99 Nights in Logar

by Jamil Jan Kochai

  “And we’re innocent in all this?” Moor said. “We don’t carry some of the weight?”

  “For what? I work. I pray. I make sadaqah. I don’t support the invaders.”

  “Adaam,” she said, “we live with them. We work with them. Our boys study with them. They know their language better than ours. Their culture. Everything. And we don’t support them?”

  Agha bit his lip and got quiet.

  “We don’t,” he started, taking a deep breath. He slipped down from the windowsill, knelt near Moor’s legs, and took her hand. He blocked the lamp, but the light of it still shone from behind him.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’ve been thinking. Your family has been doing well. There’s not too much trouble in Logar. I was thinking we could get a place in Kabul. Check out the schools. I’ve got a few things in the works. Just from the land and the trucks, we could make a living out here. You could stay near your parents. We could raise up the boys in their own country. What do you think?” he said.

  Moor shook her head and touched Agha’s cheek. Held her fingers there. Behind them, the long fire of the lamp seeped into the space between his skin and her hand. Their flesh seemed to burn in the dark. They didn’t say anything for such a long time, I almost fell asleep. Then a knock sounded from the door.

  It was Bibi.

  She wept in Farsi.

  “Abo” was all I could make out.

  On the Fifty-Seventh Night

  Nabeela found Abo laid out flat in the washroom, barely conscious and mumbling a prayer just quiet enough that no one could make it out. After failing to wake her, Nabeela shouted for her father and was instead met by Bibi, who began to weep almost immediately, and it was the echo of her crying that alerted the rest of the family. Pretty soon almost everyone in the compound had surrounded the washroom. Nabeela, Rahmutallah, and Dawood were the ones who lifted Abo. Nabeela cradling her head. Rahmutallah holding up her spine. Dawood clinging to her feet. They carried her up into Baba’s chamber and the rest of us followed after them. We sat listening to Abo mumble and moan and touch her face. Baba brought out his pharmaceutical equipment and was preparing an IV but couldn’t seem to steady his fingers. Rahmutallah Maamaa had to do it.

  Though it was already getting late when they started the IV, no one in the family—not even the littlest kids—went to sleep for the next few hours as Abo kept lapsing in and out of consciousness. At about four in the morning, Abo seemed to snap out of her spell just long enough for her to tell everyone to get out of the room immediately.

  “You’re going to catch it. You’ve probably already caught it. Doctor Sahib,” she said, looking to Baba, “don’t you know a case of land-induced seasickness when you see it? And you’ve let me contaminate the whole family.”

  “Wa, Abo,” Baba said, “seasickness cannot be induced by land and is not infectious.”

  Abo sighed a deep sigh of the sick. “You’ll see,” she said.

  And we did.

  The next day, one by one, almost every single person in the family came down with a severe case of land-induced seasickness. The symptoms of which included the following:

  A bout of dizziness so terrible it turned the earth beneath your feet into putty

  A persistent sense of mild nausea that never actually amounted to vomiting

  An occasional lapse into the in-between world of daydream, delusion, and mirage

  Loneliness

  Fatigue

  Skull-piercing migraines

  Burps the smell of burned saboo

  An abnormality in the heartbeat causing an overflow of blood to the heart’s ventricles, sometimes leading—though very rarely—to an explosion of one’s chest

  Baba was the first one to fall ill, either because of his weak immune system, or because he was in such proximity to Abo, or because he simply willed himself sick, seeing it as the surest sign of his love. Upon realizing that he had somehow been infected with Abo’s case of land-induced seasickness, he resigned himself to his new condition, curled up next to Abo, and wrapped him and his wife in his patu, so that they might at least suffer in comfort. Rahmutallah Maamaa set up an IV for them.

  Nabeela fell sick next. While hemming the skirt of her wedding dress—during a brief moment away from her mother—her head swirled and the earth turned to putty and she was so dizzy that if it were not for the fear she might vomit on her own wedding dress, she probably wouldn’t have been able to hurl herself out of the dress shop. She lay in the dust for a bit, gripping her head as if trying to steady the sky, until Moor found her and carried her into the room where all the péeghla sisters slept.

  Rahmutallah set up an IV for her too, banned everyone from visiting the sick, especially the kids, and then promptly fell ill himself. As he was gathering more medical supplies in his room, he got hit by the first surge of the seasickness, stumbled forward with his kit still in hand, and had to be caught by his wife, Hawa Khala, who somehow was able to take on all his weight, maintain her own balance, and then gently drop him on a toshak. After that, Hawa Khala took on her husband’s medical duties but then very quickly fell ill as well. Just by chance, she happened to collapse beside her husband, where they both curled up in a thick patu.

  Next, Sadaf and Shireen got sick. Gathering in Nabeela’s room, in a big bundle of blankets and tissues, Shireen sang quiet songs for her sister’s coming loss. They lay among themselves, as dizzy as lost birds, and seemed to forget all the lyrics to the love songs they grew up reciting.

  Moor and Agha fell sick just before Dhuhr, while arguing in their room, where they curled up together in a thick patu.

  The whole time Abo never told anyone that I was the source of the sickness.

  So I didn’t either.

  By the end of the day, the only people still left standing were me and my brothers and Gul and Dawood and Zia.

  We met up in the farthest corner of the orchard—as far away from the rooms as we could get without abandoning the compound—and gathered near the same spot where Budabash used to sleep. We argued for a bit.

  “We need a doctor,” Gul said.

  “Doctors cost money,” Zia said.

  “I’ll get money.”

  “No, you won’t,” someone said from behind me.

  It was Miriam. She approached our meeting from the middle of a mint patch, wearing her mother’s big purple chador. I was the last one to see her. Zia met her first, demanding she return to the den with their sisters, where she might rest up from her illness, but Miriam said she was as healthy as she would ever be.

  See, because Miriam was so persistently sick all of the time, the sudden case of seasickness hardly seemed to affect her at all. She wasn’t drowsy or nauseated, and she wasn’t that dizzy. Her head did hurt a little, but no more than it did every single day of her life.

  “I mean, you shouldn’t, we shouldn’t,” Miriam said, and went on to explain how, according to Bibi, who could still speak without speaking, we shouldn’t leave the compound until we were sure we wouldn’t spread the sickness to the rest of the village, so that meant we couldn’t leave until everyone was healed, and everyone would be healed, Bibi claimed, as long as we stayed home and looked after them and didn’t run off on another silly adventure. Besides, Abdul-Abdul and Ruhollah Maamaa would be here sometime tonight, and we’d be able to stop them before they got inside, and we’d tell them what happened and they’d be the ones to get the doctor—not us.

  “But you have to understand, boys,” she continued, “Bibi says that the best thing we can do at this point is to make sure everyone is as comfortable as possible.”

  She said this all at once, almost in a single breath, making sure Gul and Dawood and Zia and me couldn’t interrupt her like we wanted to do about twenty times over during the course of her speech; but by the time she had finished, taking a deep wh
eeze of a breath, Zia looked at his little sister wearing his mom’s chador, as sick as she always was, and he relented. “So what’s the plan?”

  It went like this:

  Me and Gwora would look after Moor and Agha, make sure they were fed and hydrated and that their seasickness wasn’t getting any worse.

  “You need to check up on them periodically,” Miriam said, “so take shifts and make sure that neither of you is being overwhelmed.”

  “What about Mirwais?” I said.

  “Mirwais will be my assistant,” she said, taking his hand.

  He didn’t object.

  Miriam assigned herself to Bibi and her sisters, and Zia to his parents. Dawood would care for Abo and Baba, while Gul was to look after Nabeela and her sisters, which Gul had a problem with, since he—as the older son—naturally had the responsibility of taking care of his parents; but Miriam explained to Gul that Abo was still mad at him over the wedding and the motorcycle. And because we needed to keep her as cool and as calm as possible, Gul couldn’t get near her. Whereas Dawood, she argued, was actually Abo’s favorite.

  “He’s the youngest,” she explained, “and the most hopeless.”

  Dawood didn’t argue. All of the guys were finally in agreement. We would go along with Bibi and Miriam’s plan and start up our rounds as soon as we could.

  The first time me and Gwora checked up on our parents, we brought them a pitcher of water and fresh veggies from the garden (cucumbers and eggplant and okra), and we found them in their room, cuddled up closer than I’d ever seen. Her head on his shoulder. His hand in her hair.

  Moor and Agha were never prone to displays of affection—except on the odd occasion when Agha was in a goofy mood, and he played at kissing Moor, knowing she’d push him away or slap him on the cheek. Sometimes he sang her Pakhto sindaras or old Farsi love poems, but he always did it as a joke, to get her blushing, to embarrass us, or to mock his own silly heart.

  They looked dizzy and confused but also content in their dizziness, their confusion. They gave each other soft smiles, soft looks, but nothing about the way they held each other seemed like a joke. In fact, it seemed so urgent that I hardly had the heart to make them stop.

  We needed to help them eat and drink, because when they sat up against the wall, they got so dizzy they could hardly hold their cups steady. It was as though by forcing them to be apart, we were torturing them. But after we fed them a little, and they got to lie back down and cuddle up underneath the patu again, they seemed to forget what we did to them. What they did to each other.

  “We’re going,” I told them.

  “Yes,” Moor said, nuzzling closer to Agha, “you should go now.”

  We left in a hurry.

  Though it was getting dark by then, Abdul-Abdul and Ruhollah still hadn’t returned to eat their nightly dinner. In the courtyard, we kids gathered to update one another on the conditions of our patients and we heard many of the same symptoms repeated over again. Dizziness and confusion. A lack of appetite. An excess of affection. And the odd feeling that the sick weren’t actually there in the room with you, that they were off someplace else, together, but still lonesome.

  “Well, the food is not as important, but no matter what,” Miriam said, “you’ve got to keep them hydrated.”

  During our second visit, Moor and Agha’s mood had changed a great deal. I mean, they were still huddled up together, uncomfortably close, but they seemed to be on the brink of tears now. Their touching was more desperate. They clung to each other. We sat them back up, and we made them each drink two cups of water, which they could hardly seem to swallow, their seasickness was getting so bad. After that, we laid them back down and started to wipe their foreheads and their faces with wet towels.

  As I soaked Agha’s forehead, I placed my right hand on his chest and he touched it and asked me what happened to my finger. I told him Budabash stole it from me.

  “You know,” he said, “I once stole a finger too.”

  And so he began.

  The Tale of the Stolen Finger

  “Listen, little bird,” he whispered to me like when I was a child, “in the autumn of ’82 Naw’e Kaleh was dying of hunger.

  Our rebellion raged in the mountains and on the roads, but the Soviets took vengeance upon the village. In Wagh Jan, they machine-gunned a bus full of schoolboys because they resembled mujahideen. In the Tangee, they littered the trails with mines shaped like butterflies, and our children picked these up, thinking them toys, only to watch their hands turn into mist. Little bird, even our singers were not spared. Poor Doray Logari, who never touched a rifle in his life, who healed our wounds with his songs, was shot through his heart while singing a ballad.

  His final verse.

  “We were so afraid to leave our homes, our crops rotted in the fields.

  “Fortunately, your nikeh had foreseen the hungers of war. We stored up rice and grain.

  “Your Zarmina Khala was not so lucky. She lived over near Wagh Jan with her small children and her husband. He was a lawyer by trade and knew nothing of war, of rationing. They were starving worse than us.

  “You have to understand, little bird, Zarmina was your nikeh’s firstborn and the child most like him. They were both tall and gangly, with massive hands and a terrible pride. They loved each other fiercely but held on to grudges like tumors. And so it happened that even with the war and the hunger, neither Zarmina nor Nikeh would concede their pride.

  “‘She will come and ask,’ Nikeh would say in his house.

  “‘He will come and offer,’ Zarmina would say in hers.

  “And so they waited.

  “But I became tired of the waiting.

  “You see, Zarmina was a half-sister who always treated me as a whole brother. She fed me mantu and palau, and I danced at her wedding. She’d tell me jokes and stories, and I’d work in her home. When I was a boy, she’d saved me from my half-brother’s beatings, and when I became a mujahideen, I planned to protect her from the Soviets.

  “So, one night, without asking my father, I stole her a bag of rice and snuck off toward her house.

  “When I got to her compound that night, and she answered the door, and saw me standing there with a bag of rice, just a single stolen bag, she almost fell to her knees.

  “She kissed my fingers and blessed me a thousand times.

  “Listen, little bird, when your half-sister, who loves you as a whole brother, who almost kills herself with pride, who you’ve never seen so hungry, nor so weak, kisses your fingers and blesses your life for not letting her starve, you will feel the mark of her lips on your fingers forever, and her one thousand blessings will follow you across the earth.

  “I begged her to rise. My elder sister.

  “She invited me inside to share in the rice with her family, and though I was hungry and planned to spend the night, I could tell by the look of her lips and the trembling in her hands that one bag of rice wasn’t going to be enough to get her through the month or even the week.

  “So before she could tell me to stop, I slipped away.

  “I planned to steal another bag.

  “But on the way back to my house, the Soviets bombed our village.

  “I heard the first rocket just as I reached the canal near where your Watak Kaakaa would one day be murdered. I jumped down and hid in the mud. While the bombs fell, I trembled and remembered the boys from the tunnel.”

  The Tale of the Boys in the Tunnel

  “Little bird, I recall that the first time my squadron gathered together in a mosque to plan out an ambush for the Soviets, we only had Chinese rifles, a few Kalashnikovs, and a single rocket launcher. Most of us carried these old English rifles captured during the Anglo-Afghan Wars. Our commanders warned us that in the morning the Soviet platoons would be rolling down the main road in Wagh Jan. With tanks and helicopters.

&
nbsp; “There were maybe forty of us. Tajiks mostly, but there were quite a few Pakhtuns too. We’d spent two days and two nights in the mosque, waiting for word from the commanders, whose code names we kept mixing up. We prayed often and carried siparahs or tesbihs from fathers or sisters we hoped would protect us in the coming days. We were all boys from the village.

  “On the morning of the ambush, we rushed the Soviet tanks in Wagh Jan under the cover of land and bush, firing from the foliage of the Logar River. Two helicopters roared above us, and the machine gunners let loose. Some of our boys were struck with invisible bullets, clutching at wounds that didn’t exist and then falling into a death that was actually life.

  “As soon as I saw the tanks, I shot six quick bursts without aiming and ran off to hide and reload. My Chinese rifle, stitched together with cloth and tape, bucked in my hands, and I prayed to Allah it would not fall apart as I fired. During the whole length of the battle, I was scared of hiding and being caught. Of running and being hit. Of shooting and becoming a killer. And all my fears warred inside of me, until they massacred one another, so that it wasn’t courage that let me fight, but the death of my fear.

  “Eventually, my cousin Abdur Rahman, who carried the rocket launcher, managed to set one of the tanks on fire. We smelled the Russians burning. We hoped they would climb out so that we could shoot them dead, but they only escaped, hours later, as smoke.

  “By the end of the first firefight, half our squadron was dead or missing. We went to search for them in the waters and found ten mujahideen hiding in a large tunnel beneath a dam in the Logar River. They were dripping wet, lying side by side, clinging to each other like young brothers on a cold morning in the hills. They stank of shit and the rushing water could not cleanse their filth. I was so ashamed for them; I kept fighting.