Review: The Wasted Vigil

The Wasted Vigil is set in a place where trees and vines might suspend growth for fear of encountering a landmine.

That's how author Nadeem Aslam describes the area around Usha, a small town in northern Afghanistan where the events of the last quarter of a century or so have been mired in horrendous warfare and rule by terror.

Marcus Caldwell has spent most of his adult life living there at the base of mountains which shelter the Tora Bora caves. He is a white-bearded prophet-in-wreckage, living alone in a dislocated world. His motivating life force — his vigil — is the hope that one day he may locate his lost grandson.

Marcus has never known his grandson, the child of his only daughter, Zameen, who disappeared one night when she was 17. She and her boyish sweetheart were falsely betrayed to Soviet soldiers as 'insurgents' by the local cleric, a man keen to ingratiate and protect himself.

Marcus and his Afghani born wife Qatrina believe that Zameen is dead, killed by the Russian soldiers. And she would have been, except for the discovery that her blood type is the same as that of the General, and for the practice in an under-supplied Soviet army of exsanguination.

But Zameen avoids being bled to death to save the General when Benedikt — a deserting Soviet soldier who has repeatedly raped her in her cell — rescues and escapes with her.

This happens close to the end of the Soviet occupation, and during the following period of civil war and vicious struggle between local warlords, Marcus and Qatrina are kidnapped separately to provide medical care to opposing sides.

When the Taliban emerge as victors and rulers, Marcus finds Qatrina and together they return to their home, a relic of a gentler and more enlightened Islam.

Marcus smears the internal house walls with mud to hide the painted illustrations depicting Allah and celebrating the five senses. He closes the underground perfume factory with its huge Buddha's head, disinterred during construction. Qatrina nails hundreds of books to the ceiling — pages of love, history and sacred words held in place by iron spikes. It is a misguided attempt to save them from destruction, for as she says "original thought was heresy to the Taliban".

But educated, intellectual, liberal-thinking humanists were never going to survive the Taliban years unscathed. Nadeem Aslam is brutally blunt in his descriptions of these years. They are so chilling at times they stop you dead.

Maybe it was no worse than other instances of inhumanity over the ages — slavery, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, Pol Pot — but that lessens the impact none.

Marcus learns of Zameen's survival, and in his search for her meets David Town, an American gem trader and one-time undercover CIA agent. David and Zameen had been lovers. David knows more of her story, and about her son Bizhad, but as a result of twisted and cynical events typical of the SNAFU experience of war, he loses them both.

Marcus and David become friends — as close as family, and David continues to visit Marcus over the years. Like Marcus, David is always searching — for Bizhad, and for answers.

Which brings us to the present and where the novel begins. Lara, the Russian sister of Benedikt has a vigil of her own to keep for she has come to Afghanistan several times searching for her brother who disappeared on the night of his escape. Lara's husband has died violently, in the aftermath of the end of the USSR, and since then she has been living a disconnected, troubled life.

Lara has recently discovered hints of a connection between Benedikt and Zameen, and arrives in Usha seeking information. She arrives ill and beaten after a passenger on her bus, a man young enough to be her son, has taken it upon himself to teach her a lesson for resting on the grass verge with her feet pointing towards Mecca. Thinking her to be a local woman he delivers three blows with a tyre iron to point out her lack of wisdom.

In his strange home, Marcus and David care for Lara with kindness and tenderness. And so we have together an Englishman, a Russian and an American, in post-9/11 Afghanistan, in a house breathing literature, music, love and compassion, and surrounded by imminent mayhem.

Into the mix steps Casa, an injured young man who was conscripted into the fundamentalist rebel army when still an orphan child. He is confused by these foreigners — their actions challenge his drilled-in beliefs, and the hard lessons he has learned. His long-term indoctrination has him reacting against their kindness, fearing it has infected him permanently, and events move to an unsentimental, inevitable conclusion.

Aslam has said that "the novelist's job is not to pose solutions, but to find out how best to live". That is the great part of this engrossing and bitter-sweet story. Despite the conflicting ideologies and the social tragedies from which we ought to learn, the story is about disparate people caring about each other against all odds, becoming friends and family. It is about the age-old phenomenon that is human history.

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