The bastard had gone in without me. I slammed down the phone. “Fuck him!” I said. “Fuck fuck fuck him!” I cursed and slammed some more.
And then I thought, Okay. Fine. I’ll go in by myself if I have to.
For the next week, I began afresh, visiting one group of mujahideen after the other, drinking one glass of sugary tea after another. I was snubbed, insulted, told to wait outside, made to step off their property, given the runaround, made to beg and fed lies until finally, almost a full week after Pascal’s departure, the Harakat-I-Islami group told me to meet them at their headquarters at 6 A.M. the next morning to go inside.
“Are you insane?” Robert yelled, when I told him of my plans. “They’re Iran-funded Shiites! They’re in bed with the Ayatollah!” (444 days, Reagan’s inauguration . . .) We were standing on the sidelines of a buzkashi game, watching a headless goat being dragged over a dusty field by a bunch of agitated Afghani men on horseback. Buzkashi—literally “goat grabbing”—is played kind of like polo, except instead of scoring goals with balls and mallets, the object of the game is to drag a dead goat with your bare hands from one end of the field to the other. A goal is scored when the goat is dropped in the middle of a circle, called the halal circle, the “kosher/pure” circle, as opposed to the haram or “unkosher/impure” circle on the other side of the field.
Buzkashi is supposed to be a team sport, with two teams facing off against each other, unified in their goals. But because each point scored earns cash prizes for the individual who scored it, the match usually devolves into a vicious free-for-all, with every man trying to grab the goat for himself. Journalists who’d spent any time covering Afghanistan usually jumped on buzkashi as the perfect metaphor for the internecine conflicts between groups of mujahideen, who were all supposed to be driving out the Soviets together instead of devoting a large part of their energy to killing one another, keeping their rival groups from grabbing the desired “goat”: the future governance of Afghanistan.
“I don’t care if they’re giving the Ayatollah nightly blow jobs,” I said. “They’re the only group who’s agreed to take me, the war’s about to end and I’m tired of all the jokes at my expense—‘Where’s your boyfriend? Wasn’t he supposed to take you inside?’ Fuck Pascal. I’m going.”
Robert looked at me and shook his head. “Debs, swallow your ego for one second and reconsider. It’s not a good idea. They’re an unknown entity. They’re Shiites. If anything happens to you, the embassy has no leverage. They won’t be able to help you.”
“So don’t tell them I’m going,” I said.
A giant roar of applause surged out from the audience as the headless goat was thrust inside the “pure” circle. The victorious player, standing up in his stirrups, clasped his hands above his head in triumph. The rest of the players milled about on their horses, looking slightly miffed. “Men,” I said, with a tone of disgust. “Halal circles, haram circles, good, bad, Madonnas, whores, goats, penises, it’s all the same.”
Robert started to laugh. “I think you’re losing it.” He tried his best all day to convince me not to go; he even tried to switch around his class schedules so that he could accompany me inside. But in the end, I was a stubborn mule, going inside like an ass, coming out riding on another.
I FINALLY ASCERTAIN THAT this new and equally frozen cave where we have now holed up for the past few days is somewhere north of the Sanglakh Valley, in a ridge of mountains circling the capital city of Kabul, just south of the city. Though the Soviets are set to retreat any day now, they leave their parting gifts of aerial bombs all around us. We hear them falling and exploding in the night. During the day, I go out with reconnaissance troops to check out the immense craters, but there’s very little to photograph. A hole is a hole is a hole.
The only hole that both fascinates and repels me here is the deep and narrow one dug into the ground just outside our cave, the one I have to squat over behind a flimsy, filthy curtain whenever the amoebas send me running. There’s something uniquely humbling about having to face—and defecate over—an enormous, frozen drip castle of other people’s feces ten times a day every day. After a while, as my dysentery worsens, it starts to feel like my only home.
The mujahideen spend the greater part of their days cleaning out their Kalashnikovs. I’ve shot six rolls of this already. Mohammed cleaning his gun. Mustafa cleaning his gun. Ali cleaning his gun. Mohammed and Mustafa, together, cleaning Ali’s gun.
SANGLAKH VALLEY, AFGHANISTAN, 1989
I myself have become quite adept at handling the Kalashnikovs. Some days, when there’s nothing better to do, the mujahideen set up a couple of cans on distant rocks and challenge one another to games of marksmanship. The rules of the game are simple. Two people play, and whoever hits the most cans first wins. I play a lot. And, though my shoulder is getting progressively more bruised from the gun’s kick, I hardly ever lose. (Thanks in part to years of summer camp riflery classes, a lifetime of perfect vision, and extremely steady hands, which allow me to shoot photographs in low light at slow shutter speeds.) At first the mujahideen thought it was funny, my prowess with a gun, but as my victories mounted, they stopped letting me play as often. Which is probably just as well, considering the fact that I’ve been having dreams where the tin cans turn into people after I pull the trigger, after it’s too late to warn them to get off the goddamned rocks. Also, there’s the whole virility thing. Men get angry when they lose to a woman.
And then they get even.
SANGLAKH VALLEY, AFGHANISTAN, 1989
One day during morning exercises, I am shooting pictures of a couple of the soldiers crawling on their bellies through the snow under a barbed-wire obstacle course when one of the mujahideen, whom I’d just vanquished the previous day in a shoot-the-can match, pulls me by the arm and drags me away from the group. He mimes for me to take a picture.
I shrug, throw out my hands palms up. Of what? We’re in the middle of a narrow valley, with mountains jutting up on either side of us. In front of me, where he’s pointing, there’s nothing but snow and the cloudless horizon.
He puts out his hand. Stay. Then he mimes taking a picture again. Then he pulses his palm five times. Wait. You’ll see. He walks away.
I crouch in the snow, my camera to my eye, waiting for whatever it is the mujahed wants me to photograph. He runs behind me, yells something in Pushto to one of his pals and in an instant, with a deafening boom, the ground just yards in front of me explodes, radiating snow and ash up and out. I fall to the ground, hold my hands over my head and, with the explosion echoing inside my chest, I start to scream. I’m choking on ash. My pulse is racing. My hands and body are shaking. I yell, “What the fuck was that?” but it comes out as high-pitched gibberish.
All of the mujahideen leave their morning exercises and come running over, laughing hysterically and pointing at me. Then I notice the green box with the T-handle: fucking string-detonated mine. What assholes! The mujahed who had dragged me to this spot takes a small, cracked hand mirror from his pocket and shoves it in my face. A moment clearly rehearsed. With his other hand, he takes his palm and starts rubbing the surface of his own face and making a sour look. Then, laughing once again, he says, “Dirty,” which is the first and only English word I’ve ever heard out of his mouth. I peer into the mirror. My face is black with ash, with only two narrow, tear-stained streaks of grayish-pink skin. Some of the men are now convulsing with laughter, unable to control themselves.
“Yeah, very funny!” I yell, my nose now running, the tears now flowing steadily, my body still shaking uncontrollably from the jolt. “That was some joke! Ha ha ha.” But the anger in my voice only makes the mujahideen laugh harder.
That night, back at the cave, Hashim tells me he thinks it’s best if I do not compete in the shooting matches anymore. I thank him for the advice. Then I unfurl my brown blanket, lay it on the dirt floor in a corner as fa
r away from the others as I can possibly get. I unroll my now filthy sleeping bag, slip inside, pull off my ash-covered, blood-encrusted jeans, and put them under my head as a pillow. Soon, the men are snoring. I’m wide awake, fantasizing about the smell of Bounce. I try to force myself to sleep. I am so lonely here, I think. So fucking lonely. And with the diarrhea and the cold and the dirt and the stench and the snow and the boredom and the bombs and the hazing and that ever-expanding pile of shit in the hole outside our cave—my only real measure of time—I don’t know how much longer I can take it. At some point that enormous pile of human excrement is going to get so tall it’ll burst out of the ground. And then what? Then what?
Another week passes, and now we are marching through the snow on a two-hour hike to check out a nearby village that was recently bombed, although by whom it is unclear. Hashim tells me he thinks Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s men might have done it in retaliation for some perceived wrong or another. As we near the village, colored flags stick out of the snow, marking the graves of the dead. The village itself is nothing more than a few haphazardly placed mud-colored walls, their torn, jagged edges reaching to the sky, useless. The villagers, about fifty or so people, mostly women and children, have all taken refuge in two rooms whose walls were left miraculously intact but whose destroyed roof looks to have been quickly reconstructed out of sheets of corrugated metal and a translucent green tarp. In one room, a room I imagine used to be someone’s kitchen, a few men sit around a stove on the dirt floor, drinking tea. In the women’s quarters, a larger room that was probably once a living room, the older women are seated on the floor, huddled next to one another under blankets, their backs against the walls. The younger ones flit about, caring as best they can for the children, many of whom, despite the cold, are barefoot.
Since the mujahideen are convinced there are Soviet-funded spies in every village, and because they think that as an American (read “noncommunist”) journalist, my life might be in danger, Hashim lies to the villagers. He tells them I am a doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières, a stalwart group of medical professionals who travel to war-torn areas and offer their much needed services.
“You can’t do that!” I say, when Hashim tells me what he’s said.
Hashim looks bemused. “Yes, I can.” In Hashim’s world, dissension is not allowed.
There are two major problems with this lie. First and foremost, I’m not a doctor. So I can’t help the boy with the open, gaping wound, or the women pointing to their babies’ bottoms covered with diarrhea, or the young girl with a dirty old eye patch gesturing for a new one. But like flies swarming around a grain of sugar, they surround and engulf me with their pleas for help. “I’m an impostor!” I want to yell, shaking my head, overcome by a mixture of guilt at our ruse and pity for those who believe it. “Really, an impostor!” But Hashim shoots me a look that says, Don’t you dare. Then he takes my camera bag away.
“Hey, give that back to me,” I say, now thoroughly annoyed with Hashim’s paranoia.
“No, Miss Deborah, no pictures. Many spies. You doctor. Be doctor.”
Which brings us to problem number two with the fake doctor scenario. To be perfectly crude, I have finally hit pay dirt as far as documentary photography goes. Images of suffering and pain jump out from every corner of the room, taunting me to capture them. This is the real face of war. A few dexterous clicks of the camera, and these people would be plastered all over U.S. News & World Report. Or at the very least they might peer out from a quaint, $250 quarter-page photo somewhere in the middle of the magazine, which will not necessarily save their wretched lives or reimburse my trip, but will let everyone back home know the internecine war in Afghanistan is still raging, despite the Soviet retreat; that the story is not as simple as Reagan would have had us believe. But because I’m supposedly a doctor, because Hashim can’t imagine a scenario in which a doctor might take a few souvenir photos, because Hashim is stronger than me and will not give me back my camera bag, I can’t shoot a single frame. It’s like a bad O. Henry plot.
The women with the diarrhea-encrusted infants are now making wild hand gestures, putting their fingers to their mouths as if they were eating small morsels of food. I turn to Hashim. “Do they want food?” I ask. I tally up my stash in my head. I still have ten Snickers bars left, which I have begun to ration very strictly between cigarettes. A third for breakfast, a third for lunch, a third for dinner. I also have half a box of Tic-Tacs, but they don’t do much to calm my appetite. I feel hungry all the time, and this on top of the dysentery has started to take its toll. I am quite literally wasting away, my fetid Levi’s now hanging on my increasingly bony frame in defiance of gravity. Though I feel badly for the villagers, and though I’m usually the first one to share my food with others, there’s no way I’d ever share my Snickers bars with these people today. Hunger, I freely admit, has transformed me.
“No,” laughs Hashim. “They want medicine. For babies. Poo poo no good. Bad poo poo.”
“It’s called diarrhea, Hashim. Di-a-rrhea,” I say the word slowly so he can learn it, “and I have no medicine for baby diarrhea. I have Flagyl for adult diarrhea, but I can’t give it to babies. Too strong. I don’t know the dosage.” Hashim looks like he understands half of what I’m saying. Christ. I don’t want to give these babies a medicine that, for all I know, might kill them. But the women are now desperate. There’s a doctor in their midst, and they are not going to let her go back where she came from until she gives them diarrhea medicine for their ailing babies. So I do the best I can: I give each of the women two Tic-Tacs. I tell them to dissolve it in some water, give it to their babies. And then I pray for a miracle.
We leave the village a few hours before nightfall and head back to our cave. An hour or so into our snowy march, we stop to pee. As usual, the men wait for me to be led away by one of the mujahideen before they will relieve themselves on the side of the road. If it were my choice, we’d all urinate together, one big happy family. Call me crazy, but I don’t like having to trudge twenty to thirty yards through a snow-covered minefield whenever nature calls. It seems unduly risky and stupid, and it makes me feel like a burden to boot. But I do understand the laws of Islam. These men get upset if I so much as forget to cover my lap with a blanket when I’m sitting Indian-style in our cave, as if the sight of my jeans-covered crotch, the mere intimation of a vagina, might cripple them.
As my mujahed guide and I walk away, I make sure, as usual, to step exactly into the snow tracks he’s marked for me with his feet. We’ve worked out a system: I walk to the very last track in the snow, he turns around and walks a few paces back over his already trodden path and waits with his back toward me for me to finish. But on this particular day, neither of us makes it that far. As if in slow motion, I watch the ground directly underneath the soldier erupt, a sonic boom ripping through my body. The explosive energy of the detonated mine throws me to the ground, where I lay stunned and screaming. I look over at the dark blood slowly seeping into the snow where the mujahed now lies, his right leg severed in half. Suddenly, as the maimed man quietly begins to weep, I can control my bladder no longer. The warm liquid gushes out of my body.
I sense only a minor pain in my right hand. A piece of shrapnel the size and shape of a small guitar pick has lodged itself into the weblike skin between my thumb and index finger. I yank it out, and the wound begins to bleed. But feeling my legs just to be sure, I realize I’m fine. Whole. I’m now sitting up in the snow, shivering. My urine-soaked jeans are starting to freeze and stick to my thighs, but I’m so happy to be alive I barely notice the discomfort. I stand up and walk carefully over to the soldier, the crunch of my boots through crimson snow drowned out by the man’s wails. “Allah akbar, Allah akbar . . .” he cries, writhing in pain. I gently stroke his hair. I tell him I’m sorry, over and over again.
The other mujahideen have now come cautiously running to his aid, stepping in the tracks he’s alread
y laid, circling around him, screaming at one another in Pushto. But the chaos is orderly. Rote. I realize that these men, these soldiers of Allah, must be used to so much blood, so much missing flesh and bone. I step back through my own tracks to give them room to work.
I know I should be working, too. Shooting pictures of this. But I feel so guilty about the whole thing, I can’t do it, cannot even fathom doing it. A man gets his leg blown off taking me to pee, and then I’m supposed to shove a lens in his face and shoot? No way. Maybe I’m not made for this job.
The men fashion a makeshift stretcher from two sticks and some cloth. Then, the same soldier who’d played the practical joke on me just one week earlier approaches me with his own piece of cloth. He rips it in half, tying the first piece tightly around my injured hand. With the second piece, he moistens it in the snow and tenderly wipes the ashes off my face. “Dirty,” he says once again. This time he isn’t laughing.
The men take turns, four at a time, carrying the injured soldier back through the narrow, snow-covered valley to our cave. It takes us a little over an hour to get there, during which time the man’s screams subside to yelps and finally to silence. He’s alive but in shock, and Hashim tells me they’ll be transporting him to the nearest medical outpost by donkey.
“A donkey?” I say. It suddenly occurs to me that I have to find a donkey myself. I must have a donkey. A donkey! A donkey! I think, My cameras for a donkey! Enough of this war, I want to go home. I’ve been stuck in these mountains for nearly a month, I’ve taken mediocre pictures of a lot of nothing, I haven’t showered once and now I’m covered in urine on top of menstrual blood on top of layers and layers of sweat and dirt. My Snickers bars are almost gone, I have probably lost nearly twenty pounds, my bouts of diarrhea are becoming more and more severe and, frankly, Hashim has been very unclear about when his troops might go back to Peshawar.
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