Ten days had passed since the death, and the house felt haunted by Massud.

She relit the lamp and looked about her. Somewhere she had read of a place where those left behind by the dead wore masks for a certain number of days. It was done so that the spirit would not recognise them and be tempted to remain on earth. Encouraging the soul to begin its journey for the cities of the next world.

There were decisions no one could teach anyone to make. Nargis did not know what to do with the clothes she and Massud were wearing that morning, his blood on them now.

She recollected gestures and words, everyday things that had now been made monumental. On several occasions during the previous week, she had walked around the rooms wondering what might be the last object Massud had touched. What was the one thing his gaze landed on as he left the house that morning ten days ago, the last colour he thought of, his last ever sensation?

Laments were as old as verses of love, she knew. They were verses of love. For the departed who will never be met again, for the burned cities.

She wished the dead were somewhere specific, but they were nowhere. They were erased into memory.
 At twilight the words of St Augustine came to her.

And I enter the fields and spacious halls of memory, where are stored as treasures the countless images…

Late one morning, she answered the door to a man she assumed was an acquaintance of Massud’s, someone who had arrived at the house to offer her a few comforting words.

“I am here about your husband,” he said.
When she invited him in, it was done almost mechanically. Had he turned around and gone away, she would never have been able to describe him. Her mind was elsewhere. She had no other wish than to be alone, to somehow recover her stillness, to attempt to regain her balance. She unrolled the cane blinds in the arches to keep out the rising heat and sat down with him on the veranda.

“We have to discuss the matter of your husband’s death and the American man,” he said.

She looked at him, unable to understand what he meant. “How did you know my husband?” she asked, examining his face with care.

“I didn’t.”

Journalists and reporters had begun to knock on the door hours after the death but she had declined to speak to anyone. The man seemed to read her thoughts. “I am not a journalist.”
 She noticed the intensity of his gaze now. The eyes were too large for the face, educated in watching everything. “The American man is in custody, as I am sure you know,” he said. “But the American government has told us that he is a diplomat and therefore has immunity. They insist he must be released.”

Nargis had begun to stand up even before he had finished speaking. “I would like you to leave,” she said quietly, without looking in his direction.

“I can’t do that,” he said. “This matter has to be dealt with.”

Nargis shook her head to herself.

“The American government insists he is a diplomat – “

“I heard he was involved in espionage,” Nargis said, “that he is a spy and did not have permission to be in this city.”
“Please don’t interrupt me again,” the man told her with a pained expression on his face, clearly taken aback by the tone in which she had addressed him.

Nargis looked around, her eyes searching for Massud. One of the things Massud and the child Helen had loved were “book ghosts”. It was when an image printed on the reverse of a page showed through on the other side, the ink seeping across the fibres. A horse – disproportionately large – flying faintly through the sky above a city. A palace situated inside a mountain. A car lodged in a goddess’s crown.

She brought her mind back to the man, listening to him again.

“The American government insists he is a diplomat, and we have to release him.”

“I really don’t care.” She knew who this man was now. He was from the intelligence agency run by the military. A soldier-spy.

“Well,” he said. “You may not care but the people of Pakistan do. They are angry at what he has done, so we can’t just release him. They will say Pakistan does what the West tells it to. And – “

“As I said, I don’t care.”

Nargis was feeling all sense of comportment slipping away from her, and the man exhaled impatiently. There was a new firmness in the voice when he did speak again:

“You have to publicly forgive him. You have to declare that you want him to be free.”
Nargis tried to place her thoughts elsewhere, on to a more bearable reality. She could think of nothing.

“You are the dead man’s next of kin, so the forgiveness has to come from you. The last blood relative was a sister, but she left Pakistan and is now deceased.”

“What about the families of the boys on the motorcycle?”

“Those two-bit thieves.”

There was open mockery in the tone of these words, and Nargis felt a surge of anger inside her, a sudden intensity after the sensationless days. The idea was that the boys would have to have been flawlessly virtuous for their murders to be unjust.

“We are approaching their families too,” he said. “They too will announce that they have no wish to press charges. You will all appear in court and sign various papers.”

“I have no intention of doing any of that,” Nargis heard herself say.

Perhaps the American government would reward Pakistan’s military and government for the freedom of the killer. Various deals would have been worked out.

“Let him go,” she said. “I have no wish to get involved.”

“But you are involved.” He sat forward and looked at her through the prominent veins in his eyes. “You have to remember that the world did not end the day your husband died. Nor did it begin that day. Many older facts and relationships have to be taken into consideration.”

Massud had once said that the Pakistani military was a curse. It had been eating Pakistan’s children for decades.

“Is he a diplomat?”

“I will not repeat what I have already told you.” Though controlled, his hostility was visible as he pointed to her chair and said, “Sit down and listen to me. As an educated person, you must see that – “

“I would like you to leave,” she said, fully resolved to put an end to the exchange. It was scarcely believable to her that she had allowed it to continue for so long. There had been no words of sympathy, nor had he introduced himself. He was in civilian clothes but his rank must be a major – she could tell from his bearing and manner. The families of the two young men on the motorcycle would have been visited by someone lower in rank, a lieutenant or a subedar.

Despite what she had said he remained in his chair, just as she herself was still standing, regardless of his curt demand.

“You obviously know a good deal about us,” she said. “Do you know about my husband’s brother?”
There was an imperceptible shrug; he managed to restrain it just in time but Nargis registered it. “He was a journalist, he died some time ago.”

“Twenty years and eight months ago. But who’s counting,” she said, smiling at him with rage. “He was a journalist and was found by the roadside. Tortured to death soon after he began investigating a story about the military-intelligence agency.”

“I would strongly advise you not to repeat that in my presence.”

“What about in your absence?”

She had seen paintings of St Anthony bringing a dead man to life, so he could reveal the name of his murderer.

She could hear her agitated breath, feel the stiff smile on her face. There was a tearfulness, held back. “Why don’t you have me killed?” she said in as clear a voice as she was capable. “Massud would have no next of kin then.”

They stared at each other without saying anything.

***

The doorbell rang at last. When she answered it she found a boy of about eleven or twelve standing in the lane, with several bags of food and a thick bushel of reeds.
‘You should be at school,’ she said when she brought him in- to the kitchen.
He did not respond. His face was beautiful and doll-like and he was looking towards the bird wings hanging on the pink wall. He had placed the bags on the dining table and was using his grimy sleeve to absorb the perspiration from his forehead and upper lip, holding his gaze on the wings. He went towards them and reached out with a finger and touched the lime green feather of an Alexandrine parakeet.
‘Does the man with the straw hat live here?’ he asked. ‘The one with the elastic going over his shoulders.’
‘They are called braces. Or galluses.’ ‘Gal…lu…ses.’
She held up the bottle of Rooh Afza he had brought, crack- ing open the seal on the cap. ‘Would you like a drink of this?’
He seemed uncertain. ‘I overheard the lady mention some- one named Helen,’ he said. ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you an infidel?’
Helen had been looking into one of the bags. She raised her head but not her eyelids. At the beginning of high school, when she was fourteen years old, a teacher had asked her to stand up in class and ‘justify taking the place of a Muslim’.
‘Are you a servant here?’ the boy continued. ‘You don’t look like one.’
When she finally glanced at him he nodded towards the Rooh Afza bottle. ‘I am a Muslim, I can’t accept a drink from your hand.’ And he added, ‘You should know that. Shouldn’t you?’
At nineteen, Helen was old enough to remain unsurprised by occasions such as these. She had always known them and could not have separated them from the most basic facts of her existence. Still, sometimes she was caught off guard.
She watched him from the kitchen window as he crossed the garden at an unhurried pace and left the house, stopping twice on the semicircular path through the grass, to look up at the ripening fruit or some creature moving in the branches.
She put away the items of food, and divided and bound the river reeds into brooms. Afterwards she carried the alumini- um stepladder to the study and unfolded it below the model of the Hagia Sophia. She stood there for a few moments: even from the topmost step of the ladder, the book would be too high up. She needed something to nudge it with, and she went back to the kitchen and unhooked the giant wing of the trum- peter swan and returned with it, the feathers blindingly white when she walked through the rays of the sun on the veranda, almost a detonation.
As she climbed up with the four-foot wing she thought of her mother who would use this ladder to dust the upper reaches of walls and shelves in this house. She recalled the story of her parents’ first meeting. Grace had been fifteen years old at the time and was a servant in someone’s house, and she had approached a passing policeman one day in a distraught state and demanded that he arrest a certain seventeen-year-old gardener’s boy from a nearby house. ‘I cannot stop think- ing about him!’ she had declared. ‘Each night the thought of him keeps me awake, and all day I long for him. I demand justice!’ Looking for a few moments of amusement, the police- man had followed the spirited, indignant girl as she led him to her criminal. He was entirely unaware of her, of course, and was speechless now, to find himself accused of being her incre- mental killer.
Helen arrived at the top step of the ladder – ‘This is where the wolf lives,’ Grace would say – and she stretched the wing of the swan cautiously towards the book on the small windowsill. The tip of the last feather fell just short of making contact with the book’s spine, and she raised herself onto her toes to attain the extra inches. There was a dull, indistinct noise from some- where below her at that moment, and she glanced down to see that the boy from the shop had appeared at the door to the study.
Carefully she brought her heels back down to the metal sur- face of the step. She had neglected to lock the door after his departure.
‘Did you forget something?’
He was looking at her and the expression on his face was somewhere between a sneer and a swoon, his body partly con- cealed in the shadow being thrown by a shelf. As he advanced into the room Helen saw that he was in fact trembling, the sharp length of the knife in his right hand moving to and fro as he approached the ladder.
‘What are you doing?’ she said with shock.
But it was the walk of a sleepwalker. It was almost as though he was being pulled forward by the knife, his arm outstretched. She wished she could reach up and grab the bottom edge of the Hagia Sophia to steady herself but it was out of reach. The touch of the wing had set it swinging gently above her.
He had arrived now and placed a foot on the first step. It made her think of a gardener or a gravedigger about to break ground with the shovel. There was nowhere she could go. He was a child but he had a naked ten-inch blade and she was pre- cariously balanced, a terrified lightness in her soles.
‘What do you want?’
In a tranced, slightly submerged voice, he said, ‘I have to see.’
‘What do you have to see?’ ‘Christians have black blood.’
She recognised the bone-handled knife as being from the kitchen out there.
‘Who told you that? It’s red, just like yours.’
She could see both his determination and his fear much more clearly now.
‘My mother told me. I have to see.’ The metal creaked under his weight as he rose another step. If he wished he could cut her leg but he was in another place.
She was about to swipe at him with the wing when her phone rang on the desk. And it jolted them both.
He whipped his head towards the device blinking among the papers.
‘You have to go,’ she said. ‘Right now.’ He looked at her and raised the knife and she decided to lie. ‘I am expecting someone. That’s probably them ringing to say they’re almost here. You have to go.’
For the next few moments, as the phone continued to ring, he seemed in a paralysis of will and she touched his shoulder with the outermost feather. And it was as though she had ac- tivated a mechanism. The knife made a sharp metallic sound on the marble floor when he dropped it. He stepped down and slowly walked backwards, looking abject.
She felt reality seep back into things.
Turning around at the door he vanished out of the room as suddenly as he had appeared.
She climbed down and went to the kitchen and poured her- self a glass of water. She drank a few sips, her other hand resting on the surface of the table. Her limbs seemed numb, but just a few moments later she was running towards the front door. She opened it and saw that he was about to disappear around the slight curve in the lane. He stopped when she called out but he did not turn around immediately. When he did look back she waved at him to make him return.
He arrived and stopped just beyond arm’s reach. She opened the safety pin she had taken from a drawer in the kitchen and with it she quickly stabbed the tip of her index finger and held the drop of blood towards him.
‘It’s red. I want you to promise me you won’t try to injure someone else.’ His face was wrenched with emotion, but she said firmly, ‘Look at it. You’ve seen now that it’s not black. Look at it.’
There was a silence. When she tried to say something fur- ther, he flinched, and then he covered his face with both hands and gave way to tears quietly.
‘I am sorry.’ ‘Promise me.’
‘I promise,’ he said.