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. Spineclass="underline" 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.