In Xanadu (30 page)

'Sir, are you married to that beautiful lady?'

'Yes,' I said, out of habit rather than any particular wish to deceive. 'My wife and I have been married three years.'

'And you have children?'

Sadly not."

'You are lucky fellow to be married," he said. 'But to have no issue is a terrible curse.'

'I have high hopes,' I replied. 'My wife has good child-bearing hips.'

'I want to marry Europe girl. Does Europe girl like Iran man?' 'I'm sure she does.' 'I have big moustache.' "Very big.'

'I want Europe wife who is good Muslim and has - how do you say? - big hip. But is very difficult to find. Very difficult indeed.'

‘Yes, I can imagine.'

‘Your wife is follower of Jesus?'

'I'm afraid so.'

'Once I met Europe girl. She was follower of Jesus. Very tall. Big hip. I asked her to many me.' 'Did she say yes?' 'No.'

'I am sorry.'

He picked at his chilli omelette. It had gone cold, and had congealed into a heavy lump on his plate. Resting beside it on the table was Joe's head. He was snoring loudly.

'She was good lady,' said Nazir. 'She would have borne me many childrens. Now she is gone and I am alone.' He shook his head, paused and then continued: Today I goto Pakistan. I have no friends there, no relations. The Pakistan men they say, 'This Iran man he is bad fellow," and they do not talk to me. The Pakistan women they do not look. Sometimes I wonder if God has forgotten me.'

'It can't be as bad as that'

'It is. Maybe it is worse. I have a little surgery in the desert south of Quetta. The people are Baluchis and always they kill each other. Always they are giving grenades to each other's houses. To be a surgeon in the desert south of Quetta is a terrible thing. For me they are dark days.'

"Well, why don't you stay in Iran?'

'Iran is worse than Pakistan. In Iran I was sent to the front and made to - how do you say - amplify?'

'Amputate?'

'Yes. I was made to amputate. They say to me - "Nazir you

must take this finger, or Nazir you must remove noise. So all day I am cutting noises and always there are more noises to cut. And all the time the guns are going BAM BAM BAM, and my scalpel it trembles. I would prefer to die alone without wife and without issue in Pakistan than to stay at front. But either way my life it is lived in shadow.'

Nazir poured out his heart until well after noon. He was like a character escaped from a terrible nineteenth-century German novel: the sort of manic who totters from disaster to disaster through books one, two, three and four, only to commit suicide on page nine hundred and eighty-seven. Like his German counterparts his melancholy was contagious. After a couple of hours I too believed that
I
would die alone and without issue, in Zahedan, surrounded only by snoring Ghanaians and half-eaten chilli omelettes.

He was still describing the amputation of Baluchis when a party of twenty Afghans wandered into the room. Their leader walked up to Nazir and asked him a question. It was the one occasion
I
ever saw him smile.

"What did he ask?' I said.

'He says he is looking for some men to share a mini-transit to the border. They want to leave immediately.' The words fell like manna from heaven.

The next few hours were dreadful. The stuffy morning had turned into a suffocating afternoon. The journey was slow and the mini-transit was hot and our shirts stuck to the plastic seats. On a good day, in a good vehicle, along a good road, you could cover eighty kilometres of desert in forty minutes. On that day, in the mini-transit, it took an hour and a half to get the engine started and well over four hours to drive the thing to the border post. The problem did not lie with the mini-transit itself but instead with the Baluchi, who forgot to fill its tank with petrol, and with the Afghans, who did not have a single passport between them.

At the first checkpoint we were held up for two hours in a thicket of limp barbed wire, while the Afghans argued with the Revolutionary Guards and waved a grubby identity document. The document was written in Pushtu and the Revolutionary Guards spoke Farsi and they were bored and had nothing better to do than argue. At the second checkpoint, the sun throbbed down and the Guards leant on their Kalashnikovs. All they wanted was a bribe and we were only held up for thirty minutes. But at the third checkpoint the Revolutionary Guards were officious teenagers, anxious to prove themselves. We left the Afghans there, barely half a kilometre from the border, kneeling down to pray in a barbed-wire pen, while the teenagers looked on, tittering like schoolchildren.

In a few minutes we reached Taftan, the border post. On one side a mange-struck dog lifted its leg on a 'Death to America' mural, opposite a bitch lay in the shade, sunk in a coma of inanition. The customs hut reeked of stale urine and something else dead. One guard wore a string vest, another, the customs officer, sprawled over a wooden desk, amid passport stamps, ink pads, half-used biros and an old safety razor. He was dressed from neck down in khaki. Above him hung a framed picture of Khomeini, Khamanei and Rafsanjani, the Trinity of the Islamic revolution, with an English caption, 'We don't want anything except the establishment of Islamic rules and laws all over the world.' Ramesh and Joe sat outside, Laura leant against a doorjamb, and I stood behind Nazir as he discussed the 'present' necessary to 'reopen' the border. The customs officer burped, studied Laura and myself, and then remarked perceptively, 'I suppose you two are Europeans.' We discussed a price, had our rucksacks checked, paid an additional 'departure tax' and then waited while the guards sent away a Baluchi tribesman and his goat. It took half an hour to find a key to the border gate. At just after seven-thirty we walked into Pakistan.

**

It
was
like
coining
up
for
air.
I
rolled
up
my
shirtsleeves
for
the first
time
in
over
a
fortnight.
Laura
whooped,
tore
off
her
black headscarf,
tossed
her
black
stockings
over
the
barbed
wire,
and danced
a
jig
on
her
chador,
to
the
delight
of
the
Pakistani customs
men.
After
the
Iranians
they
seemed
as
unthreatening
and
familiar
as
Dixon
of
Dock
Green.
All
around
lay objects
that
I
hadn't
seen
for
three
years,
since
I
had
left
India. The
customs
officers
sat
on
rope-strung
charpoy,
drinking
little white
china
cups
of
milk-tea.
Two
sandalwood
incense
sticks were
burning
beside
the
immigration
ledger.
A
bicycle
leant against
the
outside
wall.