Sweat soaked his shirt again. If he showed up without warning, the mullah and Noorudin might have him killed. His fingers shook as he punched in the numbers. He knew the words, the rhetoric, the way he had to speak. He hadn’t shaven. I will give you my life. All I need is a bomb. In the name of Allah, I will set this right for Afghanistan.
He called.
I can give you what you want, he said as soon as the ringing stopped.
You’ve betrayed us.
I’ll kill the foreigners myself. I’ll do it today or tomorrow.
Why would you?
He described the girls’ school, the men there who slept with the female students, how Idris had seen the corruption of their wealth. I’ll kill at least two.
The poor boy always sees the truth, the mullah said.
I need a bomb, one I can hide in the car.
Come. We’ll give that to you.
Idris hung up. The mullah and Noorudin could claim victory — an attack against a girls’ school — and, with the Taliban reward for foreign deaths, have financing to better their lives.
The possibility that Idris would die in the next twenty-four hours was undeniable. Having seen every eventuality in his mind, he began to empty it, to leave space for nothing else, so that he could race through this crucial period.
Only one brief fantasy haunted him, an image of Tarzi as he imagined him, with an inch-long silver beard from his time with the mullah. He had his reputation for fairness, a true Muslim who studied the holy book and lived his duties. Idris saw himself talking with him in the mullah’s compound, discussing a way to resolve all this. Tarzi would see Idris for who he was and offer him a better life.
But Idris dispelled this. He’d learned that being saved — even by the person you were saving — wasn’t freedom. There were simple acts of help — pushing someone out of the way of a car or a mother shielding her child from shrapnel — but the kind of saving foreigners came to do resembled what Idris was now doing: using others to attain his own salvation.
Far beyond Jalalabad, at the village compound, there was no meeting with the mullah or Noorudin. A man Idris had never seen walked out with a canvas bag. Idris lowered the window.
It’s powerful, the man said and opened the bag to show several bricks attached by wires. I’ll fit it inside one of the back seats so that when you go through Kabul’s checkpoints, the police will see nothing.
He opened the car’s rear door and took out a knife and shears. He lifted the seat cushion and cut into it until he’d made space for the bomb. He returned the seat to its normal position and inspected it. He took a cell from his pocket. He opened the contacts. There was only one.
This is the number. When you call it, the bomb will detonate. Choose a place with many infidels. The explosion will be great.
He returned through the gate without looking back.
The road tunneled into Idris’s head. He passed checkpoints and drove to Aziz’s shop and picked up the passport. He said goodbye as if he and Aziz would see each other soon, but Aziz glanced away.
In Wazir Akbar Khan, Idris bought a suit and shoes, a leather briefcase, and travel luggage. He stood at the mirror. With his faint beard, he could be a devout businessman, a moderate believer who found a compromise between his faith and modernity.
He purchased a laptop and a case, and went back to his hotel. He tested where to stash money in his jacket and luggage. This was a formality, since everyone knew that well-dressed men carried suitcases of cash into the Emirates daily, spending Afghanistan’s drug wealth in malls, hotels, and resorts. Dubai had no interest in impeding them.
He called Clay and told him Rashidi planned to deliver the ransom the next day. Then he left everything he’d just bought in the room and drove to the school, going slowly, taking in Kabul. It had been utterly transformed during his short life — new constructions jammed in every available space, with, here and there, the occasional prewar concrete ruins, crumbling and white, like fossils embedded in the generational layers of the city.
He was ready to break free of it.
In the pantry, he lay down to think.
Rashidi would be left with the unclaimed fake passport, thinking Idris dead. Tarzi would gain his freedom, and Faisal would be released.
Only a simple calculation remained. He pushed the heels of his hands against his eyelids. Though Frank had let him live in the school and learn an English superior to that of almost any other Afghan Idris knew, Idris had to pick someone. He would wait and see if Justin needed a ride to meet other foreigners. If not, Idris would put the bomb in Frank’s desk, wait until Justin was in the room, and then walk outside and call. But the car would be better: the explosion would destroy the steering wheel — if the police even bothered to check which side it was on — and if anything remained from the bodies, the one in front would look like the driver.
He lowered his hands. He would leave everything he’d owned in the pantry, with the door locked, as if he planned to return. There would be nothing to say to his uncle and cousins. His family had been disappearing for years.
Part 10
Kabul–Dubai: March/June 2012
}
美智子
From outside my hotel room came the unfamiliar croaking of a bird. I’d barely slept, but I went to the window. In a tree, a small silhouette hunched against the dawn. In old Afghan stories, maybe its cry was an omen, but I would never feel the resonance of this land’s myths.
The previous day, after saying goodbye to Tam, I’d met with the fixer who helped me find Clay’s visa records. He took me to a shop in the market where a young man hacked Steve’s laptop. He removed its hard drive and set it up so I could access it externally with my computer. I let him keep the rest of the laptop along with two hundred dollars.
The fixer then made some calls for me and found out that Steve was a suspect in a criminal case. One of the cars registered to his business had passed security cameras, making a quick trip to the point of a kidnapping and back. The NDS had a travel restriction on him and weren’t letting him leave the country until the case was resolved. I’d commented that all the rumors about contractors being corrupt must be true, but the fixer just shrugged and said that everyone with power had a hand in something.
Outside the hotel, I got into the taxi idling in the street. I didn’t often see the dawn. Over the past year, my days had passed so quickly Kabul seemed a calendar of sunsets, as if trying to come to an end once and for all, though the earth itself refused, its mountains holding back the flames.
By the time we reached the airport, the sun was beginning its ascent. I’d never had a plan for leaving. When I’d arrived in the spring — the airplane jostling down through clouds — I’d been more terrified and certain of my actions than ever before.
Now, as the plane lifted, Kabul was a thatch of streets far below, a raft on a sea of geologic waves. Tam and I had discussed the degrading security, robberies and attacks, and all the foreigners going home. I told myself I’d have had to leave eventually.
As the plane rumbled through the sky, I connected Steve’s hard drive to my laptop and reopened the folder I’d found the evening before: photos of Idris, the files organized by date and place, three days ago in Dubai. Steve had a private investigator tracking him. Maybe he hadn’t wanted me to tell anyone that Idris might still be alive, or he was afraid that I’d found Idris already and had information about the kidnapping. An email contained Idris’s address and information about his daily activities — a technological institute where he studied, and a woman he was dating.
In the photos, Idris was well dressed, in a modest but expensive suit, leaning against the railing near the fountains below the Burj Khalifa, the tallest skyscraper ever built. He stood next to a dark young woman with braided hair who was smiling at him.
Among the files, there were video feeds from Clay’s house.
Maybe Steve was right to be cautious. Duplicity, I had seen in myself, arises easily to serve one’s self-interest.
The hard drive would join the material I continued to gather long after Tam published her article, the most intellectual piece I’d seen from her and one in which I recognized my own ideas from our conversations — at least, I thought they were mine.
Whereas, in most cases, soldiers serve, many expats come imbued with a messianic sense of their role globally, compelled not just by the desire to help but by a sort of reverence for the power of their culture.
Even if her critique of Americans — and of herself — were true, I’d cherished the closeness of that small community, the way expats relished the character flaws that had brought them to Afghanistan. They perverted their weaknesses into bigger and better stories for late-night drinks, sometimes just to give themselves the courage to head back out and do something more daring. Tam wasn’t wrong: we acted like a sort of chosen people, better than our countrymen who stayed home, though we hungered for their admiration, and Afghanistan was our stage.
Are we any different from the British Empire, Tam wrote, surviving in their colonies by the grace of foreign servants, creating a class of Afghans who may someday have to choose between their countrymen and their foreign sponsors? She wrote of the Afghans’ anger, our surprise when they became hostile to us. Our belief in our superiority is so great that we hate our victims for not loving us.
By the time I arrived in Dubai, there was an email in my inbox from Tam, with an audio file and large Word document. At my hotel, I listened to the mp3 she’d stealthily made at the school. It began with Tam telling Frank that her friends in the army were letting her use their postal boxes on the base. She’d gotten chocolates from home and had come to share. She also had a bottle of Johnnie Walker from a friend who’d just flown in from Istanbul. He seemed hesitant and must have pointed to his gut because she asked if he had stomach problems.
“It’s my own personal insurgency,” he told her.
“The ghost of Mullah Omar.”
“If only he were dead. Whoever’s in there built his Tora Bora years ago and never left. Bin Laden, I suspect.”
“In Iraq, dysentery is called Saddam’s revenge.”
“We’ve killed enough bad guys for the entire world to have the runs until judgment day.” He hesitated. “But what the hell. It won’t be the first time I’ve pissed off my enemies.”
They ate the chocolates and talked, and she told him about her embed with Special Forces. She mentioned a magazine writer she’d been dating. “A renegade,” she said.
“I can’t see you with anything less than an outlaw,” he replied.
She cracked the whiskey, and their glasses clinked — she must have brought those along as well. Their talk rambled on in a similar vein, and then she described Afghan women teachers she’d photographed in Oruzgan the year before. He told her she should be a mentor.
“If all our girls turned out like you,” he said, “this country wouldn’t need an army.”
“Well, I’d be interested in doing a photo-essay about the effect of the tragedy on the students here — the loss of someone who’d sacrificed everything to teach them.”
“Nice angle,” he told her flatly, no doubt wanting his sacrifice acknowledged instead. “You’ll have to excuse me. I need to make a pit stop.”
His footsteps clomped out. She moved around. There were a few clicks and then silence. When he came back, he talked about Sediqa, and Tam asked if he was afraid.
“Not at all. So what if Sediqa’s uncles drive past in their beat-to-shit car? They don’t want to be hunted down by the NDS. And what’s the worst they’ll do to a man five years shy of being an octogenarian?”
Then he didn’t speak for a long time, and I was impressed that Tam allowed him to sit within that silence.
“But you know, last night I came out to use the bathroom, and standing there, at the top of the stairs, was this grimy boy in a pilot jacket. ‘What are you doing here, son?’ I said. I’d never seen him before. He just stared, breathing through his mouth. Then he walked downstairs and out of the building. That did worry me a little, but he looked more confused than dangerous. Maybe he’s someone’s friend come to see what all the fuss about education is.
“In truth, I’ve been so busy calling State-side for donors, trying to keep this machine oiled, that I can’t think about much else. And yet, when I saw that boy, I had to curse Justin. The students say he was involved with Sediqa. I did see her coming out of his room unreasonably early. He said she’d been begging for the scholarship, visiting him, but no Afghan girl would do that. It’s not believable. So I’m not sure that a photo-essay about Justin is going to elicit much sympathy here.
“There’s a story I should have told him. My first year in Kabul, a man I knew was involved with an Afghan girl, a Pashto. He was the spitting image of that Scottish actor. What’s his name? They shot him while he was walking out of a restaurant. They shot her in the market. They were setting examples. When you get right down to it, everything is basically just education.”
After a bit of small talk, their steps pattered. Her motorcycle revved. A few minutes later, Tam spoke into the recorder, saying, “I copied his personal files onto a zip drive,” and then shut it off.
This was the other Tam, the mercenary people talked about. She was showing me just how good her game was.
The document attached to the email was Frank’s, shared only because it added nothing to her article. I would read it the next day. It was an attempt at a memoir about his redemption, his vaguely flawed youth in Middle America, his experiences in Vietnam, his all-American career as a businessman, and his transformation into an activist. He touched on the borders of what pained him — allusions to mistreating women, to the pursuit of ambition and the neglect of his family — confessions that dissolved into vague lessons: moralizing as a form of denial.
I preferred his first chapters. He described the Afghanistan that I, like most expats come late, wished I’d seen. He’d arrived after the US invasion and driven cross-country. He evoked the dramatic vistas of the Salang Pass, green fields, or mountainsides painted in wildflowers, all absent of people. But then, the writing felt like a history book of which he was author and subject — the war’s chronology interleaved with personal experience and tirades.
Now, the Afghans build without believing, and homes fall apart before they are finished. A handyman told me there’d always be some kind of war, that everyone knows the house will be destroyed. No one spoke with such fatalism when I first came. A group of them are still learning our ways, and it is not too late for us “by slow prudence to make mild a rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees subdue them to the useful and the good.”
That winter, in an email, Tam would write to me that Frank had gotten sick and asked her to help at the school. Few students remained. Even the guard was gone, having won the Mr. Kabul title and opened a bodybuilding gym. In a fever, Frank told her that since the Taliban had declared war on civilian expats, vowing to eliminate the foreign contamination, he’d begun seeing the ghosts of old acquaintances wandering the rooms of the school. He woke soaked in sweat, not knowing where he was, lost in his past.
The soul is doing this work, he said. It’s like my body no longer lives in these rooms.
He told her about his health issues: sinus infections and rashes and a turbulent gut.
The part of me that feels has gone somewhere else.
He talked about the men in the Russian car who occasionally stopped in the street.
I know they’re out there. I’m not afraid of what’s coming. I won’t be running home.
Tam wrote that one of the girls he’d sent to America did come back with her degree and took over, as he always said would happen. Money then began trickling in again. After months of illness, Frank recovered and lived on in an apartment and
visited the school as his protégée rebuilt it. He told Tam his job was to make himself obsolete, but he wasn’t ready to die. He wouldn’t vanish in a ball of fire because that wasn’t his game. He hadn’t lived by the sword.
I have my wits, he told her. I have my vision. But unlike Odysseus, I’m not going home. All these girls will sail off, and only then will I climb on the pyre.
I didn’t know what Tam’s future would be — she had more transformations in front of her — but as for Frank, he’d become a name in Kabul, and I couldn’t imagine him surviving a return to America. Under his flapping clothes, I pictured a body less emaciated than fibrous, knotted, and enduring. His strength as he neared eighty seemed the product of conflicting pressures, the constant contrariness, the war a dense, obstinate element in which he thrived. He would never leave. He’d have to be pulled, a mandrake, naked and screaming, from that mutinous earth.
CLAY
In the lull between sleep and full consciousness, questions moved through him: whether he was blinded by Alexandra when he should’ve been most vigilant — whether Idris could be trusted and the mullah would honor the agreement, and Steve would let this play out without taking it in hand and putting their identities at risk. A memory resurfaced: Justin the evening they’d met in the restaurant. There had been something new in him, a new voice, conviction or passion. Clay hadn’t wanted to admit that. Maybe he’d resented him having anything less than failure.
Sleet had blown through on his second night with Alexandra, pattering on the roof and windows and terrace. Whatever they’d been twenty-four hours before was largely gone. They made love and then just lay, the rain a vibration in the air, a sense of stillness across the city.
The dawn filtered through his eyelids. He never slept past first light, but he lay for a while, enjoying her warmth. She’d burrowed deeper into the comforter, the fire long since gone out. The chill held his face like a mask.
Into the Sun Page 35