The Night Letter is offering a financial reward of two hundred dollars to any inhabitant of Usha who might help in the war they are promising against Gul Rasool for — among other things — having allowed girls to be educated here. Yes, it could be Nabi Khan’s organisation. He must be alive. The money is an unbelievable sum for most ordinary people in Usha and some could be tempted by it, seeing it as a way out of poverty.
The eyes of David’s passenger remain closed throughout most of the journey towards Jalalabad, though he occasionally takes a sip of water, one of those bottles that had landed around Marcus’s house. As soon as they near the city, however, he wants to be let out of the car, suddenly all vigour and purpose, darting looks to his left and right. David tries to reason with him, an exchange lasting many minutes with the car brought to a halt by the side of the road and with David reaching a measured hand back to stay him, telling him a doctor should take a look at his injury.
‘I have no money for the doctors because the bandit took everything.’
‘The hospital is just around the corner.’
‘I must leave.’
Does your mother know you are intent on wasting the blood she made out of her own blood, her own milk? Someone had said this to him after an injury here in Afghanistan, but it’s too intimate a thing for him to say to this boy.
‘I want to leave.’
‘Don’t worry about the money.’
He consents eventually and they drive in through the hospital entrance, past the gunmen protecting the building.
Leaving him in the waiting room for the doctor to arrive, David comes out of the building to stand under the pine trees, the Asian magpies in the branches, the crested larks. There is no breeze but a lavender bush is in constant movement due to the bees that land on or fly off the thin stalks. A small boy approaches him with a fan of Pashto, Dari, and English books for sale — 101 Best Romantic Text Messages as well as a volume entitled The CrUSAders, and also Mein Kampf translated as Jihadi.
When he sees boys like these he sometimes finds himself wondering if they are Bihzad, forgetting that time has passed, Bihzad grown up out there somewhere.
The border with Pakistan is just three hours in the eastern direction. Continue through the twenty-three miles of the Khyber Pass and you arrive at Peshawar. The Street of Storytellers.
Where he had met and fallen in love with her and she with him.
He now knows how places become sacred.
‘Where is the boy’s father?’ he asked her. The kid who had won every arm-wrestling competition with David in recent weeks.
She shook her head, and he knew not to proceed. More than a month had gone by since he met her but sometimes he felt he was still little more than a neighbour. And for almost two weeks now he had known that the man she really longed for was only a few miles away in a refugee camp.
‘Who pays for this place?’
‘An aid agency. They pay for me to be here so women from the refugee camps can come here and embroider in secret.’ The work he thought might be something to do with spying. ‘It’s secret because we fear the fundamentalists who have constructed mosque upon mosque in the refugee camps and have forbidden work and education to women, so much so that a woman in possession of silk thread is branded a wanton, it being the Western aid organisations that began the embroidery scheme to give war widows a chance to earn a livelihood. The fundamentalists tell them they must beg in the streets — that this is Allah’s way of using them to test who is charitable and who isn’t — or send their little boys out to be labourers in the bazaars. We have to be very careful in case the women are followed here by them.’
Imagining her loneliness, he had felt wretched, but the man she wanted in her life — the Communist — would only add to her difficulties, he was sure. He decided to visit him for the final time to ask him as openly as possible about his plans and prospects.
‘I don’t care if Communism has failed in Russia,’ he told David. ‘It remains the best hope for a country like Afghanistan. Never mind food, some people in my country can’t afford poison to kill themselves. There’s no other way we can put an end to the feudal lords and the ignorant mullahs who rule us with their power and money, opening their mouths either to lie or to abuse.’
‘You don’t know what you are talking about. Communism has killed millions upon millions of people …’
‘Let’s just wait until it has killed a few thousand more — the bloodsuckers who control the place I am from — then I’ll be happy to denounce it.’
People like these had to be told that Communism wasn’t the only way to end inequality. ‘We don’t have that kind of people — the priests and landlords — in the United States either …’
‘Then why are your people actually supporting them here, giving them money and weapons?’
As he talked to David he was keeping his voice low: around them were victims of Communism, and David could not imagine what they would do if they heard him talk in that manner. In 1917, one of David’s great-uncles, a copper miner sympathetic to the far-left Industrial Workers of the World, had made known to everyone his opinions about America’s recent entry into the war. He’d call President Woodrow Wilson ‘a lying tyrant’ and denounce US soldiers as ‘scabs in uniform’, unmindful of the fact that the state of Montana, in the grip of patriotic fever, was increasingly intolerant of dissent. During the course of one September night, a small group of masked men grabbed him from his house and left him hanging for all to see at daybreak. A piece of paper with the number of the Montana Vigilantes of the nineteenth century, 3-7-77, was pinned to his body, with the initials of four other men threatened with the same fate.
No, David could not allow this man and his misguidedness to endanger Zameen and the boy.
He could see that the man’s ardour was genuine, but it was directed at falsehoods. David had learnt as much as he could about his great-uncle’s death and had decided that — an outrage and a crime though his hanging was — he could not agree with the man’s views. They would have resulted in the United States becoming entangled in the barbed coils of revolution, like the rest of the countries that had adopted Communism and its offshoots. Revolutions that eventually devoured their children and turned half the planet into a prison. They were the early years of the century and he admired the optimism of people like his distant relative, was even proud to have such a person in his bloodline, someone who cared about equality and justice. But at the opposite end of the century, the consequences were there for all those who wanted to see them. In David’s time, an end to inequality and injustice meant having to contain and undo those outcomes.
‘Just wait until the Soviets are defeated,’ David said. ‘Then we’ll help you Afghans sweep away the landlords and mullahs.’
‘The Soviets are helping us now. Building roads, hospitals, dams — which your people keep destroying.’
They weren’t building anything. It was all either thirdrate or just for show, and either way they were billing Afghanistan millions for it.
‘The Soviets are flying thousands of our children to Moscow to be given free education. If I had a child I’d send him happily.’ And he said that he and a small group of like-minded young men and women had come together and were planning to journey back to Kabul in a few weeks’ time, to offer their services to the Communist regime.
David walked away from him.
And then the next afternoon, Christopher Palantine informed him that the Soviet military would be carrying out an air attack on the refugee camp where the young man lived. The refugee camps of Peshawar were the hub of the anti-Soviet guerrillas, where commanders and warriors came to regroup and recuperate after fighting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. Tested beyond endurance, the Soviets had violated Pakistani air space to bomb the camps many times before — and that afternoon they would be doing it again.