‘Larissa Petrovna. She says her brother was a soldier who knew Zameen.’
David nods. The older man does not say the Soviet soldier’s name but David hears it in his head anyway. Benedikt Petrovich. The man who fathered Zameen’s child through repeated assault, the child David later called his own son, who it is possible has grown up to be the young man at the top of the minaret over there, the sunlight making the crescent appear as though it’s on fire. At the military base Benedikt Petrovich guarded the room where Zameen was kept, and he unbolted the door night after night and went in to her.
‘David, did Zameen ever talk about a Soviet soldier, about twenty-four years old?’
‘No. Never. So what kind of things does this Bihzad remember?’
A camel goes by with the burnt-out shell of a car fastened upside down to its back, the high metal object lurching at every step.
When David met Zameen, in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, Bihzad was four and was taught to think of David as his father. It was a matter of months after that that Zameen died and the boy disappeared. Lost as he was at such an early age, how surprising it seems that he has managed to carry with him even his name. Holding onto that one possession over the violent chaotic years.
‘He remembers Zameen telling him Qatrina was a doctor, seemed to have forgotten that I was one too, though he knew I had some connection with England. He remembers you, remembers Peshawar — all very vaguely.’
David has looked for him for nearly twenty years, making a number of journeys towards hints of him, always unsure about how much someone can remember from when they were four or five. It must be different for different people. There have been several leads in the past, one or two as compelling as this one, but nothing came of them. He is forty-eight this year, and from among his own early memories the earliest is of experiencing a strong emotion — which he would in later life learn to call love — towards what a set of coloured pencils did on a piece of paper, those brilliant lines and marks with a thin layer of light trembling on them. He always wanted those pencils near. He has calculated that he must have been about three. But he has no personal recollection of something that is said to have occurred at a slightly later age, something that is family legend — of him sinking his teeth into the leg of the doctor who was about to give his brother Jonathan a vaccine shot, Jonathan weeping with fear at the needle.
Marcus unlocks the door at the base of the minaret and they enter in silence, climbing the staircase that spirals upwards at the centre. Most minarets are narrow, merely architectural details these days, but this staircase is wide enough for horses. Half-way up there is a large hole that must have been caused by a stray rocket during one of the many battles the area has seen in the previous decades, one of the many wars. It is as though someone had bitten off the side of the tower.
At the very top is the landing and then a door opens onto a balcony that runs around the minaret, a circular terrace just under the dome, exposed to the sunlight at this hour.
‘Does he actually live up here?’ They passed a cotton mattress on the landing. A small tin trunk stood open to reveal things for making tea. Powdered milk spilling from a twist of newspaper headlines. And out here there is evidence on the floor of a small fire of splintered wood, of burnt thorn and twig. There is a cot for sitting, its ropes frayed. He thinks of the summer months with their dust storms, palls of them rising up and burying the city for twenty minutes each time.
‘This area is without electricity at dawn so they can’t use the loudspeaker to make the call to prayer. Someone has to come up here and do it physically. He does that, but he actually lives somewhere else.’ He points to the east. ‘In that neighbourhood.’
They are standing on the balcony, looking at the city below. Above them is a roof of corrugated iron on which the claws of pigeons can be heard.
‘He said they used to give lessons in the Koran to the djinn up here, a long time ago. They came to the mosque down there at first but their presence was too overwhelming for humans, a child or two fainting with awe. So this minaret was built for them to walk up to without being seen or felt by humans. Bihzad says no one wants to be the muezzin, afraid in case the effect of the djinn still lingers.’
‘What does he look like? And when will he be back?’
‘Around noon. I told him I must go back home before night falls.’
David nods. ‘So this Russian woman — Larissa Petrovna, you said her name is.’
‘Lara. She’ll go back in a few days. She won’t say much but she lost her husband two years ago and is obviously in a time of darkness. She keeps apologising for being a burden on me even though it’s not a problem in the least. She is an art historian at the Hermitage in St Petersburg. You are sure Zameen never mentioned a Soviet soldier named Benedikt?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘You’ll meet her. But you haven’t told me what you are doing here. Listen to the birds, David, their wing beats.’ He is sitting on the cot, his back against the wall. ‘It feels strange to be away from the house after so long. I look at this ceiling and for a second expect to see books nailed up there.’
David looks at the panorama of the city while listening to him, the mountain range in the hazy distance.
‘The large book of Bihzad’s paintings had required three nails to stay in place on the ceiling. Such brutality had to be inflicted on it to prevent it from being burned to ashes — and here was a man so subtle he painted with a brush that ended in a single hair picked from a squirrel’s throat.’
David’s first concern is Marcus: how much has his Russian visitor told him about her brother’s assaults on Zameen? The shock would be devastating to him, but how much does she know herself? Zameen had hidden nothing from David but he has always been careful not to reveal too much to Marcus — or to Qatrina when she was alive. Qatrina who died in 2001, the long-ago spring of 2001 when the United States believed itself to be at peace, believed itself to be safe and immune from all this.
The Englishman’s eyes are closed now, the birds coming and going on the roof.
Zameen told him how she heard the door open that night, heard Benedikt enter the room in the darkness. Strangely he didn’t approach her bed as he had done over the previous nine occasions. He closed the door behind him but didn’t bolt it. A chain, hanging from a ring on the wall beside her wooden bed, was attached to an iron band around her wrist, so she couldn’t rush for the open door. His breath was rapid and shallow as though he’d been running. He whispered her name and struck a matchstick alight. Speaking in English, a language he knew brokenly from his mother, he said he was defecting and that she must go with him, said he had made it out of the base safely earlier tonight but had turned back for her.
When during his assaults she had wanted to scream but had been unable to, her hands — out of humiliation and rage — had flown at him, raking his skin, but now she listened, looking at his face in the yellow light which soon ran out.
‘Here is the key for your wrist.’ She heard something land by her feet. Like a raindrop on a leaf. He drew closer. One time he had fallen asleep beside her for a few seconds after the act and she had heard that breathing stretch much deeper.
She did not move towards the key, shaking her head even though it was dark. And so he lit another match and told her that Rostov lay bleeding out there and that she must know she would be drained of blood to save him. ‘Don’t make me go and kill him.’ There was pleading in the whispered voice, as when, his thirst quenched, he sometimes asked her to forgive him for what he had just done. During the daylight hours he was ashamed of what he did to her, but again and again in the darkness he found himself approaching her, ready to subdue, dizzy and almost sick with longing and desire and power.