He opens the book to the contents page and lets his eye slide down the list of chapters, moving deeper into the story rung by rung, Aeneas establishing an empire but along the way losing his soul. A flicker in Marcus’s eye: something slides out from between the pages and falls onto the floor. It is one of the pieces of absorbent white card on which he tested perfumes. He raises it to his face and convinces himself that it smells of Zameen, however faintly, of the fragrance he had blended especially for her.
After being forced to accompany Nabi Khan into battle, to tend to his wounded soldiers, he had ended up in the refugee camps in Peshawar, surrounded by millions of other traumatised Afghans, displaced by the rebellion against the Soviets. He didn’t know where Qatrina was, hadn’t seen her since Gul Rasool took her with him into his battles. Then one day in 1986 he discovered where in Peshawar Gul Rasool was based: he was living in a mansion in the wealthy University Town area of the city with his family and band of fighters. The blossom sitting heavy as flocks of white birds on the branches, Nabi Khan also lived near by in that area wreathed by magnolia trees, as did other tribal leaders and warlords, holy warriors all, all made rich by the hundreds of millions of dollars pouring into the jihad. Marcus went to see Gul Rasool to ask where Qatrina was, and towards the end of their conversation he felt a sweet strong stab from somewhere. Thinking back sequentially, moment by moment, he connected it to the faint sound of glass shattering in the room next door. Outside he had to lean against a palm tree for support — a vial of Zameen’s scent had been broken behind the thick mahogany door. She was letting him know she was there.
He couldn’t have asked Gul Rasool anything about the women in the house and now didn’t know how to proceed. The scent was a message from her — a call, a prompt. Through one of the servants in the house he discovered that a young woman had recently been brought there, that she was from the Street of the Storytellers in the centre of Peshawar.
Marcus went to the fabled Street and, after an hour or so of questions and answers with the locals amid the manic activity and noise, climbed two flights of dark stairs, finding himself at a small flat. Almost in tears he knocked several times and then forced his way in, suddenly past caring. Only a short while later he heard someone follow him in. He placed his hands and an ear against the wall. Feeling along it over many minutes, as though trying to locate the heart of a live organism. He silenced his breathing as much as possible and resisted the scrape of fabric and skin against the wall. Then suddenly he was overpowered and pinned to the floor with a foot on the side of his face. He strained up to see a gun pointed at his temple, the metal gleaming even in the small amount of light coming in through the window.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I am looking for my daughter.’ His mouth crushed against the floor. ‘A young woman named Zameen.’
The pressure of the boot slowly eased off his head.
‘I have reason to believe she lives here,’ he continued.
‘What’s your name?’ he was asked, in American-accented English this time.
‘Marcus Caldwell.’ He sat up. The man had been leaning down towards him and now straightened, his face moving through a rectangle of light from the open window. Marcus saw that he was a young Caucasian. ‘Who are you?’
‘My name is David Town,’ the American said and switched on the light. ‘Zameen has told me all about you, about Qatrina.’
David would never reveal anything about the activities hidden behind his gem business, and Marcus knew not to ask, having guessed more or less immediately that he was in espionage. He now said he had been away for a period and had recently returned to find no trace of Zameen and her son here.
‘I know where she is. She has a child?’
‘Where is she?’
‘Are you the father?’
‘Where is she?’
Marcus told him where he thought she was, accepting the younger man’s scepticism that the clue had been provided by perfume.
They eventually learned that since the day of Marcus’s visit, Nabi Khan had carried out a raid on Gul Rasool’s mansion in University Town. There were regular pitched battles between rival warlords in Peshawar’s streets, car bombs and assassinations, missiles and rocket-propelled grenades fired into buildings and crowds. Nabi Khan had carried away several of Gul Rasool’s women and children during the attack, to be exploited or sold, Bihzad among them. Several people had died, including Zameen.
All this knowledge was incremental, years in the acquiring.
Marcus smells now the few molecules of the perfume that still inhabit the fibres of the white card, Virgil open on his lap. Qatrina had designed the container — a map of the world and the word Zameen acid-etched onto the glass. The space inside him seems to expand when the fragrance enters him.
Stamen and flint and petal and river moss. Afghanistani women, in the songs they sing, do not desire Allah’s Paradise after death, wishing instead to become streams and grasses, the breeze and the dust. The soil placed upon them in the grave, they sing, they’ll take as their lover.
The nail had gone through the card. A hole the size of a cell in a beehive. He puts it back in the Aeneid.
LARA TURNS THE PAGES of the atlas until she holds the United States of America in her hands. Milk is a river in Montana, lit by her candle. Heart is a river in North Dakota. Rifle, Dinosaur, Delhi. These are towns in Colorado. Antlers. Two Medicine. Twentynine Palms. Talking about Usha, Teardrop, the lake outside this window, he had said a lake named Tear of the Clouds is the source of the Hudson River. She searches for it now. New York City. Marcus has told her that David was there in 1993 when Muslim terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center for the first time. Oldland, Montana, was where he was born in 1957.
She follows him with her fingertip: to university in California and then back to Montana. One grandfather was a watchsmith, the child David coming into contact with gemstones through him. The father — originally a farmer’s son — had been encouraged by his schoolteachers to apply to Harvard, and the mother was a doctor’s secretary and eventually a nurse, rolling her hair into the car window so it would jolt her awake if she fell asleep during the long commute to the nursing school. As he spoke, had she detected something like satisfaction in him? A contentment at how his family had been given the chances to improve themselves over the decades and generations, slowly and patiently encouraged to thrive by America in American sunlight?
She looks up, at the possibility of a sound from Marcus’s room, fully alert. She inclines her head for the best angle, recalling the aunt who when attending the Mariinsky Theatre always sat high up at the back of the house, saying the acoustics were better up there even if she couldn’t make out the expressions of the singers or the details of the costumes.
Nothing but silence from the other side of this wall where Muhammad sits dressed in Islam’s green with his hand plunged into a clay pitcher of water — consolidating and expanding the Islamic empire by sealing a deal with a woman.
She has noticed how Marcus tries to hide his missing hand. She wonders if ‘hide’ is still the correct word. She releases her mind into this small consideration. Can you hide something that is not there to begin with? He is trying to hide the fact of his missing hand.