“So there I am, ducking behind my dead steer, trying to drag my brother back toward me, yanking at his pants, which were drenched in blood or urine, and I had my rifle tucked between my legs and I wasn’t planning to fire another shot.
“Sisters,” he said, “you must understand: my brother was not really my brother, but we grew up in the madrassa, where the one-eyed mullah took us in after he saved us from a rapist warlord’s compound of sorrow. The mullah taught us Quran and Sharia and the atrocity of sodomy, and that we, my pretty brother and I, were bonded by our suffering and by the will of Allah, which was stronger than blood or creed or race, and that when the time came for our martyrdom, we, as brothers, might seek the death that God had written for us, which is very difficult indeed, and so it was, and I could not lift my rifle along with the weight of my shame.
“That was when my other prisoner started yelping for me to free him, claiming he didn’t want the Americans to take him. And though I did not trust him, I freed him for the sake of my solitude. In the end, he stayed true to his word and picked up my brother’s rifle and fired on the Americans, which gave me back my courage, so I fired too, until we’d killed all of them, save for the spy, who fled into the maze.”
* * *
—
“Were you the dealer?” I asked the former prisoner still holding the ugly T’s hand. He said that he was but that he had overcome the whispers of Shaytan and planned to join his new ally in his cause for Allah.
After telling his story, the ugly T requested that we guide him out of the maze and help him pursue the fleeing interpreter. Jawed told him we couldn’t and that, in fact, we had to go deeper into the compounds.
“But, sisters,” the ugly T said, “what could you need to do on such a hopeless path and without an escort?”
So Jawed told them a long lie about how he and I were residents of this neighborhood:
“We traveled here from the north after the Taliban took control of the country. The warlords had razed these grounds into ash, firing sakr rockets from Kabul. There was nothing here. So those of us who pledged loyalty to the Taliban were given these fertile lands to restart our lives. For a few years, we lived here in relative peace. We built up all these compounds with our bare hands. Our men stacked the bricks and shaped the walls. We women planted the crops and raised our children. We prayed our prayers and read Quran and tried to stay quiet and small.
“We had nothing else.
“But after the Americans invaded and the Taliban were defeated, forces loyal to the Americans and to the Northern Alliance raided our compounds, killed our husbands and our brothers, dishonored our sisters and our mothers, and turned our homes into graveyards. Some of us fled. While our brothers and sisters were killed or dishonored, we fled and hid with our children and listened and did nothing. We hid for so long our scared sons turned into wild men. They sought blood and, one by one, escaped us with vows of vengeance. Now we’re after them. We will take back their guns and bring them home alive and without honor. That’s why we cannot follow you,” he concluded.
And with that word, the ugly T gave us his blessing, the former prisoner mumbled a short prayer, and they went off in pursuit of the interpreter, still holding hands.
Again, the Thief snapped three pictures, and when they were out of sight, he turned to me and said: “He’ll kill him in the end.”
“Which one?” I asked.
“Either one.”
“I thought they were getting along.”
“That’s why he’ll kill him.”
Toward dark, we came upon the Kochian. As me and Jawed were approaching one of the gates of the compound I assumed was empty, it suddenly swung open, and there was Zarghoona, the Kochi nomad. She invited us inside. “These trails are devious,” she said. “Come in. You’ll be safe.”
“I know these trails,” Jawed said. “I’m from these parts.”
“Then for the sake of Allah come inside and advise us on how to get out.”
She stood firmly in our path, her gate blocking the entirety of the road. She held a lamp in one hand and I didn’t know what else in the other. We went inside.
While the soldiers and the Ts had roamed the trails aimlessly, destined to meet and to die, Zarghoona’s small tribe of Kochi cousins had come together, it seemed, to transform the rubble of a compound into a makeshift home. No weeds or overgrown bushes. No trash or clutter. Instead, old lamps hung from the walls and the trees, the pathways of the courtyard were swept clean, and flowers were planted along the edges of the beranda. Sure, there was some peeling paint, a few small craters, and a lingering stink of death, but in spite of the carnage haunting every room and road, the Kochian had managed to cobble together something resembling a life.
When we reached the beranda in the courtyard, Zarghoona asked us to sit down, to take off our veils, and to stay for dinner.
Jawed denied all three requests. “Bring me a parchment,” he said. “I’ll draw you a map of the maze and we’ll be off.”
Zarghoona called on her four cousins and they scoured the compound, searching for anything that could be used as a parchment. Eventually they found a flat slab of dried clay, and all five of the cousins came bearing sharp knives of different sizes for Jawed to use as a chisel; but when they entered the beranda and tossed the slab in front of Jawed, none of them offered up a knife.
Zarghoona knelt before us with a machete in hand.
“Why are you wearing these veils?” she asked.
“For the sake of Allah,” Jawed said.
“Not you. The quiet one. What are you doing on these roads, in the cloak of a woman, wandering about in the dark?”
They all put their eyes on me. Even Jawed, whose eyes I couldn’t see.
So I told them a long lie about how we lived in these compounds for a long time, outlasting the Russians and the civil wars and then the Ts, and that we were one of the last families not to have fled, but when the Americans invaded and the special forces started their night raids and massacred a few of our neighbors, including my mother’s best friend, a young Tajik woman who was eight months pregnant, my mother tried to convince my father it was time to flee. But he refused to leave his father’s land. So, about a year into the occupation, two of my brothers were killed by American sniper fire just outside our home. The Americans thought they were Ts and fired without warning. My brothers didn’t even have beards. They were too young. We buried them in the orchard, and my father, beset by sorrow, finally decided to let us move toward the outskirts of Logar, where our men still haven’t found any work. Were it not for the death of my brothers, they would have become interpreters a long time ago. Occasionally, we return to these empty compounds to find our old home and to pray at our brothers’ graves.
For a few seconds, no one said anything. The Kochian knelt with their knives and watched. Finally, Zarghoona asked me if I thought that I had fooled her with my story. “I spotted you as what you were from fifty meters off,” she said, and demanded that we unveil ourselves.
“Sister,” I said, but could not think up another lie.
I turned my eyes to Jawed and he turned toward me, and just when I thought he was starting to lift up his veil to reveal himself, he fired seven shots from a hidden pistol into the roof, scattering dust and dirt and blinding us all with the flash of a muzzle we couldn’t see. Without having to tell me to do what had become, by then, my first nature, I rushed past the ladies, ran out into the courtyard, and fled the compound—leaving my captured Thief to his fate.
On the Ninety-Seventh Night
I ran, and just as Gul once said, the deeper I fled into the maze, the darker the walls became: from bronze to brown to the black of the night, to the point where I could hardly see a thing ahead of me, save for the blue of my garment, save for the mesh of my veil; and just as Dawood once said, the deeper I ran into the maze, the tighter the walls closed in, unti
l they nearly hugged my shoulders, until they met in an arc and swallowed the sky and the stars, turning the alleys into boroughs, into caves. I stripped off my burqa, wrapped it about my shoulders, and crawled on hands and knees through a tunnel the size of an inner tube. I was so thirsty by then, I thought of drinking the wet mud from between my fingers, and just then—when the mud seemed most appetizing—I found the first bone.
To be honest, I didn’t know if it was a bone. The dark of the tunnels left me supposing that maybe I picked up a branch or a stone or an old tool or anything else but what it was. I dropped it and went on. But a little farther ahead I found another, something like a jaw, and then I found smaller bones that might have been stones or pebbles or teeth or fingers. They were scattered on the floor and in the walls and in the roof of the tunnel above my head. I felt for them in the dark and in the mud, and at first I collected the bones in my arms and in the pockets of my kameez, but there were so many, and I couldn’t bring myself to leave any of them behind, so I unwrapped my burqa, and as soon as I did the seasickness struck me. My brain spun and my guts rolled, but even with the aching and spinning, I took up the tatters of my burqa and I tied the garment into a sack.
In this, I collected femurs and legs and toes and jaws and teeth and even horns and hooves and other bones I thought probably belonged to animals, not humans, but I wasn’t so sure, and so I gathered it all. In fact, I collected so many different types of bones that my burqa’s bag became full, to the point of tearing, to the point where I had to take off my kameez and fashion that into a bag as well. And so, with one sack tied to my shoulder and the other in my hands, I crawled on. And as it went, the second bag also got full. Little bones, big bones. Femurs and fingers and teeth. Eventually, after turning my partug into yet another sack, I collected bones in the mud of the tunnel nearly naked. My skin became filthy, drenched in the earth. I thought about the bones and how much I hoped they actually were bones, and I prayed to Allah that in my sickness I had not turned rocks and sticks into humans.
I prayed for Him to forgive me if I had.
That was when I found the rifle. At first, I thought it was the long bone of a leg or a mujahideen’s arm, but as I felt along its barrel, I found the trigger and accidentally fired the weapon in the tunnel, which for just the flash of a second, lit up the darkness, illuminating all of the bones and the weapons and the tatters that lay before me. It took me a while to readjust to the darkness. Afterward, I took up the rifle and its strap, tied it across my back, and went on down the tunnel.
Then the water really began flowing. I mean the mud was wet as it was, but now as I crawled, as I collected bones in my hands and in my clothes and let them fall away when I could carry no more, there were heavy trickles of water flowing past my fingers and knees. Trickles that were almost streams, which I brought to my lips, which I lapped up like a dog or a wolf. Like a lost wolf. Like the lost wolf who, as I should have guessed—as Allah had ordained, as the Thief had foreseen, as I had always known in the deepest intestines of my dreams—was waiting for me at the end of the cave.
He didn’t seem to recognize me. Maybe the dark or the mud shrouded me and my stink. But he must have heard me. Sloshing through the mud and through the water, I was close enough that I could hear his breathing, his huffing, but I—perhaps like him—could smell nothing but the clay, could see nothing but the dark, and as I inched closer to what I thought was the end of the tunnel I traveled, the mud gave way to bone or rock. The tunnel opened out into what I thought might be the beginning or the ending of a cave. The bones seemed to be stacking up into a pile, a hill, which I climbed, without rush, without fear, without anything, toward the sound of the huffing at the top.
When I felt him there, maybe a few feet or so in front of me, I stopped. The bones were slick with water. Had I tried to collect a few more, they would have just slipped out of my hands. He huffed hard and did not move. I was maybe the same distance away from him as the day he tore my index finger. It was still bleeding. Just a few drops. But still. The rocks or the bones had leveled off. We met each other at the top of the hill in the cave.
“Budabash,” I said, not expecting him to speak.
So he didn’t.
“Budabash,” I said again, crawling on all fours into his circle.
This time, he neither lunged nor bit nor bled me. I crawled closer. I pushed down on my toes and stretched out my arms and pulled forward with my hands. He shook in the dark where he was, maybe thinking, imagining, that I’d come all this way to take back what I’d lost or, at least, to take from him some measure of what had been stolen. He could not know. I got so close that I could finally smell his wet wolf’s scent, that I could finally hear his moaning or his purring or maybe the grumbling of his belly, which probably was as empty as the top of the hill where we met. Bone marrow and mud. Nothing else to eat.
Then I touched his dark fur. Water seeped under and around him. It rushed through my fingers, past my arms and my chest. It dripped down through my feet and my toes, and there was such a rush of water that I almost lost my balance. Once or twice, I lifted my bleeding finger and I dragged my hands across the wolf’s wet skin. Or what I thought was a wolf. Or what I thought was a dog. Or what I thought was Budabash.
That was when he bit me. With my wounded finger on the small of his back, at the heart of his scar, and my other hand near his throat, he slowly turned his head in the dark and opened his jaw, and there was a moment, I think, when I could have suddenly moved my arm, when I could have saved myself from the bite. But I didn’t. And though he dug his teeth softly into the flesh of my forearm, I neither screamed, nor fought, nor bled.
No.
I did bleed.
The torn finger of my right hand kept on dripping as I clung to the fur of his skin, as water flowed past our tired limbs, and as the bones and the mud and the dog were washed in its currents. My finger bled, but from what I could feel, my forearm did not. His fangs couldn’t cut through. He was too weak to hurt me, but he wouldn’t let go. He trembled and would not release my arm, and my right hand begged to be avenged, twitching toward the old rifle still strapped to my back, which weighed upon my shoulders like a corpse, and as if to remind me of my pain, the ghost of my finger returned to my wound and it wriggled there, curling, and it ached me as it did in its loss. My right hand was free. It continued to beg for the rifle. But the hill of bones beneath us seemed so delicate and the cave so dark. The mouth of the rifle, with its fire and its light and its piercing thunder, I thought, might destroy the whole world. So I took up my right hand, its finger bleeding, its ghost aching, twitching with fury, and I used it to smooth down the wet fur of the wolf. He seemed to shudder. And when I thought there wasn’t any time left for anything else, I told him a story.
The First Tale
“Listen,” I said, “Allah made Adam from a dark clay for reasons I cannot remember. Then Allah asked all the angels and the djinn to bow to Adam and they all did, except for Iblis, who would not bow before mud since he was made of fire. So Allah, I think, smote Iblis, whose name became Shaytan, and he lived forever after as the enemy of all humanity. Nonetheless, he still loved Allah. As much as he hated Adam, I think, Shaytan still loved Allah.
“May He forgive me if I am wrong.
“For a time Adam lived in the Bagh. There were many plants and fruits and animals and he named them names to pass the days, but he was lonely among the trees, so Allah gave him a companion to share his loneliness. Her name was Hawa. They split paradise fifty-fifty. Like this, it became bearable.
“Things seemed to be going all right for a while. Adam and Hawa ate fruits and slept and talked about nothing because there was nothing to talk about. They went about the Bagh, being very bored, until Shaytan came to them in the form of a snake and told Adam and Hawa to eat a pear from the one pear tree in the whole Bagh he was not supposed to eat.
“Adam took one bite and handed it to Hawa an
d she took the second.
“That was how Adam fucked up everything ever.
“May He forgive me if I am wrong.
“Adam was expelled from the Bagh and he became the earth’s first refugee. Well, him and Hawa. I always forget Hawa, but she was there too. Them together, living on the earth, which was not their home, which was only ever the in-between, and their lives were very sad and very hard until they had some kids. And for a few years the kids gave them joy, but then, of course, Shaytan, who had nothing better to do, reentered the picture. He convinced the one son of Adam to kill the other son, and after the one son killed the other, the one son fled.
“Hawa and Adam were so beset by the sorrow of death, the first of its kind, the first of many to come, it drove them to the trunk of an olive tree. There they wept for many years. And so Allah, I think, hearing their lamentations, sent them a great flood, and Adam and Hawa were happy to drown in the deserts where they lived, but, unfortunately, they were saved by their murderous son, whose name was also Adam, in a small ark he had built in the mountains after he met another tribe of humans, I think, who took him in and gave him a wife who gave him a child. Upon the ark, his whole family survived. But when Adam and Hawa met the son of their murderous son, seeing that their bloodline would live on forever afterward upon the earth, they died immediately of wonder. The son of Adam went on to blame his own child, whose name was also Adam, for the death of his parents. So after the suns dried the flood and the tops of the mountains were once more clear, the son of Adam brought his child to the edge of a cliff where he intended to sacrifice him for the sake of his father. But Allah replaced the son with a sheep and the son of Adam killed that instead.
99 Nights in Logar Page 19