Into the Sun

by Deni Ellis Béchard

  Reza hated everyone — the mujahedeen leaders who’d fought over Kabul and failed to make a government and keep the Taliban out, and the Taliban itself. He’d heard that their mother had angered a Talib and been arrested. There were only rumors.

  She would panic, he said.

  Panic? Idris asked, not understanding the word.

  Scared. She’d get upset easily. She had fits. It’s because of the rocket attack that almost killed her.

  What rocket attack?

  You were too little to remember. The Talibs must have thought she was ignoring them or fighting back. But she can’t help herself. She gets anxious. She begins to shout.

  Idris had no idea what Reza was talking about. Reza said he would leave Kabul and join Dostum’s army in the northwest because it would be easier to reach than Massoud’s in Panjshir.

  He bundled their remaining blankets and clothes, and tied them with a string, and then he locked the front gate of the house. He led Idris across Kabul, along dusty streets lined with broken or shattered buildings to a neighborhood connected to the city by a single lane. A rut carved the middle of it, veering off at times — maybe created by rain and helped by shovels to drain the spring floodwaters. This seemed a sign of the place’s poverty: the road unable to afford a gutter on both sides.

  Reza knocked at a rusted gate. A slot snapped open, and a large eye appeared. Black hairs sprouted almost to the cheekbone.

  The slot shut, and the gate swung out.

  The man was tall and thin and seemed less old than others despite his profuse beard. Two other men were inside, similarly dressed in dusty white, bearded and with short hair. They had the hood up on an old Soviet Moskvich. Its panels were powder blue, dented and scratched, a bullet hole in one fender and cracks bisecting the windshield.

  Hello, Idris, the thin man said.

  Idris searched his mind, but the man was just another bearded stranger.

  Reza took his hand and led him closer.

  Don’t be afraid, he said. This is Osman, your uncle. He’ll take you to stay with his family in the countryside.

  Where are you going? Idris asked.

  To fight.

  How old are you now, Reza? Osman put his hand on his shoulder.

  Old enough to fight.

  Do you know how old?

  At least twelve.

  And your brother?

  Reza shrugged. He reached into his pocket and took out the keys to the house and gave them to Osman.

  You’re not old enough to fight, Osman told him.

  And what will you do? Force me to go with you? I’ll leave. I’ll just run away. I know what I want to do.

  Children should not kill.

  I haven’t been a child for a long time.

  Reza stepped back as the men at the car watched.

  Goodbye, Reza said. Please take care of Idris.

  If it weren’t for the two minds, Idris would have fit himself into the lives of Osman’s children. But days came when he couldn’t get up, when the weight pressed him to the floor. Osman tried to talk to him. The children encouraged him to play, but the best he could do was sit in a chair, dozing off, his face to the sun so it would burn through the colorless haze in his head.

  When Husnia, Osman’s wife, got angry at him, Osman told her to leave him alone. He confided in Idris that he’d lost his first wife and newborn when a mortar fell on their home in the Karteh Seh district of Kabul. He’d moved to the family land in Laghman and remarried, but his sadness had taken years to go away.

  It will get better, he said and pressed Idris’s shoulder. This was the only moment of physical affection Idris would recall in the years after his mother’s disappearance.

  Osman grew pomegranates, melons, and other fruits and vegetables that he loaded into the back seat and trunk of the Moskvich and drove into Kabul to sell, before bringing back knives, pots, pans, and medicine to use for barter in the villages. With food scarce and prices high, Osman had his children and Idris in the fields each dawn, though at night he made them read old books he hid in the floor. He reminded them that their family had once been rich and educated and would be again, but that they must never talk about this or their reading. When Idris asked if he could become a scientist, Osman said that under the Taliban science was not allowed, that he must wait and keep his dream a secret.

  Once or twice a year, Idris accompanied Osman to Kabul. The city came into view, resembling a tilled field washed out by the spring rains: the destroyed and abandoned neighborhoods at its edges fading into colorless swaths.

  Osman checked the family houses for which he held the deeds. On one trip, he and Idris went to Ghazi stadium for a soccer game. Before it started, Talibs drove two white Toyota Hiluxes inside, men with Kalashnikovs in the backs.

  A man read from the Qu’ran over the speakers, and the Talibs took a bound thief from a pickup and laid him in the grass. A Talib stooped at his side and when he stood again, he was holding a severed hand.

  The Talib with the loudspeaker declared that they would next stone a woman for adultery. They took her from the truck and made her kneel on the playing field. When the first rock struck her head, a woman a few rows before Idris shrieked, and he knew that she must be a sister or mother or daughter. Both wore blue burqas. The burqa of the woman being stoned was quickly darkening. In the stands, boys and men backed away from the screaming woman. Urine puddled around her feet.

  Osman and Idris never went back to the stadium, and their trips to Kabul were brief, to collect rent or deliver produce. Sometimes they stopped at the house where Idris once lived but only long enough to knock and take money from the guard. They stayed the night with one of Osman’s friends and returned to Laghman the next morning.

  Two years after Idris moved onto the farm, a limping figure approached along the dusty road. Every so often it stooped, holding its knees. Idris and the other children went to the edge of the melon field. In the afternoon’s glare, the silhouette was like a burnt post stuck crookedly into the earth, with heat waves all around.

  Just below a curve in the driveway, the boy came into focus. He was older than Osman’s children, with wisps of beard, and thin as a sick child. He wore a T-shirt the color of dirt, his skin visible through the holes, and his pants were tattered below the knees. Large flies clustered around a black sore on his calf.

  Idris, he said as he hobbled close. It’s me, Reza.

  His eyes were still, as if thought didn’t follow sight, as if two of the black flies had gone inside his head and died.

  After dinner, the doctor came and drained the puss from the sore and removed shrapnel. Reza told them he’d been with the Taliban hunting down Hazara rebels in the mountains.

  I fought for Dostum, he said. But why? He shelled Kabul. His men ran those checkpoints. He has fled Afghanistan now. One of his commanders made a deal with the Taliban, so we soldiers became Taliban soldiers, just like that, because a stupid man said so. I could join Massoud, but they all had their checkpoints. Kabul was their buzkashi goat, torn piece from piece. The Taliban are just the most recent. Now it’s a job. Maybe someday there will be other jobs.

  Osman told Reza he could stay, get healthy, work on the farm, but Reza had the same look as the day he’d left. His leg healed, and he gained weight, but in the fields, his motions were never economical enough to maintain a pace that could be sustained in the heat. In everything he did — weeding, digging, picking fruit — his movements jarred. He’d been recoiling, flinching, retreating for so long the memory of violence had gotten lodged in him. He had to stop and pant, his forehead streaming with sweat. He stared off as if men might be watching from the eroded hills. Maybe the only harvest he could fathom was a soldier’s.

  One morning, Reza was no longer there. He wasn’t in his bed. The family ate, heads lowered, their hands moving quickly. The walls glowed as the sun’s
radiance infused the room. Idris went back to his blanket, lay down, and drew it up to his eyes.

  On the farm, a washboard of plowed earth surrounded by scarped and bleached hills, the American invasion was nothing more than a story. Rumors spread that the Americans were bombing training camps and then the front lines where the Taliban had been fighting the Northern Alliance. Idris heard no bombs, no gunshots, just the words of a cousin who visited to say that the Taliban were fleeing Kabul and who contemplated whether it was too soon to cut his beard — whether the Taliban could come back.

  Osman began shouting to his children to load the car with whatever produce was ready. He went inside and reappeared with a pistol that he checked before putting it in his pocket.

  Idris, come with me.

  The backseat was only partially loaded, and Osman drove at a speed Idris had never experienced. The country had always crawled, vehicles so patched together and fragile that a bump might undo years of jerry-rigging. There had been no benefit to hurrying, nothing more interesting than the slow scrolling of the landscape.

  Where are we going? Idris asked.

  To the family houses. They’ll be empty. The people renting them will be running away. We have to make sure that no one tries to take them. I have the papers.

  Osman knew the road well and rarely braked, letting the car coast until they came upon trenches from spring rains, huge potholes, or bomb craters. Dozens of cars passed going the other way, plumes of dust rising behind them. On the roadside were the burning husks of vehicles, torn-apart bodies smoking around them.

  They’re all heading to Pakistan, Osman said. Let’s pray the American bombers will see we’re going west.

  When they arrived, a few solitary pillars of smoke hung above the city. Trucks full of Tajik fighters rumbled in from the north, their new black weapons at the ready.

  The first house Osman stopped at was the one where Idris had grown up. After Osman hammered at the door, the guard told him that the Arab tenants had fled that morning. One by one, Osman checked on his properties and discovered all of his renters gone. He swapped their locks and hired men he knew to stay in the homes as guards until he found new renters.

  That night, he and Idris slept on toshaks in one of the houses. They’d gathered up the possessions of those who’d left, and itemized them to make sure their guards didn’t steal them. Over the next week, Osman began moving his family back into the city. Foreigners were already arriving and needed places to stay, and by the end of December, all of his houses were rented. He told Idris that farming was no match for real estate and went out daily to find new properties.

  All through that long winter into the spring, as snow or hail fell and rains flooded the streets — the floating filth so thick it resembled solid ground — Idris waited for Reza.

  At intersections, in the shade of walls, his scrawny brother would appear to him, a glimpse of starved limbs and hollowed eyes filled with ash. Idris would stare with such intensity that the beggar would hold out his hand.

  Kabul thrived, new compounds built as foreign aid workers and civilian contractors arrived, and thousands of refugees who had lived in Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Iran during the civil war and Taliban era flooded back. The capital was transformed from a cluster of buildings in a broad valley to a sprawl of unfinished highways and crowded neighborhoods. Rows of homes were built up the mountainsides, their foundations cut from the stone of steep inclines, and children carried buckets of water and supplies up the paths all day.

  When America invaded Iraq, the growth faltered, and the presence of foreigners and American soldiers in Kabul was reduced, but as the insurgency gained traction, the foreigners rushed back en masse.

  This is the time to become rich, Osman told Idris. Tomorrow we could all be refugees.

  His uncle lived simply in a small compound. He owned six houses and had one torn down and rebuilt, and then rented it to a Dutch NGO. He now had eight children and sent them to the best private schools. He explained to Idris that with so many responsibilities — so many buildings to maintain and rebuild, bribes to pay, not to mention relatives who needed schooling and medical treatment — he couldn’t offer him as much as he would like. Idris attended a free school run by an Afghan woman who had lived in the United States. Many of her students were from a nearby orphanage and had spent years on the street.

  His kindest classmate was also the toughest, a muscular boy named Abdullah, whose shaved scalp was nicked with white scars: a lifetime of fights and thrown rocks. But those who were just below him in the hierarchy were bullies craving to be leaders, fearing Abdullah and trying to propel themselves to the top by beating up everyone beneath them.

  When Idris refused to play ball with them after school, one of the boys pushed him down. Abdullah stepped up and held the back of his hand in front of the boy. He had scars on his forearm, too, on his palm.

  Leave him alone. He looked down. What’s your name?

  Idris.

  You don’t like football?

  Idris stood and brushed dust from his pants. I hate it.

  What do you like?

  Idris hesitated. All day he’d been mulling Osman’s words from the previous evening, a nebulous comment: Americans do not know the meaning of suffering.

  America, Idris said. I’ll go to America, and I’ll be a scientist there.

  America’s the home of sinners. I’ve seen it on a TV.

  In America, the people have good lives without suffering.

  Abdullah rubbed one of his big, dark hands over his battered scalp.

  In America, he said, on hot days, people go outside in their underwear. They walk down the street. They go to the store. Men and women just stand around in their underwear.

  The other boys laughed, but Idris realized that he knew far more than they did about foreigners. He’d gone with Osman to visit the houses the foreigners rented, when water pipes burst or wires shorted. He’d seen the wine bottles clustered on the tables and windowsills, the crammed ashtrays. A young woman in a dress had once taken them from room to room, pointing up at the brown stains of water damage on the ceiling tiles, the inside of her arm pale.

  I can tell you about Americans, he said. Come with me and I’ll show you Americans.

  The boys crowded close, but Abdullah warned them off and agreed.

  Though Idris didn’t end up showing Abdullah much that afternoon — only a house he knew was occupied by foreigners — he fabricated stories from those Osman had told him about the constant partying and drugs, the endless money to buy electronics and computers, and the variety of expensive foods that stocked their kitchens. He also told him about the female renter who let out the extra rooms in the house to foreign men. Impressed, Abdullah asked where the foreigners got their money, and Idris gave vague answers.

  Later, to Osman, Idris repeated the questions and listened, trying to make sense of politics: oil, religion, war. By the time he went to bed he had more stories for Abdullah and a growing desire to do what he’d so spontaneously declared.

  Over the weeks that followed, he imagined the foreigners’ lives of luxury, picturing the parties and wealth in the house where he’d grown up. His former home was Osman’s best property — located near the embassies — and ever since he’d rented it out, Idris had been only just inside the gate with him a few times to collect payments. Grapevines now grew on an arbor along the walkway, and roses lined the yard. At times, the sound of foreign voices — along with clinking dishes and, once, a strumming, mumbling music Idris did not recognize — came from inside.

  Idris excelled in school, studying with Abdullah and helping him with homework. Winter was still hard, but since he’d relocated to Kabul, the seesawing of his minds had eased. When the other mind came, it wasn’t as bad as it had been before, and the knowledge that it would pass quickly made it easier to endure. As the days lengthened, the sun burned the co
ld out of his bones, his muscles pliable, his mind fast.

  Idris’s interest in America was no longer to please Abdullah or sustain his alliance that had solidified into friendship. Osman became wary of his questions, telling him many Afghans traveled to the West and found only menial jobs — educated people who now dug holes like the poor in Afghanistan. He’d insisted Idris put an end to his questions and focus on his studies. When Idris asked to go to school in English, Osman told him it was too expensive.

  The truth is bitter, his uncle said — an adage he’d uttered often in Laghman but hadn’t used in years. After the fall of the Taliban, shaving his beard had revealed him to be a handsome, youthful man who presented well in a suit.

  Idris’s questions continued to multiply, and one in particular began to trouble him. He counted the years back to his earliest memories but was unable to determine his age. Osman didn’t know, guessing that Idris must be thirteen or fourteen.

  Your mother had documents. She was a nurse. She kept track of those things. But who knows where they are now?

  The revelation that she’d been a nurse stunned Idris. He hadn’t known she’d had an occupation before the Taliban came. He remembered how she fed him and cared for him, and how she hid possessions throughout the house. The documents must have been hidden there as well.

  After school, he told Abdullah he had to go home and help his uncle, but he walked alone to the house and banged on the gate.

  The guard recognized him and slid back the bolt.

  I must speak to the people who live here, Idris told him.

  Come, the guard said. He couldn’t refuse him, since Idris was Osman’s nephew, but he would mention the visit the next time Osman came by. He led Idris to the terrace and knocked on the door frame. A woman called out in Dari for him to enter.

  Two women came from the living room, one larger than any man Idris knew, with short red hair and flushed, jowly cheeks, and the other of average height, shorter than Idris, with her brown curly hair uncovered. Though she wore a shalwar, her bosom seemed more pronounced because of her posture. He pinned his gaze on the floor.