The Blind Man's Garden Read online

  A grey dog yaps at the truck and a Taliban soldier jumps down and delivers it an expertly placed kick under the jaw and then, when it recovers and snarls back, shoots it dead with his AK-47, the truck coming to a sudden stop and the driver leaning his head out of his window to assess the situation. He tells the soldier to get back in but just then a small metallic sound issues from the burka of one of the women standing against a wall – a bangle or an earring. An item of audible jewellery. The driver reaches under his seat and takes out a leather whip with dozens of coins stitched along its length. He gets out with the two-yard-long instrument and, enraged, demands to know who it is that is wearing the loud jewellery, attracting the men of faith by her wiles.

  ‘Who is it?’

  The women huddle together and the driver whips this mass of dirty blue fabrics several times, running around to aim at whoever cries out, while with the stock of his AK-47 the other soldier tears open the head of the man who dares to intervene.

  ‘Are you a Muslim or aren’t you? Does Allah forbid women from such things or doesn’t He?’

  The fighters in the truck view the punishment with a sense of justice on their faces and one of them beseeches Allah to prevent everyone from sinning.

  Mikal touches Jeo’s sleeve. ‘To your left.’ His lips barely move.

  Jeo glances in that direction but is not sure what he is looking for.

  ‘Did you see him?’ Mikal whispers.

  Jeo shakes his head.

  Mikal looks quickly. ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘An American.’

  *

  The white man was in an upper-storey window on the other side of the street. It was a fleeting glimpse, and suddenly the air had become much colder for Mikal. They are here. They are organising an attack on the Taliban headquarters – the place where he and Jeo are being taken.

  As they move on towards the fort, another thin dog appears and follows them for a distance and then stands watching them. There are tank tracks in the dust leading out of the fort’s tall arched gate. The truck goes through it and stops before a complex of buildings inside, the gate closing behind them, and they climb out stiff-limbed.

  Jeo is taken away immediately to tend to a group of injured Taliban soldiers. His eyes hot from fatigue, Mikal assesses the boundary wall – it is at least thirty feet high and twenty feet thick, and along the parapet there are holes for guns, wide enough to accommodate the swing of a barrel.

  He doesn’t see Jeo until everyone gathers for the night prayer at the fort’s mosque.

  ‘There are just over a hundred and twenty men here,’ Mikal tells him. ‘There were many hundreds until two days ago but they have gone to reinforce an important battle a few villages away, taking tanks and armoured vehicles.’

  ‘Tell me about the American.’

  ‘This place will be attacked.’

  ‘I heard a few al-Qaeda members were here,’ Jeo says. ‘But they disappeared very soon after 11 September.’

  ‘We could try to steal a truck.’

  The fort is – it must be – the most hated and feared place in the region. The people in the village will show no mercy when they come in with American reinforcement and weaponry.

  ‘In the morning I will ask them for a gun and I want you to learn how to fire it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Jeo. I am not going to shoot anyone either if I can help it. I just want you to memorise how the gun works and keep it with you.’

  ‘When the attackers see a gun in my hand they’ll think I am the enemy.’

  ‘They are not going to be that discerning. You saw how these Taliban treat them. They will not leave even a sparrow alive in this place.’

  *

  Mikal awakens with the sense that someone is looking at him through the darkness. They are sharing the sleeping quarters with a group of young men, the mattresses greasy and infested. A hand has brushed his face, perhaps a fingernail has come into contact with a metal button on his coat. He was using his rucksack as a pillow and now realises that it is missing. He puts his hand into his pocket and brings out the flashlight. Muffling its light by cupping a palm over the glass, he raises it in the air, a glowing stone in his hand. Sending a spray of light over the sleeping bodies. Jeo isn’t in the room.

  He steps out into the night, being tracked by the moon as he walks across the vast courtyard, keeping the flashlight’s beam turned to the ground as much as possible. The area enclosed by the fort walls is the size of a neighbourhood – there are stables, plots of corn and wheat, and there is a stream and a rose garden. ‘Jeo?’ he whispers repeatedly. He tries the door handles of the trucks parked near the gate but all of them are locked, the metal freezing to his fingertips. One stable is filled to the rafters with weaponry – grenades, rockets and firearms, crates of ammunition, anything made for killing, even Lee Enfield rifles with dates stamped on the bayonets – 1913 – from the time that the British were contesting the area. He washes his face from the stream to remain focused. Walking back through the rose garden he finds a letter torn in half – written a year ago by a woman in the village below, addressed to the United Nations, saying she’s a teacher and is in Hell, it is my 197th letter over the past five years, please help us … He looks up into the darkness above the world and orients himself by locating Cassiopeia in the north and the two fused diamonds of Orion to the west, staring as if the secret design of the world will be revealed to him. To the east is the planet Venus.

  ‘Jeo?’

  The Angel of Death is said to have no ears, to stop him from hearing anyone’s pleas.

  ‘Yes.’

  Mikal locates him with the light. ‘Do you have my bag?’

  ‘No. I thought you went away with it somewhere.’

  ‘It’s gone.’

  ‘You are an accursed liar.’ The voice comes out of the black air.

  Two men with Kalashnikovs appear before them. ‘What are you doing out here?’ The words issue on gleaming vapour.

  ‘We couldn’t sleep.’

  The men come forward. They are in Pakistani dress but one of them is clearly an Uzbek. He says to Mikal, in Punjabi, ‘We asked you if you had any maps and you said you didn’t. We found them in your bag just now.’

  ‘They are his, not mine. You asked me not him.’

  ‘I gave them to him for safekeeping,’ Jeo says.

  ‘Do you – either of you – have any money?’

  ‘Just a small amount to get by.’

  ‘No dollars?’

  ‘No. No dollars.’

  ‘You are an accursed liar.’

  The other says, ‘What are you doing out here in the middle of the night? If you were in our place wouldn’t you think you were spying for the Americans?’

  ‘We just came out here to talk. We did not want to disturb the sleepers.’

  ‘Why are you looking up? Are you expecting American planes? Why didn’t you want us to have the maps? Your brothers and sisters are being murdered all across Afghanistan as we speak and you are too selfish to help.’

  ‘That is not true,’ Jeo says. ‘We are here because we want to help.’

  ‘Selfish people like you are the reason Islam is in the state it is.’

  ‘Just give me one map and you can keep the rest.’

  ‘People who don’t want to make sacrifices,’ the Uzbek says contemptuously. ‘Now go back in and don’t come back out again.’

  They return to their mattresses, not stirring until just before dawn when in the bitter cold everyone walks to the mosque to say their prayers, and as the sun rises the fighters begin their exercises with cries of ‘God is great!’ at every exertion, firing bullets into telephone directories of Pakistani cities soaked in water, proof that the Taliban were supported and funded by the Pakistani government and military, and then, exactly what Mikal has been expecting, the Taliban announce that an informer from the village has just sent news of an imminent attack on the fort.

  *


  Evacuating is an impossibility since the paths out of the fort have been blocked. Out there is the gathering of half a dozen villages from the surrounding area, a flash of bayonets in an unbroken circle around the base of the hill.

  There is a day moon composed of white ash in the sky.

  Mikal feels the whole mass of the war bearing down on them with nothing but their bodies and selves to hold it at bay. He needs the spare bullets for his Beretta and must look for his rucksack, asking around and almost breaking into a run as he moves from location to location. The fort was used in the 1980s by Soviet soldiers to torture and imprison the population, and there is graffiti in Russian on several walls. Someone told Mikal yesterday that there is a skeleton chained to the wall in an underground chamber, making him think of his father in Lahore Fort.

  ‘Your friend Jeo was also asking about the rucksack just now,’ one man tells him, opening the door to the arsenal Mikal saw last night – the weapons are soon piled up under a mulberry tree, clusters of them dragged zigzagging across the dust so that they leave a wide trail. He stands still for a few moments, looking at it, trying to bring clarity into his mind. And then as he hurries forward he remembers following the adder-like trace that a holy man had left in the streets – a fakir, a traveller. Mikal was about eight years old and he had overheard someone say that the holy man had a certain resemblance to his father, with his head of a sad and wise lion. As penitence for a grave transgression in the past, the mendicant wandered around Pakistan with massive lengths of chain wound about his body, dripping in loops from his neck and wrists, and trailing behind him from his ankles, and Mikal had set out to look for him, following the trail of him for miles, but unable to find him. It was the first time he had strayed from home, Basie and his mother frantic in the painted rooms.

  ‘Half these boys are not soldiers,’ Mikal says to a Taliban leader. ‘They’d be better off lying low.’

  ‘They will be better off but not our cause,’ the man says. ‘Everyone has to fight.’ And he adds with finality, ‘Allah has plans that includes this.’

  *

  His mind fails to locate intimations of a higher order behind any aspect of this place, a site all the more crude for its distance from the real world, a cold and barren frontierland of life.

  From the weapons under the mulberry tree – the sun has broken the chill of the various metals and a butterfly has appeared to collect warmth from a trigger guard – he picks up two Chinese Type 56 SMGs and begins to look for Jeo. The mulberry leaves – with their outlines composed of many sudden curves – have always made him want to draw them. No wonder Jeo’s mother couldn’t resist making paintings of them.

  In the sleeping quarters he places one of the guns on the floor and examines the other, looking up when Jeo appears in the doorway.

  ‘Pick it up,’ he points at the SMG at his feet. ‘I’ll make sure you don’t have to use it. I’ll do whatever I can. But if there is no alternative I want you to know what to do.’

  He can hear boys shouting ‘Allah is great!’ out there.

  Jeo remains where he is, staring at him from the door. There is a paper in his left hand, half crumpled up in the fist.

  Mikal walks towards him with the SMG held out. ‘You must try to shoot a gunman under the nose. The bullet will go through and sever the brainstem so the hand will be paralysed and won’t pull the trigger, not even in reflex.’ Working together they had built a computer when they were twelve years old. He closes Jeo’s fingers around the gun. ‘Keep your right hand here …’

  A drop of water falls onto his wrist and he looks up, puzzled, seeing Jeo’s eyes full of strange light.

  ‘My father …’ Jeo says.

  ‘What?’

  Jeo raises the hand with the paper and Mikal sees that it is one of Naheed’s letters.

  ‘My father …’ Jeo says again, pulling out the others from his pocket.

  ‘The letters are old, Jeo. From before you two were married. You can check the dates.’

  But Jeo’s mind is on something else. ‘My father …’ He is trembling, breathing fast as he looks at Mikal with terror in his face. ‘My father caused my mother’s death?’ Rapidly he goes through the letters. ‘It says here …’ He can’t find the one he is looking for and then releases his hold on all of them, letting them fall as he looks at him and asks pleadingly, ‘My father killed my mother?’

  Mikal shakes his head. ‘That’s not what happened.’

  On his knees among the scattered papers, Jeo pushes some aside to uncover others, reading disjointed phrases from them, searching both sides of the sheets.

  ‘She was dying and he didn’t want her to be damned eternally. He withheld her medicines till she let go of her doubts, forcing her to embrace Allah once again before it was too late. Some people say she had a heart attack during those moments … The sudden lack of drugs …’ He raises his hands to his forehead. ‘Oh God. Why did you read them?’

  He moves towards him but Jeo lets out a strangled bark. ‘Get away from me.’

  Mikal stops.

  ‘Naheed.’ Jeo drops the letters, one of which has seven coloured flowers glued to it like stains on the page. She had gone to collect them from Rohan’s garden, without knowing she would marry Jeo within months.

  ‘She loves you,’ Mikal says.

  Jeo gets up and pushes him hard into the wall. ‘How do you know?’ The shock emptying the breath out of Mikal, his head slamming against the deep blue paint and Jeo has now picked up the gun and is trying to work it, keeping it pointed at Mikal. The gun is capable of firing four hundred bullets every minute and it goes off eventually, Jeo’s finger pressing the trigger for two or three seconds, a duration long enough to release thirty bullets, gouging a curved line of chips from the wall behind Mikal.

  For a while Mikal’s wildly beating heart is the only point of reference in the formless darkness that has filled his eyes. The empty cartridges fall to the ground like a chain rattling. You told the mendicant to add a link to one of the chains hanging on his body for your sake, a link representing a need of yours, a wish. And as he wandered through the land he prayed for the need to be alleviated. When and if it was, the link disappeared miraculously from about the fakir’s person, the chain shortening. To him it was proof that Allah had taken pity on him and somewhat lightened his burden, that he was forgiven a little for his transgression.

  And now they hear, both Mikal and Jeo, what they hadn’t before – the rocket-propelled grenades being fired into the fort’s main gate. They hear the splinters exploding from the wood as the gate begins to cave inwards.

  *

  There are a few seconds of utter silence and then more than a thousand attackers penetrate the smoke and dust, firing and being fired on, kissing their guns before pulling the triggers, both sides shouting Allah’s name. A panic spreading like a flicker in a shoal of fish whenever there is a sound from an unexpected direction. Noises from the mouths of humans and the mouths of guns. In the form of screams, in the form of bullets, as if the men are shouting at the weapons and the weapons are shouting back. Mikal knows they will be in this room in less than five minutes. ‘Remember,’ he tells himself. ‘Short controlled bursts.’ He turns around to where he last saw Jeo, a second or a lifetime ago.

  Jeo is motionless and then begins to collect Naheed’s letters. Calmly walking across the room to place them in an alcove.

  Six Taliban men enter and bolt the door from the inside. Eight humans and their fate. ‘Not one of you is allowed to die until he has killed twenty of the enemy,’ one of them says; he was the driver who brought them here, the owner of the leather lash reinforced with Saudi coins.

  Mikal crouches by the window and raises his head to look out. Rooms, trucks and trees are on fire, as is the golden dome of the mosque, and he cannot believe the intensity of the fight, hundreds of guns firing at the same time. The attackers are advancing and are being brutal with each person they find. They had expected more Taliban in the fort, and �
� disappointed at the small number – they are pouring the rage and violence and metal meant for several men into just one. Each man is dying ten, twenty or thirty deaths.

  *

  Someone is trying to break down the door, the wood receiving forceful blows. And all the while someone injured out there is screaming with pain, ‘Help me, somebody help me, somebody please help me!’

  A rocket-propelled grenade – fired from the other side of the courtyard – lodges itself in the room’s wall, emerging halfway into the interior without going off. It remains there and begins to vibrate. Grit and plaster falling to the floor and onto the man standing directly below it. He – and Mikal and Jeo, and everyone else – watch the grenade with rapt fascination for a few seconds, everything reduced to fear and marvel. It should’ve exploded but it can’t because the wall is constraining it. It begins to burn instead, sending a stream of brilliant liquid flame and metal directly onto the chest of the man below with a piercing whistle. The man’s torso melts, is consumed, and the rest of him falls backwards and the blinding red and white lava continues to shower onto him, the high-pitched sound echoing off the walls.

  *

  The second RPG comes and gets stuck in the wall directly above Jeo and Mikal, vibrating again but without any loudness. Nothing except a hum, the sound of a finality beyond all illusion. Mikal breaks out of his paralysis and moves Jeo and himself from under it. Because there hasn’t been a blow on the door for a while Jeo opens it and looks out while Mikal reaches for Naheed’s letters. The base of Mikal’s neck erupts in blood, Jeo looking back and seeing him fall. The corridor outside is filled with dense smoke and the young woman who comes rushing out of it towards Jeo wears a look of wildness on her face, her eyes crazed with a radiant power. When was the last time he saw a woman? The tip of the foot-long dagger enters Jeo’s face through the left cheek – going through the gap between the lower and upper jaw. The sharp metal cuts through the roof of the mouth and reaches under the brain. The blade grates against the bone of the skull that it splinters, and it grates again immediately afterwards when she pulls it out. He hears both sounds – from the inside, between the ears. The pain is something he could not have imagined. ‘This is for what your people did to my man,’ she says, armed with love’s vengeance. Part of his mind remarks on the woman’s beauty, notices the blossoms on her dress. He has fallen with his face to one side and he sees Mikal lying prone on the other side of the room, the red coming out of his mouth as though it is something he is saying, his last words.