by John Wray
On the eighth day Ziar asked her to walk with him out to the western gate. The evening meal had ended and the yard was being swept. —Too much sitting is a poison to the spirit, he said in Arabic, cradling her right elbow lightly in his palm. —No matter what my worthy father says.
She got to her feet feeling weightless and clumsy. Altaf smiled at them and wished them happy walking. Decker stared at the ground and said nothing.
They met Ibrahim Shah at the gate of the compound. He was returning from the bazaar in Sadda with a handcart laden to the height of a man with Tyvek sacks of flour and Chinese tea and other goods that she could only guess at. He greeted Ziar with cool formality and his manner toward her now was much the same.
—Greetings to you, brothers. A fine day for an outing.
—We’re walking to the mosque, by way of the western gate, Ziar told him. —You may report this to the mu’allim, if he asks.
—Ah! said Ibrahim Shah. —Our village mosque is no great sight, I fear, to such a traveler of the world.
—You’re right about that, brother. But one must walk somewhere in this backwater, and the mosque is as good a destination as any.
If Ibrahim Shah was shocked by this way of speaking he gave no sign of it. —I said much the same thing to Brother Suleyman myself, he said politely. —Your studies will not run away from you, I told him, if you should choose to stray. They will be here for you when you return. Do you remember, brother?
—I remember, she murmured.
—It is kind of you to say so. As always you do us great honor. He pushed the handcart past them. —May you both enjoy a sweet and restful hour.
They thanked him and walked with measured steps across the square. —Ibrahim Shah is a worthy man, Ziar said. —In my absence he’s been as a son to my father. He will duly attain to mullah at his death.
—Why should that be, Brother Ziar?
—What curious questions you ask, Suleyman. Did I not just say he was a worthy man?
She felt herself redden. —But why not you?
—You’re a boy yet, little brother, sharp-witted though you may be. These matters are difficult to understand.
—I don’t like it when people tell me that. I’m not a child.
—No indeed. You are not that. He smiled. —I’ve sometimes asked myself, during these talks of ours, exactly what you are.
They walked past the cracked mud-walled cistern and the new concrete well drilled with American funds to the bazaar and the mosque, then farther to the west. When they had passed the gate she’d sat beneath with Ibrahim Shah and the mullah she asked him to tell her the story of his mother’s photograph. He replied without a moment’s hesitation.
* * *
—I was sixteen when I left this school to fight across the border. Not a man yet, Suleyman, in anyone’s opinion but my own. I told my sisters I’d come back in six months with a belt made from the hair of Russian soldiers. They laughed at me, as I deserved, and I cautioned them not to laugh, for I would surely die a martyr. This life rarely defers to our notions of it, little brother, though I was too unworldly to have known that then. I returned after a year and a half, in the best of health, to find both of my sisters in the ground.
By then my home was in the camps, not here. In the camps and in the hope they represented. The camps were beautiful in the years of the Russian war, little brother, nothing like the chicken pens we’re left with now. Money came from all points of the compass—from Karachi, from the Saudis, from Morocco, even from your own country. In my childhood men had carried arms, of course—belt knives, or pistols, or even Kalashnikovs, if they were men of means—but those had been trophies only. At the camp called the Mountain I trained with Makarovs and Kalashnikovs and M16s and Stingers and explosives, both plastique and homemade. There was a course in ballistics taught by a professor from Lahore, a man of genius. The Mountain was a university to me. Childish though the idea was—and sinful—I prayed that I would never have to leave.
These prayers went unanswered, of course. My new life started on my first day at the front. We were climbing a pass from one line to another when the boy before me seemed to whistle, then to give a kind of laugh. Everyone fell to the ground—the boy and I were the only ones left on our feet. His cap hung strangely and I tugged on it to ask him what had happened. It came off in my hands, little brother, and his head came off with it: the top of his skull from the crown to the ears. He was shot twice more before he hit the ground.
God’s design is not for us to know, but I was a young man, and I tried to understand why this boy had been killed when I was spared. He’d been a comrade to me at the Mountain, a dear one, and we’d asked to be sent into the war together. He had black hair and a pale and earnest face: not unlike your own face, little brother, come to think of it. At the camp we’d called him Abu Mushkil, Father of Trouble, because he’d shown no talent for the training. But his given name was Sangar. Sangar Kost.
As the weeks passed it grew evident that God preferred to spare me. I became accustomed to this idea, I accepted it as a fact, and this acceptance lent me the appearance of courage. But I was not courageous, Suleyman: only complacent. I felt myself to be untouchable, sequestered, set apart for some future purpose. What fear I felt was for my brothers only. They endeavored to fight as close to me as possible, imagining God’s love for me might shield them. They should have learned from Sangar’s example, but self-interest clouded their judgment. I watched the men and boys around me fall like chaff.
It was a full year before God saw fit to lift his sheltering hand. It happened noiselessly, invisibly, in the course of one late winter afternoon. Our strategy had been a sound one for a small group such as ours—to keep to country known to us, to valleys too narrow for air support, and to confine ourselves to nighttime operations—but we’d come to feel too clever, Suleyman, or possibly too proud. Humility is a virtue, after all, even in war. We drew too much attention to ourselves.
The helicopters—Black Sharks, they were called—were the one thing our entire unit dreaded. I’d observed them from a distance and I’d seen what they could do. Five times they’d flown overhead, within easy striking distance, and five times passed us by. I’d been close enough the last time to see the pilot’s features through the glass. He looked laughably young, younger even than I was—but the Russians’ hairless faces always made it hard to guess. He saw me, I’m sure, but he held to his course. One half-grown mujahid was not worth the petrol, I imagine, or the ammunition, or the time. Perhaps he was tired. Or perhaps this was God’s warning and I failed to understand.
We were bathing in the river when a Black Shark squadron found us. Two flights of six in arrowhead formation—more at one time than I’d ever seen. We’d grown proud, as I’ve said. No cover for a hundred strides and most of us still hip-deep in the water. They flew in low from the east, keeping the sun behind them: their shadows reached us twenty seconds before the first came into range. I got slowly to my feet in that shadow, wet and naked to the waist, and watched those great black sunspots dropping toward me. It was useless to make for cover, useless to reach for my rifle, useless even to speak. We might have been targets made of mud for them to hit.
Their first pass was high, which is what saved my life. I’d raised my right arm for no reason I can explain: it must have looked to them like a gesture of welcome. I felt a shock, I remember, as though my hand had been slapped. The only pain I felt was in my shoulder. I looked at my fingers and saw two were gone. That set me to running at last, though I had little hope of cover and even less thought of escape. I saw the men around me shouting but I heard no sound at all.
They made seven full passes, all twelve machines firing, and none of our party was spared. Some of us were hit by bullets from the PKMs and some by shards of sandstone from the bluffs or from the boulders. A brother bound my hand and led me up the creekbed. He was bleeding from what seemed a shallow cut above his knee. Once we’d reached shelter he drew his coat around himself
and when I looked at him soon afterward I saw that he was dead.
I rolled onto my side then and asked God to aid me. I whimpered and pleaded and stammered His praises. We lay in a thin stand of tamarisks not far from the water and the sound of dying rose up all around us. Have you ever heard that sound, little brother, when young men are dying? The noises they make are not noble, as the actors and poets would have us believe. Fourteen boys lay below me, shrieking and losing consciousness and waking in terror and shrieking again. The Russians had ground troops deployed in the area and I was certain that a sweep patrol was coming. The pain was spectacular by then but I found I could stand without fainting. I searched my brother’s body and found a Makarov PM and a cartridge in his belt. I laid stones from the river at his head and his feet and took the pistol and checked that the cartridge was full. Then I went back to the others and sent each of them to God.
The caves in that valley are ancient and their walls are inscribed in many places with verses in Arabic and in older alphabets now lost to us. I passed that night and the following day in a hole in the sandstone barely wider than my shoulders. From its mouth where I lay sweating and shivering by turns I watched the Soviet sweepers do their work. There was little use they could make of my brothers now but they amused themselves as well as they were able. They stayed a long while, an entire platoon, joking in Russian and defiling the bodies and washing themselves in the river where my brothers had bathed not six hours before. It was a judgment upon me but in my anger I could make no sense of it. When they’d finally gone my teeth were buzzing in my skull and I was dizzy from thirst and the sandstone pressed against me like a living, breathing thing.
It was cold that next morning, bitterly cold, and I heard the life departing from my body: a thin, steady hissing, like steam from a kettle. My hand had bled through its binding and was frozen by blood to the floor of the cave. It came away with a sound like tearing paper but I felt no more pain. Life was leaving me quickly.
It was then that I thought of the portrait.
The photograph was wrapped in cellophane from a packet of cigarettes, just as it is now, and tucked into the pocket of my Red Army coat. If I were one of those poets, I’d tell you that I always kept it there, against my heart—but the truth is that I’d put it there by chance. It was spotted and filthy from months of hard travel and I could hardly make out her features. I tried to peel the cellophane away but could not do it. I slid the picture up to my lips and licked it clean. I kept it between my teeth for a time, like the bit to a bridle, until I started to shiver. There are tooth marks on it still: here, Suleyman, in the bottom left-hand corner. Do you see?
I prayed to my young mother then, instead of God—or perhaps it was a form of conversation. Perhaps it was no mortal sin. Conversation with the dead, one-sided though it may be, is not the same as prayer. My mother had no great influence with Him: if she had, I’d not have been abandoned in that cave. But then I thought: it could be she’s forgotten me. It’s been more than ten years, after all. Perhaps the dead forget their lives in the calm of the Garden of Heaven. Perhaps that forgetting is itself what Heaven is.
I was delirious, you see, and thinking thoughts that bordered on apostasy. I was indeed a blasphemer in those hours in the cave. With each breath I took the walls embraced me more tightly and my thirst and fever mounted and on the second day I crawled or imagined I crawled deeper into the dark and found that the tunnel opened up into a chamber. I lay on my back for I know not how long, sobbing and laughing and speaking aloud. I’ve been hurt, little mother. I’m flat on my back on the floor of a cave. I see you so vividly, looking out from the shade of a cypress by the roadside. Smiling from the safety of its shadow at the man holding the camera, the man with the blue eyes who is not your husband. It’s the first photograph ever taken of you and you have no sense of how to behave. You want to please this man, to do as he’s asked, so you raise your chin and draw aside your veil. You are not thinking of this photograph as evidence. You are not thinking of this photograph at all, only of the man behind the camera. Your husband’s second cousin from Karachi, well traveled and courtly, who has quietly asked you to take off your veil. Although you are a virtuous and respectable woman, newly married to his cousin. No one else will see this picture until you are dead. This portrait is for your admirer only. But I myself have seen it, little mother, and I’ve held it in my teeth. It’s proof to me that you were once alive. It served as evidence to your husband, as well—a remembrance to him that you cared for another. And it’s evidence to me, here in this cave, that I exist.
* * *
That same evening after last prayers she found Ibrahim Shah waiting in her quarters. He sat cross-legged on one of the two cushions, arms fastidiously folded, and greeted her as genially as ever. Her chest was aching and she wanted desperately to undo the bandage and lie down and rest. She had always felt kindly toward Ibrahim Shah but his unannounced presence there at the end of the day, and on that day especially, put her on guard at once. His posture was perfect, his voice self-assured. The reproach behind his manner was as clear as winter air.
—How was your walk this evening, Suleyman? Do you find yourself refreshed?
—It was a walk, that’s all. You’ve taken walks.
—I have, little brother. I’ve even been so honored as to take a walk with you. He pursed his lips. —But Brother Ziar and I, it saddens me to say, have never walked together.
—You should try it. You might learn some things.
—Ah! What about?
—About the fight across the border.
—The fight across the border, Ibrahim Shah repeated.
—That’s right.
He nodded for a moment. —Let me tell you something.
—I’m listening.
—I was twelve years of age when I came to this house. My family hails from a village ten miles westward of Kabul. The name does not matter, not any longer, because the place itself has been expunged. This was done in three steps. First the Federal Army came, then the Soviets, and finally God’s own mujahideen.
Of these occupying forces I can tell you, Suleyman, that the mujahideen were by no means the most temperate. My father and my sister were burned alive in our home for selling cigarettes to Russian soldiers. My mother died soon after in a manner I prefer not to describe. I passed the next eighteen months alone, arriving finally in Peshawar’s refugee quarter, and by the grace of God was taken to this place. I have lived here since, little brother, and I will not leave until I myself am dead. What occurs across the border is of no interest to me. I have this house, I have my faith, and that is all.
Silence fell when Ibrahim Shah had finished. His affable expression had not changed.
—Forgive me, she said finally. —I’m very sorry for your loss. I didn’t know.
—Of course you did not know. I did not say.
—But you’ve told it to me now, Brother Shah. I’m not sure I know why.
—Perhaps you do know.
—Please tell me what it is you came to tell me.
He nodded again. —You will think I feel hatred for armed jihad on account of this story, he said. —Of course you will think so. But I do not confuse the men who burned my house with the group now called the Taliban, or in fact with any other group of Pashtuns. My family’s murderers, if they still live, likely fight for the north, as do many former mujahideen. They are fighting for reprisal, or for money, or simply to fight.
She nodded. —Ziar says the same thing. That’s why all genuine believers—
Ibrahim Shah raised a hand. —Please allow me to finish. The Taliban have taken up arms, against an army of the godless, to found a righteous Muslim state. Of that I have no doubt.
—Then why—
—I oppose the jihad of the Kalashnikov, little brother, because the God I follow is the God of mercy. Merciful to all. Compassionate to each. For me these are the greatest words in all the Holy Book. They are repeated more often than any others. Perhaps you
recollect this passage?
She stared at him. —Of course I know those words, she said at last.
—I do not doubt it, because no one could forget them. He brought his hands together. —The faith I follow is one that raises humility above all other virtues, Suleyman. And there is no humility in the righteous self-love of the mujahid. There is no modesty in it, no denial of desire, no compassion, no restraint. He sighed. —But of course such virtues hold no attraction for the young. Especially those for whom war is but a fairy story. To such young men inaction is the greatest of sins. To others—like Ziar Khan, perhaps—it would appear to be the only sin there is.
—Thank you for your counsel, she said. —I’d like to sleep now.
—Of course. May God sweeten your slumbers. He considered her a moment longer, then rose from the floor. —Petition Him, little brother, that you may wake up enlightened.
* * *
When Ziar failed to appear at the morning prayer she allowed herself to imagine that he’d been called away on business and she applied herself to the Recitation with an abandon that brought a smile to the declaimer’s mirthless face. But he was missing from second prayers as well, and so was Decker, and as soon as prayers were over she went looking for Hayat. She found him in his office, within arm’s reach of her bedroll, paging through an instruction manual for a Zenith color television. She stepped inside and shut the door behind her.
—Brother Suleyman! he said, dog-earing a page of the manual and setting it aside. —Are you not attending the afternoon reading from scripture? I selected the passage myself, with you in mind.