“Did they get him?”
She shakes her head.
“Did he kill them?”
“No, he’s keeping them alive. I don’t know why.”
“Do you want him dead?”
“Yes. I wish they were all dead.”
“All? All who?”
She stares at me with her strange, transparent eyes. There’s a power about her that repels me, but one I might need. I’m wondering if I should be afraid of her.
“You don’t want to kill anyone,” she says. “Most end up doing it anyway, but not you. You will create many difficult situations for yourself. Men kill. It doesn’t matter who they are or where they come from. They kill.”
I want to ask Sara if I’ll survive, but it will sound as if I believe in her ability to see the future. I’m not superstitious, so why should I care about her answer? Is my own fear starting to surface? I’m always afraid when I’m on assignment in Afghanistan—I’d be stupid if I weren’t—yet I also know it’s important never to question whether I’ll ever come home alive again.
Whenever I’m on assignment, I develop tunnel vision. I tell myself that it’s not about life. I pack up my fear so it’s as small as possible, and then I hide it under a rock like some disgusting insect I’d rather not touch. I can acknowledge my fear when I get home. “Of course I was afraid,” I say afterward, if anyone asks. It doesn’t cost anything, not even my image, and people feel safer if I make this little admission. Yet I would never acknowledge it to myself while the fear, the bogeyman, runs around screaming deep inside me.
“Where is he?”
“You have to decide if you want to follow me. That is your decision. But without me you will never find him.”
“And if I choose to stay here?”
The woman ignores my question.
“I’m coming with you,” I say.
The decision is made. Is it the right one? I can’t answer that. That’s the nature of my job. If I always knew the consequences of my decisions, I’d never make any. I have to take chances as they come—and right now this woman is my only chance. She has seen Schrøder, along with the vanished Danes. She knows something.
When I tell her my name, she doesn’t react. It’s as if I’m barely real to her. I’m just a tool for this strange fortune-teller, and it’s not clear what she wants to use me for. I’ll have to learn to read her.
My survival might depend on it.
19
Sara walks next to me and not behind me, as I would have expected from an Afghan woman. On the other hand, I can no longer see her face, now hidden beneath her burka. The light fabric flutters around her legs. She’s not wearing any shoes, and her feet, like her hands, are cracked and dusty. They look like old, worn-out work tools. She limps slightly, and I can see movement beneath her burka, indicating that every so often she’s grabbing her right side. The burka, which once was dove blue, is threadbare and dirty now, and the dust looks like it’s woven into the fabric. There’s a dark stain on the right side.
I turn toward her and suggest that we try to find a clinic.
“I’m not going to any clinic,” she says categorically.
“I can take a look at your wound,” I say. “I have a medic bag with me.”
She shakes her head again.
“How old is your son?”
“Eight.” She stares straight ahead as she answers.
“Eight?” I have to struggle to hide my disbelief. “Eight years old—and he shot you? But why?”
“Because he is a son of this country and he behaves like all men in this country.”
“He’s not a man—he’s a child.”
“You know nothing.” Her voice is full of contempt, although I can’t see her face. It’s like the burka is speaking to me, and it symbolizes an abyss I can never cross.
As we approach some houses, she moves behind me again.
Watchful, inquisitive eyes are everywhere, although there’s nothing suspicious about the sight of a man and a woman together. I could be her husband or her relative, so I’m no more on my guard than I would normally be.
I find a new inn where we can spend the night and pay for the beds. Sara disappears into the women’s area and doesn’t emerge until the next morning.
I buy two bus tickets going north. We’ll have to get off along the way, in the middle of the desert. Sara knows the spot. We’ll spend the next night under the open sky. At the bazaar, I buy two woolen patus as protection against the cold. I also purchase some supplies, water in plastic bottles, naan, onions, oranges, and quruts—small dried balls of salted yogurt.
When we get off the bus, there are no houses anywhere. Maybe that’s best. That way no one is watching us. But does it look suspicious to get off in the middle of a desolate landscape? I’ve seen Afghans do it all the time. You can see them waiting for a bus in some deserted spot where there’s been no sign of any dwellings for a long time.
At first we follow tire tracks heading for the horizon, and then they disappear in the sand. I walk ahead, yet she’s directing us from her position behind me. At times, I turn around to look at her, and she’s always there, at the same distance. I lose the feeling of having any company. I pace through a deserted landscape.
When darkness falls, we share our supplies. We drink out of our plastic bottles. I don’t start a fire, although this stretch of desert is full of dried bushes that could easily feed a good fire. I ask about her son. She shakes her head, as if I still won’t be able to understand the answer.
“Why me?” I ask. “Why were you waiting for me? Why couldn’t you find any Afghans who would help you?”
“You are stronger.” She has thrown back her burka and is staring me in the face.
“Stronger?” Surprised, I stare back. “I’m alone. I’m unarmed. How can I possibly be stronger?”
Wrapping her patu around her, she stretches out on the desert sand, a signal that the conversation is over. There are a couple of meters between us, about the same distance as when we’re awake. I doubt I’ll be getting much sleep. The temperature is falling rapidly, and the patu isn’t warm enough to prevent me from shivering in the cold. I can barely make out her shape in the cold light of the stars already filling the evening sky—so many that it seems as if each constellation has a doppelgänger. She draws the patu closer; she seems to be having trouble staying warm, too. I close my eyes and lie there for a while, but sleep won’t come.
Hearing movement, I open my eyes. Sara gets onto her knees and, with the patu wrapped around her gaunt body, crosses the short distance to me. She lies down next to me, her back to me, and presses against me. It’s not me she’s seeking—it’s the heat of my body. I pull her close, also seeking hers. Her hair smells like dust. Her body smells, too, but not the sour smell of sweat; it’s a dry smell of dust and smoke that could just as easily be coming from the landscape. I stop shaking from the cold. She could be a log, no more organic to me than a piece of wood. I’m just warming myself by the embers.
Just as I’m about to fall asleep, she starts to mumble. She speaks in a monotone, as if she’s talking in her sleep. It’s a horrifying tale with many pauses, and each time I think it’s done, she starts up again.
One night she is awakened by a terrible scream coming from a child in the qalat where she lives. In the glow of the fireplace, she sees a woman holding a child, maybe one or two years old, over a large pot of boiling water. The woman dips the child in until the boiling water reaches its thighs. The child screams in pain, and the woman quickly pulls the child up out of the pot. Wrapping a shawl around it, she lays the child on the floor and talks soothingly. But the child keeps screaming.
“The woman—was it you?” I say.
“It was not me,” she whispers.
“Where is she?”
“She’s inside me now. Every night she tries to come out.”
“So what do you do?”
“I never sleep.”
“And the child is your son, the boy
who shot you?”
“I have no son. He was stuffed into me. He is his father’s boy—not mine. Do you know what a son is? Your future tyrant if you are a woman. Nothing more. First you love him. Then you learn to fear him. He is not yours. You belong to him. You belong to them.”
“Who?”
“The men!”
I find Sara’s behavior unforgivable, regardless of her mental state at the time. Even insanity is no excuse. I’m filled with anger and disgust, yet I also feel a kind of sympathy that surprises me. Sympathy for her, for the boy I’ve never met, and for everyone locked in this maelstrom of violence, pulling the country in deeper and deeper. Will we all end up like this boy? Like this mother? Maybe like both of them, victim and executioner, at the same time?
I feel the urge to take her hand, though I know I mustn’t. Yet I suddenly feel that Sara, this crazy woman, is my mission in Afghanistan. The darkness, her voice, and the uncertainty about everything ahead of us make me feel this way. I know that when morning comes, I’ll look at things differently.
“And the man you are married to?” I ask. “Why are you alone?”
“‘Go out and fight the Americans,’ I told him. ‘I will be the first to receive news of your death.’ He struck me so hard that I fell at his feet. ‘Coward,’ I said to him. ‘Go on, little man—and show your courage.’ And then he came home. He had been shot in the stomach. He was very frightened. The children were rushed out of the room. They left him to me. He begged me for water. I rubbed the skin on his stomach like it was a dirty floor. He screamed in pain and begged me to stop. That’s how he died.”
Here’s a man conquered by the very person he abused, I think. But it’s no victory when the abused takes her abuser with her. It’s no victory when the destroyed simply passes on the destruction.
As she begins her tale, Sara’s voice is a monotone, but it becomes increasingly intense and urgent.
“In my youth I studied medicine at the university in Kabul,” she says. “I did the opposite of everything I had learned in my studies when I was supposed to take care of my husband.”
Sara looks like she’s in her late thirties, old enough to have grown up during the Soviet invasion. Maybe she belonged to the well-educated middle class who benefitted from the Russians’ presence in a few of the larger cities. Perhaps she had a well-educated father who wanted the best for her. Then the Red Army pulled out, and Afghanistan was dragged into a merciless civil war that was especially tough on Kabul. The mujahedeen—whose attitude toward women was no better than the Taliban’s, if not worse—reduced the city to rubble. Once a confident girl with dreams, she surely lost her family. Now she’s ended up here, in the deepest despair, brutalized and half out of her mind, degraded, an animal for breeding after a life so full of humiliation and suffering that my mind can’t imagine it.
I have to know more about her. “Sara,” I say.
“Sleep,” she whispers back.
At some point I must have fallen asleep, because when I open my eyes, dawn is arriving.
She’s not there. Sitting up, I can see her in the distance. She’s squatting and pissing. As she stands up, she grabs her side again.
I grab my medic bag. I know it’s a security risk if I’m stopped and searched, though I can always claim that I’m a nurse. On my own initiative, I took the same courses as the army’s medics. I wasn’t going to fucking die from some simple infection out here.
“Show me your wound,” I say. “You won’t go to a clinic, but I can see you’re in pain.”
She doesn’t protest. Instead, she lies down on the ground and pulls up her burka. She’s wearing several layers of clothing beneath it. One of them is a long dress with an embroidered front that might have been quite colorful once but is now faded and dirty gray. As she lifts up the dress, I can see her emaciated legs and then her crotch. I look away. The ease with which she exposes herself makes me feel that she isn’t revealing her genitals: it’s merely some random crevice in her body, whose only function she showed me when she peed in front of me. There’s no intimacy in the moment.
I examine her wound. There’s a bullet hole in her right side, just above the hip bone. Placing my hand on her hip, I turn her over; she follows my movements without resisting. There’s an exit hole on her back. The bullet obviously went right through her without causing any damage to the internal organs—at least I assume it didn’t. She’s been shot with a small-caliber pistol, probably a 9 millimeter, which means the bullet didn’t wreak enormous damage inside her body or exit in a crater of blasted flesh.
The wound looks surprisingly clean. Does this woman with her dirty body understand the first rule of the healing process—that wounds mustn’t become infected? Her medical studies could be one explanation. “Have you cleaned the wound?” I ask. She nods. I cleanse the perimeter of the wound with alcohol and then smear it with some ointment before dressing it.
After I finish, she gets up and rearranges her many layers of clothes until, once again hidden behind her burka, she’s standing in front of me. She doesn’t thank me, though I’m not sure I was expecting it. The closeness we experienced during the night is gone. We continue our journey.
The landscape shifts, and we enter a valley surrounded by brown hillsides. I can see qalats and walls, windbreaks and fields, but no people anywhere. Many of the trees have split, blackened trunks. There are bomb craters all over, and the fields haven’t been tilled in ages. I have no idea what grew here, but the land is cracked and lined with empty irrigation ditches; the desert seems to be slowly taking back the landscape, which the farmers only had on loan. On one of the smaller hills lie the remains of something that might have been an American outpost at one time. I spot a row of crumbling buildings on a plateau on the hillside framing the valley’s farthest end.
Then I see it, on the other side of the valley, a scorched area stretching up the side of the cliff, as if there’s been a raging fire. This must be the place Halim was talking about—where a drone slammed into a mountain and self-destructed.
A half hour passes before we’re standing at the bottom of the hillside to our right. To the left, a gravel path turns toward the settlement at the valley’s other side. I turn around and signal to Sara that she has to wait for me while I investigate the scene of the accident. Without speaking, she sits down.
I crawl up into the charred shrubbery until the mountainside becomes so steep that I can’t go any farther. No remains of the wreckage appear anywhere. The Americans have really cleaned up after themselves. There are footprints and marks left by wheels and tracked vehicles. The exploded drone’s fuel started a fire that spread quickly in the dried-out thicket. A chunk of the mountainside is also charred, and I can see that heat from the fire caused a minor rockslide. The piece of the steering mechanism Halim had and let me photograph must have been picked up before the Americans arrived. They’ve done careful work—it must have been quite important to them. I can see what an embarrassment it would be if it got out that the very core of their antiterrorism campaign—the supposedly invulnerable drones—had been compromised.
I kick around with my shoes in the ashes and sand. I have no idea what I’m searching for, maybe a sign that the unreal is real, that the invulnerable is vulnerable. I realize that I’m thinking of the drone the way ancient people thought of their erratic gods, like some unknown force interfering in our lives, an encounter between otherwise conflicting realities. And that’s what the drone is when it appears above Afghanistan’s landscapes, Zeus casting his thunderbolt from cyberspace.
I don’t find anything, but now I’ve been here.
I walk back along the tire tracks, where Sara is still waiting. We continue up the valley’s opposite side. She took the soldiers up there and they were ambushed—so what’s waiting for me?
I stop and turn to face her.
“What really happened here?”
Pausing, she pulls back her burka so that I’m staring into her unveiled face.
“They didn’t find him,” she says. “He found them. I told you that.”
“Yes, but what happened after that?”
“They became his prisoners. Then he also was attacked. There were battles. The man you are seeking won. But I hid.”
“You were wounded.”
“Yes,” she says. “But I wasn’t dead.”
I could have been here long before now if Halim, the warlord in Kandahar, had given me names and locations. Now I know just as much as he does, but maybe events have overtaken me yet again. Are the Danes still here?
“What’s up there?” I ask.
“Are you afraid?” She stares into my eyes.
“I am not afraid, but I need to know what to expect.”
“Go up there, and you’ll find out.”
20
Now I’m walking behind Sara. She’s still dragging one leg as if it hurts when she leans on that foot. I’ve offered her some pills for the pain, but she refused. We walk for an hour, and she doesn’t stop to rest. Then we’re there.
It looks like an abandoned bazaar. Although the narrow streets are deserted, people must have been here recently. In one square, there are small piles of ash and scattered clumps of camel shit. Nothing indicates that the bazaar has recently been open. The stalls are all closed up behind wooden shutters, but there are no padlocks. So it looks as if the previous owners made no effort to protect their property, nor have they given any thought to returning.
There are signs of a battle: bullet holes in the shutters and walls, and one of the houses has large cracks and a piece of the wall has collapsed. In other places, there are cartridges, all from Kalashnikovs. I pick one up. Is this how the Danes met their end? Were they simply defeated? I show Sara one of the pointy copper casings.
“They fought in the streets,” I say.
“Yes,” she says, “but it was not your men who were fighting. There were others. This happened after they were taken prisoner.”
“What happened there?”
The First Stone Page 41