The man of the house said the pictures belonged to him but Marcus hauled the chest to the door, appalled at the lie, and out there he looked for someone who would help him transport it back to Qatrina at the house. He and the man were arguing in the street when a Taliban vehicle pulled up. The pair were taken to the mosque.
He had no way to prove that the paintings were his and so it was decided that on Friday his hand would be cut off as punishment for theft.
The Taliban did not know how to deal with the pictures — each bore one of Allah’s names in Arabic calligraphy, the Compassionate One, the Immortal One — but the words were surrounded by images not only of flowers and vines but of other living things. Animals, insects and humans. They wanted to tear out these details but couldn’t because the various strokes and curves of the name took up the entire rectangle, reaching into every corner, every angle.
A man slapped Marcus, expressing everyone’s feeling of rage at the quandary the pictures had placed them in, and then they had him taken to a small chamber at the back of the mosque. Jars of the best rose essence had been given by him to be added to the mortar when this extension of the building was under way years earlier, still fragrant. He emerged blinking into daylight two days later, weak with hunger and thirst. It was Friday. He had been handcuffed — the thought with him the previous two days that one steel hoop would just slide off when the hand was amputated — and now they walked him out towards the large crowd gathered at the side of the mosque. A woman in a bloodstained burka was on her knees in the dust at the centre of the circle formed by the crowd. Her hand must have been cut off, there was blood all around her, but then he saw that both her hands were intact where they emerged from the folds — and he recognised the wedding ring on her finger. She was Qatrina and she had actually just carried out an amputation. The blood was that of the victim. There was a scalpel in the dust. She must have collapsed and now, rising to her feet and turning her head, she let out a scream on seeing Marcus, realising what lay ahead. A man came and retrieved the amputated hand of the earlier thief from the ground. He held it above the heads of a cluster of children who laughed and tried to grab it as he encouraged them to leap up higher and higher. He went away with it: according to Muhammad’s instructions the thief was to wear it around his neck for the next few days. The crowd was chanting the Koran. She tried to run away but the black-clad figures barred her way, pointing her towards the block of wood drenched in redness, glistening in the sun. They brought Marcus to the block, which was a round stump cut from a mulberry log. And a man with large hands, fingernails the size of pennies, reached towards him and held his left hand down on the bloody wood. She was screaming defiance, hurling aside the tray on which there was a butcher’s knife and several glass syringes. Lignocaine, he thought, the local anaesthetic. Mixed with adrenalin, to constrict the vessels and reduce blood flow, preventing haemorrhaging. There was a woodworker’s small saw and a rust-speckled pair of scissors.
They now held a gun to her head — ‘Do it!’ — so that Marcus had to plead with her to go ahead, knowing they would kill her without thought. He picked up the scalpel and pushed it into her hands, tried to close her fingers around it. But she kept saying no, enraging them with her defiance, shaming them in front of the crowd. She lifted her burka and looked into the eyes of the boy in front of her. The crowd suddenly silent.
‘Go ahead and kill me. I said I am not going to do it.’
She stood to full height.
She had told Marcus how, when she was a girl, some women in her family had shuddered as she became taller with each passing year, her height too immodest for a woman, a portent of catastrophe. Her growing body seemed intent on rebellion because this was the country where the term ‘white eyes’ was used to reprimand a female child or young woman by implying she let the whites of her eyes show, rather than keeping them lowered in deference, as befits a woman or someone of inferior status.
Seconds ticked by.
The gun was taken off her head and moved to Marcus’s temple.
‘Do it, or we’ll kill him.’
When the blade came towards him he stretched his fingers to touch her palm. The last act his hand performed for him.
*
In the months that followed they entered a different geography of the mind altogether. She would not speak, or couldn’t, kept her face to the walls, to the shadows. In any room she rushed towards corners. Or she wandered off into the burning noonday sun until he found her, fully expecting her eyes to have evaporated from their sockets in all that heat. In the orchard she feinted at pomegranate blossoms thinking they were live coals, fireflowers. His own wound was full of terrible pain, the pain he had to stifle so as not to terrify her, though he could have howled for entire days. The hand was missing but it still hurt as though he had closed the absent fingers around a scorpion, around shards of glass. The cut muscles, the bones, were not healing properly and he had to go to Jalalabad for treatment, relying on people’s kindness to provide a measure of care and safety for Qatrina. At times she was oblivious to him, but at other times, watching him leave, she stretched her arms towards him through the bars of the window — a song of lamentation issuing from a lyre’s strings. Twice he had to go to the hospitals in Kabul, the city where plans were being made to make the non-Muslim inhabitants — a few Sikhs and Hindus, a handful of Jews — wear clothes of a specific colour, to make sure their lesser status was immediately apparent on the street. It was a different city once. Two decades ago a group of laughing college girls had discovered that the white car parked on Flower Street belonged to Wamaq Saleem — the great Pakistani poet who was visiting Afghanistan to give a recital of his poems — and they had covered it entirely with lipstick kisses.
Returning from a week-long stay at the hospital in Kabul, Marcus found all the books in the house nailed to the ceilings.
THE HIGH GRASS REACHES UP to his pelvis as Casa makes his way towards the lake, the seed heads brushing his hands. Two o’clock in the afternoon.
A roof of sparrows goes by overhead. To save ammunition he would always shoot only when there was a chance of taking two birds at once — aiming at the point where the flight paths were to cross.
He cannot be sure if he took this route to the factory that night. If he dropped the Kalashnikov in a damp or wet place he’ll have to wipe off the water from inside it and reoil the entire mechanism, a task that will take several hours, if he is lucky enough to locate some oil, that is. Walking around, trying to remember, he is put in mind of the time he had practised laying minefields at the al-Qaeda training camp. As the procedure allowed no carelessness, everything was mapped out beforehand with precise co-ordinates: a few days later he would have to come back and find the mines as part of the training. An inattentive holy warrior could be killed by a mine he had laid himself.