She points to the boulders and the screen of bushes on the other side of the road. Rohan sees that behind the leaves and branches there is a low mud wall.
‘Go there.’
Rohan returns to the book. Number 2,279: I was given the following words of the Prophet by Osman Ibn Ani Sheeba, who was given them by Hasheem, who was given them by Obaidullah bin Abu Bakr bin Uns, who was given them by Hameed Tavail, who in turn was given them by Uns bin Malik. The Prophet said, ‘Always help your (Muslim) brother, whether he is a tyrant or victim.’
The woman is hovering and now touches his shoulder. ‘It is a graveyard. The body of a boy who died fighting the Americans in Afghanistan was brought out and is buried here. He is a martyr and will intercede on your behalf with Allah. Go and ask Mikal for your suffering to be alleviated.’
Rohan closes the book and places it in his shoulder bag and stands up. He crosses the road and enters the graveyard that contains about a hundred souls, a few decaying tombs and thorn trees. The mountains loom overhead vertiginously, the land and slopes marked with evidence of the lost sea, the effort of currents, waves, springs, streams and rivers. Verses of the Koran are on every headstone — as though the graves are quoting them, carrying on a conversation with one another using nothing but holy words. One mound just on the other side of the boundary wall is at least ten yards long, heaped with bright flowers, river soil with pieces of freshwater shells, and chips of soft blue slate quarried from the nearby hills. A group of women is reciting verses of the Koran over the mound. A man is lighting an incense stick at its head, the smoke rising in sluggish blue strands through the cold air.
‘He was a giant.’ A woman looks up at Rohan as he approaches.
‘He wasn’t,’ the man with the incense stick corrects her, walking the ten yards to light the ones at the other end. ‘He was of normal height, but he became this size on the battlefield.’
The tombstone is carved with stars along the edges. There is Mikal’s name, the date of birth, and of death — the day after he and Jeo went to Afghanistan.
‘They say he brought down six fighter jets single-handedly and saved thirty women from being ravished by American soldiers.’
He stands looking at the blossoms piled onto the boy. The dazzle of the sun is in his eyes and his body feels suddenly tired. Claw prints of an eagle were found heading away from the martyr, the warrior saint, someone tells him. His soul must have been an eagle.
How did Mikal’s body end up here? The mayhem and chaos of war. He looks up at the cliffs. The vegetation everywhere is profuse; after the level of the sea decreased this was a tropical marsh, the resort of rhinoceros, flamingo and tiger, thick with reeds, rushes and conifers. Under his breath he reads the verse of the Koran that is etched onto the ruby. Wealth and offspring are transitory adornments of the nearer life. How long he stands there in that disordered state of mind he doesn’t know, coming to himself only when he hears Abdul calling out his name from the other side of the wall.
*
Through hillside, across bridges, through a dust storm a mile long, and through streams in which float — by the dozen — the shaved-off beards of fleeing al-Qaeda militants, the journey to the destination in Afghanistan takes seventeen hours. In deep twilight they cross a broad flat valley with a river and river flats in it, every bit of it scorched black where a Daisy Cutter bomb had been dropped, reducing everything to ash, pumice, lava, the sides of the hills torn up into segments, and scattered over it all is the yellow haze of the unrisen moon, the cold night falling on them out of the east, the stars beginning their slide through the black slopes. It looks like the site of a cosmic incursion such as a meteorite, not the work of men. The US casualties number twelve in the two-month war, whereas countless thousands of Afghanistanis have perished, fighters as well as bystanders, and Rohan doesn’t know who will speak the complicated truth, and he watches with attention as though at some point in the future he himself will be asked to tell what he has seen. Towards the end of the journey a convoy of American soldiers goes past their vehicle. He wonders if he can ask them to help secure the release of the boys imprisoned by the warlord. He watches the convoy disappear just as the car radio brings news that a British Muslim has been arrested trying to blow up a passenger airliner over the Atlantic Ocean with explosives hidden in his shoes.
*
Arriving at a compound at 3 a.m., they are shown into a room full of the odour of dust and are told to spend the remains of the night there. The walls are of grey cement and hundreds of broken statues lie in heaps on the floor. The Buddha and the various people from his life — torsos, arms, feet and faces of all sizes. He looks at the exact arc of the eyebrow made above a man’s eye by the carver’s chisel. The flowers as though growing out of the hair on a woman’s head. There is barely room for Rohan and the bird pardoner to stand, and they clear a space by stacking a number of the pieces onto each other, the bird pardoner lying down against a yard-long fragment of drapery — hewn from the skirts of a nymph or temple dancer. As she lay dying, Rohan remembers burning a sketch of a Bodhisattva statue that Sofia had made. And he knows some people in the neighbourhood, on hearing the news that his vision is slowly deteriorating, comment that it is Allah’s retribution for tormenting her during her last hours. ‘He didn’t want to see what she had painted, now he won’t be able to see the real things.’
He falls asleep looking at the photograph on the far wall. The warlord is shaking hands with an American colonel. The date on the frame says it was taken soon after the Taliban regime was toppled last month. The opposite of war is not peace but civilisation, and civilisation is purchased with violence and cold-blooded murder. With war. The man must earn millions of dollars for guarding the NATO supply convoys as they pass through his area, and for the militia he must have raised to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda soldiers alongside American Special Forces.
He wakes up before the stars are down and says his predawn prayers. He had slept on the palm of a seven-foot hand, using the swollen base of the thumb as his pillow. He thinks he hears shouts of ‘Nail! Nail!’ from some nearby room and he interrupts his prayers and moves from point to point within the compound’s darkness, but the howling has stopped, nothing but the waning moon overhead casting his faint shadow on the ground, and the clear chart of the constellations that makes him think of Mikal, the bone geometry of stars.
*
A man with grave coal-black eyes enters the room, late in the morning, and asks Rohan and the bird pardoner to follow him. Guided by him they descend into the warlord’s underground prison, going along the buried hallways lined on both sides with barred cells. There is a large pool through one wide arch, but it is full of stored gasoline, the grimy walls painted with the still-beautiful flowers and parakeets and bulbuls from when it must have been used for indoor swimming. There are pumps to put the gasoline into tins for vehicles or electricity generators. As they continue along the hallways, shadow-people thrust their arms through the bars of the cells and shake dirty beakers and call out, ‘Water.’ The place smells of sweat, urine and excrement, of rotting wounds and flesh. These prisoners must all be insignificant, because the important ones are handed over to the Americans for $5,000 each.
A barred door is unlocked and the guide motions for the occupant to step out. The boy who emerges is in a daze, standing at an angle in the half dark, and the man pushes him towards the bird pardoner. He wears a dirty shalwar kameez and is ghostly thin and his hands shake as he lifts them to wipe away tears. When the father embraces him the boy’s arms come out of the torn sleeves and Rohan sees that the skin is crisscrossed with deep cuts. Abdul keeps up the glad words of reunion but the child is silent, looking as though he would rather understand than speak.