by Hakan Günday
I was the first to hop off the bed. Then I helped the others off. The armed men had also gotten off their trucks to line up side by side. There were nine of them. Their faces were covered. We stood still in front of them. The little boy in his mother’s arms was crying. He’d been struck dumb with fear through the entire chase and now he couldn’t stop even if he wanted to. The man who’d talked to the murderer must’ve been the leader of the armed men. He was the only one among them whose face was uncovered. He pointed to the hysterical boy and said something. At that, with help from the plastic bag man next to them, the mother and child were put back on the truck. So we were able to meet at a median of compassion after all. The leader of the armed men turned to us and delivered a short speech. As soon as he was finished, the people spun around and started walking back to the truck. Moving faster than everyone else, the plastic bag man got on the truck bed and began dragging the Kalashnikov crates. Two armed men took the crates and loaded them one by one onto the pickup trucks. When the last crate was unloaded, the murderer shouted at the people surrounding the truck. They started climbing in faster. Livid at having been robbed, the murderer kept shouting. Especially at the ones unable to climb in! Right then I said to myself, okay. This is it … their beef isn’t with us! They’re going to leave with the Kalashnikovs …
The young couple we’d picked up from the village and I were the only ones that remained. The young man helped his wife onto the truck bed. Just as he was about to follow her, the leader of the armed men spoke. At that the young man turned to gape at him. He started shaking his head. Tears filled his eyes as he did. Whatever it was he’d been told, he didn’t want to consent. One of the armed men, however, approached the young Pakistani to grab his arm and start dragging him away. His wife couldn’t get off the truck for fear, but begged for them to let her husband go. She screamed and wept. The murderer merely stood by. Apparently this was his agreement with the robbers: to be able to proceed in exchange for the Kalashnikovs and a man …
Right then I thought of Rastin and took a step forward, shouting. What I said didn’t matter because they wouldn’t understand me anyway. But when I shouted and beat my chest with the palm of my hand at the same time, they were able to figure out that I was telling them to take me instead of him. Ignoring me, the leader of the armed men looked at the murderer. As though to say, “All right with you?” I was a foreigner after all. They wouldn’t want to be hit by a satellite-operated American missile two days later when all was forgotten. The matter was solved when the murderer nodded his assent. They agreed to take me instead of the young man. The weeping young man was released from their tight grip. At a loss for how to react to the unexpected self-sacrifice, he was unable to react at all. He just lowered his head and passed by me. He couldn’t even say thanks. The only thing he could do was to retrieve my bag from the truck bed to hand to me. In turn I took the paper frog out of my pocket where I’d carried it for the past sixteen years and gave it to him. He peered at the frog in his hand, then at me. I pointed to the boy who still shed tears in the depths of the vault. He understood what I meant to say. Cuma’s frog was passed hand over hand and given to the little boy. The last glimpse I had of the child was of him sighing at the frog in his hand.
As the murderer lowered the tarp over the tailgate, the leader of the armed men touched my arm. We were leaving … I spun around and walked to the pickup trucks. I could feel the stares boring into my back. A truckful of people watched me in spite of the curtain that had come between us … None of them would forget me. Nor I them …
“Go,” I said inwardly. “Go at once … go wherever it is you desire to go.”
I didn’t know what would happen to me or where I would be taken. But I’d done what I ought to. The rest was of no concern to me.
No one spoke to me for the entire ride. We passed through endless plots of land and arrived at a village. A village full of houses flattened by a road roller of a war … Dark heads hung from doorways without doors and windows without panes. Those who glimpsed us emerged from these tomb-houses, yodeling. Most of them were women. The ones around me replied to the yodels with raised Kalashnikovs. The looting was being commended. The trucks stopped and we hopped off the crates. We began walking.
At the edge of the village where the houses started to thin out, I saw people at work with shovels. It was clear that as a voluntary prisoner, I wouldn’t be running. So up till then no one had hit or mistreated me. In fact, the other armed men had gone off in various directions in the village, leaving only one person with me. As we approached the area where shovels were being lifted and lowered laboriously, I saw that a hole was being dug. All the workers were old. Looking at their faces, I couldn’t tell if the dampness around their eyes was tears or sweat. They were as likely to die of fatigue as of old age. For whatever end they were digging, it didn’t seem that they’d be able to see the finished product.
I turned to look at the armed man next to me. He made a fist of his free hand and brought it to his mouth like a glass. That’s how I knew they were trying to dig a water hole. They needed workers. Someone had to stay behind in the village to work when they were out looting. But there was no one aside from the old men. Those who could leave had all left. The young, the middle-aged, and anyone else with a modicum of hope for the future … We were in a place people deserted the first chance they got, without thinking twice about it.
I was given a shovel and the old people withdrew. I took a deep breath and released it. Then I started to dig. A monster with a thousand mouths, the sun bit my back and neck with all its teeth. Being the perpetually congealing wound I was, however, I worked unremittingly. I was familiar with shoveling after all. What’s more, this time I wasn’t digging a moat to protect myself from people. Even more importantly, I knew I wouldn’t be digging up my mother’s body. Death wouldn’t come out of the hole I opened. On the contrary, life would: water. I was merely digging for water.
I dug for two months. We only found water when we got to the fourth well. We also had to bring the stones to line the walls of the well from a distance of three kilometers. And we only had one wheelbarrow. The pickup trucks came by the village so rarely that we were forced to carry the stones with the wheelbarrow.
At night I slept under the stars. Or rather, on them … In the mornings I rose before the sun and started work. I was given food. Meat now, bread then. But never the two at once … They themselves mostly went hungry. They didn’t have anything except for a few animals. And they had me. That was it …
When we found water in the fourth of the wells dug with the most primitive means possible, all wrinkled faces broke into smiles. At a depth of six meters, it was the feeblest of waterbeds. We waited on it all night long. In the morning, however, we saw that the well had only filled up a meter. But we didn’t lament as we now had a well at the bottom of which we could see our reflections.
Since there was no one to keep watch over me, I was often waited on by women or sometimes children. Holding Kalashnikovs … however, they left me alone once they saw what a hardworking, docile slave I was. I all but became one of them … When he saw the water at the bottom of the well, the leader of the looters even embraced me and tried to explain that I could stay in the village if I wanted to. But there was somewhere I needed to be.
At the end of my two months as a convict,14 I made my farewells with everyone, got on one of the trucks, and went on my way. The only things I had left from the village were two bottles of water. Two bottles of water from a well …
The truck stopped in the entrance of Kandahar. My companions indicated that they could go no farther. They didn’t want to go into the city. I could sympathize. Everyone had limits around them within which the stories of their lives unfolded. I got off the truck and walked. Toward my own life story …
I’d been on the road for a week. Either on a bus, in the bed of a truck, or on foot. I walked. I knew, however, that there wasn’t much left to my destination. I’d asked everyone
I came across, “Bamiyan?” In return they’d pointed to a dot on the horizon. The dot grew larger each time and slowly but surely turned into the threshold of the valley. In a few more steps, I’d be there …
I ascended a final incline. I stopped at the end of the path and took a deep breath. But I couldn’t release it. Like my breath I wanted to hold this moment when I laid eyes on Bamiyan Valley for the first time. The only thing to do in the face of what I was seeing was to stop. To just stop and look. Because I’d found the place I was seeking. The picture Cuma had drawn stretched ahead in front of me.
There it was … a valley with trees rising in the midst, surrounded by high crags. There they were! From where I stood, I could see the empty grooves of the two gigantic Buddha statues. There must be a few hundred meters separating them. The rock walls into which they’d been carved were like rippled curtains drawn across the length of the valley. I was seeing dozens of small cave entrances. Dozens of little cavities were speckled around the two gigantic grooves. They looked like eyes on the jagged rock face. And if the caves were eyes, the people living in them, like Cuma had once, must be their pitch-black pupils …
I started running. I was on one of the slopes leading down into the valley. I ran and ran without a care. I weaved between boulders. I weaved between trees. I fell. Rose. And ran faster. With each step, everything I looked at grew even larger. The crags grew higher, and the grooves that once housed the Buddhas loomed even more enormously.
I didn’t know which one to head toward. I couldn’t guess which one the road would take me to. I just ran. And found myself approaching the larger groove. The distance between us was maybe a kilometer, maybe more. I couldn’t take my eyes off it all.
Finally, a few hundred meters short of the gigantic groove above me, I stopped and tried to catch my breath. At last, I said inwardly … I’ve made it at last … I closed my eyes for an instant and imagined that the fifty-five-meter-tall Buddha statue was still there. Inside the enormous groove … Cuma had grown up with that statue. Always watching it … Perhaps he’d even climbed the groove in front of me and looked out at the world from between the Buddha’s feet. I could see the statue, too, now … and a boy named Cuma as he ran right past me …
I opened my eyes and the statue vanished. All that remained was its empty groove. I started walking slowly. Then a woman appeared in front of me. An old woman … she must have deduced where I was headed from the direction of my stare. She waved her hands and shook her head. “Stop!” she meant to say. “Don’t go!”
I just chuckled and walked on … but she wouldn’t give up. She shouted something in my wake. I think one of the words was Taliban. I kept on chuckling and walking.
There was no one else in sight. Only the smoke rising from the caves in the distance. Smoke that proved that lives were lived inside the caves … I drew even nearer to the gigantic groove. From here on it was only a climb. I’d feel my way up the rocks. My hands and feet knew where to go. It was as if I’d spent my life in the valley with Cuma, climbing up to the groove … Maybe I really had, since anything I wished could be real.
With a final step, I was in the groove. I raised my head. Spun around. Looked up at its ceiling looming over me like a dome. It made me dizzy. I stopped. Looked at the horizon. Spread my gaze over the mountains and hills corrugating the horizon and the vast emptiness stretching out toward it. Then I bent my head. I was standing on shattered pieces of rock. Perhaps they were the remnants of the destroyed Buddha …
I sank to the ground. Sat. Laughed. Then I heard a sound. A familiar voice … a voice I hadn’t been able to hear in years … a voice I’d come all this way just to hear …
Are you OK?
Yes.
Tired?
A little.
You’ve been on the road for years …
Yeah …
Well? Does it look like the drawing?
It does, Cuma … it really does.
Thank you for bringing me home.
Thank you, Cuma. For inviting me to your home …
What’re you going to do now?
I don’t know …
All right … what about later?
Maybe I’ll live here in place of those who left …
Gaza … I’m only telling you so you’ll be prepared: you might dream of morphine sulfate, for a while, when you sleep. But don’t you ever surrender … please.
Don’t worry.
Are you going to tell yourself your past again?
No, no … this is the last time.
You say that every time … are you sure?
Then let me put it this way: I hope I never have to tell it again!
You won’t! I believe in you … Gaza … I have to go.
I know.
Shall we say good-bye?
Good-bye, Cuma.
Good-bye, little boy … now go and finish your story …
It’s finished.
I delivered Cuma home, whom I’d carried inside me since the day I took his life. I heard his voice years later only to say good-bye. I was in the Bamiyan Valley of the Hazarajat region of Afghanistan. Inside the gigantic groove which once housed the fifty-five-meter-tall statue of a Buddha … The statue had stood for 1,500 years at the very spot I was now standing and then gone up in a cloud of dust. I looked down and saw a boy. He was fifteen at most. He stood staring at me from between the nearby trees. He held a Kalashnikov. I smiled. The boy raised the gun and fired. I felt warmth bloom in my left shoulder. I looked at the perfect emptiness stretching out in front of me. I stood up.
14 Pun on the Turkish word for convict, “shovel prisoner.”