The Opium Prince

by Jasmine Aimaq

  “I have a better idea,” Daniel said. “Let’s go sledding.”

  Keshmesh widened his eyes. “You mean like in movies? I’ve never been on a sled.”

  “Then it’s time.”

  Daniel asked Firooz to fetch the sled from the attic, and soon he was pulling the boy up a hill near the house. He placed Keshmesh in the front, then wedged himself behind him, wrapping a protective arm around his waist before pushing off. Keshmesh laughed every kind of laugh: nervous, happy, grateful, alive. The sled spun, gaining speed. Daniel laughed, too.

  “One more time!”

  Daniel obliged. They rode for an hour or more, watching the day end in a silvery haze as they pulled the sled back to the house. Their fingers were wrinkled, their hair and clothes wet.

  “Thanks, saheb,” said Keshmesh. Daniel sent the boy home with a thermos of cocoa Firooz prepared. Sledding had been exhilarating. One day, maybe he would share evenings like this with his own son, and he would never grow tired of listening to his cassettes or his laughter while sliding down a snowy hill.

  What will you do if you have a girl? Telaya asked, angrier than he’d ever heard her. Would she count?

  At work, things were worse than Ian had inferred. Elias’s newspaper detailed the Gulzar fiasco, excoriating Greenwood for his weaknesses, including his surrender to Daniel’s bad judgment and his much worse surrender to urges that should have led him to die by his own hand. But most of the reporter’s ire was reserved for Daniel, whom he attacked in paragraph after paragraph. Telex messages were piled high in Daniel’s mail tray, where the whole sorry affair was cataloged in a series of notes from Smythe.

  January 1. Dannaco furious. Ruby wasted on Gulzar. Talked to Sherzai, says he warned you, agrees with Dannaco you need a different position in project. Most important thing is Reform. Will discuss with Sec. Vance, committees, etc. L.S.

  January 3. Followed up with various. Consensus: USADE needs new leadership. Vance and Carter say massacre in Kabul potential game-changer. L.S.

  January 6. Happy New Year. Sherzai wants you off desk and off Reform. Seth reinstated, probation finished. Dannaco likes him. Seth been working over Christmas. Available because he’s Jewish. Has smart plans for 1978. We’ll discuss when you’re back. L.S.

  The fourth note was dated January 8, just two days ago. It said: Sherzai requested that State Dept. replace you. Sec. Vance says you can stay for now, but on basic admin duty. Has some desk jobs in DC that may work for you later.

  Seth was standing outside Daniel’s office, holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a stapler in the other. “Hello,” he said. He ambled away, calling over his shoulder, “I’m glad you’re back. I’ll help you move your stuff.” His gait was different. His shoulders were straighter, his stride longer. Soon he was back with a few aides in tow and a box in his arms.

  Daniel found the alcohol cart in the supply closet, took a bottle of whiskey, and locked himself in the bathroom with it. He left the building moments later, and for the first time he felt complete ownership of it. It was his building, his name on the facade. His project. His goddamn Reform. They had achieved almost nothing before him. And if it weren’t for Taj—he cut short the thought. Laila called the office and told him again to come by. “Elias and Peter are coming. And Sherzai. We haven’t seen you in ages,” she said softly. He thanked her but said he had too much to catch up on.

  He didn’t return to the office that day, wondering if he ever would. He went inside a hotel that catered to foreigners and ordered a drink, then another. He wandered on foot until the city was dark. A pair of soldiers told him to go home and sober up. What did they know? What did it mean anyway, to be sober, and why was it better? Where was home? It was where you were needed. Rebecca needed him. He should be in LA with her. No. He should be here, as he was, making a dent, no matter how small, in the scourge of the opium trade. He should be stopping people like Taj, and making up for his own cowardice in the face of blackmail. Why had he given in? The man had probably been bluffing. Daniel dismissed the idiocy that kept asserting itself: that maybe he’d capitulated because he’d wanted to save not only the people but the poppies. No. Daniel had wanted to save lives, and he’d done the only thing he could. He had lied and become a blackmailer, too. A criminal. And yet.

  Laila’s apartment was close. The world was gently spinning, and he decided he’d go after all. Maybe seeing friends would do him good. When he appeared on her steps, Peter opened the door and embraced him without a word, pulling him inside with urgency. The apartment smelled of onions and freshly baked naan. A card game was in progress. Reams of paper were scattered across the coffee table, a typewriter on the sofa.

  The floral curtains seemed oddly out of place. They clashed not with the other decor but with Laila herself. She was all business in her trousers and high-collar blouse, her sensible watch and small gold studs. She held her cards with unvarnished fingers, nails trimmed all the way to the fingertips. To her left sat Elias, to her right, Sherzai, both with cards in their hands. Sherzai rose when Daniel walked in. Peter apologized for the mess and began tidying up, shoving papers into a satchel and lugging the Smith Corona to the bedroom. “We thought you weren’t coming,” he said.

  “Agha, how’s the sandali?” Daniel asked Sherzai. He’d given him the table for Christmas, and Sherzai had been moved nearly to tears. “Is it keeping you warm?”

  “What’s the matter with you, batche’m,” Sherzai whispered. “I’ve told you so many times. Only medicinal, and never more than one.”

  “Is everybody having a good time?” Daniel asked. The floor undulated, rising and falling like the road after the crash. He had longed for the company of friends, but they felt like strangers to him. Elias watched him, unflinching.

  “Sit down and have some soup,” Laila replied. “You’re going to catch a cold.” She spoke rigidly as she buttered a wedge of naan.

  He shut his eyes and steadied himself with a hand against the wall, which was bare except for a framed image of Marie Curie and her husband standing side by side in a lab. Laila brought him a tray and led him to the coffee table, where he ate slowly. He drank the hot cider that Peter had made, while Laila returned to her cards with Elias and Sherzai. Peter veered from one mundane subject to another. He was glad for his new post at the university, though he launched into detailed descriptions of his students’ mediocrity, as he always had done. The faculty were worse, of course. Daniel saw Laila raise her eyes to the ceiling and shake her head, but she was smiling. He asked Peter about his book.

  “It’s coming along. Sherzai is very helpful.”

  “You’ve mentioned that.”

  The five of them fell silent, the only sound that of cards being plucked and moved between fingers. Then Daniel said, “Sherzai is always helpful.” He heard the liquor-flavored chill in his own voice and felt agha’s gaze, and couldn’t bring himself to look back at him. Instead, he aimed his next words at Elias. “And you. You’re so helpful, so principled. Always doing the right thing.”

  Elias dropped his hand. “I gave you a thousand chances to talk. You could have given me your side of the story.”

  Sherzai got to his feet. His cane clattered to the floor as he laid a gentle palm on Daniel’s cheek. “Sometimes other people know better, bache’m.” He bore a hardened expression belying his sorrow, the same look he had worn the day Dorothy left. And the day the royal police took Sayed away.

  “How can you still call me that? Like I’m a son to you?” Daniel was surprised by the emotion in his own voice. “My father would never have tried to get me fired.”

  “You can’t know what your father would have done.”

  “He’s right,” Laila said.

  “I don’t understand,” Daniel said. The room swayed as he stumbled to the couch and lay down.

  When did you ever? said Telaya, and he could swear he felt her patting his hand.

/>   Dreamscape

  Once Boy learns words and numbers and time, his mind becomes as quick as his feet. When he’d fled from his mother’s body, he’d run without stopping. Now he can think without stopping. He can read the signs that say, jalalabad this way, pakistan that way. He pores through magazines that talk about Fever Valley, where he used to cut poppy bulbs with Nazook, and where there’s still land for the taking, if a man has courage and imagination. The magazines don’t put it that way, but Boy understands.

  Soon, Taj feels he has earned his name. He walks into the field, enchanted by the rustling of the stalks, the warmth of the life-giving sun, and the vastness of the sky. These are the finest poppies in the valley. More important, they are his. The Kochis roam with their knives and containers, working, scarcely looking up, doing what he says.

  It took eight years. For so long, he did what he was told, still thinking of himself as Boy. With a small blade that fit in his palm, he scored poppy pods, kept his head down, followed orders. In each field, he wrapped a brightly colored scarf around the best poppies, like the farmers told him to do. After every harvest, Boy helped round up the good poppies, the ones with brightly colored scarves, because the farmers saved their seeds for next year so they could plant only the best—the ones whose sap flowed like a river, hardening into copper-colored resin.

  In a field of a thousand flowers, maybe one hundred were good, and half of those were extraordinary. He wandered from field to field like this, working harder than the others. He became known for his skills. A poppy pod would continue to give resin for a few days, and could be tapped four or five times. Taj was the best at getting every drop, tapping a pod six or even seven times.

  For every hundred exceptional poppies Boy bundled for the farmer, he set aside ten or twelve for himself. The farmers never saw, because Boy had always been the best thief. He cut the poppy at the stalk, keeping only the pod where the seeds were.

  He hid the pods in his turban. Nobody would dare ask him to take it off. At home, he meticulously extracted the seeds and dried them over a flame, adding them to his collection. At first, he kept them in a jeweled box he’d stolen from a shop, but soon he had far too many seeds. When he still lived with Nazook, he sometimes hid the seeds in plastic bags for oranges or pomegranates, shoving the bags under his mattress. But now Nazook is dead because he tried to hold Taj back, telling him he should know his place, and that he wouldn’t be anything without his mentor. Taj knew by then that his place was to be king, and kings got rid of people who stood in their way. No one will ever find Nazook’s body because only Taj knows the Valley so well, and there is no better burial ground than an endless garden.

  He stored more and more seeds, and one day he piled the boxes and bags into crates he found in an alley. Temperature mattered, so in the summer Boy buried the containers in the earth, just behind the kitchen, and in the winter he stacked them in a hole behind the fireplace. After eight years, he had thousands of seeds. The older ones wouldn’t yield much, but they would help fill the fields he dreamed of, and one day he would have the grandest flowers and the finest resin.

  Today, he is more than a king. He is a Manticore. The flowers whisper hello when Taj comes around, and sometimes he drives to the field late at night and sleeps between the stalks. There is an American agency that has been very helpful. A few years ago, it came to Fever Valley and gave land to farmers to grow corn and whatever else Americans liked to eat. First, they nourished and tilled land that belonged to nobody. Then they struck at a field full of poppies, but the poppies came back, laughing at them along with the Manticores. The Americans were very angry, not because the poppies were still growing, but because people were laughing at them.

  Sometimes Taj still had dinner with Nazook’s parents, who thought him a nice boy like their late son. It was there that he heard the American agency was struggling with money. A few years ago, he wouldn’t have believed it. He’d heard about Americans and their money since before he could read. Surely money in America was as plentiful as sand in the desert. But now that he can read the newspaper, Taj thinks that in America, some people have too much money, but the government doesn’t have enough. There is a new group from Washington coming to the agency this year to convert everybody’s poppy fields to wheat and corn. Nazook’s father says, “They think they’re magicians, these Americans, that they can just instantly turn one thing into another.”

  26

  In the following weeks, Daniel felt a calm settle over him that matched the stiff quiet of the army-strewn streets: a forced order rather than peace. He spoke with Rebecca every week, at least when the phones worked. Living at her parents’ house was hard because of the constant reminders of Sandy. But she talked about LA as if reading from a brochure. The air was soft, the climate soul-renewing. Sun had a direct effect on mood, she recited. Scientists said so.

  He didn’t want to tell her about his demotion, but it wasn’t something he could hide. She was angry on his behalf, insisting that he’d done wonderful work and concluding that his colleagues and superiors were either jealous or stupid and likely some combination of both. She told him he didn’t have to work for Washington at all. He could do anything he wanted, she said.

  At USADE, Daniel moved into Seth’s old office, a small space with a small window and a permanent smell of tea and sweat. He kept to himself, crunching numbers for the budget, writing reports when Seth asked him to, telling himself the work was still worthwhile. But with every day that passed, it became harder. Nothing more had been mentioned about the desk job in DC.

  The State Department’s fears that the horsemen had signaled a game change faded. The turmoil was over, Smythe said, nothing but a moment of drama, unsurprising in the restless third world. Sometimes the Teletype spilled over with nervous thoughts from the State Department or the desk of an especially interested congressman. But the program continued, the USADE staff growing calmer as time passed. Locally, President Daoud held occasional radio chats. His voice grew tired even as his message grew more forceful.

  Daniel met with Ian every week, sometimes more. They spent hours in the shed building things they’d tried to convince themselves were useful. A rocking chair. A new drawer for Ian’s desk. One afternoon in the middle of April, they completed a bread box they agreed was “rustic” when it turned out less elegant than the picture. When a project went south—the shape of the item wrong, the wood splintering, or the hardware going in crooked and refusing to come out—Ian insisted that these projects were just quick-and-dirty skill-honing sessions anyway. “Tools like these, you gotta use them or they go bad,” he said, making muscular gestures around the shed.

  Daniel nodded, though he knew that tools didn’t go bad just as he knew these afternoons weren’t about honing skills. They were, like so many events during those strange and sour months, an effort to force a sense of normalcy on life when things were turned upside down. Spending his days in an office run by Seth, coming home to a house without Rebecca, being on a side opposite Laila . . . it was like tuning in to a baseball game and finding out your favorite players had all been traded.

  Seth had completely commandeered the office, calling meetings at all times of the day. To say he was unkind would be an exaggeration. He mostly ignored Daniel. To say that Daniel plotted against Seth would be an exaggeration, too, but he began to think about ways to regain his position, spending hours laboring over new strategies for the Reform. He pored over maps and talked with local engineers, some of the more successful and cooperative farmers, and officials from the Ministry of Planning, although he never called Sherzai, who had officially requested that Daniel be sent back to America. Sometimes he appeared in Daniel’s mind the way Telaya did, staring at him with deep, glassy eyes and whispering the truths he couldn’t bear to hear.

  Sherzai had spent much of his life working for the government, first hired by an official who admired Sayed and agreed to do him a favor by hiring his friend. He had
risen because he was wiser and smarter than anyone had guessed, even if he was from the wrong tribe. Agha knew about Daniel’s forgery and had said nothing, so he hadn’t betrayed him, not really. He had protected him. This was how Daniel decided to look at it from now on.

  Days later, looking at a map, Daniel drew a small X in a southeastern section of Helmand Province, which lay hundreds of miles southwest of Fever Valley. Somewhere near that X, a field of poppies had once grown. Washington had a project there with a much bigger budget than Daniel’s fledgling office, but it had little to do with poppy fields. They built dams, reservoirs, highways, and canals and supported farmers who were working to become more efficient, all with the help of the river basin and reservoir. There was even a place called Little America, a place some eight blocks deep and two blocks wide, where Americans and Afghan officials lived, working with a big corporation that made Dannaco-Hastings look like a corner store. The scattered poppy fields that were coming up were designated as “out-of-project areas.”

  Many years ago, that X had contained an explosion of red blossoms. Not like Fever Valley, but still a respectable sweep of delirium. It was abandoned now. The 1953 Sugar Fire, thus named because opium resin smelled like overripe fruit when it burned, had driven the growers out. The winds had carried the cloying scent for miles on that September morning. Daniel remembered. He had been eight then, old enough to form lifelong memories. His father had started that fire. And not by accident. Sherzai had told Daniel and insisted he stay in the car, but Daniel had secretly followed the men, who walked into a mountain and vanished. He sneaked through the same crevices they did, climbing down the ragged paths made by nature, and then he saw it. A massive valley ringed by mountains and bursting with poppies. It was like a mythical kingdom, perfectly hidden and impossibly rich.