Flour and other basics. That red tea. Kerosene for the lamp. He rarely goes into Usha now, left alone by them all, his first reaction that of mild incredulity whenever someone approaches him. They can see me. And then this week a man drew near and told him about Lara, told him about a woman who was waiting for him two streets away, having come on the daily bus from Jalalabad the day before. They can see me. Some aspect of this he had sensed in the woman he was brought to, her inwardness so intense she could scarcely bring herself to speak or meet another’s eye. She stood up and smiled at him weakly. He saw the unslept eyes, the blue-black neck. The tiredness and the large bruise were physical but they seemed connected with her spirit somewhere.
He picked up her suitcase and they began the journey to his house. There were no words during the walk along the lake’s rim. Later he discovered that the clothes in the suitcase were damp. She explained that during her long journey towards him she had seen a girl raise a fire in front of a house and heat a basin of water to bleach some fabric. After she had finished and was about to pour away the leftover liquid, Lara had moved forward and asked if she could submerge her own three spare sets of clothes into it. Wanting that white suddenly, that blankness. The sole ornament on her now was a necklace of very fine beads like a row of eggs laid along the collarbones by insects.
*
Her gaze on the Buddha’s giant face, Lara sits on the lowest step of the staircase in the perfume factory. She looks at the features of the beautiful young man. He feels vulnerable and intimate, as if facing someone in bed.
Dressed in black, the Taliban that day in March 2001 were preparing to dynamite the head when one of them had contemptuously fired a round of bullets into the stone face smiling to itself. In some versions of the events of that day, a ghost had appeared in Marcus’s house to put the sinister malevolent figures to flight. But others insist it was the occurrence down here in the perfume factory. They carried Qatrina away with them, to her eventual public execution, and would have taken Marcus also if not for what happened here.
After the gun was fired into the horizontal face it was noticed that a small point of light had materialised in each bullet hole, a softly hesitating sparkle. Over the next few instants, as more and more of the men took notice and stared uncomprehendingly, each of these spots grew in brilliance and acquired a liquid glint. Welling up in the stone wounds, the gold eventually poured out and began to slide down the features very slowly, striping the face, collecting in unevenly spaced pools on the floor.
As though they had come out of a trance, the men in defiant rage sent another dozen bullets into the idol but with the same result. In addition he now seemed to be opening fully his almost shut eyes, the lids chiselled in the stone beginning to rise without sound in what felt like an endless moment.
2. Building the New
THE AMERICAN MAN, David Town, is awakened just before sunrise by a muezzin. The first two words of the call to the Muslim prayer are also the Muslim battle cry, he remarks to himself as he lies in the darkness, never having seen the connection before.
The voice is issuing from a minaret three blocks away, dissolving into the air of Jalalabad, the city that surrounds him. He has travelled through most of this country over the decades, his work as a dealer in precious stones bringing him to the amber mines of Kandahar, taking him to Badakshan for the rubies that Marco Polo had written of in his Description of the World. The war-financing emeralds of the Panjshir Valley. He found the River Murghab to be so full of rapids it could have been the Colorado.
He listens to the voice continuing as he falls asleep again. Come to worship, it says, Come to happiness.
An hour later he gets up and walks out to a nearby teahouse. There is a samovar, and bread is being pulled out of the clay oven buried in the ground in the corner. He remembers Marcus Caldwell telling him tea is an ingredient in some perfumes. Maybe it was Zameen, passing on knowledge absorbed from her father. We learn in detail that which is most insistent around us. The desert people make good astronomers.
To the left of him a chakor partridge bites the bars of its cage. They are a gregarious bird, moving in large family groups in the wild, but are kept like this all across Afghanistan. The place becomes more and more busy as daylight increases, the road full of traffic. Vans and lorries, animals and humans. Wrapped in a coarse blanket he occupies a far chair, nodding and saying salam-a-laikam whenever someone new arrives to take a seat near by. He sits with his quiet watchful air. A cap unscrewed from a missile serves as a sugar bowl in this place. He can see the words Death to America and Kill Infidels daubed in Pashto, in two different paints and two different scripts, on a nearby wall. A news hawker enters, a child of six at most, and a man buys a magazine with Osama bin Laden on the cover, photographed as always with the Kalashnikov of a Soviet soldier he had killed here in the 1980s.
*
‘Marcus?’
David, walking back from breakfast, calls out towards the figure on the other side of the narrow lane.
The man with the white beard stops and looks up and then comes to him, taking him into his arms, a long wordless hug. Just a few smeared noises from the throat.
‘I didn’t know you were in the country,’ Marcus says when they separate.
‘Why are you in the city?’
‘I came yesterday. A shopkeeper in Usha, who recently visited Jalalabad, told me about a boy in his twenties who could be … our Bihzad.’ That was the name Zameen had chosen for her son. Bihzad — the great fifteenth century master of Persian miniature painting, born here in what is now Afghanistan, in Herat. ‘David, he remembers a lot of things, remembers her name.’
‘Where is he?’ He looks at Marcus, the eyes that are the eyes of a wounded animal.
‘I met him yesterday. I spent last night with him.’ Marcus points to the minaret with the high domed top in the distance, a brass crescent at its pinnacle. ‘Up there. He makes the call to prayer from up there.’
‘Then I think I heard him at dawn.’
‘We spent almost the entire night talking, or rather I talked. He is a little withdrawn, distant. There was something fraught about him occasionally.’ From his pocket Marcus takes out a key with a cord threaded through its eye. ‘He gave me this. Come, I’ll take you up there.’
‘What about the scar?’ The child had burned himself on a flame.
‘Yes, I saw it.’
‘He’s up there now?’
‘He said he had a few things to do but he’ll be back. I came yesterday morning, thinking I’ll go back on the evening bus but the service was cancelled. So I had to stay.’
‘I’ll drive you back this afternoon.’ A journey along vineyards that produced bunches of grapes the length of his forearm. ‘I was going to come see you in the next few days anyway.’
‘I should have returned as planned. She spent last night alone.’ Marcus stops. ‘David, there is a woman back at the house.’
‘Yes?’
‘She’s Russian.’
He’d kept on walking and is two steps ahead of Marcus, but now he halts. ‘A Russian?’