‘I am hoping to drive through the darkness.’
‘He had something to do with the disappearance of your friend?’
‘I don’t know. I think so.’
‘If someone sees him they’ll cut off his head … and yours too probably, for not doing it yourself. Did you say his arm is broken?’
‘Do you know how to set bones?’ Jeo would have, he thinks with a pang.
‘Yes. But we shouldn’t stand here on the road. I don’t want to be seen tending to an American out in the open. They’ll shoot me too. I know people who don’t want to even look at a picture of them.’ The man turns to go back into the mosque. ‘Bring your vehicle to the back of the building. I’ll see if I can find some splints.’
‘And I would appreciate it if you could let me have an old sheet to cover him during the journey to Allah-Vasi. A burlap sack or something.’
Mikal brings the pickup to the back of the building to a dry river bed or a torrent that drains the hills in the rainy season, its limestone pebbles containing fossils. And the desert beyond is a dark wasteland of silence. With the water bottle he climbs up, holding it out as he moves forwards a step at a time. He unscrews the sky-blue cap with his teeth. The man is still. Mikal crouches and puts the bottle to the man’s mouth and begins slowly to pour water into his mouth. The eyes have stopped moving, trained firmly on Mikal. Then he begins to swallow. When the bottle is empty Mikal steps away and the man watches him, breathing deeply.
Some minutes later, the bearded man emerges from the mosque with a sheet, a fistful of wooden splints and strips of torn cloth to be used as binding. He hands Mikal the sheet and he opens it to see that it’s large enough to cover the soldier.
‘He’ll struggle while we set the arm but he won’t be able to free himself,’ Mikal tells the cleric.
‘Look at the size of his hands. If he gets loose he’ll snap your neck like a twig.’
‘Why are you doing the all-night reading of the Koran? Has something happened?’
‘My son is a cleric at a mosque not far away. He says the door to his mosque refused to open yesterday, not allowing anyone in. Allah is expressing His anger over some matter. Someone has committed an unconscionable deed in the vicinity and until he is forgiven the door won’t open.’ The man has tears in his eyes and he slowly wipes them away with his hands, ancient fingers doing ancient work. ‘It’s a catastrophe. No one knows what crime or sin lies behind the prohibition.’
The moment Mikal and the bearded man climb onto the bed, the American begins to struggle against his chains, thrashing inside the coils. The cleric stops fearfully but Mikal moves forward to demonstrate that the American has been rendered harmless by the chains. He rolls up the sleeve of the broken arm and the bearded man feels for the fractures. The American has not stopped growling with anger, the features of the face contorted in Mikal’s flashlight with spit seething between the lips. To inspect the shoulder bones for signs of harm, the old man loosens the collar of the American’s kameez and unfastens the front of the Kevlar vest. He is looking down the back, feeling with his fingertips, when he suddenly cries out in horror. ‘Allah, I seek refuge in You!’ When Mikal looks at the man’s back he too cannot help but catch his breath. There is a large tattoo on the skin:
The word covers the entire space between the shoulder blades, and they stand looking at it, the American continuing to struggle. It says ‘Infidel’.
But it is not in English, which would have meant that he had had it done for himself, or for others like him in his own country. It is in the Urdu and Pashto script so it is meant for people here. He is taunting. Boasting. I am proud to be an infidel, to be this thing you hate.
The cleric throws the splints away into the darkness. ‘Get him out of my sight.’
‘Please don’t tell anyone.’
‘Get that beast away from here.’ The man climbs down off the bed, shaking with rage. ‘They want to wound not only our flesh but our very souls.’
Mikal turns away rather than endure the man’s eyes. ‘I’ll leave. I’ll leave. Right this instant. But please don’t tell anyone.’
When he is behind the steering wheel the old man comes to his window and stands looking at him, as if looking for an answer. There is a confused pity in the cleric’s eyes too — why has the white man condemned himself in such a manner, daring to mark himself with the sign of His disapproval? Just before Mikal drives away the man says, ‘The West has dared to ask itself the question, What begins after God?’
*
Midnight, and he is moving through the hills with his eyes on a storm to the east, troubled flashes of brightness in the black sky, the dark shapes of the Pahari hills becoming visible for a moment and then disappearing and then the sound of thunder reaches him, strokes of lightning as fragile as filaments in a bulb. He enters a low pass in the westernmost spur of the Paharis and continues into the open desert. Once he sees the lights of an oncoming truck in the distance where the road cuts through the night. Half an hour later he passes through the last low cones of hills on that ground cracked like clay and after another half hour they are on the outskirts of Allah-Vasi. Before entering the town he gets out and covers the American with the cleric’s sheet. He removes the 9 mm pistol from the rucksack and conceals it in the waistband of his trousers. But then, feeling loath, he puts it back in the rucksack.
Running east to west, a street turns off at right angles to the main road, descending and becoming a wide earthen path, and he drives along it towards where Fatima’s sister lives. It’s almost 1 a.m. As he drives on slowly the dead silence of the night is broken by the roused dogs in various houses. He continues eastward until he recognises the door at which he had dropped off Fatima and he cuts the engine and sits looking at the house, the dogs continuing their din. He studies the school building next door, the arch above the gate carrying a saying of the Prophet. Seek knowledge. Even if you have to travel to China. He pushes the American’s rucksack deep under the passenger seat and gets out and makes sure the soldier is still covered with the bedsheet and then knocks on the large door to the house.
As he waits he puts the 9 mm back under his waistband.
It’s several minutes before someone answers from the other side of the door, asking curt, suspicious questions, and he identifies himself and eventually they let him in. The man of the house, Fatima’s brother-in-law, is holding a deer rifle and with him is his son, a young man a few years older than Mikal. Anxious to go back to sleep the son walks away immediately, leaving the father to deal with the inconsiderate, untimely guest. The father tells Mikal to bring the van in through the door and park it at the edge of the courtyard.
Mikal gets out holding the snow leopard and — looking around him, letting a breath go — says to the father who has just finished securing the door, ‘Uncle, I need to tell you something.’ The dogs in the neighbouring houses are still barking. Taking the man to the back of the pickup he pulls away the sheet in one swift movement to reveal the American sitting bowed in the mass of chains. Before the man can say anything there is a great howling from behind them, and when Mikal turns he sees that the son and five or six other young men are coming across the courtyard at great speed.
‘No, no, no, no,’ Mikal says under his breath.
He places his left hand on the low wall that encloses the pickup’s bed and vaults onto the bed, the cub held in the other hand. Reaching under his shirt he snatches the pistol from his waistband and kneels in front of the American, facing the oncoming men. The father has raised his hands to stay his son. Mikal looks over his shoulder to see that the American is sitting stock still behind him but with his eyes lit up intensely. The father moves towards his son who stops a yard away from him, and the other young men stop behind him. The father is physically a giant and has parental authority over the boy, but then suddenly the son lunges towards the pickup, scrabbling in the dirt of the courtyard, and in the skirmish Mikal hears the tearing of a shirt and he keeps the arm with the pistol fully extended, wondering if he would be able to pull the trigger, and then he notices that one of the other young men has gone around the pickup and is moving towards the American from that direction. There is nothing else for Mikal to do but fall back onto the American, to keep everything in sight, their two heads almost touching, feeling the mendicant’s chains dig in his back, swinging the gun first in one direction and then the other. Shouts and glaring eyes and a spiralling pandemonium.