*
Casa moves into the shadow of a wall when the clouds slide apart above him, the moon released. In subconscious reassurance he touches the Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, the metal cold to the fingertip. Allah sent down iron, says the Koran, so He in the unseen world may know who supports Him and His messengers.
He uses the last of his fifty sheets to wipe the glue from his hands, crumpling and tossing it onto the water collected in a ditch, making it bounce off his upper arm. All of this without making a single noise. He is a veteran of ambushes that could be called off after three days because someone had just exhaled audibly.
Travelling through the darkened landscape, he and the four others had arrived at the edge of Usha sometime after midnight to post the shabnama. Because the Koran calls upon Muslims to create alarm among non-believers. Three Afghans, a Chechen and an Uzbek — they parked the motorbikes in the shadows, and then spread out through these streets and lanes, a pair going in the direction of Gul Rasool’s house even though there is every possibility that it is protected by landmines, Nabi Khan’s express instructions having been to paste a warning onto the enemy’s front door. ‘The hypocritical West likes him now, despite the fact that he had shot a Western journalist in the 1980s for having written a favourable article about me.’
The moon is bright above him as he moves through the lanes of Usha. The archangel Jibraeel, he knows, had been asked to blot away some of the moon’s brightness with his wings, mankind having petitioned Allah that it was too strong for the nights. The grey markings on the radiant white disc were caused when he pressed his feathers onto it three times.
From shadow to shadow, he walks towards the spot where he is to meet the others to go back to Jalalabad: towards the crumbling stub of a shrine in the cemetery where they left the motorbikes. Enemies surround him here. And they are not just those who carry guns. According to the laws of the jihad the enemy can include the entire supply chain. Those who give them water, those who give them food, those who provide moral encouragement — like journalists who write in defence of their cause. Women too cannot always be innocent. If she prays to God for her husband’s safety in a battle against Muslims, she is above blame. But if she prays for him to kill and triumph over Muslims then she becomes the enemy. If a child carries a message to the enemy fighters, he can be targeted and erased.
*
Lara has decided to ask the dead for directions. Coming to a cemetery, ringed by cypress trees, she has entered it because Muslim graves are orientated in a north — south alignment, ensuring that the face is turned towards Mecca while the feet are pointing away. It’s unlikely that she’ll forget this fact though the bruise on her neck has almost faded.
A bone forest. Most of those lying around her must have met unnatural deaths, been victims of the wars of the last quarter-century.
Marcus’s house is to the south of here, but she finds herself too tired to calculate which direction the south might be, remembering how at times in the dozy heat of a late summer morning she would be unable even to concentrate on picking flowers in a meadow, a task that required concentration because the fresh flowers were mixed in with day-old ones, the pinks and yellows that dotted the swathe of grass behind their dacha. She lowers herself to the ground and leans her head against a tombstone. Her Stepan died at the dacha after testifying on behalf of the officers who stood accused of the torture of Chechen prisoners. Two days after the trial ended, Stepan and Lara had come out to their snowbound dacha on the Gulf of Finland, wishing to repair the fissures of the preceding weeks, Lara’s fury at Stepan’s comments. The couple were there less than a few minutes when Lara — walking down a hallway — heard Stepan talking to someone in the room just ahead of her. She stopped and stood listening.
‘You don’t recognise me, Stepan Ivanovich. I was hoping you would.’
‘I have never met you. What are you doing in my house?’
‘People always said my brother and I looked alike, so I thought you might guess from the resemblance. You see, you have seen my brother’s face.’
‘Have I met your brother? What is his name?’
‘You never met him either. You just saw photographs of him. He was abducted by the military to force me to come out of hiding, to make me go back to Chechnya from Afghanistan. Please stay where you are. I am telling you nicely, but my four friends here won’t be as polite if I give them the signal.’
A breeze in the cypress trees and she opens her eyes. A rustle. The night has entered its second half, she is sure. She’ll stay here till daybreak, shoulder pressed against the marble slab. At the touch of the stone she experiences a sensation from childhood — a drawing that has been filled in with coloured pencils, the paper feeling slightly silky. All the colour is down there.
‘Lara.’
David has approached and is extending a hand towards her, pulling her upright and away from the magnet of the tombstone. The day Stepan died had become the first day of the rest of her life. She had only a handful of new memories until she came to Marcus’s house. Over the months she had just stepped away from everyone, coming back to St Petersburg from Moscow, where she had moved on marrying Stepan. She desired no real communication with anyone, entire days going by without her speaking to even one person.
‘Come on, I’ll take you home,’ he says.
The wind picks up grains of dust from the ground and then releases them.
‘I couldn’t bring the car because I thought the engine would wake Marcus.’ His voice is low in the darkness, bringing energy and focus to her mind with his talk of practical matters.
‘How did you know I was missing?’
‘I couldn’t sleep. Came down and the front door was unlocked. You should have brought your phone.’
In the absence of the electricity generator he charges the phones with his car battery.
‘And why not bring a light, Lara?’
‘It broke.’
‘I was on my way to the doctor’s house but then saw you sitting here. The white glow of your clothes.’
‘We have to go back the way I came, so we can take home the broken lamp.’
‘Okay.’ And as they leave Usha behind, he says, ‘We are almost half-way there.’
‘Benedikt had great difficulty trying to commit the English alphabet to memory as a child. During recitals the letter M would always come as a relief to him, indicating he was almost half-way there.’
She stops. ‘David, tell me what the three gentlemen said.’
She takes in what the visitors had claimed about the leaf from the Cosmos Oak, listens to David’s reasons for keeping the information from her.
‘So Gul Rasool might know about Benedikt’s fate?’
‘It’s a possibility. We thought we’d check first, we didn’t want to alarm or distress you needlessly. I am sorry.’
Approaching the house, she goes through the garden while he remains beside the lake, the sky on fire with the stars. Later, sitting with a dying candle at the kitchen table, she hears him enter the house from a side door, through the room that had been the doctors’ surgery. When it overflowed the patients could be found in the orchard, lying under the trees, the drip hooked to a flowering branch overhead. Marcus said it would have been appropriate if the room dedicated to touch had been turned into the surgery but that was too high up for the infirm to climb.
She goes up to his room to ask for a candle.
She is there inside its light a while later when she looks up and sees him standing against a blue and red section of the kitchen wall. In a tale she had read in childhood there was an enchanted lamp in whose light you saw what the owner of the lamp wished you to see. I’ll make you think of me.