99 Nights in Logar Page 4

  But the butcher’s son came back.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Again and again, until he’d been rejected some twenty times in a row.

  Five months straight he came over every Friday in his only pair of clean clothes, a dingy little waskat, his hair combed back, and his heart beating in his hands.

  Meanwhile, Nabeela—to everyone’s surprise—had fallen madly in love with him.

  The last time he was rejected, she locked herself up in the dress shop and threatened to cut her wrists with her scissors, to hang herself with the dresses, to eat dirt until she vomited and died. Abo tried to explain to her daughter that the suitor only wanted her money, that the guy was six years younger than her, probably twenty pounds lighter, and, frankly, much prettier.

  This, apparently, did not help.

  With no other option, Rahmutallah Maamaa knocked the door down with an ax, dodged a few scissors to the chest, and took his sobbing sister up in his arms. After handing her over to Abo, Rahmutallah Maamaa began to shout, demanding she allow Nabeela to marry the boy and end the madness. Abo stood square to her much larger son and cursed him and his lack of honor. So Rahmutallah Maamaa, saying nothing to anybody, went and got his rifle, walked all the way to the butcher’s house near Wagh Jan, in the middle of the night, with the Ts and the marines loose and everything, and he called on the butcher, warning him that though their families had enjoyed many years of peace, and though they’d had no issues in the past, if he could not control his son, the peace built up between them for so many years would very soon, and very suddenly, come to an end.

  He said that to him and then he left.

  The threat seemed to work for a while. Rahmutallah had a history, a reputation, and people didn’t tend to fuck with him. But about a week before my family arrived, the butcher’s son came back again, ready, it seemed, to die for Nabeela.

  * * *

  —

  “That,” Gul explained, “is why we ambushed him.”

  Though jumping the butcher’s son gave us a burst of adrenaline, it wore off about an hour later when the Logari sun hit its peak. I tried to stay in the shade of the compounds or the rows of chinar, but Gul made us search the roads and the edges of the fields. Even though all we found were clues that led to nowhere: patches of fur drifting in streams, paw prints that went up into trees, dog farts that led to flowers, and witness statements from kids or old villagers that ended up being bullshit. I mean it was getting so hot, I started to wonder if Gul wasn’t chatting with a mirage or two.

  Eventually, we made a pit stop at a stream that pooled sweetly into the bank of a dam underneath these long wellehs. Their branches hung limp toward the water. So we took a dip. Gul and Zia swam and Dawood floated. I stayed in the shallow end.

  “Marwand,” Zia shouted as he floated on his back like an otter. “Come swim!”

  “He can’t,” Gul shouted back.

  “But I heard Shagha is a great swimmer,” Zia said.

  “He is a great swimmer,” I said. “One time he swam two miles with a bibi hajji on his back.”

  “I never heard that story,” Zia said.

  So I told it.

  The Tale of the Bibi and the Flood

  One morning, many summers ago, when Agha was young and his heart was still mast, all the rivers in Logar suddenly flooded with ice water from the black mountains. In a rush not to drown, Agha and his family gathered onto the roof of their compound and watched the waters fill the fields and the roads. Then, more out of boredom than courage, Agha snuck off from his family, built a makeshift raft out of an old aluminum gate, and used a shovel as a paddle to explore the flood.

  With time, he came upon an old bibi hajji floating on a toshak in the middle of a drowning orchard. She didn’t know where she was or how to get home and asked Agha for help, but because of the branches of the apple trees, he had to dive into the water, swim across the orchard, and watch his raft float softly away. As soon as he reached her, Agha put the old bibi on his back and swam for two miles until he came upon the citadel of a mosque made of mud. There he left the bibi, promised to return, and went on to search for more survivors. But by the time he got back, the bibi had disappeared. Agha swam home in great sadness and was very relieved when his mother greeted him with a switch.

  Fifteen years later, one snowy morning, Agha arrived in a refugee camp in Pakistan—his land lost, his brother dead, and almost nothing to his name—to ask for the dusmal of a pretty little Logaray his aunts had told him about. Turned out the drowning bibi he had saved that day in Logar was actually Moor’s grandma, Abo’s mom, and at the time, the old bibi was dying of a fever that Baba’s medicines couldn’t cure. Still, she saw in Agha’s eyes the young boy who had saved her from that flood so many years ago.

  “My daughter,” the bibi hajji told Abo, “by the will of Allah, give him your daughter.”

  They were married the next month.

  * * *

  —

  A few minutes into our swim, four other boys, all of them wearing patus and pakols, approached our dam, knelt over its edge, and watched us in the water. One of them was particularly tall, another skinny, another fat, and the last one just looked lost.

  We stopped swimming and stood.

  Dawood’s big belly glimmered in the sun, his teetees gleaming, while Zia rose up scrawny, not a hint of meat anywhere beneath his dark skin. I was a little chubby. Though my diet in Logar had eaten some of my baby fat, I was still soft in most spots. Gul, on the other hand, was all muscles: pecs and delts and lats and whatever else. He was paler than us too.

  He stood in the front.

  The tallest of the kids—his long limbs, raggedy hair, and too-small threads making him look like a scarecrow—spoke to us in Pakhto.

  “You boys shouldn’t be swimming here,” he said.

  “What’s the problem?” Gul said in Farsi, signaling to us to reach for stones. Dawood and Zia were ready. I stood empty-handed.

  “My kaakaa got his arm torn up by a wolf,” he said, pointing toward the spot where we set our clothes and the big black bag.

  “How terrible,” Gul said, switching to Pakhto. “May Allah preserve your kaakaa. Did he say, at all, what the wolf looked like?”

  “Just that it was massive and dark, with a long white scar running down its back.”

  Gul thanked the kid for his warning and told us to get dressed.

  Back out on the road, Zia kept holding my hand, which was slick with sweat, so after a few seconds, I offered to take the big black bag off of Dawood’s shoulders and I only had to ask him twenty-seven times in a row before he finally relented.

  I used both hands to carry it.

  First, I threw it over my shoulder like Agha would’ve done, and then I balanced the big black bag on my head like the Kochi tribeswomen we passed on the road, and then—remembering the knives—I held it away from my body; but after a while, I just dragged the thing along the path, lifting it up only when Gul glanced back.

  Zia and Gul stepped ahead, leading the squad, while Dawood, with his hands free, slowed down, put his arm around my neck, which I knew he knew I didn’t like, and asked me to teach him a few more words for his English exam.

  See, about a week into my trip, just as I was starting to get more comfortable with all the guys on the compound, Gul came up to me one morning in the den with a proposition. He tossed me a small packet of papers and asked me to read them.

  “I can’t read Pakhto,” I said.

  “I know,” he said, and explained.

  Turned out they were grade reports. Gul’s marks were a little bit higher than Zia’s, even though Zia was the one who studied the most often because his pops was always hounding him. Gul had free rein—more or less—with his schoolwork since his mom and pop were like sixty, and he was the fourth out of five sons, the eighth out of nine
kids, and because (even though no one wanted to admit it) the lower you were on the birthing totem pole, the less attention you got. But Gul was bright. Got into trouble more than he should have: missed classes, ignored assignments, started fights. But he was doing well all things considered. Same as Zia.

  Then there was Dawood.

  By all accounts, he just couldn’t hang in the classroom. Said that when he tried to sit down to study, he got plagued by horrible migraines, backaches, and finger stiffness. Gul argued that Dawood was a born laborer. Tremendously strong and fat, he had the pain tolerance of a donkey. But school just couldn’t mold him. So while Gul and Zia mostly flew under Rahmutallah’s ass-kicking radar, Dawood ate the brunt of his rage.

  His plan, it seemed, was to beat Dawood into a doctor, an engineer, or a lawyer.

  The holy trinity of all Afghan ambition.

  Once upon a time, Gul explained, Rahmutallah Maamaa had his own dreams of being called Doctor Sahib, of opening up a clinic in Naw’e Kaleh, of being the first graduate in the family. But then came the war, the jihad, the flight, and while Rahmutallah’s vision of stethoscopes and inoculations burned up with almost everything else in the country, he wasn’t going to sit back and let the same thing happen with his son and his little brothers, who were also, in a way, though none of them admitted it, like his kids.

  To Rahmutallah’s ever increasing frustration, Dawood was now on the brink of flunking. The one subject he could pass was English. Maybe because Ruhollah spoke it pretty well or maybe from overhearing military broadcasts and radio waves or maybe from watching Rambo III sixty times in a row. Whatever it was, Gul wanted me to work with it.

  “When Dawood comes home from school,” Gul said, “Zia will help him with his Arabic, you with his English, and me with everything else. You understand?”

  “I just have to help him?” I asked. “I don’t have to do his homework?”

  “No, no, no, Marwand. Of course we don’t want you to do his homework. He needs to actually learn. To pass the tests, you understand? We don’t want him to cheat.”

  So for the next few days I did Dawood’s homework. It was easier that way. We only pretended to study when Gul was around. Or we just randomly went over words like that day on the road when we were chasing Budabash.

  “Meena,” Dawood said, tearing a switch from the branch of a tree.

  “Good,” I said, big black bag on my shoulder. “What about ‘hurt’?”

  “Khog.”

  “Sad?”

  “Khafa.”

  “Anger?”

  “Qar.”

  “Rifle?”

  “Toopac.”

  “Tank?”

  “Tawnk.”

  “War?”

  “Jang.”

  “No, jang is like a fight. War is bigger.”

  Dawood looked to Gul. “What’s the word for ‘war’?”

  “I don’t know if there is one,” he said. “Zia, can you think of the Pakhto word for ‘war’?”

  “Woor? Like a fire.”

  “No,” Dawood said, “war like . . .” And Dawood took up a stick and turned into a club, into an ax, into a sword, into an AK, and he picked off targets on the road—the steer in the fields and the kids in passageways and the sleeping donkey and the wasps in the mud and the dust on the road and the birds and the leaves and whatever else passed us by—and we were so impressed with his demonstration, we didn’t think to stop him until he accidentally took a shot at someone Gul thought might’ve been a T.

  We ducked down behind a short clay wall surrounding the field where the T slept. He lay underneath a tree, wearing all black, with a pakol over his face and a machine gun slung stupidly across his chest. We spied on him for a while. He seemed very small from where we hid. I took my Coolpix out of the big black bag and snapped a few photos, but Gul spotted me and demanded I delete them.

  “But why?” I said.

  “Because he’s a T.”

  “How do you know he’s a T?” Zia asked.

  “His machine gun,” Gul said.

  “But we have a machine gun.”

  “We do?” I said.

  “Oh yeah,” Dawood said, “everyone in Logar got one. Rahmutallah moves it around so we never find it, and he thinks we don’t know where it is, but we always know.”

  “So where is it?”

  “Classified.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “I’ve shot it too,” Dawood said. “With Ruhollah. He took me out with some of his soldier buddies and we shot it at a mountain.”

  “Why did you shoot a mountain?” Zia said.

  “Why not? It was fun. We shot a mountain and some trees and some birds. The gun goes chig chig chig in your hands and it hurts to hold it still because it wants to fly everywhere, but I held it still and I hit a rock right in the face. But man it hurts to hold because . . .”

  I stopped listening to Dawood and started flipping through the pictures saved on my Coolpix. I was looking for the shots of the T but got hung up again with the pictures I didn’t take of Budabash two weeks ago. The pictures that he wasn’t in. The invisible ones.

  Let me explain.

  On the Seventeenth Day

  Me and my brothers started reconnaissance shortly after our preemptive assault on Budabash. We actually got the idea from the Tom Clancy novel I was reading. Spies always gathered intel before going in for a strike or an interrogation, so Gwora figured that since the rocks and the apples and the other poisons weren’t hurting Budabash, we should lie back and watch him for a bit, study his habits and his character until we could find out how to put the hurt on him for real.

  For the next few days, we kept detailed logs of Budabash’s behavior: when he liked to eat (before dark), when he liked to sleep (during prayers), and when he was most ferocious (near me). We took measurements of his massive paw print, his dragon’s teeth, his buffalo torso, and the long white scar (which I thought might be a chemical burn) that stretched all the way from the center of his torn ears to the beginning of his short tail. It was a burn that ran along his back like a white stream or a long trail, and here and there, along this stream or river, there were little pink sores, which from a distance looked like blossoms but when you got up close seemed to be on the brink of bursting.

  We noted the color of his dark, discolored fur and his blue, almost human eyes, and argued about his scent. To me he smelled like burning leaves, to Gwora hot gasoline, and to Mirwais a dead pup’s collar. Time and again, either Rahmutallah, who endlessly reinforced the walls, or one of my khalas would come into the orchard to watch us, but all they ever saw were three American kids studying and reading.

  To keep up with the front, sometimes Gwora read to us.

  We sat underneath the apple trees, in the dirt, with the stink of the cows and the chickens wafting one way and the scent of the flowers and the mint coming the other. And while I rubbed the gauze still wrapped around my wounded finger, I listened to Gwora read from his monster novels—Frankenstein and Dracula and It—focusing on the sections where the heroes killed their enemies.

  Around the third morning of our surveillance, Gwora got the idea to snap some photos of Budabash for the sake of a visual record, but just as I started shooting, Agha came back from his compound and told us we were going to visit his saintly orphan nephew: Waseem.

  See, Agha had an unwritten checklist of kaakaas and amas and cousins we needed to visit, and Waseem was at the very top. Me and my brothers (very quietly) groaned. Not only was Agha messing up our surveillance, but now we’d have to spend all night trying to stay awake at Waseem’s house.

  Though Agha was usually cool with us staying behind at Moor’s compound—which had a TV, a DVD player, and a whole mess of kids to play with—he really wanted us to see Waseem. He was technically our cousin, but he always felt more like an uncle. His whol
e family (mother, father, three sisters, and a brother) died in the war. So Waseem’s kaakaa, an OG named Masoom, took him in at the height of the famines in Logar and raised him as his own.

  Abo and Nabeela Khala were coming along with us that night, and while it seemed like Nabeela didn’t want to go (she kept mentioning how big Waseem’s teeth were), Abo was being adamant about it. “He’s a good boy from a good family with good prospects,” she said, and dragged Nabeela to the car. Me and my brothers jammed ourselves into the front seat, while Moor and the ladies squished into the back. Agha drove.

  Masoom and Waseem lived across the road from Agha’s compound. It would be a short drive, but I brought my camera along just in case there was something to see on the road. On our way there, we stopped by Watak’s marker and I snapped a few photos of the flag and the stones. They came out blurry in the dark.

  We arrived at Masoom’s compound in the late evening, after dinner, so that his family wouldn’t feel an obligation to serve food. According to Agha, they might have went hungry the next two days just to make sure we were fed that night. Waseem met us at the entrance, where the men and the ladies split into different rooms.

  Inside the men’s chamber, we sat cross-legged on the same pair of red toshaks every Afghan family on earth seemed to own. While Agha drank chai and chatted with Masoom, me and my brothers ate Afghan candies, had thumb wars and pinching contests, and whispered about all the things we would be doing back at Moor’s house.

  Maybe sensing our boredom, Waseem came and offered us cookies and cake, smiling wide, and just as Nabeela claimed, he had a huge mouth of teeth that jutted out from his face, smothering his little chin. Above these teeth grew a massive Turkish mustache. Though he wasn’t the most handsome guy in Logar, Waseem was still a very eligible bachelor because old Masoom, who never even learned to read, went deep into debt paying for his university fees. He was a college graduate. Unemployed but searching. Poor but with potential. Not like the butcher’s son, who according to Abo would only ever be a butcher.