FROM ENTHUSIASM TO IMPOSTURE the step is perilous and slippery … In the golden room David looks up from the heavy book in his right hand, the blood vessel in the wrist pulsing beside the edge of the page. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Marcus, Lara and the girl are elsewhere in the house, Casa probably in the perfume factory with a lamp at his side. He looks down at the book again, the smell of dust on the paper…. the demon of Socrates affords a memorable instance of how a wise man may deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud. The pulse is usually felt where the radial artery lies near the surface of the skin, on the thumb side of the wrist. Before detaching Marcus’s hand, Qatrina had cut into his flesh and clamped the radial and ulnar arteries, to prevent excessive blood loss. Can the beat of his heart be felt near the end of his forearm now? The book is heavy. In the Texas of the mid-nineteenth century the illiterate Comanche warriors remembered to take away bibles and other books during raids on farms and settlements. They had discovered that paper made an excellent padding for their bison-hide war shields, absorbing a bullet if packed thickly and tightly enough. Someone came across a shield stuffed with the complete history of ancient Rome — its rise, efflorescence and eventual fall to barbarians.
‘WHAT IS IT?’
He shakes his head. In their brief past together, this handful of days, he has told her only the most minimal of details about Zameen’s death, the barest of revelations about his own activities of the 1980s.
‘You have enough on your mind already.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I don’t want to say it out loud.’
He walks to the door and locks it, looking back towards where she stands across the wide room. And returning, he tells her everything. How he met Zameen. The boy she loved, and the Soviet bombing of the refugee camp. How the CIA knew about the raid in advance. His trip to Uzbekistan to deliver weapons and Korans. There seeing the Muslim woman being punished for having taken a lover, and a Russian lover at that. Returning to find Zameen and the child missing, and then discovering how her circumstances had once reduced her to demean herself …
She listens to all this and more. There is no reaction from her even when the generator is switched on by someone out there and the room lights up suddenly. They look around, their eyes unsteady. Two day-blind animals exposed to full sunlight. When his eyes adjust he sees how shaken she is by what he has told her, by what he is telling her. As he continues the room becomes dark again, the generator either switched off for some reason or running out of oil.
‘The CIA knew about the raid on the camp where her lover was?’ she asks through the lightless air.
‘Yes. Days in advance. I myself found out about it only a short while before, though.’
‘They knew hundreds of people were going to die and didn’t warn them. Had you known in advance, you still wouldn’t have alerted those defenceless people. Of course.’
He doesn’t answer at first but then remembers that he is supposed to be confessing everything.
‘We were letting those men, women and children die to expose the brutality of the Soviets. We were saving the future generations of Afghanistan and the world from Communism.’
‘I am not arguing with you. But really, I can’t ignore the fact that nobody asked them if they wanted to sacrifice their lives. For all I know probably all of them would have willingly gone to their deaths to secure a better future for their land, for the world. But no one asked them.’
‘The Soviets would have carried out the raid whether or not we knew about it.’
‘But you did know about it. That’s what I am interested in. God, I had conversations of this type with Stepan … When it came to what he called his nation, his tribe, he too suffered from a kind of blindness: he saw what he wanted to. “You think your principles are higher than reality,” he’d say to me.’
‘It makes no difference that I knew.’
She seems to be elsewhere, nothing but silence from her, and then she says, ‘You have spent your whole life believing such untrue things. Don’t you know how alone you are, David? We are most alone when we are with the myths.’
‘America is not a myth.’
And you can’t compare me to Stepan, he wants to add but doesn’t because the bluntness would be painful for her. He was the servant of monsters and barbarians, of a system that was an abomination.
‘Believe me, I am not defending Soviet Communism. My father died at its hands and my mother ended up in an insane asylum because of it, my brother was torn to pieces … I remember how a dissident had asked for his legal rights while being interrogated and the KGB thug had said with a pained look on his face, “Please — we are having a serious discussion here.”’
She is on the other side of a barrier now, a branching river of ice suspended in the air between them.
‘You let that boy die, Zameen’s lover … He lived but not because of you. Doesn’t it trouble you?’
‘Of that I am guilty — yes, and I am ashamed that I was that person. I thought she would leave me for him.’
‘If you were better than him she wouldn’t have. You should have given her the chance to make up her mind.’
‘As it was, she did choose me.’
Minutes of silence later he sees her walk towards the door, hears her turn the key. To go away and look for light, leaving him to the shadows.
‘I wonder about forgiveness,’ he says quietly, moving to a chair. ‘Whether it’s ever a possibility in certain cases.’
She stops, an indistinct shape surrounded by darkness. She comes back to him, advancing and leaning close over him. Her hand moves through the air and comes to rest on the lower half of his face. He can’t understand what she is doing — telling him not to speak further on the matter? — but whatever it is, he is soon unable to breathe under that hand. Then he realises that that is actually what she is trying to do. Blocking his nose, his mouth, clamping them shut. He could free himself from the grip easily, could manoeuvre his bottom lip out from under the edge of her hand to take in a gulp of air, but he does not want to struggle against her, against this, wants to be here for ever.
A minute passes, perhaps an eternity, his lungs beginning to burn.
Then she releases him and straightens, looking down as he swallows large gasps of air.
She walks back to the door and before leaving the room she says:
‘The forgiveness of the weak is the air you strong ones breathe, David. Didn’t you know? You don’t see it but you felt it just then. They allow you to go on living.’
THE BEAUTY OF THE ROSE is considered a medicine. Healing through sight, through the act of looking with all veils swept aside. Marcus had said this to Casa when he gave him the prayer mat, a row of the blossoms depicted along the base of it.
It’s not there on the mulberry branch where Dunia has been leaving it after she herself has finished with it. He stands looking at its absence. The house is locked. It’s past midnight and they’ve gone to bed.