The Fearsome Particles (16 page)

In addition to the five wells I had to test and treat, there were twelve stops on the route, which took us through the poorest neighbourhoods of Balakhet. I’d seen pictures of some of these sections during the first orientation briefing, but that was nothing like being in them for real. We drove past crumbling clay buildings that had been bombed by the Soviets and bombed again by the Americans until the walls that were left looked like they’d been scraped up from the earth. Old bearded men squatted at the side of the road, wrapped in blankets. The air smelled like open sewers.

The driver glanced over at me. “You get used to it,” he said.

At each stop, with the photographer snapping away, Lieutenant Jayne and Nila would meet with the grateful doctors, clerics, or orphanage directors who were waiting in the doorways, while the men climbed out of the backs of the trucks and unloaded thirty-three water jugs. The Afghan officials seemed eager to hug everyone from Lieutenant Jayne to the men hauling
the water, so there was a lot of hugging and a lot of pictures being taken of the hugging. At one point the photographer, whose name I never found out, made the mistake of suggesting the lieutenant wear a floppy red Santa’s cap he’d brought along in his canvas bag, but after that things went pretty smoothly and we didn’t see the Santa’s cap again. Everywhere we stopped, Legg kept to the fringes of the action with his rifle in hand, staying sharp and mostly silent, although at the third well, when I was on my knees checking a sample for turbidity, I heard him asking Nila about a ring of men that had formed in the square and about the wool-covered domes that were sitting on circles of rock.

“A partridge fight,” she explained, and pointed to the domes. “In these they keep the birds.” They watched as a short, turbaned man tilted back one of the domes – under the wool was a cage made of sticks. He grabbed the partridge inside by the neck and tossed it into the ring. When the men began shouting and gesturing excitedly, Nila said, “The Taliban hated this. They are betting on the winner.”

At the word
betting
, Legg rubbed the crumbs of grit from his face and gave the group a long, wishful look.

Our caravan rumbled for hours through the ruined districts of Balakhet, and took so many turns I lost track of which direction we were headed. On one road, as the windshield wipers cut swaths through the dust, the guard in our truck started twisting in his seat, checking out the windows. “We shouldn’t be on this road,” he said, shaking his head. A few weeks before, he told us, patrols along here had found caches of ammunition and antitank rockets in two of the abandoned buildings. “Honk the
horn,” he told our driver, and he rolled down the window, pounded on the side of the truck and shouted through the dust for the lead driver to get us off that road. We turned down a street that took us into a busier area with shops and signs painted with Pashto symbols, and after a few minutes he relaxed. The dust settled enough for us to see women in pastel burqas floating along beside the parked cars like ghosts, turbaned men pulling carts humped with sacks, or watching us from alleyways. And teenagers with one arm. I’d heard soldiers talk about this once in the kitchen, about how, a few years ago, children in the desert would see bright-painted butterfly mines scattered from Soviet helicopters and think they’d found a toy. By the end of a day of swaying in my seat, I’d seen enough one-armed teenagers that I no longer paid any attention.

And then there was one more well to treat. It sat on the eastern edge of the city, near the school with the brand-new roof, at the end of a boulevard where the buildings gave way to sand.

By now we were pretty exhausted as we climbed out of the trucks. It was late in the day; the sun sat just above the rooflines of the eroding shops and disintegrating houses. Nila, holding her hijab to keep it from being taken by the wind, motioned toward a blank space in the street. “A hotel was here once, three storeys tall,” she said. “Very modern.” There was nothing left of it; maybe the foundation was still there, but if so it was hidden by the sand the winds had pulled in from the wasteland that stretched to the mountains. I smiled to show I was interested, but I couldn’t really picture the hotel – I was too busy watching the kites.

There were six
gudiparan
fighters, running with their kites across a flat field that nudged against the beginnings of the desert. Each of the men was dressed in a long tunic, called a
chapan
, Nila told me, and billowing pants that fluttered and snapped in the wind. They were battling in pairs of two – green against orange, gold against white, red against blue – and around the field there were thirty or forty spectators, mostly men but a few small children too, who were waving their arms and shouting words I didn’t understand.

“Kyle!”

I was by the well with the testing kit and the bag of calcium hypochlorite tablets, and Legg was yelling at me from where he stood with his rifle near the trucks.

“You see that?”

He was pointing at the strings. In the yellow light from the sinking sun, they seemed to be burning. I waved back to show him I saw.

Lieutenant Jayne was standing near Legg with his papers flapping in his hand. “Steady, corporal,” he said. “Remember the briefing.” Then he shouted over the wind to the men getting out of the trucks. “Everybody stays on the hardpack!”

It didn’t take long to figure out the well was like most of the others, drilled probably sixty years ago, maybe more. It had a lever pump on a wood platform raised on old grey bricks a couple of feet off the ground. I pulled my beaker out of the kit and gave the arm of the pump a few strokes to fill it up. Jayne walked toward me and motioned around at the trampled ground. “Stay on the hardpack, all right, Kyle?”

I nodded and set down my beaker. “Lieutenant Jayne?”

“Yeah?”

“You think once I’m done here we could watch the kite fighting for a while?”

“What do you mean, ‘a while’?”

“I dunno, a few minutes anyway. Did you see the strings?”

Jayne checked his watch. He sighed. “Ten minutes. That’s all.” He waved over the corporal who had a radio set on his back and made a call to the camp.

I fiddled around with the testing kit for about a minute. All day I’d been opening the kit and going through the motions of testing water samples, but really the whole testing thing was a lie. Away from camp there wasn’t anything I could find in a test that I could do anything about. Poor turbidity wasn’t something I could fix, neither was deliberate contamination. All I had was a bunch of calcium hypochlorite tablets, like corrosive mints, and all they could do was kill bacteria. The only tricky part was figuring out how much I needed, but that was something I’d done before we left camp. Because there was no way to flush out the wells, and no way to control how quickly people would start drinking from them, I figured I needed to get the chlorine level as close as possible to 200 parts per million – high enough to do some good, but not high enough to make people sick. And because there was no way to check the precise depth and volume of each of the wells, I’d come up with a formula based on a rough guess of the average.

Basically, with the math done, it meant measuring out half a pound of tablets at each well and dumping them in. And anybody could have done it. I never told Colonel Hister that because if I had he’d never have let me come – and then I never would have
seen the kites with Legg, and what came next never would have happened.

When I was finished, I stood up and shielded my eyes from the glare.

“You done?” called Jayne. Most of the men were huddled by the trucks, keeping out of the wind, but Jayne was with Nila off to the side, near the spectators, and one of the kite fighters was kneeling in front of them. Legg was there too; maybe he was supposed to be standing guard. But everybody including Legg seemed to be focused on what the kneeling kite fighter was doing.

“Yeah,” I shouted, and Jayne motioned me over.

I walked around the well and made my way across the open field toward Jayne and the others, staying out of the way of a shouting Pashtun with a green kite who ran right in front of me. When I got close to them, I saw they were gathered around a kneeling kite fighter – his name was Chari, according to Nila – who looked to be about forty-five, which I guess is old for Afghanistan. Like most of the other men I’d seen that day, he wore a wool scarf wrapped tight around his head with one end falling loose at his neck and shoulders. On the ground in front of him were two large clay bowls. One was messy with a grey paste that had slopped over its edges, and the other was filled with sparkling grains of glass. He was working on the twine of his pale yellow kite, methodically dipping a length of it in the glue, cleaning off the excess, then burying the sticky string in the glass until it was covered with sharp fragments. Then he draped that length over the ground and worked on the next.

Legg reached over and hit me on the arm. “This is the guy! Look at his hand!” He leaned down and touched the old kite fighter on the shoulder. When he looked up, Legg stuck out his hand with his fingers splayed. “Show him!” he said, pointing to me. “Show him your hand!”

Chari seemed confused and he turned to Nila with a hard look. When she translated he smiled wide, with teeth that were tea-coloured from chewing tobacco, and wiped his right hand on his clothes. Then he turned up the palm for me to see.

His hand looked like it was made of wax, like somebody had spent hours pouring drips from a candle over his palm and fingers, until the hand was completely hidden by hard, crisscrossing ropes and ridges. Chari watched my reaction and he seemed happy, his lined face broke into a grin, and for added effect he leaned over and pressed the palm of his hand into the bowl of ground glass, then lifted it out and showed it around, as if his hand was now made of diamonds.

Shouts were coming from the spectators around us and arms went up, pointing, and I tried to follow and see what they were seeing. There were two fighters on the field, one pulling a red kite and the other an orange, and seconds after I looked up their strings came together and the string of the red kite snapped. Everyone started laughing and spitting tobacco juice into the dirt as the wind carried the kite across the field. Some of the older children raced off to chase it, and some of the younger ones were lifted up onto their fathers’ shoulders for a better view. And as I watched, the winning fighter, a younger man whose beard was darker than the others’, and who wore the flat,
felt
pakul
cap of the mujahideen, approached us with his kite in tow like a flying orange pet, his gloved hand wrapped tight around the string. He didn’t appear to be smiling.

Legg nodded toward him. “What’s this fucker want?”

“We’re done,” said Jayne. “We should get going.”

But no one moved and as the fighter came close it became clear that he wanted to offer one of the people in our group a chance to hold the string of a conquering
gudiparan
. And as he got very close I realized he was handing it to me.

“No, thanks,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s okay.” But inside my blood was racing because I realized that this was the reason I’d brought us here. I turned and squinted against the sun and the wind, and I pointed at Legg. “I think he wants to try.”

Legg’s eyes went wide and he looked immediately at Jayne. “Sir? That okay?”

I could see a knot rolling at the turn of the lieutenant’s jaw but finally he gave a sharp nod. “For a minute,” he said, and held his hand out for Legg’s rifle.

Legg passed it over and began to reach out for the string. Before he could touch it the man yanked it back and said some words that sounded like a warning.

“He says the string is sharp,” said Nila.

The man shook the leather glove off his right hand, held it out for Legg, and Legg took it. Then he looked down at Chari, still at work on his twine, and he glanced over at me, and he winked. He passed the glove back to the Afghan and grabbed hold of the string with his bare hands.

“Corporal,” said Jayne, “you rip your hands up and you’re on gate duty until we ship out.”

“Yes, sir,” said Legg, beaming. He had the string in both hands and he wrapped it carefully around his right. “This part’s not too bad,” he said. A hundred feet up, the orange kite dove and curled in the wind and Legg had to work hard to keep it under control. He walked with it some ways out, away from our group, but stayed clear of the four fighters on the field.

As he eased out, the wind swirled suddenly and the kite dove as if it might crash. Legg reached up with his left hand to steady it but immediately whipped it away – “Fuck!” – and shook it as if he’d been stung.

“I’m serious,” shouted Jayne.

For a second, after he got control again, I dropped my eyes to look at the men in the crowd. They were all lined and worn, like they’d personally been through a century of being fucked around, and they were watching this spectacle – a foreign soldier handling a
gudiparan –
almost greedily, like they were hungry for some kind of comedy relief. So there was a lot of pointing and laughing when Legg showed off the bright stripe of red on his left hand, running from the base of the fingers to the heel.

“That’s enough, corporal.”

It was getting dark, and part of me started to worry. Even though the look on Legg’s face said he’d happily trade a month of gate duty for what was happening, I had this feeling that if things went on too long, what had been good might turn sour. I waved my arm to get his attention.

“Hey, Legg?”

He heaved on the string and made the kite swoop. “Whoa! I’m getting the hang of this fucker. Who wants to bet on me?”

“Legg!”

He turned and looked at me. “What, you wanna try now?”

“No, but –” I didn’t bother to finish because Legg wasn’t listening. He was leaning back, into the wind, holding the kite steady. Then he started motioning with his thumb, trying to tell the Afghan something. Once it seemed like he’d made the man understand, he slowly walked the kite in.

When he got close, he held his hand out for me to see. “Looka that!” he said, elated. “That mother’s gonna scar up!”