Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar

by Matt McAllester

  Kitovani had been released from prison two years earlier. I talked to him in the back of his black Mercedes, with a bodyguard in the front seat. He was squat and fleshy like a toad, kept his sunglasses on throughout the interview, and said nothing of any interest that did not serve his own.

  Zaliko often visited some families he knew among the refugees from Abkhazia, brought them lengths of pink sausage or a plastic Coke bottle or two filled with his homemade firewater, chacha. He seemed to be a one-man NGO, a freelance humanitarian. He was one of the very few Georgians at that time who used to go up to South Ossetia, and he maintained a rare point of informal contact with moderate Ossetians, despite plenty of his acquaintances muttering “traitor” under their breath. He drove me up to Tskhinvali, the capital (scarcely an hour and a half from Tbilisi), on a raw wintry day, through the black market that sold cheap Russian goods—almost exclusively lurid yellow soda and gasoline of the same color—on the unrecognized border. We were met by two young men, earnest enough and friendly and glad to have some help with some project or another, but I remember them looking over their shoulders in case someone saw them fraternizing with the enemy.

  My efforts—I talked to historians, ex-soldiers, politicians, journalists—to identify the moment, the order, the misunderstanding, the spark that had caused those Georgian soldiers to open fire on August 14, came to naught. Nobody knew or especially, it seemed, wanted to. I harbored a dreadful suspicion that there was no particular reason or order for the shooting at all. It need not have happened, it had been a random mistake, a spur-of-the-moment reaction.

  The following summer my brother came to visit me in Georgia, and Zaliko took us up into the mountains, rattling up the stone road to the northern slopes of the Caucasus, to the vertiginous meadow sweeps of Khevsureti. We walked up high over piebald snow slopes, through freezing snowmelt rivers in bare feet to keep our shoes dry, past slate shrines surmounted with goat skulls, and into the valley of Arkhoti for a ceremonial horse race.

  In the mountains Zaliko was half goat, wiry, strong, and lithe, half mischievous Pan, striding up a near-vertical track with a cheap Viceroy cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth and a hundred pounds of clinking bottles (chacha and plum sauce accounted for the bulk of his baggage) on his back. When we stopped to rest I would bend over my knees to steady the lightheaded space of veering height against my jelly knees, and Zaliko would reach inside his shirt pocket and produce a magical plastic bag of lemon slices and sugar that had been macerated into a bright delicious sludge by the action of his stride.

  “Very good for energy!”

  Khevsurs, rosy-cheeked highlanders, came from surrounding valleys and villages, tied their horses to a fence, and stacked their Kalashnikovs by the doors of the few houses. On the day of the race we feasted on boiled ox and tiny fried river fish and salads of finely diced radish, potato, and dill. The village elders drank ceremonial beer made from precious barley, and everyone else drank chacha till there was singing and fistfights, and the children ran around in loops catching skittish horses. That night Zaliko slept with his body across the entrance to my tent to protect me from kidnappers.

  In other trips to the northern side of the Caucasus, Zaliko would tell me about village feuds and plague huts and describe the ingenious irrigation systems for abandoned slate villages or the asymmetrical plow that the uplanders used to cultivate such steep slopes. He often took supplies for the few poor families who stayed in Upper Khevsureti through the winter, cut off when the first snows blocked the passes. He passed out sixty-pound sacks of flour, quantities of macaroni and sugar, bags of peaches we had brought from the lowland farmers along the road, and, for the kids to share, a giant red watermelon or two.

  We were camping in a meadow a few miles from the Chechen border one night when a lone man with a scraggly beard, wearing a camouflage jacket and a Kalashnikov across his back, emerged from the gloaming. I felt a sense of foreboding but Zaliko welcomed him warmly, tore off a chunk of bread and offered it to him, shared our supper, and poured our guest glass after glass of chacha. I sat watchful and quiet as Zaliko enthusiastically toasted the mountains, family, friendship, brotherhood, honor. The lone man drank tumbler after tumbler, and his suspicious stony expression softened in the firelight glow as the stars came out, livid above. When we packed up the next morning our visitor was still lying where he had collapsed, dead to the world, with his head on a rock for a pillow. Zaliko, strangely, was as sprightly as ever.

  “Aha!” he tapped the side of his nose, “after the first two toasts, I am filling my glass with water!”

  We drove out of the mountains, filthy, unslept, tired, and aching from the jolting stone flint roads. We stopped at Zaliko’s favorite shack for khinkali—great fat dumplings of dough pleated into a topknot and filled with a nugget of ground pork surrounded by broth. You had to eat khinkali very carefully, balancing the scalding-hot rim of the dumpling against the forked topknot and biting gently to suck without losing any of the precious juice. I could manage only four or five, but Zaliko always ordered twenty because somehow it was a shame to order a paltry plate.

  “Do you know the story of the man who ordered ninety-nine khinkali?” Zaliko’s moustache twitched merrily. I shook my head. “The waitress asked him, ‘Why not just order 100?’ ‘Oh, no!’ said the man, patting his big round stomach proudly, ‘I know my limits!’ ”

  “He would give everything to everyone else!” Zaliko’s wife, Marina, smiled, rueful, remembering his stubbornness. I had left Georgia in 2001 and had returned only intermittently, following the Rose Revolution from afar and keeping in touch with my friends. I marveled with them at the novelty of uncorrupt police, the new buildings going up, ATM machines, and home loans; everyone seemed a little more prosperous, Saakashvili’s presidency had brought a buzz. Now it was the end of August 2008 as Marina and I reminisced. The Russians had pulled their tanks back to the South Ossetian border a few days before. I had spent the day in hospital wards, interviewing wounded soldiers and trying to piece together the events of another sudden war in the Caucasus, and Marina had just come back from delivering food to refugee families.

  We shared accounts. Marina made me a cup of tea and poured a little wine Zura had made from the vines at the dacha. She put out a plate of hazelnuts, and as she talked she cracked them with a little hammer and placed the naked kernels in a row for me to eat. I told her that the soldiers’ wounds—shrapnel, blasts, amputated limbs—were all from aerial bombardment.

  “No small arms. Not a single bullet hole. They were smashed up by Russian air superiority. Aviatsia.” I used the Russian word. “They were brave, I think—hiding, scattering, trying to regroup under the bombs—but their orders were contradictory, no helicopters, radios were down—”

  “Many of the refugees from the Georgian villages in South Ossetia are in ZAKVO,” Marina told me. I nodded; I had been to talk to families there too. She said she had been making lobio, bean stew, and taking it to them in the evenings. “What can we do? We can do something, but it is very small.” She shrugged wearily and smiled, beautiful as always, undimmed, almost beatific.

  ZAKVO was a giant hulk of 1970s architecture that had housed, in former times, the headquarters for the southern Military Strategic Planning Authority of the Soviet Union. This was where Soviet generals had putatively planned an invasion of NATO-allied Turkey. The Russians had only actually vacated the building a few months before; in recent years it was rumored to have been a leftover listening post. Marina and I rolled our eyes at the doomed-to-repeat looping irony of the situation: Georgian refugees from a war promulgated, encouraged, and egged on by Russia were now camping in the deserted offices once populated by Russian military officials planning wars.

  Our conversation halted at some point, in deference to the sadness and the weight of it.

  “I’m so sorry I did not come for the funeral,” I said, tears beginning to well along with chagrin at the too-many years that had passed before my return to
Georgia. Marina shook her head.

  “No, no. It was very far for you. And there were many, many people—all of Tbilisi it seemed came—”

  Zaliko had died in 2005. He was killed in a climbing accident on Ushba, the treacherous mountain that rises, sheer, icy, and double-peaked, above Svaneti, the highest region in Georgia. Zaliko and two other Georgian mountaineers were guiding two Dutchmen to the summit when there was an accident of some kind. Mamuka, Zaliko’s friend, was injured, equipment was lost, and the weather closed in. The third Georgian and the two Dutchmen continued up and climbed above the clouds, calling from mobile phones for a rescue party, but for several days Zaliko and Mamuka were missing. When the rescue party found Zaliko’s frozen body, they said there was still a smile on his face. He had died in the mountains that he loved; he had died because he would not leave his dying friend.

  “Everything he gave away,” repeated Marina. I allowed a wan, inward smile; after all, she had just returned from feeding the hungry. “Especially his time. All his time and energy went on other people. And the last time we spoke I was angry with him and shouting down the telephone, because he did not even tell me he was in Svaneti. And when I heard where he was I was angry, because I had some premonition that he would try to climb Ushba.”

  A couple of days after I met Marina for coffee that afternoon, I got a commission to write a profile of President Saakashvili for an American magazine. I reported for more than a month, trying to disentangle the Georgian official version of the summer’s events. I interviewed Saakashvili and his security team several times. Who shot first? Whose rockets were fired from which position? The tale was clogged with intercepted radio transmissions, public pronouncements, and Russian propaganda. The Georgians distorted sections of the timeline and tried to overwrite events with an official narrative. They clung to nationalist outrage and pointed north shouting, “The Russians! The Russians!” at the top of their lungs.

  At 7:00 P.M. on August 7, as tensions and gunfire between South Ossetian militias and Georgian army and police posts was intensifying, Saakashvili had gone on television to declare a unilateral ceasefire. By midnight he was shelling the South Ossetian capital and had ordered a full-scale attack. What happened—or what he thought or guessed or hoped was happening—between those two decisions, I never discovered. The Georgian attack foundered, the Russians sent in armored columns. And in the middle of the worst of it, when the Russian tanks were rolling down the highway toward Tbilisi and the Americans continued to dither, Saakashvili was caught on a BBC satellite feed, as he waited to make another impassioned, desperate plea for Georgian democracy, munching the end of his tie like a demented man.

  Another scrappy, brutal, stupid Caucasian war, meaningless and tragic. I missed Zaliko. I missed him telling me it was all “a bullshit.”

  DINNER WITH A JESTER

  ~ AFGHANISTAN ~

  JON LEE ANDERSON

  IN MARCH 2005, AN AFGHAN FRIEND INVITED ME TO JOIN HIM FOR dinner at the home of a relative who lived in the countryside near the market town of Charikar, some fifty miles north of Kabul. We would have to stay overnight, he said, because it was not safe to drive back after dark. Highwaymen were known to attack and rob motorists who ventured on the road at night. With the twinkly look of someone withholding a secret, he promised me that the evening would be a “special” one. Intrigued, I agreed to go along.

  We drove for an hour northward across the fertile Shamali Plain that leads to Charikar, which sits where the foothills of the Hindu Kush begin. Beyond Charikar, the road begins to climb and wind and soon enters the narrow mouth of the fabled Panjshir Valley, which became a symbol of mujahideen resistance during the Soviet military occupation of Afghanistan. During their decade-long presence in the country, the Soviets proved unable to take the Panjshir. As testament to their failure, the roadsides of the valley are littered with the rusting hulks of their mangled tanks and armored personnel carriers. After they seized Kabul, Taliban fighters had massacred their way north across the Shamali Plain, but had been unable to take the Panjshir either. Their final frontline defenses with the Northern Alliance had been fixed just south of Charikar until they abandoned them and melted away in November 2001, following six weeks of sustained American aerial bombardment.

  Since the Taliban rout, hundreds of the Shamali’s war-displaced farmers had returned to their shattered lands and begun to rebuild and replant, even as the UN’s mine-clearance experts worked to clear the fields and roads around them. Beyond the old front line around Charikar, however, the orchards and vineyards were abundant with fruit, and the irrigation canals sparkled with fresh snowmelt.

  We eventually came to a mud-walled compound. There we were greeted by our host, Atta, a thin man in his late thirties. My friend explained that Atta was his cousin and, effectively, a local warlord. He had been a commander for the Northern Alliance for many years, and was now a landowning farmer of some substance. Because of his past military status and his relative wealth, he remained the de facto authority in the area. Although it was no longer legal to do so, Atta kept fifty or so gunmen on his payroll. With the central government still weak, they helped enforce security in the area. If more fighters were ever needed, my friend explained, Atta could quickly summon additional volunteers from among his tenant farmers and his neighbors.

  Atta waved us graciously into a long carpeted room strewn with pillows, where he introduced several shy-looking teenage boys as his younger brothers and nephews. A strongly built, dark-skinned older man stepped forward. My friend whispered excitedly that his name was Samad Pashean, and he was a traditional maskhara, or jester, of some renown. He had been invited to Atta’s home at his request, and in my honor, to provide the evening’s entertainment. Pashean shook my hand and held it in a firm grip as he stared boldly into my eyes. He had a mischievous face. My friend said, “I told you it would be a special evening.” He smiled proudly.

  This was indeed a rare treat. I had thought Afghanistan’s maskhara to be an extinct species. For centuries, maskhara had entertained the country’s monarchs with their japes and buffoonery, and by lampooning them. They may well have been the originators of the European tradition of court fools, as well, for maskhara is a term of Arabic or possibly Sanskrit origin, and along with the first royal jesters, words using the same root appeared in medieval Europe sometime in the thirteenth century, ultimately seeding the English language with such exoticisms as mascara and mask.

  Samad Pashean, who estimated his age at sixty, was evidently one of Afghanistan’s last remaining maskhara. He had survived the abolition of the monarchy, the Soviet military occupation, the ensuing bloody civil war, and then the Taliban years by wandering from one warlord’s lair to another, plying his prankish wares in exchange for food, shelter, and the occasional handout of money. As my friend explained it, Atta had placed Pashean under his protection, maintaining him in a house nearby and giving him regular allotments of food from his harvests. Atta bade us all sit down as boys brought in large round trays heaped with salad, pilau rice, bowls of yogurt, mutton soup, fruit, baked chicken, and lamb, and laid them on the carpet in front of us.

  Over our food, which we dug into with our hands, Atta boasted proudly of Pashean’s many talents, telling me that in addition to his prowess as an entertainer, he was also a professional blackmailer, a master thief, and a prolific murderer, with an estimated fifty victims killed by his own hand. As Atta related this last statistic in delighted exclamation, the other men and boys in the room laughed and stared reverentially at Pashean, who grinned and nodded his head in acknowledgment.

  After the trays with our food were taken away and we were sipping at sugary black tea and munching dried mulberries, Pashean began to perform, regaling us with vaudevillian skits and dances, bawdy jokes, and gossipy, extemporaneous riffs on everything from sex to politics. To the ecstatic amusement of Atta and his boys, Pashean acted out a skit that he called “The Unwilling Bride on Her Wedding Night.” After encouraging one of the boys
to play the “eager bridegroom,” Pashean placed a turban cloth over his head to resemble a burka. As the “groom” got into the spirit of things by attempting to paw Pashean, giggling hysterically as he did so, Pashean was transformed into a skittish virgin bride, a wriggling bundle of firmly locked knees, defensive slaps, and falsetto mewings of mock-terror.

  Pashean called his next piece “The Willing Bride on Her Wedding Night.” Using the same youth as his stand-in for the bridegroom, Pashean imitated the amorous cooings and heated gasps of a supposedly impassioned woman, and proceeded to climb into his lap and rub the boy’s thighs lasciviously. The skit ended decorously enough, with Pashean lying supine, his head nestled in the groom’s lap, staring longingly into his eyes.

  To my Western eyes, this was exceedingly tame fare, more Perils of Pauline than Sex in the City, but to the Afghans in the room, Pashean’s bodice-ripping farce was heady stuff, and had them gagging and weeping with laughter and embarrassed incredulity.

  After a few minutes, Pashean enacted his own death scene. He called it simply “The Death of Samad Pashean.” The performance involved Pashean lying prone on the floor in front of us and periodically gasping for an extended period of time before finally falling silent. The death rattle was very authentic.

  But then clearly, Pashean was no stranger to death, and afterward, as if to underscore the point, he began bragging about one of the murders he had committed. It seemed that a man had insulted him, and in order to avenge his honor, Pashean had later gone to his home, killed him, and then stolen his shoes. To have made off with his victim’s shoes was the height of effrontery—and a very funny thing to do, as well, for everyone laughed uproariously about this.