The Golden Legend - Couverture souple

Prologue

It was a large room. There were many shelves of books, a metal helmet for a stallion from the times of the Crusades, and there were the vertebrae of a whale from a bay in Antarctica. In one alcove was the earliest known photograph of a snowflake.

The child entered the silence and stillness of the vast interior through the far door. She came past the fishing canoe resting on a long low table under the window.

She was seven years old and her name was Helen.

Two buildings stood next to each other at the centre of the room. Each was taller than the girl, was perhaps four times her height. During that early morning hour, the light still only half awake, she stood looking at them.

They appeared to be mosques, and they were beautiful—with their families of domes, semi-domes, and minarets. She thought of them as two elaborate hats or headdresses, possibly meant for djinns or a pair of giants from a fairytale. She considered taking a few additional steps and peering through one of their windows. The colours and features were so precise and assorted—the muted shine on the walls and the arcs of the domes. She reached out and touched the detail of a painted leaf.

Buildings situated within a room! Normally it was a room that existed within a building, was contained by it. She described a circle around them now.

She went past the cupboard where stood the vase of dried branches brought back from Russia. They were from the apple trees that Count Tolstoy had planted with his own hands. Four of them were still alive in his orchard.

The girl stopped when one of the buildings produced a creak, as though it were experiencing a mild earthquake. It stirred now and rose a few inches, breaking free of gravity, swaying a little. And then it ascended further, beginning to travel at a languid pace towards the ceiling. It was being pulled up by the delicate-seeming yet strong chains that were attached to the tips of its minarets. Eventually it came to a stop—up there, in the high distance

The immense room she was in was a library and a study. A place of fertile solitude. Due to its size it was difficult to heat in the winter months. Not long ago they had had the idea of bringing in two small cabins—each just large enough to house a desk and chair, a stack of immediately necessary books and papers, and a small heater. The thinking was that from December to February a person would go into one of the cabins, close the door behind her, and work in that pocket of warmth. From ordinary cabins, however, they had become detailed models of two historic buildings—the Great Mosque of Córdoba, and the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

The girl had caught glimpses of them being constructed during the previous few weeks. Now they were ready, and because it was June they were being winched up, to remain suspended up there until December.

After the Hagia Sophia, she watched the Great Mosque of Córdoba being pulled up by the system of pulleys and chains.

Neither of the two buildings had a floor of its own. They would borrow the room’s floor when they were down here. So when Helen looked up now she could see into the interiors. She imagined moths fluttering like trapped prayers under the miniature domes in the evenings, bumping against the coloured insides. She would always remember this handful of moments from her early years. Childhood—when minutes could feel as prolonged as hours, and the days vanished in the blink of an eye

It was Helen’s father who had carpentered the buildings. And it was he who was causing them to rise through the air, storing them out of the way. She turned and looked at him where he stood at the other end of the room, operating the various cranks and pulleys located near the corner. She liked the fact that he made one last minor adjustment to the chains, making sure both buildings were held at exactly the same height.

He was a tall bright-blooded man, and his name was Lily

The Orchard

1

This world is the last thing God will ever tell us.

A few hours before he was killed, Massud woke at the call to the predawn prayer. It was issuing from the loudspeakers attached to the minaret just across the lane. He imagined the worshippers approaching the eighteenth-century mosque in silence, some of them carrying lanterns. The sight of empty shoes at the thresholds of mosques had always made him think that the men had been transformed into pure spirit just before entering.

After the call ended, the smell of bread drifted to him from the house behind the mosque, where the cleric lived, the man’s daughter rising at this hour to prepare a meal for him.

Massud turned his head on the pillow and looked at Nargis, asleep beside him. How long he lay there looking at her he would not have been able to say, but the amount of light was increasing softly around them, the earliest rays of the day arriving at the house. There were shadows but they were out of focus. How noisy the sun would be, Nargis had observed once, if sound could travel through space. The ceaseless firestorms. The oceans of flame.

Massud had turned fifty-five years old the previous month, and Nargis was fifty-two. They had met and married when they were in their twenties, and as he would confess to her later, he hadn’t had the courage to cast a direct second glance towards her until a fortnight after the first. With her contemplative calm and beauty, she hadn’t seemed like a real person at all. Much to his embarrassment, he had almost lost consciousness the first time he had taken her into his embrace.

He lay awake now, grateful for her presence beside him in life. The breeze came from the direction of the mosque again, and as he fell back asleep he remembered reading somewhere that the smell of bread instils kindness in human beings.

Numerous bird wings were hanging from nails driven into the far wall of the kitchen, lit up by lines of sunlight. They were in a range of sizes, beginning with a sunbird’s two-inch pair, and ending with a single giant one that had belonged to a trumpeter swan, with dozens of species in between. The most beautiful modern building in Pakistan was said by many to be a mosque designed by Nargis and Massud. They were architects, and they lived surrounded by objects from which they might draw inspiration. Apart from the bird wings, in one corridor there was a chariot from Sindh, and there was a samurai’s suit of armour that looked as though it were made out of dragon scales. The earth was not a perfect sphere. Were the oceans to be emptied, it would resemble a distorted ball, and Massud had carved that shape precisely in sandstone. It stood at the centre of the garden. Scattered on various tables and ledges around the house were small replicas of some of the world’s celebrated buildings. The cross-section of Durham Cathedral. The Forbidden City. The Glass House in New Canaan, USA.

In the kitchen Nargis was preparing tea. She switched on the radio when it was time for the news.

For a few weeks now, someone had been entering the city’s mosques—most often during the night—and revealing the secrets of the citizens over the minarets’ loudspeakers. People’s immoral acts and corruptions, some of the most securely concealed vices were now in full view. No one had been able to catch the culprit, or culprits, and the city of Zamana was experiencing a strange new dread. Perhaps inevitably, it was being said that it was the voice of Allah. There were those who thought that the clerics of the mosques themselves were responsible for the distressing phenomenon, but in a number of instances the loudspeakers had exposed the profound defects and hypocrisies within a mosque itself.

Nargis became still as she listened, the newscaster telling her that a young woman had died at the hands of her brothers during the night, an hour or so after a minaret revealed her trysts with a lover.

She went to the shelf and switched off the radio.

Through the open door she could see Massud in the garden. It was still early, still the fragile hour, though the trees were woven through with sunlight. He was examining the Rangoon creeper that the hailstorms had damaged last month.

Nargis looked at the clock. This morning they would leave the house to supervise the transfer of thousands of books from one of Zamana’s oldest libraries to its new premises, which had been designed and built by them.

The majority of the library’s books had already been taken to the new premises. The volumes in the Islamic section were the ones that would be moved this morning. Since each one of these texts contained the names of Allah or Muhammad somewhere, it had been decided that they should be taken from one building to the other by hand. In a truck or cart the risk was too great of something coming into contact with uncleanliness. Nargis and Massud would be walking to the nearby Grand Trunk Road to be part of a human chain, and the books would travel a mile-long succession of hands.

“We should leave by seven-thirty,” Nargis said when Massud entered the kitchen. He had just watered the sunflowers, and a sequence of his wet footprints marked his passage on the floor. He came and closed his arms at her waist from behind, his chin resting on her shoulder. “I had the strangest of dreams,” he said. “Someone was walking with a lit candle in his hand.”

“That’s not so strange.”

“It was raining. Hard.”

“Well,” Nargis said, considering the words, “the brain is the most complex object in the universe.” Her own sleep was always much deeper than his. She rarely dreamed.

“Helen said she will be here this morning,” Massud told her as he was setting the table for breakfast. “She is writing an essay and wanted to consult some books in the study.”

Nargis did not react outwardly, but her silence made him look towards her.

“I know,” he said.

“We have to tell her, Massud. We have to tell both Lily and her.”

Massud nodded.

“We really mustn’t delay it any further.”

And with a new note in her voice, Nargis added, “Pakistan produces people of extraordinary bravery. But no country should ever require its citizens to be this brave.”

Helen was the daughter of the couple whom Nargis had employed as housekeepers. Lily and Grace were Christian and were both illiterate. And Helen—who was now nineteen years old—too would have grown up to be an uneducated servant in some Muslim household had Massud and Nargis not provided her with an alternative set of opportunities. They had paid for her education at Zamana’s finest schools and she had been an assiduous and brilliant student until three years ago when her mother’s life had come to a terrible end. There were several witnesses to the crime, but the murderer was a Muslim and this was Pakistan. The police were initially reluctant to even register a case. Eventually, however, the man was sentenced to life imprisonment—but the day before yesterday Nargis and Massud learned that Grace’s killer had been released, as a reward for having memorised the entire Koran. He had served less than a year in prison.

“They are only just beginning to recover from the death,” Nargis said. The loss was detectable in the eyes of both father and daughter.

After they finished breakfast, Massud walked out into the garden again. At its other end was the largest room in the house: their study and library, where the Hagia Sophia and the Great Mosque of Córdoba were suspended from the ceiling. He told himself that he should make sure at least one of the desks in there was tidy for Helen.

Nargis and Massud had demanded that the correct legal procedures be followed. They had engaged the best lawyer, and they felt that the verdict had been a just one. Neither they nor anyone else, however, could have predicted what happened shortly afterwards. A few days after he delivered the verdict, the judge was stabbed to death as he left his house in the morning. And on several occasions over the coming weeks, men on motorcycles slowed down outside the lawyer’s home to spray the exterior with bullets from machine guns, one bullet narrowly missing his young child, until he and his family went into hiding.

Beyond everything else, Nargis and Massud blamed themselves for the fates of the lawyer and the judge.

The air in the garden was noticeably warmer now. It was April and the days were already twelve hours long. Massud went towards the study, passing under the rosewood trees that were being visited by many dozens of pale butterflies. It was a wonder to him that so much activity did not produce any noise.

Helen would let herself into the house with her own key in their absence. The house was a former paper factory, and it was said that it had made the entire area smell like money when it was operational. As young architects Nargis and Massud had visited the neighbourhood one day and decided to convert the abandoned building into a home.

Massud had always regretted not having had children—or, more precisely, a daughter—and that was what Helen had become over the years. She and Lily lived next door but she had more or less grown up in this house. She had a room of her own here. As a child she took running jumps onto Massud’s back, much to her parents’ embarrassment. Here he had seen her draw a cat with five legs by mistake. He still remembered the day she returned from school aged five or so, her eyes wide with indignation as she announced, “The wolf ate Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother!” Massud had told her the wolf had eaten all the biscuits in the grandmother’s house, but the other children had revealed the truth.

It was 7:20 when they left the house. As always at this time of the year, Massud was wearing a pale linen suit. Instead of a belt his trousers were held up by braces, and his head was protected by a straw hat purchased in London some years ago. Nargis was in a voile shalwar-kameez. Its neck had been embroidered by Grace. Their destination—the human chain stretching along the Grand Trunk Road—was a half-hour walk away.

The neighbourhood was known as Badami Bagh. As the name suggested, it was once an orchard of almond trees. It had stood on the northern outskirts of the city for almost two hundred years. In 1857 some of the leaders of the Mutiny had hidden in the orchard’s thick groves, plotting their attacks; and later, once the Mutiny had been put down, the British had hanged them from the branches of the same trees.

By the 1950s—the British had left by then and Pakistan was an independent nation—the city was growing rapidly towards the orchard, and its owners were beginning to realise that the land on which the almond trees stood would be more lucrative if built upon. The orchard was owned by a single extended family, and they decided to build the smallest possible houses and rent them out mostly to Christians, who worked as servants in the houses of Zamana’s Muslims, or cleaned the city’s roads and sewers, and were docile and obedient.

By the time the twenty-first century began, Badami Bagh was the poorest neighbourhood in Zamana, a ghetto. The city had continued to grow and had approached, half-circled and finally swallowed it, spreading far beyond. Surrounding the enclave of Christian houses with Muslim ones on all sides.

And a single tree was all that remained of the orchard. It stood in the courtyard of Lily and Helen’s house. Now and then, the ghost of a hanged Mutineer would climb down from its branches and wander about Badami Bagh, asking people to untie the noose from around his neck.

Walking towards the Grand Trunk Road, Nargis and Massud took the lane that was the only way in or out of the neighbourhood. Th...

One of the Best Books of the Year: The Christian Science Monitor, The Economist, and LitHub

“Powerful and engrossing. . . . [Aslam] writes with great sensitivity and depth.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Stunning. . . . [The Golden Legend is] masterful and compelling fiction, intricately layering symbols and parallels, unspooling its plot in dramatic twists until the very last sentence.” —The Boston Globe
 
“A powerful and timely comment on the precarious state of religious minorities in Pakistan and an honest mirror to the Pakistani state and society.” —The Washington Post

“Beautifully imagined.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“Remarkable. . . . The Golden Legend is extravagant with imagery and elaborate with metaphor.” —The Economist

“A heart-pounding and timely novel about kinship and resilience.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“A magical book. . . . Aslam’s writing is lyrical and expansive. . . . He’s a brilliant novelist, one of two or three truly great writers in the world today. His work reminds me of Orhan Pamuk at an earlier stage of his career. And, yes, like Pamuk, Nadeem Aslam ought to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.” —Charles R. Larson, Counterpunch
 
“At once a coming-of-age love story, a study of loss, and a lucid portrait of the conflicts pervading contemporary Pakistan. . . . Aslam’s crystalline prose and emotionally nuanced characters give his novel a wide resonance. . . . Though unsparing in its depiction of the brutal exercise of power, this is also a paean to human resilience.” —Financial Times
 
“Aslam has quietly built up a body of work quite unlike that of any other novelist, detailing the worst that humans can do in prose that suggests the redemptive possibilities of art. Horror and beauty are held in precarious balance in The Golden Legend.” —Peter Parker, The Spectator
 
“Mesmerizing . . . other-worldly astonishing. Superlatives feel downright insufficient.” —The Christian Science Monitor