An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (31 page)

S
eizing the charred stump of a rocket bomb, a Mujahid raised it high above his head and turned to face the Young Man, his eyes shining fiercely as if to say: This is why you came! Now look, look! Your business here is to see! See this, and understand it; never forget it!
and the Young Man stood looking at the man’s leathery reddish-brown face, the cheeks drawn up in effort as he held the bomb high, the parted lips, the even white teeth, the graying hairline just below the double-lipped prayer cap, the shadow of the bomb falling from shoulder to shoulder, those upraised arms in which the bomb casing lay khaki and black and orange-rusted, rusted through in places so that the Young Man could see the skeleton grid beneath the shell (it must have been a dud), and the bomb hung eternally in the air and the Mujahid’s cotton shirt hung down and the river flowed clear and shallow behind him, leaving undisturbed the white rocks that lined it, and the hills were tan with dry grass, green-spotted here and there with a bush or a tree, and the other Mujahideen had also turned and were staring at the Young Man as the bomb stared at him and he stared back and said to himself: Whether or not I can do anything useful, at least I will remember.

In so many frames of my Afghanistan Picture Show I see the men in wildly various caps grinning at their guns and cradling them, uplifting them among the tree-pocked mountains, loving them, pointing them, holding them like guitars, the bullets long and gold and heavy together in cartridge belts sweeping down shoulder and chest; each laughing at the sight the others made, each looking at his Kalashnikov or Lee-Enfield or Springfield with shy fondness because the weapon was a dream like a son was a dream;
^e
the weapon was a dream of revenge.

And I also see those Pakistanis and Afghans leaning forward into the tape recorder, talking and talking emphatically, some hoping, some desperate, some without expectations, just helping me to understand. —What a daunting thing RECOGNITION is.

I
t rained there every day at a little past twelve. The result was to raise more dust. It always stank of dust there, a metallic, choking, dirty taste in the throat like you might expect to get after kissing someone who’d worked for twenty years in a tombstone company or a cement factory. Everybody coughed all the time. It was no wonder, the Young Man thought, that Pushtu speech has so many
t
’s and
s
’s and
kh’
s; if you are going to hack, why not make use of it? Maybe people with the same disease ought to get together to communicate with their spots.

Every time it rained the rooster crowed.

The men sat around in their baggy white shirts and trousers, spitting.

The Young Man hated the flies. There were always dozens of them on him, with at least two or three on his lips and eyes.

To console him, Poor Man went and got him some peaches. —“Go back to Peshawar,” he said. “Tell them, send strong American.”

“You want I go to Peshawar?” said the Young Man angrily.

“I want you see the fight. I want you go to city, see dead
Roos
. But you”—he pointed to the Young Man’s legs—“no good.”

Across the river gorge, a few clouds lay over a grubby reddish hill. There were trees on the hill; there was agricultural terracing; there were flies there, and a smell of dust, bomb debris and one tiny spring. There was a wide and easy path up the hill, but the guerrillas told him that an
alootooka
^f
had flown over it and dropped butterfly mines there. So to climb the hill you had to ascend a steep slope of loose rock. On the summit of the hill were many trees, and empty Russian food tins. It was here that the war zone really began. Looking discreetly through the tree branches, you could see Afghanistan ahead, a desert dream of sand dunes and hazy dunes spread out far below, for this was the edge of the mountains. It was like a map that kept unrolling in the sun, with
its bright baked canyons and oases and villages showing forth on the plains as if they had been painted there.

To the left of where the Young Man stood, the hill continued on to a ridge that made a right angle and ended in a spur, like an arm and fist extended from a man’s shoulder. The ridge was bare. It was very dangerous to go out on it. It had been torn by rocket shells. It was explained to the Young Man that if you went out on it, the
Roos
could see you.

Just on the horizon were six black dots in the middle of a village.

Suleiman guided the Young Man’s eyes to them. —
“Roos,”
he said. The Young Man peered through his telephoto at 600 mm. —Sure enough. Six tanks. —He looked at them for a while. Later he and Suleiman went down to the spring, and Suleiman gathered for him little sour yellow peaches and the
tutan
fruits, although it was still Ramazan and Suleiman could not eat. Suleiman smiled happily to see him eat.
—“Malgurae,”
the Young Man said. —Friend.
—“Malgurae,”
Suleiman said, and gripped his hand.

He had finally gotten to like the food. The morning after they had arrived, Poor Man had made him breakfast with his own hands: two eggs fried for a few seconds in very hot oil (so what he had, then, was a glass bowl full of hot oil, with the eggs diffused through it in curds of greater or lesser size) and a hunk of bread to eat it with, salted cucumber slices and tea saturated with sugar. It all tasted good. He was very hungry.

Every day a boy sneaked him dried apricots and
tutans
beneath his armload of kitchen onions. The Young Man took himself off to eat them. In midafternoon the Commander in Blue, Poor Man’s lieutenant, would fix him beef kebab and sweet green tea. An old man brought him a double handful of almonds. Later he found out that they were not almonds after all, but the nutlike kernel of the
zwardailoo.
^g

“Much rain tomorrow?” he asked the Commander in Blue. Poor Man had gone into the
chakar
to meditate and pray.

“Kum-kum,”
said the Commander in Blue. “
Leg-leg
. Fifty-fifty.”

He went up to the top of the red hill again. The tanks were still
there. From nowhere he felt a hand on his shoulder. A Mujahid smiled at him. There was always someone on watch here. —The Mujahid asked him to take his picture. When he obliged, the Mujahid was very happy and honored. It did not matter that he would never see the picture. He stood there with his Kalashnikov and smiled. Later he gathered a bunch of wild grapes for the Young Man. The Mujahid’s lips were chapped with dry dusty thirst, for it was still Ramazan, but he insisted that the Young Man eat the grapes there. (If he ate them, he would not be as good as the Mujahideen were. If he did not eat them, friendship would be insulted.) They tasted so sweet, so refreshing; he ate them and was ashamed.

On the safe side of the hill, just below the crest, was a line of shallow pits. Against the tanks a semicircular wall of stones had been
constructed in each pit. In the event of an attack, Poor Man told him, the men would get into these pits and begin to shoot. A single gunship helicopter could probably have killed everyone in the pits. But they were all the Mujahideen had.

One morning the air of laziness disappeared from the camp. All morning the men cleaned their weapons and loaded them, soberly, but in good spirits.
^h
There was no wasteful shooting off of cartridges.

Down by the Young Man’s
charpoy
, Poor Man and the Commander in Blue sat on a mat in a circle with some new arrivals who had brought cases of bombs. With them also was a commander with whom the Young Man had eaten dinner in the tree-house the previous night. He wore flashy rings and bird ornaments; his face was made up. He carried with him little balls of colored sugar, in a hashish box. He gave the Young Man a handful of them. When he posed for a picture, the Commander in Blue made him put his ornaments aside, which made him crestfallen. Later, when the Commander in Blue was gone, the Flashy Commander winked at the Young Man and posed for another picture.

Poor Man was talking slowly, fiddling with a rocket launcher. The Commander in Blue, who had just thumbprinted some new recruits, was studying a letter which one of them had given him. Poor Man seemed abstracted. His round face looked up smiling sometimes, but then his eyes flickered down again to the rifle he was cleaning, or to the message that he’d already read. He was a pudgy man, graying a little, who, unlike the grandly gesturing Mujahideen commanders whom the Young Man had met at the General’s, did not seem impressive. Poor Man had been sick to his stomach during the journey from Pakistan. Every hour or two he stopped to vomit, but that had never kept him from returning to the head of his line of men (who never
waited for him), leading them at a steady, rapid walk, with his arms serenely folded across his chest. Within a few minutes he would be so far ahead as to be out of sight, and they caught up with him only when he paused impatiently for them, or when he was sick again. He said very little. His men honored him. They carried a bottle of rose-petal Sharbet syrup which only he could drink. In the high passes, he poured a little of the syrup into a snowball and ate it, smiling. Sometimes in the morning Poor Man looked very pale, and then the Mujahids massaged his back. But when it came time to go, he was never anywhere but in front. —The sunshine was white and brown as Poor Man and the Commander in Blue sat in state, and Poor Man flexed his toes, turning a cartridge slowly round and round in his hand, and the cursive on the green N.L.F. banner above his head was like swords, crowns, wriggling snakes, crossed ribbons, and the Commander in Blue sat dreamily in the half-darkness of the doorway, and the books shone snowy white in the sun.

Elias, the malik of the village nearby, came up the trail to the camp, leaning on his staff. He took his cap off, brushed away the flies from his baldness, put his cap on again, picked up his staff, and put it down … He sat on the mat with the others. He leaned forward and spoke. Now several men were speaking excitedly at once. Old Elias shook his head. —“ Qur’an,” he said. —Poor Man’s eyes flicked back and forth slowly.

Poor Man signed a book slowly, carefully, as yesterday he had done with the new party membership cards. A young boy leaned on a gun sternly, then rose as Poor Man reached to take his hand, put his hand on the stamp pad, and entered his fingerprint in the register book. The boy looked proud. Every man smiled at him; every man was like the man in the white skullcap, whose cheeks were wrinkled into long laugh lines as he stood cleaning his rifle, the stock braced against his belly with one hand, oil can in the other, and the stained awning covered the others who sat talking quietly on their mats and Poor Man sat against the wall, watching with eyes that gave and took.

Poor Man seemed more relaxed now. The talk was slow—and then abruptly he ordered away the Mujahids sitting by the Young Man’s side on the
charpoy
.

The Flashy Commander stretched, got up, and put his sandals on. He winked at the Young Man and chewed a ball of sugar.

Poor Man said something about guns, and everyone laughed. He and Malik Elias gripped a Kalashnikov from opposite ends, inspecting it, and then he entered a note in his book. Someone handed him another gun. He looked it up and down very slowly, and then fingerprinted the next recruit.

It was half past seven in the morning now. The flies were coming out strongly. The battle was set for nine.

Poor Man took a cartridge and straightened it with a pair of pliers. —Was that safe? the Young Man wondered. He knew nothing about guns. It reminded him of the way the Mujahideen used hair tonic as lip balm, because it smelled like peaches and was thick and yellow. They wouldn’t believe him when he translated the label for them.