Into the Sun

by Deni Ellis Béchard

  You’ve been a real asset. The space isn’t much, but you’ll have privacy.

  One night Idris came out in wool socks a volunteer had given him and sat on the stairs, listening to one of Frank’s Skype conversations.

  I have two options, he heard him say. Make this school self-sustaining and guide one of the girls into running it, or close it down as soon as every last girl has a scholarship in America.

  The next day, Idris was at the market for masonry screws so he could install a new whiteboard on the classroom wall, when he heard his name.

  Abdullah hadn’t grown much since he’d been a boy at the orphanage. He wore army pants, a black T-shirt, and a leather jacket. His hand, when he shook Idris’s, was as coarse as concrete but stony in its density.

  They fell into stride, walking as they used to.

  So you do know Americans now, Abdullah said.

  Idris described the American obsession with Afghan girls and repeated a story he’d heard from his cousin who studied at American University, about foreign professors who made female students sleep with them for better grades.

  This is exactly the problem, Abdullah told him. If they come to our country, they should follow our rules. What will we do if America takes our women or makes them like theirs?

  Idris agreed. He wanted a country where his mother and sister would have survived, but he didn’t want to be treated like a Talib and left behind.

  As if synced to his thoughts, Abdullah said, I’ve never cared for the Taliban, but is America any better? I joined the army because we need Muslim soldiers to defend a Muslim land. The Americans can’t lead us when they hide behind walls in our cities. They say they’ll do great things, but the Taliban are the ones talking to the people. They hear their suffering. They know that the rich who serve America aren’t suffering like this.

  Abdullah and Idris passed rows of vendors — carts of oranges, apricots, strawberries. Their shoes scuffed the uneven roadway, over grit, gum and candy wrappers, and gray bits of tire-shredded refuse. Idris nodded, but he would never see any good in the Taliban.

  Most of us, Abdullah said, we were children when the Taliban was here. Do you know what the older people remember? The stealing ended. One man told me you could have left a bar of gold in the street and it would have been there the next day. People want to know if we’ll protect them like that. The police and army have robbed people. When the poor tribes fight the corruption, the ruling tribes call them Taliban and send Americans to kill them. The Americans get to brag that they fought evil men when they were just shooting down farmers.

  So you’ll go back to the army? Idris asked.

  No. I’m finished with the army. Do you know how we found the Taliban? We drove around and made ourselves targets so they’d attack. But we didn’t have the American vehicles with their armor. We were in little Ford trucks. Mine was blown up. I woke up on the grass. Only two of us survived. So I left. This isn’t a way to defend a country. Let the Taliban come back. They’ll be no worse than what we have now. What is this war? If you ask me, it’s America on both sides. America funds Pakistan, and Pakistan funds the Taliban. America wants our country. It’s about China. It’s about Iran. It’s their way of controlling the earth.

  Idris had heard Afghans repeat such things. Many of them believed America fabricated an endless war. He’d read about this online but also knew that the situation was far more complex.

  So what will you do now? Idris asked.

  I have become a thief, Abdullah told him and laughed.

  Idris stopped. Abdullah took a few more steps, turned on his heel, and walked back, his shoulders level, his legs swinging confidently.

  It’s not so bad, my friend. We are ruled by thieves. Should we not partake in the banquet?

  He looked down, just in front of his scuffed army boots. His black hair was still cut short, and the dozens of white notches in his scalp remained visible. He seemed to be lowering his head to show Idris the lifetime of abuse he’d endured, a map of lines leading nowhere.

  I tried, he said, to be a true believer. I went to mosque. I prayed. But why does Allah make us suffer when we have given him only love?

  With his head lowered, Abdullah lifted his eyes, like an actor who bows to the audience while glancing up to see if someone has felt his story.

  Over the weeks that followed, he and Idris met a few times, Abdullah always paying their meals, revealing his success at his new vocation. They visited Aziz, ate large dinners and watched movies. And then one evening Abdullah failed to arrive. Idris stood in the street, outside the kebab shop, the smoke of burning mutton rising from the doorway, his stomach in a knot.

  He visited Aziz, who told him Abdullah had been arrested. He’d been caught in someone’s home and had killed the guard in self-defense.

  When you’re a thief who kills a guard who attacks you, Aziz said, you’re a murderer, and you’ll be hanged. We must forget him. He’s dead.

  Idris knew he should eat to calm his constricting body, but the bright doors in his mind were closing. The next morning he lay beneath his other mind. Three days passed before he forced himself up. The weight wasn’t so heavy. He realized he had to change his life soon. This country would swallow everyone.

  He’d been driving the girls by then. He called Frank to apologize for his absence.

  You’re fired, Frank told him.

  I was sick, Idris croaked. It was very bad, Mr. Frank.

  You’re no longer welcome here.

  The line beeped and went dead.

  Idris dressed. His numb feet bumped the floor. In the kitchen, he forced himself to eat before going outside, blinking in the painful light, his tears streaming.

  He took a taxi to the school and begged for his job back.

  Frank tilted his head and gestured him inside.

  Never again, he said. Never again.

  Idris had tried to be perfect, but his desire to please others was fading. The men who’d hurt his sister and mother hadn’t been born cruel. They’d changed as Reza had, broken beneath the weight of something dead. If you were broken, could you only be further broken, crushed until you had no shape of your own, like dust pushed with each gust of wind?

  Daily, he drove the girls to the mall, to their jobs and appointments. Small pleasures sustained him. A volunteer gave him an old laptop when he left. The hard drive was filled with episodes from TV shows, and Idris studied the exuberance and innocence of America. But there were also shows about desperation, men and women who rejected their old way of living, their beliefs even, and chose a violence they could justify. To Idris, it seemed less criminal than liberating.

  Justin was unlike any previous volunteer. He had the posture of devotion, a straight spine, and the moral certitude that subdued the body’s joggle and twitch, and put it to a higher service. He sized up Idris the way a man might survey a plain where a city was to be built. Maybe his seriousness was due to his handicap — the artificial eye immediately evident to Idris, a Western luxury: a man could walk the street and work and feed his family without a glass eye.

  Justin demanded that Idris meet the goals he set, and this made Idris believe that, unlike other volunteers, Justin wasn’t here to experience the war through him but to help.

  At first, Idris thought that Justin’s cold — the rusty sound from his vocal cords — made him reticent to speak, but even after he’d recovered, he remained quiet. Idris saw the questions in him, the way he stared at things or people and didn’t ask but made up his mind as if he’d deduced the answer.

  Sometimes, Idris intuited Justin’s inner dialogue and tried to address it. Once, as they waited in traffic, a pale redheaded man was scrounging in the trash alongside the street, and Idris said, He could be European, Irish maybe, if he wasn’t picking bottles out of the gutter, but maybe that is his disguise.

  His disguise? Justin asked.r />
  Maybe he is an American, and he gets around Kabul as a trash collector so he won’t be noticed. Who would suspect him?

  Hmm, Justin said, nothing more. He didn’t seem to have a sense of humor. Maybe it was because he was so Christian. None of the other volunteers had kept a bible next to their bed.

  Once, after a class when Justin flushed upon learning that no one had done the homework, Idris explained to him that in Afghanistan homework was often seen as being for children.

  People, he said, they will think you are talking down to them.

  Maybe we need to have a discussion about self-realization, Justin replied. Transformation happens on people’s own time. Class is never enough.

  One evening, as Idris drove Frank to Le Jardin, Frank ranted: Justin will get things sooner or later … He might be good with grammar, but he couldn’t pull off a comeback to save his life … And he’s definitely a hard read — should give up education and hit the poker tables.

  The conflict between the two men provided Idris with protection, and for the first time, he argued with Frank, asking, When am I going to get a scholarship?

  I’ve already had two earfuls from Justin. Cut me some slack. I’m going to show up to dinner with no appetite.

  But, Mr. Frank, Idris said, measuring his words, you care more about me fixing the toilets than my education. I didn’t know I was attending the Plumbing Academy of the Future.

  Plumbers make good money in the States.

  I want to be a scientist and go to a good university in the US.

  I’m not training young people so they can run away to America. We have enough slackers there already. I want students who will come back here and fix the problems in Afghanistan. You should give some thought to politics.

  Politics, yes, maybe someday. But science first.

  A lot of good you’ll do anyone cramped up in a lab.

  In the weeks after Justin’s arrival, Idris challenged Frank more often, and when he’d gone too far and angered him, he returned quickly to his helpful, subservient self.

  If Frank thought Idris stood a chance in politics, he was deluded. Idris had an average education, no significant family connections, no wealth. He’d tried to read his future in Afghanistan’s and seen only hardship. When volunteers left books, many of them about Afghanistan, he read them, learning that his country was likely named by foreign powers — that his people were historically fierce warriors, repelling invading empires. He must deserve better than becoming a plumber.

  Idris focused on the life he wanted, on getting a scholarship, but when Sediqa began appearing from Justin’s room early each morning, he realized what was happening. And the few times she cried to Frank, Idris had to drive her to the mall. In the car, they hardly spoke as she cleaned up her running makeup. She was already a university student. Maybe if Idris’s parents had lived, he would have had the status to ask for her hand. His uncle had told him that once he had a career, they would discuss marriage.

  Now, when Justin came into the classroom, the students quieted. Smiles faded. Then, as he wrote grammar lessons on the whiteboard, the murmuring started up in Dari.

  Is everything okay? he asked.

  None of the gazes were friendly — wary at best.

  Yes, Mr. Justin, Idris said in a faintly dismissive voice. Please continue.

  As Justin faced back to the board, someone snickered, but he did nothing.

  Day after day, Justin seemed less assured. He began moving like a man with an injury, afraid to be jostled. After a snowstorm, when no students came, he told Idris he needed a break from the school. Idris drove him to a café. Justin flinched when the guard with the Kalashnikov opened the metal door. Inside, Bollywood videos played on a flat-screen TV. Expat women had pulled chairs into a circle and were having a meeting of some sort. Windows let in a gray light. Justin flinched again when a stout man in Afghan dress and a solid beard came in to stoke the bukhari.

  Justin hardly touched his French fries and kebabs, his immorality no doubt weighing on him, Idris thought.

  Snow began to fall, and after leaving, as they crossed the white street, Justin stopped before a single boot print.

  What is it? Idris asked.

  This … this print … There’s only one.

  The treads of a boot were marked in the snow, no footprints before or after it.

  Who knows? Idris said, but Justin was glancing around, appearing to search for the source of the mystery above the walls or in the blotted sky.

  On the way back to the school, Justin told him that he’d once gone to a fair where a palm reader said he would choose his destiny in war.

  But fortune-tellers serve the devil. That’s what we believe in my church.

  Idris nodded. Ahead of them, a car skidded on worn tires. Winter would end soon. The sun would return. His body wanted that warmth.

  After Faisal’s kidnapping and the meeting with Rashidi, Idris hadn’t been able to decide whom he could sacrifice — the word itself another foreign idea, this time pagan: making something holy by giving it up. For whom or what would those he chose become holy?

  Asking questions of this sort kept him from having to admit his choice was already made, until Justin threw him against the wall and vengeance at last became one of the few lights Idris could see through the dark of that encroaching mind.

  Clay had been harder to betray. When they met at the restaurant, Clay drank his whiskey, and his eyes became somber and empty. As they left — out past the guards and into the night — Idris felt electric with the fear of kidnapping Faisal.

  You’re being straight with me, right? Clay asked.

  Of course, Clay.

  Of course, Clay repeated. Of course. Sweat gleamed on his forehead and neck. I can take care of things if they get out of hand. I’ve done it before. I’ve killed boys like you.

  When Idris returned to the school, Shafiq was in the backyard, in the dark. He had on only his pants, the muscles of his arms corded, his skin like a film over them.

  What are you doing?

  I must compete soon. The cold will take away the fat. It will give me strength.

  Small scars marked his body.

  Shrapnel? Idris asked.

  Yes. The mujahedeen sent mortars into the street when I was a boy.

  Because of his bloodless skin or the moon infusing the low clouds, Shafiq appeared a statue, a memorial to the endurance of damaged bodies.

  The night of the party, after the foreigners locked themselves in the safe room, as Noorudin’s men died one by one and Idris lay under the bed — the box spring against his chest, sweat pooling around his eyelids, in his navel, in the hollow of his throat — he fully understood that the cost of failure was his life.

  Back at the school, he changed into dry clothes and then took a taxi to the market. He bought a new phone and several SIM cards. He returned to the lot.

  This is a disaster, Rashidi said. It’s all over the news. You’re an idiot.

  I’ll set this right.

  How is that possible?

  I’ll kill the foreigners myself.

  Idris heard his footsteps — not walking to a private place, but pacing: quick steps in one direction, a lull, quick steps in the other.

  Did the NDS talk to you?

  They did.

  Then I can never meet with you again.

  You won’t have to. I need just one thing. A passport with my photograph in it.

  That’s easy. With your name?

  No. Pick any name. Can it be ready by tomorrow?

  I can make that possible, but how do I know you won’t just escape with the passport?

  The deaths of the foreigners will be in the news. If I’m alive, I’ll pick up the passport.

  Rashidi’s breathing was faintly audible. You’re not so innocent. I don’t know what part
of all this you’re to blame for. I’ll never know. Just get Faisal back.

  Faisal will be released, Idris told him, and you’ll never see me again.

  He hung up and took a taxi to the market. Aziz was alone, watching Alien. He pushed his hair into position over his temple.

  On the screen, men shouted and fired weapons into passageways as Idris asked for a favor. He needed a passport, with his photo and the name Jalal Hafiz. He needed it within a day. Aziz told him it would be expensive. He broke down the costs on a scrap of paper.

  Four thousand dollars, he said. We might be able to do it for less. But it’ll be hard. Everyone along the chain will need to be paid.

  And how do we make sure no one reports it after he’s paid?

  They’ll receive a bonus once the passport has been proven to work.

  Idris counted out eight thousand dollars. Can you have it by tomorrow night?

  With this much, yes.

  Idris thanked him and stood, but paused in the doorway.

  The birthday, he said, make it Nawruz. Let Jalal Hafiz be a child of the New Year.

  He then went to the Serena Hotel, took a room, and locked his money in the safe. Idris texted Frank to say that the car was burning oil badly and he would have it fixed in the morning, at his cousin’s repair shop. He received a quick OK.

  Though he’d never been in a bed so luxurious, Idris barely slept. His mind obsessively evaluated his plan. He twisted in his blankets, sweating and then shivering. He changed shirts three times before dawn.

  In the morning, he drove out along the Kabul–Jalalabad highway, down through the winding canyon, the traffic heavy in a haze of diesel emissions.

  Out of the mountains, he passed an Afghan National Army checkpoint, where a few men crouched next to a tan Ford Ranger, beneath camouflage netting on poles to diffuse the sun.