An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (10 page)
Read An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World Online
Authors: William T. Vollmann
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #History, #Military, #Afghan War (2001-), #Literary
The man never came.
“Tomorrow,” said the Young Man to the Brigadier, “I will ask the other parties for help.”
When he got up in the morning, the Brigadier was wringing his hands. “I no sleep last night,” he cried. “He—
no
come. I am party leader, but now you write: ‘Brigadier—
wrong
, wrong man.’ My party BROKEN, my work here all broken then.”
The Young Man felt very sorry for him. On the other hand, what kind of party leader
was
he? —He promised to wait until ten-thirty, when the Brigadier would return from another search for the ammunition man. After that no-doubt-unsuccessful mission, the Young Man would have the pleasure of going out in the midday heat.
He had come to dread the sun in Pakistan.
The General was very angry with the Brigadier. —“Bloody bastard,” he said. “The Afghans don’t want to be helped! They just want money. This commander has broken a gentleman’s agreement. His father and grandfather come from respectable families, I assure you. And now this fool and the Brigadier have made me lose face with you.”
f
A little after eleven, the Brigadier came with his man. The next morning, dressed in Afghan clothes, with his cameras and tape recorders in a gunnysack, the Young Man was headed for the border.
“H
ow many people did you kill, Brigadier?” asked the Young Man ingenuously. This would be a good cross-check of what the General had said.
The Brigadier stood straight and tall in the guest room. The curtains were drawn against the afternoon light.
“I killed about a
thousand
and more of
thousand
people in the fight of the Afghanistan,” he said in his slow, dignified English.
g
“I killed the more people, from Russia. —Russian! In Holy Qur’an say, ‘Don’t kill the peoples,’ but
who
is peoples? Peoples, he is peoples when he going by the
Holy Books
. Holy Books is four: Qur’an, Bible, [indecipherable], Torah is the Books.
h
These people is
people
. Who is don’t like the Books, he—
no
people! The
Roos
is wild. Like horses, like donkeys, like cows, they are coming in the Afghanistan here—invasion to Afghan countries! We don’t like them. I kill
more
of the Russians in Russian forts. He living in the Afghanistan now. He came, the
Roos
, him, from Russian country to our countries. They are
fighting
with me, they KILLING our little boys—he drinking milk, he hitting, they taking on his shoulder and his small small hand and small feets, they take him away, they kill him; this is not good.” —(The Brigadier shook his fist; he cried; I can never forget the anguish with which he said this.) —“Our children they are killing,” he said. “Our children, and our girls, and our old mans and young mans … In the fight, he taking and putting in the tank, between the tank, the young man and the young girls that are fighting with him; he killing! They are doing the
zillah
with the dead mans.
i
They, they
sexing
the dead girls!
j
They are like donkeys, from another world. I kill them! They kill me! I kill them!”
U
pon his return to San Francisco, the Young Man called the C.I.A. as he had been requested to do. —“When were you in Afghanistan?” the C.I.A. man said. —The Young Man told him. —“What was this Brigadier’s full name?” the C.I.A. man said. —The Young Man told him. —“What languages do you speak?” the C.I.A. man said. —The Young Man told him. —“What’s your social security number?” the C.I.A. man said. —The Young Man told him. —“Thank you for calling, Mr. Vollmann,” the C.I.A. man said. “You can reach me at this number anytime. If you call, please refer to me as ‘Nick.’ ”
Five years later, I still had news of the Brigadier. But if Nick ever rearmed him, I never heard of it.
k
*
Water.
†
Which remains disputed territory.
‡
Here is one of many examples of the Pakistani and Afghan freedom with dates. In fact, Daoud became Prime Minister in 1953, not 1954. He retained this position until 1962, at which time a commoner succeeded him. In 1973 he ousted Zaher Shah in a coup, and remained in power until he was assassinated by the Taraki coup in 1978. Taraki was killed by Amin in 1979, and Amin was executed by the Soviets upon their invasion later that year. See the Chronology at the end of this book for more details.
§
The Parcham (Flag) and Khalq (Masses) parties were two rival leftist parties in Afghanistan which found themselves sharing power uneasily after the invasion. Daoud had both Parcham and Khalq backing in his coup. Amin and Taraki were Khalq. Babrak Karmal, their Soviet-installed successor, was Parcham. In 1982 Karmal was still in power.
‖
I have not hesitated to edit the interviews in this book in order to make their syntax more readily comprehensible.
a
Each of the latter two parties called itself Hezb-i-Islami.
b
“Your gift of help to Afghans is very appreciated,” wrote the General in 1984, “but this amount cannot be given to anyone. You could donate the amount to an education institute—if you so desire.” —“SORRY,” said the rather surprising signs put up by the Berkeley Spartacists in 1983, who vowed to defend bureaucratically deformed workers’ states by any means necessary. “AFGHAN SLIDE SHOW CANCELED—will be rescheduled.” —“Your show was well received, and, as I believe you would have wished, provoked a goodly amount of reflection afterward,” wrote Mr. Scott Swanson in 1985. “Unfortunately, a snowstorm kept all but the most hearty away.”
c
Or else—what seems more likely to me now—the General had a very kind heart.
d
I know now that I could have done no better.
e
Thousands.
f
Imagine that! This fine old man, who was close to the center of power in his country, was worried about losing face with a twenty-two-year-old boy who got sick in the sun. Why? Because the boy was American.
g
The Brigadier’s numbers, like much else about him, are enigmatical. Pakistanis and Afghans seem freer in their use of figures than we. By “a thousand” he might mean “a good number.” Then again, he might mean “a thousand.” The General’s corroboration was important, for I never knew him to make a deliberate misstatement of any kind.
h
Indeed, in token of their kinship with us—which we Christians are too provincial to feel with them—Muslims call us “the People of the Book.”
i
Sexually violating.
j
I have heard many reports of Soviet soldiers raping Afghan women, but only one other account of sexual violation of corpses.
k
The Brigadier “is fine and healthy,” wrote the General a few months after I left. “All those who matter now realize that we ought to help those who are involved in fighting inside. Masoud the hero of Panjsher has contacted him through his father, who is also a retired Brigadier General … Lord C— B— of U.K. had also contacted him. He will be all right, in spite of no help from his Arab friends …” —The General did not even mention the Americans anymore.
II
THE REFUGEES
“OR AT LEAST A LONG HALT”:
REFUGEES IN THE CITY
(1982)
From the Young Man’s sketch map
And Peshawar is now, as always, very much a frontier town. The formalities of dress and manner give way here to a free and easy style, as men encounter men with a firm handclasp and a straight but friendly look. Hefty handsome men in baggy trousers and long loose shirts swing along with enormous confidence, wearing bullet-studded bandoliers across their chests or pistols at their sides, as if it were a normal part of their dress. There is just that little touch of excitement and drama in the air that makes for a frontier land. An occasional salvo of gunfire—no, not a tribal raid or a skirmish in the streets, but a lively part of wedding celebrations.
… Peshawar is the great Pathan city. And what a city! Hoary with age and the passage of twenty-five centuries; redolent with the smell of luscious fruit and roasted meat and tobacco smoke; placid and relaxed but pulsating with the rhythmic sound of craftsmen’s hammers and horse’s hooves; unhurried in its pedestrian pace and horse-carriage traffic; darkened with tall houses, narrow lanes and overhanging balconies; intimate, with its freely intermingling crowd of townsmen, tribals, traders and tourists—this is old Peshawar, the journey’s end or at least a long halt, for those traveling up north or coming down from the Middle East or Central Asia, now as centuries before when caravans unloaded in the many caravan-serais now lying deserted outside the dismantled city walls or used as garages by the modern caravans of far-ranging buses.
from a brochure by
T
HE
P
AKISTAN
T
OURISM
D
EVELOPMENT
C
ORP
., L
TD
.
(ca. 1979)
T
rying so hard to generalize (why, I really don’t remember), the Young Man Who Knew Everything explained to his notebook: “The uncleanliness of American cities is composed of such items as shattered bottles and blowing newspapers, beer cans, chemical spills, Styrofoam incubators for hamburgers, and the like. In Pakistan production and distribution are not nearly as advanced; accordingly, the diet of its cities is hardly so rich, and their excretions and lymphatic disorders have an altogether different character. Much that would be thrown away in the U.S.A. is prized here—and of course there are no beer cans.” —Peshawar, then, was a city of tumbledown streets and filth; and the Young Man, with his preference for advanced trash, believed it even dirtier than it was. (I confess that I myself would rather die from an industrial cancer than through an amoeba’s agency; this is a question of upbringing.) —Then, too, there was the fact of being perpetually observed, accosted and remarked upon; this superfluity of attention was at times somewhat like dirt. Like other cheats, he wanted to study, not to be studied. As the attention was almost always kindly meant, responding to it eventually became a pleasure; but in the meantime the Young Man must also face the city itself: the stands selling rotten mangoes and meat so thick with flies that its own color was a mystery; the gasping men, cooling themselves off in the midst of their labor by sticking hoses down inside their shirts; the shops offering expired medicines, sugar syrup, cooking oil and brand-new fans. In the Saddar district, the sidewalks had buckled and upthrust, as if unsettled by the tunneling of giant moles. Here and there were three-foot pits without apparent purpose: little graves for fruit peels and the hooves of slaughtered cattle, with concrete shards mixed in like bones. When he bought
bananas they were soft and black. The gutters stank; the water in them was gray, like the underbelly of a dead snake. Everyone moved slowly in the heat.
The Young Man wrote treatises on the effects of that heat: First you felt it in your wet forehead, as the sweat began running into your eyes in the first seconds. Next the sunlight penetrated your scalp. Your hair warmed uncomfortably. The base of your neck was sodden like your armpits, and you inhaled steam as though you were going through the motions of breathing; and soon you got dizzy and sick to your stomach. Some people (such as Afghan refugees) might bleed from the nose and ears.