The Good Son (30 page)

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.”