the tunnel was of such key importance, the Soviets guarded it day and night and nothing was ever allowed to obstruct the traffic inside it — you couldn’t just park a truck full of explosives in the middle and then walk out, having set the timer going. The only possible way of collapsing the tunnel was for someone to blow themselves up in there. The Afghans were appalled when the Americans suggested this to them. No one volunteered because suicide was a sin. The path would not fork at the moment of the explosion, sending the bomber to Paradise, the infidels to Hell. No, the Afghans told the Americans then, it would deliver both parties to Allah’s Inferno.

The statement now continues:

The blameless Muslim adults who have died are like the blameless Muslims who died in the attacks on the Twin Towers: Allah has sent them to Paradise …

The age David is, in the middle years of his life, he is equally responsible for the young and the old. Those above him and those below. As he drives he places a hand on Marcus’s arm to transmit comfort. The bones of the Englishman are thin under the weight of his palm.

It was in the Pakistani city of Peshawar that he had met Zameen, when he was twenty-seven years old, a dealer in gems. Someone who knew by heart the co-ordinates of where to locate various stones. Spinel: 34° 26’N, 64° 14’E. Emerald: 35° 24’59”N, 69° 45’39”E. Someone who knew that Kublai Khan had paid as much as 170,000 ting for Afghan rubies. And that the world’s earliest known spinel was discovered in a Buddhist tomb near Kabul in 101 BC.

In Peshawar a ruby had suddenly materialised at his feet one day at dusk. He leaned closer because of the lack of light and saw that it was a sphere of embroidery silk. There were others around him. Emeralds. Sapphires. Opals. They had leapt out of the door at the top of a staircase a few yards from him, unravelling as they came in a waterfall and then a river of loveliness. A young woman stood there holding the other end of the red filament that was in his hand, and for a few seconds they had remained linked by it, looking at each other.

Pure distilled life, a beautiful child behind her was stretching his body in a high-armed yawn, his shirt rising up to reveal his navel.

CASA IS FOLDING a sheet of paper in half. In the light of the lantern resting on the ground near by, the paper is bright in his hands. He is swift though careful. A series of ten folds — some small, others spanning the entire length of the sheet — and the plane is ready. Gripping it between his forefinger and thumb, he walks towards a clearing. He releases the plane a few times into the air to test its arc. After a number of adjustments, he walks to another section of this disused expanse of land behind his home.

He raises the small white plane above his head and puts his other hand into his breast pocket. He strikes the match against the bark of a nearby tree without looking, introducing a smell of smoke into the air, and brings the fire to the aeroplane’s tail. The flame touches it almost caressingly and the white paper ignites.

He releases the burning shape, watching it glide along the low tree branches.

He walks away then, travelling in the opposite direction to the airborne fire, turning around only when he is fifteen or so yards from where he was, his eyes all intensity and seriousness. The plane — or what remains of it — comes to rest precisely where he had wanted it, and the surrounding dry grass begins to burn. The flames grow quickly in size and strength. He covers his ears and the ground erupts in an explosion, a fountain of earth or a small cypress tree rising seven feet into the air. The stones and the larger pieces of soil fall back immediately but particles of finer dust float sideways, slowly drifting with the breeze.

He had found the mine thirty minutes ago, had immediately warned the others in the surrounding houses against venturing out, telling women to make sure all the children were in, and then set to work. It was from the time of the Soviets. Perhaps as old as he was. He dripped petrol onto the grass above it. After an early childhood spent in the company of bird-stunning catapults, and the later years with various guns in the jihad training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan, he knew he could make the paper plane land on the target precisely. At several locations around him are planes whose trajectory he had been unable to hone, those that had looped or corkscrewed away towards this or that high branch.

Once he had seen a mine detonating in a grove of pomegranate trees with such force that the skin of every fruit on every branch had cracked, the red seed spilling out.

He enters the small brick building he shares with seven others, mostly taxi drivers — like he used to be — or day labourers who work in the centre of the city not far away. After the US invasion, he — someone with links to the Taliban and al-Qaeda — had begun to drive taxis, first in Kabul and then here in Jalalabad. One day he took a passenger to a poppy farm beyond the northern outskirts of the city and ended up being introduced to the people there, Nabi Khan’s men, and he has been with them since.

Even though he wishes to take off his shirt and enter his bed, he performs his ablutions and begins to wait for the time to say the night prayer. Today was a long day and he is tired, but Nabi Khan’s organisation has achieved all it hoped. A message had come from Pakistan that if they could arrange this spectacle — the proposal had been sent to Peshawar last month — then they’d have funding and support for other greater missions, culminating in the eventual taking of Usha, Nabi Khan’s home base somewhere to the south of the city. Though nothing was made explicit, the message that came down the Khyber Pass from Pakistan was from a former Pakistani Army officer by the name of Fedalla. He had been at the ISI, the Pakistani spy agency, but when Afghanistan was attacked in 2001, he had resigned in protest because the Pakistani government had chosen to side with the Americans instead of the Taliban. Some say he had not resigned but had been forced to leave. When the Taliban were uprooted he had smiled and said that the Americans should not exult: ‘The war hasn’t ended. The real war is about to begin.’ He is renegade, they say, a rogue. He and other like-minded individuals in Pakistan are indispensable in the jihad against the Americans and their Afghan supporters. The message he had sent ended with an exhortation not to lose heart, never to give up the struggle against Islam’s enemies:

When Nimrod built a pyre to burn Allah’s prophet Ibrahim, the hoopoe carried water in its beak and released it onto the flames from above. An onlooker, some Dick Cheney of his time, asked the hoopoe whether it thought the two drops of water would put out the mighty blaze. ‘I don’t know,’ replied the bird. ‘All I know is that when Allah makes a list of those who built this fire and those who tried to put it out, I want my name to be in the second column.’

Casa listens to the muezzin and spreads the prayer mat on the floor. Night has fallen and the call to the last prayer of the day has begun to issue from the minarets. The mechanism of the Islamic world functioning with precision.

3. Out of Separations

THE SOUND OF AN APPROACHING VEHICLE brings Lara to a window. A tree quivers and shakes in the glass pane, its leaves outlined in bright light against the sky. Walking away from the book she has been reading and the lamp that burns in an alcove beside her chair, she emerges from the house to meet the Englishman in the darkness. She stops upon drawing near and, burying her face in her hands, begins to weep silently. She hears him cover the distance between them. Placing her face on his chest she releases the sobs, her hands clutching the lapels of his jacket, the fabric drenched in smoke. When he did not return yesterday she was certain he had died somewhere. The long hours of imagining the absolute worst, too afraid to approach the radio.

He puts his arms around her and at their touch she tightens her grip on the lapels, thinking it is an attempt at separation. A brief squeal-like sound of protest, until she realises he wishes to hold her. They stand joined like this for two minutes. In the darkness surrounding them, her white clothes seem to glow. Light from the lamp had soaked into them.

Going past the rosemary plant that is said never to grow taller than Christ, she brings him into the house. She knows now from one of his notebooks on perfume that rosemary increases in breadth rather than height after thirty-three years.

He requests with a gesture and she dilutes condensed milk in water and brings it to a boil for him to drink. Through all this they do not say a word. She is still trembling with sorrow. Only when she is in another section of the house to wash the tears off her face does she think of the man who had driven Marcus here. She returns to see him standing beside Marcus. He holds in his earth-covered hands a bottle of whisky. He must have gone off into the night to dig for it the moment he arrived. Like a gold muscle or sinew he pours a measure of it into Marcus’s milk.

*

Past midnight, and all three of them are motionless, her fingers interlaced with Marcus’s where he lies in a bedroom on the ground floor. David in a chair on the other side of the room.

‘A daughter, a wife, a grandson,’ Marcus had been saying earlier. ‘You could say this place took away all I had.’ She was sitting beside him on the bed, as now. ‘I could so easily appear to be one of those unfortunate white men you hear about, who thought too lovingly of the other races and civilisations of the world, who left his own country in the West to set up home among them in the East, and was ruined as a result, paying dearly for his foolish mistake. His life smashed to pieces by the barbarians surrounding him.’

David’s eyes seemed fixed on some random detail in a corner.

‘But, you see, the West was involved in the ruining of this place, in the ruining of my life. There would have been no downfall if this country had been left to itself by those others.’

‘Don’t do this,’ Lara had said quietly. ‘You must try to sleep.’

Now she stands up and turns the small wheel at the side of the lamp, reducing the diameter of light so that darkness appears to take a step closer. A thought she dislikes. ‘I’ll be in the room next door tonight in case you need something. Just on the other side of this wall, I’ll listen for you.’

‘So it is that we make links out of separations,’ he mutters.

Books are stacked high on the bed in the adjoining room, and as she is clearing them David enters and begins to help. They have exchanged only a few words so far, and now too they work in silence.

Through stories we judge our actions before committing them, said the Englishman, and so this was a house of readers, declaring a citizenship of the realm of the mind. She has seen five different editions of The Leopard here, four each of In a Free State and Rustam and Sohrab. Each beloved book has more than one copy — some small with the text crowded into perhaps too few pages, others where the print and the page are both generously proportioned. At first she hadn’t understood but by now she does. Sometimes there is a need to take pleasure in a favourite book for its story line alone, and the smaller editions facilitate this because the eye moves fast along a closely printed page. At other times one wishes to savour language — the rhythm of sentences, the precision with which a given word has been studded into a phrase — and on such occasions the larger size helps to slow one down, pause at each comma. Dawdling within a landscape.

When the bed is free she thanks him, and he glances at her and then she watches him disappear along a darkened corridor, towards the distant painted wall which is covered in the long wash of moonlight from the window, the numerous pinks and reds. The soles of his shoes are worn the way the edges of erasers become rounded with use. As though he walks around correcting his mistakes.

She wonders if his eyes and the quality of his gaze are always those of someone on the verge of sleep — or are they of someone who has not finished waking up?

During the first fever-haunted hours and days, her mind had shimmered with the things she had encountered in this house. They were desert mirages. Phenomena she could not really be sure she had seen. She would separate herself from the sheets and go down the darkened staircase just to check. In the kitchen cinnamon sticks were indeed being stored in a plastic box that had once contained a video cassette. Marcus must have dropped the jar accidentally and then placed the spice in whatever came to hand. It is 1573, she read the summary printed on the box, by the light of a struck match, and Japan is being torn apart by a bloody civil war …

*

Becoming aware of movement during the night she comes out to find David at the kitchen table.

She turns to leave, thinking he might wish to be alone. His back is towards her but the amount of light in the room has increased at her approach, the candle reflecting brightly off her white clothes, the brightness flung up the walls. He turns around.

‘Forgive me, I thought it was Marcus,’ she says.

‘No, it’s me.’

Hesitantly she enters and stands across the table from him and he gestures towards a chair.

‘I thought he needed something,’ she says.

There is no movement from him. To you, insane world, only one reply: I refuse. She thinks of this line from a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva.

‘I am sorry to hear you have been unwell,’ he says. ‘Quite a tough journey you made to get here.’

‘Marcus has been kind. I’ll leave in a few days.’

‘He said you work at the Hermitage. Qatrina made beautiful paintings when she had the time.’

She knows. The bottles for Marcus’s perfumes, and their stoppers, were designed by her, as well as the mazes of calligraphy and flowers to be etched on the glass.

‘Sometimes I shudder at the books up there,’ she says. ‘They are after all a reminder of someone who lost her reason in the face of cruelty. Did you know her well?’

‘I loved her. She was endlessly kind in her personal conduct. But there was something very hard about her intelligence at times. She would not have agreed with what Marcus was saying earlier.’

‘No?’

‘The cause of the destruction of Afghanistan, she said to me towards the end of her life, is the character and society of the Afghans, of Islam. Communism wasn’t the ideal solution to anything but, according to her, her fellow countrymen would have resisted change of any kind.’ He stops, no doubt given pause by his remark about Communism in the presence of a Russian. ‘Whenever Marcus spoke the way he did earlier, she would ask him to remember the circumstances of his father’s death.’

He has opened the outside door and is standing framed within it, looking up at the sky. According to the Afghans each star represents a victim of the wars of the last quarter-century.

‘Did Zameen ever mention to you a Soviet soldier named Benedikt Petrovich?’

‘Not that I recall.’

‘Or someone called Piotr Danilovich?’

‘I’m sorry, no.’ He looks at his wrist watch and switches on the radio, the volume low. ‘I couldn’t sleep so I thought I’d come and wait for the next news bulletin, to see if there have been any developments in Jalalabad.’

It is four-thirty. The radio informs them that the gangs who roam the streets looking for children to kidnap, to harvest their eyes and kidneys, had attempted to drag away several of the half-dead ones from the site of the explosion.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t have started the school,’ he says after switching off the radio. ‘A provocation to the jihadis.’

She doesn’t know what to say.

‘I’ll go back to Jalalabad very early in the morning but I’ll return in the evening. Would you please tell Marcus?’

‘Of course.’

‘Thank you. Goodnight.’

After he has gone up to his room, she sits in the chair, looking out now and then at the silhouettes of the trees, the sudden startling bats that appear out of nowhere like flickering ink blots. Quite a tough journey you made to get here. In her room she looks through the sheaf of letters Benedikt sent home from this far country. Princess Marya, learning of her brother’s wound only from the newspapers and having no definite information, was getting ready to go in search of him … When her courage had failed just before an earlier journey to Afghanistan, Lara had encountered this sentence in Tolstoy’s great book and become resolute again. As she is putting the letters back in a pocket within her handbag, her fingers slip through a tear in the lining and touch something. She closes her eyes the moment she pulls out the small cellophane-wrapped sweet into the light. Unable to bear the sight of it. They were loved by her husband, the colour of strawberries. After she made him give up cigarettes he had become addicted to these. She doesn’t know what to do with it now, her breath awry, and then in great hurry she extracts it from the crackling wrapper and places it in her mouth, her teeth working very fast, consuming it, letting it go down into her body.

As in a lyric the moon glitters like a jewel. Through the pane she watches the pomegranate trees, the blossoms and the foliage that would be dripping with dew in the morning.

She had taken with her the gift of a single pomegranate when she went to visit Piotr Danilovich last December, having located him after all the years. When he returned from Afghanistan he had failed to adjust to life, becoming silent like all soldiers who come back from a war. There was a period about which he would speak somewhat vaguely to Lara, but which she knew from other sources to be a time of mental collapse. Now he lived a hundred or so kilometres outside Moscow, in a place known as the House of Ten Thousand Christs.

Bringing with her the crowned, brass-coloured fruit wrapped in black tissue paper, Lara had gone to meet him through the thickly falling snow, to that monastery whose central icon of Christ had been lent at one time to armies, to be carried into battles against the Crimean Tartars. Faith going to war. The Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan had called the rebels dukhi, Russian for ghosts, never knowing when they would arrive, never understanding how they could slip away suddenly, the only explanation being that they had otherworldly assistance.

Piotr Danilovich’s responsibility at the sacred House of Ten Thousand Christs was to repair damaged images, his fingers smeared with resin and ink and pigment, dissolved gold under his fingernails. There was a period during the Soviet rule when the great mosque at Leningrad was turned into a weapons depot. And so wheat was stored at the monastery during the Soviet years, the icons rotting away out of neglect in the back rooms, being eaten by rats.

‘How did you find me?’ he asked.

‘My husband, Stepan Ivanovich, was in the military. One of his friends told me about you, about the story — or rumour — that you had tried to defect with Benedikt but had changed your mind and returned.’

‘You say your husband was in the military. Has he left?’

‘He died this time last year.’

‘So you are the wife of that Stepan Ivanovich.’ His voice remained low throughout her visit and he kept his head very still when he talked.

Three officers had been put on trial for killing prisoners in Chechnya, torturing those suspected of being guerrillas or supporters of the rebellion against the Russian government. Stepan Ivanovich had served as character witness for two of them. If we have in our custody someone who knows where a suitcase full of explosives is planted, set to go off in a few hours, but who refuses to talk, do we not have the right to hurt him into revealing the information — burn him, freeze him? This would have been his line of defence.

‘I am sorry for your loss,’ Piotr said.

She had nodded, looking out at the snow lying in front of the building, then turning to him. With his thinness, and the darkness of his eyes, he seemed to her a figure stepped out of the margins of one of the icons, aged beyond his years.

The pomegranate was on a table close to the fireplace.

She slit it open now. The outer layer of scarlet seeds had been warmed by the flames. The temperature of menstrual blood, of semen just emerged from a man’s body.

‘Afghan fruit vendors would sometimes inject poison into the oranges, melons and pomegranates they sold us Soviet soldiers.’

*

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

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

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

‘Is it something distinctive?’

‘Unforgettable. Benedikt mentioned it in one of his letters home.’

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

‘Look there, Lara. That tree with pink blossoms.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Of course not.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘I am surprised the tree has survived.’

‘It even produces some fruit, later in the year.’

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

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

‘There is no need,’ she shakes her head but then murmurs a thanks.

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A man and a woman.

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David thought he’d never encounter this man again, but he would see him only a few hours later under circumstances even more murderous. He’d learn that his name was Fedalla. And, some years from now, he would be one of the first people David would suspect of being involved when Zameen and Bihzad disappeared.

Blood on his face and clothes like a wild cursive script, he arrived at the US embassy around noon and was admitted when he produced his passport. The nurse had just finished attending to him when buses began pulling up outside the main gate. Hundreds of armed men streamed out in wave upon wave and began jumping over the perimeter fence, firing guns and hurling Molotov cocktails.

There were six Marines at the embassy but they were not allowed to open fire. They were in any case massively outnumbered. Within minutes, one of them, a twenty-year-old from Long Island, had caught a bullet in the head.

The rioters were led by a gang of students from the fundamentalist Islamic wing of the city’s university. Inspired by the events in Tehran and the fire-breathing triumph of Ayatollah Khomeini, they had been waiting for a chance to demonstrate their own power.

David, and 139 embassy personnel and the dying Marine, found themselves behind the steel-reinforced doors of a vault on the third floor as they waited for the Pakistani government to send police or military troops.

The vault echoed to the sound of a sledgehammer coming down on CIA code equipment that could not be allowed to fall into the hands of the mob, a mob now fifteen thousand strong.

Around and below them, the building was on fire, the floor of the vault beginning to get intensely hot, the tiles blistering and warping under their feet. The other Marines were still out there but the request from them to open fire was repeatedly denied as it would only incite the riot further. When the ground floor had completely filled with smoke the Marines retreated upstairs to join the others in the vault, dropping tear-gas canisters down each stairwell as they came.

Despite pleas from the ambassador and the CIA station chief, hour after hour passed without any rescue attempt by the Pakistanis. Giant columns of gasoline-scented smoke issued from the building, visible from miles away — miles away where rioters arriving in government-owned buses were also attacking the American School while children lay cowering in locked rooms.

The mob at the embassy climbed onto the roof and pounded on the hatch door that led down into the vault. David, looking up at the ceiling, watched it buckle and twist from the blows over the course of an hour, the oxygen running out, many around him fainting or vomiting. But the hatch door held and as the sun set over Islamabad the rioters dissolved away into the darkness.

From the vault they emerged with the body of the dead Marine. Two Pakistani employees of the embassy lay on the first floor, killed by asphyxiation and then badly burnt. An American airman had been beaten unconscious and left to die in the fire.

Climbing onto the roof David saw the arrival of a few Pakistani troops at last. They stood around, and David thought he recognised one of them — the young man who had been behind the steering wheel of the car. The photographs that were taken of these moments would later confirm his suspicions. Fedalla. So he was in the army.

Later that evening David, and most of the others who had feared for their lives in the vault for over five hours, were amazed to learn that President Carter had just telephoned Pakistan’s dictator General Zia and thanked him for his help.

In the near future, upon joining the CIA, David would know that the explanation for some events existed in another realm, a parallel world that had its own considerations and laws. As he watched Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington accept the gratitude of the United States and claim that Pakistani Army troops had reacted ‘promptly, with dispatch’, he had little idea of the larger things at stake, didn’t know why the United States could not afford to dwell on the issue. Khomeini’s revolution had meant the loss of important listening posts in Iran that had been trained on the Soviet Union. General Zia had accepted a CIA proposal to locate new facilities on Pakistani soil.

Strange sacrifices were required in that shadow-filled realm, strange compromises. In another month the Soviet Union would invade Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s corrupt and brutal military dictator would become a fêted ally of not just the United States but of most of the Western world, David himself present on a number of occasions where the man was extravagantly celebrated and flattered, his own voice adding to the dishonest chorus.

‘LARA CARRIES WITH HER a leaf from the Cosmos Oak that grows in the Kremlin,’ Marcus tells David. ‘Her cosmonaut father was killed when his spacecraft malfunctioned during the return to Earth in 1965.’

The two men are at the lake, beside the small fire that David has built. Night insects, knees and elbows of finest wire, cross and recross the zone of light around the flames.

‘There were rumours he knew while still in orbit that he was doomed, that his death screams during the dive back towards the world were recorded by American monitoring stations.’

‘Where is she now? Does she know we are out here?’

Marcus points to a lit window on the first floor of the house. ‘She knows where we are. I have told her she’ll never be left alone here again. One of us will always be with her.’ Marcus has a rose blossom with him, and he smells its petals from time to time. It is from one of the plants which he has patiently retaught their former elegance.

David brings more wood for the fire, two sword-length dead branches which he breaks into eight sections, leaning them onto the burning pyramid, at evenly spaced points.

He looks towards her window. The Cosmos Oak was planted to mark the first manned space flight by Yuri Gagarin, he knows.

‘Her father’s last journey had been timed to celebrate a day of International Solidarity,’ Marcus says, ‘and the Kremlin ordered the launch despite the chief designer’s refusal to sign the flight endorsement papers for the reentry vehicle.’

‘I remember when we landed on the moon in 1969. Jonathan took me to have what they were calling “moon burgers”. There was a small American flag planted on top of the bun.’ He smiles at the memory. ‘I was about twelve, he must have been eighteen.’

A few minutes before midnight they walk up to the house to collect Lara — waiting for her by the threshold’s cypress trees until she emerges with a lamp — and then the three of them go to David’s car to listen to the news bulletin. The batteries of the kitchen radio are lifeless due to use and David will have to pick up new ones tomorrow. A night journey, along the curved sequence of Persian lilac trees. Marcus says that when Muhammad’s disciples were leaving his house, he would put his hand out of the door and the light from his palm would light their way home.

There is a trace of acacia scent in the air as there is the faint presence of Alexander’s name in the word Kandahar, as there is the presence of Ahmed in Anna Akhmatova’s surname, she whose lines Lara had quoted during a conversation yesterday: As if I was drinking my own tears from a stranger’s cupped hands.

They get in and close the door against the sound of the lake water and the million leaves, against insects hungry for light.

The news tells them that an angry statement has appeared, purporting to be from those who choreographed the bombing. They wish to point out the hypocrisy of the Americans who condemn this killing of the children but whose president had shaken hands with the people who in the 1980s had blown up a passenger plane just as it took off from Kandahar airport, carrying Afghan schoolchildren bound for indoctrination in the Soviet Union.

‘Is that true?’ Lara asks, turning towards David, but he doesn’t answer.

Apart from that there is nothing about the Jalalabad bombing in the bulletin. Afterwards they sit in the darkness for a while, the various metals and mechanisms of the car cooling around them, Marcus having gone to the house.

‘In the States we call them chinaberry trees,’ David tells her as they slowly walk under the Persian lilacs, going towards the lake. ‘The berries are poisonous. My brother and I would dissolve their pulp in a deep slow-moving part of the river and when the fish passed through those waters they’d be stunned. We’d just pick them up with our hands.’

‘Marcus told me about your brother.’

A 180-person military task force scrutinises the hills, fields, and jungles of Vietnam to determine the fate of more than a thousand Americans unaccounted for there. In Vietnam, as well as Laos and Cambodia, witnesses are interviewed, crash sites are excavated, ponds are drained, and bone fragments are sifted from shallow graves.

Men lost in long-forgotten ambushes.

Men lost in falling B52 bombers.

Men last seen alive in the hands of their captors.

‘He was twenty. 1971. Last month I was looking at a photo of him from that time. How young he was, how amazingly young we all look at that age!’ Like one of those miniscule new leaves found at the very tip of a branch, the ones that can be crushed into a watery green smear between thumb and forefinger — so unformed, so … resistanceless.

The fire is out when they arrive at the lake, just an exhalation of the red embers and a column of smoke that changes direction every few instants.

‘I read somewhere that there once existed in Burma a ruby so large and vivid that when the king placed it in a bowl of milk, the milk turned red.’ She is blowing into the fire while he looks for pieces of wood that might be lying around.

‘The watch my father gave Jonathan when he left for Vietnam had a tiny spinel inside it, attached to one of the plates that held the mechanism. He said it was from Afghanistan. That was one of the reasons I came to this country, all those years ago. Always wanted to visit Afghanistan because of that small jewel. And then of course the Soviet Union invaded and my interest deepened.’ He’d visit Afghanistan’s gem mines even during its Soviet occupation when no Americans were permitted. Slipping in from Pakistan and out again without leaving an official footprint anywhere.

‘You helped the anti-Soviet guerrillas, the dukhi? Yes?’

Nothing from him. The sound of the wood splitting as the fire comes back to life. The water swaying.

‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘The two empires hated each other. I know that when Soviet troops entered Afghanistan, the reaction in the United States was, “We now have the chance to give the Soviets their Vietnam.” Revenge.’

But he is shaking his head. ‘It’s possible that everyone else was fighting the Soviets for the wrong reasons, was mercenary or dishonest, faking enthusiasm due to this or that greed. Even wanting revenge, yes. But I never doubted that my own reasons were good, genuine.’

Just as it doesn’t matter to a person when he is in a hall of mirrors — he himself knows he is the one who is real. The confusion is for the onlookers.

He says: ‘How I feel about the mayhem I helped unleash, how I live with that, is a separate matter, but my opposition to the principles behind the Soviet Union is still there when I look — my opposition to what the Soviet empire did to those who lived in it, those who were born in it.’

MARCUS TAKES DOWN Virgil from the shelf. On the cover is a painting of Aeneas fleeing the burning destruction of Troy. The great broken heart of the city in the background. Aeneas is accompanied by his young son — a path to the future — and is carrying his aged father over his shoulder — the reminder of the past. The old man clutches the statues of the household gods in his right hand, and because the other hand is out of sight in the folds of his cloak, absent beyond the wrist, Marcus thinks for a moment of himself. If so, then David is Aeneas — he had offered to carry Marcus up the tall minaret in Jalalabad. The little boy, is he Bihzad?

He opens the book to the contents page and lets his eye slide down the list of chapters, moving deeper into the story rung by rung, Aeneas establishing an empire but along the way losing his soul. A flicker in Marcus’s eye: something slides out from between the pages and falls onto the floor. It is one of the pieces of absorbent white card on which he tested perfumes. He raises it to his face and convinces himself that it smells of Zameen, however faintly, of the fragrance he had blended especially for her.

After being forced to accompany Nabi Khan into battle, to tend to his wounded soldiers, he had ended up in the refugee camps in Peshawar, surrounded by millions of other traumatised Afghans, displaced by the rebellion against the Soviets. He didn’t know where Qatrina was, hadn’t seen her since Gul Rasool took her with him into his battles. Then one day in 1986 he discovered where in Peshawar Gul Rasool was based: he was living in a mansion in the wealthy University Town area of the city with his family and band of fighters. The blossom sitting heavy as flocks of white birds on the branches, Nabi Khan also lived near by in that area wreathed by magnolia trees, as did other tribal leaders and warlords, holy warriors all, all made rich by the hundreds of millions of dollars pouring into the jihad. Marcus went to see Gul Rasool to ask where Qatrina was, and towards the end of their conversation he felt a sweet strong stab from somewhere. Thinking back sequentially, moment by moment, he connected it to the faint sound of glass shattering in the room next door. Outside he had to lean against a palm tree for support — a vial of Zameen’s scent had been broken behind the thick mahogany door. She was letting him know she was there.

He couldn’t have asked Gul Rasool anything about the women in the house and now didn’t know how to proceed. The scent was a message from her — a call, a prompt. Through one of the servants in the house he discovered that a young woman had recently been brought there, that she was from the Street of the Storytellers in the centre of Peshawar.

Marcus went to the fabled Street and, after an hour or so of questions and answers with the locals amid the manic activity and noise, climbed two flights of dark stairs, finding himself at a small flat. Almost in tears he knocked several times and then forced his way in, suddenly past caring. Only a short while later he heard someone follow him in. He placed his hands and an ear against the wall. Feeling along it over many minutes, as though trying to locate the heart of a live organism. He silenced his breathing as much as possible and resisted the scrape of fabric and skin against the wall. Then suddenly he was overpowered and pinned to the floor with a foot on the side of his face. He strained up to see a gun pointed at his temple, the metal gleaming even in the small amount of light coming in through the window.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I am looking for my daughter.’ His mouth crushed against the floor. ‘A young woman named Zameen.’

The pressure of the boot slowly eased off his head.

‘I have reason to believe she lives here,’ he continued.

‘What’s your name?’ he was asked, in American-accented English this time.

‘Marcus Caldwell.’ He sat up. The man had been leaning down towards him and now straightened, his face moving through a rectangle of light from the open window. Marcus saw that he was a young Caucasian. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is David Town,’ the American said and switched on the light. ‘Zameen has told me all about you, about Qatrina.’

David would never reveal anything about the activities hidden behind his gem business, and Marcus knew not to ask, having guessed more or less immediately that he was in espionage. He now said he had been away for a period and had recently returned to find no trace of Zameen and her son here.

‘I know where she is. She has a child?’

‘Where is she?’

‘Are you the father?’

‘Where is she?’

Marcus told him where he thought she was, accepting the younger man’s scepticism that the clue had been provided by perfume.

They eventually learned that since the day of Marcus’s visit, Nabi Khan had carried out a raid on Gul Rasool’s mansion in University Town. There were regular pitched battles between rival warlords in Peshawar’s streets, car bombs and assassinations, missiles and rocket-propelled grenades fired into buildings and crowds. Nabi Khan had carried away several of Gul Rasool’s women and children during the attack, to be exploited or sold, Bihzad among them. Several people had died, including Zameen.

All this knowledge was incremental, years in the acquiring.

Marcus smells now the few molecules of the perfume that still inhabit the fibres of the white card, Virgil open on his lap. Qatrina had designed the container — a map of the world and the word Zameen acid-etched onto the glass. The space inside him seems to expand when the fragrance enters him.

Stamen and flint and petal and river moss. Afghanistani women, in the songs they sing, do not desire Allah’s Paradise after death, wishing instead to become streams and grasses, the breeze and the dust. The soil placed upon them in the grave, they sing, they’ll take as their lover.

The nail had gone through the card. A hole the size of a cell in a beehive. He puts it back in the Aeneid.

LARA TURNS THE PAGES of the atlas until she holds the United States of America in her hands. Milk is a river in Montana, lit by her candle. Heart is a river in North Dakota. Rifle, Dinosaur, Delhi. These are towns in Colorado. Antlers. Two Medicine. Twentynine Palms. Talking about Usha, Teardrop, the lake outside this window, he had said a lake named Tear of the Clouds is the source of the Hudson River. She searches for it now. New York City. Marcus has told her that David was there in 1993 when Muslim terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center for the first time. Oldland, Montana, was where he was born in 1957.

She follows him with her fingertip: to university in California and then back to Montana. One grandfather was a watchsmith, the child David coming into contact with gemstones through him. The father — originally a farmer’s son — had been encouraged by his schoolteachers to apply to Harvard, and the mother was a doctor’s secretary and eventually a nurse, rolling her hair into the car window so it would jolt her awake if she fell asleep during the long commute to the nursing school. As he spoke, had she detected something like satisfaction in him? A contentment at how his family had been given the chances to improve themselves over the decades and generations, slowly and patiently encouraged to thrive by America in American sunlight?

She looks up, at the possibility of a sound from Marcus’s room, fully alert. She inclines her head for the best angle, recalling the aunt who when attending the Mariinsky Theatre always sat high up at the back of the house, saying the acoustics were better up there even if she couldn’t make out the expressions of the singers or the details of the costumes.

Nothing but silence from the other side of this wall where Muhammad sits dressed in Islam’s green with his hand plunged into a clay pitcher of water — consolidating and expanding the Islamic empire by sealing a deal with a woman.

She has noticed how Marcus tries to hide his missing hand. She wonders if ‘hide’ is still the correct word. She releases her mind into this small consideration. Can you hide something that is not there to begin with? He is trying to hide the fact of his missing hand.

She closes the atlas and moves towards her bed. These are the rooms where Qatrina had lost her reason, Marcus having to tell her there was no need to be afraid just because the bar of red soap was producing white lather. Benedikt and Lara’s own mother, someone who graduated from the Philological Faculty of Leningrad University and had worked as an engineer and a translator, was declared schizophrenic and confined for six years to a psychiatric hospital prison where drug treatment was administered. She was a civil rights activist and was arrested in 1969 for participating in a demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Lara and Benedikt, their father already consumed in fire above the planet, were billeted with various relatives from then on, some as powerless as them, others well connected — in these houses even the brooms were softer. But nothing could be done, no network of influence and protection available, when Benedikt was summoned by the army.

To be sent to the feared war against ghosts in Afghanistan.

To become a ghost himself.

4. Night Letter

CYANIDE CAN BE EXTRACTED from apricots, Casa knows. He had distilled it at a jihad training camp, injected it into the bodies of creatures. The memory comes to him as he walks past a flowering tree at the edge of a street in Jalalabad city centre, the flowers still not finished emptying themselves of scent this late in the afternoon. An ant travels up the trunk at the speed of a spark along a fuse wire.

Pencils. Lemons. Corn syrup. Dye. As he walks through the street he knows he could fabricate explosives from many things on the carts and in the shops around him. Sugar. Coffee. Paint. He even knows how to make a bomb out of his urine.

Three international military patrol vehicles go by containing khaki-clad soldiers, a clamorous knot developing in the traffic because all others have to make way for them. There are women and blacks among the soldiers, an attempt, Nabi Khan says, by the USA-led Western world to humiliate Muslims by having sows and apes be their new monarchs.

Word has come that the explosion outside the school has delighted the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the covert grouping of Pakistani military officers led by Fedalla. They have promised further help.

Casa himself has never attended a school, just various religious institutions. Attached to a number of which there was a military training camp. At about ten he had wanted permission to fight in Bosnia but he was told it was too far for someone so young. And the response was the same at eleven when he wanted to pursue martyrdom in Chechnya. By then he had been holding a Kalashnikov for three years. He knew the finger on the trigger was steadier during exhalation as opposed to during inhalation. He knew how to strip and clean the rifle blindfolded, and he could do it in sixty seconds. He had fired it from moving vehicles and had fired it in the darkness, had fired it after running for an hour to simulate the banging heartbeat of a battle. He was proud of the fact that it was a Soviet gun. The Koran told of Daud, the raw youth with no weapons or armour who had used Jaloot’s own sword to slay him, Jaloot the giant whom the Christians call Goliath, having felled him with a sling first; and so the Afghans had used captured Soviet weapons as the instruments of the evil Godless empire’s own destruction. The Koran being a guidance for all time, this method continues to be relevant. Of the sixty-six Tomahawk missiles fired at Afghanistan’s training camps in the 1990s, across thousands of miles from an American warship in the Arabian Sea, a number had failed to detonate — and these had been sold by al-Qaeda to the Chinese for millions of dollars.

Casa was present at a camp at the exact moment the missiles landed. He had been bowing before Allah and had just raised his forehead from the prayer mat. The needle of the small compass fitted at the head of the mat — to allow the faithful to always find the direction of Mecca — had started to spin at great speed just as it did in lightning storms. He was severely injured but Allah had spared his life, having better plans for him.

Because no true Muslim should shrink from killing in cold blood, his jihad training had included slitting the throats of sheep and horses while reciting the verse from the holy Koran which gives permission to massacre prisoners of war: It is not for the Prophet to have captives until he has spread fear of slaughter in the land. In the laboratories of the camps, stocked with labelled drums of various acids, acetones, cellulose, wood composite and aluminium powder, he had learned to mix methyl nitrate, had hit a small drop of it with a hammer to see it shatter the hammer. He blew up a car with a sack of fertiliser and ammonium nitrate fuel oil, the burning chassis travelling in an arc through the air to land a hundred yards away. He crumbled a boulder with twenty pounds of US-made C-4, and, for comparison, others with C-1, C-2, and C-3, and also with Czech Semtex. He knew the Americans were trying to get back from the Afghans the Semtex they had supplied for use in the Soviet jihad, so dangerous was the substance. During all this he chanted the sacred words of the Koran. I will instil terror in the hearts of the Infidels, strike off their heads, and strike off from them every fingertip.

The faces of women are on display around him but he keeps his eyes off them as he walks. Nowadays he doesn’t think of such matters but at one time he had dreamed of a wife, preferably one of the thousands upon thousands of Bosnian women who had been raped by the Serbs, many of them becoming pregnant so that the Bosnian men banished them. These men couldn’t contemplate raising a child who was half enemy. But Casa and his brothers at the camps and madrassas had felt it their duty to marry these women, and raise their children to become jihadis, who could go on to slaughter the Serbs whose blood they shared.

He arrives at the crossroads where someone is to pick him up. To take him to Nabi Khan at the poppy farm. There they’ll get ready and wait. Tonight, under cover of darkness, he and four others are going to Usha.

IN CITY OF GOD St Augustine records his belief that the peacock’s flesh has the God-given property of resisting putrefaction after death. Marcus withdraws his hand from deep within the bird’s breast, having plunged the scissors into the topiary figure to snip at a branch. He is in the shattered glasshouse to the west of the house, most of its panes missing. The candle flame shudders as he turns around, suddenly aware of the three men standing at the lake’s edge. He walks to the house where Lara sits reading by lamp at the kitchen table.

‘Stay in here, Lara,’ he says to her without stepping in. ‘But could I please have the light for a moment?’

She stands up perhaps too fast. In a moment of vertigo she has experienced before with the books in this house, she feels as though the things printed on the paper would drain away through the hole in the centre of the page. From the door she sees him disappear along the curved path, catching the last hint of his greyed blue jacket amid the rustle of the long grasses.

She is in darkness. She switches on the cell phone she brought with her from St Petersburg, though there is no signal for it here. In the silver haze of its light she goes out and moves along the path until she can see him in the distance, talking to the three figures near the tree split in two by Qatrina’s despondent love for her countrymen.

She stands there and then David arrives from his day in Jalalabad, the beams of the car scattering on the low foliage. He gets out and joins the group, a voice from there drifting towards her whenever the wind spins around — she realises she has begun to recognise the voices of these two men.

‘The doctor in Usha is away for a few days,’ David walks up and tells her. ‘One of the old men out there got injured last week but the wound he thought was healing is suddenly giving him trouble today. He’s hoping Marcus can help.’

They will not come into the house, she knows, afraid of the ghost of the perfume maker’s daughter. Of the Buddha, the suffering stone that had bled gold, that had been granted life by bullets.

‘I’ll get more light, to make it easier for Marcus.’

When she had appeared at Usha and asked for Marcus, she was mistakenly brought to the current doctor’s house, and his young daughter — the teacher at the one-roomed school Gul Rasool has permitted in Usha to please the United States — had lovingly taken charge of her. Before leaving for Russia she intends to visit the girl.

She follows David towards the lake, bringing a hurricane lamp and a flashlight. All things considered, the Afghans she has met have been helpful and kind towards her — with the exceptions of the boy who attacked her with the tyre iron, and the guide she had hired to bring her from Kabul to Usha, who had absconded with most of her money one night.

Marcus is leaning towards the bloody shoulder of the man sitting on a tree stump, and now with a sound of astonishment he extracts a piece of paper from within the gash. It is blood-soaked and folded tight to the size of a coin. The man attempts an explanation while Marcus tries to spread it to its full size: what appear to be verses of the Koran are written on the paper. As she doesn’t understand the language the aged man is speaking, Marcus explains,

‘It is a talisman. Given to him by someone at the mosque to make the wound heal. Instead of just wearing it around his neck he has inserted it into the wound, thinking it’ll speed up the process! That is why the bleeding won’t stop.’

She can smell the injury, the small percentage of blood in the air.

The man takes the paper from Marcus’s hands and begins to fold it again, both of them shaking their heads at each other and talking very fast — he obviously wishes to slot the holy words back under his skin.

The three strangers steal glances at her from time to time, their faces lovely to her, the beard of one fox-orange with henna, the eyes of another an uncontainable grapeblue. And Islam and its love of flowers! They have helped themselves to a pink rose from somewhere and are passing it between themselves.

One of the men, his skin the colour of violins in this light, says something in her direction. She realises it is ‘Rus.’

Russia.

She nods.

‘Rus,’ the man says again, grinning. And he makes a comment which elicits an identical reaction of surprise from David and Marcus. They ask him questions and soon the other visitors begin to contribute — a discussion with many gestures.

‘What are they saying?’ she asks, smiling. Old timers. Perhaps one of them had visited Russia in the past. She tells herself to restrain the expression on her face — her guide had told her that she smiles too much for a woman. One of the men shakes the rose in his hand, thrusts it at the others.

The talk continues and then she hears one of the men clearly and carefully utter the name Benedikt, syllable by syllable.

She is suddenly numb.

‘What did he just say?’

‘Nothing,’ David replies but she catches him exchange a glance with Marcus.

‘Didn’t he say Benedikt?’

‘No, no.’

A man is now drawing a shape on the dust between his feet. A lobed oblong with a stalk. An oak leaf? Like the one she has, like the one Benedikt carried with him. Or is she mistaken? It could just as easily be a quick map of Afghanistan.

David quickly rubs away the drawing with his hand, avoiding her eye, while Marcus pretends busyness, the face determinedly turned away from her.

‘They are just talking about a visit to Russia,’ Marcus says to her at last. ‘The Afghans are great travellers. Farming the valleys of California or journeying across the Australian deserts for trade.’

‘There is more than one Giovanni Khan in the Italian villages that their fathers saw in the battle heat of the Second World War,’ David adds; and, turning to Marcus, says, ‘Now, we must try to persuade him to keep the paper in the layers of the bandage and not in the wound itself …’

She can’t help but feel shut out. There is a profound uneasiness around them. Even the air and light feel different to her, and after standing at the edge of the group for a while she walks back to the house. Not sure what has just happened.

*

She is silent and subdued all evening, and retires to her room earlier than usual.

‘Do we tell her what the men said, David?’

‘She knows we are keeping something from her.’

One of the three men had said that Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan had all those years ago fought over the possession of a Soviet soldier. And that the soldier, named Benedikt, had had a leaf in his pocket. But his companions — contradicting him and offering alternatives — had made Marcus and David uncertain about every detail.

‘Did Benedikt bring a leaf with him?’

Marcus nods. ‘I think she mentioned it.’

Marcus is sitting against the painted lyre on the wall and it appears as though the instrument is strapped to his back, its frame showing on either side of his body, the curled ends protruding above his shoulders.

‘We have to tell her, David. That is why she is here, to know the truth about him.’

‘Let’s try to find out a little more on our own first. There is no need to worry her if it isn’t true.’

And if the truth is too terrible? David has allowed Marcus to believe that Zameen died at Gul Rasool’s villa in Peshawar, during a raid by Nabi Khan. That was what David was told originally. But the real facts — when he came upon them later, years later — weren’t something he could have revealed to Marcus.

‘Do you think Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan killed him, David?’

‘No, that’s not what they said. The two had just fought over him — probably over his pistol though they themselves had huge arsenals by then. They just needed an excuse to clash.’ Ancient tribal rivalries.

They are in the kitchen, David sitting on the doorsill, the moths feeding near by on the small blossoms that grow at the base of the cypress trees.

The candle stub goes out with a hiss. No light except the stars now, the moon not yet up. Each star is a drop of transparent nectar, just large enough to fill a moth’s stomach.

‘Is it possible Benedikt ended up in a Western country? Looking for him, she says, she came into contact with the parents of a soldier who did manage to make his way to America. They distrusted the letters he wrote to them from Chicago, convinced they had been written by the CIA.’

‘And the letters they sent him, he must have thought were dictated by the KGB.’

‘On American trains and buses he took snapshots of children and sent them for his sister’s little girl in Moscow.’

There was disagreement between the three men about what kind of leaf it was. One of them said he had heard it was a dried flower. Another that the soldier’s name was Ivan, was Nikolai. The fate some captured Soviet soldiers and defectors met at the hands of the Afghan warriors like Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan was horrifying. To save bullets they were buried alive. Or repeatedly hurled from a roof until dead. Thrown off mountainsides, nothing remaining of them but bones at the base of a cliff after the wolves had been at them. Many of these conscripts were mere children and the beautiful ones were raped and traded between persons, for a good knife or a bad gun, before being shot in disgust by an owner somewhere down the line. The Afghans could remain suspicious of the loyalty of the defecting Soviets and refuse to give them guns, and so, dead weight, they would be executed when a major offensive drew near. And given the chance the rebels of today would do all that and more to American soldiers, to the enemy cities and towns of their bodies.

*

Two a.m. and Lara steps out of the house quietly, not lighting the lamp until after she has gone some distance along the lake’s edge, in case a particle of light or a scrap of smoke alerts David or Marcus. She had felt distraught all evening and now the feeling has spilled over into something like determination, perhaps defiance. If they won’t tell her what the three visitors said earlier, she’ll go to Usha and try to find out for herself. The doctor’s daughter in Usha will help, help her locate the men who visited Marcus earlier. She is quite certain she will remember how to find the house where the father and daughter live. A house with apple trees in the courtyard. A nocturnal insect occasionally decides to accompany her then disappears back into the night. To the right of her is the lake. When they wished to end their lives, Afghanistan’s women often chose water instead of the noose or the knife in the breast. It was a final assertion of dignity, one last proclamation of their humanity. Why choose ropes or blades, the things used by men to overpower and kill animals?

She stumbles and the glass globe of the lamp, lit a moment ago like a jar of honey, is lost, the flame disappearing into fumes of oil and hot glass. She stands so still she imagines that even the flow of blood inside her body has been suspended, but then she forces herself to continue, arriving at Usha’s outermost house and then on into the maze of lanes towards the dark centre. She realises soon that she is lost and in a panic she turns back, her breath jagged, wondering how to align herself. A mosque, she knows, has a niche pointing towards the west, the direction of Mecca. Perhaps she should present herself at the biggest house in Usha, Gul Rasool’s mansion, and ask for help there.

When Marcus was away and she was alone in the house, she had looked out at dawn and seen a dog crossing the space between two trees with a bird in its mouth, the small head swinging from the limp neck, the hide on the animal’s snout corrugating in a snarl when it caught sight of her at the corner of its eye. She’d only just woken up and later wasn’t sure she had seen the disturbing sight. She now tells herself she is only imagining the low canine growl from somewhere up ahead. The mastiffs here are wolf battlers. The Afghan hounds can kill leopards.

The religion of Islam at its core does not believe in the study of science, does not believe the world runs along rational and predictable laws. Allah destroys the world each night and creates it again at dawn, a new reality that may or may not match the old one of yesterday, the Muslim clerics demanding a ban even on weather forecasts since only He can decide such a thing according to His will. And so in the darkness Lara feels as though she is buried alive under the ruins of the universe, under the weight of the extinguished and smashed suns and moons.

*

David plunges into waist-high grass in his hurry to reach Usha, to find Lara, his body scoring a deep black trench in the mass of grass blades silver-lit by the moon, the beam of the flashlight swinging wildly in the night. The sun provides heat because it is made of fire, and given the chill tonight it is possible to believe that the moon is carved from ice. He has cancelled the fears of landmines from his thinking. He remembers going out into the night with the Afghan rebels in the 1980s as they planted landmines along roads frequented by Soviet tanks, the explosion a few hours later tearing the turret off a T72 and hurling it and the gun several yards away, the thick heavy steel of the hull perforated like a colander. He had watched the rebels open up an unexploded Soviet bomb found in a field of wheat, a thousand-pounder, and extract the half-ton of explosive from it, using it to increase the power of the Chinese mine.

Hava hu, hava hu — he hears the call of a jackal from somewhere behind him just as he nears Usha. Or is it the djinn? Up there on the mountains are fronds of shining mist in extreme slow motion.

Before entering Usha he stands listening, looking for possible signs of her. In one of the volumes of paintings in the house, he has seen a jewel-like miniature from the sixteenth century, depicting Jalal in his search for the beautiful and winged Jamal, who encourages his quest by visiting him in the guise of a series of birds, by having him encounter trees on all of whose leaves her name is written, by having him converse with talking flowers and a drum, even kill a hostile member of his own family.

The doctor in Usha hadn’t brought Lara to Marcus’s house when she arrived there because, despite being a man of science, he believes in the djinn and in ghosts.

And now suddenly David knows where Lara has gone — to the physician’s house. He stops to orientate himself. The house, he remembers, has a large board outside it with the doctor’s name and qualifications painted on it, has the tops of several apple trees showing above the enclosure wall. Zameen said that upon visiting England for the first time as a child she was astonished to discover that the two halves of an apple were always symmetrical there.

He goes past the mosque in whose shadow Qatrina had had stones aimed at her. She had to wear the burka while they were killing her. Afterwards, as she lay on the ground, a man had gathered the hem of the burka and tied it into a knot and dragged her away as he would a bundle, and he grinned at his own ingenuity the while, as did the spectators. Blood was draining steadily through the holes of the embroidered eye-grille.

Next to the mosque is the house belonging to a widow. Marcus has told him how she had run off into the desert with her two teenage daughters at the end of 2001, having heard that the Americans were coming to rape and slaughter everyone they saw. Out there the three women had fallen into the hands of a group of Taliban men. The American soldiers arrived just in time to save their lives and honour, leading them back to this house.

Perhaps he has only imagined it but, a hundred yards ahead of him in this narrow lane, there is a movement, a graphite-grey form traversing the darkness at a diagonal. He raises the hand with the flashlight but there is no one at the end of the tunnel bored by the light. His other hand is pressed against a wall and he senses a wetness there — in the curved valley between thumb and forefinger. A swivel of the torch and the Night Letter, the shabnama, pasted onto the side of the house perhaps only minutes ago is revealed, the glue glistening under his light. He stands there reading the text and then turns away. Someone is going around posting these warnings to Americans and their Afghan sympathisers, swearing imminent extermination in the name of Allah. There is another stuck to the house across the lane. In nineteenth-century Montana, the number 3-7-77 would be pasted onto the houses of ‘undesirables’ in the middle of the night. An ultimatum by the Vigilantes to leave town. No one to this day knows what the number stands for and there are many theories. You have three hours, seven minutes and seventy-seven seconds to get out or face violence? Or are they the dimensions of a grave — three feet by seven feet by seventy-seven inches? One of David’s great-uncles was found hanging from a bridge in 1917 with the number pinned to his clothing.

He plays the beam into the next street. Several sheets are revealed on the walls there also.

She is out there, with demonic forces roaming free near her.

The grandson of a watchsmith, he appeals for leniency from the god who decrees the point of no return. The moment the arrow leaves the bow, the moment when sexual climax is unstoppable, the moment when poetic inspiration begins.

*

Casa moves into the shadow of a wall when the clouds slide apart above him, the moon released. In subconscious reassurance he touches the Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, the metal cold to the fingertip. Allah sent down iron, says the Koran, so He in the unseen world may know who supports Him and His messengers.

He uses the last of his fifty sheets to wipe the glue from his hands, crumpling and tossing it onto the water collected in a ditch, making it bounce off his upper arm. All of this without making a single noise. He is a veteran of ambushes that could be called off after three days because someone had just exhaled audibly.

Travelling through the darkened landscape, he and the four others had arrived at the edge of Usha sometime after midnight to post the shabnama. Because the Koran calls upon Muslims to create alarm among non-believers. Three Afghans, a Chechen and an Uzbek — they parked the motorbikes in the shadows, and then spread out through these streets and lanes, a pair going in the direction of Gul Rasool’s house even though there is every possibility that it is protected by landmines, Nabi Khan’s express instructions having been to paste a warning onto the enemy’s front door. ‘The hypocritical West likes him now, despite the fact that he had shot a Western journalist in the 1980s for having written a favourable article about me.’

The moon is bright above him as he moves through the lanes of Usha. The archangel Jibraeel, he knows, had been asked to blot away some of the moon’s brightness with his wings, mankind having petitioned Allah that it was too strong for the nights. The grey markings on the radiant white disc were caused when he pressed his feathers onto it three times.

From shadow to shadow, he walks towards the spot where he is to meet the others to go back to Jalalabad: towards the crumbling stub of a shrine in the cemetery where they left the motorbikes. Enemies surround him here. And they are not just those who carry guns. According to the laws of the jihad the enemy can include the entire supply chain. Those who give them water, those who give them food, those who provide moral encouragement — like journalists who write in defence of their cause. Women too cannot always be innocent. If she prays to God for her husband’s safety in a battle against Muslims, she is above blame. But if she prays for him to kill and triumph over Muslims then she becomes the enemy. If a child carries a message to the enemy fighters, he can be targeted and erased.

*

Lara has decided to ask the dead for directions. Coming to a cemetery, ringed by cypress trees, she has entered it because Muslim graves are orientated in a north — south alignment, ensuring that the face is turned towards Mecca while the feet are pointing away. It’s unlikely that she’ll forget this fact though the bruise on her neck has almost faded.

A bone forest. Most of those lying around her must have met unnatural deaths, been victims of the wars of the last quarter-century.

Marcus’s house is to the south of here, but she finds herself too tired to calculate which direction the south might be, remembering how at times in the dozy heat of a late summer morning she would be unable even to concentrate on picking flowers in a meadow, a task that required concentration because the fresh flowers were mixed in with day-old ones, the pinks and yellows that dotted the swathe of grass behind their dacha. She lowers herself to the ground and leans her head against a tombstone. Her Stepan died at the dacha after testifying on behalf of the officers who stood accused of the torture of Chechen prisoners. Two days after the trial ended, Stepan and Lara had come out to their snowbound dacha on the Gulf of Finland, wishing to repair the fissures of the preceding weeks, Lara’s fury at Stepan’s comments. The couple were there less than a few minutes when Lara — walking down a hallway — heard Stepan talking to someone in the room just ahead of her. She stopped and stood listening.

‘You don’t recognise me, Stepan Ivanovich. I was hoping you would.’

‘I have never met you. What are you doing in my house?’

‘People always said my brother and I looked alike, so I thought you might guess from the resemblance. You see, you have seen my brother’s face.’

‘Have I met your brother? What is his name?’

‘You never met him either. You just saw photographs of him. He was abducted by the military to force me to come out of hiding, to make me go back to Chechnya from Afghanistan. Please stay where you are. I am telling you nicely, but my four friends here won’t be as polite if I give them the signal.’

A breeze in the cypress trees and she opens her eyes. A rustle. The night has entered its second half, she is sure. She’ll stay here till daybreak, shoulder pressed against the marble slab. At the touch of the stone she experiences a sensation from childhood — a drawing that has been filled in with coloured pencils, the paper feeling slightly silky. All the colour is down there.

‘Lara.’

David has approached and is extending a hand towards her, pulling her upright and away from the magnet of the tombstone. The day Stepan died had become the first day of the rest of her life. She had only a handful of new memories until she came to Marcus’s house. Over the months she had just stepped away from everyone, coming back to St Petersburg from Moscow, where she had moved on marrying Stepan. She desired no real communication with anyone, entire days going by without her speaking to even one person.

‘Come on, I’ll take you home,’ he says.

The wind picks up grains of dust from the ground and then releases them.

‘I couldn’t bring the car because I thought the engine would wake Marcus.’ His voice is low in the darkness, bringing energy and focus to her mind with his talk of practical matters.

‘How did you know I was missing?’

‘I couldn’t sleep. Came down and the front door was unlocked. You should have brought your phone.’

In the absence of the electricity generator he charges the phones with his car battery.

‘And why not bring a light, Lara?’

‘It broke.’

‘I was on my way to the doctor’s house but then saw you sitting here. The white glow of your clothes.’

‘We have to go back the way I came, so we can take home the broken lamp.’

‘Okay.’ And as they leave Usha behind, he says, ‘We are almost half-way there.’

‘Benedikt had great difficulty trying to commit the English alphabet to memory as a child. During recitals the letter M would always come as a relief to him, indicating he was almost half-way there.’

She stops. ‘David, tell me what the three gentlemen said.’

She takes in what the visitors had claimed about the leaf from the Cosmos Oak, listens to David’s reasons for keeping the information from her.

‘So Gul Rasool might know about Benedikt’s fate?’

‘It’s a possibility. We thought we’d check first, we didn’t want to alarm or distress you needlessly. I am sorry.’

Approaching the house, she goes through the garden while he remains beside the lake, the sky on fire with the stars. Later, sitting with a dying candle at the kitchen table, she hears him enter the house from a side door, through the room that had been the doctors’ surgery. When it overflowed the patients could be found in the orchard, lying under the trees, the drip hooked to a flowering branch overhead. Marcus said it would have been appropriate if the room dedicated to touch had been turned into the surgery but that was too high up for the infirm to climb.

She goes up to his room to ask for a candle.

She is there inside its light a while later when she looks up and sees him standing against a blue and red section of the kitchen wall. In a tale she had read in childhood there was an enchanted lamp in whose light you saw what the owner of the lamp wished you to see. I’ll make you think of me.

Her hand reaches out and douses the candle he had given her.

Mind torn by contending emotions, she takes a step towards the wall in the perfect darkness, to find out.

*

Casa is going through a stand of acacia trees when he hears a small sweet-edged noise. Coming to a standstill, he lets his hearing pierce the darkness. The noise is like metal coming into contact with something, giving a small ring. A blade or iron nail. He becomes still and parts his lips slightly — a hunter’s trick to increase the sharpness of hearing. The world is full of homeless ghosts, and it is said that by the time a house has a roof on it, it has a ghost in it. He switches on his flashlight, sending its gaze — and his own alongside it — out into the night. He sees the gun pointed at him in the high grass and weeds. There are others, he now sees, ranged in a circle around him, each a black grasshopper the length of his arm.

They are flintlock guns, resting on foot-high tripods in the undergrowth, concealed in the foliage. He identifies the tripwire stretching across his path. Two more steps in the darkness and his foot would have landed on it. The gun that this taut wire is attached to would have swivelled on the tripod and fired into his shin.

The entire grove is crisscrossed by these lengths of wire. Each gun has three of them fastened to its trigger, the central coming at it from the base of the tree directly in front, and the other two reaching it diagonally. To kill jackals or wolves or wild boar, or to maim thieves. These things were first employed during the times when there was a British presence in these parts.

He raises a foot and places it carefully on the wire before him, just holding it there for a few seconds before starting to release the weight onto the metal filament. The branches and leaves of the acacia trees are moved by a sudden breeze just then. It passes and the trees are still again, as though the angel of death had flown down into the grove.

He continues to press downwards with his foot until, to his left, a gun turns towards him like a magnetised needle inside a compass. With extreme caution he lifts the foot off, suddenly aware of the weight of his limbs. A Russian PMD6 mine — just 250 grams of TNT in a cheap wooden box with a detonator — could blow off your legs. Someone he knew had stepped on one, and as Casa had braced himself to lift him onto his shoulders, he had learned at the upward swing that the man had become shockingly lighter.

Knees raised high, he goes over the wire but then stops. What is that noise, the small metallic chime? It has never really stopped, some variation of it always present in his hearing. He looks up with the beam — the light separating into shards of seven colours on his eyelashes — and sees the dagger hanging from a cord fifteen feet above him, gently swaying. There are others, dozens of them, and they flash in the canopies when the wind sends them towards the rays of moonlight pouring through the leaves. When one of them occasionally meets a branch it makes a noise.

A second trap.

A moth has appeared, as soft-looking as a pinch of rabbit fur, attracted by his light. He still hasn’t worked out how the second trap will be activated when his weight sets off some buried mechanism. The blades are released in unison all through the grove as though they are pieces from a mirror shattering overhead. One of them almost enters his flesh, cutting through the thin blanket wrapped around his body. There is a gust of wind, powerful enough that had it been daytime the bees in the grove would have been thrown off their flight paths.

When he moves forward to avoid the falling knife, he loses his balance and ends up on his knee in shock, his turban falling into the grass. He continues forward because of momentum so that his hand snags the tripwire attached to one of the guns. The result is a blinding flash and an explosion. The hot ball of lead shoots out in a shower of sparks and grazes the back of his skull, tearing off skin and tissue, the dry grass bursting into a line of flames towards him.

*

Lara’s eyes are open in the darkness as she lies beside David, his hand on her rib. She feels a measure of safety here against him, though her mind is at the dacha with Stepan in the grip of his killers.

‘Who’s that out there? You said you were here alone, that your wife was back in Moscow.’

She had slipped away then, leaving the corridor and rushing upstairs to hide. They began to hurt Stepan, so that his cries would force her to reveal herself.

‘Just like my brother was tortured to call me back to Chechnya.’

Of course she presented herself to them, unable to bear it any longer, Stepan’s mouth hoarse from shouting at her to stay where she was — to run away into the snow and ice outside — and then just from screaming.

*

There are tough calluses on many areas of his skin as though part of his body is shell. He can survive this. Under the white lantern moon he runs down the alley away from the acacia grove, casting a long sharpened shadow before him. He feels the night itself had come alive to attack him back there, the air clotting into predator muscle, into bone and razor. The noise of the guns going off will bring men who will give chase. He is not sure whether the sounds he can hear are his own thoughts or something outside him. With one hand he is holding a fold of his blanket to the back of his head to staunch the blood flow, his fingers wet. Allah is on his side. We have created the human being in the throes of loss. But does he think no one is watching over him? Haven’t We made for him two eyes, a tongue, and two lips? And guided him to two places of safety in distress? He must find somewhere to tend to the wound, mustn’t lose focus. His blood bellowing in his ears. Two places of safety. He is very cold as though his skeleton is made of ice. Now suddenly he knows where he must go: towards the house that belongs to a doctor — he had pasted a shabnama on the metal signboard outside it. He’ll go and ask for — or demand — help with his injury. As he runs his head spins. The peripheries of his soul don’t feel bound within his body.

*

‘How big is the Cosmos Oak?’

‘Say that again. My mind was elsewhere.’

‘Nothing.’

David is standing at the window.

We and others like us will never stop until we have covered ourselves in glory by reaching Jerusalem and blowing up the White House, says the Night Letter.

He has dressed, and she is sitting on the bed wrapped in a sheet, hugging herself with the fingers that had gently slid into his hair earlier, when they were both searching for themselves in each other.

When he touched her he felt it was not in the present. He was as though a ghost, watching himself place his hand on her shoulder, his mouth on her thigh. Either a ghost or a memory. He is not young enough to believe that a moment can be seized, no longer a child who looked at the hundred clocks in his grandfather’s workshop without seeing that the hands were moving like scythes.

‘I’ll see today if I can find James Palantine and talk to him,’ he tells her, moving towards the door. ‘He’ll talk to Gul Rasool to find out about Benedikt.’

‘Who is James Palantine?’

‘His father, Christopher, was someone I knew, though I know him too. He is friends with Gul Rasool — an “associate” is probably a better word. He is responsible for Gul Rasool’s security. I knew Christopher Palantine back in the 1980s in Peshawar.’

‘When you were in espionage?’

A hesitation.

Both Christopher and he were. He thinks of the CIA’s motto. From the Gospel of John: And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.

He opens the door and leaves. Outside the wind rustles in the trees as though trying to speak someone’s name.

5. Street of Storytellers

DAVID HAS HEARD it said that no other war in human history was fought with the help of as many spies. When the Soviet Army crossed the River Oxus into Afghanistan in December 1979, secret agents from around the world began to congregate in the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar. It now became the prime staging area for the jihad against the Soviet invaders, rivalling East Berlin as the spy capital of the world by 1984.

By then seventeen thousand Soviet soldiers had been killed, and David had been living in the city for two years. Because it was once the second home of Buddhism, the city could count Lotus Land among its almost forgotten names, the peepal tree under which the Enlightened One was said to have preached continuing to grow in a quiet square.

The City of Flowers.

The City of Grain.

It was transformed into a city filled with conjecture, with unprovable suspicions and frenzied distrust. Everyone’s nerves were raw and everyone had something hidden going on. For most of its history it was one of the main trading centres linked to the Silk Road, and now the United States was sending arms into Afghanistan through here. Wherever David looked he could find evidence of the war in which those weapons were being used. Makeshift ambulances filled with the wounded and the dying raced through the mountain passes towards Peshawar, carrying at times children who had been set alight by Soviet soldiers to make the parents reveal the hiding places of guerrillas. Dentists filled cavities with shotgun pellets in Peshawar.

Having trained with the CIA, David now had an office in the Jewellers Bazaar, his interest in gems an ideal façade. He had met Christopher Palantine during the Islamabad embassy siege back in 1979, when Christopher had put forward the possibility that he might like to answer a few questions upon returning from his forthcoming trip to Afghanistan. To gain information about the Soviet Union, the CIA had been known even to question the pilgrims who arrived in Mecca from the central Asian republics, the Saudi Arabian government allowing this because of the abhorrence it felt for Communism. And David too had agreed readily to Christopher’s request. By the time his sentient life began, a hatred and fear of Communism was in the air an American child breathed, and it could have remained as just subconscious animosity, but there was the matter of Jonathan’s death. The Soviet Union had supported Vietnamese guerrillas and had thus played a role in the disappearance and probable death of his brother. He was fourteen years old when the news came that Jonathan was missing presumed dead. Even the festive occasions would now be sad ones because Jonathan wasn’t there, and everything reminded David of him. He wept into the crook of his arm standing in front of the house: as soon as they reached the age of twelve, both he and Jonathan were allowed in the mornings to take the car out of the garage and down this very driveway while their father collected his coat and briefcase. As the days passed without further news of Jonathan, his father gently began to ask him whether he would be able to control his tears — the two of them had to give strength to their mother. But a fire of immense intensity burned inside his young body. Having trapped a coyote in the woods one day he began to hit it with a club. Who gives a fuck if this is wrong. He needed release, and, as though he wished to obliterate the evidence of what he had done, he continued to beat the animal long after it was dead. And for the rest of my life I am going to do everything I can to fuck up the Reds.

But that was then. By the time he came to Peshawar as an employee of the CIA, his opposition to Communism was the result of study and contemplation. Not something that grew out of a personal wound.

He was in Peshawar as a believer.

*

An almost blind white-haired poet lived in the apartment next to David’s office in the Jewellers Bazaar in 1984, having fled death threats from both the Communists and the Islamic guerrillas in Kabul some months earlier. For most of the day he sat cross-legged on a threadbare rug on the floor, surrounded by books. A god of immutable stone, the entire earth his plinth.

David had slipped into his apartment to check for listening devices: any number of people could have wished to spy on him — the KGB, Pakistan’s ISI, the Saudi Arabian spy agency, or the KGB-trained Afghan intelligence service that at the height of the conflict would swell to thirty thousand professionals and a hundred thousand paid informers, maintaining secret bases in Peshawar, Islamabad, Karachi, and Quetta. The jihad was at its fiercest then and had anyone wished to gain access to a conversation taking place in David’s office, it would have been a case of just piercing the wall in the poet’s apartment with a silenced drill and inserting a microphone.

He found the apartment to be free of any devices but before the month was over its occupant had vanished: while the poet was out one afternoon a five-year-old girl with her throat slit was discovered at his place. A crowd baying for blood descended on the apartment and the man was never seen again.

David learned from ________, his own source within Pakistan’s ISI, that a Pakistani intelligence officer had ordered a child to be picked up from the streets of Peshawar, brought to the poet’s place, and killed there. The mob and the police were then sent in to discover the crime. The intelligence officer wanted the place empty so he could install a tenant able and willing to spy on David.

‘So it was Fedalla who did it?’ Christopher Palantine said when David told him.

‘Yes. He was among the ones I suspected.’

Five years had passed since Fedalla and his friends had assaulted David in Islamabad, and David had recognised him when he ran into him at a meeting with the Pakistani military personnel not long after coming to Peshawar with the CIA. Back in 1979 Fedalla had been a senior captain aching to make major, which he now was, heavier in both face and body. David waited for his chance and then confronted him but Fedalla denied all knowledge and memory of the assault in Islamabad.

‘You have to move out of the Jewellers Bazaar fast,’ Christopher told David.

David acquired premises in the nearby Street of Storytellers, the street that in ancient times was the camping ground for caravans and military adventurers, storytellers reciting ballads of love and war to the amassed wayfarers and soldiers. It extended from east to west in the heart of the city, and in April 1930 British soldiers had massacred a crowd of unarmed protesters there, a defining moment in the struggle to drive the British out of India. When the protesters at the front were felled by shots, those behind had come forward and exposed themselves to the bullets, committing suicide in all but name, as many as twenty bullets entering some bodies. The massacre continued from eleven in the morning till five in the afternoon, court martial awaiting the soldiers who refused to pull the trigger.

His new neighbours in this three-storey building were clean, as was the unoccupied apartment on the level above. One day a few months later, as he was emerging from his office, fifty or so orbs of thread leapt down the steep staircase leading to that upstairs apartment, some stopping but others continuing to bounce past him, going down the next stairwell, leaping over the banister until they had fully uncoiled themselves.

The suspicion was immediate: the young woman who stood in the open door at the top of the stairs was a spy.

The hand in which she held the thread was dyed with henna, indicating the possibility that she had recently attended a wedding.

‘Thank you,’ she said in English after he had helped her gather the silk filaments.

‘What’s your name?’

She stopped and looked back at him from the staircase, then the haughty face brightened into a smile.

‘All names are my names,’ she said with something like mischievousness and disappeared.

He was in her apartment the next afternoon when she went out with the child. He found nothing in there that suggested subterfuge then or during the searches he carried out on later dates.

Zameen.

A single word.

How easily a person gave his name to another, and yet how restless he was during the few hours when he didn’t know it, finding it out through methods of his own. Discovering for the first time that there could be something magical about someone’s name — a mere word but what power it held, as in a fairy tale. It was after all the first thing one learned about another. A way in, and a possibility.

At the moment of the initial encounter he had been on his way to a meeting with Christopher Palantine, and he thought of her during it. He was then away for several days, vanishing once again into schemes he’d set in motion in and around the teeming city, he and Christopher Palantine both great mavericks of that time and place, a cause of some anxiety to their superiors when they simply became invisible for weeks. But when he returned to the Street of Storytellers he synchronised several appearances at the door of his office just to encounter her, to just see her again. Once when the area plunged into darkness due to power failure, he went up to ask for a matchstick instead of going down into the bazaar. He had known when he began this work that there would be sacrifices. Loneliness was the price they paid for being who they were. And yet as he sat in the light of the lamp lit with her matchstick, he couldn’t help seeing how incomplete his life was. There were houses and establishments in Peshawar he occasionally entered to alleviate solitude, and he had a rendezvous with a certain woman each time he visited the city of Lahore, meeting her for a few hours in Falleti’s, the hotel where Ava Gardner had stayed when she was in Pakistan filming Bhowani Junction. But this was different, seemed to be something deeper.

He listened to her feet in the ceiling above him, following her movements.

And then one afternoon he managed to talk to her openly, running into her in the Street at the stall of a cassette vendor. Before engaging in a battle with Soviet soldiers, the Afghans sometimes inserted a blank cassette into a tape recorder to capture the sound of combat. They played these cassettes to themselves later during periods of recreation and leisure, reliving the excitement. They were for sale, the seller beginning to shout out the highlights of each cassette the moment David picked it up:

The ambush at Qala-e Sultan, April two years ago, a little-known battle but …

The Dehrawud offensive, October 1983, the sound of helicopters and fighter planes, the screams of the wounded, contains the famous death by torture of a captured Soviet infidel …

Battle for Alishang District Centre, August 1981, on three cassettes. The Soviets are made to withdraw in a hurry but they force the elders of the next village to come ask the Mujahidin for the bodies of the dead Soviet soldiers left behind …

He recognised the decorative motifs on the henna-dyed left hand that reached towards a cassette at the same time as him and when he looked up he saw that, yes, it was her. The recording was of a mujahidin attack at a newly opened village school, the teachers and everyone associated with it massacred.

‘Something like that happened in the place I am from,’ she told him in her apartment later. ‘A place called Usha. It means “teardrop”.’

He had attempted to talk to her in the crowded Street but she had shaken her head in fear, telling him in a quick whisper to come up in a few minutes.

‘Why only the one hand?’ he asked now.

‘The henna? It takes a while to dry, I have work to do and my son to look after. That’s why I kept my right hand free. As it is I grabbed the wrong child one day in the chaos outside.’ The boy was moving across the floor on his knees, pushing a toy car along.

They stood facing each other, not knowing what to say or do. She bent to clear away the sheets of paper bearing the outlines of foliage, flowers, dragonflies, and vines. They were embroidery patterns and he remembered being told how, just before the First World War, patriotic young Germans had entered the French countryside with butterfly nets, catching specimens and sketching wing patterns to take back to Germany. Encrypted in the designs of the butterfly wings were maps of strategic information, such as the exact locations of bridges and roads.

He picked up one of the sheets and looked at it. The French country people were knowledgeable about their local butterflies and soon realised the drawings were incorrect, exposing the spies before the information could be sent back to headquarters.

‘You live here by yourselves, the two of you?’

She held out her hand for the drawing.

He listened as she began to speak about her lost parents, and then, his heart breaking, about a young man who as a boy had been so beautiful he had had to be veiled.

‘He was shot by the Soviets. I was with him that night, and that was the last time I saw him. I thought he was dead but I have since learned from refugees who have come from Usha that he had actually survived. I don’t know where he is.’

One night when David had been standing above her sleeping form in the darkness, having gained access to her place to see if she was involved with intelligence-gathering or surveillance, he had heard her say a man’s name in her sleep.

It was that of the missing lover, he now realised.

She wanted his help in finding these three, she herself — being a woman — lacking the ability to move as freely in this place.

As he took his leave her little boy moved towards the kitchen area and, thinking himself unobserved, put back onto the shelf the knife he’d kept concealed upon his person during the entire visit; David had seen him pick it up a few moments after his mother opened the door to him. What have they been through?

A few evenings later as he was leaving the office he noticed that the door to her place was ajar, something unusual for that hour. He stood listening and then went up slowly. He raised his hand and knocked. Spoke her name. And when there was no response he looked in.

She was sitting on the bed with her back towards the door — the kid asleep, hardly any light from a weak lamp on a table. He could hear the sobs clearly.

‘Zameen,’ he said but she did not turn around. The impression he had had of her was that she was quite self-sufficient and tough: after fire she probably wouldn’t be ashes, she’d be coal. But this was darkness and solitude. The hidden side of the courage required from her daily.

He spoke her name again.

She turned to him but there was no recognition. He could have been the noise of the breeze against the window.

He stayed there until she had exhausted herself and then he watched as she took up a pair of scissors and began to cut herself out of her clothes, ready for sleep but still in a daze, unable to find the correct path for the given destination.

Her clothing fell from her in pieces.

‘Zameen,’ he said in a half-voice, afraid she might hurt herself.

He stayed where he was until she got into bed in just her white shift, and then he withdrew and spent the night in his office. Only when he heard her lock her door around dawn did he go home to the apartment he rented a few miles away.

Before the month was out he found the man she was looking for, in one of the refugee camps closest to the border with Afghanistan. He was there on an unrelated matter when a likeable person came forward and began to help with the translation because David was experiencing difficulty with certain dialects.

As they talked, it became apparent that his name and details were the ones Zameen had given David regarding her lost lover.

He didn’t tell him she was looking for him.

He arrived back at the Street of Storytellers and before he knew it an entire week had gone by without him having said anything to her either. I’ll do it this afternoon. I’ll do it tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Her son was becoming fond of David, frequently loud with delight around him, the boy who was born under a thorn tree while she was making her way towards Peshawar, and, yes, he had begun to notice signs of attraction in her also. He went back to the refugee camp twice and talked to the young man. It turned out he was a believer in Communism despite the fact that the Soviets were tearing apart his land.

He didn’t know what to do.

I’ll tell her tomorrow.

He came into her place to see the mother and child out on the small wooden balcony. It was raining weakly, a kind of mist that coated everything, and they were leaning towards a nasturtium plant, observing something with great concentration. She waved him to her, the boy immediately leaning against him when he joined them, a rumble of thunder in the far distance. He saw how on each nasturtium leaf the minute dots of moisture joined up until they were recognisably a drop of liquid, balanced perfectly and brightly in the centre of the circular leaf for a while. But then, in a matter of seconds, it became so overgrown that the leaf stalk could not support it: the leaf began to sway and finally tipped the bead to the ground, becoming upright again for the entire process to be repeated.

She smiled at him — presenting this, one of the unasked-for delights of existence, to him.

His conscience ached.

Today let me stay here, I’ll tell her tomorrow.

CASA OPENS HIS EYES to see the giant face suspended above him, the first light of dawn falling gently onto it. He lifts his head off the floor and looks around. He remembers descending the steps in the darkness a few hours earlier, coming to a halt upon seeing the stone object in the centre of this space. A contour of it had caught the edge of the beam from his flashlight. He trained the light on it and saw that it was the face of a Buddha. He approached it and spread his blanket on the ground, with difficulty because his head was numb even though the bleeding was being kept in control with strips he had torn from the blanket. There had been no response to the knocks he had sounded on the doctor’s house in Usha and then he had decided that he must make his way to the cemetery. When he managed to get there the three motorbikes were gone — his companions had had to flee without him. The gun going off in the acacia grove had alerted the inhabitants of Usha to the presence of a thief and then the shabnama must have been discovered, the place in an uproar.

He doesn’t know where he dropped his own Kalashnikov. After spreading the blanket on the floor beside the stone head he had unknotted from around his waist the cloth that had been his turban. He lay down under the fabric — it is actually his shroud, everyone always taking theirs with them on arduous operations, to signal their blissful willingness to die.

Five days ago, the man called Bihzad was sent to bomb the school not because Casa and the others were cowards themselves. They knew that a greater mission awaited them, the coming battle for Usha.

He must get up now and find his way back to Jalalabad.

He tries to sit up but as in a bad dream he cannot manage it. He would at the very least like to choose another spot to lie on — somewhere not so close to this idol — but he feels drained of all force, his mind askew.

He lies there aware of the giant features hovering above him in the half-light.

The almost-closed eyes.

The smile.

*

Lara is half-way down the staircase when she notices the figure. He is asleep pressed up against the painted wall so that a shrub with small yellow flowers is growing out of his left hip, the Buddha’s decapitated head a few yards away from him. She has never been able to find any sign on the stone of the bullet marks that are said to have bled gold. But sometimes she imagines that being nailed to the ceilings in the house had made the books drip brilliance onto the floors in each room.

She takes her eye off the boy only upon gaining the topmost step and then she rushes out into the avenue of Persian lilacs, the avenue of chinaberries. David’s car, always parked here under these trees, is moving towards the lake, taking him to Jalalabad for the day, and she can see Marcus emerging from the kitchen to add a glass to the basket of washed dishes she had left out to dry in the morning sunlight.

David tells the two of them to remain outside and goes into the factory, returning five minutes later.

‘He has an injury, a two-inch wound,’ he tells them. ‘Has lost a lot of blood. He says he was attacked by a bandit last night, up in the mountains. He came down the ridges and stumbled in there, probably losing consciousness.’

Lara and Marcus peer down to where he sits immobile against the wall, the side of the head resting against the flowers. He is thin, dust on his face and clothes and hair, and there is a pad of blood-soaked fabric tied to the back of the skull. A red butterfly three-quarters of the way up the wall makes it appear as though a small quantity of his spilled blood has become airborne.

David brings the car back to the factory and then goes down to lead the stranger up into daylight, supporting him by feeding an arm along the back of the ribs at one point but the young man gently uncouples himself.

‘I think you should take him to Jalalabad,’ says Marcus after he has had a look at the wound, managing to ease off the fabric stiff with caked blood, his hair glued into it. ‘Have the hospital look at him. He’ll need stitches — one or two.’

The young man sits on the back seat without a word or glance towards anyone, taking a few sips from the sugar-rich tea he has been brought. The back of his shirt is streaked with blood, but he declines with a raised hand when Marcus offers to find a new set of clothing for him. He hands back the cup without lifting his eyes and then settles down and brings his white cloth over himself. His only other communication is the nod when David tells him in Pashto that he is being taken to the city.

*

They go through Usha, the place subdued this morning because of the shabnama. In other villages, the Night Letters tell people to plant opium poppies, a crop forbidden by the new government, but here in Usha, Gul Rasool is a poppy farmer already despite the fact that he is in the government. As in Vietnam, as in the Afghanistan of the 1980s, where the CIA ignored the drug trafficking of the anti-Communist guerrillas it was financing, the activities of Gul Rasool have to be tolerated because he is needed. Last month he was among the dozens of male politicians who had hurled abuse at a woman MP as she spoke in parliament, shouting threats to rape her. Harassed and fearful, she changes her address regularly and owns burkas in eight different colours to avoid being followed.

The Night Letter is from an organisation that chooses to call itself Building the New Muslim — the bombing of the school was carried out by Building the New Afghanistan. It could be the same organisation: if they have found rich backers outside Afghanistan, people who have Islamic goals, they must have asked for the name to be amended. This isn’t about one particular country — it is about the glory and aspirations of Islam. Saladin fought for Allah and for Muhammad and so he won Palestine, but today’s Palestinians are fighting just for land, even if it is their own land, and therefore losing.

The Night Letter is offering a financial reward of two hundred dollars to any inhabitant of Usha who might help in the war they are promising against Gul Rasool for — among other things — having allowed girls to be educated here. Yes, it could be Nabi Khan’s organisation. He must be alive. The money is an unbelievable sum for most ordinary people in Usha and some could be tempted by it, seeing it as a way out of poverty.

The eyes of David’s passenger remain closed throughout most of the journey towards Jalalabad, though he occasionally takes a sip of water, one of those bottles that had landed around Marcus’s house. As soon as they near the city, however, he wants to be let out of the car, suddenly all vigour and purpose, darting looks to his left and right. David tries to reason with him, an exchange lasting many minutes with the car brought to a halt by the side of the road and with David reaching a measured hand back to stay him, telling him a doctor should take a look at his injury.

‘I have no money for the doctors because the bandit took everything.’

‘The hospital is just around the corner.’

‘I must leave.’

Does your mother know you are intent on wasting the blood she made out of her own blood, her own milk? Someone had said this to him after an injury here in Afghanistan, but it’s too intimate a thing for him to say to this boy.

‘I want to leave.’

‘Don’t worry about the money.’

He consents eventually and they drive in through the hospital entrance, past the gunmen protecting the building.

Leaving him in the waiting room for the doctor to arrive, David comes out of the building to stand under the pine trees, the Asian magpies in the branches, the crested larks. There is no breeze but a lavender bush is in constant movement due to the bees that land on or fly off the thin stalks. A small boy approaches him with a fan of Pashto, Dari, and English books for sale — 101 Best Romantic Text Messages as well as a volume entitled The CrUSAders, and also Mein Kampf translated as Jihadi.

When he sees boys like these he sometimes finds himself wondering if they are Bihzad, forgetting that time has passed, Bihzad grown up out there somewhere.

The border with Pakistan is just three hours in the eastern direction. Continue through the twenty-three miles of the Khyber Pass and you arrive at Peshawar. The Street of Storytellers.

Where he had met and fallen in love with her and she with him.

He now knows how places become sacred.

‘Where is the boy’s father?’ he asked her. The kid who had won every arm-wrestling competition with David in recent weeks.

She shook her head, and he knew not to proceed. More than a month had gone by since he met her but sometimes he felt he was still little more than a neighbour. And for almost two weeks now he had known that the man she really longed for was only a few miles away in a refugee camp.

‘Who pays for this place?’

‘An aid agency. They pay for me to be here so women from the refugee camps can come here and embroider in secret.’ The work he thought might be something to do with spying. ‘It’s secret because we fear the fundamentalists who have constructed mosque upon mosque in the refugee camps and have forbidden work and education to women, so much so that a woman in possession of silk thread is branded a wanton, it being the Western aid organisations that began the embroidery scheme to give war widows a chance to earn a livelihood. The fundamentalists tell them they must beg in the streets — that this is Allah’s way of using them to test who is charitable and who isn’t — or send their little boys out to be labourers in the bazaars. We have to be very careful in case the women are followed here by them.’

Imagining her loneliness, he had felt wretched, but the man she wanted in her life — the Communist — would only add to her difficulties, he was sure. He decided to visit him for the final time to ask him as openly as possible about his plans and prospects.

‘I don’t care if Communism has failed in Russia,’ he told David. ‘It remains the best hope for a country like Afghanistan. Never mind food, some people in my country can’t afford poison to kill themselves. There’s no other way we can put an end to the feudal lords and the ignorant mullahs who rule us with their power and money, opening their mouths either to lie or to abuse.’

‘You don’t know what you are talking about. Communism has killed millions upon millions of people …’

‘Let’s just wait until it has killed a few thousand more — the bloodsuckers who control the place I am from — then I’ll be happy to denounce it.’

People like these had to be told that Communism wasn’t the only way to end inequality. ‘We don’t have that kind of people — the priests and landlords — in the United States either …’

‘Then why are your people actually supporting them here, giving them money and weapons?’

As he talked to David he was keeping his voice low: around them were victims of Communism, and David could not imagine what they would do if they heard him talk in that manner. In 1917, one of David’s great-uncles, a copper miner sympathetic to the far-left Industrial Workers of the World, had made known to everyone his opinions about America’s recent entry into the war. He’d call President Woodrow Wilson ‘a lying tyrant’ and denounce US soldiers as ‘scabs in uniform’, unmindful of the fact that the state of Montana, in the grip of patriotic fever, was increasingly intolerant of dissent. During the course of one September night, a small group of masked men grabbed him from his house and left him hanging for all to see at daybreak. A piece of paper with the number of the Montana Vigilantes of the nineteenth century, 3-7-77, was pinned to his body, with the initials of four other men threatened with the same fate.

No, David could not allow this man and his misguidedness to endanger Zameen and the boy.

He could see that the man’s ardour was genuine, but it was directed at falsehoods. David had learnt as much as he could about his great-uncle’s death and had decided that — an outrage and a crime though his hanging was — he could not agree with the man’s views. They would have resulted in the United States becoming entangled in the barbed coils of revolution, like the rest of the countries that had adopted Communism and its offshoots. Revolutions that eventually devoured their children and turned half the planet into a prison. They were the early years of the century and he admired the optimism of people like his distant relative, was even proud to have such a person in his bloodline, someone who cared about equality and justice. But at the opposite end of the century, the consequences were there for all those who wanted to see them. In David’s time, an end to inequality and injustice meant having to contain and undo those outcomes.

‘Just wait until the Soviets are defeated,’ David said. ‘Then we’ll help you Afghans sweep away the landlords and mullahs.’

‘The Soviets are helping us now. Building roads, hospitals, dams — which your people keep destroying.’

They weren’t building anything. It was all either thirdrate or just for show, and either way they were billing Afghanistan millions for it.

‘The Soviets are flying thousands of our children to Moscow to be given free education. If I had a child I’d send him happily.’ And he said that he and a small group of like-minded young men and women had come together and were planning to journey back to Kabul in a few weeks’ time, to offer their services to the Communist regime.

David walked away from him.

And then the next afternoon, Christopher Palantine informed him that the Soviet military would be carrying out an air attack on the refugee camp where the young man lived. The refugee camps of Peshawar were the hub of the anti-Soviet guerrillas, where commanders and warriors came to regroup and recuperate after fighting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. Tested beyond endurance, the Soviets had violated Pakistani air space to bomb the camps many times before — and that afternoon they would be doing it again.

He and Zameen had kissed for the first time last night, standing in the dark wooden staircase that led to her door, and it was she who had initiated it.

Having learned of the bombing raid in advance, Christopher said, from a mole inside Afghanistan’s spy agency, the CIA had arranged for journalists and television cameras from several major cities of the Western and Muslim world to be present in Peshawar, so that the news and images of the carnage would spread around the world.

He sat under a massive tree with Christopher Palantine, in a saint’s shrine not far from the Street of the Storytellers, the holy man’s grave covered in a lively skin of tiles. He knew there was not enough time to get to the refugee camp and warn the man. So he sat there with his friend and watched the huge crowd in the courtyard before him. They were mostly women. The shrines of the Muslim saints were places journeyed to more by women than men, Zameen had told him, their despair greater, their lacks more essential and urgent. They would come from various places in the land and stay for days around a sacred grave, their saint often the only person in this life they could question with impunity and even accuse of neglect in the language and manner of a wronged lover.

When he got back to his office a note had been slipped under the door. Only he knows how he managed to get to that camp within the sixty or so minutes that remained before the arrival of the Soviet jets. The note, from Zameen, said she’d received word that the boy from her teenage years was living in that refugee camp and she was going there to meet him.

He got there before her, watching her arrive and then leading her and the child away from the site. The place was of course a furnace, smoke issuing from it in enraged billows as though demons had been set free by the bombing. All paths to the part of the camp where the man had his room were impassable, row upon row of burning homes. Leading them away from the deaths of the innocents, he looked over his shoulder. The civilised world would see this and condemn Soviet brutality, Moscow made to rethink its policies.

*

That night David became her lover and within days she was half his world.

*

He watched her pour water onto her shoulder when she bathed, the water spreading in a thin layer on her skin and then breaking up into shapes that resembled countries and islands, resembled continents. She lifted her hair, revealing the length of her neck, and said she and her school friends had been shocked when the prince climbed up the rope of Rapunzel’s hair. ‘We had all read Ferdowsi’s Book of Kings. When the daughter of the ruler of Kabul lets down her hair from a high window, her suitor Zal is unable to bear the thought of using it as a substitute rope.’

The only part of him that seemed alive was where the two of them came into contact. There was no way of identifying many of the bodies after the bombing but it was certain that no one who lived in the bombed part could have survived. And yet initially he remained afraid that the other man would turn up, recognise David and expose his deception. He had already asked her to marry him. They would keep looking for Qatrina and Marcus. And when the Soviets were defeated and Afghanistan was at peace — and her parents were back in the house over there in Teardrop — David, Zameen and Bihzad would move to the United States.

She said her father’s sense of smell was so acute he could discern a word written with colourless perfume on a sheet of paper.

The CIA required that he declare anyone with whom he had regular contact for more than six months. Soon that period was about to pass and he would have to mention her in the report he filed, though he had swept her place and knew there was no need to put her to the trouble of being under an investigation. The Agency also made the recruits sign a paper saying they wouldn’t mention to their spouses the true nature of their work, but he didn’t know of anyone who didn’t tell everything to his wife or husband — easier than having to explain those late-night meetings with agents.

It was 1986 and the war was entering an unprecedented stage: the secret services of the United States, Great Britain and Pakistan had agreed that guerrilla attacks should be launched inside the Soviet Union itself, in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the states that were the supply routes to the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. This was to be done by Afghan guerrillas, but David had decided he would go with them. As he readied himself to meet up with the group, he was aware of the nightmare that would result if an American spy was captured either in Afghanistan or in the USSR, but he was convinced of his ability to avoid detection. When it came to these matters, in adulthood he had never felt himself surrounded by forces larger than himself.

Outfitted with mortars, boats, and target maps, he and the guerrillas intended to cross the River Oxus and mount sabotage and propaganda operations inside Uzbekistan. They poured diesel over the light-reflecting paintwork of their vehicles so the dust of the roads would stick to them as camouflage. The Soviet Union’s chief cartographers had, at the KGB’s behest, falsified virtually all public maps for almost fifty years. But David and the Afghans were carrying accurate CIA maps of the region. The stars above them were like mirror signals, the rapids of the Oxus giving off a ghostly glow in the darkness, the Arabs having renamed it the ‘Insane River’ when they met it centuries ago.

As well as weapons, they were bringing thousands of Korans in the Uzbek language, a translation the CIA had commissioned from an Uzbek exile living in Germany. Islam had to be encouraged in the USSR, to make the Russian Muslims rebel against Moscow. Five days — and several explosions in key buildings and on vital bridges and roads — later, David saw a woman in a silkworm village being paraded naked through the streets. She cowered as she was beaten by men for having committed adultery, for having taken a Russian lover. The men who were whipping her were part of the clandestine group that David and the Afghan guerrillas met here in Uzbekistan. Her head had been shaved and a green cross was painted on her forehead. The men were laughing — ‘Call out to your lover to come and save you, “Sasha, Sasha, help, help!”’ There was nothing he could do to put an end to her torment — they stopped at his outraged shouts but he knew it was temporary — and he watched as a man moved forward and placed around her neck one of the Korans he had brought.

Just before coming out to Uzbekistan, he had returned from a ten-day visit to Cambodia, his search for Jonathan taking him there. Her joy at seeing him when he returned made her suggest they go to Dean’s. ‘The three of us. Let the world go hang.’ They had tried to keep their affair as secret as possible till then, fearing reprisals against her. As it was, she had lied about Bihzad to the world, never disclosing that technically he was illegitimate, claiming she was a widow whose husband had perished in the war.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

A fountain played in tiers like a jelly mould at Dean’s. She got up from their table and walked over to it. She had told him how every few weeks a man would come along the lake shore in Usha with a basket of crabs which he emptied into the fountain behind the house. The Afghans did not themselves eat these creatures, calling them ‘water spiders’, but were willing to catch them for the doctors in exchange for money or medical treatment. The crabs stayed in the stone basin until required in the kitchen, Zameen approaching the water to lift them out, jabbing competitively at their pincers with a pair of tongs.

‘Who was that?’ he asked distractedly, busy with the child, when she returned. Under an arch he had seen her exchange a few words with someone.

‘Who?’

‘The man you were talking to.’

‘I wasn’t talking to anyone.’ The voice did not waver. The voice in which she had sung Corinthians to him. And now I will show you the most excellent way.

He slowly looked up. Her face was a mask.

‘Okay.’

They continued with the meal. Hadn’t something similar happened before? She had convinced him he was mistaken, but this time he was sure. She was wearing a light-pink tunic patterned with saffron flowers, over narrow white trousers, and combined with a long stole of white chiffon resting on the left shoulder. It was she whom he had seen, even though the light was not clear over there under the arch.

Was it the Communist, had he survived the bombing after all? How will David explain to her that he kept his existence secret from her because he loved her, was afraid of losing her? By now, even to himself, it seemed an incredible thing to have done. In her anger she will turn away from him for ever, never allow him to see Bihzad his son again.

And then suddenly everything became clear. O Christ, she was spying on him. He hadn’t hidden anything from her about his activities. And now suddenly everything became dangerous. If it was someone else he would have known exactly what to do. But she wasn’t someone else.

Dropping her off at the Street of Storytellers, saying he had to do something but would be back in about an hour, he drove back to Dean’s, prowling the corridors to see if the man was still there. Aware of the tight jaw muscles, aware of the handgun under his shirt, his breath loud. He sat until dawn in that arch, then got a bed at Dean’s and woke up around noon. What now? He was meant to cross into Afghanistan in a few hours, to enter Uzbekistan through there. She knew that. Would there be an ambush? He phoned her and said the plan had changed, that he wouldn’t be going to Uzbekistan.

‘I’ll see you in a few hours.’

When he got back from the Uzbekistan excursion nineteen days later he found her apartment empty. He sensed immediately that something was wrong: the silence in the two small rooms seemed deeper than just silence. This was more than mere absence. On the windowsill nine candles had burned all the way down to small coins of wax. Day or night she would light a candle here as indication that it was safe for him to come up, signalling that she wasn’t in the company of Afghan visitors, the women who gathered at the place to embroider.

Her fiercest loyalty had been to these women. The one occasion she quarrelled with David had been over a matter concerning them. One of the women had just lost several relatives in a bombing the previous week. Nineteen names of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins.

‘It looked like the list of guests for a wedding feast,’ Zameen said to David.

‘How is she? Would she be okay?’

She did not answer him, moving around the apartment silently for the next few minutes, attending to various things.

He stood up to leave — it was time for the women to arrive. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I have to be, don’t I?’ she said over her shoulder, the vehemence shocking him. ‘We have to be, don’t we? Just as long as you Americans and Soviets can play your games over there — nothing else matters!’

She turned to face him, glaring from the other side of the room, eyes red and brimming with tears. Daring him to cross over to her.

The candle didn’t burn for a week after that. Then one day it summoned him. One massacre of innocents had driven him away, and another had now caused the reunion. The news that day had been terrible and she needed him. ‘I feel so alone.’

Now David sought these women out, to ask them if they knew where she was. Most of them recoiled or let out apprehensive noises when he approached them. But eventually one of them did prove unafraid. In great desperation and hurry he began to question her about Zameen, asked her if she knew who the man Zameen had denied talking to might have been.

‘I knew her very well, sir,’ the woman said. ‘So I can tell you that there is only one possibility why she could have lied to you. The newborn Bihzad was close to death when she arrived with him from Afghanistan. There is supposed to be healthcare for everyone in the refugee camps but the Pakistanis are corrupt. And the camps were ruled by warlords who wouldn’t do anything until she registered with one of their parties — the more members each party has the more money they can get from you Americans. She needed to have a card made before they would even look at him and he was dying, she needed money to save him … Can you guess, sir, how she obtained the funds? I’d rather not say it out loud.’

Yes.

‘She had to do it for about three months. There was no alternative, you must understand. After she gave up she was sometimes accosted by her former … clients.’

He sat still, trying to absorb the information.

That night he dreamt of her face full of disappointment at him, perhaps even contempt. The face that had laughed at his impatience with jazz and had told him Tolstoy smelled of cypress wood. The face that had expressed the purest of joys when he found for her a volume of paintings by the Persian master Bihzad, a book her parents had owned but which she had been unable to find in the Peshawar bookstores.

But where was she now? He sat in the apartment where nothing, it seemed, had been disturbed. While he was making his way towards Uzbekistan, she had lit the candles: he’d told her the journey had been cancelled and she must have thought he was avoiding her, that he had somehow found out about what she had had to do to save her child. He was staying away until he discovered what he felt about the information. Trying to see if he could unlove her.

There was no sign of a break-in. The raw jewels Bihzad liked to play with were still here — two sapphires and two emeralds, like someone with blue eyes staring into someone’s green eyes. Her books were stacked high in the corner, old stories that came to an end on the last page but hurled their wisdom and judgement decades and centuries into the future, there into the midst of them all. As was everything else, except the bottle of the pale-gold perfume she always kept with her, her father having composed it for her. Maybe Fedalla and the ISI slit her and the boy’s throats so they could acquire the apartment for someone who would spy on him. A snake-oil vendor always sat not far from their building, with a large thorn-tailed lizard sitting untethered among the bottles of his wares, the fact that it never made a bid for freedom always a surprise to David until he was told that its spine had been broken by its master. From him David learned that while he was away there had been an explosion just across the road. A bicycle bomb had gone off. David himself had taught the rebels how to rig these up, to kill Soviet soldiers in Kabul and Kandahar, in Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif.

He kept hearing her voice.

If I speak with the tongues of men and angels,

but have not love,

I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge,

and if I have a faith that can move mountains,

but have not love, I am nothing.

She’d told him how she had left the refugee camp where she had been living and come to the Street of Storytellers: the cleric from Usha had these years later found his way to Peshawar, staring thunderstruck at her when he saw her one day in a lane that came out of the camp. This site was particularly sacred to Peshawar’s few Hindu citizens because here a banyan and a peepal tree grew side by side, their roots entwined to signify the coming together of the body and the soul. And Zameen had gone out there on hearing that the people from the camp’s newest mosque had attacked the two trees with axes. The CIA didn’t care what the religious affiliation of the warriors was — wanting the funds to go to those who fought the Soviet soldiers the hardest — but the Pakistanis made absolutely sure the funds provided by the United States and Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world were channelled only to the Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas, who went on to assassinate the moderate clerics and warlords. Zameen retreated after she recognised the cleric supervising the mutilation of the sacred trees. Within months he had had seven women murdered for being prostitutes. Five were in the camp but two were in the city of Peshawar itself because he was linking up with Pakistani extremists. He was arrested once and confessed to killing two sinful women but walked free after one month. His patrons had paid off the relatives of the killed women and therefore he had been reprieved under Islamic law. He scrutinised the inhabitants of the camp for moral laxity, calling down Allah’s wrath on them through his Friday sermons, and Zameen knew he would focus on her fully some day soon. The city’s police and the magistracy seemed to enjoy or approve of what he and people like him were doing because soon after each murder, each beating or arson attack, the eyewitnesses recanted their earlier statements due either to threat or inducement.

Zameen began receiving visitors from the new mosque, who asked her to prove that her son was legitimate. She was planning to flee to another camp but then, fortunately, she heard about the aid agency that needed someone to mind and live in an apartment in the city.

Maybe she has been driven out of her apartment in the Street of Storytellers too.

‘Sasha, Sasha, help, help!’

‘David, David, help, help!’ He couldn’t shut these words out of his mind. A peepal leaf blew in on the wind one afternoon and over the coming days it lay there, became more and more shrivelled and sickly brown, its veins prominent. To him, nightmarishly, it was like a real person dying.

What did they, the Americans, really know about such parts of the world, of the layer upon layer of savagery that made them up? They had arrived in these places without realising how fragile were the defences that most people had erected against cruelty and degradation here. Conducting a life with the light from a firefly.

He now entered fully the hell that was the Afghan refugee camps ringed around the city, searching for the pair of them among the three million people. Children screamed on seeing this white man, thinking he was a Soviet soldier. He was sure he would know her by her shadow alone but panic spread through him at the thought of Bihzad. Each day he grew up more and more, becoming unrecognisable. He couldn’t rest because the boy had to be found soon. Some parent birds, he knew, would not recognise a fledgling if it fell out of the nest because they hadn’t seen it from that particular angle, only in the nest. And Zameen had told him about the demoiselle cranes that landed on the lake beside her house in Usha, on their migration to and from Siberia each year: how the young lost their high-pitched calls in the first twelve months of life so the parents simply did not respond to them. Unseen though still beside them.

He saw the years stretching ahead of him, the decades of not knowing where the brutal improbabilities of war had taken the mother and child. One of the fears of a CIA case officer in Peshawar was kidnap by the Afghanistani secret service or the KGB, but David didn’t care as he moved through the camps, the clerics of the mosque shouting from the minarets that while the USSR was a prison, and the USA a whorehouse, Islam was the answer. Music had been banned in several camps for two or more years now.

One evening he stood to watch a pair of children, participants in a game of hide-and-seek that was in progress in a street of hovels. They were crouching next to an open sewer that spilled black matter, their eyes trained on the door from which the seeker was probably to emerge, the smell of cooking smoke and bread floating in the evening air. David watched as the two children sprang to their feet and grabbed the little boy who had just appeared in the door, chewing, having just finished a meal. They marched him to a corner and then quickly, before David could believe what he was seeing, or react, a finger was inserted into the overpowered little boy’s throat, the vomit emerging and being caught in the hands of the two assailants, who then began to eat the still-undigested food. The little boy stumbled away dazed and fell, his eyes bright with liquid even in the dusk. And David was hurrying through the four-foot-wide ‘street’, trying to find a way out of the maze. He had helped create all this.

No, all this was the Soviet Union’s fault because … because … He could not complete the thought. He had before and he would later but not just then.

The henna blossoms had completely faded from her hand, but she had two mirror-image birthmarks on her shoulder and thigh. And the distinguishing mark on Bihzad’s body was the three-quarter-inch burn just above the waist on the left side, one of those windowsill candles having fallen on him one day.

What would become of the child in this place? As they emerged from Uzbekistan into Afghanistan, he and the Afghan warriors had been ambushed by the Soviets and had lost three men. It was discovered that an orphan boy and girl from a nearby village, shepherds, had guided the Soviets across the hills towards them in exchange for food. David awoke the next day to find his companions drinking tea under the bough from which the lifeless bodies of the two very young children were hanging.

Days passed in the search, and then one evening he came back — exhausted as a firefighter — to see that her apartment had been broken into, the door half-open. He slipped into the darkness and stood listening. In the room about the sense of touch in Usha, she had told him, there was a master archer who could put out a candle with an arrow blindfolded, by focusing on the heat from the flame.

‘I am looking for my daughter,’ said the man he pinned to the floor, the gun at the ready. ‘A young woman named Zameen.’

David bent closer to the figure and lifted his foot off the head. The father from England? From Canterbury, the town that produced the saint venerated as the protector of secular clergy. The Englishman was sitting up now, his face moving through a rectangle of light from the open window. After revealing to him that Zameen had become a mother, David told him he wasn’t the father, that she hadn’t told him about the child’s paternity. He should leave it up to her to reveal as much or as little about Benedikt to Marcus as she preferred.

He told David he had sensed her presence at the house belonging to someone called Gul Rasool, that she had signalled to him by breaking the perfume bottle.

David didn’t want to approach Gul Rasool and mention that it was Marcus who had told him about Zameen being at his place, putting Marcus in danger. Gul Rasool’s car was eventually rammed off a deserted road outside Peshawar. Almost three years had passed by now, two previous attempts to apprehend him having proven unsuccessful. Now Gul Rasool was pulled out of the mangled vehicle and brought to the ruins of a mosque in a wilderness. He was interrogated with David present but out of sight, looking down through filigree on an upper storey.

All this based on something as evanescent as perfume. But he couldn’t think what else to do.

The mosque’s dome — tiled with blue fragments — had fallen to the ground and was like a giant cracked bowl in which the rain had collected to the brim. When the water moved, the Koranic calligraphy amid the mosaics writhed like a nest of black vipers. With the help of that water, among other things, Gul Rasool was made to talk.

It was just a case of turning one of those trick bottles the right way up — the information just poured out of the man.

Gul Rasool said he had been in one of the shops at the Street of Storytellers when the bicycle bomb had gone off near by and then he had seen Zameen, her head and face uncovered because she had come out in a hurry at the sound of the explosion to look for her son. Gul Rasool recognised the young woman instantly as the daughter of the two doctors from Usha, the Englishman and Qatrina, having seen her any number of times in Usha, Qatrina even carrying a photograph of her when she accompanied Gul Rasool into the battlefields.

He lost Zameen in the crowd of the bazaar, but then saw her face briefly in an upstairs window, lighting a candle.

The vigil she was maintaining for David.

Gul Rasool knocked on the door and, telling her he had a message from her father, brought her to his house.

So Zameen was there when Marcus visited.

David heard all this standing behind the panel of cement lace. A set of elaborate ruses had been invented to get at Rasool’s knowledge about Zameen indirectly, letting him think the interrogators were interested in completely different matters. Nor could they let him see David in case Rasool later saw him in Marcus’s company.

Gul Rasool revealed that Nabi Khan had staged an attack on his mansion in University Town, a raid during which he carried off among other things the group of women and children he kept for pleasure. Zameen and Bihzad among them.

Soon after that day David learned this to be partial truth. Only Bihzad was abducted by Khan — some of the others, including Zameen, had remained in Rasool’s captivity. Despite their best efforts and forethought, the men who had questioned Rasool at the ruined mosque had had to become specific about the women and children, and Rasool must have guessed that they were the reason why he was being interrogated. No longer wishing to be held responsible for any of them, he had said they were all taken away by Khan.

The child’s fate has remained a mystery to this day. He hasn’t been able to obtain an opportunity to talk to Nabi Khan, these warlords always disappearing into battles, into various hiding places and retreats. He has put out feelers and sent messages through intermediaries but without success. People tell him the boy had probably been sold or given away, jettisoned as Khan and his guerrillas moved from place to place. They are probably right.

Compared with this, how quickly it was, after that day behind the cement filigree, that he found out Zameen’s fate. About what happened to her as she remained in Rasool’s custody without her son. About what Rasool made her do in exchange for the promise that he would help her reunite with Bihzad.

And following the trail of her murderers, David would realise, he had been stepping on his own footprints.

CASA WALKS DOWN the cold hospital corridor. His reflection caught glasslike in the just-wiped floor. The smell of medicines in the air. It is late afternoon, his stitches in place at last, and he has just borrowed a phone to call for his companions to come and collect him from here. He is glad he had managed to persuade the American to leave some hours ago, his kindness an embarrassment and confusion for him. As they approached Jalalabad he was afraid of being taken to another nearby hospital, a place where there was a chance someone would recognise him as one of the twelve wounded fighters who had been delivered there in December 2001, their bodies smashed in various places, the nurses letting out terrified gasps when they were rushed to the X-ray room and it was revealed that they all carried pistols and knives and had grenades tied to their bodies. Wild with wrath and pain, four were Arabs, three Uzbeks, one Uighur Muslim from China, one Chechen, and the rest were Afghans, and they had warned that they would pull the pins on their grenades if they felt threatened or caught a glimpse of a foreigner.

He looks at the black plastic Casio on his wrist, the digital numbers startling themselves onwards second by second.

They should be here any minute. His other fear as they approached Jalalabad was that someone would see him in the company of the white man. The attack Nabi Khan has planned for Usha is too important for even the smallest of risks. There are dreams of putting together a large militia with the help of the ISI, using Usha as a base. If they have cause to doubt Casa’s loyalty they will torture him. Though he knows nothing beyond the vaguest details, not even the exact date. There is every chance they would execute him out of hand.

Through the window at the end of the corridor he looks out at the road, touching his bandages absently, the long white strips encircling his head. When he was about six and living in a refugee camp in Pakistan, some women upon arrival from Afghanistan would pull out lace that had been wound around their limbs and torsos under the clothes. Smugglers’ apprentices, they would step away from the miles of looped softness they had just shed, and the boys would then go into the room to gather them up. They could feel the warmth of the women’s bodies still in them, lingering in the haze of colour. The older boys would occasionally pocket one — for, he now knows, moments of arousal later.

He looks up and his heart sinks upon seeing David the American walking towards him.

‘Are you well?’

Casa manoeuvres him away from the large window. ‘I thought you had gone.’

‘Not without seeing if there’s anything else you needed, and we have to pay for your treatment. I went off to attend to a few things.’

‘I thought you had already paid, I thought you had gone.’

From the plastic bag he has with him, the man takes out three new sets of shalwar-kameez. ‘For you. I wasn’t sure about the size but I think they’ll fit.’

Casa takes them from him and just as the man is proffering a sheaf of Afghani banknotes — ‘Do you want to settle the hospital bill yourself?’ — Casa catches sight of the three figures at the other end of the corridor, watching him. His fellow warriors. They pivot away and are gone in the next instant, Casa’s fingers still not fully closed around the money.

They’ve gone to report to Nabi Khan what they have seen, to ask him what should be done. People at the very centre, like Khan, cannot use electronic equipment, made watchful by the bounty on their heads. Only the external circle can be contacted through the cell phones — they would then convey the message verbally to Nabi Khan and bring out his response and instructions. Casa has at most ten minutes before they return to kill him, spray him from their guns. Those standing near by will die also because bullets are blind. He has to think fast, extremely fast. No location in the city is safe for him. They know all possible places where he might hide for a few days to work out what to do.

He feels thirsty all of a sudden, intensely so, as though he has been force-fed thorns. Where is that bottle of water?

‘I am glad you came back,’ he tells David. ‘Would you be kind enough to take me back with you?’

He still has his shroud. No one has commented on it so far — wrapped around his body under his blanket it just looks like an extra layer for warmth — but he must hide it somewhere when they get back to Usha. The stark white cloth is dabbed with a few syllables of his blood from last night. A Saudi Arabian boy had given it to him as a gift, having soaked it in the holy water of the spring in Mecca which burst forth when the infant prophet Ismael struck the ground with his heel, to quench the thirst of his mother, the pair having been abandoned in the desert by his father at Allah’s bidding.

*

David has to negotiate his way into Usha. As a result of the shabnama, armed gunmen have been posted on the road in from Jalalabad. A third of an orchard has been felled and the flowering trees arranged in a barricade, a giant white garland in front of which the men stand with their weapons, the last bees of the day working the blossoms. Gul Rasool was away but has now come back to Usha.

Near by a father is chastising a little boy for playing football, as all that kicking would damage his new shoes.

David had phoned James Palantine earlier today and asked if they could meet. He too was in another province but is making his way towards Usha at Gul Rasool’s request. A group of his men, young Americans like James himself, is here to safeguard Gul Rasool in the meantime.

‘He’ll come and see me here,’ David tells Lara when they arrive. ‘I’ll ask him about Benedikt then.’

They are taking a pillow and a thin mattress and some sheets to the perfume factory for the boy. He is too reserved to enter the house, saying he’ll sleep down there.

David looks at her under the evening sky, the leaf-filtered light from above. All day he had wanted this, had wanted to touch her, but there has been no contact since his return. Marcus always present. There was also the matter of their unexpected guest. And, yes, he must admit, there is a hint within him of shame, of doubt. What makes him think he deserves these moments of gladness amid all this wreckage? Afghanistan will still be there in the morning?

As he and Zameen made love at the apartment in the Street of Storytellers — that thing a woman’s long hair does, when it accidentally comes to lie over the face in crosshatched layers, her features seen through the overlapping gauze! — songs would drift in through the open window, words on the night breeze. He hadn’t at first understood why in these lyrics mundane observations were mentioned in the first verse — a mosquito’s whine, the sound of a twig broom on the courtyard floor — but were coupled in the second verse with expressions of deepest longing. But by then as he smelled the jasmine on her breast, looking into the vertigo-inducing depths of her eyes, he knew that in its obsession the heart responds to everything by echoing back a truth about the lover, by echoing back a truth about love. Everything — everything — reminds you of her. The pomegranate tree has produced its first blossom, a woman would sing on a radio in the bazaar downstairs, and as Zameen sighed in his ear, the singer would add, On the journey towards the beloved, you live by dying at every step.

Slowly he raises his hand and touches Lara’s neck with the back of his fingers as they walk towards the perfume factory.

CASA IS CLIMBING the giant face, using his hands and his toes to seek out holds amid the stone features. The arc of the lip. The nose ledge. The dot between the eyebrows. Reaching the top — which is the side of the head, full of waving locks of hair — he sits beside the horizontal ear, the stone grainy under his palm. The floor is ten feet below him. He looks into the pit of the ear’s whorl and reaches for the flashlight in his pocket. Half a minute later he switches off the beam and sends his fingers in there.

He scrambles down and then goes up the staircase where the oil lantern they had given him burns on the fourth step, emerging into the dark corridor of trees, going past David’s car. He is carrying before him the old bird’s nest he has discovered in the ear. A loose bowl of grass. The bird must have found its way into the factory through one of the many broken windows. Amid the straw and grass blades there is a black feather, a complete diamond-shaped pink rose petal, and bits of brittle moss that he can see. With a tentativeness in his demeanour, trying not to smile, he enters the kitchen and places the woven object on the table where the three of them are sitting. The candle flame giving a lurch in the draught, the light sloshing to one side of the room like liquid. He turns and leaves, a small sound of delight and surprise from Lara behind him.

DAVID MOVES AMONG the shapes in the glasshouse. A sweep of stars above him. The Straw Ribbon, Keh Kishan, is what the Milky Way galaxy is called in Persian. Zameen had told him this.

After the Soviet Army conceded defeat in 1989 — the war had lasted longer than the Second World War — Marcus had returned to Usha and David had gone back to the United States, visiting every few months for the next five years. One night at a function at the Islamabad embassy he ran into Fedalla, who was now a colonel, rich with all the money he had siphoned from the guerrillas. A large house, a harem of cars. He was in a group with ________, David’s mole in the ISI, and was participating drunkenly in a conversation about Afghanistan. How the influx since 1979 of the millions of filthy Afghan refugees had ruined the once beautiful city of Peshawar. Had led to what he termed the ‘Kalashnikovisation’ of his homeland. ‘Look at the shapes of the two countries on a map and you’ll see that Afghanistan rests like a huge burden on poor Pakistan’s back. A bundle of misery.’

As the conversation moved on to the ten thousand bombs that had fallen on the city of Kabul the previous month, the civil war having begun, ________ indicated that he had something to convey to David.

‘Back in 1986,’ David was told when they met the next day, ‘Christopher Palantine had arranged to meet Gul Rasool at a location outside Peshawar. Rasool was selling missiles supplied by the CIA to the Iranians. Christopher had the evidence and wanted to confront him, but when he arrived early he saw a young woman planting a bomb there. Rasool had lured him there because Christopher had to be eliminated, couldn’t be allowed to expose Rasool and have his CIA funding stopped. Christopher accused Rasool of trying to kill him when he and his men arrived, but he said, “Would I turn up here myself if I had sent her?” He had her shot then and there to prove she wasn’t anything to do with him. But he was more than an hour late, so it could have been him. And we actually now know that it was. Definitely.’

For some unknown reason David dreaded the moment the young woman’s name would be spoken. All names are my names.

‘She could have been sent to eliminate Christopher by the KGB or the Afghan secret service.’

‘That was one of Christopher’s initial suspicions. Fedalla, who has heard of the incident from somewhere, was telling us about it last night, convinced she had been sent by you, by the CIA. And Fedalla was in awe that the CIA allowed one of its own to be killed. He said it is such cunning and resolve that has turned your country into a superpower. That the Pakistani secret service cares too much about its people, cares too much about civilians to be truly effective.’

‘What was her name?’

‘I don’t know. But she pleaded to be let go, telling Christopher she couldn’t disclose who had sent her because then she wouldn’t be able to see her son again. Obviously too afraid of Rasool.’

The very next day David flew to New York City and telephoned Christopher Palantine and asked to see him.

Christopher was already there at the restaurant when he arrived and took his seat almost wordlessly, his silence cutting off Christopher’s words of pleasure at seeing him after such a long period. Friends who loved each other like brothers.

All David could do was stare at him. A cold February noon outside.

‘What is it?’

David took out Zameen’s photograph from his pocket and reaching his arm across the table placed it before him, swerving it in the air so that it was the right way round for the other man.

Christopher looked at the image and then lifted it off the tablecloth, and his hands disappeared below the table with it, the neutral expression not leaving his features. Perfect composure. They were after all spies, committed to their dark profession, their conversations laced with phrases like ‘plausible deniability’ and ‘I can’t tell you how I know that’ and ‘we never had this discussion’. Such words were spoken so often in Peshawar that they could be plucked out of the city’s dirty air.

There followed moments of chilling merciless disbelief as David had his answer. No language was needed. As confirmation there now came the sound of the photograph being torn up under the table. Three long rips that must have divided the rectangle of paper into narrow strips; these were gathered together and there were three shorter, thicker rips that must have carved the whole thing up into sixteen small squares. David remembered her telling him how someone from the mosque in the refugee camp — believing her child was illegitimate — had broken into her trunk and drawn a large dagger on her mirror as warning. She had lifted it out and seen the weapon superimposed onto her face.

David leaned back against his chair and closed his eyes, suddenly drained, Christopher’s stare still fixed on him.

He wanted to cry out, the noise a raised welt in the air.

‘It’s over, Christopher,’ he managed to say. ‘I am finished.’ Homer used the same word, keimai, for Patroclus lying dead in battle as for Achilles falling beside his body in grief. And later when Thetis came to comfort her son, the poet had her take his head between her hands — the gesture of the chief mourner in the funeral of a dead man.

It was then, just after 12.17 p.m. that February afternoon in 1993, that the thirteen-hundred-pound bomb exploded a block away in the underground garage of the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

It was a yellow Ryder truck, parked there by a graduate of one of the training camps set up in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. The explosion was meant to release cyanide gas into the building but the heat burned it away. And one tower was supposed to fall into the other — the terrorists had hoped to kill a quarter of a million people.

The ground shook. Some fragments of the woman’s image scattered from Christopher’s hands. They had almost arranged to meet at the Windows on the World, 106 floors directly above the bomb.

They rushed out into the street now. There were flakes of snow in the air, floating like sparse bits of airborne glass, mixing with the smoke. People from all directions were running towards the site — soon there were doctors, ambulances, police cars, bystanders, groups of workmen from a nearby construction site, one of them wearing an IRA — FREEDOM FIGHTERS T-shirt. Sirens and cries and shouts.

He could have been up there, the elevators and the electricity having failed, smoke pouring up through the Tower towards him. And he felt as though he was, with devastation all around him and the howling depth outside.

‘They are here,’ he murmured to Christopher in the shocked recognition of inevitability.

He saw himself clearly, making his way down the black stairwells, and the deeper he went the greater the number of wounded and disorientated people who joined him like shades in Hell, the darkness and smoke increasing. Wherever you may be, death shall overtake you, though you may put yourself in lofty towers, said the Koran.

They are here.

Cops with flashlights were guiding people out as they neared the giant hole at the bottom.

Christopher dragged him away into a doorway. ‘Who was she?’

But he was still up there with them.

‘Who was she, David?’

‘I loved her.’

‘I didn’t know who she was or I wouldn’t have allowed her to die.’

‘Where are her remains?’

‘I don’t know. I doubt if anyone does.’

The workers digging the foundations of these buildings years ago had found ancient cannonballs and bombs, a ship’s anchor of a design not made after 1750, and one small gold-rimmed teacup made of china but still intact, with two birds painted on it.

He left Christopher and walked away.

The cleric who had inspired the attack — he lived and preached across the Hudson in Jersey City, having sought asylum in the United States — had called on Muslims to assail the West in revenge for the centuries of humiliation and subjugation, ‘cut off the transportation of their cities, tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air, or land’. The bomb resulted in more hospital casualties than any event in American history since the Civil War. And what did his life resemble from that point onwards? He became fundamentally inconsolable. It was like missing a step on the stairs or losing one’s balance for a moment — that sensation extended to hours to days to years.

*

He looks towards the window of Lara’s room, as yet unlit. Midnight, and she is still with Marcus. No one has ever mentioned — anywhere — the dust-and-ash-covered sparrow that a man leaned down and gently stroked on September 11, the bird sitting stunned on a sidewalk an hour or so after the Towers collapsed. It is one of his most vivid memories of that day’s television, but no one remembers seeing it. Perhaps he remembers it because he has since read that Muhammad Atta’s nickname as a child was Bulbul.

*

David didn’t want to retaliate against Gul Rasool — for killing Zameen, and for lying about her to his men during torture. Too sickened and exhausted, and also because it could have jeopardised Marcus’s safety.

And now Gul Rasool is a US ally, James Palantine providing him with security. James must know that Rasool had once wanted to kill his father. In the wake of the 2001 attacks, Gul Rasool was the only one who was around to help root out the Taliban from Usha, to help capture al-Qaeda terrorists, and to keep them at bay, the United States paying him handsomely for his support. The first CIA team that arrived in Afghanistan soon after the attacks, to persuade warlords and tribal leaders, had brought five million dollars with them. It was spent within forty days. Ten million more was flown in by helicopter: piles of money as high as children — four cardboard boxes kept in a corner of a safe house, with someone sleeping on them as a precaution against theft.

Originally the idea of asking Gul Rasool was resisted, Nabi Khan’s name being put forward instead. But when Gul Rasool heard of it, he put together a death squad to assassinate Nabi Khan. Khan — who, also scenting money, had dispatched his own men to kill Gul Rasool — was the first to be wounded and was therefore unable to fight with the Americans.

*

David watches as the light comes on gently in Lara’s room, can visualise the candle flame stretching itself to full height. He wonders what news James Palantine would bring for Lara. He hadn’t seen the boy for years when he contacted the family after hearing of Christopher’s death. He enters the house, going past the bird’s nest on the shelf, and walks down the dark green floor of the hallway.