The First Stone

by Carsten Jensen

  Sørensen can’t help but smile. He thinks there’s a lot Sylvester still needs to learn about life, but all in all he wouldn’t mind if Sylvester were his own son.

  “A father like you,” says Sylvester, as if reading his mind. “They’re damn lucky!”

  In one of the tents, Sebastian, Tobias, Jonas, Mathias, and Gustav lie on their backs, their hands folded beneath their necks, and stare up at the canvas ceiling. Dennis is there, too. “Time to get up!” Viktor stomps into the tent and stares reproachfully at his boys. He wants them to shake off their stupor. Hit the exercise tent. Or just get out and move. “Don’t be so damn maladjusted!” he says.

  Dennis stands up, but only to torment Viktor. “How come we don’t have any colonies we can practice on?” he asks. “The French got to shoot the Algerians. The English got to shoot the Chinese in Malaysia. Why were the Greenlanders satisfied with shooting polar bears, seals, themselves, and each other? What about a quick little colonial war? Then there would be something for an honest Danish soldier to do.”

  “I’m not dealing with this right now.” Viktor turns and leaves the tent. Dennis grins triumphantly.

  Stacks of Family Journal’s Christmas issue have been sitting untouched, wrapped in plastic, in the common-area tent since November. Now, Clement and Troels have cut open the plastic and are wistfully perusing the photos of Christmas tables brimming with roasted duck and browned potatoes. Lasse knocks the magazine out of Troels’s hands. “Up and at ’em, hillbillies,” he says.

  Lights out. Sidekick holds on the dark screen. He’s filming the waiting.

  11

  Steffensen has always considered himself a fine judge of character. Now he’s not so sure. He has no contact with his own soldiers, and everything is falling apart.

  He calls for a meeting at the flagpole to give the speech they’ve all been anticipating. The speech is a balancing act: he can neither deny nor confirm that something is wrong. If he denies that the rumors have any basis in reality, he’ll lose his authority. If he confirms the rumors, on the other hand, he risks the soldiers going into a state of panic.

  A light wind is blowing and gray clouds blanket the February sky. He hopes it doesn’t start raining before he’s finished. The camp is muddy from a shower that passed through last night.

  Steffensen, in regulation uniform, also has his combat boots on. He knows his speech by heart. The men mustn’t think he’s simply reading from the decree issued by the ministry. They’re all in the same boat, rank and file. That’s his message.

  He’s facing an infantry company, an armored vehicle platoon, and support troops—120 men altogether—though three times that number are stationed in the camp. The rest are on duty. The whole scene is mostly symbolic. He starts by saying that the situation at home remains unresolved. They are working on the case. Camp management is in constant contact with the Ministry of Defense and Army Operational Command.

  He tells them he understands their anxiety and concerns. He appeals to their sense of solidarity and says that for the next fourteen days it will be impossible to receive any news from home. And there will be no communication the other way, either.

  “You’ve all been in stressful situations before,” he says. “You’ve learned how to manage. You are strong. It’s important to remember that. Now you must pass this test.”

  He stands there for a moment, as if considering whether or not he’s finished. He looks distracted, but then he pulls himself together.

  “We’ve overcome crises before and we’ll do it again. The uncertainty is your real trial. You need to grin and bear it. That’s all I can say. We’ll all have to grin and bear it together. And if it becomes necessary, we’ll fight. There mustn’t be any doubt about who we are or why we’re here. We are here to win.”

  For a moment it looks as if he’s grinning and bearing it to emphasize his point. His jaws clench and his eyes narrow, as if he’s focusing on some spot far away.

  He used the word “win.” It’s a tactical concession to the men. He doesn’t reside in their black-and-white world, where the thought of winning means something. If he were honest, he would have used the word “function.” We’re here to make things function—though even that expression is losing any meaning for him.

  The applause is brief and dies out quickly.

  Steffensen performs his duties. He attends weekly meetings with representatives of the local authorities, including the new mayor. At first he doesn’t notice it, but then it dawns on him. No one is speaking to him anymore. Nobody comes over to say hello. The circle formed by the tables and in the courtyard outside, once the formal part of the meeting is over, doesn’t include him. Even the mayor, who, strictly speaking, is nothing but a puppet, refuses to come near him.

  “Do you think there was something unusual about the meeting?” he asks Roshaan afterward. Roshaan is a good observer, and Steffensen has faith in his assessment of a situation.

  “What would that be?” asks Roshaan.

  For a moment, Steffensen feels that Roshaan is not who he thought he was.

  He contacts Naib Atmar and lets him know that he’d like to meet with him, although even the thought of a reunion fills him with distaste. Still, Atmar is a contact he can’t afford to lose. If he wants an explanation for the silence surrounding him, he must speak to the warlord. He doubts Atmar will tell him the truth, but sometimes even a lie is better than nothing.

  They meet in Atmar’s house outside the camp entrance. The television is off and there’s no food this time. Steffensen hasn’t brought any dessert from the mess tent, either.

  “Do you have a guilty conscience?” asks the warlord at the sight of Steffensen’s troubled face. There’s a derisive tone in his voice that’s hard to miss. Steffensen stares uncertainly at him. “We Afghans have a saying you can learn from. Conscience is nothing more than a tenant in your house. If he makes too much noise, kick him out.”

  Atmar then adds something else. Steffensen stares expectantly at Roshaan. “Well,” he says encouragingly when the translation isn’t forthcoming. Roshaan has assumed the face he always uses when he has to translate something unpleasant. “This man informs me that he does not have time to meet with the commander of the Danish forces. Not now or in any foreseeable future.”

  Once again, Steffensen pictures the walls surrounding all compounds in Afghanistan. He’s a man alone in a labyrinth of fortifications. The city he’s supposed to be the formal ruler of has closed its doors to him, a logical conclusion to the developments he set in motion when, with Atmar’s help, he outsmarted the mayor. They’ve used him—and now he’s unnecessary.

  He trudges along the bastion’s massive gravel-colored wall running along the camp’s periphery. There are no tents, containers, or parked vehicles, only large empty areas that serve as safety zones should the camp come under fire. He looks at the parked personnel carriers with their mounted machine guns; he inspects the British L118 light guns lined up in the magazine; he looks at the sixty-two-ton Leopard 2 tanks; he feels the air tremble beneath a passing fighter jet; he watches a GMLRS missile cross the sky and, for an instant, reflect the sun’s rays, as if the missile is about to spontaneously combust; he hears the distant, ominous whir of a drone. As all this fighting power seems to concentrate in his chest, something starts to smolder in him, a rage completely foreign to his nature, one he’s never known before, despite his mature age.

  He asks a mechanic for permission to crawl into a Leopard 2. He works his way down toward the gunner’s area, in the front and to the right in the heavily armored body. He lies almost horizontally in the anatomically customized compartment. There’s no way to sit upright, let alone stand. He is fully encased in armor.

  Lying there, he thinks about Bartolomeo Colleoni, the general from Venice who didn’t go to war to win but to make things run smoothly, the man who took the irrationality, hatred, and violence out of the war. Now Steffensen has also suffered a defeat, but he’s no Colleoni.

  His
thoughts turn to another officer, Braga, or something like that. His body, or rather what’s left of it, is lying only a few meters away from Colleoni’s horse-and-rider statue in a sarcophagus inside the Basilica di Santi Giovanni e Paolo. For ten months, Braga led the defense of a city on Cypress against a larger Turkish army. Only when supplies dried up and a large number of troops had fallen did he achieve a worthwhile peace, saving many of the survivors’ lives. But not for . . . He struggles again to remember the name. Then it comes to him. Bragadin. The Turkish commander suddenly changes his mind; he cuts off Bragadin’s ears and nose, and then allows him to be skinned alive. He fills the empty skin with hay and, in a macabre procession, Bragadin’s stuffed body is paraded on the back of an ox through the streets.

  That’s me, Steffensen thinks. That’s what Atmar has done to me. He has skinned me alive, and now he’s parading my body through the streets.

  Returning to his office, he asks Roshaan to deliver a message to Atmar. The contract with Helmand Security is hereby terminated. A significant number of the warlord’s men have been transferred to the police. But new ones have arrived, and the security firm still exists. The same goes for the agreement to man the eight checkpoints surrounding the camp: effective immediately, the warlord’s men must vacate these posts.

  He also orders that an explosive be planted in the clay house outside the camp’s entrance, where he usually meets with Atmar. The explosion roars through the camp as the house is blown to bits, leaving a large crater in the middle. First he has them remove the television that was always on during their meetings. Now it’s sitting in the desert gravel, screen black and cord snaking across the ground. No Indian soap operas. No cleavage turning into flesh-colored clouds.

  The warlord can come and get the television, if he can’t do without it.

  The next morning there’s a thin layer of frost on the screen.

  12

  The next night a mortar grenade lands in the camp. It hits the Dust Bowl, where they keep most of the vehicles parked. In the winter, when heavy rains fall at irregular intervals, it turns into a muddy field. In the summer a permanent cloud of dust settles over the area. Unless you want sand in your teeth and red eyes that run all the time, you can’t go near the area without a shemagh wrapped around your mouth and protective glasses, like a race car driver from motoring’s early days.

  No one is hurt, nor are any vehicles struck. They all have to jump out of their cots and throw on their helmets and flak jackets. They stumble around drowsily before making their way to the camp’s bunkers, constructed of HESCO bales, sandbags, and wood.

  No more grenades fly in, and the alarm is soon silenced. At daybreak, a patrol is sent to the outposts where Atmar’s militia resides. They’re firing the mortar grenades from here.

  The next night more grenades fly in, and once again they do no harm to anything other than a good night’s sleep. Yet again they have to jump out of their cots and run around in the dark to seek cover. Afterward, there’s the same wait for the dawn, the same brooding, the same silence. They sit hunched over between the HESCO bales, their carbines in their hands, both furious and punch drunk from a lack of sleep.

  Third Platoon has sought shelter in the northeast corner of the camp. By accident, Hannah and Adam end up sitting next to each other, their platoon leader sitting not so far away. Viktor sits on the other side of Hannah, who can’t help glancing over at Schrøder. She gets a little warm every time she looks his way and forgets about the incoming mortar fire. Then she pulls herself together. She needs to keep her eyes to herself. Also, she wants to talk to Adam, who keeps looking straight ahead. She doesn’t know what to say and wishes he’d break the silence. They had such a great talk that last time, but something about his stiff expression makes it seem as if he’s consciously avoiding her. She must be imagining it—or has he suddenly become hostile toward her? Adam, she wants to say, just his name, as if it were a key that would immediately open him up. Open him up to what? Talking. Regaining confidence. Maybe it’s not the right moment.

  Viktor is talking about the importance of keeping up their courage. There’s something caring about the former social worker, something she likes.

  By the time the alarm is turned off, she still hasn’t spoken to Adam.

  The ten soldiers sent to man each of the warlord’s former checkpoints are equipped with searchlights, and mines are planted all around them. They look like islands of light in the boundless desert night, cut off from the camp like fallen satellites.

  From time to time, shots fire from somewhere in the darkness; they hear the roar of a rocket launcher and piercing cries, as if a flock of hyenas has suddenly appeared. Again and again these ominous sounds interrupt their sleep in the camp, until the soldiers are seized by a relentless agitation that stays with them, whether daylight arrives or night falls again.

  Camp management holds crisis meetings in which Steffensen must explain his actions to the Brits and the Americans. The Danes have high command. The Americans seem indifferent, while it takes some discussion before the Brits accept his decision to terminate the contract with Atmar.

  The soldiers stop sharing their uplifting experiences while on patrols: children who wave, new stalls opening in the bazaar, building materials sold along the side of the road. When children throw stones at their vehicles, they’ve always called it pranks. Now, they’re not sure how to take it. The same children who always accepted crayons, pencils, and jump ropes turn their back on them now. Have the children become their enemies?

  Steffensen decides to abandon the unnecessary checkpoints. Officers convey the order in exhausted voices. Still, they have no strategic significance in defense of the camp; their only purpose has been to pacify a local warlord.

  They reinforce the watchtowers on top of the bastion’s walls. Through their infrared binoculars, they stare out at a landscape that phosphorizes in green, as do their hands and faces when they use the binoculars to look at each other from a distance. Their eyes vanish, as if into the black sockets of a skull. On the other hand, their mouths light up, as if they have some hidden source of light, perhaps an alien being on its way out. Everything seems dead and dangerously alive at the same time. They’re preparing for an attack that never comes. Why aren’t these assholes attacking? They know the answer. Because waiting is fear’s best ally. Who’s hiding out there in the darkness? The Taliban? Atmar’s militia? They’re as vulnerable as worms that come out after a heavy rain, the lowest link on a food chain of monstrous creatures whose names they don’t know.

  Sidekick walks around hunched over. He has captured the silence by filming the night’s pulsating darkness. There are infrared recordings, too, not that they’re contributing to any sense of cheerfulness. How will he ever be able to fill the sites he wants to build on the net? Silence, waiting, darkness. Maybe it’s a realistic portrait of what war can be—but they want to see themselves. They want to see their lives out here gel into a larger narrative. Instead, everything is on standby.

  Årslev has stopped talking about aromas and taste testing. No more odes to pine needles, quince, and caramelized birch sap. Instead, he’s been cursing the Board of Health, which recently outlawed his favorite beer, Rough Snuff. Just because it contains snuff! He hates the Danish Food Agency more than he hates the Taliban, and his constant whining about it has made him tiresome.

  Clement and Troels have perused their way through the Christmas issue of Family Journal. Lasse tells them they can go home to Lille Vildmose and their beloved potatoes if they can’t take it anymore. “Really, man, it’s crappy enough as it is. Do we also have to sit here watching you two moping around?” Nikolaj and Daniel also start picking on them. Mathias and Sebastian launch a counterattack on the Gucci Boys surrounding Dennis, who’s going into withdrawal because he can’t get onto GrejFreak.dk and ShopUSA.com. Their solidarity is showing cracks, and it’s not going any better in the other platoons. The whole camp is on edge.

  Sidekick wants to film Mads, b
ut he shakes his head. He has nothing to say. Iraq Robert volunteers instead, but this time Sidekick says no. He already knows what he’ll hear. The same old stories about Iraq—about the time Robert was stuck in a convoy in a market in Sadr City, about burned-out cars, mutilated bodies doused in gasoline, charred like the remnants of some wild barbecue held by cannibals, and faces that are nothing more than crusty masks.

  The showers and toilets sparkle every morning. They don’t just wash their hands before meals; they stand in line to rub them with hand disinfectant, like doctors prepping for an operation. It’s Afghanistan they’re washing off their hands before they eat, as if the country were nothing more than infectious dirt.

  13

  They meet again in the APC in the parking lot. It’s dark.

  The day Schrøder falls apart.

  That’s how Hannah sees it. He hides behind a wall of words and seems distant. She doesn’t know whether he’s talking to her or merely out loud to himself. Sometimes she can’t tell the difference. His voice is full of a contempt she doesn’t like and it scares her.

  Every time he laughs, she squeezes the shemagh in her pocket, her talisman for warding off all evil.

  “Death is easy in a computer game. The screen goes black or red for a few seconds, and then you’re brought back to life again. Your stay in the kingdom of death lasts only for a moment. Isn’t that a relief?”

  He looks at her encouragingly. She doesn’t know what to say. So he continues. He refers to death in a video game as a pause and says that a video game is nothing more than a modern version of the belief in resurrection. “Lazarus,” he says. “In front of a screen you, too, can be Lazarus. You can be resurrected from the dead.”

  Hannah still doesn’t know what to say. What he’s saying isn’t uninteresting—it’s the way he’s saying it. The expression on his face is both intense and absent.