‘I knew you’d come back,’ the old man says. A core of light with blurred edges flicks on and reveals him standing in the far corner with the leopard cub. He comes forward and hands Mikal a key, the leopard and finally the flashlight. ‘The key is to the room where he is. I have also unlocked the gate. You can just walk out.’
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘My son is in American custody. If I am kind to him maybe they’ll be kind to him.’
‘I wonder if that’s how it works.’
‘Where will you take him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He won’t be able to walk very far.’
‘Can you get me the keys to one of the cars?’
‘They’ll hear the engine.’
‘Yes.’ He switches off the flashlight and walks towards the kitchen door.
‘Do you feel your amputated fingers?’ the man asks him through the darkness.
‘Sometimes.’
‘Then it’s a sign that Afterlife exists.’
*
With the piece of coal Mikal begins to draw a jeep on the floor. The American watches him. On the bonnet he draws a large American flag. He points to the drawing and then upwards beyond the stairs.
*
Just as they leave the gate, a light comes on behind them and someone shouts. The American is leaning on him, the weight making Mikal feel like he is wearing the chains. In the darkness he keeps his eyes on the light at the minaret’s tip. They enter the street and when they come to the mosque he motions for the American to sit down behind the stand of canna lilies planted along the shadowed front step. Putting his feet into alcoves and mouldings on the facade, he scales the wall, his two damaged nails leaving small red smears as he goes. He leaps into the courtyard on the other side and opens the door to let in the American. He locks the door again and bends down to unlace the American’s boots and take them off. Against the wall behind them is the plank of wood on which the dead are bathed. He takes off his own shoes and then both of them enter the sacred building, the weave of the reed prayer mats shifting under their feet. Entering the main prayer hall he bolts the door behind them and walks to the cupboard beside the mimbar pulpit and opens it. Inside is the equipment that allows the muezzin to call the faithful to prayer — the ancient amplifier and the steel microphone shaped like the head of a golf club. He hears people gathering at the mosque’s front door, someone asking for a ladder to be brought, a rope.
Mikal switches on the amplifier — several small red lights becoming illuminated — and gestures towards the microphone. ‘Call out to them,’ he says in Pashto. ‘Call them. Tell them where to come and find you. Tell them to come to the mosque.’ Perhaps he should draw the picture of the jeep with the American flag again, but the American seems to grasp the idea immediately and nods.
There is no knowing if the Americans Mikal saw are within hearing range, but there is no alternative. When and if the Americans come there will be a fierce gunfight. The white man begins to speak but they hear nothing from the minaret, no echo of his words outside, no amplification. Mikal twists the volume button up to maximum but it makes no difference. Then he remembers how, earlier in the evening, the call to prayer had ended abruptly only partway through.
The American has stopped speaking and is bending down to examine the wire that emerges from the back of the amplifier, leaves the cupboard and climbs up to a transom window located near the ceiling, going out and connecting to the loudspeaker at the tip of the minaret. He points to a six-inch gap where the wire has melted away due to a power surge.
Mikal stands looking at it, the sounds outside the door getting louder. There are footsteps in the courtyard, that susurration of the reed prayer mats. Reaching behind his neck he undoes the clasp of the necklace. With two quick twists he splices it into the gap in the amplifier’s wire, completing the circuit.
The American takes up the microphone again and the room fills immediately with the sound of his breath magnified ten, twenty, thirty times. It seems to put swords in the air. The minaret, meant to invite the faithful to offer prayer and praise to the Almighty, is summoning unbelievers, to arrive and desecrate His house. The words spread through the darkness and over the clay shale and hills and flatlands, the bouldered desert that had watched the arrival of humans many centuries ago, and that has witnessed the shedding of older blood, prophets and lovers, pilgrims and warners.
*
It takes fifteen minutes for the Special Forces soldiers to arrive at the mosque, and the schoolbus-sized Chinook helicopter appears overhead a further ten minutes later, the blades whumping. ‘American hostage!’ the white man shouts through the locked door of the prayer hall. ‘American hostage! American hostage!’ He had kept talking via the mosque’s loudspeaker for a full seven minutes, summoning his countrymen, guiding them. But then the loudspeaker had stopped working. The heat of the electricity had melted the necklace.
Mikal stands beside the American with his back pressed against the wall, and the cub cheeping its distress in the crook of his elbow. He is thinking of Naheed, near whom what mattered was whether he was good or bad — not strong or weak, not favoured by God or cursed. The commandos are coming closer and closer to the prayer hall, blowing their way in with explosives through walls and doors.
‘American hostage, open the door and approach me on your left with your hands in the air and lie down on the ground!’
The white man takes Mikal firmly by the wrist and unlatches the door.
*
Under heavy fire, the American soldier is half dragged, half carried out of the mosque by the commandos. Through the blur of English and Pashto shouts and the screams of the wounded, and the flare and smoke of explosions, he is hurried to a dimly outlined cornfield behind the building where the helicopter has landed. The commandos tell him they will go back and attempt to look for the boy with the leopard cub. When exactly in the confusion and carnage his wrist slipped out of his grip, he doesn’t know. And it is too soon to know whose face it was that he saw, with a red knot on the upper part of the forehead and several lines running down from it to spread out over the features, as though someone tried to draw a branch of coral on the skin. Later he will try to bring order to the various memory fragments, slide them correctly into a sequence. For now the Chinook is rising into the air, above the blink of muzzle flashes, and some of the soldiers are leaning out and firing downwards, the mosque getting smaller and smaller, and then the helicopter swings away from the violence of war and the building disappears completely, nothing but stars shining in the final blackness, each marking a place where a soul and all the mysteries living in it might flourish, perennial with the earth.
37
It is still dark above Pakistan, and in the distances the sky and the ground can be distinguished only with difficulty. Three-quarters of an hour before sunrise, a few luminous bands of orange appear above the eastern horizon — light compressed yet breathing at the very edge of the world. Then it disappears and there is greyness, followed by moments of growing blue light. The sun when it comes up is a surprise — the world appearing once more, the usual rules seeming to apply.
Naheed stands on the dew-covered path, her face serious.
‘What are you doing?’ he had asked her last week, before he left for Waziristan. She was spreading paint onto the petals of a flower, making its yellow more vivid. She was using Sofia’s paintbox and one of her thin brushes.