"There is a saying-When the student is ready, the teacher appears-do you know it?" he asked, laughing. It seemed that he was laughing at me, rather than with me.
"Yes," I whistled patiently, through clenched teeth.
"Well, just at the point in my studies of philosophy and religion when I came to need the special knowledge of a scientist, one appeared for me. I knew that there were many answers for me in the science of life and stars and chemistry. But, unfortunately, these were not the things that my dear Mackenzie Esquire taught to me, except in the most elementary fashion. Then I met a physicist, a man who was working at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Bombay. He was a very good man, but he had a weakness for gambling at that time. He found himself in big trouble. He lost a lot of money that was not his to lose. He was gambling at one of the clubs owned by a man I knew well-a man who worked for me, if I needed it. And there was more trouble. The scientist was involved with a woman-he fell in love with her, and he did stupid things for the sake of this love, and so there were many dangers. When he came to me, I solved the problems of this scientist, and kept all the matters strictly between us. No-one else ever knew the details of his indiscretions, or of my involvement in solving them. And, in exchange for this, the man has been teaching me ever since that day. His name is Wolfgang Persis, and I have arranged it that you will meet him, if you wish, soon after we return."
"How long has he been teaching you?"
"We have been studying together once every week for the past seven years."
"Jesus!" I gasped, thinking, with a little curl of mean delight, that wise and mighty Khader hacked out his pound of flesh when it suited him. In another heartbeat I was ashamed of the thought: I loved Khader Khan enough to follow him into a war. Wasn't it possible that the scientist loved him just as well? And in thinking that, I knew I was jealous of the man, the scientist I didn't know and probably would never meet. Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument. Jealousy can raise the dead with a single, spiteful taunt, or hate a perfect stranger for nothing more than the sound of his name.
"You are asking about life," Khader said gently, changing tack, "because you are thinking about death. And you are thinking about the taking of a life, if it happens that you must shoot a man. Am I right in this?"
"Yeah," I muttered. He was right, but the killing that preoccupied me wasn't in Afghanistan. The life I wanted to take was perched on a throne, in a secret room in a grotesque brothel called The Palace, in Bombay. Madame Zhou.
"Remember," Khader said insistently, resting his hand on my forearm to emphasise his words. "Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong- that we do not lie to ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we do is right."
And later, as the wedding whirled and clamoured to the last wail of its rejoicing, and as we rejoined our men and scrambled, clattered, and strained our way across new mountains, I tried to unwind the wreath of thorns that Khader had coiled around my heart with his words. The wrong thing for the right reasons...
Once before he'd tormented me with that phrase. I chewed at it, in my mind, as a bear will chew at a leather strap that binds it by the leg. In my life, the wrong things were almost always done for the wrong reasons. Even the right things that I did were too often goaded by the wrong reasons.
A gloomy mood enwrapped me. It was a sullen, doubting temper that I couldn't shake off, and as we rode into the winter I thought often of Anand Rao, my neighbour from the slum. I remembered Anand's face smiling at me through the metal grille of the visitor's room at Arthur Road Prison: that gentle, handsome face, so serene, and softened with the peace that had suffused his heart. He'd done the wrong thing for the right reasons, as he saw it. He'd calmly accepted the punishment that he'd earned, as he said to me, as if it was a privilege or a right. And at last, after too many thinking days and nights, I cursed Anand. I cursed him to drive him from my mind because a voice kept telling me-my own voice, or maybe it was my father's-that I would never know that peace.
I would never come to that Eden in the soul, where acceptance of punishment and acknowledgement of wrong and right roll away the troubles that lodge like stones in the barren field of an exiled heart.
Moving north again at night, we climbed and crossed the narrow Kussa Pass in the Hada Mountains. The journey of thirty crow kilometres was closer to one hundred and fifty climbing-and descending-kilometres for us. Then, exposed to the wide sky, we travelled over flatter land for almost fifty kilometres to cross the Arghastan River and its tributaries three times before we reached the foothills of the Shahbad Pass. And there, with my mind still choked on its rights and wrongs, we were fired on for the first time.
Khader's command that we commence the climb of the Shahbad Pass without a rest saved many lives, including my own, that cold evening. We were exhausted after the headlong, trotting march across the open plain. Every man among us hoped for rest at the foothills of the pass, but Khader urged us on, riding the length of the column and shouting for us to keep on, keep on, and keep up the pace. Thus we were moving fast when the first shots were fired. I heard the sound: a hollow metal tapping, as if someone was rapping on the side of an empty gasoline can with a piece of copper pipe. Stupidly, I didn't associate it with gunfire at first, and I kept trudging forward, leading my horse by the reins. Then the bullets found their range, and they smashed into the ground, our column, and the rock walls around us. The men scrambled for cover. I fell to the ground, grinding my face into the dust of the stony path and telling myself that it wasn't really happening, that I hadn't seen the man in front of me ripped open across his back as he stumbled forward. Our men began firing from all around me. And rapid-breathing the dust into my mouth, stiff with fear, I was in the war. I mightVe stayed there, with my face in the dirt and my heart thumping seismic terror into the earth, if it wasn't for my horse. I'd lost the reins, and the horse was rearing in fright.
Fearing that it might trample me, I scrambled to my feet and scrabbled at the flailing reins to regain control of her. The horse that had been so impressively obedient to that point was suddenly the worst of the entire column. She reared and then bucked. She stamped her hooves and tried to drag me backward. She thrashed and drove us in tight circles, trying to find an angle where she could kick backward at me. She even bit me, snapping at my forearm and causing intense pain through three layers of clothes.
I glanced along the line, left and right. Those nearest to the pass were making a run for it, leading their animals toward the rocky shelves for shelter. Those immediately in front of me and behind me had managed to bring their horses down, and they crouched beside or behind them. Only my horse was still rearing and widely visible. Without a horseman's skill, it's a damn hard thing to convince a horse to lie down in a battle zone. Other horses were screaming in fear, and each whinny of terror put more panic into mine. I wanted to save her, to bring her down and make less of a target of her, but I was afraid for myself as well. The enemy fire slammed into the rocks above and beside me, and with every shattering sound I flinched like a deer nudging a thorn hedge.
It's a bizarre feeling, waiting for a bullet to strike: the nearest experience I can recall that's anything like it is falling through space, and waiting for the safety chute to open.
There's a special taste; a unique taste. There's a different smell on your skin. And there's a hardness in the eyes, as if they're suddenly made of cold metal. Just when I decided to give up and let the animal fend for herself, she buckled easily and followed my dragging arms down and onto her side. I hurled myself down with her, using her swollen middle as a shield. In an attempt to calm her, I reached over to pat at her shoulder. My hand squelched in a bloody wound. Raising my head, I saw that the horse had been struck twice, once high on the shoulder and once in the belly. The wounds were streaming blood with every heaving breath, and the horse was crying-I have no other word for it.
The sound was a breathy, stuttering, whining sob. I put my head against hers, and wrapped my arm around her neck.
The men in my group concentrated their fire on a ridge about one hundred and fifty metres away. With my body pressed hard against the ground, I peeked over the mane of my horse to see dusty plumes rise and spill over the distant ridge as bullet after bullet rammed into the earth.
And then it was over. I heard Khader shouting in three languages for the men to stop shooting. We waited for long minutes, in a stillness that groaned and moaned and sobbed. I heard footsteps crunching the stones nearby, and looked up to see Khaled Ansari running toward me at a crouch.
"Are you okay, Lin?"
"Yeah," I answered, wondering then for the first time if I, too, had been shot. I ran my hands over my legs and arms. "Yeah, I'm all here. I think I'm still in one piece. But they shot my horse.
She's-"
"I'm doing a count!" he interrupted me, holding up the palms of both hands to calm me and stop me speaking. "Khader sent me to see if you're okay and do a head count. I'll be back soon. Stay here and don't move."
"But she's-"
"She's finished!" he hissed and then softened his tone. "The horse is gone, Lin. She's done for. She's not the only one.
Habib's gonna finish them off. Just stay here and keep your head down. I'll be back."
He ran off at a crouch, stopping here and there along the column behind me. My horse was breathing hard, whimpering with every third or fourth chugging breath. The flow of blood was slow but steady. The wound in her belly was oozing a dark fluid that was darker than blood. I tried to soothe her, stroking her neck, and then I realised that I hadn't given her a name. It seemed grievously cruel, somehow, for her to die without a name. I searched my mind, and when I pulled the net of thought up from the blue-black deep there was a name, glittering and true.
"I'm going to call you Claire," I whispered into the mare's ear.
"She was a beautiful girl. She always made me look good, wherever we went. When I was with her I always looked like I knew what I was doing. And I didn't start to love her, really, until she walked away from me for the last time. She said I was interested in everything and committed to nothing. She said that to me once.
And she was right. She was right."
I was babbling, raving, in shock. I know the symptoms now. I've seen other men under fire for the first time. A rare few know exactly what to do: their weapons are returning fire before their bodies have finished an instinctive crouch and roll. Others laugh, and can't stop laughing. Some cry, and call for their mama, or their wife, or their God. Some get so quiet, shrinking down inside themselves, that even their friends get spooked by it. And some talk, just like I talked to my dying horse.
Habib scrambled up to me in a slithering, zigzag run, and saw me talking into the mare's ear. He checked her over thoroughly, running his hands over the wounds and probing under the thickly veined hide to feel for the bullets. He pulled his knife out of its scabbard. It was a long knife, with a dog's tooth point. He positioned it over the horse's throat and then paused. His mad eyes met mine. There was a sunburst of gold around the pupils of his eyes that seemed to pulse and whirl. They were big eyes, but the madness in them was bigger, straining and bulging at them as if it wanted to burst outward from his very brain. And yet he was sane enough to sense my helpless grief, and to offer me the knife.
It may be that I should've taken the knife and killed the horse, my horse, myself. Maybe that's what a good man, a committed man, would've done. I couldn't. I looked at the knife and the trembling throat of the horse, and I couldn't do it. I shook my head. Habib pushed the knife into the horse's neck and gave it a subtle, almost elegant twist of his wrist. The mare shuddered, but allowed herself to be calmed. When the knife left her throat, the blood gushed in heart-thrusted bursts onto her chest and the sodden ground. Slowly, the straining jaw relaxed, and the eyes glazed over, and then the great heart was still.
I looked from the gentle, dead, unfearing eyes of the horse into the sickness that careered in Habib's eyes, and the moment that we shared was so charged with emotion, so surreally alien to the worlds I knew, that my hand slid involuntarily along my body to the gun in my holster. Habib grinned at me, a toothy baboon grin that was impossible to read, and scrambled away along the line to the next wounded horse.
"Are you okay?"
"Are you okay?"
"Are you okay?"
"What?"
"I said, are you okay?" Khaled asked, shaking a handful of clothing at my chest until I looked him in the eye.
"Yeah. Sure." I focused on his face, wondering how long I'd been staring at my dead horse, with my hand resting on her punctured throat. I looked around me at the sky. The night was close, only minutes away. "How bad... how bad was it?"
"We lost one man. Madjid. A local guy."
"I saw it. He was right in front of me. The bullets cut him open like a can opener. Fuck, man, it was so quick. He was alive, and then his back opened up, and he dropped over like a cut puppet.
I'm sure he was dead before his knees hit the ground. It was that fast!"
"Are you sure you're okay?" Khaled asked when I paused for breath.
"Of course I'm fuckun okay!" I snapped, a purely Australian accent punching into the expletive. The gleam in his eyes goaded me for another heartbeat of vexation and I almost shouted at him, but then I saw the warmth in his expression, and the concern. I laughed instead. Relieved, he laughed with me. "Of course I'm okay. And I'd be a lot better if you'd stop asking me. I'm just a bit... talkative... that's all. Gimme some slack. Jesus! A man just got killed on one side of me, and my horse got killed on the other side. I don't know whether I'm lucky or jinxed."