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 beautifuclass="underline" 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 …