The Blind Man's Garden (17 page)

He turns and walks back into the building.

It is the mountain house owned by the warlord who is holding him prisoner. The chain at his ankles is long enough for him to walk at a slow pace but not to run. He goes through the kitchen without pausing and climbs the staircase and then continues along a long corridor, towards a room filled with voices at the end.

He saw the Quadrantids meteor shower three nights ago so he knows what month it is. Meteor showers occur at approximately the same time every year and the Quadrantids are seen at the beginning of January.

He was trying to escape from here the night he saw it. The house is surrounded by towering pines and snow-covered peaks, most of its rooms locked, the only human presence being a retinue of six of the warlord’s men.

He still doesn’t know where Jeo is. During the months since his capture in October, he has been bartered and sold among various warlords, and as the weeks have gone by there have been fewer and fewer words from him, none at all on most days. The current warlord doesn’t even know his name.

He comes into the room to find the men huddled around a coal brazier. The warlord is a bandit and the son of bandits, and Mikal has heard stories of how much his bloodthirstiness is feared. Once, having received word that he was about to mount a raid, the inhabitants of a village had left their jewellery and valuables out in the streets at night, the thousands of banknotes blowing about in the air as he rode in.

Mikal lifts a pomegranate from a dish and squats in the far corner of the room, listening to them as he opens the fruit with his teeth and fingernails, careful as he manipulates the fruit because the wounds from the missing fingers are still tender these months later. Every warlord has told him that he would have to be ransomed. He had refused to give any of them a contact address, no matter what they did to him. The only way anyone could gain financially from him was to send him to work on construction sites every day – a school being built, a prison for women being expanded – and he laboured while wearing his chains, becoming thinner with each week, his clothes hanging on him in rags. His hair became long and lay on his head like a thick ungovernable cap, and he still wore the boots he had been wearing back in October, having washed the blood out of them. He worked as hard as he could because he feared they would otherwise shoot him for being just a mouth to feed. But then being worked to death was another fear.

He chews the pomegranate seeds and drips the red liquid from his mouth onto the bandaged areas of his hands, knowing it is a potent healer.

One of the men is lamenting about a pistol that keeps jamming. It is an M9 Beretta and Mikal knows how simply the trouble can be fixed. He could tell the man to put a piece of electrical tape over the hole in the bottom of the pistol’s handle to keep the dust out. But he remains silent, keenly alive to the possibility that the weapon could be turned on him at some point as he attempts to flee.

He has been brought here to the mountain house to assist in a mission, a theft. Around the fire the men are finalising the details of the plan. The Prophet Muhammad’s 1, 400-year-old cloak has been kept at the mosque in Kandahar since 1768. But when the American bombing started back in October, the cloak was brought into the mountains for safekeeping, and it hasn’t been sent back to Kandahar yet. It is still there in a high-altitude mosque a distance of fifty miles from this house, and the warlord wishes to acquire it to increase his prestige, to benefit from its miraculous powers.

The warlord’s most expert thieves will go with Mikal to acquire the Prophet’s cloak, a father-and-son team, the son the same age as Mikal. The sacred garment is no doubt guarded and if they are discovered during the crime a fight will ensue. Mikal would rather not take part in the theft but he has to obey. In addition, the warlord has said that he will consider granting Mikal his freedom if the cloak is successfully brought to him. Mikal doesn’t believe the man would keep his word, so he resolves to remain alert to every possibility of escape during the journey.

They stand up when they are ready to go, everyone beginning to walk out to the front courtyard to see them off. Mikal lingers in the room and is the last one through its door: with as much swiftness as his chained legs allow him, he picks up the bullet he had seen lying under a chair the moment he came in. He works it into the waistband of his trousers as he walks behind the others in the dark corridor, the metal cold against his skin even through the fabric.

Outside, as they walk towards the van, minute specks of frozen moisture float in the otherwise dry air. It glitters in the late morning sun like shining sand or a dust of glass. The mansion has high walls of stone with lookout posts, and five large Alsatians roam the compound at night. In spite of this he has made three attempts at escape, getting further on each successive occasion, and it was only the sub-zero cold that forced him back. He had wrapped his ankle chain in rags to muffle it but in the end he couldn’t walk fast enough to generate the necessary heat, the mountainside locked in the white iron of winter.

The father gets behind the steering wheel, and he and his son utter in unison the Arabic phrase all good Muslims are meant to use before setting out on travel: ‘I hope Allah has written a safe journey for us.’

Mikal climbs into the second row of seats. He must be ready to act at the first chance. He has known for two days that something is wrong with the vehicle, that it could break down during the journey. The day before yesterday they had gone hunting for deer in the woods, and when they came back the Alsatians had not recognised their approach, had barked as they would at the noise of an unfamiliar vehicle. Some mechanism inside the engine is about to fail, a fracture spreading in the chassis.

He touches the painful arm as they drive off. For a while his wounds had made him manically alert to bees, following the progress of each one in the air with the hope of being led to the hive, coveting the yellow colour sealed inside the cellular wax, knowing that honey can mend flesh as nothing else can, healing wounds that have remained open for a decade.

*

The air inside the van becomes colder as they climb towards the snow line, moving through the rocks and the immense boulders, the landscape ripped to pieces by its own elemental energies. They interrupt the journey when it is time for the afternoon prayers, getting out and spreading a blanket on the rock-strewn ground while the wind howls in a gorge to the left of them. Standing next to each other on the blanket with their faces turned towards the mountains in the west, they begin to bend and bow towards Mecca hundreds of miles away.

Mikal finishes earlier than the father and son and hurries back into the vehicle, his hand working the bullet out of his waistband as he goes. It’s a .22 calibre, and working as fast as he can he replaces the fuse of the van’s headlights with it. The procedure requires about thirty seconds and all through it he fears the father and son will conclude their prayers and look towards him, but his luck holds. The bullet is a perfect fit in the fusebox which is located next to the steering-wheel column. After about fifteen miles the bullet should overheat, discharge and enter the driver’s leg. It’d be as though he had been shot with a gun.

Afterwards Mikal sits looking out, waiting for them to finish praying, the sky composed of horizontal pink, yellow and grey bands repeated in Allah’s strict order above them. When they come back the father scolds him for hurrying his communion with Allah, and then they move on. The headlights – that have been in use since before they stopped to pray in the afternoon gloom – illuminate giant slabs of stone thrust out at all angles as though the place had been attacked from the inside with pickaxes and sledgehammers, resulting in entire zones of star-shaped fractures.

The days are short in the mountains and the greyness intensifies as one hour passes and another begins. While they are making a narrow turn, Mikal notices that the soles of several boots have left deep imprints on the muddy ground of the bend. America is everywhere. The boots are large as if saying, ‘This is how you make an impression in the world.’ After the victory in November, the war had quickly devolved into an endless series of raids and manhunts for terrorist leaders and lieutenants. And these must be Special Forces soldiers looking for a possible Osama bin Laden hideout or gravesite.

He sits leaning forward from the back, his head between the two front seats. When the bullet enters the driver’s body it will cause an accident: the vehicle will be damaged and it is possible that his son will not be able to drive them to safety, that they will bleed to death here in the wilds. A part of him wants to cancel the plot he has set in motion and after a while that is exactly what he tries to do.

‘Stop the van,’ he says.

‘What?’ the son asks, turning around to look at him.

‘We must say the evening prayers.’

‘It’s a little early for that,’ the driver says, and the van remains in motion, the headlights burning into the mountainside. Mikal reaches out and grabs the steering wheel and it swings violently to the left for a moment. The son takes hold of Mikal at the collar and pushes him backwards and shouts for him to be still. Mikal sits back in and the father strikes his face hard without turning around, the back of the fingers paved with coloured gems. The vehicle continues to move beyond any hope of influence, and again Mikal says, ‘We have to stop.’

After that it’s only another few seconds before the van has entered the air above the gorge with a loud tearing of steel against stone – it’s preceded by the noise of the exploding bullet but Mikal hears it only in retrospect. Twenty feet below is a river overhung with weeping trees, and as they begin their plunge towards it everything out there becomes darker, because the bullet leaving the fusebox has broken the electric connection to the headlights.

*

‘It’s a bullet wound,’ says the father with a mixture of shock and confusion, turning his back to the two of them and opening his trousers and looking down at his thigh. ‘I have been shot.’

They’ve splashed ashore, the man limping badly, barely able to stand upright. Every pain in Mikal’s body has been awakened, a jolt to the spine when the vehicle landed in the shallow river.

‘Shot? How is that possible?’ the son says, going around to look at the wound. ‘Maybe a part of the van pierced you.’

‘I know what a bullet wound looks like,’ the father says. He is a large man but at this moment just the effort to raise his voice seems too much for him.

Beyond them in the glacial water a thick rope of blood emerges from the driver’s side of the wrecked van and goes swaying down the slow current. It is as though the metal itself is bleeding.

‘We need to bring it out,’ says the father, gesturing towards the van. Mikal can see that apart from everything else both father and son are terrified at having ruined their master’s property.

‘It’s not going to move now,’ Mikal says. He looks under his shirt for any injuries. There is a pause while everyone reflects on what has happened, the drenched bodies shivering in the terrible cold, the son wincing as he touches the two-inch cut on his forehead. ‘It’s a warning from Allah,’ the boy says quietly. ‘This is a wicked and sinful thing we are attempting, stealing the blessed cloak. I think we should turn back …’

His father looks at him sharply. ‘You have no knowledge of this matter. Stop talking nonsense.’

The boy shakes his head. ‘We have to turn back. You’ve been shot with an invisible pistol. It’s a warning from Allah …’

‘Be quiet,’ the man says, attempting to remain in control, and the son looks away, torn between who he fears more, Allah or his father. The man is losing blood very fast, the red-black liquid spreading on the pebbles at his feet. It seems to be something seeping up from the earth due to the weight of his body. ‘We can’t stay here,’ he says. ‘We have to walk the five miles to the mosque.’

‘Go and see if you can rip out the seat belts,’ Mikal says to the boy. ‘We need to bind your father’s leg.’ And he asks the father, ‘Are the keys to my chain in the van?’

‘I didn’t bring them.’

Mikal is aghast. ‘How did you think I would help you steal?’ He doesn’t believe the man is telling the truth. ‘What if I’d had to run?’

The thief lifts his gun and aims it at Mikal unsteadily with shivering hands. The pain is making his eyes murderous. ‘I don’t have them. And don’t think you can run away from me. Now go and get the seat belts.’

After applying the tourniquet they begin to walk, finding a path that leads them back up to the level from which they fell, the thief leaving a glistening trail. Moving through freezing air in wet clothes, the footsteps of all three soon become less sure but they continue, wordlessly, Mikal’s chain the only sound. Two years ago in Pakistan he had gone hunting at the same latitude as this, and had prevented frostbite by duct-taping his entire face, leaving just a half-inch slot for the eyes and another for the nose. Now he watches the father and his son as they weaken. He knows they’ll fail sooner than him, the father leaning on the son as they stagger along. He must summon the last bit of warmth inside him. Naheed. The word in which all meanings converge.

The father is the first to collapse among the grey rocks just as they are approaching a ridge. The son succumbs a moment later as though he had needed permission. From where he lies the man swipes at Mikal’s shirt in sudden desperation, to hold onto him, but the mountains have sucked out all his strength, the slopes and summits that stand around them like solidified silence – time made visible in a different way, ancient and on an elongated scale.

In a trance of liberty Mikal keeps walking towards the ridge. In another half hour the darkness will be complete. He looks over his shoulder and sees that the injured man, lying on the ground, is attempting to aim his gun at him, the barrel jerking as though he is trying to shoot a butterfly that won’t settle.

He goes over the ridge and stops in his tracks, seeing what lies on the other side. ‘What the hell?’ And only after a long moment does he take another step forward.