Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  At that moment it was 115°F in the shade outside the command hut, and my fatigues were tattooed to my skin. I was swimming in sweat, I felt I was melting like ice cream. My skin, my hair, and my underwear were all boiling wet. None of my physical training had prepared me to handle this climate. I was afraid I would faint. And I worried about the kids on guard duty at the entrance to the base, in their helmets and bulletproof vests under that murderous sun. It must have been like wearing an iron breastplate in a furnace. The command hut had air-conditioning, but it couldn’t be turned on because it used too much electricity and shorted out the system. Three fingers of sand had collected beneath the rusty window. The colonel was suffering from the heat, too, and trickles of sweat ran down his cheeks. I remained at attention, wary. Minotto was forty-six, with a basketball player’s build, a pelican’s nose, and beady eyes that sank into his cheeks, as if they’d been chiseled absentmindedly in his face. From his grim expression, I expected to be bawled out.

  The rapport among officers, NCOs, and troops had broken down. Once we’d passed D+120, in other words two thirds of our tour of duty, the platoon leaders limited sorties from the FOB as much as possible. Even though it brought bad luck, the soldiers were counting the days till they could go home. The officers were tired, and the slowness, the bureaucracy, the lack of coordination, the delays, and the unexpected difficulties, which they had faced boldly in the beginning, now discouraged them. Captain Paggiarin nearly wept with rage over the cancellation of a cooperative project—the construction of a bridge on the Farah River—that had cost the regiment a great deal of effort and the Italian government a great deal of money. It was whispered that Carlo Paggiarin of Feltre, the imperturbable Skinny Buddha whom no one, in his thirty-eight years of life, had ever seen get angry or lose his cool—until he came to Afghanistan—had broken his hand punching a wall. And sure enough, his right hand was bandaged. The soldiers’ discontent was even more physical. Fights broke out over nothing—for refusing to lend a cigarette, or cutting in line, or over a box of cookies that went missing. Some people’s nerves gave out. Others sought doctors’ excuses, the infirmary was always crowded. Complaints of crippling stomach pains and headaches that the doctors were convinced were made up. Nevertheless, orders came from headquarters to eliminate all dead weight, so as to avoid slander spreading about the competence of the health care. Private Rizzo—who faked an asthma attack every time he was supposed to leave the base—was sent home. A soldier from Cerberus platoon was repatriated for insubordination. But I didn’t want to go home. I felt I was just beginning to understand Afghanistan.

  Still, I was scared of what the colonel wanted to tell me. One of the NCOs from the Ninth—I could never figure out who—had complained to the captain, accusing me of causing hierarchical confusion among the troops and their superiors. He insinuated that I was having a relationship with Corporal-Major Diego Jodice, which was—in addition to being regrettable—also prohibited. He therefore requested that Sergeant Paris be sanctioned with repatriation.

  “What do you know about Karim Ghaznavi?” Minotto asked without any sort of preamble. “The interpreter?” I replied, relieved. No, it wasn’t about me. The captain hadn’t given any weight to the complaint. He had plenty of other things to think about besides gossip. The colonel nodded. Ghaznavi was a bright little man, with amber skin, refined manners, and sad eyes behind his round glasses; he wore tired leather moccasins, and too-short, Western-style pants that revealed a pair of droopy, coffee-colored socks. He was always sweaty, dusty, breathless. He slept in a hut at the entrance to the base with the other two interpreters, younger than him by at least thirty years, and much more resourceful. His every gesture displayed the exhausted, impoverished dignity of a man who has seen better days. When I was introduced to him, I instinctively called him Professor, and I could tell that he appreciated the nickname. I didn’t trust the Afghani officers, whose pasts, I imagined, included stoning women and cutting off the hands of thieves; I was suspicious of the Afghani police who collaborated with our regiment; at times I was afraid of the impetuous, arrogant, and careless ANA soldiers who roamed the base with guns loaded even though it was forbidden; I found the other interpreters greedy for money or gifts and superficial in their imitation of Western ways with their slicked-back hair and stylish sunglasses—or else unscrupulous and ready to betray us. I was always apprehensive when I went on patrol with them, afraid they’d sell us out to the insurgents by communicating our movements, our coordinates, or our itinerary, which I would choose with my squad leaders right before leaving the base. Whoever was planting IEDs always knew when and where the Alpini were going: my platoon alone had identified and defused five of them. Someone had to be informing them. But the sad Professor seemed trustworthy to me.

  “For what it’s worth, sir, in my experience Ghaznavi is reliable,” I said warily. I didn’t want to go too far out on a limb because I gathered from the colonel’s grim expression that he, on the other hand, had a low opinion of the interpreter. I thought I knew Ghaznavi well. Ever since I arrived, I’d had the impression that he wanted to strike up a conversation with me, but wouldn’t let himself because I’m a woman. The pleasure of discovering that we shared a passion convinced him to overcome his reluctance. He’d surprised me one evening holding a book and said, rather ceremoniously, that Sergeant Paris must be a special person: soldiers and NCOs never read. “Maybe in Italy one has to be at least a lieutenant or a captain to love books. But that’s strange, because poetry is for everyone, and anyone can appreciate it. Poetry is like a flower growing in a field. It doesn’t ask permission to be there, it takes root wherever it pleases.” I’ve always loved reading to learn or to escape from the world, but I’d never read a book of verse: my indifference to poetry seemed shameful, so—to keep Ghazvani from realizing the misunderstanding—I slipped my volume on strategic analysis into my jacket pocket. “If I had met someone when I was young who knew how to talk to me about poetry with so much conviction, perhaps I wouldn’t be here,” I responded. Then I started to cough, because it was the time of the 120-days wind, and the blowing sand burned my throat. “Poets say that the wind is the voice of God,” Ghaznavi had commented. “He prefers to speak to mortals in a language that only sensitive people can understand.” “And do you believe them?” “Poets always speak the truth,” Ghaznavi assured me, “but my grandfather used to say that the summer wind is the army of angels that travels the country in order to inspect the battlefield before the Apocalypse, and my grandfather always spoke the truth, too.”

  The Professor was from Herat. As an archaeology student he had worked with Italians on the restoration of Qal’a-i-Ikhtyaruddin, or the Citadel—sometime around 1976. It was a magnificent site, a fortress with eighteen towers over a hundred feet tall, covered in Kufic inscriptions, majolica, and frescoes. Almost totally destroyed. According to Ghaznavi, most of Afghanistan’s archaeological treasures had been lost, and the rest were at risk. No one understood art here. But Italians, then and now, always ask a lot of questions. And every time I saw a mound of stones I would ask him, “Are they ancient?” Ghaznavi had learned Italian from the archaeologists. He’d never been to Italy, though.

  I sensed that the colonel wasn’t interested in the Professor’s archaeological experience, however, and I didn’t allow myself to express too forceful an opinion. I was only a sergeant, after all. “We’ve received a report from the Afghani police,” Minotto said, scribbling in a notebook. “It seems that Ghaznavi is selling drugs to someone on the base.”

  “Drugs!” I exclaimed. “Impossible.” “That’s what I said, too.” The colonel sighed. “It has to be a lie, someone who wants revenge, or his job, you know he earns in a month what an Afghani working at a ministry earns in a year,” I added, and then repented immediately because a subordinate answers only what is asked, and doesn’t make inferences. “It’s a very detailed report,” Captain Paggiarin cut in. “It seems it’s been going on for a while. It mentions two female soldie
rs. Now, Paris, other than Lieutenant Ghigo, the only women at Sollum are you and Giani. The military police have already questioned Giani, discreetly because it’s a serious case, and the corporal swears she knows nothing about it. Besides, she handles supplies, she’s only been off the base once, it does not appear she has had any contact with Ghaznavi—whereas you, Sergeant, have often been seen conversing with him.”

  It was true. But they were innocent chats. We either talked about books or theology. Ghaznavi told me he would have liked to be able to give me a volume by Rumi, the greatest classical poet of Persian literature. He wrote the Mathnawi, a fifty-thousand-verse poem in rhymed couplets, the Diwan, and a collection of maxims. Ghaznavi used to have an English version of Rumi’s Selected Poems, from the end of the nineteenth century, it had belonged to his grandfather. Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī was a poet but also a Sufi mystic, an enlightened man, it’s said he was crazy for God. “Do you believe in God, Sergeant Paris?” “Yes, yes,” I was quick to say, because during mission prep our instructors had coached us not to offend the Afghanis with our lack of faith. And to say that we were Christians, regardless of what we really believed. For them a life without God was inconceivable, and they wouldn’t trust anyone who did not fear him. The Koran teaches that God is closer to us than our own blood. “You really should read him,” Ghaznavi said. He believed that Sergeant Paris appreciated the beauty of light. Every thought that is not a memory of God is merely a whisper. And no one knew how to speak of God like Rumi, he had even written him a love song.

  But Ghaznavi no longer had the book, unfortunately. During Afghanistan’s darkest years, he had burned all the books in his library, one by one. Out of fear. He wept as he poked the fire. All that beauty, flying away in the smoke and turning into a pile of cold ashes. He had learned a few bits of the Mathnawi by heart, and he would read it in his mind, eyes closed. As he told me these things, I wondered if I could accept a gift from him, and I told myself no. So it was just as well that he didn’t have that book anymore, or else I would have had to insult him by refusing. “Books are our truest friends,” Ghaznavi said. “They are your companions through good times and bad, they never desert you. You may abandon them, but they know how to forgive you.” And he was in need of companions because he had no one left. His brothers and nephews had emigrated to Canada. His wife and children were refugees in Iran, and he rarely saw them; it pained him. “Why don’t you have them come back?” I had asked naïvely. Ghaznavi looked at me with a sorrowful smile. And it took me weeks to understand what he couldn’t say: it was too dangerous, he’d been working for the foreigners for too long, by now a lot of people knew he was an interpreter, they would be hung.

  “But even now,” Ghaznavi continued, ignoring my question, “it’s difficult to buy a book.” If any Alpini, when their tour of duty was over, wanted to leave him theirs, he would be grateful. “I’ll spread the word,” I had promised him, “I’ll collect everything I find.” And I had. Ghaznavi’s future library included Russo’s The Road to Oxiana, my history and travel books about Afghanistan, two novels from Barry Sadler’s series about the immortal soldier Casca Rufio Longinus that belonged to Spina, Lorenzo’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Giani’s Twilight books; other Panthers contributed The Lord of the Rings, three mysteries, and a book by Mauro Corona. Ghaznavi recited some verses of Rumi:

  A narrow passageway runs between your heart and mine, my love.

  I have found the door, and now I know what spring is.

  My heart is a pool of clear water that reflects the moon.

  Ghaznavi was quick to explain that the erotic language is a metaphor: the poet sings his love for God. I reflected that love, be it for a man, a woman, or God, called for the same words. I would have liked to have someone to say them to.

  I tried to remember what else I talked to him about. Oh yes, I had asked him about the customs of the nomads, whose black goat-hair tents had appeared along the banks of the Farah River in the spring. Were they Taymanis? Or Kuchi? And about the local men’s gestures, which I couldn’t work out, and why they held hands, like lovers. About the kareze, the traditional canal irrigation system, which a cooperation project was supposed to restore. Operation Reawakening had already cleared two square kilometers for use. About the danger of the brown-and-white striped viper I’d spotted near the latrines. (Ghaznavi’s answer was comforting: hemotoxins, as deadly as a cobra, watch where you step, especially if you get up in the night, because it is an irritable nocturnal predator.) I’d asked him all sorts of things, and I’d also asked his forgiveness. “The wise man knows and asks,” he had replied with a smile, “the ignorant man doesn’t know and doesn’t ask.” But Ghaznavi never asked questions. He knew he couldn’t, and he didn’t want to step out of line, so he was saving them for a day when he might be able to get some answers. The accusation was insulting. But a river doesn’t become dirty just because a dog puts his paws in it. They could say what they wanted; the sad Professor was not a spy or an opium dealer, I refused to believe it.

  “It’s ridiculous,” I protested stubbornly. “Just yesterday when we were searching the village of Tamyrabad, we confiscated six drums of gas from a truck driver suspected of supplying drug dealers.” “Paris, can you repeat the argument you made to me a month ago, in the mess tent?” Paggiarin interjected. “No, I don’t remember,” I said hastily. But I remembered all too well, unfortunately. I wanted to swallow my tongue. Fiery rivulets of sweat streamed down my spine.

  “Sergeant Paris was struck by the quantity of poppies surrounding us,” Paggiarin reported, looking Minotto in the eye. “She asked me why the ISAF countries couldn’t legally purchase opium, to use in hospitals in the West. That way, the Afghani peasants would have an income and the Taliban would lose their principal source of revenue. That’s what she said. I didn’t report it because I hadn’t grasped its potential danger.”

  “I know it may seem like a risky idea,” I said, trying to endure the radioactive gaze of Colonel Minotto. “But it’s not, actually. My father died of cancer, he suffered like a dog because the hospital wouldn’t give him any morphine. Not everyone understands the importance of pain relief therapy, and morphine is expensive, too expensive for many. It seems a tremendous waste to let all this opium enrich the drug dealers and the Mafia, to let it ruin the young, Italians included, when it could be doing good, helping Afghanis to live—and Europeans to die—with dignity.”

  “It is not your job to come up with strategies to fight drug trafficking, Sergeant,” the colonel cut me off. “The best think tanks in the world are working to find a solution to this plague. Which, however, cannot be dealt with until the safety of this country is assured and its development set in motion. I am sure you will never propound such an argument again.” “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Have you ever noted any strange behavior in your men?” Minotto insisted, scrutinizing me. I knew what he was thinking. That he had discovered me when I was just a student at the NCO Academy, that he had believed in me. And had challenged me. The first time I met him, during training, he told me I should think of myself as a mosquito larva. If I settled in the first comfortable pond I found, I’d certainly be able to grow and to fly eventually, but I wouldn’t go far. If, on the other hand, I humbled myself and hid in the tire of a plane, if I survived the difficulties of the journey, I would travel the world. I accepted the challenge, and he taught me everything I knew; he had encouraged, supported, rewarded me. And I had disappointed him. I was sorry he suspected me. His esteem meant more to me than anything. At least up until that moment. “Nothing unusual,” I assured him. “It would be a matter of unprecedented and intolerable seriousness, and it would be my duty to advise my superiors immediately.” “Keep an eye on Ghaznavi. And report to the captain if there is any suspicious talk among your men,” Minotto concluded wearily. “Yes, sir,” I said. The next time I saw him was at the Celio military hospital. We never spoke about that conversation in the command hut at Bala Bayak again. But the
fact that it occurred can never be erased.

  As I walked in the sun toward my tent I was aware that I hadn’t been honest. I had not told the colonel that my men said suspicious things all the time. But what could Minotto have done to us? Set the military police loose on us? Asked the dog unit to intervene with their drug-sniffing canines? And what would TFS have said? He would have disgraced Ninth Company and the Alpini—for nothing. Besides, what else were the men supposed to talk about? We were literally living in the middle of a poppy field. In April their purple, white, pink, red, and yellow petals inflamed with color the valleys we crossed to get to the villages to be searched, cleared, and assisted. There the desert retreated. It was like a carpet of colored silk. We were surrounded by opium, growing out in the open. Something had to be done. The Americans had initially tried to use force. They wanted at first to bomb the poppies with napalm, though later they decided to simply uproot them. But good intentions do not always bring about good results—almost never, in fact. In reality, they condemned entire peasant families to abject poverty; the poppy harvest was their only means of subsistence, and when that was taken away, the Americans lost the peasants’ initial sympathy and ended up pushing them to the rebels’ side. So they changed their strategy completely: the allies promised incentives to peasants willing to grow saffron instead. They distributed bulbs and fertilizer; in fact, most of the convoys we escorted that winter carried tons of bulbs and fertilizer. The first harvest, the previous year, had been encouraging: a hectare of saffron crocuses yielded four times what a hectare of poppies did. But some of the peasants had their throats cut and their fields burned, and the changeover proceeded slowly—and in the meantime, the ISAF commanders, who were eager to conquer the hearts and minds of the Afghani people, preferred to resign themselves to tolerating the poppy fields to ensure if not benevolence, then at least neutrality. Whenever we left the FOB, we made our way through fields of flowering poppies.