She closes the atlas and moves towards her bed. These are the rooms where Qatrina had lost her reason, Marcus having to tell her there was no need to be afraid just because the bar of red soap was producing white lather. Benedikt and Lara’s own mother, someone who graduated from the Philological Faculty of Leningrad University and had worked as an engineer and a translator, was declared schizophrenic and confined for six years to a psychiatric hospital prison where drug treatment was administered. She was a civil rights activist and was arrested in 1969 for participating in a demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Lara and Benedikt, their father already consumed in fire above the planet, were billeted with various relatives from then on, some as powerless as them, others well connected — in these houses even the brooms were softer. But nothing could be done, no network of influence and protection available, when Benedikt was summoned by the army.
To be sent to the feared war against ghosts in Afghanistan.
To become a ghost himself.
4. Night Letter
CYANIDE CAN BE EXTRACTED from apricots, Casa knows. He had distilled it at a jihad training camp, injected it into the bodies of creatures. The memory comes to him as he walks past a flowering tree at the edge of a street in Jalalabad city centre, the flowers still not finished emptying themselves of scent this late in the afternoon. An ant travels up the trunk at the speed of a spark along a fuse wire.
Pencils. Lemons. Corn syrup. Dye. As he walks through the street he knows he could fabricate explosives from many things on the carts and in the shops around him. Sugar. Coffee. Paint. He even knows how to make a bomb out of his urine.
Three international military patrol vehicles go by containing khaki-clad soldiers, a clamorous knot developing in the traffic because all others have to make way for them. There are women and blacks among the soldiers, an attempt, Nabi Khan says, by the USA-led Western world to humiliate Muslims by having sows and apes be their new monarchs.
Word has come that the explosion outside the school has delighted the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the covert grouping of Pakistani military officers led by Fedalla. They have promised further help.
Casa himself has never attended a school, just various religious institutions. Attached to a number of which there was a military training camp. At about ten he had wanted permission to fight in Bosnia but he was told it was too far for someone so young. And the response was the same at eleven when he wanted to pursue martyrdom in Chechnya. By then he had been holding a Kalashnikov for three years. He knew the finger on the trigger was steadier during exhalation as opposed to during inhalation. He knew how to strip and clean the rifle blindfolded, and he could do it in sixty seconds. He had fired it from moving vehicles and had fired it in the darkness, had fired it after running for an hour to simulate the banging heartbeat of a battle. He was proud of the fact that it was a Soviet gun. The Koran told of Daud, the raw youth with no weapons or armour who had used Jaloot’s own sword to slay him, Jaloot the giant whom the Christians call Goliath, having felled him with a sling first; and so the Afghans had used captured Soviet weapons as the instruments of the evil Godless empire’s own destruction. The Koran being a guidance for all time, this method continues to be relevant. Of the sixty-six Tomahawk missiles fired at Afghanistan’s training camps in the 1990s, across thousands of miles from an American warship in the Arabian Sea, a number had failed to detonate — and these had been sold by al-Qaeda to the Chinese for millions of dollars.
Casa was present at a camp at the exact moment the missiles landed. He had been bowing before Allah and had just raised his forehead from the prayer mat. The needle of the small compass fitted at the head of the mat — to allow the faithful to always find the direction of Mecca — had started to spin at great speed just as it did in lightning storms. He was severely injured but Allah had spared his life, having better plans for him.
Because no true Muslim should shrink from killing in cold blood, his jihad training had included slitting the throats of sheep and horses while reciting the verse from the holy Koran which gives permission to massacre prisoners of war: It is not for the Prophet to have captives until he has spread fear of slaughter in the land. In the laboratories of the camps, stocked with labelled drums of various acids, acetones, cellulose, wood composite and aluminium powder, he had learned to mix methyl nitrate, had hit a small drop of it with a hammer to see it shatter the hammer. He blew up a car with a sack of fertiliser and ammonium nitrate fuel oil, the burning chassis travelling in an arc through the air to land a hundred yards away. He crumbled a boulder with twenty pounds of US-made C-4, and, for comparison, others with C-1, C-2, and C-3, and also with Czech Semtex. He knew the Americans were trying to get back from the Afghans the Semtex they had supplied for use in the Soviet jihad, so dangerous was the substance. During all this he chanted the sacred words of the Koran. I will instil terror in the hearts of the Infidels, strike off their heads, and strike off from them every fingertip.
The faces of women are on display around him but he keeps his eyes off them as he walks. Nowadays he doesn’t think of such matters but at one time he had dreamed of a wife, preferably one of the thousands upon thousands of Bosnian women who had been raped by the Serbs, many of them becoming pregnant so that the Bosnian men banished them. These men couldn’t contemplate raising a child who was half enemy. But Casa and his brothers at the camps and madrassas had felt it their duty to marry these women, and raise their children to become jihadis, who could go on to slaughter the Serbs whose blood they shared.
He arrives at the crossroads where someone is to pick him up. To take him to Nabi Khan at the poppy farm. There they’ll get ready and wait. Tonight, under cover of darkness, he and four others are going to Usha.
IN CITY OF GOD St Augustine records his belief that the peacock’s flesh has the God-given property of resisting putrefaction after death. Marcus withdraws his hand from deep within the bird’s breast, having plunged the scissors into the topiary figure to snip at a branch. He is in the shattered glasshouse to the west of the house, most of its panes missing. The candle flame shudders as he turns around, suddenly aware of the three men standing at the lake’s edge. He walks to the house where Lara sits reading by lamp at the kitchen table.
‘Stay in here, Lara,’ he says to her without stepping in. ‘But could I please have the light for a moment?’
She stands up perhaps too fast. In a moment of vertigo she has experienced before with the books in this house, she feels as though the things printed on the paper would drain away through the hole in the centre of the page. From the door she sees him disappear along the curved path, catching the last hint of his greyed blue jacket amid the rustle of the long grasses.
She is in darkness. She switches on the cell phone she brought with her from St Petersburg, though there is no signal for it here. In the silver haze of its light she goes out and moves along the path until she can see him in the distance, talking to the three figures near the tree split in two by Qatrina’s despondent love for her countrymen.
She stands there and then David arrives from his day in Jalalabad, the beams of the car scattering on the low foliage. He gets out and joins the group, a voice from there drifting towards her whenever the wind spins around — she realises she has begun to recognise the voices of these two men.