An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (9 page)

“You are not well, Young Man,” the General told him. “Why must you go into Afghanistan? You can take pictures of Afghans with guns in Pakistan. The journalists do it. It will be all the same to the Americans. I
am concerned about you. You cannot go into the battlefield with a loose tummy; I speak to you as a soldier.”

But the Young Man was adamant.

The General was not without influence. General Zia, now the man who ran Pakistan, had once been his subordinate. He arranged many interviews which the Young Man could never have gotten otherwise—for, unlike the Amerikis, the General believed him capable of actually Helping, and so took him seriously.
^c
As a result of these interviews the Young Man was able to string the beads of important men’s words into his necklaces of analysis, somewhat as follows:

The major political dichotomy in Pakistan seemed to be liberalism versus Islamization, or (not to beat around the bush) the People’s Party of Bhutto versus the established regime of Zia, who had revived Islamic law to such an extent that public floggings were now broadcast on television. At present, the People’s Party was almost impotent, Bhutto having just been hanged in 1979, the invasion year. —“He was executed for
murder
,” said the General. “He was a Communist, and all of us in the North-West Frontier were very satisfied to see him replaced by Zia. You see, Young Man, Bhutto was a schemer, but Zia is a just man!” (It was not until half a dozen years after, when Zia was killed in that mysterious plane crash, that Bhutto’s charismatic daughter Benazir was able to ride her rallies into power; until then the People’s Party barely clung to existence.) The General maintained sufficient relations with a few officials of the Bhutto regime to arrange for the Young Man to speak with them in his presence. One had been jailed several times under Zia. When they visited the man, the General pointed out an automobile parked by his house. —“They keep an eye on him, you see,” he said. —They were hospitably entertained. It was Ramazan, and Muslims could not eat or drink until sunset, but the Young Man was brought a Coke on a saucer and many cordialities were exchanged. The Young Man thought that the General and the former official must be friends. Then, as they left, the Young Man’s cassette nicely magnetized full of interesting information, the General remarked, “He is a very stupid man,
you see. He will be back in jail again, and he should be.” The Young Man wondered how he’d ever know who
his
enemies were.

One day they drove to a funeral in a small village to the east, just the three of them: the General, the Young Man and the Brigadier. The village was pro-Bhutto, and the General knew a former minister there who would give the Young Man his recollections. Unfortunately, the man was too busy, although he said hello to the Young Man politely enough and found the time to make a few digs about the postponement of the elections. The General remained calm. —The bier was carried through the mud-walled streets. The Brigadier’s deep frown was softened into the expression that he wore when he read his Qur’an. He strode through the crowd and shouldered a corner of the bier. At the mosque they set the dead man down for the ceremony, uncovering his face for a moment so that the relatives could kiss it. He was an old man, with a long white beard. His mouth was open, his head twisted to one side, like a crawl-stroke swimmer. The next morning the Young Man saw a run-over cat in the same posture, with the same intense, rather scholarly gaze. The man had died that morning. He was already swelling and yellowing in the heat. —They drove home in the General’s car, with the Young Man in the back seat. The Brigadier made a remark about the liberals; the Young Man could not understand the language but he understood the sneer. —The General laughed and nodded.

The Young Man admired the General in almost every respect. He was a very moral man who tried to do good. He initiated the building of a mosque, of a park (the Young Man saw him on the news once, standing with a group of dignitaries in his new mosque). He did a considerable amount of social work; the Young Man was one of his cases. Not only did he give him instruction in Islam, he also tried to find an appropriate group for him to go to Afghanistan with. On this subject he had his opinions. Being a soldier like the Brigadier, he despised the fundamentalists. When the Young Man asked a guerrilla commander why he belonged to Herakat and not Jamiat-i-Islami, the General answered for him: “Because he is not a fool.”

One afternoon they had Mr. Pizzarda, the Secretary-General of Hazarat, over for a drink (of Sharbet, a sickening syrup of sugared rose petals). The Brigadier had said that Pizzarda was one of his men. Was he? It was impossible to tell. —They sat in the patio chatting about this and that, sometimes, out of politeness to the Young Man, in English, and sometimes, very fiercely, in Pashto. The General seemed a little left out of it. But when he sat with the Young Man later that night, against the soothing roar of the fan, he said that in ten days the Young Man could go into Afghanistan with the N.L.F.

“But we must be very careful,” the General said. “You may only go if you are completely well. Your parents would never forgive me if I were responsible for the death of their only son.”

The General was big on sons. He treated the Young Man as his son. When the Young Man expressed interest in photographing one of the handmade pistols from Darra that were disguised as ballpoint pens, the General loaned him one, and, seeing his delight in the toy, smiled and said, “Well, Young Man, if you are so fond of it I will present it to you.” —The Young Man thanked him. —The General put a hand on his shoulder. “It is nothing. You are an honorary Pathan now: you wear the clothes, we have given you the cap, and now you have the gun.”

He was angry when he learned that the Young Man was living with his fiancée in California. He believed that Americans in general had loose morals, particularly in the area of sexual relations. The Young Man wanted to know why the Qur’an was so hard on sleeping with someone you hadn’t married when a Muslim man could legally sleep with up to four women at a time. The General explained that there was always a danger that an unmarried woman would get pregnant. The Young Man assured him that he and his fiancée used birth control, and that his fiancée would be getting sterilized soon anyway.

The General was astounded. “Did you pick her up or did she pick you up?” he said.

The Young Man considered. “She started it, I think,” he said.

“Well, then you tell her that you will drop her if she will not bear you sons. What good is a girl who will not have sons? How could your parents die knowing that their only son would have no sons?”

In the first few days of the Young Man’s stay the General was particularly disgusted with Americans. His son Khalid was a student in California, under a temporary visa, and Khalid’s wife had applied for a temporary visa to visit him. The application had been denied on the grounds that it could not be proved that the young woman would not become an immigrant. The General had offered to put up a surety, but this did not affect the case. This hurt the General deeply. He could not understand why his son could have a visa and his daughter-in-law could not. He told the Young Man that America didn’t know what friendship was.

“What do you think of Brigadier X?” the Young Man asked at the U.S. consulate.

Thumbs down. “We’ve passed on his stories, and the consensus seems to be that he’s slightly”—finger to forehead. —“He was a Brigadier once, and he isn’t now, and he hasn’t made the transition.”

This might be true, the Young Man thought. Sometimes I myself, watching the monotonous circular motions of his hands, or his talking to himself—or is that just his Muslim devotions? (for I don’t speak the language)—sometimes I think that he might be a little mad. —But
how am I to know?
he said to himself angrily.

“It does seem as if he has a following,” the Young Man said.

“We’re not sure if it’s his following or if it’s a consequence of the fact that he’s staying with General N.”

“There are lots of people who claim he’s their boss,” said the Young Man.

A shrug. “I really have to go to a meeting.”

“Well, would you recommend that I go to Afghanistan with him?”

“I’d advise against it.”

The Brigadier had told the Young Man to inform the Ambassador
and his wife that he sent his
salaam
to them, and to ask when his work would be ready. The Young Man did neither. Returning, he met the Brigadier on the porch.

“What they say?”

“They had no time for me today,” the Young Man said.

The Brigadier flew into a rage. —“They Amerikis, but—if they Afghans, I—KILL THEM! They servants—not masters! You—NO help me! Democracy—NO good!”

The Young Man lied, saying that he had done his best,
^d
but the Brigadier would not believe him. At last the Young Man replied curtly. The Brigadier smiled, the way people there smiled to express deep offense.

“They treat me like—DOG!” he said.

Wearily, the Young Man agreed and went in to the toilet. The walk to the consulate and the heat had stirred up his dysentery.

Sitting on the toilet seat, he imagined a dialogue with the General, who had just been lecturing him on the Jewish lobby:

“General,” he’d say, “I think the Brigadier’s on the brink.”

“Because you won’t help him,” the General would reply sternly. “He’s a friend of America, but you’re making him an enemy. You won’t give my daughter-in-law a visa. If I can’t get a visa, no one in Pakistan can get a visa. Zia was my subordinate. If I wanted to, I could go to him, and he would make them give me the visa.

“But that’s against my principles. I ask no one for favors. I expect nothing from anyone. But now you are supporting Israel, and
lakhs
^e
of people are homeless.”

And the Young Man, slightly light-headed with fever, suddenly understood his role as an American: to accept responsibility for everything.

A
few nights later, the Brigadier, the Young Man and the General were sitting on the patio. The cement was writhing with winged ants trapped by the house lights, crawling along, hunting in the seamless concrete for a crack in which to lay their eggs and die. Presently came the accustomed stealthy noises from the lawn, and the fat toads appeared. For a moment they stopped short, as if astonished by the profusion of prey. Then they fanned out and began to gobble up the stragglers, avoiding giving alarm to the larger mass. When the stragglers were safely eaten, however, the toads hopped in among the main body of the ants and commenced liquidation in earnest. How the toads flicked their tongues! And how blindly the ants streamed, with the very breath of their predators on them, like philosophers who had forgotten a cause.

The Brigadier was talking about the fundamentalist factions again. —“They—
no
good!” he said. “They very bad. They—
no
true Afghans!”

The reports from Panjsher Valley were bad that day. The Russians were really breaking through. —
“Roos,”
the Young Man said, pointing to the toads. “Mujahideen”—pointing to the confused, decimated ants.

At once the Brigadier got up and shooed and hissed the toads away. He stamped his foot an inch from their heads. They hunched themselves back into the darkness. (But a few minutes later they were back, cautious at first but just as greedy as before. This time the Brigadier ignored them. Soon there were no more ants.)

“The Brigadier is a bit of a brute,” said the General in his lawn chair. “He’s killed over a thousand people.”

A day before he was due to cross the border, the leader of the N.L.F. band that was going to take him came to the General’s house. The
General listened carefully. —“They’re planning to attack an airfield,” he told the Young Man. “Is that acceptable to you?”

“Sure,” the Young Man said, a bit uneasily. “That sounds very interesting.”

“But they must go to Islamabad to get ammunition. It will be another five days.”

On the fourth morning the General put down his paper. “Yesterday in Parachinar they fired at the Tribal Agent,” he said.

The Young Man was eating a boiled egg. Everyone else in the household had to be finished eating and drinking shortly after four a.m., when it was light enough to distinguish white thread from black. But the Young Man never got up until seven or even later, and then they prepared for him a breakfast which they could not touch, with their own prized honey for his tea.

“Who fired at him?” he said, not understanding.

The General’s good manners forbade him from showing the disgust that this bit of ignorance deserved. “The K.G.B., Young Man. I had best ring up and find out the situation. If there is too much unrest in the border areas it might not be possible for you to go.”

He made a phone call. —“Somebody has been killed,” he told the Young Man. “We had best put it off.”

They put it off for another three days.

The Young Man listened to the sound of the fan, which seemed pitched to remind the user that every second was costing money. The three days passed. So did the fourth. On the fifth day he picked a lime from the General’s tree, and squeezed it into a glass of cold water. It tasted so good to him that he did it again after breakfast. He had gotten the idea from the Brigadier, who the day before had walked ten miles in the heat, observing Ramazan the while, searching for the man who should have come back from Islamabad with the ammunition to take the Young Man to the border. But the Brigadier did not know exactly where the man lived, and never found him. He came back silent. As soon as darkness was ruled official that night, the family went in to break their fast, but the Brigadier seemed unable to quench his thirst. He was an old man. An hour later, he came to the guest room and
mixed himself a glass of fresh lime water. —“Very thirsty,” he said to the Young Man, whom he had adopted as his son. “Ramazan very difficult.” —“Yes,” said the Young Man. “Very difficult.”