The Blind Man's Garden (34 page)

The second phone in his pocket rings and the delighted Kyra offers him his congratulations.

‘The news has been spreading,’ he says. ‘It’s on every national TV channel now. But they are belittling your achievement by giving the incorrect figure for the hostages.’

They claim that there are only three hundred or so people inside.

Yesterday Ahmed was in the assembly hall at ten thirty in the morning when the man with his foot on the detonator had turned up his radio to listen to the news. The newsreader said that a school in Heer was under siege and then lied that ‘negotiations are under way’. It was the fifth story in the bulletin and was given only two lines, and the holy warriors were enraged when it was said that only fifty or sixty pupils and teachers were inside the school. Two of his hooded companions had gone into the corridor and begun to slam chairs and tables into the walls, howling with tetherless fury, screaming, ‘Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!’ until others from every corner of the school had joined in and they had continued until hoarse. The man with his foot on the pedal of the bomb had looked as though he would get up and join them.

Now Kyra says, ‘When you speak to the representatives of the government you must tell them you are unhappy about it.’

‘He said it is up to the journalists.’

‘The government is controlling them, making sure the news doesn’t gain the attention of foreign news agencies. You must insist. Tell them you will be compelled to martyr a child if they lie again.’

‘We must have Father Mede. The Western press will not be interested unless he is here.’

‘They are saying they can’t find him. Are you sure he is not hiding somewhere inside the school?’

‘We have looked everywhere.’

‘And you don’t have Basie either. I have been trying to get past the cordon to see if his car is parked at his usual spot outside the school. I’ll try again.’

*

You will say that the hostages here in this school are Muslims. But we know what kind of Muslims they are. We know that they and their kind approved of the destruction of the Taliban regime. Anyone over the age of thirteen who takes up arms against Islam can be erased. Any Muslim who approves of the West’s actions in Afghanistan, and follows it into this Crusader war by providing material or verbal support, should be aware that he is an apostate who is outside the community of Islam. It is therefore permitted to take his money and his blood, as worthy of death as any American general with his braided glory
…

*

The library door opens and the two women enter, or rather one of them is led in roughly by the other.

‘I wish to leave, brother Ahmed,’ says the one whose total commitment he had doubted. ‘You’re traumatising children. You said we were on our way to attack a government building.’

‘Sister, we have had this conversation twice already,’ Ahmed says quietly.

‘What about the children being traumatised in Afghanistan?’ the other woman says. ‘And this
is
a government building. These people are all instruments of the state.’

The doubting woman listens to Ahmed as he explains once again. In movement, thought and gravity, he is older than his countable years, his point of view rooted firmly, and at times all his gestures seem to be ritual gestures.

‘I don’t want any part of your death-laden victory,’ the woman says after he has finished speaking. ‘I don’t want to stay.’

‘You cannot leave.’

‘I will not watch Muslim blood on Muslim swords.’

‘You cannot leave,’ Ahmed says, raising his voice by a fraction. ‘We need to hold the children here until the white man is given to us.’

‘Most of these children are not innocent,’ the other woman says.

‘And those who are?’

‘You must believe me when I say that I too am upset about the innocent children. But I feel that Allah is asking us to sacrifice them to prove our love to Him, as He asked Ibrahim to cut the throat of his son to prove his obedience. With these few wounds we will heal Islam.’

‘You are comparing yourself to a prophet? Do you think you are sane enough to make these big decisions? You are half mad because of what you saw in Afghanistan, because your companions were captured or slaughtered.’

‘Take her away,’ Ahmed says, ‘and keep an eye on her.’ After they are gone the head of Cordoba House comes in.

‘What did the commissioner say on the phone just now?’ he asks Ahmed.

‘He was insisting yet again that they don’t know where Father Mede or Basie are, that they have no influence over the Americans to ask them to release captives, or withdraw from Afghanistan, that America is too big and too wounded at the moment for Pakistan not to obey it.’

‘We mustn’t lose faith or hope. I came in here to ask you to come and look at what is happening outside.’

They walk to a room that has a window looking out to the front of the building. A cleric has been brought in, in a van that has a loudspeaker attached to its roof. It has been driven as close to the school as possible. The man is quoting verses of the Koran against harming the innocent. He talks in minutes-long spasms and says that the passages of the Holy Book that
do
condone jihad have to be read in the context of the times in which they were revealed to Muhammad. ‘A verse in the Koran reads,
The nearest in love to the Believers are those who say, “We are Christians.”’
He continues and once Ahmed has endured enough, he orders for the guns to open fire onto the van, onto the sickness of spirit emanating from it, and it drives away very fast towards the nuclear mountain, the tyres skidding and the terrified cleric calling for Allah’s help through the loudspeaker while telling the driver to drive faster.

*

Basie watches Naheed from the other side of the hall, as she and a female teacher take a dozen children at a time to the bathrooms. The children are exhausted and hungry and are not even allowed to drink water. When Basie takes the boys to the bathroom he lets them drink and tells them not to get any drops on their clothes and not to speak about it.

Later she walks towards him in the corridor, becoming more familiar with each step. Her eyes are downcast, and he stares at her until she realises he is looking at her. To begin with there are no words between them during this encounter: it is late afternoon but for some reason it feels dark as though light has rejected the place. Homesick for lost assurances, the children are falling asleep in clusters, the limbs going limp. The hands are holding onto fistfuls of each other’s clothing and the place feels somewhat calmer, almost hushed.

‘How are you?’ he asks eventually.

She nods, barely outlined, the face wearing the great stain of this experience, but unconsumed by the desperation he has seen in others.

‘Did Jeo know about you and Mikal?’

Her gold eyes look at him in silence for a few moments. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘I wonder. Do you think that’s why he went off to Afghanistan?’

She is leaning against a wall. ‘So you know about Mikal and me?’

He nods.

‘Who told you?’

‘You did. Just now.’

‘It was before I was married to Jeo.’

‘OK.’

‘I think he’s alive.’ A sense memory of him pulses in her blood.

‘When this is over we’ll go and search for him.’

She gives a nod and looks around. ‘Basie, where are the Christian, Shia and Ahmadiya people they took away?’ They were thirty or so, and they were removed from the hall with the words, ‘Go out and start digging your graves.’

‘I don’t know.’ Seeing her jaw harden, he adds, ‘You won’t cry, will you?’

She shakes her head.

‘I’ll keep telling myself I must get through this so we can go look for Mikal.’

‘I’ll do that too,’ he says.

She wants to experience a simple feeling – laughing with a neighbour or washing her hands, complaining to the vegetable seller that one of the aubergines he sold yesterday had had a caterpillar in it.

‘Basie, one of the terrorist women –’

‘Don’t say my name.’

She nods, shocked at her mistake. He has thought several times of revealing himself, to induce the terrorists to release the children, but he fears the English teacher who lied about him being absent will be punished. Recovering, she says, ‘One of the women doesn’t agree with all this. I have spoken to her to see if she might be willing to help us, if I and the other women teachers plan something.’

‘What are you doing?’ A hooded figure shouts at them from the other end of the corridor and Naheed quickly walks away towards the bathroom. ‘Who told you you could wander around?’

As Basie turns the corridor to the assembly hall a terrorist appears and touches his shoulder and quickly passes him a handful of sweets, whispering, ‘For the children. I didn’t know we were coming to a school,’ he says. ‘This has nothing to do with me.’

‘You must help me put an end to it.’

‘I have to go.’

Basie grabs him by the arm. ‘Do some of the others feel like you?’

The man tries to free himself and raises his gun towards Basie, perhaps in reflex, perhaps in genuine affront at his audacity.

But Basie refuses to let go. ‘Find me during the night. Come and talk to me when you see I am alone.’ The man wrenches himself free and walks away with a firm-footed pace, the swagger of a street tough.

Michael took Adam to Heaven in a chariot of flames and buried him after his death with the help of the angels Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel. And Basie looks up at him as he enters the hall, thinking of Mikal, alive out there somewhere.

*

Father Mede heard about the siege an hour after it began. He was in his hotel room in Islamabad, waiting for a former pupil and now friend who was arriving on the flight from England with the various medicines his aged body needs to stay functional, some of which he has difficulty acquiring here in Pakistan. Chlorphen-amine, pantoprazole, mebeverine, codeine phosphate, irbesartan, amoxicillin, ezetimibe, metoclopramide, Dicloflex, finasteride, doxazosin … A list as long as a catalogue of Homeric ships. He tried to get back to Heer but was prevented by the authorities. His driver and car vanished and when he tried to arrange a taxi the telephone in his hotel room lost its dial tone. In the lobby, full of policemen, he was told that all phone lines in the hotel were down and would you very kindly return to your room, sir. It was only a few hundred miles away but he might as well have been in Borneo, Adelaide or Rio de Janeiro.

The government obviously did not want a white person being visibly linked with the affair. His frustration had turned to anger and some substance was administered to him through the cup of tea he asked for at noon. He was unconscious for almost thirty-six hours.

Now, 2 a.m, he is on the Grand Trunk Road, being driven towards Heer.

He is being followed by several vehicles that have made no attempt to disguise the pursuit. Their guns, their everywhere eyes. He had woken just after eleven this evening. There were puncture marks on his arms where he must have been injected with further drugs. Demanding to be let out of the hotel, he was told that he was free to go to Heer if he could. His driver and car had then appeared, the driver telling him that the vehicle had been mysteriously towed away and that he was sent from place to place by the authorities as he tried to locate it, that when he arrived at the hotel yesterday evening he was told Father Mede had left.

The public phones he approaches are always occupied, the person engaged in a long conversation, and thirteen times they have been flagged down by police for ‘random’ security checks. There have been seven long detours, four of them ending in culs de sac.

Around four in the morning, as he turns off the Grand Trunk Road towards St Joseph’s a police car cuts him off and he is told that if he tries to go near the building he will be arrested immediately. He sits wordlessly looking out of the car window for several minutes, imagining the rain falling on the frangipani tree that Sofia had sent to be planted outside his office, the flowers large and beautiful like mysteries in a tale. Then he asks the driver to turn around. An hour later he is still trying to gain access to his home or a telephone, encountering repeated roadblocks and obstructions. As he stops at a roadside tea stall someone says that another school on the other side of Heer has been attacked with grenades, bombs and gunfire.

‘But that is a Muslim school,’ Father Mede’s driver says upon hearing the name. ‘Do they really want to destroy all schools, not just the Christian ones?’

‘It must be the commandos rehearsing the storming of St Joseph’s,’ Father Mede tells him. ‘It is the only explanation.’

‘They will kill everyone inside,’ the driver responds, and begins to murmur the verses of the Koran under his breath to avert disaster. And he reassures Father Mede. ‘Allah is a friend to the broken-hearted.’

*

On the outskirts of Heer, Kyra opens the back door of the Land Rover and gets in, the saluki jumping in after him.

‘Whose idea was the siege?’ the man behind the steering wheel asks. A sense of massed impending force in the voice.

‘It was suggested by six students and I approved it.’

‘What are their names? I want –’

‘Let me explain,’ Kyra says.

‘I want you to write down the names of all thirty-two people in the building and if you interrupt me again I’ll empty a syringe of mercury in your skull.’

The man hands Kyra a small notebook over his shoulder, without looking back.

‘I hope they are not stupid enough to reveal their faces to anyone. If any civilian has seen them without the hoods, I want that person or persons to be isolated, so they can be eliminated during the raid. Was the school’s guard the only person approached during the planning?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’ll be found in a sack near Muridke in about an hour.’

The man has short hair and precise short sideburns, the nape razored clean and neatly finished, much like Kyra’s own. He wears a sky-blue shalwar kameez made of the fabric KT. Kyra can’t see it but he knows that on the right side under the kameez is a handgun.