The Mountain Shadow

I saw Abdullah at once, his long black hair trailing over the edge of the table. I wanted to turn away. I wanted to run. That beautiful face, that lion heart, that fire in the sky: I couldn’t bear to see it emptied, and cold.

But Karla went to him, put her head on his chest, and wept. I had to move. I drifted along the table, dead men’s heads a breeze against my fingers, and took Abdullah’s hand.

The face was stern, and I was comforted to see it. He was wearing white, and it showed blood everywhere. A clear line crossed his brow, where his white cap had been, but his proud face, all eyebrows, nose and beard like a king of Sumer, was speckled and blotched everywhere else.

He’d been shot, and stabbed, but his reddened face was unmarked.

It hurt inside like a cramp to see his time stopped. My own threads of time vibrated within me, one strand of the harmony silenced.

It hurt to see no breath, no life, no love. It was hard to stare at a man still there, and already suffered for, and already missing.

She was right, to make us cry. If you don’t say goodbye, an Irish poet once said to me, you never say goodbye. And it took a long time to cry goodbye.

Finally I let the dead hand fall, and let the myth of the man fall with it. Each one that leaves us, leaves an unfillable space. She came back with me to the veranda in control again, but grieving, and knowing that there was an empty cave inside both of us: a cave that would draw us again and again to sorrow, and remember.

Khaled was waiting for us.

‘You should hurry,’ he said. ‘My Company is very jumpy tonight.’

‘Your Company?’

‘The Khaled Company, Lin,’ Khaled replied, frowning. ‘This night, we took Vishnu’s life, and now we take everything that Vishnu had. This night, the Khaled Company is born. That was the plan. Abdullah’s plan, in fact, to use himself as the bait.’

‘You know what, Khaled –’ I started to end it with him, but I stopped, because just then a man stepped out of a shadow.

‘Salaam aleikum, Shantaram,’ the Tuareg said.

‘Wa aleikum salaam, Tuareg,’ I said, standing closer to Karla.

‘The Tuareg has been freelancing for me,’ Khaled said. ‘He set all of this up. And now he’s back home, in the Khaled Company.’

‘You set this up, Tuareg?’

‘I did. And I kept you out of it, by sending you after the Irishman,’ the Tuareg said. ‘Because you shook my hand.’

‘Goodbye, Khaled,’ I said.

‘Allah hafiz,’ Karla said, taking my arm on the steps, because we were both unsteady on our feet.

‘Khuda hafiz,’ Khaled replied. ‘Until we meet again.’

When we reached the base of the mountain, Karla stopped me.

‘Do you have the keys to State of Grace?’

‘I always have the keys to my bike,’ I said. ‘You wanna ride?’

‘Oh, yeah, let’s ride,’ she said. ‘I’m so messed up that only freedom can save me.’

We rode to the temple, where Idriss and the students were sheltering for the night, and told them that the danger was over. Idriss sent a fit, young student to tell Silvano the news. We took a blessing from the sage, and left.

We rode the last hours before dawn, going nowhere the long way, the bike chattering machine talk on empty boulevards, with signals on both sides flashing green, because nobody in Bombay stopped, at that hour, for red.

We parked the bike at the entrance to the slower, softer path to the mountain. I chained the bike to a young tree, so she wouldn’t be afraid, and we walked the long, gentle, winding path to the mesa.

Karla clung to me. I put an arm around her waist, supporting her, and making her steps a little lighter.

‘Abdullah,’ she said softly, a few times.

Abdullah.

I remembered when she said it to make us laugh, on the steep climb. I remembered when Abdullah was a friend I could laugh with, and tease. We cried together as we walked.

We reached the camp, and found students there, already bringing things back to function and faith.

‘Okay, this is too busy,’ Karla said, leaning against my shoulder. ‘Let’s hit the grassy knoll.’

We headed for our makeshift tent on the knoll. I set her down there, unresisting, falling back onto a cushion as if into a dream, and within a minute she was asleep.

We had a large water bottle in our kit of supplies. I soaked a towel, and cleaned the cuts and grazes that I’d already imagined, and then found, on her hands and feet.

She moaned, from time to time, when cloth and water sent streaks into her sleeping mind, but didn’t wake.

When the wounds on her hands and feet were clean, I rubbed them with turmeric oil. It was the medicine that everyone on the mountain used for cuts and scratches.

When I finished massaging oil into her scraped and cut feet, she curled onto her side, and went deeper into that annihilating sleep.

Abdullah. Abdullah.

I took water into the forest, emptied myself, cleaned myself, scrubbed myself, and returned to find her sitting up, staring at our patch of sky.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

‘I’m okay,’ she said. ‘Where were you?’