The Wasted Vigil (4 page)

Next comes a section from a woman’s ribboned hair. She consults her imagination—the outline of the picture she is trying to construct—and then positions the piece on the floor accordingly. Marcus must have saved these from when the room was attacked, the strafing of guns tearing out these details from the walls. How carefully he has washed away the mud even from these fragments. Moving backwards and forwards she positions further pieces. Some are as large as her hand. One has half a face on it, a beauty mark on one cyclamen cheek. There is a whole moth in flight, wings patterned like a backgammon board.

From the candle comes the smell of burning wax and a twisting line of smoke. The image on the floor develops section by section. It is a kind of afterlife she is constructing for all those who have been obliterated from the walls. A young man and a woman made out of the ruins of the dozens in this interior.

He should have brown eyes, she tells herself, and she exchanges them, moving the green irises to the girl’s face. Now suddenly he seems disbelieving. A lover is always amazed.

She takes out another fragment and looks at it—a black tulip, a rare flower native to northern Afghanistan. She closes her fist around it until it hurts. In the spring of 1980 a Soviet lieutenant had died holding this blossom, having picked it moments before a sniper’s bullet found him. A comrade threaded it into his collar and he came home with it on his chest. Later in the war the large transport planes flying dead soldiers home took the name of Black Tulips, this flower becoming a symbol of death in the Soviet Union.

This is her third time in Afghanistan. Over months and years she tracked down soldiers who knew her brother, gathering vague clues, and then planned a trip. The number of Soviet soldiers still missing here is 311 but that could be one of Moscow’s lies, just as the true figure of the dead is closer to fifty thousand, four times the official number. It was said that the general who supervised the initial invasion had shot himself soon afterwards, but for the first several years of the war the Soviet Union would all but deny any casualties. When the dead multiplied, the relatives were discouraged from holding funerals and no mention of Afghanistan was made when occasionally a soldier’s death was reported in the newspapers—he simply
died whilst doing his International Duty.
When losses could no longer be denied or stifled it was judged best to make them fantastically heroic, and so wounded Soviet soldiers kept blowing themselves up with grenades in order to take thirty Afghan rebels with them. Lara didn’t know at the beginning but Benedikt hadn’t died or gone missing in battle—he had defected. Lara herself was under great suspicion as a result of what her brother had done, if things weren’t bad enough already because of the activities and opinions of their mother. They wouldn’t even tell Lara where in Afghanistan he had been based at the time of his disappearance. Later, as the years progressed and the Soviet Union began to be dismantled, they continued to tell lies or sent her from person to person to exhaust and frustrate her.

But by now a part of the story is clear. Benedikt was with another soldier when he defected, a seventeen-year-old. They both ran away from their military base together but Piotr Danilovich eventually lost courage and went back before he could be missed. He was the last Russian person to have seen Benedikt. By tracking down Piotr Danilovich she has managed to collect Benedikt’s last known movements. Their plan, he said, was to simply walk into the nearest Afghan village in the middle of the night carrying weapons stolen from the base to present to the Afghans as a sign of good faith. Thieves of food, of medicine, of the photographs of sweethearts—every soldier had some skill when it came to picking locks; and so Benedikt was to get the guns from the armoury while Piotr Danilovich went into the bedroom of one of the officers, a colonel. In Afghanistan there were deserts whose names conveyed everything about them.
Dasht-e-Margo,
Desert of Death.
Sar-o-Tar,
Empty Desolation.
Dasht-e-Jahanum,
Desert of Hell. And a few months earlier in one such desert, where the temperature had gone beyond fifty degrees, and on the dunes the spiders stitched together sand grains with their silk to make sheets to shelter under, the colonel had come upon an ancient skeleton with a mass of gems scattered on either side of the spinal column, where the stomach would have been. On the night of the desertion, Benedikt sent Piotr Danilovich to the colonel’s room—he was to find and swallow these gemstones. When he couldn’t get into the safe, he made his way through the darkness to where, having successfully stolen seven Kalashnikovs, Benedikt had emerged from the armoury and run into the colonel. The man was in all probability on his way to help himself to some weapons, Piotr Danilovich told Lara years later, to sell to the Afghan enemy. Piotr watched from the shadows as Benedikt and Colonel Rostov stood looking at each other in silence.

Always hungry, always ill, the weak Soviet antibiotics of little use if ever they were to be had, many soldiers had thought of and talked about deserting, about defecting—an arc of movement in their minds, from Afghanistan to a country in western Europe, perhaps even the United States of America. They had been conscripted and sent out here and they drank antifreeze to escape from life for a few hours or left shoe polish to melt in sunlight and then filtered it through bread to obtain a sip of intoxicant. There were stories about what the Afghan rebels did to captured Soviet soldiers, loathing them as much for being non-Muslim as for being invaders—they who in trying to wipe out one Dashaka machine gun, or a journalist from the West, would literally flatten an entire village. Having dreamt that they had fallen into the clutches of the Afghans, the soldiers sometimes woke up screaming and were unable to fall asleep again for hours. Pillows of thorn. But there were other stories about how the Afghans welcomed defectors, especially if they agreed to convert to Islam.

Time slowed down around them as Benedikt and Rostov faced each other, Piotr watching from the darkness. Rostov had sold a ZPU-1 antiaircraft gun to an Afghan warlord recently, writing it off as lost in combat, but he had begun to suspect that one of the captains at the base intended to expose him, and so he had ordered the captain and two other men chosen at random—Benedikt and Piotr Danilovich—to carry out a dawn reconnaissance mission in a nearby area, an area notorious as a hive of the most dangerous guerrillas. It was to be tomorrow. And although for safety reasons it was customary to take two vehicles, Rostov insisted the three of them take only one. Benedikt and Piotr had dreamed about desertion often but tonight was truly their last chance.

Piotr watched as Benedikt lowered the Kalashnikovs from his shoulders, time accelerating now. A forward lurch of Benedikt’s body towards Rostov. Piotr would tell Lara that he felt the slam of the body, saying he knew it was packed solid with fury at the abuse and drunken humiliation suffered by all the young soldiers at the hands of the officers. The blade moved back and forth three times. Twice in the stomach, and then again in the ribs. The man fell onto his side on the ground, one arm pinned under him, the other raised half-way in the air, the wet index finger trembling.

When Piotr and Benedikt were more than a mile from their military base, running towards the village they knew lay ahead in the darkness, Benedikt had stopped suddenly. “We have to go back.” And he wouldn’t take another step, just shook his head when Piotr asked him to forget about the gemstones.

“No, not the jewels. We have to go back for the girl.”

“No.”

“She’ll die.”

“Better her than me.”

“Most of Rostov’s blood is on my clothes. He was alive when we left him so we either go back to make sure he is dead or we get the girl. They’ll kill her in trying to save him.”

Death by exsanguination. The Soviet Army would kill prisoners by draining them of blood whenever transfusions were required for its battle-wounded soldiers.

The girl, Zameen, her name was, had not provided any information regarding the rebellion after she was captured, though others had been made to talk successfully, and then it was discovered that Rostov and she had the same rare blood type. She was separated from the other prisoners. On one occasion Rostov even took her with him when he visited another city in case he sustained a serious injury there.

Benedikt led Piotr to a small wooden bridge and told him to wait underneath it, and, astonishingly, he was back with the girl in just over two hours. Rostov, he said, had dragged himself into the armoury, smearing red on the floor as he went, and though he was still alive at the end of that path of blood Benedikt had gone to the small room where Zameen was kept.

She was as dazed as she had always been—she had not uttered a word or made a sound since her capture—but now she spoke, startling them, saying Piotr and Benedikt must change the direction of their journey. She said she would take them to a place called Usha and then a little further beyond that to the house of her parents. Piotr was certain she was leading them into a trap—a month ago three Soviet soldiers were found hanging cut up in a butcher’s shop. The time he had spent alone in the darkness had altered him, when he had felt like a castaway on a vast black ocean, fears accumulating around him. Now terrified, he wanted to go back to the base. He arrived just before Rostov was discovered, and he was among the soldiers who were sent out into the night to hunt for Benedikt and the girl—but they were not to be found.

The breeze rustles through the branches of the silk-cotton tree. Lara has heard this sound captured on the recording of the bird that Marcus had made in this garden decades ago.

Another few days and then she’ll leave, another few days of sitting beside his aged form as they both drink the bright red tea he loves, a vague smile occasionally on his lips when he glances up from a page to tell her something. A Prospero on his island.

The mountain range looms above the house. On those quartz and feldspar heights at the end of 2001, American soldiers had ceremonially buried a piece of debris taken from the ruins of the World Trade Center, after the terrorists up there had either been slaughtered or been made to flee. Before these soldiers flew out to attack Afghanistan, the U.S. secretary of defense told them they had been “commissioned by history.”

We sharpened the bones of your victim and made a dagger to kill you, and here now we lay the weapon to rest.

No. Perhaps something sacred is meant to grow out of the fragment of rubble. She thinks of the Church of the Resurrection on the banks of Griboyedov Canal in St. Petersburg. It is known also as the Saviour of the Spilled Blood, built as it was on the spot where a bomb thrown by a member of the People’s Will revolutionary movement had mortally wounded Alexander II in 1881. The canal was narrowed so the altar could stand exactly where the royal blood had stained the pavement.

Always like a distant ache within her is the thought of landmines, so she cannot bring herself to go too far into the garden. She has seen single shoes being sold in Afghanistan’s shops.

She goes back into the house. Dusk, the hour between the butterfly and the moth. Standing in the dark kitchen she drinks water from a glass. She places the glass on the table and remains still, listening to her breath.

She has told him everything she knows about Zameen and Benedikt, all that Piotr Danilovich related to her.

“Did they come to this house?” she asked. “They were on their way here at the point where Piotr Danilovich’s story breaks off.”

“Qatrina and I were not here at that time—the house was taken over by others,” he replied, looking at her. The bereaved glance. “I don’t know if she brought him here. I had gone to a village to the west of here, where a battle between the Soviet Army and the rebels had left almost a hundred civilians wounded. Women and children mostly. The Cold War was cold only for the rich and privileged places of the planet. Qatrina remained here while I was away. There was no knowing when a doctor would be needed
here.
I returned to find her missing and was told that she had been taken away by the warlord Gul Rasool, the man from Usha who was one of the resistance leaders in this area. He wanted her to accompany his men into battle to treat the wounded. Nabi Khan, the other resistance leader from here, a great rival and enemy of Gul Rasool then as now, had the same idea soon enough and came to get
me.
There was nothing left here, no one in the house.”

“Then as now, you say?”

“Yes. Only the dead have seen the end of war. Gul Rasool is the sole power in Usha now, and Nabi Khan is out there somewhere plotting to unseat him.”

She looks at the moon caught in a windowpane, great in size and brightness both. It seems that to shatter it would be to flood this room and then the entire garden and orchard with luminous liquid. In the 1950s, when the Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in the space race, the U.S. Air Force had asked scientists to plan a nuclear explosion on the moon. People would see a bright flash, and clouds of debris would probably also be visible. Higher than they would be on Earth because of the difference in gravity. She knows from the tales of her cosmonaut father, someone who fell towards Earth in a burning machine, that Moscow had also had the idea of a nuclear blast. Yes, after such a demonstration who wouldn’t cower beneath a nuclear-armed Soviet moon, a nuclear-armed American moon? It never happened but she wonders if the terrorists didn’t come close to something like it in 2001, an enormous spectacle seen by the entire world, planting awe and shock in every heart.

She leans against the wall and closes her eyes.

Even if she hadn’t fallen ill she would have considered asking Marcus for a short refuge when she met him, letting a portion of her weight onto another, being held. While almost everyone else gave it to understand that shame must accompany failure, because you obviously weren’t wise or strong or brave enough to have prevented a derailment of your life, Marcus seemed one of those few humans who lent dignity to everything their gaze landed on. Like a saint entering your life through a dream. To him she would have admitted that the years have left her bewildered by life.