‘Who was that?’ he asked distractedly, busy with the child, when she returned. Under an arch he had seen her exchange a few words with someone.
‘Who?’
‘The man you were talking to.’
‘I wasn’t talking to anyone.’ The voice did not waver. The voice in which she had sung Corinthians to him. And now I will show you the most excellent way.
He slowly looked up. Her face was a mask.
‘Okay.’
They continued with the meal. Hadn’t something similar happened before? She had convinced him he was mistaken, but this time he was sure. She was wearing a light-pink tunic patterned with saffron flowers, over narrow white trousers, and combined with a long stole of white chiffon resting on the left shoulder. It was she whom he had seen, even though the light was not clear over there under the arch.
Was it the Communist, had he survived the bombing after all? How will David explain to her that he kept his existence secret from her because he loved her, was afraid of losing her? By now, even to himself, it seemed an incredible thing to have done. In her anger she will turn away from him for ever, never allow him to see Bihzad his son again.
And then suddenly everything became clear. O Christ, she was spying on him. He hadn’t hidden anything from her about his activities. And now suddenly everything became dangerous. If it was someone else he would have known exactly what to do. But she wasn’t someone else.
Dropping her off at the Street of Storytellers, saying he had to do something but would be back in about an hour, he drove back to Dean’s, prowling the corridors to see if the man was still there. Aware of the tight jaw muscles, aware of the handgun under his shirt, his breath loud. He sat until dawn in that arch, then got a bed at Dean’s and woke up around noon. What now? He was meant to cross into Afghanistan in a few hours, to enter Uzbekistan through there. She knew that. Would there be an ambush? He phoned her and said the plan had changed, that he wouldn’t be going to Uzbekistan.
‘I’ll see you in a few hours.’
When he got back from the Uzbekistan excursion nineteen days later he found her apartment empty. He sensed immediately that something was wrong: the silence in the two small rooms seemed deeper than just silence. This was more than mere absence. On the windowsill nine candles had burned all the way down to small coins of wax. Day or night she would light a candle here as indication that it was safe for him to come up, signalling that she wasn’t in the company of Afghan visitors, the women who gathered at the place to embroider.
Her fiercest loyalty had been to these women. The one occasion she quarrelled with David had been over a matter concerning them. One of the women had just lost several relatives in a bombing the previous week. Nineteen names of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins.
‘It looked like the list of guests for a wedding feast,’ Zameen said to David.
‘How is she? Would she be okay?’
She did not answer him, moving around the apartment silently for the next few minutes, attending to various things.
He stood up to leave — it was time for the women to arrive. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I have to be, don’t I?’ she said over her shoulder, the vehemence shocking him. ‘We have to be, don’t we? Just as long as you Americans and Soviets can play your games over there — nothing else matters!’
She turned to face him, glaring from the other side of the room, eyes red and brimming with tears. Daring him to cross over to her.
The candle didn’t burn for a week after that. Then one day it summoned him. One massacre of innocents had driven him away, and another had now caused the reunion. The news that day had been terrible and she needed him. ‘I feel so alone.’
Now David sought these women out, to ask them if they knew where she was. Most of them recoiled or let out apprehensive noises when he approached them. But eventually one of them did prove unafraid. In great desperation and hurry he began to question her about Zameen, asked her if she knew who the man Zameen had denied talking to might have been.
‘I knew her very well, sir,’ the woman said. ‘So I can tell you that there is only one possibility why she could have lied to you. The newborn Bihzad was close to death when she arrived with him from Afghanistan. There is supposed to be healthcare for everyone in the refugee camps but the Pakistanis are corrupt. And the camps were ruled by warlords who wouldn’t do anything until she registered with one of their parties — the more members each party has the more money they can get from you Americans. She needed to have a card made before they would even look at him and he was dying, she needed money to save him … Can you guess, sir, how she obtained the funds? I’d rather not say it out loud.’
Yes.
‘She had to do it for about three months. There was no alternative, you must understand. After she gave up she was sometimes accosted by her former … clients.’
He sat still, trying to absorb the information.
That night he dreamt of her face full of disappointment at him, perhaps even contempt. The face that had laughed at his impatience with jazz and had told him Tolstoy smelled of cypress wood. The face that had expressed the purest of joys when he found for her a volume of paintings by the Persian master Bihzad, a book her parents had owned but which she had been unable to find in the Peshawar bookstores.
But where was she now? He sat in the apartment where nothing, it seemed, had been disturbed. While he was making his way towards Uzbekistan, she had lit the candles: he’d told her the journey had been cancelled and she must have thought he was avoiding her, that he had somehow found out about what she had had to do to save her child. He was staying away until he discovered what he felt about the information. Trying to see if he could unlove her.
There was no sign of a break-in. The raw jewels Bihzad liked to play with were still here — two sapphires and two emeralds, like someone with blue eyes staring into someone’s green eyes. Her books were stacked high in the corner, old stories that came to an end on the last page but hurled their wisdom and judgement decades and centuries into the future, there into the midst of them all. As was everything else, except the bottle of the pale-gold perfume she always kept with her, her father having composed it for her. Maybe Fedalla and the ISI slit her and the boy’s throats so they could acquire the apartment for someone who would spy on him. A snake-oil vendor always sat not far from their building, with a large thorn-tailed lizard sitting untethered among the bottles of his wares, the fact that it never made a bid for freedom always a surprise to David until he was told that its spine had been broken by its master. From him David learned that while he was away there had been an explosion just across the road. A bicycle bomb had gone off. David himself had taught the rebels how to rig these up, to kill Soviet soldiers in Kabul and Kandahar, in Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif.
He kept hearing her voice.
If I speak with the tongues of men and angels,
but have not love,
I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have a faith that can move mountains,
but have not love, I am nothing.
She’d told him how she had left the refugee camp where she had been living and come to the Street of Storytellers: the cleric from Usha had these years later found his way to Peshawar, staring thunderstruck at her when he saw her one day in a lane that came out of the camp. This site was particularly sacred to Peshawar’s few Hindu citizens because here a banyan and a peepal tree grew side by side, their roots entwined to signify the coming together of the body and the soul. And Zameen had gone out there on hearing that the people from the camp’s newest mosque had attacked the two trees with axes. The CIA didn’t care what the religious affiliation of the warriors was — wanting the funds to go to those who fought the Soviet soldiers the hardest — but the Pakistanis made absolutely sure the funds provided by the United States and Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world were channelled only to the Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas, who went on to assassinate the moderate clerics and warlords. Zameen retreated after she recognised the cleric supervising the mutilation of the sacred trees. Within months he had had seven women murdered for being prostitutes. Five were in the camp but two were in the city of Peshawar itself because he was linking up with Pakistani extremists. He was arrested once and confessed to killing two sinful women but walked free after one month. His patrons had paid off the relatives of the killed women and therefore he had been reprieved under Islamic law. He scrutinised the inhabitants of the camp for moral laxity, calling down Allah’s wrath on them through his Friday sermons, and Zameen knew he would focus on her fully some day soon. The city’s police and the magistracy seemed to enjoy or approve of what he and people like him were doing because soon after each murder, each beating or arson attack, the eyewitnesses recanted their earlier statements due either to threat or inducement.