The Wasted Vigil Read Online Free Page A

moon’s fourteen faces. Seeking reassurance, she stretched her hand in the darkness until it was pressed against the boy’s face. At one time there would have been thin silk between the palm of her hand and his features. So great had been his beauty a few years ago that, fearing abduction, his parents had confined him to the house. A second Joseph, a second Yusuf, he was draped in diaphanous material if ever he was allowed into the street. There had been several attempts to seize him, the house shaken by the ferocity and the organised nature of some of the assaults.
    Zameen and the other young girls of Usha had kissed the adolescent through the veil, his mouth the mouth of a doll for them.
    Now he was older—eighteen years of age, the delicacy of the features beginning to coarsen into handsomeness—and was truly loved by her. He came regularly to her house to borrow books and she saw him frequently in Usha, writing in his notebooks—sometimes very rapidly as though using a quill whose top end was on fire, but slowly at other times, as carefully as an embroiderer intent on delighting a sultan. In the beginning she was too timid to say anything to him and had consoled herself with what Muhammad had said about those who died of secret love—that they would be granted immediate admission to Paradise as martyrs—but a fortnight ago she had revealed her feelings to him. What she hadn’t known was that when he shyly removed his cap in her presence it was so she could see him better.
    Now, in a dark grove of trees near the lake, she shook as they tried to think of something to do. They were sure the next day the news would come that one of the cleric’s older wives had vanished, and then in a few weeks he would marry a young girl.
    “She was still alive.”
    “I heard her too. We must go back.”
    They went past the burnt remains of the school that the Communist regime had opened in Usha last month. The first one in the area, Zameen herself being a boarder in Jalalabad, coming home at the end of the week. Following the sermons from the mosque, and with the active involvement of the members of the two rich landowning families—whose wealth and lands the Communists promised to distribute among the deprived and unfortunate majority of Usha—the teachers and their families had been savagely massacred a week ago and thrown into the lake, the poor of Usha doing their worst to announce their loyalty to the landowners and to Allah—their only protectors. They had wanted to kill Zameen’s lover too, because he was always reading and a young man who spent that much time with books had to be a Communist. He had managed to flee, revealing himself to Zameen only tonight with that sparrow peck on her window.
    Now they led each other back to the djinn’s lair, but despite an hour and more of searching they were unable to locate the burial site.
    Neither of them knew that during their search Usha had filled up with soldiers. Among the murdered teachers had been the Soviet headmaster of the school and his young family. And tonight the Soviets had retaliated.
    Zameen was holding the boy’s hand in the thinning darkness at the end of the night when she felt her arm being suddenly tugged downwards, and only then did she realise that he had been shot, the sound of the gun also reaching her now. The Soviet soldiers surrounded her and took her to Usha where the cleric confirmed her identity to them with a nod. She saw the mud on the hem of his trousers.
    The mosque was among the first places the soldiers had visited upon entering Usha, rightfully suspecting it of being the possible centre of the resistance, and the cleric—just back from interring his wife—had provided them with a list of names to save his own life. This was a chance for him to eliminate the two lovers also, to make sure what they had seen would go no further. He said Zameen and the boy had participated in the massacre, that they were among the people who had marched