All That's Left to Tell(6)

And then she took three steps to the door, knocked on it once to alert Saabir, and quietly closed it behind her.





3

When he woke in the morning, for the first time since his capture, no one was in the room with him. He sat up on his mat. Saabir’s had been rolled up and set against the wall in what he’d learned were Saabir’s meticulous habits of neatness. Saabir swept the floor every few hours with a broom he kept outside, even when no one had passed through the door. He brought in a short ladder to keep the window free of dust, but removed it immediately afterward. The emptiness of the room struck Marc as oppressive more than either Saabir or Azhar, as if, unknowing, he’d been delivered from a dream of friends and woken into destitution, with the last word the woman had said before leaving still resonating in his ears.

Outside, in the distance, he heard two men talking. About what, he had no idea, but he thought he understood the tone of their shortening sentences—they were exchanging lines of a familiar story—and then a burst of laughter from both. They walked on. To most everyone back home, but especially to those who questioned his move to Karachi (among them his mother, seventy-five now, who had begun forwarding e-mails with the names of Muslims serving in the president’s cabinet—as a safeguard or a warning, he wasn’t certain—and the post-separation friends who narrowed their eyes and said, “Marc, Pakistan? How about China or Brazil? You trying to punish Lynne?”), he’d fluorescently blathered on about the commonality of the human experience, how we were more alike than different despite fences, despite more profound religious and cultural barriers. But listening through the wall to conversations he couldn’t understand, at those moments a recognizable language would have seemed like a clothesline on which you could hang a worn, comfortable shirt and let the breeze sweeten its scent. At what point, at what age, he wondered, had he passed from longing for the exotic to longing for what had once been familiar?

Saabir came through the door with his rifle strapped to his back, and without looking at him handed him a bowl of rough-cut fruit mixed with grain. Saabir sat in the chair across from him and watched him eat, almost unblinking. Marc swallowed the cereal with difficulty, his throat dry from sleeping on the floor.

“Can I have a cup of water, please?”

But Saabir only continued to stare at him blankly.

“Some water,” Marc said again, and motioned as if lifting a cup to his lips. Saabir stared for another moment, and then slowly shook his head, averting his eyes in disgust. He stood up and put his hand on Marc’s chest and looked at him.

“Stupid,” he said, and shook his head slightly. “No stupid.”

Nevertheless he left and came back with the water, and stood only two feet away while Marc drank. When Marc finished he set the cup in his lap.

“You,” Saabir said. He was gazing down at him with his deep eyes narrowed, as if he were trying to make a calculation. He was handsome enough to star in films. Saabir reached out and laid the tip of his index finger on Marc’s forehead, lightly, letting it rest there, and then drew the finger gently down the length of his nose and chin until it came to rest again on his Adam’s apple, where he pushed slightly harder. The pressure made Marc swallow involuntarily. “You,” he said again, then with effort, “tell me. Tell me.” And then he removed his finger.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Marc said. Oddly, he was not feeling terribly threatened. Saabir stepped away.

“No time,” he said. “You do not. No time,” and then a sentence in Urdu that he spoke very quickly, as if in relief over a language that he knew well.

After this, Saabir pulled a scarf and a rope from the pocket of his salwar kameez—Saabir’s was more formal than many Marc had seen, a long, flowing black shirt over loose white trousers—and first tied Marc’s hands, then wrapped and knotted the scarf around his eyes. Saabir didn’t leave immediately to get the woman, and Marc sensed him standing in front of him.

“Blind man,” Saabir said, and then Marc heard him turn away and go out the door.

When she came in, she didn’t speak. She seemed to be moving about the room, taking an inventory of things. When she lifted the cup from his lap, he flinched because he hadn’t recognized she was that close. He again caught the fragrance of her clothes. She handed the dishes to Saabir outside the door, who spoke to her in soft, almost pleading tones. She closed it then and pulled the chair across the floor and sat down, remaining silent.

“Saabir,” he said, “might be in love with you.”

She offered something close to a snort. “Why would you say that?”

“You can hear it in the way he speaks to you.”

“How do you know he wasn’t saying, When do we get to kill the son of a bitch?”

This silenced him for a moment, and he turned his head. “Well, if he did, he said it with affection.”

“You know,” she said, “there are over twenty million people in Karachi.”

This seemed an odd non sequitur, so he said nothing, despite the fact that she had affirmed where he was being held.

“And you can still—” But she didn’t finish her sentence.

“He touched me in a strange way.”

“He touched you?” She sounded surprised.

“Yes. He put his fingertip on my forehead, then ran it down my face and pressed it on my throat. He said there was no time.”