He opens the door and leaves. Outside the wind rustles in the trees as though trying to speak someone’s name.
5. Street of Storytellers
DAVID HAS HEARD it said that no other war in human history was fought with the help of as many spies. When the Soviet Army crossed the River Oxus into Afghanistan in December 1979, secret agents from around the world began to congregate in the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar. It now became the prime staging area for the jihad against the Soviet invaders, rivalling East Berlin as the spy capital of the world by 1984.
By then seventeen thousand Soviet soldiers had been killed, and David had been living in the city for two years. Because it was once the second home of Buddhism, the city could count Lotus Land among its almost forgotten names, the peepal tree under which the Enlightened One was said to have preached continuing to grow in a quiet square.
The City of Flowers.
The City of Grain.
It was transformed into a city filled with conjecture, with unprovable suspicions and frenzied distrust. Everyone’s nerves were raw and everyone had something hidden going on. For most of its history it was one of the main trading centres linked to the Silk Road, and now the United States was sending arms into Afghanistan through here. Wherever David looked he could find evidence of the war in which those weapons were being used. Makeshift ambulances filled with the wounded and the dying raced through the mountain passes towards Peshawar, carrying at times children who had been set alight by Soviet soldiers to make the parents reveal the hiding places of guerrillas. Dentists filled cavities with shotgun pellets in Peshawar.
Having trained with the CIA, David now had an office in the Jewellers Bazaar, his interest in gems an ideal façade. He had met Christopher Palantine during the Islamabad embassy siege back in 1979, when Christopher had put forward the possibility that he might like to answer a few questions upon returning from his forthcoming trip to Afghanistan. To gain information about the Soviet Union, the CIA had been known even to question the pilgrims who arrived in Mecca from the central Asian republics, the Saudi Arabian government allowing this because of the abhorrence it felt for Communism. And David too had agreed readily to Christopher’s request. By the time his sentient life began, a hatred and fear of Communism was in the air an American child breathed, and it could have remained as just subconscious animosity, but there was the matter of Jonathan’s death. The Soviet Union had supported Vietnamese guerrillas and had thus played a role in the disappearance and probable death of his brother. He was fourteen years old when the news came that Jonathan was missing presumed dead. Even the festive occasions would now be sad ones because Jonathan wasn’t there, and everything reminded David of him. He wept into the crook of his arm standing in front of the house: as soon as they reached the age of twelve, both he and Jonathan were allowed in the mornings to take the car out of the garage and down this very driveway while their father collected his coat and briefcase. As the days passed without further news of Jonathan, his father gently began to ask him whether he would be able to control his tears — the two of them had to give strength to their mother. But a fire of immense intensity burned inside his young body. Having trapped a coyote in the woods one day he began to hit it with a club. Who gives a fuck if this is wrong. He needed release, and, as though he wished to obliterate the evidence of what he had done, he continued to beat the animal long after it was dead. And for the rest of my life I am going to do everything I can to fuck up the Reds.
But that was then. By the time he came to Peshawar as an employee of the CIA, his opposition to Communism was the result of study and contemplation. Not something that grew out of a personal wound.
He was in Peshawar as a believer.
*
An almost blind white-haired poet lived in the apartment next to David’s office in the Jewellers Bazaar in 1984, having fled death threats from both the Communists and the Islamic guerrillas in Kabul some months earlier. For most of the day he sat cross-legged on a threadbare rug on the floor, surrounded by books. A god of immutable stone, the entire earth his plinth.
David had slipped into his apartment to check for listening devices: any number of people could have wished to spy on him — the KGB, Pakistan’s ISI, the Saudi Arabian spy agency, or the KGB-trained Afghan intelligence service that at the height of the conflict would swell to thirty thousand professionals and a hundred thousand paid informers, maintaining secret bases in Peshawar, Islamabad, Karachi, and Quetta. The jihad was at its fiercest then and had anyone wished to gain access to a conversation taking place in David’s office, it would have been a case of just piercing the wall in the poet’s apartment with a silenced drill and inserting a microphone.
He found the apartment to be free of any devices but before the month was over its occupant had vanished: while the poet was out one afternoon a five-year-old girl with her throat slit was discovered at his place. A crowd baying for blood descended on the apartment and the man was never seen again.
David learned from ________, his own source within Pakistan’s ISI, that a Pakistani intelligence officer had ordered a child to be picked up from the streets of Peshawar, brought to the poet’s place, and killed there. The mob and the police were then sent in to discover the crime. The intelligence officer wanted the place empty so he could install a tenant able and willing to spy on David.
‘So it was Fedalla who did it?’ Christopher Palantine said when David told him.
‘Yes. He was among the ones I suspected.’
Five years had passed since Fedalla and his friends had assaulted David in Islamabad, and David had recognised him when he ran into him at a meeting with the Pakistani military personnel not long after coming to Peshawar with the CIA. Back in 1979 Fedalla had been a senior captain aching to make major, which he now was, heavier in both face and body. David waited for his chance and then confronted him but Fedalla denied all knowledge and memory of the assault in Islamabad.
‘You have to move out of the Jewellers Bazaar fast,’ Christopher told David.
David acquired premises in the nearby Street of Storytellers, the street that in ancient times was the camping ground for caravans and military adventurers, storytellers reciting ballads of love and war to the amassed wayfarers and soldiers. It extended from east to west in the heart of the city, and in April 1930 British soldiers had massacred a crowd of unarmed protesters there, a defining moment in the struggle to drive the British out of India. When the protesters at the front were felled by shots, those behind had come forward and exposed themselves to the bullets, committing suicide in all but name, as many as twenty bullets entering some bodies. The massacre continued from eleven in the morning till five in the afternoon, court martial awaiting the soldiers who refused to pull the trigger.
His new neighbours in this three-storey building were clean, as was the unoccupied apartment on the level above. One day a few months later, as he was emerging from his office, fifty or so orbs of thread leapt down the steep staircase leading to that upstairs apartment, some stopping but others continuing to bounce past him, going down the next stairwell, leaping over the banister until they had fully uncoiled themselves.
The suspicion was immediate: the young woman who stood in the open door at the top of the stairs was a spy.
The hand in which she held the thread was dyed with henna, indicating the possibility that she had recently attended a wedding.
‘Thank you,’ she said in English after he had helped her gather the silk filaments.