An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (20 page)

It was a holiday. They were unlikely to meet any of the camp administrators or staff, and the Young Man had already promised that he would be the only one in trouble if they were caught, and that he would bear his punishment gracefully. They rolled cheerfully down
Khyber Road, raising a persistent narrow trail of dust behind them as far as they could see. Here was Jabbar Flats and University Town, and all the sad vending stands, and now, off to the right, the acres and acres of heat-faded tents and brownish-yellow walls and streets and houses of some adobe-like stuff. It was rather hot today; the Young Man promised himself that on his return to the hotel he would mix up many Mango Squashes for himself from the bottle of syrup that he had bought. —The camp seemed to go on and on as they entered it. In its vastness and seeming lack of people, in the way that it kept to itself, it reminded him of those old New England cemeteries that stretched along the side of the road. You held your breath when you drove by a cemetery. The car went slowly down the mud-baked road. —They stopped in a cul-de-sac between cracked walls, and at once the refugees came running out of their homes, the women staying a little back with their water vessels, peering from the rims of deep pits in the baked dirt (were those wells? he never found out), while everyone else rushed up and crowded around the car, children first, putting their heads right up against the windows but maintaining somehow a certain shy distance. They cleared a path when the Young Man and B. and the taxi driver got out and stretched themselves in the heat and looked around them at the dryness and the faded brown tent canvases and the shiny empty tins on the ground which had once held cooking oil (another gift from the European Economic Community); and all the people stood watching, hushing, at the sight of the Young Man. After a moment, the men stepped up closer around him, and the women disappeared again.

B. took him to a tent where an old man sat.
—“Asalamu alaykum,”
said the Young Man as usual, awkwardly.
—“Walaykum asalam,”
the old man answered. He took his guest’s hands in his. They all sat down, and the old man poured them water. The people went away.

As the old man and the Young Man could not understand each other’s speech, B. interpreted.

“Do you have enough food?” the Young Man asked.

“Yes, enough.”

“What kind of food do you eat?”

The old man shrugged. “Sometimes they give it and sometimes they don’t give it. We get
chai
and
ghee
^*
and sugar and milk. Sometimes for two, three months we don’t get nothing, you know. Then we supply for ourself. We didn’t get our refugee allowance for two months.”

Of course it was in the old man’s interest to say that he was not getting enough food, whether or not he was. That way his “extras” might be increased. The Young Man could afford to be perfectly sincere in his questions, because he had nothing at stake. But can those with nothing at stake ever
feel
the truth? In the years since I talked with this old man I have talked with many panhandlers and beggars. They always say the same. —Does it mean that you should only listen to what you are not asking them to say?

What the Young Man should have done was to move into Kachagari Camp. Then he would have KNOWN. —But no, he could never have become enough of a part of life there to know. And he would have been a burden. And Abdullah would have caught him. —The truth was that the heat, his illness, and worse yet his purpose, which required so straight and perfect a track to travel in that everything derailed it, had exhausted the assertion in him. He could do nothing new anymore. Through a sad irony he was becoming more and more like his own picture of these people whom he thought to save. It was
he
who was lost, questioning, thirsty, and ever so far from his own land…

“What do you do every day?” asked the Young Man. “How do you spend your time?”

It took a moment for the old man to understand this question.

—What did he do? What did this American think he did? —“We don’t have any, no job to do! Just sitting and reading and losing the time.”

“What would you like to do with your time?”

“I am
Mechaniker
, you know. All the time weld. If this job here possible, I will do it. I can do everything. I am ready to do it.”

“Do you have a family?”

“Fourteen, sir.”

“Many children?”

“Ten.”

“And are the children getting any education?”

“There is classes, only for the children, in religion.”

The Young Man hesitated. “Are you, uh,
happy
in the camps?”

Both B. and the old man laughed gently. “We have to be here.”

“How would you like the Americans to help you? What things do you need?”

The old man answered at once. “What we need, they don’t give it to us! We don’t need to eat; we don’t need money; we need only guns and like this to fight with the Russians, you know!”

It seemed so simple. It was so simple.

“From Pakistan they don’t give everything to us,” B. had said in the hotel room while they waited for the taxi. “I know about guns. We have machine gun, and when the machine gun came here, they took the machine gun away and give us only old guns, you know, from 1861, 1875, like this. This is too bad, too sad for us.”

The door creaked. B. stopped abruptly. “But we have good relationship with the Pakistan!” he cried. “They are
helping
us; they are keeping us here; we are very happy happy with the Pakistan!” (The door
handle turned slowly.) “This is very hard for the Pakistan, to keep us here,” said B. “And the people who are selling the supplies, that is not important—every country has good people and bad people!”

Another Mujahid came in. Sweat was running down B.’s face.

Dr. Najibula had warned the Young Man that B. was considered an unreliable commander.

I
t was very hot, and the people crowded him. Here it was impossible to do those things which one can check off. Levi had said that for a while the U.S. was sending large quantities of weight-loss syrup for dieters—surely the last thing that a refugee would need. The Afghans very practically sold this stuff. —How useless everything was! How useless he himself was in Pakistan, where he sat around sweating and having diarrhea and passing the time with stupid poems in his head like:

and he thought this was a good start, but it needed a

ROUGHNECKS’ CHORUS

by which time it was obvious to him that it must be a suspenseful narrative poem by R. Kipling and R. W. Service sitting around together thumping the table for ten years in—well, it couldn’t be a bar, so let’s
suppose it was the Jordanian boy’s air-conditioned house not far from Jabbar Flats (he was rich, it was obvious: imagine that! air conditioning!) and the Jordanian boy, who was very fat, gave the Young Man an ice-cold Orange Crush and put “Seasons in the Sun” and suchlike songs on his cassette player, smiling at him and licking his lips, and he said, “Are you K.G.B.?” and the Young Man thought oh not again and said, “I’ve got to go,” and he walked out into the afternoon furnace and took a rickshaw back to the General’s and sat with the Brigadier in the garden, the Brigadier reading and reading from his Qur’an; and it was ten days and then nine days before he could go to Afghanistan, so he visited the Jamiat-i-Islami again, feeling almost healthy again as the airstreams of his rickshaw fanned him, and the guard was a young boy cleaning his gun; the poster above his head showed a diabolical Russian face above a pool of blood, and everybody was in conference or sleeping or out, so the Young Man went back to the General’s and worked on his epic, let’s see:

The next day he went to Mardan. Since it was so hot there, as it had been in the I.R.C. camps at Kohat, the Austrian Relief Committee people began work early in the morning and finished by noon. He accompanied Hassan Ghulam and his energetic Norwegian assistant on an inspection trip, via Islamabad. The A.R.C. administered only two camps, but the staff at each was all-Afghan. The I.R.C. was presumably under pressure from Commissioner Abdullah not to hire anyone but Pakistanis; the Young Man wondered how Mr. Ghulam had gotten around it, but not too much, because his diarrhea was back and the nausea got worse every day. The Norwegian girl was full of energy and good fellowship, playing ball with everyone at the staff house in Mardan, but it was all that
he
could do to choke down a hunk of the staple (greasy potato with rice), for after the first swallow his stomach ached at once, sharply, as if to spank him for giving him more of this oily fly-infested stuff; then his intestines rumbled and the sweat of his nausea broke out to refresh him. So his grand empathy with the Other had failed; the miserable snail pulled in its horns. I cannot remember exactly what he felt, for my ability to recall my own humiliation is mercifully limited, but a good way of seeing him might be the way my friend Jake did a few years later when he was meeting me in the Long Beach bus station on a hot day after I had ridden in from Tijuana very hung over on tequila, so I sat sweating and nauseous in my camouflage shirt in that hot parking lot, with my head bowed down, and Jake walked right past me looking for me and thinking: I bet that sad old soldier has some
interesting
stories to tell. —The Young Man’s diarrhea was now a thin, chalky-brown liquid. In Afghanistan the life expectancy was thirty-five to forty, he had heard; the cause of death was often diarrhea. —Even tea or water made him retch: the conquering hero had a year of pills and proctoscopes ahead of him.

Just lazing around in Mardan, in other words, the Young Man popped rehydration salts. The well at the staff house was full of snakes and frogs. Morbidly, he held his drinking glass up to the light and saw something green in the water. He had begun to look distinctly thin and pale in those days.

“He’s going to go
inside
next week,” said Mr. Ghulam to the Norwegian girl, who studied him brightly, without sympathy.

“With which group?” she said.

“The N.L.F.” said the Young Man.

“The situation in Afghanistan came about because of America’s false politics,” said Mr. Ghulam. “If America and Russia had not interfered, the Afghans would be living in their homes! And now you seek to solve their problems with this pleasure tour
inside
!”

“Mr. Austrian Relief Committee,” said the Young Man, “go take a flying
Anschluss
.” —No, he didn’t say anything. He rubbed his aching belly.

Actually it was not a particularly smart idea for him to be going to Afghanistan. He admitted that. The General had said that the way in was very short and easy. All they had to do was go over a hill and they would be there. That did not sound so bad. But he wished that he felt stronger. The Norwegian girl was laughing, calling, playing volleyball … They saw no villagers.

In the morning they went out to the camps. Driving through the village, he thought that people were pointing at him and trying to make him look at them.

A refugee camp, it seemed, could be described as a place where two choices were available to the inhabitants: get sick or do nothing. Some children had school of a sort; some men sold soft drinks and fruit; but the keynote was definitely idleness in that sun that he could not long forget because his throat would get dusty and his tongue would get dry and the heat left him dizzy and sick and dreaming of drinking a dozen Sprites. (Could it be that he was not suited for this kind of work?) Here sat the lines of men outside the malaria treatment tent: today was men’s day; tomorrow would be women’s and children’s day. Here two little girls played listlessly in a wilderness of big blue drums; tents stretched
behind them toward the purple mountains. Tawny supply tents, unpleasantly hot to the touch, sliced off long rectangles of dry shadow unblinking behind eyelashes of guy ropes. Narrow paths (ankle-deep trenches bordered by stones) led between them. The sky was a dusty cloudless blue. But there was one cool place. Sick refugees stood there. The wide dark leaves of the tree behind them caught the sunlight like dust. Men and boys stood leaning around the square waist-high reservoir (which had worms in it), in whose water their faces and the tree were reflected, and they were all looking the Young Man in the face. (Only a mullah in white looked away, smiling tranquilly down at the ground as the Young Man got out his camera.) A dark-eyed young man thrust broad shoulders forward to look at the foreigner; beside a diamond-patterned water jug, young boys peeped. Closest to the Young Man was a boy in a silver skullcap. His lips were parted; his eyes were big and sad. Between two fingers he held up a scrap of paper with printed words on it—Pushtu words, though what they were the Young Man would never know. The paper had been torn right through some of the words. Whatever the message said, it was incomplete.