An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (22 page)

Strange as it may seem, I did not understand the nightmare that I was seeing. Partly it was because I was sick that I was sometimes little more than a data collector; partly it was because I was so young that the
exoticism of the experience made the greatest impression on me; partly it was because, thanks to my background, I had little understanding of physical suffering. Now, when I reflect upon this school without books, open on a day so hot that the other school was closed—this school without water, this single class for all students irrespective of age (I saw six-year-olds there, and I saw ten-year-olds, all reciting the same things over and over)—I want to weep—no, to do something—but I don’t know what. As for the Young Man, I don’t remember precisely what he thought, but the plain of his speculations had already become flat, sandy ground, oval-shaded by a single tree, on which grazed scrawny cattle light and dark. Tents and little stone houses lay along the ridges. It was very hot.

“In education,” said my informant in 1985, “the English language was the main foreign language. Now Russian is. But they do not call it a foreign language; they call it ‘the language of our big neighbor to the north.’ They are gradually eliminating English in Afghanistan. The puppet government is on good terms with the Cuban government, so now Spanish is taught. —This is a new phenomenon on our cultural scene,” he said sarcastically. “They still have a German Department, but it is now an East German Department.”

I
n every camp he went they were hospitable to him (except, as I said, when he took pictures of their women). They made him tea and served him bread and meat, always waiting until he had had his fill before they ate. Some of them worked with their trucks and tractors, hauling things. A man laughed and showed him how to plait a rope from grass. The boys played ball. Never did he forget the man laughing
so happily ha-ha!, showing all his white teeth, as he braided grass into rope to show the Young Man, and his elder son watched the Young Man with a polite upward-bowing of lips but the younger son stood half behind, resting his head dreamily on his brother’s shoulder…

The sum of his failures almost, but not quite, confronted him—like the turbaned man who rode his donkey home to the straw-mud-straw house, where he saw the Young Man and stared at him, his two small boys staring at the Young Man also, their arms around each other, and far away, behind the stone wall, a red-veiled woman turned away.

W
hile an increasingly desperate Hafizullah Amin was conducting pacification operations in every province, while his superior, Mr. Nur Muhammad Taraki, began the last six weeks of his presidency (and, incidentally, his life), while Babrak Karmal waited in Moscow, while the Soviet Union was bland (for this was still five months before the invasion of Afghanistan stunned and horrified us), in the month of July I first visited Alaska. At that time I had no suspicion that I ever might go to Afghanistan. We were on the ferry from Seattle to Haines, my friend Erica and I. She was older. The inland passage narrowed, and on either side of us evergreen forests ascended mountain shoulders until they met snow, white fogs lying in all the hollows, and we passed rocky grassy beaches and the wind smelled of salt. —When the two shores began to draw away from each other again, the sky to open, we stood on the cabin deck, our hair beating against our faces. We could see for a long way. The windbreakers of the passengers standing at the rail fluttered violently.

Erica pointed down. “If your child fell overboard, would you jump down and save it?”

“If it were a wanted child,” I said flippantly.

“If it wasn’t, you’d just let it drown?”

“Sure,” I said, straight-faced.

When I was growing up, my little sister drowned because I hadn’t paid attention.

“This is the life!” laughed Erica, who had taught at Outward Bound. Her hair was a wild cloud of curls. She had a ruddy, happy face; her skin was so thick, she said, that no mosquitoes could bite it. She was as strong as a bear. How many weaklings had she saved?

Drawn in my notebook by a ten-year-old Afghan girl—parents executed by the Soviets

Tenting in the rain with Erica was always the best part. We were all set up, which was a relief, because I was bad at that and other things; we were resting, going nowhere, and I could feel as though I were in the
Arabian Nights
, the tent covered with tapestries and furs, perhaps, with a brazier of incense between our sleeping bags, and a silver bowl of dates (actually, we ate them from one of Erica’s ziplock plastic bags), and when she slept she kept on smiling, which made me happy, too—the Land of Counterpane was not dangerous at all—we had hours left before I’d have to prove myself again, a good respite to tell each other fantastic stories (the rain being reliable that way); so Erica told me about being married and climbing the mountain in South America that later got named after her, Pico Erica; and being in the Peace Corps
and snorting heroin and breaking into people’s houses solely to steal ice cream and living with the Navajos and all the other things she had done that left me wide-eyed and determined to do things like that (and at the very end of that year, when I was reading the Christmas newspapers in Switzerland, and there it was in black and white and French:
Afghanistan had been invaded!
I suddenly thought, “Someday I would like to go there,” and it was not because Afghanistan was Afghanistan, but because Afghanistan was invaded); and my tentmate snuggled her sleeping bag up against me and asked me to rub her back and I said that I would and she laid her head on my knee and said, “Go ahead, scratch! Long, hard strokes, all the way down my back! Harder!”—for she was from a military family.

“You really want me to
scratch
your back?” I said.

“You got it!”

“All right,” I said dubiously.

“What do you mean, ‘all right’? My body is different from yours.”

“It must be.”

… “It’s getting monotonous now.”

“Sorry.”

… “Oh, that feels good.”

“Thank you.”

“That’s nice. Could you go just a little lower? And make your strokes harder. Oh, that’s wonderful. Oh, keep doing that.”

The rain thundered and thundered.

“Isn’t this exciting?” said Erica sleepily.

It was. The tent shuddered and flapped. Water was leaking in. We had no idea whether or not the evening wind would rip it apart—a dessert of uncertainty which pleased Erica; Erica loved to climb mountains because they brought her so close to death. She’d seen another climber fall a thousand feet; she’d seen a frozen German couple in the Swiss Alps. Because danger fulfilled Erica so much, it also fulfilled me—or at least the thought of it did. Or at least I thought that the thought of it did. I had a crush on Erica.

We were up at McGonagall Pass. To the east were the stony cones of Ostler Mountain, and the trail that we had come up from the river.
To the west below us was a plain crawling with the black rivers of glaciers, peaks dolloped with snow and ice everywhere we looked (or at least our maps told us that they were peaks;
we
could see only massive pillars, some blue, some white, some gravel-brown, that disappeared into the clouds). That plain was mainly gravel piles and raw earth so soggy with glacial melt that it swallowed our boots to the ankle. There were heaps of loose stones: white granite flecked with black, or rusty shale, or yellow-tinted crystals that Erica thought were sulphur. We had both become very quiet; I was almost frightened by everything. Stones trickled into pools of a strange pale green. The water tasted sweet and silty. Between the gravel country (“No-Man’s-Land,” Erica called it) and the titanic black-earth mounds of the glaciers was a river with the same green pallor, too wide to cross, eating deeper and deeper into a sculpted channel of ice. Not even Erica dared to go very close to it. What I most remember now is the still steady trickling of water everywhere, a sound which seemed uncanny to me because in that vast nature-riddled place everything should have been roaring and booming, and I kept waiting for something to happen, for the black mountains to explode, for the ice to break, for thunder and lightning to come…

It was a dark, stifling tent. Flies buzzed outside and inside. The Young Man felt as if he could barely breathe. The refugees sat in the hot darkness. The whites of their eyes gleamed. —“Are you happy here?” he asked the head of the family.

“Oh, you see,” explained the Pakistani administrator of the camp, “we are trying to make them happy, but they have left their own country, so it is
difficult
for them to be happy! But we want to make their stay here as comfortable as we can. They are satisfied with the help that we are giving them and the United Nations is giving them, and they are appreciating that.”

“Do you think they’ll stay here for the rest of their lives?”

The Young Man apparently had a knack for surprising the administrator. “Why should they?”

“Because the Russians will not give Afghanistan up.”

“No, that is impossible!” cried the administrator. “The whole world is against them, you see!”

“I hope you’re right.” —The Young Man turned to the refugees. —“Why did you leave Afghanistan?” he asked.

“Russian … attack us,” the man said slowly. “Their … airplanes and tanks. Russian came, and they … tease our womans, they hurt them … and we are very in trouble. Their … airplanes come, and … bombs
destroy
our places …”

“Are you happy living here?”

“No, sir. We are not happy. We are satisfied here, but in summer season, we … are in troubles.”

“Do you have enough food to eat?”

“Yes, sir. Enough food.”

“And enough water?”

“It is hard. We don’t have enough drinking water. And the food is not of such good quality, sir. Afterwards we feel ill. And there are giant insects that scare us …”

“Don’t be apprehensive,” Erica had said.

“I’ll do my best.”

“It’s really a very trivial crossing.”

“Good,” I said politely.

We sat down on the moss and picked blueberries into my wool hat. I could not stop thinking about what had happened in the river before. Erica picked about four times more blueberries than I did. The sun was very hot and sweet in our faces.

“Let’s go,” Erica said at last. We put our packs back on, and I tightened my sweaty straps and hip belt as we went down the incline. The
closer I got to the edge of the river, the less I liked it. There were two channels. The first was easy enough: I could see the rocks on the bottom. The second, however, was of the treacherous kind, a wide, deep, smooth stretch of water that might be thigh-deep and slow, or maybe chest-deep and very very fast underneath, and the bottom might be slippery, and that second channel might drown me on this sunny afternoon.

Erica looked at me, scanned the river, and looked at me again. She waded the first channel, stepped onto the sandbar in the middle, peered into the water again, and came back to me. —“Good news,” she said. “We’re crossing tomorrow.”

I felt horribly depressed and ashamed.

“Today’s your birthday,” Erica said. “You set up the tent and I’ll make you a special birthday dinner. I don’t want you to help. Just get in your sleeping bag and relax.”

“You’re so nice to me, Erica,” I said.

Erica sat by the stove, singing songs in Navajo and French. The evening was very beautiful. “You know,” she said, “one Christmas all my brothers and sisters and I were fighting. My father used to be a brigadier general. All the sudden he lost control and barked out,
‘I command you to be happy!’
We kids just burst out laughing.”