The Blind Man's Garden (7 page)

‘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.

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.’