The tarpaulin is on fire here and there in coin-sized patches and he rips it off the American, revealing him and his chains. Long fronds of steam are attached to them, taking fresh shapes with each new second, the sling and plaster cast smouldering a fevered red in one place.
The man gasping for breath. Mikal smothers the fire on the plaster and touches the chains to see if they are hot and then wipes the sweat and condensation from the American’s eyes with both hands. When he climbs down he sees the group of men ten feet away from the pickup, the hostile spirits of unfamiliar places, lit by the burning bridge. More than a dozen guns are pointed at him and at the American, and one of the men is holding the cub. He is as large and strong as the American. Mikal stands watching them with his hands placed on top of his head, all the exhaustions of his life catching up with him.
*
The room they are put into has the odour of dust. A hood has been placed over the American’s head, his chains removed. Mikal gave them the keys and several of the men climbed onto the pickup’s bed. Instead of freeing the American completely from the chains they unlocked the strands that bound him to the pickup and carried him down like a metal effigy, a chainmailed knight.
He doesn’t know where they are — Waziristan or Afghanistan. The wrists of both of them are tied behind their backs.
They travelled through the darkness until the modest birds of the desert had appeared in the young air, and the sun climbed in long lengths of gold, scarlet and silver, and begun to burn without diminishing, and it was midmorning by the time they arrived at a small village and drove through its central street full of rolling dust, past the mosque, the few shops, a dozen children and almost as many dogs running behind their truck. The truck stopped at the gate of the largest house on the other side of the village and one of the men from the back leapt out and opened the gate and the truck drove through into a large courtyard filled with towering she-date palms in flower.
They left them here in the room and went away. Mikal had refused to answer their questions concerning the American and had watched them puzzle over the situation. Should they release Mikal? He had after all captured the American and put him in chains. But what lay behind Mikal’s ambivalence, almost tenderness, towards the soldier?
Mikal looks at him in the semidarkness. The cloth bag over the head. The singed cast on the arm. The fabric of the shalwar kameez that is minutely wrinkled from where Mikal had wound the chains about him.
It is an underground room and the floor is of large unglazed clay tiles, badly out of line, like the walls. There is a high glassless window from which a shaft of light barely reaches the floor, most of it dissolving in the darkness above their heads. He sleeps in dreamless exhaustion and wakes some time later when the door at the top of the stairs opens. An old man is climbing down very slowly. He comes and stands looking at Mikal and the American. It is obvious that he doesn’t see very well. The silhouettes of several children have appeared at the door at the top of the stairs and the man walks to the lowest step and raises his antler-like hands, shouts at them and they scatter. He is small and dark and Mikal suddenly has a feeling that the smell of dust and soil is coming from him. As though in old age he has decided to slowly revert back to what humans are made of.
‘Do you want something to eat?’ he asks Mikal quietly.
Mikal nods. ‘What about the white man?’
The man’s black eyes look at the cloaked head. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ He takes a step closer to Mikal.
‘Did you catch him deliberately? To claim the bounty offered by that Arab guerrilla?’
‘No.’
‘Who are you?’ the man says.
It is hot in the room and he can see the drops of sweat on the man’s abraded brow.
Mikal shakes his head.
They remain silent.
‘I am looking for some people,’ Mikal says. ‘I think they have been taken away by’ — he nods towards the American — ‘his people.’
‘Westerners.’
‘Yes.’
‘Westerners,’ the old man says in his raspy voice.
‘Yes.’
‘What is your name?’
‘Mikal.’
The old man says the name in silence to himself. ‘Who are your people?’
‘You wouldn’t know. I am not from Waziristan.’
The man thinks. ‘You caught him yesterday? It was a day with three suns.’
‘There was a sun and two sundogs, one on either side, yes.’
‘It’s mentioned in great and ancient books.’
Mikal nods. He’d read about sundogs in his astronomy books.
The man looks at the American. ‘I fought against Westerners when they were here in the 1930s.’ He closes his eyes and opens them again. In the weak light the eyes betray nothing. He seems to be studying the shadows in the room.
‘I myself was held captive by the Americans,’ Mikal says. ‘I didn’t really know what they wanted from me. I am afraid of what they might be doing to the people they have picked up.’
‘We can’t know what the Westerners want,’ the old man says. ‘To know what they want you have to eat what they eat, wear what they wear, breathe the air they breathe. You have to be born where they are born.’
‘I am not sure. You mentioned books. We can learn things from books.’
‘No one from here can know what the Westerners know,’ the man says. ‘The Westerners are unknowable to us. The divide is too great, too final. It’s like asking what the dead or the unborn know.’
The man reaches out a trembling hand in the partial light and wipes the sweat off Mikal’s brow. He is shocked to find it cold. Hard and bloodless.
‘Is this your place?’ Mikal asks. ‘What will happen to us, me and him?’
‘I am just a servant. They will decide tonight. They have sent for all the leaders of the surrounding tribes.’
The man turns to go.
‘I need to make a phone call,’ Mikal says, realising how absurd it sounds as he says it. ‘I need to tell someone that I am coming back, need to tell her not to lose heart.’
‘Is she your love?’
‘Yes, but she might have to marry someone else.’
The man’s nod is a reminder that certain things will persist in the world. He nods and then continues towards the stairs.
The sunlight from the high window has become dark yellow when the old man returns and reaches behind Mikal and slowly unbinds his hands. ‘I have been told to bring you out. They want to talk to you.’
Mikal follows the old man up the stairs and they go out into the large courtyard. Somewhere nearby a cow has just been slaughtered. Several men cross their path with tubs full of glistening meat — one is holding a set of bloody knives, another is dragging an enormous rear leg, the hoof scoring a line on the packed earth of the courtyard. The singed pickup has been brought here from the riverbank and sits propped on stacks of bricks in one corner, its charred tyres taken off. Two boys appear — they must be children of servants because their clothes are dirty and their hair matted, the teeth already yellow — and they walk at a distance behind Mikal and the old man, their words coming to Mikal. ‘He single-handedly caught the American, who killed fifty dear Muslims and cut out their hearts …’ ‘The American will be released into the hills tomorrow and hunted with dogs …’ ‘The American stole his uncle’s pickup and he gave chase and caught him …’ The old man turns around and his mere glance is enough to make the boys vanish, and then Mikal and the old man go along a veranda that is being washed and wiped with a rag by three small children.