by Barry Grant
FOURTEEN
An Afghan Tale
‘Pardon the cough, gentleman, it . . . I . . . sorry. Two days ago at rehearsal I fell off the stage, if you can believe it, and I landed on my chest on a chair in the first row. Ever since I’ve been as hoarse as you hear, and coughing, I’ll try to . . . sorry.
‘I won’t weary you with a lot of David Copperfield detail. Yet to make sense of my little tale I must begin at the beginning . . . sorry . . . I can’t think why I am coughing . . . I was born in a small village north of Kabul. My father was Afghan, my mother American. She had been born and bred in Chicago, which is where my father met her. They moved to Afghanistan so that I could be born there – partly because my father wanted me to know my people, partly because my mother was an exuberant lass of Irish descent who was game for any adventure. In Afghanistan I grew up amidst family, crowded in little rooms. I was quite happy, blooming in the hothouse intensity and narrowness of village life. Everything seemed beautiful. Distant mountains, dust rolling in heat. I walked to school past a canal where reflections of silvery poplar trees shimmered. The schoolroom was plain, walls and a blackboard, but it seemed perfectly adequate to me at the time. I had no idea how Spartan it was. I walked home with my cousins, jumping and laughing. We were proud of things. We were proud of our family compound, for instance. Mud walls twelve feet high surrounded it. Within those magical walls were lush gardens where we ran and played and picked fruit and sought shade. The rooms of our building were intricate and numerous. At the time I thought they were huge. People, rooms, gardens, and at the middle of the confusion, my grandmother. She was the centre that held all together. She sat in the main room leaning on an embroidered cushion, knitting and telling us tales. That’s how I remember her. I remember her happy. I wanted always to remember her happy.
‘I was seven years old when suddenly we moved to Evanston, Illinois, a town situated just north of Chicago. My father, who had been educated in England, had taken a job as an electrical engineer for a large Chicago corporation. It was fine with me. America, the land of Coca-Cola and cowboys, sounded enticing. I had no fear. My parents had always spoken English to me, and I made the transition from Pashto to English quite easily. My school was vast, and vastly different, and full of magical things. Yet, truth to tell, I did not find it superior to my old bare-walled school. Only different. It was just a different adventure.
‘When I graduated from high school I went to England to university. My father had always planned this. He had been a Cambridge man but I went to Christ Church, Oxford. While there I became an Englishman. I loved England. Love it still. I love it as Rupert Brooke loved it – shall I quote the poetry of Rupert Brooke, Mr Holmes, to prove that I love England?
‘At University I was in all the theatrical activities I could manage, and when I went down from Oxford I enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. The years I spent there were the most arduous I have spent anywhere, but also a great joy. It was at this period that I changed my name from Salman Barialy to Simon Bart. It sounded like a better stage name. It sounded more British. And now I am British, for I have a British passport. I am also Irish through my American mother. I am also Afghan and American. I am a citizen of the world, as we all should be.
‘For the next eight years I worked in the London theatre, making steady progress in my career. By then my family had moved to the north of England, near Leeds, where my father’s company had a branch. Then came the 9/11 attacks, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq. My grandfather on the Afghan side was long dead but my grandmother still lived in the old compound north of Kabul. I began to worry about her, and I resolved to go see her and, if possible, make her life easier for her. My parents thought this would be a good idea. Accordingly, I left England and arrived in Kabul. I was completely unprepared for the chaos and danger that I instantly encountered. Taliban fighters were everywhere present and nowhere visible. US troops were engaged in firefights. Bombs were likely to go off on any roadside, and bullets to fly at any moment over any street.
‘When I reached my old family compound I was shocked that the outer walls were bullet-pocked. In one place the wall had been breached completely. My cousins and grandmother were glad to see me. They put the best face on their situation, but it was obvious to me that they had already lost hope that they would ever regain their lives. I had been there a week when the worst day of my life leapt upon me. I had no idea a horror like this would ever visit me. It was a beautiful dawn, the sun rising pink over the still brown land, the liquid call of a bird falling through my window. I got up from my pallet, dressed. I went out to walk by the canal where I had walked as a boy. It was already hot. As I returned towards the compound I heard rifle fire, and I saw soldiers leaping over the breach in the compound wall. I rushed inside and found that my cousins and their families had vanished but my grandmother sat alone on a wooden chair in her usual room, leaning against her embroidered pillow. Her dog, a German police dog mix, was by her side. As I looked through the open window, three American soldiers appeared in the room. They began to question her in English. Of course, she didn’t understand. One kicked open a side door with his boot, rifle at the ready, and looked out. They looked huge in the small room, all their equipment dangling from them, though they were not big men. My grandmother now looked terrified. She was beginning to cry but fought back the tears. She kept knitting. The dog was a big dog but she had her tail between her legs. She was trying to stand her ground but backing up till she was almost behind my grandmother. All this happened in a second or two. One of the men was pointing his rifle at the dog. Another one said, “Watch out for that dog.” The third said, “Shoot the fuckin’ thing if it moves.”
‘I rushed around and in through the door, and shouted, “Leave her alone!”
‘And then the dog growled, and I could see what the one soldier was going to do, and I tried to stop him but someone put a bayonet in my chest. A gentle jab, and the blade went in and I felt a flame inside me and I went down. They shot the dog. One shot and she was dead. My grandmother, overcome with anguish and desperation, stood up – silent as death – and went for the soldier with her knitting needle, and the soldier backed away from her looking angry and confused but also frightened, and as he backed away he raised his arms that held the rifle, as if protecting himself, and as he turned away he smacked her on the side of the face with his rifle butt. She went down. I was bleeding, the front of my shirt wet with blood, but suddenly I didn’t feel it and I got to my feet and grabbed the soldier who’d shot the dog – and all this while the other two were standing back a bit and watching this scene. One was laughing, but the other said “Shit,” as if he weren’t happy with what was happening.
‘“What do you want!” I cried. “What do you want!” I sounded fairly rational. Too rational, I thought.
‘I have played this scene over a thousand times in my brain. It is there forever.
‘I grabbed the chin strap of his helmet, pulled him and he fell. Something fell out of his pocket. The other two men had grabbed me now. My grandmother lay on the floor.
‘“Shit, he speaks English,” one of them said. As if this fact had only just now registered with them.
‘The soldier I had pulled off his feet pointed at the floor. “Pick it up,” he said. “Pick it up you fuckin’ bastard – look what you’ve done!”
‘The two soldiers on either side of me pushed me down, forced me down to my knees. I picked up what he’d dropped. It was a pocket bible. The front loose cover fell open as I lifted it, and printed in black ugly letters on the inner cover, as if written by a retarded child, was the name Calvin Hawes. I never forgot that name.
‘“My bible, my bible,” he cried, angrily, grabbing it from me. I thought he might shoot me.
‘They held me. I said, “Are you going to just let her die?”
‘Suddenly rifle fire erupted nearby and they ducked for cover and ran into the next room, and I could hear them shouting and running thr
ough the compound. I went to my grandmother. Her face was bruised but nothing was broken that I could see. I helped her up. She was crying. One of my cousins appeared from somewhere, and helped her to her bedroom.
‘My cousins wrapped my chest. Tied it. Then the soldiers returned and took me away. A firefight had broken out and they were afraid of being cut off from their troops. They dragged and shoved me, and somehow I fell and was on a stretcher and a medic was working on me. I was in a medical facility somewhere. The doctor said a thoracic aortic aneurysm had been caused by the knife thrust, and he looked concerned, but the other doctor said it was not a great concern so long as the bleeding was stopped. I was taken to a questioning centre of some kind, and I was called a Taliban agent. They declared that my papers were false, even my British passport. After a while they sent me to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. I begged for a lawyer but the Americans said I had no rights. None. I didn’t know where I was, or what was happening.
‘I was at the prison for two years. I was tortured daily. The more that I swore I had nothing to tell, the more they tortured me. They put me on a board and began to drown me. They kept me awake for days. In winter they stripped me and made me cold for weeks, and I slept on cement. I lost track of time. I thought I was going mad. I think I am mad now. You say you are Sherlock Holmes. Obviously you are a madman – or are you? I don’t know anything anymore. The world will never be right for me again. You cannot understand how it is. It is so unbelievable that no one can understand it. For two years I wondered – in anguish – what had happened to my grandmother and cousins. At first it is the horrible injustice that keeps going through your mind. You have been raped, battered, unjustly accused, your family smashed. The idea of injustice obsesses you. But then the idea of injustice fades and you are just numb, you are just trying to stay alive. And then that feeling also fades, and you no longer want to stay alive. You want to die. You dream of dying but you can’t die. They won’t let you die.
‘I heard his name first from a guard who was talking to another guard: Colonel Davis. That was the name. It rang around the horrid halls of the place, the barren bloody walls. He was the man in charge. On him my hate focused. Not on the guards who abused us, for they were too much like animals, moles, rats in a sewer. No, my hate focused on Colonel Davis. And one day Colonel Davis appeared. I actually saw him. He came down to see his orders carried out. The guards made ten or twelve of us kneel. We were nude. There were women guards too, men and women. Some of the men took down their pants and urinated in our faces. Then they made us lick their . . . what! You lurch from your chair, Mr Holmes? I’m sorry. Are you really so delicate? It is funny. After all this happens to you enough times, it becomes normal. Not extraordinary. Of course, it leaves its mark. I can never in this life enjoy sex again. Nor love. Nor hope. Nor anything. All is but a screen of pain on to which I cast my shadow and try to pretend I am living. I acquired social graces early in life that linger and create the illusion that I am a more or less normal living being. But I am dead, Mr Holmes, quite dead. It is not even a stage on which I move, it is a movie screen. Poke your finger through it, and there is nothing behind.
‘I will overleap the details – for your sake, Mr Holmes. Let me only say that the guards had sex in front of us, made us have sex with each other, rammed sticks up our asses, and when we screamed with pain they pretended our screams meant we desired more of this sexual pleasure. Colonel Davis, who has in the press so adamantly asserted that he never knew what was happening in the prison, who has said that he was only vaguely aware, who has sworn before a committee that he never saw anything, who has argued that it was in fact illegal for him to participate in the interrogation sessions, who has asserted repeatedly that there really was no way he could have known – Colonel Davis who denies everything, was there. Colonel Davis, in addition to all his other charming traits, is a liar. He watched us be humiliated in every way known to man. Many times I heard guards mention that Colonel Davis had given orders. Many times I heard them say, “Don’t let up on these shits, or Davis will be on your ass.” And Davis, yes, Colonel Davis came down to watch the fun. Davis was very clean in his uniform. His face was shaven and sober and satisfied. I stared at his face. I memorized it. I decided to kill him.
‘I was released in 2005, for reasons as random and inscrutable as the reasons I was arrested and imprisoned. In 2004 the world had learnt of how the United States treats its prisoners, so when I came out and people learnt where I had been – the few close friends I told – they believed. They asked about the black hood that was pictured in all the newspapers of the world. I said, yes, I too had been hooded. But I told them that was nothing compared to the worst they did to us. But most people I never told. It is not something one wants to tell, for to tell it makes it happen again. And again. And again. Makes it happen not only in dreams at night but in daytime whenever they ask. Then you have no respite in waking, none in sleeping, no respite at all.
‘I was released, and I soon afterward learnt that my grandmother had died less than two weeks after the Americans had abused her and killed her dog. I had expected such news, and yet it devastated me. Fortunately I had someplace to go, and though my father had died while I was in prison, he had left my family quite well off. So I had money at my disposal. The poor are simply crushed, but the fortunate such as I must carry on the fight against injustice.
‘Do you know the plays of Webster and Tourneur, Mr Holmes, Mr Watson? The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi. Tragedies of blood, as we like to call them, but mine would only be the last act of a tragedy concocted by other men, that killed 600,000 Iraqis and Afghans, or more. That sent American boys whirling into eternity, lifted into their graves by roadside bombs, or sent them home without limbs. Or sent them home to America (where I went to school and loved movies and ate ice cream) half mad. I saw once on the front page of the New York Times pictures of scores of ex-soldiers who had gone home and killed their fellow citizens. A madness has been turned loose in the first four acts of the play, and I would write the fifth, and madness and revenge would be my theme.
‘Private Calvin Hawes of Georgia had been wounded and sent home to recuperate in a VA hospital there. I managed to find his email address and I began to write to him, posing as a fifteen-year-old British girl who was, oh, so sympathetic to his plight. I wrote as a child and he responded, and when I began to indicate my passion, and when I sent him a photo of a delicious blonde who was supposedly me, he could not resist my invitation. He was young, hungry, deprived, and the madness of desire in the blood leads many a man to destruction. I did not intend to kill him, only to destroy him.
‘It was all as you said, Mr Holmes. As you so rightly deduced, I lured him to The Old Vicarage. Through the window I saw him come uncertainly up the walk, with a bouquet of flowers held behind his back. I met him at the door in my costume and I pretended in a small voice that it was a Halloween costume, and I spoke in a tiny whisper and told him that I was shy, and then I told him how I had dreamt of him, and I told him what I wanted, and I asked him to kneel and eat me. He was trembling with desire as he knelt – and suddenly he discovered his horrible mistake, and he lurched backwards in an agony of revulsion, and then I swatted him with David Jenkins’s oak walking stick which I had found leaning in a corner, and he fell to the floor out cold. I tied his hands behind his back, and thrust the flowers into his hands because it seemed the thing to do, and I dragged him into the bathroom and laid him in the huge lion-foot tub. I intended simply to leave him there, stripped of his wallet and all his belongings, and let him awaken to his terrors and humiliation. Then I got to thinking he should be reminded of the dog he’d shot, and the old woman he had indirectly killed. The death of the poor dog bothered me even more than my grandmother’s plight. How could that be? The image seared me; a noble creature made afraid, trying to defend herself, tail between her legs, impotent, helpless, crushed, humiliated, killed.
‘I waited until he awakened, then told him why he was t
here. He stared. I asked him questions. His answers revolted me. I grabbed a door with glass panes that I had seen leaning in the back hallway, and I laid it over the tub. I began to run water into the tub. He began to struggle. The water grew deeper. He grew tired of trying to keep above water. He gave a tremendous lurch, like a huge fish, and sat up violently, and his head smashed through the glass pane, and he slit his throat a huge gash as he fell back. The blood poured out. The tub of water turned red. I knew nothing could save him. Then the phone rang, and I heard a message that someone was coming, and I left quickly. It was all as you said, Mr Holmes.
‘I had not intended to kill Private Hawes. I wouldn’t have killed him. But he’s dead now. And my grandmother is dead, her dog is dead, my village is dead, three of my cousins’ children are dead. A lot are dead. For many, hope is dead. They live on, but they are dead.
‘I had not intended to kill Private Hawes, but I did intend to kill Colonel Davis. After torturing him, of course. You see this rag I brought? With it I would have made him know he was drowning. You see this cord I brought? Oh, I have several sweet ideas for Colonel Davis, but none sweet enough to pay him for all the horror he has caused to innocent men. Have you read, gentlemen, how the army person in charge of the prison has now said publicly that probably ninety per cent of the people there were innocent? ’Tis true.
‘I did intend to kill Colonel Davis tonight. I have been caught in a kind of madness. Always I have known I am ruining my own life with revenge. Revenge is sweet but only for a moment or two. Yet I cannot help myself. I’d like to sup on horror for an hour or two more. But you gentlemen have thwarted me . . . pardon me . . .’
Here he broke off in a fit of coughing. He had been half-sitting on the edge of the little table in the window alcove, with the revolver in his hand. Holmes and I sat in two chairs across the room, facing him.
‘To thwart you is our duty,’ said Holmes.