by George Foy
She snorted. ‘You’re feverish, Joe.’
‘We could do it,’ he insisted.
‘Oh—’ Comprehension dawned. ‘You mean.’ She jerked a thumb at Rocketman. ‘But he’s awake.’
‘I don’t mean that.’ The pilot wiped sweat. ‘I mean down the road. But I don’t think you want to.’
‘Oh Lord,’ Ela said. ‘That, again.’ She cocked her head at him, and used her fingers to wipe sweat from places he had not reached. ‘Love, etcetera. You’re rushing it.’
The pilot winced.
‘No,’ the pilot said, ‘I’m not.’
‘With me you are,’ she told him. ‘You know,’ she continued, ‘this trip’s been good for me. It’s like I’m really six, seven different people. Till now I only knew two or three of ’em.’
‘But I’m the same way,’ the pilot countered, a little wildly. ‘Me, Joe, Skid, pilot, Marak! All same-same.’
‘Everyone’s like that.’ Ela spat on a corner of blanket and used it to wipe dirt off his forehead. ‘With men, most of the people are all booked up. Work, power, sports. For Roger, designing security systems. Selling LSD, for my dad.’
‘But you know we’ve got something together,’ the pilot insisted, feeling his chest constrict from the effort of talking, feeling his throat contract from the hurt generally. Now the pain was purple, just as Noor had said. He wondered, with a pang, what had happened to her. She had pretty eyes, he thought, though not as pretty as Ela’s.
Ela nodded thoughtfully. ‘I cared for you,’ she said, ‘right from the start. But there’s something in you that frightens the hell out of me. I haven’t figured it out yet.’
‘Me?’ the pilot pointed at his chest. ‘But I’m just a little pussycat. I’m a young pussycat, my eyes are barely open, blue, harmless.’
‘You’re a tomcat,’ she told him, ‘a teenage tomcat. Never mind all the high philosophy about borders; you just wanna roam around, knocking down garbage cans. Yowling when the moon’s up.’
‘Don’t forget the she-pussies,’ he said, and pretended to yowl, though he felt more like making the sounds Rocketman was making.
Ela had the gift of switching subjects back and forth when it suited.
‘Also,’ she continued, ‘there’s something in me that says the world is so full of new and interesting things – why focus in on one man? Why try to see all those mountains and rivers and valleys and oceans just through the filter of his little blue eyes?’
*
They came for the prisoners that evening, hustling them up and out of the courtyard with the sharp light of stars and the smell of cold wood smoke in their noses.
When they got outside the courtyard they found a whole caravan had assembled in the village’s main street. Mules and horses stood lined up and decked out in ribbons and tassels of such bright colors you could distinguish them in the dark. Metal cases full of AK-47 ammunition and BM-40 mortars rode piled high on each side of the animals’ backs. A dozen long black fibreglass cases with no insignia at all were being wrapped in rugs and tied on top of the lead mules.
Yuk-yuk and Goat hooked one end of the chain to a dapple-gray mule. After twenty minutes of men shouting and running around in random directions, the caravan began to move.
They marched all night, steadily upwards.
The moon rose, full or close to it. The landscape, forbidding enough to begin with, grew downright scary. The valley narrowed to a gorge whose walls somehow seemed to rise two steps with every step forward. Frozen streams made lovely organic forms in the silver darkness. Footing was perilous. Snow piled high on the mountaintops, occasionally exploded into the gorge, pushed by the wind, drenching them every time with pounds of freezing crystals.
The pilot was very weak, but his weakness ebbed and flowed. At first each step was difficult and he was convinced he was going to die – he could not possibly survive even an hour of this, and the gorge showed every sign of going on right up to the clouds. Then he would get a burst of hot strength and walk more easily for forty minutes or so, until the exhaustion caught up and he sagged back against the chain.
To make matters worse, the pilot had entered the diarrhea part of the flu cycle. He had to stop at hourly intervals, which meant the whole back of the caravan piled up behind as he squatted ignominiously in the snow, chained between the horse and Ela, blowing his insides out in smelly liquid bursts. He was too exhausted and fever-ridden to give a hoot about embarrassment, and the girl was good, ignoring the smells and noises, holding his forehead for him as if he were a kid vomiting, unconsciously mimicking what her mother had once done for her. But the tribesmen had no such solicitude. ‘Dushman,’ they screamed, pointing at the cliffs above. They aimed their machine guns at the sky, made firing noises and shouted ‘Tshuravi!’ They pulled at the prisoners’ chain until the pilot was finished and, wearily, could stand up with the help of Ela and Rocketman – Rocketman functioning wordlessly, pulling at the pilot’s arm, as Ela told him what to do – and plod upward behind the spotted gray rump that seemed to have become the only horizon they had to look forward to.
But every time was harder for the pilot. Each hour brought levels of exhaustion he had not thought possible the hour before. The wet snow melted on his clothes, multiplying his discomfort, making it harder to lift his feet. Finally he came to a point where he no longer had the energy to stand up from his latest squat. Goat and Yuk-yuk gave up screaming to confer. Then they unhooked him from the chain that tied him to his friends, hoisted him like a sack of meal over the dappled-gray mule, tied him lengthwise across bundles of mortar ammo, and set the caravan in motion once again.
They reached a pass in the early morning. A couple of tall conifers marked a traditional campsite. The wind blew vigorously from the north. The snow was very deep here but the caravan halted anyway, to make tea and pray.
Ela helped the pilot down from his mule. She huddled next to him and fed him tea a sip at a time. He watched her eyes as she did this. It seemed to him that her pupils had changed color, into a blue-gray marbling that had its own combustion tightly locked and dampered down at the center.
In the first fingerpaints of dawn they both watched a mollah stand on a high rock next to the conifers and take something out of a varnished wooden box, with hieratic gestures. It was an old brass sextant with a bubble-level for land observations. The mollah aimed the instrument at a morning star, carefully checking his wristwatch and then a pocket altimeter after each sight. He drew a line in the snow. The line pointed toward Mecca more accurately than any line outside of the big religious centers of Herat and Bokhara. Every man in the caravan came up to the line and laid out a prayer rug parallel to it.
The mollah wrapped and packed away his instrument. Then he took out a battery-operated loudspeaker and began to chant the morning prayer.
The mountains rang with his clear voice. There were no jackals this high to hear or bark back. In the pure light of dawn, in the crystalline ecstasy of coming winter, the robes of the tribal smugglers seemed to radiate, perfectly white.
‘It’s so new,’ Ela whispered.
‘That mollah’s read Hawkley,’ the pilot answered. ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, but it’s more than meets the eye.’
Ela looked at him. She saw the red spots on his cheeks and decided not to answer. She fed him some more flu pills instead.
*
The downhill route was easier. There was much less snow on this side of the pass, and the valley opening before them showed flanks of reddish brown earth that grew broader and more frequent as the day progressed. ‘Al hamd’ ’ul illah,’ Goat said, taking a pinch of that earth and rubbing it between thumb and forefinger, ‘Nooristan!’ His yellow teeth flashed.
Their path switchbacked through a rare and fragrant forest of pines. The pilot, tied once again to the back of the packhorse, had somehow got used to the violent rhythm of the mule’s saunter, the sharp corner of the wooden ammo boxes. He dozed, opened his eyes, dozed some more.
Farther on the caravan rattled down a dry riverbed, coming out eventually in a deep valley that lay, like a conch muscle in the smooth folds of its shell, among the huge and snowy mountains. The valley was checkered with fields of corn and hemp, and dotted with forts known as ‘khors’. All the khors had thick earthen walls and tall adobe towers studded with pillboxes and embrasures.
In the valley the mules could go at a faster pace and the men hustled them along with wooden switches and cries of ‘Tchak-tchak!’ Rocketman and Ela limped from blisters. The pilot, tied on his back to the ammo boxes, felt like he was being disassembled from the mule’s quicker motion. Sometimes, when he opened his eyes between bouts of fever dreams, he saw women dressed in gaily colored silks traversing the valley in single file with huge airy mounds of hay on their heads. The silks billowed behind the women, like sails of burgundy, saffron, and royal blue. They never came near the caravan and in the refraction of sun they seemed to float like spirits, upside down over the backdrop of mountains, of sky. The pilot dismissed them as dreams; it was only later, in comparing notes with the others, that he discovered the women were real.
Around five in the afternoon the caravan drew near to one side of the valley. Here a khor big as a town guarded a deep-cut arroyo. The towers of the fort were tall and dangerous-looking, yet they were nowhere near as tall and menacing as the huge orange cliff set in the mountain beside the dried river. As they got closer the prisoners saw that the lower third of the cliff had been carved into the likeness of a human form. By the time the caravan reached the gates of the khor they could recognize in the rock the calm pose, the portly shape of a Buddha figure. The Buddha dominated the fort like a real god. It had to be two hundred feet high.
The odd thing about this sculpture, apart from the size, was this: the features of the Buddha were pure European. In fact, the face, with its very straight nose, horizontal eyes, and thin lips, looked exactly like the idealized features of Achilles, or some other hero in a Greek myth.
Inside, the khor was so big it took in the whole caravan without seeming crowded. The general feeling was of a city. People stared from thin windows in the three-story walls. Square adobe buildings were tacked every which way to walls and towers, separated by thin alleys, till it was hard to distinguish defenses from living quarters. There were squares, markets, a mosque, even fields full of living hemp and dead squash vines. There were sounds of goats, water buffalo, and women; but no women were visible, then or at any other time.
The only reminder that this was a country in the throes of war were the pockmarks of bullet holes in many of the walls, and a trio of Chinese-made Ziqriat anti-aircraft cannon, clumped together in a nest of sandbags in the main square.
The leaders of the caravan retreated into a porch-like enclosure under one of the towers. Yuk-yuk and Goat shepherded the three prisoners into a small room containing a number of rope-woven beds. Their gear already had been dumped on the floor. God was safe in his box but again the ECM-pak was missing; and in all the disconnection of fever, the pilot felt even more alone, knowing that his instruments were gone.
A tiny fire burned in the earthen hearth, its meager smoke escaping through a hole in the roof. ‘Sit,’ Yukyuk commanded, and made a sketchy wave. ‘Khodafis,’ Goat said, smiling with his big teeth. The door shut behind them.
Thick woollen quilts covered the beds. The pilot ambled wearily over and lay down on one. It jerked – hard moving shapes roiled the cloth forms. A thin, very pale face over a scraggly black beard and very pale naked shoulders popped out of the covers and shrieked ‘Lasciate mi dormire! C’e giá stato abbastanza di, ma chi siete?’
The pilot fell off the bed in fever-enhanced panic. Rocketman came out of his depression long enough to stare. Ela said, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ and ‘Do you speak English?’
‘Marco,’ the face said, ‘I am Marco. I am Italian.’
‘Are you a prisoner too?’ Ela asked him.
‘No,’ Marco replied. His chin lifted. ‘I come here, two weeks before for business, a costruire un – ció é, to build a shee-lift.’
‘A what?’ Ela replied, surprised out of her fatigue.
‘A ski lift,’ Rocketman said neutrally, before succumbing to depression again.
‘Yes. A cable car.’
‘Here?’ the pilot gasped from the floor where he’d slumped.
‘Of course.’ Marco pulled the quilt around him and hopped off the bed to the room’s single window. ‘Guardi,’ he said. ‘Look these mountains. They are perfetti. Long alps under this cime, how do you say? Peaks? Friable rocks, like the Dolomite, but long alture, si? Good snow, on the east side.’
‘A cable car.’ Ela sat down on one of the beds and began laughing, helplessly. ‘Ski Afghanistan.’
‘Nooristan,’ Marco contradicted. ‘Is separate now. They even have a minister of foreign affairs. Abdul Rahman. He will give me a contract, one day, for turismo, tutto quello.’
‘You came here on your own?’ Ela said.
‘I am freelance,’ the Italian replied, with great dignity. ‘I am entrepreneur. I am here to see. I will be number one to develop turismo here, when the war is finish, ció é.’ He scratched his ass under the quilt unselfconsciously, and looked at Ela.
‘You have beautiful ankles,’ he told her, ‘beautiful face. It is so fantastic to see a woman again. I hope you will stay here very long.’ He got back into bed.
‘Thank you,’ Ela said, ‘I think,’ and moved over, automatically dragging her chain, to feed the small fire and stop her shivering. There were chips of very resinous wood next to the hearth, and shreds of newspaper. Kneeling, she threw in some of both, then arrested her efforts, staring at a torn page she was about to crumple in one fist.
‘Joe,’ she said, ‘look at this.’
She stood up and brought the paper to the pilot. He looked at it through half-closed eyelids. ‘. . . zette,’ he read, and his eyes opened all the way as he recognized the typeface. ‘The Gazette,’ he said in astonishment. ‘What’s it doing here?’
‘Yeah,’ the girl said, ‘I thought you’d be interested. It’s the same one we saw in Breslau.’
‘This one’s later,’ the pilot contradicted her. He took the torn paper and tried to read it. It was hard to focus with the purple burn behind his eyes. He held the paper closer to the fire. There was a bunch of the usual classifieds taking up the back two-thirds of the paper. He even found the latest installment from the weird classified writer. ‘Sapphic historian seeks SDM Bantu-speaker (non-smoker) with SS# ending 113.20 for comprehensive oral history on influence of Sir Clowdisley Shovell’s ring finger on modern concept of time,’ the ad read.
He tried to think ahout connections, and why the district commissioner of Chitral valley should work with Daud Khan and why Daud should bring them here, but he had to void his bowels once more. He banged on the door. An armed man opened, and led him to an outhouse and, when he had finished, back again. He picked up the Gazette once more but was too tired to read and fell asleep sprawled on the earth floor against one of the beds with the torn paper still crumpled in one fist.
*
Roughly an hour before sunset a boy brought them a large pot of tan tea.
They all sat around the floor and drank solemnly while the little fire did the best it could against the gathering chill. Even Rocketman drank. The exertions of the past twelve hours had dried their bodies like wrung sponges.
‘You come back to here one day,’ Marco said, after the tea was finished. ‘You take a gondola to the peak of Khatinza.’ He pointed at the mountains, through the window. ‘There is a restaurant, serving hot chocolate and Tiramisú. You put on skis outside this restaurant, no? You push off weet your poles.’
Marco made airy gestures in the air with his fingers.
‘The snow will be – come si dice? Light. Your skis, they feel like you ski on – what is on cake?’
‘Icing,’ Ela suggested. ‘Whipped cream?’
‘Cream, ecc
o. Your skis are so smooth, is easier to make turns than not make turns. You will go like a bird. The snow will become flowers. Red, yellow, green flowers.’
‘Flowers?’ Ela said.
‘Purple flowers, with yellow dots.’
The pilot noticed Marco’s voice was getting very hollow, as if it were coming from that long gray tunnel into which Ela already had receded. He leaned forward to check Marco was OK. The Italian did not seem farther away in terms of distance, but he was growing blurry because of a blue mist that had clustered around his face and hands, like a cloud of microscopic blue hummingbirds.
‘Saronno bestie,’ Marco continued, ‘in the pretty flower snow, will be tiny animals, yes? Lions, only three centimeters tall; they roar like mice.’
‘Something’s ha-happening,’ Ela said in a silly voice, like a rabbit’s. She stretched out her hand toward Marco, but her hand would not move. She concentrated on lifting a finger. It came, very slowly, upward; then fifteen or twenty lovely yellow butterflies settled on it and began to sing. ‘I’m always true to you, darling, in my fashion,’ they warbled. ‘I’m always true to you, darling, in my way.’ Her fingers sank under their weight.
The valley, which until then had been entirely free of any mechanical noise, filled with the tearing roar of internal combustion. The pilot tried to get up to look out the window, and found that every molecule he owned was tied by yards of nylon kite string to the floor.
Roman Marak, the pilot’s father, came into the room and began collecting his gear. He picked up the cage he’d made for God. Inside, the rat stretched, and yawned. Bright ivory-handled daggers sparkled where his teeth had been. His paws were tied to large gossamer wings stretched over struts of light bone.
‘Noor,’ Rocketman called out in a voice so full of childlike wonder it made everyone in the room burst into black tears, ‘they let you come!’
The tiny blue hummingbirds kept congregating. Soon they filled the room. Their song was so high and pure it was the expression of movement itself. It sounded like Schumann, played on two million arpeggioni the size of thumbtacks. The song sliced every kite string tying the pilot to earth, wafting him easily into the breeze, out of the khor, into the air; high above the huge red Buddha, so close to the cathedral walls, the blasted russet rock, he could see every vein of quartz and lime; past the flash-frozen waterfalls of suspended glaciers; up, skimming the scalloped snowfields of the high passes; spinning him, without weight, without substance, without matter, pure form, perfect song, impossible to detain or stop at checkpoints, free of hurt, clear of pain, into the warm golden benediction of the sun.