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

5. “OR AT LEAST A LONG HALT”: REFUGEES IN THE CITY (1982)

And Peshawar is now, as always, very much a frontier town. The formalities of dress and manner give way here to a free and easy style, as men encounter men with a firm handclasp and a straight but friendly look. Hefty handsome men in baggy trousers and long loose shirts swing along with enormous confidence, wearing bullet-studded bandoliers across their chests or pistols at their sides, as if it were a normal part of their dress. There is just that little touch of excitement and drama in the air that makes for a frontier land. An occasional salvo of gunfire — no, not a tribal raid or a skirmish in the streets, but a lively part of wedding celebrations.

… Peshawar is the great Pathan city. And what a city! Hoary with age and the passage of twenty-five centuries; redolent with the smell of luscious fruit and roasted meat and tobacco smoke; placid and relaxed but pulsating with the rhythmic sound of craftsmen’s hammers and horse’s hooves; unhurried in its pedestrian pace and horse-carriage traffic; darkened with tall houses, narrow lanes and overhanging balconies; intimate, with its freely intermingling crowd of townsmen, tribals, traders and tourists — this is old Peshawar, the journey’s end or at least a long halt, for those traveling up north or coming down from the Middle East or Central Asia, now as centuries before when caravans unloaded in the many caravan-serais now lying deserted outside the dismantled city walls or used as garages by the modern caravans of far-ranging buses.

from a brochure by THE PAKISTAN TOURISM DEVELOPMENT CORP., LTD. (ca. 1979)

Trying so hard to generalize (why, I really don’t remember), the Young Man Who Knew Everything explained to his notebook: “The uncleanliness of American cities is composed of such items as shattered bottles and blowing newspapers, beer cans, chemical spills, Styrofoam incubators for hamburgers, and the like. In Pakistan production and distribution are not nearly as advanced; accordingly, the diet of its cities is hardly so rich, and their excretions and lymphatic disorders have an altogether different character. Much that would be thrown away in the U.S.A. is prized here — and of course there are no beer cans.” —Peshawar, then, was a city of tumbledown streets and filth; and the Young Man, with his preference for advanced trash, believed it even dirtier than it was. (I confess that I myself would rather die from an industrial cancer than through an amoeba’s agency; this is a question of upbringing.) — Then, too, there was the fact of being perpetually observed, accosted and remarked upon; this superfluity of attention was at times somewhat like dirt. Like other cheats, he wanted to study, not to be studied. As the attention was almost always kindly meant, responding to it eventually became a pleasure; but in the meantime the Young Man must also face the city itself: the stands selling rotten mangoes and meat so thick with flies that its own color was a mystery; the gasping men, cooling themselves off in the midst of their labor by sticking hoses down inside their shirts; the shops offering expired medicines, sugar syrup, cooking oil and brand-new fans. In the Saddar district, the sidewalks had buckled and upthrust, as if unsettled by the tunneling of giant moles. Here and there were three-foot pits without apparent purpose: little graves for fruit peels and the hooves of slaughtered cattle, with concrete shards mixed in like bones. When he bought bananas they were soft and black. The gutters stank; the water in them was gray, like the underbelly of a dead snake. Everyone moved slowly in the heat.

The Young Man wrote treatises on the effects of that heat: First you felt it in your wet forehead, as the sweat began running into your eyes in the first seconds. Next the sunlight penetrated your scalp. Your hair warmed uncomfortably. The base of your neck was sodden like your armpits, and you inhaled steam as though you were going through the motions of breathing; and soon you got dizzy and sick to your stomach. Some people (such as Afghan refugees) might bleed from the nose and ears.

“Yes, it is hot,” sighed the proprietor of the hotel. “In Baluchistan, they say, there is a town where in summer the water comes from the tap hot enough for tea. I have never been there; I hope I never will, in sh’Allah!”^*

As the Young Man walked along, everyone looked up. They made the quick hissings used to attract rickshaw drivers, or called out to him: “Hey!” “What you want?” “Where you going?” or simply, “Mister!” —To all of these, Mister returned an imperturbable and inane “Asalamu alaykum”—the traditional Islamic greeting.^† —“Walaykum asalam,” they said automatically, becoming more friendly. From there it was only a few steps to the free soft drink, the tea, the guided tour with the rickshaw to his hotel paid for at the end of it, the multitude of improbable favors. Everyone said, surprised that he would even comment: “But you are a guest of our country!” or, “It’s a question of national honor.”

Coming back from the Austrian Relief Committee one evening, he became lost. It was Ramazan, so the General’s family had been without food or water all the long, hot day. He did not want to keep them waiting to break their fast. — But where was Saddar? If he could find that, he could walk to the General’s house. — A cyclist came up the hill carrying a great load of fresh-cut tree boughs. The Young Man asked directions. The other beckoned to a passing rickshaw. But the Young Man had no rupees left; they had been stolen at a refugee camp. — “I pay for you!” smiled the Pakistani. — “No, no,” said the Young Man, embarrassed. It was not far to a crossroads that he knew; the Pakistani had explained it to him. He could easily walk there. — So then, making certain that the branches were lashed tightly to the rear wheel, the Pakistani set the Young Man sidesaddle just behind the handlebars and began to pedal. — “Allah, Allah!” he cried near the summit of the hill, sweat running down his face. The Young Man, ashamed, tried to dismount, but he shook his head. — “No, no! You friend! I take you there.” —In front of the General’s house, before the Young Man could thank him, he smiled and turned back the way he had come.

The Afghan refugees across the hall at the hotel were sweet to the point of obsequiousness. They loaned him their soap, rushed to get water when he was thirsty, and even washed his shirt. They made him elaborate Afghan meals. — Every day the “uncle” went to the consulates or the Mujahideen political offices. The boy stayed inside all day. (The Young Man thought of him as a boy even though he had a wife and child.) The Young Man let the boy’s brother sleep in his room, on the spare bed, so that he would not have to sleep on the floor with the baby anymore. — One hot night the boy and his brother invited him to go out for a walk. They strolled through Saddar, turned around, went for ice cream … All the males his own age seemed like boys to him, because (1) they didn’t drink alcohol; (2) they didn’t have much money; (3) they deferred to him.

“Why did you come to Pakistan?” he asked the boy.

The boy looked at him with nervous brown eyes. “It was — I was in the Kabul. I was a student of agriculture, and all of my family was investigated. They investigated my father, and they took him in the jail. Afghanistan, it is — it is all in the jail.”

“He is not my nephew,” explained the “uncle,” who spoke excellent English. “But I let him call me uncle to show respect. His father, his mother and all his brothers except that one were detained by the Russians and killed one by one. I am all he has now.”

The Young Man bought the boy a bunch of bananas, and a detective novel to help him with his English. — “Why do you never go out?” he asked him. But the boy would not answer.

The “uncle” had three beautiful daughters, who were very shy, but when the Young Man said that he was trying to help they let him take their picture. Standing on the flat roof of the hotel, they smiled sadly. One of them shaded her eyes with her hand. In the evenings they helped him with his Pushto. (It was unfortunate, he reflected, that the word for “sister” sounded like “whore” prefaced by an expectoration, but the moving of one’s tonsils among the Pathans would seem to be as much a necessity — here the worms turned over in his intestines — as the moving of one’s bowels.) — The girls also practiced their English on him. After he had essayed, with great effort, “I am your … friend,” or “It is very hot today,” they would reward him by smiling, and saying an English sentence that they had memorized: “Brezhnev — is—dog!” Then they burst into giggles. — Once he said, consulting his English-Pushto dictionary at every other word, “I … like the Afghan … people. I … hope … I can help you.” —They smiled and giggled. —“Dera miraboni.”^‡ They made him dinner. They stood and served him while he ate. He was made to sit. They prepared for him curry and meat and vegetables, with plums for dessert. Later he saw them eating old bread.

“There are two kinds of refugee,” the hotel proprietor explained to him over green tea. “Rich refugee and poor refugee. Rich refugee, he live in Peshawar, in hotel. Poor, he live in camp. Afghan refugees no good. They wear everything out, break everything. Too many of them.”

There were nine people in that family, counting the uncle’s old wife. They existed in two rooms. Each room had a table and two single beds. They had been there for two months. They were trying to go to the United States or West Germany, but so far they had found no sponsors. In another month, said the uncle, if they still had no luck they would go to India. They were the rich refugees.

“It is right that they speak sweetly to you,” an Iranian told him. “They want your help; you are American; you can do anything for them.”^§

“What happens if they go to a camp?” the Young Man asked.

“You don’t understand camp,” the Iranian said. “In camp they live like animals. They have not enough food; they have not enough water; they are too hot; there is only sickness over there.”

The Young Man went to the American consulate and asked if he could do anything for the family.

“They need a U.S. sponsor,” the woman said.

“What do I have to do to become a sponsor?”

“Can you guarantee their financial security?” said the woman.

“No, I can’t.”

“Give it up,” the woman said. “There are so many cases like this. I see so many cases like this every day. Just give it up.”

Every day he walked up and down Saddar, interviewing the off-duty Mujahid commanders cleaning their guns in hotel rooms, talking to miscellaneous Afghans and Pakistanis, buying himself Cokes and Sprites, catching rickshaws to go to the political offices. Peshawar seemed to him a fishy place. Everybody he met wanted to get out or was waiting for something. He was almost the only Westerner. One day he saw a blond, blue-eyed man buying soap. The man started a conversation. He said he was Swiss and he was waiting for a letter from someone who was to meet him there. He asked the Young Man questions in a friendly way. The Young Man saw him again a few days later, in the American Center. This time he was from Rhodesia. — That night he told the uncle about it. — “Be careful,” the uncle said. “I have seen him. He is a bad man.”

The third time he saw him, the man said, “You want to cross the border, don’t you?”

The Young Man did not entirely trust either the Swiss-Rhodesian or the uncle. So he merely said, “Well, that’s pretty dangerous, isn’t it?”

“Come on with you,” the man said. “Why else would you be in this bloody miserable place?”

“No,” the Young Man said. “I’m just a tourist.”

In the hotel was a fellow from Chitral who was very interested in the Young Man. His brother was the chief of police in Peshawar, he said, and the police were going to come arrest the Young Man as a spy.

“And what will happen then?” said the Young Man, feeling some alarm.

“They will beat you,” Yusuf Ali laughed.

“And then what?”

“They will make you sleep with them.^‖ And they will beat you again. Then you will go to jail.”

“Oh,” said the Young Man noncommittally.

“They will beat you, you C.I.A.!” Yusuf Ali chuckled, slapping the Young Man’s shoulder. “Do you understand? They will beat you and beat you, you spy!”

“Oh, I understand,” the Young Man said. He resolved to change his hotel.

“You are very dull, my friend,” said Yusuf Ali. “I am just joking.”

“But your brother is chief of police?”

“Yes.”

“And you really think I am a spy?”

“You are C.I.A., yes. But I have no told my brother about you, my friend. But if they find you, they beat you, you C.I.A.”

His aims and plans seemed to be wandering through alien channels like those narrow, high-walled, white-walled streets of Peshawar, in which men in cotton-white passed white-veiled women. He went out that night to get a fruit drink (which later made him urinate blood). On the way back, a crowd of Pakistanis surrounded him. They had been watching him day after day. They asked where he was going, what he was doing, where he was from. And why didn’t he stay in a youth hostel? They could have arranged “a better reception for him there.” —The Young Man said that he was happy with his reception here. — Why wasn’t he going to India? — He didn’t have much money, he said, and anyhow he only wanted to see Pakistan. — Oh, was he applying to his government for assistance in returning home? — No. —Why not? (And, by the way, the youth hostel was cheaper.) —“Don’t you want me here?” said the Young Man. — Oh no, it wasn’t that at all. But it might be very dangerous for him here, so near the border. — Now the conversation shifted to another topic with which he was already familiar: Could they get visas to the U.S.A.? — The Young Man said that that was very hard; so they had told him at the consulate. — Well, could he get them visas to the U.S.A.? — No, he said. — But he was satisfied with his reception here, he’d said? — Yes, thank you; everyone was very kind. — Well, then wasn’t he very selfish not to help them? They turned their backs on him. — When he lost his temper, they said that they had only been joking. — “Friend! Friend!” they cried.

…Yusuf Ali touched the Young Man’s neck and asked him when he would be crossing the border. The Young Man wrote in his diary: “What’s so special about me, anyway? Well, if he just wants to scare me, or to try to paw me, I can handle that, but I don’t like the idea of arrest and confiscation.” —He decided that maybe he should show Yusuf Ali some friendliness, and try to find out what was going on. So he asked him out for a walk the next day. Yusuf Ali rubbed his hands together and agreed. But the next morning, when the Young Man went to knock on his door, there was no answer. The proprietor said that Yusuf Ali had left for good at four that morning. — The Young Man decided to change his hotel. But he never got around to it. The police never came, anyhow. He saw the same people on the street every day. The Swiss-Rhodesian had gone away.

(“So what makes you think that I am C.I.A.?” he had once asked Yusuf Ali. “My tapes, my film?” —“No, no,” said Yusuf Ali. “My dear friend, it is in the lines of your hand; I can read hands, you see.”)

In the afternoons he sometimes saw the young soldiers marching and marching along the street. — “It is only a matter of time before the Roos, they come here to Pakistan,” a man told him. “Then we must be ready with our jihad. Even now they are in Peshawar, the K.G.B., and there is shootings. Their planes, they fly every day over Peshawar.”

The Young Man now took a trip to the Khyber Pass, so that he could say that he had been there. At the border, they told him, you could wave to the Soviet guard and he would wave back. You could take a picture. Alas, he did not get to the border. The bus took him across the desert and up into the cracked red mountains. Dust blasted in through the open windows and swept through the bus as they went. At one checkpoint there were boys selling water through the windows of the bus. The water came in old motor-oil cans; after you drank you returned the can. The Young Man’s seatmate bought him some; it tasted wonderful. They kept going up into the hills. They passed three women in black chadors squatting together under a tree, like resting crows. When the bus entered the tribal area, some of the men began to chew their hashish. The Young Man’s neighbor gave him a pinch, and showed him how it was done. At Landi Kotal, an evil little town of ancient, low-roofed houses, he had to change buses. He was five kilometers away from Torkham, the border town. The bus to the border was an old station wagon. All the passengers were nomadic tribespeople: old men with snow-white beards, children carrying chickens, red-robed women with long braids and silver earrings who wore no veils. They could barely understand his Pushtu. — “Kabul?” they said. — The Young Man shook his head. — “Torkham. All you, Kabul?” —“Kabul, yes.” —A boy tried to sell him opium, but his father slapped him. — Halfway to Torkham there was a customs check. The officials poked the grain sacks with sticks and looked around. When they saw the Young Man, they stopped dead and began to shout. Then they pulled him off the bus. — The Young Man, feeling as usual that blitheness was his best defense, told the other passengers goodbye with a wave and a smile, but they looked at him in silence. The bus went on to Kabul. — Inside the dugout, they looked at his passport very carefully. He acted like an American, asking them to let him take pictures, and seeming generally friendly but bewildered, until finally they let him go. They put him in the back of a pickup truck and took him back to Landi Kotal. They let him off near the bus station and drove away without speaking to him.

They had many dugouts there on the edge of the mountain. Every now and then, when they were deciding what to do about the Young Man, their attention wandered and they looked up into the rich blue sky, in the direction of Afghanistan. From far away came the noise of a plane.

After another inconclusive interview with Dr. Najib of the Jamiat-i-Islami’s political office, he took a rickshaw back to Saddar. The expatriate “Rhodesian” had told him about the joys of the American Center, with its air-conditioning and its color portrait of President Reagan, so the Young Man decided to stop there. He wanted to be a recluse for an hour. — They had Time, Newsweek, and even the Partisan Review. He took all three. He sat at a clean round table by himself, his happiness alloyed only by the realization that eventually he would have to go outside again and walk past the men in baggy white cotton shirts and trousers who sat cross-legged in small white-painted shops, smiling or staring at him, the sewing machine with which they made their living momentarily idle; they all seemed to have dark faces, dark hair, dark eyes, mustaches and white teeth; they were summer-white like chalk dust or road dust beneath the trees of Peshawar’s British cantonment, and their hands were still; then after other ceremonies of mutual appreciation he would find himself back at the hotel; he would enter his room, where every dirty wall was as hot as an oven door, even late at night, and where, in ecological cheer, ants crawled slowly across his bed, and a cricket led him in song from the bathroom, as it had been doing for days; and scorching air came from the fan, which every now and then died for a while along with the lights (electrical power in Peshawar was erratic) — but here at the American Center things couldn’t be better. — He picked up Time first. Israel had been doing something in Lebanon. He saw an Afghan staring at him from another table. He ignored him. He looked at Newsweek. Newsweek appeared to agree with Time.

The power went out. At first it was merely dark; within five minutes it was hot and dark. Most people left; the staff brought out dimly flickering lanterns for the rest. The Young Man stayed, hoping that the power would be restored; meanwhile it was impossible to read. He looked up, and the Afghan smiled at him, and he smiled back, and the Afghan came to join him, laughing at the lanterns. — “Like in my father’s time,” he said.

He was a diplomat’s brother. (The diplomat, of course, was now an ex-diplomat.) He hated Pakistan. “Afghanistan once ruled Pakistan and India!” he cried, looking around him wildly. “They are nothing but a nation of money-lovers and slaves! They do not help us!” —He took the Young Man to an ice-cream parlor and bought him a Sprite, which the Young Man drank down thirstily. — “Last month this cost two rupees fifty paisa,” the Afghan said. “Now it is three rupees fifty. They make it hard to live.”

He took tranquilizers at night, he said. He was thirty, and his hair was going gray. If Afghanistan was free he would have returned there at once. “But also I like America,” he said placatingly, “America is a very good country.” He had been told that if he went there he could immediately obtain a girlfriend, an apartment, a Cadillac. He asked the Young Man to call up the consulate and arrange for him to leave tomorrow.

He wouldn’t believe that the Young Man couldn’t do it. “What is freedom, what is democracy, then?” he said.

He said that Pakistani girls were not allowed to meet him, because he was Afghan. He was very lonely. He asked the Young Man if he had a girlfriend. The Young Man told him that he would be getting married soon. — “Very good,” the Afghan said in his deep voice. “You are a superpower; you can do anything. Me, I am nothing.”

The Young Man could think of nothing to reply.

He implored the Young Man to get him a visa.

“What will happen to you if you cannot get a visa?” said the Young Man, returning his problem to him like a prize package.

“If I cannot, I …” The man’s voice trailed off uncertainly. “My money will be finished after a few months …”

“And then what will you do?”

He laughed. “I–I’m not sure.”

He cleared his throat. “But I, also, try a lot to find a job. But I cannot find any job.”

“Do you think,” pursued the Young Man, “that you’ll have to go live in one of the camps when your money is gone?”

“Yah, yah. Yah, I must go.”

“And what will happen then?”

“I don’t know. But United States is a very good country for me. It’s a very big country. If I found someone to send me a visa, I can go there.”

“Thank you,” the Young Man said, shutting off the tape recorder.

He never did anything for the Afghan.

It is much nicer to work for the Citizens’ Action League, as I subsequently did, than to set out to Help Afghanistan, for all that I had to do in the former case was to get a stoplight built at a dangerous intersection (which also never happened) or fill up ten pages of petitions a day with signatures; but what the Young Man wanted to do is less susceptible to being broken into necessary procedures which can be checked off (and it is certainly an American need to check things off).^a I suppose that he would have satisfied that urge had he been a happy part of some worthwhile organization which could require him to inspect so many camps, scrounge so many rounds of ammunition per time period. The only trouble is that committing oneself to any organization requires faith without knowledge, for as long as you are snooping around trying to learn which group, which side is the right one (before going to Afghanistan, as I said, he was willing to entertain the idea that the Soviet Union might be doing something progressive in Afghanistan), all organizations will be like closed clams. And why not?

They are as vulnerable as you. — The International Rescue Committee would not hire the Young Man or let him work as a volunteer because it was not his intention to go into relief work for its own sake, but to “help the Afghans” (and, not yet having seen Afghans or relief work, he could not be certain to what extent the two were compatible. If you think this prissy, think again). Understandably, the I.R.C. was not thrilled by his attitude — which perhaps they sensed from his résumé, for they canceled the interview — but then of course there were not any positions open even for unpaid work: Pakistan had strict limits on employed foreigners. He was able to visit the camps, in fact, only because Aid for Afghan Refugees (A.F.A.R.), a fine fund-raising organization in San Francisco, sent word that the Young Man belonged to their group. This was generous of them, it not being strictly true, since the Young Man had come to several A.F.A.R. meetings but neither he nor A.F.A.R. had ever suggested that he become a member. It is my guess that A.F.A.R., like I.R.C., felt slightly uneasy about him. A.F.A.R., like Joan Baez’s Humanitas International or Dr. Joseph Pace’s Direct Relief in San Jose, could not officially support violence or other forms of politics; and the Young Man was considering going into Afghanistan with the Mujahideen, whom it was important for A.F.A.R. to dissociate itself from. The members of A.F.A.R. — mainly Peace Corps volunteers who had served in Afghanistan — could not quite fathom the Young Man’s connection with their issue. Nor were they all that interested. The Young Man was callow, babyfaced, unproven. A.F.A.R.’S president felt sorry for him, though, and very kindly made the telephone call to I.R.C. That made all the difference. So in the end A.F.A.R. committed itself to him through a kind of faith without knowledge. — Or rather, A.F.A.R.’S president did. No one helped the Young Man out for any reason connected with what he thought and hoped he was: he was a megalomaniac. Even the Afghanistan National Liberation Front took him into the war zone as their guest only because they respected the General and he asked them to (and because he paid them). Only the desperate Afghans that he met in the streets had any illusions that the Young Man could accomplish anything. After all, what could he have done? — A book, maybe, or a slide show, or a radio show, or sale of his photographs on the street, or mailing campaigns to libraries and churches, or fund-raising booths? — Later, he tried every single one of these.^b

And, anyhow, when you’re walking among the largest refugee caseload in the world, and here they all are begging you to help them with tears in their eyes, what can you do? First you meet one of them in Peshawar (come to think of it, why not begin counting with the Pakistani beggars in Karachi, or the whores in San Francisco? — the General was always saying that do-gooders must put their own houses in order first), and then you meet a family of them, and then several thousand in a camp (thank God he didn’t have the money to go to the Northern Territory, where supposedly it was even worse, with homeless people as far as the eye could see along the margins of muddy mountain roads, selling their possessions at bargain prices to rug and curio importers — but he had only heard about it; I’m sure it wasn’t quite that bad); so you give something to the first person who touches you, and maybe the second if you have more to spare, and then your quota is expended (whenever I hear of a church’s sponsoring some starving child in an African village, I, being basically a cheerless fellow, think about the ten others beneath that same roof); and you say to the third person, “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you,” and he and his three sisters cannot understand why you, who have so much, cannot help them, unless somehow they offended you or did not treat you with sufficient hospitality or else maybe the fact that the sisters put on their best dresses to ask you was unredeeming because the dresses had become shabby, so that they were not worthy of you; but surely once you explain to them what they did wrong they can make amends so that their souls can this time purely beseech your soul and then you, being a god, will grant what is after all a pro forma gesture on your part? — and you (if you are decent) are cut inside with guilt and pain, so maybe you forget your quota and give them what they need, for it does mean so little to you compared to what it means for them,^c and they all embrace you and go away happy, but now here is case number four, whom you really are going to have to turn away, because the consulate has told you that one can sponsor only so many refugees; and he has in his eyes that same astonished look: “You are going to let me fall!”—which is not reproach because you are not reproachable, so how can he reproach you without reproaching the entire world? (and he couldn’t possibly be doing that). The Afghans were among the lucky, for their case was one of mere invasion, not genocide, and, as you had already learned, in helping people one has to draw the line somewhere. Of course helping them would be delicious, the line drawn considerately to avoid them, since their distress had been brought about by our international enemy; this was why working with them made more sense to an American of utilitarian bent than aiding Soviet war widows: other Americans would surely back you. — Cases number five and six, however, come at you simultaneously with ruthless aggression; if you gave something to five you’d have to give to six, too, so to hell with them. (The population of Peshawar had doubled since the refugees came.) Here’s case number fifty speaking: “But United States is a very good country for me; it’s a very big country; if I found someone to send me a visa …” —This fellow bears an interesting resemblance to case two, but differs from case seventeen in ways x, y and z; and now, safe on the High Ledge of Generalizations, the Young Man has become me, who is quite satisfied to raise enough money here in Oakland to maybe send the Mujahideen one machine gun,^d and then let’s call it quits and go on to some other project.

When the relatives of my friend H. arrived in California, they were kept in custody for several days, and then assigned to a foster family. The parents were treated as servants by the family. The children were made to eat out of dog bowls. When the parents protested, their five-year-old son was placed in an institution. They were not allowed to visit him. (I did not quite believe any of this when H. told me — how could such things happen? Had they entered the country illegally? Was H. exaggerating to get my sympathy? But why would he do that? He had more money than I.) They did not see the boy for six months. H. hired a lawyer and filed suit. Eventually they succeeded in getting custody. The boy had become very quiet. They did not know what had happened to him in the institution because he would not talk about it. Meanwhile, the parents awaited a judgment as to whether they would be allowed to stay in the United States. At length the Immigration official assigned to their case summoned them. He put leg irons on their feet. He made them shuffle after him down a long corridor. He told them that he was going to put them on a plane back to Afghanistan. When they landed, the Russians would execute them, he said. It is not hard to imagine how they felt as they walked toward that unseen airplane; they had to walk down the hall, just as my friends and acquaintances in Afghanistan must go over the mountains at night to the place where the Russian soldiers had cut their pipeline and stand there selling gasoline or trading it, so much gasoline in a dirty cup for so much hashish, the Russians too stupid to see that they are selling to their enemy one of the things needed to go on killing Russians, and that Russians who use hashish are easier to kill! (Yet I wonder why the Afghans even bothered to pay, why they didn’t just go farther down in the moonlight and kneel beneath the leak where the gas came dribbling out; or why they didn’t set it afire? — but of course it was their own gas; why should they blow up their own country’s gas?) — To H.’S relatives, of course, it did not seem evident that there was anything left to buy or sell or negotiate. — Then the Immigration man smiled and set them free. It was only a joke. They could stay. When I met the family a few days later at a restaurant, they smiled and picked at their food. They spoke hardly any English; they had no money. I gave them two hundred dollars — all I had. They smiled and told me how happy they were to be here. They insisted on paying for the lunch. I think they really were happy. What had happened to them here was insignificant.

Let’s suppose that the Young Man had been able to give everyone he saw exactly what was asked for; that, being the American that he was said to be, he truly was the genie in the Sprite bottle. After all, their expectations were modest (most of them). They did not want to have EVERYTHING that the Young Man had. By and large, they wanted money and guns. If he gave them those, then the Soviets would feel obliged even more often to violate Pakistani airspace with their low-flying planes that grazed Peshawar so teasingly and then swerved back toward the border to bomb another refugee camp or drop another load of toy-shaped butterfly mines where Afghan children would pick them up; or else another Afghan politician might be murdered in Peshawar and no one would be able to say for sure whether a K.G.B. agent or another Afghan did it. So the Young Man would have to wave his magic wand somewhat more vigorously, to wish the Soviets right out of Afghanistan, which happened eventually, indeed (although few history books will credit the Young Man for it), but until it did his help would not mean a goddamned thing. If he had been the President, would it have meant anything? — Yes. — Then why wasn’t he the President? It wasn’t fair. If he were President he could do something good that people would respect him for.^e As it was, what was the use?

At this point, however, the Young Man was still trying, or going through the motions of trying, so he developed a dread of going outside. There were people there who would ask something of him. He often had nightmares. Once he dreamed that he was cutting up a beef carcass on a ranch where he had once worked in California, when suddenly an Afghan or Iranian came up behind him asking for a visa. The Young Man told him that he was busy, for these people never accepted a no and you had to argue with them for half an hour, which was impossible in this case because he was busy fulfilling his own stupid little function. — “I don’t think you understand,” the refugee’s sister said, flashing her eyes winningly. “He’s at the top of his class, commended for this and that.” —The whole family was here now, sitting down to dinner around that carcass, which belonged to the ranch, not to the Young Man; but traditions of hospitality forbade him from saying anything about that. So he remained his weak self, sneaking around taking little bits of meat off their plates unobtrusively, trying to save something for his organization. — The family didn’t approve at all. They ate everything.

One evening the Young Man was coming back to Saddar along Hospital Road. A man was looking at him out of the crowd of people looking at him. —“Asalamu alaykum,” said the Young Man automatically. —“Walaykum asalam,” the man said. “Where you go?” —“I’m just walking,” the Young Man replied. “I like to walk.” —The Pakistani bought him a cold Sprite. It was a very hot evening, and he was dehydrated from dysentery; he drained the bottle in seconds. The Pakistani bought him another. — He was an engineer studying at Peshawar University. He also liked to take walks, he said. — They walked together down past Balahisar Fort (originally, said the guidebook, built by Babur, first of the Mughal Dynasty), and along the wide British avenues. The trees were painted with wide white stripes of lime.

“You want to see Peshawar Museum?” the man said. — “Very much,” he said. — It was six-thirty. The museum had closed at five, but the Young Man’s benefactor spoke for a long time to the grumbling old caretaker until finally the wooden doors were flung back, and the Young Man stepped into the dark. Behind him, the caretaker turned on the electric lights one at a time, as they were needed. There were beautiful Qur’ans, in blue and white, and other colors; a whole room was set aside for them. There were women’s costumes that would have jangled in silver, had the women still been alive to wear them; and water-skins, and knives, and muskets; and remote black Buddhas from the forgotten time. The Pakistani was among friends. He told the Young Man something about every display that was there, until the Young Man felt great respect and wonder creeping upon him like a lovely evening shadow across sunny rooms. Again they went to look at the room of the Qur’ans, which were so perfectly made that even now I can still sometimes see them with my eyes closed, the pure blue and white cursive weave of them, and I hope that I will see them again.

At sunset the Young Man and the Pakistani walked into the old city and its dinner smells of kebab and mutton tika and curry. Entire streets sizzled with frying meat. As twilight came, a weariness settled over the town. In the fabulous garden of Shahi Bagh they stopped beneath the trees, and the Pakistani bought him a Sprite and a 7-Up. Shahi Bagh smelled like flowers. In the fading light, he saw men sprawled in the grass, or sitting with one another talking quietly. — “Who are they?” he asked. — “Afghan refugees,” the man said. “They sleep here.” —“Where do they sleep if it rains?” —“In the mosque,” the man said. “If there is room.”

When it was dark the man got him a rickshaw, paid his journey to Saddar for him in advance, and disappeared.

Did the man do this for refugees, too? If so, for how many? And if not, why not?

Does asking the first question get at something useful, or is it an insult to the man’s simple kindness? And this tendency that I now have years later to recall the Young Man’s journey as a sort of failed Pilgrim’s Progress, does it give me a chance to make practical generalizations about how people ought or ought not to be, or was that my problem in the first place? If these memories were only “travel experiences” for you, the reader, to nibble at, would you like them better? Would that be a more honest presentation of the understatedness of life? For as it is, I have excavated and reworked what was once a random if picturesque trail into something resembling one of the freeways in my country, with road signs and billboards writhing with strange secret symbols. — And yet, encrusted though the route may be, I think, I hope it goes somewhere …

In the days before he left his hotel room for the General’s, the Young Man spent time with an Iranian student at Peshawar University and his friend, a Jordanian. They were tormented people. The Iranian was effectively an exile, because upon hearing about Khomeini’s executions he’d gone to the Iranian consulate and torn up his passport. “Now they will put me in jail, maybe shoot me, if I go back,” he said. — The Young Man took a bus out to the Iranian’s apartment at Jabbar Flats, and they got a watermelon and the three of them sat on the bed and ate it. The Iranian and the Jordanian were outraged at the condition of the camps. — “Two, maybe three million Afghan refugees are living here!” the Jordanian shouted. “They don’t have shoes, they don’t have clothes, they don’t have food, they don’t have books for school; they don’t have anything! Every day they become more and more poor, and, you know, they have got only sickness over here.” —The Young Man was a little skeptical. For one thing, he recollected that according to both the World Health Organization and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in Afghanistan in 1965 (around that time the Soviets were offering the Afghans arms against the Pakistanis), thirty percent of the population had tuberculosis, ninety percent had helminthiasis, malaria was ubiquitous, and so was, let’s see, typhus … There were 1,564 cases of cholera; thirteen percent of the residents of Kabul had trachoma (this figure ascended as high as seventy-five percent in the rural areas); 30,000 people had leprosy; and of course the infant mortality was one out of two — so how could you blame the camps for disease? — On the other hand, with all the overcrowding, conditions were probably worse now. But how much worse? That he never found out.^f

They introduced him to a refugee who had once been the editor of a prominent newspaper in Kabul. Now he drove a rickshaw and hauled loads on his back. He was in his sixties. — The Young Man asked him why he did not register as a camp inmate to collect the refugee allowance. The man stared at him; the Iranian had to explain that this Young Man was just an ignorant foreigner who had not seen the camps. “In the camp they must live like animals,” the rickshaw driver said in Pushtu. “They have no food, no water.” —The Young Man asked Mark Ice, the head of the International Rescue Committee’s office in Peshawar, what he thought about that. — “Well, they exaggerate,” said Ice. “I’ve never heard of anything like that. Now, it is true that the administration of the camps is divided up among sixteen voluntary agencies — Saudi Red Crescent, I.R.C. and so on — and some are run by the Pakistanis and are closed to foreigners. Conditions in the various camps do vary.”

Meanwhile, the Young Man still had not visited the camps. Every day he took the bus up to Jabbar Flats and talked with the two students in that bare concrete room that was now only patchily white, and the fan whirred and they stood pacing with their shirts off because it was so hot and the clock ticked very loudly. One day they said that the old rickshaw driver wanted the Young Man to meet his son. They went to a restaurant in which the pukkas roared futilely against the heat. Sweat rolled off everyone’s face onto the table. They ordered a Sprite apiece, and after ten minutes the Young Man had two more. It was a fancy place: with each soft drink the waiter brought salt and lemon.

The waiter was a man in his twenties. He was a very clean and graceful person who was constantly being called for by name among the clattering of teacups; all the patrons knew him, apparently. —“Abdul, tsalor Fanta!”^g Yes, it appeared that he was popular. He was summoned into the kitchen and to a front table and to a back table and into the kitchen. He was very energetic and always smiled as he came quickly to where he had been called. — In two hours, however, business had slackened, and he came over to the Young Man’s table to talk.

“When I was in Afghanistan my father has a little money, do you know?” began the waiter earnestly. “When we left Afghanistan we sold our furniture and some other things to come here. We walked three days without a stop. Russian soldiers are now living in our home. We came here; now I am working here. I get from here eight hundred rupees monthly.^h I am working only for rent, from six o’clock morning until twelve o’clock midnight. We brought a little money with us from Afghanistan. And I think that after two, three months this money will be finished. And I ask myself, what will we do?” —He laughed. — “We cannot live in the camps. By God, we cannot! It is my mother and my sisters — how can she live? She cannot go out; everyone watches when she washes … For me it does not matter, but for her — most of the people of Afghanistan is religious. The poor womans, do you know, they don’t like the people or the foreign people looking at wife. For this reason we cannot stay in the camp. In the tent there is no water; there is nothing; it is very hot; this is very difficult. It is not safe.”

They called him to the kitchen. Apologetically, he laughed. The Young Man shut off the tape recorder and waited. He was almost alone in the restaurant now. The students had left some time ago, and there were only a couple of men at another table, eating kebabs and staring at him. They snapped their fingers and called for Abdul: Another Coke! — And now here he came back to the Young Man’s table, smiling brightly.

“What do you think the situation is like in Afghanistan now?” the Young Man said. “Is Mr. Karmalⁱ firmly in control?”

Abdul laughed. “Karmal is like a dog; he is like a dog of Russia, do you know? I think sometimes he want to kill himself. If he want to sleep, there is one Russian soldier always watching. They don’t have necktie: maybe he will die himself with his necktie.” —He laughed. — “In Afghanistan, Russian is everything, Afghanistan is nothing.” (How often Afghans said to the Young Man, “You are everything; I am nothing!”) “There is only Russian film and Russian dance on television,” he said. “In the government they don’t like us. But the soldiers don’t know. They think they are fighting against Pakistan, because when they came to Afghanistan the captain told them: ‘There is attack from Russia and China.’ These were Russian soldiers, but they didn’t know anything. He told them: ‘There are more than one million China in Afghanistan; they are against the government. They look like this: they have turban, they have beard, they have nose like this.’ ” (The waiter touched his own nose.) “The captain told them: ‘You kill them! You kill the Pakistan people because they want to attack Afghanistan.’ And then every person who is bad, who is from religion, they killed them.”

The Young Man watched the red light and the steady green light on his tape recorder.

“So they go to village,” the waiter said. “They kill the womans. I saw one woman, they kill her, the Russian soldier shoot and she die … I was in the village with my grandfather; I was there when the Roos attacked. With tanks they attacked our village, and we ran away to the mountains.

Another woman there, she started to fight back; she climbed on the roof of the tank, and at last one soldier with Kalashnikov kill her, like that”—he made a machine-gunning noise—“she fall down; she was young, and she died in that time. She was a very brave girl. Still she had not married. And she died. — And there was two other old person, do you know, seventy years old, sixty years old; we all us ran away to the mountains, and also the womans, but these two, three old persons, they think the Russians never do anything with them; they are older!” —He laughed. — “One of them carries something with his donkey. But the Russian soldiers came. Before they ask him, ‘What are you doing? What do you have?’ they kill him, by God, and the other one also.

“And after this time,” the waiter said, “we have many problem in the village, because all the womans they cannot run for two, three hours; they are very tired. We make the underground place, and we have a soldier in the first street, and when the Russians attack he run for us and inform to us, ‘The Russian soldiers coming!’; then all the girls and womans go underground, and the young boys shooted against the Russian, and they run away; sometimes they kill many Russian soldiers. But one problem was that we did not have many guns and other things.

“At that time my father was in the city, in Kabul, and also my brother and my sisters, and I decided to come here. The village was damaged. I couldn’t go back to the city: the policemen was there, and they put my father in jail for two, three weeks for us. They say to him, ‘Where is your children; where is your sons? They are young, so they must be soldier!’^j But my father refused that he didn’t know anything, so finally they released him; and I came here to the Pakistan, and my brother and my father and my mother and my sisters also came here; and that is the story of my life.”

There was a silence for a moment, and the waiter leaned back, shredding invisible things in his hands. “Once,” he said, “I talk with Russian soldiers the first time they get off airplane. They told me, ‘We are here to help you, but you kill us! I want to fight with China and Pakistan people.’ —I say, ‘You didn’t come to Afghanistan to help Afghan people; you came to kill them and make trouble. Go back to your country. Don’t fight against people.’ —They say, ‘Are you bandit? Why are you talking opposite of your country?’ ”

“Abdul!” called the men at the other table. “Fanta, Sprite, Sprite!”

“I have one uncle, he was twenty-three years old,” the waiter said. “He completed his studies, but he didn’t work. They caught him; they make him soldier. After two, three weeks he die; they kill him.” —He laughed and got up and served the men at the other table a Fanta and two Sprites, in cool wet bottles. The fans roared.

“When I imagine that someone who is laughing is really in pain I don’t imagine any pain-behaviour, for I see just the opposite. So what do I imagine?”^k

At last the waiter came back and looked at the Young Man questioningly. So many people had looked at the Young Man full in the face with pleading glowing in their eyes, so desperate to be saved that they forced themselves to believe in him; but the waiter expected only one thing: that in the space of a few months he must go with his family to the camps. His gaze of questioning was meant only to be courteous—“What else would you like to ask me?” —but to the Young Man it seemed a different kind of question that filled him with fear and sadness.

“What is life like for you here?” said the Young Man, striving instinctively to propitiate that soul that had not been wronged by him, could not be propitiated by him, could not be propitiated by anything that was likely to happen (for six years later, as I wrote this, nine years after the invasion, the Russians were still in Afghanistan, and the year after that there was only chaos).

“Refugee is very bad life,” the waiter shrugged.

“If you had a message for the Americans, what would it be?”

“All the young boys from the camps,” said the waiter, “they are fighting against the Roos. There is no difference between Mujahid and refugee; my father and I are refugee and Mujahid …^l If Americans help us, we want to be helped as Mujahids. It is more important to give ammunition; then we will be able to fight bravely against the Russians. The second is food; food is very important, and medicine.”

“And no help specifically for the refugees?”

“Many refugees in America, they have sponsorship and the rich people,” the waiter said. “At the embassy in Islamabad they told me, ‘Have you a sponsor?’ and I told them no. ‘Then you don’t have a chance,’ they say. I asked them, ‘Why you help only special people?’ ”

It did not seem to the Young Man that the waiter had answered his question. He sat waiting until for the second time the waiter looked him full in the face and said, “Nothing will help refugees. But send us just one atom bomb and we will be happy forever.” And he laughed.

* Allah permitting.

† Asalamu alaykum: Peace be upon you. — Walaykum asalam: And upon you, peace.

‡ Thank you very much.

§ “Please send me material on Anti-Jamming as well as Electronic Counter measures …,” the General wrote him in 1984. But the poor Young Man, try as he would, could find out scarcely anything about this subject. He did not have the right connections.

‖ Yusuf Ali was certain that all the boys in America touched each other. “Have you ever touched another boy?” he asked. “No? Very good. You are a pure, gentle boy.”

a Probably this is why doctors so often seem callous to those who do not have to do their work. Beset with a flood of suffering and dying, they must accept the fact that they can make almost no difference. Good doctors, of course, only work that much harder.

b “Professor E— B—, the judge for this year’s B— Prize in Political Science, asked me to convey to you his admiration for the work,” wrote the administrative assistant. “Although not really ‘political science,’ as literature it is splendid.” —A literary agent thought that it had some good political insights, although it did not stand up as literature.

c In 1982, someone told me that an American dollar was worth the equivalent of ten dollars to a Pakistani, and a hundred dollars to an Afghan.

d INTERARMSGram: May 8, 1984

Mr. William T. Vollmann

San Francisco, CA 94122

Dear Mr. Vollmann:

We thank you for your inquiry and request for quotations on anti-aircraft missiles and launchers. We are sorry to inform you that we are unable to be of assistance on these items as we do not handle this type of armament.

Very truly yours,

Carl Ring

Vice President

CR: smc

INTERARMS · NUMBER TEN PRINCE STREET · ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA 22313

e “To Wm. Vollmann the PRESIDENT of Afghanistan Media Committee: We the Revolutionary Community Party of America condemn your rightwing propaganda. We will fight your death propaganda by whatever means necessary.”

f At that time I thought such distinctions very important, because if disease in the camps was no worse than it had been at home, then I could not blame the Soviet Union for it, so it did not matter. (If this book is only about the effects of the invasion of Afghanistan, then of course that is a fair way of looking at the matter. Fortunately for my soul, it isn’t.)

g “Abdul, four Fantas!”

h In 1982, the official rate of exchange was Rs. 11 to the dollar. The black-market rate was eight to ten rupees higher.

i Babrak Karmal was the Soviet puppet in Kabul, later replaced by Najibullah.

j The occupation forces found it convenient to conscript Afghans to fight the Mujahideen. The conscripts were put in the front lines; thus the Mujahideen could usually kill only other Afghans. Many boys were forcibly inducted at their high school graduation or earlier.

k Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I.393.

l However, some camp inmates did draw a distinction between Mujahideen (holy warriors in what was primarily seen as a religious war) and Mujahers (people who had become refugees as a result of anti-religious persecution). For the Afghans, the religious nature of events cannot be overemphasized. What they especially despised about the Soviet invaders was that they were atheistic. This helps to explain why they were so perplexed about public inaction toward their cause in the U.S.A. We Americans were also People of the Book, weren’t we? Then was it not our religious duty to help the Afghans? — The Afghans had many illusions still to lose about us.

6. THE LUCKY ONES: REFUGEES IN CALIFORNIA (1983–87)

“So, we’re doing a perm and a cut?” said Anjilla, and Jenny nodded earnestly, her legs crossed; and while Anjilla got her client card Jenny sat looking into the mirror and playing with her hair. She had already put her smock on.

“It’s kind of long,” Jenny said. “If I cut it I’m going to get it permed anyway, so I might as well perm it.”

“It’s kind of dry,” said Anjilla. “So I’d like to use some lotion on it, if it’s okay with you.” She took Jenny back to wash her hair.

The hairdressing department was a bright place, bisected into a wide aisle and a series of semiprivate bays angled toward the window. Anjilla’s bay was halfway down the room. Her work space was impeccably clear, clean and ordered. Bottles and squeeze tubes stood at the base of the mirror. The cabinet top was white and spotless. The light shone upon it without glare.

Jenny came back wet and smiling, her hair pulled back from her forehead, while Anjilla stood behind her, a handsome brown woman in a blue silk blouse. She had thick black hair, thick black eyebrows and big black eyes. Jenny said she thought that she looked quite Persian. She worked the curlers into Jenny’s hair, talking happily about the vacation that she would take when her grandmother came from India next month. Jenny’s head was paved with curlers, like the plates of an armadillo. Anjilla tucked a strip of cotton around the circumference of Jenny’s head, added the perming solution, and slipped a plastic bag over the curlers.

“So, you like to work?” said Jenny, a little maliciously I thought. Anjilla’s family had once been well off.

Anjilla stiffened. “It’s fine,” she said.

Anjilla and Jenny both wanted to be doctors. They were both Asian immigrants. Jenny became a doctor. When she came to the United States, Anjilla lowered her expectations and hoped to be a nurse. But that didn’t work out, either. Her brother was going to be an engineer. He got a job as a mechanic. Her sister had been in dental school. She didn’t get a job. And Anjilla, here she was.

When the perm was done, she bent over Jenny. “Any trouble, let me know. Let me give you a dry towel.”

Anjilla’s father had had three houses. They lived in Kabul. They had a gardener, and a servant who cleaned, and a servant who washed their clothes. Her uncle got shot in front of his house. After that they came here.

I remember crossing the mountains into Afghanistan when it was around ten in the morning and it was very hot and sunny as we went up among the rocks, and when at last we reached the summit of the ridge and looked down at the green meadow below us and the snow and ice along the shoulder of the next mountain, and mountains going on before us forever, we saw a group coming our way: a beautiful, proud-looking young woman and her family ascending the divide, leaving Afghanistan; and one of the men led a donkey that clopped along wearily with their possessions on its back. They came up to where we stood, passed us in silence, and went on down into Pakistan to be refugees.

They were going to have to descend the piles of chalk-colored boulders, and clamber down the cliff sides and go down into the trees and cross many streams until they came to Parachinar. Then they would sell their donkey and take a bus or a taxi through the desert to Peshawar, where they would be registered. Next they’d apply for visas and settle into an overcrowded hotel that cost twenty rupees a night (two dollars for me at the current exchange rate, which is to say two hundred dollars for them). Then they would wait. The average waiting time for visas to the United States was two years. Within a few weeks their money would run low. They could try to find work in Pakistan or India, or go to a camp, where it was so hot that their children would bleed from the nose and run high fevers. Because of the crowding in the camps and the dictates of Islamic modesty, that young woman I had seen — and her mother and grandmother — would have to wait until dark to go out and relieve herself. And the canal water that she washed pots in would be the same water that refugees drank from and used as a latrine. (“There is an Afghan proverb,” a man told me. “ ‘Water is clean if it turns over three times.’ ”) — She would become like the woman in brown and red who sat on the bank of sharp white stones looking at the river that was the color of her clothes, and her family’s clothes, the ones that she had just washed, lay wrung out beside her as she sat rocking herself and rubbing the back of her head; she would become like the man who posed for my Afghanistan Picture Show so patiently that he did not even brush a fly from his mouth; like the smiling boy with the growth below his eye; like the man who wore a heart locket around his neck. — Anjilla, however, was among the lucky ones. Her family flew West.

When Anjilla was little, she wanted to be one of the puji.^* Her father used to let them come inside the house to drink during Ramazan. When she saw what happened to them after the Russians came, she cried.

One day Anjilla’s father saw President Amin on the TV. Amin was talking about loving your country; he was hinting at the need for the U.S. to come in. So he got sick after that, and then they bombarded his castle.

“Why,” the Young Man wanted to know, “did the Soviets invade Afghanistan?”

“To have acted otherwise,” said Brezhnev, “would have meant leaving Afghanistan prey to imperialism and allowing the aggressive forces to repeat in that country what they had succeeded in doing, for instance, in Chile, where the people’s freedom was drowned in blood. To act otherwise would have meant to watch passively the origination on our southern border of a seat of serious danger to the security of the Soviet state.”

Anjilla’s family had a friend who they knew was a Communist. He used to bring Lenin’s picture to their house. On the night the Russians came, he knew that something was happening, but he said nothing. That night the sky was full of airplanes. In the morning her father said that it was not safe to go anywhere. Her mother wanted the friend out because he was not safe for the family. The friend was up early in the morning. He seemed very excited. He said he had to get cigarettes. When he got to the store, he was shocked. He was expecting that something could happen, but he couldn’t believe that the Roos had come. The Russian soldiers were looking at him in the store. The friend came running back to Anjilla’s house crying, “The Roos are here and we are finished!”

That day and the next day the Russians went to all the important places and secured them. On the radio they said that due to U.S. interference they had to get help from our very kind neighbors the Russians. Everyone in Anjilla’s family was crying. Anjilla prayed to Allah.

The friend had a brother who was a Mujahid. The Mujahid had said, “If I see him, he’s a dead man.” But after the invasion the friend became a Mujahid also…

Anjilla’s family had two guns. When the Russians came, they hid them in the flour. Eventually the Russians began searching the houses with metal detectors. Then they had to give the guns to the Mujahideen.

I went to see Anjilla’s father at work once. He refused to say anything about himself or his family. His words and thoughts were walled like one of those villages in the North-West Frontier where trees rise randomly from dry terraces, hiding things, and the houses are low and hidden behind the wall, and in the open field below graze bullocks, never looking up at that village, never looking sidelong at the refugee camp beside them where fresh-faced children stare and smile from between the crowd of white tents and everything is open and everybody sees you. — He had relatives in Afghanistan. He was afraid that I would publish his name and then the Roos would kill them.

As for Anjilla, time went on and she got engaged and became less and less inclined to think about the past.

And the refugees came year by year.

“I was in an underground press organization,” the man said on the phone. He would not meet me; he would not give his name. — “The secret police found out. They put much emphasis on the secret police in Afghanistan today. There is a salary of 8,000 afghanis, plus coupons, free medical facilities, and an ID to enter any house at any time. They are entitled to a military rank and title. For many people, this is how they are standing on their feet, actually. The inflation is two hundred percent; and flour, sugar and tea are quite expensive, so one has to live. That is why freedom-fighter activities in Kabul are—limited, let us say. — So they discovered us. Several friends were captured; the rest escaped. I left for this reason, and also because my wife happened to be on Daoud’s constitutional committee, and she had training in home economics from Pennsylvania State, so she was an Undesirable Element and assumed to be C.I.A. Amin was president of the— —Association in the United States in 1965. My wife was the treasurer. (But please change this information; for my safety you must change this information!) Recently in Afghanistan they found an old yearbook of the Association, so they said, ‘Ha, ha, ha! We’ve got another one! Another C.I.A. here!’ A friend of mine was in a meeting in which they decided to seize my wife. So we came to Pakistan. My brothers are still in Afghanistan and they are fighting fiercely. My sister is fighting in Panjsher. There are many teams of women fighters there. I am happy to be here. I love you people, really, because you are doing something. Refugee aid is not a solution. The solution is: Give us a gun and we will do the job. God bless you, and I hope we can return the support in kindness.”

“When I was in West Germany waiting for my visa,^† I was very depressed,” Nahid told me, pouring more tea in my cup and then in hers. “I didn’t want to go out, ’cause I just left after the demonstrations and I saw some people get killed. Well, I was very depressed in the beginning. What I saw in my country, I thought the whole world would realize it and everybody was thinking about it, but once I left my country everything was normal. It’s not that other people don’t care, but it’s just — you know, it’s just the way it is.”

We ourselves feel nothing: we do not feel the earth reach up when a stone lands at our feet. But that does not mean there is nothing to feel. The earth is moved by the stone. And I hope that it is not a mere conceit of mine that the earth moves when a bomb falls on the far side of the world. But of course it does not move; we are not moved; that is just the way it is.

“What made you decide to leave Afghanistan?” I said.

“Well, almost everything,” Nahid said. “The situation, the fighting, the demonstrations, and, uh, those students got killed …” She looked down at the floor. “And we couldn’t study, you know. Almost all the teachers were coming in class and telling us that we should be ashamed of studying because other people were getting killed behind those mountains, because They were bombing everything. And in public you couldn’t talk without to be afraid of everybody. They didn’t like us because They were saying that we were feudals or landowners or whatever, and we were afraid of Them because whoever They were thinking was against the government, They were going to put them in jail and then who knows. They’ve killed a lot of people. No one asks why. No one can ask.”

“Did you consider joining the resistance instead of leaving?”

“Well, it’s hard here, you know. We hardly make very much money, you know, to pay our expenses. I do want to help my people and I did, but it’s easier to say it than to do it, because if I go to Pakistan right now they won’t let me fight, ’cause I have to stay home and cover my face and stuff like that. And when you live, you have to deal with your own problems, too.”

“What is life like for you here?”

“Well,” Nahid said, “the hardest thing is when you think you have lost everything you had behind you. You never know if you’ll be able to go back or not. On the other hand, I can go to school here, I can make my living, and people are really nice to us. Maybe it’s the nature of America, because it’s a country for all refugees.”

Nahid gave a party once, and there was beer and music and dancing. One of the guests got drunk and started shaking his finger in my face, yelling, “You Americans, you don’t care about us; you are a bullshit people!” and everyone else was shocked and shushed him because he was not being hospitable to me, and Nahid smiled apologetically and sipped her beer, and the musicians played one more song, one more song on their Afghan instruments, until it was three in the morning, and they gave me a bed to sleep in and the next morning they gave me breakfast. But I could not forget that I had seen Nahid drinking beer. She was becoming an American. — “I don’t know if the fighting is going to stop or how long it’s going to take,” she said to me passionately, defensively, “and when you’re young you have to do something, to be something where you are. My grandmother and my mother, they are older and will never be reconciled to living here. They want to go back because it’s very hard for them: they don’t speak the language, and they’re mostly alone because everyone else goes to work or school. But I think if Russians leave my country, then everything will be okay. I think most of us would like to go back. I do.” —Her head was down; her voice was very low. — “I would like to go back to help my people, to stay there. But then again, I don’t know if …” —She stopped. — “I don’t want to go back to my country and see that everything has changed so that I can’t—bear it anymore.”

* Nomads.

† In Europe the consulates were more willing than in Pakistan to grant visas to the United States. Lucky Nahid only had to wait for half a year!

7. “… DESCRIBED FORMALLY AS REFUGEE CAMPS …”: WOMEN (1982)

The Young Man had expected the refugee centers to look like pictures of concentration camps set in pictures of the Gobi Desert: barbed wire, jaundiced children dying of thirst, work gangs, sentries and corpses in the sand. He can, I think, be forgiven this lack of insight. For an American in 1982, the most practical course was to assume the worst about conditions in Asia. (Now we can fear and hate Asians instead, since they are taking over our markets.) At that time we were sufficiently far away for only the most important news to reach us — and when was the last time that important news was good? Before the Young Man left the United States, a Pakistani doctor had given a talk to an A.F.A.R. meeting. The doctor had worked in the camps. He said that conditions in the camps run by Pakistan alone tended to be worse than in those administered by the U.N. and the voluntary agencies. Some were much worse. But all were bad. Hearing this, the Young Man had felt anguish. It was still four months before he was to leave for Pakistan, and in that time how many more refugees would die? If only he could go tomorrow! Then he could accomplish something that much sooner.^* —Of course the U.N.H.C.R. nutritionist in Peshawar, Marie Sardie, was in the right when she said to him, “I hate typical Western propaganda about Eastern countries: you know, the begging bowls. I hate that. It’s this whole attitude that if someone’s actually dying, then you help them. But if they look okay, then forget it, Charlie. And this is defeating everything about development.” —And yet she was missing a point, because the refugees, being refugees, were by definition not okay. — Can we blame the do-gooder, then, whose urgency planted the camps with imaginary barbed wire?

No, he was right.

If I could speak to the Young Man now, what would I say to him? I can’t deny that I feel very dull now. There was some excitement and belief that the Young Man had that I don’t have. But although my life is flat, it is content with its flatness. I am a success. It is only that sometimes, when I read over his words, something brushes against me like a soft garment, and I feel a pang. What have I lost? If I set out to Help Somebody now, I know that I would be more effective, that I would accomplish more, give more, take less. — For a time the Young Man embarrassed me. Now, despite all his ignorance, I admire him a little. I wish that I could be more like him. But when I was him, I got hurt. — What about the saints, and Albert Schweitzer? Their existence proves that it is possible to be inspirational and effective. But did they feel inspired? Is inspiration an indulgence?

Mainly, the Young Man’s careful records bore me. He never thought to ask for stories: all he wanted was facts. Those facts are largely meaningless now. All that I have left now are the things that his fact-crusher could not quite digest: debris and colored bric-a-brac, like the old woman with tuberculosis who let him look at her as she sat out on the hard clay ground beside her house, the red shawl flaming about her gray hair, a silver ring on her finger; and her face was almost impossibly lined and wrinkled and beaten but he could not honestly tell her mood or what she was thinking or anything about her except that she was looking back at him, her mouth wrinkled in emotion — but which emotion? — or was it emotion at all? — and the men stood in a line behind, scowling at him as he watched her. — What can she mean or be for me now except another person whom I annoyed or perhaps even tortured with my good intentions? I can’t forget her but she isn’t alive. But the hand that wrote those records in the battered notebook, those tanned fingers dancing upon the keyboard of my computer now in front of my eyes, that hand fascinates me: it has traveled on a voyage to a place where I have never been.

And yet there is something despicable about it, too.

The do-gooder wanted to do good; he wanted exotic distress to remedy, so he had a sinking feeling on discovering less of that than he had anticipated. To his uneducated eye, it was not always so easy to tell the difference in condition between refugees and locals: neither had what he had! (Whereas those refugee camps in Thailand really had barbed wire; the Young Man saw it on TV.)

The stories — yes, those were sad, but although he thought he believed them, he didn’t; that took a few years of bad dreams. The Afghans could go freely in and out of their camps, and while malnutrition was widespread, starvation seemed nonexistent. The men retained their weapons and frequently slipped back across the border to take part in the jihad. To his eye the camps did not seem to be cesspools of misery at all, but rather festive and “ethnic” like one of those big Fords decorated by Pathan truckers until it was more gorgeous than any Karachi bus, the way its pennant pointed grandly down, bearing in its blackness the many-colored wheel-circle, and its paintings of mosques in blue and gold, captioned by Pushtu cursive like white snakes or breakers, ranged all around the top of the cab, framed by golden waves, and sun and dust had bleached these colors to a milky delicacy so that the truck had become a tea-tin from some dream-Persia, and clusters of bright streamers grew down across the windshield and the son and father leaned against the hood squinting at the Young Man; the tiny daughter, already wearing the long strip of flower-patterned cloth over her hair, gaped at the Young Man in pure frankness, clutching at her throat with one hand, holding a ricepot in the other, and the horizon was nothing but a dusty ridge — so too in the camps with the young girls in their bright-patterned garments, the mud houses graced by sunflowers, the extraordinary strength and handsomeness of the people, the sun and the cloudless sky. — Here for once I do not judge the Young Man so harshly. What if Saint George had come all the way across the Mountains of Doom and found no dragon to slay? Of course he’d be happy that everyone was still alive—wouldn’t he?

Dr. Levi Roque, who headed the International Rescue Committee’s field team in Pakistan, pointed out that conditions in Afghanistan were now such that vast increases in the refugee population could well occur. (They have.) — Oh, good, said the Young Man to himself; things will get worse, then. (They have.) He settled into the interview with real enjoyment.

“No amount of medicine can cure them,” Levi said. “We have to educate them. But how? That remains to be seen; it will take a long, long time. That is why we are starting on this wash-your-hands, cut-your-fingernails business. Why is it important that you wash your hands and cut your fingernails? These are the things that they have to learn right now. We are trying our best to do it.”

“How often would you say that refugees ask for medicines that they don’t need?”

“They don’t ask for things they don’t need,” said Levi wryly. “They just ask for everything, whether they need it or not. ‘Give me the white pill. Give me this yellow.’ Give me this, give me that. — Oh, I’ll give you an example. We’re doing family planning. We have these contraceptive pills. So. One of these men got hold of our contraceptive pill, because it comes in pink color. And he’s taking it, because he loves the color!” —He laughed. — “I hope he don’t get pregnant.”

The Young Man remembered something that Levi had told him earlier. “Do any of them still hold your medical teams at gunpoint?”

“Well, not anymore,” Levi said. “But they always say, ‘All of this medicine belong to us anyway; give us all this!’ But when we give them proper explanation, they say okay. They are stubborn, but they listen … In here, well, the Afghans are lazy. They do not want to help themselves. The Indochinese refugees, they work very hard for themselves. Here,” Levi chuckled, “they don’t help you. You pay them, they help you.”

“What do you think the best thing the Americans could do for the refugees would be?”

“I really don’t know,” Levi said. “Well, the Americans are giving a lot of food, and I think they should keep it up.^† Why? Well, now we are facing so many Afghans already in Pakistan. If we can keep them healthy, that’s a very good sign; that’s very good. We have to anticipate that those Afghans in Afghanistan, in which, in the long run, there might — who knows? — be an emergency, they will cross Afghanistan like the Kampucheans and be dying of hunger. Then we face only one problem — that one, because we keep the refugees here healthy. So that is why, I hope, a lot of people will give more.”

Prescription form for illiterate refugees, the dosage and timing being indicated by the number of pill-symbols blackened and the sun positions.

Levi was the sort of person that the Young Man had always wanted to be, and never would be. He was quick, brave, effective. During the first outbreak of that disease called Khmer Rouge, he had gone regularly into Cambodia to bring the refugees out. (You knew when you had crossed the border, he said, because suddenly in the jungle you began to see the bodies.) Sometimes he treated the wounded on the spot. He had flown in and out of Phnom Penh under fire. If anyone helped people, Levi did. He gave the Young Man medicines for his dysentery, dark beer and prime cut for his homesickness, and even paperback romances in English for the worst of the hot Peshawar afternoons. (“Dirty books!” said the General.) Everyone got on with Levi, from the pretty girls at the American Embassy to the refugees themselves. And he seemed to run the I.R.C.’s field operation very capably, which meant that he had no illusions about anything.

One morning at around seven they were passing through a bazaar on the way to a checkup of Hangu Camp. It was quite hot already, and they saw a soft-drink stand. — “Pull over there, Hassan,” Levi said. “You two want what to drink? Sprite? Coca-Cola?” —The Young Man and Hassan settled on Sprite. Levi got out to buy the drinks. The Young Man stepped out, too. At once he was required to decline a shoeshine, a hat and a live chicken. Then a kid came up to ask Levi for money. He was a skinny, runty-looking little boy, with his hair cut almost bald in the pragmatic Pakistani fashion. He was a Pathan; he might have been either Pakistani or Afghan. He looked like one of the black-and-white magazine pictures of hungry children whom relief organizations invite you to sponsor. — “I—no mother,” he said. “Please, rupees, please.” —Levi laughed, dropping a straw in his drink. — “You don’t have a mother? You’re very lucky. You do what you want; nobody give you a hard time!” And presently they had all finished their sodas, and Hassan started the engine.

Once the Young Man had worked on a ranch in California with a fellow named Mike. Mike was very idealistic. He even believed in Jerry Rubin. Their truck stalled on them one day six miles from the ranch, so they started the walk back to get another vehicle. After they had taken a few steps, Mike saw a beer can. He picked it up. A few steps later he saw another can. He picked it up. The Young Man looked along the shoulder of the highway where they were walking. As far as he could see there were cans. He pointed this out to Mike. Mike said nothing. Soon his arms were so full of cans that he could not carry any more. They came to the next can. Mike set the cans down and crushed them with his boot; then he gathered them up again. The two of them walked on, Mike always picking up cans, until at last his arms were so full of crushed beer cans that he could not carry any more. The Young Man, who had been anticipating this for some time, waited to see what Mike would do. Mike stopped for a moment, thinking. Then he put his cans down in a neat stack at the side of the road, walked on, and picked up the next can. When they finally reached the ranch, Mike had left little caches of cans behind them for six miles. The ranch manager bawled them out for taking so long to get back. That Saturday, Mike borrowed a truck, collected all his cans with it, and took them to the dump. For a few days, six miles of one side of the highway was pristine.

Thinking about Mike and the beer cans, the Brigadier and the toads, the Afghans and the Russians, the relief groups and the refugees, the Young Man shrugged a little. He supposed that the boy with no mother was one of those cans on the other side of the road. — Then Levi laughed again. — “You know,” he said, “last time I was there, he told me he had no father. I ask him, ‘All right, you have no father; where’s your mother?’ He pointed up the hill and said, ‘Up there.’ Now he’s learning. He’s a very bright boy.”

The refugees kept coming and coming. Year after year, the ants fled the toads. “They have probably killed a hundred thousand Afghans altogether now,” an ex-professor told me in 1984. “Government officials are not killed on the spot; they are given a just trial and sent to jail, but villagers — villagers and freedom fighters — are killed on the spot. This is done regardless of age. If a village is bombed and someone is found alive, even a woman who does not know how to use a machine gun, she is killed on the spot, because her crime is that she helped the Mujahideen. A child is killed on the spot, a child! Even animals like horses are killed so that freedom fighters cannot use them.”

At some of the camps they sat in the sun for hours in front of the signs: MALARIA DISPENSARY, TUBERCULOSIS CHECK. There were not enough doctors.

In the I.R.C. camps near Kohat he very often saw the malnourished infants, tightly swaddled in the heat, too weak to disturb the flies that crawled across their faces.

Then for his Afghanistan Picture Show a young boy whose face was spattered with fine birthmarks like a buttermilk pancake stepped forward smiling with mouth and greenish-black eyes and his friend set a watermelon upon his head!

The old ones sat still. They must know that they would die in Pakistan. The little girls tilted their heads at him and ran away coyly, as little girls seem to do almost everywhere. The men took him inside their mud houses and showed him photographs of the martyred ones — large, grainy black-and-white posters on the walls. They showed him their guns and told him that their sons, their uncles, their brothers were in Afghanistan right now killing Russians, and when the others returned they themselves would go. They smiled.

At Kohat the houses were sometimes grass-roofed castles whose ramparts were molded of mud and gravel. These had baked hard in the sun; they were very hot to the touch. Blankets and bedding lay stretched out on them to dry.

At the little soft-drink stands, fruit stands, cigarette stands, sat vendors indistinguishable from those about Peshawar. It was hot in the camps, though, and often there was no ice for the Fantas and orange sodas. — As for the Young Man, he sat in town, drinking his ten Sprites a day.

In the camps people were polite to him. They never asked him for anything.

Levi’s van pulled up by a dispensary tent. It was only about nine in the morning, so it was not too hot yet; and they were up in the hills anyhow. Then tents and mud houses of the camp were widely spaced, but they went on and on. You could walk up the ridge and across the rolling plateau and up the next ridge and along the hill and up the ridge again and still see no end to it.

The dispensary was crowded. A baby cried. Women in chadors — red or green or black — waited silently. They drew back when the Young Man was brought in. Dr. Tariq had stopped his examinations for the moment in Levi’s and the Young Man’s honor, and his assistant brought them both cups of green chi. The baby cried and cried.

“How many people a day do you treat?” said the Young Man, switching on his tape recorder. The Afghans watched in fascination.

“Per day is about three hundred, four hundred patients,” said Dr. Tariq.

“What’s your greatest need here?”

“Well, we would like funds for the X-rays, because most of the people are having tuberculosis. We would like to screen the patient’s immediate family. I mean, like about ten chaps are living in one tent, so when the mother’s got it, I think frankly the children must be having it also. They’re very crowded.^‡ And another immediate requirement, I should say, is caused by the fact that these people are from a cold climate. They’re not used to the Pakistani climate. It’s very hot here. And especially for the ladies with this thick garment of theirs.” —He pointed to a patient in a chador. — “You see this clothes that she’s wearing? It’s very thick, and they wear it day and night. We’ve been having cases of bleeding from the nose.”

“Too much heat can do that?”

“Yeah,” Dr. Tariq said. “And patients are coming in with a fever of 106°, 107°. We try to cold-sponge them and whatnot, but it takes time. We are hoping that they can have mud houses. In this heat it is too much for them to live in a tent, especially as these tents are nylon, some of them, so the heat is really wicked.”

“Are people suffering from malnutrition?”

Dr. Tariq was surprised. “Oh yeah. About five minutes back I saw a very severely anemic lady, and if there was some hospital I would have taken her …”

“We are mainly involved in the surgical field in Peshawar,” the man explained. “We have a hospital of one-hundred-bed capacity, and we treat mostly, uh, victims of war inside Afghanistan. Most of the wounds we have are bullet injury, mines injury and let’s say also broken legs from normal accident inside Afghanistan.”

It was refreshing to hear his crisp Swiss-French accent. He was very clean, and in fact the hospital was much cleaner than anyone had a right to expect.

A man lay shiny-eyed in the bed, watching the clear liquid drip down from the plastic bag into the first white joint of the plastic tube, then down to the second, not far above his face, then down onto his arm with its white dressings, and his hands were outflung and open, and his chest was etched like a map of islands black upon a sea of tender pinkness. The Roos had dropped napalm on him.

“How are the patients referred to you?”

“Well, most of them are coming to our hospital by themselves. I mean they have very often to walk about two, three days from inside Afghanistan to the border, and then they take taxi or private car to the hospital here. The weakest ones die on the road due to the length of the trip. It’s more difficult to treat something that is already old, and this is infected sometimes, and they don’t have the right thing to treat inside, right on the spot where the accident happened.”

(“Accident” was a quaint term, the Young Man reflected as he came to the man who had taken a bullet in the jaw, so that a bandage went around his head like a bonnet and a plastic thing pulled his lower lip down so that slobber ran down it from his bloody tongue and his mustache was wet with sweat and blood and a tube went up his nose and his red-rimmed eyes stared very wide and still and patient.)

“There is a lot of infections, and a lot of amputations,” the man went on, “and we have an artificial-limb workshop for these people after they have been treated, and we help them to walk again after this. And we have a facility for the paraplegics …”

The detail that the Young Man most remembered later was a lovely, intricately carved wooden plate. Having nothing else to do, the patients who were still capable of using their hands produced these artifacts. They sold them for next to nothing.

In his undergraduate years, the Young Man had been very impressed with the way that Wittgenstein would demolish beautiful ontological edifices with taps of a chisel, each tap a vicious, laconic, numbered proposition (“298. The very fact that we should so much like to say: ‘This is the important thing’—while we point privately to the sensation — is enough to shew how much we are inclined to say something which gives no information”). As he went about trying to Help the Afghans in the Best Possible Way, his mind composed — effortlessly — a similar set of entries in its ledger of self-torture. At first they were vacuously abstract, like a nightmare brought on by some vague bodily discomfort. As the Young Man’s health continued to decline, however, they took on an anecdotal character. The Young Man accepted them, as he did his many free Sprites, with passive courtesy. He knew that they could do him no harm, since he never abandoned a project that he had begun, even if something convinced him that it was wrong. Besides, they tended to contradict each other:

(1) Being a citizen of the U.S.A., I really don’t understand what anyone is doing in Afghanistan. This failure of imagination, while not directly relevant, nonetheless vitiates my activities.

(2) Even if the Afghans get their country back, in the long run it will be invaded again. Whether or not this is a ludicrous argument depends on how long the long run is. It does not make sense to give up brushing my teeth on the grounds that someday they will fall out anyway, but it may be intelligent not to rebuild a house of cards in a strong prevailing wind. I suppose that if Afghanistan were left to itself during the rest of my lifetime I would be satisfied. But that would hardly encourage me to live a long time.

(3) Since I have decided to be “of service,” people might well ask me whom I will be of service to, and under what circumstances. — “If I saw a woman being starved by her relatives I would help her.” This absurdity can be demolished fairly easily. Afghan women and girls tend to be malnourished. They eat last. Sometimes, a doctor in the camps told me, their families just let them die. If the only evil that had been brought to my attention vis-à-vis Afghanistan were the suffering of women within the family, I’d never have lifted a finger, because I am neither Afghan nor a woman, and so right away I would KNOW that there was nothing that I could do. It might well be that in changing the position of a woman in an Afghan family I would destroy the Afghan family. (Maybe, for that matter, it is better to be an Afghan woman than an American woman. I might prefer to eat last and to be protected from men’s eyes by my thick black veil while I sat in my hot tent than, wearing my fashionable skirt, to eat all I want in some restaurant while enduring comments about my tits. Who am I to say? — How simple, by comparison, is the wrongness of a napalm wound!) — Most likely, if I were an Afghan woman I would have no idea of what it would be like not to be an Afghan woman. As it is, I have no idea how to help any or all Afghan women be Afghan women. Should I marry four refugees, as the Holy Qur’an allows, and try to make them all happy?

(4) “If I wanted to help a woman I would not rape her.” —This, too, shows a fundamental misunderstanding. I must take photographs of Afghan women. Otherwise, American women might think that Afghans are sexist (wouldn’t that be wrong?) and not want to help them. American men would be disappointed at not having the above-mentioned exotic faces and tits to comment on. — Fair enough. — I explain my requirement to the administrator of the camp, a very obliging Pakistani gentleman. — “I understand, sir,” he tells me. “I get some women for you.” —He turns to the refugees and explains. Voices rise, but he does what he has to do; he yells at them; the voices become more excited and angry than ever; he lifts his arms firmly, shouts the Afghans down, reaches out, pushes away a boy, and points to a woman, whose baby on her shoulder turns its head, sees me, and starts to cry. The woman crouches miserably in the sand like a dark bird. Her husband comes forward, balling his fists at me, and the administrator puts a hand on his chest and pushes him back. He stands there looking at me. We are surrounded by people — the woman, the administrator and I — all of them standing and looking at me. The administrator speaks to the woman rapidly and fiercely. Everyone is murmuring and watching my face. The woman removes her veil. She will not look at me. I see her cheeks, her mouth. Her unbound hair. I move to one side and raise my camera. I believe I am taking good pictures. — Afterward, the administrator goes to speak with her husband, who finally comes forward. —“Dera miraboni,” he says to me. Thank you very much. — We shake hands.

(5) In proposing to help the Afghans, I must accept the postulate that it is better for people to be exploited by their neighbors than by strangers. I cannot prove this.

(6) Nor is it fair to claim that the atrocities currently committed by the Soviets represent what would be an ongoing situation once the resistance movement was wiped out. Surviving Afghans would probably be forced into a more equitable system of distribution than currently exists. The women would receive as much food (or as little) as the men, we might hope.

(7) “But this would mean destroying the indigenous culture.” —After x years of Soviet rule, it would be the indigenous culture. Surely the current culture of Afghanistan displaced an earlier one. There is thus no need for action. Anyway, what does being indigenous have to do with whether a culture is “good” or “bad”?

(8) “But isn’t inaction in situations of human suffering even worse than making the wrong decision?” —Oh, I don’t know about that.

(9) If the Soviets took over the world, humanity would become more homogeneous. It seems that heterogeneity is one of the principal causes of strife: the conclusion must be that every new school of fish that Leviathan swallows extends by so much the dominions of peace. Of course, the process of mastication and digestion is a little painful, but ah! after that, each glob of excrement will be like every other; and Afghanistan, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and perhaps (if Fate smiles its wide, toothy smile at us) we ourselves will all be one mass of tranquillity and quietude.

(10) Besides, nobody else is interested in Afghanistan.

At the far end of the park which the General had arranged to be built was an Afghan camp. On the Young Man’s evening walks with the General and the Brigadier, he saw a man bent down, carefully going through the grass to find twigs and thick stalks to burn. A polite distance beyond, women were collecting dung to add to the fuel.

“They would stop it if anyone asked them,” the General said. “But they have such a miserable life, poor chaps — nobody would ask them.”

There was a lovely purple sunset on the mountains, along which ran the Durand Line dividing Pakistan from Afghanistan.

The next day he walked over to see the camp. It was a hot morning, so hot that he became violently sick. Children were swimming in the big canal, in which, from time to time, excrements came cruising along. The women were washing their pots in that water. As the Young Man walked along the edge of the canal, boys waved at him and begged him to take their picture. He raised his camera. At once they formed two rows, smiling and extending their hands. When the shutter clicked, they bowed to him and hugged each other for happiness.

The camp extended for a long way. A man came up to him and showed him around. Now indeed helplessness was the Young Man’s leader, in the person of this man who strode ahead of him along the wall of the canal, brown heels lifting in white sandals; over his head, to keep off the sun, he wore a kerchief that resembled nothing so much as a red-and-white-checked tablecloth, and his baggy shirt and trousers hung limp in the breezeless air as he went on toward the wrinkled dirty tents between which little children toddled silently in the sand, toward the cornfields that did not belong to him, but in the canal a naked girl of three or four stood rubbing her belly and sucking her fingers; seeing the Young Man come, however, she rushed to squat down in the dirty water to cover herself. — Some of the families lived in tents, some in wretched grass-grown houses of earth. They all bowed or nodded to him: He could help them.^§ It was still Ramazan, and their lips were cracked with the heat and the dryness, but they offered him tea. Guilty and ashamed, the Young Man refused. — Another little girl was running naked along the side of the canal. When she saw the foreigner she jumped into the water. Something gray and bloody floated by her and snagged itself in her hair.

As he came to a great cornfield (owned by Pakistanis), he found a dozing water buffalo blocking his way. He stood there for a minute, wondering what to do. Children ran up and slapped and pulled at the beast until it finally yawned and got up. As he walked on, they followed him. Presently they came to a mullah with sky-blue eyes and a white beard. The children stopped respectfully. The mullah took the Young Man’s face in his hands and looked at him for a while, then stepped back. — “Peace be upon you,” the Young Man said. — “And upon you, peace,” said the mullah. He stood there smiling and nodding after the Young Man…

So the refugees were not well off. At least, they were not as well off as he was. Well, what should be done about it? (Whether it could or would be done did not yet concern him, for the Young Man was methodical.

Before all else he must draw up his IDEAL PLAN. Then, if he had time, he would implement it.) So he would analyze; he would data-pick and wool-gather; he would take new batteries from their plastic bag in his camera pack; he would insert them plus to minus into his tape recorder in preparation for

The first thing to draw in one’s IDEAL PLAN is the Overall Picture, the theme, the constellation of significant data points, one, two, three like the three children whose father had been executed by the Roos, standing in the coolness between mud-straw walls, a big girl, a little girl and a boy in between. The girls wore red dresses with gorgeous patterns. They stood squinting at the Young Man with slightly averted heads. The youngest girl’s face was very dirty. The boy stared straight at the Young Man, his hand, half balled up, thrust before him. In the darkness behind the children, the grandmother was making green chai in the Young Man’s honor. The children looked at him shyly, curiously; and there was something else in their look as well that he would never understand. It was not hostility or anything like that. It had nothing to do with him. It had to do with something that had happened. — Next you must obtain a few random points that deviate enough from your curve to add the human interest of uniqueness, but not enough to make it look as if the curve was arbitrary. After that, history becomes an organic whole, susceptible to genteel understatements about human suffering and crisp recommendations toward the alleviation of aberrant conditions.

“Why did you leave Afghanistan?”

“The Russians beat me up because I was not loyal to the Karmal regime,” said the man. “And I had not enough firearms — only one rifle for five, six males in the family, so we could not protect our womenfolk and children to be safe.”

“Are you happy here?”

“No, we are no happy.”

“Do you have any request to make of the Americans?”

“Tell them that we are very grateful for what the Americans are doing, and we say, God be with them.”

Looking back, I am appalled at the unimaginativeness of my questions. I remember that I wanted to ask everyone the same things (“Are you happy here in the camps?” —“Why did you leave Afghanistan?” —“How could the United States best help you?”), because I was looking for some underlying structure or other to explain things. Then I could draw a blueprint showing where the refugee money came from, itemized down to the cent; I could draw elegant flow lines showing where it went: to a diamond entitled “RELIEF,” to a wide thin rectangle called “CORRUPTION”—and I could logically determine from this exactly how much was needed, and what was needed. (If ninety percent of the Afghans I asked said that they needed guns, I would try to send them guns.^‖) The next step would be to calculate how efficient the workings of the Mujahideen parties were, and which party was the best to support; from these and related computations I could begin the totaling of broader-based sums to discover who Afghans, Soviets, Pakistanis were … when all they were was people.

To get the Overall Picture, you also talk to officials. Through a friend of the General’s who worked at the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, the Young Man arranged an interview with Marie Sardie, the U.N.H.C.R. nutritionist. — The Young Man she found slightly bewildering. — “Now, what is your purpose here?” she said at one point. “Is your purpose to increase aid for the refugees, or decrease aid for the refugees, or what?” —The Young Man replied that he wanted only to determine what exactly the refugees needed, and whether they were getting more or less than that. If they were getting less, then he would say in his presentation (which you are now reading)^a that more should be sent. If they were getting more, then clearly he need not trouble himself with that problem. — This sort of fact-finding is essential to the draftsmen of arbitrary curves. — I for my part am probably even more irresponsible, since in my hesitation to draw arbitrary curves I forget that some curves are not arbitrary, that living, breathing life demands its due, which was hardly what it got when, for instance, I was picking apricots from a tree in Afghanistan with my friend Suleiman and found that I was standing on a human jaw with the flesh still on it, the flesh of a person killed by another person brought specially to kill him by people with their own great dues of state to pay; and I will never forget how blue the sky was. So let me pose a non-arbitrary question for the Young Man to ask Marie Sardie in her pleasant office in Peshawar: Are the Afghan refugees in the camps receiving enough nutrition to sustain life and to keep them — men, women, children — physically and mentally healthy? — Of course, replies the Young Man, if your seemingly straightforward question is broken down into its component atoms and particles, the arbitrariness of it comes to light; you see that, don’t you? That must be why your reflection is staring back at me so sadly from the darkness in the window. Yessir, Heisenberg was right, for consider: Whether or not the refugees receive enough, what proportion of what we give them goes to them, and what proportion is sold by Pakistanis in the stores at Saddar? How much of what gets to the camps is distributed fairly? — Surely such matters are subject to some ethical calculus, though what the axia of it are would be wretchedly difficult to say. — Is handing out rations year after year a satisfactory method of feeding people? If they don’t eat their own food, does something in them go unfed? — And how much from the rations is taken into Afghanistan with the Mujahideen? And is that fair? — Mujahideen are also refugees; many of them are registered at the camps, and they have as much of a right as any other refugees to the supplies provided — possibly more, since the idea of Afghans as refugees-in-perpetuity is repugnant to all of us who believe that the invasion was wrong, and the Mujahideen are at least trying to use those supplies to regain their homeland, and thus end their dependence on our subsidies. One has to respect them for that; and yet, is it right for the Mujahideen to eat U.N.I.C.E.F. tablets of condensed milk intended for their children? It seems to me right, but maybe it wouldn’t to U.N.I.C.E.F. — Round and round, round and round went such butterflies in the Young Man’s amoeba-ridden stomach; now these questions make me impatient, because, having resolved that the Afghans are in the right, and knowing that waste and corruption exist everywhere, I don’t care how many tons of supplies are diverted to uses other than feeding the refugees, as long as the refugees have enough; I cannot be bothered to wish that everything were perfect when all that I wish is that I never had to find that jaw beneath the apricot tree, with the flies on its one black lip; if I had the power, I would send them tons of food and missiles and tanks and airplanes and not worry about where they all went, because here the end justifies the means. It has to. And, so believing, I relinquish that aspect of innocence known as good faith, and my dreams are just a little stained; no doubt that is why the Young Man’s reflection is looking so sadly at me in the mirror. (Until he went to Afghanistan, he had scarcely even fired a gun!)

So the Young Man sat in Marie Sardie’s office, drinking her tea and asking somewhat hesitant and ill-informed questions, to which she gave entirely reasonable answers. She could not satisfy him, but then no one could, and, being unable to take that leap of faith which is really a fall, he was unable to help anyone.

“No one can say what their health is like subclinically,” she said, “but clinically it’s not too bad. The service they get is much better than the local, and it’s far, far better than what they get in Afghanistan. They’ve all got food and schooling and shelter and water supplies — some facilities, anyway — and the medical coverage is at least once a week. Now in Afghanistan they’d be lucky if they saw an orthodox doctor once in their lifetime … And this causes a lot of friction between the refugees and the locals. There’s no way the U.N.H.C.R. budget would be healthy enough to integrate the local facilities with our own program. But in some cases we’ve been trying to make the medical dispensaries available to the locals and the refugees. But the refugees don’t usually like that; and so many times the dispensary tends to be in the center of the camp.”

Some Pakistanis didn’t actually like the refugees so much. Sometimes they wouldn’t even give them water.

The Young Man edged the tape recorder closer. — “Do you think that equity would dictate that these extras be cut back to the level of the local population?” he asked. He considered himself very precise.

“In the immediate future, no,” she replied, “in the long-term future, maybe. Look what’s happened with the Tibetan refugees. They get much less than the local population, because who’s interested in Tibetan refugees? But at the moment the donor countries are still extremely generous toward the Afghan refugees. But who knows what it’s going to be like in five years, ten years? And there are pockets of malnutrition throughout the frontier, but that’s not because they’re refugees; they have this cultural habit that you don’t feed solid foods to the infants until they’re around at least two years of age,^b so it’s survival of the fittest. The strong ones live, and the weak ones”—she shrugged—“just die away.” —The Young Man nodded and gulped his tea. The fan in the office felt very, very nice. — “In some areas we’re trying to institute solid feedings to infants six months of age and older; it’s very difficult,” Marie Sardie said. “And the women, some of them, tend to be malnourished because of the repeated pregnancies; and also, as you know, the females in this part of the world have got absolutely no value at all. If the women keep producing female children, the husband doesn’t really care if the children die, or if the wife dies; you can always get another wife who hopefully will give you male children.”

Levi said that men sometimes parked their wives like cars when they went somewhere, eyes facing the wall, and left them there for two hours.

Marie Sardie had her own office and car and chauffeur so that it would be clear to all that she fulfilled the official functions of a man. But Mary McMorrow didn’t. Mary was an I.R.C. nurse.

“There was one camp where I was ordered not to return because their women were seeing me,” she said. “They were just seeing me. They’re mostly rural people who’ve lived in the hills or been out with their sheep all their lives, and this is new: when they see a woman coming in driving a car, when they see a woman telling someone something and they’ll do it for her, it causes them a lot of trouble.”

At noon the Young Man accompanied Mary to a dispensary tent through whose square sun-choked doorway little brown boys with cropped heads stood staring with dark eyes, frowning or sucking thumbs; behind them old men in white squatted patiently; and inside sat a weary pretty health worker in white, her desk being the white-covered examination table upon which lay her scissors in a steel box of disinfectant, her squeeze bottle of alcohol, her tray jumbled full of cotton and pills; and a refugee, tanned, handsome, unshaven, came before her and was awarded his TB medication, and then came another and another. Only 64 children had been vaccinated since morning. Mary said that in Thailand her team had vaccinated 500 a day. The Pakistani administrator used the phrase “motivation” defensively. A driver was being bawled out for misusing a truck. There was an argument about receipts, which went on and on in the 110° heat. Mary walked up, grabbed two or three children at random, and looked at their arms. All vaccinated; everything was okay. — From the window of the tent could be seen a well, a mosque (which resembled a tin-roofed barn), a dirty mother with her dirty infant, and dirty staring children, one without pants.

“The vaccines aren’t being kept cool enough,” Mary said.

“It’s not my fault!” shouted the immunologist, who was Pakistani. He began barking orders. “Everything here is no good,” he said. “We don’t have enough of anything! Why won’t the Americans give more funds for the refugees?”

“Pakistan refused the aid before,” Mary said. “The Americans went ahead and spent the money on something else.”

“Well, the U.S. should manage its money better,” said the immunologist triumphantly. He stared Mary in the face.

“The women are the most neglected, the women are the most anemic, the women have the highest level of tuberculosis; the women in general are in pretty bad shape,” said Mary. “According to our standards, they’re treated pretty bad. According to their standards, they’re treated as they expect to be treated. Traditionally, the Afghan men get the best of the food, which is then passed down to the children, and the women eat last, what’s left over, if anything. There are certain long-standing taboos: women in some of the tribes won’t eat meat or vegetables, because they think they’re bad for them. So what they basically live on is sweet bread and green tea.

“A woman’s life is really less than an animal’s. A camel or a water buffalo is valued more than a woman in this society. You can’t get a husband to donate blood for his wife because if you take his blood you take his life, but if she dies he can always get another wife.

“Last week a woman delivered her baby, but retained the placenta for more than twenty-seven hours, which is a very serious — lethal — problem. You continually bleed. It was just herself and this little old lady who happened to be around. And by the time we found her she was in shock from loss of blood. We had to rehydrate her; we had to give her drugs to stabilize her blood pressure; we had to do a lot of heroics to keep this woman alive. And, you know, we stabilized her and she was on her way to recovery and her husband came in (it was the first time that we had seen him in the five hours that we were in the tent). And the only thing he had to say was, ‘How am I going to get water since she is useless for me?’ ”

But unlike me, Mary accomplished something. She had saved that woman. She taught mothers to breast-feed longer, to mash bananas and feed them to their little children…

“So maybe attempts to make them more self-reliant haven’t been a complete failure?” asked the Young Man so hopefully.

“There have been no real attempts to make them more self-reliant,” Marie Sardie said. “Any such attempts have been on the refugees’ own initiative. It’s very difficult, because in the beginning you’re just trying to alleviate your own caseload. You give them goods, like charity. You kill their pride and integrity; you make them professional beggars and parasites. When you give them something for nothing, why should they work for it? But those refugees who are interested in doing their own thing do it. They help out in the dispensaries and with the distributions; they help the staff. Because basically they’re bored. They’re fed and watered and clothed, so what can they do with their time except look at the empty space? So a lot of them have set up little kitchen gardens and shops where you can buy food and cigarettes, detergents and soap …”

After his return from Hangu, the Young Man was very sick. Mary and Levi had him over and fed him. In the middle of the meal he had to go to the bathroom a couple of times, and Mary said, “You don’t have to eat anything if you don’t want to.” Then for once he had a wonderful sense of ease and freedom. He didn’t have to please anybody and do anything, even though the Roos were said to be embarking on much construction now, in Kabul, in Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif … Bases and houses, the Afghans said. At Hairaton they were building a city of a hundred thousand people. The Mujahideen were losing control of many large cities. In Herat they were still partially in control of the airport, but Shindand was completely in the hands of the Roos. Kailagai was the place where the Russians built their weapons and bullets. It had been a muddy and dusty area. Now the whole area is covered with metal! a man told me in wonder. There are airplanes and tanks there; it had become a staging area for Soviet troops. The Roos had a factory there; they dug up entire hills to use for their manufacturing, people said. But he could do nothing; he relaxed and had a bowl of Mary’s soup and drank one of Levi’s beers and felt incredibly happy.

“There’s two hundred schools in our camps,” said Marie Sardie. “There’s thirty thousand schoolchildren going to school, and two thousand are girls.”

“That seems a little unbalanced.”

“No, response is very high; it’s higher than the local response. There’s more refugees who are going to school per total population than there is per total local population, and very much higher than in Afghanistan. The literacy rate’s extremely high. So we’re changing that structure. Many radical changes are now taking place in two years which would have taken fifty years in Afghanistan. Exposure to Western influence is very great; it’s too great. We’ve killed the tradition of Pathan food-gathering; here we give it to them. And we’ve killed the tradition of male education alone. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, no one’s going to give a judgment on that.”

“I think it will take some time to make the Afghan men understand that Afghan women are also human beings,” he said, looking out at the women at the well just outside the low baked-clay walls, where a great pale-leaved tree shaded them a little as they pumped water into old petroleum tins and milk tins, and their dresses were blue with orange flowers or red with yellow blossoms or orange or beige but they all wore veils, “and they also have the right to go anywhere they wish to get help, and they need to be educated. It will take the men some time. But a sudden change in their culture will be disastrous, because they will fight with their guns and everything.”

* Consider the simple economics of the project. He spent thousands on transportation and equipment, and raised hundreds.

† They haven’t.

‡ As was already mentioned, by 1982 Peshawar’s population had doubled since the invasion. So had that of the Kohat district to the south (178,000 locals, 178,000 refugees), where field teams of the International Rescue Committee operated their mobile medical units. These camps were closed to new arrivals, being already at their carrying capacity. Supplies of hygienic drinking water were a limiting factor: in Kohat there was at least one camp whose only water supply was a filthy trickle that dribbled onto a level space of gravel below the huts. That was also the latrine. Because it was so exposed to view, a refugee said, the women could not relieve themselves at all during the day. More refugees arrived and more were expected. New camps were established in the Northern Territory and down in Baluchistan, but many Afghans chose to remain here even though they could not register for the food allowances: everyone at least spoke their language in the North-West Frontier Province, and the factions had their offices in Peshawar. The cool mountains of the north were only a week’s walk for them and their grazing animals, and the Khyber Pass was a couple of hours away by bus. To the east, in the muggy farmland of the Punjab, stood Islamabad, the modern capital, where sometimes imported rocket launchers and cases of bullets could be bought, for increasingly inflated prices.

§ On my return, I went to half a dozen radio and TV stations, showing my photographs, carrying my stacks of tapes, but the general consensus was that they just keep breeding and getting massacred over there, and so what? — “The Little Brown People,” an American oil executive called them. It was as though he was speaking of sprites and fairies. — “They’re like children,” he said sadly. “I know. I’ve spent twenty years in Asia. The Little Brown People are charming really but they can’t think beyond today.”

‖ In my fund-raising ventures I set out two coffee cans. One said REFUGEES and the other said REBELS. How thoughtful I was! I remember my first time, when at the end of the evening I found that the refugees were now thirty dollars richer, and the rebels had gained nine dollars. Well, the amounts were modest, but at least, at last, I was accomplishing something! But, as it turned out, U.C. Berkeley charged me forty dollars for the use of the room.

a “We’ve now had a chance to give careful consideration to your book on Afghanistan,” wrote Houghton Mifflin in 1983. “Certainly your journey there was a remarkable one, as was your boldness in making it. Our problems with the manuscript are not so much with the keenness of your perceptions as with what we feel is the nature of your presentation … From our point of view … though the book might be well regarded by reviewers, we’d have a hard time finding a large enough audience for it to be able to publish in a way that would satisfy either you or us. I am therefore regretfully returning the manuscript to you …”

b For more on this, see the interview with Mary McMorrow, below.

8. “… DESCRIBED FORMALLY AS REFUGEE CAMPS …”: CORRUPTION (1982)

Meanwhile his eyes were blinking, and his Afghanistan Picture Show, with which he would galvanize the world, was staring at him like the two little girls who stared at him between tents. One’s hair was combed, and she wore a clean white dress. The other was unkempt, with a dirty face and a faded wrinkled dress; she scratched an insect bite on her knee. Both were beautiful; both were shy. They stared and stared at him; they would never have enough of him. How strange he was! What did he want? Why had he come to them? Why was he so thin and pale and sweating? Something must be wrong with him. The two girls watched him, hoping that he would neither go away nor come closer. His Picture Show was staring at him like the two small boys who squatted down between the tent and the clay box that they lived in; they clasped hands over knees; they smiled, and between them was an empty tin that said: BUTTEROIL 99.8 % MILKFAT GIFT OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC COMMUNITY, and another empty tin which had been made into a bucket stood on top of their house and the ground was packed baked cracked clay; it was staring like the square-eyed houses of clay watched him, thatch hanging down over their foreheads like the bangs of the refugee boys, and inside one of them the wide-faced boy who had lost his father to the Roos stared at the Young Man through brownish-green eyes, one hand pressed against his temple as if to help him stare even harder, and the Young Man thought: well, maybe I can do some good after all; maybe I can at least be a diversion; and behind the boy, a patterned blanket made a rainbow.

But he could not yet see what these things meant. He was too busy analyzing and solving once and for all (as he had all the other problems) the issue of

In effect, Marie Sardie was offering two arguments for the “extras”—the first being the expedient one that the situation might reverse itself of its own accord in the future, as with the Tibetan refugees, in which case hoarded “extras” might be needed; the second being that even with the “extras” malnutrition still existed, so the arbitrary curve could be drawn without being arbitrary at all, and the Young Man’s complicated doubts about omniscience and fairness became irrelevant: either people were malnourished or they were not.

“Whether you’re a one-month-old baby or a forty-year-old man you get the same ration,” Marie Sardie explained, “so there’s more than enough for everybody, which, even without the corruption of bogus registered families, allows them to have excess food to sell on the market to get other food and things that they need.”

“So,” said the Young Man, “you think that between the extra food and the fifty-rupee-a-month allowance most of the families do okay?”

She leaned back in her chair. “I don’t know about this fifty-rupee-a-month allowance,” she said. “Most of them are lucky to see it once a year or twice a year. On paper the refugees receive it, but the experience is that they usually don’t get it.”

“Where does it go?”

She laughed. “Like most other things here, through other people’s hands and pockets!”

The refugees sold their medicines in the bazaars. (I was so shocked when I first heard this!)

“Food and medicine, that is right, some people sell them. I don’t know if they are Afghans. Once I bought the medicine from one shop and there was written on the medicine: SPECIAL FOR AFGHAN REFUGEES.”

The issue of corruption had begun to occupy the Young Man increasingly. His mind turned to the notion of secret plots. If he could only show that the refugees (like the smiling boy whose skin was just a little redder than cocoa holding his little brother in his arms for the Young Man to see; the little one holding something in a bundle of white cotton cloth that he would not unwrap; he held the twist of it down tight with three brown fingers and his brown face looked at the Young Man so raptly as he almost smiled, his mouth curving in something shy and sweet), if he could only show that the refugees were being cheated, or the Mujahideen were being hindered systematically, he would feel much better. That would be a problem whose solutions were theoretically clear. He resisted the parable of the beer cans. He did not want to admit that the shoulder of every road is heaped with waste and wreckage. How much nicer it would be simply to post a sign that said: PENALTY FOR LITTERING Rs. 500. As I reread these interviews years later I feel equally helpless.

“For example, maybe a medical commander distributes food rations. He makes about four or five rations for himself, and he needs just one; this is one corruption I can tell you about.”

“You give cereal to a mother for one child,” Mary said, “and you know the other seven children are going to eat it, as well as the husband.”

“So you give her a lot,” said the Young Man.

“Well, the more you give her, the more it gets spread out. It’s the extended family, and everything gets extended. A malnourished child is getting, say, two kilos of this stuff a week and he’ll gain half a kilo. And you know that food went somewhere else; you expect that.”

The question seemed to be, then, how severe those pockets of malnutrition were. Knowing this, he could construct his if → then conclusions and be on his way to Afghanistan (I remember that long hot summer so well, when I kept thinking about the border). Before speaking with Marie Sardie, the Young Man had arranged with B., a minor guerrilla commander with the Jamiat-i-Islami, to visit Kachagari Camp on Khyber Road. — Kachagari, he was given to understand, was administered jointly by Red Crescent and the government of Pakistan. He would not be officially welcome there; Commissioner Abdullah in the Refugee Office was unlikely to give him permission to go. So, once he had secured a note from Dr. Najibula, who controlled the Jamiat’s political office, the Young Man passed the note to B. — which gave B. assurance that the Young Man was not believed to be a K.G.B. agent — and then they set off illegally in a taxi, which happened to be a big old Packard. The trip cost the Young Man two hundred and fifty rupees.

It was a holiday. They were unlikely to meet any of the camp administrators or staff, and the Young Man had already promised that he would be the only one in trouble if they were caught, and that he would bear his punishment gracefully. They rolled cheerfully down Khyber Road, raising a persistent narrow trail of dust behind them as far as they could see. Here was Jabbar Flats and University Town, and all the sad vending stands, and now, off to the right, the acres and acres of heat-faded tents and brownish-yellow walls and streets and houses of some adobe-like stuff. It was rather hot today; the Young Man promised himself that on his return to the hotel he would mix up many Mango Squashes for himself from the bottle of syrup that he had bought. — The camp seemed to go on and on as they entered it. In its vastness and seeming lack of people, in the way that it kept to itself, it reminded him of those old New England cemeteries that stretched along the side of the road. You held your breath when you drove by a cemetery. The car went slowly down the mud-baked road. — They stopped in a cul-de-sac between cracked walls, and at once the refugees came running out of their homes, the women staying a little back with their water vessels, peering from the rims of deep pits in the baked dirt (were those wells? he never found out), while everyone else rushed up and crowded around the car, children first, putting their heads right up against the windows but maintaining somehow a certain shy distance. They cleared a path when the Young Man and B. and the taxi driver got out and stretched themselves in the heat and looked around them at the dryness and the faded brown tent canvases and the shiny empty tins on the ground which had once held cooking oil (another gift from the European Economic Community); and all the people stood watching, hushing, at the sight of the Young Man. After a moment, the men stepped up closer around him, and the women disappeared again.

B. took him to a tent where an old man sat. —“Asalamu alaykum,” said the Young Man as usual, awkwardly. —“Walaykum asalam,” the old man answered. He took his guest’s hands in his. They all sat down, and the old man poured them water. The people went away.

As the old man and the Young Man could not understand each other’s speech, B. interpreted.

“Do you have enough food?” the Young Man asked.

“Yes, enough.”

“What kind of food do you eat?”

The old man shrugged. “Sometimes they give it and sometimes they don’t give it. We get chai and ghee^* and sugar and milk. Sometimes for two, three months we don’t get nothing, you know. Then we supply for ourself. We didn’t get our refugee allowance for two months.”

Of course it was in the old man’s interest to say that he was not getting enough food, whether or not he was. That way his “extras” might be increased. The Young Man could afford to be perfectly sincere in his questions, because he had nothing at stake. But can those with nothing at stake ever feel the truth? In the years since I talked with this old man I have talked with many panhandlers and beggars. They always say the same. — Does it mean that you should only listen to what you are not asking them to say?

What the Young Man should have done was to move into Kachagari Camp. Then he would have KNOWN. — But no, he could never have become enough of a part of life there to know. And he would have been a burden. And Abdullah would have caught him. — The truth was that the heat, his illness, and worse yet his purpose, which required so straight and perfect a track to travel in that everything derailed it, had exhausted the assertion in him. He could do nothing new anymore. Through a sad irony he was becoming more and more like his own picture of these people whom he thought to save. It was he who was lost, questioning, thirsty, and ever so far from his own land…

“What do you do every day?” asked the Young Man. “How do you spend your time?”

It took a moment for the old man to understand this question.

— What did he do? What did this American think he did? — “We don’t have any, no job to do! Just sitting and reading and losing the time.”

“What would you like to do with your time?”

“I am Mechaniker, you know. All the time weld. If this job here possible, I will do it. I can do everything. I am ready to do it.”

“Do you have a family?”

“Fourteen, sir.”

“Many children?”

“Ten.”

“And are the children getting any education?”

“There is classes, only for the children, in religion.”

The Young Man hesitated. “Are you, uh, happy in the camps?”

Both B. and the old man laughed gently. “We have to be here.”

“How would you like the Americans to help you? What things do you need?”

The old man answered at once. “What we need, they don’t give it to us! We don’t need to eat; we don’t need money; we need only guns and like this to fight with the Russians, you know!”

It seemed so simple. It was so simple.

“From Pakistan they don’t give everything to us,” B. had said in the hotel room while they waited for the taxi. “I know about guns. We have machine gun, and when the machine gun came here, they took the machine gun away and give us only old guns, you know, from 1861, 1875, like this. This is too bad, too sad for us.”

The door creaked. B. stopped abruptly. “But we have good relationship with the Pakistan!” he cried. “They are helping us; they are keeping us here; we are very happy happy with the Pakistan!” (The door handle turned slowly.) “This is very hard for the Pakistan, to keep us here,” said B. “And the people who are selling the supplies, that is not important — every country has good people and bad people!”

Another Mujahid came in. Sweat was running down B.’s face.

Dr. Najibula had warned the Young Man that B. was considered an unreliable commander.

It was very hot, and the people crowded him. Here it was impossible to do those things which one can check off. Levi had said that for a while the U.S. was sending large quantities of weight-loss syrup for dieters — surely the last thing that a refugee would need. The Afghans very practically sold this stuff. — How useless everything was! How useless he himself was in Pakistan, where he sat around sweating and having diarrhea and passing the time with stupid poems in his head like:

Now, this is a tale fer a ramblin’ man, an’ not fer a crook or lawyer:

If YOU were a man you’d fan your nan in dear old P-Peshawar.

and he thought this was a good start, but it needed a

ROUGHNECKS’ CHORUS

Pukka is as pukka does

An’ 7-Up is as Bubble-Up was;

So let’s send out fer ice, my bros,

In dear old hot Peshawar!

by which time it was obvious to him that it must be a suspenseful narrative poem by R. Kipling and R. W. Service sitting around together thumping the table for ten years in — well, it couldn’t be a bar, so let’s suppose it was the Jordanian boy’s air-conditioned house not far from Jabbar Flats (he was rich, it was obvious: imagine that! air conditioning!) and the Jordanian boy, who was very fat, gave the Young Man an ice-cold Orange Crush and put “Seasons in the Sun” and suchlike songs on his cassette player, smiling at him and licking his lips, and he said, “Are you K.G.B.?” and the Young Man thought oh not again and said, “I’ve got to go,” and he walked out into the afternoon furnace and took a rickshaw back to the General’s and sat with the Brigadier in the garden, the Brigadier reading and reading from his Qur’an; and it was ten days and then nine days before he could go to Afghanistan, so he visited the Jamiat-i-Islami again, feeling almost healthy again as the airstreams of his rickshaw fanned him, and the guard was a young boy cleaning his gun; the poster above his head showed a diabolical Russian face above a pool of blood, and everybody was in conference or sleeping or out, so the Young Man went back to the General’s and worked on his epic, let’s see:

Took a rickshaw to — pshaw! — to dear old p-Peshawar,

Fought the Russkies tooth an’ claw fer dear old p-Peshawar,

Then I became a refugee,

Settled down with rice an’ ghee,

A girl in the camps an’ Qur’an on my knee

In dear old p-Peshawar.

Got a gun an’ took a bead

On another Mujahid

From a rival rebel group

Headed by some Commie dupe

In dear old p-Peshawar.

Must’ve been in K.G.B.:

’Fore I got him, he got me.

But in jihad that’s mighty nice

’Cause you go straight to Paradise,

Which sure ain’t dear Peshawar.

The next day he went to Mardan. Since it was so hot there, as it had been in the I.R.C. camps at Kohat, the Austrian Relief Committee people began work early in the morning and finished by noon. He accompanied Hassan Ghulam and his energetic Norwegian assistant on an inspection trip, via Islamabad. The A.R.C. administered only two camps, but the staff at each was all-Afghan. The I.R.C. was presumably under pressure from Commissioner Abdullah not to hire anyone but Pakistanis; the Young Man wondered how Mr. Ghulam had gotten around it, but not too much, because his diarrhea was back and the nausea got worse every day. The Norwegian girl was full of energy and good fellowship, playing ball with everyone at the staff house in Mardan, but it was all that he could do to choke down a hunk of the staple (greasy potato with rice), for after the first swallow his stomach ached at once, sharply, as if to spank him for giving him more of this oily fly-infested stuff; then his intestines rumbled and the sweat of his nausea broke out to refresh him. So his grand empathy with the Other had failed; the miserable snail pulled in its horns. I cannot remember exactly what he felt, for my ability to recall my own humiliation is mercifully limited, but a good way of seeing him might be the way my friend Jake did a few years later when he was meeting me in the Long Beach bus station on a hot day after I had ridden in from Tijuana very hung over on tequila, so I sat sweating and nauseous in my camouflage shirt in that hot parking lot, with my head bowed down, and Jake walked right past me looking for me and thinking: I bet that sad old soldier has some interesting stories to tell. — The Young Man’s diarrhea was now a thin, chalky-brown liquid. In Afghanistan the life expectancy was thirty-five to forty, he had heard; the cause of death was often diarrhea. — Even tea or water made him retch: the conquering hero had a year of pills and proctoscopes ahead of him.

Just lazing around in Mardan, in other words, the Young Man popped rehydration salts. The well at the staff house was full of snakes and frogs. Morbidly, he held his drinking glass up to the light and saw something green in the water. He had begun to look distinctly thin and pale in those days.

“He’s going to go inside next week,” said Mr. Ghulam to the Norwegian girl, who studied him brightly, without sympathy.

“With which group?” she said.

“The N.L.F.” said the Young Man.

“The situation in Afghanistan came about because of America’s false politics,” said Mr. Ghulam. “If America and Russia had not interfered, the Afghans would be living in their homes! And now you seek to solve their problems with this pleasure tour inside!”

“Mr. Austrian Relief Committee,” said the Young Man, “go take a flying Anschluss.” —No, he didn’t say anything. He rubbed his aching belly.

Actually it was not a particularly smart idea for him to be going to Afghanistan. He admitted that. The General had said that the way in was very short and easy. All they had to do was go over a hill and they would be there. That did not sound so bad. But he wished that he felt stronger. The Norwegian girl was laughing, calling, playing volleyball … They saw no villagers.

In the morning they went out to the camps. Driving through the village, he thought that people were pointing at him and trying to make him look at them.

A refugee camp, it seemed, could be described as a place where two choices were available to the inhabitants: get sick or do nothing. Some children had school of a sort; some men sold soft drinks and fruit; but the keynote was definitely idleness in that sun that he could not long forget because his throat would get dusty and his tongue would get dry and the heat left him dizzy and sick and dreaming of drinking a dozen Sprites. (Could it be that he was not suited for this kind of work?) Here sat the lines of men outside the malaria treatment tent: today was men’s day; tomorrow would be women’s and children’s day. Here two little girls played listlessly in a wilderness of big blue drums; tents stretched behind them toward the purple mountains. Tawny supply tents, unpleasantly hot to the touch, sliced off long rectangles of dry shadow unblinking behind eyelashes of guy ropes. Narrow paths (ankle-deep trenches bordered by stones) led between them. The sky was a dusty cloudless blue. But there was one cool place. Sick refugees stood there. The wide dark leaves of the tree behind them caught the sunlight like dust. Men and boys stood leaning around the square waist-high reservoir (which had worms in it), in whose water their faces and the tree were reflected, and they were all looking the Young Man in the face. (Only a mullah in white looked away, smiling tranquilly down at the ground as the Young Man got out his camera.) A dark-eyed young man thrust broad shoulders forward to look at the foreigner; beside a diamond-patterned water jug, young boys peeped. Closest to the Young Man was a boy in a silver skullcap. His lips were parted; his eyes were big and sad. Between two fingers he held up a scrap of paper with printed words on it — Pushtu words, though what they were the Young Man would never know. The paper had been torn right through some of the words. Whatever the message said, it was incomplete.

And this would happen again, in Afghanistan where a man stood before him, tall, sad, imposing in vest and cartridge belt, and the clean creek that ran between houses gurgled very quietly (it was early morning), and wide trees roofed that dirt street with shade as the man stood there, not going away because he had something to show him, and he had dark eyes and brows and a rich dark mustache and his eyes were large and there was not a line in his face, and he wore a black cap. In his hand he held a medal, by a little chain. He lifted the medal to his breast and stood there holding it so that the Young Man could see. Beside him stood a young boy, also wearing a black cap. His son? The boy did not look at the medal. He looked only into the Young Man’s eyes, as his father did, and the boy’s arms fell away from him as if he were almost shrugging, but the expression on his face was so very serious; and this was one of the many frames in the Afghanistan Picture Show which the Young Man never understood: it belonged with those other mysteries, such as who the Brigadier was, and which faction was the best, and how serious corruption was in the refugee camps, and why the Roos had invaded Afghanistan, and why the Young Man had invaded Afghanistan — but how strange and sad it was, that the man with the medal wanted him to understand something, and he would never ever understand it.

“Could you tell me a little about your operations?” said that one-man freakshow, the Young Man, switching on the tape recorder. The interview was conducted in German.

“We work in two refugee camps,” said Mr. Ghulam, “and the total number of refugees there is around fifty thousand. In each camp we have a medical team, consisting of a female doctor, a male doctor, with a sickbed for men and one for women.” (The woman doctor he had seen at work, with the soft white wrappings about her head, leaning forward, pursing her lips as she brought the cool stethoscope against the little boy’s chest and the boy turned his face against the shoulder of his father, who, wearing a cap that glistened like gilded fish scales, seemed to be concentrating even harder than the doctor; and otherwise, save for a table and the two chairs that the adults were sitting in, the tent was empty, and outside there was only whiteness and heat.) “And we distribute these milk biscuits,” said Ghulam, “and we also give instruction in the schools on basic care and sanitation, and we have maternity programs as well. We speak a great deal with the refugees, and tell them that they are not clean, that they are not washing their clothes, that they are not washing their children, and they ask us: ‘Why should we wash, and how should we wash?’ and we teach them sanitation. There are many sick people, and especially social problems, and they come up to us, and we talk to them. We give the aggressive ones precedence. That is our work.”

The Young Man could not admit that it was not these interviews that were important. Maybe at the time they were important. Maybe the checklists of things done and yet to do were all that mattered, that good action without poetry. How many sick people are there? Do we have enough housing? Yes, these are the most important things, and yet there are new checklists now, and the number of milk biscuits that the Austrian Relief Committee distributed in 1982 carries no more weight now than the Young Man’s flock of hopes and aims that dissipated like all the women who so quickly covered their mouths with their veils when they saw the Young Man approaching; they always saw him coming before the menfolk did.

“What can Americans best do for the refugees?” he asked.

“Well, it is hard to say precisely what is entirely good,” said Ghulam. “But a general principle that one might state for the Americans is that, as they can imagine, they should do what they can to help. And the help should come either directly to our population or through an intermediary, but the more direct the better. And also, of course, they should not make false politics against Russia, here or in Latin America, because they ought to think of the solidarity of all people, and not help to bring about a war.”

The Young Man’s experiences with offices in Pakistan was that the pace of work was not frantic. When he went to the Special Branch of the police station in Peshawar to get the document which he was required to carry as an alien, the police chief and his subordinates all knocked off and had him take snapshot after snapshot of them. They made him promise to send copies. — “We make everybody take pictures, but they never send them to us,” the police chief lamented. — The Young Man did not send his snapshots to them either, because in every one the police chief looked quite sinister in his dark sunglasses. — In the post offices in Karachi and Peshawar, they sent you from window to window whenever they could, opened late, closed early, and took long lunches. To transact business at the office of the state tourist bureau in Peshawar, it was necessary to bang on the door for a long time, because the official, a gentle, boyish-looking fellow with dark hair, would lock the door, turn on the air conditioning, and stretch out on the carpet to sleep away the long, happy day.

The Afghan Refugee Office was another matter. It was housed in a huge building full of guards, waiting rooms and variously stamped passes. True, Commissioner Abdullah did keep the Young Man sitting for three hours after his appointment — but this was due less to a relaxed attitude than to the pressure of more important business. Abdullah was an imposing, brisk man who was not at all impressed with his guest; why, the Young Man felt just as if he were back in his own country! — He was said, this Abdullah, to be a supporter of the Gulbuddin faction, and to direct some of his office’s resources toward it (for it was of course impossible to separate refugees from Mujahideen). — The Young Man hoped that he could draw Abdullah out on this with clever and subtle questions. He failed utterly.

The office had a wide wooden desk that was piled with papers. The phone rang several times. Many people needed to see the Commissioner. In the waiting room were racks of brochures about the different camps, almost as if they were summer camps.

“Are you getting everything that you need from the relief organizations?” the Young Man asked.

“Not everything that we need,” Abdullah frowned, “but we are getting substantial assistance in many sectors. Our basic problem is that our population always exceeds the level of assistance that we receive from outside, from the U.N.H.C.R. or the voluntary organizations. (We have about sixteen of them in our province, including this I.R.C. that you’re talking about.) And that complicates the problem of distribution; we have increasingly more people to feed; and it’s very difficult to plan when you are dealing with such quantities as appear in the Afghan question. But fortunately in the last two years we have managed to evolve a workable pattern of distribution in planning the requirements of the refugees, particularly in the health sector. So we do get the assistance, and we hope it continues, but it wouldn’t be quite correct to say that we get everything that we need. We are dealing with a continuing emergency, and the world outside should see it like that.”

“So you want a continuation of the same level of aid or an increase?”

“Obviously the level must increase. We have more people to feed, we have more people to heal, we have more people to clothe, to give drinking water to; we have more cattle — and the logistical problems involved are enormous, you know. We had only 300,000 people in 1979; that is our base, that is the benchmark. And in the last one and a half years, we have about 2.2 million people …”^†

“Do you have much of a problem with dishonesty — refugees reporting larger families than they have, and so forth?”

“No,” cried Abdullah, annoyed, “that is a human factor; you always find it in all refugee theaters in the world. I don’t think it’s the kind of factor which should affect our planning or the basic health of this operation. We have been fully cognizant of the situation right from the beginning, and in this last reevaluation operation, which continued more than five months (and even now it is continuing in some areas), we have become very sure of our figures. Those unverifiable families have not been counted.”

Commissioner Abdullah, it seemed, spoke on so lofty a level that the Young Man could not relate the words to anything in his experience. For the life of him he could not get a single concrete picture from what the man said.

“How possible do you think it is to separate refugee aid from political aid for the Afghans?” he said, hoping to hear some reference to Gulbuddin.

“Well, that question need not be asked at this forum, for we basically deal with the refugees, not with the politicians. But when you help the refugees, you, in a way, directly or indirectly, are helping their cause also. So, the greatest help for the refugees would be to create conditions where they could go back to their country and live there peacefully and honorably.”

“I was under the impression that certain political groups … were doing a great deal for the refugees on their own …”

“… Yes, they do…,” said Abdullah. “We treat them all alike …”^‡

At the end of the interview, Abdullah made him play the tape back for him, listened very carefully, approved it, and dismissed him.

Going back out, he lost his way and passed through a suite of do-nothing clerks whose desks were clean of papers, pencils, or anything other than their bare feet. They were rolling cigarettes on their knees.

A lesson at school (Hangu Camp)

“So the school is closed today?” the Young Man asked. The administrator nodded earnestly. “It is closed today. They have been given leave.”

“Because of the heat?”

“Because of the heat. There were, um, so many illnesses in this school, you see. But the other school is open. The students are studying. We’ll take you there.”

“How often are the students given leave?”

The administrator sighed. “Only when it is extensive heat, like nowadays. Oh, it is terrible.” —He fanned himself. — “For us it is terrible; for them it is, um, killing, you see.”

They walked up to the school. The children were reciting aloud, in unison. The nearest one was a tiny boy in blue, leaning over the cloth pages of the book that was almost as big as he was, his hands clasped as he studied the picture of the tent, beneath which were three lines of Pushtu cursive, then the picture of the parasol, and he huddled very close because the tent was dark. The Young Man thought in anguish: so I have seen him, recognized him; but I can never see all the others! — For he could not get over this recurring difficulty. — When the administrator and the Young Man arrived, the schoolteacher stopped the lesson immediately, in order not to waste the Young Man’s valuable time.

“What are they taught here?” he asked.

The administrator interpreted.

The schoolteacher stood at attention. “Pushtu, Urdu, English, ABC, and so forth.”

“But religion is the most important course?” the Young Man hazarded.

“Yes, it is compulsory, you see.”^§

“How many students do you have?”

“The total number is about 290. But the smaller ones, they have allowed them not to come, because of the heat.”

“What is your biggest need?”

“Books,” the schoolmaster said. He was a young, very serious man. “These have been supplied by Hezb-i-Islami. The education department, they have not supplied them to this school.”

The children stared up at him from their mats.

“And, you see,” the administrator added, “I was feeling very thirsty just now, so I asked them what about these people when they become thirsty and there is no arrangement for water? I have now told one of their watchmen to have a big jug and fill it up.”

“I see,” said the Young Man. — How odd that no one had thought of this until now! Perhaps by some coincidence the children had never been thirsty before today. That must surely be it.

“Still, this water problem is general,” confided the administrator. “In every camp we face this insufficiency of water.”

“How do you manage to teach students of different ages all at the same time?”

The administrator did not bother to translate. “But it is all the same class!”

“Could you tell him for me that I’m very sorry to have interrupted his class?”

“No, no, never mind; it is too hot!” the administrator laughed. “They want some diversion. There are very few diversions in their lives, you see.”

Strange as it may seem, I did not understand the nightmare that I was seeing. Partly it was because I was sick that I was sometimes little more than a data collector; partly it was because I was so young that the exoticism of the experience made the greatest impression on me; partly it was because, thanks to my background, I had little understanding of physical suffering. Now, when I reflect upon this school without books, open on a day so hot that the other school was closed — this school without water, this single class for all students irrespective of age (I saw six-year-olds there, and I saw ten-year-olds, all reciting the same things over and over) — I want to weep — no, to do something — but I don’t know what. As for the Young Man, I don’t remember precisely what he thought, but the plain of his speculations had already become flat, sandy ground, oval-shaded by a single tree, on which grazed scrawny cattle light and dark. Tents and little stone houses lay along the ridges. It was very hot.

“In education,” said my informant in 1985, “the English language was the main foreign language. Now Russian is. But they do not call it a foreign language; they call it ‘the language of our big neighbor to the north.’ They are gradually eliminating English in Afghanistan. The puppet government is on good terms with the Cuban government, so now Spanish is taught. — This is a new phenomenon on our cultural scene,” he said sarcastically. “They still have a German Department, but it is now an East German Department.”

Surely thy Lord [2]

In every camp he went they were hospitable to him (except, as I said, when he took pictures of their women). They made him tea and served him bread and meat, always waiting until he had had his fill before they ate. Some of them worked with their trucks and tractors, hauling things. A man laughed and showed him how to plait a rope from grass. The boys played ball. Never did he forget the man laughing so happily ha-ha! showing all his white teeth, as he braided grass into rope to show the Young Man, and his elder son watched the Young Man with a polite upward-bowing of lips but the younger son stood half behind, resting his head dreamily on his brother’s shoulder…

The sum of his failures almost, but not quite, confronted him — like the turbaned man who rode his donkey home to the straw-mud-straw house, where he saw the Young Man and stared at him, his two small boys staring at the Young Man also, their arms around each other, and far away, behind the stone wall, a red-veiled woman turned away.

* Tea and cooking oil.

† In 1987, there were 3.5 million registered Afghan refugees in Pakistan alone. By 1989, when the Soviet troops left, the number was near 4 million.

‡ The five deletions here were made by Abdullah.

§ I was told that vocational education was not permitted by the host country, for fear that still more Pakistanis would be displaced in the labor market by Afghans.

9. ALASKA (1979)

While an increasingly desperate Hafizullah Amin was conducting pacification operations in every province, while his superior, Mr. Nur Muhammad Taraki, began the last six weeks of his presidency (and, incidentally, his life), while Babrak Karmal waited in Moscow, while the Soviet Union was bland (for this was still five months before the invasion of Afghanistan stunned and horrified us), in the month of July I first visited Alaska. At that time I had no suspicion that I ever might go to Afghanistan. We were on the ferry from Seattle to Haines, my friend Erica and I. She was older. The inland passage narrowed, and on either side of us evergreen forests ascended mountain shoulders until they met snow, white fogs lying in all the hollows, and we passed rocky grassy beaches and the wind smelled of salt. — When the two shores began to draw away from each other again, the sky to open, we stood on the cabin deck, our hair beating against our faces. We could see for a long way. The windbreakers of the passengers standing at the rail fluttered violently.

Erica pointed down. “If your child fell overboard, would you jump down and save it?”

“If it were a wanted child,” I said flippantly.

“If it wasn’t, you’d just let it drown?”

“Sure,” I said, straight-faced.

When I was growing up, my little sister drowned because I hadn’t paid attention.

“This is the life!” laughed Erica, who had taught at Outward Bound. Her hair was a wild cloud of curls. She had a ruddy, happy face; her skin was so thick, she said, that no mosquitoes could bite it. She was as strong as a bear. How many weaklings had she saved?

Drawn in my notebook by a ten-year-old Afghan girl — parents executed by the Soviets

Tenting in the rain with Erica was always the best part. We were all set up, which was a relief, because I was bad at that and other things; we were resting, going nowhere, and I could feel as though I were in the Arabian Nights, the tent covered with tapestries and furs, perhaps, with a brazier of incense between our sleeping bags, and a silver bowl of dates (actually, we ate them from one of Erica’s ziplock plastic bags), and when she slept she kept on smiling, which made me happy, too — the Land of Counterpane was not dangerous at all — we had hours left before I’d have to prove myself again, a good respite to tell each other fantastic stories (the rain being reliable that way); so Erica told me about being married and climbing the mountain in South America that later got named after her, Pico Erica; and being in the Peace Corps and snorting heroin and breaking into people’s houses solely to steal ice cream and living with the Navajos and all the other things she had done that left me wide-eyed and determined to do things like that (and at the very end of that year, when I was reading the Christmas newspapers in Switzerland, and there it was in black and white and French: Afghanistan had been invaded! I suddenly thought, “Someday I would like to go there,” and it was not because Afghanistan was Afghanistan, but because Afghanistan was invaded); and my tentmate snuggled her sleeping bag up against me and asked me to rub her back and I said that I would and she laid her head on my knee and said, “Go ahead, scratch! Long, hard strokes, all the way down my back! Harder!”—for she was from a military family.

“You really want me to scratch your back?” I said.

“You got it!”

“All right,” I said dubiously.

“What do you mean, ‘all right’? My body is different from yours.”

“It must be.”

… “It’s getting monotonous now.”

“Sorry.”

… “Oh, that feels good.”

“Thank you.”

“That’s nice. Could you go just a little lower? And make your strokes harder. Oh, that’s wonderful. Oh, keep doing that.”

The rain thundered and thundered.

“Isn’t this exciting?” said Erica sleepily.

It was. The tent shuddered and flapped. Water was leaking in. We had no idea whether or not the evening wind would rip it apart — a dessert of uncertainty which pleased Erica; Erica loved to climb mountains because they brought her so close to death. She’d seen another climber fall a thousand feet; she’d seen a frozen German couple in the Swiss Alps. Because danger fulfilled Erica so much, it also fulfilled me — or at least the thought of it did. Or at least I thought that the thought of it did. I had a crush on Erica.

We were up at McGonagall Pass. To the east were the stony cones of Ostler Mountain, and the trail that we had come up from the river. To the west below us was a plain crawling with the black rivers of glaciers, peaks dolloped with snow and ice everywhere we looked (or at least our maps told us that they were peaks; we could see only massive pillars, some blue, some white, some gravel-brown, that disappeared into the clouds). That plain was mainly gravel piles and raw earth so soggy with glacial melt that it swallowed our boots to the ankle. There were heaps of loose stones: white granite flecked with black, or rusty shale, or yellow-tinted crystals that Erica thought were sulphur. We had both become very quiet; I was almost frightened by everything. Stones trickled into pools of a strange pale green. The water tasted sweet and silty. Between the gravel country (“No-Man’s-Land,” Erica called it) and the titanic black-earth mounds of the glaciers was a river with the same green pallor, too wide to cross, eating deeper and deeper into a sculpted channel of ice. Not even Erica dared to go very close to it. What I most remember now is the still steady trickling of water everywhere, a sound which seemed uncanny to me because in that vast nature-riddled place everything should have been roaring and booming, and I kept waiting for something to happen, for the black mountains to explode, for the ice to break, for thunder and lightning to come…

It was a dark, stifling tent. Flies buzzed outside and inside. The Young Man felt as if he could barely breathe. The refugees sat in the hot darkness. The whites of their eyes gleamed. — “Are you happy here?” he asked the head of the family.

“Oh, you see,” explained the Pakistani administrator of the camp, “we are trying to make them happy, but they have left their own country, so it is difficult for them to be happy! But we want to make their stay here as comfortable as we can. They are satisfied with the help that we are giving them and the United Nations is giving them, and they are appreciating that.”

“Do you think they’ll stay here for the rest of their lives?”

The Young Man apparently had a knack for surprising the administrator. “Why should they?”

“Because the Russians will not give Afghanistan up.”

“No, that is impossible!” cried the administrator. “The whole world is against them, you see!”

“I hope you’re right.” —The Young Man turned to the refugees. — “Why did you leave Afghanistan?” he asked.

“Russian … attack us,” the man said slowly. “Their … airplanes and tanks. Russian came, and they … tease our womans, they hurt them … and we are very in trouble. Their … airplanes come, and … bombs destroy our places …”

“Are you happy living here?”

“No, sir. We are not happy. We are satisfied here, but in summer season, we … are in troubles.”

“Do you have enough food to eat?”

“Yes, sir. Enough food.”

“And enough water?”

“It is hard. We don’t have enough drinking water. And the food is not of such good quality, sir. Afterwards we feel ill. And there are giant insects that scare us …”

“Don’t be apprehensive,” Erica had said.

“I’ll do my best.”

“It’s really a very trivial crossing.”

“Good,” I said politely.

We sat down on the moss and picked blueberries into my wool hat. I could not stop thinking about what had happened in the river before. Erica picked about four times more blueberries than I did. The sun was very hot and sweet in our faces.

“Let’s go,” Erica said at last. We put our packs back on, and I tightened my sweaty straps and hip belt as we went down the incline. The closer I got to the edge of the river, the less I liked it. There were two channels. The first was easy enough: I could see the rocks on the bottom. The second, however, was of the treacherous kind, a wide, deep, smooth stretch of water that might be thigh-deep and slow, or maybe chest-deep and very very fast underneath, and the bottom might be slippery, and that second channel might drown me on this sunny afternoon.

Erica looked at me, scanned the river, and looked at me again. She waded the first channel, stepped onto the sandbar in the middle, peered into the water again, and came back to me. — “Good news,” she said. “We’re crossing tomorrow.”

I felt horribly depressed and ashamed.

“Today’s your birthday,” Erica said. “You set up the tent and I’ll make you a special birthday dinner. I don’t want you to help. Just get in your sleeping bag and relax.”

“You’re so nice to me, Erica,” I said.

Erica sat by the stove, singing songs in Navajo and French. The evening was very beautiful. “You know,” she said, “one Christmas all my brothers and sisters and I were fighting. My father used to be a brigadier general. All the sudden he lost control and barked out, ‘I command you to be happy!’ We kids just burst out laughing.”

I smiled.

“So,” said Erica, “I command you to be happy!”

By this time I had separated Erica into two personalities: Erica Bright, who was sweet, playful and girlish (and who liked me), and Erica Green-Eyes, who could best be described as prowling and competent. Green-Eyes was the one whom I continually offended; and it was Green-Eyes who made my first thoughts so filled with dread as I lay beside her in the small hours of a sunny morning, knowing that in minutes she’d awake and hustle me along to another river crossing, snapping at me, glaring at me, shoving me because I was slow and we had to cross before the glaciers began their morning melt. It maddened Green-Eyes that I continued to lose tent stakes, that I had no sense of balance, that I was a poor map reader. — “Come on!” Erica said as we canoed up Moose River. “Hard, deep strokes! Dig into that water! Come on; there’s a tribe of hostile Indians behind us and we have to stroke for our lives! They’re going to catch us at this rate! Stroke! Stroke! Stroke! Hard, deep strokes! They’re coming closer; they’re cocking their bows; let’s see you put yourself into your stroke! Dig in! Bend at the waist, move your shoulders; STROKE!” —As we went farther upriver, my stroke actually began to get smoother and better. Erica was happy, believing that maybe I’d actually learned something. I paddled us around for a little while as she lay back and watched the clouds. Presently we felt an impulse to piracy, so we tied up at a private dock, tiptoed into somebody’s garden, and stole a handful of strawberries. — “Now stroke…,” said Erica very sleepily, laughing and yawning in the sun, and the sunbeams danced on the water and a faint breeze stirred her hair. — Going back downriver, I also stroked creditably. We had a good time until we reached the landing. I jumped out to pull the canoe up onto shore. Still inside, Erica giggled as it wobbled, thinking that I was playing, and as I summoned my energies for a return smile I stumbled, tipping it and her into the water… “God damn it,” she said… — In general, no matter whether I did or did not learn things from Green-Eyes (and I do remember a few occasions where she nodded at me in a satisfied way, and once because I had located our position so accurately she gave me the McGonagall Pass topo map for my own), the lessons were neither easy nor pleasant. I would look down at the ground, apologizing for my latest stupidity and feeling a strange tightness in my chest which I thought then was pure self-loathing (but which I now suspect was anger, too); and Erica threw her head back despairingly, reached to me, and cried, “Think!” Then she would feel a pitying impulse to rally me, would make herself smile and say, “Your river crossings are a hundred times better than at the start.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Once when we were hitchhiking, Erica Bright stood on the empty road, ready to play the pretty part (even when it was cold she kept her sweater off so that the drivers would see that she had breasts). She was singing a song by Jacques Brel. Her face was young and clear. She combed her hair, sang a song in Spanish (she knew eight languages); got impatient and sprang upside down, walking on her hands in the middle of the highway, smiling and singing. Then Green-Eyes decided to make me exercise, and she was yelling because I couldn’t twist my neck and arms in the way she wanted. — “You move like a robot!” she cried after half an hour. “There’s no use trying to get you to do anything, is there? You might as well sit down.” —She cheered up, though, a moment later, when I tied a perfect knot (Erica was always making me practice things).… “Good,” she said to me. “Very good.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re being sarcastic,” said Bright. Her feelings were hurt.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are,” said Green-Eyes. “That really bothers me about you, that you’ll never admit it when you’re being sarcastic.”

“What are you doing with your knife?” said Erica.

“Not much.”

I got up and started walking. It was my plan at that moment to walk into the woods until I died. Erica called my name, tentatively. I kept walking.

“Come back!” cried Bright.

I stopped.

“Let’s just try and enjoy each other,” she said. “Okay?”

I didn’t say anything.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m not thinking anything.”

Ten days later we were climbing the side of a steep ravine in the mountains, with a frozen stream below and the dusk-blue wall of a glacier above, and it was snowing but we both felt hot.

“Let me carry your sweater,” Erica said.

“No, that’s all right.”

“Come on, we’ll go faster if I have it. Just give it to me.”

“All right. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” said Erica, smiling at me.

Erica carried my sweater. What did I do for anyone in Afghanistan? Well, once I brought a few armloads of wood for a fire. Somehow this should be worth as much as Erica carrying my sweater, in terms of mass carried over a distance for a utilitarian purpose; and somehow it seems to me that in Afghanistan I never did a goddamned thing.

One night we camped in a boggy, grassy place by the highway near Anchorage. It was finally starting to get dark late at night, because we had achieved the month of August, and the tent, which hung loosely on its poles in the soft grass, took on a primeval quality, the walls seeming like shaggy, wrinkled skins in the dusk and the thick grass beneath our bodies feeling like them; and reeds whispered all around us, reddened through the back window of the tent by the alpenglow. Erica’s features, hard and shadowy and strong, were in relief as she lay beside me. Her sweater looked like mail. She lay still with her eyes closed. We slept late; there were no more river crossings to make. The next morning was a happy one, a relapse in the progress of Green-Eyes’s contempt for me. She talked to me a little, and even smiled at me. She said she’d make breakfast beside the railroad tracks across the highway. When she’d gone I got up and struck camp, shaking the tent fly clean of slugs, pulled my pack on and hiked over. Erica was just fixing my breakfast: a big dish of granola, heaped with brown sugar and beautiful raspberries that she had picked for me.

It was four-thirty in the morning when we struck the tent and left the wooded sandbar. Green-Eyes hustled me along. It was very warm and sunny; the water level was rising fast. Our boots filled up with cold water and gravel in the first channel. Within a few minutes my feet were completely numb. — “Listen,” Green-Eyes told me as we ran through toe-deep streams and gravel beds. “No, don’t slow up, just listen. You hear that noise like thunder coming from the east? That’s the ice beginning to break up for the day. Look, the water’s getting higher! Can you hear how it sounds different?”

We had reached the first of the difficult channels. Green-Eyes tied a bowline around my waist and showed me how to step into the rope to pay it out across my hip. — “Watch for me as I go across!” she said. “Be ready to pull me in if I fall. If you can’t do it, you’ll have to throw off your pack and run for me. Give me slack when I call for it.”

“Right.”

“Now, remember, you have to pay attention!”

“I will.”

She undid her hip belt and started across. The gray water was rising very quickly now. The stump on the sandbar behind us, which had been dry a quarter hour before, was now almost entirely underwater.

“Tension!” Erica screamed from the middle of the river channel. I could barely hear her. The water roared.

“All right,” I said, pulling in rope.

Erica stumbled in the current. — “No! Slack, goddamnit; give me slack! I tell you to pay attention and you pull in rope!”

“Sorry,” I said. She couldn’t hear me.

I paid out rope, and Erica crossed the channel. — “Come on!” she called. “Hurry!” I started into the water, remembered to unbuckle my hip belt, and crossed slowly, carefully, thinking only left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot so that I would not be thinking about where I was, and I did not look around me more than I had to. Green-Eyes pulled in the rope from her side of the channel. The water was waist-deep. It pushed at me, trying to knock me down. I missed my footing for a moment, aborted the step, and reached with the other toe until I found a rock. Carefully, my arms outstretched in proper Outward Bound fashion, I made the crossing and pulled myself up onto Erica’s gravel bank. I was numb from the waist down.

“You’re going to have to go faster than that,” Erica said.

“That’s true,” I said. “I can see that.” —We went to the next channel at a run. I was terrified. The water was somewhat deeper here, and Erica crossed with difficulty. I could see the look of complete concentration on her faraway face.

“Okay — come on!” she called faintly.

I stepped into the water, my open hip belt swinging loose against my thighs. My pack did not feel properly balanced. The current was very strong. I took another step, and another. The bottom dropped away suddenly, and the water was above my belly. The pack twisted on my shoulders as the river shoved me back and forth. —“Erica!” I screamed from the middle of the channel. I was falling; I fell; the current was pulling me down, and my heavy pack held me underwater, trapping the back of my head against the hard frame so that I could not reach air. The world sang in my ears. I could not get up, and the cold, cold water was paralyzing me. I thrashed stupidly. Then Erica was pulling the rope tight and calling something to me in a firm voice. I couldn’t understand her, but I knew that I had to get up. The water was very cold. My arms and legs still responded somewhat, and I floundered forward, clawing at the rope, until at last the channel was only knee-deep again and I got to my feet.

“Good recovery!” Erica called encouragingly.

“Thank you,” I said.

I waded up onto the sandbar, shivering, and stood beside her, looking at the next channel. The water was gray and swollen; it was quick and calm and deep. As soon as I saw it, I knew that I was going to fall.

“Let’s go,” said Erica. “We’ve got to get across soon. The water’s rising faster.”

“All right.”

“Watch me! Be ready to run for me! Pay attention!”

“All right.”

The water was already up to her hips. As I watched, she staggered and righted herself. Carefully I paid out rope. Then she was across and looking anxiously at me. — “Okay!” she called. “Come on!”

“This doesn’t look too bad,” I said across the channel to her, knowing that she couldn’t hear. I stepped into the water. For the first time that day I allowed myself to look ahead, and saw that the other side of the river was a long distance away. We were less than halfway to it. The bank became a green ridge of tundra that met the horizon, topped by the squat white shape of Mount McKinley thrusting into the blue sky.

“Come on!” Erica called through cupped hands.

I wasn’t frightened anymore. I felt doomed. I started stumbling when the water was only calf-deep. Arms spread wide, I kept on. The current pushed at me rhythmically with each step. The cold water was up to my knees. The only noise I could hear was the gravel churning in the water. My legs were numb. I decided to hurry to get it over with. Paying no attention to my footing, I bolted toward Erica. I looked up at her on that distant sandbar ahead of me; she was pulling in rope complacently. She was pleased, no doubt, that I had finally gotten the knack of river crossings and could perform them with all deliberate speed — when actually, of course, I was rushing through the water in a panic. My pack slammed into my back; I felt relief when I finally fell. The river slugged me, chilly, strong and hateful, and ground me into the rocks. I was shooting downstream, scraping across the rocks as I went. I was breathing in water. I didn’t even try to raise my head. I considered myself dead.

Then I stopped moving with a jerk. Erica had thrown herself down to the ground and began to haul me in. I felt myself being hauled, but I could not help her. Slowly, slowly she dragged me out of the river. I could hear her grunting with the effort. At last I was lying in only three or four inches of icy water. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. My body was without feeling, and my pack was heavy with water. I undid one shoulder strap, pulled myself slowly out of the other, and dragged myself and my pack very slowly along through the wet stones, as if I were a snail.

“Come on!” Erica was calling. “Get up!”

I tried to keep moving.

“You can do it! You’ve got to do it! Get up!”

Erica called my name again, breathlessly.

…We were on another big sandbar. Erica Bright was pulling off my shoes and my torn, bloody blue jeans; she was unrolling my sleeping bag, which had stayed dry in its double stuff sack; she was holding me tight. My legs and face were bloody. — “Hurry up and get into your bag,” Erica Green-Eyes said. “You have hypothermia.”

“Erica …” I said. It took all my effort to say her name.

“My heart really went out to you, too,” she said. “Now get in.”

For a long time I shivered in the sun. Erica sat beside me all afternoon. — “You know,” she said finally, “I’m starting to get fond of you.”

I smiled up at her.

The next day we crossed the McKinley all the way. In the last channel, Erica fell. We were side by side in the water, holding on to each other by my belt. There was a heavy clank as Erica hit the rocks with her pack, and then a grinding. I was pulled down.

“Get up!” I shouted in my best Green-Eyes manner. I pulled her up; she slipped off her pack. We were in calm, shallow water. I helped her to her feet, and the two of us dragged her pack onto the final sandbank. She looked at me, wet and smiling, and threw her arms around me and kissed my cheek.

Of course, she hadn’t needed my help at all.

I will never forget that morning, which was so sunny and joyous, with the river behind us and ahead of us a rolling tundra ridge sparkling with wet blueberries,^† beyond which (although we could not see that yet) was a valley of beautiful little lakes in which we could bathe, and then ankle-deep moss, some red, some green; and then more ecstatic days and terrible days until one morning we woke up in someone’s bedroom, she in the double bed, I in my sleeping bag on the floor (for we never slept together), and the shades were down so that the room was so dim that we could hardly see each other; we had woken up at the same time; she reached down from the bed, I reached up, and we gripped each other’s wrists in that solid way that gives support on river crossings, and I have not seen Erica again, but I went back and back to the Arctic and crossed rivers by myself because dear Erica showed me how; and as Erica and I came out of the river on that morning in late July I somehow knew all this and was so happy as we ate blueberries out of Erica’s enamel cup; and of course within hours came the edge of that mossy plateau, and below waited our next river and I could hear the heavy sound of the water, and the river was just as dreadful as ever; but while we were eating blueberries it was a long way away yet; and the place where we found ourselves was so beautiful, so beautiful, and I was stunned by the sunlight and the sound of the river behind me and the unknown vastness ahead of me; I was stunned by it all. — I think now that if my purpose in going to Afghanistan was at all good, then it must have been to learn if there was a way to help people get across rivers — as I said, I didn’t help them, but they helped me. When I went into Afghanistan, my friend Suleiman carried me across the rivers on his back.

* Hangu Camp, 1982.

† When I first read Purgatorio, Canto I, it made me feel this way again.