Strange sacrifices were required in that shadow-filled realm, strange compromises. In another month the Soviet Union would invade Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s corrupt and brutal military dictator would become a fêted ally of not just the United States but of most of the Western world, David himself present on a number of occasions where the man was extravagantly celebrated and flattered, his own voice adding to the dishonest chorus.
‘LARA CARRIES WITH HER a leaf from the Cosmos Oak that grows in the Kremlin,’ Marcus tells David. ‘Her cosmonaut father was killed when his spacecraft malfunctioned during the return to Earth in 1965.’
The two men are at the lake, beside the small fire that David has built. Night insects, knees and elbows of finest wire, cross and recross the zone of light around the flames.
‘There were rumours he knew while still in orbit that he was doomed, that his death screams during the dive back towards the world were recorded by American monitoring stations.’
‘Where is she now? Does she know we are out here?’
Marcus points to a lit window on the first floor of the house. ‘She knows where we are. I have told her she’ll never be left alone here again. One of us will always be with her.’ Marcus has a rose blossom with him, and he smells its petals from time to time. It is from one of the plants which he has patiently retaught their former elegance.
David brings more wood for the fire, two sword-length dead branches which he breaks into eight sections, leaning them onto the burning pyramid, at evenly spaced points.
He looks towards her window. The Cosmos Oak was planted to mark the first manned space flight by Yuri Gagarin, he knows.
‘Her father’s last journey had been timed to celebrate a day of International Solidarity,’ Marcus says, ‘and the Kremlin ordered the launch despite the chief designer’s refusal to sign the flight endorsement papers for the reentry vehicle.’
‘I remember when we landed on the moon in 1969. Jonathan took me to have what they were calling “moon burgers”. There was a small American flag planted on top of the bun.’ He smiles at the memory. ‘I was about twelve, he must have been eighteen.’
A few minutes before midnight they walk up to the house to collect Lara — waiting for her by the threshold’s cypress trees until she emerges with a lamp — and then the three of them go to David’s car to listen to the news bulletin. The batteries of the kitchen radio are lifeless due to use and David will have to pick up new ones tomorrow. A night journey, along the curved sequence of Persian lilac trees. Marcus says that when Muhammad’s disciples were leaving his house, he would put his hand out of the door and the light from his palm would light their way home.
There is a trace of acacia scent in the air as there is the faint presence of Alexander’s name in the word Kandahar, as there is the presence of Ahmed in Anna Akhmatova’s surname, she whose lines Lara had quoted during a conversation yesterday: As if I was drinking my own tears from a stranger’s cupped hands.
They get in and close the door against the sound of the lake water and the million leaves, against insects hungry for light.
The news tells them that an angry statement has appeared, purporting to be from those who choreographed the bombing. They wish to point out the hypocrisy of the Americans who condemn this killing of the children but whose president had shaken hands with the people who in the 1980s had blown up a passenger plane just as it took off from Kandahar airport, carrying Afghan schoolchildren bound for indoctrination in the Soviet Union.
‘Is that true?’ Lara asks, turning towards David, but he doesn’t answer.
Apart from that there is nothing about the Jalalabad bombing in the bulletin. Afterwards they sit in the darkness for a while, the various metals and mechanisms of the car cooling around them, Marcus having gone to the house.
‘In the States we call them chinaberry trees,’ David tells her as they slowly walk under the Persian lilacs, going towards the lake. ‘The berries are poisonous. My brother and I would dissolve their pulp in a deep slow-moving part of the river and when the fish passed through those waters they’d be stunned. We’d just pick them up with our hands.’
‘Marcus told me about your brother.’
A 180-person military task force scrutinises the hills, fields, and jungles of Vietnam to determine the fate of more than a thousand Americans unaccounted for there. In Vietnam, as well as Laos and Cambodia, witnesses are interviewed, crash sites are excavated, ponds are drained, and bone fragments are sifted from shallow graves.
Men lost in long-forgotten ambushes.
Men lost in falling B52 bombers.
Men last seen alive in the hands of their captors.
‘He was twenty. 1971. Last month I was looking at a photo of him from that time. How young he was, how amazingly young we all look at that age!’ Like one of those miniscule new leaves found at the very tip of a branch, the ones that can be crushed into a watery green smear between thumb and forefinger — so unformed, so … resistanceless.
The fire is out when they arrive at the lake, just an exhalation of the red embers and a column of smoke that changes direction every few instants.
‘I read somewhere that there once existed in Burma a ruby so large and vivid that when the king placed it in a bowl of milk, the milk turned red.’ She is blowing into the fire while he looks for pieces of wood that might be lying around.
‘The watch my father gave Jonathan when he left for Vietnam had a tiny spinel inside it, attached to one of the plates that held the mechanism. He said it was from Afghanistan. That was one of the reasons I came to this country, all those years ago. Always wanted to visit Afghanistan because of that small jewel. And then of course the Soviet Union invaded and my interest deepened.’ He’d visit Afghanistan’s gem mines even during its Soviet occupation when no Americans were permitted. Slipping in from Pakistan and out again without leaving an official footprint anywhere.
‘You helped the anti-Soviet guerrillas, the dukhi? Yes?’
Nothing from him. The sound of the wood splitting as the fire comes back to life. The water swaying.
‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘The two empires hated each other. I know that when Soviet troops entered Afghanistan, the reaction in the United States was, “We now have the chance to give the Soviets their Vietnam.” Revenge.’
But he is shaking his head. ‘It’s possible that everyone else was fighting the Soviets for the wrong reasons, was mercenary or dishonest, faking enthusiasm due to this or that greed. Even wanting revenge, yes. But I never doubted that my own reasons were good, genuine.’
Just as it doesn’t matter to a person when he is in a hall of mirrors — he himself knows he is the one who is real. The confusion is for the onlookers.
He says: ‘How I feel about the mayhem I helped unleash, how I live with that, is a separate matter, but my opposition to the principles behind the Soviet Union is still there when I look — my opposition to what the Soviet empire did to those who lived in it, those who were born in it.’
MARCUS TAKES DOWN Virgil from the shelf. On the cover is a painting of Aeneas fleeing the burning destruction of Troy. The great broken heart of the city in the background. Aeneas is accompanied by his young son — a path to the future — and is carrying his aged father over his shoulder — the reminder of the past. The old man clutches the statues of the household gods in his right hand, and because the other hand is out of sight in the folds of his cloak, absent beyond the wrist, Marcus thinks for a moment of himself. If so, then David is Aeneas — he had offered to carry Marcus up the tall minaret in Jalalabad. The little boy, is he Bihzad?