‘Scalping,’ I said. ‘We call it ticket scalping. It’s big business—black-market business—at the most popular football matches in my country.’
‘Yes. And I made an excellent profit in the first week of my work. I already began to have dreams of moving to a fine apartment and wearing the best clothes, perhaps even buying a car. Then, one night, I was standing outside the cinema with my tickets when two very big men came to me, showed me their weapons—they had a sword and a meat chopper—and demanded that I go with them.’
‘Local goondas,’ I laughed.
‘Goondas,’ he repeated, laughing with me. For those of us who knew him as lord Abdel Khader Khan, the don, the ruler of his kingdom of crime in Bombay, it was hilarious to picture him as a shame-faced eighteen-year-old in the custody of two street thugs.
‘They took me to see Chota Gulab, the Little Rose. He had that name for the mark on his cheek made by a bullet that had passed through his face, breaking most of his teeth, and leaving a scar that was pinched like a rose. He was the boss of that whole area in those days, and before he had me beaten to death, as an example to others he wanted to take a look at the impudent fellow who had trespassed on his area.
‘He was furious. “What are you doing, selling tickets in my area?” he asked me, speaking a mix of Hindi and English. It was a poor English, but he wanted to intimidate me with it, as if he was a judge in a court of law. “Do you know how many men died, how many men I had to kill, how many good men I lost, to take control of the black-market tickets at all the cinemas in this area?”
‘I was terrified, I admit it to you, and I thought that my life was but a few minutes’ worth. So I threw away my caution, and I spoke boldly. “Now you will have to eliminate one more nuisance, Gulabji,” I told him, speaking an English that was far superior to his, “because I have no other way of making money, and I have no family, and I have nothing to lose. Unless, of course, you have some decent job of work that a loyal and resourceful young man can do for you.”
‘Well, he laughed out loud, and he asked me where I learned to speak English so well, and when I told him, and when I told him my story, he gave me a job right away. Then he showed me his smashed teeth, opening his mouth wide to point out the gold replacements. Looking into Chota Gulab’s mouth was a real honour amongst his men, and some of his closest goondas were very jealous that I got such an intimate tour of the famous mouth on my very first meeting with him. Gulab liked me, and he became a kind of father to me in Bombay, but I had enemies around me from the first time that I shook his hand.
‘I went to work as a soldier, fighting with my fists and with swords and cleavers and hammers to enforce Chota Gulab’s rule in the area. Those were bad days, before the council system, and there was fighting every day and night. After a while, one of his men took a special dislike to me. Resentful of my close relationship with Gulabji, he found a reason to pick a fight with me. So I killed him. And when his best friend attacked me, I killed him, too. And then I killed a man for Chota Gulab. And I killed again. And again.’
He fell silent, staring ahead at the floor where it met the mud-brick wall. After a time, he spoke.
‘And again,’ he said.
He repeated the phrase into a silence that was thickening around us and seeming to press in upon my burning eyes.
‘And again.’
I watched him wade through the past, his eyes blazing recollections, and then he shook himself back into the moment.
‘It is late. Here, I want to give you a gift.’
He opened the chamois-leather parcel to reveal a pistol in a side holster, several magazines, a box of ammunition, and a metal box. Lifting back the lid of the metal box, he displayed a cleaning kit of oil, graphite powder, tiny files, brushes, and a new, short pull-through cord.
‘This is a Stechkin APS pistol,’ he said, taking up the weapon and removing its magazine. He checked to ensure that there was no round in the firing chamber, and handed the pistol to me. ‘It is Russian. You will find plenty of ammunition on the dead Russians, if you have to fight them. It is a nine-millimetre-calibre weapon, with a magazine of twenty rounds. You can fire it as a single shot, or set it on automatic. It is not the best gun in the world, but it is reliable, and the only light weapon with more bullets in it, where we are going, is a Kalashnikov. I want you to wear it, clearly displayed at all times from now on. You eat with it, you sleep with it, and when you wash yourself, you have it within your reach. I want everyone who is with us, and everyone who sees us, to know that you have it. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ I answered, staring at the gun in my hands.
‘I told you that there is a price on the head of every foreigner who helps the mujaheddin. I want it to be so, that someone who might think of this reward, and of claiming it with your head, will also think of the Stechkin at your side. Do you know how to clean an automatic pistol?’
‘No.’
‘Very well. I will show you how it is done. Then you must try to sleep. We leave for Afghanistan at five, before dawn, tomorrow morning. The waiting is over. The time has come.’
Khaderbhai showed me how to clean the Stechkin. It was more complicated than I’d imagined, and it took the best part of an hour for him to walk me through the instructions for its complete service, repair, and handling protocols. It was a thrilling hour, and men and women of violence will know what I mean when I say that I was drunk with the pleasure of it. I confess with no little shame that I enjoyed that hour with Khader, learning how to use and clean the Stechkin automatic pistol, more than the hundreds of hours that I’d spent with him while learning his philosophy. And I never felt closer to him than I did that night as we hunched over my blanket, stripping and reassembling the killing weapon.
When he left me, I turned out the light and lay back on my cot, but I couldn’t sleep. My mind was caffeine-alert in the darkness. At first I thought about the stories Khader had told me. I moved through that different time in the city I’d come to know so well. I imagined the Khan as a young man, fit and dangerous and fighting for Chota Gulab, the gangster boss with a little rose scar on his cheek. I knew other parts of Khader’s story—I’d heard them from some of the goondas who worked for him in Bombay. They’d told me how Khaderbhai had seized control of Gulab’s little empire when the scarred one was assassinated outside one of his cinemas. They’d described the gang wars that had erupted across the city, and they’d talked of Khader’s courage, and his ruthlessness in crushing his enemies. I knew, as well, that Khaderbhai was one of the founders of the council system, which had brought peace to the city by dividing territories and spoils between the surviving gangs.
I wondered, as I lay in a darkness scented with the polished-floor-and-raw-linen odours of the gun and the cleaning oil, why Khaderbhai was going to war. He didn’t have to go—there were a hundred more like me, prepared to die for him in his place. I remembered his strangely radiant smile when he’d told me about his first meeting with Chota Gulab. I recalled how quick and youthful his hands had been when he’d shown me how to clean and use the gun. And it occurred to me that he might’ve been with us, risking his life, simply because he was hungry for the wilder days of his youth. The thought worried me because I was sure that at least some small part of it was true. But that other motive—that he’d judged the time right to end his exile, and to visit his home and family—worried me more. I couldn’t forget what he’d told me. The blood feud that had killed so many and driven him from his home had only ended with his promise, to his mother, never to return.
After a while my thoughts drifted, and I found myself reliving, moment for moment, the long night before my escape from prison. That, too, was a night without sleep. That, too, was a night of wheeling fears and exhilaration and dread. And just as I had on that night years before, I rose from bed before the first stir and shuffle of the morning, and prepared myself in the dark.
Soon after dawn, we took the train to Chaman Pass. There were twelve from our grou
p on the train, but none of us spoke through the several hours of the journey. Nazeer sat with me, and we were alone for much of the trip, but still he held his stony silence. With my pale eyes concealed behind dark sunglasses, I stared through the window and tried to lose myself in the spectacular view.
The train ride from Quetta to Chaman was one of the glories of the illustrious sub-continental railway system. The tracks wound through deep gorges and crossed riverscapes of astounding beauty. I found myself repeating, as if they were lines of poetry, the very names of the towns through which it passed. From Kuchlaagh to Bostaan, and the small river crossing at Yaaru Kaarez, the train climbed to Shaadizai. At Gulistan there was another climb, with a sweeping curve that followed the ancient dry lake at Qila Abdullah. And the jewel in the twin steel-bands of that crown, of course, was the Khojak Tunnel. Built by the British over several years at the end of the nineteenth century, it smashed its way through four kilometres of solid rock, and was the longest in the sub-continent.
At Khaan Kili the train negotiated a series of sharp curves, and at the last remote regional stop before Chaman we climbed down with a few dusty locals and were met by a covered truck. When the area was deserted we climbed onto the extravagantly decorated truck, and followed the main road toward Chaman. Before we reached the town, however, we took a side road that seemed to end in a deserted track, with a stand of trees and several scrubby pastures, about thirty kilometres north of the main highway and the Chaman Pass.
We climbed down from the truck, and as it drove away we mustered in the shade of the trees with the main group of men, who’d been waiting there for us. It was the first time that we’d assembled in our full number. There were thirty of us, all men, and for a moment I was reminded of the men who gathered in similar groups in prison yards. The fighters seemed tough and determined and, although many of them were lean to the point of being thin, they looked healthy and fit.
I removed my sunglasses. As I scanned the faces, my eyes met those of a man who stared back at me from the heart of darkness. He was in his late forties or early fifties, and perhaps the oldest man in the group after Khaderbhai. His short hair was grey beneath a brown, round-edged Afghan cap, identical to the one I wore myself. His short, straight nose divided a long, pointed face that was so deeply lined beneath the sunken cheeks that it appeared to have been slashed with a machete. Heavy bags hung below his eyes. Theatrically peaked eyebrows like the wings of a black bat spiked above his eyes, but it was the eyes themselves that caught and held me.
As I locked eyes with him, returning his psychotic stare, the man began to stumble toward me. After the first few shambling steps, his body twitched into a more efficient mode, and he began to lope, covering the thirty metres that separated us in long, crouching, feline strides. Forgetting that the gun was strapped to my side, my hand instinctively moved to the hilt of my knife and I took half a pace backward with my right foot. I knew the eyes. I knew the look. The man wanted to fight me, perhaps even to kill me.
Just as he reached me, shouting something in a dialect that I couldn’t recognise, Nazeer stepped from nowhere to stand in front of me and bar his way. He shouted something back at the man, but the other ignored him, staring past his head at me and shouting his question, again and again. Nazeer repeated his reply, shouting to match the other. The crazed fighter tried to shove Nazeer out of the way with both hands, but he might as well have tried to push aside a tree. The burly Afghan stood his ground, forcing the madman to shift his gaze from me for the first time.
A crowd had formed around us. Nazeer held the man’s lunatic stare, and spoke in softer, pleading tones. I waited, tensed and ready to fight. We haven’t even crossed the border yet, I thought, and I’m going to have to stab one of our own men …
‘He was asking if you are a Russian,’ Ahmed Zadeh muttered from beside me, his Algerian accents rolling over the R in Russian. I flicked a glance at him, and he pointed at my hip. ‘The gun. And your pale eyes. He thinks you are a Russian.’
Khaderbhai walked between the men, and put his hand on the madman’s shoulder. The man turned immediately, and with eyes that seemed ready to weep, searched Khader’s face. Khader repeated what Nazeer had been murmuring, in a similarly soothing tone. I couldn’t understand all of it, but the sense was clear. No. He is American. The Americans are here to help us. He is here with us to fight the Russians. He will help us to kill the Russians. He will help us. We will kill many Russians together.
When the man turned to face me once more, his expression had changed so dramatically that I was moved to pity him, when a moment before I was ready to run my knife into his chest. His eyes were still deranged, hanging unnaturally wide and white beneath the brown irises, but his frenzied expression had collapsed into such wretched, pitiable misery that his face reminded me of the many ruined stone cottages we’d seen beside the roads. He looked once more into Khader’s face, and the stutter of a smile flickered across his features as if animated by an electric pulse. He turned and walked away through the crowd. The tough men parted for him warily, compassion vying with fear in their eyes as they watched him pass.
‘I am sorry, Lin,’ Abdel Khader said softly. ‘His name is Habib. Habib Abdur Rahman. He is a schoolteacher—well, he once was a schoolteacher, in a village on the other side of these mountains. He taught the little ones, the youngest children. When the Russians invaded, seven years ago, he was a happy man, with a young wife and two strong sons. He joined the resistance, like every other young man in the region. Two years ago he returned from a mission to find that the Russians had attacked his village. They had used gas, some kind of nerve gas.’
‘They deny it,’ Ahmed Zadeh interjected. ‘But while they fight this war they are testing their new weapons. A lot of the weapons used here, land mines and rockets and everything, are new experimental weapons that have never been used in a war before. Like the gas that they used on Habib’s village. There is no war like this one.’
‘Habib wandered alone through the village,’ Khader continued. ‘Everyone was dead. All the men and the women and the children. All the generations of his family—his grandparents, from both sides, his parents, his wife’s parents, his uncles and aunties, his brothers and sisters, his wife, and his children. All gone, in just one hour of one day. Even the animals, the goats and the sheep and the chickens, were all dead. Even the insects and the birds were dead. Nothing moved. Nothing lived and nothing survived.’
‘He make … a bury … all men … all women … all childrens …’ Nazeer added.
‘He buried them all,’ Khader nodded. ‘All his family, and his friends from childhood, and his neighbours. It took so long to do it, all alone, that it was a very bad business, at the end. Then, when the job was done, he took up his gun and rejoined his mujaheddin unit. But the loss had changed him in a terrible way. This time he was like a different man. This time he did everything in his power to capture a Russian, or an Afghan soldier fighting for the Russians. And when he captured one—and he did capture them, many of them, because he was very good at it after that—when he did capture them, he tortured them to death by impaling them on a sharpened steel spike, made from the wooden handle and the blade of the shovel he had used to bury his family. He has it now. You can see it strapped to the top of his pack. He ties the prisoners to the spike by their hands, behind their backs, with the spike touching their backs. At the moment that their strength fails them, and the metal spike begins to tear its way through their bodies, forcing its way out through their stomachs, Habib leans over them, staring into their eyes, and spits into their screaming mouths.’
Khaled Ansari, Nazeer, Ahmed Zadeh, and I stood in a deeply breathing silence, waiting for Khader to speak again.
‘There is no man who knows these mountains, and the region between here and Kandahar, better than Habib,’ Khader concluded, sighing wearily. ‘He is the best guide. He has survived hundreds of missions in this region, and he will get us to our men in Kandahar. And there is no man mor
e loyal or trustworthy, because there is no man in Afghanistan who hates the Russians more than Habib Abdur Rahman. But …’
‘He is completely insane,’ Ahmed Zadeh offered into the silence with a Gallic shrug, and I found myself liking him, suddenly, and missing my friend Didier in the same instant. It was just the kind of pragmatic and brutally honest summary that Didier might’ve made.
‘Yes,’ Khader agreed. ‘He is insane. His grief has destroyed his mind. And for as much as we need him, there is the fact that he must be watched at all times. Every mujaheddin unit from here to Herat has cast him out. We are fighting the Afghan army that serves the Russians, but the fact is that they are Afghans. We receive most of our information from soldiers in the Afghan army who want to help us to win against their Russian masters. Habib cannot make this fine distinction. He has only one understanding of this war: to kill them all quickly, or to kill them slowly. And he prefers to kill them slowly. There is such a cruel violence in him that it frightens his friends no less than his enemies. So he must be watched, while he is with us.’
‘I’ll watch over him,’ Khaled Ansari declared firmly, and we all turned to look at our Palestinian friend. His face was set in an expression of suffering and anger and determination. The skin was tight across his eyes from brow to brow, and his mouth was drawn into a wide, flat line of tenacious resolve.
‘Very well …’ Khader began, and he would’ve said more, but with those two words of consent Khaled left us and walked toward the slumped, forlorn figure of Habib Abdur Rahman.
Watching him leave, I was struck with a sudden, clutching instinct to cry out and stop him. It was a foolish thing—an irrational stabbing dread that I was losing him, losing another friend. And it was so ridiculous, so petty in its jealousy, that I bit down on it and said nothing. Then I watched him sit down opposite Habib. I watched him reach out to lift the gaping, murderous face of the madman until their eyes met and held, and I knew, without understanding it, that Khaled was lost to us.
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