Текст книги "A God in Every Stone"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Remmick pulled himself out of the water, and lay down on his back with a squelching sound, eyes fixed on the jut of the high diving board. Viv struck the lighter, was amazed to find it working, and offered him a lit cigarette. When he didn’t move she held the cigarette a few centimetres from his mouth and his head eased off the cement floor to take it between his lips, the length of a filter between her fingers and his kiss. She found herself imagining something that should be ludicrous, and by the catch of his breath knew he was imagining it too. She moved a few feet away, and everything that had started to happen stopped. When Remmick spoke his words leaned into each other, and she realised he was drunk.

– Remember when the Tochi Scouts were here on leave and one of them rode a motorcycle up the stairs of the diving board and then dropped – whoosh! – into the pool?

– Whoosh? I must have missed that.

– Really? ’Twasn’t you? Could’ve sworn it was. Anyone else would’ve been thrown out of the Club, but everyone recognised those fellows spend all that time in the tribal areas, Peshawar the oasis where they can let their hair down. That’s what it is, you know. An oasis. The place which isn’t all those other places in the Frontier.

– Or wasn’t all those other places?

He closed his eyes and there was a sound which was almost a sob.

– How bad is it? Viv asked. He held his arm up and pushed the sleeve back so she could see his wristwatch.

– What time is it?

– Nine twenty-three. No, wait, I think your watch has stopped. Must be the water. A few minutes past then.

– Within an hour we’ll have abandoned the Walled City.

– Who?

– We. The British. We’re pulling out the troops.

– Why?

– Because idiots and cowards are running things.

He crossed his arms over his chest like a pharaoh, eyes still closed.

– And you’ll have to leave tomorrow. All women and children being evacuated.

– Could you please sit up and start making sense?

Several seconds passed in silence. The men in the deckchairs stood up and walked across the lawn toward the verandah, not looking in her direction, their eyes fixed in front of them in a way that made it clear they were aware of her and would take back news to the dining room of an assignation beside the pool. She tapped Remmick’s forehead with the lighter. His eyes opened and he said, Go back to England.

– We did something terrible yesterday, didn’t we?

He put his hands to his ears, began to hum ‘Makin’ Whoopie’, and she shivered, wondering what could bring this man – always so assured, so solid – to this teetering place.

– The lorries, she said. The humming stopped, almost mid-note.

– Who told you?

Viv tasted blood in her mouth. It wasn’t her imagination. There was blood, real blood, she was swallowing it. And an ache in her tongue where her tooth had driven into it.

– Someone in a position to know, she said, and her voice was measured, without judgement.

– What was done had to be done, he said.

She closed her hand around the solidity of the lighter. There was a lesson she’d learned many years ago, though she hadn’t understood it at the time: how to coax information out of someone, how to make them believe you would never use it against them.

– If there’d been funerals this morning, all those bodies paraded around the street!

In her voice there was just the right mix of horror at what would have ensued and sympathy for the decision that had to be made to prevent it. There was a tiny exhalation – she understood it to be relief – from Remmick, before he responded:

– Mayhem. Absolute mayhem. The bastards, beg your pardon, would have whipped the entire Walled City into a frenzy.

– But we’ve lost the City all the same?

– Bolton – he’s cracking up. Somehow they’ve got him convinced that there’s a dam about to burst unless he withdraws the troops. It’s madness. We’ve contained it. We’ve done what had to be done.

– How many were there in the lorries?

She placed a hand on his shoulder as she asked the question; a woman appreciative of men who did what had to be done.

– I don’t know. I didn’t ask.

– Where were they taken?

– Six feet under. Beyond that, I don’t imagine anyone other than Caroe knows.

– Caroe?

– Man in charge of it. He’ll go far.

A lone cricket chirped in the vicinity of the oleander tree.

– Shall I tell you something I never understood, she said. My mother had a friend who lost a son in the Great War; he was buried in France. This was a woman who couldn’t venture more than ten feet from her house without treating it as if she was going on the Grand Tour. But on Armistice Day she heard the news on the radio, walked out of her door and didn’t stop until she was at her son’s grave. He’d been dead three years. Why should standing at a grave matter? But it mattered more than anything else in all the world.

Remmick sat up, then stood, entirely steady on his feet.

– You will keep your own best interests at heart, won’t you, Miss Spencer?

– It’s a vexed matter, to decide what those might be.

– Oh, not really. For instance: it wouldn’t be in your best interests to give anyone reason to go over the unfortunate matter of your wartime record.

Viv stood too, and slipped her shoes onto her bare feet, which gave her the advantage of several inches over him.

– Unfortunate. So speaks the man who was sipping tea at Dean’s while his countrymen were in the trenches at the Somme. And while I was nursing those men.

– You see, the question of your loyalties. I don’t like bringing it up. But I kept my eye on you, after you left here. I know about the letters you sent to the War Office, accusing a man who worked there of lying to you, and of murdering – what was your phrase – a man with more nobility in his little finger than the entire War Office has in all its bloated carapace?

– I barely remember those letters. I was. . upset.

– Yes, that was clear. And it was clear why. But if this proclivity for the King’s enemies should prove to be habitual –

– Proclivity?

– You used to speak to me about him, though never before you’d had a drink or two. Men aren’t such fools in matters of the heart as women like to think. So, that was the Turk. And now you’re here to see the boy to whom you had that unnatural attachment. People used to talk about it – I always defended you. He was just a child. But he’s a grown man now, with a Red Shirt brother.

The emptiness, the terrible emptiness of it, would it never leave her? For what had she betrayed that dear man, that mentor, that friend, that love? For men like Remmick. For the crumbs of their approval. Not just the whip-thin man from the War Office, but Papa, too, who even now was a shadow in her mind, telling her women didn’t understand the weighty decisions that men must make on their behalf.

The verandah doors opened and a small group of people came out, headed by one of the men who had been sitting in the deckchairs, Remmick’s wife walking beside him. Remmick turned his head at the sound of her voice, and called out, Darling, look who I found sitting out here. It’s Miss Spencer.

– She’s not still Miss Spencer, I’m sure, said his wife, walking rapidly across the garden. She looked at Viv’s hand for a wedding ring, her glance travelling to take in her unstockinged legs and Remmick’s wet clothes.

– He saved my lighter from death by drowning, Viv found herself saying, holding up the silver rectangle as though it were the guardian and proof of her chastity, and her voice was steady as the world hurtled into the cold darkness and she allowed herself to be pulled along with it towards the lights of the club building, Remmick by her side.

24 April 1930

Najeeb wasn’t at home; he wasn’t in either of his sisters’ houses; he wasn’t in Khan Sahib’s clinic where planks of wood had been nailed to the wall to make extra beds for the wounded; he wasn’t on the very short list of those who had been taken to the English-run hospitals in the Cantonment; he wasn’t in the back room of Avtar Singh, the antique dealer’s, shop, so lost in artefacts that he was unaware his brother and nephews and brothers-in-law and the cobbler Hari Das were striding around the Walled City with his photograph in hand, knocking on doors, saying, Have you seen this man? He wasn’t with this friend or that friend or the boy he walked back from school with ten years earlier. He wasn’t at the mosque to which he never went except for Eid prayers; he wasn’t at the neighbourhood tea shop which was closed; he wasn’t at any of the places to which he might go in search of Qayyum if he were the one trying to find his brother. He wasn’t, no, that wasn’t him in the corner of Qayyum’s eye; he wasn’t the man who threw that shadow against the wall; he wasn’t the force which knocked over the mosque-reflecting mirror leaning against a tree so that it held the sky, placed clouds within reach. He was everywhere until Qayyum looked closer, and then he was nowhere.

Troops patrolled the perimeter wall, looking towards the hills where word of the massacre would have reached the tribes; six men from the Congress Party stood on the stairs of the Municipal Library, their skin red, sun-flayed – they had been made to stand there since the morning when they tried to picket a liquor shop; round the corner came the sound of a lathi striking a man’s flesh.

Qayyum kept his eyes to the ground, instructed his nephews to do the same, and moved from house to house, knocking on doors. Have you seen this man? He was wearing a frock-coat yesterday. In one of the houses a very old woman touched the photograph and said, You’re lucky to have this; my son is missing and all his father can do to try and find him is take our daughter to unveil herself in front of strangers and say imagine if she were a boy. But otherwise every house was the same: No, I’m sorry, I haven’t. Go to the Congress offices, go the Khilafat offices, that’s where they took the bodies – but Qaayum shook his head and moved on.

It was evening already by the time Qayyum crossed the square dominated by the domed structure of Hastings Memorial. Troops stood guard around it, protecting the memory of an Englishman who had died decades earlier; a group of boys, a few feet away, spat pulpy sugar cane in the direction of the soldiers. Their aim fell short, but they didn’t move closer, and the soldiers ignored them.

– Get out of here; go home.

Qayyum had hardly touched one of the boys, a gentle push to move him along, when all the boys scattered and ran, shouting Inqilaab Zindabad as if it were the chorus to a game. Qayyum walked past the monument and entered the Street of Jewellers; overhead, the flapping of a paper kite trapped in wires magnified the silence by disrupting it. Further along the street a tea-shop – Khalsa Hotel, the signboard said – was the only establishment open for business. Two long, low benches usually occupied by customers were being used as parallel tracks for a game of marbles by men whose turbans identified them as a Wazir and a Marwat – they sat facing each other, simultaneously flicking two marbles along the length of both benches, glass ricocheting off glass.

Shaking his head apologetically at the owner of the tea-shop who hurried forward to ask what he wanted, Qayyum showed the marble-players the picture which was already thinning at the corner where his finger had been gripping it all day: Najeeb at Taxila, pointing at a double-headed eagle carved in stone. The Wazir shook his head and the Marwat said he looked as if he needed to sit down, drink some tea, play a game of marbles. The owner of the tea-shop wiped his hands on the end of the turban draped over one shoulder and took the picture from Qayyum.

– I saw him. Yesterday, on the Street of Storytellers. He was wounded.

– Where? Wounded how badly?

– His shirt was all blood, I don’t know.

– Shirt?

– He’s a Khudai Khidmatgar, yes? He was wearing a red shirt, shouting Inqilaab Zindabad. I saw him, and then he went deep into the crowd, and when I saw him again two men were carrying him and his shirt was all blood, and that’s all I saw.

– No, that wasn’t him.

– No? Allah alone knows – how can our minds make sense of such scenes?

A marble bounced on the ground and came to rest beside a cat curled under the stool. The animal looked up at Qayyum, a thick film over its eyes. Beneath its paw, a green-flecked cat’s eye.

The Congress office was only a short distance from Hastings Memorial but darkness came quickly and the day had moved from evening to night by the time Qayyum approached the door from behind which there was the sound of raised voices, typewriters, a ringing telephone. He knocked several times before the door opened and a Congresswalla he knew – the lawyer, Abdul Hakim – stepped out, closing the door behind him, his exhausted expression giving way to a smile of surprising warmth.

– Qayyum Gul, I haven’t seen you all day. I was beginning to worry you were among those we lost yesterday.

– I’ve been looking for my brother. I need to see the bodies. There are some which haven’t been claimed?

He could barely understand his own words spoken with a tongue which felt sluggish in his mouth, but Abdul Hakim placed the palm of his hand against his own forehead in a way which suggested he understood better than Qayyum did.

– Please. Where are they? I need to know he’s not among them.

– We took them to the Khilafat offices yesterday evening. So that all the dead would be in one place. To make it easier for the families.

– I’ll go there, then. Thank you.

Abdul Hakim caught him by the shoulder as he started to walk away.

– We did it to make it easier for the families. We thought it would make things easier. They were in the care of the Khilafat Committee.

Qayyum didn’t know what the lawyer was trying to tell him. The Khilafat Committee in Peshawar was practically indistinguishable from Congress, the membership overlapping, anti-Imperial strategies planned and executed together.

– I’ll go there, then, he repeated; and Abdul Hakim said, I have a car; I’ll drive you.

Military pickets remained in place but no one was attempting to stop or question passers-by any longer, and the numbers out on the street were greater than earlier in the day. Unaccustomed to car travel, Qayyum braced his hands against the dashboard. Speed blurred the night sounds together, only the muezzin’s call for Isha prayers remaining distinct. The Khilafat offices were closed, no light seeping from beneath doors or through windows, but Abdul Hakim didn’t even slow, as if he already knew there was no one there, and continued driving in silence through the Walled City. Perhaps he had no destination; perhaps they would drive and drive in circles, for ever on their way to the place where the bodies were laid out, and while they circled Najeeb would be neither alive nor dead.

The muezzin’s voice rose higher. His words, stitched into the air of the Walled City, were a challenge, not a lament. Every morning Qayyum greeted the day by swearing the oath of the Khudai Khidmatgar: In the name of God who is Present and Evident, I am a Khudai Khidmatgar. I will serve the nation without any self-interest. I will serve people without regard to their religion or faith. I will not take revenge and my actions will not be a burden for anyone. My actions will be non-violent. I will make every sacrifice required of me to stay on this path.

The muezzin’s voice – Ash-hadu-anna; I bear witness – turned the oath into a provocation. Why swear to God using the word ‘sacrifice’? Which man had it in him to be Ibrahim? In a field a rabbit with sewn lips thrashed in the grass, its dying breaths drawn alone.

– Nearly there now, the lawyer said, turning into a street only just wide enough for his car. Almost immediately, he braked. A press of people was gathered outside the front door of a house Qayyum recognised as belonging to a municipal commissioner who was also one of the notable figures of the Khilafat Committee. One man was knocking on the door, a rhythmic repetition to the action which suggested he’d been doing so for a while; the other men – and two women – stood silently, looking up at the shuttered windows.

– So much for secrecy, the lawyer said, reversing out and driving a short distance to the parallel street.

Here he knocked on the door of the house which backed onto the Municipal Commissioner’s house, and whispered a few words to the broken-nosed man who answered. The man stood to one side and gestured towards the stairs which Qayyum and Abdul Hakim climbed up to the roof. Overhead, a low-hanging moon, clustered stars. A row of bulrushes planted in troughs separated the broken-nosed man’s roof from the Commissioner’s, their spiked tips etched in sharp relief against the sky. Together Qayyum and the lawyer moved one of the troughs – a metallic scraping sound – and entered the property of the Municipal Commissioner.

He was standing alone at the edge of his roof, looking through the narrow slit between the khus mats which formed a wall facing the street.

– They won’t go away until you tell them what they need to know, Abdul Hakim said. The Commissioner turned sharply, though it seemed impossible he hadn’t heard the sound of the trough being moved, and was visibly relieved to see the Congresswalla and the Khudai Khidmatgar.

– What can I tell them? I don’t know where they took them.

– Qayyum Gul’s brother has been missing since yesterday.

Abdul Hakim pushed Qayyum forward slightly, and the Commissioner raised his hands, palms facing Qayyum as if to say, I’m defenceless, you can’t attack me.

– He was in a frock-coat. Have you seen him?

– A frock-coat, no. No, there was no one in a frock-coat. I swear on the Qur’an. I would have remembered that.

The Commissioner’s manner changed after that, becoming more confident, almost avuncular. He placed an arm around Qayyum’s shoulder, and said, He’s probably been arrested, so many have. We’ll go tomorrow to the Kabuli Gate police-thana and find him. I’ll come with you.

The relief of an explanation was dizzying. Qayyum wanted to embrace the older man, who he decided he must have loved and admired for years. This stalwart of the city. This sage who walked among the powerful and used his influence for those who had none. How fortunate it was to live in an age which demanded the best from the best, and allowed them to illuminate the world.

– Go downstairs and tell those people you’ll find their brothers and sons as well, Abdul Hakim said, sitting on the lip of a trough so the bulrushes formed the high back of a throne of gold behind him.

– Do you think I had a choice? the Municipal Commissioner said.

– No? Explain it to me. Explain it to Qayyum Gul who has spent all day looking for a man who can’t be found.

Qayyum wanted only to return home with his relief and tell his sisters and nieces and nephews and brothers-in-law that they would find Najeeb tomorrow, and tease him about the English frock-coat which couldn’t keep him from being thrown into prison. He walked over to the khus mats, looked through a gap between them at the street below. The numbers seemed to have grown, and someone had taken the place of the man knocking on the door, without disrupting the rhythmic thud-thud thud-thud. Across the street, someone opened a window and said, Enough now, enough! and one of the women below cried out, Where is my son?

– Tell me what else I could have done, the Municipal Commissioner said. Caroe called us together – four of us – and said we had to hand over the bodies. The ones in the Khilafat offices, the ones in the Madrassa, all of them. Do you think he phrased it as a request?

– What?

– Now you hear the truth, Qayyum Gul, the lawyer said. Go on, Mr Commissioner, tell us how you tried to resist. Tell us you said take me to prison, put a bullet through my brain, but I will not be a part of this shameful, criminal act.

The Municipal Commissioner winced at the bite of the word ‘Mr’, but the rest of the sentence had him flicking his hand at the lawyer, dismissing him.

– What do you understand of it, Abdul Hakim? Caroe was right; he said if there’s a mass funeral tomorrow no one – not the Congress, not the Khilafat Committee, not Gandhi and Ghaffar together if they were here – will be able to control the passions of the city. Haven’t we had enough bloodshed already?

– Oh, oh, listen to him! He was acting in Peshawar’s best interests. Oh Qayyum Gul, are you witnessing this?

– Remember Chauri Chaura, the Municipal Commissioner said, his voice stern, reminding the two other men that he was the oldest here. After your Congress volunteers burnt the police station Gandhi called off the entire Non-Cooperation Movement. Do you want something like that to happen again? Here? So that all the rest of India, all the Congress officials, can say those savage men of the Frontier! How can we trust them to be part of a movement of non-violence?

Abdul Hakim spread his hands in Qayyum’s direction as if to say, Can you believe this?

– I don’t understand. What did they do with the bodies? Qayyum asked.

The lawyer made a sound which would have been a laugh if it had contained any humour.

– Probably threw them into the nearest river or in some ditch somewhere.

– Don’t start these ridiculous rumours! They were buried according to full Muslim rites. Caroe swore that.

– What, even the ones who weren’t Muslim?

– Enough, Qayyum said, holding up his hand. His voice was ragged with anger when he said to the Municipal Commissioner, Those people down there, they want to bury their dead. Some way could have been found to allow them to do that.

– Really? said the Municipal Commissioner. You think after a day like yesterday Peshawari men would quietly walk behind row after row of shrouded bodies, including the body of a young girl shot dead by an English bullet. And not just any young girl. The angel on the Street of Storytellers. You should have seen the men in the office when she was brought in, the ones who recognised her particularly. I thought their hearts would burst right there.

– What girl, what angel?

The lawyer stood up.

– Didn’t you see her, Qayyum? Yesterday, on the Street of Storytellers. A figure made of light stood on a balcony, dispensing water to the men on the street below; the water itself liquid light, a miracle. The English officers saw her standing there, a sign of Allah’s grace, and shot her with every single gun in their artillery. She plunged from the balcony, a falling star, and only when she landed, dead, did the light extinguish, and the men saw it wasn’t an angel against whose brightness they had closed their eyes even as they drank her blessing, but a Peshawari girl, blessed by the Almighty.

In the silence that followed the lawyer struck a match and in a completely different voice, flat, slightly cynical, added, That’s what the man who told me about it insisted, though I know he was hiding at home all day. He extended his arm, held the match against the spiked tip of a bulrush and stepped back. A circle of brightness flared; a string of gold unspooled from the circle, wrapped itself around the dense tip of the bulrush, and the flames caught. Within seconds there was a wall of fire, the shapes of individual bulrushes visible within it.

– Have you gone mad, the Municipal Commissioner shouted, backing away from the crackling light.

– No, just letting the people down below know you’re up here. You might as well go and try to explain things to them before they work out the route from your neighbour’s roof. I think you’ll find a way to control their passions. But I might be wrong.

With a great, spat-out curse the Municipal Commissioner descended the stairs into his house. The bulrushes were disintegrating but the night was breezeless, the flames stayed contained. A concentration of heat and brightness and beauty, unapproachable. So might an angel appear to a man, veiled in the fire of heaven.

– Which balcony was she on? Qayyum asked Abdul Hakim.

– There’s no need to say anything to anyone about the girl, the lawyer said, putting a hand on Qayyum’s arm. What can’t be denied we’ll admit, but let’s not start speaking about our allies giving dead girls into the hands of Englishmen. Understand?

– Was it the carpet-seller’s balcony?

– Yes.

Qayyum scooped up hot ash from the trough in cupped palms, and whispered a verse from the Qur’an, his breath scattering grey flecks.

– Their works are as ashes which the wind bloweth hard upon a stormy day. They have no control of aught that they have earned.