He and Zameen had kissed for the first time last night, standing in the dark wooden staircase that led to her door, and it was she who had initiated it.
Having learned of the bombing raid in advance, Christopher said, from a mole inside Afghanistan’s spy agency, the CIA had arranged for journalists and television cameras from several major cities of the Western and Muslim world to be present in Peshawar, so that the news and images of the carnage would spread around the world.
He sat under a massive tree with Christopher Palantine, in a saint’s shrine not far from the Street of the Storytellers, the holy man’s grave covered in a lively skin of tiles. He knew there was not enough time to get to the refugee camp and warn the man. So he sat there with his friend and watched the huge crowd in the courtyard before him. They were mostly women. The shrines of the Muslim saints were places journeyed to more by women than men, Zameen had told him, their despair greater, their lacks more essential and urgent. They would come from various places in the land and stay for days around a sacred grave, their saint often the only person in this life they could question with impunity and even accuse of neglect in the language and manner of a wronged lover.
When he got back to his office a note had been slipped under the door. Only he knows how he managed to get to that camp within the sixty or so minutes that remained before the arrival of the Soviet jets. The note, from Zameen, said she’d received word that the boy from her teenage years was living in that refugee camp and she was going there to meet him.
He got there before her, watching her arrive and then leading her and the child away from the site. The place was of course a furnace, smoke issuing from it in enraged billows as though demons had been set free by the bombing. All paths to the part of the camp where the man had his room were impassable, row upon row of burning homes. Leading them away from the deaths of the innocents, he looked over his shoulder. The civilised world would see this and condemn Soviet brutality, Moscow made to rethink its policies.
*
That night David became her lover and within days she was half his world.
*
He watched her pour water onto her shoulder when she bathed, the water spreading in a thin layer on her skin and then breaking up into shapes that resembled countries and islands, resembled continents. She lifted her hair, revealing the length of her neck, and said she and her school friends had been shocked when the prince climbed up the rope of Rapunzel’s hair. ‘We had all read Ferdowsi’s Book of Kings. When the daughter of the ruler of Kabul lets down her hair from a high window, her suitor Zal is unable to bear the thought of using it as a substitute rope.’
The only part of him that seemed alive was where the two of them came into contact. There was no way of identifying many of the bodies after the bombing but it was certain that no one who lived in the bombed part could have survived. And yet initially he remained afraid that the other man would turn up, recognise David and expose his deception. He had already asked her to marry him. They would keep looking for Qatrina and Marcus. And when the Soviets were defeated and Afghanistan was at peace — and her parents were back in the house over there in Teardrop — David, Zameen and Bihzad would move to the United States.
She said her father’s sense of smell was so acute he could discern a word written with colourless perfume on a sheet of paper.
The CIA required that he declare anyone with whom he had regular contact for more than six months. Soon that period was about to pass and he would have to mention her in the report he filed, though he had swept her place and knew there was no need to put her to the trouble of being under an investigation. The Agency also made the recruits sign a paper saying they wouldn’t mention to their spouses the true nature of their work, but he didn’t know of anyone who didn’t tell everything to his wife or husband — easier than having to explain those late-night meetings with agents.
It was 1986 and the war was entering an unprecedented stage: the secret services of the United States, Great Britain and Pakistan had agreed that guerrilla attacks should be launched inside the Soviet Union itself, in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the states that were the supply routes to the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. This was to be done by Afghan guerrillas, but David had decided he would go with them. As he readied himself to meet up with the group, he was aware of the nightmare that would result if an American spy was captured either in Afghanistan or in the USSR, but he was convinced of his ability to avoid detection. When it came to these matters, in adulthood he had never felt himself surrounded by forces larger than himself.
Outfitted with mortars, boats, and target maps, he and the guerrillas intended to cross the River Oxus and mount sabotage and propaganda operations inside Uzbekistan. They poured diesel over the light-reflecting paintwork of their vehicles so the dust of the roads would stick to them as camouflage. The Soviet Union’s chief cartographers had, at the KGB’s behest, falsified virtually all public maps for almost fifty years. But David and the Afghans were carrying accurate CIA maps of the region. The stars above them were like mirror signals, the rapids of the Oxus giving off a ghostly glow in the darkness, the Arabs having renamed it the ‘Insane River’ when they met it centuries ago.
As well as weapons, they were bringing thousands of Korans in the Uzbek language, a translation the CIA had commissioned from an Uzbek exile living in Germany. Islam had to be encouraged in the USSR, to make the Russian Muslims rebel against Moscow. Five days — and several explosions in key buildings and on vital bridges and roads — later, David saw a woman in a silkworm village being paraded naked through the streets. She cowered as she was beaten by men for having committed adultery, for having taken a Russian lover. The men who were whipping her were part of the clandestine group that David and the Afghan guerrillas met here in Uzbekistan. Her head had been shaved and a green cross was painted on her forehead. The men were laughing — ‘Call out to your lover to come and save you, “Sasha, Sasha, help, help!”’ There was nothing he could do to put an end to her torment — they stopped at his outraged shouts but he knew it was temporary — and he watched as a man moved forward and placed around her neck one of the Korans he had brought.
Just before coming out to Uzbekistan, he had returned from a ten-day visit to Cambodia, his search for Jonathan taking him there. Her joy at seeing him when he returned made her suggest they go to Dean’s. ‘The three of us. Let the world go hang.’ They had tried to keep their affair as secret as possible till then, fearing reprisals against her. As it was, she had lied about Bihzad to the world, never disclosing that technically he was illegitimate, claiming she was a widow whose husband had perished in the war.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
A fountain played in tiers like a jelly mould at Dean’s. She got up from their table and walked over to it. She had told him how every few weeks a man would come along the lake shore in Usha with a basket of crabs which he emptied into the fountain behind the house. The Afghans did not themselves eat these creatures, calling them ‘water spiders’, but were willing to catch them for the doctors in exchange for money or medical treatment. The crabs stayed in the stone basin until required in the kitchen, Zameen approaching the water to lift them out, jabbing competitively at their pincers with a pair of tongs.