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He found the River Murghab to be so full of rapids it could have been the Colorado.
    He listens to the voice continuing as he falls asleep again. Come to worship, it says, Come to happiness.
    An hour later he gets up and walks out to a nearby teahouse. There is a samovar, and bread is being pulled out of the clay oven buried in the ground in the corner. He remembers Marcus Caldwell telling him tea is an ingredient in some perfumes. Maybe it was Zameen, passing on knowledge absorbed from her father. We learn in detail that which is most insistent around us. The desert people make good astronomers.
    To the left of him a chakor partridge bites the bars of its cage. They are a gregarious bird, moving in large family groups in the wild, but are kept like this all across Afghanistan. The place becomes more and more busy as daylight increases, the road full of traffic. Vans and lorries, animals and humans. Wrapped in a coarse blanket, he occupies a far chair, nodding and saying salam-a-laikam whenever someone new arrives to take a seat near by. He sits with his quiet watchful air. A cap unscrewed from a missile serves as a sugar bowl in this place. He can see the words Death to America and Kill Infidels daubed in Pashto, in two different paints and two different scripts, on a nearby wall. A news hawker enters, a child of six at most, and a man buys a magazine with Osama bin Laden on the cover, photographed as always with the Kalashnikov of a Soviet soldier he had killed here in the 1980s.
     
    “Marcus?”
    David, walking back from breakfast, calls out towards the figure on the other side of the narrow lane.
    The man with the white beard stops and looks up and then comes to him, taking him into his arms, a long wordless hug. Just a few smeared noises from the throat.
    “I didn’t know you were in the country,” Marcus says when they separate.
    “Why are you in the city?”
    “I came yesterday. A shopkeeper in Usha, who recently visited Jalalabad, told me about a boy in his twenties who could be . . . our Bihzad.” That was the name Zameen had chosen for her son. Bihzad—the great fifteenth-century master of Persian miniature painting, born here in what is now Afghanistan, in Herat. “David, he remembers a lot of things, remembers her name.”
    “Where is he?” He looks at Marcus, the eyes that are the eyes of a wounded animal.
    “I met him yesterday. I spent last night with him.” Marcus points to the minaret with the high domed top in the distance, a brass crescent at its pinnacle. “Up there. He makes the call to prayer from up there.”
    “Then I think I heard him at dawn.”
    “We spent almost the entire night talking, or rather I talked. He is a little withdrawn, distant. There was something fraught about him occasionally.” From his pocket Marcus takes out a key with a cord threaded through its eye. “He gave me this. Come, I’ll take you up there.”
    “What about the scar?” The child had burned himself on a flame.
    “Yes, I saw it.”
    “He’s up there now?”
    “He said he had a few things to do but he’ll be back. I came yesterday morning, thinking I’ll go back on the evening bus but the service was cancelled. So I had to stay.”
    “I’ll drive you back this afternoon.” A journey along vineyards that produced bunches of grapes the length of his forearm. “I was going to come see you in the next few days anyway.”
    “I should have returned as planned. She spent last night alone.” Marcus stops. “David, there is a woman back at the house.”
    “Yes?”
    “She’s Russian.”
    He’d kept on walking and is two steps ahead of Marcus, but now he halts. “A Russian?”
    “Larissa Petrovna. She says her brother was a soldier who knew Zameen.”
    David nods. The older man does not say the Soviet soldier’s name but David hears it in his head anyway. Benedikt Petrovich. The man who fathered Zameen’s child through repeated assault, the child David later called his own son, who it is