by Mike Bond
“Ahmad comes begging for money. For the orphanage he says. I give him all I can.”
“He must have kept it for himself. I was the one who brought food. Finally I left and went to the Koran school.”
“And in the madrasah what have you learned?”
“To kill the infidels wherever we find them.”
“Very good –”
“Once I found a grenade. Some Russians were singing and drinking wine in a café. I threw it in and ran away.” Suley snatched another rib. “Even on the houses across the street there was blood.”
“Well done!”
“Once I saw three of Hekmatyar’s men take a woman into a cellar. Her hands were tied behind her and they pushed up her clothes and did things to her. One man left his rifle against the wall... I went quietly down the stairs. I feared they would kill me, but they were like goats at a female. I had never shot a rifle before. My hands were shaking. It is loud. It is hard to hold the barrel straight when it is firing.”
“Do you remember the infidel teacher? From your school in Edeni?”
“He scorned me.”
“He’s in the mountains now with other Americans. They say they want to help –”
“O true believers, take not the Jews or Christians for your friends.”
“You have learned your Koran well.” Wahid pulled him close. “The Russians are speaking of peace. We must seem to welcome this yet prevent it. To keep them and the Americans killing each other.”
SUMMER WAS NEAR but nights stayed cold. Sophie sat cross-legged on the bed, wearing Leo’s green wool socks. He came in and dropped his combat boots in the corner. She snatched her Russian-French dictionary. “Болван! No, wait – that’s not it! Бойня! Бокал!”
He stretched out on the bed beside her. “You need more lessons.”
“I was calling you an oaf!”
“Oaf? What is that?”
“The kind of person who drops his muddy boots on the bedroom floor.”
“Ah... Болван – ‘Bolvan’ – that is a woodenhead, a dolt. Very good. But you also called me ‘Bokal’ – that is a wine glass.”
“That’s not quite your shape.”
“And also ‘Boinya’ – that means massacre. A slaughter.” He tugged off her socks. “These are property of the Soviet Army.”
“I requisitioned them. As part of the Peace Through Friendship program.” She burrowed her toes under his back. “What did he say, General Volnev?”
“He doesn’t like Malraux.”
“So what did he say? Stop teasing me!”
“That when this peace mission’s over I’m reassigned to Brussels. Because of my head wound. That’s the best he can do.”
“The best he can do? Oh my God!” The air had wings, had risen from the back of her neck and left her free, as if it were possible again to want, to dare. “Darling I never hoped!”
“Ah you French.” He pulled her into his warm arms. “You’re all like Malraux.”
“You should have foraged more champagne – to celebrate our leaving.”
“First we’ll go to Moscow. To meet my parents. Then we’ll go to the Caspian. There’s a lovely headland covered in pines, a white village where we can get married. My friend Dmitri will come from Poland, your parents from France... Then in Brussels I’ll come home in my major’s uniform and you’ll come back from the hospital and we’ll drink wine and laugh about how silly is the human race.”
“Major’s uniform?”
“I forgot. Volnev’s made me a major.”
She grabbed his hands. “Darling that’s marvelous!”
“Funny how I spent years working for it and now it doesn’t matter.”
“It’s wonderful. Please admit you’re happy! I feel so good for you.”
He slipped his hand under her shirt. “Yes, you do feel good.”
“Be serious! Anyway, there’s something wrong with your Brussels picture... Maybe I won’t be coming home from working at the hospital. Maybe I’ll stay home.”
“Home?” The thought astounded him. “You’re a doctor .”
She slid up his undershirt, kissing his chest. “Even doctors have babies...”
Joy filled him. Could you wish for things that really matter, and receive them? It was fine to believe in joy, but did it really happen? He thought of the famous poem they’d memorized in school about the Nazi siege of Leningrad,
We have battled our way out of that long darkness,
And fought through barrages of fire.
You used to say, “We have turned to stone,”
No,
We’re stronger than stone,
We are alive.
All his life he had fought for the good, never expecting it to touch him. As if he were outside life somehow, made of stone. Now Sophie had changed everything: to be alive was to make love, make life, to pass on this joyous mystery. Was it perhaps true, what Dostoyevsky’s Father Zossima had said, that we are made for happiness, and he who is completely happy can say to himself, I’ve carried out God’s sacred will on earth?
Had he too battled out of the long darkness, was he stronger than stone?
But why did it take war to make us alive?
Sunflower
DUST CLOUDS HOWLED down the Panjshir Valley, buffeting the APCs and driving grit through the firing ports. How, Leo wondered, do people live up here?
The engines howled with the climb as the road rose toward Kalat pass. Snow clouds wreathed the Anjoman crests; wind through the open front hatch made his eyes water and froze the tears to his cheeks.
Wahid must’ve talked to the weatherman, Leo decided, found out it was going to be stormy. If Massoud had agreed to a truce, would Wahid?
“Back home I’d still be in bed,” Kolya said. He was nineteen maybe, with blond hair and blue eyes, and he drove this APC that he’d named Sunflower with a nonchalant grace.
“Good you’re in the Army,” Leo said. “Keeps you from that kind of lazy behavior.”
“Lazy? You should see my girl.”
You should see mine, Leo thought. You kids don’t know anything.
“I can’t imagine any girl would fancy waking up beside you,” the gunner told Kolya.
“Snowing,” Kolya changed the subject. “Now the road’ll be slippery on the pass.”
Leo glanced out. They had driven right into it, a wall of tiny hard-driven flakes. The engine yowled as Kolya geared down. “Can’t see a thing!” he yelled.
“Just stay in the middle –”
“What about mines?”
“They cleared this road last week.”
“That don’t mean shit,” the gunner said.
It was warm inside the APC, and Leo forced himself to keep his head out, to take turns watching with the gunner through the snow. Looking back over the gun mount he could see only the first APC behind him, a ghost. “Hold that music down,” he said to Kolya.
“It’s AC/DC,” Kolya said. “If you want blood...” he sang in Russianized English.
“We’ll go far as Kalat,” Leo called out. It was unfair, this late storm. In the valley the fruit trees had already started blooming. “If the snow keeps up we turn back there.”
The road worsened, as did the storm, the snow straight into their faces. Over the howl of the wind and the roar of engines he heard the river frothing and booming down the canyon beside them.
“If you want blood,” Kolya was singing, “you got it –”
“Blood on the streets,” the gunner answered.
“Blood on the rock –” Kolya added.
“Blood in the gutter,” the gunner sang.
“Every last drop,” Kolya sang back, and to Leo it was bad medicine, but these were young guys, heedless. Thought they would live forever.
The road curved to the right and down across the River, the APC’s wheels slithering as it fought its way up the other side. A gray shape in the gloom ahead became a burnt-out tank, half on its side in the ditch.
“Watch the goddamn road!” Leo yelled.
Snow had blown through the front slot and was piling up around Leo’s feet. “Why can’t we fight wars in Tahiti?” the gunner said.
With a roar the world turned black then white as the APC’s dashboard leaped up and smashed his forehead, and he was on the floor with an arm under the brake pedal and voices yelling and a whine in the back of his head and someone tugged his arm free and he pulled himself out of the hatch and fell face first in the snow.
“Good,” the gunner said. “We’re out of it.”
Leo sat up. The snow was warm as a down blanket. “Goddamn mines,” he said. “Goddamn duki.” He checked that the soldiers had taken up defensive positions around the APCs. There was nothing to see but snow, nothing to shoot at.
The APC caught fire and for an instant Leo wanted to stay near it. The soldiers in the second APC made room for him, the gunner, and Kolya, jamming together on the floor between the rifle butts and boots and ammunition boxes. Kolya had wrapped a scarf across his bleeding nose. “She was my favorite,” he said. “Sunflower.”
“What the fuck is Sunflower?”
“My APC.”
“It was just a mine,” Leo said. “Random, nothing to do with us.”
The wretched bedraggled town of Kalat came and went, then Anjoman.
If Massoud had agreed to a truce, why not Wahid?
FROM HIS ROCK NICHE above the deserted village Jack watched the APCs take form out of the white. At first he thought he imagined them, then they were barely darker than the snow, then squat ugly arachnids coming fast.
The terror returned, the nearness of death. Come, he urged the APCs, Come closer, at the same time wanting them to go. Closer they came, bigger and bigger, metal edges and thick steel, wheels crushing snow, gun barrel stingers of death.
His body felt naked, exposed. They had steel sides and he had only this spider hole in the scree. He glanced across at Bandit, who sat apart in a snow hole because he would not be near Husseini. Am I going to get you killed too?
The snowfall was thinning and he could see the raveled slope below them and the rooftops of the village where his mujihadeen hid, even the ridge across the road where McPhee and Aktoub waited in their rock holes.
Here it was just him and Bandit and Husseini the Algerian. And an SA-7 and three missiles. If choppers came they had to bring them down. But not him or McPhee – this time the Strelas would be fired by mujihadeen. “Technology transfer,” McPhee had grinned with the coolness he affected before battle. “First world helping the third into the modern age.”
“They’re going to see us!” Husseini whispered in French. “We should pull back!”
“You don’t care about our men below?”
“God will protect them!”
The lead APC hesitated at the first houses, a huge mantis before a spider’s web. Its cannon traversed, barked flame. A building convulsed in a white-red flash somersaulting chunks high into the air and down on the street and on the roofs of other houses.
Jack swore at himself for not training his mujihadeen well enough. Some asshole had shown himself – an inch of cloth, the momentary glisten of a barrel.
The APC backed off, cannon swiveling, the others backing up behind it. “They’re running away,” Husseini said. “Cowards!”
“I’ll kill him,” Jack said. “Whoever showed himself.”
The lead APC revved and lurched forward, picked its way over the rubble past all the houses and accelerated into the clear, stopped a hundred meters further down the road and swung its cannon back toward the village.
“They see us!” Husseini moaned.
“Shut up.”
On the other side of the village the other APCs edged closer. The second geared down and raced through. It halted thirty meters past the first.
One by one the other APCs passed through the village, linked up thirty meters apart and vanished. The growl of their engines faded over the ridge.
“One at a time like that,” Husseini said, “how could we get them?”
“Once they find no one’s waiting to meet them in Skazar they’ll come running back.”
From the south, above the clouds, came the whuh whuh whuh of helicopters.
Jack imagined the gunships bristling with death, a rocket blowing him into the little chunks of flesh that were often all that remained of a man. He wanted to go down and check on his men but that would leave tracks in the snow. “Anybody hit?” he called.
“All is well, praise God,” Aktoub shouted up. “They shot at nothing.”
Before we came, Jack thought, you would’ve fired back. Consumed by images of manhood and courage, hungry for the life you imagine comes after. It’s us who’ve taught you to be soldiers, not God.
“They’re coming back,” Husseini said. “Fast.”
“I hear nothing.”
“That’s because you grew up with cars and television. They kill the hearing.”
The first APC resolved out of the white, then one by one the others. When the lead APC was nearly through the village Aktoub detonated the mine in the middle of the road, the one Jack had wrapped the night before in extra nitro. The APC seemed to take flight then collapsed on itself, pieces settling to earth like feathers of a bird hit by a shotgun.
The others behind it braked hard. As the last skidded sideways the mujihadeen at the end of the village detonated the mine beneath it and it spun awkwardly on its tail and crashed backward into the huts. With a wham of RPGs the mujihadeen hidden on the near side of the road opened up. The soldiers inside the trapped APCs scrambled out and took cover behind them.
A chopper screamed over, invisible in the snow, and Jack had a moment’s astonished fear of a pilot who would fly so low in blinding conditions in the doomed attempt to save his comrades. “Fire!” he screamed, and Husseini’s Strela hit it showering chunks of metal through the storm.
The soldiers pinned behind the APCs were returning fire now, green tracers flashing through the snowstorm. The mujihadeen on the near side had stopped firing. As the soldiers began to regroup behind their vehicles the mujihadeen on the far side opened up, the bullets cutting them down like toy figures knocked over by a child’s hand, and there was nowhere for them to go, nothing to do but die.
Jack ran down the hill through the knee-deep snow. “Pull out! Before the storm clears!” A second chopper roared over, trying to see them through downblasting snow.
“We got him.” Aktoub bent to wipe bloody hands on the snow. “Their major.”
“Praise God,” Husseini grinned through crooked teeth.
“We got him, Goddammit!” Jack yelled.
“How many times I’ve told you?” Husseini yelled back. “Whatever good befalleth thee, O man, it is from God. And whatever evil befalleth thee, it is from thyself!”
The major lay in bloody snow, gripping his belly in massive bloody hands. He had a thick moustache and pockmarked face. “Who are you?” Jack said in Russian.
The man glared up at him. “Death to you and all your children, may they never have children.”
Husseini nudged his rifle muzzle against the man’s cheek. “I shall shoot him?”
“No!” Jack knelt to look at the major’s wound.
Something shoved against Jack’s shoulder. Suley. “Get up the hill,” Jack snapped.
“He’s the one who destroyed Edeni.” Suley choked back a breath. “He stood my parents against the apple tree and shot them.”
Jack saw Ahmad’s mother and the school children being shot down by this man.
“What’s he saying?” the Russian gasped.
“That you destroyed his village.”
“I fight duki. Not civilians.”
Husseini edged closer, racked his AK. The Russian pointed to his heart.
“No!” Jack screamed.
Husseini shot Leo in the head.
Bridge over a Stream
THE ONLY SANE THING, Ahmad told himself, was get out
Kabul was Hell, eternal suffering and endless death. The orphans were an inundating sea, more each week, many of them partial humans only, missing limbs and eyes and genitals and minds. Widow Safír had been killed by an errant shell that had also killed twenty-one kids and maimed forty-two of which eleven had died, but now the orphanage had over three hundred and every day there was less food.
If he left, most or all of them would die. If he stayed wouldn’t they die anyway?
A veiled girl in a purple yashmak came in without knocking and stood before him with her head bowed. “I was a teacher,” she said. “Then the religious police killed the teachers so I became a nurse. Now they’re killing nurses. I thought I might ask if there is work here.”
“There’s much work but nothing to eat.”
“I can find food. I can cook. I worked in the clinic, can heal sick children.”
“Take your veil off, child. And look at me.”
She pulled it back. “Already you know me.” She was not a child but a beautiful young woman. “The French doctor? I worked in her clinic.”
“Ah yes, poor Sophie. How could I not remember you, Galaya?”
JACK HATED WALKING POINT because of the mines, but never let his men do it, always did it himself. Particularly he hated walking point at night when there was no chance of seeing a tripwire or the disturbed dirt or dead grass that might indicate where a mine was buried. But tonight he didn’t mind, in the cool midnight with stars thick overhead, in the damp grass scents of early autumn, Bandit trotting silently ahead, the trail slinking down to a little stream gurgling under a stepping-stone bridge, the other men spaced behind him. As a kid he’d made up a poem once, about a bridge over a stream in a small child’s dream.
That night, he was seven maybe, he lay in bed saying the poem and watching the stars slide across the windows. When he recited it next morning his father said where’d you steal that?
At night now the Soviets usually didn’t patrol. In the three months since Loxley’s death Wahid’s men had won back part of the Panjshir; nowhere now could the Soviet helicopters or MiGs fly without fear; every time they neared the earth a Strela waited to knock them down.