The Good Son

10

S o what happened after that?” Gloria asked.

“You really want to know this? My war stories? Why?”

“It’s interesting,” she said. “Like I told you, most guys are totally boring. Your life is like a movie.”

“You think? Okay, where was I?”

“Your grandfather and your sisters got blown up.”

“Right.”

And it happened at the worst possible time, not that there ever would have been a good time, but my mother was in Zurich. My uncle Nisar was studying in London, but it was some school break and he was off in the country with friends, out of touch for weeks. My uncle Seyd was with the army on maneuvers in occupied Kashmir, so he was also more or less out of the picture for days afterward. My aunt Rukhsana was a kid, although I have to say she paid more attention to me than anyone else. My father, who should have taken charge of the situation, he just collapsed, became practically catatonic, and had to be hospitalized, or so I heard later on. My grandmother didn’t bother looking for me. She was probably already plotting to get Farid a new wife to replenish the gene pool.

Anyway, when the bomb went off I ran and hid in the storeroom. I wanted to be near my mother’s tin trunk. Wazir found me there on the night after the disaster. When I saw him I started bawling and he told me to stop crying, and when I continued he slapped my face. He said, “Be a man! A man doesn’t cry like a woman. If a man is injured he seeks revenge.”

I stopped crying. I asked him against whom I should seek revenge and he said, “My father knows, and he is planning his revenge this minute.”

I said, “It’s my grandfather who was killed and my sisters. I should have a part in the revenge.”

So he took me to his father. Gul Muhammed agreed that I should have a part, and he told me the story of why my grandfather had been assassinated. There was a zamindar, a wealthy landowner, who was cheating his peasants-which is to say he ate food, drank water, and breathed air-but in this case the peasants had somehow found the courage to bring a lawsuit against him, the case landed in the courtroom of Laghari Sahib, and Laghari Sahib had refused the customary bribe and given justice to the peasants, at which point the zamindar, Babur Amir, threatened him aloud in his own courtroom, and Laghari Sahib had thrown him in jail-five days-for contempt of court. Babur Amir had waited and plotted the death of Laghari Sahib. There was a man who worked for Babur Amir and did his dirty work: beatings, shootings, and also bombs, because he had been with the jihad in Kashmir and understood explosives. This man was Salim Malik.

I asked Gul Muhammed how he knew this and he said, in the way you explain something to a young child, “Everyone knows this. There would have been no point to Babur Amir’s revenge if it were not known; also, having it known shows that Babur Amir has no fear of the police or the courts. Thus he can act after this with impunity, and no peasant will ever challenge him again.”

Then I asked why the police didn’t arrest these men for the murders, and he said, “Because Babur Amir is well with the government of Zia, and the government of Zia hated Laghari Sahib so they will do nothing.” He made a gesture encompassing all of us. “But we will not do nothing, oh, no!”

He thought for a while, tapping his bearded chin. “You must stay here in my quarters and keep hidden.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I say so. Wazir will bring you food. I leave tonight, and while I am gone you must not by seen by anyone but him. Say that you understand and will obey!”

I said this, happy to have someone strong in charge of me.

He smiled and patted my head. “Good. When you are older you will know why I do this.”

The next morning, he was gone, Wazir did not know where, except that he had packed his pistol and his Enfield rifle in the sidecar of his ancient BSA motorcycle. A week and a day later I was sleeping when Wazir slipped into my room and awakened me.

“What’s happening?”

“Quick. Get dressed. Wear your Pashtun clothes and take anything you want to take, but make sure you have blankets and warm clothes. One small bag only. We leave tonight.”

I dressed in a black shalwar kameez and put a felt Pashtun hat on my head. I packed a bag: underwear, socks, sweater, a lined rain jacket, boots. And my mother’s knife.

Gul Muhammed was waiting in the courtyard with his motorcycle. He pushed it out into the street and cranked it up, a sound shockingly loud in the night air. I climbed onto the pillion and we were off, through the warren of Anarkali and then past the Mayo Hospital and out onto Railway Road. We crossed through the deserted Landar Bazaar and by a tunnel under the tracks entered a part of the city I had never been in, an area of hulking godowns and small repair shops. Gul Muhammed threaded his motorcycle slowly through alleys where men pounded metal by the light of buzzing fluorescents and hissing gasoline lanterns; the work of Lahore never ends. At last he stopped in front of a godown. He unlocked and lifted a corrugated steel door, walked the idling motorcycle up a ramp, and closed the door behind us with a clang that echoed through the vast inner space of the warehouse. By the light of the motor-cycle’s headlamp I could see towers of crates and jute bags strapped to pallets. He steered the bike through the aisles of merchandise, the thumping motor sounding like a beating heart.

He stopped. Against the wall I could see the bound and gagged figure of a man. Gul Muhammed said, “Babur Amir is dead. I went to his haveli in Gulberg. He was well guarded. Three hundred meters from this house I found a tall tree, a cedar, that provided a view into the courtyard of the haveli. I climbed it and waited. Three days I waited, until Babur Amir came out to kick a ball around the courtyard with his sons. It was a long shot, but I didn’t miss. This animal is Salim Malik, who set the bomb.”

With that, he took his Webley out of the sidecar and handed it to me. I looked into the face of Salim Malik. It seemed to me that the resignation of death was already on it, but at the time I was not the expert I later became. I thought about what my grandfather and my sisters had looked like as they burned in the car, and what they looked like afterward, and what the smell was like. So it was not hard to cock the big pistol, set myself carefully so I wouldn’t get hit in the face by the recoil, and shoot Salim Malik in the head like a good Pashtun.

Gloria gave a small shriek. “You shot him? Oh, my God, how old were you?”

“Around nine. It was no big deal at the time. It was just like playing guns and Hindus with Wazir, which I guess is why those African militias recruit kids as soldiers. We numb up real fast and kill without thought. You want to hear the rest of this?”

She did, and I went on.

An hour later I was stuffed uncomfortably into the sidecar of the motorcycle, along with a twenty-five-kilo bag of rice, plastic sacks of dal, oil and spices and salt, the Enfield with its ammo; a jerrican of water was lashed onto the hull forward of the little windscreen: the commissary and armory of our tiny army. Wazir was on the pillion, leaning back against our luggage. He looked at me with a wild delight. We were going to war, to jihad against the Russians. Gul Muhammed had been brief in his explanation: the infidels had invaded Afghanistan three months ago and all Pashtuns were obliged to heed the call of religion and tribe. Also, it was no longer safe for any of us in Lahore. I recall asking about my mother and how she would find me in Afghanistan, and he’d said war was not the business of women, which seemed a reasonable answer at the time.

So we sped through the night city to the Grand Trunk Road, north out of Lahore toward Peshawar and the border. I was exhausted, and after a while I arranged the dal sacks like beanbag pillows, and fell asleep on them. I recall I awoke once; it must have been near dawn. We had stopped for some reason, and I looked up and into the face of a boy about my own age in a white shalwar kameez. He was attending an allnight roadside tea stall. He smiled and waved and I returned the salute. I thought he envied me my adventure.

We got to Peshawar on the third day after two hundred and fifty miles of hard pounding, half choked by dust and fumes. The city was already full of Afghan refugees from the communist takeover and the brief civil war that followed, but not as crammed as it would be in future, when the war really bit in. Gul Muhammed had an address of a cousin, Bacha Khan, who offered us the customary hospitality. He was a fat man with a long beard, the first fat Pashtun I had ever seen. At the time, as I gathered from the conversations of the men, the resistance was fragmented into half a dozen squabbling parties, each with their own armed force and ideas about the future of the country, but which were temporarily united as the Islamic Unity of Afghan Mujahideen. I obviously didn’t get the religious and political difference between the seven main mujahideen groups, but in the end it didn’t matter much. The clan elders of the Barakzai were going with the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, so that’s where we went too.

The NIFA had a training camp outside of Peshawar in a village called Ali Shawr, so one day we packed up our stuff and went there. The original village had exploded into a vast improvised encampment on flat squishy land on either side of a trickling stream, thousands of people living a pickup kind of life in tents or shelters made of plastic tarpaulins, scrap wood, cardboard, and corrugated tin. Gul Muhammed found a shanty for us in the area occupied by members of his clan, and we slipped into the seething mass like a drop fallen into the sea. They say children are adaptable, and that was how it was for me. After a week or so, my life in the Laghari mansion was like a half-recalled dream; it was as if I had always lived here in the cold and the mud, with a dozen families, our neighbors, living out their lives in our laps, at full volume and odor.

A few days after we arrived, Gul Muhammed made his contacts with the NIFA command and went off to train as a guerrilla. We two boys, to our immense disappointment, discovered that we were to be sent to school at the village madrasa. I went along willingly enough, because they fed you a meal at the school, but Wazir rebelled, the first time I ever saw him defy his father, and he was savagely beaten for it, with an actual camel whip. Wazir was dying to go and kill Russians for God, although he had never seemed to be particularly religious up until then.

Before he left, though, Gul Muhammed formally adopted me into his clan and tribe, so I would have protection and be a real person. It was Wazir who convinced him to do it, a big deal among Pashtuns, so now I had two fathers and a brother.

Then he was gone and Wazir and I went to the school and were more or less looked after by the clan. The teacher was a half-deaf old man named Bazgar, and our education consisted entirely of memorizing the Qur’an, in classical Arabic, which none of us understood. I once asked Teacher Bazgar what it meant and he said, “It’s the word of God, that should be enough for you,” and swatted me for insolence.

Then came the endless winter-we huddled around the fires while old men told us stories of former wars and revenges-and after that the spring, wildflowers lighting up the slopes around the camp with color. When the passes and trails were clear of snow, an air of heightened feeling ran through the camp, for now convoys and caravans could be organized, to move supplies and reinforcements north to battle. Gul Muhammed came to see us one night to say farewell. He was armed, dressed for the mountains in boots, a quilted jacket, and a felt Pashtun cap, and carried an immense backpack.

“Why can’t I go with you?” Wazir complained.

“Because I say not,” his father replied. “Stay here and grow strong. This war will last a long time.” Then he gave instructions about what to do if he should be killed, threading through his vast cousinage in succession, with contingencies: if such a one should die, go to that one, if he should die, then the next. With that, he gave us each a rough embrace and was gone into the night.

There were hundreds of similarly deserted children in that camp, yet we were all cared for in the manner of the Pashtuns. Our clan took care of us, and the clans of the others did the same. We formed wild bands, fighting battles in the rocky hills around the camp, practicing ambush, assault, escape. We hung around the mujahideen training grounds, yearning; we hitched rides into Peshawar and strolled the arms bazaars, ogling the wares like boys my own age in the States did in back rooms of magazine stands; pistols were our Penthouse, rifles our Hustler, weapons of all the world’s armies over nearly a century: Mausers, Garands, Tokarevs, Enfields, Nagants, and, prized above all, the Kalashnikov AK-47, drool-making object! The bazaaris complained that prices were plunging disastrously, weapons were flooding in from all over the world; the Saudis were shipping, the Americans, the Pakistanis most of all. But the prices were still too high for boys with no money at all.

Summer, and the camp was a stove, it became unbearable to sit in a hot courtyard and chant suras, so we ditched school entirely. Refugees from the war continued to pour into the camp, and the crowding became insane, all the better accommodations taken by families with young children. We slept under a sheet of plastic propped up by sticks. In July the monsoon rains came, and the whole camp became a steaming mire. We found work building duckboards for a local guy and did that for a couple of months. We were restless and bored, and one day Wazir came to me saying, “I am tired of this life. We are not of the menial tribes, you and I, and this work disgraces us. But listen: there is a convoy leaving tonight. We can sneak onto one of the trucks and by the time they find us it will be too late. We will be in the jihad.”

“But they’ll send us back.”

“They will not. I have spoken with men who have returned. They use Afghan boys just like us for carrying and for lookouts and for spies. We can do the same.”

Wazir cleverly chose a truck loaded with blankets and medical supplies, or we would have frozen to death on the trip over the mountains. The mujahideen organizations supplied their fighters via a skein of caravan trails from their Pakistani bases, always switching routes to avoid patrols. We went north from Peshawar to Chitral and then took the Dorah Pass into Afghanistan, although at the time we had no idea where we were. It was cold. I was a kid from tropical Lahore and didn’t know what cold was until that trip; winter in the camp had been nothing compared to it. We burrowed down in our nest of blankets in a tight embrace and pissed into jars. The convoy had to make several detours into side canyons and wait while patrols from the government army, the DRA, went by. It took us nearly a week to get to our destination, by which time Wazir and I would’ve fought for the Russians, almost, if they had given us something to eat or drink. We’d only brought enough food for a few days.

Anyway, they found us among the blankets when they unloaded our truck, and we got roughed up a little and cursed, and then we were taken to the leader of this particular band of mujahideen, Murad Habib, who was called the Colonel, because he had been one in the old Afghan army, before the communist coup. He looked us over and poked us to see if we were worth keeping as pack animals. Wazir was fairly well built at fourteen but I was a skinny little thing-I probably didn’t weigh over seventy pounds at the time-and they were going to take him and send me back as baggage with the trucks, but Wazir said he wouldn’t leave me and he told our clan lineage to them, and it turned out that the Colonel was a Barakzai just like us and he was distantly related to Gul Muhammed. So it was decided that we could stay with them and wash pots and carry things and dig holes, but if they ever ran into our father they would dump us with him and let him deal with us.

Wazir became a bearer, which meant that at least he went out on ambushes and raids, but I stayed in our village of Gumban and watched the unit’s sheep. We had a flock of several hundred, for meat and milk and sheepskins, and also a herd of donkeys for haulage. The shepherd was Zorak, an older man, formerly a fighter, who had one eye and one leg. The first day he asked me if I wanted to hear how he lost them and naturally I did and he said he had been an RPG gunner and in the midst of a hot fight with a Russian column, he had fired so many rockets that he had fouled the tube of his launcher, and when that happens the tube kicks back when you shoot the next one and the rear sight rips out your eye. I asked him if it had hurt and he said he hadn’t much felt it until later, but the blood had gummed up his other eye and while he was stumbling around in the open, a Russian machine-gunner had blown off his leg.

He was a friendly enough guy for a Pashtun and seemed glad of my company, and after a few unsuccessful attempts he left my young ass alone and resumed the love of sheep. Every day was the same. We both lived in a one-room stone hut at the edge of the village. At dawn we would eat our breakfast of bread and ewe’s milk and, after morning prayer, feed the donkeys and drive the sheep up to pasture on the slopes of the Babur Valley and pray at noon and eat our lunch of bread and dal, then bring the sheep back at dusk, and pray again. When it snowed, we would feed them on hay and sit around the fire and sing songs and tell stories. Zorak knew the usual tales of kings and their clever daughters, of deos and fairies and man-eating devil-women, and I replied with what I could remember of the Arabian nights and Kipling and the plots of films I had seen. He was particularly fond of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And we sang, to each other at night and to the sheep in their pastures. He knew a lot of traditional Pashto songs, mainly about love, and I responded with renditions of the ghazals I’d heard at Laghari Sahib’s parties. The sheep seemed to like it. Actually, at the time I had a good, clear boy’s voice and Zorak must have said something to someone in authority, because after a while I was invited to the celebrations the unit used to have after successful operations, to sing the ghazals of Ghalib and Mir and Nazir.

The NISA was a comparatively liberal organization, as things went in Pashtunistan. It attracted former Afghan army officers like the Colonel and other educated people. Their religion was the traditional mild Sufi-influenced Islam of the region. They loved music. Some of the younger guys had tape players on which they listened to Pashto pop songs from Pakistan, but the senior people liked the old ghazals and the old way of hanging out on a Thursday evening for a concert. I would come in from the sheepfold, wash, put on my one good shalwar kameez, wrap my turban neatly, and perform to the beat of the tabla and the plinking drone of the rubab, singing to my audience of rough, violent men about hopeless love and the great cosmic questions of life and death. I guess I became a kind of pet, especially of Colonel Habib’s. He would ask for particular ghazals; I remember he liked the one that goes:

We are bound by life and bound by grief,

It is the same binding cord,

Why should we look to be unbound from sorrow

Before the day of death?

Once I asked the Colonel how long he thought the war would last, and without hesitating he said, “Ten years, just like Vietnam,” and then he had to explain to me what Vietnam was and what had happened there. I got a good strategic education from the Colonel; he spent a lot more time with me than colonels typically spend with shepherd boys.

This connection helped ease my loneliness, because aside from Zorak I didn’t talk to anyone for days on end, and often when I was in the high pastures I didn’t even talk to him. Wazir had more or less dropped me, which is to say he would have given his life gladly to defend me, but he was a fighter and I wasn’t. He’d moved up from bearer and now carried an Enfield-this was maybe in the spring of our second year with the mujahideen command-and he treated me with a condescension I found hard to take.

I was a shepherd for something like two and a half years, the first phase of the Russian war. When I started out I was the coddled, maybe even spoiled, child of a wealthy Lahori family and at the end I was a Pashtun shepherd, tough as the roots of a camel thorn, uncomplaining, rainproof, snowproof, uncaring of the cold or the heat, master of the hills. It was the work that did it, I think. It’s no mystery why shepherds have featured so much in the great religions; being out in all weathers, under nothing but the sky, you can feel the eye of God on you all the time, and also the stupidity of the sheep, the constant worry over what they’re getting into, makes you think you should try your hand at fixing the stupidity of men. That, and the land itself, the bony country of the Pashtun: looming hills, red and tan and black above the evergreen forests, and other colors I can’t name, depending on the light and the season; and the softness of the floodplains, their green more gracious and lovely for the contrast with their setting of flint. The white of the apricot trees in spring, and in early summer the whole valley would be red with poppies, and in their midst you could see from the heights the glittering, braided river. And the air of the place, sharp as glass shards in the winter, like breathing live flame in deep summer, and the nights, ear-hissing silent except for the imbecile moaning of the sheep and the eternal wind in the stunted thornbushes, and overhead a million stars wheeling over the black rim of our canyon.

And I hated the Russians for stepping on my land and I hated anyone who wasn’t us, and a month or so before my thirteenth birthday I got my chance to fight them. I started as a bearer for an RPG team, carrying bags full of rockets and booster tubes. On an ambush, I would hang back a little from the team and hand a rocket and a booster to the loader. The RPG-7 is a terrific weapon and guerrilla warfare would be nearly impossible without it, but it has the disadvantage of being fairly slow to reload and of leaving a trail of blue-gray smoke that points right back to the shooter’s position, which means you have to change position after you fire. But it’s also hard to get a one-shot kill on an armored vehicle at any range and so we always had one team with two RPGs; its leader was Mirzal, our best shot with the weapon, and there was a loader, Bohrum Khan, and now I was a bearer.

“Are you bored yet?” I asked Gloria.

“I’m riveted.”

“Why? I wasn’t riveted when I was doing it. War is pretty boring, especially guerrilla war. Most of it is hanging around and waiting for the other guys to send a convoy through so you can blow it up. And hiding. We did a lot of that.”

“Okay, did you do any heroics? Let’s cut to the chase here.”

“Oh, heroics. The problem with heroics is that it all goes down so fast you can hardly remember what happened. Other people have to tell you what you did, after. Why do you want heroics?”

“Women love heroes; it’s the secret shame of women’s lib. We want our precious eggies to get sprayed by guys who can defend us. And also, you have all these scars on you. Don’t you think I’m curious about how you got them? Surely you’ve been down this road before, the seductive powers of the hero and all.”

“Not a lot. I’m not that experienced with women, to tell the truth.”

“What? I thought soldiers were the horniest creatures on earth.”

“Yes, soldiers, but I wasn’t a soldier, I was a mujahid. A Pashtun mujahid. We didn’t mess with the local women. It would’ve torn the jihad apart.”

“So you were, like, celibate for the whole war? All of you?”

“No. There were plenty of sheep. Some of the big shots had boy harems. Others… well, for example, me and Wazir were an item after I became a fighter.”

“You were gay?”

“That’s the wrong language. I loved him and he loved me and we were warriors together. We shared our blankets. It was part of our war. It’s hard to put in an American frame. He was a terrific person, a terrific fighter, much better than me, a real leader and smart as shit. It was very intense, a kind of love-hate thing going on there too.”

“Because you thought he was smarter than you and a better soldier?”

“No, I admired the hell out of him for that. No, it was my mother at first. She sort of took him under her wing, spent a lot of time with him, and I wanted her for myself. “

“Why was she interested in him?”

“I don’t know. We never talked about it. I was embarrassed, I guess, and she didn’t volunteer anything. She was a very strange woman-is, I mean. They wouldn’t-I mean the family wouldn’t-really let her raise me; I was the eldest son of the eldest son, the heir. I guess that made her want to have someone of her own to form. You would’ve thought that Gul Muhammed would’ve objected, but for some reason he didn’t. They had a funny relationship too, practically never talked, but he would stare at her when she walked by, like she had two heads. I never could figure it out. So then later, because I could sing and knew a lot of poetry, ghazals and Rahman Baba and all that, I became a favorite of the Colonel, and Wazir got crazy jealous.”

“Why, did you do the Colonel too?”

“Of course. He was a great man. It was an honor to be asked. And Wazir found out about it and we had a knock-down drag-out fight and he kicked my ass. That was just before the Tsawkey operation-”

“Wait, what happened to him?”

“Wazir? I don’t know. If he survived the war and the Taliban afterward, he’s still up there. He might even be fighting against us.”

“How come you left?”

“I’ll get to that. Do you want to hear about my heroic deed?”

“After I pee,” she said.

I was still humping rockets for Mirzal and Bohrum Khan. We’d been hitting the outlying posts pretty regularly, shooting them up, killing DRA and stealing weapons, but now the Colonel wanted to take out the main post, which was set up in the two-story brick high school in Tsawkey town. We had about fifty mujahideen, with Kalashnikovs, Enfields, RPGs, and two PK light machine guns. They had a company of Democratic Republic of Afghanistan troops and a few Russian advisers.

We went in just before sunrise. I was part of a team under a commander named Sahak, twenty-one men and a boy, me, tasked to attack the south side of the school, and there were other teams going to hit the north and east sides simultaneously. I was carrying a satchel of rockets and boosters, a bag of Russian hand grenades, and an Enfield slung across my back, a load that weighed apporoximately as much as I did.

We had good cover in woods up until about a hundred meters off, where the enemy had cleared off the trees and brush. Our target was the heavy machine gun they had mounted on the roof, one of two up there in sandbagged positions. They also had a battery of 82mm Podnos mortars up there, so it was a pretty tough nut. We spread out along the tree line, and Mirzal, Bohrum, and I sneaked out and set up on a little rise a couple of dozen meters out. We were just aiming our first round when someone in one of the other attack groups must have stumbled or maybe he was just an asshole, of which we had a good number in our ranks, but there was a burst of fire off to our flank and immediately parachute flares shot up from the school and it was like we were in the movies, I could see the hairs in Mirzal’s beard. He took aim, though, at the bulk of the huge machine gun and I dropped to the ground, and there was this enormous noise and something heavy and wet dropped on me. I struggled out from under it and found it was the top half of Mirzal’s body, headless and trailing guts. He’d taken a full burst and the 12.7 had killed Bohrum too.

But the RPG was intact, all loaded, and when the flare went out and the rockets from the next one were just tracing a red pencil up into the night, I picked up the launcher without much thought and fired it at the machine gun. It was my first shot, but I’d seen it done often enough; the main thing is to remember that the rocket tends to fly into the wind and not away from it like a bullet. As soon as I shot I started running toward the school, because I knew I was dead if I stayed there and dead if I tried to make it back to the trees, and as it happened my shot just clipped the steel shield that protects a DShK machine gun from small-arms fire, and it exploded and one of the guns on the roof was out of action.

I heard a cheer behind me as the mujahideen swarmed out of the wood, and then the mortars started up and bombs fell among them but I didn’t look back. I just ran toward the school and a door in the wall. Other DRA were shooting down from the roof and out of loopholes in the walls. I could hear the snap of rounds going by and felt a sharp blow on my side, but I figured it was from the tip of one of the rockets, it was always happening, and the other men were pouring in fire at the guys shooting at me so I stopped, knelt, loaded my tube, and shot one at the door. It blew down and I ran up to the doorway and pulled out a grenade and tossed it in, wondering why the grenade was all slippery, and then I dropped my tube and the bag of rockets and went into the building with my rifle.

I discovered I’d been dumb lucky, because the defenders had just been setting up a defensive position with a PK machine gun behind a pile of office desks in the corridor on the other side of the door just as my rocket hit, and the blast had killed or wounded half a dozen men. One of them tried to get up and I shot him with my rifle, my first face-to-face kill, not counting my boyhood revenge. The machine gun seemed all right so I picked it up and draped the belt of rounds over my shoulder and another one around my neck like a fashionable scarf. The PK is just a glorified Kalashnikov and weighs about fifteen pounds, so compared to what I usually carried I was floating on air. I went through a door and down a corridor. Three men came racing around a corner, pulling on equipment. They seemed surprised to see me and skidded to a halt, open-mouthed, and I shot them down.

Then I heard the sound of lots of men coming, pounding boots, so I ducked in a door, which turned out to be a stairway. I went up the stairs, past the second floor and up to the roof. Just as I got to the last flight up, the roof door opened and a man in Soviet camo gear appeared and yelled something. He was surprised to see me too, I guess.

After I shot him I stepped over his body and out onto the roof. There were the mortarmen loading rounds like crazy and an officer with night goggles standing by the parapet behind some sandbags yelling ranges and azimuths, and the other DShK machine gun was blasting away. So I set myself against the edge of the doorway I’d just come through and with one long burst shot everyone on the roof. There was still firing coming from the north side of the building, and I looked down and saw that the DRAs had set up a sandbagged position in front of the north door and they were holding up our guys attacking from that side, so I dropped a couple of grenades down on them. I was feeling a little bushed by then, so after making sure that everyone was dead and shooting them if they weren’t, I sat down against the sandbags near the DShK gun and checked my weapon. My PK was nearly out of ammunition but I had lots of grenades. I remember seeing that the grenade bag was covered in blood, but it somehow didn’t occur to me that it was mine.

I got up and began to futz around with the DShK, and figured out how to fire it, and did fire a short burst just for fun. As I was wondering what was keeping the rest of my people I heard sounds of boots and voices on the stairwell and out walked two DRA soldiers carrying crates of mortar bombs. They stopped and looked at the scene on the roof, stunned, I guess, and I turned the big machine gun around and blew them both to rags. Then I ran to the head of the stairs and threw a bunch of grenades down there, and the explosions must have set off the mortar bombs because the whole roof erupted like a volcano and knocked me on my ass.

When I came to again I was in bed back in our village and Wazir was sitting next to my charpoy holding my hand. There were tears in his eyes. He asked me to forgive him for his envy. He said the Prophet, on whom be peace, taught that envy eats up good actions as fire eats up wood. I asked him why he was envious of me-I had been a shepherd boy and a mere bearer while he had fought the jihad with arms and was accounted brave-and he answered, because the Colonel favored you. And then he went into a long story about something that had happened five hundred years ago, about the envy between the son and the adopted son of Ghoughusht and how this had brought calamities on their tribe, and this was the same thing and he was ashamed. He said he thought he could own me like a pet, which was very wrong, for all belong to God alone, especially we mujahideen, and this is proven by what you did with God’s help two days ago; the Pashtuns will sing of it for a thousand years, how one boy captured a fort by himself and slew sixty men.

So I forgave him and said I loved him above all men and we were reconciled. It was interesting that I’d been out of it for two whole days. I didn’t recall anything that happened after I fired the RPG, and it took days for me to recollect what I’d done. I’d taken a round through the flesh on my right side, my first battle scar. After that, people treated me with a kind of awed respect, since it was clear to them that I was under the special protection of God, or else I never could have captured a strongpoint almost single-handed and wiped out the better part of a company of soldiers. But the fact is that things like that happen from time to time in combat, call it God or inexplicable luck. You read, say, Audie Murphy’s Medal of Honor citation, and it sounds like someone made it up. For a whole hour this little guy holds off an entire company of Wehrmacht infantry, supported by six tanks, while standing upright in a burning vehicle firing a.50-caliber machine gun-and survives. He was eighteen when he did that. I was thirteen when I took the high school in Tsawkey. It makes no sense.

“Nothing makes any sense if you look at it that way,” she said, when I’d laid all that out. “Why are we here? Why is there air? Is that where you got this scar?” She stroked it gently.

“No,” I said. “Tsawkey’s on the other side. That’s a shrapnel wound.”

“Is there another story?”

“Yes, but even I’m getting bored. And it’s not very interesting. It was near the end of the war, a big operation. I was hiding behind a wreck. I shot a rocket at a Russian tank; the tank shot back. I should’ve died, but I didn’t. I was out for ten days and woke up in a hospital with Gul Muhammed and Wazir holding a hand each. They told me I had been dead but came back to life according to the will of God, and I said God can do all things and asked how the battle had turned out. Gul Muhammed said it had been a great victory, with the greatest loot ever captured. The Russians were pulling out.”

“And that was it, huh?” she said. “The end of the war. Or that war. How did you get back to the States?”

“That’s another story,” I said. “Time to sleep.”

“Time to go,” she said, hopping out of bed.

“You’re not staying?”

“No, I have a shift that starts in about four hours. I’ll barely have time to shower and change. Call me a cab, will you?”

I did and watched her hop into her clothes, all business now; whatever intimacy we had generated with our bodies and our talking was gone. It was an American hookup, about as serious as having a pleasant seatmate on a long-haul flight, and I’ve never gotten used to it.

Why don’t you look at me properly?

Why do you magnify my suffering?

The torturer flays for a reason.

What’s yours, beloved?

Ask your fierce eyes

Why they cut me to pieces.

Rahman Baba. We used to sing that one in the jihad as we marched through the dry hills. This came out of a culture where marriages are arranged and women are cattle. It makes you think.

After Gloria left, I slept for a few hours and then washed and dressed in my traveling clothes, packed up a small bag, and went downstairs.

My father was in the kitchen in white shirt and tie with the Post and a cup of tea. He must have heard me moving around upstairs because he’d made me a cup, strong, milky, and sweet.

I sat down and he reached into the pocket of his suit jacket where it hung behind his chair and handed me a thick envelope.

“Here is your ticket and your Pakistani passport and enough cash to keep you for a few days. You can always get more from Nisar.”

I stowed it in my bag and said, “How are we doing?”

He removed his horn-rims and rubbed his eyes. He looked tired but brighter somehow, like he was plugged into a higher energy channel.

He said, “Well, we have laid the bait, as you know. The calls have been fabricated as we discussed.”

“Jafar went for it?”

“No, of course not. I wouldn’t dream of involving Jafar. He is a government man, and only family by marriage. No, Rukhsana sent her eldest to Kahuta and he borrowed his father’s cell phone and made the call to her.”

“This is Hassan?”

“Yes. He’s turning out to be quite the conspirator. A very credible imitation of his father’s voice.”

“Who’s in on it?” I asked.

“Just Rukhsana and her boys-and Nisar, of course. And us.” He gave a sigh and put his glasses back on and looked at me through them, his owl look. He said, “I will tell you, Theo, if a month ago you had told me I would be involved in such a conspiracy, breaking the laws of my own and my host nation, with the intent to bring about a military invasion of Pakistan-well, I would have called you a lunatic. And now I have done these things-me, Farid Bashir Laghari, full professor of law, LLD, by God.”

“Why are you doing it then, if it bothers you?”

“You ask me why? You, who wept like a child in my arms when you thought she was in danger, who has not wept in my presence since you were small enough to carry? Because your mother makes me insane and has since the moment I first laid eyes on her in Central Park. Who could have known I would have such a weakness? I was always a good boy, studious, obedient-my God, how obedient I was! Nisar was always the rascal and Seyd was the spoiled baby, and I was the model son, I assure you. And suddenly, in this foreign park I am in the midst of a ghazal, I am Háfiz, I am Mir,” and he recited in Urdu:

“From the instant of the heart’s creation,

the body has been tinder,

so fell this spark,

the mantle burst into flames,

now like the light of the full moon

the fire has spread all over me.”

I said in the same language, “Wracked with madness, the only sound the rattle of my chains,” which is a line from the same poem.

He smiled. “Yes, and I thought I could become sane again, by bringing her into my home. I had a fantasy, a fantasy that by some miracle she might become a good Muslim wife.”

“That was always a long shot.”

“Yes, but hope is a mighty drug. You know the line-the same poem, in fact-about ridding the terrified gazelle of wild despair? Those who tamed her had done a miracle. I thought I had done it. We had a son, you, and I thought she was settling in. I knew she didn’t love me as I loved her, but I imagined that as we grew older-”

He stopped and looked away from me. Maybe he was stunned by the memories. I was stunned myself; I’d never had a conversation like this with my father.

I said, “But she ran away.”

“Yes. Can you imagine what it was like for the son of B. B. Laghari to have his wife run off and travel across half of Asia with that faqir? And then to write about it? My mother absolutely commanded me to divorce her. As you know, divorce is very easy in Islam, you say a few words, and it is done, and there is no question that it is the father who gets the children, but I could not. I simply could not do it. It would have strangled my heart. And so I waited and thought evil, unworthy thoughts. I prayed she would get into trouble out there and I would get a frantic call at three in the morning, Oh, Farid, come save me with your law books and your money! But the call never came, and then she became famous out of my disgrace, and then she went away again, on the haj, and this time she did something that scandalized even my father. Traipsing around Central Asia disguised as a man was bad enough, but on the haj! She had endangered the position of the whole family, so my father sent her into exile. And finally came the bomb and the catastrophe and I broke down and you vanished and what did I do? As soon as I recovered I could think of nothing else but finding her.”

“In Zurich.”

“Yes. Isn’t it remarkable that we have never discussed these events, as father to son? I am ashamed of myself, but you know, Sonia draws a pall of secrecy behind her like a dark cloak.”

“Yeah. I’m not entirely sure how she managed to find me. She was always pretty vague.”

“Well, I can barely help you there. I was not a party to those doings; I was only the father, after all! But it happened very quickly. After I found her, I begged her to let me stay with her, I was pitiable, crying and all that, I said that I had lost everything; was she going to abandon me as well? And so on. Pitiable! My mother, you can imagine, was insane with fury. She cut me off entirely. I could not work in Switzerland, but Sonia still had some money left, so we were not absolutely destitute. We had a flat in the Kreuzstrasse, we took the trams in the morning, she to the Jung Institute, I to the Zentralbibliothek to do research for an article on international law I was trying to write, and we existed that way-I won’t exactly call it living-like the war refugees you see on television. I did all the shopping and the housework, me who had never made a bed in his life! I made her tea, I massaged her feet, I thought if I turned myself into a servant she would acknowledge me, she would see my suffering and turn toward me with love. It was all I could think of doing.”

“Did she? Turn to you with love?”

He was silent for a moment and then slowly nodded his head. “Yes, in her fashion, she did. It took some time, and I think that what she was doing, the therapy and all that, must have helped. I thought we might be able to repair things and start to live again. So some years passed. She completed her training and was certified as a Jungian analyst. I applied for jobs in the States, and the U.K., and so forth. I published a number of articles on international law that were well received and gave me a small reputation in this field. And then the American came to our flat. This was in 1987, late in the year. Or, at least, I assume he was an American; I only heard his voice in the foyer. So I am waiting there in our living room, and Sonia comes in with tears in her eyes, and says, Oh, Farid, he’s alive! Theo is alive! This man had apparently found you in Afghan i stan. Of course I was full of questions. Tears were in my eyes too. I wanted to rush out and question this man, whoever he was, but she stopped me; she said I must not tell anyone about this. It was a condition.”

“A condition?”

“Yes, the gentleman in question had told her he could arrange to have you taken from Afghan i stan provided the whole thing was kept completely dark.”

“And you went along with that?”

“It was not a question of going along. Before I could say two words, she had taken her coat and disappeared from the flat. The next time I heard from her it was two months later, and she was calling from Washington, and she had you with her. So I forgave her that as well, and we made a life for ourselves here in this city, although she cannot bear to be with me for more than a few months at a time.”

“But she stays married to you. That’s something to think about.” As I said that I was wondering, Who was the American in Zurich in 1987? It was something I planned to ask Sonia, if and when I got to see her again.

“Yes!” said Farid. “She does love me, in her way. When she’s here, when we travel, she gives me the fullness of her presence, and it’s only then that I feel truly alive. When she’s gone, when I’m here alone, being looked after by a housekeeper and eating my meals in restaurants, I say to myself, Farid, you are keeping a hawk; don’t expect her to lay eggs like a chicken.”

“You could get another wife. It’s one of the advantages of the true faith.”

My father shrugged and smiled a little sheepishly. “Yes, I could, but I am too modern for that. I’m almost as deracinated as you. Tell me, do I seem different to you, since this all started?”

“Yes. You seem like a completely different person.”

“I feel like a different person. I find it hard to concentrate on my classes; I can no longer participate in university politics and all that rubbish. I ask myself why, and I can only arrive at one answer. At last the call has come! She needs my help. I feel that this is what I was meant for, my purpose on earth. You know, sometimes I feel as if I am one of those insect species where the male is tiny and the female gigantic. He lives for one single act, and when it is over he dies. But who knows what he feels in his brief moment of importance? Perhaps it is a concentrated ecstasy that, if translated into human terms, would rival the satisfactions of an unusually long and extraordinarily sensual life.”

He stared at me, trying to read what was in my eyes. He asked, “You don’t think this is perverse? To risk everything, perhaps even prison, for this?”

“No, I feel exactly the same way,” I answered, “and I’ve spent a lot less time with her than you have. It’s just Sonia. Also, sometimes you have to do crazy things for love.”

He smiled then, a kind of smile I don’t recall ever seeing on my father’s face. He said, “Yes, at long last we’re both turning into Sufis. I expect your mother will be quite pleased.”

And then, after a second or so, we both laughed like maniacs for a good long time.