Tanner’s Virgin

Chapter 14

We reached Kabul two hours after dawn on the morning of November 24th. We rode trimphantly into town, I with a sash around my neck and a rifle over my shoulder and a pistol on my hip, Phaedra wearing men’s clothing and carrying a British Army canteen and a German pistol. I pulled up on the reins and our horse neighed gratefully and went down to his knees. We dismounted. The horse stayed on his knees. I didn’t really blame him, and I was surprised he hadn’t dropped dead altogether.

We had stolen the horse. According to family legend, a great-great-uncle had done much the same thing in the Wyoming Territory, and had subsequently become, as far as I know, the only Tanner ever hanged in the Western Hemisphere. That sort of skeleton in the ancestral cupboard makes one a bit apprehensive about stealing horses, but the clown to whom the horse had belonged had really left us no choice.

He stopped at our signal, a tall slim Afghan who carried himself with military bearing. His moustache bristled, his eyes bored into mine. I told him I wanted to buy his horse. He said that the animal was not for sale. I told him I would pay its price in gold several times over. He said that he had no use for gold and much use for the horse. I told him I would pay equally for a ride to Kabul. He said that he was going only so far as his village a few miles away. I suggested that I might borrow the horse, and that I would leave it for him to reclaim in Kabul, and that I would pay him enough gold to make his troubles worthwhile. He remarked that, if he wanted my gold, he could simply return for it when my woman and I had perished of thirst.

So I took out the gun and told him to get off the horse or I would shoot him dead. He took told of his rifle, and I squeezed the trigger of the handgun and nicked his earlobe. He touched it with his finger, looked at the bead of blood on his fingertip, and respectfully dismounted from the horse.

“You are a superb marksman, kâzzih,” he said. “My steed is yours.”

So were his rifle and his clothing. I forebore telling him that I was not a superb marksman at all. I had not been aiming for his earlobe. I had been aiming for the center of his forehead, because when someone draws a rifle to shoot me with I want to do more than scare him a little. My rotten shooting was his good fortune.

It turned out that Phaedra had never been on a horse before. I had her ride sidesaddle at first, but after a few miles of jogging along she swung her leg over the horse. I was right behind her and I watched her, and after a few minutes I figured out what she had in mind. She would start to breathe a little faster than normal, and as the horse bounced she would bounce along with it, and muscles worked in her thighs, and she made odd little noises deep in her throat, and then, finally, she would give a little sigh and fall forward, her arms around the horse’s neck.

She kept doing this.

Once we were in the city we got off the poor goddamned horse and sort of abandoned him. I suppose it’s not good policy to abandon horses, and there’s probably a local ordinance against it, but abandoning a horse can’t be any worse than stealing it in the first place, and I had a hunch that whoever took over the horse’s ownership would do at least as good a job as we had done. As far as I was concerned, if I never saw a horse again it would be fine. I had what are probably called saddle sores, except that this particular horse had not had a saddle, so I guess what I had were bareback sores, if there is such a thing. There was such a thing as far as I was concerned. I staggered along, cross-eyed and bowlegged and wholly out of sorts. Phaedra, too, looked a little bowlegged, but I don’t know whether that was caused by the horse or by the way she had spent the past two months in Anardara. Bowleggedness is an occupational disease of maradóosh.

“I’m going to miss that horse,” she told me, on the way to Amanullah’s house.

“I can believe it.”

“I never realized the rapport a human being and a horse can establish.”

“Yeah, rapport.”

“I mean-”

“I know what you mean.”

“Evan, I can’t help it.”

“I know.”

“I just have to-”

“I know.”

“You always wanted me. In New York, in your apartment-”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“I just-”

“Forget it.”

“Maybe I should kill myself.”

“Yeah, kill yourself.”

“Evan, do you mean that?”

“Huh?” I snapped to attention. “No,” I said. “No, my mind must have been wandering. Don’t kill yourself. Everything’ll be all right. Believe me. Everything will be all right.”

“But you don’t want me. You came halfway around the world to save my life and now you don’t even want me anymore.”

“I’ll get over it.”

“You hate me.”

“Oh, hell. I don’t hate you.”

“You must. You came all the way to Afghanistan to save me from a fate worse than death and now you find out that I’m actually a whore at heart. Aren’t I?”

“No.”

“But I am,” she wailed.

I turned on her. “Now shut up for a minute,” I roared. “This goddamned city is absolutely crawling with a bunch of crazy Russians. Crazy, murdering Russians. And I only know one man in the whole damned city, and he’s the man who gave me that car. It was his car and he was very proud of it, and he loaned it to me and now it’s gone. And I have to tell him the car is gone, and that he’ll never see it again-”

“Why do you have to tell him?”

“Shut up. I have to tell him this, and then I have to get him so mad at the Russians that he’ll get the rest of the city equally mad at them. And then between the two of us, Amanullah and I have to lead mobs to root out the stupid Russians and hang them from the streetlamps, and I have a feeling that there are more Russians than streetlamps in this crazy city. And I have to do all this without getting killed, and without getting you killed, and then the two of us have to get the hell out of here. Do you understand what I’m talking about?”

“I guess so.”

“And do you understand why I have more important things on my mind than your twat?”

“I-”

“Come on.”

Amanullah was not at his house. We found him at the Café of the Seven Sisters. He was eating a leg of lamb.

I told him the whole story while he ate, and it hit home with such force he almost stopped eating. As it was, he quit while there was still a little meat clinging to the bone. He pounded the bone down on the top of the table and roared. Every eye in the place was on him.

“To attempt to destroy our country is an outrage,” he bellowed.

A murmur ran through the crowd.

“To attempt the assassination of my young friend and his woman is barbarism,” he cried out.

The crowd surged forward, muttering agreement, adding shouts of encouragement.

“But to destroy my automobile,” Amanullah screamed. “To destroy my automobile,” he shrieked. “MY AUTOMOBILE!”

The crowd was roaring its agreement.

“Twenty miles to the gallon,” Amanullah bawled.

The crowd pressed at the doors of the café.

“Automatic transmission! You never had to shift!”

The crowd was in the streets.

“Snow tires!”

The crowd was adding new members. Lurking in the shadows I saw the Bulgarian with the pointed beard. “It’s one of them,” I called out, “Don’t let him get away!”

They didn’t let him get away. Men and women, screaming hysterically, took hold of his arms and legs and tore him apart. Little children used his head for a soccer ball. And the crowd, wild with the taste of blood, surged down the street toward the Soviet Embassy.

“Vinyl seat covers,” Amanullah screamed. “A heater! A radio! An emergency brake! Oh, the villains!”

The Afghan police, reinforced by soldiers, took to the streets. They flooded the area around the Soviet Embassy. There were whispered exchanges between the police and the crowd.

The police joined the crowd.

The army joined the crowd.

“Onward,” shouted Amanullah. “For Kabul! For Afghanistan! For your lives and your country and your sacred honor! For my car!”

Those poor goddamned Russians.