An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World

1. SURELY THY LORD (1982)

It was his first hour in the country. He picked up his luggage and went to the door marked EXIT. The customs officials stared after him sternly.

Immediately as he stepped outside he had the sense of being crowded by something. He stood there in the night until he could see, hearing patient, deferential breathings and rustlings of garments on either side of him. He saw that the sidewalk in front of the terminal had a low fence on his right and his left, like a slaughter chute. Pressed up against the fence were hundreds of men, calling out softly: “A nickel, please?” —“Taxi, sir?” —They awaited his pleasure. Step by step he traversed the protected space, trying to look straight ahead of him and hoping that he would see a sign directing him to official transportation of some kind. Fifty feet ahead, the railings ended at the street curb. The Pakistanis stood waiting for him. He was by himself; the other passengers, who were all native to the place, had been cleared quickly and had gone. He had never been to Asia before. What should he do? Would they rob him there in the dark when he came in among them? — He continued walking. Having worked for a year in a reinsurance firm to finance his visit to the battlefields (which were still a thousand miles away), he had drawn up and balanced out to zero a list of his assets and liabilities:

ASSETS

LIABILITIES

1. My what-the-hell attitude.

1. The same.

2. My meager need for comfort.

(Call this “stamina.”)

2. The steady decay of my immune system.

3. Lack of much hunger.

3. Lack of much money.

4. Prudence.

4. The same. (Call it “cowardice.”) TOTALS: 0 0

He concentrated on that first item, his what-the-hell attitude, and took his last few steps.

Once upon a time there was a Young Man who wanted to be more than he really was. This made him unhappy. He decided to go to Afghanistan and take pictures of the bullets whizzing past his ears. Unfortunately he had a stomach ache.

Once there was a Young Man who wanted to go to war. Unfortunately, no one would take him at first. — “Well,” he reflected in his hotel room, “it could have been worse. They could have taken me and gotten me killed.”

Still and all, he thought, choking down a kebab at the Lone Star Café, he felt like a failure; for he had tried and tried to go. — What a panting puppy! — Had he been called upon to fetch newspapers for any master, oh! he would have run across the lawn of politics, tail a-wagging, like that breathless zigzagger Lukács, that silly noser-around in satellite countries, trying desperately to implement his convictions with any ready-to-hand artillery clip, even obligingly changing the convictions themselves as required by Stalin & Co. (At least, thought the Young Man, if any creepy organization is breathing down my neck at the moment, I’m on the other side!) — and always missing the democratic revolutionary boat, poor György, always getting short-circuited in the Great Electrification; for whenever he got his revolver out and aimed at the head of the oppressor class he would be informed of dismaying changes in the curriculum, so that all his efforts to raise the toiling masses and other Igor beavers up to social consciousness succeeded no more than any other type of levitation — and every time he got expelled from the people’s this and the people’s that, until he was left with nothing to do, finally, but talk about praxis in nineteenth-century novels. Stupid bastard. — Well, he wasn’t going to end up like that, the Young Man vowed, no sirree; why, he’d grab one of these here topaks all cocked and loaded with golai swiped from some Soviet ammunition dump, knock out the lights and maybe shoot somebody’s cap off just for effect (if only he could shoot!), assume command, lead the Mujahideen to the battlefront like Lawrence of Arabia, capture a helicopter in Kabul and proceed to Moscow, rotoring comfortably along below the radar line; and then he’d strafe the Kremlin roof and interrupt any number of important meetings. Oho, he’d change the objective conditions of history, he would; he’d make the materialists acknowledge the mud that they were made of—

And if he had been a Soviet Young Man, he would have gone to Nicaragua.

His little fiancée bought him sausage, and shortbread, and marzipan, and chocolate, and fancy crackers, convinced as she was that she would never see him again. He put it all in his camera duffel, which he then in military fashion STOWED beneath his feet on the plane. As one kind of cloud gave way to another beside his window seat, he drank ginger ale. He imagined calling his fiancée from each stop — New York, Frankfurt, Karachi — getting successively worse connections, having less and less to say. Mainly, however, he let himself be pampered by a benign blankness of thought, as if the ever-changing clouds had wandered in behind his eyes, and the blue lucidities between them were vacant. — He passed out of Swiss airspace. The clouds were thicker over Yugoslavia, and it was raining in Istanbul during the refueling. He stayed in the plane and watched a blue tank stenciled POLIS amble around the runway, with two white helmets sticking out from the hatch.

Coasting from time zone to time zone, he presently found himself sitting next to an ex-ambassador who was going home to India to do some trout fishing. The plane was almost empty. At midnight the blackness in the windows was challenged by rare small patterns of brightness from the United Arab Emirates. Two hours later came the descent, the lights of Karachi extending indefinitely beneath the window in all directions like electric pushpins marking the spread of cholera. The plane stopped, the door opened, and from the Arabian Sea came a fishy, sulphurous steam, like a malfunctioning boiler, that made the stewardesses’ uniforms stick to their bodies. The Young Man picked up his duffel, hands sweating, and got off the plane.

2. THE LAND OF COUNTERPANE (1959–81)

It is part of the fragmentation of life that certain states of existence can barely be recalled in others, as to a storybook sailor long away the feel of walking in the street drains first from his mind, which can conceive of only present time; and then gradually from his hands, which once flashed in free arcs at his sides and now must always be grasping stanchions or rigging; and finally from his legs and feet, which, having through greatest proximity become most accustomed to the confidently repetitive action of striding over the unmoving pavement, are the slowest to forget; and at last the sensation of walking on land becomes an abstraction, like the mountains of some country beyond the horizon. This was especially true for me when as a child I was ill. — I would wake up feeling hot and nauseous; the breakfast which my mother had made me I was unable to eat, and there was no talk of my going to school. My father, who sometimes suspected me of malingering, would study me sharply, but in the end my pallor and forehead heat would convince even him, and I would be sent back to bed for the day. I would lie there, and watch the sun slowly ascend in the sky, the other children going off past my window with their schoolbooks slung under their arms if they were boys, or held tightly against their chests if they were girls; and then I lay still and watched the clock beside me change the position of its hands with all the monotonous slowness of the great geological epochs. At five of eight the hands began to move faster; eight o’clock was the fatal hour when school began, and I knew that if I jumped out of bed even now, and dressed and ran off to school breakfastless, then I might perhaps arrive before the teacher called off my name, which, beginning as it did with “V,” was at the bottom of the attendance list. And I knew that my father, too, if he had not already left for the office, was also looking at the clock, thinking that it might not be too late to force me out of bed and take me to school in the car; but he did his best to judge my case fairly, and reconsidered the evidence which he had seen me exhibit: Was my temperature genuinely high, and did I look all that pale? Eventually he decided that yes, I was sick; or that at any rate it would be difficult to establish that I was not well; and it would certainly be too late to take me to school; for achieving that would involve first confronting and then besting my mother, who stood with her back toward him, also looking at the clock, but only unobtrusively, between the breakfast dishes, so as not to give my father an excuse for reopening the subject; and then eight o’clock had come and the issue was decided. It was only then that the hands of the clock stopped once again, and I became completely absorbed in my state of sickness.

The world outside blurred in the sunlight, in the same way that a streetlamp, seen through tears, becomes a bright, vague star; and this lack of definition seemed to me a force with a self, swelling until it pushed against my windowpane, halted at first by the smooth, cold surface, but waiting there, growing stronger and more determined, until it was able to seep in through some edge-crack. My desk, my schoolbooks and the few toys which I had not yet given up slowly became enveloped in its luminous sparkle; the closet’s black mouth filled with it; and then it flowed around me from three sides, and into me. Charged with it, I began to forget the cues and sensations of health, as in health I could not imagine myself as feeling sick, nor could I have much empathy for my sister Julie when she had the measles, nor keep from getting angry at my teacher when she did not come in that day and we had to have a substitute. The idea of a world beyond the window, which was now a translucent slab of light, or for that matter of any other possibility than that of lying in my bed immobile, became as dry and strange as some ontological argument of the Middle Ages, and by degrees ever less likely, until when at mid-morning, my mother came in to bring me a cup of tea or some soup, I refused politely, in the same way that I would have done if she’d come to ask whether I would be willing to study law at the university. This inability to grasp my own state of existence of the day before would have possessed me so much that by midafternoon, when my mother came in to read to me, I no longer shifted my position beneath the blankets at all, but lay absolutely still in the hot faintness of my malady as though I were one of those people one reads about in old books who are always getting becalmed in the tropics.

As soon as I was old enough to read by myself I stopped having my mother read to me at night, because I always disagreed with my sister as to what should be read to us that evening; and it was so much better for me to read what I wished while Julie sat on my mother’s lap and listened to her reading from Just So Stories or a poem from A Child’s Garden of Verses (both of which I now found childish) in her slow, soft voice; and when I was sick my mother would simply buy me a book, such as Captains Courageous, which I was too proud to ask her to read to me. But when I did still like having my mother read everything to me, and I was absorbed by poems like the one about the fight between the gingham dog and the calico cat, or the one that described a voyage to Africa, in which the traveler sees the knotty crocodile of the Nile (but I used to think that it was the NAUGHTY CROCODILE that had eaten people up and so must be spanked), and he finds the toys of the old Egyptian boys and all the other things which rhyme — there was still one poem which I dreaded. It was called “The Land of Counterpane,” and it recounted the fantasy of a child who is sick and abed with his toy soldiers. This “Land of Counterpane” is simply the topography of the wrinkled and up-thrust blankets; and the child marches his soldiers up and down the quilt-patterned hills, skirmishes them on whatever rare plains there may be, and sets up ambushes and rescues at the mouths of little vales formed by pinching the sheets into contours of sufficient exactitude. My mother could never understand why it was that I so disliked this poem,^* but, accepting my detestation as she would have accepted one of my father’s pronouncements on some mechanical matter, she did not read the poem to me, and I felt grateful, dreading the sight of the very poem that preceded it as my mother slowly turned the pages, which were as colorful as butterflies’ wings; and feeling the smug contentment of one who has arrived alive, most bones intact, after a session or two on the rack, when we were safely a couple of poems beyond. The truth of the matter, which I was always ashamed to explain, was that the image of the wrinkles terrified me, I having just become aware of the correlation between the wrinkles on the faces of my grandparents and the fact that they were going to die within the next several decades; and once I had been prevailed upon to accept the fact of my own death, I started feeling my face every day for wrinkles, knowing that one day they would come; and I watched my parents closely, noticing with horror the ever-lessening resemblance between my mother and her bridal picture in the family album, and the fact that my father’s hair was slowly graying; and when I lay in bed all day, the eerie luminescence of my sickness in me and all about me, my inability to recall my healthy state in any real sense made the wrinkles of my own “Land of Counterpane” seem a menacing memento mori.

But I wanted to go to Antarctica. In New England there was the snow and the woods, but it was gloomy among the trees and when I went sledding with Julie we would always crash into old stone walls. Antarctica sounded much better; my father told me that hardly anyone lived there. I imagined a sunny space of snow, a smoothness of ice that sparkled blue and green. There were penguins, of course. Icebergs moved through the ocean like ships, and far away could be seen jumping porpoises, and I could build snow castles and have my own ice-cream mine. One needed a parka to live there, but it was not too cold, especially when the sun was out in the afternoons and the ice was like a mirror. I would come out of school sometimes in February or March, almost understanding fractions. Those were warm days for winter; the snow was a little sticky, and it packed perfectly. They were building tall snow sculptures on the green. On my way home I walked past fields with the grass coming up golden through the snow, and that was territory belonging to Antarctica.

When I looked out the window of our new house the yard was just like a photograph. The trees and shrubs were various shades of green against the yellow-brown lawn (which I had just mowed). The sky was cloudless, naturally. Other houses in the neighborhood maintained the still solidarity of the nouveaux riches. I had a plenitude of time, and time being, like all things which have been thought on and settled, value-free, I could, I suppose, have made those free afternoons and evenings into delightful baskings in supra-conscious temporality as well as I did make them into hours of boredom and horror.

After some discussion, my friend and I agreed to put two hours’ worth of coins in the parking meter. It was a hot day, and neither of us thought that we would want to stay any longer than that.

“Should I lock my door?” I said.

“Yes, please,” my friend said.

We walked over to the ornamental fountain where the demonstration was scheduled to begin, and children came up to give us pamphlets. The man with the bullhorn said that if we were united we would never be defeated. The shouting procession began. Nobody saw us. Sweat was in our eyes. My friend and I walked listlessly. We were both feeling very tired. After two blocks we went back to the car.

It is part of the fragmentation of life that after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan I wanted to go there. It sounded like a treasure-trove of nightmares. Allow me to quote briefly from the Encyclopædia Britannica to set my expectations’ scene:

A kingdom in … For information about border disputes … great central range of mountains … a series of deep ravines and broken ridges … more than 115°F in the summer, while in the highlands of Kabul … to -15°F in February … the influence of the southwest monsoon hardly extends beyond Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan … a dry, invigorating atmosphere … periodic blizzards … large forest trees … The lowest terminal ridges, especially toward the west, are naked in aspect … Wild animals include the wolf, fox, hyena, wild dog, wildcat, common leopard, mongoose, wild sheep, mole, shrew, hedgehog, bat, several species of jumping mouse, jerboa and pika hare. Bears are found in the forests and the Mongolian tiger is said to inhabit the thick reed country of the Amudarya … The Pathans, i.e., the Afghans proper … dark hair and … The Tajiks … The Hazaras, also, are part of the far-flung Mongolian race. They are glabrous, short-haired … Different forms of the vendetta exist … the protagonist hops on one leg … involves the attempt to retrieve a decapitated calf’s body from a ditch, on horseback, and carry it to the goal, hundreds of riders participating in the contest … singing in a chorus accompanied by native instruments … an Iron Age settlement at Balkh with plain buffware … few remains of the early Muslim invaders … the Hephthalite domination … when already Arab armies … descended upon the city … Mongol hordes … no living thing was to be spared. The beautiful city of Balkh was utterly … The horrors of the Mongol invasion were then repeated, though on a lesser scale … peace and prosperity … was parceled between the Mughals of India and … were slaughtered … The Russians … Internal strife … Meanwhile … blinded and imprisoned … indolent ruler … Napoleon … but instead the Sikh ruler robbed him of the famous Koh-i-Nor diamond … the unfortunate minister to be cut to pieces … holy war in 1836 … A British army … honorably treated … who killed him with his own hands … a speedy but peaceful settlement of the Afghan question … annihilated … evacuated … machinery and other modern appliances … assassinated … the national awakening … independence … a group of reactionaries who … a reign of terror … Unfortunately, this steady progress was interrupted by … Internal peace was maintained, and steady progress … neutrality … friction between Afghanistan and Pakistan … agreements with certain foreign governments … a motorway and … the new constitution … rioting by students … the assembly … social welfare centers … a military academy at Kabul … facilities for jet bombers.

It all sounded quite interesting, especially since I had just realized that open space was not in fact the life-pervaded medium which I had imagined. The softness of blown grass or willows or evergreens is not a genuine softness, because gravity and death make all living things hard. We do not all have skeletons, of course, for in marine environments particularly, where both of these rather stern considerations are harder to keep sight of in that hazy green light, any competent researcher can find the octopi, say, or the many phyla of benthic worms which do seem to manage without, but we are given a clue, by virtue of the documented failures of arthropoda and cartilaginous fishes, that all is not well nonetheless. And indeed, on consideration we see that even an octopus (most marvelously developed eyes of any of the invertebrates, said my biology teacher, Dr. Mawby) often lives and hides in a nice hard little GROTTO or CORAL FORMATION somewhere. It follows from my presentation that we are (all of us, vegetables, protists and animals alike) members of a great fraternity of scavengers — that we are either patches of mold or ants crawling through the fissures of some immense decaying skull: a familiar central range of mountains, their contours almost memorized now after long nights of study in the desert, eyes aching over the textbook … a series of deep ravines and broken ridges, the lowest of which, especially toward the west, are naked in aspect because we have picked them clean … a dry, invigorating atmosphere, at least where we are, in our bone-ivory tower built some distance above that rather creepy-looking eye socket (please, God, don’t let that be on Dr. Mawby’s exam): in short, the Land of Counterpane.

Sitting at my bleached college desk one summery evening, waiting to graduate on Sunday, I looked out the window, which was hung with white drapes, and could see only the night leaves (back-lit by streetlights) and the articulated branches from which they fanned like the skeleton of a hand. Everything was quiet, and I finally closed my eyes, sustained by the humidity that impinged on marine benthic organisms as currents bearing to eager gill slits the dissolved nutrients of rotting things in their richness — and that brushed, too, about the lonely corpse of that Russian cosmonaut, faintly crackling between the stars, as that scientifically undetectable but nonetheless palpable Ether that everybody had once believed in, and its swirlings made the frost sparkle now and then beneath his cracked and darkened helmet — what was his name? — as he circled round and round the deserts and poles of the world in a people’s soviet socialist tin can. — Had this really happened, or did it come from a science-fiction book I’d read? I didn’t even know that much.

“I still don’t understand why you want to go to Afghanistan,” my father said. “I guess I’ll never understand it.”

Actually it was very simple. I just wanted to comprehend what had happened there. Then I would put myself at someone’s service. I meant to be good, and was prepared to do good.

In my notebook, on the page of questions to be answered, I wrote: Is it possible that the invasion will be beneficial in the long run (increasing literacy through compulsory schooling, etc.)? For it was and is my habit to take everything at face value first.

Take religion, Lenin had said, or the denial of rights to women, or the oppression and inequality of the non-Russian nationalities … In our country they have been settled completely by the legislation of the October Revolution. We have fought and are fighting religion in earnest. We have granted all the non-Russian nationalities their own republics or autonomous regions. We in Russia no longer have the base, mean and infamous denial of rights to women or inequality of the sexes, that disgusting survival of feudalism and medievalism, which is being renovated by the avaricious bourgeoisie …

I had never been to the Soviet Union, although I had always wanted to see Tashkent with its fountains and roses, Gorki, Leningrad, Western Siberia (“the land is fabulously rich in reindeer and luxurious furs”)… So it was possible that face value was honest value, that this multinational republic had succeeded in ending starvation, in making books available to all, in giving women a fairer chance (we could not even pass the Equal Rights Amendment!), and that the Afghans, too, could hope someday to serve on the Supreme Soviet in their national costumes — and why shouldn’t Afghan women be granted formal equality? — But maybe that consideration did not apply in Afghanistan; maybe wearing the veil was what was right there. If so, the Soviet re-educators should leave them alone. — And what about this business of “fighting religion in earnest”? I did not much like that. It seemed wrong to strike at someone else’s faith (if, indeed, that was what the Soviets were doing, for again our newspapers might be distorting things). Most disturbing, of course, was the fact that the upward evolution had to be forcibly sponsored.

At the university I had met an old Maoist who was visiting through some exchange program or other; in the kitchen late one night I asked him about the liquidation of the landlords in China, for I was sure that that had not been right.

We were alone, and the kitchen light was very bright. The night was hot. Crickets chirped. The professor said, “Maybe it could have been done eventually without the liquidations. But I doubt it. Once their land was expropriated, would they have been content with that? Why did they have more land than the small peasants in the first place? If we left them there to make trouble in the villages, you can be assured that they would have gotten their neighbors in debt to them again; they would have schemed to do it. The land would become theirs again. So there was no other way to do it.”

“Do you think that the executioners should have been sorry?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t think so. But I had nothing to do with it.”

Later I remembered Vlad IV of Romania, who had abolished poverty by burning up the poor. I wondered how well and for how long this had worked.

* The dislikes we have are such a mystery! My friend Seth was always terrified of whales, although he never met any, and I once met a little Afghan girl who screamed whenever she heard an airplane. Later I found out that an airplane had killed her parents and transformed her into a paraplegic.

3. DIFFICULTIES OF THE MIRACLE WORKER (1982)

King’s “Restaurant” for lunch. He ordered chicken fry with nan.^* The chicken was literally a skeleton in chicken-flavored oil. Evidently the bird had been boiled and boiled into soup, and somebody else had ordered the soup. — As he was a foreigner, he was brought a knife and fork. The waiter and the owner stared with almost religious interest at his attempts to eat with these utensils, which he had seen before in this life, but which had never been applied by him to such difficult usages. The skeleton swam about halfheartedly (if that is the right word) when his proxies pursued it through its frictionless bath. The liquid ran through the tines of his fork. A perfect drop of oil remained on each point after immersion, so every now and then he raised the fork to his mouth coolly, as if he were getting somewhere, and sucked at it. It tasted as if they had cooked the entrails and feathers along with the bones. Fishing politely for a velvety snippet of blood clot or rooster’s comb at the bottom of the dish, he accidentally overturned the skeleton and discovered some meat on the wing. The fork and knife could not pull it loose, however, as he hadn’t been raised in France or Italy, where in the afternoons you could watch old men peel a peach with their silverware, wasting scarcely a molecule of fruit-flesh as the skin came perfectly off; no, the Young Man was an American, and so finally he plunged his hand into the lukewarm oil to get at the skeleton, and he disarticulated the wing joint so as to free that sliver of meat. — The unsprung bone snapped fiercely against the dish, and his table jerked. — The waiter tch-tch’ed, though whether out of pity or offense it was impossible to say.

“Very sorry, sir,” the owner said from behind the counter. “Very fresh.” —He was a bald old man in the uniform of the Indian Army. Watching his almost empty establishment from the back of the room, he played a cassette over and over. Whenever it reached the end of a side, he flipped it again. The sound was a muffled drumming of static within static, with remnants of calliope in as much evidence as a whore’s hymen.

Well, the Young Man thought, giving up on the meat and dipping little bits of nan into the oil, at least they were subservient instead of inquisitive here; they said they were sorry, so, okay, okay; and believe you me, there’s no finer sight than a thousand waiters tacking into the wind, running for water at the snap of a finger or a waved rupee note, lighting cigarettes for the customer, his napkins blowing like racing pennants in the wind of the pukkas^† as he steams on, crunching another bone, skipper of his appetite, proud, great and Yankee come to help the Third World.

…Stomach aching heartily after partaking of a nauseating sweet composed of fermented buffalo milk — what wouldn’t he do for courtesy?… It had been a wedding reception, at the home of relatives of General N., and everybody was very nice; they took him in to see the bride in her ceremonial costume of golden fringe, with her yellow glass bangles; they found an American program on television for him, they showed off the family’s young sons, the host let him handle the guns of the household, and Wife Number Two waited on him constantly with this delicacy and that. He liked the family very much. He had had a lot of diarrhea that day, with blood, and the thought of eating anything at all made him want to throw up, but he would not insult them. Manfully he ate the meat and picked at his nan. They had honored him; his portion was the biggest and the most limpid with grease. The vegetables were good, and the water potable, but meanwhile they had brought him sweets, each more sickening than the one before. There were hard, stale orange pretzels so sweet that his teeth ached. Then came red things that were glazed rock-solid on the outside, but burst in his mouth like cockroaches, running with sour-sweet syrup supersaturated with sugar, so that crystals of it stuck to his gums and under his tongue, and his breath began to stink in his throat. Finally they hauled out the buffalo-milk candy — a platter of it, stacked with whitish, crumbly squares, each as big as his hand. He had been taking very small portions all evening, and could see their growing disappointment with him. So this time, instead of breaking off a corner of a piece and hiding it in his pocket later, he grabbed the biggest piece he could see and opened his mouth wide. Everyone beamed. It took him half an hour to finish it.

“My dear brother,” said the Afghan Brigadier the following afternoon, selecting his words with great care from his small English repertoire, “please come outside.” —But the Young Man was in agonies just then from what he was sure was the buffalo sweet, and could only sit up in bed and pat his stomach feebly. — “Uh, good afternoon,” he told the Brigadier, pretending not to understand (people often did that to him). The Brigadier shook his head slowly and went out.

It was quiet. The Brigadier spent his days sitting in a lawn chair, his feet in another, his cheek and mouth resting against his hand as he looked at nothing, crowded by busy birds. A big vein ran down his temple like a bolt of lightning. The morning breeze stirred the air between them when they took their breakfast together, but his white prayer cap and his gray hair remained still. He had a deep, sad crease on either side of his mouth.

The Brigadier put his hand to his forehead that afternoon, waited, and finally got to his feet, crossing his arms behind his back. He walked away around the corner of the hedge. The Young Man lay watching through the window. A little later, when it had become horribly hot, the Brigadier came back to take his siesta. He slept with the same benign expression as he sat all day, the expression of someone whom months of unproductive waiting are slowly bringing to seed. Finally the Young Man’s own eyes closed.

General N.’s guest room had only one large bed, in which the Young Man and the Brigadier both slept. At first the Young Man felt uncomfortable with this arrangement. Like most males from his country, he believed that close and prolonged proximity to an older man might well presage homosexuality. He did not like it when old men held his hand to guide him through the bazaars. He felt as a Pakistani woman might have felt if her husband had taken her hand in public. None of this was right or wrong. He who adapts insufficiently to an alien society is a sort of evolutionary failure, condemned to isolation, sterility and extinction; he who adapts too much defaces the self he was born with. The Young Man, being young, should have adapted substantially; he had less previous self to deny. He did his best. In Karachi he’d met two men who befriended him. They paid for his lunch (nan, oil and curried egg), bought him a leaf-wrapped packet of betel nut to chew, showed him the tomb of Mr. Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and took him on a bus ride to Clifton Beach, where in September the giant sea tortoises came to lay their eggs. “It’s a fascinating spectacle on a moonlit night,” the guidebook said. Unfortunately, this was the middle of a 125-degree afternoon (so it seemed) in the middle of June.

The buses were painted in a hundred gorgeous ways: blue and silver, like the turquoise jewelry of the American Southwest, red diamonds with yellow centers (buttercups in poppy fields, the Young Man thought), emerald-glazed ivy patterns … They never stopped. You ran behind one for a block or so, dodging the cars and motor-rickshaws and the carts of the spitting camel-drivers, until there was a wagon blocking the intersection ahead, or the conductor felt sorry for you, and then the bus slowed. The conductor held out his hand. You grabbed it as the bus picked up speed, got a foot in and jumped. Inside it was dark. The floor was wet with spittle. His two new friends, Akbar and Muhammed Ibrahim, stood protectively on either side. Muhammed Ibrahim insisted on carrying his pack for him. The Young Man, who’d spent hours in the heat trying to get his railway ticket to Peshawar, being bullied by people who wanted to do him expensive services, terrified by wailing beggar-women who pantomimed that they were dying of hunger (were they? how could he tell? why was it his fault?), cheek-stroked by smiling prostitutes, reviled by the men in official red uniforms (COOLIE NO. 17302) because he would not let his pack be carried by them; baffled by everything, thirsty, but afraid to drink for fear of disease (by the end of that first day in the country he was drinking a Sprite every hour and a half, plus water when he had to; he usually had to), sweating in crowded lines, always in the wrong line, until finally a man in the line got his ticket for him, saying, “You are a guest of our country; I must help you!”—all this with a gentle smile that confounded the Young Man with gratitude and guilt, for then his benefactor must go once again to the end of the line to get his own ticket; as for the Young Man, his train didn’t leave until ten that night and somehow he had to last till then, so he moved through the long confusion of that afternoon like a restless fly afraid of being swatted, knowing that whenever he stopped, the beggars, prostitutes, arrangers and desperate children would come; gasping, he hailed a rickshaw and roared off to the bazaars, those unknown fixed points devoid for him of any content; while the ride lasted it was marvelous because no one could bother him and he enjoyed the hot wind against his ears in that flimsy taxi, which was simply a Suzuki motor and two seats nested beneath an aluminum canopy painted with some movie star’s likeness; but then they got to the bazaars, and as soon as he got out the problem of not being left alone reasserted itself, so he couldn’t stop anywhere; didn’t know what to do, poor helpless yoyo; walked the sunny, steamy streets, making a show of looking at straw mats and lovely plastic water coolers, becoming more and more exhausted and afraid of having his blood sucked by all these people who grasped at him and whom he refused — the Young Man, then, was happy to be in someone’s keeping. — There were so many passengers on the bus that it was impossible to sit down. Strong-looking, swarthy men stood all around, rubbing their beards and conversing in low, serious voices. They looked at the Young Man, but left him to himself. Akbar and Muhammed Ibrahim smiled at him kindly. That made him feel guilty again, because he had presented himself to them falsely. Since he could be arrested for trying to cross the Afghan border, he’d told everyone who asked that his purpose was to visit Pakistan. When Akbar and Muhammed Ibrahim discovered that he did not intend to go on to India, they were astonished and touched by his interest in their country. The Young Man, who had never given much thought to Pakistan before he came there, decided then and there to make his interest sincere, and at the close of his journey he reckoned that that was one of the few good things that he had actually done. — The bus lurched on. — “Cal-lif-lif-lif-lif-lif, Cal-lif-lif-lif-lif-lif, Cal-lif-lif-lif-lif-lif, Ca-lifton!” the conductor sang out the door. Passengers leaped on and off. They passed a billboard for Sprite; the picture showed a veiled woman pouring the bubbling stuff into a glass. The afternoon had changed its character; feeling safe, he had begun to enjoy himself. — Here he was, in an Oriental city as fabulous as the Land of Counterpane, and he was riding toward the shores of the Arabian Sea; with him, two new friends; around him, exotic-looking personages in bright pajamas, talking in Urdu! (What else ought they to have been speaking, after all? But it must be admitted that the Young Man’s attitude was endearing.)

Akbar directed his attention to all the most interesting things: over there, the pillars proclaiming the Islamic virtues of FAITH, UNITY, and DISCIPLINE; over there, the new hospital for tuberculosis patients; then the almost completed Holiday Inn. — “Cal-lif-lif-lif-lif-lif, Ca-lifton!” called the conductor. — Just ahead, a checkered cab smashed into a donkey. For a moment the great traffic-pulse seemed to miss a beat; and he could hear, as he had early that morning, the songs of tropical birds. — No, perhaps he had imagined the accident, for in less than an instant everything began again, the cab and the donkey going their separate ways; and now came half a dozen embellished rickshaws, nephews or cousins of the one he had ridden, all empty; and an old man dashed across the street, pulling behind him a wheelbarrow full of lemons. — The bus was passing along a wide street, evidently of Empire construction, lined with the canvas lean-tos of clothes vendors. The whining calls of these salesmen stung through the traffic like bees. — The Young Man’s sense of well-being began to dissolve. Everything seemed strange to him; he was so far from home! He dug through the compost layers of his education, looking for familiar correspondences, and though he found them it did not matter in the least. — A leper jumped aboard, moving his silvery cattish head from side to side. He took in the Young Man almost at once. The other men stopped talking, watching to see what would happen. — “He want you give him money,” Akbar said. — “Do I need to?” said the Young Man, wondering if he was being taken advantage of. — “No, no,” said Akbar politely, holding out a few paisa, and the leper took the money without saying anything and jumped off the moving bus…

Should I have given the leper money, or did I in fact present an appearance of courageous steadfastness by being selfish? (I should make the record accurate by confessing that I did not in fact come to a decision; in this case, “not to decide was to decide.”) If I was in fact obligated to give him money, should I have also accepted those many services offered to me by the coolies, tour-guides and prostitutes until my money was gone? And if I was obligated to give them money, should I not have been more obligated to give all my money to my poorest neighbors in America? If I’d stayed home, I could have given away the cost of my plane ticket. — But no! How could I have Saved The Afghans then? And, being no longer at home, I had to hoard my money; I did not know how much it would cost to Save Them.

Clifton was the end of the line. Everybody got off. The Young Man and his companions passed through a British pavilion in memory of Lady So-and-so, and down a long, gentle flight of steps to the beach. It stank there. Akbar and Muhammed Ibrahim stopped so that he could admire everything. A quarter mile out, a twin-masted ship had run aground or been abandoned. The wreck was canted and decaying. To the right, and possibly a bit farther out (it was hard to tell), were a pair of islets, or rather — if one were mean-spirited — rocks. For the sake of saying something, he asked if anyone ever went there. Akbar gave him a look which he thought might be contemptuous. — “Smugglers go there.” —“Oh,” the Young Man said. — Families squatted along the beach, roasting what looked like Indian corn over open fires. On the little bluff between him and the ocean stood the booths of the banana and mango sellers, faithfully attended by swollen flies. Sweat ran down the Young Man’s back.

Akbar insisted that the Young Man have a camel ride. The camel crouched in the warm sand by its master. Its fur was matted with little dried balls of mud or dung where it had rolled on the ground. The Young Man took his pack off and clambered onto the place that Akbar directed, just below the hump. — “You want by yourself, or you lonely?” Akbar said to him. — “Lonely,” the Young Man said, feeling that not to have replied so would have been impolite. — Akbar got on behind him and held on to him tightly. The owner of the camel, a bitter-looking fellow with a mustache, kicked the camel in the throat until it stood up. Then he led it down a path to the waves. Muhammed Ibrahim came smiling behind with the Young Man’s pack. After the camel ride he carried it for the rest of the day, despite the Young Man’s embarrassed protests.

Later they walked along the beach, ignoring the beggars. People approached the Young Man with various commercial offers, but his two guardians motioned them away, until presently no one importuned him anymore. (Nonetheless he knew that the whole mass remained aware of him, that if he were for a moment left to himself, then the consequences would be the same as that morning. He tried to imagine a comparable situation for a foreigner in America — being stuck in the middle of a ten-lane superhighway, maybe. But maybe there was none.)

Akbar and Muhammed Ibrahim invited him to go out wading with them, but he declined, knowing that salt water was bad for his cameras, which he would need to take pictures of famous battles; so his friends went out into the breakers alone and had him take a picture of them.

“You will send to us?” Akbar said.

“Yes, I’ll send it.”

“If you no to send, we will be sad. Very sad.”

“I’ll send it,” he said.

“We will write to you letter. You will please to answer our letter? You will send to us?”

“I’ll send it. Don’t worry.”

They never wrote him later. So he didn’t have their address. So he didn’t send it.

They took him on the merry-go-round, from which he had a whirling view of that tawny, canvas-colored beach whose camels stretched their necks as men led them through the sea shallows, and the low booths of vendors and the cotton-clothed crowds wavered in the hot fog; then the ride was over, and Akbar was offering to buy him one of the toys that were sold in the dirty booths along the beach. — “No, thanks,” he said, feeling embarrassed at all they had already done for him. “Maybe I’ll come back later and buy one.”

“You pick it out, we buy for you now,” said Akbar implacably.

“No, no, some other time.”

“Sure,” said Akbar, insulted. It was the first time that the American had not given in.

They took him to the railroad station an hour before the departure time of his train, the Khyber Mail Express. Akbar went and bought them all glasses of lessee. The guidebook had said to stay away from lessee; it was a health hazard to Westerners. In the vendor’s stand he could see the big kettle in which the milk fermented. The surface of the scum was black with dead flies. — “Thank you very much,” he said to Akbar, “but maybe—” —“Drink,” said Akbar, bringing the glass against the Young Man’s lip so hard a tooth chipped. — “Okay,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

While they stood there drinking, Akbar had Muhammed Ibrahim buy the Young Man another packet of betel nuts to chew on his journey. The Young Man wanted to refuse, but Akbar took his hand and closed his fingers around the packet. He thanked them both and stood holding it in his hand, drinking his lessee. — He felt a touch. A girl in a red sari was standing at his shoulder. She smelled like old vomit. — “She want money,” Akbar explained. “She no good.” —He shoved her. She took a few listless steps back, and the Young Man forgot her until he smelled her beside him again. She was looking him full in the face, standing there and saying nothing. — “Should I give her a couple of rupees?” he said, trying to make up for the leper. — “No, no,” said Akbar, irritated. He slapped the young woman’s face and pushed her away again, but without much indignation; it was as if he were brushing a yellowjacket away from a picnic lunch. The girl moved just out of Akbar’s reach and began saying something to the Young Man very dreamily, earnestly, but she could not talk, it seemed, and after a while her lips gave up their slow, silent fluttering. He turned away, but she was still there. If he took out the pouch with his rupees in it, he knew that Akbar would see and be offended; then, too, no doubt everyone else on the street would see, too, and come running. He would give her the packet of betel nuts in his left hand; maybe she could sell it — it must be worth at least a quarter of a cent. The size and shape and color of the packet reminded him of a sealed condom. He felt disgusted with himself and with her. This Afghanistan project, which he had thought to be such a fine self-assertion, had erased every possibility of existence for him except a waxy passivity. — He held out his left hand slightly. Sipping at his lessee, he pretended not to be looking at her. She approached, touched his hand with nervous cunning. He let his fingers begin to open. Akbar was looking at him. He couldn’t let the packet drop to the ground; he had to count on her to take it unseen. Her fingers drummed against the back of his hand; the touch of them was loathsome. She did not understand what he wanted her to do. He opened his fingers a little more, but still she did not understand. Finally she let her hand drop resignedly away from his, and she stepped backwards, still looking at him. — He had finished his lessee. The hand she had touched smelled like vomit.

Akbar and Muhammed Ibrahim were telephone operators. They had gone to school together. Akbar had to start his shift at 7:00 p.m., so Muhammed Ibrahim took the Young Man to his seat on the train. Then they sat looking at each other.

“In Peshawar, people very wicked,” said Muhammed Ibrahim. “They rob you, kill you, take everything.”

“I’ll be careful,” the Young Man said.

“On train, very dangerous. You stay in seat three days, until you reach Peshawar. Never leave the seat. You must promise me, never leave the seat. You leave the seat, come back; they take your pack, take your seat, rob you, take everything. You sleep never. You sit like this all the time, with your pack under your feet. You never stand up.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll be careful. Thank you very much.”

“You remember us. You send to us picture. You come back to Karachi, you stay with me. I love you.”

“You’re my friend,” the Young Man replied, a little awkwardly.

“I love you. You come, be my wife. You make me full-fresh. I hate Akbar. You, you are AMERICA. You are my best friend.” And Muhammed Ibrahim began to weep.

The American felt bad. “You’re my friend,” he said again. He let Muhammed Ibrahim take his hand.

“You are so good to me,” Muhammed Ibrahim said. “You are my best friend. You make me full-fresh. Please come back to me. Every day I will wait for you. Every day I will keep a room in my house for you. If you call, I come for you. Even to Peshawar I will come for you. If you have trouble, I come to you. I pick you up, take you to my house.”

“Thank you very much,” he said.

“If you no come back, no write, no telephone, I will kill myself. You have made me full-fresh.”

“Thank you very much. You’re my friend. You’ve been very kind to me.”

“Do you like me?”

“Very much,” said the Young Man. Decency made him say it.

“Thank you. I so happy. I am so happy. I do anything for you. I am your friend.”

Muhammed Ibrahim spoke to the passenger whose seat faced the Young Man’s. “He take care of you to Lahore,” he said finally. “Then he find someone else to help you.”

The whistle of the train sounded. Muhammed Ibrahim had to get off the train now. He stood on the track and held the Young Man’s hand through the window even after the train began to move. Then he ran alongside, crying. To make him feel better the American stuck his head out the window and waved to him until he could no longer be seen.

So when he had to share a bed with the Afghan Brigadier, he soon got used to it. The Brigadier was a good man. He only felt the Young Man’s calves in broad daylight, in public, to see if he was strong enough to go into the war zone. Occasionally he held his hand.

“My dear son,” he said. “What is your name?”

The American told him.

“If the Amerikis say they no can help me, I very happy. I go back to Afghanistan to fight with the Roos.”^‡

The Young Man thought of Muhammed Ibrahim’s saying: “Thank you. I so happy. I am so happy.”

* Nan and dordai are the equivalents of pita bread. Nan is Pakistani; dordai is Afghan — very similar to nan, but thicker.

† Fans.

‡ Russians.

4. THE BRIGADIER (1982)

Just taking her easy here at the Blue Lagoon Snack Bar — a ritzy place for Pakistan, to be sure, for it had white lace tablecloths (full of holes, and so filthy that one touch blackened his fingers), a dependable fan behind him, and Indian music on the radio — he sat comfortably, though maintaining good posture. The waiter, who like his counterpart at King’s Restaurant could tell that this customer hailed from a developed country, brought him on a plate a real fork and knife with a paper napkin wrapped around them. At King’s he hadn’t had a napkin. This was pretty good. — In front of him stood a blue pitcher of cool obuh,^* doubtless full of disease … and now he was whisked his dinner with dismaying speed considering that (a) he was the only customer, (b) they were staring at his every move, and (c) he somehow had to kill two hours waiting for Dr. Tariq. Well, anyhow, what was his dinner actually, let’s see, he’d first ordered an onion steak at fourteen rupees, on the principle that a protracted stay demanded an expensive purchase, but today was a meatless day, so he was stuck once again with a chicken roast: mm-hm, half-raw meat given the position it deserved in the middle of the plate, encircled by okay onions, putrid peppers, merely wilted peppers and some perfectly acceptable tomatoes … Time passed, the meal passed, and the sick hot evening improved until when Dr. Tariq came he was in the middle of a conversation with some Jordanians about how dull the nightlife had been here ever since the imposition of martial law. The Young Man paid his bill, shook hands all around, and proceeded into the swelter with Dr. Tariq, who had invited him to stay the night with his family.

The household was headed by Tariq’s father, Major General N., a fine old man who influenced the guest more than anyone else in Pakistan, for in the end he stayed not a night, but a month. The General’s family gave him food, lodging, clothes and presents. He came to feel love for them.

I no longer have the plastic scraps of a butterfly mine from Afghanistan, because I gave them to Dr. Tariq’s younger brother Zahid (since become a doctor in his own right). One of the yellow glass bangles that the family gave me for my fiancée broke on the trip home; the others left with her when she left me. I do still have a stack of photographs, through which I used to flip with some complacency, the vividness of the color dyes convincing me that I must not have failed in Afghanistan after all, and for a while I busied myself with them, blowing them up into fund-raising posters that cost more than the money they brought in — for I was and still am a most lamentably ludicrous Young Man — but within three or four years I had studied those pictures so many times that not a single image was real. I retain my illegal pen-pistol from Darra, but seldom roll its fat coldness between my fingers. My best aid to memory (for I doubt that I will ever go to Afghanistan again) is the set of clothes that General N.’s family gave me. — They hang in the back of the closet, whose white door is now shut, with its black knob like a sphere of darkness extruded from the darkness inside. — My shirt (which I think once belonged to Zahid) is a baggy affair that hangs down to my knees like an apron. The pants are wide enough around the waist for two people; they tighten with a drawstring. — On hot days, this loose cotton skin of mine feels cool, luxurious.

The other guest of the N. household was, of course, the Brigadier, with whom the Young Man shared the double bed. Thirty-six years ago the General and the Brigadier had been pals, back in British days, when the Pakistanis (or Indians, as they then were) had been involved in an insurrection in Kashmir.^† —“I was his teacher,” said the General, “and I regarded him as an honest man.

“You think I have picked him up now for no reason? I am convinced he will be of use. He has been with me now for six months. Every day he writes letters. He is the leader of a national party inside, you see, and he is trying to obtain weapons. If he had not been of use I would have gotten rid of him long ago. But if your people would just give him weapons, he would be a great thorn in the side of the Russians. When you go back to America, Young Man, you must tell people about him.”

The Young Man was given a copy of the letter that the Brigadier had written to President Reagan in October of 1981 (receiving, of course, no reply). It is a remarkable and pathetic document, and is here given as is. (It should be noted again that the Brigadier spoke minimal English; the peculiar spelling and syntax are the fault of the translator employed.)

Oct.29.1981

To his excellency the President of U.S.A.

(Mr. Ronald Reagan)—

Dear excellency,

I wo-ould like to bring to your kind notice the following facts related to the destiny of Afghanistan.

When the late president Daud went to Moscow to attend the funeral of stalin on behalf of Ex-King Zahir Shah he strengthened bi-latiral relations between the two countries. On returning to Kabul he started his pro-communist activities at the beck and call of Moscow and on 1954 succeeded to the post of Prime Minister.^‡

Being Brig: in Afghan army I realised his brutel activities. There and then I resolved to lay out all the secrecies and make it public but I could not succeed to overt his false design during my 10 years tenure of service.

On his resigning from the poist of Prime Minister he established indirectly of pro-Russian parcham party^§ on new lines. It was the only alternative to quit my Military services on 1970 to impede their ways independently.

I came to know in Qandahar province in 1973 that Daud succeeded in a Coupe-De-Ta backed by Moscow. Soonafter that I consulted all my Military and companion and various other religious, and Political Co-workers in Ghazni province. It was unanimously decided in that meeting to refer to U.S.A., Embassy in Kabul for the expected friendly co-operation for the solution of our national grievances.

Unfartunately Amirican Embassy was under the Eyes of K.G.B.s and local spies due to which we could not succed to have proper contacts.

Eventually I got an opportunity to contact U.S.-Embassidor through a prominent personality of the Embassy Feroz Mohsin who worked as an interpreter. He was an Afghan National and latter on proved a Rusian detictive. I handed over a list of my fellow Army personnel, Religious Schalor and politicians along-with other details of national interest to the Ambassador, besides a revolutionary and reactionary plan against then then Daud’s regime. He thought over the subject and latter on a states envoy Mr. Edvard Fox Martin came to Kabul and I visited him in Feroz Mohsin lodge. He supported our plan on belhaf of the states Government, which was based on humanitarian and bi-latiral relations. After conversation Mr. Edvard and myself signed on 1976 an Agreement (Known as Ox-Fox plan) bearing the following context that after two months of the agreement we will be helped with the following:

1- 300 Machineguns

2- 240 Bazoka Antitank launchers.

3- 4 Hawan (Marterguns and exessaries)

4- 40 Powerful explosive Bumbs.

5- Numerous Wirless Radio sets.

6- Establishment of Radio Broad-Casting station.

7- 22600000 Afghani money repayable and interest free.

8- 400 Rifles.

Soon after the agreement I was chased by the detictives with a consequent imprisoned of 3 years with other four brothers.

On my release from the Jail there was no hope to visit the U.S.-Embassy during the regime of late Taraki. I deputed my companion 1978 Mr. M— S— R— to see the Amirican Embassy in Pakistan and to convey my message to him. He met with the staff of the Embassy in Islamabad but with no result.

Now I have lift the nations behind to fight against the Russian intervention and came to Pakistan with 60 other comrades, who represent all the provinces of Afghanistan, in hope to revive the foresaid agreement.

I visited the 3rd Secretary of states in Islamabad and the Counsellor in Peshawar in this regard but all in vain.

Now I wish to put our problems on your table for a very kind and just favour which is based on share humanitarianism and anti-communistic expansionism ideals. I shall be very much grateful to you in person and on behalf of my nation, if you pay a very kind attention to our matters and affairs and arrange for a possible help and clue.

Thanks and thanks.

Your Sincerely,

(BRIG: — -)

U.S.A., Counselte, Peshawar

(Pakistan)

In the course of time the Brigadier grew angry at America, for Reagan and the C.I.A. ignored his letters; and the people at the consulate were less and less polite about his coming by. It was clear enough to the Young Man that if the Ox-Fox Agreement had ever been made, it would long since have been written off the books by Mr. Fox Marten’s organization; for who would want to support a man whose plot had not been airtight? — Then again, Napoleon had made a comeback; so had Lenin. The Young Man, who did not understand very much about political change in Asia, decided to maintain an attitude of genial neutrality until more facts came in.

He is still waiting.

“I was in the jail for three days without food or water, in summer,” he told the Young Man in his slow, earnest English.^‖ “Then three years I was there, and I took up the fight against the Roos.” —The story went that he had been Zaher Shah’s bodyguard, and a jewel dealer on the side. Soon after the invasion, the Russians napalmed his house and confiscated his jewels—“ten kilos of emeralds, fif—fifty kilos rubies, many other—jools!” cried the Brigadier fiercely. Some of his fortune remained hidden; this he disposed of by equipping a group of freedom fighters personally loyal to him. Then he set off for Pakistan to obtain the arms due him according to the Ox-Fox Agreement. Here he was. — One of his sons was missing in action; another had been conscripted by the Roos and every night supplied the guerrillas with ammunition for their Kalashnikovs. His wife was sick somewhere in Afghanistan, and his daughter (if I understood his pantomime) had a bullet wound in the chest. At intervals he heard from his family. A messenger would come to the General’s house and deliver a square of linen, covered with Pushto cursive, which had been sewn into his garments. The Brigadier would read it over and over to himself for hours. When he had not gotten a letter for a long time, the Young Man saw him going through the other bits of cloth which had come to him, and slowly shaking his head.

“What he says, it is a tissue of fictions,” said the Young Man’s Afghan translator back in California. “I was in Kabul many years and I have never heard of this man. He was no bodyguard; he is no leader; he is nothing.” —But perhaps the translator supported a different party.

In the morning and in the afternoon the Brigadier sat working on new letters to various heads of state. He read each draft aloud to the General, who patiently suggested insertions and modifications. Between his siesta and the evening prayer the Brigadier read his Qur’an aloud to himself in the low singsong of custom. The Qur’an was kept wrapped in a bright, supple cloth whenever it was not in use. As the Brigadier picked up the bundle or replaced it on the guest-room table, he kissed it. He prayed outside in the garden with the General, touching head, hands and feet to the prayer mat.

“My dear son,” said the Brigadier one dizzily hot day, “I am very sorry that I have come to the Pakistan to get help. I want to be back at the fight.”

“I hope you can go back soon,” the Young Man said. He had a feeling that the Brigadier would still be waiting for arms on his dying day.

Over the course of that afternoon the old Brigadier became more and more agitated. He decided that democracy was the problem. — “Why the Amerikis no help in the fight?” he asked over and over. “Why they keep me sitting here?” —The Young Man made the mistake of trying to explain checks and balances. (What a theoretical Young Man!) He did not have the heart to tell the Brigadier that the Americans did not want to help him, which fact he knew from the consulate. (And it was even possible that checks and balances had something to do with that.) — He said, “Maybe part of the American government wants to help you, Brigadier. Maybe another part doesn’t want to help you. Our government argues with itself before it decides anything.” —The Brigadier was astounded and infuriated. If the Amerikis had a dictator like Zaher Shah, he said, there would be no vacillation; the Ox-Fox Agreement would be adhered to with honor. — “Democracy,” he cried urgently, “road — to—Communism!” —He picked up an embroidered cushion. “Democracy: He want it there”—he touched the cushion and pointed to the bed; “he want it there”—he pointed to the floor. “Dictatorship: one place. Very bad, democracy!”

Well, it was better, the Young Man supposed, that he believe the problem to be one of inefficiency rather than intention. But he felt some revulsion all the same. This was the General’s prize candidate, our pro-Western friend, faithful unto death … Spitefully, the Young Man told him that he should be happy, that thanks to the Roos there was a good, solid dictatorship in Afghanistan now. Fortunately the Brigadier did not understand. Later the Young Man was ashamed of himself.

In Peshawar at that time the Mujahideen were divided into six major factions based on tribal antagonisms and on ideological ambitions. They had formed two coalitions, each of which (typically enough) was called the Islamic Unity of Afghan Mujahideen. The first Islamic Unity was composed of the fundamentalists and mullahs: Jamiat-i-Islami, Gulbuddin and Khalis.^a The second was made up of the liberals and social democrats: Hazarat, Mahaz-i-Islami, Herakat. The Brigadier’s party, Wahdati-i-Islami, or National Liberation Front, was not officially recognized. Through an interpreter the Brigadier explained that many of the administrators in the liberal parties, and a few in those of the fundamentalists, were working secretly for him and diverting arms to the N.L.F. Naively, the Young Man asked the interpreter why, in that case, the Brigadier needed American weapons. But this made the interpreter angry, and the interview came to an end.

For a time the Young Man paid court to the Jamiat-i-Islami fundamentalists. They were strong in Afghanistan’s Panjsher Province, where the fighting was heaviest at that time, and the Young Man wanted very much to go there. But the Jamiat distrusted him. He spent many hot afternoons in their offices, listening to the buzzing of the fans, watching their leader, the famous scholar Dr. Rabbani, talking behind his desk; Dr. Rabbani resembled a saint with his long silver-white beard; and the fans buzzed and the Young Man drank Sprite after Sprite sitting on the carpet between Jamiat warriors, who teased him and told him that since he was pale-skinned he must pretend to be a Nuristani to fool the Roos when he went inside, and in his intoxication at the idea of going to Afghanistan the Young Man was not even afraid. — At first the Jamiat said that they could not take him because he did not know the Qur’an, and so could not represent their point of view to the Amerikis. But the Young Man had learned to bluff his knowledge in school; he quoted a few passages of the Qur’an back at them. — Next they told him that they could not take him because he was too young; it was too dangerous. He pointed out that many of their Mujahideen were younger than he, and that he could surely help them by taking his pictures.^b Then they said they’d let him know if something came up.

“You are not well, Young Man,” the General told him. “Why must you go into Afghanistan? You can take pictures of Afghans with guns in Pakistan. The journalists do it. It will be all the same to the Americans. I am concerned about you. You cannot go into the battlefield with a loose tummy; I speak to you as a soldier.”

But the Young Man was adamant.

The General was not without influence. General Zia, now the man who ran Pakistan, had once been his subordinate. He arranged many interviews which the Young Man could never have gotten otherwise — for, unlike the Amerikis, the General believed him capable of actually Helping, and so took him seriously.^c As a result of these interviews the Young Man was able to string the beads of important men’s words into his necklaces of analysis, somewhat as follows:

The major political dichotomy in Pakistan seemed to be liberalism versus Islamization, or (not to beat around the bush) the People’s Party of Bhutto versus the established regime of Zia, who had revived Islamic law to such an extent that public floggings were now broadcast on television. At present, the People’s Party was almost impotent, Bhutto having just been hanged in 1979, the invasion year. — “He was executed for murder,” said the General. “He was a Communist, and all of us in the North-West Frontier were very satisfied to see him replaced by Zia. You see, Young Man, Bhutto was a schemer, but Zia is a just man!” (It was not until half a dozen years after, when Zia was killed in that mysterious plane crash, that Bhutto’s charismatic daughter Benazir was able to ride her rallies into power; until then the People’s Party barely clung to existence.) The General maintained sufficient relations with a few officials of the Bhutto regime to arrange for the Young Man to speak with them in his presence. One had been jailed several times under Zia. When they visited the man, the General pointed out an automobile parked by his house. — “They keep an eye on him, you see,” he said. — They were hospitably entertained. It was Ramazan, and Muslims could not eat or drink until sunset, but the Young Man was brought a Coke on a saucer and many cordialities were exchanged. The Young Man thought that the General and the former official must be friends. Then, as they left, the Young Man’s cassette nicely magnetized full of interesting information, the General remarked, “He is a very stupid man, you see. He will be back in jail again, and he should be.” The Young Man wondered how he’d ever know who his enemies were.

One day they drove to a funeral in a small village to the east, just the three of them: the General, the Young Man and the Brigadier. The village was pro-Bhutto, and the General knew a former minister there who would give the Young Man his recollections. Unfortunately, the man was too busy, although he said hello to the Young Man politely enough and found the time to make a few digs about the postponement of the elections. The General remained calm. — The bier was carried through the mud-walled streets. The Brigadier’s deep frown was softened into the expression that he wore when he read his Qur’an. He strode through the crowd and shouldered a corner of the bier. At the mosque they set the dead man down for the ceremony, uncovering his face for a moment so that the relatives could kiss it. He was an old man, with a long white beard. His mouth was open, his head twisted to one side, like a crawl-stroke swimmer. The next morning the Young Man saw a run-over cat in the same posture, with the same intense, rather scholarly gaze. The man had died that morning. He was already swelling and yellowing in the heat. — They drove home in the General’s car, with the Young Man in the back seat. The Brigadier made a remark about the liberals; the Young Man could not understand the language but he understood the sneer. — The General laughed and nodded.

The Young Man admired the General in almost every respect. He was a very moral man who tried to do good. He initiated the building of a mosque, of a park (the Young Man saw him on the news once, standing with a group of dignitaries in his new mosque). He did a considerable amount of social work; the Young Man was one of his cases. Not only did he give him instruction in Islam, he also tried to find an appropriate group for him to go to Afghanistan with. On this subject he had his opinions. Being a soldier like the Brigadier, he despised the fundamentalists. When the Young Man asked a guerrilla commander why he belonged to Herakat and not Jamiat-i-Islami, the General answered for him: “Because he is not a fool.”

One afternoon they had Mr. Pizzarda, the Secretary-General of Hazarat, over for a drink (of Sharbet, a sickening syrup of sugared rose petals). The Brigadier had said that Pizzarda was one of his men. Was he? It was impossible to tell. — They sat in the patio chatting about this and that, sometimes, out of politeness to the Young Man, in English, and sometimes, very fiercely, in Pashto. The General seemed a little left out of it. But when he sat with the Young Man later that night, against the soothing roar of the fan, he said that in ten days the Young Man could go into Afghanistan with the N.L.F.

“But we must be very careful,” the General said. “You may only go if you are completely well. Your parents would never forgive me if I were responsible for the death of their only son.”

The General was big on sons. He treated the Young Man as his son. When the Young Man expressed interest in photographing one of the handmade pistols from Darra that were disguised as ballpoint pens, the General loaned him one, and, seeing his delight in the toy, smiled and said, “Well, Young Man, if you are so fond of it I will present it to you.” —The Young Man thanked him. — The General put a hand on his shoulder. “It is nothing. You are an honorary Pathan now: you wear the clothes, we have given you the cap, and now you have the gun.”

He was angry when he learned that the Young Man was living with his fiancée in California. He believed that Americans in general had loose morals, particularly in the area of sexual relations. The Young Man wanted to know why the Qur’an was so hard on sleeping with someone you hadn’t married when a Muslim man could legally sleep with up to four women at a time. The General explained that there was always a danger that an unmarried woman would get pregnant. The Young Man assured him that he and his fiancée used birth control, and that his fiancée would be getting sterilized soon anyway.

The General was astounded. “Did you pick her up or did she pick you up?” he said.

The Young Man considered. “She started it, I think,” he said.

“Well, then you tell her that you will drop her if she will not bear you sons. What good is a girl who will not have sons? How could your parents die knowing that their only son would have no sons?”

In the first few days of the Young Man’s stay the General was particularly disgusted with Americans. His son Khalid was a student in California, under a temporary visa, and Khalid’s wife had applied for a temporary visa to visit him. The application had been denied on the grounds that it could not be proved that the young woman would not become an immigrant. The General had offered to put up a surety, but this did not affect the case. This hurt the General deeply. He could not understand why his son could have a visa and his daughter-in-law could not. He told the Young Man that America didn’t know what friendship was.

“What do you think of Brigadier X?” the Young Man asked at the U.S. consulate.

Thumbs down. “We’ve passed on his stories, and the consensus seems to be that he’s slightly”—finger to forehead. — “He was a Brigadier once, and he isn’t now, and he hasn’t made the transition.”

This might be true, the Young Man thought. Sometimes I myself, watching the monotonous circular motions of his hands, or his talking to himself — or is that just his Muslim devotions? (for I don’t speak the language) — sometimes I think that he might be a little mad. — But how am I to know? he said to himself angrily.

“It does seem as if he has a following,” the Young Man said.

“We’re not sure if it’s his following or if it’s a consequence of the fact that he’s staying with General N.”

“There are lots of people who claim he’s their boss,” said the Young Man.

A shrug. “I really have to go to a meeting.”

“Well, would you recommend that I go to Afghanistan with him?”

“I’d advise against it.”

The Brigadier had told the Young Man to inform the Ambassador and his wife that he sent his salaam to them, and to ask when his work would be ready. The Young Man did neither. Returning, he met the Brigadier on the porch.

“What they say?”

“They had no time for me today,” the Young Man said.

The Brigadier flew into a rage. — “They Amerikis, but — if they Afghans, I — KILL THEM! They servants — not masters! You — NO help me! Democracy — NO good!”

The Young Man lied, saying that he had done his best,^d but the Brigadier would not believe him. At last the Young Man replied curtly. The Brigadier smiled, the way people there smiled to express deep offense.

“They treat me like — DOG!” he said.

Wearily, the Young Man agreed and went in to the toilet. The walk to the consulate and the heat had stirred up his dysentery.

Sitting on the toilet seat, he imagined a dialogue with the General, who had just been lecturing him on the Jewish lobby:

“General,” he’d say, “I think the Brigadier’s on the brink.”

“Because you won’t help him,” the General would reply sternly. “He’s a friend of America, but you’re making him an enemy. You won’t give my daughter-in-law a visa. If I can’t get a visa, no one in Pakistan can get a visa. Zia was my subordinate. If I wanted to, I could go to him, and he would make them give me the visa.

“But that’s against my principles. I ask no one for favors. I expect nothing from anyone. But now you are supporting Israel, and lakhs^e of people are homeless.”

And the Young Man, slightly light-headed with fever, suddenly understood his role as an American: to accept responsibility for everything.

A few nights later, the Brigadier, the Young Man and the General were sitting on the patio. The cement was writhing with winged ants trapped by the house lights, crawling along, hunting in the seamless concrete for a crack in which to lay their eggs and die. Presently came the accustomed stealthy noises from the lawn, and the fat toads appeared. For a moment they stopped short, as if astonished by the profusion of prey. Then they fanned out and began to gobble up the stragglers, avoiding giving alarm to the larger mass. When the stragglers were safely eaten, however, the toads hopped in among the main body of the ants and commenced liquidation in earnest. How the toads flicked their tongues! And how blindly the ants streamed, with the very breath of their predators on them, like philosophers who had forgotten a cause.

The Brigadier was talking about the fundamentalist factions again. — “They—no good!” he said. “They very bad. They—no true Afghans!”

The reports from Panjsher Valley were bad that day. The Russians were really breaking through. — “Roos,” the Young Man said, pointing to the toads. “Mujahideen”—pointing to the confused, decimated ants.

At once the Brigadier got up and shooed and hissed the toads away. He stamped his foot an inch from their heads. They hunched themselves back into the darkness. (But a few minutes later they were back, cautious at first but just as greedy as before. This time the Brigadier ignored them. Soon there were no more ants.)

“The Brigadier is a bit of a brute,” said the General in his lawn chair. “He’s killed over a thousand people.”

A day before he was due to cross the border, the leader of the N.L.F. band that was going to take him came to the General’s house. The General listened carefully. — “They’re planning to attack an airfield,” he told the Young Man. “Is that acceptable to you?”

“Sure,” the Young Man said, a bit uneasily. “That sounds very interesting.”

“But they must go to Islamabad to get ammunition. It will be another five days.”

On the fourth morning the General put down his paper. “Yesterday in Parachinar they fired at the Tribal Agent,” he said.

The Young Man was eating a boiled egg. Everyone else in the household had to be finished eating and drinking shortly after four a.m., when it was light enough to distinguish white thread from black. But the Young Man never got up until seven or even later, and then they prepared for him a breakfast which they could not touch, with their own prized honey for his tea.

“Who fired at him?” he said, not understanding.

The General’s good manners forbade him from showing the disgust that this bit of ignorance deserved. “The K.G.B., Young Man. I had best ring up and find out the situation. If there is too much unrest in the border areas it might not be possible for you to go.”

He made a phone call. — “Somebody has been killed,” he told the Young Man. “We had best put it off.”

They put it off for another three days.

The Young Man listened to the sound of the fan, which seemed pitched to remind the user that every second was costing money. The three days passed. So did the fourth. On the fifth day he picked a lime from the General’s tree, and squeezed it into a glass of cold water. It tasted so good to him that he did it again after breakfast. He had gotten the idea from the Brigadier, who the day before had walked ten miles in the heat, observing Ramazan the while, searching for the man who should have come back from Islamabad with the ammunition to take the Young Man to the border. But the Brigadier did not know exactly where the man lived, and never found him. He came back silent. As soon as darkness was ruled official that night, the family went in to break their fast, but the Brigadier seemed unable to quench his thirst. He was an old man. An hour later, he came to the guest room and mixed himself a glass of fresh lime water. — “Very thirsty,” he said to the Young Man, whom he had adopted as his son. “Ramazan very difficult.” —“Yes,” said the Young Man. “Very difficult.”

The man never came.

“Tomorrow,” said the Young Man to the Brigadier, “I will ask the other parties for help.”

When he got up in the morning, the Brigadier was wringing his hands. “I no sleep last night,” he cried. “He—no come. I am party leader, but now you write: ‘Brigadier—wrong, wrong man.’ My party BROKEN, my work here all broken then.”

The Young Man felt very sorry for him. On the other hand, what kind of party leader was he? — He promised to wait until ten-thirty, when the Brigadier would return from another search for the ammunition man. After that no-doubt-unsuccessful mission, the Young Man would have the pleasure of going out in the midday heat.

He had come to dread the sun in Pakistan.

The General was very angry with the Brigadier. — “Bloody bastard,” he said. “The Afghans don’t want to be helped! They just want money. This commander has broken a gentleman’s agreement. His father and grandfather come from respectable families, I assure you. And now this fool and the Brigadier have made me lose face with you.”^f

A little after eleven, the Brigadier came with his man. The next morning, dressed in Afghan clothes, with his cameras and tape recorders in a gunnysack, the Young Man was headed for the border.

“How many people did you kill, Brigadier?” asked the Young Man ingenuously. This would be a good cross-check of what the General had said.

The Brigadier stood straight and tall in the guest room. The curtains were drawn against the afternoon light.

“I killed about a thousand and more of thousand people in the fight of the Afghanistan,” he said in his slow, dignified English.^g “I killed the more people, from Russia. — Russian! In Holy Qur’an say, ‘Don’t kill the peoples,’ but who is peoples? Peoples, he is peoples when he going by the Holy Books. Holy Books is four: Qur’an, Bible, [indecipherable], Torah is the Books.^h These people is people. Who is don’t like the Books, he—no people! The Roos is wild. Like horses, like donkeys, like cows, they are coming in the Afghanistan here — invasion to Afghan countries! We don’t like them. I kill more of the Russians in Russian forts. He living in the Afghanistan now. He came, the Roos, him, from Russian country to our countries. They are fighting with me, they KILLING our little boys — he drinking milk, he hitting, they taking on his shoulder and his small small hand and small feets, they take him away, they kill him; this is not good.” —(The Brigadier shook his fist; he cried; I can never forget the anguish with which he said this.) —“Our children they are killing,” he said. “Our children, and our girls, and our old mans and young mans … In the fight, he taking and putting in the tank, between the tank, the young man and the young girls that are fighting with him; he killing! They are doing the zillah with the dead mans.ⁱ They, they sexing the dead girls!^j They are like donkeys, from another world. I kill them! They kill me! I kill them!”

Upon his return to San Francisco, the Young Man called the C.I.A. as he had been requested to do. — “When were you in Afghanistan?” the C.I.A. man said. — The Young Man told him. — “What was this Brigadier’s full name?” the C.I.A. man said. — The Young Man told him. — “What languages do you speak?” the C.I.A. man said. — The Young Man told him. — “What’s your social security number?” the C.I.A. man said. — The Young Man told him. — “Thank you for calling, Mr. Vollmann,” the C.I.A. man said. “You can reach me at this number anytime. If you call, please refer to me as ‘Nick.’ ”

Five years later, I still had news of the Brigadier. But if Nick ever rearmed him, I never heard of it.^k

* Water.

† Which remains disputed territory.

‡ Here is one of many examples of the Pakistani and Afghan freedom with dates. In fact, Daoud became Prime Minister in 1953, not 1954. He retained this position until 1962, at which time a commoner succeeded him. In 1973 he ousted Zaher Shah in a coup, and remained in power until he was assassinated by the Taraki coup in 1978. Taraki was killed by Amin in 1979, and Amin was executed by the Soviets upon their invasion later that year. See the Chronology at the end of this book for more details.

§ The Parcham (Flag) and Khalq (Masses) parties were two rival leftist parties in Afghanistan which found themselves sharing power uneasily after the invasion. Daoud had both Parcham and Khalq backing in his coup. Amin and Taraki were Khalq. Babrak Karmal, their Soviet-installed successor, was Parcham. In 1982 Karmal was still in power.

‖ I have not hesitated to edit the interviews in this book in order to make their syntax more readily comprehensible.

a Each of the latter two parties called itself Hezb-i-Islami.

b “Your gift of help to Afghans is very appreciated,” wrote the General in 1984, “but this amount cannot be given to anyone. You could donate the amount to an education institute — if you so desire.” —“SORRY,” said the rather surprising signs put up by the Berkeley Spartacists in 1983, who vowed to defend bureaucratically deformed workers’ states by any means necessary. “AFGHAN SLIDE SHOW CANCELED — will be rescheduled.” —“Your show was well received, and, as I believe you would have wished, provoked a goodly amount of reflection afterward,” wrote Mr. Scott Swanson in 1985. “Unfortunately, a snowstorm kept all but the most hearty away.”

c Or else — what seems more likely to me now — the General had a very kind heart.

d I know now that I could have done no better.

e Thousands.

f Imagine that! This fine old man, who was close to the center of power in his country, was worried about losing face with a twenty-two-year-old boy who got sick in the sun. Why? Because the boy was American.

g The Brigadier’s numbers, like much else about him, are enigmatical. Pakistanis and Afghans seem freer in their use of figures than we. By “a thousand” he might mean “a good number.” Then again, he might mean “a thousand.” The General’s corroboration was important, for I never knew him to make a deliberate misstatement of any kind.

h Indeed, in token of their kinship with us — which we Christians are too provincial to feel with them — Muslims call us “the People of the Book.”

i Sexually violating.

j I have heard many reports of Soviet soldiers raping Afghan women, but only one other account of sexual violation of corpses.

k The Brigadier “is fine and healthy,” wrote the General a few months after I left. “All those who matter now realize that we ought to help those who are involved in fighting inside. Masoud the hero of Panjsher has contacted him through his father, who is also a retired Brigadier General … Lord C— B— of U.K. had also contacted him. He will be all right, in spite of no help from his Arab friends …” —The General did not even mention the Americans anymore.