He is dragging the canoe to the water’s edge, the various woods of it gleaming in the late-morning sun. The water seems to take it out of his hand, attempting to uncouple it from his grip. He has to make sure his feet don’t slither sideways. It looks raggedy. The ends of the ribs protruding where they haven’t yet been trimmed. It has not been sealed — with that gum sticky to the touch like certain leaf buds before opening — but it floats. Keeping his hand on the prow he walks with it into the water until he is submerged up to the navel, standing on rocks within the water. He lets go and with his one hand tries to lift a heavy rock out of the lake. Failing, he takes a deep breath and crouches. His head is in the liquid now. He manages to work one round stone out of the bed and then slides it up along his thighs, into his lap. Cradling it, he stands up out of the diffused shimmer and then carefully sends the black stone over the edge of the canoe. The bark vessel sinks half an inch deeper into the lake, the water sieving in. This was how the Native Americans stored the canoes when they were not in use, burying them in the water.
He looks towards the house, the balcony of the room where Lara is. He saw her walking from the direction of Usha earlier and took her into the house, helped her upstairs, stopping on the seventh step of the staircase to pick up the book that had become dislodged and landed there. The blood on her clothes was, she said, that of Casa and David. She wouldn’t bathe in the house, rejecting the idea of the drain, and had stood in the lake instead so that all the redness would become part of the roaming water. The sun-dazzled surface. One year soon after the Soviet Army invaded, the air around the house had turned yellow, thick billows of the colour arriving on the breeze, falling from the sky, every heart fearful at the sight because there had been reports of attacks with chemical weapons. In the end it turned out to be the pollen-rich droppings of a large swarm of wild bees. The colour settled on this water thickly enough for Zameen to be able to write her name in it.
He knows Dunia will never be found. Her face of unstudied nobility. The silent earrings she was still wearing from the time of the Taliban regime, when women would hold up a piece of jewellery and shake it to see if it made a noise. No one will know what happened to her. The talk in Usha will be that she must have run away with a lover. Her father will hold Marcus responsible for her disappearance. Perhaps violence will come from him towards Marcus.
He goes down into that water again, amid the drowned rays of the sun, and brings out another rock. Then another. He does this carefully, imagines the boat tipping and pouring the stones onto him, a landslide of his own making. Now and then he is forced to look towards Usha, the sound of an explosion. Rockets. Gunfire. Street fighting in the sewers and alleys of Usha. He imagines flattened homes, with hands protruding from the rubble as though still trying to grab hold of and stay the rampaging storm. The heroes of East and West are slaughtering each other in the dust of Afghanistan.
Both sides in Homer’s war, when they arrive to collect their dead from the battlefield, weep freely in complete sight of each other. Sick at heart. This is what Marcus wants, the tears of one side fully visible to the other.
Over the next ten minutes the boat sits lower and lower on the water. There are small insects on the lake not far from him like words suspended on the surface of a page. When the water is just three inches from the lip of the canoe he walks away from it, the lake falling from him in dense liquid sheets.
He stands watching it as it takes in an increasing amount of water and eventually disappears. He feels he has driven seventeen nails of various sizes into a book to make it stay on the ceiling.
Nothing but a set of oval ripples is on the surface. They become more and more circular as they travel away from the centre.
10. All Names are My Names
A BREEZE comes along the migratory route of birds and enters the orchard. The Buddha’s head slowly rises off the floor in the perfume factory, the first movement it has known for several centuries.
The knitted harness of chains, almost a net, lifts it through the gap in the glass roof and brings it out into the September sunlight, the avenue of Persian lilacs — the chinaberries — thrashing in the wind that is being generated by the aircraft’s two mighty sets of rotor blades. In March there had been flowers but none of them remain, so only the foliage and the clusters of green berries are being dismantled onto the Buddha.
The stone face hangs from the twin-rotored military helicopter. As they hover and then move sideways and gain in height, Marcus looks down and catches glimpses of the head. The features smiling above the suddenly visible vista. His own body — the portion of earthly dust assigned him — feels insubstantial in comparison with all this. The soldiers have strapped him to the metal wall beside a window though they themselves know how to move with confident safety within the hulking machine. The mountains and hills rise and fall on either side of them. Sometimes the shadow of the flying machine is tiny — moving like a gnat along the floor of a deep valley — but at other times it is almost life-size, projected onto the side of a mountain that has suddenly appeared beside them.
‘Do you live alone?’ one of the soldiers had asked Marcus.
His family and friends are gone. He is alive but has been buried in many graves.
A letter came from Lara in July. The fragments of painted plaster she arranged on the floor in the golden room are still there. Looking at the mosaic after she went back to St Petersburg, he realised that one piece was missing, the piece on which the faces of the two lovers made contact. She had taken it with her to Russia. That and one of the perforated books. A kinship of wounds. It was The Golden Fleece picked at random. The dead may speak the truth only, even when it discredits themselves.
Rivers and small bright lakes pass under them — pale-yellow light held together by water. Some of the hills down there are dotted with red: the rocks have been daubed to warn that the vicinity hasn’t yet been cleared of landmines.
Marcus and Qatrina had informed the National Museum at Kabul when the head was discovered during the building of the perfume factory decades ago, and they had attempted to take it away but hadn’t managed it. In the end Marcus’s house was officially designated an annexe of Kabul Museum, a dozen or so visitors managing to make it to the house every year to see the colossal Gandhara sculpture. During this summer Marcus has persuaded the Museum to make another attempt to transport the statue to Kabul, most of the priceless collection once housed there having disappeared or been smashed during the wars.
He can see a shepherd resting under a tree in the plains below. His animals have spread themselves out in such a way that they form a living imprint of the tree on the ground, making maximum use of its shadow.
From the folds of one of the hills in the next valley a rocket is fired at the aircraft.
Marcus watches it climb, almost in staggered time, incrementally. Its low speed seems unconnected with the massive tail of white smoke issuing from its rear, hinting at its great weight, at the effort involved in raising it — the many deaths it contains. Then another comes, both of them missing the target.
The American boys around him lower the Buddha onto a low hill, and he too alights. The metal bird rising and veering away to investigate, the soldiers telling him they’d prefer it if he weren’t with them. He watches them disappear towards the possibility of a battle.