99 Nights in Logar

by Jamil Jan Kochai

  Our search party stood at this fork in the chase, glancing from the maze to the road, from the road to the maze, and then back to the toot. We were so hungry and the toot was so sweet, we ate too much too quickly, and our mouths got sticky from the juice. Gul said he was going to wash his face and he gestured for me to follow him. We walked across the trail, past this hedge of chinar, and slid down a slope of clay into the bank of a canal, where I washed my whole face and where Gul mostly focused on his mustache.

  All of Gul’s sisters used to say that he had the most beautiful lips they’d ever seen on any man or woman and that it was a crime for him to cover them up with the monstrosity growing beneath his nose. But Gul wouldn’t listen, and as he moved through his teenage years, the mustache grew thicker and thicker, and to the rest of the girls in his family, at least, Gul grew less and less beautiful. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Gul was a good-looking kid even with his mustache, at least much better looking than me or Dawood, but we did wonder why he was so adamant about hiding his lips.

  “You know what happened here?” Gul asked me.

  I told Gul I didn’t, which was true.

  “You don’t know what happened to your Watak Kaakaa?”

  Watak was Agha’s little brother. I heard that he was executed during the war by the Russians. Died really young, a kid practically. A shaheed of the highest purity.

  That’s all I knew.

  “This is where it happened,” Gul said, pointing to the earth beneath his feet as if that were the exact spot, as if we squatted right where he was standing when the Russians slit his throat or shot his face or filled his heart with lead.

  The shade from the chinar fell slantwise against the bank of the water where we knelt.

  He must have fallen in the water, I thought, it must have carried him.

  “Shagha never told you that story?”

  “Sometimes bits and pieces. But never the whole thing.”

  “No one hears the whole thing.”

  “Just bits?”

  “Just pieces. Shagha’ll tell you the story piece by piece. And you’ll have to put it together yourself, and when you do, you have to come and tell me too. You understand?”

  White lilies fell from the chinar, scattering on the water.

  “Maybe we should go back,” I said.

  “We’ll capture Budabash first. Then we’ll go back.”

  “But how much farther you want to go?”

  “Down that road,” he said, “in about a kilometer or two, we’ll get to your father’s compound. I figure we can go at least that far. And if we don’t find Budabash by then, we knock at the gate, and you tell them who you are, who your father is, and we spend the night there.”

  “Wallah?” I asked.

  “Inshallah,” he said.

  Though I would’ve preferred a “Wallah,” I took the “inshallah” with faith.

  When we walked back out on the road, we found Zia and Dawood whispering to each other beneath the mulberry tree. The two of them had created a secret pact in order to gather the strength to call for a second jirga, demanding that we, as a clan, a tribe, a nation, reinitiate our former council and vote on whether we should abort our prolonged mission.

  “It’s getting dark,” Zia said.

  “I’m getting hungry,” Dawood added.

  Gul wasn’t buying it. “We’ll go a little farther,” he said, “just until Shagha’s house.”

  “Gul, you keep saying a little farther, just a little farther,” Zia argued, “but you can’t force us unless we vote on it. We all agreed to save Budabash, but now me and Dawood want to head back. You’re the only one who wants to keep going.”

  “Marwand wants to keep going.”

  “Marwand wants to go back.”

  “Well, what do you say, Marwand? You want to go home?” Zia asked.

  “Or you want to go on?” Gul added.

  The three of them looked to me for an answer and, Wallah, I was trying to come up with one that might make everyone happy, but the toot juice in my belly wouldn’t let me think.

  “What’s your vote?” Gul asked.

  And just as my guts were about to give up and give in, I shouted: “Ghwul!” as loud as I could, and ran off through the chinar.

  Hidden in between some bushes near the fields on the other side of the bank, I squatted and waited. Down the road the voice of a child called out the adhan from the megaphone of a mosque’s citadel, and even with the static and the echo and the cracking of his pitch, it sounded so sweet in the fading light, with the fields darkening, and the crickets chirping their songs.

  When the adhan finished, Zia stepped through the chinar and started to pray his Maghrib Salah near the stream. He recited his verses out loud, singing the surahs even though he prayed by himself. Funny thing was Zia didn’t even know Arabic. Couldn’t tell an Aboo from an Amoo from an Aloo. But he sang surahs like a little Oum Kalthoum. The way he stretched the Name. Just the Name by itself. God, it ached you to hear it.

  Behind me, the fields rustled and the dark crept at my back.

  “Asalamalaykum Rahmutallah wa Barakatu,” Zia said to the angel sitting on his right shoulder, and just before he turned his head toward the angel on his left to say his final salaam, I too peeked past my left shoulder, through Atid, God’s first informant, and clenched my guts and watched the dark fields at my back, whose every single stalk of grain trembled back and forth and side to side, while the whirlpool in my belly spun wildly into itself.

  And all at once.

  Zia finished his salaam.

  I shat my flood.

  Atid wrote this down.

  The wind parted the wheat.

  And a shadow leapt from the field, toppling me over like a pile of rocks.

  On the Thirty-Second Night

  Gul came bursting through the chinar, shouting half phrases in Farsi and Pakhto: “Zia, goddamn it, Zia, Budabash, Zia, fuck, Zia, Budabash, Zia, quit praying, Dawood, sniff, get to sniffing, sniff the Budabash, Budabash, and where the fuck is Marwand?”

  I was still hiding between the bushes and the fields, desperately trying to wipe the shit off my clothes. I worked quietly, without breathing, and as soon as Gul left with a curse and a huff, I hobbled over to the canal, took a deep breath, and jumped in. Gul must have heard the splashing.

  “Marwand . . . ,” he started saying before he spotted Zia a little ways up the canal, still facing toward the Kaaba, his hands before his face, his head bobbing to the tune of a song we couldn’t hear.

  Standing in the stream, I looked to Gul as Gul looked to Zia as Zia looked to God, and I could see that Gul was being torn at the moment between his uncle’s inclination to beat the shit out of Zia for ignoring him and his long-held Afghan’s esteem for the act of worship, whether faked or not.

  Gul ordered me to stay and wait for Zia, but it took such a long time for him to finish his prayers. At first, I sat beside the stream, watching him, waiting for him to finish, trying to guess which head bob, which dua, which surah would be his last, but he just went on and on until I got tired of it and went back toward the road and sat beneath Watak’s mulberry tree.

  It was cold on the road by myself as wet as I was.

  About two seconds later, Zia came crawling through the chinar, finally finished with his prayers, and sat right next to me. I gave him a suspicious look, like I see you. And he, in response, gave me an expression of innocence as if to say, God sees all, which was true, you know. I guess I could have pressured him, made him explain why he kept on praying his fake prayer when Gul needed him most. I wondered if he was making a stand, if he was tired of Gul’s rule. Or if maybe he was just scared. But mostly, I think, I was so relieved we didn’t enter that dark maze in the night, with some shadow of a creature roaming its walls, I didn’t want to question why. Besides, Zia was all I had left, and I was all
he had left, and so, even though I stank horribly of toot-shit and mud, Zia unfurled his patu and wrapped it around me and him both.

  We sat there side by side and watched Watak’s marker and waited for Gul and Dawood to come back with news of Budabash, still hopeful. To pass the time, Zia asked me for a story.

  I told him I didn’t have any.

  Zia glanced at me. “You’ve said that before. When was it?”

  “A few days ago.”

  “But someone told a story,” he said.

  “Yeah, someone did.”

  And so I began.

  The Tale of the Tale of Marena and the Shit-Eating Djinn

  Listen, my maamaazai, on one of those nights when the generator busted or there wasn’t enough cash for the fuel, you and me and the guys snuck up onto the roof of the main compound, where we lay back on the rough clay and watched the stars mark the sky.

  “When the Commies came,” Gulbuddin started, “a man or a kid from every house would sleep on the roof—like we’re doing now—in case the helicopters or the bombers came up over the mountains in the night, so that the kid on the roof would hear them first and could warn the rest of the family to run toward the shelter, even though he’d be the last one in. And you know who was the guy who always lay up on this roof here? Do you know?”

  We knew. But we never said who.

  When Gul’s stories got too depressing, Dawood told Mullah Nasruddin jokes, like the one where Mullah Nasruddin carried his donkey on his back so that it wouldn’t get tired, or this other one where Mullah Nasruddin tried to teach his donkey to read to impress an emperor, or the one where Mullah Nasruddin got mad at God for killing his donkey because he prayed for God to kill his cow. And even though they weren’t really that funny, we always laughed, especially me and my brothers, who told so many stories during our first week, I said we had no more left. But you wouldn’t listen.

  “Tell us a werewolf story,” you said.

  “No, tell us an American story,” Dawood said, “about American girls.”

  “What about Shagha’s war stories?” Gul asked.

  But before I could tell them I had no stories left, Gwora spoke up.

  “I have a story,” he said.

  I shook my head at him.

  “I heard it someplace,” he said.

  I bit my lip the way Agha did when he got angry.

  “Well, how does it go?” Gul said.

  “Once, before the war,” Gwora started.

  “Which war?” Dawood said.

  “All of them,” Gwora said. “Once, before the war, there was a wicked girl named Marena. Who one day was doing the bad thing in the kamoot and while doing the bad thing got distracted by a light she saw in her head and fell through the hole and drowned in a pile of her own shit.” Gwora sucked in a deep breath and went on. “But before she could die she met a shit-eating djinn—dark green and hairy and smelling of rot—and with the permission of Shaytan, the shit-djinn made a deal with the girl. He would bring her back to life, re-created from the shit, but from then on she had to crawl from compound to compound and hide in the kamoots, where if a boy or a man came there to squat and do the bad thing, she got them by the balls and pulled them through the hole and drowned them in their own—”

  “Astagfirullah,” you said, looking more worried than the rest, “how does she die?”

  “One day,” he kept going, “after many years in the dark. After many men yanked and swallowed and drowned. After forgetting everything from when she was a girl. Even her own name. She pulls herself up through the hole of the kamoot where she first tried to die and seeing the sunlight and hearing the water and smelling the mulberries she used to pick when she was a girl. For the first time in a long time she walks out into the hottest day of the hottest summer of the decade, and the shit and the mud dripping from her skin hardens in the light and she freezes where she stands. Beneath a tree. Reaching out for a mulberry she would never eat.”

  Gwora took one last deep breath and closed his mouth.

  “Is that the end?” Dawood said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Gulbuddin clapped him on his shoulder. “Mashallah,” he said. “Nice try. Really nice. But Gwora, the ending was no good. Next time you tell it,” Gulbuddin advised, “change it up a little. Put in a hero or, even better, a bunch of heroes. And a love story. Because, Gwora, it’s okay to change a story a little if you can make it better. And heroes and love, they always make things better. Otherwise, you know, what’s the point?”

  Later that same night, Gul wouldn’t let us off the roof. He demanded that we sleep up there and keep an ear out for the copters, which roamed about the heads of the black mountains, dropping, every few minutes, some rumbling thing that barely touched us kids in the valley. It was odd, I thought, how a few miles could turn bombs into lullabies.

  In between the quakes from the mountains and the snores from the guys, I listened to the shuffling from the orchard where Budabash roamed. The nights in Logar never got too quiet, but there was a rhythm to all the sounds: the howls and the rumbling and the crickets and the snores, which always put me to sleep so much quicker than the sound of America.

  Eventually, I dreamed of my finger.

  I dreamed it was mended and whole and that none of me was missing anywhere, and when I woke up to the howling of a wolf I couldn’t see, the ghost of my finger started wriggling at the end of my hand and—

  * * *

  —

  “Like Yaseen,” Zia interrupted my story beneath Watak’s mulberry tree.

  “I don’t know Yaseen,” I said.

  “Yaseen’s my third best buddy. He’s got no foot.”

  “I’ve got my foot.”

  “Yeah, but Yaseen’s foot haunts his leg just like your finger haunts your hand. He stepped on a mine, lost his foot, and got a ghost in its place. Says he can feel it sometimes. The lost foot. Says that sometimes he forgets it’s not there. Says he wakes up in the morning and feels it there and jumps out of bed and starts running without a foot and slips and falls flat on his face. Says the ghost of his foot tricks him, and makes him fall, and he doesn’t know why.” Zia laughed for some reason, nervously. “So you should be grateful it’s just the ghost of the little bit of your finger and not a whole foot.”

  “It hurts, though,” I said. “You feel it there wriggling and when it’s gone again it hurts like the day Budabash took it.”

  “You shouldn’t have got so close so fast. You thought he was like an American dog.”

  “I thought he was like the old dog.”

  “What old dog?”

  I told him what I did to the dog in ’99.

  The Tale of the Old Dog

  Six summers ago—I remember—me, Gwora, and Mirwais were out in the orchard in Moor’s compound, searching, I think, for this nest of chicks we planned to feed with fresh worms and toot until they evolved into phoenixes or falcons.

  The orchard was wet with flood because Baba and Rahmutallah Maamaa were rebuilding entire portions of the compound from scratch. Your whole family had just returned to Logar from Peshawar. That’s why Agha brought us back that summer. It was the first time my moor had seen her home since she fled the Russians in the ’80s.

  So there we were, Agha and Moor helping Rahmutallah with the rebuild, while me, Gwora, and Mirwais helped some chicks with their lunch. As we walked deeper into the orchard, toward the corner of the northern wall where the little red chicks hid inside the puncture of an old rocket’s blast, we didn’t realize just how muddy the orchard had got that morning. In a rush to grow the chicks into woodpeckers, Gwora and Mirwais ran ahead of me, and before I knew it, the both of them were ankle deep in mud. Not only that, but every time they lifted their feet to try to slog out of the muck, they only sank deeper, as if the orchard were trying to swallow them and their new white clothes.

&
nbsp; So I stood there on the edge of the mud pit, still as clean and as white as I would ever be, and with my brothers in the heart of the muck, being eaten, and with Moor’s wrath waiting for us somewhere within the newly forged walls of the courtyard, I looked at my brothers, and they looked at me, and I knew we were all doomed no matter what.

  I couldn’t handle it any longer.

  I leapt.

  All three of us hopped and skipped and played in the mud until we found more worms, until we fed the birds, until we made mud angels, mud pies, and mud men, until we turned ourselves into Scooby-Doo swamp monsters, until Moor, maybe sensing we were gone for too long, called out our names from the courtyard.

  When she saw us, she lost it. Whupped me and Gwora with whatever she could get her hands on: chaplacks and boots and branches and those old school Afghan brooms made of spindly sticks tied together.

  A little while later, I went to visit the dog.

  He was prettier then. No scar or mange or stink. Wallah, even his fur was blonder.

  Listen, Zia, I could tell you that I was beating the dog because I was beaten, that I was six and stupid and knew no better. But here is the other thing I have to admit: the more I hurt him and the more he took it, as quiet as he did, without even a growl, the more I became attached to the dog. You see, I spent all day sitting on him, kicking him, punching him. I used to throw knives and drop huge stones on his back and watch his skin tremble and jerk. But no matter what I did, the dog just suffered it. His head down, his eyes in the mud, doing nothing to hurt me. He suffered so quietly. Day after day I went on torturing him until this one morning when Rahmutallah Maamaa caught me bashing the dog’s back with a log. He took me aside and explained about Raqib and Atid, the recording angels, and he asked me why I did it.

  “The dog never barks,” I said. “It never tells me to stop.”

  “Then I tell you to stop,” Rahmutallah Maamaa said with all the love he could muster in his little black beard.

  But I didn’t stop. I was just more careful. And it was only after I flew back to the States—where my American teachers taught me that dogs were supposed to be loved, hugged, cuddled, chained, and sometimes whacked, often neutered, but never tortured—that I realized how much I’d wronged the old mutt.