The Blind Man's Garden Read online

  He turns into a corridor with a handkerchief on the lower half of his face. The doctor is examining an English journalist who is bleeding from the head and has a broken arm, the enraged crowd having set upon him. He is weak but keeps saying he holds no grudge, that if he were someone from these lands he too would be unable to stop himself from venting his anger at the first Western person he saw.

  When the doctor is free for a few moments Rohan reaches forward and asks him about Jeo and is told that Jeo and his companion Mikal left three hours ago. Jeo had told one of the nurses that they were on their way to the battlefields of Afghanistan, had asked what essential medicines might be needed over there.

  ‘Mikal?’ Rohan asks. He points to the area between his eyebrows.

  The doctor nods. ‘Yes, that’s him.’

  *

  Feeling inadequate and too old for the emergency, he moves towards the nearest phone and dials the number for Mikal’s brother Basie in Heer, to ask him for advice, to tell him to come to Peshawar immediately. They must follow the two boys into the conflict and bring them back. With each minute they are moving deeper and deeper towards the war, into the crosshairs of history.

  It’s mayhem in Afghanistan. The Taliban are ruling with an iron fist, punishing traitors, informers, spies and those inciting rebellion. But the people are rising up, encouraged by America’s covert help – the Special Forces soldiers are moving on horseback from village to village, between towns and cities, dressed in shalwar kameez and shawls and woollen caps, emboldening, bribing and arming the population. Ahmed the Moth died there ten days ago while visiting his Taliban friends. A group of ordinary citizens had grabbed hold of him and a Taliban soldier on the street corner and forced them to the ground. Every ounce of rage – every rape, every disappearance, every public execution, every hand amputated during the past seven years of the Taliban regime, every twelve-year-old boy pressed into battle by them, every ten-year-old girl forcibly married to a mullah eight times her age, every man lashed, every woman beaten, every limb broken – was poured into the two men by fist, club, stick, foot and stone, and when they finished and dispersed nothing remained of the pair. It was as if they had been eaten.

  7

  The door has opened and both of them have entered the future. Jeo sits in the back of the van with Mikal as they are driven through the shadowland of hill and plateau, the use of headlights kept to a minimum so that at times there is no knowing what lies a mere five seconds into the darkness. Later in the night lightning appears overhead and illuminates not only the earth and the clouds but also the place in the mind where the line of fear crosses the thoughts, and the ground glows blue for a few seconds with a crystal immediacy, vistas opening up as in a vision, with black shapes looming in them, shadows perhaps, perhaps creatures who can be fought only with the weapons forged by the spirit, not the flesh, and then as the night deepens the stars come out and wheel overhead, smearing the sky with ancient phosphorescence.

  There are ten men and there is silence between them. A few, including Mikal, are in deep sleep. Occasionally, without realising it, one of the waking men begins to read aloud the verses of the Koran he must be reading in his heart and the voice materialises in the darkness and after a few moments is gone.

  Jeo reaches into Mikal’s bag. His fingers touch the very cold metal of the handgun’s spare bullets. Switching on his small flashlight, he sees that interspersed with the maps he has taken out there are letters, and he smiles immediately, feeling as though he’s sixteen years old once again, when all the girls were in love with Mikal. He separates the letters carefully and places them back in the bag just as the vehicle enters an expanse strewn with bright yellow packets of food air-dropped by Americans. The packs crunch and explode softly as the tyres go over them, and he pulls out the letters again. A name had caught his eye at the end of the text in one, and now he sees that it is there on another. And another. Suddenly his skin is burning because the handwriting in all of them is identical, and it is hers. It’s almost as though Naheed’s face appears behind the sentences, the eyes looking just past his shoulder.

  Mikal stirs at the noise from outside and Jeo drops everything back into the bag and quickly zips it up. It could be another Naheed. Has he recognised her handwriting?

  He needs to look at the letters again. He thinks of the night early in the marriage when he had come out of sleep to discover her weeping in the darkness. Months later in the garden he would hold her and she would be smiling and suddenly her eyes would fill up. Was she sorrowful at having forgotten Mikal for a few instants? Feeling blameworthy for not loving Jeo?

  To look into her eyes was to realise that eyes were part of the brain. Thoughts were visible through and in them. Was he mistaken?

  The driver has a handheld Motorola radio with which he is communicating with the other two vans in their convoy. Jeo and Mikal have been told that they can expect to arrive at the medical centre at noon the next day. The other eight men in the truck will go elsewhere.

  There are cries of jackals in the distance.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Mikal says, draping his arm along Jeo’s back.

  ‘Yes.’

  She is the miracle in his life, granted to him suddenly last year, he who had resigned himself to loneliness, his studies being his primary horizon, knowing he wouldn’t experience certain aspects of life until he married after completing his education in his mid-twenties. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them his wristwatch tells him he has slept for two hours. It is still dark but the vehicle has halted on an elevated ridge and the driver has stepped outside, looking around with a flashlight. Jeo thinks of his father. At this hour he would be awake and saying prayers for his mother.

  ‘We are lost,’ Mikal says, pointing to the stars. ‘I told him an hour ago but he wouldn’t listen. We haven’t been going in the right direction for some time.’ He gets out of the van with his bag over his shoulder and Jeo watches him talk to the driver, gesturing at the sky and at the maps. Jeo goes out to join them as do the others, each wrapped in a blanket against the cold air, their several flashlights revealing that they are in the remains of a very extensive iron foundry, the surface of the hills for many hundreds of yards covered with the ruins of ancient furnaces made of soapstone, indestructible in the fire, for the smelting of iron ore. Relics of the departed Buddhist races of these lands. The ground strewn with small cubes of iron pyrites. And as they stand there surrounded by the strange earth and the strange sky, Jeo hears what he has never heard before, the awful crump of tank shells, explosions and gunfire in the far distance.

  ‘Do you hear it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mikal replies.

  ‘It’s a battle, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s the world,’ one of the other men says. ‘The world sounds like this all the time, we just don’t hear it. Then sometimes in some places we do.’

  There is a string of massive impacts and suddenly he is unable to glance at a spot of earth without imagining pieces of metal speeding towards it, large and small and of all shapes. The moon has long since disappeared but the stars are so many that they are still casting shadows within the roofless ruin, and now everything has fallen silent and from very high overhead he hears the slender calls of birds moving eastwards in faint calligraphy-like lines and strokes, thousands of them amid all the smouldering silver.

  ‘Before we go, we need to refill our water bottles,’ the driver says. He points to Mikal and Jeo. ‘We passed a spring a few minutes back. Take the empty bottles from the truck and fill them. Follow the tracks the jeep made in the dust and you will avoid the landmines.’

  ‘I’ll go on my own,’ says Mikal.

  ‘No, take your friend. We’ll wait here for you.’

  ‘I said I’ll go alone,’ Mikal says, with surprising firmness in the voice. ‘I want Jeo to stay here with you.’

  The driver walks up to him and grabs him by the lapels with his large thick-wristed hands, Mikal almost
losing his balance. They both stand glaring at each other in silent opposition and then just as suddenly the man releases him. ‘Do as you are told.’

  Jeo takes Mikal’s sleeve in a light grip. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  *

  They take the two gallon bottles and walk back along the tyre marks through the pebbles and fragments of quartz, primitive limestone and mica, but fail to locate the spring. Just as they are about to abandon the search, however, the sound of falling water reaches them from the other side of a gorge, accessed through clay slates and traprock. They climb down into another geological age and walk towards the water through the scar of a dried riverbed, dwarfed between boulders lying where they had fallen ten thousand years ago.

  ‘Make sure you fill it to the very top,’ Mikal says as Jeo holds one of the bottles under the vertical trickle of water falling from a hill spur, a rope of thin silk that breaks at the merest contact. ‘You’d hear it sloshing a mile off otherwise.’

  His feet sunk in muddy earth, Jeo is tightening the cap back on when he becomes aware of a figure in black sitting on the ground just ten yards away. The man is perfectly motionless with his back to them, but there is no prayer mat under him and he is facing in the wrong direction, otherwise Jeo would have thought of him as someone at prayer.

  Keeping the flashlight trained on his back they slowly walk towards him. The small stones that cover the ground shine in the beam of light as if wrapped in foil. They approach through all that moon debris and Mikal clears his throat to alert the stranger. They walk to his front and see that a piece of cardboard is held in place on his chest by the broken-off tip of a spear, driven into him between the fifth and sixth ribs.

  Jeo withdraws the spear and blood jets out of the wound onto the lap.

  ‘I thought the dead didn’t bleed,’ Mikal says, taking a step backwards.

  ‘They don’t. The right side of the heart holds liquid blood after death – the spear must have punctured it.’

  He hands the freed cardboard sign to Mikal, who knows Pashto.

  ‘It says, This is what happens to those who betray Allah’s beloved Taliban.’

  Mikal runs the torch into the darkness around them, along the strata of the hills aligned northwest to southwest. ‘We should go.’

  Jeo takes off his blanket and covers the dead man with it and stands up. ‘We’ll say a prayer for him later.’

  They get back with the water to find that the three vans have driven off. On the dusty ground – that sends up a puff at the lightest step – the imprints of the tyres stretch away into the darkness, and they stand wordlessly beside each other for some minutes.

  ‘All my things were in the truck,’ Jeo says. ‘The satellite phone, the bag of medical supplies, my clothes.’

  Mikal still has his rucksack strapped to his back and he is looking up at the stars, examining their positions. And all the while, over the ridge, the battles are continuing.

  ‘Something happened and they had to drive off in a hurry. They’ll come back for us.’

  ‘They are not coming back.’

  Jeo looks at Mikal. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They wanted to leave us here, that’s why they insisted you go with me.’ He looks into the darkness while he speaks as if addressing the night. ‘I think we’ve been exchanged for weapons. Or were we sold for money? The Taliban need soldiers, reinforcements, and I think we are two of them.’

  ‘You were talking about this back in Heer. You are wrong.’

  ‘I think we should get as far away from here as possible. Someone is coming to pick us up and take us to a battlefield.’

  ‘You want to walk out into the night? Are you trying to get me killed?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you trying to get me killed?’

  Jeo grabs the torch from him and looks into the darkness with its raw glare and then at his face. ‘Why are you really here? Why did you decide to come with me suddenly?’

  ‘Have you lost your mind?’

  Jeo moves forward and puts his hand on the rucksack. ‘Give me the maps.’

  Mikal steps away from him, whipping around. ‘Let me get them,’ he says. Taking the bag off and plunging his hands in there with his back to Jeo. Jeo spends his week at the medical school in Lahore and comes home at the weekend – do Mikal and Naheed meet in his absence?

  ‘They know I am not a fighter,’ Jeo says quietly as Mikal hands him the maps.

  ‘They’ll make you fight, Jeo. They’ve paid for you. We have to get away from here as fast as we can.’

  *

  In the darkness thirty minutes away they find a cave and they send in the beam of light ahead of them, onto the curved walls of rock in which sharply polished pieces of a mineral are embedded, reflecting their eyes and fragments of their faces all the way up to the ceiling – a stirring awake of deep yellow and deep red wherever the torchlight lands. There is a powerfully heightened sense that the two of them have been imprisoned in the mountain and are now moving around inside it.

  Jeo gathers an armful of dusty wood and Mikal collects the dried-up swallow droppings from the back of the cave. Taking the spark-mechanism of a dead cigarette lighter from his pocket, he starts a fire and they rub their hands before the flames, run them up and down on their clothing to gather the soaked heat while their reflections look at them from the other side of the mountain.

  ‘Mikal, we have to go back and bury the dead man.’

  ‘I know.’

  To look for more wood Jeo stands up and walks over to the high piles of rocks that lead to the depths of the cave and there he finds an electricity generator and a cardboard box filled with glass light bulbs. When he returns carrying the box, Mikal is surrounded by a group of armed men, dressed in black like beings provoked out of the absolute darkness. One of them motions with the gun for Jeo to join Mikal.

  ‘What is that in your hands?’

  ‘I just found these. I don’t know what they are.’

  One of the men examines the contents of the box while the others watch Jeo and Mikal with slow movements of their eyes.

  ‘Are you trying to send signals to the Americans?’

  One of the men says that he had recently seen a string of electric light bulbs laid out on a plateau on the outskirts of his village, hooked to a gas-powered generator. The bulbs lay glowing on the ground and then a helicopter had landed, guided by them, and several white men had emerged, wearing jeans and carrying computers and guns and heavy black canvas bags. They had gone away with the warlord who controlled the village – a Taliban loyal who is now with the Americans. The black canvas bags were no doubt full of dollars with which he was bought.

  ‘We have nothing to do with any Americans,’ Mikal says.

  Jeo could have shown them his medical supplies but they are in the van. He tells them that he is training to be a doctor and is here to help his Afghan brothers and sisters.

  ‘So which of you is Jeo and which Mikal?’ one of the men asks, looking at them carefully. ‘We were told one of you knows the language of stars.’

  ‘How do you know our names?’

  ‘We met the convoy you were with. Now you will travel with us.’ Half the light from the coloured mirrors scattered on the cave wall has been obscured by the black the men are wearing.

  Outside there is a glowing shiver of the unrisen sun in the darkness to the east and the morning star has climbed higher. Trucks are parked among the boulders and their occupants get out and embrace Jeo and Mikal, calling them ‘brothers’. Everyone says the predawn prayers with their faces turned to the dense blackness in the west.

  A long fan of light comes from the sky when the sun rises and they get into a truck and the convoy moves onwards. The metal roof is perforated with a line of evenly spaced bullet holes, where one of the boys had madly opened fire at an American helicopter overhead, unable to contain his rage.

  ‘How old are you?’ Mikal asks the boy next to him.

  ‘Sixteen.’
/>   Mikal reaches out and feels his throat for the Adam’s apple. ‘You are twelve. Thirteen at most.’

  *

  Full of courage and the sense of duty, the new boys are fighters and veterans of various jihad training camps. They have a feeling of relief and a subdued stimulation in them at the prospect of holy combat drawing near, their clothes marbled with sweat and dust, their shoes in disrepair, their skins deeply weathered. They talk earnestly about the Crusades and jihad, of legendary weapons and famed warriors, and they are from all parts of Pakistan and the wider Muslim world, Egyptians, Algerians, Saudi Arabians and Yemenis, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, recruited through a fatwa issued by the Saudi cleric Sheikh al-Uqla, a fatwa praising the Taliban for creating the only country in the world where there are no man-made laws. There are Uzbeks and Chechens also and a group from northern England, several of them with turbans wound around baseball caps so they are easy to remove. Among them though there is one Pakistani who just wants to catch an American soldier and collect the bounty being offered by Osama bin Laden, one hundred thousand dollars per soldier, more than a million rupees.

  *

  Interrupting the journey only to say the noon and afternoon prayers, they travel all day and in the evening they arrive at a mud-built village on the lower slope of a hill. The fort at the top is the area’s Taliban headquarters and they drive through the village towards it, the speed reduced due to the narrowness of the streets, men and women withdrawing to either side on seeing the Taliban vehicle, hugging the walls with eyes lowered. The doors and windows of many houses have had splinters torn out of the wood by bullets and in one place a number of people have been lined up and shot in recent days, their blood remaining in bursts on the walls. One of these is at the height of a child’s head.