The generator had stopped working suddenly earlier tonight so there was only candlelight at dinner. For some reason David hadn’t eaten anything and had sat with them only for a while, and silently, and when Casa suggested they should investigate the generator he said it can be left until tomorrow.
The house is in darkness. Allah has sent her here so he can possess her. It is His command that he do this, then go and find a way of becoming a martyr. When he walks around the dark house he discovers an open weakly illuminated window on the north side on the ground floor. Looking in he becomes aware that something is wrong. It is an instinct long before it is a full sentence in his head. A candle has almost burnt itself to the height of half an inch on a stack of books. The flame squat and blue-tipped. There is a careless ruck in the prayer mat near by. As though a serpent sleeps underneath.
One of Dunia’s earrings lies between the prayer mat and the window. They had carried her out through here.
They must have disturbed her at prayer, while she was unguarded, when the difference between this world and the next is slowly wiped out.
He climbs in.
This house is unhinging him, asking him to look into mirrors he shouldn’t. Allah does not wish him to have any ties. Three-and-a-bit days living with them is enough, these people whose very existence is and should be a provocation — to think that he has spent time under the same roof as a Russian, the butchers of Afghanistan, the butchers of Chechnya! — and it is an effort to remain silent all the time. He should steal the keys to David’s car and leave. The Americans know him now — if they stop him he’ll say he’s running an errand, that someone has fallen ill.
He wants to go back to the state of war. For the clarity it brings.
If she is blameless Allah Himself will find a way to save her. Nothing is beyond Him. Casa has heard how a group of the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters had become trapped here in Usha towards the end of 2001, when the American soldiers were going from house to house, smashing open any door they wished to in their hunt. All escape routes were blocked but then suddenly, out of the room where the fighters stood more or less cornered, ten iron nails had flown out and swerved into the street. Each was six inches long and verses of the Koran written on small pieces of paper had been tied with thread to the head of each. The sharp tips pointing along the direction of travel, the nails continued in a straight line through the moonlight, the rays glinting off the grey iron, took a corner to the left and then to the left again in order to enter the next street, increasing in speed as they approached their targets. Without sound they came and, shattering through the night-vision goggles, lodged themselves into the eyes of the five American soldiers who were keeping guard there, blocking the path to safety.
The miracles of Allah.
Now he goes deeper into the house and finds a lamp and then returns and exits the house and goes to the wooden kiosk that houses the generator. Several of the cables have been cut, he sees. Quick strokes with a blade. The thin copper wires within the rubber insulation shining like insect eyes as they catch the lamp’s light. He presses the lever and raises the glass shield of the lamp and blows out the flame. He steps out and stands with his back pressed to the kiosk’s door, looking deep into the surrounding darkness.
*
In the autumn of 1959, Khrushchev visited New York but he kept delaying his departure back to Moscow. When this aroused suspicion, the Western world’s listening posts in England, Italy, Japan and Turkey set to work and eventually homed in on signals issuing from a rocket launch site within the Soviet Union. Among the signals was the regular beating of a human heart. The heartbeat grew faster as the rocket reached its first staging point, the cosmonaut experiencing the normal reaction of fear and excitement. At the moment the rocket’s second stage should have ignited, all signals ceased abruptly and the tracking devices lost contact. Though the Soviet Union denied it, the owner of the heartbeat had been incinerated in millions of gallons of exploding fuel. It is now believed that important safety checks had been ignored for the Soviet leader to have a triumphal moment while visiting the West — ‘The first human being in space is a citizen of the Soviet Union.’
Lara feels along the darkened wall. Her fingers touch the coldness of the lyre-shaped mirror and then journey over its frame, the warmth in the fingertips releasing the fragrance of the wood.
From the shelf she takes the matchbox and strikes herself a flame. In its brief yellow light she picks up the foot-long narrow box that lies on a higher shelf. Five more seconds — and a star bursts before her eyes, the silver brilliance at the centre of it scorching the retina. She turns around with it in her hands, the room shaking with the light. It is a child’s sparkler: a small amount of — what is it, surely not gunpowder? — moulded onto a stiff wire. She can’t find a candle and has just heard a sound from outside. It’s seventeen minutes past one. She moves towards the window with the white starburst. Her shadow is grey tinted with lapis lazuli and it wavers and shifts from side to side, almost vibrating. As when lightning flashes in a storm, entering a room from two different windows. She stands looking out into the night, the five inches of burning powder almost running out.
‘How do you think that kind old man out there would feel’, she had asked David, stopping him in a corridor, ‘if you were to tell him that his daughter’s death was needed for the secure and singing tomorrows you were arranging for Afghanistan and the world?’
And he had replied, ‘I loved her as much as he did. But Christopher made a mistake.’
He was not innocent but he was not guilty.
She was collateral damage.
‘When you are alone at night and your rage takes over — what face do you give it?’
‘I am also the man who is privileged to have saved many many lives, Lara.’
Everyone in the house came together at dinner but then she had withdrawn into this room with Dunia. Around midnight the girl said she wanted to pray and went downstairs, Casa’s fists sounding on the kitchen door not long after that. He was shouting that the girl was missing, that the electricity had been sabotaged.
There are two possibilities. Either someone from the mosque has taken her, to mete out justice for being immoral. Or — according to David — someone linked with Gul Rasool has, thinking she is involved with the people who put up the shabnama that night.
Marcus is in the kitchen now. And she doesn’t know where David and Casa have gone.
She takes out the two dozen or so lights that remain in the flat cardboard box and ignites them simultaneously. She stops herself from shaking. With all the power in her arm she throws the fragments of lightning out into the blackness, watching the thin silver flares slowly drop towards the ground, illuminating the air, the edges of leaves, the boughs of the rosewood tree that is honoured by the three ring-dove nests. They go out one by one in the garden and are a handful of dead moments, bits of time turned to ash.
*
In the nineteenth century, one of Marcus’s uncles in the North-West Frontier Province was in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. On parade every man of the regiment wore a single red feather at the front of his pith helmet. The regiment had taken part in the successful night attack on the Americans at Paoli in September 1777, the sleeping Americans massacred with swords and bayonets, the place set alight around the screaming wounded. The Americans had vowed vengeance and, in defiance, in order that they should know who had done the deed, the light company stained red the white feathers they wore in their hats, the tradition continuing for a century and more into the future.