Contraband

by George Foy

  They crossed the saddle just before dusk. Snow was banked so high under the glaciers they could not see above the roadside as the jeep plunged into the valley.

  Dark contorted pines brought darkness early. In the gloom the valley’s rocks looked like trolls frozen in a position of winter larceny.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  ‘We don’t need visas, or whatever they are . . .

  We just walk over the border.’

  Alan Jan, quoted in Peter Mayne

  Journey to the Pathans

  Chitral was a long valley in the mountains where northern Pakistan touched Afghanistan and China. Chitral was also a town of silver and dark flame. Black settlements throbbed with campfires on a silver river. Starlight made silver of the shale lining the water. Shining white peaks rose like distant gods on both sides and on the spurred shadows that marked the valley’s continuation north and south. A Russian Federation gunship slunk between two of the peaks and chopped into the valley, drawing fire from troop emplacements at the snow-stoppered airport, then drifted, lazily, north.

  As they drove up the town’s only road they saw the river embankments were covered with tents erected on walls of shale. Light reflected off the snow and onto the canvas walls, most of which bore the names of relief organizations that had donated the tents: ‘UNHCR’ or ‘Saudi Red Crescent.’ Kerosene lamps blossomed in the depths of market stalls. Eyes hooded in blankets gazed at their passing, withholding judgment.

  The pilot remembered the tenements beside the El, in Brooklyn, and shivered.

  Jamal drove them straight to the District Commissioner’s office. This was a whitewashed house in a courtyard, protected by two brass cannon and a squad of militiamen armed with antique Lee Enfield .303s. Large snow-shrouded trees loomed by the greenhouse; under their shelter the sole representative of the King-Emperor had once heard the petitions of local tribes. A varnished board hung in the office, inlaid with the names of the district commissioners who had gone before. ‘Capt. A.E.B. Parsons, OBE, 1920–1921. Capt. C.E.U. Bremner, MC, 1924–1925.’ Men with moustaches as long as their sense of mission was deep, who believed an island that built palaces of crystal and twenty-thousand-ton Dreadnoughts must enjoy the favor of a deity who himself was white, and spoke English, and could probably play a fair round of snooker, if he chose.

  The current district commissioner was very lean and dark and taut. His name was Zayid Shah. He wore an old white silk scarf under a faded tweed suit and spoke English with an Oxbridge accent that Captains Parsons and Bremner might not have sneered at. He looked long and hard at their pass-cards and did not believe them for a minute when they said they were tourists.

  ‘We are having a bit of bother in Chitral, at the moment,’ he told them. ‘We have fifty thousand refugees from the trouble over the mountains—’ he gestured toward the west ‘—living here. We do not have enough food, we have almost no firewood left. The airport is open only sporadically, and the road will close with the next snow. The Russians, as usual, are setting bombs in the bazaar, in order that the Chitralis will turn against the refugees. Men paid by the Afghan government and men from the Nooristani Liberation Front shoot each other every day. On top of everything, I have just heard a report of a new fever that is sweeping the camps.’

  Zayid Shah picked up a dagger from a foot-high stack of triplicates on his desk. The weapon was richer than the one Jamal wore. It had a handle of yellowed ivory and masses of silver inlay. He patted the sheath idly on the palm of one hand. An orange fire spirit groaned and strained to get out of the potbellied stove. An orderly typed out visitors’ permits on a 1930 Underwood. The DC’s eyes were dark and taut as the rest of him. He looked at each of them individually.

  ‘You will be my guests,’ he told them abruptly. ‘Your driver will bring you to the fort.’ When the pilot started to protest, on the pretext of not imposing on Zayid Shah’s hospitality, but above all not wanting to place them under constant scrutiny from the authorities, the DC interrupted him. ‘All farangi – all foreigners – are required to stay with me until further notice.’

  He did not stop looking at them. He unsheathed the dagger and drove the point violently into the teak top of his desk. The metal sprang and quivered. Zayid Shah smiled pleasantly.

  ‘Dinner will be at eight,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he added, ‘any of you play the game of Gō?’

  *

  Chitral Fort was a massive affair of timber-reinforced earthen walls with stone towers at every corner and one overhanging the river. The only way in was through a postern beside a giant wooden gate. The battlements were patrolled by militiamen. Under tall aspens outside the wall, next to the single dirt track leading to the gate, a Saracen armored car was dug in, its 7.62-mm machine gun pointing toward town.

  Inside, the fort was cut up into a maze of dark offices and living quarters. The power was out – the power was out more often than not in Chitral, from sabotage, or malfunctions, or simply snow – and the rooms and hallways were illuminated by Chinese-made kerosene lamps spaced at strategic intervals. They were shown to different rooms and water was poured in their washstands but by the time they washed up and their bags arrived it was already 7:50 and a steward was walking up and down the hallway ringing a gong for dinner.

  At eight o’clock precisely servants brought into the dining hall a dozen heavy silver tureens still scrolled with the serifed heraldry of the Indian Civil Service, and laid them down the length of the DC’s table.

  The table was thirty feet long, massively carved in mahogany so old and polished it was virtually black.

  Carved silver lamps extruded thick yellow light in diamond shapes. A fire crackled in an enormous fireplace.

  The walls of the dining hall were built of umber brick. In the deep-set windows, through leaded panes, you could see a newly risen moon pour sparkling light on the snowy top of Tirich Mir. The moonlight seemed to splash downward like a fountain, cascading over the icy crags, onto the scraped, deforested slopes next to the town, on the reflecting canvas of the refugee camps; on stark aspens, the ghostly ivory minarets of a nearby mosque, and the river’s white water.

  Four American engineers, a Pakistani hotel owner, and a British anthropologist as well as the pilot and his party sat at the long table. A half-dozen servants dressed in grimy wool waistcoats and turbans served potato, lamb, and lentil stews. These were sopped up with the nan, the unleavened bread. No alcohol. Alcohol was prohibited by the Koran, and the colonels who ran things from Islamabad, though they personally enjoyed their whisky, deferred to the crypto-fundamentalists in these obvious tests of faith.

  When no one was looking, the pilot filled a water glass with clear vodka from his pocket flask.

  Zayid Shah came in late. He sat at the head of the table, drinking liquid salted yoghurt, staring at the fire. Everyone seemed used to his silence. The engineers talked among themselves. One of them, who wore a beard to conceal the fact that he had no chin at all, said ‘We have to get in touch with Islamabad, and it’s up to them to get in touch with Washington.’

  The anthropologist told Ela about the pagan tribes who lived down the valley in Kafiristan. Some said they were descendants of soldiers of Alexander the Great, who once had bivouacked near Peshawar. They wore black and made rough wine and worshiped the moon. Until recently the pagans had enjoyed special dispensation as a sort of ethnological sideshow but now the regime was cracking down on their use of wine and their stubborn refusal to convert. It was hard, the anthropologist added with a sort of post-imperial relish, to tell these mountain people what to do.

  The Pakistani hotel owner competed for Ela’s attention from the other side of the table. He was in his thirties, bored, a chain-smoker. He was also a big fan of what he believed was true American music. He had a stereo system in his jeep. He would play ‘Enegada Davida’ for Ela, he would play it for all of them.

  A woman came out of curtained shadows in one corner of the long room. She was wrapped in voluminous sil
k robes and a heavily embroidered wool jacket. A silk shawl covered two-thirds of her face. Her fingers were thick with rubies. She nodded politely to the table, then sat down to the right of Zayid Shah, who ignored her.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ a younger engineer said, ‘why do we have to do an EIS, if Washington’s gonna fund it anyway?’

  ‘The stars are very beautiful tonight,’ the woman told Zayid Shah in English. ‘I have seldom seen them so close.’

  The woman had a very low, almost husky voice. It sounded the way brown enamel finish looked. Her accent was an attractive braid of Indian and upper-caste British.

  Rocketman shifted his gaze from the door, where he’d been checking for eavesdroppers.

  The woman picked up a piece of bread, pulled down her shawl to eat it. Her cheeks were very strong but they would have to lie down and surrender if you compared them to her eyes. These were enormous, a little almond-shaped, dark and soft as two ponds of night. The lamps reflected in them like twin moons. Rocketman suddenly felt as if he’d been released into zero gravity, floating in a spacesuit above earth like Billy’s dream, or Major Tom; his umbilical cord full of oxygen and pressure and radio communications with the rest of humanity suddenly cut.

  She looked back at him steadily. Seconds ticked by. Half-glances sprouted in the dead air. Zayid Shah pulled his eyes from the fire and watched the woman and Rocketman stare at each other.

  ‘Noor,’ Zayid Shah said sharply.

  She dropped her gaze to the table.

  ‘Yes, Zayid,’ she said.

  ‘This is my wife,’ Zayid Shah told his newest guests.

  Silence fell. In the mosque outside, a muezzin climbed stiffly in long robes to the shining tower and began to chant into a loudspeaker. ‘There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.’ From the hills all around, the jackals howled in response.

  ‘There is no more medicine,’ Zayid Shah’s wife said suddenly. ‘Why can’t they bring us more medicine?’

  ‘They have done all they can.’

  ‘But all they can do is very little—’

  ‘They have a budget—’

  ‘—after they have bought their Chinese missiles—’

  ‘Be quiet.’

  ‘I cannot,’ the woman said. Her voice was still soft but determination had reinforced its timbre. ‘People are dying. They have not enough food to resist, and this fever is killing them like fleas.’

  Rocketman watched her. His hands were sweating so hard they left marks on the wood. His heart beat like a kettledrum. He had no idea why a few words from this woman’s mouth, a simple glimpse of her eyes, should do this to him. Or why the concordance of voice and grace and eyes should affect him so strongly. All he knew was that the room had disappeared for him, with all its eavesdroppers, informants, and government spies, and nothing existed but the quick darts of glance she still sent in his direction, once in a while, in resonance, in response.

  ‘What kind of fever,’ he said hoarsely, ‘Mrs Shah?’

  She looked at him directly now. Her face was full of light. His breath stopped. The woman’s words came quick and intense.

  ‘We think it is a variation of the flu. Only much stronger. It strikes very quickly. There is much diarrhea and vomiting and dehydration. The body temperature goes to thirty-eight, thirty-nine degrees almost immediately.’

  Zayid Shah clapped his hands. The dinner trays were replaced with bowls of sweet nut candies, small cups, and a samovar full of thick tan tea, already mixed with condensed milk and sugar. He clapped his hands again and one servant placed a clunky laptop computer before him, with a rechargeable battery pack hooked up. Another, to one side, set a game board on the table beside a wooden bowl containing hundreds of shiny polished stones.

  ‘Central Asia,’ Zayid Shah announced, spilling the 361 little pebbles on the table before him. ‘Nexus between the great civilizations of Persia and China, India and Europe. The land road between Europe and the East. A thousand languages, a hundred races. We are sitting in the middle of the world’s greatest Gō board, gentlemen. Who wishes to play on the little screen with me?’

  ‘We need doctors. We need nurses. We need people just to help give water,’ his wife said, talking to the mahogany again. ‘There is only one aide there now, and he is old—’

  ‘The Chinese invented the original Gō,’ Zayid Shah stated loudly, ‘to practice dealing with threats from this area.’

  ‘The tribesmen believe the flu is a curse – they will not come near the hospital until they are so sick they have no choice.’ Noor’s voice was rising slowly. Her cheeks were very dark. Her eyes stayed cast down.

  ‘Civilizations in conflict.’ Zayid Shah said the words with a sigh. He tapped out a command on the laptop. ‘For three thousand years empires have clashed over this earth we stand on. In this very fort, British officers and Indian troops held off a Chitrali mutiny for forty-seven days. History is like a living animal here. It scraps and snarls on our doorstep in this valley. And my wife worries about the flu.’ Zayid Shah smiled broadly at his guests, but his eyes did not change.

  ‘Do you know the Beatles song “I am the Walrus”?’ the hotel manager asked. ‘If you play it backwards at 78 RPM it says “Paul is dead.” And the Viking symbol for death was, the walrus!’

  Rocketman had no idea what to do next. He only knew that, in this limited segment of time, of space, the woman was all that existed for him; that contact with her was the only contact that mattered. Can you hear me, Major Tom?

  He played with his teacup – it was so delicate it practically vanished inside the palm of his hand. The words came from the pit of him, almost against his will.

  ‘We could help.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I, uh, worked in a hospital for many years. I could help. PC, here, too.’

  The woman looked at PC, to avoid looking at Rocketman.

  ‘We need help desperately,’ she said. ‘We need hands.’

  The pilot watched her avoiding Rocketman’s eyes.

  ‘Don’t go there alone,’ one of the engineers said, ‘the Dacoits come in, after dark.’

  ‘And what of history?’ Zayid Shah asked, taking the long dagger from a fold in his woollen coat and laying it quietly on the Gō board. He looked at Rocketman as he said this. ‘Are you such men, that you must go with the women to treat the dying, and leave me with my strategies, alone?’

  ‘History,’ Rocketman said, ‘is in the details.’

  ‘Balls,’ Ela said softly, and giggled at her own remark.

  Noor looked at PC and the engineers.

  ‘I can show you how much they need help. I can show you,’ she said, and spread her hands, at a loss for words.

  ‘This is what happens,’ Zayid Shah commented in a tone of great disgust as he laid out the Gō stones carefully on the crossed lines, checking the laptop screen to remember where he was in this part of the game.

  ‘This is what happens, when you take a woman of the East, and send her to Girton College for an education.’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  ‘Badal (retaliation) must be exacted for personal insults, damage to property, or blood feud.

  The most fruitful sources of feuds are;

  (a) Intrigues with women . . .’

  Maj. R.T.I. Ridgeway, 40th Pathans

  Pathans

  In the end they all went – that is, Rocketman, PC, Ela, the pilot, and the British anthropologist went down the bazaar road, past the stalls selling vodka and gems and refrigerators, all smuggled on the backs of donkeys over the Suleiman Range from Afghanistan. Men pulled machine-gun parts from small ruby-glowing forges and filed intently at the hot metal. Others scrambled goat brains in broad woks full of clarified butter and spices. Coals glowed satanic from braziers in the teeming dark.

  The hospital proved to be a small wooden two-story building built around a courtyard. It was quiet enough from the outside, unremarkable save for a line of men and women, many too sick to stand, waiting to get in the courtyard g
ate.

  Once you crossed the threshold the place was so full of the sounds and smells of human misery it seemed about to burst at every joint. Wood smoke, lamplight, and filthy linens textured each surface. The operating areas were lined with ancient enameled tin. Cracked tiles and faucets stuck out of the walls. People lay on any available space, on cots or pallets on the bare floor, excreting wastes and pain. This variety of fever, Noor said, produced both in abundance and colors – the pain gave the victims a sensation of purple, and the wastes were typically liquid and yellow.

  Only a few of the ill had blankets, and these were old and in many cases dirty. There was a high percentage of infants. The hospital’s only doctor, a thirty-year-old Afghan medical student named Nassir, was so tired he barely noticed them when they came in, but carried on diagnosing the walk-ins, murmuring to them in the flat brittle tone of utter exhaustion.

  The British anthropologist took one sniff at the stench and departed, leaving them with a handful of pills. ‘Novogrippe,’ she explained. ‘You’re not immune, you know.’

  PC hung by the entrance to the ward. He had lost color, and kept shaking his head as if trying to refuse something his five senses were telling him.

  ‘This is crazy,’ he whispered to the pilot. ‘Who knows what kind of virus they have here? This is Darkworld, man – selenium-deficient areas, where plagues come from. We get this shit, we could be dead in a week.’

  The pilot shrugged. What PC said was probably true, but somehow hard statistics seemed less important in mountains like these. The knowledge of high granite, and the clarity of the constellations above the Hindu Kush, and the sense of human history piling up with the snows over millennia to isolate this valley, made risk less singular here, life’s imperatives more abstract.

  Zayid Shah’s wife turned and saw them hesitating.

  ‘Are you coming?’

  The pilot looked at PC. Noor followed his gaze.