‘None, if you keep quiet about it.’
To the side of him Casa makes a lunge towards the open door. David hears sounds of a scuffle from out there. If he had died they would have buried him somewhere under cover of darkness? No one would have been any the wiser.
‘Tell them to let him go,’ he tells James.
‘No. He could run off and warn Nabi Khan. And I want to know what else he knows.’
‘You know all this is illegal?’
‘Illegal? This is war, David. You’ve been looking into the wrong law books. These are battlefield decisions.’
‘Tell them to let him go. You do not have the authority to do this.’
‘Suddenly you are an angel.’
‘Whatever I did or did not do, I was an employee of the government of the United States.’
‘How do you know I am not?’
‘I intend to find out. This is not over.’
He looks at the others. The long thick veins on the arms of the one holding the blowtorch are like cables or tubes that feed the blowtorch, the instrument a part of him. And David sees that on his white T-shirt is printed the sonogram image of a few-weeks-old foetus. A black rectangle filled with grainy strokes. His future child back in the United States, no doubt.
He turns and leaves the room with James following. Casa is on the ground out there, in the rectangle of light falling from the door. And when they release him and James moves forward to lift him to his feet, Casa makes to stab him in the face with the canoe maker’s awl he has produced from the folds of his clothing, the barb as thick as a porcupine quill moving past James’s shoulder. James wrenches it out of the weak grip and steps away.
‘They are the children of the devil. They have no choice but to spread destruction in the world.’
‘He is the child of a human, which means he has a choice and he can change.’
James throws the spike into the darkness. ‘Just look around you, David. Look at the devastation all around you. These people have reduced their own country to rubble and now they want to destroy ours.’
‘Where’s the girl, James?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘She’s missing.’
‘Wasn’t us. Must be the fellow countrymen of this man, the people you are so keen to protect. Do you know what is probably being done to her by them right now?’
When Lara said she was very brave to have taken on the responsibility of the school, the girl had replied, ‘I pretend I don’t exist. It’s easier to be courageous that way.’ As Zameen used to say at the Street of Storytellers.
Casa has stood up and begun to stagger away, trailing that bit of rope.
David now moves in front of James to block direct access to Casa, just in case. There are only a few inches of space between their faces, the eyes staring at each other. The gap widens as David backs away in Casa’s direction. ‘This is not over,’ he says firmly.
Like lightning arriving a few beats before the roll of thunder, James’s face tenses and his eyes flash and then the noise of his rage comes out. ‘We are not responsible for this. If he is half-blind or if he dies of his wounds — it’s not our fault. And those hundreds who died by chance in our bombing raids, and those who are being held in Guantanamo and in other prisons — none of it is our fault. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and their Islam are answerable for all that. We are just defending ourselves against them. This is not over? You bet.’
David turns his back to him and looks for Casa. His ruined face. The water in the eye gone, the colour too turned to smoke and ash in the cindered socket. He glances around but there is no sign of him. Occasionally when he is in Asia he visits the site where Zameen’s death took place, on the outskirts of Peshawar, around where she possibly lies buried. The first time he went he felt her presence there, a hint of her like an unevenness in a sheet of glass. Has she been accompanying him since, the unanchored dead? Before leaving he had bent down and picked up a handful of earth from the ground and closed his fingers around it and he took it with him to the USA. This is among the few things that can be said about love with any confidence. It is small enough to be contained within the heart but, pulled thin, it would drape the entire world.
*
It’s almost dawn and Lara has been here at the table with a book, surrounded by the painted vistas and processions on the wall, for many hours. Marcus is in an armchair in the next room, in a state of alert exhaustion no doubt, like her. She can see part of his body next to the plum blossom printed on the chair’s fabric. Can see part of his lengthy comet-like beard. ‘This land and its killing epochs,’ he had been saying earlier. ‘The Soviet invasion took away Zameen, the Taliban era swallowed up Qatrina. I fear that this new war will take someone else away.’
She had gone to sit on the floor beside him. Her head on his lap.
‘You have to go away, Marcus. Go far away from this place.’
‘I live here.’
‘It’s called waiting.’
‘Do you think?’
In both of them there was a wish to conserve energy so it was a whispered exchange. A drowsiness, and little or no inflection behind the words. He began stroking her hair but soon stopped even that, the hand just resting there.
‘I am waiting for my grandson, yes. All this’ — the hand was lifted a fraction off her head because he probably wished to wave it around the room, the house, what she thinks of as the ruin of golden Islam, a destroyed markaz perhaps and a ‘Zone of Peace’ with him as the Sufi — ‘is his and must be passed on to him. Having all of you here has made it even more clear to me that this is my life and my home. I don’t just live here because I don’t have an alternative.’
‘I inherited everything of Stepan’s. But I want nothing to do with it, the wealth he left. I don’t really want to know the methods by which it was accumulated. You could buy a trainload of Siberian timber for one dollar during the financial crash of 1993. No, I don’t want it. Who would?’
‘Me.’
‘As children we heard a story about the tin-based Russian currency. How one particularly cold winter, when temperatures fell below minus eighty-six degrees, the nation’s entire coinage had turned to white powder, as tin does under such conditions. I am sure the story is untrue, but I don’t want to touch what Stepan has left me, I will let it turn to dust. I have come to hate money.’
‘Not me.’
She had straightened at that, shocked even within her tiredness. ‘I can’t believe what I am hearing. You wish you had money?’
‘A vast amount of it. Why not? It could be used to build schools and hospitals, parks and libraries and community centres. I am not saying the only way to save someone is through money, or that life should be reduced to quantities of wealth. The rich have this idea that they have paid off their debt to the world by becoming rich. No, I am talking about the difference between greed and need. And not just this country, there is a world out there that I would try to help.’
She had felt ashamed. ‘You are good.’ It all depends on how big you think your family is. The words of her mother.
‘I didn’t say that to imply you were being self-centred.’ He cupped her face in both his hands. Or got as close to doing it as was possible for him. He attempted it and she understood the attempt. If the left hand was missing — well then, it was missing.
The touch of his hand was tough in some places, fine in others. A gatepost weathered by departures.
He said, ‘You must go back and take charge of these matters intelligently. You must delve deeper into Stepan’s death, try to discover what your country’s government and your country’s army is doing.’