An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (21 page)

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.

Abdullah’s seal, on the ration book of the kidnapped Afghan doctor

“S
o 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.”