“What made you decide to leave Afghanistan?” I said.
“Well, almost everything,” Nahid said. “The situation, the fighting, the demonstrations, and, uh, those students got killed …” She looked down at the floor. “And we couldn’t study, you know. Almost all the teachers were coming in class and telling us that we should be ashamed of studying because other people were getting killed behind those mountains, because They were bombing everything. And in public you couldn’t talk without to be afraid of everybody. They didn’t like us because They were saying that we were feudals or landowners or whatever, and we were afraid of Them because whoever They were thinking was against the government, They were going to put them in jail and then who knows. They’ve killed a lot of people. No one asks why. No one can ask.”
“Did you consider joining the resistance instead of leaving?”
“Well, it’s hard here, you know. We hardly make very much money, you know, to pay our expenses. I do want to help my people and I did, but it’s easier to say it than to do it, because if I go to Pakistan right now they won’t let me fight, ’cause I have to stay home and cover my face and stuff like that. And when you live, you have to deal with your own problems, too.”
“What is life like for you here?”
“Well,” Nahid said, “the hardest thing is when you think you have lost everything you had behind you. You never know if you’ll be able to go back or not. On the other hand, I can go to school here, I can make my living, and people are really nice to us. Maybe it’s the nature of America, because it’s a country for all refugees.”
Nahid gave a party once, and there was beer and music and dancing. One of the guests got drunk and started shaking his finger in my face, yelling, “You Americans, you don’t care about us; you are a bullshit people!” and everyone else was shocked and shushed him because he was not being hospitable to me, and Nahid smiled apologetically and sipped her beer, and the musicians played one more song, one more song on their Afghan instruments, until it was three in the morning, and they gave me a bed to sleep in and the next morning they gave me breakfast. But I could not forget that I had seen Nahid drinking beer. She was becoming an American. — “I don’t know if the fighting is going to stop or how long it’s going to take,” she said to me passionately, defensively, “and when you’re young you have to do something, to be something where you are. My grandmother and my mother, they are older and will never be reconciled to living here. They want to go back because it’s very hard for them: they don’t speak the language, and they’re mostly alone because everyone else goes to work or school. But I think if Russians leave my country, then everything will be okay. I think most of us would like to go back. I do.” —Her head was down; her voice was very low. — “I would like to go back to help my people, to stay there. But then again, I don’t know if …” —She stopped. — “I don’t want to go back to my country and see that everything has changed so that I can’t—bear it anymore.”
* Nomads.
† In Europe the consulates were more willing than in Pakistan to grant visas to the United States. Lucky Nahid only had to wait for half a year!
7. “… DESCRIBED FORMALLY AS REFUGEE CAMPS …”: WOMEN (1982)
Many centers described formally as refugee camps were set up in the territory of Pakistan. Armed groups that are sent into Afghanistan undergo training there. It is in these camps that they sit it out or are being rallied after making raids on populated Afghan localities and communications and other projects. Among instructors training these units are members of the U.S. Secret Services, Chinese experts in so-called “guerrilla operations” and even specialists in subversive operations from Egypt.
The Young Man had expected the refugee centers to look like pictures of concentration camps set in pictures of the Gobi Desert: barbed wire, jaundiced children dying of thirst, work gangs, sentries and corpses in the sand. He can, I think, be forgiven this lack of insight. For an American in 1982, the most practical course was to assume the worst about conditions in Asia. (Now we can fear and hate Asians instead, since they are taking over our markets.) At that time we were sufficiently far away for only the most important news to reach us — and when was the last time that important news was good? Before the Young Man left the United States, a Pakistani doctor had given a talk to an A.F.A.R. meeting. The doctor had worked in the camps. He said that conditions in the camps run by Pakistan alone tended to be worse than in those administered by the U.N. and the voluntary agencies. Some were much worse. But all were bad. Hearing this, the Young Man had felt anguish. It was still four months before he was to leave for Pakistan, and in that time how many more refugees would die? If only he could go tomorrow! Then he could accomplish something that much sooner.* —Of course the U.N.H.C.R. nutritionist in Peshawar, Marie Sardie, was in the right when she said to him, “I hate typical Western propaganda about Eastern countries: you know, the begging bowls. I hate that. It’s this whole attitude that if someone’s actually dying, then you help them. But if they look okay, then forget it, Charlie. And this is defeating everything about development.” —And yet she was missing a point, because the refugees, being refugees, were by definition not okay. — Can we blame the do-gooder, then, whose urgency planted the camps with imaginary barbed wire?
No, he was right.
If I could speak to the Young Man now, what would I say to him? I can’t deny that I feel very dull now. There was some excitement and belief that the Young Man had that I don’t have. But although my life is flat, it is content with its flatness. I am a success. It is only that sometimes, when I read over his words, something brushes against me like a soft garment, and I feel a pang. What have I lost? If I set out to Help Somebody now, I know that I would be more effective, that I would accomplish more, give more, take less. — For a time the Young Man embarrassed me. Now, despite all his ignorance, I admire him a little. I wish that I could be more like him. But when I was him, I got hurt. — What about the saints, and Albert Schweitzer? Their existence proves that it is possible to be inspirational and effective. But did they feel inspired? Is inspiration an indulgence?
Mainly, the Young Man’s careful records bore me. He never thought to ask for stories: all he wanted was facts. Those facts are largely meaningless now. All that I have left now are the things that his fact-crusher could not quite digest: debris and colored bric-a-brac, like the old woman with tuberculosis who let him look at her as she sat out on the hard clay ground beside her house, the red shawl flaming about her gray hair, a silver ring on her finger; and her face was almost impossibly lined and wrinkled and beaten but he could not honestly tell her mood or what she was thinking or anything about her except that she was looking back at him, her mouth wrinkled in emotion — but which emotion? — or was it emotion at all? — and the men stood in a line behind, scowling at him as he watched her. — What can she mean or be for me now except another person whom I annoyed or perhaps even tortured with my good intentions? I can’t forget her but she isn’t alive. But the hand that wrote those records in the battered notebook, those tanned fingers dancing upon the keyboard of my computer now in front of my eyes, that hand fascinates me: it has traveled on a voyage to a place where I have never been.