The Blind Man's Garden (47 page)

‘How do you think I feel about that? And I would take your love for children more seriously if you didn’t have children cleaning your floors.’

The man watches him for a while, then says, ‘Do you think having them clean floors is as bad as starving them to death?’

‘That is not what I said.’

The man waves him away. ‘I have decided to let you go.’

‘I am not leaving without the American soldier or the cub.’

There is a laugh of mockery.

The old servant touches Mikal’s arm but Mikal doesn’t acknowledge it. ‘I am not leaving.’

The man stands up.

‘You are used to giving orders, aren’t you?’ Mikal says.

‘It’s worse than you think. I’m used to being obeyed.’

*

Mikal stands outside the house all afternoon, the sun burning above him, hearing sounds from the other side of the tall gate, the watchman conversing with someone now and then. The gate is opened when a vehicle arrives and the watchman gives him a glance before closing the gate again.

‘Is it true the American violated and then murdered the woman you love?’ he asks Mikal from the other side.

‘No.’

Just as the sun is setting he begins to walk away from the house. He walks into the street that passes through the village, the shops selling rice and cooking oil, threads and buttons, children’s sweets, gram flour, rice husk to feed horses or scrub cooking pots. He asks if there is a public telephone he might use but there is none. He buys a mango, the vendor telling him that it is the same variety that Alexander the Great had tasted, and he eats it with the skin on as he continues along the street. He encounters himself in the darkness at the back of a shop, halts, and realises it’s a mirror. He sits down to rest on the other side of the street, where the fields begin, and watches a convoy of vehicles move towards the house at the other end. He sits listening to the call to prayer issuing from the minaret – the concentric circles of sound expanding in the air, making it seem that this is the very centre of the earth. The call rising from the core of the planet. But then it ends abruptly halfway through, something suddenly going wrong with the loudspeaker. He goes into the mosque and washes the dust and sweat off his face and then stands in a row with the others to say his prayers. Afterwards he sits on the mat and tries to ask questions about the owners of the large house. He walks out of the mosque and buys food from a teahouse, flies spinning around the place like marbles swirled in a jar, and he feeds the bones from his meat to a street dog, talking to it in words and whistles, much to the displeasure of the owner and the other diners. He asks them questions about the family that owns the house. At around ten in the evening, as he sits smoking a cigarette at the edge of the emptying street, listening to the music of the crickets, he sees the old man in the distance.

Mikal stands up and walks towards him.

‘I have come to ask you to leave for your own good,’ the man says. ‘They have seen that you are still here and they want to bring you back to the house.’

‘I’ll come.’

‘No. I am here to warn you. You should leave.’

‘I can’t.’

‘If I steal the leopard for you, will you leave?’

‘No. Not just the leopard.’

‘Go,’ the man says. ‘If they catch you they won’t release you again.’

He stands there, shaking his head. ‘Have they done anything to him?’

‘I don’t know. I told you I am only a servant.’ Just then he sees a giant in a black turban walking towards the two of them.

‘He has come to fetch you,’ the old man says. ‘Run away. Go.’

‘No,’ Mikal says, walking towards the man in the distance.

*

He emerges from the house two hours later and walks into the hills, feeling himself to be an addition to the ghost-life of the night, the thousand desert stars above him, each of them blinking alone. The dark air is warm around him and his feet crush the scent from a fragrant hill plant as he climbs upwards. Looking back now and then at the village lights receding behind him, nothing eventually except the bulb at the tip of the mosque’s minaret. And then that too disappears. An hour later in a valley sculpted of rock he lies down at the edge of a stream, the trees pale as paper around him. Sleeping close to the ground, the insulted earth, he enters a nightmare … Or perhaps it is a confusion of dream and memory of what he saw a few hours ago …

Around two he wakes and realises that a beam of light passing over his face has roused him, a shaft of gluey brightness. He rolls over on his stomach and watches the four vehicles containing Americans. They pass within yards of him. Commandos or task-force soldiers or intelligence collectors. After they are gone he gets up and begins to walk back to the village as fast as he can, breaking into a run until a stitch appears at his side, letting it dissolve and then running again. During sleep he has clenched his hands in anguish and two of his nails are bloody. He passes through the dark abandoned street, whistling when a pair of dogs begin to roar at him, and they fall silent immediately. He approaches the large house from the rear and is on the roof within five minutes, climbing onto the water tank and leaping down. He goes along the wide raw-brick expanse of the roof. Climbs a set of open banister-less stairs onto a lower roof. The courtyard below is scattered about with squares and rectangles of pale light, the date trees dark, and he crosses it weaving from shadow to shadow. He pushes open the kitchen door and reaching into the tandoor finds a lump of coal and puts it in his pocket. He turns and is about to walk out when he hears a sound.

‘I knew you’d come back,’ the old man says. A core of light with blurred edges flicks on and reveals him standing in the far corner with the leopard cub. He comes forward and hands Mikal a key, the leopard and finally the flashlight. ‘The key is to the room where he is. I have also unlocked the gate. You can just walk out.’

‘Why are you doing this?’

‘My son is in American custody. If I am kind to him maybe they’ll be kind to him.’

‘I wonder if that’s how it works.’

‘Where will you take him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘He won’t be able to walk very far.’

‘Can you get me the keys to one of the cars?’

‘They’ll hear the engine.’

‘Yes.’ He switches off the flashlight and walks towards the kitchen door.

‘Do you feel your amputated fingers?’ the man asks him through the darkness.

‘Sometimes.’

‘Then it’s a sign that Afterlife exists.’

*

With the piece of coal Mikal begins to draw a jeep on the floor. The American watches him. On the bonnet he draws a large American flag. He points to the drawing and then upwards beyond the stairs.

*

Just as they leave the gate, a light comes on behind them and someone shouts. The American is leaning on him, the weight making Mikal feel like he is wearing the chains. In the darkness he keeps his eyes on the light at the minaret’s tip. They enter the street and when they come to the mosque he motions for the American to sit down behind the stand of canna lilies planted along the shadowed front step. Putting his feet into alcoves and mouldings on the facade, he scales the wall, his two damaged nails leaving small red smears as he goes. He leaps into the courtyard on the other side and opens the door to let in the American. He locks the door again and bends down to unlace the American’s boots and take them off. Against the wall behind them is the plank of wood on which the dead are bathed. He takes off his own shoes and then both of them enter the sacred building, the weave of the reed prayer mats shifting under their feet. Entering the main prayer hall he bolts the door behind them and walks to the cupboard beside the
mimbar
pulpit and opens it. Inside is the equipment that allows the muezzin to call the faithful to prayer – the ancient amplifier and the steel microphone shaped like the head of a golf club. He hears people gathering at the mosque’s front door, someone asking for a ladder to be brought, a rope.

Mikal switches on the amplifier – several small red lights becoming illuminated – and gestures towards the microphone. ‘Call out to them,’ he says in Pashto. ‘Call them. Tell them where to come and find you. Tell them to come to the mosque.’ Perhaps he should draw the picture of the jeep with the American flag again, but the American seems to grasp the idea immediately and nods.

There is no knowing if the Americans Mikal saw are within hearing range, but there is no alternative. When and if the Americans come there will be a fierce gunfight. The white man begins to speak but they hear nothing from the minaret, no echo of his words outside, no amplification. Mikal twists the volume button up to maximum but it makes no difference. Then he remembers how, earlier in the evening, the call to prayer had ended abruptly only partway through.

The American has stopped speaking and is bending down to examine the wire that emerges from the back of the amplifier, leaves the cupboard and climbs up to a transom window located near the ceiling, going out and connecting to the loudspeaker at the tip of the minaret. He points to a six-inch gap where the wire has melted away due to a power surge.

Mikal stands looking at it, the sounds outside the door getting louder. There are footsteps in the courtyard, that susurration of the reed prayer mats. Reaching behind his neck he undoes the clasp of the necklace. With two quick twists he splices it into the gap in the amplifier’s wire, completing the circuit.

The American takes up the microphone again and the room fills immediately with the sound of his breath magnified ten, twenty, thirty times. It seems to put swords in the air. The minaret, meant to invite the faithful to offer prayer and praise to the Almighty, is summoning unbelievers, to arrive and desecrate His house. The words spread through the darkness and over the clay shale and hills and flatlands, the bouldered desert that had watched the arrival of humans many centuries ago, and that has witnessed the shedding of older blood, prophets and lovers, pilgrims and warners.

*

It takes fifteen minutes for the Special Forces soldiers to arrive at the mosque, and the schoolbus-sized Chinook helicopter appears overhead a further ten minutes later, the blades whumping. ‘American hostage!’ the white man shouts through the locked door of the prayer hall. ‘American hostage! American hostage!’ He had kept talking via the mosque’s loudspeaker for a full seven minutes, summoning his countrymen, guiding them. But then the loudspeaker had stopped working. The heat of the electricity had melted the necklace.

Mikal stands beside the American with his back pressed against the wall, and the cub cheeping its distress in the crook of his elbow. He is thinking of Naheed, near whom what mattered was whether he was good or bad – not strong or weak, not favoured by God or cursed. The commandos are coming closer and closer to the prayer hall, blowing their way in with explosives through walls and doors.

‘American hostage, open the door and approach me on your left with your hands in the air and lie down on the ground!’

The white man takes Mikal firmly by the wrist and unlatches the door.

*

Under heavy fire, the American soldier is half dragged, half carried out of the mosque by the commandos. Through the blur of English and Pashto shouts and the screams of the wounded, and the flare and smoke of explosions, he is hurried to a dimly outlined cornfield behind the building where the helicopter has landed. The commandos tell him they will go back and attempt to look for the boy with the leopard cub. When exactly in the confusion and carnage his wrist slipped out of his grip, he doesn’t know. And it is too soon to know whose face it was that he saw, with a red knot on the upper part of the forehead and several lines running down from it to spread out over the features, as though someone tried to draw a branch of coral on the skin. Later he will try to bring order to the various memory fragments, slide them correctly into a sequence. For now the Chinook is rising into the air, above the blink of muzzle flashes, and some of the soldiers are leaning out and firing downwards, the mosque getting smaller and smaller, and then the helicopter swings away from the violence of war and the building disappears completely, nothing but stars shining in the final blackness, each marking a place where a soul and all the mysteries living in it might flourish, perennial with the earth.

37

It is still dark above Pakistan, and in the distances the sky and the ground can be distinguished only with difficulty. Three-quarters of an hour before sunrise, a few luminous bands of orange appear above the eastern horizon – light compressed yet breathing at the very edge of the world. Then it disappears and there is greyness, followed by moments of growing blue light. The sun when it comes up is a surprise – the world appearing once more, the usual rules seeming to apply.

Naheed stands on the dew-covered path, her face serious.

‘What are you doing?’ he had asked her last week, before he left for Waziristan. She was spreading paint onto the petals of a flower, making its yellow more vivid. She was using Sofia’s paintbox and one of her thin brushes.

‘Next year when this plant blooms again, Father will be completely blind,’ she had told him. ‘So I want to make sure he can see it today.’

The brush had travelled along the outline of the petals carefully one last time, and then she had washed the yellow paint off the soft bristles and begun to add small points of red inside the flower’s throat.

He had walked into Sofia’s room and located another paintbox and brush and had clambered up pillars and tree trunks, painting the flowers above her, disappearing from sight now and then, using rainwater pooled in the crevices of the bark, the drops collected on the leaves, or his own saliva when no other liquid was nearby, the creases in his lips as filled with colour as the lines he drew on some of the petals, the roses and the crepe myrtle, the drab blossoms of the music tree that grow straight out of the trunk, the thorny pink cassia. He met birds in the canopies, exploding flocks of them as he leant down into the Rangoon creeper with the white-loaded brush, humming.