He can see the great helpless rage on his face, the eyes filled with detestation as he inhales long noisy draughts of air. The American soldiers are not allowed to go more than ten kilometres into Waziristan or Pakistan — so he is clearly used to doing things his own way.
‘Vere iz gurl vere iz gurl vere iz gurrl,’ Mikal murmurs to himself as he climbs out. He is shocked that night has fallen, taken aback that he has done everything in the darkness. There is the almost electronic noise of the insects. The moon is out and its light is falling undiluted onto the pale vastness around him. It is as though snow has fallen on the desert.
*
It’s past midnight when he concedes that there is no way to circumvent the toll booth. Leaving the pickup behind, he walks out onto the ledge above the road and squats and examines the land to the east, to the west and north, the road cutting through it. They have placed pieces of wood on the road outside the booth and set them on fire. When the wind changes he can smell the tar of the road burning.
He comes back and gets into the pickup, lowers his forehead onto the steering wheel and closes his eyes for a few seconds. Sleep overpowers him and he dreams that the American soldier has disappeared from the back of the pickup, the sloughed-off chains lying there on the bed. In the dream he panics that he will be attacked by the soldier from any direction and he stands paralysed in the darkness. Then he sees the American, sleepwalking, and he watches as the man approaches and gets into the back of the pickup and carefully begins to rechain himself.
He awakens from the dream but remains in the same position, brow touching the steering wheel, and it’s a while before he realises that he can hear a melody. He raises his head. He switches on the flashlight and looks in through the broken opening to see that the soldier is singing to himself. He gets out and stands looking at him from the tailgate, listening to the song shining in the darkness, a sudden Paradise of sound. The man doesn’t stop or meet Mikal’s gaze, the rapt concentration on his face unchanging as he forms the English words which at one moment seem to be an ecstasy of praise for everything he knows — he, Mikal, everything all humans know in fact — and in the next moment a lament, by turns tender and bloody, a weapon forged out of the steel of woe stabbing at him from the very heart of suffering. Mikal wants to cut open the words with a razor and examine their insides, their secret colours, and he doesn’t want to move for fear of breaking the spell and after a while he begins to recognise a few phrases that recur, and after a while he feels that there is nothing else at all in the wide hills and desert but that song and its careful singing and its subtle colours of permanence, the unafraid resonance connecting the two of them across the heat-thinned air.
*
What he decides to do. He will take the soldier off the pickup, still in chains, and hide him somewhere in the landscape. Then he himself will drive up to the toll booth — let them examine the pickup if they want. Moving on he’ll park the vehicle, and return on foot through the hills to the place where he left the American. Bring him back to the pickup and drive on.
He is not sure whether he should wait till dawn to do all this, sleep for a few hours and reconsider everything freshly. He sits thinking, one hand on the leopard, the ribcage rising and falling softly with each precious breath. Tomorrow will be yet another day without him beginning his journey to Heer. He wonders whether he should tie the cub next to the American, because they might want to confiscate it.
With no warning a blazing jewel appears from the darkness, holding itself almost stationary before his eyes for a moment. A pinch of humble dust, the firefly goes by outside and he watches it making its weightless turns for as long as he can. He looks away from the miraculous sight and back at the American, wondering if there are fireflies in his country. Looking through the broken window between them he is suddenly overwhelmed, not by any emotion he knows, suddenly feeling himself unequal to so wide a chase, so remorseless a life. He is shocked to find himself close to weeping, a few initial sobs escaping. He wipes the tears but can’t stop and he covers his face with his incomplete hands and weeps loudly, uncontrollably. He reaches out a hand and places it on the man’s shoulder and, his mouth full of failed words, tells him about Naheed, the sidelong gold of her look, and about Jeo, and about his incarceration by the Americans and by the warlord who mutilated his hands and sold him to the Americans for $5,000. About Rohan’s blindness. About the death of Basie.
‘I am sorry I killed your countrymen.’
The American is trying to look over his shoulder, or is looking at the hand with the missing finger on his shoulder. All these things are painful for him to know and he wonders how the man would feel about them if he understood them. And so he stops. Not wanting to hurt him more than he has to. Emotions disrupting thoughts, he withdraws his hand eventually and sits facing the front for some minutes.
*
He drives onto the road half a mile from the toll booth, the speed low, looking to either side of him with a flashlight in search of a location where he might leave the American and the leopard. A wind is carrying the dust from this side of the road to the other, low over the tarmac. When he rounds a curve and sees a toll booth located ten yards ahead of him, it’s too late to turn back. He hadn’t been able to see this booth from the ledge. A small bulb is lit outside it and the man sitting on a chair outside has risen on seeing Mikal. He is waving for him to stop.
He should have known there would be more than one booth. The entire area is a patchwork of clans, full of rivalries even though descended from a common ancestor who had met Muhammad in Arabia and had been charged by him to take Islam back to Waziristan.
The toll booth is actually a well-built square room of plywood, with a corrugated-iron roof. A gleaming black Corolla station wagon and a Pajero are parked beside it. Mikal lifts the dozing cub from his lap and places it at the base of the passenger seat as fast as he can and covers it with a rag and brings the vehicle to a stop. The man’s beard is awry, his eyes blinking in the headlights. He is holding a tired-looking red rose and has an ancient.45 automatic slung at full cock on a belt at his right hip. Behind him the door to the room is open and Mikal can see a number of sleeping figures. The man’s eyes take inventory of everything about Mikal.
‘Get out of the vehicle. What’s your name?’
‘Mikal. I am on my way to Megiddo.’
‘Come out. What’s in the back?’
‘My mother and sister and my wife,’ Mikal says as he climbs down, closing the door behind him swiftly.
The man sniffs the petals of the rose, spinning the flower very slowly under his nostrils. ‘Where are you going with them at this hour?’
‘We were meant to be home several hours ago but the pickup broke down.’