An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (34 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
“Hello,” the banana seller said in English.
Bananas were safe; you could peel them. And they would be moist inside. There was a great cracking lump in his throat.
“Bananas,” he croaked, not knowing the Punjabi word.
The vendor went back to his cart and pushed it away, walking down the tracks to the next car. The Young Man hissed and hissed, without any luck. Finally the train began to move slowly away from the
station, and he passed the man again. He held out a five-rupee note pathetically. The banana seller stared at him, said something, and thrust a giant bunch of bananas into his hand—it must have been forty or so. The train went on. Evidently most people used a one-rupee note for that transaction.
A few of his compartment mates had woken up, and they laughed at him and his many bananas good-humoredly. “Okay,” they said to him delightedly. “Okay.”
The bananas were juicy and sweet. He ate about twenty of them right away to satisfy his thirst, and gave most of the remainder away over the hours.
One man had a flute. He played sitting on a seat top. The flute was gorgeously carved and painted with rings of color.
“You like?” the flute player said when he found that the Young Man could speak a little Pushtu.
“Very much. Very good. How long you play?”
“Ten years. For you. Gift. Take to Am-rika.”
“But I cannot use. No understand flute.”
They tried to show him how to play. For half an hour they tried. He couldn’t blow a note. They laughed and laughed; it was a game. He laughed, too. After a while another man tried to learn. He couldn’t do it, either. They all laughed.
They bought him sodas all day, and dinner (
dordai
with onion, a few tomato slices and, for the main dish, lumps of corn flour fried in curry oil). When he thanked them, they looked a little hurt, and said, “But it’s our duty!”
On hospitality:
1. If you extend it to everyone, does it mean less because you don’t care about the particular person involved, or more because you genuinely care about everyone?
2. If you exclude Russians, Kaffirs, et cetera, does that make hospitality mean more or less? (Sartre says two people make a community by excluding a third.)
You cannot love as thoroughly as you ought to, and you cannot love those who aim to destroy you, but you can love (maybe, the Young Man qualified, gulping). Click to next picture: His first night at the Hotel Excelsior, which they called the Hotel Exercise; across the street there were people sleeping at the State Hotel on tables outside; and what I find most astonishing about that is that he was astonished, because at that time there weren’t so many people in his country who had to sleep that way; if I went to Pakistan now and saw them I probably wouldn’t even notice.
On the Afghans:
They have their faults, but so do we. Let us give them what we can. And let’s accept whatever they can give us.
That’s really what he wrote and thought; it seems so sweet to me now, like something that a child might have written. He had the feeling of being rich, his notebook and cassettes now filled weightlessly with information susceptible to understanding. He would comb it like a head of hair, having whipped out his long- and fine-toothed analyses. Now that the Soviets have left (whether or not they come back), it is funny to see how much of it has turned to ashes.
On the Pakistanis:
The same.
It was an overcast day when the Young Man disembarked at Karachi Cantt. Everyone invited him to stay. He went instead to a youth hostel, drinking Sprite after Sprite until his Pakistani money was gone. Then he lay listening to the call to evening prayers.
…“
wie fromme viktorianische Kriegsgeschrei
…” said the
Süddeutscher Zeitung
as they flew out of German airspace, the Young Man rolling back home like the proverbial foul ball to the fallow field. —“Sorry about the turbulence,” the captain said. —The Young Man didn’t mind
it. It kept him awake. But his eyes flicked down to his belly, where he felt the familiar cramps begin—was it that grape-leaf stuff from the Turkish caterer, or simple intestinal incredulity at preservatives, meat ’n’ cheese? A glut of food for whatever reason on airplanes, and never enough to drink—half the volume in the glass is ice cubes, and after ten 7-Ups a day in Pakistan he needed it, oh how he needed it—even the air-conditioning seemed fake, and his body could not stop preparing itself for the shock that must come when it ended, as when he stepped out of Levi’s car, or the Habib Bank, or the American Center, into the reality of dear old P-P-Peshawar—and every time a hair moved on his head he raised his hand, expecting to dislodge a cloud of flies, for the moment too ill and exhausted to plan out the action-steps of his Help to the Afghans stage by stage;
†
closing his eyes, he did not see the narrow cafe in Peshawar with its counter topped with long-necked bottles of Mango Squash and rose-flavored syrup, the racks of Sprites and Fantas in the cooler with its magnificently transparent double doors (although it was not cool inside), where the customers sat, dark-mustached, with wide giving eyes, and someone always bought the Young Man a soda when he came in; and it took him years to think the thought: What if I had bought everybody there a soda?—since after all that’s all I could have done for them—but he had selfishly hoarded in order to be selfless, as for instance in Afghanistan when the Mujahideen were sitting under a tree with him and they wanted to play an Indian rock-and-roll cassette on his tape player but he said no because he had to save the batteries for interviews; after all, interviewing them was the only way to begin helping them (to his credit, he did at least feel bad about it—he honestly was not stingy even though he acted that way; he was convinced of himself just as Pakistanis and Afghans were each convinced that the other was dirtier); and the plane descended toward this—ISLE, this—
WHIMSY
, this—
POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE
where all topics are mediated through sports and weather and people read books like
All Quiet in the Garden
and (look at the lovely unveiled face of that girl across the aisle!) now here they all were in this—
ENGLAND
… He had lost thirty pounds. He had taken about twelve hundred slides, most of which were worthless. Soon he would be organizing his Afghan relief presentations, to which hardly anyone would come; he would scrupulously send his pure-got contributions to Pakistan, in doses so small that they ought to have been homeopathic, instead of simply useless. —Oh, he was determined to be of use, all right. Two years after his return, he began learning to shoot a gun…
My dear Bill,
Thanks for your nice letter. There is an old saying—Health is wealth. You ought to take good care of your health. Three things are needed for every Project:
a. brain
b. hands—Physical fitness to do things
c. money.
You have the brain—but you are not physically fit and you have no money—hence forget about the AFGHANS—for the time being. My advice to you is to get down to serious profession—any of your own choice.…… and take good care of your health…………
“ROOS” is at our doorstep.…… We will keep her at a distance ourselves, if we live as Muslims..… The other day a young Afghan orphan boy came to see me. He had a bullet injury in his head. A C.R.C.
‡
doctor removed it but he has gone blind now..… Surely they could arrange Eye transplant etc…… “T.B.” is on the increase—sitting in America you can’t appreciate the problems of the Refugees in Pakistan and the problems inside Afghanistan.
More in my next.
With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
THE END
*
“Bottles! Bottles! Soda! Cold!”
†
“Bill,” wrote the General six months later, “get well soon. If the American Doctors can’t take care of you—come back to Pakistan, we shall look after you. The weather is nice and chilly. Please accept Xmas and New Year’s greetings from all of us. May the New Year bring happiness and prosperity. Are you still reading the holy Qur’an?”
‡
Committee of the Red Cross.
POSTSCRIPT
Bill—your First Book is a “hit”—now get down to serious business of writing. I read the book reviews at least ten times and side-lined/under-lined the remarks—try to eradicate your failings in printed ink.
Your book on Afghanistan must reflect the following:
a. Afghanistan—its importance to the Free World & USA, if any, prior to the Russian invasion.
b. Why Russia invaded Afghanistan. Has Russia achieved its aim?
c. How the Afghans kept the Russians—a superpower—at bay! with outmoded weapons.
d. Will the Russians quit Afghanistan—for good.
e. Spell out the Russian and the USA interest in clear terms, in this Region—before invasion, during invasion and after the Russian pull-out.
f. The role played by Pakistan—its physical and economical contribution—Afghanistan’s impact on Pakistan’s economy.
g. Has the Free World adequately compensated Pakistan and the victims of Russian aggression by air and blasts?
h. A friend in need is a friend indeed. Has Pakistan lived up to this role?
I ask the reader: What would your list of important issues be? Have I addressed them? How can
you
help?
B
ecause I am a believer in the Fairness Doctrine, I decided to contact the consulate of the U.S.S.R. to obtain their opinion of this book. Here is what I wrote.
3065 Pacific Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94115
6 November 1987
Consulate General of the
Soviet Union
279 Green Street
San Francisco, CA
Ladies and Gentlemen:
…Being somewhat of an empiricist, I place a high value on what I see and hear myself. It causes me some regret, therefore, to admit that when I was in Afghanistan I never spoke with Soviet or pro-Occupation personnel. This makes my book seriously flawed. I have, of course, read a few key documents which present the Soviet point of view: the 1980 interview with Brezhnev given shortly after Babrak Karmal took office, those two or three of Babrak’s speeches which are available, some
Tass
statements, etc. But the fact remains that almost all of my sources have a very strong anti-Soviet bias.
For this reason, I would like to give you the opportunity to read and comment on the manuscript draft of my book (which is about 250 double-spaced pages). Any suggestions or corrections to errors of fact would be gratefully appreciated. I frankly believe that the Soviet presence in Afghanistan is wrong. I do my best to make my readers believe this, too. I challenge you to convince them otherwise. If you care to comment on the
book, I will give you five or ten pages in it to do so. I will not edit or alter your remarks in any way without your permission. If you sincerely feel that the views of my book are in error, well, as Lenin said (“All Out For the Fight Against Denikin!”), “All our agitation and propaganda must serve to inform the people of the truth.” If not, your silence will speak for itself…
Yours truly,
William T. Vollmann
Their silence spoke for itself.
This is a story about how various big fishes gobbled up the little fishes and then turned their attention to a certain medium-sized fish…
1734
The Russians make conquests in Kazakhstan.
1747
Afghanistan is unified under Ahmad Shah in an absolute monarchy.
1765
The British take Calcutta.
1813
Persia signs the Treaty of Gulistan, yielding most of its territory in the Caucasus to Russia.
1828
Persia signs the Treaty of Turkmanchai, relinquishing the southern Caucasus to Russia.
1837
Lord Auckland, Governor-General of India, sends a Captain Burnes to Kabul “to work out the policy of opening the River Indus to commerce.” Meanwhile, the Tsar sends a Captain Vitkievitch on the same errand.
1838
The British undertake the forcible restoration of Shah Shuja to the Afghan throne, a project which launches the First Afghan War (1838–42). Severe casualties are inflicted on both sides.