Contraband

by George Foy

  ‘It’s cool,’ PC said. He picked up a piece of nan and got to his feet. ‘Anyway, there’s always the plane.’

  ‘The plane only runs when the clouds are higher than the pass. Anyhow, the plane’s not the point.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You know,’ PC added, ‘I’ve never been here before – but when I think of Manhattan, it’s the City that seems totally foreign to me. And it’s this valley that seems real.’ He slapped the pilot on the shoulder, gave Ela a quick kiss, and disappeared through the curtained doors.

  ‘I think we just lost the Scarecrow,’ Ela muttered.

  The pilot looked at her. He was about to respond when Zayid Shah tapped one final time at the laptop’s keys, stared at the screen, removed three pebbles from his board, and said, ‘That is the end. I have completely surrounded myself.’

  Everyone looked at him.

  ‘Sometimes I think that is all we do here,’ Zayid Shah continued. He rattled the Gō pebbles in the palm of his hand, gauging their tiny weight. ‘Centuries after centuries. The Pakistanis, the British, the Sikhs, the Russians, the Han, the Mughals. Surround ourselves.’ He looked at his wooden board for a full minute. The polished granite glinted in the flicker of lamps. Then in one brutal movement he swept all the little rounded pebbles off the board. They rattled and bounced, a hard cold hail on the stone slabs of the dining hall floor. The wind, knowing good stage management when it saw it, gusted hard. The lamps flickered out.

  In the shadow play of light from the fireplace Zayid Shah spoke.

  ‘It is the Great Game,’ he said. ‘Bluff and counterbluff. Tribes and empires. Feint and withdraw. The center holds or folds. But if it folds, does it cave in on rot, or is the emptiness at the center a trap, till the sides fall in on the pursuers, and they drown? It is not unlike the questions we ask about ourselves.

  ‘I have not found a rule,’ Zayid Shah continued, ‘that can explain both the Hindu Kush mountains, and the suffering of children. Kipling said it best: “For the North, guns; quietly, but always guns.” But the British did not understand. Not really. The Russians do not see it either. The tribesmen react without comprehending, and the mountains are silent.’

  Zayid Shah fell silent himself.

  No servants ran around relighting lamps. Doors swung shut and shadows moved in the back of the large room, but no one noticed, so intense was the district commissioner’s performance.

  Rocketman rose into the vacuum, as if his legs were impelled by a force far stronger than he. His voice cut through the rush of wind in the chimney. It came deep and angry, as if the mountains had found voice to answer Zayid Shah.

  ‘Where is Noor?’ he roared.

  Zayid Shah did nothing. The shadows fooled with the fire. Rocketman shoved his chair out of the way and moved next to the district commissioner’s seat. His fists were wound tight as roots. He repeated the question.

  ‘You do not understand, either,’ Zayid Shah said at length, in a voice like velvet glued onto tank armor.

  ‘I understand one thing real clear,’ Rocketman told him. ‘You’ve done something with her.’ He started closer to Zayid Shah’s chair. Zayid Shah raised his hand, almost languidly. From all along the wall in back, like a drumroll in metal, came the ratcheting sound of rifles being cocked.

  A line of Chitral Levy militiamen moved out of the room’s far shadows. Their Lee Enfields pointed up and down the long table. Most were aimed at the big dark-colored man who hung over the district commissioner like a storm cloud. Three of the militiamen surrounded Rocketman, the barrels of their carbines only centimeters from his skin.

  ‘You do not understand,’ Zayid Shah insisted. ‘You have never understood. It is not just Islam. It is a basic division of labor – a survival trick, in a region so harsh, in human terms, that any change in the division here, you see, could spell death for our way of life.’

  ‘But you don’t love her,’ Rocketman said, in a voice as low as it was desperate. ‘That’s a crime.’

  ‘She is an adulteress.’

  ‘What are you talking about? I don’t understand you.’

  Zayid Shah smiled.

  ‘You have been with her,’ he said, ‘alone. It has been witnessed. In our society, that is enough to bring shame on my entire family. In our society, adultery is punished by stoning. Stoning to death. If she is lucky. However,’ Zayid Shah sighed, ‘times are changing. The Industrial Islam has softened our customs. She may only get life in prison. I would not wish that for her.’

  Rocketman stared at him. Then he appeared to topple forward, like a tree, in slow motion, and the pace and import of his action froze the passage of seconds and his hand goes for Zayid Shah’s throat.

  Four militiamen jump on Rocketman’s back. His grunts and curses overcome the wind. Someone swings a rifle butt into his stomach and the fight goes out of him.

  Anger is injected quick and violent into the pilot’s brain. He reacts without thinking, leaping at the militiamen who have hit Rocketman, and gets much the same treatment. A rifle jabs his chest, a couple of solid soldiers pull him down. ‘You sonsabitches,’ the pilot yells, and someone smacks him in the face, backhanded. Another militiaman frisks him, expertly. He finds the switchblade in the pilot’s boot, presses the button, and grins as the shiny blade lashes out of the handle.

  Ela screams, prettily.

  ‘It has no meaning,’ Zayid Shah says vaguely.

  *

  A sergeant leaned over the district commissioner’s chair. They whispered at length. Zayid Shah pointed at Ela. Militiamen pried her from her seat with rifle butts, like digging out an oyster.

  The engineers watched with stony faces. The British anthropologist looked uncomfortable. ‘I hope you have grounds,’ she said to the district commissioners. ‘You must have grounds.’ She played with a necklace of cowrie shells given her by the pagans she studied.

  Now servants came in with candles and relit the guttered lamps. The militiamen lined up their three prisoners by the door.

  The pilot tried to move his smarting mouth. He was trembling from rage, short of breath, and sweating like a racehorse to boot.

  ‘What’re you doing to us?’ he hissed, ‘Zayid Shah!’

  The DC did not look at him. Instead he watched the fire. The flames leaped and swirled like dancers.

  ‘I have decided you are a terrorist,’ Zayid Shah said after several moments had passed.

  ‘You’re not too bright,’ the pilot told him, ‘but you ain’t that stupid.’

  ‘My intelligence is not the issue.’

  ‘I’d say it is. I’d say that is exactly what is the issue.’

  ‘There is something about you,’ Zayid Shah countered, ‘that smacks of defiance. In Chitral, defiance and terrorism equate, they are one and the same.’

  ‘In Chitral,’ the pilot started to say, ‘you think you can get away with equating any fucking thing you want,’ when the militiamen dragged them toward the door.

  ‘But,’ Ela protested.

  ‘Noor!’ Rocketman yelled suddenly, arching his back away from the soldiers holding him up, anguish stretching from his bruised guts, ‘Noooor!’

  But no answer came. No one else in the dining hall uttered a word. The militiamen made canine comments as they hustled their prisoners along the stone passage. The wind moaned in a pain much older and more general but no sharper than that of Rocketman, as the postern door opened and the group passed into the night.

  Chapter Thirty

  ‘Five and twenty ponies

  Trotting through the dark—

  Brandy for the Parson,

  ’baccy for the clerk;

  Laces for a lady, letters for a spy.

  Watch the wall, my darling,

  while the Gentlemen go by!’

  Rudyard Kipling

  The Smuggler’s Song

  The militiamen fastened iron shackles around their wrists. The shackles were of the real Dracula’s-dungeon variety; screw
-set, forge-wrought, black with age, and very heavy. The shackles were hooked to a single black chain. A Bedford truck, intricately pastiched like all the other antiquated Bedfords in this part of the world, ground up the track and stopped before the fort. The militiamen loaded their prisoners in the open back and threw in gear collected from their rooms. They giggled at God’s box, and poked their fingers through the airholes at him, then chucked him in with the bags and the ECM-pak.

  Two guards, not militiamen, climbed in with the prisoners. The truck moved off, rumbling across the British bridge, onto the stone road past Daud Khan’s daftar, then north, as the track turned back to dirt, up Chitral valley towards Tirich Mir.

  The cold had fangs of ice and claws of wind. The guards let them dig jackets from their gear and put on as many layers as would fit around the shackles. The pilot checked God was OK in his box. He needed to make sure the ECM-pak was securely shut but when he reached for it one of the guards leaned forward, placed the Kalashnikov muzzle in the angle of the pilot’s jaw, and said, very firmly, ‘Sit.’ He sat back down, next to Ela, trying to cover her with as much of his body as he could, but he had little warmth to give her and she continued to shiver violently beside him.

  Rocketman collapsed on the floor of the truck and wound himself into a large curl around a spare tire, holding his knotted stomach. He moaned repeatedly, from pain or anguish or both, they’d asked him several times and he’d not responded. The name of Noor was usually part of his groans. The guards stepped on Rocketman whenever he spoke but this did nothing to deter him.

  The guards both wore the usual turbans, blankets, and pistols besides their AK-47s. One of them looked like a goat, with yellow eyes and big brown teeth. The other had jug ears and laughed repeatedly in a high-pitched voice. The pilot tagged them silently; Goat and Yuk-yuk. Goat knew one word of English. The word was ‘sit,’ and he used it for all purposes, whenever he had information to impart to his prisoners.

  The trail narrowed, climbed more steeply. Clouds unveiled the rising moon, like a magician pulling the scarf off a dove newly appeared in his hand. The customary death-drops and chamois crags loomed and plummeted on either side of their bald and spinning tires. Ela stopped looking. The snow got deeper on the precipice tops. The pilot peered up into the indigo light, into the silver-blue ice of the peak country they were low-gearing into. The desperation in his mind took on color, the way pain did in the minds of the flu victims of Chitral hospital. The despair was of gray hue, with lots of green and scarlet, pushing mauve.

  When he looked down, and sought Ela’s face, she was the same pale gray, and he realized his desperation stemmed from her; beyond the kisses, despite the private smiles, over and above their midnight intimacies, she was drawing further and further away from him for no reason he could fathom; the pull-back he had first begun to sense right after Peshawar was growing, imperceptibly but remorselessly, the way a big ship came unstuck from the quay. Mooring warps were being tossed in the water and hauled up the fairleads; the paper streamers grew taut and broke. Her face was fading away from him, down a long ringed tunnel of the same insipid lavender-gray, and there was no way of calling her back.

  Despair caused the usual reaction, and the pilot felt a brutal physical longing for cookies. Slightly warm Pepperidge Farm Nantucket cookies with chocolate chips and pecan chunks would be great, but any kind of cookie would be good at this stage, the sweeter and crunchier the better. He tried to unbutton his jacket. All of a sudden he felt very warm – hot, even. Goat looked at him incredulously in the back haze of headlights.

  ‘Sit!’ he yelled.

  When the pilot tried to unbutton his shirt Goat pulled out blankets and angrily threw them over both Ela and the pilot.

  The wind rose and fell. The truck whined and roared. Ela sang softly to herself. ‘. . . you’re Inferno’s Dante; you’re the schnozz, on the great Durante.’ Two hours into the trip Rocketman rolled with no warning toward the back – dragging the chain, the pilot, and Ela – and tried to buck himself over the tailgate. Yuk-yuk and Goat hauled him back into the truck bed. Yuk-yuk giggled hysterically. Goat screamed ‘Sit! Sit! Sit!’ as he pounded Rocketman’s back with his rifle butt. In a red fury the pilot tried to kick at Goat and missed. Ela put her arms around the pilot and kept the blanket tight around his shoulders. She could feel the fever radiating in waves from his face. ‘You’re sick,’ she said. ‘Go easy.’ She fetched three Novogrippe pills from her bag and forced them into the pilot’s mouth.

  ‘Not sick,’ the pilot gurgled. He was truly convinced this was depression striking. He thought he knew the cause. ‘You won’t let me love you.’

  ‘Sick,’ Ela repeated, as firmly as she could through chattering teeth. ‘You’ve got the Chitrali flu.’

  ‘Don’t understand why,’ the pilot said, feeling the pain in him swell like a tumor. ‘This happens to people who don’t wan’ it. PC’s the one wanted to fall in love. Not Rocketman. Not me.’

  ‘PC was never interested in women,’ Ela replied. ‘Any fool could see that. Like Rocketman was never really interested in rockets—’ but at that point Goat stuck his AK-47 practically in their faces and yelled ‘Sit!’ to shut them up, and the rest of what she said got lost in their slipstream.

  The trail swung left, seemingly pierced a cliff, wanted to go through a mountain, but at the last minute turned up a tiny, winding valley. Big gloomy trees, of the sort Ichabod Crane rode under on his way through Sleepy Hollow, stooped under fresh snow. Fields appeared. Stone walls framed crowds of dead cornstalks. Intricate waterworks of carved wood brought long ice from invisible springs to equally invisible cultivations sandwiched onto hillside terraces. Occasionally the glow of lamps would appear, as living structures loomed out of the snow. The villages too were built into the hill; cubed heaps of tiny dwellings, stacked on top of each other, built of black wood and mountain stone, channeled with water conduits. Every spare inch of the dwellings was stacked with goats and firewood.

  Women stood at the entrances of chai houses. They wore black dresses and their faces were unveiled.

  Twice, behind the women, they spotted the pink shiny intrusion of European ethnologists, madly taking notes.

  ‘Kaffir,’ Yuk-yuk said, and chuckled. Pagans. It was not clear to whom he was referring.

  ‘Noooor,’ Rocketman wailed from the bed of the truck.

  At Rocketman’s cry the pilot woke sweating from a dream of flying. ‘There’s Vikings all over the fucking place,’ he said. ‘I’m never landing in Rockefeller Center again.’

  ‘We have to stop,’ Ela told Goat. ‘This man has a bad fever.’

  ‘Sit!’ Yuk-yuk shouted.

  ‘But,’ Ela said, and gave the guards her most evil look; however this was a country where men did as they chose no matter what faces women made and it had no effect.

  Just before dawn they reached a village at the valley’s head. A frozen torrent of ice split the village in two. Every space with a slope of less than fifty degrees was occupied by tents and supply dumps. And horses – there must have been two thousand horses and mules, packed in corrals, hobbled in fields, tethered in corners, chomping on hay, being loaded, unloaded, and watered.

  In one of the corrals boys kicked and yelled at a herd of chopped-mane Mexican mules, imported by the CIA from Texas to supply Nooristani rebels on the border. The mules, who were used to Tejano accents and commands, seemed confused. They milled in ten different directions, braying pitifully.

  Bearded Muslim tribesmen wearing robes, machine guns, and impassive looks watched the truck grind up the main drag and into a mud-walled courtyard.

  A gate closed behind them. A door opened in the courtyard. In the light of a kerosene lamp the pilot saw very clearly the broad frame, the large white beard, the distinctive smile of Abd el Haq. Beside him stood a small man with red hair. He was robed and bearded but there was something in his posture and the way he held his hands that seemed distinctly Anglo-Saxon.

  The door slammed abrup
tly shut. The prisoners were hustled into a long room with wooden beams and an earthen floor. Their gear, with the signal exception of the ECM-pak, was tossed in after them. That door too was shut and barred. Through chinks in the daub-and-wattle roof they saw the rising sun pick selected mountaintops and paint them in broad strokes of apricot.

  The pilot’s fever ebbed and flowed. The day was filled with fantasies of Ela. Always she was a distant figure. Once she stood on a station platform. The station smelled of coal and stale urine. Dim figures stood at every corner of the gray platform. The figures wore cloaks and carried rifles. Armies were marching, war was imminent. He and Ela were waiting for the last train to leave this doom-sodden country, but the train never came. Fog blew in from the open fens, like the long breath of skeletons.

  At midday a kid brought in plates of potato stew, hot nan wrapped in burlap, a pot of sweet tan tea.

  God had been eating too much nan, and his digestive tract was acting up again. He skittered around the walls of the room, sniffing in dank corners, squeaking his discomfort.

  Throughout the day Rocketman refused to talk. Wrapped in his blanket, hunched in a corner, he continued to groan at intervals. The pilot shivered. Ela was the only one besides God who took an interest in her surroundings, and she explored their jail, to the extent of the possible, to the limits of their common chain.

  ‘Where do you think they’re taking us?’ she kept asking the pilot. And once, ‘Why do you think they’re doing this?’

  She tucked the blanket closer around his shoulders. He shrugged the blanket off. He tried to assemble the straws of lucidity in his brain, and arrange them in some kind of order.

  ‘Who knows,’ he muttered. ‘I just think it has to do with you.’

  ‘What, me?’

  ‘You know. You and me. You an’ me an’ fate.’