‘The doctor in Usha is away for a few days,’ David walks up and tells her. ‘One of the old men out there got injured last week but the wound he thought was healing is suddenly giving him trouble today. He’s hoping Marcus can help.’
They will not come into the house, she knows, afraid of the ghost of the perfume maker’s daughter. Of the Buddha, the suffering stone that had bled gold, that had been granted life by bullets.
‘I’ll get more light, to make it easier for Marcus.’
When she had appeared at Usha and asked for Marcus, she was mistakenly brought to the current doctor’s house, and his young daughter — the teacher at the one-roomed school Gul Rasool has permitted in Usha to please the United States — had lovingly taken charge of her. Before leaving for Russia she intends to visit the girl.
She follows David towards the lake, bringing a hurricane lamp and a flashlight. All things considered, the Afghans she has met have been helpful and kind towards her — with the exceptions of the boy who attacked her with the tyre iron, and the guide she had hired to bring her from Kabul to Usha, who had absconded with most of her money one night.
Marcus is leaning towards the bloody shoulder of the man sitting on a tree stump, and now with a sound of astonishment he extracts a piece of paper from within the gash. It is blood-soaked and folded tight to the size of a coin. The man attempts an explanation while Marcus tries to spread it to its full size: what appear to be verses of the Koran are written on the paper. As she doesn’t understand the language the aged man is speaking, Marcus explains,
‘It is a talisman. Given to him by someone at the mosque to make the wound heal. Instead of just wearing it around his neck he has inserted it into the wound, thinking it’ll speed up the process! That is why the bleeding won’t stop.’
She can smell the injury, the small percentage of blood in the air.
The man takes the paper from Marcus’s hands and begins to fold it again, both of them shaking their heads at each other and talking very fast — he obviously wishes to slot the holy words back under his skin.
The three strangers steal glances at her from time to time, their faces lovely to her, the beard of one fox-orange with henna, the eyes of another an uncontainable grapeblue. And Islam and its love of flowers! They have helped themselves to a pink rose from somewhere and are passing it between themselves.
One of the men, his skin the colour of violins in this light, says something in her direction. She realises it is ‘Rus.’
Russia.
She nods.
‘Rus,’ the man says again, grinning. And he makes a comment which elicits an identical reaction of surprise from David and Marcus. They ask him questions and soon the other visitors begin to contribute — a discussion with many gestures.
‘What are they saying?’ she asks, smiling. Old timers. Perhaps one of them had visited Russia in the past. She tells herself to restrain the expression on her face — her guide had told her that she smiles too much for a woman. One of the men shakes the rose in his hand, thrusts it at the others.
The talk continues and then she hears one of the men clearly and carefully utter the name Benedikt, syllable by syllable.
She is suddenly numb.
‘What did he just say?’
‘Nothing,’ David replies but she catches him exchange a glance with Marcus.
‘Didn’t he say Benedikt?’
‘No, no.’
A man is now drawing a shape on the dust between his feet. A lobed oblong with a stalk. An oak leaf? Like the one she has, like the one Benedikt carried with him. Or is she mistaken? It could just as easily be a quick map of Afghanistan.
David quickly rubs away the drawing with his hand, avoiding her eye, while Marcus pretends busyness, the face determinedly turned away from her.
‘They are just talking about a visit to Russia,’ Marcus says to her at last. ‘The Afghans are great travellers. Farming the valleys of California or journeying across the Australian deserts for trade.’
‘There is more than one Giovanni Khan in the Italian villages that their fathers saw in the battle heat of the Second World War,’ David adds; and, turning to Marcus, says, ‘Now, we must try to persuade him to keep the paper in the layers of the bandage and not in the wound itself …’
She can’t help but feel shut out. There is a profound uneasiness around them. Even the air and light feel different to her, and after standing at the edge of the group for a while she walks back to the house. Not sure what has just happened.
*
She is silent and subdued all evening, and retires to her room earlier than usual.
‘Do we tell her what the men said, David?’
‘She knows we are keeping something from her.’
One of the three men had said that Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan had all those years ago fought over the possession of a Soviet soldier. And that the soldier, named Benedikt, had had a leaf in his pocket. But his companions — contradicting him and offering alternatives — had made Marcus and David uncertain about every detail.
‘Did Benedikt bring a leaf with him?’
Marcus nods. ‘I think she mentioned it.’
Marcus is sitting against the painted lyre on the wall and it appears as though the instrument is strapped to his back, its frame showing on either side of his body, the curled ends protruding above his shoulders.
‘We have to tell her, David. That is why she is here, to know the truth about him.’
‘Let’s try to find out a little more on our own first. There is no need to worry her if it isn’t true.’
And if the truth is too terrible? David has allowed Marcus to believe that Zameen died at Gul Rasool’s villa in Peshawar, during a raid by Nabi Khan. That was what David was told originally. But the real facts — when he came upon them later, years later — weren’t something he could have revealed to Marcus.
‘Do you think Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan killed him, David?’
‘No, that’s not what they said. The two had just fought over him — probably over his pistol though they themselves had huge arsenals by then. They just needed an excuse to clash.’ Ancient tribal rivalries.
They are in the kitchen, David sitting on the doorsill, the moths feeding near by on the small blossoms that grow at the base of the cypress trees.
The candle stub goes out with a hiss. No light except the stars now, the moon not yet up. Each star is a drop of transparent nectar, just large enough to fill a moth’s stomach.
‘Is it possible Benedikt ended up in a Western country? Looking for him, she says, she came into contact with the parents of a soldier who did manage to make his way to America. They distrusted the letters he wrote to them from Chicago, convinced they had been written by the CIA.’
‘And the letters they sent him, he must have thought were dictated by the KGB.’
‘On American trains and buses he took snapshots of children and sent them for his sister’s little girl in Moscow.’
There was disagreement between the three men about what kind of leaf it was. One of them said he had heard it was a dried flower. Another that the soldier’s name was Ivan, was Nikolai. The fate some captured Soviet soldiers and defectors met at the hands of the Afghan warriors like Gul Rasool and Nabi Khan was horrifying. To save bullets they were buried alive. Or repeatedly hurled from a roof until dead. Thrown off mountainsides, nothing remaining of them but bones at the base of a cliff after the wolves had been at them. Many of these conscripts were mere children and the beautiful ones were raped and traded between persons, for a good knife or a bad gun, before being shot in disgust by an owner somewhere down the line. The Afghans could remain suspicious of the loyalty of the defecting Soviets and refuse to give them guns, and so, dead weight, they would be executed when a major offensive drew near. And given the chance the rebels of today would do all that and more to American soldiers, to the enemy cities and towns of their bodies.