99 Nights in Logar

by Jamil Jan Kochai

  “Marwand,” Moor whispered to me in the room where I pretended to sleep.

  Gwora and Mirwais lay on one side of her, and I was on the other.

  Agha was still out on the roads.

  “Marwand,” Moor whispered again. And with her eyes closed, she felt for the gauze wrapped around my finger and held my hand like when I was little. “I wasn’t here for Gul’s birth,” she said. “Or Dawood’s. I blessed their lives from thousands of miles away, over the phone, while my sisters wept on the other end. Marwand, do you remember the last time we came? Gul almost died from a fever. An everyday fever. A few days after that, Dawood got kicked in his chest by a donkey. It should’ve caved his heart in. Do you remember?”

  I said that I did.

  “I don’t know what it is. What it is that I do to them. I’m not there for their births. I’m away their whole lives, and as soon as I come back, all my duas become curses. Your father. He almost lost himself when his brother died. It’s a terrible, terrible thing, my little bird. It’s like waking up one morning without a limb or an organ. Without your lungs. Your skin.”

  She squeezed my hand and an ache shot through me.

  “Marwand,” she said, “once more.”

  I told it slow this time. Giving her every single detail. Every sigh and breath and beat. Every image from the road. Some real. Some not. Like this, I took as long as I could before getting to the part where I failed. Where all our sorrows began.

  Moor fell asleep sometime between the carcass and the marker.

  In the morning, when the men returned without Gul, the news of his loss got all the way back to my missing maamaa, Abdul-Abdul, who finally decided to come home from the base.

  The Tale of Our Ghost Maamaa Abdul-Abdul

  According to Agha (and a few other sources to be left unnamed), Abdul-Abdul was secretly a distant cousin adopted by Moor’s family after his parents were killed in a Soviet bombing. But Baba raised him like a son, and Moor loved him like a brother, and even though I’d never actually met him or seen him in real life, she always made sure I considered him a maamaa.

  “He just has a bad habit of disappearing,” she used to say.

  Started young too. As a kid in Pakistan, he’d vanish for hours among the tents in the camp. Rahmutallah Maamaa would search for him all day, only to find him in bed the next morning, stinking of naswar.

  Moor said that in Baba’s youth, he would beat Abdul-Abdul to the brink of exhaustion, and after he got too old for it, Rahmutallah Maamaa inherited the switch and the belt, but, sadly, Abdul-Abdul never accepted the punishments or the life of the farm. When Moor’s family returned to Logar in ’98, Abdul-Abdul didn’t follow them, knowing that there was no place for him in a T-run state.

  For a while, Moor’s family thought they’d lost Abdul-Abdul to the cityscape. Until the American invasion in ’01, which, in a way, sort of saved Abdul-Abdul. Our ghost maamaa found himself an occupation as a translator, which didn’t require too much education or experience, immediately put him in a position of power, allowed him to spend most of his time at a fortified base, and, best of all, paid him pretty well. Soon afterward, he returned to his family in Logar, wearing some crisp fatigues, an air of authority, and an envelope of cash. Although the source of his income was an issue for Rahmutallah Maamaa (especially since the Ts still had a presence in Naw’e Kaleh), Baba was cool with the new cash flow and welcomed his son back into the family.

  * * *

  —

  Around the time that Gul got lost in the maze, Abdul-Abdul had been caught up in a six-month stint in Kandahar, assisting the marines or the special forces with a top secret operation. But on the second day of Gul’s absence, when word got back to Abdul-Abdul’s base, he decided to come home with a foolproof plan to save his little brother.

  On the Thirty-Fifth Day

  Abdul-Abdul announced his plan before the entire family.

  Well, except for the kids.

  Me and Zia had to sneak up to the corner of the roof right above Baba’s room, where we inched as close as possible to an open window and eavesdropped on the proposal. In a voice as sweet as it was brittle, Abdul-Abdul claimed that during his time with the American military, he’d accrued himself quite a few favors. So much so, he went on to say, that if Baba and Abo let him call in the Americans—with their radar and their night vision and their robot’s eyes—he could find Gul within a few hours.

  Honestly, it seemed like a good idea. Or, at least, the best idea we had. Though there were a few pressing issues. Abo, who was quite familiar with her son’s propensity for bullshit, wanted to know how/why the Americans would help Abdul-Abdul look for Gul, when they still hadn’t found that Saudi they’d been trying to get at for the past four years.

  “Sweet Mother,” Abdul-Abdul said, “if I could reveal such information, I would, but it is precisely because the Americans trust me with their secrets that they will be willing to return all the favors I’ve done for them.”

  “The Taliban will give us trouble,” Rahmutallah said.

  “Your neighbors too,” Agha added.

  “The Taliban are finished,” Ruhollah spoke up, defending his older brother.

  Abdul-Abdul agreed, arguing that in a matter of months the Ts wouldn’t even be an issue in Logar, that from their base in Kabul, the Americans were coming to fully secure all the bordering provinces, that the Ts hadn’t pulled off a successful bombing or an ambush in months, that they were fighting the most technologically advanced military force on the planet with rusted Kalashnikovs and cheap IEDs, and that it was only blind will, fear, Pakistani brainwashing, and suicidal tendencies that kept them fighting.

  Wallah, it was a convincing speech. Started in Farsi, switched to English, and then ended with Pakhto. According to Agha, Abdul-Abdul was known all over Logar for how smoothly and quickly he could weave a parchment of bullshit (in four different languages!), but it was still impressive to hear it up close. His argument was so damning and so fast. I wondered if he needed to rehearse.

  In the end, Baba and Rahmutallah Maamaa decided to go along with Abdul-Abdul’s plan. The men had lost their confidence in themselves and were willing to try anything. The whole meeting, Agha was pretty quiet and didn’t object to anything in front of the family. Immediately afterward, he sought out Rahmutallah Maamaa and spoke to him, one on one, in the guest room.

  Me and Zia shadowed them along the roof.

  Agha started in Pakhto.

  “For the sake of God,” he said, “don’t let your brother do this.”

  “It’s been two days, Shagha. If Gul is not already dead, then someone has got him.”

  “There are other ways. We’ll get more men. Weapons. We’ll spread word to every house in the province that if someone’s holding the boy for ransom—”

  “If they’re still holding him, it’s not for ransom.”

  “God forbid.”

  “Such things happen.”

  “But the village knows him. You. Your father.”

  “And where is the village? Why hasn’t it spoken? Two days and we’ve heard only silence from our neighbors. You’ve been gone a long time, Shagha. The village has changed. The people are not like they used to be.”

  “Who changed the village? The people?”

  “Boys don’t just vanish from the earth. Bodies turn up. Ransom notes. Fingers or ears. Something always turns up. Except when . . .”

  “God forbid.”

  “He thinks he’s a man, you know, but he’s just a boy.”

  Agha said something in Pakhto, real quiet, and then the both of them switched to Farsi, going back and forth like that for a few rounds.

  I asked Zia to translate, but he said it was the same. “Your father doesn’t want my father to allow it, but my father has to.”

  “No, he doesn’t,” I said.

  Zia looked at me,
but before he could reply, Agha hollered my name at the top of his lungs. He called for my brothers and Moor, and he was in such a rage, I slipped off the roof with my muscles twitching.

  The whole family gathered in the orchard, surrounding the two Corollas parked underneath the apple trees. Abdul-Abdul and Ruhollah were in one car, heading out to the nearest base to ask for their big favor, while me, my brothers, and Moor were in the other car with Agha, who was driving us back to his own compound.

  After some hasty goodbyes, our car started up the path toward the big blue gate, with Abdul-Abdul following close behind. Moor sat in the back seat with my brothers, and I rode shotgun. Far as I knew, Agha didn’t tell her why we were leaving, and she didn’t ask. None of us wanted to go, Moor especially, and everyone knew, but no one argued either. We just went along with what was being done by our father, without a word, even if it might not be undone.

  We fast approached the big blue gate. Someone had to open it for us. Zia was the one. And, Wallah, before anyone else noticed, before anyone else saw them waiting just beyond the gate (about to knock), I saw the butcher and his son, and there, sitting sleepy upon a beautiful black donkey, was our Gul.

  2

  On the Thirty-Fifth Day

  Gul’s return broke something in me, in the whole family.

  As he got off his donkey and limped in through the gate with the help of the butcher and his son, me and Agha ran to him. We were the first ones to touch him, and that was when everyone else caught sight of him. His skull was wrapped in bandages, his face a mess of cuts and scratches, even his big black mustache had the line of a wound running through it. He hugged me and held my hand as I let loose, sobbing away like on the day Budabash first bit me.

  “Gul,” I said, wiping snot with my gauze, “I thought you died.”

  “Did you really?” he said, still sort of dazed.

  “I did, Gul. Wallah, I did.”

  “I promise—” he started just before Moor snatched him away, and for a quarter of a second I almost resented her for it. She clutched him to her, the white of his kameez rippling against the blue of her burqa. Next, Ruhollah and Abdul-Abdul snuck forward and took up their share of Gul’s grace, at which point the whole family began to move in and through and over the top of the Corollas, toward the boy who had returned. Almost everyone in the family started circling toward him, to hold him and kiss him or at least to touch him, and when their turn quickly passed, they went up to the butcher and his son to thank them.

  Only Zia hung back near the gate. He had probably been the first one with a shot at welcoming Gul, but he didn’t. When I went up to him later on, and he saw me coming, he slipped away down the side trail of the compound, toward the main gate.

  Everyone else continued to cry big sloppy tears, without shame, without tissues, wiping their snot and their dribble on their skirts and their hijabs and their beards. Even Agha cried a little. There was so much tenderness in that orchard, it got to be too much—condensing and collecting—but before it had a chance to reach its peak, Gul sobered everyone up.

  “Where is Dawood?” he asked.

  We went to show him.

  As soon as Gul entered the room where Dawood slept, he smiled and seemed to see something in his brother the rest of us didn’t. Dawood’s nose started twitching and sniffing, and by the time Gul sat next to him, his hand above Dawood’s mouth, about to touch his lips, Dawood’s eyes shot open. He sat up too quick, groggy and confused, seeing the whole of his family trying to squeeze into his chamber, and he glanced to Gul and reached for his fingers, and they both held hands for a bit. The first and the last time I saw them do it.

  “How you feeling?” Gul asked.

  “Hungry,” Dawood replied.

  We went from tears to laughter to tears again and eventually settled on soft smiles. Soon afterward, Agha and Rahmutallah heeded Dawood’s desire and went out to buy a few kilos of meat while Zia’s mom and Moor and her sisters and even Abo rushed out to the tandoor to start up the fires. And just like that, the family decided it was time for a feast.

  That night we laid out a distarkhan in the orchard, hung lamps in the apple trees, ran two lines of mosquito netting from one wall to the other, which draped down to the dirt, shimmering in the lamplight like spiderwebs, and we invited the butcher’s family to eat and drink with us.

  During the feast, I sat near the butcher’s son. His name was Hameed, and even with the bruises Gul gave him a few days ago, he still held pretty. Abo sat him as far away from Nabeela as she could. He spoke Farsi in an accent Moor had a little trouble translating. A northern dialect, she told me, maybe from his mother. Everyone’s eyes (except Nabeela’s) were fixed on him. We were all eager to hear the story of how he saved Gul, and he knew it. So he waited awhile, eating dainty bites of rice, and about halfway through dinner, he finally obliged us.

  Supposedly, on his way toward Wagh Jan, Hameed stopped by a canal near his home to wash his pretty face, but when he saw a scattering of flower petals and blood drops running with the water, he stopped and followed the petals up the canal, almost a mile, until he got to a small makeshift bridge of branches and mud. He spotted Gul caught up in the bridge, his mouth barely above the water, his head gashed and leaking. A mess of dust and dried blood. The butcher’s son said he tried to stir Gul awake, but seeing he was knocked out deep, he picked him up out of the water and threw him over his shoulder without even wringing him dry. Then he carried Gul all the way back to his house, almost a mile or so. There, his mother and father fed him and clothed him until Gul was well enough to head home.

  The family nearly applauded, thanking Hameed over and over, in three different languages. To repay him for his kindness, Abo offered him food and money and blessings. She offered him Dawood and Gul as assistants in his father’s shop. She offered him her home as a sanctuary and her husband as a source of guidance. And she offered him almost everything and everyone she loved or controlled except for the one person he truly desired.

  Nabeela was oddly quiet throughout dinner.

  When the butcher’s family finally left in the night, thanking us for our hospitality but knowing we were obligated to offer more in the coming days, the rest of us, I mean the rest of Moor’s family, all the ladies and the men, all the kids and even the babies, gathered in the beranda so that Dawood, while still munching on the bone of a spent chicken, could start the story of the maze.

  The Tale of the Two Mazes

  “Marwand was taking a ghwul,” Dawood started. “Zia was having a prayer, and Gul was losing his mind because for the first time in forever no one was listening to him. Meanwhile, I was sitting under the mulberry tree, dying of hunger, when some big black shadow of a thing jumped up out the chinar and flew off into the maze.”

  “It wasn’t a shadow,” Gul interrupted. “It was Budabash.”

  “So then Gul comes up to me, and he’s jabbering about Budabash, losing his mind even worse than before, and he is saying we need to run off into the maze after that shadow, except he didn’t say shadow, he said—” Dawood sucked loudly from one bone, tossed it aside into a little pile in the corner of the beranda, and picked up another.

  “And he goes off past the chinar and he can’t find Marwand or Zia or he did find one of them. I don’t know. But anyways he’s mad as hell and he sprints off into the maze after the shadow he thought was Budabash.”

  “It was Budabash,” Gul repeated.

  “And me, being the sweetie I am, I go and run after him to make sure he don’t get eaten.”

  “But you couldn’t keep up?” I asked.

  “No, I could keep up,” he said, sucking another bone. “I did keep up. But I hadn’t eaten and my leg was cramping and Gul had a head start. The whole time I was right behind him. I was keeping up. Wallah, I wasn’t going to lose him. I wasn’t going to lose my brother. But as I was running, the walls of the maze started closing in real s
low. And right when I thought to myself that a man might get stuck in such a tight alley, this rush of wind hit me with all of these white flowers and this sand and the walls closed in so tight that—”

  “You got stuck?” Ruhollah Maamaa laughed.

  “Just for a few minutes,” Dawood said. “I got unstuck. Eventually. But my clothes tore up and I’d lost Gul’s scent and I had no other way to go. So that’s why I headed back toward Marwand and Zia, but at some point, I think, I fell asleep.”

  “Did you have any dreams?” someone asked.

  “I did,” he said. “I dreamt of a long distarkhan, stretching for miles, where we laughed and ate and never got hungry or lost again.”

  There were no more bones to gnaw. Dawood’s story was over.

  Gul picked up the thread.

  “First of all,” Gul said, “I saw Budabash. Our Budabash. Four legs, two eyes, one scar, and a bunch of teeth. Not a shadow. Not a demon. Not anything else but—”

  “We understand, Gul. On with the rest of it,” Rahmutallah Maamaa said.

  “All right, well, Budabash leaps out of the trees and flies into the maze, but he leaves a path of black tracks behind him—”

  “Never saw any tracks,” Dawood said.

  “And noticing the black tracks, I try to get Zia and Marwand to get going, but Marwand was wet in his shit and Zia was pretending to pray. So I let them both be and called for Dawood, and we ran off after Budabash, but Dawood, being as slow as he is, started falling behind, and I tried to slow down too, but the black tracks of tar were getting smaller as we were running deeper, and I was afraid I was going to lose Budabash again, and so I started running faster, and Dawood’s yelping and wheezing fell behind, until I couldn’t hear him at all anymore and it was just me and the tracks and the maze and—”