Baghlan Boy Read online

  ‘Stop lying,’ shouted the lieutenant, repositioning himself downstream.

  Misha broke cover along the opposite bank. He sprinted straight, and then dived before the crack had ridden the airwaves. The young Talib lowered his rifle, surprised at his accomplishment.

  ‘He might not be dead, go see,’ ordered the commander.

  His lieutenant stepped to the edge of the river and went no further. ‘I don’t want to bring mud into the car.’

  The commander returned to the truck and climbed into the driver’s seat, the lieutenant onto the back. The commander brought a walkie-talkie to his lips. They zoomed away to the sound of their own gunfire.

  Misha was drenched head to foot from lying down under the run of the river. The bullet had missed him. They used a scarf to help bathe his face and back. No one said much in the Datsun on the road to Kabul.

  When they drove through Charikar, Misha, who had been spitting blood out of the window, turned to the other passengers. ‘Where’s my beard? I’ve been trying to grow a moustache and I can’t.’

  ‘That’s why they knocked your teeth out.’

  Misha laughed at the truth of Jamal’s statement.

  Jamal turned to Farood. ‘You still want to know why I’m leaving this country of mine?’

  Not long after Charikar, dusk began to fall upon them.

  Farood leaned forward. ‘I need to pray.’

  ‘We’re not stopping until my house,’ snapped the driver.

  ‘We have to pray before it’s too late.’

  ‘Too late for what? It’s already too late.’

  Farood persisted until Misha took his side and he pulled over. Farood prayed on the narrow beach of a stream and was soon joined by Misha. The driver smoked, and Jamal lay down and closed his eyes. He took the photograph of the woman from his pocket and looked up at it against the darkening sky.

  Then Farood stood in what light there was. ‘You should pray,’ he said to Jamal.

  ‘The Taliban pray.’

  ‘They’re not Muslims. Not all of them.’

  ‘That’s not what they say,’ replied Jamal, eyes fixed on the photograph.

  Seven

  Kabul, October 2002

  The evening sky was bedding down over Kabul and the frost was preparing to settle on the earth. On the edge of the city, north of the Sherpur district, fires were kindling in the warped mud houses, under the fraught tarpaulins and amongst the rubbish mounds. And then there were the families of six, eight, bunched in the shadows with nothing other than a blanket between themselves and the coming frost. The week before the price of wood had doubled to a dollar for one maan or four kilos. This was more than the men, who spent their days breaking rocks in the mountains for others to build houses with, could earn in a week. The only comfort for those with nothing to burn was that they were invisible when night came. A group of five young boys were jostling amidst a pall of thickening smoke rising from a heap of rubbish. Sporadically illuminated by flashes from the fire’s edge, Farood could just make out their profiles and Western clothes. They looked wild.

  He was standing on the lower balcony of the agent’s house in Kabul looking north. From the inside the house felt more like a series of houses; from the outside it looked like a garrison. Farood became disorientated as he and the other were led through a courtyard, corridors, up staircases, empty rooms and shown to one large bare room with mattresses on the floor where they were told to wash before a promise of an evening meal. The driver had broken into silence on arrival.

  Their host, a fat, middle-aged Tajik man named Rastin, laid down the rules. ‘There’s plenty of room for you here. But don’t leave this area unless I come for you. And stay off the balcony. There’ll be a meal soon. I have a good cook.’

  The room smelt fusty. The mattresses cradled the imprints of heads and hips, the door off to the balcony had broken slats, there was some handwriting here and there on the walls. The passengers looked nervous, disenchanted.

  Rastin saw the blood upon Misha’s shirt, put a hand on Misha’s shoulder and left it there. ‘Whatever happened today, try and forget about it. It’s in the past for you. For all of you. I will find you a shirt.’

  Misha looked back at him with glassy eyes, rolling his tongue around his mouth. Rastin looked to his other two passengers for some confirmation, but there was none. Why weren’t they grateful to be in his house? People never were. They were brought from hovels and caves and hopelessness. They were brought into his home and cared for. His servants waited on them; he let them meet his family, stroke his dog. He was a smuggler not a jailer, but nobody seemed to acknowledge that. He set people free, took risks and he deserved what he had. But Afghans never change. They can’t be helped; they all believe they are above it. They imagine themselves to be proud.

  ‘I have some painkillers I can give you.’

  ‘That would be good. But you know what would be better? If I could help prepare the meal.’

  ‘Sure? You don’t want to rest?’

  ‘No. If I can’t eat then I’d like to cook.’ Misha stood his ground against his host’s pity.

  ‘Okay. Come with me. I’ll get you that clean shirt.’

  Farood watched as Misha followed Rastin, wishing he could follow. He realised that his brother, mother and sister would have already eaten by now, but they would not eat as well as him. They would be lying down together in the cave, unable to sleep because of the cold. He shivered with shame as he had done when chasing Karam once; he knocked over a pot of boiling water, scalding his mother. She had hidden her face from him, muffling her cries whilst he stood, craving for his father to beat him. Instead he was forgotten about – he felt forgotten now. He switched on the light in the room, then switched it off again.

  Jamal was outside on the balcony, trying to make out the structure on a hill in the distance.

  ‘He told us not to go out there.’ Farood was invisible and unheard. He sat on the floor and wondered who had written the message on the wall. He stroked his finger over the words: ‘I will never forget you’. Where were they now? Perhaps they had left the person they loved back in the mountains somewhere.

  Jamal spat into the wind and returned to the room. He lay down, his back to Farood. The eleven-year-old realised there would be more of this to come: waiting in rooms, looking at walls amidst strangers who would not speak to him. How, he wondered, will I know when I’ve arrived at my destination? The place where I’m supposed to be? As yet no one had said how long the journey would take. Surely there would be someone to tell him. He would ask the Rastin tomorrow. Maybe that Tajik with the big car, who had met his brother and taken the money, could be trusted after all. He ran his finger over the writing on the wall and crossed the dimness to the balcony.

  In the shadows below two of the five boys were pushing and shoving a smaller boy in rolled-up tracksuit bottoms. They prodded him like a goat that refused to move. They kicked tufts of burning paper at him, some of which clung to him. Farood shouted at them and to his amazement, the tallest among them swept the embers off the youngest and saluted an apology. They seemed to confer for a moment. Then the oldest strode along into his own shadow until he was under the balcony, shouting up in a snappish voice. ‘Where are you going?’

  The question confused him. ‘I don’t know.’

  A sudden squall extinguished the fire and smothered another question hurled from below. The boy held up his cupped hands to beg.

  Behind him Jamal switched on the light and joined him on the balcony. ‘He thinks you’re rich.’ Jamal motioned the beggar away, but he stayed, joined by the others, who picked up stones as they approached, running and throwing them at the balcony. The wooden lattice doors behind Farood and Jamal splintered under the barrage. All five boys were now throwing in increasing competition, stones echoing into the room. Farood and Jamal ducked down, crawling back into the room as a ro
ck chipped off the plaster.

  Just then, Rastin entered the room. ‘What did I say to you?’

  He walked straight towards the volley, stepping over Jamal, and withdrew a Glock 17 pistol that snapped angrily three times. There was a pause in the proceedings before he retreated from the balcony and grabbed Farood by the throat. ‘Always do what we tell you to.’

  Jamal would not be ranked alongside a boy like Farood. ‘I went on to the balcony. It was my fault,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all your fault. You and your people. Clear up this room.’

  *

  Misha placed the plate of meatballs and pilau onto the rug before they were halfway through the noodle soup. He was wearing an apron and had been giving orders to servants about more cream for the soup. He seemed reluctant to leave the kitchen as he fluffed the rice in front of the other three.

  ‘Tajik pilau,’ he complained. ‘They put too much butter in everything.’

  Farood watched Misha as he sucked mouthfuls of rice, watched Rastin throw meat to his dog – even the servants threw food away. He couldn’t eat anymore.

  ‘Tajiks eat horses,’ whispered Farood, lowering his eyes in disgust.

  ‘You know what, little man?’ Jamal broke off to pick his teeth, ‘When you decided to make this journey, you also decided to eat whatever you were given along the way.’

  Misha held a grain of rice up to the light. ‘Maybe you should’ve brought your own food.’

  ‘All I’m saying is that it might have been a sick horse.’

  Somewhere along the way, Jamal hoped this boy would be discarded. In the meantime, he would bestow some obvious advice. ‘Just because there are people living in caves with nothing to eat, doesn’t mean you have to starve as well. You left to become rich, didn’t you?’

  ‘I’m not a cave person,’ said Farood, his eyes narrowing.

  Rastin gave further instructions. ‘Farood, there’s some clothes in your room, change into them.’

  Farood protested. ‘What’s wrong with these?’

  ‘They’re for going the other way. Once you cross the border, you’re an illegal. All of you. You won’t be long in Pakistan – you’ll need to blend in in Iran.’

  He put on the baggy tee shirt and jeans, rolled up the legs and tied the sleeves of the jacket around his waist. There were other people in the room now – Hazaras – two men, and a boy and his mother. Three generations who would not be changing into anything. The boy was a year or two younger than Farood. He had lost eyes. Farood remembered his father saying that Pashtuns should drink the blood of the Hazaras for what they had done to their women. He never said what that was, but it made them terrifying. He looked again at the clothes he’d been given, the same as the boys outside were wearing. The two Hazara men, father and son, talked amongst themselves into the night. They would have stolen the money to pay the agent, slit someone’s throat for it, he thought. They would’ve followed someone home, tied them up, cut off their nose so they told them where the money was. And that boy with them, the one with the blank face, would have watched it all.

  Men moved and breathed, prayed and whispered in the darkness. Farood was too anxious to sleep; he began to envisage his brother’s wedding, a wedding where there was too much food, all prepared by Misha. He was moving through the wedding party, the air filled with the warmth of food, looking for his father when Rastin arrived to awake the room. He gave them all soft-boiled eggs and bread and ten minutes to report to the courtyard.

  The younger of the two Hazara men opened the doors to the balcony. He had sunken eyes and a pencil moustache. He looked at Jamal and pointed to the hill in the distance. ‘We call it Bibi Mahru. For some reason the Russians built a swimming pool on the top, but they could never get enough water up there.’

  ‘Another useless hole in the ground,’ muttered Jamal.

  ‘The Taliban used it. They liked to execute people from the diving board,’ said the Hazara.

  ‘Hazara, why are you telling me this? Get away from me,’ replied Jamal.

  The man withdrew to sit with his son. Daylight soon flooded the terrain beyond the balcony, granting a clear view of the land at the city’s end, beyond the houses and the fortresses that were edging north like breeze-block glaciers. The fires had all but gone. A man submerged under a grey shawl stared in their direction. A woman strode the uneven ground with a bucket. Looking down from the balcony, Jamal saw the plots and broken slabs of graves that the agent had built his house on.

  *

  In Farood’s village a dozen men were crowded into a low house. At the front of the room sat three Taliban fighters boasting of their victories in Helmand far to the south. They described how they had fought the British, driving them out of villages and into their fortified compounds. They said the fight in the north wasn’t going as well because the people there seemed happy to live alongside the invaders. There were too many Tajiks and Turkmen there who worked for the infidels. It was up to the Pashtun, people with pride, people who had seen off the Russians and the British twice before. The speaker wanted to know, who would stand up in Baghlan? From the front row Farood’s elder brother, Karam, got to his feet and nodded.

  Eight

  The Bush Highway, Afghanistan

  They were on the highway before the sun had dissolved the morning mist. The day would be dry and it would warm, a little. The mountains would waste into a desert; the river that flowed from them would slow to a tarry then widen itself across the plain along with the wind. Before long – before they had reached Registan – there would be killing on the highway. The carcasses of supply vehicles, of civilian cars, Taliban jeeps and charred flesh would soon be accompanied by others. The dead of the valley congregated there, beckoning travellers to join them on the ‘Bush Highway’, as it was known. America had laid out 190 million dollars to build a road halving the journey time between Kabul and Kandahar. Now everyone came to the highway: to invade the country, to kill those who had invaded and to flee the country; a stream of prey either way, day and night. The Bush Highway was galvanising the enemy more than any offhand US atrocity. It had given Taliban fighters a shooting gallery and a routine: lay mines at night, followed by checkpoints and executions at dawn, and then on to sniping and the detonation of roadside bombs by mid-morning. Soon after the opening of the highway there were grumbles within Taliban ranks about the longer hours imposed upon fighters. And as they waited for the agent and his passengers in the rolling hills and in the irrigation ditches, they cursed the Americans for building it.

  They were in the agent’s minibus now, the Baghlan boys with God’s eternal foreigners, the Hazaras, at the rear cloaked in a ragged assortment of European and traditional clothes: frayed and patterned turbans and sunglasses, dusty shalwar and waistcoats. Farood was in the seat in front of them. He listened nervously and closely to their quietly spoken Dari, sensing their Mongol eyes sizing up his neck. When they came to his village it had been to sell untamed horses with sores on their backs, and he had been quickly ushered inside with his mother. His brother told him how his father and other Pashtuns confronted them, daring them to draw their daggers, threatening to flay them if they ever came back. Jamal looked across at them and considered they would only go as far as Quetta. They might think they were descended from Genghis Khan, but they hadn’t inherited his sense of adventure. He looked ahead down the highway. He could see the expanse of plain between the two mountain ranges. The same plain that the armies of Alexander the Great and the British Empire had crossed on their way to Kabul. Though the desert was creeping towards them, there were still outbursts of green beside the wadis where almonds, dates and grapes grew; tiny villages hiding behind golden wheat fields, flocks of sheep and goats. Jamal considered he would miss the sight of roaming camels and wondered what else he would remember about his home once he was in the West. He would recall, he suddenly realised, that he was a stranger to everyone.

>   For the agent the scenery either side was only camouflage for the Taliban. He wasn’t armed. A pistol or any other weapon short of a tank would create more trouble than it would solve. And the agent had good reason to fear an ambush. He had been stopped at a checkpoint last month, outside Ghazni, warned about profiteering by taking Afghan people into the arms of infidels. They had taken a boy from him – boys rarely made it all the way to Europe. He was forever hearing other agents talking about ‘smaller packages’ being lost along the way. If families persisted with enquiries they were usually repaid after a year or so; but only the balance after the agents had taken their cut for as far as they’d made it. Misha sat in the front next to the agent, his back stinging more than it did yesterday.

  The agent looked into his rear-view mirror. ‘If anyone asks, you are going to work for me in my factory in Kandahar.’

  Some passengers nodded.

  ‘What do they do there?’ asked Misha.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At this factory?’

  ‘They pack food. Almonds.’

  ‘Bit early for almonds. We should say fruit.’

  There was a moment’s muddled silence then Jamal said, ‘Because Taliban never shoot the fruit packers.’

  Two hundred kilometres down the same highway, Corporal Sean Hanlon of Alpha Company was chewing dust at the outskirts of a checkpoint. He had pulled down his goggles and raised his scarf over his mouth, but still the desert filtered up his nostrils and on to his palate. He spat. His sergeant and two privates were seventy metres behind him, never less; for if a car or a man was going to explode beside them, Hanlon wanted seventy metres of clearance and a split second to hug the highway. So they ambled back and forth in tandem like a well-disciplined offside trap. Hanlon’s job was to decide which vehicles were suspect enough to warrant a search and direct them to park up next to his sergeant. Of course, the problem was, insurgents weren’t afraid of being discovered, and assigning them to within an arm’s length of three or four American soldiers, when they were attired in high-explosive shrapnel-embroidered underwear, only served to help the enemy. Therefore, the vehicles that Hanlon directed to his sergeant were the ones he believed carried no danger at all. Anything the least suspicious, anyone faintly ominous even by Afghan standards, he waved through towards the British waiting in Kandahar. Otherwise every twenty minutes or so he ushered one, maybe two subjects towards his sergeant, who would point a gun in the faces of children, whilst a private waved a detector wand over mules and old men on bicycles. As a tactic it had backfired, literally. Those Taliban Hanlon ordered to float past in their Toyota Land Cruisers had eventually turned off to lay down in the hills and riverbed with their rifles, labelling this part of the Bush Highway as ‘Ambush Alley’. Hanlon had been shot at many times; only once had a bullet found him, scattering his clavicle like a rack of pool balls. Six months later he was back on the hot asphalt. He could have been posted elsewhere, but he declined. Hanlon expected to be shot at, and at least he could return fire, he could fight; he couldn’t do that if a boy on a motorbike burst into flames and blew his arms off. Being blown up was for civilians. Hanlon looked up the highway through his scope. The people from the mountains, from the remote north, from Baghlan, were closing in.