The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam Page B

that I recall.”
    “Or someone called Piotr Danilovich?”
    “I’m sorry, no.” He looks at his wrist watch and switches on the radio, the volume low. “I couldn’t sleep so I thought I’d come and wait for the next news bulletin, to see if there have been any developments in Jalalabad.”
    It is four-thirty. The radio informs them that the gangs who roam the streets looking for children to kidnap, to harvest their eyes and kidneys, had attempted to drag away several of the half-dead ones from the site of the explosion.
    “Maybe I shouldn’t have started the school,” he says after switching off the radio. “A provocation to the jihadis.”
    She doesn’t know what to say.
    “I’ll go back to Jalalabad very early in the morning but I’ll return in the evening. Would you please tell Marcus?”
    “Of course.”
    “Thank you. Goodnight.”
    After he has gone up to his room, she sits in the chair, looking out now and then at the silhouettes of the trees, the sudden startling bats that appear out of nowhere like flickering ink blots. Quite a tough journey you made to get here. In her room she looks through the sheaf of letters Benedikt sent home from this far country. Princess Marya, learning of her brother’s wound only from the newspapers and having no definite information, was getting ready to go in search of him . . . When her courage had failed just before an earlier journey to Afghanistan, Lara had encountered this sentence in Tolstoy’s great book and become resolute again. As she is putting the letters back in a pocket within her handbag, her fingers slip through a tear in the lining and touch something. She closes her eyes the moment she pulls out the small cellophane-wrapped sweet into the light. Unable to bear the sight of it. They were loved by her husband, the colour of strawberries. After she made him give up cigarettes he had become addicted to these. She doesn’t know what to do with it now, her breath awry, and then in great hurry she extracts it from the crackling wrapper and places it in her mouth, her teeth working very fast, consuming it, letting it go down into her body.
    As in a lyric the moon glitters like a jewel. Through the pane she watches the pomegranate trees, the blossoms and the foliage that would be dripping with dew in the morning.
    She had taken with her the gift of a single pomegranate when she went to visit Piotr Danilovich last December, having located him after all the years. When he returned from Afghanistan he had failed to adjust to life, becoming silent like all soldiers who come back from a war. There was a period about which he would speak somewhat vaguely to Lara, but which she knew from other sources to be a time of mental collapse. Now he lived a hundred or so kilometres outside Moscow, in a place known as the House of Ten Thousand Christs.
    Bringing with her the crowned, brass-coloured fruit wrapped in black tissue paper, Lara had gone to meet him through the thickly falling snow, to that monastery whose central icon of Christ had been lent at one time to armies, to be carried into battles against the Crimean Tartars. Faith going to war. The Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan had called the rebels dukhi, Russian for ghosts, never knowing when they would arrive, never understanding how they could slip away suddenly, the only explanation being that they had otherworldly assistance.
    Piotr Danilovich’s responsibility at the sacred House of Ten Thousand Christs was to repair damaged images, his fingers smeared with resin and ink and pigment, dissolved gold under his fingernails. There was a period during the Soviet rule when the great mosque at Leningrad was turned into a weapons depot. And so wheat was stored at the monastery during the Soviet years, the icons rotting away out of neglect in the back rooms, being eaten by rats.
    “How did you find me?” he asked.
    “My husband, Stepan Ivanovich, was in the military. One of his friends told me about you, about the