Текст книги "A God in Every Stone"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

– What will our mother say if I come home without money because I’ve been listening to silly tales all day? Go, get out of here. Let me work.

– You’re afraid of everything, Najeeb shouted, and ran away before Qayyum could respond.

Qayyum looked down at his hand, rubbing his thumb against the bump on the side of his finger formed by holding the quill in place. It had replaced the old rifle-calluses. How could Qayyum tell his brother that he hadn’t walked away from the Storyteller because of the crush of people, or the threat of a rifle to his eye. He left because for a moment he pictured himself in the uniform of the British Indian Army, and what he felt was shame.

A tarpaulin flew off a donkey-cart. The load of hand mirrors caught the sun, threw circles of light up onto surrounding facades whose windows flung the glare back into the eyes of the men on the street – camel-drivers, Victoria-drivers, merchants, customers, wayfarers. Dazzling chaos. A bolting donkey, an upturned cart of turnips, a man walking into a tower of brass urns; the blur of other things falling, colliding at the periphery of Qayyum’s vision. He closed his eyes for a long moment, but without any feeling of panic. Weeks of working in the bazaar, watching its everyday courtesies and camaraderie, and other people had ceased to be a threat.

In just the second or two that he wasn’t looking everything moved quickly into aftermath. No signs of serious damage, but in the absence of tragedy there was nothing to leash the frayed tempers of summer. Men were stepping out of shops, dismounting bicycles, pointing at scrapes and cuts and dented brass. Ugliness in the air; any moment there would be fists or blades.

A young boy who had been trying to sell Qayyum an oxtail fly whisk from the tray he was carrying in his too small arms set it down on the pavement beside the knife-sharpener, dashed across the street to the donkey-cart, lifted out a mirror which he angled so that it struck reflected sunlight into the eyes of a man whose raised voice, directed at the cowering donkey-cart driver, was on the brink of violence. The man shielded his eyes, turned in the direction of the boy, anger swerving. Laughing, the boy lowered the mirror, his little hand covering part of its surface so that a circle of light appeared over the man’s genital area, a hand silhouetted within, groping about as though trying to catch hold of something that wasn’t there.

Raucous laughter broke out in the street; the boy darted back to the pavement, made a noise of indignation at the flies which had settled on his whisks, picked up the tray and was surrounded by customers, including the knife-sharpener. The man who had knocked over the brass urns helped the donkey-cart driver replace the tarpaulin, and the man who had been on the receiving end of the boy’s teasing pointed towards his groin and said, First time, even my wife thought a thing that size must be my thigh, which turned him into a hero, though not because anyone believed the brag.

How Qayyum loved these men. Why had he ever chosen to live his life away from them?

He was still smiling when another boy approached, hair matted, clothes tattered. He held out a piece of paper and Qayyum told him to sit down; he had the look of someone who planned to race off without paying as soon as Qayyum finished reading. That almost never happened – people seemed to want to keep hold of anything addressed to them, even if they couldn’t understand the symbols on the page – but there were always exceptions. But the boy just laughed and walked away, leaving Qayyum holding the piece of paper.

Your brother from the orchards has survived hell. His blade of ice will melt at your approach, and yours only.

Qayyum cupped his hands together, the paper a grainy lining between them, reciting a prayer. A missing limb, a missing eye – these were the only reasons an Indian soldier would be discharged and find himself in Peshawar again, but Allah, let it be a miracle; let it be something else. He placed his fingertip against his glass eye, astonished to find it wet with tears.

Kalam strode towards him through the orchard, arms swinging. An eye then, oh Kalam, if only I had been there to wash your wounds, to be a light in the terrifying darkness of day, to string together in whispers the names of all the gates of the Walled City as though they were prayer-beads. But just before the other man embraced him he saw that both his eyes were eyes, no artifice of glass. It could mean only one thing: it wasn’t his body, but his mind which had been destroyed.

– The English have decided to stop recruiting Pashtuns.

Kalam bit into a plum, arching his neck forward so that the spray of juice wouldn’t stain his clothes.

– For the Army? Qayyum asked.

The other man nodded, wiping his mouth against his sleeve so that all the juice he had carefully kept off his clothes was now a dark smear near his wrist. It was the closest thing to madness he’d displayed in these several minutes during which he’d asked so considerately about Qayyum’s time in Brighton, the sea voyage, the return to Peshawar.

– Too many of us mutiny, too many desert. Particularly when we’re asked to fight our Muslim brothers. Don’t look indignant, Lance-Naik – you should be proud to belong to a people who won’t kill their brothers at the command of their oppressors.

Kalam grinned as he said it, a piece of pulp between his front teeth.

– Perhaps I belong to a people who desert because they know they can hide with the tribes where the English will never find them and have them court-martialled.

– So you’ve guessed it. Yes, I go tomorrow to my mother’s people and do what must be done.

– What is it that must be done?

– Jihad.

This morning had brought fresh rumours of the bloody battles between the English and the tribesmen under Haji Sahib in the mountain passes and foothills; on his way to the orchard Qayyum had walked past a battalion heading towards the hills, and the sound of feet marching in unison tore at his heart as if they were the footsteps of a beloved walking deliberately away. He said this to Kalam to take that look of fierceness from his face, but his friend raised his hands sharply to ward off the words.

– You’ll fight for the Europeans who want to keep their land away from invaders but when your brothers want the same thing you turn the invaders into your beloved.

– Kalam, remember that sepoy who stood up in the moonlight and started running towards the Germans, screaming a sound with no words in it?

– Of course I remember.

– Why do you remind me of him?

Kalam placed a hand on Qayyum’s face, thumb stroking the scars beside his eye.

– Come with me.

The debt Qayyum owed Kalam was immense – he couldn’t say no, and the other man knew it. But when he hesitated Kalam merely shook his head, and dropped his hand.

– Still a loyal soldier, Lance-Naik?

– No, Kalam. Not still any kind of soldier.

– But your loyalty is with the English.

– My loyalty is with my friend Kalam. And I know if a deserter is captured while attacking English troops he’ll be executed.

– They won’t capture me.

So quickly Qayyum barely had time to know what was happening, Kalam spun him round and caught him in a neck-hold, the tip of a knife pressed against Qayyum’s breast.

– See, Lance-Naik? I know all their tricks, but they don’t know all mine. And if their bullets find me, let them find me. I’m not afraid.

– I am. What is the world if Kalam isn’t in it?

Kalam loosened his grip, pulled Qayyum closer to him. They stood that way for a while looking towards the plum trees, the mountains, the clear blue skies. There was peace here in the orchards, peace that could never be found in Peshawar with its constantly parading troops and bandoliered tribesmen. When Kalam’s hand started to wander, Qayyum batted it away – it was almost ritualistic, the advance and the rejection, a shadow of the past in which there was heat in both actions. It was almost comforting. With everyone else in his life there was an abrupt severing – the Qayyum of before distinct from the Qayyum of now; but with Kalam, his life was restored to continuity.

– I tried to come to you at Kitchener.

– I know; I heard you. But I thought you were a dream made of morphine. It was only later they told me it was you, and that you believed I’d been sent away.

– Stay here. Pretend you aren’t the deserter, Kalam Khan. Tend the orchards with your father. Find a beautiful wife and have lots of sons.

– It’s a lovely dream.

– If we can live nightmares we can live dreams.

A pause as Kalam thought about it, and then a booming laugh.

– Lance-Naik, sir, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.

– I know, I know!

The pleasure of a comrade. On the days when he felt adrift in his life how would he stop himself from travelling up into the hills for a day in Kalam Khan’s company? But he knew the laws which prohibited anyone in British India from communicating with members of hostile tribes. Once Kalam joined his cousins, the Mohmands, even writing to him would be a crime.

– Then will you do something else for me, brother? Kalam said.

– Anything.

– When it’s planting season will you come to help my father if he sends for you? He used to hire someone, with the money I sent him from the Army, but now. .

– Of course I will. For as long as he needs me.

Poor Kalam – twenty-one years old, a fugitive with nothing to offer the men with whom he was seeking refuge except his skill at war, no way to fulfil the obligations of a son, and no way back, no possible way back.

Qayyum rolled a leaf between his palms, releasing its scent, and saw his own life as blessed.

It was always night in the Street of Courtesans, the alley too narrow to admit sunlight. Qayyum wrapped the end of his turban around his face as he walked towards it, hunching his shoulders to make his gait unrecognisable. At this time of the afternoon only the ice-sellers did good business, so most of the doors lining the alley were open to display the women lying against pillows, propped on one elbow.

Two men waited outside a closed door, talking about the massacre of English troops by Haji Sahib’s forces at Rustam. They swept down the Ambela Pass and attacked the camp, the shorter of the two said – so many dead and wounded soldiers that sixteen trucks were required to shift them to the nearest hospital. Allah keep Haji Sahib safe, said the other, and the short man threw his hands up in despair.

– How can I stay here now that you’ve mentioned Allah’s name. You bastard, you just want to get rid of me so you’re next in line. Hey, you. Scarred-man.

Qayyum had slowed to listen to their conversation – Haji Sahib’s forces included Kalam – and now found the short man speaking to him, saying, Take my place. The taller man withdrew a dagger from his belt. Qayyum shook his head – a refusal to one man, a warning to the other – but his curiosity couldn’t stop him from asking the next question.

– So many open doors, why are you waiting outside this one?

From across the street one of the courtesans called out:

– Some Pathans lick the shoes of the English, some want to lick other things.

Along the alley the sound of laughter from the courtesans. Any further questions Qayyum had were cut short by the door opening. A man scented in rosewater stepped out, and the woman in the room came up to the doorway, one hand on her hip, and flicked the other hand in dismissal at the courtesan across the street. Qayyum stepped back, and further back, his spine pressing against the wall. It was an Englishwoman in a long white dress, her arms encased in gloves, a bonnet on her head. Eyes grey, skin lightly freckled, age no more than twelve or thirteen.

– Good afternoon, gentlemen.

She spoke in English but her accent was of Peshawar, and brought with it the understanding that she was only part-English, her father probably a customer of one of the women in the alley.

– We haven’t met.

Still speaking English, she stepped forward to Qayyum, her gloved hand extended. The man who said he couldn’t stay was glowering, no longer willing to give up his place. Qayyum looked at the extended hand, and found that was a useful way to keep from looking at her face, the monstrous childishness and knowledge of it.

– Don’t want to play, good-looking?

He squeezed his eyes closed as she brought her face closer to his, a scent on her breath which he didn’t want to think about. Then something moist – her mouth, her tongue? – was on the scars near his eye.

– You taste of death.

Qayyum turned and ran down the alley, the mocking laughter of the Walled City’s fantasies following after him.

The old man walked down the street in the drab and green of the 40th Pathans; the uniform hung off his frame, rolled up at ankle and wrist. He stopped to look closely at Qayyum’s father who was reading a letter out loud to one of his long-standing clients, a man almost completely deaf into whose ear the elder Gul spoke, the palm of his hand resting lightly on the back of the man’s head. The old man stepped around the almost-embracing duo at the desk with the buffalo horn, neck craning in an attempt to see something hidden from his view. Qayyum, sitting a few feet away on the ground where he’d been relegated since his father’s return, raised a hand to draw the man’s attention to himself.

– Can I help you while my father’s busy?

The old soldier came up close, touched the side of Qayyum’s face, just beneath his missing eye.

– A letter, will you write a letter for me?

The old man lowered himself onto his haunches, not sitting across from Qayyum but close to his elbow, so Qayyum had to twist his body round to face him.

– Address it to Sepoy Hakimullah, Mardan. We served together.

– I’ll need more than that for the address.

– Just write.

– But. .

– Write!

Qayyum picked up the pen, and waited. The man cleared his throat, held up one hand, the back of his palm facing Qayyum, and began to orate rather than speak.

– My brother, today we have the news that those brave Sikhs who were put on trial in Lahore for mutiny have received their sentences including death for some. I know if you and I had still been serving we would have been among the honourable soldiers who were ready to support their plans for revolt. But why call it revolt when really it is a fight for freedom?

Qayyum placed his pen on the ground and shook his head, no. The new laws brought into effect to help stamp out rebellion could have him jailed just for writing down this treason, and he would certainly lose his pension. But the old man continued speaking.

– You might remember that the trial itself started on 26 April of this year. On that same date our old regiment was getting torn to pieces on a battlefield in a distant place called Vipers, not knowing what they were dying for, not asking why they were dying for it. Wouldn’t they have been braver, and wiser, to fight for their own land, their own freedom?

– What is this? Why are you saying all this?

– Kalam Khan sent me, glass-eye.

Qayyum picked up the paper he’d been writing on and tore it into long shreds, standing up as he did so, turning his back to the man.

– Is this how you treat a messenger from the man who risked his life for you?

– What do you want from me?

– I want to help you remove these chains from your feet. It’s what Kalam wants too.

– And how will you do that?

– I’ll send you to the Ottoman Empire.

– For what?

– To help turn the Indian prisoners of war who are being held there. You’re a soldier – they’ll listen when you tell them they’re fighting for the wrong side. If they agree to join the Indian Volunteer Corps they’ll win their freedom from the prisoner-of-war camps, and then they’ll win all our freedom from English tyranny.

– What? The what? Indian Volunteer Corps?

– You are so blind, glass-eye. It gains numbers every day – our brothers, the Turks, promise when the time comes for Ottoman troops to sweep through Persia into India the Volunteer Corps, led by Indian generals, will be part of the army. You could be one of those men, Lance-Naik. A general in the army of Indian liberation.

– You must be mad to come and speak to me of this.

– Kalam said you’re one of us, you just don’t know it yet. He said if you betray us he’ll slit his own throat.

– Tell Kalam to go to the Ottoman Empire then.

– He’s already found his place in the world, with Haji Sahib, attacking the English here. When the Volunteer Corps comes through the Khyber Pass the two forces will combine. And what is your place in the world, Lance-Naik? Under a tree, writing letters from a man to his brother complaining about flour prices?

A hand gripped the old man’s shoulder, and Qayyum wondered for how long his father had been listening.

– But there is nothing in the world more important than flour prices, his father said. Son, why don’t you go home. Your mother needed help with some matter.

Out here, where he was a man whose table had a built-in inkhorn, his father possessed authority. This was his place in the world, a table beneath a tree. The old man quietened, his fierce gaze changing into the slightly resigned expression of someone who realises the moment in which he could impose his will on the situation has passed. He lifted and dropped his shoulders and turned to walk away just as Qayyum realised that the uniform wasn’t hanging on the man because his youthful frame had withered away but because it was Kalam’s uniform, with stains near its collar that were Qayyum’s blood, spelling out a clear message: Repay the debt you owe me.

September 1915

Najeeb walked through the Hall of Statues, a prince visiting his frozen brothers, all under an enchantment which it was his destiny alone to lift. Silence, save for the rotating ceiling fan and his voice speaking to the artefacts in his simple Greek sentences which they all seemed to understand: the winged sea-monster; ichthyocentaurs and fish-tailed bulls; Tritons kneeling before the Buddha; Indra and Brahma adoring Him; a winged figure seated on a fragment of an Achaemenid column, looking out of deep-set eyes. A centaur bearing a shield. The Buddha receiving an image of the Buddha.

Of all the astonishing things in the Peshawar Museum the most astonishing of all was the Pashtun man in an English suit who walked through the Hall of Statues with an air of ownership and knew more about each artefact than even Miss Spencer. Mr Wasiuddin, Native Assistant at the Peshawar Museum. Yes, why not, Miss Spencer had said when Najeeb asked her if one day that might be him. Then she crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair. No, why stop there? Najeeb Gul, Superintendent of the Archaeological Survey, Frontier Circle. It’s a step down from the Herodotus of Peshawar, of course, but it suits you just as well.

Pulling open the doorway to return to the ordinary world, he turned to look over his shoulder. A giant Buddha raised his hand to him in farewell. Solemnly, Najeeb returned the gesture before stepping out. The white sky of summer had finally softened into blue that September morning, allowing for loitering – the weekends, once a time of delight, were now a Miss Spencerless wasteland. He walked towards the station where Qayyum had made his heart contract when he stepped off a train with the face of a stranger, and climbed up onto the railway bridge. From here, the whole of the Cantonment was spread out – wide streets in straight lines, single-storeyed houses surrounded by gardens for people who viewed other people as nuisance rather than refuge, automobiles which looked like steel insects without wings, barracks for soldiers from whom Qayyum had started to veer away, the Governor’s House across from the Museum with its gardens as large as a park which must mean the Governor really disliked other people, and everywhere, Englishmen and women whose mouths formed sounds in inexplicable ways (Miss Spencer always elongated the space between the ‘n’ and the ‘j’ in his own name). Since Miss Spencer it had started to seem less like a place in which he didn’t belong, but even so it was only when he crossed the bridge and walked the short distance to the Walled City that he stopped feeling as if he were in a classroom with a teacher he didn’t yet know well enough to avoid annoying.

He walked through the Street of Storytellers, stopping to listen to snatches of this badala or that, but nothing held him in place. All these old stories, not old enough. Perhaps he should go and find Qayyum. It was a heavy feeling to know that this felt like a duty rather than the most wonderful option in the world. His brother looked much as he used to before he went to war, it was true – the redness and swelling had gone from his eye, the scars around it were mere flecks which looked as if a bird had walked on charcoal and rested one claw on Qayyum’s face before flying away, and most days Najeeb even forgot that half his brother’s gaze was glass. But despite the healed wounds, his entire appearance was altered. It’s because he wears different expressions now, their mother had tried to explain to her youngest child. Among the new expressions was that look of disquiet any time someone mentioned the English which meant that Najeeb must keep the most important part of his life from the most important person in his life.

An unexpected sound through the thrum of the street. A woman, calling out:

– Men of Peshawar! Oh, you men of the market! How much will you give me for my daughter?

Najeeb hopped up onto the wooden leg of a rope-bed meant for a storyteller’s audience, looking over the heads of the men who were glancing this way and that at the scattering of women in burqas on the street, trying to pinpoint the origin of the shouting. The other women saw her first, all moving closer together and angling their bodies in her direction as if this were a dance they’d been practising. The men’s heads turned – everyone was silent now, and the caged songs from the nearby Street of Partridge Lovers filled the air – and there she was, a very tall uncovered woman, her hair wild, holding out a child in her arms.

A moment, no more, and a man in a long-tailed turban seized her by the elbow.

– Don’t do this! came a cry from a balcony looking down on the street. The carpet-seller who was a particular favourite with the English was leaning over the balustrade, one palm extended in appeal. The woman looked straight up at the carpet-seller.

– In Allah’s name, save us, she said. But she left the carpet-seller no choice but to look away from her uncovered face, and as soon as he did so the man holding onto her pulled her away.

Curious, Najeeb moved among the knots of men who hadn’t resumed their business and were, instead, either glancing up at the balcony or at the place where the woman had stood.

Before long he had the story. The man with the long-tailed turban was in debt, and refused to borrow money from any of the Hindu money-lenders because his piety wouldn’t allow him to accept the idea of paying interest. So he’d come to an agreement with one of the prosperous merchants – in exchange for the money his infant daughter would be married to the merchant’s son when she was of age. You’d think the man must be some kind of magician to have acquired both money for himself and a husband for his daughter. But the truth was that the merchant’s son had some demon inside him. He’d killed his first wife; the second had killed herself. A third wife had recently been found, but she would certainly be dead or mad before that child grew old enough to leave her parents’ home. And the carpet-seller? He was brother to the first wife.

Ever since Qayyum had returned from England Najeeb had started to feel that the world was filled with sadness. He saw it now everywhere. There, the boy with the crippled arm looking into a cage filled with clipped-winged birds; the man so stooped with age he had to carry a tilted mirror in his hand in order to see the reflection of the world above knee-level; the carpet-seller still on his balcony, making gestures of entreaty as though rehearsing what he could have said, what he should have said, what he would most certainly say if he had another chance to save that child from his sister’s fate.

There had been a moment when the child had looked directly at Najeeb, her green eyes bewildered. She couldn’t have been more than three or four years old, and already it had been determined that her life would be filled with cruelty.

I know the stories of men from twenty-five hundred years ago, but I’ll never know what happens to you.