After that, when the bus was rolling again, we talked about the wretched state of the country and how bad it had been under the Taliban and what a mess the current masters had made of it and how tired we all were of the endless war. What didn’t come up was anything personal. I’ve sat with people I’ve met by chance on airplanes and buses in the U.S., and sometimes you get their whole life story whether you want it or not.
But in this country reserve is the rule-no, it’s more than reserve, it’s a impenetrable thick mask-that prevents the expression of any genuine feeling. Maybe there is no genuine feeling; maybe the mask is all there is. I sometimes think that’s the case, and it’s one of the weirdest things about the transition from the West. My pal Claiborne is reticent for an American, he has the stoic uncomplaining humor of his mountain people, but Claiborne is an Oprah guest compared to the average Pashtun. Not making emotional waves is like the ruling passion of his life. The Americans see it as lying, as bad faith, but we think that the protection of honor, of the family, of the clan, is worth more than any mere veracity. Among the Pashtuns a man’s front is everything; no one can penetrate it except, if you’re lucky, you’ll find a friend of the heart, and he’ll be the only person in the world who will ever know what you really feel about things. For me this had been Wazir, and I for him.
It’s impossible to explain this kind of friendship to people in the West; it gets all tangled up in the whole gay thing they have, and it’s not like that at all. Or maybe it is, I wouldn’t know. We loved each other up in the mountains, in the war; it was the core of my life then, and when I was stolen out of my life it was gone, which is why when Bacha Khan told me Wazir was dead it was like someone recounting a dream: interesting maybe, but not real life.
So we talked, Janat Gul and I, as the bus jounced over the potholes, communicating, if that’s the word, in the veiled poetic Pashtun way, until we ran into another roadblock about ten miles outside of Asadabad, this one built around a couple of up-armored humvees and a squad of imperial storm troopers, my countrymen. The Americans were trying hard to be correct and do the rules-of-engagement thing, but you could see the drawn terror on their faces; they knew that any vehicle could be a bomb and, having been on the other side a time or two, I knew they would’ve preferred smoking any wheeled vehicle from a hundred meters away and fuck them if they can’t take a joke.
They unloaded the whole bus and lined us up, and a uniformed translator helped the young lieutenant in charge question all of us, which was sort of amusing because the translator would ask a guy where he was going and what his business was, and the guy would say, indicating the American, “I am traveling to see his diseased whore of a mother fucked by dogs” or some such, and the translator would render it in English, “He is a shepherd returning home.”
When it was my turn I took a long look at the lieutenant. He was in his early twenties, smooth-faced, wearing dark sunglasses. The translator, an older man, with the tired, cynical look of a city-bred Pashtun, took my papers and asked me where I was going.
I told him and added, “You have a pretty officer, brother. Does he let you fuck him in the ass?”
“He demands it,” said the man. “All night long. I think they should pay me more than a hundred and twenty dollars a month.”
“And have you caught any Taliban here?”
“You’re joking,” he said. “These sister-fuckers couldn’t catch a terrorist if he was hanging by a rope from their balls.”
“What are you saying?” asked the lieutenant.
“Nothing, sir,” said the translator. “He’s just another shepherd going home.”
Nor did they find any Taliban on the bus, although of course Janat Gul got the treatment again, because they were working off the same lists as the first guys. They were actually less rough on us than the Afghans, but the people were more pissed off when they finally let us go. It is just shitty to be questioned by foreign troops in your own country; there’s no way you can make it right, no way in hell.
So when the bus started again our mood had turned dark. Some cursed the Americans and wished for the Taliban to return, and others asked those donkeys to recall what it was like under the Taliban; voices rose, fists shook. I leaned across to the nearest musician and offered a twenty-dollar bill, saying, “Brother, let’s have some songs.”
He smiled, shrugged, spoke to his compadres, they unlimbered their instruments-dhol, rubab, toola-and broke into a lively attan, which is to the Afghans what the samba is to Brazil. They were pretty good, and after they had got the bus jumping to the wild rhythms of the dhol, they segued into a ghazal, one voice wailing over the drone of the rubab with the waving toola tootling in counterpoint. I knew the song, it was one we’d sung in the jihad, and the next one too was an old one; they were recalling the old days, before the Taliban crushed the music and the spirit of the people in the name of an alien version of Islam preached by an Arabian maniac two hundred years ago.
And then they played one I didn’t know, about a boy warrior who loved another boy warrior in the jihad and who had mysteriously vanished, leaving his abandoned lover to mourn alone, and it wasn’t until they got to the refrain-where is my young lion, my little ghazan? I wait, I wait, I know he’ll come back-that I realized that they were singing about me, me and Wazir.
I wanted to shrivel and I felt the blood rise to my face, but then I realized these people had no idea I was the guy in the song and I relaxed a little. It’s a weird thing to find out you’re a myth.
So we arrived, singing and dancing in the crowded aisle, at the town of Asadabad, having taken over eight hours on the trip. It was late in the afternoon by then and Janat Gul the schoolteacher insisted on giving me a meal and a bed for the night. His wife and sisters had to work like mad to clean out the room in his house where they sewed clothing to supplement his schoolteacher’s wage, which I felt bad about, but you can’t turn down hospitality among the Pashtuns and they are women after all; it is women’s work.
In the morning the wife, upon whom I had not laid eyes, of course, supplied a big greasy bag full of parathas, fruit, and bread for my journey, and I started walking out of town, north and almost straight up. It was fifty-odd kilometers into the mountains of Nuristan and I’d figured on two or three days’ travel, what with my bad leg, and that worried me, because my mother had been in captivity for seven days. On the other hand, no news was good news. Jihad groups had kept hostages alive for months-years-and I kept telling myself that my mother was a survivor, because if I wasn’t thinking that I would be thinking really bad thoughts and getting crazy, and that would screw up any chance I had of getting her out.
As it turned out, I caught a lift from a Tajik in a truck hauling consumer goods and grocery items to Warna, which took me almost all the way I was going. The driver said the area was fairly prosperous since the dope trade picked up after the war, lots of orders for generators and TVs and cell phones. He asked me if I was going to the jirga at Barak Sharh, and I said I was going to Barak Sharh but I hadn’t known there was a jirga, and he said yes, the Barakzai were having one, one of their clans anyway, and he hoped I was known there because they were very strict with strangers now. It was the opium trade and because the Arabs were killing all the maliks, them and the Taliban, the shit eaters, the pigs, the sister-rapers. The Tajiks don’t like the Taliban.
We reached Warna a little after noon, and I walked up the track toward the ancestral village of my adopted ancestors. I passed the cemetery and the old Sufi shrine. The gravestones had all been smashed or toppled during the Taliban era and the shrine was a blackened shell. There was a group of armed men from the clan militia at the entrance to the village, and they braced me and asked me who I was and what I wanted, and I said I was Kakay Ghazan, and I was here to see Gul Muhammed Khan, my father.
Well, that caused a stir, and at first they didn’t believe me. They held me at gunpoint, scowling, and sent a messenger off to their honcho, who turned out to be Sahak, my old commander
from the assault on Tsawkey, and he hugged me and lifted me off the ground and kissed me on both cheeks, and then he took me in to see my father.
Who was lying on a charpoy in the courtyard of his house, which was packed with armed men. And the usual thing: you haven’t seen someone in twenty years, you still expect them to look more or less the same, and it’s a shock when they don’t. Gul Muhammed the mighty had turned into an old man, his white beard dyed with henna, his strong hands reduced to chicken claws, his face stripped to sharp bones and leathery deep-lined skin. Only his eyes seemed the same: under the thick gray bristles of his brow they still had that hawkish look, but they filled with tears when he saw me and learned who I was. I fell to my knees before him and kissed his hands. We embraced while the hard men of the tribe murmured around us.
So I was welcomed back into my clan, introduced to the many I did not know, and kissed by those few I did. The clan had not loved the Taliban and had suffered for it, and they confirmed what the driver had told me, that the insurgents were assassinating the maliks and the tribal elders. This tribal jirga they had coming up was to plan a joint response and to decide what the Barakzai position would be in the new American war. They had been neutral, but with the killings this was no longer possible.
After a while the others politely withdrew to allow Gul and me to speak privately.
He smiled at me with his four teeth. “So, my son, you have grown to a man. And how many sons have you now?”
“None, Father. I’m sorry.”
“None? You have no woman?”
“I have had many women but none who wished to raise my sons.”
“Then get one who will. Get two. Men will be fighting with knives to wed their girls to Kakay Ghazan.”
“Whatever you decide, Father.”
“Good. You know Wazir has two boys. They are around here somewhere.”
“I am happy for you. I heard he has gone to Paradise.”
“Ah! Where did you hear that?”
“From Bacha Khan.”
“I see. Yes. Well, I miss him; he was a good boy.”
“May I visit his grave?”
“His grave is not here. What do you do with yourself now?” he asked, changing the subject.
“I am a soldier for the Americans.”
He gave me a sharp look. “And do you kill as they do, from far away, and never see the faces of those you slay, or whether they are enemies or children?”
“No, Father. The kind of soldier I am watches the enemy from very close, and if killing is necessary it is done silently and face to face.”
He grunted to acknowledge this, that I was not utterly without shame.
“So will you do this for your whole life?”
“I don’t know, Father. One reason why I’ve come here is to seek your counsel.”
“Then my counsel is to leave the service of the infidels and join us here. We need good men, fighters, and there is no end of gold from the poppies.”
Everyone wanted to get me into the dope business. I said, “I will consider it, Father, thank you. But before that I must do something. Some mujahideen have kidnapped my mother, and I have come to rescue her.”
“Yes? I heard something about a kidnapping of foreigners. Your mother was among them?”
“She was. Have you heard anything about where they’re holding them? It must be somewhere in Swat and perhaps even Kunar, close to the border.”
“It is not Kunar, or I would know. I hear they got five crore dollars for one of them, and I did not see a rupee of it, and I would have if they were in Kunar.”
He stroked his beard. For a while he seemed lost in thought. At last he said, “Your mother… I never met a woman like her, before or since. Many times I thought of stealing her for myself, just to see… but it was against my honor. I heard she took you herself, after the jihad.”
“Yes. Who did you hear it from?”
“Oh, you know, bazaar rumors. But it was true, I see.”
“Yes, she wanted me to be an American and be safe from the war here.”
Now he gazed off into space again, like old men do. “A remarkable woman, a devi almost. She took both my sons-”
“Both, Father?”
“I mean she used to talk with Wazir in the evenings and filled his head with strange ideas. But in the end he was a Pashtun.”
I was about to ask him what he meant, because there was something disturbing about the way Gul Muhammed was speaking, as if there were a message underneath his words that he wanted me to know but could not bring himself to voice. But now the courtyard was filling up with people; there was a continual rumble of trucks in the narrow streets outside, for the jirga was arriving, and my father had duties more important than chatting with a prodigal foster son about his mother. He asked me to sit down at his right hand, which I did, and there commenced a series of formal greetings of the assembled elders and chieftains. Tribal society is not efficient, which is one reason why it has faded over most of the earth, and I found that I was enough of an American to become bored by the pace of the proceedings. After an hour or so I excused myself and took a walk around the village.
It was a miserable little pile, with houses built of local stone and mud brick, more miniature forts than houses, surrounded by walls and dark and cramped within. In what passed for a market square, men were slaughtering sheep for the feast they’d laid on for the jirga, and I watched that for a while, but the sight of throats being cut and the gush of blood and the heads resting in the dust, swarmed with flies, reminded me of what I was trying to stop, and I moved on, back to Gul Muhammed’s house.
Entering my father’s courtyard, I waved to the guards there and they smiled and gestured for me to go through. The courtyard was more packed than before. I started to work my way through the mob and noticed that just in front of me two men were doing the same, so I stayed in their wake, like you do in a stadium or a concert. One of them was a thin Kiel with a heavy limp, probably eighteen or so, and the other was an older man in a turban; he had his hand on the kid’s shoulder, guiding him, and I thought, father and son come to the big party from some village like this one, the kid probably hasn’t seen this many big shots in his whole life.
But then the older guy gave the kid a little push and the kid moved out of sight into the crowd, and the older guy turned around to go back the other way and I saw his face, the beard, the knobby cheekbones. He looked right at me, I saw his eyes widen, and then he turned abruptly away and started to bull his way back toward the gate.
It was Baz Khatak, the man I’d seen in Peshawar talking to the ISI captain who’d run me off the road. I reached under my kameez and pulled my pistol out and started chasing him. He was pushing people aside-which is not wise in a Pashtun throng; they don’t take kindly to that kind of treatment-and men were shouting curses and kicking at him, and I’d almost caught him by the time we both got to the courtyard gate.
I saw him fumbling under his kameez and my belly lurched because then I knew what he was going for and why he’d shoved the kid forward. I shot him in the back, and he went down. I was just bringing the front sight up on the back of his head when I saw the small black box in his fist and before I could get the round off he pushed the button and as my bullets smashed his head the kid exploded.
We had twenty-seven dead and forty-eight injured, including Gul Muhammed, who’d been hit in the chest and hip by bits of human shrapnel; the human body makes a pretty good frag grenade and there was a lot of metal junk in the kid’s suicide vest in case that wasn’t enough. They brought a doctor in from the government clinic in Asadabad, probably at gunpoint, and he got the shrapnel out of my father’s stringy old body and I sat with him for a day and a night while he ran a fever and mumbled, talking to people who weren’t there or were dead.
When he was well enough to eat I fed him beef broth with a spoon, and he spoke sense for the first time, asking me what happened. I told him the story, about the Taliban I’d spotted from Peshawa
r and the kid with him, the bomber, and asked him to forgive me for not seeing him sooner. He waved that off.
“If it had not been for you, the bomber would have pushed through and exploded in the midst of the jirga, and I would be dead along with all the elders of the clan. You know, the reason we Pashtun don’t have a nation of our own is because no tribe can bear to see a man from another tribe above him, and so we are always under the heel of strangers. These Taliban say we should all be one people under the command of God and His holy Qur’an, as the Prophet, peace be on him, united the tribes of Arabia and conquered half the world. They are right in this, we should be united, as we were for a time against the Russians, and I do not like to see American soldiers in our country, but I have not heard that the tribes of Arabia were united by murdering their leaders.”
“So the clan will turn against the Taliban now?”
“We will have our revenge, surely, but you know what we say: the right side is good but the winning side is better. No one thinks attacking America is a real jihad, not like the Russians, when they were using mosques as latrines. If the Americans have a blood feud with the Taliban, that’s none of our affair. Let them kill each other!”
“I too have a blood feud with them, Father.”
He nodded and looked at me, not with his regular sharp and challenging stare but almost tenderly. He said, “Yes, I know. It’s what I would do and you are like me, although I didn’t raise you. I have had few regrets in my life. I lived as a Pashtun and kept my honor and my land, and that is sufficient, but I regretted not having my sons by my side. Yet you are like her too, and that’s not nothing. I have sworn an oath not to tell this, sworn it on naked steel, but I think it now touches the honor of my house, which comes before any oath, and when I swore it I did not think I would ever see you again, or that you would come with such a purpose, or that you would have saved my life, mine and these others of my kinsmen. So I will tell you, and let God judge me. They are holding these hostages in a village called Paidara, in the northern end of the Swat Valley. Until you told me, I did not know your mother was among them. But, son, let no one hear where you learned this. I would not have the Barakzai know that Gul Muhammed Khan has not kept his word.”
The Good Son Page 36