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.’