‘What’s your name?’
She stopped and looked back at him from the staircase, then the haughty face brightened into a smile.
‘All names are my names,’ she said with something like mischievousness and disappeared.
He was in her apartment the next afternoon when she went out with the child. He found nothing in there that suggested subterfuge then or during the searches he carried out on later dates.
Zameen.
A single word.
How easily a person gave his name to another, and yet how restless he was during the few hours when he didn’t know it, finding it out through methods of his own. Discovering for the first time that there could be something magical about someone’s name — a mere word but what power it held, as in a fairy tale. It was after all the first thing one learned about another. A way in, and a possibility.
At the moment of the initial encounter he had been on his way to a meeting with Christopher Palantine, and he thought of her during it. He was then away for several days, vanishing once again into schemes he’d set in motion in and around the teeming city, he and Christopher Palantine both great mavericks of that time and place, a cause of some anxiety to their superiors when they simply became invisible for weeks. But when he returned to the Street of Storytellers he synchronised several appearances at the door of his office just to encounter her, to just see her again. Once when the area plunged into darkness due to power failure, he went up to ask for a matchstick instead of going down into the bazaar. He had known when he began this work that there would be sacrifices. Loneliness was the price they paid for being who they were. And yet as he sat in the light of the lamp lit with her matchstick, he couldn’t help seeing how incomplete his life was. There were houses and establishments in Peshawar he occasionally entered to alleviate solitude, and he had a rendezvous with a certain woman each time he visited the city of Lahore, meeting her for a few hours in Falleti’s, the hotel where Ava Gardner had stayed when she was in Pakistan filming Bhowani Junction. But this was different, seemed to be something deeper.
He listened to her feet in the ceiling above him, following her movements.
And then one afternoon he managed to talk to her openly, running into her in the Street at the stall of a cassette vendor. Before engaging in a battle with Soviet soldiers, the Afghans sometimes inserted a blank cassette into a tape recorder to capture the sound of combat. They played these cassettes to themselves later during periods of recreation and leisure, reliving the excitement. They were for sale, the seller beginning to shout out the highlights of each cassette the moment David picked it up:
The ambush at Qala-e Sultan, April two years ago, a little-known battle but …
The Dehrawud offensive, October 1983, the sound of helicopters and fighter planes, the screams of the wounded, contains the famous death by torture of a captured Soviet infidel …
Battle for Alishang District Centre, August 1981, on three cassettes. The Soviets are made to withdraw in a hurry but they force the elders of the next village to come ask the Mujahidin for the bodies of the dead Soviet soldiers left behind …
He recognised the decorative motifs on the henna-dyed left hand that reached towards a cassette at the same time as him and when he looked up he saw that, yes, it was her. The recording was of a mujahidin attack at a newly opened village school, the teachers and everyone associated with it massacred.
‘Something like that happened in the place I am from,’ she told him in her apartment later. ‘A place called Usha. It means “teardrop”.’
He had attempted to talk to her in the crowded Street but she had shaken her head in fear, telling him in a quick whisper to come up in a few minutes.
‘Why only the one hand?’ he asked now.
‘The henna? It takes a while to dry, I have work to do and my son to look after. That’s why I kept my right hand free. As it is I grabbed the wrong child one day in the chaos outside.’ The boy was moving across the floor on his knees, pushing a toy car along.
They stood facing each other, not knowing what to say or do. She bent to clear away the sheets of paper bearing the outlines of foliage, flowers, dragonflies, and vines. They were embroidery patterns and he remembered being told how, just before the First World War, patriotic young Germans had entered the French countryside with butterfly nets, catching specimens and sketching wing patterns to take back to Germany. Encrypted in the designs of the butterfly wings were maps of strategic information, such as the exact locations of bridges and roads.
He picked up one of the sheets and looked at it. The French country people were knowledgeable about their local butterflies and soon realised the drawings were incorrect, exposing the spies before the information could be sent back to headquarters.
‘You live here by yourselves, the two of you?’
She held out her hand for the drawing.
He listened as she began to speak about her lost parents, and then, his heart breaking, about a young man who as a boy had been so beautiful he had had to be veiled.
‘He was shot by the Soviets. I was with him that night, and that was the last time I saw him. I thought he was dead but I have since learned from refugees who have come from Usha that he had actually survived. I don’t know where he is.’
One night when David had been standing above her sleeping form in the darkness, having gained access to her place to see if she was involved with intelligence-gathering or surveillance, he had heard her say a man’s name in her sleep.
It was that of the missing lover, he now realised.
She wanted his help in finding these three, she herself — being a woman — lacking the ability to move as freely in this place.
As he took his leave her little boy moved towards the kitchen area and, thinking himself unobserved, put back onto the shelf the knife he’d kept concealed upon his person during the entire visit; David had seen him pick it up a few moments after his mother opened the door to him. What have they been through?
A few evenings later as he was leaving the office he noticed that the door to her place was ajar, something unusual for that hour. He stood listening and then went up slowly. He raised his hand and knocked. Spoke her name. And when there was no response he looked in.
She was sitting on the bed with her back towards the door — the kid asleep, hardly any light from a weak lamp on a table. He could hear the sobs clearly.
‘Zameen,’ he said but she did not turn around. The impression he had had of her was that she was quite self-sufficient and tough: after fire she probably wouldn’t be ashes, she’d be coal. But this was darkness and solitude. The hidden side of the courage required from her daily.
He spoke her name again.
She turned to him but there was no recognition. He could have been the noise of the breeze against the window.
He stayed there until she had exhausted herself and then he watched as she took up a pair of scissors and began to cut herself out of her clothes, ready for sleep but still in a daze, unable to find the correct path for the given destination.
Her clothing fell from her in pieces.
‘Zameen,’ he said in a half-voice, afraid she might hurt herself.
He stayed where he was until she got into bed in just her white shift, and then he withdrew and spent the night in his office. Only when he heard her lock her door around dawn did he go home to the apartment he rented a few miles away.
Before the month was out he found the man she was looking for, in one of the refugee camps closest to the border with Afghanistan. He was there on an unrelated matter when a likeable person came forward and began to help with the translation because David was experiencing difficulty with certain dialects.