The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam

Author:Nadeem Aslam
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2008-09-09T05:00:00+00:00

DAVID, before leaving for Jalalabad, goes along the corridor towards Lara’s room. “Even to this day,” Zameen had told him at the Street of Storytellers, “my dreams take place in that house in Usha.” She had wanted to bring him here, and after that small place in the Street of Storytellers he wanted to be with her in rooms brightened by rows of windows. Curious about the transformation her face might go through against a different background, in the air of a different temperature. He fastened the small transparent buttons on Bihzad’s shirt, no bigger surely than the lens inside a nightingale’s eye, and wanted him to run and tumble in a large garden. “Like legendary heroes he was born in the middle of the night,” she said, “the hour when the wicked sleep.” Two hours after he was born the night air had filled up with butterflies.

Just about here last night—this wall with its painting of a woman on a horse playing a portable harp—he had decided he couldn’t go in to Lara and had continued towards his own room, overwhelmed suddenly by shame and regret—he must be the last thing on her mind in all this disorder. He also wondered how much of the previous night was just her need to feel safe, a desire for security. Perhaps she was in shock. But then he heard the door open behind him.

“I have just phoned James Palantine again,” he tells her now. “He’ll be in Usha tomorrow.”

She nods. Dressed in white.

“You know you have to be prepared for the worst?”

“Yes.” She is looking straight at him, unflinching, then she turns away, busying herself with some objects in an alcove. He brings home newspapers at the end of the day and she is lining the shelves with yesterday’s atrocities and small hopes. Most of her face is out of sight. Just a part of an eyebrow is visible, the dark-brown hairs that are fine like embroidery silk—a bird’s wing in flight.

“It’s my twelfth day as Marcus’s guest.”

“I wish I’d come to the house earlier.”

“Marcus must feel his home is so crowded all of a sudden.”

“He doesn’t mind.”

She turns to look at him and smiles.

He moves towards her but stops and they both look towards the door because someone is going by outside in the corridor. Though there is no need to hide anything from Marcus, they are awkward at the thought of having to reveal this to him.

Marcus had been concerned for him when—Zameen and Bihzad having disappeared from view, the Soviets having been defeated—he went back to the United States, placing telephone calls to Afghanistan, visiting, writing.

Marcus worried that he might be grieving too much for Zameen and the boy, that he wasn’t progressing with his life. Once when David mentioned a girlfriend called Angela, he was very suspicious, saying didn’t you say last time her name was Angelica.

Somewhere along the way he had picked up the ability to endure isolation. There were no lovers, only moments of love. It seemed enough.

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