I Am Pilgrim(94)

Not the Saracen, though – he knew it as well as any place on earth.





Chapter Thirty-five


LEAVING THE PRISONERS handcuffed, he hobbled the horses at the entrance to the village, held his weapon at the ready and returned to the heady days of his youth.

Back in his laboratory in Lebanon, he had come to the conclusion that there was only one place remote enough to conduct his human trial – the ruined village where he had bivouacked for over a year during the Soviet war.

Now, as he walked its broken streets – every building familiar, every blackened fire-pit full of memories – he sang out a greeting in Arabic. ‘Allahu Akbar,’ he called.

He had no way of knowing if the Taliban, a group of war refugees or one of the endless caravans of drug couriers had colonized the place, and he had no intention of bringing his prisoners in until he knew that he was alone.

‘Allahu Akbar.’ God is great. And the only reply he received was the sound of the wind, the constant biting wind he remembered so well, the one that blew all the way to China. Confident he was alone, he turned past the old mosque and stepped into the kitchen where he had first shared a cigarette with Abdul Mohammad Khan.

The ghosts danced all around him – he could almost see the bearded faces of the other muj who had been sitting in a semicircle, making their final requests of the great warlord. They were all so young then, so alive. For the Saracen it was before he was married, before he had a child of his own, and for a moment he remembered what it was like to have so much road in front of you and barely any behind.

He pulled himself out of his reverie, lit a fire in the hearth for probably the first time since the muj had left and made a makeshift stable in the area where the grain had once been stored. Only then did he bring the prisoners in, chain them to the old sinks, refill their water bottles and give them each two of the hardtack biscuits which had sustained them since their capture and which they had now come to hate.

They ate them mechanically, too exhausted to care, and didn’t even bother spreading out their bedrolls, curling up instead on the old straw piled in a corner. For the two men, it was the last unfevered sleep they would ever have.

The three of them woke in the morning to the sound of hammering. The Saracen had been up for hours, rebuilding one of the stone storehouses perched on the edge of a cliff, not far from the mosque. The three prisoners could see, by looking through chinks in the wall, that he had repaired one section which had collapsed and was now using one of the horses to haul in a hardwood door which would replace the flimsy one that had fallen from its hinges. It was clear this was going to be their cell.

Only once did the Saracen enter the kitchen, and that was to retrieve the pane of reinforced glass from boxes containing what, to the prisoners, looked like medical supplies. They watched him return to his building site and set the glass halfway up a wall and seal it into the stone with a mixture of mud and mortar. A window? That was strange, the prisoners thought. But it wasn’t a window at all – it was an observation panel.

Just after lunchtime, wordlessly he transferred them to what would become their stone tomb. Once inside, they looked around and saw that he had thrown a pile of saddle blankets into a corner for bedding, dug a toilet pit behind a rough curtain and provided a box of hardtack, four large casks of water and a wood stove with a good supply of fuel. Once again they tried to communicate with him, demanding to know how long they would be kept in the airless room, but he just checked the chains that secured them to ringbolts in the wall and left.

A short time later they heard the sound of the horses’ hooves on the stone roadways and, by climbing up on one of the water casks to peer through the observation panel, they saw that he was riding out with his string of ponies. Where in God’s name could he be going? The nearest human habitation had to be at least several days’ travel away, even on a fast horse, and it was unlikely he would leave them unguarded for that length of time.

Even so, they set about trying to work the ringbolts free of the rock in which they were set. It was an agonizingly slow and thankless task – the only implements were shards of wood from their fuel pile – and after four hours they had made hardly any impression on the granite and mortar, when they heard the horses returning.

Again using the observation window, they saw that the Saracen immediately disappeared into the maze of crumbling streets and houses, digging and hammering, then periodically returned to the packhorses and unloaded several grey metal boxes and at least a dozen wooden barrels. Where he had found them, they had no idea.

That night, for the first time since he had entombed them, the cell door opened. The Saracen entered and wordlessly laid down three plates of what looked like a vegetarian curry accompanied by a pile of the circular flat bread the Afghans call naan. It was the first hot food the prisoners had seen in almost two weeks, and they fell upon it ravenously. As plain as the food was, the Dutch engineer said laughingly it was the finest meal he had ever eaten.