Chapter thirty-four

For two months of cold and ever colder days we lived with the guerrilla fighters in their cave complex on the Shar-i-Safa range. They were hard months in many ways, but our mountain stronghold never came under direct fire, and we were relatively safe. The camp was only fifty crow-kilometres from Kandahar. It was about twenty kilometres from the main Kabul highway and about fifty kilometres south-east of the Arghandab Dam. The Russians occupied Kandahar, but their hold on the southern capital was tenuous and the city was subject to recurring sieges. Rockets had been fired into the city centre, and guerrilla fighting on the outskirts claimed a steady toll of lives. The main highway was in the hands of several well-armed mujaheddin units. Russian tank and truck convoys from Kabul were forced to blast their way through blockades to resupply Kandahar, and that they did, from month to month. Afghan regular army units loyal to the Kabul puppet government protected the strategically important Arghandab Dam, but frequent attacks on the dam threatened their hold on the precious resource. Thus we were roughly in the centre of a triad of violent conflict zones, each of which constantly demanded new men and guns. The Shar-i-Safa range offered no strategic advantage to our enemies, so the fighting didn't find us in our well-disguised mountain caverns.

The weather shifted during those weeks to the cold heart of a severe winter. Snow fell in fitful gusts and squalls that left us sodden in our many-layered patchwork uniforms. A freezing mist drifted so slowly through the mountains that it sometimes hung suspended for hours at a time: still and white and as impenetrable to the gaze as frosted glass. The ground was always muddy or frozen, and even the stone walls of the caves we lived in seemed to ring and tremble with the icy chill of the season.

Part of Khader's cargo had consisted of hand tools and machine components. We'd set up two workshops in the first days after our arrival, and they were busy throughout the creeping weeks of the winter. There was a small capstan lathe, which we'd bolted to a homemade table. The lathe ran on a diesel engine. The fighters felt certain that there were no enemy forces within earshot, but still we dampened its noise with a little igloo of burlap sacks that covered the engine, leaving gaps for the air inlet and exhaust gas outlet. The same engine powered a grinding wheel and a speed drill.

With that assembly, the fighters repaired their weapons and sometimes adapted them to suit new and different purposes. First among those weapons were the mortars. After aircraft and tanks, the most effective battle weapon in Afghanistan was the Russian 82-millimetre mortar. The guerrillas bought the mortars, stole them, or captured them in hand-to-hand fighting, often at the cost of human lives. The weapons were then turned on the Russians, who'd brought them into the country in order to conquer it. Our workshops stripped the mortars down, refitted them, and packed them in waxed bags for use in combat zones as far away as Zaranj in the west, and Kunduz in the north.

Apart from the cartridge pliers and crimping tools, the ammunition and the explosives, Khader's cargo also included new parts for the Kalashnikovs that he'd purchased in the arms bazaars in Peshawar. The Russian AK-Avtomat Kalashnikova-was designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov in the 1940s, in response to German armament innovations. Toward the end of the Second World War, German army generals disobeyed the explicit orders of Adolph Hitler and produced an automatic assault rifle. The armaments engineer Hugo Schmeisser, using the germ of an earlier Russian concept, developed a weapon that was short, light, and fired its magazine of thirty bullets at a practical rate of more than a hundred rounds per minute. Hitler was so impressed with the weapon he'd previously forbidden that he named it the Sturmgewehr, or Storm Weapon, and immediately ordered its intensive production. It was too little, too late for the Nazi war effort, but Schmeisser's Storm Weapon set the trend for all assault rifles for the rest of the century.

Kalashnikov's AK-47, the most influential and widely manufactured of the new assault rifles, operated by diverting some of the propellant gases produced by a fired bullet into a cylinder above the barrel. The gas drove a piston that forced the bolt back against its spring, and cocked the hammer for the next round. The rifle weighed about five kilos, carried thirty rounds in its curved metal magazine, and fired the 7.62-millimetre rounds at around 2,300 feet per second, over an effective range greater than 300 metres. It fired more than a hundred rounds per minute on auto, and about forty rounds every minute on the semi-automatic, single-shot function.

The rifle had its limitations, and the mujaheddin fighters were quick to explain them to me. The low muzzle-velocity of the heavy 7.62-millimetre round defined a looping trajectory that called for tricky adjustments to hit a target at three hundred metres or more. Muzzle flash on firing the AK was so bright, particularly with the new 74 series, that it blinded the firer at night, and often betrayed his position. The barrel overheated rapidly, becoming too hot to hold. Sometimes a round grew so hot in the chamber that it exploded in the user's face. That fact explained why so many guerrilla fighters held the gun away from their bodies, or over their heads, in battle operations.

Nevertheless, the rifle worked perfectly after total immersion in water, mud, or snow, and it remained one of the most efficient and reliable killing machines ever devised. In the first four decades after its development, fifty million of them were produced-more than any other firearm in history-and the Kalashnikov, in all its forms, was carried as a preferred strike weapon by revolutionaries, regular soldiers, mercenaries, and gangsters all over the fighting world.

The original AK-47 was made of forged and milled steel. The AK-74, produced in the 1970s, was made from stamped metal parts.

Some of the older Afghan fighters rejected the newer weapon, with its smaller 5.45-millimetre round and its orange plastic magazine, preferring the solidity of the heavier AK-47. Some younger fighters chose the 74 model, dismissing the heavier gun as an antique. The models they used were produced in Egypt, Syria, Russia, and China. Although they were essentially identical, the fighters often preferred one to another, and the trade in the weapons, even within the same unit, was energetic and intense.

Khader's workshops repaired and refitted the AKs of every series, and modified them as required. The workshops were popular places.

The Afghan men were insatiable in their desire to know about weapons and learn new skills with them. It wasn't a frenzied or brutal curiosity. It was simply necessary to know how to handle guns in a land that had been invaded by Alexander the Great, the Huns, the Sakas, the Scythians, the Mongols, the Moghuls, the Safavids, the British, and the Russians, among many others. Even when they weren't studying at the workshops or helping out with the work, the men gathered there to drink tea made on spirit stoves, smoke cigarettes, and talk about their loved ones.

And for two months I worked with them every day. I melted lead and other metals in the little forge. I helped to gather scraps of firewood, and carried water from a spring at the foot of a nearby ravine. Trudging through the light snow I dug out new latrines, and carefully covered them over and concealed them again when they were full. I turned new parts on the turret lathe, and melted the helical metal shavings to make more parts.

In the mornings I tended to the horses, which were billeted in another cave further down the mountain. When it was my turn to milk the goats, I churned the milk into butter and helped to cook naan bread. If any man needed attention for a cut or graze or sprained ankle, I set up the first-aid kit and did my best to heal him.

I learned the answering choruses of a few songs, and in the evenings when the fires were smothered and we huddled together for warmth, I sang with the men as softly as they did. I listened to the stories that they whispered into the dark, and that Khaled, Mahmoud, and Nazeer translated for me. Each day when the men prayed, I knelt with them in silence. And at night, enclosed within the breathing, snoring swathe of their soldier-scented sleep-smells of wood-smoke, gun oil, cheap sandalwood soap, piss, shit, sweat soaking into wet-serge, unwashed human and horse hair, liniment and saddle-softener, cumin and coriander, peppermint tooth powder, chai, tobacco, and a hundred others-I dreamed with them of homes and hearts we longed to see again.

Then, when the second month ended, and the last weapons were repaired and modified, and the supplies we'd brought with us were all but exhausted, Khaderbhai ordered us to prepare for the long walk home. He planned to make a detour west, toward Kandahar and away from the border with Pakistan, to deliver some horses to his family. After that, with marching packs and light weapons, we would march by night until we reached the safety of the Pakistan border.

"The horses are nearly loaded," I reported to Khader when I'd packed my own gear. "Khaled and Nazeer will be back up here when it's all done. They told me to let you know." We were on the flattened top of a tor that gave a commanding view of the valleys and then the desert plain that stretched from the foot of the mountains all the way to Kandahar at the horizon. For once, the cloudy mists and snow had cleared enough for us to take in the whole, panoramic sweep of the view. There were dark, thick clouds massed to the east of us, and the cold air was damp with the rain and snow they would bring, but for the moment we could see all the way to the end of the world, and our wintry eyes were drowning in the beauty of it.

"In November of 1878, the same month that we started this mission, the British forced their way through the Khyber Pass, and the second Afghan war with them began," Khader said, ignoring my report, or perhaps responding to it in his own way. He stared toward the ripple of haze on the horizon caused by the smoke and fire of distant Kandahar. I knew that some of the horizon's shimmer and drizzle might've been exploding rockets, fired into the city by men who'd lived there once as teachers and merchants.

In the war against the Russian invaders, they'd become devils in exile, raining fire upon their own homes and shops and schools.

"Through Khyber Pass, there came one of the most feared, brave, and brutal soldiers in the whole British Raj. His name was Roberts, Lord Frederick Roberts. He captured Kabul, and began a ruthless martial law there. On one day, eighty-seven Afghan soldiers were killed by hanging in the public square. Buildings and markets were destroyed, villages were burned, and hundreds of Afghan people were killed. In June, an Afghan Prince named Ayub Khan announced a jihad to drive out the British. He left Herat with ten thousand men. He was an ancestor of mine, a man of my family, and many of my kinsmen were in the army that he raised."

He stopped talking and flicked a glance at me, his golden eyes gleaming beneath the silver-grey brows. His eyes were smiling, but his jaw was set and his lips were compressed so tightly that they showed white at the rims. Reassured, perhaps, that I was listening to him, he looked back to the smouldering horizon, and spoke again.

"The British officer in charge of Kandahar city at that time, a man named Burrows, was sixty-three years old, the same age that I am today. He marched out of Kandahar with one thousand five hundred men-British and Indian soldiers-and he met Prince Ayub at a place called Maiwand. You can see the place from here, where we sit, when the weather is good enough. In the battle, both armies fired canons, killing hundreds of men in the most terrible ways that can be imagined.

When they met each other, as one man to another man, they fired their guns at such close range that the bullets went through one body to strike the next. The British lost half their number. The Afghans lost two thousand five hundred men. But they won the battle, and the British were forced to retreat to Kandahar.

Prince Ayub immediately surrounded the city, and the siege of Kandahar began."

It was cold, bitterly cold on the windy tor, despite the unusually bright, clear sunlight. I felt my legs and arms growing numb, and I longed to stand up and stamp my feet, but I didn't want to disturb him. Instead, I lit two beedies, and passed one to him. He accepted it, raising his eyebrow in thanks, and took two long puffs before continuing.

"Lord Roberts-do you know something, Lin, my first teacher, my dear Mackenzie Esquire, always said this thing, Bobs your uncle, all the time, and it became a thing that I also said, to imitate him. Then, one day, he told me that the saying came from him, from Lord Frederick Roberts, because, you see, the man who killed my people in hundreds was so kind to his own soldiers that they called him Uncle Bobs. And they said that if he was in charge, everything would be well-Bobs your uncle. I never said that again, not ever, after he told me that. And something that is very strange-my dear Mackenzie Esquire was the grandson of a man who fought in the army of Lord Roberts. His grandfather and my kinsmen fought each other in the second British war against Afghanistan. That is why Mackenzie Esquire had such fascination for the history of my country and such knowledge about the wars.

And, thanks be to Allah, I did have him as my friend, and my teacher, while men were still alive who bore the scars of fighting the war that killed his grandfather, and killed mine."

He paused again, and we listened to the wind, feeling the first sting of the new snow that it was bringing to us: the shivering wind that began in distant Bamiyan, and dragged the snow and ice and frosty air from every mountain all the way to Kandahar.

"And so Lord Roberts went from Kabul, with a force of ten thousand men, to relieve the siege of Kandahar. Two-thirds of his men were Indian soldiers-and they were good fighting men, those Indian Sepoys. Roberts marched them from Kabul to Kandahar, a distance of three hundred miles, in twenty-two days. Much more than the distance we covered, you and I, from Chaman, on our journey-and you know that took us a month, with good horses, and help from villages along the way.

And they marched, from freezing snow mountains to burning desert, and then, after twenty days of this unbelievable march through hell, they fought a great battle with the army of Prince Ayub Khan, and they defeated him. Roberts saved the British in the city, and from that day, even after he became the field marshal of all the soldiers in the British Empire, he was always known as Roberts of Kandahar."

"Was Prince Ayub killed?"

"No. He escaped. Then the British put his close kinsman Abdul Rahman Khan on the throne of Afghanistan. Abdul Rahman Khan, also an ancestor of mine, ruled the country with such a special wisdom that the British had no real power in Afghanistan. The situation was exactly the same as it was before-before the great soldier and great killer, Bobs your uncle, forced his way through the Khyber Pass to fight the war. But the point of this story, now that we sit here and look at the fires of my burning city, is that Kandahar is the key to Afghanistan. Kabul is the heart, but Kandahar is the soul of this nation, and who rules Kandahar also rules Afghanistan. When the Russians are forced to leave my city, they will lose this war. Not until then."

"I hate it all," I sighed, sure in my own mind that the new war would change nothing: that wars can't really change things. It's peace that makes the deepest cuts, I thought. And I remember thinking it-I remember thinking that it was a clever phrase, and hoping for a chance to work it into our conversation. I remember everything about that day. I remember every word, and all those foolish, vain, unwary thoughts, as if fate had just now slapped my face with them. "I hate it all, and I'm glad we're going home today."

"Who are your friends here?" he asked me. The question surprised me, and I couldn't guess at his intention. Reading my baffled expression, and clearly amused, he asked me again. "Of those you have come to know here, on this mountain, who are your friends?"

"Well, Khaled, obviously, and Nazeer-"

"So, Nazeer is your friend now?"

"Yeah," I laughed. "He's a friend. And I like Ahmed Zadeh. And Mahmoud Melbaaf, the Iranian. And Suleiman is okay, and Jalalaad - he's a wild kid-and Zaher Rasul, the farmer." Khader nodded as I ran through the list, but when he made no comment I felt moved to speak again.

"They're all good men, I think. Everyone here. But those... those are the men I get on with the best. Is that what you mean?"

"What is your favourite task here?" he asked, changing the subject as quickly and unexpectedly as his portly friend Abdul Ghani might've done.

"My favourite... it's crazy, and I never thought I'd ever say this, but I think tending the horses is my favourite job."

He smiled, and the smile bubbled into a laugh. I was sure, somehow, that he was thinking about the night I'd ridden into the camp hanging from the neck of my horse.

"Okay," I grinned, "I'm not the best horseman in the world."

He laughed the harder.

"But I really started to miss them when we got here and you told us to stable the horses down the mountain. It's funny-I sort of got used to them being around, and it's always made me feel good, somehow, going down to see them and brush them and feed them."

"I understand," he murmured, reading my eyes. "Tell me, when the others are praying and you join them-I've seen you sometimes, kneeling behind them and not very close-what words are you saying? Are they prayers?"

"I'm... not really saying anything at all," I replied, frowning.

I lit two more beedies, not for the need of them, but for the distraction they provided, and their little warmth.

"What are you thinking, then, if you're not speaking?" he asked, accepting the second cigarette as he tossed away the butt of the first.

"I couldn't call them prayers. I don't think so. I think about people, mostly. I think about my mother... and my daughter. I think about Abdullah... and Prabaker-I've told you about him, my friend who died. I remember friends, and people I love."

"You think about your mother. What about your father?"

"No."

I said it quickly-too quickly, perhaps-and I felt him watching me closely as the seconds passed.

"Is your father living, Lin?"

"I think so. But I... I can't be sure. And I don't care, one way or the other." "You must care about your father," he declared, looking away again. It seemed such a condescending admonition to me then: he knew nothing about my father or my relationship to him. I was so caught up in resentments, new and old, that I didn't hear the anguish in his voice. I didn't realise, as I do now, that he, too, was an exiled son talking about his own father.

"You're more of a father to me than he is," I said, and although I felt it to be true, and I was opening my heart to him, the words came out sounding sulky and almost spiteful.

"Don't say that!" he snapped, glaring at me. It was the closest he ever came to showing anger in my presence, and I flinched involuntarily at the sudden vehemence. His expression softened at once, and he reached out to put a hand on my shoulder. "What about your dreams? What are you dreaming about here?"

"Dreams?"

"Yes. Tell me about your dreams."

"I'm not having many," I replied, trying hard to recall. "It's weird, you know, but I've had nightmares for a long time-pretty much since the escape from jail. Nightmares about being caught, or fighting to stop them catching me. But since we've been up here, I don't know if it's the thin air, or being so damn tired and cold when I get to sleep, or maybe just worry about the war, but I'm not having those nightmares. Not here. I've had a couple of good dreams, in fact."

"Go on."

I didn't want to go on: the dreams had been about Karla.

"Just... happy dreams, about being in love."

"Good," he murmured, nodding several times, and taking his hand from my shoulder. He seemed satisfied with my reply, but his expression was downcast and almost grim. "I, too, have had dreams here. I dreamed about the Prophet. We Muslims, you know, we are not supposed to tell anyone, if we dream about the Prophet. It is a very good thing, a very wonderful thing, and quite common among the faithful, but we are forbidden to tell what we have dreamed."

"Why?" I asked, shivering in the cold.

"It is because we are strictly forbidden to describe the features of the Prophet, or to talk about him as someone who is seen. This was the Prophet's own wish, so that no man or woman would adore him, or take any of their devotions away from God. That is why there are no images of the Prophet-no drawings, or paintings, or statues. But I did dream of him. And I am not a very good Muslim, am I?

Because I am telling you about my dream. He was on foot, walking somewhere. I rode up behind him on my horse-it was a perfect, beautiful white horse-and although I didn't see his face, I knew it was him. So I got down from my horse, and gave it to him. And my face was lowered, out of respect, all the time. But at last, I lifted my eyes to see him riding away into the light of the setting sun. That was my dream."

He was calm, but I knew him well enough to see the dejection that hooded his eyes. And there was something else, something so new and strange that it took me a few moments to realise what it was: fear. Abdel Khader Khan was afraid, and I felt my own skin creep and tighten in response. It was unimaginable. Until that moment I'd truly believed that Khaderbhai was afraid of nothing.

Unnerved and worried, I moved to change the subject.

"Khaderji, I know I'm changing the subject, but can you answer this question for me? I've been thinking about something you said a while ago. You said that life and consciousness and all that other stuff comes from light, at the Big Bang. Are you saying that light is God?"

"No," he answered, and that sudden, fearful depression lifted from his features, driven off by a look that I could only read as a loving smile. "I do not think that light is God. I think it is possible, and it is reasonable to say, that light is the language of God. Light may be the way that God speaks to the universe, and to us."

I congratulated myself on the successful change of theme and mood by standing up. I stamped my feet and slapped at my sides to get the blood moving. Khader joined me and we began the short walk back to the camp, blowing warmth into our frozen hands.

"This is a strange light, speaking about light," I puffed. "The sun shines, but it's a cold sun. There's no warmth in it, and you feel stranded between the cold sun and the even colder shadows."

"Beached there in tangles of flicker..." Khader quoted, and I snapped my head around so quickly that I felt a twinge of pain in my neck.

"What did you say?"

"It was a quote," Khader replied slowly, sensing how important it was to me. "It is a line from a poem." I pulled my wallet from my pocket, reached into it, and took out a folded paper. The page was so creased and rubbed by wear that when I opened it the fold-lines showed gaps and tears. It was Karla's poem: the one I'd copied from her journal, two years before, when I went to her apartment with Tariq on the Night of the Wild Dogs. I'd carried it with me ever since. In Arthur Road Prison the officers had taken the page from me and torn it into pieces. When Vikram bribed my way out of the prison I wrote it out again from memory, and I carried it with me every day, everywhere I went. Karla's poem.

"This poem," I said excitedly, holding the tattered, fluttering sheet out for him to see. "It was written by a woman. A woman named Karla Saaranen. The woman you sent to Gupta-ji's place with Nazeer to... to get me out of there. I'm amazed that you know it. It's incredible."

"No, Lin," he answered evenly. "The poem was written by a Sufi poet named Sadiq Khan. I know his poems by heart, many of them.

He is my favourite poet. And he is Karla's favourite poet also."

The words were ice around my heart.

"Karla's favourite poet?"

"I do believe so."

"Just how well... how well do you know Karla?"

"I know her very well."

"I thought... I thought you met her when you got me out of Gupta's. She said... I mean, I thought she said that was when she met you."

"No, Lin, that is not correct. I have known Karla for years. She works for me. Or at least, she works for Abdul Ghani, and Ghani works for me. But she must have told you about it, didn't she?

Didn't you know this? I am very surprised. I was sure that Karla would have talked to you about me. Certainly, I have talked to her about you, many times."

My mind was like the screaming jets that had screeched over us in the dark ravine: all noise and black fears. What had Karla said as we lay together, struggling against sleep, after fighting the cholera epidemic? I was on a plane, and I met a businessman, an Indian businessman, and my life changed forever... Was that Abdul Ghani? Is that what she meant? Why hadn't I asked her more about her work? Why didn't she tell me about it? And what did she do for Abdul Ghani?

"What does she do for you-for Abdul?"

"Many things. She has many skills." "I know about her skills," I growled at him angrily. "What does she do for you?"

"Among other things," Khader answered, slowly and precisely, "she finds useful and talented foreigners, such as you are. She finds people who can work for us, when we need them."

"What?" I asked, gasping out the word that wasn't really a question, and feeling as if pieces of myself-frozen pieces of my face and my heart-were falling splintered around me.

He began to speak again, but I cut him off quickly.

"Are you saying that Karla recruited me-for you?"

"Yes. She did. And I am very glad that she did."

The cold was suddenly inside me, running through my veins, and my eyes were made of snow. Khader kept walking, but when he noticed that I'd stopped, he halted. He was still smiling when he turned to face me. Khaled Ansari approached us at that instant, and clapped his hands together loudly.

"Khader! Lin!" he greeted us with the sad, small smile that I'd come to love. "I've made up my mind. I gave it some thought, Khaderji, just like you said, but I've decided to stay. At least for a while. Habib was here last night. The sentries saw him.

He's been doing so much crazy stuff-the things he's done to Russian prisoners, and even some of the Afghan prisoners near here on the Kandahar road in the last couple weeks are... well, it's grisly shit-and I'm hard to impress in that way. It's so weird, the men are going to do something about it. They're so spooked, they're gonna shoot him on sight. They're talking about hunting him down like a wild animal. I have to... I have to try to help him, somehow. I'm gonna stay, and try to find him, and try to talk him into coming back to Pakistan with me. So... you go on without me tonight, and I'll... I'll come through in a couple of weeks, on the next trip out. That's... that's it, I guess. That's... what I came to say."

There was a cold silence after the little speech. I stared at Khader, waiting for him to speak. I was angry, and I was afraid.

It was a special fear-the kind of arctic dread that only love can inspire. Khader stared back at my face, reading me. Khaled looked from one to the other of us, confused and concerned.

"What about the night I met you and Abdullah?" I asked, speaking through teeth clenched against the cold and the even colder fear that ripped through me like spasms of cramp.

"You forget," Khader Khan replied a little more sternly. His face was as dark and determined as my own. It never occurred to me then that he, too, was feeling deceived and betrayed. I'd forgotten about Karachi and the police raids. I'd forgotten that there was a traitor in his own circle, someone close to him, who'd tried to have him and me and the rest of us captured or killed. I never saw his grim detachment as anything but a cruel disregard for what I felt. "You met Abdullah a long time before the night that we met. You met him at the temple of the Standing Babas, isn't it true? He was there to look after Karla on that night. She did not know you well. She was not sure of you, not sure that she could trust you, in a place that she did not know.

She wanted someone there who could help her, if you had no good intention with her."

"He was her bodyguard..." I muttered, thinking she didn't trust me...

"Yes, Lin, he was, and a good one. I understand it that there was some violence, on that night. Abdullah did do something to save her-and perhaps to save you. Isn't that true? This was Abdullah's job, to protect the people for me. That is why I sent him to follow you when my nephew Tariq went to stay with you in the zhopadpatti. And on the very first night, he did help you to fight some wild dogs, isn't it true? And for the whole time that Tariq was with you, Abdullah was close to you, and to Tariq, just as I told him to be."

I wasn't listening. My mind was all angry arrows, whistling backward to a much earlier time and place. I was searching for Karla-for the Karla I knew and loved-but every moment with her began to give up its secret and its lie. I remembered the first time I'd met her, the first second, how she'd reached out to stop me from walking in front of the bus. It was on Arthur Bunder Road, on the corner near the Causeway, not far from the India Guest House. It was the heart of the tourist beat. Was she waiting there, hunting for foreigners like me, looking for useful recruits who could work for Khader when he needed them? Of course she was. I'd done it myself, in a way, when I'd lived in the slum. I'd loitered there, in the same place, looking for foreigners just off the plane who wanted to change money or buy some charras.

Nazeer walked up to join us. Ahmed Zadeh was a few paces behind him. They stood together with Khaderbhai and Khaled, facing me.

Nazeer screwed his face into a scowl, and scanned the sky from south to north, calculating the minutes before the snowstorm hit us. The packing for the return journey was complete and double-checked, and he was anxious to leave.

"And the help you gave me with the clinic?" I asked, feeling sick, and knowing that if I unlocked my knees and let my legs relax, they would crumple and fold beneath me. When Khader didn't speak, I repeated the question. "What about the clinic? Why did you help me with the clinic? Was that part of your plan? Of _this plan?"

A freezing wind blew into the broad plateau, and we all shuddered, unsteadied, as the force of it whipped at our clothes and faces. The sky darkened swiftly as a dirty, grey tide of cloud crossed the mountains and tumbled on toward the distant plain and the shimmering, dying city.

"You did good work there," he replied.

"That's not what I asked you."

"I don't think this is the right time to talk of such things, Lin."

"Yes, it is," I insisted.

"There are things you will not understand," he stated, as if he'd thought it through many times.

"Just tell me."

"Very well. All of the medicine that we brought here to this camp, all of the antibiotics and penicillin for the war, was supplied to us by Ranjit's lepers. I had to know if it was safe to use here."

"Ah, Jesus..." I moaned.

"So I used the opportunity, the strange fact that you, a foreigner, with no connection to a family or an embassy, set up a clinic in my own slum-I took that chance to test the supplies on the people in the zhopadpatti. I had to be sure, you understand, before I brought the medicines into the war."

"For God's sake, Khader!" I snarled.

"I had to be-"

"Only a fuckin' maniac would do that!"

"Take it easy, Lin!" Khaled snapped back at me. The other men tensed on either side of Khader, as if they feared that I might attack him. "You're way outta line, man!"

"I'm out of line!" I spluttered, feeling my teeth chatter, and struggling to make my numb limbs obey my mind. "I'm out of fuckin' line! He uses the people in the slum as guinea pigs or lab rats or whatever the fuck, to test his antibiotics-using me to trick them into doing it, because they believed in me-and I'm the one who's out of line!"

"No-one got hurt," Khaled shouted back at me. "The medicines were all good, and the work you did there was good. People got well."

"We should get out of the cold, now, and talk about it," Ahmed Zadeh put in quickly, hoping to conciliate. "Khader, you'll have to wait for this snow to clear before you leave. Let's get inside."

"You must understand," Khader said firmly, ignoring him. "It was a decision of war-twenty lives risked against the saving of a thousand, and a thousand risked to save a million. And you must believe me, we knew that the medicines were good. The chance of Ranjit's lepers supplying impure medicines was very low. We were almost completely sure that the medicine was safe when we gave it to you."

"Tell me about Sapna." There it was, out in the open, my deepest secret fear about him, and about my closeness to him. "Was that your work, too?"

"I was not Sapna. But the responsibility for his killings does come back to me. Sapna killed for me-for this cause. And if you want me to tell you the whole of the truth, I did make a great benefit from Sapna's bloody work. Because of Sapna, because he existed, and because of their fear of him, and because I made a commitment to find him and stop him, the politicians and the police allowed me to bring guns and other weapons through Bombay to Karachi and Quetta, and to this war. The blood Sapna spilled- it did oil the wheels for us. And I would do this again. I would use Sapna's killings, and I would do more killings, with my own hands, if it would help our cause. We have a cause, Lin, all of us here. And we fight and we live and perhaps we will also die for that cause. If we win this fight, we will change the whole of history, forever, from this time, and in this place, and with these battles. That is our cause-to change the whole world. What is your cause? What is your cause, Lin?"

I was so cold, as the first flakes whirled about us, that I shivered and shook and couldn't stop my jaw from shuddering.

"What about... what about Madame Zhou... when Karla got me to pretend I was an American. Was that your idea? Was that your plan?"

"No. Karla has her own war with Zhou, and she had her own reasons. But I approved of her plan to use you, to get her friend out of the Palace. I wanted to see if you could do it. I had the thought, even then, that you would one day be my American in Afghanistan. And you did well, Lin. Not many people do so well against Zhou in her own Palace."

"One last thing, Khader," I stammered. "When I was in jail... did you have anything to do with that?"

There was a hard silence, the kind of deadly, breathing silence that insinuates itself into the memory more deeply than the sharpest sound.

"No," he replied at last. "But the truth is that I could have taken you out of there, even after the first week, if I chose to do it. I knew about it almost at once. And I had the power to help you, but I did not. Not when I could have done it."

I looked at Nazeer and Ahmed Zadeh. They stared back evenly. My eyes shifted to Khaled Ansari. He returned my stare with an anguished and angrily defiant grimace that pulled his whole face into the jagged lash of the scar that divided his features.

They all knew. They all knew that Khader had left me in there.

But it was okay. Khader didn't owe me anything. He wasn't the one who put me there. He didn't have to get me out. And he did, in the end: he did get me out of jail in the end, and he did save my life. It was just that I'd taken so many beatings, and other men had taken beatings for me, trying to get a message out to him... and even if we'd succeeded, even if we'd managed to get a message to him, Khader would've ignored it, and left me there, until he was ready to act. It was just that all the hope had been so empty, so meaningless. And if you prove to a man how vain his hope is, how vain his hoping was, you kill the bright, believing part of him that wants to be loved.

"You wanted to be sure that... that I'd be... so grateful to you. So you... you left me there. Was that it?"

"No, Lin. It was just unfortunate, just your kismet at that time.

I had an arrangement with Madame Zhou. She was helping us to meet with the politicians, and get favours from one of the generals from Pakistan. He was a... contact... of hers. He was, in truth, Karla's special client. She was the one who first brought him, that Pakistani general, to Madame Zhou. And it was a critical connection. He was critically important to my plans. And she was so very angry with you, Madame Zhou, that nothing less than prison would satisfy her. She wanted to have you killed in there. As soon as my work was done, at the earliest day, I sent your friend Vikram for you. You must believe me when I tell you that I never wanted to hurt you. I like you. I-" He stopped suddenly because I put my hand on the holster at my hip. Khaled, Ahmed, and Nazeer tensed at once and raised their hands, but they were too far away to reach me in a single springing leap, and they knew it.

"If you don't turn around and walk away now, Khader, I swear to God, I swear to God, I'll do something that'll finish us both. I don't care what happens to me, just so long as I don't have to look at you, or speak to you, or listen to you, ever again."

Nazeer took a slow, almost casual step, and stood in front of Khader, shielding him with his body.

"I swear to God, Khader. Right now, I don't care much if I live or die."

"But, we're leaving now, for Chaman, when the snow clears,"

Khader replied, and it was the only time I ever heard his voice waver and falter.

"I mean it. I'm not going with you. I'm staying here. I'll go on my own. Or I'll stay here. It doesn't matter. Just... get... the fuck... out of my sight. It's making me sick to my stomach to _look at you!"

He stood his ground a moment more, and I could feel the urge to take the gun out and shoot him: an urge that was drowning me in cold, shivering waves of revulsion and rage.

"You must know this," he said at last, "whatever wrong I have done, I did for the right reasons. I never did more to you than I thought you could bear. And you should know, you must know, that I always felt for you as if you were my friend, and my beloved son."

"And you should know this," I answered him, the snow thickening on my hair and shoulders. "I hate you with the whole of my heart, Khader. All your wisdom, that's just what it comes down to, isn't it? Putting hate in people. You asked me what my cause is. The only cause I've got is my own freedom. And right now that means being free of you, forever."

His face was stiff with cold. Snow had settled on his moustache and beard, and it was impossible to read his expression. But his golden eyes gleamed through the grey-white mist, and the old love was in them still. Then he turned, and he was gone. The others turned with him, and I was alone in the storm with my hand frozen and trembling on the holster. I snapped the safety clip off, pulled the Stechkin out, and cocked it quickly and expertly, just as he'd taught me. I held it at my side, pointed at the ground.

The minutes passed-the killing minutes, when I might've gone after him and killed him, and myself. And I tried to drop the gun then, but it wouldn't fall from my numbed and icy fingers. I tried to prise the gun free with my left hand, but all my fingers were so cramped that I gave it up. And in the whirling white snow-dome that my world had become I lifted my arms to the white rain, as I once had done beneath the warm rain in Prabaker's village. And I was alone.

When I'd climbed the wall of the prison all those years before, it was as if I'd climbed a wall on the rim of the world. When I slid down to freedom I lost the whole world that I knew, and all the love it held. In Bombay I'd tried, without realising it, to make a new world of loving that could resemble the lost one, and even replace it. Khader was my father. Prabaker and Abdullah were my brothers. Karla was my lover. And then, one by one, they were all lost. Another whole world was lost.

A clear thought came to me, unbidden, and surging in my mind like the spoken words of a poem. I knew why Khaled Ansari was so determined to help Habib. I suddenly knew with perfect understanding what Khaled was really trying to do. He's trying to save himself, I said, more than once, feeling my numb lips tremble with the words, but hearing them in my head. And I knew, as I said the words and thought them, that I didn't hate Khader or Karla: that I couldn't hate them.

I don't know why my heart changed so suddenly and so completely.

It might've been the gun in my hand-the power it gave me to take life, or let it be-and the instincts, from my deepest nature, that had prevented me from using it. It might've been the fact of losing Khaderbhai. For, as he walked away from me, I knew in my blood-the blood I could smell in the thick, white air, the blood I could taste in my mouth-that it was over. Whatever the reason, the change moved through me like monsoon rain in the steel bazaar, and left no trace of the swirling, murderous hate I'd felt only moments before.

I was still angry that I'd put so much of a son's love into Khader, and that my soul, against the wishes of my conscious mind, had begged for his love. I was angry that he'd considered me expendable, to be used as a means to achieve his ends. And I was enraged that he'd taken away the one thing in my whole life- my work as the slum doctor-that might've redeemed me, in my own mind if nowhere else, and might've gone some way to balance all the wrong I'd done. Even that little good had been polluted and defiled. The anger in me was as hard and heavy as a basalt hearthstone, and I knew it would take years to wear down, but I couldn't hate them.

They'd lied to me and betrayed me, leaving jagged edges where all my trust had been, and I didn't like or respect or admire them any more, but still I loved them. I had no choice. I understood that, perfectly, standing in the white wilderness of snow. You can't kill love. You can't even kill it with hate. You can kill _in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can't kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it's a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.

Afterwards, when the snow cleared, I stood a little apart from Khaled to watch Khaderbhai and Nazeer and their men leave the camp with the horses. The great Khan, the mafia don, my father, sat straight-backed in his saddle. He held his standard, furled about the lance in his hand. And he never once looked back.

My decision to separate myself from Khaderbhai and to stay with Khaled and the others in the camp had increased the danger for me. I was far more vulnerable without the Khan than I was in his company. It was reasonable to assume, watching him leave, that I wouldn't make it back to Pakistan. I even said those words to myself: I'm not gonna make it... I'm not gonna make it...

But it wasn't fear that I felt as lord Abdel Khader Khan rode into the light-consuming snow. I accepted my fate, and even welcomed it. At last, I thought, I'm gonna get what I deserve.

Somehow, that thought left me clean and clear. What I felt, instead of fear, was hope that he would live. It was over, and finished, and I never wanted to see him again; but as I watched him ride into that valley of white shadows I hoped he would live.

I prayed he would be safe. I prayed my heartbreak into him, and I loved him. I loved him.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-26