Into the Sun

by Deni Ellis Béchard

  The guard told the second woman that Idris was the owner’s nephew, and she evaluated him, looking up at him through her glasses, her dark eyes large and birdlike.

  What do you need? she asked in slow Dari.

  I’m trying to find some documents.

  Documents? We have a rental contract.

  No, I’m sorry — personal documents, he told her. They say how old I am.

  She nodded to the guard and said she’d like to speak with Idris alone. The big woman shrugged nervously, repeatedly squinting as if she had a twitch. They exchanged a few words, and she went into the living room, sat, poured coffee from a press, and picked up a magazine.

  The smaller woman considered Idris. How old are you?

  I don’t know. I was born here. I grew up here during the war. But everyone is gone — my mother, my father, my sister, my brother.

  Well then, let’s find those documents, she told him and led him upstairs to the bedroom where he’d once slept with his family. He blushed at the sight of the bed piled with pillows. A desk cluttered with papers and books sat against the wall. The flowery pattern of the carved wooden armoire was as familiar as the skin of his hands.

  This was here, he told her.

  She reached to the top of the frame and turned the piece of wood that held the door in place. Clothes hung inside: so many colors. She opened the drawer in the bottom, even took it out. They continued this ritual throughout the house. He watched as she searched inside cabinets or behind the drawers of a warped buffet built into the concrete wall.

  I’m sorry, she told him when they found nothing. They stood in the dining room, where the mortar had fallen and smashed the table his mother had wiped down daily until it shined, where the bucket had tocked all night, sleeplessness a meaningless procession of time.

  A furrow scored her brow. She observed him the way Abdullah had when Idris first told him about Americans. Sunlight filled Idris’s mind, and he felt that he was looking down into it from the mountains above Kabul, his thoughts as clear as the cars flitting or following in lines.

  May I ask you one more favor? he said.

  Of course.

  I want to learn English so much, but my uncle won’t send me to a school that teaches it.

  What is your phone number? I may be able to help find something for you.

  He had a cheap cell Osman had given him to coordinate errands, and she put its number into a phone with a screen almost the size of its body.

  I’ll call you, she said as she continued to study him.

  He thanked her, and they walked onto the terrace.

  My name is Sarah.

  Thank you, Sarah. I’m Idris.

  When he glanced back from the gate, she was still there, her interest in him strange and clear even at a distance.

  Frank still had enough meat on him back then that a smile made handsome lines around his mouth. In Kabul, beards were disappearing, cleanly razored Pashto, Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara youths wearing slim, embroidered jeans and leather jackets, their hair styled with gel and trimmed on the sides. As these young men flooded in from the provinces, hunting jobs, driving taxis, establishing businesses, Frank aged exponentially. He became older than the bearded laborers; he was a foreign elder, the grandfather of America come to save Afghanistan, or — Idris sometimes mused — the grandfather of the war itself.

  Sarah had called Idris and told him that she’d arranged for him to attend an academy after his normal school hours, or whenever his uncle would allow. It would be free, but students were required to participate in the upkeep, to make it their own. Idris’s uncle accepted that he attend, saying that the free education would enrich the family, and that Idris could do fewer errands now if he contributed more later, once he was educated and employed.

  Never had Idris wanted to make himself more useful than at the school. The building was clean and spacious with large new tables and silver-gray folding metal chairs. Books were displayed openly, stacks of textbooks filled with graphs and equations he didn’t understand.

  Here, English would offer him a path to science. His first day, he knew so few words he felt he could hold them in his fists: hello, how are you. But they soon exceeded the points of his knuckles, spreading from his wrists to his neck, encasing him, his arms less slack, buoyed, a density about his shoulders, until finally, after months of matching English’s few sounds to its endless combination of letters, they filled him and he no longer echoed with the city’s rumble.

  The heft of a new language brought with it the confidence required to gather more of it into himself, and in that calm he studied the school, fixing broken objects, replacing blown bulbs or cracked electrical wires. Frank praised the simple skills that the Afghans used to preserve what little they owned; he denounced the lost savvy of America.

  Necessity is the mother of invention, and there isn’t much we need back home anymore.

  Idris was beginning to make sense of complex sentences, and Frank had gone from a grinning grandfather to an orator who spoke the strangest things Idris had ever heard.

  He gave the statement some thought and said, Maybe needing to win this war will make America invent again.

  Maybe, Frank conceded, his small blue eyes studying Idris crosswise before darting away. Idris later heard Frank repeat the idea to another student, but by then Idris had moved on to consider that a war like this one could make all sides more inventive.

  Now that Idris could follow stories, Frank told them constantly. One was about a girl who was going to be married to a man she hated when she was in love with a boy her own age, and how Frank planned their escape. The boy was angry that an American was involved until he met Frank and realized he would put his own life in danger to drive them to Pakistan.

  The moment of my death does not bother me, Frank said. I am not afraid. Men’s ends are dictated at their birth and they … How does it go again? … they will seek their deaths in the face of every obstacle. I forget the rest, but in any case, it says that men don’t meet death in strange or obscure places that they might have avoided. No, they find it there because they have sought it.

  Why did you decide to move to Afghanistan? Idris asked him.

  I owe a debt to the world. We men have done much harm, and most of the suffering we create falls on women. So naturally it’s our responsibility to remedy it.

  One morning, when Idris woke in his uncle’s house, the weight of the other mind pinned him to the bed. He knew all he would lose if he neglected the school, if he wasn’t there to reset or replace fuses. Power surges came often. Adapters and bulbs blew.

  He commanded himself to get up but couldn’t. He feared for his place at the school, knowing that Frank would never treat him the way he did the girls. He bought them clothes, books, even laptops and plane tickets. With the boys, Frank made it clear that they could survive on their own. Few lasted long, having to find jobs, bowing to the demands of their families. When Frank smiled at Idris, his eyes remained stern. He looked at the girls the way Sarah had looked at Idris, with an air of need that made no sense.

  After five days, Idris got out of bed. His hands trembled. His ankles and knees hurt. He tore off a piece of bread and chewed. His stomach felt as small and tight as the pocket of his jeans. He ate bread with jam, a small wedge of cheese, and two eggs. With each bite, he wanted to throw up. He drank water to wash the painful mass of food into his muscles.

  At the school, Frank saw him from the stairs. His gauntness had yet to reduce his anger to the single slack expression he could make other than his smile.

  Where have you been? You have responsibilities.

  I was sick.

  Being sick is a luxury.

  Idris swept the floor, organized the books, and inspected the adapters for computers and laptops. He checked the fuses, checked the bulbs, removing those that had blown.

  In
his readings, he’d run across crucial and had checked the dictionary — an echo of the cross to suggest importance, though he struggled to understand the origin: an indicator at a crossroad or an evocation of Christ? Wanting to be something of the cross might make him an infidel, so he found synonyms: vital, essential, pivotal, key.

  A light fixture on the living room ceiling had never worked, so he shut off the breaker and removed it. He found door hinges that creaked. He went to the market and bought a new fixture and oil and a small can of paint for metal. He bought kebabs and ate fast on the roadside, his knees trembling, cars rushing past, leaving delirious tracers.

  At the school, he replaced the fixture, oiled the hinges, and then carefully, with a small plastic brush, painted the rust-pitted surface of the kitchen fridge. The brush left faint striations that settled and smoothed into a glossy finish.

  What do I owe you for the material? Frank asked when Idris showed him all he’d done.

  Nothing. This is my school too.

  Frank tilted his head, swiveling on invisible hips somewhere in the folds of his clothes.

  Have I not done a good job? Idris asked.

  Be modest, Frank said. Look up modesty. Look up humility. Let me appreciate your work without you having to tell me.

  He climbed halfway up the stairs and then turned, as if he wanted a platform from which to deliver his moral.

  Sometimes, even when you’re sick, it’s good to get up. You’ll feel better once you’re working. You don’t really know if you’re sick until you try not to be.

  Winter began, and Idris feared the distancing of the sun that burned away the other mind. Frank continued to offer him lessons but never kindness.

  Idris knew Afghans who ingratiated themselves with foreigners only to use them. They talked about the naiveté of Westerners, their lack of strength, how easy it was to lie to them and to steal from them when they were out. Other Afghans were loyal to those they worked for and refused to speak of disparity. Idris knew the day would come when Frank would acknowledge his value, but he thought less about this when American volunteers began to arrive.

  The first was Michael, a young man who’d been in the Marines and come back on a three-month visa to teach conversational English. A string of academics followed, interested in women’s rights or learning Dari or firsthand experience with the people they were tasked with writing about, as if teaching grammar or moderating classroom debates between teenagers would help them with their dissertations on the history of foreign involvement and the rise of militancy from the mujahedeen to the Taliban.

  Once, when Michael had been helping Idris practice English, James came to the door. James was a paper-white blond New Yorker doing a PhD on governance in Afghanistan.

  Did I hear you guys talking about the war?

  I’m just getting Idris to describe things for practice.

  You saw the civil war? James asked him.

  Idris shrugged.

  Did you ever see any battles?

  Not really, Idris told him.

  There was a lot of fighting here. You must have heard things.

  Yes.

  Bombs?

  Yes.

  Anyway, Michael said, we were focusing on politics, not the war itself. We were discussing warlords who become politicians and how to integrate those guys but keep them from ruining the democratic process.

  What’s your position on Dostum? James asked them. Do you think he should be in the Afghan government or prosecuted in the International Criminal Court?

  Sorry, man, Michael told him, you might have to fill me in. To be honest, Idris was the one explaining the politics to me. I’m still learning the whole warlord thing.

  You don’t know about the Convoys of Death?

  Nah, I don’t.

  James described how, after the American invasion, Dostum, an Uzbek general in the Northern Alliance, was accused of loading men who’d been fighting for the Taliban into box trucks and driving them across the desert, under the full sun, to a prison. The captives suffocated in the heat, and when the doors were opened, according to a few testimonies, the asphyxiated, sweat-soaked bodies poured out like fish.

  That’s horrible, Michael told him. Yes, I’d say that’s criminal.

  But do we expect angels to emerge from decades of war? James asked. If Dostum were a nice guy, he wouldn’t have survived, and he wouldn’t have been our ally. If there’d been no 9/11, the Taliban, with Saudi funding and Pakistani support, would have conquered the rest of Afghanistan. Dostum had been fighting for so long he probably didn’t believe the war would end. America had abandoned him once before, after the Soviet withdrawal. Why should he trust that the Americans’ ouster of the Taliban would be anything but temporary? He was eliminating his enemies before they regrouped. I bet he figured he was going to kill them sooner or later.

  Idris stood, said good night, and went down to the basement to sleep. With the other mind — the one that felt the proximity of death — he could understand James’s words, but he didn’t want to. Though Reza had gone to fight for Dostum, he’d ended up with the Taliban to survive.

  Over the years, most volunteers, especially the women, came for the girls. They talked to them and touched their arms and hands, and made the sounds of mothers cooing over babies. They painted and photographed them. They told them about the history of the women’s liberation movement in America and the West. They brought them gifts and paid for them to study in America or contacted people they knew to find them scholarships.

  But these volunteers also asked insistently about the war. Once, Idris had seen one of the girls trying to answer, her expression frozen, her voice barely a whisper: We saw people …

  With the fingertips of one hand she touched her other arm.

  People with no … members, no …

  She was searching for the right word, unable to say it. Foreigners didn’t realize that telling the story meant remembering.

  For five years, Idris tried to make sense of the volunteers. There was guilt in their words — guilt that their country had armed the mujahedeen who’d defeated the Soviets and gone on to destroy Kabul. Were they trying to correct a historical wrong or their country’s present actions? Were they trying to correct the Afghans’ impression of America by showing they cared? Or to correct Afghanistan, by doing the work of soldiers in the daily lives of Afghans, as James once claimed?

  Though the school took up most of his time, Idris stayed close to Abdullah and Aziz, another boy who’d fallen under Abdullah’s protection. Having taught himself programming on an old laptop he’d bought in the bazaar, Aziz had given up on high school. He wore his hair flopped to the side, as he’d once seen in a movie, to hide a shrapnel scar on his left temple. He’d opened what he called his shop-of-all-things, selling code-broken software from Pakistan and making ID cards that the illiterate police couldn’t discern from official ones. He’d helped so many government officials repair their computers or get documents that he spoke of his capital as the people who owed him favors rather than the secondhand electronics that crowded the walls of his alley shop. It was the width of a closet — so many young Afghans forced to aspire in spaces as narrow as coffins. Idris, Abdullah, and Aziz watched movies there, crammed hip to hip. The ritual ended only when Abdullah joined the army.

  As Idris excelled at English, his other mind came less frequently, and the few times it did, he managed to go to the school. But after he graduated high school, as the summer burned the city, his mind came alive, wanting more. He had conversations in English with himself, debating both sides, arguing with Frank over how he deserved to be rewarded, or seducing foreign women in fantasies of New York and Los Angeles.

  In the course of his readings, he looked up philosophy, surprised a word existed for lovers of wisdom: people devout before knowledge as if before God — as if the two could be disconnected or a person mig
ht find a cavern burning with the sun’s glow, divine radiance existing separate from its source. One of the volunteers told him that the great Persian poets — Jalal al-din Rumi and Hafez — were best-sellers in America. He spoke of them in a way that called to mind philosophers: their attention to how people understand themselves and find peace with each other. Idris hadn’t known that Persian literature was so popular in the West. He read their mystical lines, stopping on one: Every desire is holy.

  He observed his mind’s natural expansion toward all that he wanted, but when the ways into the world refused to open to his desires, when he found no space into which to expand, his energy fell back in on itself. The impasse at which he found himself was hard to deny as winter invaded and the fumes of poverty dulled the sky.

  He’d been able to push himself for years to learn so much, to do chores because he’d envisioned a door that would open one day on a life filled with light. But delay after delay, Idris struggled to keep ahead of the other mind. As he lay down in exhaustion, the cold pinned him to his mattress. He saw it clearly at last, how the other mind rose around the collapse of the first, like suffocating smoke, like dark water.

  By the end of 2011, Afghans were talking about the changes to come, warning that the money was leaving with the foreigners, that America and NATO were leaving, and the time to become rich was passing. New buildings were still lifting Kabul’s skyline, but everyone understood that this was how drug lords invested the heroin money they couldn’t smuggle out. Wealth was condensing around the rich, disappearing into their fortified palatial homes. The rest of the city scrambled for the crumbs. Even Frank was frantic, telling Idris to buy only the essentials at the market.

  Vital, essential, pivotal, key. He tried to be the source of the school’s life, the essence: the fulcrum on which events turned, the key to all he wanted.

  When boys complained about the girls’ opportunities, Frank told them to leave, but most left on their own. He seemed to bait them, primed to discard them, lining up their errands while simultaneously spoiling the girls. When he could no longer pay rent for the girls’ dorm, he told the boys that financing had gotten thin and the girls would be moving into the basement. In the weeks that followed, a few boys tried to make it back for classes but their families lived far away, and the cost of travel and the time required were too much. Only those who’d never lived in the basement, like Faisal, continued to attend classes, oblivious to the upheaval. To Idris, Frank offered the pantry.