Tanner’s Virgin

Chapter 8

In the seventeenth century an Afghan nobleman named Ali Mardan Khan demonstrated his public spirit by raising national monuments of one sort or another in and around Kabul. The greatest of these was an arcaded and roofed bazaar called Chihâr Châtâ. Its four arms had an aggregate length of about 600 feet, with a breadth of about thirty. Kabul is a beautifully situated city to begin with, nestled among the mountains with peaks rising on three sides of the city. It is a city of striking architecture, and Chihâr Châtâ, it would seem, was something rather extraordinary.

In 1842 a British general named Pollock evacuated Kabul. On the way out he leveled Chihâr Châtâ to punish the city for its treachery. Leveled it. Knocked the whole thing down, that is, so that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t.

I couldn’t really blame General Pollock. Kabul was that kind of a town. Treacherous.

By the time I had been in the city for all of twenty-one hours, they had made three attempts on my life.

That’s treacherous.

But wait a minute – wasn’t he in Israel a minute ago? Something about getting on a camel?

True. Except that it wasn’t a minute ago, really, but several weeks ago, and since that camel (and if you have never ridden a camel you cannot possibly know how bad they are) there had been donkeys and mules and broken-down cars and a truck and a lot of walking and, all in all, an almost incredible spate of boredom. Well, not boredom, exactly. It wasn’t boring sitting around a mountain campfire with a band of Kurdish rebels. It wasn’t boring at a village a few miles from Teheran, eating sheep’s bladder stuffed with cracked wheat and almonds and apricots, which is at least a thousand times better than it sounds. The mountain views through Afghan Turkistan were never boring, nor were the languages (some new, some half-known) or the people.

It was just such a grind. I kept on the move constantly and I just couldn’t find any real way to speed things up. The distances were great, the roads fairly primitive, and my own lack of valid papers kept me away from main roads and speedier methods of transportation.

So it took a while. It took more time to live through than it does to put down a quick summary of what happened. What happened was that virtually nothing happened, and I stayed alive and wound up in Kabul, and all of a sudden the rest of the world decided I had lived too long and to too little purpose and did what it could to change all that.

I reached the outskirts of Kabul after nightfall, and it was another hour by the time I got as far as the center of town. I stopped at a coffeehouse, where an old man with a wispy beard and stainless steel teeth was playing an instrument that was a cross between an oud and a round-backed mandolin. I had a cup of coffee – very thick, very bitter – and a pilaf of cracked wheat and currants. I kibitzed a backgammon game, had another cup of coffee, and asked a fellow kibitzer if he knew a man named Amanullah.

“I know Amanullah the Seller of Fish, and Amanullah the Son of Hadi of the Book Stall.”

“Perhaps he means Amanullah of the Lamps and Old Artifacts,” one of the players suggested.

“Or Amanullah Who Has But One Eye. Is this the Amanullah you seek, kâzzih?”

Amanullah, it seemed, was as rare in Afghanistan as flies in a latrine. Kabul was positively buzzing with Amanullahs. I explained rather haltingly, which is the only way I’ve ever learned to speak Pushtu (also known as Pakhsto and Pakkhto and Pashto). It is the language of the Afghans, and it is one of those unnecessarily complex Asian tongues to which I attribute the illiteracy of such a large portion of the population. Of course they can’t read and write. There are thirty-seven classes of verbs, thirteen intransitive and twenty-four transitive. No one should have to contend with that sort of nonsense.

Well. What I explained haltingly was that I had traveled upon a journey of many miles in search of a man named Amanullah whom I had never met and whose likeness I had never seen.

“I know not the name of his father,” I said. “Amanullah is a large man with white hair, long white hair. He is a seller of slaves.”

“Ah,” said the kibitzer, thoughtfully. “Amanullah of the White Hair.”

“Amanullah of the Selling of the Slaves,” said the backgammon player.

“Do you know where I may find him?”

“I know of no such man,” said the kibitzer.

“He is unknown to me,” said the other one.

I had always wondered where the old vaudeville acts went when the Orpheum circuit dried up. I went back to my own table and had another cup of coffee. Then I left a few copper coins on the table and went outside, and as I was slipping my little change purse back into the folds of this robelike Afghan garment I was wearing, it fell to the ground. The change purse, not the garment.

So I bent down to get it, and my turban blew off.

That seemed silly. There was hardly any wind at all, surely not enough wind to blow a turban off somebody’s head. I said, “What the hell?” which probably means nothing at all in Pushtu, and I turned around and picked up the turban, and there was a dagger sticking in it.

If I hadn’t dropped the change purse, the dagger would have landed in the small of my back or thereabouts.

I looked around and didn’t see anyone. I looked at the dagger again to make sure it was still there, and it was. I was suddenly reminded of all those terrible movie bits where a guy walks into a bar in Boston and asks questions about a man named Kyriatos, then gets on a jet to St. Louis and charters a private plane to the Sun Valley slopes. Halfway up the ski lift somebody sticks an automatic in his back and a voice says, “I am Kyriatos. What do you want with me?”

I’d always objected to that sort of garbage in the movies. But here I had gone into a coffeehouse and asked some dumb questions about Amanullah, whom evidently no one had ever heard of and cared not at all about, and then I took three steps out the door and somebody put a dagger in my turban.

It couldn’t be connected, I decided. That was the trouble with secret agentry as a career. It fostered paranoia. After a few years in the field you couldn’t get mugged by a junkie without reading international intrigue into the affair. Every penny-ante burglar who knocked over your apartment took on the trappings of a spy searching for mysterious documents. Obviously some Afghan lowlife had tried to do me in for the purse I had just dropped. Or, if you prefer, some ardent nationalist had tried to do to me what he had just heard me doing to his language. But none of this, obviously, had anything whatsoever to do with Phaedra Harrow or Amanullah of the White Hair.

I removed the dagger from my turban and found a place for it in my robe. It was a very impressive affair, that dagger. The handle was some sort of bone with an elaborate inlay of mother-of-pearl. The blade was of fine steel with a geometrical pattern etched on either side. It was the sort of weapon that used to be found in English gentlemen in very early Agatha Christie novels.

The idea of resuming my search for Amanullah made me a little nervous at first. But I told myself I was being silly, and after telling myself this for a few minutes I began to believe it, and off I went on the trail of Amanullah of the White Hair.

The next few hours produced a few offers of slaves for sale and very little else. Slavery, I learned, is illegal in Afghanistan, just as off-track betting on horse races is illegal in the United States. From what I could see, it was about as hard to purchase a slave in Kabul as it was to get a bet down in Manhattan. Perhaps it was even easier, because the slave-selling business seemed more competitive than bookmaking. I kept shuffling around asking for Amanullah the Slave Trader, and I kept finding myself referred to other men with slaves for sale who did not, sad to say, happen to be Amanullah.

Kabul gets very quiet between midnight and dawn. Almost everything closes and the streets are empty. There was a cold dry wind blowing down from the north, and I spent the early hours of the morning huddled in the doorway of a saddler’s shop, trying to get warm and organize my thoughts. The one was as hard as the other.

The sun came up in a hurry. I shook the dust out of my robes and resumed wandering through Kabul, asking more questions, nibbling dough cakes here, sipping coffee there, and gradually finding my way to the oldest section of the city. The streets were extremely narrow, with the huts on either side taking up where the street left off. Motor vehicles could not negotiate those streets. Heavy-boned Afghan work horses and little Persian donkeys plodded patiently through the streets. The air was heavy with an air pollution centuries older than carbon monoxide. The sun rose higher in the sky, and the heat, trapped by the too-close huts and shacks, became oppressive.

And in the early afternoon a sidewalk vendor of doubtful sausages closed his good eye a moment in thought, stroked his beard with tobacco-stained fingers, opened his eye again, and nodded pensively at me. “A great man with white hair that hangs to his shoulders,” he said. “A man with a furious appetite, a man who eats day and night and whose belly would press through his robes if it could. A man who deals with the foreigners, with the men of Europe and India and with the sons of Han from the Chinese hills, purchasing women from them and placing them in houses in the countryside where the miners use them as maradóosh. Is this the Amanullah you seek, kâzzih?”

“It is, old one.”

“He is the brother of the husband of the sister of my wife.”

“Ah.”

“You have business with him, kâzzih? You have women to sell?”

“I have business with Amanullah.”

“By your accent you have come on a journey of many miles. You are an Afghan?”

“My mother was an Afghan.”

“Ah. If you go to the Café of the Four Sisters, kâzzih, you find him there. Amanullah. You tell him you bear good wishes of Tarsheen of the Sausage Pot. May your business prosper, kâzzih.”

“May your road run downhill and the wind be at your back, Tarsheen.”

“Blessings attend you, kâzzih.”

The Café of the Four Sisters was a little wineshop deep in the heart of the old part of town. Two of the sisters passed among customers seated on cut-down wine barrels. One brought me a glass of sweet white wine. If all Afghan women looked like the two sisters, I could understand why Amanullah’s business was prosperous. I couldn’t remember ever seeing a more unspeakably ugly woman.

Unspeakable or not, I spoke to her. I asked for Amanullah and was pleased to note that she knew precisely whom I meant. We didn’t even go through the vaudeville routine aimed at defining precisely which Amanullah I had in mind.

“He comes here every day, kâzzih.”

“Is he here now, then?” I had seen no one who fit the description.

“Ah, but he is gone.”

“He returns soon?” There is, incidentally, no future tense in Pushtu, which is why the conversations reported up to now have been somewhat stilted. Just a present tense and an imperfect tense. The present is used to convey present time and all future and conditional time. The imperfect covers all past time. “He comes again to the café this afternoon?”

“It is said that he goes on business to the west. He returns by nightfall, but if he stops here for wine I know not.”

“I thank you, sister.”

I set my wine glass down. Someone brushed my table and nearly knocked it over. I rescued the glass, raised it, set it down untasted. Something struck a chord in my mind but I couldn’t pick out the notes. That man who had passed my table-

I got up, glanced around for him. He was just leaving the café. I followed him out, lost him in the crowd. I caught a glimpse of his small eyes and spade-shaped black beard and then he was gone.

I returned to the café. In the corner an old man was coughing violently, pounding the earthen floor with his fists. His face had a bluish cast to it and he seemed to be dying of something. A few of his friends were clustered around him. The rest of the drinkers ignored him.

I got back to my table, but my wine glass was gone. I decided that the waitress must have picked it up, and I remembered how cloyingly sweet the wine had been and decided I didn’t want any more anyway.

On the way out the door I heard the death rattle in the old man’s throat.

The third time was the charm.

I don’t really think anyone would have figured it out on the basis of a simple dagger through the turban. I suppose, though, that I should have gotten the message in the Café of the Four Sisters. My own wine glass gone, an old wino coughing himself to death, a man who looked familiar passing my table and almost spilling my wine – I guess anyone with half a brain would have figured out that the man with the spade-shaped beard had put some poison in my glass, which the other man had cadged when I ducked out of the café. If I had read it all somewhere I’m sure I would have figured it out for myself, but instead I was living through it, and it’s always harder that way.

If nothing else, I was certain that I didn’t know anybody in Afghanistan. I know people almost everywhere, and on the whole I found it quite remarkable that I didn’t know anybody in Afghanistan, since a friend in need in Kabul would have been a friend indeed, indeed. And if no one knew me, there would be no reason for anyone to be putting daggers in my turban or poison in my wine.

I went back to the Café of the Four Sisters a couple of times in the course of the afternoon. Amanullah never did get there. I spent the rest of my time sort of wandering around and getting the feel of the city. It was what guidebooks call a study in contrasts, with broad avenues as wide as the streets of the old quarter were narrow. There were a few foreigners in the city, most of them Pakistanis from Kashmir, a few Russian types of one sort or another. Mostly, though, there were Afghans, and most of them were dressed more or less as I was – leather sandals, a loose-fitting robe more like an ancient Roman toga than anything else, and a sort of turban.

By sunset I was hungry. I had started drifting back in the general direction of the Four Sisters, and I stopped along the way at a hut from the central chimney of which wafted the odor of broiling mutton. I went inside and stood at a long counter. A thickset man took a mutton steak off the charcoal fire, sprinkled a mixture of unidentifiable spices over it, and slapped it onto a cast-iron plate, which he placed on the counter before me. There were no knives or forks. When in Rome, I thought, and picked the meat up in my hands and began gnawing at it. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed another man glaring at me. I turned. All of the other diners, I saw, had selected knives and forks from a bin against the far wall. All of the other diners looked at me as if I were a barbarian. Chastened, I went to the bin for knife and fork, returned, and went to work on the food.

While I was eating, the chef spooned a mixture of cracked wheat and rice onto my plate. The mutton was rare on the inside and black on the outside and very tangy. The cracked wheat and rice was a successful combination. I noticed another man drinking some sort of beerish concoction, and when the chef passed my way again I pointed at my fellow diner and made drinking motions. It turned out to be beer, but with an unusual taste to it that I finally identified as cashew nuts. This didn’t seem to make sense, as the cashew nut is native to the Western Hemisphere, and world trade would have to advance to an extraordinary degree before South Americans took to shipping cashew nuts to Afghanistan breweries. I found out subsequently that an Afghan nut vaguely similar to the cashew is used to flavor the beer.

I had two liters of the beer and finished my mutton steak. I ordered another beer – it wasn’t the best beer I’d ever tasted, but there was something habit-forming about the taste – and I drank a little of this, and then I realized that I would have to get rid of some old beer in order to make room for the rest of the new beer.

There was no lavatory as such, just a trough at the base of the back wall. I went out there and did the sort of thing one does at urinals, and as I was concluding this operation the little hut blew up.

For an insane moment I thought I had done it. The Man Who Pees Dynamite. I suppose that’s the feeling a woodpecker gets if he goes to work on a tree just as the lumberman gives it the final chop. After all, it was a pretty extraordinary experience. One minute I was urinating on this building, and the next minute the goddamned building was gone.

The damage was close to total, the destruction approached utter, and the chaos was absolute. There was the sound of the explosion followed by complete silence. This held for maybe ten seconds. Then everybody in Kabul set up a hue and cry.

The blast knocked me flat on my back, which was probably just as well, because most of what was inside the little restaurant was blown outside, and it wouldn’t have been wise to be standing in the way. By the time I was back on my feet, neither bloody nor unbowed, the chaos had reached absolute pitch. There were sirens wailing in the distance, and it occurred to me that I was in what might well turn out to be a bad place for a foreigner without papers.

So I manfully ignored the cries of help rising from the near-dead, and heroically resisted the temptation to come to the aid of my fellow man, and didn’t even go back to look for my beer. I don’t think I’d have had much luck anyway; the counter was gone, and the charcoal stove, and the chairs, and most of the people. I got the hell out of there as fast as my legs could carry me, which turned out to be somewhat faster than I had suspected. I raced down the block and around the corner, and I very nearly collided with the man with the spade-shaped black beard.

He stared at me. “You’re alive!”

“You speak English,” I said, cleverly.

“Curse you, Tanner! What does it take to kill you?”

He pulled out the world’s biggest pistol and stuck it in my face. “This time you don’t get away,” he said. “Knives don’t work on you, bombs don’t work on you, it’s impossible to drown you. But with a hole in your damned head perhaps it will be different.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, reasonably. “Do you realize what you’re doing? Do you have any idea?”

He stared at me.

“You’re making a terrible mistake.”

“Talk,” he demanded.

“Well,” I said, and kicked him in the groin.