99 Nights in Logar

by Jamil Jan Kochai

The translator was a scrawny, dark fellah, visibly sweating under his helmet and armor. If it weren’t for his drooping eyes (he almost looked bored), I would have thought he was scared out of his mind. The four soldiers behind him were all wearing so much armor, with the goggles and the helmet and the chin strap and the mouthpiece, I couldn’t tell one of them apart from the other. Most likely, each of them had his own rank and name and story. But at that moment, those four white boys—possibly the first white boys to have stood on that particular spot, on that particular road, since poor Watak Shaheed got executed almost twenty years ago—probably assumed that if they tried to speak the only tongue they knew, we wouldn’t understand them.

  As with our other visitors, Zia informed the translator that we had seen a blue-eyed gunman pass our way, but that he carried no special equipment, no mechanized armor, no night-vision goggles, no Teflon vest, no M4 carbine with the ACOG sight and the foregrip, and no coffee machine. Just a single AK, a patu, and a black pakol. Also, he seemed to be heading toward the black mountains.

  The translator translated most of this in an English so broken he had to repeat himself six times in a row, explaining and reexplaining the location of the black mountains. One of the soldiers nodded his helmet, acting as though he understood, and told the translator to ask Zia what we were up to by ourselves, on this road, so early in the morning, without consent from them or their government.

  The translator did as he was told, though he left out the part about consent.

  Zia said something to him in Farsi I didn’t understand. And the translator told the soldiers that Zia wasn’t cooperating.

  “These fucking village kids,” the same soldier said (which, for a second, made me so happy), “you tell him that if he doesn’t tell us what happened to the fat kid that all three of them are coming back with us to the base.”

  The translator translated this to Zia, leaving out the part about going back to the base.

  But before Zia could tell him the truth, I spoke up, addressing the soldiers directly, in English, and I told them a long lie about how me and Zia and Dawood were all half-brothers, each of us having different mothers but the same father, a native of this village, who was forced to leave Zia and Dawood and their mothers behind in Afghanistan, so that me and him and my mother could go to America to learn to be good Americans, and that after me and my mother and father got our citizenships we came back to visit Logar, so that I could reacquaint myself with my half-brothers and become a good Afghan, and that’s why he dropped us off here, where he used to go swimming in this stream with his own brothers, who were all killed by Communists and then warlords and then Ts, so we could play and get along and know one another, but the thing was while me and Zia were getting along fine since both of our mothers were Farsiwan, we didn’t have much to say to Dawood since his mother was a Pakhtun, and so he got bored of our Farsi conversation and fell asleep, and although he’s a Pakhtun, he’s still our blood and so we couldn’t just leave him here and we couldn’t wake him either since our father taught us it was a sin to even wake up a snake, but that’s okay since fortunately our father will be coming back to pick us up at any moment.

  Then I took a deep breath and shut my mouth.

  The same soldier from before stepped in front of the translator, sort of pushing him aside, and asked me where exactly I was from.

  But before I could answer, the soldiers got a report over the radio about the possible location of a runaway squadron, and so they marched off into the maze without another word, translated or otherwise.

  Finally, near Dhuhr, we were visited by a solitary laborer covered from head to toe in wet cement, who was pushing a wheelbarrow that was also completely stained in cement. He looked like he was in a rush, and at first it didn’t seem that he would stop for us, but when Zia evoked the name of God, he halted. He came slopping up to us, big globs of cement trailing behind him. Zia explained our ordeal and pleaded for his help.

  “How far?” he said in Pakhto, his face so thickly lathered with his labor, I couldn’t tell if he was sixteen or sixty, if he was dark or light skinned, if he was handsome or ugly or anything in between. Hell, if it weren’t for his clothes and his hair, I could hardly tell he was a man at all.

  Zia told him.

  “Listen,” he said, spitting a hock of cement, “I’ve got to take this to a work site. My mule’s stashed over there. How about I bring you boys that far in my barrow and I’ll ask my boss for some time off to bring you the rest of the way home. You understand?”

  We did and, Wallah, if it weren’t for the cement, me and Zia would’ve kissed his hand as if he were our old father returned to us after a long journey. Instead, the three of us lifted Dawood into the wheelbarrow and began to travel down the road. Before we left sight of the maze, I asked Zia if we should head back to the marker and pray for Gul’s safe return.

  “The faster we get home,” he said, “the faster we bring help.”

  “At least a dua.”

  “I’ll whisper one as we go,” he said.

  But I never saw his lips move.

  On the Thirty-Third Afternoon

  The new cement road contracted by the Kabuli government was to extend from the main highway in Logar, through the Wagh Jan market, past the bridge built above the Logar River, which connected Wagh Jan to the inner villages, deep into all the passages and clay mazes within the countryside.

  “That way,” the cement-man explained in a Pakhto so slow and simple it was like he knew I wasn’t a native, “all the crops grown by the Logarian in the valley can be better transported to Kabul, and as the sale of food becomes more fluid, so too will the cash flow between the landowners and the merchants.”

  The cement-man had not stopped talking since we left Watak’s marker. I didn’t mind it so much because I appreciated how loud and comfortable he was on the road, and although I knew we couldn’t truly trust him (me and Zia each pulled one of the kitchen knives out of the big black bag when he wasn’t looking), it was still nice to feel like we had a guide again. Besides, I was the one who made the mistake of asking him about his work.

  “Trouble is,” the laborer went on, wiping the cement from his lips to make his pronunciation even clearer, “whenever we try to pave a new road from the bridge to the inner roads, the Taliban come in the night and set off explosions.”

  “But why?” I let slip.

  “You see,” the cement-man spat, “although the roads will make it easier for the trucks and the shipments to get around within the village, it will also make it easier for the Humvees and the tanks. Plus, these homes are built too close together. In order to make a proper road, there will be demolitions. Certain people in this village know that. They can see what is coming. A cement road is never just a cement road. It’s the beginning of a whole new town. So while every morning the Kabuli government orders the road to be repaved, rebuilt, and reconstructed, every night the Taliban come back to blow it up again. As long as the Americans are footing the bill, the contractors just subcontract the project to a lesser contractor, pocketing millions, and that subcontractor does the same thing to another subcontractor. Until the roads are never actually built and I’m never out of work. Nobody really minds all the lost cement. Well, except for the Americans.”

  I thought he looked straight at me as he said that last word, though I couldn’t be sure because of the cement on his face and eyes and clothes, dripping behind us on the road. Leaving a trail.

  When we finally got to the work site, the cement-man unloaded Dawood and our big black bag near the donkeys’ post (we sat him up against a tree, returned our knives, put the bag under his arm, and tucked a pakol over his eyes to make it seem like he was just resting), and he went over to talk to his boss.

  Almost immediately, we lost our man in the bustle of the site.

  And almost immediately after that, someone gave us a job to do.

  We w
eren’t the only kids at the site, and we weren’t the youngest either. While me and Zia unloaded bags of cement from the trucks and pushed barrows of gray slush back and forth from the road and the mixing trench, little kids, some of them as young as nine or eight, carried buckets of water from the Logar River, just underneath the bridge, and hauled bags and pushed barrows.

  On the other side of the bridge, closer to Wagh Jan, there were also men building up power lines. Rows of wooden poles ran from the start of the bridge up through Wagh Jan, all the way, it seemed, back to the highway toward Kabul. I wondered when those pole lines might reach Moor’s compound. We could run the electricity all night. We could watch movies forever.

  About an hour or two into the work, me and Zia slipped away to check on Dawood, who was still sleeping soundly with the donkeys, and there, by the side of the road, in the cover of the trees, we found the cement-man’s mule, unhitched and licking Dawood’s fingers.

  It seemed like a sign. We had no idea where the cement-man was or when he might find us, and he already promised us the mule. Maybe, I thought, he left it unhitched on purpose, just for us to come and get it. Who could say otherwise? And just as I was coming up with my argument to borrow the donkey, Zia made it unnecessary.

  “Marwand,” he said, “let’s take this thing.”

  “You sure?”

  “We’ll take it, ride home, and return it afterward.”

  But it wasn’t that simple.

  After lifting Dawood onto the mule’s back, we realized that without a harness or a whip, it wouldn’t move. Nothing to persuade it. That was until I shuffled through the big black bag and pulled out one of the kitchen knives.

  Even through the thick layer of cement lathered on his face, I could see Zia’s heart sink at the sight of it. For a second, I thought he might recite a hadith or a surah about cruelty. I thought he might guilt me with a suggestion of Allah’s sadness or remind me of the sins I’d confessed to him. What I did to the dog.

  But he didn’t.

  “It’s for Gul,” I said, offering a knife. “Allah will forgive us.”

  “No, it’s not,” he said, and took the knife anyway.

  At first, Zia only gave the mule a little prod, barely a pinprick, but it wouldn’t budge. Then, although I had no ill will toward the mule, I was just so sick and tired of being lost, I stepped up and cut sideways into its hide, a deep slit, and as soon as I drew blood, the mule started forward at a slow trot.

  The whole ride home I kept cutting at the mule as gently as I could, pushing him along the trail, and, Wallah, anytime I stopped bleeding him for just a few seconds—because my hand was getting tired or because the twitching of its flesh left me breathless—he stopped moving, and Zia would have to cut him, and like that we made it all the way back toward the roads near our home. There, at the beginning or the end of the first maze we entered, I cut the mule a final time, deep and sure, sending him off one way, while me and Zia dragged Dawood home.

  On the Thirty-Third Evening

  Before we knocked, we tried to clean ourselves up as best we could, especially Dawood, whose clothes we scraped of cement and whose face we washed in a nearby canal. We held him up between us like he wasn’t knocked out at all but maybe tired, and just as Zia stepped forward, readying his fist, Abo opened the gate.

  She stood there beneath the doorway in the biggest, bluest burqa I’d ever seen. With a log in one hand and a hatchet in the other, Abo looked like the punishment I’d been waiting for, but then she uttered the word “bachyan,” dropped her weapons, and didn’t even try to stop all the other ladies from flooding out onto the trail. They surrounded us, kissing and pinching and passing me along until I got back to Moor, who held me to her chest and smacked me and blessed me, just as Zia’s mom did to him.

  Down in the dirt, Abo held Dawood in her arms, crowded on all sides by his sisters, who were also trying to wake him up: bringing their fingers to his mouth and his eyelids, shouting and pleading, before Abo pulled off her burqa and began to kiss him, little pecks on his forehead and his eyes and his hands.

  Then she started counting.

  She held Dawood in her arms and glanced from him to Zia to me, and she counted:

  One two three.

  One two three.

  One two three.

  And on the final number of the third count she asked the question I’d been dreading to answer ever since I realized, maybe a few minutes beforehand, that we were actually going to make it home.

  “Where is our Gul?” she said.

  About half an hour later, Rahmutallah Maamaa was asking me the same question.

  I told him what I told Abo. “He’s in the maze.”

  “Which maze?” he said. His hand on my shoulder, sinking.

  “Watak’s maze,” I said, not knowing what else to call it.

  All of the men (Baba, Rahmutallah, Agha, Ruhollah, plus a few more of my distant uncles and older cousins) and a few of the mothers (Moor, Zia’s mom, and Abo) were interrogating me and Zia in Baba’s chamber. They didn’t seem to think it was necessary to give us the whupping I thought we were destined to receive. In fact, as soon as the men got home from their search and realized that only three of us had made it back, they didn’t even take the time to yell at us. It was a huge letdown. By that point, seeing the family in the torment that we put them, I felt so guilty about leaving Gul behind, I hoped some punishment might relieve me of the pressure. Instead, it was all business: they just wanted to know as quickly and as accurately as possible where and when we last saw Gul.

  After we told them what we knew, Rahmutallah gathered all the men from his side of the family and they called on all their cousins and distant relatives and close friends from all across the village, and Agha did the same thing with his side, and all of them got together somewhere near Watak’s marker. They took Zia as a guide, leaving me behind with the kids and the ladies.

  In the courtyard, as soon as she got me to herself, Moor inspected my butchered finger, which by that point was infused in so many layers of dirt and shit and toot and blood that it seemed like it was decomposing. When she peeled back the rotting gauze, even I could tell the thing was infected: pus leaking, meat turned mushy and white, stinking too.

  At first, she just stared her Afghan’s death glare.

  Even though Moor was an especially small woman, I’d only recently gotten taller than her, and it was still odd to look down into her eyes instead of up at them. She dragged me into the washroom with the iodine and the rubbing alcohol. After disinfecting my wound, she inspected my face and my arms and my chest. Then, taking up a washcloth, she rubbed my skin so raw, I thought the flesh might tear free. But with Moor as tense as she was, I was not ready to deny her anything.

  She put both her hands on my face and declared: “Gul is okay.”

  Moor had calloused fingers scarred rough by fire and dirt, and when she touched me like this I was always so ashamed of how much softer my skin was than hers. Even at that moment, with all the dirt and the blood and the cement just barely washed off, with all the suffering I thought I’d gone through, it was nothing.

  “Marwand,” she said, “is Gul okay?”

  The washroom we knelt in was made of stone, hollowed out of the clay like a cave, and just like a cave, it echoed out and bounced back every drip and every word, so that it was not as if Moor, by herself, were asking me the question, but that the whole family or the whole village was asking it over and over.

  “Inshallah,” I whispered, because it was the quietest thing I could think to say.

  Later on, when I searched for my brothers, I found that the both of them had shunned me. Gwora spent all his time in the den, writing and reading, ignoring my pleas, and forcing Mirwais to do the same. Nothing I did could make them hear me.

  Meanwhile, all the ladies in the house just wanted me to retell the story of how I got lost,
of how I led the boys out, of how Gul tried to stop me, and of how, after losing Gul, I did nothing to get him back. And every time they asked, no matter who it was, I told the story just the way Gul would’ve wanted. I mean, in a way, it was my fault Gul got lost. But there was no punishment for me, the American guest, who started all the trouble, acted a coward, left Gul behind, got back home, and didn’t even get a whupping in the end.

  What a shitty story, I thought. But that was the one good thing about my brothers’ shunning me: they never came out to hear it.

  For the rest of the day, the men were out searching the area near Watak’s marker: the fields behind the canal, the roads leading up to and away from the flag, and, of course, the maze itself. The ladies, on the other hand, stayed home to look after Dawood.

  We all sat in the den where Dawood slept. Abo cradled his head and stroked his cheeks. Nabeela and Sadaf Khala sat behind him, rubbing his belly and reciting surahs they memorized as children. Moor held his feet. Just held them. Hawa Khala and Shireen were running back and forth from the kitchen, cooking all his favorite meals (samosas, shorwa, landi, and halwa), placing them before his nose, and stealing them away when they failed to wake him.

  I sat in the middle of the room and told my story, over and over, until I began to forget little facts I mentioned earlier, which Nabeela Khala (more than anyone else) would correct. But she wasn’t even mean about it. “Wa Marwand,” she would say, softly, almost as though she didn’t want to wake Dawood, “didn’t Gul say this?”

  “Didn’t you fail here?”

  “Weren’t there five soldiers?”

  “Six Kochian?”

  “Two interpreters?”

  “Weren’t you afraid of the maze more than the road?”

  “Wasn’t the second visitor the Thief?”

  “And didn’t you forget to ask the cement-man his name?”

  I said yes, every time, to every question, late into the night, until Moor sent me away to sleep a sleep that wouldn’t come. For hours afterward, I could hear the echo of a sad song I knew belonged to Shireen, but which I wished were coming from me.