The First Stone

by Carsten Jensen

  When we return with the little body wrapped in a shawl, the men are still dragging stones for the Malalai sisters’ ziarat. Yet another myth is taking shape before my eyes. Pilgrims will come here, but thinking of the dead won’t make them feel that time heals all wounds. Revenge is a better remedy. Nothing heals like a gunshot. That’s what the mausoleums to the jihadists and Malalai’s sisters are: weapons made of an indestructible material.

  Once the memorials are finished, Møller steps in front of them. He’s staring straight ahead, and I realize what he wants as he waves me over. “Translate for me,” he says. He’s decided to make a speech.

  “Forget it,” I tell him.

  He looks right at me, and his tone becomes biting in a way I haven’t heard before. “Don’t forget who I am. I’ve converted. I’m a jihadist. I’m their mullah now.” There’s no contempt in his voice, surprisingly; he sounds calm and clear as if he’s made a definite decision. “You’ll translate exactly what I say to them.”

  I nod. I can always translate what he says as something else. But what? I feel a great emptiness. Will he comfort them? Will he incite them? Or will he just fuck it all up with his disillusioned talk about a merciless god whose only purpose is destruction? Hannah is still standing with the women, and Steffensen and Simon stare down at the ground. I can see how exhausted and confused they are. Simon’s medic bag, lying at his feet, has become the most useless object in the world. He hasn’t saved any lives today. And Steffensen? He’s finally realized that all plans fall short on the battlefield. In war, there’s no place for good will. His mission is as much of a failure as mine. But Møller, who has just renounced God, seems somehow electrified.

  The chaplain focuses on a patch of blue sky between two mountainsides framing the valley, the kind of blue you only see in the mountains. He speaks as I’ve never heard him speak before, as if his voice is coming from someone else, with a resonance as deep as the Hindu Kush, born of the deserts we have crossed, of the mountains we’ve wandered through, of imprisonment and humiliation, of doubt and lost faith, of murder and massacre and retaliation. He seems like someone possessed. I know he eats hash, so maybe he’s high and it’s the drug talking. I heard he wasn’t a particularly inspired preacher. I’ve also heard that he was entirely different one-on-one, attentive and understanding. Everything made sense in his presence; soldiers left a conversation with an inexplicable feeling of strength. I can see all that in the way he’s speaking now, as if the intimacy he was able to establish with one person now exists with around a hundred.

  “The world might end at any hour of the day!” he yells.

  I don’t know where he’s finding the words. If not the Koran, could it be some Christian scripture? It doesn’t matter. The talk of destruction reflects the Afghans’ own lives, and, as if Møller has sensed their very thoughts, he goes on.

  “It rains fire from the sky,” he calls out. “The ground opens beneath your feet. Your homes collapse. Your fields are destroyed. You’re running for your life. You see your children die, your daughters raped. Wherever you go, you’re slaughtered. You know what it means to suffer. Your lives are hard. But your enemies don’t know what it means to suffer and lose. They think life is sweet.”

  He delivers the sentences staccato, pausing between each of them and then delivering the next in rising excitement. It’s all in his voice and facial expressions. My translation, which I deliver as soberly as possible, is merely a footnote.

  “These mountains—which no one can conquer—speak to you every single day. They speak when your enemies die. They speak when you help each other. Listen, listen to the mountains.”

  It doesn’t matter where he’s finding the words. They’re really coming from the Afghans themselves. I can see it. Møller is speaking for the mountains, for the earth, for the plow, for the draft animals, for experiences dating back to when the first people settled here. Who is he denouncing with such great passion? Everyone who doesn’t know the mountains’ unyielding laws, those haughty invaders who confuse a mountaintop with steps leading to new conquests.

  The men take their Kalashnikovs from their shoulders and aim them at the sky. They fire, and the thunder rolls through the mountains.

  Once the sound dies down, the moans of the wounded are all that’s left.

  Suddenly I spot them, wrapped in shawls, wearing black turbans and backpacks. At least a dozen of them. They disperse among the wounded and kneel down beside them. Opening their backpacks, they take out bandages and instruments as their trained hands examine the recumbent bodies.

  Everyone stares at them. They stand up and greet us by slightly bowing their heads while placing their hands on their hearts.

  It’s only the first wave.

  A few moments later, a larger group appears, not as many as we are, about fifty men, but they move with the long, determined steps of warriors. They’re festooned with bandoliers, and on their shoulders they have not only automatic rifles but rocket launchers as well. They aren’t refugees like us.

  The man in front walks over and introduces himself. His name is Pason. “You must be Khaiber,” he says. Perhaps he recognizes me from a photograph. Beneath the black turban, he has a sharp-featured face framed by a gray-speckled beard. Like the others before him, he lays his hand on his heart.

  “Your father says hello,” he says.

  My plan worked.

  The Taliban have arrived.

  50

  In the few hours remaining before the abrupt nightfall, we prepare to leave. The Taliban’s vanguard consists of doctors and trained medics, much like a regular army, and they—along with the villagers, Steffensen, Simon, Møller, and Hannah (who’s rejoined the group)—carry off the wounded on emergency stretchers identical to those the Danes use. Steffensen stares inquisitively. I haven’t told him who the newcomers are yet, but I’m going to have to eventually. As we make our way up a mountain path, I assume we’re heading toward a new valley parallel to the one we just passed through.

  Who’s waiting for me, and will my father already be there?

  I was rootless in my twenties and deeply confused about everything, just like my father when he arrived in Denmark in the mid-eighties—full of loathing for the Afghan mujahedeen he’d fought against and contempt for the Afghan Communists he’d been fighting for. I think that explains what eventually happened between us. I reminded him too much of himself.

  “Rootlessness, my son,” he used to say, placing a hand on my shoulder and staring into my eyes, knowing full well that I’d rather look anywhere else. “Rootlessness is the greatest of all evils.”

  And I was pretty fucking rootless. He always said, “My son.” There was a bond between us, and he wanted to remind me. The most rootless and confused person I knew felt it was his calling to be my mentor.

  He cured his own rootlessness with the most effective of all remedies. He labeled himself Pashtun and rediscovered the Muslim faith he had turned his back on when he became a Communist. He created a new persona out of the two worst sources of antagonism he could find: ethnicity and religion. The Pashtun culture stretches back two thousand years—some say five thousand. Measured against that, Islam is no more than a recent guest in the Afghan mountains and deserts. He placed an enormous burden on his shoulders, but he needed a burden. And he wanted me to share the load.

  I didn’t see his offer as a gift, however; I saw it as a curse. Tradition means expectations. And forced reciprocity. You have to do what eighty generations have done before you. I said thanks but no, thanks. I might have been unsure of myself, but not that unsure.

  I’d been the lost son—then I became the bad son. That’s how he made me feel. Guilt makes people easier to manipulate. So he became indulgent, biding his time until the guilty feelings he’d sown would reap their rewards.

  He invited me to Quetta, where he had settled. I visited him often, but everywhere I went, I was followed, even when I asked if I could walk around alone. I was lectured constantly, sometime
s by men I found detestable, sometimes by men I couldn’t help but admire. Still, the message was always the same: I should return to my roots, like my father. To return to your roots is basically a conversion erasing all former mistakes.

  Although I quickly realized my father was a member of the Taliban’s inner circle, I never revealed that knowledge to anyone. They don’t know anything about it at work, although they must speculate. Just what they’re speculating about I have no idea—maybe something that isn’t so far from the truth. They know I’ve visited him in Quetta. They don’t suspect me of being a double agent, and I’m certainly not. I don’t want to betray Denmark, but I don’t want to betray my father, either. In other words, I’m facing a dilemma. I want my father to help get the surviving Danes out of here alive. In return, I’ll make some concessions, including asking forgiveness for my mistakes.

  I know I’m a traitor in my father’s eyes. Not to any specific country—none of us has any country we can call our own. Denmark is more of a homeland to me than his fantasy country, Pashtunistan. No, I’ve betrayed the values he lives by, even though he didn’t raise me in them. He came to them later in life. To me, his newfound fanaticism was nothing more than an emergency exit, a fire escape he crawled down desperately, not because the house was on fire but because he couldn’t find his way around all its rooms.

  He offered me everything I didn’t have in Denmark. He’d find me a girl I could marry. A nice little qalat where I could settle down with relatives and other true believers. There were men ready to die for me.

  And I said no to all of it.

  He’s never really given up on me, nor has he condemned or rejected me. Maybe it really is a love that even my disappointments can’t kill. Maybe he has some psychological insight into guilt’s corrosive power, which even the most fundamental convictions can’t withstand. Or maybe the fanatic in him simply refuses to give up. He’s convinced that the most persistent always win, so he’s waging psychological guerrilla warfare against me.

  The last time we parted, he gave me an address where he could be reached. He said a cell phone was too risky, and I understood that his current life led him to many locations. I could tell that he was hoping I would need him one day. And now I do.

  Then I started working for the secret service. I found my way, no thanks to him; to be honest, I should say I found a way out, and like all ways out, it’s temporary. That’s my path in life now: temporary. Most importantly, he wasn’t guiding me. If he knew what I was doing, he’d denounce me for having gone over to the enemy.

  How should we meet? Like two politicians trying to reach a compromise? Should we hope for a temporary cease-fire? Or should I bet it all on our blood ties? That’s the question.

  I’m assuming a father won’t take his own son’s life. And that’s quite a gamble.

  51

  I was wrong when I thought the path the Taliban have us on would lead to a parallel valley. As we climb farther up into the mountain, the path neither rises nor falls. We’re moving horizontally across an enormous stony hillside. Rocky protrusions cast shadows here and there, where the snow still lies in drifts. It’s several hundred meters down to the valley floor, though it’s not a vertical fall. If you were to trip here, you’d be in for an unpleasant roll before the hillside’s numerous large rocks would probably stop you. Just looking down is dizzying.

  The path is wide enough for two, so Simon is walking beside me. I’ve noticed he looks even paler and is sweating profusely, despite the fall in temperature this late afternoon. I’m sure it’s the extreme emotions he has been through. He’s a professional medic, but he’s been repeatedly exposed to mutilated, dying, and dead bodies. I’m suddenly worried he might go into shock.

  “Are you all right?” I ask.

  He stares at me intensely. “Do you know anything about cow stomachs?”

  I shake my head. Where’s he going with that question? Maybe he really is falling apart. “Not really. I know they have several stomachs . . .”

  “Four. They have four stomachs.” He keeps staring at me as if what he’s telling me is of the utmost importance. “I’m thinking about the reticulum.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s where the indigestible food is sorted from the digestible. Everything the cow can’t digest stays in the reticulum. Nuts and bolts, plastic bags, that kind of stuff. Know what happens when the reticulum becomes full?” Simon keeps staring at me as if his life depends on my answer.

  I have no idea what to say. I don’t know anything about cow stomachs.

  “It explodes! The reticulum explodes! And that’s how my brain feels right now! Like a reticulum!”

  He suddenly disappears. He was so caught up in what he was saying that he got too close to the edge. He must have missed a step, because now he’s tumbling down the steep hillside. He’s falling fast but doesn’t get far—maybe eight or nine meters—before his head hits a sharp stone.

  I scramble down to him, but I can already see that it’s bad. He’s not moving. I lean over him. He’s not breathing and he has no pulse. My hand gets soaked in blood as I lift the back of his head. Two Afghans crawl down to us. We carry him back up and lay him carefully on the path. The back of his head is bleeding profusely. I look up and shake my head. Hannah hides her face in her hands. Her shoulders shake helplessly, and she makes no attempt to control herself. Neither Steffensen nor Møller say anything. Simon’s death seems to underscore the meaninglessness of our entire endeavor. We’ve survived the most unthinkable horrors—and then one of us trips and busts his head in a completely random accident.

  They bring over a stretcher, and, along with three others, I carry him. Simon wasn’t particularly large, and now he feels unnaturally light, as if death has already caused significant weight loss.

  A cave appears behind one of the rocky protrusions, and the Taliban lead us into it. This is where we’ll have to wait.

  The cave’s walls are black with soot. In the fading light from the entrance, I see other openings farther in. A raw chill permeates the air. Spring and the outside light can’t penetrate here. Piles of firewood are lined up along one wall, alongside sacks. Supplies, I assume. We aren’t the grotto’s first guests.

  The Taliban direct the stretchers with the wounded on them to an opening farther in. We carefully set the stretcher with Simon down on the uneven floor. I can tell that the others aren’t ready to say goodbye to him yet. They turn on their headlamps. For a while they sit staring at the dead soldier, Hannah still crying, though her cries are muffled now. The lights from their headlamps turn toward me.

  “Give me a headlamp,” I say. “I want to see you if we’re going to talk.” Steffensen hands me one and I snap it on. They were eleven when we began. Camper and Sylvester, Sebastian and Mathias, Viktor and Andreas, and Dennis were still alive. Now Simon is gone, too. The difference is enormous. Back then, Third Platoon still felt like a close-knit group, and I could tell that that’s how they perceived themselves. Now only three remain.

  There’s nothing I can say to comfort them. The only thing I can do is tell them what’s about to happen.

  “We’re staying with the Taliban,” I say.

  I don’t say anything about the role my father will play—no reason to reveal the weaknesses in my plan.

  “And you’ll be seeing Schrøder again.”

  52

  I sit looking out at the mountainside. The fifteen graves outside the cave’s entrance are all the wounded we couldn’t save, now lying under small mounds of stone. We couldn’t bury them in the ground because no shovel, let alone a pair of naked hands, could dig into this rugged terrain. So we’ve simply placed stones on top of the bodies to protect them from wolves and bears. The stones look like landmarks on a landscape whose steepness and inaccessibility seem to symbolize eternity. Farther away, in the valley where their villages lie, there’s another kind of eternity, the earth they’ve been cultivating for thousands of years. Their lives exist somewhere in the t
ension between these two eternities: earth and death. Simon is lying here, too, the same bloody pennants waving above his grave.

  I’m holding Andreas’s camera. He was filming to the very end—even while running for his life. I found the camera next to him on the rocky plain.

  I think about his great project: to create an internet memorial to both the living and the dead, soldiers filmed up close, at war and every day in between, screens wallpapered with war’s endless parade of moments, a vault filled with lived and abruptly ended lives, more detailed than anyone’s memory. There isn’t much power left in the video camera. I watched as much as I could. If Andreas wanted to create a great narrative about the war, he failed. There’s nothing more than bits and pieces, half bodies, shattered limbs, destroyed faces, the detritus of dreams and half-accomplished deeds. Not a monument, only a hall of cracked mirrors. Isn’t this the truth about every war memorial? Isn’t it already a ruin, right from the start?

  I find a recording of the flayed bodies lining the road as we left Khan Kala. I had no idea Andreas had filmed it or I would have stopped him. I can see that his hands were steady. Is this what the camera was for him? Protective sunglasses when he had to stare into the white-hot sun of nothingness?

  At one point, Andreas talks directly into the camera. It must be a recording from Camp Price. He’s reading from a piece of paper. I don’t know if he wrote it, but it sounds like a manifesto. “Like the universe, the internet is constantly expanding,” he reads uncertainly. “Imagine a star. Now imagine how its light travels through the universe to reach a planet infinitely far away. That’s how the internet is—light traveling through a universe and constantly expanding. And even though the star has long since extinguished, the picture of its light is eternal. That’s us and our actions when we appear on the net. We’re the light that can’t be extinguished, starlight that never fades.”