She used to say she did not want any mention of God at her funeral.
They move towards the tree through the sunlight. Easy to imagine, at such an hour, how Qatrina could have filled notebooks with the colours she found in a square foot of nature. An olive grove outside Jalalabad — grey, white, green. A mallow blossom — red orange, sulphur, yellow bone, red-wine shadow. The mountains above the house — silver, evasive grey, blue, sapphire water. She’d use these notes as reference when painting. Muhammad had said, ‘Verily there are one hundred minus one names of Allah. He who enumerates them would get into Paradise,’ causing Muslims to search them out in the Koran so that a list was compiled. And Qatrina’s life’s work was a series of ninety-nine paintings concerning these names — ‘the Artist’ among them. They are now lost because of the wars.
‘She worked with the patients for longer hours than I did,’ Marcus says. ‘Travelled to remoter areas than I ever contemplated whenever she heard about an outbreak or epidemic. But she would at times feel utterly helpless at the state of her country’s people.’
‘I am surprised the tree has survived.’
‘It even produces some fruit, later in the year.’
‘Then I won’t get to taste it. A few more days, at most, is all I’ll spend here.’
‘If you are in no hurry to get back to something, you can stay here longer. And I’ll talk to David so we can accompany you to Kabul airport, we’ll try to walk right up to the plane, when you do decide to go.’ The night she had spent alone in the house has deposited the blue of fearful anxiety under her eyes.
‘There is no need,’ she shakes her head but then murmurs a thanks.
*
For the next three days, David leaves for Jalalabad early each morning, the song of the birds entering his ears like gentle pins, and he returns to the house in the evenings. The electricity generator is actually broken, he discovers, and he takes it to Jalalabad to be mended, the house continuing to live by candle- and lamplight, moving between weakly illuminated pools.
One morning there is a demonstration in Jalalabad, the placards and shouts expressing contempt for the people who had planned and carried out the bombing of the school. Pakistan’s government has denied suggestions that current or former members of its secret service were involved in the crime. Another day, the weeping father of one of the eleven dead children insists the Americans leave Afghanistan because if they had not come the atrocity would not have occurred. And a woman, broken with grief at having lost a girl and a boy, approaches David and wants to know why the Americans had released that criminal from custody. She demands they catch his accomplices and take them away to be slowly tortured to death somewhere.
He sits on the stone steps that descend into the perfume factory. As night arrives he can barely see the Buddha’s head, save for slashes of minimum light that define his hair and mouth. He spreads ambergris onto his hands. His head filling up with sea odour. He discovered a small amount of it in a jar here like a dab of black butter. It is obtained from the insides of sperm whales but the Arabs who peddled it along the Silk Road always disguised its origins, protecting a trade secret. For a long time the Persians believed that it came from a spring beneath the oceans, and the Chinese that it was the spit of dragons.
They are saying that the building next to the school was a warehouse for storing heroin. It belonged to Gul Rasool, the man who is the court of appeal in all matters in Usha. If the intended target was the warehouse, then Nabi Khan must be alive. It must be him, trying to strike a blow against his enemy. But the statement left behind by the suicide bomber had hinted strongly that the school was the target. It had ended with the words Death to America.
A rumour has also spread that the bombing was carried out by the Americans themselves so that the concept of jihad can be blamed and discredited.
He sits quietly at the table with Lara and Marcus, listening to their talk. Twice during the months he knew her, Zameen woke up screaming from a dream of being assaulted by the Soviet soldier. Memories rising in her like bruises as he held her. A dream of lying lifeless on the floor, the attacker manipulating her body ‘as when a corpse is washed before burial’, arranging her limbs before beginning. ‘Of course he committed a crime,’ she said, ‘and if these were normal times I would have liked to have seen him brought to justice. What else can I say? That doesn’t change the fact that I am grateful he helped me escape from the military base. He may have saved my life. When I think of that I hope he’s all right, wherever he is.’
When he is not with the other two inhabitants of the house, David walks through the orchard and the garden, some younger stems as slender as nai flutes. One night he builds a fire at the water’s edge. As a young man he had gone to Berkeley for a university interview and, having stood on the roof of the astronomy building and looked out at San Francisco Bay with its sailboats, had made his decision. He bought an ancient twenty-seven-foot boat and for the next four years lived on it in the Berkeley marina. And every time he has visited Marcus, this lake has begged to be paddled on. This time he has brought with him from the United States the basic materials to construct a birch-bark canoe, having contemplated spending a week or so building it here; from a storeroom in the half-ruined school in Jalalabad he brings it all to Usha one day, unloading it into an unused room. Visiting the lakes of the northern United States as a child, in the company of his brother Jonathan and an uncle, he had seen a sea of wild rice engulf an Ojibwa woman seated in a canoe. A slide into harvest: she gently bent the slender stalks that were sticking out of the water’s surface and knocked the grain into her vessel, to sell for twenty-five cents a pound. The last armed conflict between the United States military forces and the Native Americans had taken place right there on Leech Lake in 1898. White officers and troops — and around them in the forest, circling quietly on the icy ground, nineteen Natives with Winchester rifles.
He walks around the house, reacquainting himself with it. The broken painted couples enclose him when he enters the room at the top. On the walls of muted gold, they are either in union or keeping vigils for each other in grove and pavilion. Waiting. On first walking in he has to halt mid-step — seeing the hundreds of coloured fragments arranged on the floor. Initially he is not sure what they mean but circling around them he discovers the vantage from where they do not appear arbitrary and the image is the right way up.
A man and a woman.
‘I’ll pick these up. Do you wish to use the room?’ Lara has come in.
‘Don’t put them away on my account, please. I was just going around the house, reminding myself of things.’
Having removed an oval piece on which the strings of a harp are painted — just a few black lines made as though by ink-dipped twigs — she lets her hand remain some inches off the floor, the limb suspended in the air irresolutely, and then she puts it back and stands up.
They look at each other, and he doesn’t know how to fill the silence and then she withdraws.
He moves towards the windowsill to gaze at that vast sky of Asia, caught between inside and outside.
*
It was here in this part of the world that David had heard for the first time the call for America’s death. A mob fired by visions of a true Islamic society, shouting, ‘Kill All Americans!’, ‘President Carter the Dog Must Die!’ It was in Islamabad, Pakistan, in November 1979. He was twenty-two.