An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (5 page)

The world outside blurred in the sunlight, in the same way that a streetlamp, seen through tears, becomes a bright, vague star; and this lack of definition seemed to me a
force
with a self, swelling until it pushed against my windowpane, halted at first by the smooth, cold surface, but waiting there, growing stronger and more determined, until it was able to seep in through some edge-crack. My desk, my schoolbooks and the few toys which I had not yet given up slowly became enveloped in its luminous sparkle; the closet’s black mouth filled with it; and then it flowed around me from three sides, and into me. Charged with it, I began to forget the cues and sensations of health, as in health I could not imagine myself as feeling sick, nor could I have much empathy for my sister Julie when she had the measles, nor keep from getting angry at my teacher when she did not come in that day and we had to have a substitute. The idea of a world beyond the window, which was now a translucent slab of light, or for that matter of any other possibility than that of lying in my bed immobile, became as dry and strange as some ontological argument of the Middle Ages, and by degrees ever less likely, until when at mid-morning, my mother came in to bring me a cup of tea or some soup, I refused politely, in the same way that I would have done if she’d come to ask whether I would be willing to study law
at the university. This inability to grasp my own state of existence of the day before would have possessed me so much that by midafternoon, when my mother came in to read to me, I no longer shifted my position beneath the blankets at all, but lay absolutely still in the hot faintness of my malady as though I were one of those people one reads about in old books who are always getting becalmed in the tropics.

As soon as I was old enough to read by myself I stopped having my mother read to me at night, because I always disagreed with my sister as to what should be read to us that evening; and it was so much better for me to read what I wished while Julie sat on my mother’s lap and listened to her reading from
Just So Stories
or a poem from
A Child’s Garden of Verses
(both of which I now found childish) in her slow, soft voice; and when I was sick my mother would simply buy me a book, such as
Captains Courageous
, which I was too proud to ask her to read to me. But when I did still like having my mother read everything to me, and I was absorbed by poems like the one about the fight between the gingham dog and the calico cat, or the one that described a voyage to Africa, in which the traveler sees the knotty crocodile of the Nile (but I used to think that it was the N
AUGHTY
C
ROCODILE
that had eaten people up and so must be spanked), and he finds the toys of the old Egyptian boys and all the other things which rhyme—there was still one poem which I dreaded. It was called “The Land of Counterpane,” and it recounted the fantasy of a child who is sick and abed with his toy soldiers. This “Land of Counterpane” is simply the topography of the wrinkled and up-thrust blankets; and the child marches his soldiers up and down the quilt-patterned hills, skirmishes them on whatever rare plains there may be, and sets up ambushes and rescues at the mouths of little vales formed by pinching the sheets into contours of sufficient exactitude. My mother could never understand why it was that I so disliked this poem,
^*
but, accepting my detestation as she would have
accepted one of my father’s pronouncements on some mechanical matter, she did not read the poem to me, and I felt grateful, dreading the sight of the very poem that preceded it as my mother slowly turned the pages, which were as colorful as butterflies’ wings; and feeling the smug contentment of one who has arrived alive, most bones intact, after a session or two on the rack, when we were safely a couple of poems beyond. The truth of the matter, which I was always ashamed to explain, was that the image of the wrinkles terrified me, I having just become aware of the correlation between the wrinkles on the faces of my grandparents and the fact that they were going to die within the next several decades; and once I had been prevailed upon to accept the fact of my own death, I started feeling my face every day for wrinkles, knowing that one day they would come; and I watched my parents closely, noticing with horror the ever-lessening resemblance between my mother and her bridal picture in the family album, and the fact that my father’s hair was slowly graying; and when I lay in bed all day, the eerie luminescence of my sickness in me and all about me, my inability to recall my healthy state in any real sense made the wrinkles of my own “Land of Counterpane” seem a menacing
memento mori
.

B
ut I wanted to go to Antarctica. In New England there was the snow and the woods, but it was gloomy among the trees and when I went sledding with Julie we would always crash into old stone walls. Antarctica sounded much better; my father told me that hardly anyone lived there. I imagined a sunny space of snow, a smoothness of ice that sparkled blue and green. There were penguins, of course. Icebergs moved through the ocean like ships, and far away could be seen jumping porpoises, and I could build snow castles and have my own ice-cream mine. One needed a parka to live there, but it was not too cold, especially when the sun was out in the afternoons and the ice was like a mirror. I would come out of school sometimes in February or March,
almost understanding fractions. Those were warm days for winter; the snow was a little sticky, and it packed perfectly. They were building tall snow sculptures on the green. On my way home I walked past fields with the grass coming up golden through the snow, and that was territory belonging to Antarctica.

W
hen I looked out the window of our new house the yard was just like a photograph. The trees and shrubs were various shades of green against the yellow-brown lawn (which I had just mowed). The sky was cloudless, naturally. Other houses in the neighborhood maintained the still solidarity of the nouveaux riches. I had a plenitude of time, and time being, like all things which have been thought on and settled, value-free, I could, I suppose, have made those free afternoons and evenings into delightful baskings in supra-conscious temporality as well as I did make them into hours of boredom and horror.

A
fter some discussion, my friend and I agreed to put two hours’ worth of coins in the parking meter. It was a hot day, and neither of us thought that we would want to stay any longer than that.

“Should I lock my door?” I said.

“Yes, please,” my friend said.

We walked over to the ornamental fountain where the demonstration was scheduled to begin, and children came up to give us pamphlets. The man with the bullhorn said that if we were united we would never be defeated. The shouting procession began. Nobody saw us. Sweat was in our eyes. My friend and I walked listlessly. We were both feeling very tired. After two blocks we went back to the car.

I
t is part of the fragmentation of life that after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan I wanted to go there. It sounded like a treasure-trove of nightmares. Allow me to quote briefly from the
Encyclopædia Britannica
to set my expectations’ scene:

It all sounded quite interesting, especially since I had just realized that open space was not in fact the life-pervaded medium which I had imagined. The softness of blown grass or willows or evergreens is not a genuine softness, because gravity and death make all living things hard. We do not all have skeletons, of course, for in marine environments particularly, where both of these rather stern considerations are harder to keep sight of in that hazy green light, any competent researcher can find the octopi, say, or the many phyla of benthic worms which do seem to manage without, but we are given a clue, by virtue of the documented failures of arthropoda and cartilaginous fishes, that all is
not
well nonetheless. And indeed, on consideration we see that even an octopus (most marvelously developed eyes of any of the invertebrates, said my biology teacher, Dr. Mawby) often lives and hides in a nice hard little
GROTTO
or
CORAL FORMATION
somewhere. It follows from my presentation that we are (all of us, vegetables, protists and animals alike) members of a great fraternity of scavengers—that we are either patches of mold or ants crawling through the fissures of some immense decaying skull: a familiar central range of mountains, their contours almost memorized now after long nights of study in the desert, eyes aching over the textbook … a series of deep ravines and broken ridges, the lowest of which, especially toward the west, are naked in aspect because we have picked them clean … a dry, invigorating atmosphere, at least where we are, in our bone-ivory tower built some distance above that rather creepy-looking eye socket (please, God, don’t let
that
be on Dr. Mawby’s exam): in short, the Land of Counterpane.

Sitting at my bleached college desk one summery evening, waiting to graduate on Sunday, I looked out the window, which was hung with
white drapes, and could see only the night leaves (back-lit by streetlights) and the articulated branches from which they fanned like the skeleton of a hand. Everything was quiet, and I finally closed my eyes, sustained by the humidity that impinged on marine benthic organisms as currents bearing to eager gill slits the dissolved nutrients of rotting things in their richness—and that brushed, too, about the lonely corpse of that Russian cosmonaut, faintly crackling between the stars, as that scientifically undetectable but nonetheless palpable Ether that everybody had once believed in, and its swirlings made the frost sparkle now and then beneath his cracked and darkened helmet—what was his name?—as he circled round and round the deserts and poles of the world in a people’s soviet socialist tin can. —Had this really happened, or did it come from a science-fiction book I’d read? I didn’t even know that much.

“I
still don’t understand why you want to go to Afghanistan,” my father said. “I guess I’ll never understand it.”

Actually it was very simple. I just wanted to comprehend what had happened there. Then I would put myself at someone’s service. I meant to be good, and was prepared to do good.

In my notebook, on the page of questions to be answered, I wrote:
Is it possible that the invasion will be beneficial in the long run (increasing literacy through compulsory schooling, etc.)?
For it was and is my habit to take everything at face value first.

I had never been to the Soviet Union, although I had always wanted to see Tashkent with its fountains and roses, Gorki, Leningrad, Western Siberia (“the land is fabulously rich in reindeer and luxurious furs”)… So it was possible that face value was honest value, that this multinational republic had succeeded in ending starvation, in making books available to all, in giving women a fairer chance (
we
could not even pass the Equal Rights Amendment!), and that the Afghans, too, could hope someday to serve on the Supreme Soviet in their national costumes—and why shouldn’t Afghan women be granted formal equality? —But maybe that consideration did not apply in Afghanistan; maybe wearing the veil was what was right there. If so, the Soviet re-educators should leave them alone. —And what about this business of “fighting religion in earnest”? I did not much like that. It seemed wrong to strike at someone else’s faith (if, indeed, that was what the Soviets were doing, for again our newspapers might be distorting things). Most disturbing, of course, was the fact that the upward evolution had to be forcibly sponsored.