An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (13 page)

Let’s suppose that the Young Man had been able to give everyone he saw exactly what was asked for; that, being the American that he was said to be, he truly was the genie in the Sprite bottle. After all, their expectations were modest (most of them). They did not want to have EVERYTHING that the Young Man had. By and large, they wanted money and guns. If he gave them those, then the Soviets would feel obliged even more often to violate Pakistani airspace with their low-flying planes that grazed Peshawar so teasingly and then swerved back toward the border to bomb another refugee camp or drop another load of toy-shaped butterfly mines where Afghan children would pick them up; or else another Afghan politician might be murdered in Peshawar and no one would be able to say for sure whether a K.G.B. agent or another Afghan did it. So the Young Man would have to wave his magic wand somewhat more vigorously, to wish the Soviets right out of Afghanistan, which happened eventually, indeed (although few history books will credit the Young Man for it), but until it did his help would not mean a goddamned thing. If he had been the President, would it have meant anything? —Yes. —Then why wasn’t he the President? It wasn’t fair. If he were President he could do something good that people would respect him for.
^e
As it was, what was the use?

At this point, however, the Young Man was still trying, or going through the motions of trying, so he developed a dread of going outside. There were people there who would ask something of him. He often had nightmares. Once he dreamed that he was cutting up a beef carcass on a ranch where he had once worked in California, when suddenly an Afghan or Iranian came up behind him asking for a visa. The Young Man told him that he was busy, for these people never accepted a no and you had to argue with them for half an hour, which was impossible in this case because he was busy fulfilling his own stupid little function. —“I don’t think you understand,” the refugee’s sister said, flashing her eyes winningly. “He’s at the top of his class, commended for this and that.” —The whole family was here now, sitting down to dinner around that carcass, which belonged to the ranch, not to the Young Man; but traditions of hospitality forbade him from saying anything about that. So he remained his weak self, sneaking around taking little bits of meat off their plates unobtrusively, trying to save something for his organization. —The family didn’t approve at all. They ate everything.

One evening the Young Man was coming back to Saddar along Hospital Road. A man was looking at him out of the crowd of people looking at him.
—“Asalamu alaykum,”
said the Young Man automatically.
—“Walaykum asalam,”
the man said. “Where you go?” —“I’m just walking,” the Young Man replied. “I like to walk.” —The Pakistani bought him a cold Sprite. It was a very hot evening, and he was dehydrated from dysentery; he drained the bottle in seconds. The Pakistani bought him another. —He was an engineer studying at Peshawar University. He also liked to take walks, he said. —They walked together down past Balahisar Fort (originally, said the guidebook, built by Babur, first of the Mughal Dynasty), and along the wide British avenues. The trees were painted with wide white stripes of lime.

“You want to see Peshawar Museum?” the man said. —“Very much,” he said. —It was six-thirty. The museum had closed at five, but the Young Man’s benefactor spoke for a long time to the grumbling old caretaker until finally the wooden doors were flung back, and the Young Man stepped into the dark. Behind him, the caretaker turned on the electric lights one at a time, as they were needed. There were beautiful Qur’ans, in blue and white, and other colors; a whole room was set aside for them. There were women’s costumes that would have jangled in silver, had the women still been alive to wear them; and water-skins, and knives, and muskets; and remote black Buddhas from the forgotten time. The Pakistani was among friends. He told the Young Man something about every display that was there, until the Young Man felt great respect and wonder creeping upon him like a lovely evening shadow across sunny rooms. Again they went to look at the room of the Qur’ans, which were so perfectly made that even now I can still sometimes see them with my eyes closed, the pure blue and white cursive weave of them, and I hope that I will see them again.

At sunset the Young Man and the Pakistani walked into the old city and its dinner smells of kebab and mutton tika and curry. Entire streets sizzled with frying meat. As twilight came, a weariness settled over the town. In the fabulous garden of Shahi Bagh they stopped beneath the trees, and the Pakistani bought him a Sprite and a 7-Up. Shahi Bagh smelled like flowers. In the fading light, he saw men sprawled in the grass, or sitting with one another talking quietly. —“Who are they?” he asked. —“Afghan refugees,” the man said. “They sleep here.” —“Where do they sleep if it rains?” —“In the mosque,” the man said. “If there is room.”

When it was dark the man got him a rickshaw, paid his journey to Saddar for him in advance, and disappeared.

Did the man do this for refugees, too? If so, for how many? And if not, why not?

Does asking the first question get at something useful, or is it an insult to the man’s simple kindness? And this tendency that I now have years later to recall the Young Man’s journey as a sort of failed Pilgrim’s Progress, does it give me a chance to make practical generalizations about how people ought or ought not to be, or was that my problem in the first place? If these memories were only “travel experiences” for you, the reader, to nibble at, would you like them better? Would that be a more honest presentation of the
understatedness
of life? For as it is, I have excavated and reworked what was once a random if picturesque trail into something resembling one of the freeways in my country, with road signs and billboards writhing with strange secret symbols. —And yet, encrusted though the route may be, I think, I hope it goes somewhere …

I
n the days before he left his hotel room for the General’s, the Young Man spent time with an Iranian student at Peshawar University and his friend, a Jordanian. They were tormented people. The Iranian was effectively an exile, because upon hearing about Khomeini’s executions he’d gone to the Iranian consulate and torn up his passport. “Now they will put me in jail, maybe shoot me, if I go back,” he said. —The Young Man took a bus out to the Iranian’s apartment at Jabbar Flats, and they got a watermelon and the three of them sat on the bed and ate it. The Iranian and the Jordanian were outraged at the condition of the camps. —“Two, maybe three million Afghan refugees are living here!” the Jordanian shouted. “They don’t have shoes, they don’t have clothes, they don’t have food, they don’t have books for school; they don’t have anything! Every day they become more and more poor, and, you know, they have got only sickness over here.” —The Young Man
was a little skeptical. For one thing, he recollected that according to both the World Health Organization and the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
, in Afghanistan in 1965 (around that time the Soviets were offering the Afghans arms against the Pakistanis), thirty percent of the population had tuberculosis, ninety percent had helminthiasis, malaria was ubiquitous, and so was, let’s see, typhus … There were 1,564 cases of cholera; thirteen percent of the residents of Kabul had trachoma (this figure ascended as high as seventy-five percent in the rural areas); 30,000 people had leprosy; and of course the infant mortality was one out of two—so how could you blame the camps for disease? —On the other hand, with all the overcrowding, conditions were probably worse now. But how much worse? That he never found out.
^f

They introduced him to a refugee who had once been the editor of a prominent newspaper in Kabul. Now he drove a rickshaw and hauled loads on his back. He was in his sixties. —The Young Man asked him why he did not register as a camp inmate to collect the refugee allowance. The man stared at him; the Iranian had to explain that this Young Man was just an ignorant foreigner who had not seen the camps. “In the camp they must live like animals,” the rickshaw driver said in Pushtu. “They have no food, no water.” —The Young Man asked Mark Ice, the head of the International Rescue Committee’s office in Peshawar, what he thought about that. —“Well, they exaggerate,” said Ice. “I’ve never heard of anything like that. Now, it is true that the administration of the camps is divided up among sixteen voluntary agencies—Saudi Red Crescent, I.R.C. and so on—and some are run by the Pakistanis and are closed to foreigners. Conditions in the various camps do vary.”

Meanwhile, the Young Man still had not visited the camps. Every day he took the bus up to Jabbar Flats and talked with the two students in that bare concrete room that was now only patchily white, and the fan whirred and they stood pacing with their shirts off because it was
so hot and the clock ticked very loudly. One day they said that the old rickshaw driver wanted the Young Man to meet his son. They went to a restaurant in which the
pukkas
roared futilely against the heat. Sweat rolled off everyone’s face onto the table. They ordered a Sprite apiece, and after ten minutes the Young Man had two more. It was a fancy place: with each soft drink the waiter brought salt and lemon.

The waiter was a man in his twenties. He was a very clean and graceful person who was constantly being called for by name among the clattering of teacups; all the patrons knew him, apparently.
—“Abdul, tsalor Fanta!”
^g
Yes, it appeared that he was popular. He was summoned into the kitchen and to a front table and to a back table and into the kitchen. He was very energetic and always smiled as he came quickly to where he had been called. —In two hours, however, business had slackened, and he came over to the Young Man’s table to talk.

“When I was in Afghanistan my father has a little money, do you know?” began the waiter earnestly. “When we left Afghanistan we sold our furniture and some other things to come here. We walked three days without a stop. Russian soldiers are now living in our home. We came here; now I am working here. I get from here eight hundred rupees monthly.
^h
I am working only for rent, from six o’clock morning until twelve o’clock midnight. We brought a little money with us from Afghanistan. And I think that after two, three months this money will be finished. And I ask myself, what will we do?” —He laughed. —“We cannot live in the camps. By God, we cannot! It is my mother and my sisters—how can she live? She cannot go out; everyone watches when she washes … For me it does not matter, but for her—most of the people of Afghanistan is religious. The poor womans, do you know, they don’t like the people or the foreign people looking at wife. For this
reason we cannot stay in the camp. In the tent there is no water; there is nothing; it is very hot; this is very difficult. It is not safe.”

They called him to the kitchen. Apologetically, he laughed. The Young Man shut off the tape recorder and waited. He was almost alone in the restaurant now. The students had left some time ago, and there were only a couple of men at another table, eating kebabs and staring at him. They snapped their fingers and called for Abdul:
Another Coke!
—And now here he came back to the Young Man’s table, smiling brightly.

“What do you think the situation is like in Afghanistan now?” the Young Man said. “Is Mr. Karmal
ⁱ
firmly in control?”

Abdul laughed. “Karmal is like a dog; he is like a dog of Russia, do you know? I think sometimes he want to kill himself. If he want to sleep, there is one Russian soldier always watching. They don’t have necktie: maybe he will die himself with his necktie.” —He laughed. —“In Afghanistan, Russian is everything, Afghanistan is nothing.” (How often Afghans said to the Young Man, “You are everything; I am nothing!”) “There is only Russian film and Russian dance on television,” he said. “In the government they don’t like us. But the soldiers don’t know. They think they are fighting against Pakistan, because when they came to Afghanistan the captain told them: ‘There is attack from Russia and China.’ These were Russian soldiers, but they didn’t know anything. He told them: ‘There are more than one million China in Afghanistan; they are against the government. They look like this: they have turban, they have beard, they have nose like this.’ ” (The waiter touched his own nose.) “The captain told them: ‘You kill them! You kill the Pakistan people because they want to attack Afghanistan.’ And then every person who is bad, who is from religion, they killed them.”

The Young Man watched the red light and the steady green light on his tape recorder.

“So they go to village,” the waiter said. “They kill the womans. I saw one woman, they kill her, the Russian soldier shoot and she die … I was in the village with my grandfather; I was there when the
Roos
attacked. With tanks they attacked our village, and we ran away to the mountains.

Another woman there, she started to fight back; she climbed on the roof of the tank, and at last one soldier with Kalashnikov kill her, like that”—he made a machine-gunning noise—“she fall down; she was
young
, and she died in that time. She was a very brave girl. Still she had not married. And she died. —And there was two other old person, do you know, seventy years old, sixty years old; we all us ran away to the mountains, and also the womans, but these two, three old persons, they think the Russians never do anything with them; they are older!” —He laughed. —“One of them carries something with his donkey. But the Russian soldiers came. Before they ask him, ‘What are you doing? What do you have?’ they kill him, by God, and the other one also.