But by now a part of the story is clear. Benedikt was with another soldier when he defected, a seventeen-year-old. They both ran away from their military base together but Piotr Danilovich eventually lost courage and went back before he could be missed. He was the last Russian person to have seen Benedikt. By tracking down Piotr Danilovich she has managed to collect Benedikt’s last known movements. Their plan, he said, was to simply walk into the nearest Afghan village in the middle of the night carrying weapons stolen from the base to present to the Afghans as a sign of good faith. Thieves of food, of medicine, of the photographs of sweethearts — every soldier had some skill when it came to picking locks; and so Benedikt was to get the guns from the armoury while Piotr Danilovich went into the bedroom of one of the officers, a colonel. In Afghanistan there were deserts whose names conveyed everything about them. Dasht-e-Margo, Desert of Death. Sar-o-Tar, Empty Desolation. Dasht-e-Jahanum, Desert of Hell. And a few months earlier in one such desert, where the temperature had gone beyond fifty degrees, and on the dunes the spiders stitched together sand grains with their silk to make sheets to shelter under, the colonel had come upon an ancient skeleton with a mass of gems scattered on either side of the spinal column, where the stomach would have been. On the night of the desertion, Benedikt sent Piotr Danilovich to the colonel’s room — he was to find and swallow these gemstones. When he couldn’t get into the safe, he made his way through the darkness to where, having successfully stolen seven Kalashnikovs, Benedikt had emerged from the armoury and run into the colonel. The man was in all probability on his way to help himself to some weapons, Piotr Danilovich told Lara years later, to sell to the Afghan enemy. Piotr watched from the shadows as Benedikt and Colonel Rostov stood looking at each other in silence.
Always hungry, always ill, the weak Soviet antibiotics of little use if ever they were to be had, many soldiers had thought of and talked about deserting, about defecting — an arc of movement in their minds, from Afghanistan to a country in western Europe, perhaps even the United States of America. They had been conscripted and sent out here and they drank antifreeze to escape from life for a few hours or left shoe polish to melt in sunlight and then filtered it through bread to obtain a sip of intoxicant. There were stories about what the Afghan rebels did to captured Soviet soldiers, loathing them as much for being non-Muslim as for being invaders — they who in trying to wipe out one Dashaka machine gun, or a journalist from the West, would literally flatten an entire village. Having dreamt that they had fallen into the clutches of the Afghans, the soldiers sometimes woke up screaming and were unable to fall asleep again for hours. Pillows of thorn. But there were other stories about how the Afghans welcomed defectors, especially if they agreed to convert to Islam.
Time slowed down around them as Benedikt and Rostov faced each other, Piotr watching from the darkness. Rostov had sold a ZPU-1 anti-aircraft gun to an Afghan warlord recently, writing it off as lost in combat, but he had begun to suspect that one of the captains at the base intended to expose him, and so he had ordered the captain and two other men chosen at random — Benedikt and Piotr Danilovich — to carry out a dawn reconnaissance mission in a nearby area, an area notorious as a hive of the most dangerous guerrillas. It was to be tomorrow. And although for safety reasons it was customary to take two vehicles, Rostov insisted the three of them take only one. Benedikt and Piotr had dreamed about desertion often but tonight was truly their last chance.
Piotr watched as Benedikt lowered the Kalashnikovs from his shoulders, time accelerating now. A forward lurch of Benedikt’s body towards Rostov. Piotr would tell Lara that he felt the slam of the body, saying he knew it was packed solid with fury at the abuse and drunken humiliation suffered by all the young soldiers at the hands of the officers. The blade moved back and forth three times. Twice in the stomach, and then again in the ribs. The man fell onto his side on the ground, one arm pinned under him, the other raised half-way in the air, the wet index finger trembling.
When Piotr and Benedikt were more than a mile from their military base, running towards the village they knew lay ahead in the darkness, Benedikt had stopped suddenly. ‘We have to go back.’ And he wouldn’t take another step, just shook his head when Piotr asked him to forget about the gemstones.
‘No, not the jewels. We have to go back for the girl.’
‘No.’
‘She’ll die.’
‘Better her than me.’
‘Most of Rostov’s blood is on my clothes. He was alive when we left him so we either go back to make sure he is dead or we get the girl. They’ll kill her in trying to save him.’
Death by exsanguination. The Soviet Army would kill prisoners by draining them of blood whenever transfusions were required for its battle-wounded soldiers.
The girl, Zameen her name was, had not provided any information regarding the rebellion after she was captured, though others had been made to talk successfully, and then it was discovered that Rostov and she had the same rare blood type. She was separated from the other prisoners. On one occasion Rostov even took her with him when he visited another city in case he sustained a serious injury there.
Benedikt led Piotr to a small wooden bridge and told him to wait underneath it, and, astonishingly, he was back with the girl in just over two hours. Rostov, he said, had dragged himself into the armoury, smearing red on the floor as he went, and though he was still alive at the end of that path of blood Benedikt had gone to the small room where Zameen was kept.
She was as dazed as she had always been — she had not uttered a word or made a sound since her capture — but now she spoke, startling them, saying Piotr and Benedikt must change the direction of their journey. She said she would take them to a place called Usha and then a little further beyond that to the house of her parents. Piotr was certain she was leading them into a trap — a month ago three Soviet soldiers were found hanging cut up in a butcher’s shop. The time he had spent alone in the darkness had altered him, when he had felt like a castaway on a vast black ocean, fears accumulating around him. Now terrified, he wanted to go back to the base. He arrived just before Rostov was discovered, and he was among the soldiers who were sent out into the night to hunt for Benedikt and the girl — but they were not to be found.
*
The breeze rustles through the branches of the silk-cotton tree. Lara has heard this sound captured on the recording of the bird that Marcus had made in this garden decades ago.
Another few days and then she’ll leave, another few days of sitting beside his aged form as they both drink the bright red tea he loves, a vague smile occasionally on his lips when he glances up from a page to tell her something. A Prospero on his island.
The mountain range looms above the house. On those quartz and feldspar heights at the end of 2001, American soldiers had ceremonially buried a piece of debris taken from the ruins of the World Trade Center, after the terrorists up there had either been slaughtered or been made to flee. Before these soldiers flew out to attack Afghanistan, the US secretary of defense told them they had been ‘commissioned by history’.