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.