No Good Men Among the Living

by Anand Gopal

  Shaysta stared ahead, then looked at an adjacent field, waist-high with wheat. “Well, then this is the only way.”

  They stepped carefully through the farmer’s field. Around them, the silence was complete. The fields were packed with mud and they stopped now and then to pull their feet free. The old lady wanted to rest, but Shaysta moved her along. It occurred to Heela that despite living in a farming community for ten years, this was the first time she had ever set foot in a field.

  After some time, the wheat thinned and they were back on the gravel road. Still in single file, they walked until they came upon the dark rectangular outlines of the bazaar. There were no lights, no animals, nothing but a quiet wind wheezing through the narrow street. They approached the pharmacy.

  When Heela cranked open the old shutters, the echo went caroming out over the buildings and the fields. For a moment everyone stood waiting. She stepped inside, and the memories—her surreptitious trip here with Musqinyar and the children, the years he had put into the business, the merciless pointlessness of it all—rushed back. She collapsed, sobbing.

  Composing herself, she retrieved a few hundred dollars’ worth of Afghan currency, everything the family had left, and handed it to Shaysta.

  Now what? The enormousness of what she was hoping to do dawned on her. She had never heard of a woman successfully running away. But what choice did she have? She would rather die than return to the village. And at least she would die trying to survive.

  Outside, she considered the darkened bazaar. Somewhere out there, Zahir’s policemen were patrolling. She’d have to be quick, wherever she went. The trouble was, there were no neutral sides, nowhere to seek refuge. Everyone had lined up in one way or another. Zahir had spies everywhere.

  She considered fleeing to a Hazara village. But was such a thing even possible? Shaysta would never escort her there.

  Then she looked through the bazaar, past the governor’s building, to a small hill overlooking the fields. She looked back at Shaysta and wondered. The idea seemed absurd, even reckless. She looked back at the distant hill.

  “We have to go in that direction,” Heela said, pointing toward the far end of the bazaar. “There’s a man there who owes my husband money. You can have some.”

  Muttering under his breath, Shaysta slowly led them down the narrow road. She approached the very last building of the bazaar, looked at it, glanced back at Shaysta, and kept walking—right into the open desert.

  Shaysta stopped. “What are you doing?”

  She kept walking.

  A dark compound loomed ahead up on the hill. The children clung tightly to her.

  “There?” Shaysta exclaimed. “You want to go there? Are you crazy?”

  She kept walking.

  The elderly lady refused to budge another step. Her son and Shaysta chased after Heela, who kept walking up the gentle slope. Bright lights came into view.

  “Are you sick? What is happening to you?” Shaysta asked.

  She kept walking.

  Soon she was close enough to see the concertina wire twirling up from the ground. Large cement barricades sat nearby. Floodlights drenched the clearing.

  It was the American base.

  “Heela, this is serious,” Shaysta exclaimed. “Think about the village. What kind of person are you?”

  She turned and asked, “What do you want me to do?” Tears streamed down her face. “Do you want me to go back to my enemies? Do you want me to live among those people who destroyed my life?”

  “This is madness,” he said, no longer whispering. “You’ll bring shame upon the whole village. What will people say? A woman ran off to live with foreigners?”

  She kept walking toward the base.

  “You’re a whore!” He was screaming. “You’re a dirty prostitute. I swear to God, I will kill you!” He reached over and grabbed her.

  She pulled back and revealed her gun, pointing it directly at him. “I am going.”

  Everyone stood speechless.

  She kept moving.

  A few dozen yards away, the US guards looked on as a man with a large turban engaged in a heated discussion with a woman holding a Kalashnikov.

  Light shone down upon the group. Afghan militiamen working for the Americans trained their weapons on Heela.

  “For God’s sake, put your weapon down!” Shaysta screamed. “They’re going to kill you!”

  She stopped in her tracks and looked around, not knowing what to do next. Something was being said over the loudspeaker.

  “Raise your hands!” Shaysta shouted. “They’re telling you to raise your hands. Put them in the air!”

  She held her hands aloft, and the gun and her documents dropped to the ground. Moments passed as everyone stood watching. Finally, a translator for the Americans spoke over the megaphone.

  “Sister, what are you doing here? Why do you have a gun?”

  Heela’s two children identified the translator immediately from his frequent visits to the pharmacy over the years. They darted toward the sound of his voice, waving their hands. He recognized them and advised the Americans to open the gate.

  * * *

  The first thing Heela saw inside the base was her husband’s old Corolla. She found herself staring at it, unable to approach, but the children ran over immediately. For them, it was a sort of homecoming.

  When the Americans began questioning her, she knew that this was her chance. She wanted to tell them everything from the beginning: how she had fled Kabul, her underground schools, Musqinyar’s dispute with Jan Muhammad’s people, the corruption, the killings, everything.

  But she stopped herself. If she had learned anything in her decade in Uruzgan, it was that politics out here didn’t work that way. Her story would not be one the Americans wanted to hear. It might, in fact, be taken as indirect criticism of them. After all, who was Commander Zahir but their close ally? And Jan Muhammad, likewise? Her life now depended on the Americans, and there was no escaping the fact that she had to choose a side, like everyone else around her had done. The neutral ones ended up buried; the shrewd survived. She had to speak in a language that they would understand.

  She said, “The Taliban killed my husband. I need your help.”

  Through a translator, an officer asked what exactly they could do for her. “I want to leave here,” she said. “I can’t ever come back. And I want to see my sons.”

  Over the next few days, the soldiers made her comfortable, gave the children candy, and explored ways for her to go somewhere else, somewhere safe. Then early one morning in November, after nearly a week on the base, she and the two boys were loaded onto a Chinook helicopter. The chopper lifted off the ground, hovered for a moment above the maze of mud walls and corrugated iron roofs, and carried Heela away.

  PART FOUR

  10

  Back to Work

  For a while, all Mullah Cable could do was play video games. Morning, noon, and night. It was January 2002, and while it would be some years before hope would erode from villages like Heela’s, Mullah Cable had already lost faith in the future. It had been nearly two months since his ignominious retreat from Afghanistan, and he had hardly a clue what to do next. He and his family were living in a cramped cinder-block apartment with relatives in a working-class neighborhood of Karachi, Pakistan. He hated everything about the city: it was too big, too noisy, too crowded. The food was too spicy. And you couldn’t trust anyone. Not long after his arrival, a Pakistani businessman had used a phony marketing scheme to swindle Mullah Cable out of a significant portion of the money he’d brought from Kabul. Some days later, he was robbed in a restaurant.

  At first he had ventured out daily in search of work, but it was hard enough for Pakistanis to find jobs, let alone illegal Afghan immigrants. So he abandoned his quest, and for days on end he would retreat to an arcade parlor, playing virtual pinball and chatting up the Afghan owner.

  Life now was a matter of keeping down the past. Mullah Cable was no more; indeed
, if he could have had his way, Mullah Cable would have never existed. There was only Akbar Gul, and he told everyone that the previous five years were a diversion, merely a job that had to be done, a job he hadn’t put much thought into. Privately, however, the bitterness clung to him. It was impossible to forgive the Taliban, Mullah Omar, all those who had left him in the lurch. He couldn’t shake off this rancor, so he learned to live with it, fixing his mind on the days ahead.

  Those were months of one job or get-rich-quick scheme after another. The nadir came when he opened up a delivery service with an acquaintance—and his partner absconded with the start-up funds. The truth was, you simply couldn’t make ends meet in Pakistan, not honestly, not if you didn’t know someone. Iran, on the other hand? Now there was a country. Akbar Gul had heard about it since boyhood, and it had always been the plan to get there, somehow. Now the war was over, and he knew that the time was right to make the trip.

  Borrowing money from a cousin, he paid for a smuggler escort and was guided with other migrant workers through the hot open country of the Pakistani-Iranian border. They came to Shiraz, a towering city, bright and clean like nothing he’d ever seen. Every morning he showed up at the muster zone and sometimes found a day’s work at a marble factory. Always gifted with his hands, he now put them to good use, making marble figurines for rich collectors in Tehran and further afield. He was a quick study and in short order was promoted to full-time employment.

  Soon enough, however, Iranian authorities swept through the industrial zone to clamp down on illegal immigrants. Akbar Gul ended up hiding in a migrant camp on the city’s outskirts. The spring months came and he continued to pick up occasional employment sculpting figurines, sending the earnings back to his wife and daughter in Pakistan. But the work was never steady, and he was left with ample time to think. Some evenings he stood across from the mall, watching the lights and the gleaming new cars and the men and women with their children. There were days when he went to the ice cream parlor, not for the ice cream but just for a look.

  At nighttime, in bed in a shared room at the migrant camp, he would think back to Afghanistan, longing to be among his people, to hear Pashto spoken in the streets. He missed the food, the hospitality, the mountain air. He wanted to be near his family again. It was true that folks back home could never even dream of the sort of life Iranians enjoyed, with their trains and glass buildings and grand multilane highways. But what good was it all if you could be locked up or deported at a moment’s notice?

  That summer, he was listening to the radio when he caught a voice speaking Farsi with an Afghan accent. It was President Karzai. All refugees should return immediately, the president urged, to help rebuild their country. It was exactly what Akbar Gul was waiting for. That very night he arranged to leave for Pakistan to collect his wife and daughter. This time, he told himself, he wouldn’t make the same mistakes. He would follow his brothers’ footsteps. He’d get a job, maybe join the police force. It would be a new beginning, a quiet life.

  * * *

  When Akbar Gul and his family stepped out of the taxi in Kabul on a bone-dry, dead hot August day in 2002, he hardly recognized the city he’d left behind nine months earlier. It was a place reborn. There were returnees everywhere, living up in the mountains around town or squatting in abandoned homes. At an intersection, he saw a man in a pressed uniform and white hat directing traffic as cars flooded in from all directions. There were schoolgirls and bicyclists jockeying for space on the sidewalk, and vendors selling music openly on the streets. That very day, he picked up a cassette player.

  With money saved up from Iran, he rented a small apartment at the edge of town. In a corner of one room he placed his other new acquisition: a television set. Over the weeks that followed, he reconnected with his old comrades, all of whom, like him, were settling into civilian life.

  Early one morning he walked through downtown to a narrow street with low, red-painted cement walls and came to a large gated entrance. It was the Ministry of the Interior. A line of people had already formed, spilling out into the street, and a pair of men in pakols carrying Kalashnikovs stood watch. Akbar Gul sat down along the wall with the others. An hour passed, and then a second. The waiting men pooled money together and bought some bolani turnovers, which they parceled out among themselves and ate. A third hour passed, and still no one came out to address the line. Word was that only a few men would get interviews on any day. Finally, a man in a white-topped visor hat appeared and announced that they would not be taking inquiries today but that people should come back the next morning. Akbar Gul walked home, caked in dust from the broken asphalt roads.

  He returned every day, and it took him a good week to make it into the waiting room. Applicants and police officers crowded in together, and he stood there for hours. A picture of Ahmad Shah Massoud hung on the wall, under it the words NATIONAL HERO OF AFGHANISTAN.

  He came back for weeks more, but the waiting room was the farthest he got. The problem was that he didn’t know anyone in the ministry, and without access you were out of luck. He tried other government agencies, construction firms, even aid organizations, but the story was always the same. “The situation became very bad,” he recalled. “We had nothing. I came home one day and saw my daughter sleeping on a flour sack. There was no carpet or anything else—she was just on the ground.” As the last of his Iran savings dried up, he started collecting old bread discarded from the bakery and soaking it in water for dinner, just as he had during the civil war.

  * * *

  Returning refugees were pouring into Kabul in part because so many had lost claims on their land out in the provinces. During the war years, squatters or warlords had occupied the vacant land, and without documentation it was impossible to prove ownership. Akbar Gul was more fortunate: relatives had stayed behind in his ancestral home of Wardak Province to guard the family property. They owned a plot of good soil, a small section of which had been apportioned to him. It had always been his intention to hold on to it for old age, but it was now clear that he would have to sell it, or at least part of it, just to survive the winter.

  The property lay adjacent to his father’s house, which had been empty for the better part of a decade. So in late September 2002, Akbar Gul and his family packed up their possessions once again and relocated to Wardak Province. Their new home, in Chak District, was only fifty miles from Kabul, yet it couldn’t have seemed more remote. The village was perched on a broad gravel hill overlooking sagebrush slopes, and down in the valley below were wheat farms and apple orchards with small houses amid them, like tiny mud castles. The water that fed the soil was itself the color of mud, as was the road running across the valley to the bazaar. The mud-splattered shops there were converted shipping containers, with felt mats or tarpaulins covering their entrances. They all sat in the shadow of a gargantuan dam, which in better times had provided electricity for Kabul but had by now fallen into disrepair, its waters muddy and still.

  After selling a portion of his land, Akbar Gul finally felt himself again. His daughter was eating, and he even had enough money left over to purchase a used station wagon, which he planned to put into use as a taxi. The winter came and went, and he busied himself meeting people around the village. His life was now made up of mornings chatting up shopkeepers in the bazaar, lunches of rice and naan, afternoons in slumber, and evenings back at the bazaar. For the first time since Iran he had money to spare, and he took to making improvements to the house. It gradually occurred to him that his worst fears about the Taliban collapse had not been realized. Maybe the coming of the Americans wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe it was exactly what his people needed—help, stability, a chance for a decent life. Sure, there were problems. The Northern Alliance seemed to control everything, leaving Pashtuns like him impotent. But what country didn’t have issues? Certainly this was better than what he’d suffered in Pakistan and Iran.

  The trouble was, he needed to keep himself busy. Village life moved slowly, and
a man with Akbar Gul’s tastes couldn’t keep still for long. Casting an entrepreneurial eye around the village, he saw opportunity everywhere. At the bazaar he would poke his head in at one shop after another, in no time assuming the role of occasional butcher, tire salesman, or grocery vendor as he filled in for his new friends. He spent most evenings behind the counter at an electronic goods stall, which sold everything from hand-cranked radios and flashlights to the newest addition to village life, the cell phone. He was there one day when a young man strolled up holding a broken phone.

  “Can you fix this?” he asked. The phone wasn’t turning on, even when fully charged.

  “I don’t know,” Akbar Gul said, turning it over. In fact, he hadn’t the faintest idea how such a machine worked.

  The man said he’d pay whatever it took.

  Never one to refuse a challenge, Akbar Gul agreed to take a look and told the man to return in a few days. He wasn’t sure why he did things like this. It usually just landed him in trouble, but he couldn’t help himself. He pried the phone open with a screwdriver and stared at the circuit board, with its strange knobs and pathways and wires. There has to be a logic to it—it doesn’t run on magic, he told himself. He thought back to the automobiles he had retooled on the front lines. This couldn’t be that different.

  Yet it was. Everything was tiny, and you couldn’t simply pull parts out. Or could you? He followed the pathways to a flat square with miniature wires emanating from its side like some sort of strange centipede. He took his screwdriver and slid the tip under the square. Suddenly, it snapped. Akbar Gul stared at what he’d done. It had come clean off the board. He tried to fit it back on, in the process mangling two wires. Struggling to fix those, he damaged others. In the end, the phone appeared beyond repair.

  He jumped into his car and drove an hour to Kabul. At the electronics bazaar there, his fears were confirmed: the phone was ruined.

  The was only one way out of this. On the spot, he purchased a phone of the same model and then replaced the damaged interior with the new one.