The First Stone

by Carsten Jensen

  Schrøder laughs, a strange staccato laughter that sounds as if something inside of him has broken loose. She’s never heard him laugh like that before.

  “Is something wrong?” she asks.

  Schrøder ignores her. He’s speaking very loudly. “Maybe it’s here, of all places, on these latitudes, in Afghanistan, in the most stinking backwater of all, that moons, comets, and fables collide.”

  “Sssh! What if someone hears us?”

  “Justice! Hope! Just the words! I want to throw up! Picture an overweight man with osteoporosis. Watch him falling apart.”

  Finally he stops talking. They make love. For the first time he doesn’t look into her eyes when he climaxes. He’s far away. She’s not present, either. She keeps thinking about the things he has said, not the words but the rage in his voice, a dangerous zeal. She doesn’t know where it will all lead.

  She gets the crazy thought that maybe she should confide in Adam. Is she naïve? But Adam would understand. He would listen. She feels lonely, the same damn lonely feeling she thought she’d finally escaped. She feels as if she has taken a vow of silence with Schrøder. But maybe that’s how love is. You’re sucked into one world and turn your back on the rest.

  “Do you know who Stalin is?” he asks. She has gotten up off the floor. She’s standing with her back to him and putting on her T-shirt.

  “Everyone knows who Stalin is.”

  “So you don’t think he’s just some Bosnian gangster in Grand Theft Auto?”

  Is he being condescending or is this some kind of humor, a new side she hasn’t seen before? She wants to ask him but decides not to.

  “Did you know that he went to seminary?”

  She shakes her head.

  “When he was twenty-three, he tore some old, valuable icons off the walls and pissed on them. He’d already committed his first murder.”

  Hannah has just pulled up her pants and is fastening her belt. She crouches down to tie her bootlaces.

  “Pol Pot—know what he did when he was twenty?”

  Hannah shakes her head again. She doesn’t know who Pol Pot is. She’s not sure she understands where Schrøder is going with all this.

  “Pol Pot murdered a quarter of the inhabitants of Cambodia. At the age of twenty he was still wearing a school uniform. He was the teacher’s pet at a school in a small provincial town. He’d never harmed a soul. Neither had Hitler or Mao when they were his age. Stalin was the exception, not the rule.”

  Hannah, who has tied up her boots, stands up. Schrøder is still sitting on the floor. He looks up at her. “Someone ought to give all of you the grand tour in murder. You’re all trained killers. But what did the geniuses of mass murder do when they were your age? Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, the whole succession of psychopaths? Nothing special. They hadn’t discovered their talents yet. You’re all already on your way. At the age of twenty! Do you all even know what you’re going to do with yourselves?”

  Furious, she stares at him. “Do you expect me to answer that?”

  “If I were an unholy warrior, would you follow me everywhere?” His tone suddenly shifts. His expression is pleading, but in such an affected way that she feels she’s being mocked.

  Everything he’s said is so unfair. And now he’s saying “you all” to her. Their little circle is broken; he cast her out of it. In his eyes, she’s no better than the others.

  She turns around and crawls out of the vehicle. She doesn’t say goodbye.

  Before long she is seized by the fear of losing him. She needs to turn around and apologize. Or wait for him. But they can’t be seen together. Not really knowing what she should apologize for, she becomes angry with herself. Schrøder is erratic, and she must be careful not to become dependent on him. She should have never started all this, she thinks suddenly. She barely thinks so before she starts missing him and fears that something is about to go wrong between them. Why did he say all that shit? The contempt in his voice. Where did that come from? She clenches the shemagh in her pocket.

  As she steps onto the illuminated path running between the soldiers’ tents, Adam appears in front of her. Adam, whom she wants to confide in . . . but there’s something in his face she can’t read, so she decides not to. Not now anyway.

  “You’re too much, you know that!”

  Adam’s voice is out of control. And then suddenly he seems to lose his courage. His shoulders fall. She’s about to veer around him when his anger flares up again. “You think I don’t know? That you’re whoring around with Schrøder! Is it some kind of father-figure bullshit? Have you found your long-lost father? Is that it, Hannah?”

  Her eyes fill with tears and she hates herself for it, even though they’re tears of rage. She strikes out at him. Not some girlish slap but a hard one to the chest, which makes the large man fall backward.

  Adam sits in the middle of the path and, dazed, looks up at her. She can see how embarrassed he is.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean it.”

  She walks around him and continues down the path. Adam runs up behind her and is by her side in a flash. “Leave me alone,” she says. “I don’t need this nonsense.”

  “Schrøder is full of shit.” Adam’s voice is earnest. “He’s involved in something. Hannah, something is wrong. I just want you to be careful.”

  She stops and looks Adam right in the face. She knows she’ll never forgive him for the shit he just said about Schrøder being a replacement for her father. Adam is the only one she’d ever confided in. And he used it against her.

  “Fuck you!” she says.

  14

  The soldiers from Camp Price start to drive faster on Highway 1. The high speed, the heft of the armor, and the complete control over the road provide an overwhelming sense of power. They fire several warning flares when an oncoming car doesn’t pull over quickly enough. As they roll by in their vehicles, their machine guns scan walls, stalls, and pedestrians. They notice it themselves: that second before they pull the trigger.

  And then it happens.

  Third Platoon is driving on Highway 1 in a convoy of twelve APCs and eight jeeps. Mads, Sidekick, Iraq Robert, Lasse, Daniel, Clement, Troels, Årslev, and Nikolaj are in the last APC in the convoy, and they’ve fallen behind. A wide gap has opened between them and the vehicle in front of them. Mads, the gunner, says later that the car, a white Toyota Corolla, tried to get between and run them off the road. On the film Sidekick took from the open hatch, where he always stands when they’re on patrol, it just looks like the Corolla is taking too long to pull to the side. They could have simply fired one of the flares. Instead, the 12.7 gets one right into the car’s engine.

  Mads just plain needed to do it.

  They all do.

  At high speeds, however, it’s difficult to hit a target precisely. The front windshield shatters and falls back into the car, which skids onto the shoulder and turns over on its side. A crowd of locals gathers around the car. Some scream and make threatening gestures at the convoy. If they stop, it will turn into chaos. And then, surrounded by a worked-up mob, they’ll have to change, chameleonlike, from soldiers into sympathetic first aid workers with concerned faces, providing assistance, as if it’s merely a common accident they aren’t responsible for, while they struggle to keep the furious crowd at a distance at gunpoint until they have to shoot a few of them before it sinks into their thick skulls who they are.

  Maybe there were children in the car. Maybe they’ve killed them and their parents. Fuck it! This is war. Learn it now!

  Two days later they are called in to see Steffensen. Schrøder is sitting next to him behind a desk. Steffensen looks down while he reads from handwritten notes. They shot at an oncoming car that was pulling to the side. Two people were killed and two seriously injured. The driver and the passenger in the front seat were killed by their shots. They did not stop to offer first aid. They did not report the incident on their own. This is serious. Nevertheless it has
been reported, which must be taken as a sign of the local population’s cooperation.

  “They didn’t just take matters into their own hands,” says Steffensen. “They came to us because they still believe that we stand for law and order. We mustn’t lose their confidence. And that’s exactly what we’ve done. We have human lives on our hands. This isn’t a case of unforeseen consequences from an act of war. We’re talking about innocent civilians, victims of an attack, due to either gross negligence or ill will.”

  They expect Steffensen to throw an accusatory glance their way at some point, but he never does. He simply rattles off the charges in a lifeless voice, as if going through a routine review of some meaningless rule. Silence follows. Obviously they’re supposed to say something in their defense, but the lifelessness in his voice has rubbed off on them.

  “The car continued with undiminished speed.” It is Mads who responds. “It showed no signs of stopping. It tried to get between us and the vehicle ahead of us. We were just following the rules.”

  “According to witnesses we’ve spoken to”—Steffensen shoots a quick glance at Schrøder—“the car was pulling to the side when you shot at it. Also, no flares or warning shots were fired. So at no point did you follow the rules.”

  “Witnesses? Who?”

  Schrøder fastens his gaze on them. Now Steffensen also starts to stare. They have nothing to say in their defense. They did it because they wanted to, or more accurately, because they needed to. They’re at war, for Christ’s sake! But they can’t say that. They’re standing in a container in a military camp in the middle of a strange and distant desert, surrounded on all sides by invisible enemies, enemies who plant mines in the roads they drive on every day, who shoot at them at the drop of a hat. A country full of shitheads who will jump out of the nearest field and slit their throats—and they’re not allowed to say they’re at war? War is the big, bad taboo, and what this ridiculous interrogation is really about is avoiding the forbidden word.

  “That’s war,” says Mads. “Shit happens.”

  “In Iraq—” Robert starts to say.

  “War has rules, also.” Steffensen speaks like he’s reading from the phone book.

  “You could be brought before a court. But the situation is . . .” He hesitates for a moment. It sounds as if he’s fading. Then he clears his throat. “The situation is”—he hesitates again—“unusual. I mean the situation back home, yeah, you know what I mean, the uncertainty about your relatives. Therefore, we won’t be writing any report. It won’t appear in your files. It stays between us. But”—he lifts an index finger—“if it occurs again . . .” He stops again, looking down at his papers as if searching for his next remark. “We’ll overlook it this time. In defiance of all rules. I hope you all understand that. We’re letting you go. And you have to guarantee that there won’t be a next time . . .”

  They should feel a sense of relief. Their entire lives could have just taken a sharp turn. Instead, another feeling smolders inside them. Contempt. Contempt for their boss, his tired voice and evasive glance, and this whole bullshit war they can’t even call by its real name.

  “I’ve looked into the family.” Schrøder stares directly at them. “The family that isn’t a family now. Your bullets killed both parents. A son and daughter were sitting in the back seat. The boy will be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life—if you can imagine an Afghan in a wheelchair. He’ll probably be dragging himself around on a pair of crutches. The girl will recover, but her face is disfigured. She’ll probably never marry.”

  Uncomfortable, they shift their weight from one leg to the other. They feel as if they’ve been on trial for a long time.

  “Mads,” says Schrøder, looking directly at him. Mads, who stiffens when he hears his name, stares straight ahead at a point somewhere to the right of the platoon leader. “You lost your girlfriend a month ago. A stabbing. The case is still unsolved. I’m sure you can identify with what’s happened here if you try. Simon, your father was run down by a hit-and-run driver, so surely you can understand the consequences of your”—they can hear the anger in his voice—“shooting spree. Now you have destroyed a family. Is that what all of you think war means—private acts of vengeance against innocent people? Or maybe they’re not so innocent in your eyes? They’re only Afghans, after all, right? They’re all alike, so you might just as well shoot one as the other? Random shootings—that’s been their life for three decades now. Sometimes it’s foreign armies shooting at them, sometimes their own. Is that your ambition? To be yet another in a series of executioners camping out in their country? Weren’t we the ones who were supposed to make a difference?”

  They look at each other as they leave Steffensen’s office and cross the square with the three flags. They’re struggling to look unaffected, but their heavy silence speaks volumes. Why did they shoot? To hide their own vulnerability?

  It’s so impossible, all of it. Overwhelmed by the complexity of the situation, they collapse on their cots. Commands exist to extricate a soldier from his dilemma—but they’re certainly not getting any commands.

  “Fuck them,” says Iraq Robert. “In DarkSky, we also picked off a few civilians who weren’t moving fast enough. That kind of thing happens. It didn’t stop the Danish government from signing a contract with the firm. They knew what the hell was happening. Hypocrites!”

  “Ask us to fucking kill someone,” Mads says into Sidekick’s camera. “Send us down into the Green Zone and tell us not to come back until we’ve cleared the area. Make life simple for us! Then it won’t matter if we’re the good guys or the bad guys—we can always discuss that later with the chaplain. Shoot, that’s what we can do. That’s what we want to do. So let us fucking do it. Or are we here just to let others shoot at us and not respond?”

  Though his voice is sarcastic, his eyes reveal the same dark despair as before. “We’ve destroyed a family. I can’t even stand thinking about it. A boy on crutches. What should we do? Take him home with us? A girl with a disfigured face. How disfigured? Is her jaw shot off? Does she have only one eye left? No nose. A black hole in her cheek? Does one of us have to marry her?

  “We’ve injured other people. Well, of course we’ve injured other people. What else is the purpose of running around with a large, evil gun in your hand and spending a whole year learning how to handle it in the most effective way? We’re not Doctors Without Borders, are we?”

  15

  The survivors are admitted to the field hospital at Camp Bastion, and Steffensen orders the soldiers to visit them as part of their penance. Schrøder comes along as their platoon leader. Naturally, they’re all guilt-ridden, but they don’t understand what good it will do to visit the hospital. The children don’t know who they are. Say hello to the people who shot their mother and father? They’ve come to ask how you’re doing? Is that how they should be introduced?

  After a brief discussion, they decide that Sidekick should bring his camera.

  A Danish nurse stares disapprovingly at them when she realizes who they are. If she’s so sensitive, what’s she doing here? What gives her the right to judge them? She’s a part of all of it, too, another cog in the killing machine.

  Mads, Iraq Robert, Årslev, Clement, Troels, Lasse, Nikolaj, and Daniel stand by the beds with their hands folded in front of their crotches. They look like soccer players trying to protect themselves in front of a goal. They’ve made a free kick—a very direct free kick—and now they’re facing the result: a pair of children who will never walk or have lost an eye or part of a jaw. They can’t keep track of the list of anatomical catastrophes they’ve caused, and the sight of the children in their hospital beds isn’t helping. They’re wrapped in bandages and casts, as if they’d fall apart if they weren’t, and there’s no hope that they’ll become whole again behind the bandages. They aren’t starfish; a lopped-off arm won’t simply grow back again. Maybe all of Afghanistan is like these children, not a starfish but a country that has lost so much that it
can never become whole again and must spend all of eternity hobbling around on crutches, seeing with only one eye, stinking of iodine and rotten wounds behind bacteria-infested bandages, with no prospect of work or marriage, no future, dependent on foreign helpers who have to constantly pump antibiotics into the very bodies they’ve shattered to prevent gangrene from spreading and bacteria from growing even stronger, while the doctors cut and cut until there’s so little of the patient left that the stump can no longer be called a person and the last chunk of flesh is tossed into the dumpster with the rest of the garbage from the slaughterhouse. Every doctor’s nightmare. And isn’t that also every soldier’s nightmare? To discover that death reigns on both sides of the front and that there’s really no difference between you and the enemy? You both have death as your employer, and you carry out its orders in perfect harmony with each other.

  What should they say?

  Schrøder gives a little speech in Pashto for the children. He points at his men, one by one. The children’s eyes follow his finger. The men have no idea what he’s saying; he never translates it for them. When he’s finished speaking, a smile breaks out on one of the small, bandaged faces.

  Sidekick has turned off his camera.

  No one asks to see the recordings.

  16

  “I want to seek asylum,” says Roshaan, who, unannounced, steps into Steffensen’s office.

  Oh, no, thinks Steffensen, not this again.

  Roshaan looks like a man in disguise. He has let his beard grow since Ali Shar’s murder, and now his face is completely covered. He must have been trimming his eyebrows before, because they’re much bushier now, too.

  “Asylum?”

  Steffensen tries to hide his embarrassment. Whether Roshaan wants to come to Denmark now or later is totally irrelevant. It will never happen. He might just as well try to walk through a wall.