Текст книги "A God in Every Stone"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

All this is a few seconds of diversion, a few seconds to imagine a future in which today is remembered for the start of love.

Gunfire again. He crashes down a flight of stairs and through a doorway, searching for a window without bars through which he can escape. There, an enclosed balcony with shutters he batters open. It takes a while before the men below hear his shouts but when they do he climbs onto the balcony railing, his back to the street. The woman with the plait enters the room, holding his frock-coat as if dancing with it in the English style, one arm at its waist, one at the wrist. They regard each other without expression and then she raises the hand which is holding his frock-coat sleeve and he sees her arm and his own wave goodbye at him.

He clamps his hands to his turban and falls. A bullet sings its ways through the place where his body had stood just a moment earlier, through the open shutters, into the room where the woman and frock-coated stranger dance. The waiting arms beneath catch him, place him on his feet. There is no way back into the room.

His red-brown shirt gives him authority in this crowd. He taps a shoulder in front of him and the man glances down, sees the colour of his sleeve, and steps aside. There are thousands here, all of them men as far as he can see. What happened to the woman with the dyed face? What is her relationship to the dancing woman? Where did the bullet go? He keeps moving forward through the scent of sweat and blood.

Two men carrying bricks in their hands are arguing with two men in Congress khaddar who want them to put down their weapons.

He comes to a small group of women, all old as grandmothers. They are trying to go forward, to shame the soldiers into putting down their weapons. The men around are trying to keep them back, away from the bullets which have stopped again.

Two men, holding hands, trade couplets about cruel lovers.

He knows he is coming to the front of the crowd when these individual tableaux fall away and the red-brown and khaddar shirts increase in density. His borrowed shirt, which had dried, is wet at the armpits. It’s hard to move now, these front rows packed in tightly, stepping forward together than falling back with inexplicable logic. He addresses the man next to him.

– What are we doing?

– If you don’t know, go home.

It’s only then he realises that every experience of his life feels pallid beside this one, including that moment yesterday in which the shape of the object in the soil of Shahji-ki-Dheri became clear.

– Inqilaab Zindabad!

He shouts the words to see what hearing them in his own voice will do to them. It feels slightly ridiculous until the men around him join in the cry. How wonderful this is.

– My brother; I must go to my brother.

He parts the shoulders of the men in front of him, and steps into the trajectory of a brick hurtling from a balcony.

23 April 1930

The bullet travels through the frock-coat, missing Diwa by millimetres, and burrows itself into a mirror. Her arm is still raised in the direction of the bewildering man who has just dived backwards off her balcony and it takes a moment to understand the smell of burnt fabric, the crackling sound towards which she turns, and the frozen sun in the mirror, glass rays shooting out from a dark circle.

This day has been the strangest of her young life.

By rights she should still have been in Kohat with her parents and brothers, celebrating her cousin’s wedding. But yesterday when her eldest brother heard of the planned anti-British protest in Peshawar he said he was returning to join the nationalists and his wife, Zarina, insisted she would go along too. If it had been any other woman she would have been overruled, but Zarina had made clear the strength of her will when she entered Diwa’s family home two years earlier and said she refused to marry the man her family had chosen for her, and wished to marry Diwa’s brother instead. Under the laws of Pashtunwali I come here seeking the protection of your household, which can only be given to me through marriage, she had said. It was as if a woman from legend had walked through the door.

So when Zarina said she would return to Peshawar with her husband it was quickly understood that there was no point in arguing. The only one who might have tried was Diwa’s mother, but she had seen many of the women of her extended family eyeing her fifteen-year-old daughter as a prospective bride for their sons and, seeing the possibility of losing her only daughter to another city as her own mother had lost her when she married her cousin the carpet-seller, she was grateful for the opportunity to send Diwa back to Peshawar under the pretext of keeping Zarina company.

Diwa hadn’t minded at all, being sent back to Peshawar with her wedding clothes uncreased except where they had been folded for packing. If she could have had one wish in the world it would be this – to be at home with Zarina, and no one else. No one else demanding her time, distracting her attention. Only Zarina with her quick gestures, her stories and poems, her ability to be loved enough to be forgiven everything. Even rushing into a street filled with men, her face uncovered though Diwa’s mother repeatedly warned her against doing that, even this she’d be forgiven. By now she would have found her husband and he would be plying her with endearments, his hand touching hers, both wrapped around the hilt of the dagger. My warrior, Malalai of Maiwand reborn, he’d say.

Everything is turned around today. Diwa woke up to birdsong instead of the tumult of the marketplace, smelt boiling walnuts and plum instead of tea, watched her brother leave his books in order to go out and fight. When an unknown man appeared on the roof she thought, of course, on this upside-down day, why not? But when none of the neighbourhood women or their children noticed him it started to seem possible that he was there for her, not as threat but opportunity. Opportunity for what? He looked half-crazed, sweating in his black coat. And then, more crazed, he cut his clothes off himself in order to put on the kameez she had tossed in his direction as a more ventilated option. Mad, completely mad, she decided as he ran down the stairs again, leaving the coat where it had fallen.

She knelt on the ground, fastening the gold buttons of the coat. The metal was warm, like a fired bullet. She had just watched men die, and a horse too. It was the horse she couldn’t stop looking at, the horse’s flanks over which she wanted to run her hand, giving it the comfort of her presence as it twitched towards death. The dying men didn’t seem as real as the horse. She’d found herself looking away from them, towards the elevation of Gor Khatri, wondering how the Walled City might appear to someone on top of its Mughal gateway who could look down onto all the roofs of the Walled City, cut off from each other by enclosing walls but open to the sky. An Englishwoman had once described the view to Diwa’s father as looking into a honeycomb made of jewels – but the English spoke this way about things in Peshawar that were entirely ordinary, so it didn’t help. What she wanted to know was if life was proceeding as normal on the roofs a little further back from the Street of Storytellers, where no one could see the horse and the men, the English bayonets and the Peshawari bared chests. Or did everyone feel the strangeness in the air, the sense of possibility?

She stood, the coat in her arms. The crazy stranger was the height of a short man or a tall woman. Zarina’s height. She took the sleeve of the coat in one hand, placed her other hand at its waist. Zarina would wear this, and they would dance as the English dance. Weeks earlier they had watched a couple on the Gor Khatri gateway twirling in the open air, and Zarina had said it was so English to dance in public, as if there was nothing intimate in their embrace, as if it was merely a social transaction and there was no danger that a limb pressed against another limb could lead to desire. No fire in their blood, she said, only half-thawed rivers of ice.

Bullets and shouts from below. Perhaps Zarina would change her mind about the English today.

Diwa continued to hold the coat close as she skipped lightly down the stairs. She’d leave this on Zarina’s bed as a surprise. How soft the fabric. She rested her head against Zarina’s shoulder and they spun together into the bedroom. And there was the crazy man, standing on the balcony railing, about to jump. She raised her hand in command, Don’t! – but he just clutched his head as though a pair of soft palms were enough to keep a head from splitting, and fell. Then the burning smell, the crackling sound, the frozen sun.

She opens the wardrobe door. The bullet has travelled through the mirror and is lodged in the splintering wood. When she touches it, her fingers burn; she doesn’t think of coat buttons in the sun, but of the metallic edge to blood, the stench of which is rising off the street.

She leans back against the wardrobe frame, hands at her temples. A man whose scent and heat is still in the coat she held close to her breast has just looked into her eyes and chosen to die. She tamps down the desire to see what the fall has done to his body, whether it has erased the madness from his features. Even as she thinks that, she understands that she is the one to have been mad these last minutes, not the man who clutched his head just as she is doing now, her brain consumed with terror. Her brother is out there, and Zarina.

Zarina, who never wanted her husband to take part in this protest, who insisted on accompanying him back to Peshawar because every second in his company was an opportunity to dissuade him from becoming a participant in this non-violent army of Pashtuns. Zarina, who took a dagger in her hand and walked out bare-faced, the dye of the Khudai Khidmatgar staining her skin not as tribute but as taunt, so that she could shame her husband, so that all the neighbourhood would say, His woman has to be the man in the family now that he’s turned weak. It is unnecessary; everyone knows that Diwa’s eldest brother has no real commitment to protests and political parties – handsome and good-natured enough to be spoilt by everyone around him, he sometimes flings himself upon a whim for a brief duration. If he wanted to join Congress we’d need to worry, her father said, but an army of unlettered peasants? Everyone understands this, so why can’t his wife leave him alone to become dissatisfied with this new pretence at stepping out of his own life instead of creating such a scene about it. Zarina, the self-absorbed, the unseeing.

This is the first time Diwa has thought of Zarina with such anger. Her palm presses against the tip of the bullet, which is cooling now and doesn’t even have the ability to break her skin, let alone cut through muscle and bone. She prises the bullet out of the wood. A spent cartridge, Zarina called her husband when she went up to the roof this morning, Diwa following behind, to see him plunging white clothes into a bucket, his hands already red-brown from the kameezes which were strung along the washing line. Now, the weight of the bullet resting in her palm, Diwa can’t help thinking there’s nothing so wrong with a spent cartridge.

There are sounds of adult command, and childish protest. The rooftop spectators are making their way down the stairs. One of the neighbourhood women comes into the room and closes the shutters without looking onto the street below.

– They’re firing up at the roofs. Stay hidden.

For a while she does. She sits on Zarina’s bed, one hand clutching a bullet, the other resting on the black coat. She is alone now. For the first time in her life she is alone in this house. What if Zarina and her brother never return? Will she just go on sitting here, holding an inert bullet in her hand while live rounds echo on the street below? How many people live in an empty house? One! She heard her father say this once. It hadn’t made sense at the time. The bullets continue on and off for a while. Then they stop, or perhaps she stops hearing them. Eventually, she crosses the border from fear to boredom and is surprised to find the two emotions lie adjacent to each other. She lies down, propped on one side, the black coat resting beside her on the embroidered bedcover. While stroking the softness of the fabric, from breast to thigh, she feels something beneath the cloth, a rectangular shape. She unbuttons the coat, heat rising to her face as she works her way down the length of the garment, and feels her way along the silk lining until her fingers encounter a pocket, and pull out a metal case which she opens to find business cards.

They’re written in English, and for the first time she’s actively grateful she knows the language. So far its only purpose has been commercial. Her father’s carpet trade has many English customers, and his blurring eyesight has left him dependent on his daughter to make sense of the pen-stroke demands which arrive from as near as the Cantonment and as far away as Calcutta. Sometimes the letter-writers arrive themselves and when she carries in the tray of tea she is able to match up handwriting to person, smug in the knowledge she has derived of them from the written courtesies they extend or withhold, the slash or curl of their penmanship, the punctuation. All this is in the past. Over a year ago her father’s blurring eyesight intercepted something in the glance of one of the Englishmen, and since then it’s been her younger brother who takes in the tea tray. She wishes she had caught the glance herself; it might have made the exile seem worthwhile.

NAJEEB GUL, INDIAN ASSISTANT, PESHAWAR MUSEUM.

Najeeb Gul. That was his name. It’s suddenly unbearable that someone called Najeeb Gul jumped to his death from her balcony. If only she’d known his name – she would have called out, Najeeb! and he would have stopped, climbed off the railing and come towards her. But now he lies broken on the street below. She stands up and sits down again. What is she supposed to do for him, for the dead stranger in a frock-coat who works at the Museum?

She walks over to the balcony, opens the shutters and – with a quick prayer asking for the sight of death to be bearable – looks down onto the street below. But there is no street, only a thicket of men. Of course. She is so much closer to them now than when she was on the roof. She could lower herself off the balcony and jump down onto the shoulders of the men below, who might not even notice her until they felt her tread. They are so handsome, these men of Peshawar. She notices it with pride, as though the good looks reflect back on her. How silly. And yet, this is the first time she’s seen such a gathering. Men of Peshawar, in row after row. The traders of Bukhara and Tibet and Tashkent and Farghana and Delhi and Kabul and China are all absent from the Street of Storytellers. She thinks of her father, standing up here, his arms open wide to the street below, his voice filled with pride as he says, Peshawar, the Heart of the World, pointing out all the men of different nations who throng its street.

She thinks all this, even while trying to make sense of what’s happening below. Everything seems to have stopped. Or paused. No one is leaving, but no one is fighting or calling out slogans. An elderly Peshawari man is standing on a fire truck, near Kabuli Gate, nodding at something said by the men at the front of the gathering, and then turning to address the English officers. The dead horse has turned dark in clumps, the darkness composed of something living which pulses and swarms. She turns her face away and finds herself looking straight into the raised glance of a man in the street below. Before she can retreat indoors he places his palms together and raises them in supplication.

– Water.

She nods, yes of course, they must all be thirsty, and this at least she can do.

Diwa is strong – she can carry rolled-up carpets that her younger brother is too feeble to hold on to – but even so her arms ache by the time she has carried the earthenware vessel from the kitchen and hoisted it onto the balcony railing. One hand holding it in place, she uses the other – with a certain flourish – to whip off the tin cup which she has balanced on her head. But here she is confronted by the empty space between her hand holding the cup and the man below waiting to receive it. The two of them look at each other, blinking in perplexity for a moment, and then he taps on the shoulders of the two men standing next to him and each crouches down with interlocked palms.

And there he is, raised above the crowd, close enough that her outstretched fingertips could touch his. His eyes are on the tap near the base of the earthenware vessel, but she is aware how easily he might glance up and see her watching him. As any man on the street below might glance up and see her watching him. She has become more accustomed than she’d realised, in this last year, to the invisibility conferred on her by a burqa, its gift of allowing the wearer to stare without being noticed, drinking in the unseeing sight of men. She is entirely jumbled about whether she wants him to look up at her, or not.

He closes his eyes and raises his face towards her. She angles the earthenware vessel, and opens the tap. A rope of water slips out, beginning to unbraid just before his mouth receives it, some of it splashing his cheeks and chin. She watches his throat work, gulp after gulp, until with a splutter he turns his face away and she stops the flow of water. The two men lower him to the ground, and then take turns being lifted up to drink. And so it goes on. One man after another taking position just beneath her balcony. She starts to feel desperate. There are hundreds down there, and the sun is getting hotter. Her arms ache from holding the vessel in place, her back aches. She is thirsty herself, but it seems indulgent to take a drink. She stops noticing the individual faces of the men, her concentration unwavering on the clear, beautiful water entering thirsty mouths.

Then a hand grabs at the fabric of her kameez and pulls her backwards. The earthenware vessel crashes to the balcony floor, and she hears the man who was just raised up cry out. She is being pulled back, back, away from the balcony, into the room, flailing.

– Have you gone mad?

Zarina slaps her across the face. An odd silence follows the sound of palm striking cheek, one not of shock or pain but of something dramatic shifting in a relationship and as if to confirm that things have turned on their head Zarina sits – collapses really – onto the bed and begins to weep. This woman who Diwa has always viewed as something out of a tale of valour has turned feeble at the mere scent of battle. The knife she’d carried this morning is on the bed, sheathed, merely decorative. Diwa tries to wipe the clinging red clay from her clothes, and only succeeds in smearing it.

– Now I look like a Khudai Khidmatgar too.

There is no response beyond more weeping. Not a sorrowful weeping but a jagged little-girl-who-lost-her-toys weeping. Shrugging, Diwa picks up a glass bottle filled with water and drinks, holding the mouth of the bottle a few feet away from her face. It makes her feel a sense of kinship with the men below.

– Where is my brother? Diwa asks.

– I don’t know. I couldn’t find him.

– How did you get back here?

– The soldiers let me through. They said women shouldn’t be out there.

Zarina lies back, one hand covering her face which is splotchy with dye and emotion. She is clearly in need of some comfort, but Diwa is too annoyed at the manner in which her sister-in-law pulled her away from the men, as though she were a child. It’s clear, she is the heroic one, the water carrier in battle, and Zarina is just a frightened girl. The three-year age gap between them seems to have reversed, and widened.

– Everyone out there could see you, Diwa. So why didn’t your brother come to stand beneath the balcony and shout at you to go inside?

– Why should he? I was helping. Couldn’t you see that?

– I could see you. So could all the soldiers with guns.

She reaches out for the glass bottle in Diwa’s hand and presses her forehead against it.

– I thought I saw him. Your brother. I was standing under the watch-shop awning and one of the men who had been wounded, they carried him there, into the shade, trying to stop the bleeding. I couldn’t see his face at first, but I saw blood everywhere, and I saw his sleeve with a long tear through it. Just like that kameez your brother won’t throw away because he was wearing it the day I walked into your house for the first time.

She rocks herself back and forth silently, and once more it is Diwa who is the child, knowing that she is watching both the shining promise and the dark pain of adulthood, enmeshed. It takes a moment to realise what Zarina has just told her.

– Was he badly hurt? The man with the torn sleeve?

A tiny shrug. A shrug which says, It wasn’t your brother, so what I felt was relief.

– There was a lot of blood, Zarina says.

– Did he say anything? Was he in a lot of pain?

– Why are you so interested? What’s this?

Zarina lifts up the sleeve of the frock-coat, catches a whiff of something which makes her bend more closely towards the fabric. She has no sooner found the bullet hole than she sees the bullet lying on the bedcover.

– Diwa?

Diwa pulls the frock-coat into her own arms, says, Tell me about the injured man.

Zarina stands up, bullet in hand, and walks across to the shattered mirror. She places the bullet against the dark circle and it slides in.

– Where were you when this happened? Whose coat is this?

– Tell me about the injured man.

– Whose coat is this?

– Tell me about the injured man.

– What is there to tell? He was wounded, he was in pain. Probably delirious. He kept shouting, My turban, my turban.

– What about his turban?

– How should I know? He wasn’t wearing one. Whose coat is this? Where were you when this bullet came in?

Diwa puts her hands to her ears and turns away. She has never before noticed how tiny this room is, how oppressive its dark walls. His turban? She has no sooner thought it than she recalls how carefully he pulled the kameez over his head, with what precision. And then the hands clasped to the turban as he fell.

She must act quickly, before Zarina can stop her, or else she could be here for hours, stuck with this cowering, shrill version of her commanding sister-in-law. Before she can give herself time to reconsider, she is on the balcony railing, calling out to the startled men below.

– Catch!

For a long terrifying moment she falls. Then she is in the arms of men, and it is all too brief before they set her on her feet and urge her to go back. She hears Zarina’s voice calling to her from the balcony, but she knows this new version of her sister-in-law won’t follow. She pushes through the crowd. A man puts his hand on her shoulder to stop her – it’s the first of the men into whose mouth she sent a rope of water, the one with the strong hands – and she roars at him, a sound which might have had words in it but she’s not sure it does. His hands spring away from her as though she’s a flame. She barrels her way through the crowd, feeling herself on fire, no one must stop her, no one must even try. The men can feel it radiating off her, they step out of her way, some of them saying things she can’t hear because the roaring of the fire is in her ears.

Then she’s beneath the watch-shop awning, and he’s there. Najeeb Gul. Standing on a crate, looking around as if searching for someone or something in the crowd. There’s blood everywhere – seeping through the bandage on his head, staining his clothes. When he sees her, he steps off the crate, grimacing in pain. His feet have barely touched the ground when he almost falls over and has to loop an arm around a slim tree trunk for support.

– How bad is it?

– Nothing like it looks. A brick hit my head, and I fell over onto a bayonet. The soldier looked more surprised than me. Don’t worry, please, it’s just a flesh wound.

– What was beneath the turban?

– It doesn’t matter now.

Then he says the words which she’s been hearing for so many hours she’s stopped hearing them: Inqilaab Zindabad.

When she stood on the roof those words meant nothing to her. They belonged to that part of her brother’s life in which he turned most tedious. But down here, amidst the musk and thrum of a suspended battle, everyone waiting for a starting gun, she finds herself moved to emotions she’s never known before. She sees herself unwinding Najeeb Gul’s bloodied bandage and waving it like a flag, joining in the cry of Inqilaab Zindabad. But first she wants to know what was beneath the turban.

– Where is it? The turban?

Najeeb Gul smiles. He says, Now we have to get married.

– What?

– Think of the story we’ll tell our children. When they brought me here I saw you on that balcony, dispensing water onto the parched battlefield. There was a light shining from you, I swear it.

She feels herself blush. She doesn’t know if he’s mad, half-delirious with pain or simply as struck as she is by the day’s sense of possibility. She might agree to anything right now. She might agree to step onto a train with a man who she knows only by the scent of his clothes, the muscles of his back and the fact that he works in the same place her brothers go on school excursions. She might find herself in London with him, wearing his turban on her head. Because in London, she has heard, fashionable women wear turbans.

– When he pulled the bayonet out I fell. The turban rolled off my head.

– Where did you fall?

– Near the armoured car. It rolled beneath the wheel, just past where my arm could reach. The turban doesn’t matter now. Stay here. Tell me your name.

But the fire is too much inside her. She tells him her name and lightly touches his wrist – it’s some kind of promise, she feels – and rejoins the crowd. Moving forward gets harder as she nears the front. The men here are on fire themselves, and don’t want to yield an inch of ground. But she keeps insisting she has a message for someone, it’s important, she has to deliver it in person, and they let her go either because she’s convincing or because their attention is elsewhere or because they see they’ll physically have to carry her away and no man wants to be the one to lay a hand on her.

She understands so little of what’s going on here. It has been an age since the bullets stopped, but everyone is still here, waiting. The man who was standing on the fire-truck has gone now, and now that she’s near the front she hears an English voice say, This is your last chance. Disperse. A Peshawari voice replies, with exquisite courtesy, After you.

She can see nothing past the shoulders of the men in front of her. Then, amazingly, a space opens up and she sees it: the long-tailed turban, resting against the wheel of the foremost armoured car. She pushes her way through the tiny space, and steps out into the middle ground between her people and the English, a space wider than any valley, wider than the sky. The startled eyes of men turn to her, voices of different accents and different languages tell her to retreat, in a tone which makes it clear she is nothing but disruption. She is amazed by her own fearlessness. She darts forward, picks up the turban and places it on her head. It’s a little loose, but only a little. As she pushes it down onto her skull her palms encounter some kind of band between the fabric and the hard cap. Very slowly – head up, eyes meeting the eyes of an Indian soldier with his gun trained on her – she steps back into the battalion of Peshawari men. One of the men, his beard white, pats her shoulder.

– I’m sorry for your loss. But go now. Quickly.

He thinks mourning has propelled her here, the turban a memento of a fallen brother or father. Or husband, if she appears old enough for a husband.

The men are content to step aside and let her through now that she’s retreating. As she approaches the watch shop she sees that Najeeb Gul is moving towards her, his eyes on her turban, then on her face, his expression telling her she is a miracle. Diwa runs towards him. So full of elation she doesn’t understand the cracking noises, the screams, the sharp pain in her spine; there is only time to wonder if Najeeb Gul’s arms are reaching for her or the object on her head as he, too, stumbles and falls.