The Good Son (50 page)

Kabul to Asadabad is about two hundred kilometers, and even given the usual state of the roads the trip should take about five hours in peacetime. Our vehicle looked like a stumpy school bus painted vivid blue on the body, with the green and black national colors on its snout, plus a good deal of gold and silver paint, some of which was twirled into Qur’anic calligraphy, including
The greatest terrors shall not dismay them, and angels shall receive them
. I thought that made sense, given the state of the bus and the roads it was going to traverse.

My fellow passengers were mainly Kunar peasants back from shopping trips to the big city (their purchases towered on the roof rack), leathery men with missing teeth and sun-narrowed eyes, some with their burqa-clad wives and their children, plus a trio of musicians headed for a rural wedding, a schoolteacher, and three Afghan army soldiers in uniform going on leave. It was a fair cross-section of the people of Afghanistan, mainly Pashtuns, with some Tajiks and Hazaras. The bus had not left the outskirts of the city before we were a party, with people passing around food and tobacco, showing photos, registering their opinions, telling jokes. I sat in the front of the bus with the musicians on one side of the aisle and next to the schoolteacher. He was a soft-eyed man about my age with a neat spade beard and horn-rims. He was the one I had spotted as the suicide bomber, but he was not. He
said he taught English in Asadabad, and I said I knew that language and if he liked we could practice on the way.

Up the narrow climbing road at unsafe speeds, and the terrors did not dismay us; we made good enough time to the Kunar border and then, because it was not peacetime at all, we were stopped by an Afghan army checkpoint. An hour baking in the oven of the little bus while the soldiers inspected our baggage and papers. I passed, no problem, but my schoolteacher was hassled, led off the bus; and returned forty minutes later, sweaty, red in the face, fuming. His name, Janat Gul Babori, was the same as or similar to that of someone the authorities wanted and he had to prove he wasn’t that man, his argument being helped along by the usual bribe.

While we were waiting, another bus pulled up and the soldiers passed it right through without pulling people off or checking it out. I looked at Janat and he shook his head. Bribes again, the whole bus could’ve been packed with Taliban and weapons and dope, the whole country was bribed to the nipples, every public office was for sale, but what could you do? There
was
no Afghanistan the way there was a France or a Canada, there were only individuals and families and clans, and the Americans trying to make it different was like assembling a fighter plane out of wet toilet paper.

After that, when the bus was rolling again, we talked about the wretched state of the country and how bad it had been under the Taliban and what a mess the current masters had made of it and how tired we all were of the endless war. What didn’t come up was anything personal. I’ve sat with people I’ve met by chance on airplanes and buses in the U.S., and sometimes you get their whole life story whether you want it or not.

But in this country reserve is the rule—no, it’s more than reserve, it’s a impenetrable thick mask—that prevents the expression of any genuine feeling. Maybe there
is
no genuine feeling; maybe the mask is all there is. I sometimes think that’s the case, and it’s one of the weirdest things about the transition from the West. My pal Claiborne is reticent for an American, he has the stoic uncomplaining humor of his mountain people, but Claiborne is an Oprah guest compared to the average Pashtun. Not making emotional waves is like the ruling passion of his life. The Americans see it as lying, as bad faith, but we think that the protection of honor, of the family, of the clan, is worth more than any
mere veracity. Among the Pashtuns a man’s front is everything; no one can penetrate it except, if you’re lucky, you’ll find a friend of the heart, and he’ll be the only person in the world who will ever know what you really feel about things. For me this had been Wazir, and I for him.

It’s impossible to explain this kind of friendship to people in the West; it gets all tangled up in the whole gay thing they have, and it’s not like that at all. Or maybe it is, I wouldn’t know. We loved each other up in the mountains, in the war; it was the core of my life then, and when I was stolen out of my life it was gone, which is why when Bacha Khan told me Wazir was dead it was like someone recounting a dream: interesting maybe, but not real life.

So we talked, Janat Gul and I, as the bus jounced over the potholes, communicating, if that’s the word, in the veiled poetic Pashtun way, until we ran into another roadblock about ten miles outside of Asadabad, this one built around a couple of up-armored humvees and a squad of imperial storm troopers, my countrymen. The Americans were trying hard to be correct and do the rules-of-engagement thing, but you could see the drawn terror on their faces; they knew that any vehicle could be a bomb and, having been on the other side a time or two, I knew they would’ve preferred smoking any wheeled vehicle from a hundred meters away and fuck them if they can’t take a joke.

They unloaded the whole bus and lined us up, and a uniformed translator helped the young lieutenant in charge question all of us, which was sort of amusing because the translator would ask a guy where he was going and what his business was, and the guy would say, indicating the American, “I am traveling to see his diseased whore of a mother fucked by dogs” or some such, and the translator would render it in English, “He is a shepherd returning home.”

When it was my turn I took a long look at the lieutenant. He was in his early twenties, smooth-faced, wearing dark sunglasses. The translator, an older man, with the tired, cynical look of a city-bred Pashtun, took my papers and asked me where I was going.

I told him and added, “You have a pretty officer, brother. Does he let you fuck him in the ass?”

“He demands it,” said the man. “All night long. I think they should pay me more than a hundred and twenty dollars a month.”

“And have you caught any Taliban here?”

“You’re joking,” he said. “These sister-fuckers couldn’t catch a terrorist if he was hanging by a rope from their balls.”

“What are you saying?” asked the lieutenant.

“Nothing, sir,” said the translator. “He’s just another shepherd going home.”

Nor did they find any Taliban on the bus, although of course Janat Gul got the treatment again, because they were working off the same lists as the first guys. They were actually less rough on us than the Afghans, but the people were more pissed off when they finally let us go. It is just shitty to be questioned by foreign troops in your own country; there’s no way you can make it right, no way in hell.

So when the bus started again our mood had turned dark. Some cursed the Americans and wished for the Taliban to return, and others asked those donkeys to recall what it was like under the Taliban; voices rose, fists shook. I leaned across to the nearest musician and offered a twenty-dollar bill, saying, “Brother, let’s have some songs.”

He smiled, shrugged, spoke to his compadres, they unlimbered their instruments—
dhol
, rubab,
toola
—and broke into a lively
attan
, which is to the Afghans what the samba is to Brazil. They were pretty good, and after they had got the bus jumping to the wild rhythms of the dhol, they segued into a ghazal, one voice wailing over the drone of the rubab with the waving toola tootling in counterpoint. I knew the song, it was one we’d sung in the jihad, and the next one too was an old one; they were recalling the old days, before the Taliban crushed the music and the spirit of the people in the name of an alien version of Islam preached by an Arabian maniac two hundred years ago.

And then they played one I didn’t know, about a boy warrior who loved another boy warrior in the jihad and who had mysteriously vanished, leaving his abandoned lover to mourn alone, and it wasn’t until they got to the refrain—where is my young lion, my little
ghazan
? I wait, I wait, I know he’ll come back—that I realized that they were singing about me, me and Wazir.

I wanted to shrivel and I felt the blood rise to my face, but then I realized these people had no idea I was the guy in the song and I relaxed a little. It’s a weird thing to find out you’re a myth.

So we arrived, singing and dancing in the crowded aisle, at the town of Asadabad, having taken over eight hours on the trip. It was late in the afternoon by then and Janat Gul the schoolteacher insisted on giving me a meal and a bed for the night. His wife and sisters had to work like mad to clean out the room in his house where they sewed clothing to supplement his schoolteacher’s wage, which I felt bad about, but you can’t turn down hospitality among the Pashtuns and they are women after all; it is women’s work.

In the morning the wife, upon whom I had not laid eyes, of course, supplied a big greasy bag full of parathas, fruit, and bread for my journey, and I started walking out of town, north and almost straight up. It was fifty-odd kilometers into the mountains of Nuristan and I’d figured on two or three days’ travel, what with my bad leg, and that worried me, because my mother had been in captivity for seven days. On the other hand, no news was good news. Jihad groups had kept hostages alive for months—years—and I kept telling myself that my mother was a survivor, because if I wasn’t thinking that I would be thinking really bad thoughts and getting crazy, and that would screw up any chance I had of getting her out.

As it turned out, I caught a lift from a Tajik in a truck hauling consumer goods and grocery items to Warna, which took me almost all the way I was going. The driver said the area was fairly prosperous since the dope trade picked up after the war, lots of orders for generators and TVs and cell phones. He asked me if I was going to the jirga at Barak Sharh, and I said I was going to Barak Sharh but I hadn’t known there was a jirga, and he said yes, the Barakzai were having one, one of their clans anyway, and he hoped I was known there because they were very strict with strangers now. It was the opium trade and because the Arabs were killing all the
maliks
, them and the Taliban, the shit eaters, the pigs, the sister-rapers. The Tajiks don’t like the Taliban.

We reached Warna a little after noon, and I walked up the track toward the ancestral village of my adopted ancestors. I passed the cemetery and the old Sufi shrine. The gravestones had all been smashed or toppled during the Taliban era and the shrine was a blackened shell. There was a group of armed men from the clan militia at the entrance to the village, and they braced me and asked me who I was and what I
wanted, and I said I was Kakay Ghazan, and I was here to see Gul Muhammed Khan, my father.

Well,
that
caused a stir, and at first they didn’t believe me. They held me at gunpoint, scowling, and sent a messenger off to their honcho, who turned out to be Sahak, my old commander from the assault on Tsawkey, and he hugged me and lifted me off the ground and kissed me on both cheeks, and then he took me in to see my father.

Who was lying on a charpoy in the courtyard of his house, which was packed with armed men. And the usual thing: you haven’t seen someone in twenty years, you still expect them to look more or less the same, and it’s a shock when they don’t. Gul Muhammed the mighty had turned into an old man, his white beard dyed with henna, his strong hands reduced to chicken claws, his face stripped to sharp bones and leathery deep-lined skin. Only his eyes seemed the same: under the thick gray bristles of his brow they still had that hawkish look, but they filled with tears when he saw me and learned who I was. I fell to my knees before him and kissed his hands. We embraced while the hard men of the tribe murmured around us.

So I was welcomed back into my clan, introduced to the many I did not know, and kissed by those few I did. The clan had not loved the Taliban and had suffered for it, and they confirmed what the driver had told me, that the insurgents were assassinating the maliks and the tribal elders. This tribal jirga they had coming up was to plan a joint response and to decide what the Barakzai position would be in the new American war. They had been neutral, but with the killings this was no longer possible.

After a while the others politely withdrew to allow Gul and me to speak privately.

He smiled at me with his four teeth. “So, my son, you have grown to a man. And how many sons have you now?”

“None, Father. I’m sorry.”

“None? You have no woman?”

“I have had many women but none who wished to raise my sons.”

“Then get one who will. Get two. Men will be fighting with knives to wed their girls to Kakay Ghazan.”

“Whatever you decide, Father.”

“Good. You know Wazir has two boys. They are around here somewhere.”

“I am happy for you. I heard he has gone to Paradise.”

“Ah! Where did you hear that?”

“From Bacha Khan.”

“I see. Yes. Well, I miss him; he was a good boy.”

“May I visit his grave?”

“His grave is not here. What do you do with yourself now?” he asked, changing the subject.