God Lives in St. Petersburg (3 page)

Graves lay back, alone in his pain, his skull finding the pillow of his duffel bag. “It’s my head, Duncan. I can’t bloody
think.
”

“Mister Donk!” Hassan said, but it was too late. The jeep was approaching in a cloud of dust.

The owner of the jeep was a thirtyish man named Ahktar. He wore blue jeans and a thin gray windbreaker and, as it happened, was only lightly armed, outwardly friendly, and claimed to live in the village they were headed toward. It was his “delight,” he said, to give them a ride. He spoke a little English. “My father,” he explained, once they were moving along, “is chief of my village. I go to school in Mazar city, where I learn English at the English Club.”

“You’re a student now?” Donk asked, surprised. He found he could not stop looking at Ahktar’s thick mustache and toupee-shaped hair, both as impossibly black as photocopier ink.

He laughed. “No. Many years ago.”

Hassan and Donk bounced around on the jeep’s stiff backseat as Ahktar took them momentarily off-road, avoiding a dune that had drifted out into the highway. Jumper cables and needle-nose pliers jangled around at Donk’s feet. Graves was seat-belted in the shotgun position next to Ahktar, jostling in the inert manner of a crash-test dummy. Donk had yet to find the proper moment to ask why in Afghanistan the steering wheels were found on the right side of the car when everyone drove on the right side of the road. He thought he had found that moment now but, before he could ask, Ahktar hit a bump and Donk bashed his head against the vehicle’s metal roof. “Your jeep,” Donk said, rubbing his head through his terrorist-style do-rag.

“Good jeep!” Ahktar said.

“It’s a little . . . military-seeming.”

Ahktar looked at him in the rearview and shook his head. He had not heard him.

Donk leaned forward. “Military!” he shouted over the jeep’s gruff lawn-mowerish engine. “It looks like you got it from the military!”

“Yes, yes,” Ahktar said, clearly humoring Donk. “I do!”

Donk leaned back. “This
is
a military jeep, isn’t it?” he asked Hassan.

“His father maybe is warlord,” Hassan offered. “A good warlord!”

“Where are you from?” Ahktar asked Donk. “America?”

“That’s right,” Donk said.

“You know Lieutenant Marty?” Ahktar asked.

“Lieutenant Marty? No, I’m sorry. I don’t.”

Ahktar seemed disappointed. “Captain Herb?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

Ahktar reached into the side pocket of his gray coat and handed back to Donk a slip of paper with the names
Captain Herb
and
Lieutenant Marty
written on it, above what looked to be a pi-length satellite phone number. “Who are they?” Donk asked, handing the paper back.

“American soldiers,” he said happily. “We are friends now because I help them with some problems.”

“Is there a phone in your village? We could call them.”

“Sorry, no,” Ahktar apologized. “We have radios in my village but nearest phone is Kunduz. I think today I will not go to Kunduz. They are having problems there.” He motioned toward Graves, who seemed to be napping. “From where in America is your friend?”

“I’m not an American,” Graves muttered, with as much force as Donk had heard him manage all day. “I’m
English.
”

“What?” Ahktar asked, leaning toward him.

Graves’s eyes cracked open, dim and sticky like a newborn’s. “I’m
English.
From England. The people your countrymen butchered by the thousand a hundred and fifty years ago.”

“Yes,” Ahktar said soberly, downshifting as they came to a hill. Something in the jeep’s heater was rattling like a playing card in bicycle spokes. The waves of air surging from its vents went from warm, to hot, to freezing, to hot again. Ahktar drew up in his seat. “Here is village.”

As they plunged down the highway, hazy purple mountains materialized along the horizon. From the road’s rise, Ahktar’s village appeared as an oblong smear of homes and buildings located just before a flattened area where the mountain range’s foothills began. Now came a new low-ground terrain covered with scrabbly, drought-ruined grass. Along the road were dozens of wireless and long-knocked-over telephone poles. The jeep rolled through the village’s outer checkpoint. Set back off the highway, every fifty yards, were some small stone bubble-domed homes, their chimneys smoking. They looked to Donk like prehistoric arboretums. None of it was like anything Donk had ever before seen in Central Asia. The virus of Soviet architecture—with its ballpark right angles, frail plaster, and monstrous frescoes—had not spread here. In the remoter villages of Tajikistan he had seen poverty to rival northern Afghanistan’s, but there the Soviet center had always held. In these never-mastered lands south of the former Soviet border, everything appeared old and shot up and grievously unattended. These discrepancies reminded Donk of what borders really meant and what, for better or worse, they protected.

The road narrowed. The houses grew tighter, bigger, and slightly taller. The smoky air thickened, and soon they were rolling through Ahktar’s village proper. He saw a few shops crammed with junk—ammunition and foodstuffs and Aladdin’s lamp for all he knew—their window displays tiered backward like auditorium seating. Black curly-haired goats hoofed at the dirt. Dogs slunk from doorway to doorway. Dark hawk-nosed men wearing shirts with huge floppy sleeves waved at Ahktar. Most looked Tajik, and Donk cursed his laziness for not learning at least how to count in Tajik during all the months he had spent in Tajikistan. Walking roadside were beehive-shaped figures whose bedspread-white and sky-blue garments managed to hide even the basest suggestion of human form. These were women. Around their facial areas Donk noted narrow, tightly latticed eye slots. Children ran happily beside the jeep, many holding pieces of taut string. “Kites,” Graves observed weakly. “They’re flying kites.”

Ahktar’s face turned prideful. “Now we are free, you see.” He pointed at the sky. Donk turned his head sideways and peered up out the window. Floating above the low buildings of Ahktar’s village were, indeed, scores of kites. Some were boxes, others quadrangular; some swooped and weaved like osprey, others hung eerily suspended.

Hassan looked up also. “We could not fly kites before,” he said quietly.

“Yes,” Donk said. “I know. Let freedom ring.”

“When they leave our village,” Ahktar—a bit of a present-tense addict, it seemed—went on, “we see many changes, such as shaving of the beards. The men used to grow big beards, of course very long, and they checked!”

Donk smiled. “So you had a long beard?”

“Of course I have. I show you my pictures. It was a very long beard! Now everybody is free to shave or grow as their own choice.”

It seemed impious to point out that virtually every man momentarily centered within the frame of Donk’s murky plastic window had a griffin’s nest growing off his chin.

“When did they leave?” Donk asked. “Was it recently?”

“Oh, yes,” Ahktar said. “Very recently!” He cut the engine and rolled them down a rough dirt path through a part of the village that seemed a stone labyrinth. Sack-burdened peasants struggled past plain mud homes. Kunduz suddenly seemed a thriving desert metropolis in comparison. A high-walled compound guarded by two robed young men cradling Kalashnikovs stood where the path dwindled into a driveway. Inches before the compound’s metal gate the jeep rolled to a soft stop. Ahktar climbed out of the vehicle, and Donk followed.

“What’s this?” Donk asked.

“My father’s house. I think you are in trouble. If so, he is the man you are wanting to talk to now.”

“We’re not in trouble,” Donk said. “My friend is sick. We just need to get him some medicine. We’re not in any trouble. Our car broke down.”

Ahktar lifted his hands, as though to ease Donk. “Yes, yes.” He moved toward the compound’s gate. “Come. Follow.”

“What about my friend?” But Donk turned to see that the guards were helping Graves from the jeep and leading him toward Ahktar’s father’s compound. Surprisingly, Graves did not spurn their assistance or call them bloody Hindoos, but simply nodded and allowed his arms to find their way around each guard’s neck. They dragged him along, Graves’s legs serving as occasional steadying kick-stands. Hassan followed behind them, again nervously eating the raisins he kept in his pocket.

The large courtyard, its trees stripped naked by autumn, was patrolled by a dozen more men holding Kalashnikovs. They were decked out in the same crossbred battle dress as the soldiers Donk had seen loitering around Kunduz: camouflage pants so recently issued by the American military they still held their crease, shiny black boots,
pakul
s (the floppy national hat of Afghanistan), rather grandmotherly shawls, and shiny leather bandoliers. While most of the bandoliers were empty, a few of these irregulars had hung upon them three or four small bulblike grenades. They looked a little like explosive human Christmas trees.

“Wait one moment, please,” Ahktar said, strolling across the courtyard and ducking into one of the many dark doorless portals at its northern edge. The guards deposited Graves at a wooden table, and a minute later he was brought a pot of tea. Donk and Hassan, exchanging glances, walked over to Graves’s table and sat down in the cold dark light. The soldiers on the compound’s periphery had yet to acknowledge them. They simply walked back and forth, back and forth, along the walls. Something about their manner, simultaneously alert and robotic, led Donk to guess that their weapons’ safeties were off—if Kalashnikovs even
had
safeties, which, come to think of it, he was fairly sure they did not.

“Nothing quite like a safe, friendly village,” Graves said in a thin voice. He sipped his tea, holding the round handleless cup with both hands.

“How do you feel, Mister Graves?” Hassan asked eagerly.

“Hassan, I feel dreadful.”

“I’m sorry to hear this, Mister Graves.”

Graves set down the teacup and frowned. He looked at Hassan. “Be a lad and see if you can’t scare up some sugar for me, would you?”

Hassan stared at him, empty-faced.

Graves chuckled at the moment he seemed to recognize that the joke had not been funny. “I’m joking, Hassan.” He poured them both a cup of tea, and with a dramatic shiver quickly returned his arm to the warm protective folds of his blanket. “Bloody freezing, isn’t it?”

“It’s actually a little warmer,” Donk said, turning from his untouched tea to see Ahktar and an older gentleman walking over to join them. Ahktar’s father was a towering man with a great napkin-shaped cinnamon beard. He wore long clean white-yellow robes and a leather belt as thick as a cummerbund. Stuffed into this belt was what looked to be a .45. He was almost certainly Tajik, and had large crazed eyes and a nose that looked as hard as a sharp growth of bark. But he was smiling—something he did not do well, possibly for lack of practice. When he was close he threw open his arms and proclaimed something with an air of highly impersonal sympathy.

“My father says you are welcome,” Ahktar said. He did not much resemble his father, being smaller and darker-skinned. Doubtless Ahktar had a Pashtun mother around here somewhere. Donk could almost assemble her features. His father said something else, then nudged Ahktar to translate. “He says too that you are his great and protected guests.” His father spoke again, still with his effortful smile. “He says he is grateful for American soldiers and grateful for you American journalists, who care only of the truth.”

“English,” Graves said quietly.

“Whatever trouble you are in my father will help you. It is his delight.”

“Ahktar.” Donk stepped in gently, “I told you. We’re not in any trouble. My friend here is very sick. Our car broke down. We were trying to go to Mazar. It’s very simple.”

Ahktar said nothing.

“Well,” Donk asked, “are you going to tell your father that?”

“I tell him that already.”

“Then can we go to Mazar from here?”

The muscles of Ahktar’s face tightened with regret. “Unfortunately, that is problem. No one is going to Mazar today.” He seemed suddenly to wish that he were not standing beside his father, who of course asked what had just been said. Ahktar quietly back-translated for him, obviously hoping that his pea of an answer would be smothered beneath the mattress of translation.

“Why can’t we go to Mazar?” Donk pressed.

At this mention of Mazar his father spoke again, angrily now. Ahktar nodded obediently. “My father wishes you to know you are safe here. Mazar is maybe not so safe.”

“But Mazar’s perfectly safe. It’s been safe for days. I have friends there.”

“My father is friendly with American soldiers in Mazar. Very friendly. And now we are helping them with some problems they are having in this region. We have authority for this. Unfortunately, Mazar’s Uzbek commander and my father are not very friendly, and there my father has no authority. Therefore it would be good for you to stay.”

After a pause, Donk spoke. “Who, may I ask, is your father?”

“My father is General Ismail Mohammed. He was very important part of United National Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, which fought against—”

“But Mazar’s commander was part of that same front.”

“Yes,” Ahktar said sadly. “Here is problem.”

Donk had met a suspiciously large number of generals during his time in Afghanistan, and was not sure how to judge General Mohammed’s significance. Warlord? Ally? Both? He let it drop. “Do you have medicine here?”

Again Ahktar shrugged. “Some. But unfortunately it is with my father’s soldiers now. They are out taking care of some problems for Lieutenant Marty.”

“Is Lieutenant Marty with them?”

“Oh, no. Lieutenant Marty is in Mazar.”

“Where we can’t go.”

“Yes.”

There really were, Donk had often thought, and thought again now, two kinds of people in the world: Chaos People and Order People. For Donk this was not a bit of cynical Kipling wisdom to be doled out among fellow journalists in barren Inter-Continental barrooms. It was not meant in a condescending way. No judgment; it was a purely empirical matter: Chaos People, Order People. Anyone who doubted this had never tried to wait in line, board a plane, or get off a bus among Chaos People. The next necessary division of the world’s people took place along the lines of whether they actually knew what they were. The Japanese were Order People and knew it. Americans and English were Chaos People who thought they were Order People. The French were the worst thing to be: Order People who thought they were Chaos People. But Afghans, like Africans and Russians and the Irish, were Chaos People who knew they were Chaos People, and while this lent them a good amount of charm, it made their countries berserk, insane. Countries did indeed go insane. Sometimes they went insane and stayed insane. Chaos People’s countries particularly tended to stay insane. Donk miserably pulled off his do-rag, the bloody glue that held the fabric to his skin tearing from his ruined eyebrow so painfully that he had to work to keep the tears from his eyes. “So tell me, Ahktar. What are we supposed to do here?”