Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

  The whiny roar of those two bikes as they bounced across the rock-strewn path was like listening to a chainsaw having a breakdown. It pitched up and down until you wanted to put a round into the crankcase. But Danny wasn’t even hearing it. He was completely focused on what had just come over the hill, following Zadran and his entourage.

  It was like a parade of ghosts. It was the women—maybe thirty of them, covered from head to foot in burqas. They were a flock of shrouds of different colors, obliterating whatever individuality was under them. Of everything I saw there in that country, this image disturbed me the most, for some reason even more than the terrible violence. This was a different kind of violence. And whenever I saw a little girl laughing and playing, all I could think of was that hideous shroud awaiting her in a few years. Always. And now I thought of Zinger. And what these incarcerated souls under those burqas would make of her, up there in the air waging war.

  Through the telephoto compression of the scopes, the women appeared jammed together, jostling along the descending path in hues of orange, black, brown, or blue. Some held plastic mesh bags filled with what looked like food. I knew Danny was doing what I was doing—focusing the scopes on the heavy latticework grids across the eyes of the women, seeing if any tiny detail, anything physical, revealed itself. An eye. A nose. Part of a mouth. Anything that hinted at Ariana.

  The burqas were impenetrable.

  “Goddamn. Goddamn.” Danny was muttering. His voice was quavering. “Constance was right.” Will I recognize her? We were both picking the same thoughts out of the air.

  In all the situations I’d seen him in, this was the first time Danny lost that coolness. In all those combat situations, he’d barely showed a pulse, but now he was breathing like a sprinter after a marathon. “Oh God,” he kept saying.

  “You okay?”

  “No.” He shifted back and forth on his feet. “Lookit, lookit.” He was pointing at the head of the cavalcade. “Kids.” Ringed around Zadran’s donkey cart were little children, maybe five of them, all somewhere around six or seven years old. There were at least two little girls, bouncing up and down. Totally unaware of why they were there. Collaterals. Again the thought shot through two minds. Zadran had placed those children around him so that from the air, any pilot—even our Zinger, Sugar—would have to radio tactical command and, in one way or another, pose the baby-killer proposition: The old bastard’s surrounded himself with kiddies. Hit him, hit them—maybe. It’s fifty-fifty. Do we risk it? Huh?

  Danny and I were both playing Cyclops, stumbling around with our scopes to one eye, practically falling over each other.

  “He’s even got a little kid on the wagon with him!” Danny whispered. I flailed and focused. It was true. A little kid, maybe two, maybe three, sat on the big cushions. Checkmate! Zinger, in her most war-crazed, collateral-damage state—How was I to know that there were kids?—would drop teddy bears and rose petals at the sight of that cute little kid sitting beside Zadran. The little kid made that old tyrant Apache-proof. No one was going to vaporize him while that little kid was beaming all around.

  “That little boy . . .” I whispered into the mountain air. Danny? Was I imagining something about the smile—the grin—on the face of that little boy?

  “No, no, no, no.” Danny was trembling like a leaf. I turned to look at him. I put my hand on his shoulder to steady him. It was almost like he was going to pitch face forward into the stream below.

  “What?”

  “Constance!”

  “Constance?” At that instant, Danny and I were in different worlds.

  “The white veil,” he said.

  Not far behind the bobbing horde of blue and orange and black and brown burqas, there was a solitary white burqa. Apart from the rest, it moved in front of several armed men in turbans.

  Maybe it was my imagination, but the white burqa had a different rhythm to her stride. I know Danny felt that too.

  We raced about fifty meters south to a place near where another of the log bridges precariously crossed the chasm above the rushing stream. The caravan descended and drew closer. We were neither hidden nor obvious, merely standing among the trees. We waited as it approached on the other side of the chasm.

  “You sure about what you’re doing?”

  “No. There’s only one thing I’m sure about.” He was looking through the scope again.

  On the path, the white burqa was a kind of beacon apart from all the other colors. It moved—were we imagining this too?—with a kind of grace. Watching it, for some reason at that moment, I was seeing her. And I knew Danny was too. He was standing there, no longer using the scope because Zadran’s donkey cart and the caravan of ghosts was less than a hundred meters away from us. “The white burqa,” he said again. “I know her walk.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’ll know it till the end of my days. It’s Ariana.”

  The procession followed the path, turning along the other rim and heading toward us on the far side of the chasm. We stood stock-still, among trees and boulders, waiting for them to see us. We’d instinctively made a calculation—that Zadran was not going to do anything to derail the gravy train loaded down with the American money he knew he so richly deserved for a whole month’s worth of loyalty. Maybe two. And so, to him, we’d just look like a couple of soldiers—Americans who happened to be there watching. In these times there was nothing that unusual about that.

  At least that was the thinking. Our thinking.

  It was one of the motocross guys who saw us first and raised his hand. After a fair amount of jabbering and nodding from Zadran, they kept going. From his cushioned perch, without even looking at us, Zadran raised a hand in a majestically disinterested greeting.

  We attempted the same.

  They were closing on us, separated by the rushing stream below. The noise of that small torrent grew to a roar within my mind.

  The closer Zadran got to us, the more uncomfortable and angry he appeared, as if he was embarrassed at being seen riding in the cart. He snapped a sudden barrage of orders, making sure we knew he was the boss. They were directly in front of us now, only about fifty feet away, passing by in categories. The motocross went by first. Then some of the men, followed by the children, the little shields. A couple of them looked at us with eyes like dark pools. Then a few more men.

  And finally, maybe thirty meters away, the ghosts—the burqas moving toward us—all of them looking straight ahead. Only the white burqa turned to look toward us.

  Danny took a half step forward, almost like he was going to say something. The white burqa faltered for a moment but kept walking. “No,” whispered Danny. “No, no, no.” The white burqa was almost in front of us.

  Will she recognize me?

  “Oh shit, no, no.” He dived into the rucksack, his hands shaking so badly that I had to help him unzip one of its compartments. Just another foreign soldier, lean, toughened, with shaggy hair, sunglasses, and unshaven for days? Will she . . . He pulled out the little speakers and his new iPod. I thought they were going to fly out of his trembling hands. He sank to his hands and knees, pressing buttons on the iPod, listening through the headset. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” he muttered. Then he took the headphones off and unplugged them from the iPod.

  Through the little speakers came the sound of a piano. “Für Elise.” Echoing off the walls of the chasm as Liberace filled the air with music.

  On the other side, many of them shot a glance toward us, afraid, as if stopping to look would bring Zadran’s wrath down upon them. But the white burqa almost swiveled, for an instant frozen, and then took two quick steps back toward us.

  “Wait!”

  It was Ariana’s voice.

  That one word shot through Danny as if he’d just grabbed lightning.

  In a blur of motion that shot confusion through the whole procession, she ran through the burqas and the men. It was the shock of a perfect social order being shattered, an order where everyone had their
place. She raced over to the cart where Zadran was angrily trying to turn his bulk around to quell whatever nuisance had broken out. The white burqa—Ariana—grabbed the child from the cart and ran back toward Danny, who tried to stay across from her on the other side of the chasm. You could feel it burning from within that white shroud—some force of defiance and joy and fear shining through. She held the little boy up for Danny to see. The boy chortled as if it was a game and pointed to Danny.

  “Danny, Danny!” Ariana called out from inside that burqa.

  “Deenee,” laughed the little boy. In an instant you could see Danny all over that child’s face. The wide green eyes, the mouth that crinkled up in response to the world’s foolishness, even the hair, the reddish-blond thatch.

  “Oh, dear God.” Danny was crying and laughing all at once. He was making little baby waves to the boy, who gurgled a chuckle and then squealed, burying his face in the burqa.

  Ariana brushed the hair away from the boy’s eyes. He laughed and shook his head, sending the hair tumbling all over. “Your hand!” yelled Danny, louder, more urgently than anything he’d said to her.

  She whipped her hand behind the burqa. I only caught a glimpse of it—twisted and mangled in ways no hand should be.

  From the donkey cart, Zadran let out a snarling, guttural shout. He had shifted himself around enough so he could see Ariana. That giant mustache, like a dead black squirrel in rigor mortis across his top lip, curled and bounced in rage at this spontaneity from one of his own burqas.

  He shouted to a huge turbaned man with deep lines on an angry face and bullet belts crisscrossing his chest. Holding a rifle in one hand, the man raced toward Ariana.

  “No!” Danny said, almost to himself.

  The man prodded Ariana with the butt of his rifle, moving her in the direction of Zadran.

  “Don’t touch her,” Danny yelled, his voice getting stuck in his throat. I moved closer to him, ready for anything.

  Ariana spun around the man, circling back and calling out, “Danny, don’t do anything. I’ll be okay.” She was moving toward him when the squirrel came to life. I was watching Zadran, not the others. One of the deadliest species in all nature—the tough guy facing humiliation. Zadran bellowed again. The man nodded and drove his rifle butt into the side of Ariana’s head. She collapsed. The little boy spilled out of her arms, wailing. On the ground she lurched on hands and knees, the white burqa soaking red with blood as she staggered to her feet, groping for her son and wiping the red smear away from the latticework across her face. The man was moving toward her . . .

  . . . as Danny, in one unnaturally swift motion, fired a round that caught the man in the chest, sending him twisting, spinning, and then toppling backwards into the chasm, landing in the stream below, a fraction of a second before our world exploded.

  • • •

  It was Zadran’s bellowing that silenced the firing. For a moment his angry shouts were mixed in with other, weaker voices as if some kind of argument broke loose and then was smothered. Then there was only the clanging clatter of hooves, feet, and a motorcycle engine. All of it mixed with bursts of Zadran’s yelling. The sounds receded down the path on the way to their hurried destiny of a rendezvous with Americans dispensing cash at lower altitudes. The Pashtunwali code of retribution would wait for proper financing.

  What we did not understand until the chaos had subsided, until Zadran’s caravan had scrambled and jostled its way further down into the valley, was that the real attack on us was coming from the hill high above.

  In that instant after Danny fired, the top of his sleeve blossomed red. A bullet had not quite missed him, slashing through his shirt, leaving only a thin gash. But the bullet had not come from Zadran’s caravan. In that second or two while his armed fighters and the men guarding the boxes of American money were still scrambling for cover, I lunged at Danny, sending us both tumbling down behind the boulders and trees. He struggled to get up, but fell back as the bark on the tree above our heads exploded.

  Through it all I heard “Für Elise” in all its intimations of beauty and passion. Strangely, I had never appreciated music as much as at that moment while I lay there struggling to breathe, waiting for the end, and wondering what it would be like to die to Beethoven.

  Beethoven as played by the incomparable Liberace. I mean it. Never has Liberace played with such meaning, such passion as he did when we were about to die. The beauty of it will soar for as long as there is memory.

  Danny had struck the back of his head on something and now he stumbled twice as we tried to climb up from the gully to level ground. We got up there just in time to see the donkey cart rounding a bend in the rutted path. Ariana, in the white burqa, had been put on the cart next to Zadran, facing away from him and supporting herself with one hand on the cart. The other hand went to the top of the white burqa, which was splattered with blood.

  Danny stumbled toward the rucksack that had the big McMillan sniper rifle. He grabbed the rucksack and was dragging it toward me when the iPod and the little speaker exploded in a wild kaleidoscope of flying metal and plastic. We both tumbled behind rocks.

  “Ah, my Danny,” said a voice from somewhere very close. “You know I always hated that music.”

  29

  All you really need to know about military radios—or at least, the ones we were using—is that right when you desperately need one is when you’re most liable to be holding a piece of junk in your hands. In the midst of all the modern miracles that could not have been imagined by Patton, Sun Tzu, Bismarck, Napoleon, and all those other warrior gods, there are times when two kids communicating through tin cans connected by a taut piece of string have more effective equipment than what we had.

  I’ve had higher command refusing to give us the frequencies we needed to communicate with a different unit on the opposite side of a valley. And then there’s those green, bricklike batteries we get for laptops and sat phones that curl up and die in the cold. Which leaves your radio pretty much like a small rock to be thrown at the enemy.

  But other times there are those miracles of irony and communication, the kind you’d find on dead Ninjas, cheap little radios that Radio Shack wouldn’t sell but were working just fine for the bad guys. And could yield a treasure trove of eavesdropping once our linguists were hustled in to eavesdrop on what the Ninjas are saying to one another over the airwaves.

  Which is what happened us to us in reverse.

  I had been using a handheld military radio officially designated an MBITR but known among the troops as an Em-Biter. All day the thing had regularly quit working every couple of minutes. I had just pitched it away when a dozen different taunting inflections of my Danny suddenly came curling over the Em-Biter lying at our feet.

  The Taliban had gotten one of them from someone they had killed or captured. And Omar had been listening to us from somewhere up on that hillside that we couldn’t see.

  Danny picked up the source of the taunts and stared at it like he was trying to make it melt. He almost spit out the words. “What did you do to her hand?”

  “Ah, my Danny,” came the silky reply. “How nice to hear you. I knew you would show up.”

  Danny repeated the question. Yelling this time.

  “Danny, my Danny. It was not me who destroyed her hand.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Why, her husband, of course. She violated his will when she told him she would play your piano again. So he smashed her hand. It is his right. As the husband.”

  “I should have shot Zadran.”

  “Noo-noo-noo-no! Danny, my Danny! Zadran did not do this.” Omar’s words were not so much spoken as unfurled.

  “He’s her husband.”

  “He was. Until he found out that she was not a virgin. Do you know how that happened, Danny, my Danny? That my sister was not a virgin?” A silence louder than a barrage followed. “Did you see her face, Danny? No, of course not. She is not pretty anymore. Zadran is not a man you ever want to giv
e a whore to as his bride. So he beat her and then divorced her and gave her to the worst man in his tribe.”

  Danny was staring into the radio. Like he was trying to make his mouth work.

  “Even you wouldn’t want her now that she’s not pretty. Would you?” Omar laughed. “But she’s available now—after what you did to her husband.”

  “What I did to her husband?”

  “You just killed him.”

  • • •

  I’ll say this about Liberace: He was brave. A true hero. He definitely took one for the team.

  After we’d sat through a few more of Omar’s taunts, we had the problem of finding some way to crawl out from behind the little gully we were in. It all got worse when we figured out we had absolutely no idea where Omar was. Only that he was somewhere up on that hill. One wrong move and we’d be in his sights without knowing it.

  Which is where Liberace in all his cardboard glory came in. Danny unpacked him from the drag bag. We unfolded him and put the support brace up so he could stand there in that gloriously outrageous pose, his leg kicking out, wearing those oh-so-tight little silk shorts and his hands fluttering out just beyond all that Fifties cowboy fringe hanging down from his arms.

  And with that million-watt smile, he was ready for showtime.

  I crawled to a place below the little ridgeline at the top of the gully. About thirty feet away, Danny was ready with his rifle and a laser-aiming device he almost never used. In his hand was the Em-Biter.

  “Omar, my Omar,” he said softly in a rasping voice. “I will keep playing music. Your sister will keep playing music.”

  “Oh my Danny, you are still so ignorant. Zadran will sell her to another tribe now. There will be no music. Trust me, my Danny.”

  “Oh, there will be music.” And then Danny laughed. A curling laugh that was my cue to whip Liberace up above the ridgeline—Ladies and gentlemen, the one, the only—Liberace stood there prancing for his audience of one. The biggest performance of his career.

  And still Danny kept laughing at Omar through the Em-Biter.