Clay hated the place. He’d parked his motorcycle outside the glitzy anomaly. A nine-storey, multi-million-dollar target. But Idris was compelling — a young man with resources and will who’d stopped believing in what he was taught just enough to contemplate another future. He’d come of age in the boom, the frenzied commerce in security, foreigners starting companies: fortifying homes, installing safe rooms and containment cages inside entrances, or establishing English academies, IT institutes, and private high schools. But the civilian surge and its bubble would end when the troops went home and the foreign aid flowed to a newly devastated land. Idris should profit from this sham while he could.
Idris arrived in a cheap leather jacket that hung on his bony shoulders. His black hair was getting long and would have made him resemble a gangly, overgrown child if it weren’t for shadows beneath his eyes so dark he could be recovering from a boxing match.
What’s with the girl? I’ve never heard of schools providing field trips to the mall.
I can’t say no to my boss.
I thought you were a student.
I work for Mr. Frank too.
You need the money?
It’s not about money. It’s … all or nothing.
Idris seemed uncomfortable with the words: not a difficult colloquial expression but a greater implication, a servitude.
And what does Justin think of that?
Idris shrugged lamely. He wants to help, but … he must help everyone.
Bullshit, kid. You’re not being straight. If you want to work for me, you have to be able to say hard things. That’s how people trust you.
If I told other Americans the truth, they’d fire me.
I don’t know about that, but the truth is going to get you the opposite with me.
Okay. Fine. Everyone in the school says Mr. Justin is making sex with this girl, Sediqa.
Jesus Christ. I didn’t see that coming.
He said he would help me, but I don’t think he’ll stay long. The students don’t like him.
Clay leaned against the railing. People ambled across the tiles, past shop windows, clearly in no rush, happy to be in the least dusty public spot the city could offer.
So you’ve talked to Rashidi’s son?
Faisal. Yes. We’ve talked. He’s sixteen but like a kid. You can tell he is very protected.
What do you mean?
I mean protected by his family. He does not come to the school with guards, just a driver and a regular car.
Clay hunched at the railing, feigning interest in the shoppers below.
So what do we do? Idris asked.
I’m thinking. You have any ideas?
I will try to become his friend. It’s not easy. When someone offers you friendship, you wonder what the reason is. Nothing is innocent here.
Then be a good actor. I’ll make it worth your while.
Clay took a folded hundred from his pocket and shook Idris’s hand, the bill between their palms.
Do this your way. I trust you.
Clay let go and left. As he rode the elevator down, he neared the glass. Idris was still at the railing, head lowered, gazing into his palm.
At the mall entrance, a woman in a burqa ran up the stairs in high-heeled leather boots, her youth evident in the pliable lines of her body. Clay’s pang of desire made him realize he’d been here too long. If only the Soviets and Americans hadn’t waged their proxy war, she’d be wearing a skirt and blouse and looking him in the eye. Maybe, underneath it all, she was.
He started his motorcycle. A red sunset crowned the nearest range, light breaking between peaks.
Briefly, nostalgia for the army — for his friends, for immersion in that primal awareness so material in his body it felt like an element denser than his bones — ached in him. Few had liked being a soldier the way he had. He missed the camaraderie, even the boredom. But he’d hated seeing the enemy dead when they were hardly more than boys. A boy himself, he’d dreamed of mountains on the horizons and taking up his .22 to confront something so big its destruction would illuminate every facet of his life. Helping Idris felt good, though it didn’t fix anything.
At home, Clay tried to read, but his mind drifted. He imagined an attack on his house, dealing himself worse hands and more insurgents with better weapons. And then he thought about an article he’d run across while perusing the online news. It described human habitations in South Africa dating back more than 70,000 years. Scientists had connected the cliff-side dwellings to a time when the human race almost went extinct, only a few thousand people remaining. The climate had been cold and dry, killing off most humans, and the survivors had retreated to the southern coast.
He pictured himself standing on cliffs above rocky shoals, in a world where everything was essential for survival: hunting, foraging, and reproduction — or killing whatever threatened the home. He could hardly fathom a life he could create now that would have that much purpose. The sky would be like it was in the desert — the spill of stars, the air so clear the atmosphere touched the outer dark of space.
JUSTIN
Justin’s students had become as unreadable as the Afghans in the street: their stares devoid of feeling, as if they were looking now only so they could remember. Because he, like the rest of the foreigners, would soon be gone.
As he worked on his curricula each morning, Sediqa timed her arrival before the rest of the girls. If he refused to let her in, she made things even worse — crying at his door and clutching his shirt with a conjugal intimacy. If he ushered her to the chair, the gasping and uncontrollable rocking began again. He hadn’t expected an Afghan girl to be so bold. She’d thrown this country behind her, willing to destroy her reputation and his to get what she wanted. His frustration festered into anger, and only after he grabbed her arms, shook her, and commanded her to be quiet did she stop. In the days after, she still visited his room, at times bringing him tea, at others thanking him for saving her, even though his mind wasn’t made up. In class, she smiled at him with complicity.
The girls, Idris told him one evening, are all talking about how you will pick who gets the new scholarship.
The school belongs to Frank, Justin said. I have to run everything by him.
So Sediqa will get it.
That’s not decided. Besides, there are lots of scholarships for Afghan students —
For girls. Yes. The rest go to people who know people. I had a friend who got one. His cousin was in charge of the scholarship program. Otherwise, it’s rich people bribing officials.
Idris’s mouth trembled and then drew down, clamping his emotion in place.
Mr. Justin, I’ve done years of grammar classes. Is that all I’m ever going to do?
No. Justin sighed, searching for the right words, but before he could reply, Idris left. He went down through the school. The sound of the gate closing was barely audible.
In the days that followed, Idris rarely came to class, returning late to the pantry.
Unable to sleep one night, Justin prayed in the heater’s radiance. As a teenager, he’d fantasized about being shipwrecked on an island where he’d meet an uncorrupted woman who would support his faith. Alexandra could not be more distant from this, but she might understand what he was living.
He took his Nokia, hesitated a moment, and called her.
Hello. Her voice came through thinly, her neat, foreign-sounding consonants. Faith dropped away. He was a body sitting on a thin mattress, holding a cheap plastic cell to his ear.
It’s Justin. I wanted to say sorry. For how I was at the supermarket. It wasn’t a good moment.
Oh. I guess that’s how it is here.
He considered this. Beyond his window, a constellation of house lights along the mountainside pulsed with the uneven current of generators.
Are you there? she asked.
Yes. Sorry.
How is the school?
It’s not much. Not yet at least.
Most offices and homes here are not much, she replied. But others are palaces.
Would you like to visit the school?
Just below the summit, a needle of light moved — the headlights of a car making its way over the steep dirt roads between the dwellings.
I would like that. Is tomorrow okay?
He said it was. Frank would be courting donors. He often had meetings with cell companies, Roshan or Etisalat, or local businessmen who profited from contracts with the US government. Frank both bragged about the status of the men he met and lamented that they were all talk and no action.
The next day his mind wandered from his lessons to how he should act with Alexandra and whether he should share his growing resentment. He’d expected Afghans to be grateful.
She arrived as the afternoon ended. The girls were at the mall, and he’d made tea and put chairs on the back porch. She asked about his goals and he described what he’d learned in university about stabilizing society with education. He explained how the curriculum he was developing would teach grammar simultaneously with democracy.
She smiled. It’s like the Taliban textbooks that taught math with examples of how many infidels are killed if five bullets are shot and two miss.
He wasn’t sure how to interpret her joke. The sun was going down, and she adjusted her scarf to shield her eyes.
Do you really believe so strongly in God? she asked.
How else can we understand this creation?
But what kind of God wants this world? The children who walk on landmines. Girls splashed with acid. Women treated like cattle.
It’s not for me to figure out. The mystery creates meaning and makes faith possible.
There are other ways to create meaning.
Like what? Pleasure? Personal satisfaction? How long can that sustain us?
Until we no longer exist. It’s possible to be good without a divine judge. Fuck the God who wants to test us.
So why did you come to see me?
I can want to know you even if we don’t agree. The missionary spirit isn’t as common as it used to be. At least you care. At least sacrifice means something to you.
He wanted to talk about Job’s suffering and the power of a higher purpose, but he’d read in books on conversion that the best way to change another was through example. The heart did not know reason: it felt and, in feeling truth, could be changed.
My brother died here, she said suddenly. He was a soldier.
Justin’s thoughts lost their traction, struggling to place Canada in the war. Her brother must have been with NATO. The old guilt — that he himself had never served — was there again.
Are you okay?
Yes. I’m sorry about your brother.
She leaned forward and held his face, her fingers on the skin above his beard. He wasn’t ready for this. She put her lips against his.
It’s like I’m kissing a medieval king, she said. Or an ancient Christian hermit.
He tried to smile. You don’t know any Christians in Canada?
In Quebec, yes, she replied. Canada’s another story. In Quebec, there are grandmothers who believe. I don’t personally know any young people who are serious about religion, but some exist.
She moved her fingers through the cropped hair above his ear.
This talk of belief is rather primitive, she said, but at least it’s not predictable.
I’m sorry about your brother. Were you close?
He was my twin.
Her cell chimed, and she stood and told him next time she would invite him to her place since it was heated. She’d pre-ordered a taxi, and it was already outside, its headlights faint in the blue gloom of the dusk.
美智子
I read Frank’s letter on the plane. Nothing was written on the envelope and Justin’s parents wouldn’t know either way, so I tore it open. I would buy a new one after I landed.
His words were a medley of clichés, a rambling paean to the warriors who carry no weapons. It was as if Frank didn’t just want to have the last say in his argument with Justin but to utter the final lines at his grave, give the verdict on the war itself — as if, when foreign armies withdrew and the president proclaimed America had done all it promised, Frank would take his place and declare: Justin did more than give his life to our country. He made the ultimate sacrifice to do what war cannot — to change minds. He is not a memory but rather a part of all that he has met. I see him as he first walked through my door, embodying hope, a hope that has been breathed into every young Afghan.
I resisted the urge to tear up the letter. His parents would picture a gleaming academy, not a crumbling school among many on the fringes of a city jerry-rigged with foreign aid.
But maybe Frank’s language would make sense to Justin’s parents — not those Americans I knew, who were educated and managed projects with clear goals, but those who believed in messiahs and empires, and confused the salvation of souls with that of nations.
The warmth of Louisiana startled me after Kabul’s winter, its ugliness more so. The buildings were ramshackle, much like in Kabul. Maybe there’d been a race for land here too — to put down anything and build with whatever was at hand.
I drove the rental car west from New Orleans, through hamlets of uneven clapboard and tin with a few characterless stores, and maybe a supermarket or gas station. The asphalt was fissured and warped, dissolving into the swamps the way mud dwellings erode back into the desert. Only the occasional cottage or plantation house behind immense mossy oaks seemed enduring.
Justin’s home was itself vaguely plantation-style, curtailed for a suburban street and made on the cheap, with vinyl siding and no ornamentation. It was fortified with tall boxwood hedges that had grown up on either side of a chain-link fence.
I rang the doorbell with the roller bag at my side. Footsteps slowly approached.
Justin’s mother was thin, with a face of rucked-up lines, and she began to cry when I told her I was a friend of Justin’s from Kabul.
“Ed,” she called. “Ed!” Justin’s father came down the hall, stooped, his head jutting between the knobs of his shoulders. His sagging gut and the weight around his hips suggested grief more than excess. It wasn’t until his hand was on his wife’s back that she was able to wave me inside.
We sat facing each other over a coffee table. The mantle was a shrine to Justin, photos and flowers, football trophies and diplomas. He appeared as he had each time I saw him — like a soldier, his seriousness compelling, even if comical at those times when everyone else was laughing and having a drink.
Age and sadness had erased whatever resemblance his parents shared with him. Only his father’s wide forehead and a few small faded scars held any memory of vitality.
He took the letter from me and began speaking. It was another version of that American voice, more sober and resigned than Frank’s, but the rhythms echoed, as did the biblical undertones, the conviction behind the words that truth was within reach, if only he could devote himself to it.
“I’ve never seen anyone with such a sense of mission. You could take out his eye, but you couldn’t kill his vision. I’d tell him to live a modest life and he’d look at me like I was the devil on the mount.
“So maybe he was better than us, but see where it landed him. We raised him to be humble. Pride is sin. I believe Jesus would have told you sure as he shows it in the Bible — you can’t save the world if you’re doing it for yourself.”
His wife began to cry.
“It’s my fault,” he said. “I never should have agreed to let him go after he lost his chance to be a soldier. She didn’t want him to be a soldier, but at least soldiers serve something greater than themselves. He cared about what mattered. But how can you care abou
t what’s right and still be led down the wrong path?”
As he spoke in searching cadenced tones, I sensed he believed Justin’s death to be the result of his wife’s victory somewhere along the way, or he simply needed to pin the blame on a person he could reach. His discourse was a vague philosophy, incomplete musings on weakness and the Fall, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the sermon might be the impromptu oral form of this region, like ballads or ghazals in ancient lands. It might explain why Americans were given to rants and lectures, and were such bad conversationalists.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not easy for us. Thank you for coming all this way. You must have been close to him in the time he was over there.”
As we sat, the smell, the sounds, the dry sterility of the air seemed typical of a suburban living room: a ticking clock, the faint odor of recently vacuumed carpets.
“Is there anything we can tell you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I was wondering if you knew Clay.”
“Clay?” He stared with such ferocity that I wondered if he had information about Justin’s death that hadn’t been made public. “How do you know Clay?”
“I’m sorry. He was with Justin in the car.”
“The car? What car?”
“In Kabul. In the car that — ”
“That’s impossible.”
I told them that Clay worked for a security company there, and suddenly Justin’s mother shouted, “He’s the one to blame. Not me. Not Justin’s pride.”
His father closed his eyes, in defense against his own rage cast back at him, and Justin’s mother went on to tell me the story of their boyhoods. Anger eventually silenced her, and he took over, confessing he’d seen a future for Clay, but she interrupted, denouncing the boys’ love of war. Only when she’d been silent a while did he finish by asking why the desire to save another so easily led to the destruction of the savior.
Just before we said goodbye, they asked me to come for dinner to tell them about the final months of Justin’s life.
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