The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam

SOUND OF AN APPROACHING VEHICLE brings Lara to a window. A tree quivers and shakes in the glass pane, its leaves outlined in bright light against the sky. Walking away from the book she has been reading and the lamp that burns in an alcove beside her chair, she emerges from the house to meet the Englishman in the darkness. She stops upon drawing near and, burying her face in her hands, begins to weep silently. She hears him cover the distance between them. Placing her face on his chest she releases the sobs, her hands clutching the lapels of his jacket, the fabric drenched in smoke. When he did not return yesterday she was certain he had died somewhere. The long hours of imagining the absolute worst, too afraid to approach the radio.
    He puts his arms around her and at their touch she tightens her grip on the lapels, thinking it is an attempt at separation. A brief squeal-like sound of protest, until she realises he wishes to hold her. They stand joined like this for two minutes. In the darkness surrounding them, her white clothes seem to glow. Light from the lamp had soaked into them.
    Going past the rosemary plant that is said never to grow taller than Christ, she brings him into the house. She knows now from one of his notebooks on perfume that rosemary increases in breadth rather than height after thirty-three years.
    He requests with a gesture and she dilutes condensed milk in water and brings it to a boil for him to drink. Through all this they do not say a word. She is still trembling with sorrow. Only when she is in another section of the house to wash the tears off her face does she think of the man who had driven Marcus here. She returns to see him standing beside Marcus. He holds in his earth-covered hands a bottle of whisky. He must have gone off into the night to dig for it the moment he arrived. Like a gold muscle or sinew he pours a measure of it into Marcus’s milk.
     
    Past midnight, and all three of them are motionless, her fingers interlaced with Marcus’s where he lies in a bedroom on the ground floor. David in a chair on the other side of the room.
    “A daughter, a wife, a grandson,” Marcus had been saying earlier. “You could say this place took away all I had.” She was sitting beside him on the bed, as now. “I could so easily appear to be one of those unfortunate white men you hear about, who thought too lovingly of the other races and civilisations of the world, who left his own country in the West to set up home among them in the East, and was ruined as a result, paying dearly for his foolish mistake. His life smashed to pieces by the barbarians surrounding him.”
    David’s eyes seemed fixed on some random detail in a corner.
    “But, you see, the West was involved in the ruining of this place, in the ruining of my life. There would have been no downfall if this country had been left to itself by those others.”
    “Don’t do this,” Lara had said quietly. “You must try to sleep.”
    Now she stands up and turns the small wheel at the side of the lamp, reducing the diameter of light so that darkness appears to take a step closer. A thought she dislikes. “I’ll be in the room next door tonight in case you need something. Just on the other side of this wall, I’ll listen for you.”
    “So it is that we make links out of separations,” he mutters.
    Books are stacked high on the bed in the adjoining room, and as she is clearing them David enters and begins to help. They have exchanged only a few words so far, and now too they work in silence.
    Through stories we judge our actions before committing them, said the Englishman, and so this was a house of readers, declaring a citizenship of the realm of the mind. She has seen five different editions of The Leopard here, four each of In a Free State and Rustam and Sohrab. Each beloved book has more than one copy—some small with the text crowded into perhaps too few pages, others where the print and the page are both generously