The kitchen door creaks open at his touch and the first thing he notes is the spent cartridge on the tiled floor and he enters and walks through the room without a sound, the movements of the body honed down to the essential, the breath held. The door on the far side of the kitchen looks out onto the inner courtyard of the house and he peers through it, eyes surveying quickly. There is nobody and no light in any of the rooms lining the courtyard. Everywhere there is the red light of the setting sun as though the place is submerged in water-thinned blood.
He withdraws into the kitchen and lifts the cartridge from the floor and studies it for a long time.
He had glimpsed the car belonging to Akbar’s brother, parked on the other side of the courtyard, and taking a rag from a shelf he goes out to it at a walking crouch. He tears off the wing mirror from the car’s body, wrapping the cloth around it to muffle the noise, a fast decisive twist like breaking the neck of a rabbit.
He uses the mirror to inspect the rooms before entering them, sending it in at the end of his arm from each doorway.
Several walls are scarred with bullets. The phones have no dial tone. He is about to switch on the light but then stops himself. Instead he plugs in the clothes iron and touches its base after ten seconds to see if it is getting warm. It stays cold so the electricity has been cut off.
The three dogs are missing from the front of the gun factory and as he walks through the long grass mosquitoes appear, abdomens swollen with sucked blood, and he doesn’t know whose blood it might be. Inside the factory, the part of the floor before the furnace is covered with ashes of burnt money. An area the size of six or seven prayer mats. The patterns of ink that had been printed on the banknotes and the words, portraits and landmarks appear grey against the black of the crinkled paper — greys of various tints, depending on the original colour of the ink. Blue-grey. Orange-grey. Green-or red-grey.
His toes reduce one complete rectangle of blackness to a smear of black dust and as he moves around he is watched by the eye on each dollar bill.
The kitchen is filled with soft twilight shadows when he returns. He lights a lantern, almost wincing as the flame grows in the glass globe and the amount of light increases around him, as though someone is speaking louder than is prudent. He turns down the flame. The bag with the money has remained hanging from his shoulder. He lifts the terracotta lid of the milk pot to find that the milk has gone bad. He fills a glass with water and stands drinking in the semidarkness. There are chapattis stiff as cardboard in a basket but they can become like that within a day, so he can’t really work out how old they are.
At last he picks up the lamp and goes to the south wing and he stays in there for the better part of an hour, trying to reconstruct what has occurred there. The metal door at the entrance has been blown off and he sniffs the hinges to determine what explosive was used. The battle seems to have been fiercest here. The room that had contained boxes of leaflets and other literature is completely empty, the glass in the windows smashed, the casements splintered. There have been explosions in several rooms. Rockets, bombs. The soldiers must have thrown in grenades before entering. Shot through doors. He moves through the wing like a sapper, room by room, and only when he unlatches the very last door does he find two of the three Airedales. The bodies have entered rigor mortis. They are lying a few yards apart in the middle of the floor — bootprints join one pool of blood with the other and then walk away towards a window. There is no sign of the third dog.
Returning to the kitchen he takes one of the dried chapattis and eats it with the curried potatoes and mutton he finds in a bowl in the dead refrigerator, chewing the stiff pieces until they soften. He finds a jar of carrots in sugar syrup and eats them in the dark light, lifting the long red pieces to his mouth two or three at a time, looking out through the window at the river flowing silently under the rising moon, the hatchery of stars in the most distant field of vision.
Wiping his hands on his trousers he walks into the women’s section. Quietly he calls out to the leopard several times as he goes deep into the inner sanctums. Silence surrounds him in her room and he feels it is the silence of a trap. He is enclosed in an immense thing and he breathes slowly to remain calm, telling himself it shouldn’t matter how deep the water is as long as you can swim.
He falls asleep on the kitchen floor, using the shoulder bag as a pillow, and wakes several hours later looking up at the dark blue sky. He has no memory of it but sometime in the night he had left the kitchen and come out onto the courtyard and resumed his sleep in the grass and now he lies looking up at the constellations in the warmly burning canopy and he feels the earth pressing up against his spine, sustaining him, lifting him inside the nocturnal space. He is held against the taut trembling solidity of the planet, the enormous living curve of the world under his body.
Even though it is still night, he walks out of the house through the kitchen door, the bag hanging from his shoulder, the moon casting blades of light on the river’s surface. Going along the water he comes out to the road leading to Megiddo, and halfway along it he takes the narrow path which ends in the yellow flowers. He can smell them as he nears. It feels as though he hasn’t seen them for several months instead of several days. Above him the craters and canyons are clearly visible on the moon’s surface, and in the bluish light he walks through the flowers, still warm from the day’s heat, and on towards the low light-capped hills in the distance, and three-quarters of an hour later he is crouched in the dry bed of a spring, watching the group of dark figures in the distance. He wonders if they are Americans. They are fifty yards away from him across a wide band of gravel. Between them there is a stand of small dark bushes. He moves forwards on elbows, the bag resting in the small of his back. They are moving slowly across the slope of the hill and seem to be searching the network of caves. Looking for terrorists. And suddenly a group of figures emerges from one cave and they run and struggle with the searchers. Each one as angry as a snake in an eagle’s claws. Some of them fall to the ground and the dust blows in the air and the wind brings him their shouts along with Arabic words of praise for Allah, which the apprehended figures utter at each bit of pain and each restraining grip. The Americans, if they are Americans, are completely silent as though their words and sounds are incapable of travelling through the air of this land. Their existence here generates electricity that he can feel on his skin and for a fraction of a second he believes he sees the glittering eyes of a white man in the moonlight. But now he knows that the searchers are Pakistani soldiers because he hears them begin to talk in Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto and Hindko. The prisoners will be handed over to the Americans and the Pakistani army will collect the reward. The Arabs have probably just arrived from Afghanistan and were hoping to join up with their companions who have already escaped to this area. It is even possible that they were on their way to Akbar’s house. Three of them have now run away down the hill towards the valley of flowers and five soldiers go after them, raising dust that shines palely under the moon, passing within twenty feet of where he lies, and they turn and move far out on the slope until they are the smallest of figures in the blue light and then they disappear.