99 Nights in Logar Read online

  The nighttime talks started with certain formalities: Agha informed his host about his time in America, about how it felt to finally be home, and after Masoom updated Agha with a brief summary of what was going on with his own family (certain things were always left out: the failing crops, the lost toe, the bruised face, and all the other secrets every family hid more out of habit than necessity), the conversation always seemed to circle back to the war.

  Usually, it was some rumbling from the mountains, or the distant chatter of artillery, that triggered a memory or a dream from so long ago that the men couldn’t even be sure how old they were when they first remembered it. And all of a sudden, Agha and his host were deep into the bad times. Every relative from the old generation—or what was soon becoming the old generation—had his own special story to tell: how he was imprisoned or beaten or shot or tortured, how or when he joined the resistance, and with which particular faction he aligned himself. Often, the names of lost ones were mentioned. Waseem said his mother’s name at one point: Zarmina. I thought I heard Agha say Watak.

  If there was a group of men, one of them sipped his chai and told his story, and when he got to a point where he couldn’t continue, the point in the story I most wanted to hear, someone else took a sip of his chai and began his own story, and so on and so forth, until everyone was given a say and not a single story was actually finished. Eventually, it got to be Agha’s turn, and though he didn’t tell the story I wanted to hear, he told a good one.

  The Tale of the Tale of Ghulam Ali

  Once, very late in the night in ’96, I woke up in Fremont to a call from Afghanistan.

  Here come news of death, I thought, of dying, but instead I was greeted by the ghost of my old kaakaa Mahmoud come back to life. It’d been over twenty years since I last heard his Logari drawl, untarnished by his living in the north. I thought the civil war had eaten him.

  “It didn’t have the belly,” my kaakaa said when I told him.

  I asked him how he managed to get out of Badakhshan alive.

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. That’s why I’m calling you. Tell me,” he said, “the story of the Hazara.”

  I thought it odd at the time. Here was one ghost asking me about another. But curious to hear his story, I started mine.

  The Tale of the Soldier from the Road

  Though the snows were beginning to melt in Logar that winter of ’81, it had become so cold and so quiet in Naw’e Kaleh that the stutter of machine-gun fire carried on for miles across the roads. One night just after Maghrib, my cousins and a few other mujahideen and I were coming home from our patrol, and we heard the drawn-out retort of an AK. We waited a few moments on the side of the road. When no enemies appeared, we thanked Allah for our fortune and continued home.

  The next morning, my squadron and I were on our way toward Zarghun Shar, just past the black mountains, in order to meet with another coalition of mujahideen whom we planned to guide through the White Mountains into Peshawar. That night, it was a group of Tajik fighters, but a few nights earlier we’d assisted Hazara and Pashtun mujahideen too. At the time, the Afghan rebellion had not begun to eat itself.

  It was on this road that I first spotted a Hazara soldier staggering toward us in a large winter coat: the garb of the Communists. He was covered in so much blood I thought for certain this man was dead but did not know it. Had he a weapon, any weapon, we would’ve laid him down immediately, but he was unarmed and alone, and he might have had information.

  The first thing he did was he told us to kill him, we Pakhtuns, because he didn’t care anymore. We’d killed everyone else already, all of his allies, and he was as good as dead anyway. I don’t know what it was. Maybe because we were impressed with his bravado, or because he seemed certain to die, or because none of us wanted to live with another ghost in our dreams, we told him to calm down and to explain to us what he was doing on our road, in our village, with his blood leaking all over our land.

  He lifted his shirt and showed us the wreckage of his belly torn up by machine-gun fire. When he saw that we weren’t about to kill him on the spot, his bravado faded a bit. He asked us, as his Muslim brothers, to help him. I could tell he was going to live just long enough to suffer a great deal more before the end. At that point, I’d done things. Helped with the resistance. Brought in arms. Taken part in ambushes and firefights. But, to my knowledge, I had not killed a man.

  I was terribly curious to hear how he got his wounds.

  So while my cousins and the other mujahideen went on toward Zarghun Shar, I brought the wounded soldier back to my home. Put him up in the cow’s shed, made him a bed out of hay, and called on my mother, who, during the course of the war, had learned to patch up bullet holes. She bandaged his belly as best she could and cursed me for bringing a Communist into the house. I couldn’t fault her. Though my family and I were well respected by the mujahideen in the area, if the commanders got word that we were harboring a Communist, it wouldn’t end well.

  That night, I brought our guest his chai and asked him to tell me his story. Apparently, he’d been fighting alongside the Communists for only a few months. He was stationed in Kabul, where he and a few of his allies decided they were sick of the massacres and the bombings and the low pay and planned to make their way toward Peshawar.

  Of course, the main route from Kabul to Pakistan then was through our little village in Logar, so one of his Pakhtun friends got in contact with a Pakhtun guide from my village and set up plans for their departure. But on the night they were supposed to flee for Pakistan, they never made it out of Logar. The guide had planned to meet up with them in an orchard just within Naw’e Kaleh. And it was there, beneath the apple trees, that they were ambushed.

  The Hazara soldier and ten of his comrades—three Tajiks, two Pakhtuns, and five other Hazaras—were waiting in the dark of the orchard when machine guns lighted on all sides of them. His comrades were massacred, while he, who was in the very center of the bloodshed, survived. The carcasses of his allies shielded him. For a long time afterward, he pretended to be dead. When he was sure that the gunmen were gone, he climbed out of the carnage and staggered onto the road until he found my squadron.

  The story of his desertion, whether a lie or not, lessened the weight of the guilt I felt about harboring a Communist. The next morning, I told my mother we would care for him just until his wounds healed.

  She spat and said nothing.

  Well, the months passed and his wounds healed, but instead of fleeing the first chance he got, he stayed on with us for another season, helping around the compound with the chores and the work, feeding animals and caring for the crops within our walls. He made chai with my mother, ate with us during supper, and kept his distance from our girls. Watak, especially, took a liking to him. They were always working together, you see, while I was fighting. At first, Watak claimed he was shadowing him just to make sure he didn’t get near our little sisters, but they quickly became friends. Little by little, our guest was even learning Pakhto.

  He lived with us for eight months, and who knows how much longer he would’ve remained, but after Watak was murdered, I decided it was time to leave Logar. I still remember how our guest wept when I told him we were heading for Pakistan. I pointed him toward Kabul and said he could rejoin the Communists, or he could continue his original journey toward Peshawar. Half of the country was fleeing. His path was his own.

  We parted in the summer of ’82.

  * * *

  —

  After Agha finished the story of the soldier, he began the story of Kaakaa Mahmoud.

  The Story of Kaakaa Mahmoud

  My kaakaa’s story begins in Badakhshan, when the wars reignited between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. At the time, Massoud and his cronies were committing massacres against any Pakhtun they could find in the north, marking them as Taliban, torturing and imprisoning them, and redist
ributing their land and their goods among the northern soldiers. And even after Massoud and Sayyaf carried out the Afshar massacre, many Hazara soldiers still joined the Northern Alliance, and they too were committing massacres against the Pakhtun, who were being punished for massacres committed by the Taliban against the Hazara, who were being punished for massacres committed by the Communists against the Pakhtun, who were being punished for the Iron Amir’s enslavement of the Hazara a hundred years ago, who were being punished for the Mongol invasion of Afghanistan almost a thousand years before that, and, to this day, Pakhtuns and Tajiks and Hazaras and Turkmen and Uzbeks, even in America, still argue about where exactly the violence all started, and none of us can really agree, and none of us can concede a point. And so it goes.

  Eventually, one of these northern factions fell upon the village where my kaakaa was living at the time. They rounded up all the Pakhtun men, stripped them and beat them, locked them up in a small cell within a makeshift base, and tortured them routinely in response to atrocities committed by Pakhtun warlords. But my kaakaa wasn’t a warlord. He’d lived for many years in Badakhshan as peacefully as he could manage before that northern faction swept in and imprisoned him.

  As the days went on, my old kaakaa rotted in his cell with the other Pakhtun. One by one the prisoners disappeared, and my kaakaa was just waiting for the day when they would come for him. Then, one morning, he was sitting in his cell, eating his own fingernails, when the commander of the entire faction decided to give him a visit.

  He asked my kaakaa where he was from.

  “Badakhshan,” he said.

  “Come now, Kaakaa,” the commander said, “you’re a Pakhtun and you speak the eastern dialect. Where are you from originally? Where is your father from?”

  “Logar,” he admitted.

  “Mohammad Agha?”

  “How do you know Mohammad Agha?”

  The commander ordered all the guards and the prisoners out.

  “And you have family in Naw’e Kaleh?” he said.

  My kaakaa told him he did. He told him his brother lived in Naw’e Kaleh. He gave him his name and the names of his sons, and when he mentioned Watak and myself, the commander knelt down close to my kaakaa.

  “You don’t know what happened to Watak?” the commander said.

  He didn’t. We had not been able to reach him in Badakhshan. No phones, no mail, nothing. And so that night the Hazara commander told my Kaakaa Mahmoud what he knew of the sad story of Watak.

  Afterward, the commander ordered that my kaakaa and the other men from his village be cleaned, fed, and released and that no other soldier or faction should touch them unless they wanted to be held accountable to Ghulam Ali. That was his name, you understand, Ghulam Ali, and as I spared him that night in ’81 on the roads of Logar, so Commander Ghulam Ali spared my kaakaa on the morning of ’94 in a prison cell in Badakhshan, almost two hundred miles away, because you see . . .

  * * *

  —

  But Agha couldn’t continue, and the men understood. Someone else took up the line and the tales wore on.

  Near the end of the night, when Agha was listening or whispering so intently he didn’t seem to see me anymore, I took my Coolpix out of my vest pocket and started searching for the pictures of Budabash. I found pictures of his tree, his chain, his shadow, his bowl, his bones, his food, his bed, everything, almost everything else, but no Budabash himself. He was absent from every picture. Not even a trace.

  The next morning, when I got back to Moor’s house, I took twenty more photos of Budabash, and I looked through them immediately, and at first, he was there in the image, but then maybe an hour or two later, I skimmed through the pictures again and he was gone.

  I wanted to demonstrate this phenomenon for all of my cousins and uncles, especially for Gul, but Gwora thought better of it. He told me we should keep our work to ourselves until we really had a solid collection of evidence. More photos, he demanded, more notes, more data, more intel. More and more, until there could be no doubt left. Until the evil of Budabash was as certain as the good of God.

  I agreed.

  I wanted a solid case. I wanted him doomed for sure.

  But about two weeks later—on that road that day—as I flipped through the invisible pictures of Budabash and ignored Dawood’s story, I was starting to lose hope in our chase. That was until we came upon the carcass.

  On the Thirty-Second Day

  Around Asr, the sun dipped into the late afternoon.

  Gul was getting so desperate for some sign of a clue, he suggested that we pray on it, and although he was very clearly trying to bribe God with our salah, Zia was so ready to play the part of the imam, he didn’t seem to mind.

  We made wudhu, one by one, in a nearby stream and laid out our scarves on the rough clay. Zia made the call to prayer and Gul said the iqama and the three of us stood behind Zia and we prayed to Allah together, but by ourselves.

  I had a list.

  My list was in English, though it should have been in Arabic or at least Pakhto.

  First, I prayed for Allah to forgive me and to save me from myself, and I prayed for Him to assist me and my buddies on our mission to capture Budabash or else to prove with his death that he was a fiend. Then I prayed for my parents, Moor and Agha, for her mind and his body. I prayed they wouldn’t have to be so lonely all the time. I prayed that my brothers might become men, Mirwais especially, who I thought might become a snitch or a coward, though in many ways I couldn’t admit, he was much braver than me.

  Dawood was praying on one side of me, fidgeting and cracking his knuckles and scratching his elbows, but I went on with my list anyway.

  I prayed for Baba and Abo, for Nikeh and Athai, for all my maamaas and khalas, and for my amas and my one dead kaakaa, Watak, and for all of my cousins, and I prayed for the health of the girl I might marry someday, and I prayed for the health of all the mothers on the earth, but in Afghanistan especially, and I prayed for the men in the village who took care of their families and prayed all their prayers and watched over their neighbors and worked all day in the sun and never beat their wives and never sold their daughters and never snitched on their people and never joined the Americans and never hurt anyone they didn’t have to hurt, because I swear to God those sorts of men existed in Naw’e Kaleh, in Logar, in the country. I swear to God.

  A few villagers joined our line—farmers from their fields, laborers from their homes, and shepherds from their trails—until there were maybe thirty men or so praying behind Zia as he was wrapping up his final rakah.

  I went on.

  I prayed for all of my family and all of my friends and for all of the innocents and the martyrs, and I prayed for so many people and so many things that, Wallah, just as Zia was turning his head to say salaam to the angel sitting on his right shoulder, Raqib, the recorder of good, I prayed one more time for Allah to bring us home, safely, so that I had no time left to pray for my enemies.

  When Zia finished greeting Atid, God’s first snitch, and turned around to make his dua, he was flustered for only a second by the size of his congregation. He then recited a lovely little dua in what I assumed was perfect Arabic. Afterward, some of the men who had joined us in our prayer recognized Zia as Rahmutallah’s son, and they asked him what we were doing out on the road.

  But before Zia could answer, Gul spoke up, telling them that we were chasing after a dog. A young shepherd stepped forward and informed us that his flock had recently been attacked by something resembling a dog. He led us along a stream, back the way we had come, to a clearing in a pasture where his flock was allowed to graze and where he’d been briefly distracted by the erratic flight patterns of an American helicopter. By the time he brought his attention back to his flock, his sheep were gathered in a circle, baaing sadly, and so, pressing past one sheep after another, he came to the center of the circle and found the sour
ce of their mourning. At first, he thought his poor little lamb had exploded from the inside out. Then he saw the red paw prints leading away from the carcass.

  We thanked the shepherd for his story, promised to capture the beast, and, following the red tracks, journeyed deeper and deeper into the valves of the country.

  Unfortunately though, Budabash’s tracks disappeared just as we got to Watak’s marker.

  So did his scent.

  Dawood sniffed and sniffed as the sun dipped into the late afternoon but got nothing.

  Watak’s flag didn’t look much different from the other flags littering the makeshift graveyards and the dirt roads all over Logar. It hung red and torn from a wooden rod. Stones gathered at the base of it. Ash too. It was the loneliest thing I had ever seen.

  Near the flag there was a mulberry tree planted specifically in honor of Watak as a sadaqah. We gathered underneath it, catching our breath, rubbing our feet, and eating the toot from the branches, which belonged to Watak and so belonged to no one or else belonged to the whole village. To the left of the mulberry tree, there was a maze of compounds with these high mud walls that seemed to be on the verge of crumbling. Clay chipped. Thatch sprouting. First layer of mud giving way to a darker clay. It was quiet too. No kids screaming, dogs barking, cows mooing. Unlike the first maze just outside Moor’s house, this one seemed almost deserted. To the right of the tree, there was the road, which, if you walked it for long enough, would eventually lead to Agha’s compound.