Green on Blue (23 page)

Stay, he said. I will prepare us some breakfast.

Atal lit a match and touched it gently to the ends of a leafy branch. The flame took slowly. Then, all at once, it spread as the dry leaves caught fire. He threw the branch in the stove. I hadn’t noticed that the room was cold until it filled with quick warmth.

Atal sat on his haunches and faced the stove. Badal, he said,
should resolve an injustice, not continue it. But that is our way. Some injustice is done against a man, so he continues it against others. That is the way of Commander Sabir. He learned this after what happened to his brother, Jazeem.

Did you know Jazeem? I asked.

No, he said, but there are few men whose fates have been tied closer to mine. The man who led the ambush that killed Jazeem, Hafez, was my cousin, not by blood but by friendship. Hafez had no real family. As boys we played in the same dirty alleys and sometimes lived in the same house, him sleeping on my family’s floor in the winter. When I became a man, I inherited that house and a plot of land, not much, but a livelihood. Hafez had none of this. Soon he took to the mountains and found his livelihood in the war, fighting. I saw him from time to time when he would come out of the mountains. Only when Sabir gunned him down did I realize my obligation to him as family. I awoke that morning and Hafez’s body was sprawled outside this house, delivered to me as his only kin. He lay there, legs straight out, head bent back on the wall, eyes rolled up, the whites peeking through slits. I still see it clearly.

We buried him. Then the entire village looked to me for badal. People who barely knew Hafez spoke to me of Pashtunwali, of right and
wrong. He led the ambush against Jazeem, but he did not kill him! they’d say. Others told me: If Sabir was to take Hafez’s life, he should have taken it in battle. That is fair, an assassination is not! They came to me with plenty of reasons and their reasons always ended with: There must be badal!

Hafez had gone to fight when he was angry and young. By the end, though, he’d forgotten his anger. In the months before he died, he’d come to my home every few weeks, delivering money to me. He asked that I give it to a woman who lived in Orgun, no questions. And in friendship that’s what I did. But in the end whatever Hafez had found and built with this woman mattered little. Although he forgot the anger that first sent him to the mountains, it never forgot him. It took him.

The kettle atop the stove came to a boil. Atal wrapped a towel around its handle and brought it to the table. He poured out two steaming cups and continued: For weeks after his death, I couldn’t see the right path. To purpose myself toward killing Sabir seemed the only option that offered nang, but it would continue the same cycle that destroyed my cousin. One night my answer came as I slept. A noise woke me in this room. I walked out, rifle in hand. I imagined that Sabir or one of his men had come to kill me. In that moment I felt certain I’d acted too slowly, my foolish restraint was now my undoing. As I moved through my house, a desire for violence ran through me. I was determined to destroy whatever I found. And as I crept into this room, on that couch, where you sit, was a little girl, Fareeda. Her eyes were wet and wide with fear. When she saw me she began to sob. I set down my rifle, sat next to her, and she wept through her black hair into my shoulder. She was healthy then. Not as she is now.

Atal glanced down at his arm, but smiled as he thought of her in those days.

Fareeda is Hafez’s daughter? I asked.

Who is to say? said Atal. At first she was gripped by silence and tears, but she came to tell me how her mother had paid a man to bring her to my house from Orgun. A few days later, I drove with her to the house where before I’d delivered Hafez’s money. When I knocked on the door, a man I’d never seen answered. His face was scarred from pox and red as side meat. This was the type of person your eyes knew to avoid. At his appearance, Fareeda clung to my leg. It was the first time she’d embraced me. The man said that the woman who’d lived there before had been very poor and that he’d let her stay without rent for some months. He assured me of his kindness and virtue toward her and because of that was surprised when she’d suddenly left. But the man’s dirty clothes and sickly appearance did not bespeak generosity. The world hadn’t been generous to him, so what could be expected. But he looked at the little girl and promised he had done nothing to harm them.

By the time we traveled back from Orgun, I made a vow to keep Fareeda until her mother returned. Weeks passed and it became clear no one was coming. She’d been abandoned, and shortly after the disease took form in her arm. I then decided I had a niece and that Hafez’s memory would be one of family. I committed my life to Fareeda out of respect for his memory.

From time to time, Sabir came to our village. He always paid me a visit or offered polite taunts in the shura. He’d tell the spingaris: Atal knows better than most the problems this village faces. Or he’d say: You above all understand why a family should not oppose the Special Lashkar. He hoped that I’d purpose my badal
against him and in turn give him a purpose against me.

Atal sipped his tea and stroked his graying beard.

And Gazan? I asked.

Gazan was inevitable, said Atal. His reason for fighting I don’t know. I imagine his tragedy is common. There will always be angry men ready
to kill each other. But now Gazan swears he is for peace, and if I can help him find it through the Americans, I will. Peace with Gazan could break the cycle of fighting and this threatens all Sabir has. Tomorrow I am going to see my American contact in Shkin. I need your help to get there and back safely.

I sipped my tea, twisting my expression from uncertainty to resolve. I felt unsettled but told him: Of course I’ll help.

Good. When Gazan left, said Atal, he warned me to stay off the north road today.

His men took a mine there, I replied. An attack against the Special Lashkar, it seems.

Yes, he said, I figured the same. It is a strange thing that Sabir lets his own dog bite him. We’ll go tomorrow night then.

I nodded and swallowed the last of my tea.

At that moment we heard a sharp and faraway rumble. We rose and walked into Atal’s courtyard. Outside, villagers stood on their rooftops and gawked into the distance. We gazed northward through a gap in the rubbled wall. A column of deep black smoke corkscrewed into the blue sky. The mine. After a few moments, the smoke thinned into a loose gray haze that blanketed the surrounding mountains. The haze hid the origin of the explosion as well as Gazan’s fighters, who surely watched from some fold in the rock or gathering of pines.

We stood silently until the villagers climbed down from the roofs and went back to their work. Atal turned toward me. In the daylight I could see the tired shadows that hung beneath his eyes.

It’s grown so late it’s morning, he said. I’ll see you when it’s dark again.

We shook and placed our palms over our hearts, as is the custom with friends. I left for Mumtaz’s home. On the way, I passed a number of villagers. None of them paid me notice. They’d accepted the outside
world intruding on their lives. But as they walked by, I felt a certain kinship with their resignation. It was the same resignation I felt toward Commander Sabir. He’d done nothing to stop the attack I’d warned him about. And I’d surely known the men who’d just been killed, but still, all I felt was numbness, the numbness of circumstances that can’t be changed, unless we’re reckless. Atal was reckless.

–

I collapsed in a pile by the stove. It was morning. Through the day I slept. Mumtaz came and went. Beyond my closed eyes, I felt his movements. He fumbled nearby, near the firewood, near his bed, close. He cooked lunch and left. Then he cooked dinner and left. He was there. I felt safe with him near, but I didn’t want to face him. He wouldn’t ask what I’d done the night before or where I’d been. He was too polite for that. Written into the lines of his face, as if in ink, was his knowledge of this war, and it would be difficult to look at him as I left to gain knowledge of my own.

I awoke after nightfall. Laid out next to me was a flat steel plate and on it an oily mound of chalow Mumtaz had prepared. The rice was slippery and still warm in my fingers. I shoveled it into my mouth with guilt. The old man hadn’t cooked for himself. He’d cooked for me. Would I repay the generosity of one who’d sworn off badal to live a lonely peace, by killing Gazan, who claimed to want the same? But this was not the way to think. Mumtaz’s brother was dead. Mine was alive. It is easy to fall into loneliness when the world has already fallen from you.

I wiped my greasy fingers against the hem of my shalwar kameez and left half the rice for Mumtaz. He didn’t owe me all of it and I didn’t want to owe him anything else.

I stepped outside. A warm wind spun a coil of dust across the courtyard. Leaning against the chicken coop, Mumtaz sat in the dark, staring
a ways off. Iskander’s head rested in his lap. I stood in the door of the main house. As I looked at Mumtaz, he turned away. He surely knew that no act of kindness could convince me to stay. So he said nothing, neither did I, and I left.

–

Atal’s HiLux idled in the courtyard, echoing off the night. I climbed through the hole in his compound’s outer wall. Here I saw Fareeda. She lay in the back of the house, the outline of her body etched in light from a lamp she used for her opium. Her black hair was uncovered. It spilled softly across her pillows. Her gaze rested somewhere in the darkness. I wasn’t sure if she noticed me there. She exhaled a thick cloud of smoke. As it tumbled through the lamplight, I saw where the tangled flesh from her arm spread up her neck, unwinding just beneath the ear.

Before I could approach, Atal crossed the courtyard toward me. In each hand he carried a Kalashnikov. He pushed one into my chest. I flinched, taking a full step back. My hands were still slick with grease from the chalow and the gunmetal became slippery in them. The rifle forced a decision, one I wasn’t ready to make. I no longer knew who I should be shooting at.

We’ll take the north road to Shkin, said Atal. You drive. I’ll keep watch. You know how to drive blacked out, yes?

Yes, with night vision, I replied.

Atal pointed toward the three-quarter moon. There is your night vision, he said.

I followed him into the HiLux, and slowly we drove through Gomal’s dusty lanes. Atal whispered directions to me, his voice filled with a flat sameness that suited the colorless night of our journey. In the dark, we struggled to avoid the many mud-brick walls of the other compounds. Soon came our final turn out of the village, and a wide expanse of
mountain lay before us. I slowed the truck and searched the distance for where we’d pick up the north road.

Atal grabbed my shoulder and pointed. There, he said.

A clean, flat stretch of earth unraveled from the far peaks like an inconvenient thread hanging loosely from a hem. It was the north road and it connected Gomal to the unkind world beyond.

We eased across the broken ground. Dust stuck to our windshield, obscuring everything. Atal hung from his waist out the passenger window. He looked for obstacles, shouting his corrections: Right turn! RIGHT TURN! and I’d jerk the wheel and we’d miss running into a boulder, or: Stop! STOP! and we’d brake just shy of dropping into a wadi. Every few seconds, I’d shoot windshield wiper fluid to clear my view. As Atal hung out the window, the fluid squirted into his face and he cursed, but he didn’t tell me to stop. He knew I needed to see and I began to feel a fondness for him as we struggled across the broken ground together, me blind and his beard and shirt spotted with the blue soap.

After nearly thirty minutes, we planted our wheels on the hard-packed gravel of the north road. Now our truck sped from a crawl to a jog. Switchbacks carried us over the ridgelines. At times the rises were so steep it seemed as if the world had fallen away from us and we drove into the sky on a road of nothing. Then we’d crest a ridge only to descend, straining in first gear toward a stubborn earth that seemed determined to burrow us into it. At points the switchbacks became so narrow that the mountain rock clawed at our doors and we pulled our side mirrors in lest they snap off. For hours we drove like this. All that passed beside us was the mountain’s face or the valley’s drop, and between us was only silence.

Late in the night we climbed yet another switchback and crested yet another ridge. As the hood of our truck went from pointing at the stars to shuttling toward the valley floor, Atal’s body shot up straight as a
stalk. He grabbed me. AZIZ! he shouted. I stood with both feet on the brake pedal. We skidded forward. The front of our truck dropped hard. I fumbled for the emergency brake, found it, and tugged with both arms. We tilted and stopped. Atal carefully leaned out his window. I did the same.

In front of us, on the road, a piece of earth had been scooped out and threatened to swallow our truck. Our two tires hung over the crater’s edge. I shifted into reverse, revved our engine, our wheels spun, our cab shook. Nothing. I tried once more. Again, nothing. Our truck balanced as scales do. Atal tapped my arm, opened his door a crack, and managed to slide out. I turned off the ignition and did the same. My door opened to a straight drop, nearly a hundred yards down the mountainside. I clung to the side of the truck as it crowded me against the small ledge. That’s when I saw it. At the bottom of the mountainside was another truck. It’d been blown down there by whatever had cratered the road—the mine. The truck had flipped over and its chassis stared upward, frozen and useless, a mechanical death mask.

The three-quarter moon cast uneven shadows as we walked to the front of our truck and into the crater’s bottom. Atal held his palm over the earth.

Still warm, he said.

I too held my palm above the earth and felt the warmth. I picked up the soil, rubbing its burned crust through my fingers. It felt oiled and sticky, a mix of engine grease, gasoline, and blood, most likely blood. Pressed against the far side of the crater was a door that had been blasted from the truck. Two vertical stripes were painted down it—Comanches. Relief tinged through me, a shameful sensation to have, but none of the Tomahawks had been killed, none of my closest friends, over a single fighting season that’s what they’d become. Atal stood in the crater. Looking up, he examined our truck’s chassis.