An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (11 page)

“Yes, it is hot,” sighed the proprietor of the hotel. “In Baluchistan, they say, there is a town where in summer the water comes from the tap hot enough for tea. I have never been there; I hope I never will,
in sh’Allah!
”
^*

As the Young Man walked along, everyone looked up. They made the quick hissings used to attract rickshaw drivers, or called out to him: “Hey!,” “What you want?,” “Where you going?,” or simply, “Mister!” —To all of these, Mister returned an imperturbable and inane
“Asalamu alaykum”
—the traditional Islamic greeting.
^†
—“Walaykum asalam,”
they said automatically, becoming more friendly. From there it was only a few steps to the free soft drink, the tea, the guided tour with the rickshaw to his hotel paid for at the end of it, the multitude of improbable favors. Everyone said, surprised that he would even comment: “But you are a guest of our country!,” or, “It’s a question of national honor.”

Coming back from the Austrian Relief Committee one evening, he became lost. It was Ramazan, so the General’s family had been without food or water all the long, hot day. He did not want to keep them
waiting to break their fast. —But where was Saddar? If he could find that, he could walk to the General’s house. —A cyclist came up the hill carrying a great load of fresh-cut tree boughs. The Young Man asked directions. The other beckoned to a passing rickshaw. But the Young Man had no rupees left; they had been stolen at a refugee camp. —“I pay for you!” smiled the Pakistani. —“No, no,” said the Young Man, embarrassed. It was not far to a crossroads that he knew; the Pakistani had explained it to him. He could easily walk there. —So then, making certain that the branches were lashed tightly to the rear wheel, the Pakistani set the Young Man sidesaddle just behind the handlebars and began to pedal. —“Allah, Allah!” he cried near the summit of the hill, sweat running down his face. The Young Man, ashamed, tried to dismount, but he shook his head. —“No, no! You friend! I take you there.” —In front of the General’s house, before the Young Man could thank him, he smiled and turned back the way he had come.

The Afghan refugees across the hall at the hotel were sweet to the point of obsequiousness. They loaned him their soap, rushed to get water when he was thirsty, and even washed his shirt. They made him elaborate Afghan meals. —Every day the “uncle” went to the consulates or the Mujahideen political offices. The boy stayed inside all day. (The Young Man thought of him as a boy even though he had a wife and child.) The Young Man let the boy’s brother sleep in his room, on the spare bed, so that he would not have to sleep on the floor with the baby anymore. —One hot night the boy and his brother invited him to go out for a walk. They strolled through Saddar, turned around, went for ice cream … All the males his own age seemed like boys to him, because (1) they didn’t drink alcohol; (2) they didn’t have much money; (3) they deferred to him.

“Why did you come to Pakistan?” he asked the boy.

The boy looked at him with nervous brown eyes. “It was—I was in the Kabul. I was a student of agriculture, and all of my family was
investigated. They investigated my father, and they took him in the jail. Afghanistan, it is—it is
all
in the jail.”

“He is not my nephew,” explained the “uncle,” who spoke excellent English. “But I let him call me uncle to show respect. His father, his mother and all his brothers except that one were detained by the Russians and killed one by one. I am all he has now.”

The Young Man bought the boy a bunch of bananas, and a detective novel to help him with his English. —“Why do you never go out?” he asked him. But the boy would not answer.

The “uncle” had three beautiful daughters, who were very shy, but when the Young Man said that he was trying to help they let him take their picture. Standing on the flat roof of the hotel, they smiled sadly. One of them shaded her eyes with her hand. In the evenings they helped him with his Pushto. (It was unfortunate, he reflected, that the word for “sister” sounded like “whore” prefaced by an expectoration, but the moving of one’s tonsils among the Pathans would seem to be as much a necessity—here the worms turned over in his intestines—as the moving of one’s bowels.) —The girls also practiced their English on him. After he had essayed, with great effort, “I am your … friend,” or “It is very hot today,” they would reward him by smiling, and saying an English sentence that they had memorized: “Brezhnev—is—
dog!
” Then they burst into giggles. —Once he said, consulting his English-Pushto dictionary at every other word, “I … like the Afghan … people. I … hope … I can help you.” —They smiled and giggled.
—“Dera miraboni.”
^‡
They made him dinner. They stood and served him while he ate. He was made to sit. They prepared for him curry and meat and vegetables, with plums for dessert. Later he saw them eating old bread.

“There are two kinds of refugee,” the hotel proprietor explained to him over green tea. “Rich refugee and poor refugee. Rich refugee, he live in Peshawar, in hotel. Poor, he live in camp. Afghan refugees no good. They wear everything out, break everything. Too many of them.”

There were nine people in that family, counting the uncle’s old wife. They existed in two rooms. Each room had a table and two single
beds. They had been there for two months. They were trying to go to the United States or West Germany, but so far they had found no sponsors. In another month, said the uncle, if they still had no luck they would go to India. They were the rich refugees.

“It is right that they speak sweetly to you,” an Iranian told him. “They want your help; you are American; you can do anything for them.”
^§

“What happens if they go to a camp?” the Young Man asked.

“You don’t understand camp,” the Iranian said. “In camp they live like animals. They have not enough food; they have not enough water; they are too hot; there is only sickness over there.”

The Young Man went to the American consulate and asked if he could do anything for the family.

“They need a U.S. sponsor,” the woman said.

“What do I have to do to become a sponsor?”

“Can you guarantee their financial security?” said the woman.

“No, I can’t.”

“Give it up,” the woman said. “There are so many cases like this. I see so many cases like this every day. Just give it up.”

E
very day he walked up and down Saddar, interviewing the off-duty Mujahid commanders cleaning their guns in hotel rooms, talking to miscellaneous Afghans and Pakistanis, buying himself Cokes and Sprites, catching rickshaws to go to the political offices. Peshawar seemed to him a fishy place. Everybody he met wanted to get out or was waiting for something. He was almost the only Westerner. One day he saw a blond, blue-eyed man buying soap. The man started a conversation. He said he was Swiss and he was waiting for a letter from someone who was to meet him there. He asked the Young Man questions in a friendly way. The Young Man saw him again a few days later, in the American Center. This time he was from Rhodesia. —That night he told the uncle about it. —“Be careful,” the uncle said. “I have seen him. He is a bad man.”

The third time he saw him, the man said, “You want to cross the border, don’t you?”

The Young Man did not entirely trust either the Swiss-Rhodesian or the uncle. So he merely said, “Well, that’s pretty dangerous, isn’t it?”

“Come on with you,” the man said. “Why else would you be in this bloody miserable place?”

“No,” the Young Man said. “I’m just a tourist.”

In the hotel was a fellow from Chitral who was very interested in the Young Man. His brother was the chief of police in Peshawar, he said, and the police were going to come arrest the Young Man as a spy.

“And what will happen then?” said the Young Man, feeling some alarm.

“They will beat you,” Yusuf Ali laughed.

“And then what?”

“They will make you sleep with them.
^‖
And they will beat you again. Then you will go to jail.”

“Oh,” said the Young Man noncommittally.

“They will beat you, you C.I.A.!” Yusuf Ali chuckled, slapping the Young Man’s shoulder. “Do you understand? They will
beat
you and
beat
you, you spy!”

“Oh,
I
understand,” the Young Man said. He resolved to change his hotel.

“You are very dull, my friend,” said Yusuf Ali. “I am just joking.”

“But your brother is chief of police?”

“Yes.”

“And you really think I am a spy?”

“You are C.I.A., yes. But I have no told my brother about you, my friend. But if they find you, they
beat
you, you C.I.A.”

His aims and plans seemed to be wandering through alien channels like those narrow, high-walled, white-walled streets of Peshawar, in which men in cotton-white passed white-veiled women. He went out that night to get a fruit drink (which later made him urinate blood). On the way back, a crowd of Pakistanis surrounded him. They had been watching him day after day. They asked where he was going, what he was doing, where he was from. And why didn’t he stay in a youth hostel? They could have arranged “a better reception for him there.” —The Young Man said that he was happy with his reception here. —Why wasn’t he going to India? —He didn’t have much money, he said, and anyhow he only wanted to see Pakistan. —Oh, was he applying to his government for assistance in returning home? —No. —Why not? (And, by the way, the youth hostel was cheaper.) —“Don’t you want me here?” said the Young Man. —Oh no, it wasn’t that at all. But it might be very dangerous for him here, so near the border. —Now the conversation shifted to another topic with which he was already familiar: Could they get visas to the U.S.A.? —The Young Man said that that was very hard; so they had told him at the consulate. —Well, could
he
get them visas to the U.S.A.? —No, he said. —But he was satisfied with his reception here, he’d said? —Yes, thank you; everyone was very kind. —Well, then wasn’t he very selfish not to help them? They turned their backs on him. —When he lost his temper, they said that they had only been joking. —“Friend! Friend!” they cried.

…Yusuf Ali touched the Young Man’s neck and asked him when he would be crossing the border. The Young Man wrote in his diary: “What’s so special about me, anyway? Well, if he just wants to scare me, or to try to paw me, I can handle that, but I don’t like the idea of arrest and confiscation.” —He decided that maybe he should show Yusuf Ali some friendliness, and try to find out what was going on. So he asked him out for a walk the next day. Yusuf Ali rubbed his hands together and agreed. But the next morning, when the Young Man went to knock on his door, there was no answer. The proprietor said that Yusuf Ali had left for good at four that morning. —The Young Man decided to change his hotel. But he never got around to it. The police never came, anyhow. He saw the same people on the street every day. The Swiss-Rhodesian had gone away.

(“So what makes you think that I am C.I.A.?” he had once asked Yusuf Ali. “My tapes, my film?” —“No, no,” said Yusuf Ali. “My dear friend, it is in the lines of your hand; I can read hands, you see.”)

In the afternoons he sometimes saw the young soldiers marching and marching along the street. —“It is only a matter of time before the
Roos
, they come here to Pakistan,” a man told him. “Then we must be ready with our jihad. Even now they are in Peshawar, the K.G.B., and there is shootings. Their planes, they fly every day over Peshawar.”

The Young Man now took a trip to the Khyber Pass, so that he could say that he had been there. At the border, they told him, you could wave to the Soviet guard and he would wave back. You could take a picture. Alas, he did not get to the border. The bus took him across the desert and up into the cracked red mountains. Dust blasted in through the
open windows and swept through the bus as they went. At one checkpoint there were boys selling water through the windows of the bus. The water came in old motor-oil cans; after you drank you returned the can. The Young Man’s seatmate bought him some; it tasted wonderful. They kept going up into the hills. They passed three women in black chadors squatting together under a tree, like resting crows. When the bus entered the tribal area, some of the men began to chew their hashish. The Young Man’s neighbor gave him a pinch, and showed him how it was done. At Landi Kotal, an evil little town of ancient, low-roofed houses, he had to change buses. He was five kilometers away from Torkham, the border town. The bus to the border was an old station wagon. All the passengers were nomadic tribespeople: old men with snow-white beards, children carrying chickens, red-robed women with long braids and silver earrings who wore no veils. They could barely understand his Pushtu. —“Kabul?” they said. —The Young Man shook his head. —“Torkham. All you, Kabul?” —“Kabul, yes.” —A boy tried to sell him opium, but his father slapped him. —Halfway to Torkham there was a customs check. The officials poked the grain sacks with sticks and looked around. When they saw the Young Man, they stopped dead and began to shout. Then they pulled him off the bus. —The Young Man, feeling as usual that blitheness was his best defense, told the other passengers goodbye with a wave and a smile, but they looked at him in silence. The bus went on to Kabul. —Inside the dugout, they looked at his passport very carefully. He acted like an American, asking them to let him take pictures, and seeming generally friendly but bewildered, until finally they let him go. They put him in the back of a pickup truck and took him back to Landi Kotal. They let him off near the bus station and drove away without speaking to him.