The Blind Man's Garden Read online

  *

  Rohan stands up. The light is so strong everything disintegrates in it – it is like being in a field of pure energy. Rohan sweeps at his head to remove the white cloth that has come to rest over his eyes but realises there is no cloth. The world moves away and everything becomes smaller but then the vision returns for a few moments and he sees the fire eddying along the ground. He is tired, tired of living without Sofia, and as he stumbles against something and falls, feeling a patch of meagre grass under his hands, he knows he is blind.

  15

  To one side of the house in Heer, between the window to Rohan’s study and the cluster of the towering silk-cotton trees, a bathroom sink is affixed to the wall. As children Jeo and Mikal loved to wash their faces there in the mornings, amid birdsong and the breezes of the garden. At certain hours the sun’s rays shine in the mirror that hangs above it, and above the mirror is a bougainvillea with its heart-like leaves and tissue-paper blossoms, its long branches sometimes covering the mirror so that they have to be parted for the face to be seen. Sometimes they are tied back or are cut away in a square shape to expose the mirror. The colour of rust on apple slices, the deep orange blossoms of the bougainvillea fall into the sink by the dozen and have to be lifted out before the taps are turned.

  Naheed splashes water onto her face, avoiding eye contact with her reflection. She tilts her face to the December sun and stands there for a minute, feeling the water dry on her skin. I know he is alive, she had said to her mother, I feel him.

  Walking back to the chair she picks up the book she had been reading, having selected it out of one of the boxes. Rohan went to Peshawar two days ago to thank the family of the kind donor. They are no longer a recent presence in the house but still she forgets them at times, emerging out of a doorway and walking into a column of boxes as though she wishes to enter and disappear into it.

  There is no body, there is no grave. She will keep telling herself this. If the sun and the moon should doubt, they would be extinguished.

  She looks up from the book now and then, her tunic patterned with grey flowers and black leaves, a garden at dusk, due to the ash.

  Love does not make lovers invulnerable, she reads. But even if the world’s beauty and love are on the edge of destruction, theirs is still the only side to be on. Hate’s victory does not make it other than what it is. Defeated love is still love.

  II

  THE BLIND MAN’S GARDEN

  If there is no God,

  Not everything is permitted to man.

  He is still his brother’s keeper

  And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,

  By saying that there is no God.

  Czeław Miłosz

  16

  Adam was pardoned in winter.

  The thought comes to Mikal as he stands in the cold air, his breath appearing and disappearing before him. In his bandaged right hand he holds the small dried flowers he has kept hidden in his pocket. The index finger is missing from each hand. The flowers are faded and torn, but with all the grey around him they are still the brightest things in his gaze. He shields them as he would a candle flame, as though preventing their colours from being extinguished. He runs a finger along the centre of one, the parts small yet feelable, fine as thread with minute swellings of pollen.

  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 attempt
s 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 thi
s, 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.

  He is facing a graveyard of planes and helicopters, Russian MiGs and Hinds, all resting at odd angles with cockpits slung open and the glass smashed, the tyres ripped and rotted. There are several dozen of them, a swathe of hulks stretching all the way to another ridge half a mile away.

  He moves towards a helicopter and looks inside. There is Russian graffiti scratched onto the tarnished walls. Names, sentences, and hearts with initials in them. The interior has been stripped of everything, from the seats to the instrument dials. Each aircraft is little more than a pod or shell, a coffin meant for a giant, and the metal of each must weigh thousands of kilograms. At some point each has had a growth of lichen on it, layer upon thick layer dried now to a crust. He continues to walk in an almost straight line through and between them, climbing in and out of the doors, speaking quietly to himself as he goes, to stop the mind from losing focus. ‘Mikal is free at last. Mikal keeps walking. Mikal hears the sound of his chains. Mikal cannot feel any of his fingers. Mikal is not going to die in this metal cemetery. Mikal has probably caused the death of a man. Mikal wants to see Naheed’s face. Mikal wants to live with her in the room in Heer. Mikal must find Jeo.’ After a while he stops and turns around.