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.