An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (14 page)

“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.

Gunshot wound

“S
o, 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.