‘I am too weakened, Marcus.’
‘You are going to let them go unchallenged?’
‘They are very strong.’
‘Then you’ll fail. But so what? At least you will have tried. The goal is to have a goal, honesty the striving for honesty.’
A dependable clarity dissolved out from him. An aura. It was as though she had been able to make out each of the pages her mother thought she was filling her notebooks with in her last days.
Now she rises and drinks a few gulps of water, which after the thirst feel immensely pure. It is like being a bowl of dew.
From the orchard she looks out at the lake. During the night she had gone down the path towards Usha several times, always turning back because of fear, but starting out again later, covering this time a distance greater or shorter than earlier. At the dacha they had hurt Stepan to make her reveal herself. She had heard his screams from the hiding place where she sat whimpering. And so, during the course of the night that is ending, she kept hearing Dunia’s voice, calling to her.
Now she moves along the path again, trying to gather her nerves as she goes. The sky above her is still dark but there are many hints of light, almost everything visible. A sound like a shower of broken glass and she looks to her left, into the trees that are populated by the djinn, catching sight of the peacock just before it disappears with its waterfall-like tail. The retractable trim of long feathers on each wing was glowing with the reddish orange of rust-covered knives. She enters the contained and muffled solitude of the trees, the silence so heavy it is as though her ears have been sealed. Here could be another explanation for the painted rooms of Marcus’s house: it could have been built to provide an education to the djinn about what it means to be human. Each interior a classroom, the djinn moving upwards within the building as their knowledge increased sense by sense, arriving finally at the topmost golden space.
She notices small birds flitting around and above her. Bee-eaters, parakeets, orioles and goldfinches, who received their red faces when they tried to remove the crown of thorns from Christ’s head. They are too many and too different for it to seem natural. It’s as though the door to an aviary has been left open somewhere. Minutes later, lost and unable to find a way out onto the path, she is leaning against a tree when she becomes aware of an intense fragrance. There is no arrival or gradual rise in intensity — it is there suddenly like music released. There is movement beside her, the faintest of stirrings. She turns her head and sees the ten figures, bowing in two rows towards Allah. All their attention on their Maker. They are not aware of her even though she is only two metres away from the end of the second row. This beautiful brown-skinned boy is little more than fourteen. How close she is to the pulsating energy field that this innocent-looking child exists within, the grand realm of spiritual events in which his real life occurs, Muhammad and Gabriel more real to his passioning eye than she.
He has Pakistani features and colouring. Recruited from a religious school for this cause? Terrorist groups in that country buy and sell boys as young as twelve for suicide missions. Once they receive training they can be barred from returning to their families, becoming virtual prisoners. The groups have been known to accept ‘ransom’ for their release, justifying it by saying that neither the boys nor their training had come cheap.
Or is he doing this willingly? In the months to come his mother or father, sister or brother, would be scouring this land for some word of him.
Hundreds of Russian mothers wait along Chechnya’s border with Russia, women of advancing years who have decided to come and discover the fates of their conscripted sons, brought there by the news that his military card has been found or a locket with his name on it. They move from town to town and search the train carriages heaped with the dead boys, looking for a birthmark or asking one another if eye colour is the same in death as in life, untangling one boy from the press of the hundred others and pulling him out, already unrecognisable, bitten by dogs and rats or cut to pieces.
A few birds are singing in the branches overhead. The song much more powerful than the fragile body of the singer.
In America they would have to face the east in order to say their prayers, and so, David said, the early Muslims in America were thought to be worshippers of the sun and the moon.
They have straightened in unison — it’s like opening a child’s pop-up book — and are now standing up, hands folded neatly on the stomachs, on the suicide belts, faces lowered in obedience. Today is the day of reckoning promised in the shabnama. There is a slope in front of them where the tall grass is tiger-striped with paths. They must have come down through there to perform this final act of worship before going on to meet Allah, and other battalions must be elsewhere around Usha.
How long, she wonders, before they finish and see her? They’ll perform the two motions that are the last acts of the Muslim prayer: the head is rolled first to the right, then to the left. Allah, I wish well-being and peace for all those on this side. And, Allah, I wish well-being and peace for all those on this side. She had seen Casa and Dunia do this at the house.
She is sure they can hear the noise her heart is making. She steps sideways, the support of the tree disappearing from along her spine. And she takes a step back. The corner of her eye is fixed on them and now she sees David at the other end of the rows. He hasn’t seen her: he is moving towards the back row, eyes fixed on the third boy along from his end.
Casa.
David inches forward and comes to stand directly behind Casa, carefully raises his right hand towards the boy’s waist and his left towards the head. As the other boys move forward to bow again, David clamps shut Casa’s mouth and with the other arm fastens the boy’s arms to his sides. A tight grip. He lifts him out of the rank just as the others fall to their knees and then make their bodies foetally compact on the ground. The combined rustle of the others’ clothing hides any noise that the two of them have made. Why is Casa’s eye bandaged? she wonders. David drags the struggling boy away from the two bowing lines of the death squad, away into the trees, managing to raise him off his feet so the thudding cannot alert the others — their ears so close to the ground in their prostration. Her hands are wet with the tears she has wiped off her face, her vision slipping in and out of focus. Their clothing has drenched the air with perfume here. Jihad handbooks warn terrorists not to wear fragrances in airports, as it gives them away as devout Muslims. They have, of course, become aware of the disturbance, reacting as though in a dream, unable and unwilling to interrupt their prayer. By religious decree they are not even allowed to look sideways until the act of worship is complete. But in ones and twos around the gap that Casa has left behind, they come out of their trance, look back, see her, see David and Casa in that terrible embrace. All this takes place in a matter of seconds but to her it seems so slow that buds could appear and break into blossom and then wither around her. Coins of the realm and the names of cities could change. Governments and empires fall.
David’s mouth is next to Casa’s ear, and he is whispering something fast.
He is hoping to win over his murderer with an embrace.
THEY HAVE FALLEN BACKWARDS onto the earth. Managing to free his right hand from David’s grip, Casa feels along the belt tied to the waist. Through gritted teeth he says something, his face parallel with the sky visible through a gap in the foliage. The last words David hears.
The blast opens a shared grave for them on the ground.
TEN OR SO BUTTERFLIES go past Marcus’s knees and they double in number when they begin to fly over the lake’s reflecting surface. The sky has a milky lustre above him, the pale blue of lines ruled on the pages of a child’s exercise book.