Things He Gave Her

Rawalpindi, Pakistan: 1966-1976 A lead box three and3/8 inches long, one and l/l6th inches wide, and almost an inch deep, hinged neatly but sprung now from the compacted grey dust of thirty years. Inlaid upon the cover, a plump gold deer holds his antlers high, his cloven hooves pawing a patch of tall grass, one golden crocus. The box was made for Dost Mohammed Khan, the Muhammedzai chieftain who brought Afghanistan to a brief order in the 185Os. Is Dost Mohammed dead that there is no longer justice in the land? Dost Mohammed must have used it for opium; her lover filled it with bird-shot. he wanted only simple and useful things, perfectly made. The dog whistle she lost on the polo field walking his black labrador was pure gold, given to him when he was a boy by the old Maharajah of Kashmir. His handkerchiefs were silk with handturned edges; he could tell by touch whether the silk was Chinese or Italian or Indian. When he gave her the box, she filled it first with little rough rubies from Kashmir, then green cardamom to sweeten her mouth; toward the end, a promiscuity of sleeping pills. An emerald-green river stone the size of a peacock egg. When she first knew him he slept on a folding camp bed which in summer was conveyed to an elaborate colony of tents on the broad plain of the Indus, a few miles from its icy fall through the Karakorams. She had arrived in 'Pindi in the bitter cold of January with a young husband hungry for advancement. She was already accustomed to the conventions of the Foreign Service: pay, pack and follow. When the sea-freight came, she settled into the drafty bungalow, hired the servants who presented chits from foreign women who had come and gone before her, and began to give dinner parties. The military attache helped her arrange for a pair of horses from the Army and a sais to look after them, but her husband's official day was long and most often she rode alone. Then in the early summer they were invited to join a party driving out for dinner beside the Indus by someone she was introduced to after a polo match, when the Ambassador's wife handed out the prizes. She told her husband that night she'd met a man with eyes like a lynx. They could see his encampment as soon as they turned off the Grand Trunk Road. It was late afternoon, still stifling, but the breeze off the river caused the side-panels of the sleeping-tents to shift and shimmer in the distance. Servants in khaki with starched pugrees waited at the edge of the road to guide them and carry the bags of those who were spending the night. Drinks had been set out, a whole sheep was roasting on a spit. His hand, when he took hers in greeting, was dry as parchment, and through all the long evening he never met her eyes. On the last weekend of june they were invited again, this time to spend the night. When they arrived, it was late. There were only a half-dozen other couples, and their talk was pitched low, subdued. The murmur of the river dominated everything, its constant, even lapping. The moon was in its dark phase, and through the prolonged twilight the brighter stars were gradually presenting themselves. Halfway to darkness, while the rest of the company drank their sundown gins and the servants prepared the trestle tables for the evening meal, he led her to one of the narrow little boats that lay like minnows on the river bank, and, without a word, rowed across to the largest of the sandy islands that had risen from the river for that single hot season. It was lush with grass and the occasional scarlet poppy wind-sown from the vast fields on the other bank. They disembarked and stood for a while watching the mountains withdraw into blackness, the studded sky pale to grey. At water's edge he found a smooth oval stone, polished by the river, green as a Swat emerald. It was the first gift, marking a covenant already sealed. A platter of Russian Gardner, its wide border the maroon of dried blood, with a pawky little clutch of flowers at the center like a Victorian nosegay. …

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