Lawrence Block - Tanner’s Virgin

“He is the brother of the husband of the sister of my wife.”

“Ah.”

“You have business with him, kâzzih? You have women to sell?”

“I have business with Amanullah.”

“By your accent you have come on a journey of many miles. You are an Afghan?”

“My mother was an Afghan.”

“Ah. If you go to the Café of the Four Sisters, kâzzih, you find him there. Amanullah. You tell him you bear good wishes of Tarsheen of the Sausage Pot. May your business prosper, kâzzih. ”

“May your road run downhill and the wind be at your back, Tarsheen.”

“Blessings attend you, kâzzih. ”

The Café of the Four Sisters was a little wineshop deep in the heart of the old part of town. Two of the sisters passed among customers seated on cut-down wine barrels. One brought me a glass of sweet white wine. If all Afghan women looked like the two sisters, I could understand why Amanullah’s business was prosperous. I couldn’t remember ever seeing a more unspeakably ugly woman.

Unspeakable or not, I spoke to her. I asked for Amanullah and was pleased to note that she knew precisely whom I meant. We didn’t even go through the vaudeville routine aimed at defining precisely which Amanullah I had in mind.

“He comes here every day, kâzzih. ”

“Is he here now, then?” I had seen no one who fit the description.

“Ah, but he is gone.”

“He returns soon?” There is, incidentally, no future tense in Pushtu, which is why the conversations reported up to now have been somewhat stilted. Just a present tense and an imperfect tense. The present is used to convey present time and all future and conditional time. The imperfect covers all past time. “He comes again to the café this afternoon?”

“It is said that he goes on business to the west. He returns by nightfall, but if he stops here for wine I know not.”

“I thank you, sister.”

I set my wine glass down. Someone brushed my table and nearly knocked it over. I rescued the glass, raised it, set it down untasted. Something struck a chord in my mind but I couldn’t pick out the notes. That man who had passed my table-

I got up, glanced around for him. He was just leaving the café. I followed him out, lost him in the crowd. I caught a glimpse of his small eyes and spade-shaped black beard and then he was gone.

I returned to the café. In the corner an old man was coughing violently, pounding the earthen floor with his fists. His face had a bluish cast to it and he seemed to be dying of something. A few of his friends were clustered around him. The rest of the drinkers ignored him.

I got back to my table, but my wine glass was gone. I decided that the waitress must have picked it up, and I remembered how cloyingly sweet the wine had been and decided I didn’t want any more anyway.

On the way out the door I heard the death rattle in the old man’s throat.

The third time was the charm.

I don’t really think anyone would have figured it out on the basis of a simple dagger through the turban. I suppose, though, that I should have gotten the message in the Café of the Four Sisters. My own wine glass gone, an old wino coughing himself to death, a man who looked familiar passing my table and almost spilling my wine – I guess anyone with half a brain would have figured out that the man with the spade-shaped beard had put some poison in my glass, which the other man had cadged when I ducked out of the café. If I had read it all somewhere I’m sure I would have figured it out for myself, but instead I was living through it, and it’s always harder that way.

If nothing else, I was certain that I didn’t know anybody in Afghanistan. I know people almost everywhere, and on the whole I found it quite remarkable that I didn’t know anybody in Afghanistan, since a friend in need in Kabul would have been a friend indeed, indeed. And if no one knew me, there would be no reason for anyone to be putting daggers in my turban or poison in my wine.

I went back to the Café of the Four Sisters a couple of times in the course of the afternoon. Amanullah never did get there. I spent the rest of my time sort of wandering around and getting the feel of the city. It was what guidebooks call a study in contrasts, with broad avenues as wide as the streets of the old quarter were narrow. There were a few foreigners in the city, most of them Pakistanis from Kashmir, a few Russian types of one sort or another. Mostly, though, there were Afghans, and most of them were dressed more or less as I was – leather sandals, a loose-fitting robe more like an ancient Roman toga than anything else, and a sort of turban.

By sunset I was hungry. I had started drifting back in the general direction of the Four Sisters, and I stopped along the way at a hut from the central chimney of which wafted the odor of broiling mutton. I went inside and stood at a long counter. A thickset man took a mutton steak off the charcoal fire, sprinkled a mixture of unidentifiable spices over it, and slapped it onto a cast-iron plate, which he placed on the counter before me. There were no knives or forks. When in Rome, I thought, and picked the meat up in my hands and began gnawing at it. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed another man glaring at me. I turned. All of the other diners, I saw, had selected knives and forks from a bin against the far wall. All of the other diners looked at me as if I were a barbarian. Chastened, I went to the bin for knife and fork, returned, and went to work on the food.

While I was eating, the chef spooned a mixture of cracked wheat and rice onto my plate. The mutton was rare on the inside and black on the outside and very tangy. The cracked wheat and rice was a successful combination. I noticed another man drinking some sort of beerish concoction, and when the chef passed my way again I pointed at my fellow diner and made drinking motions. It turned out to be beer, but with an unusual taste to it that I finally identified as cashew nuts. This didn’t seem to make sense, as the cashew nut is native to the Western Hemisphere, and world trade would have to advance to an extraordinary degree before South Americans took to shipping cashew nuts to Afghanistan breweries. I found out subsequently that an Afghan nut vaguely similar to the cashew is used to flavor the beer.

I had two liters of the beer and finished my mutton steak. I ordered another beer – it wasn’t the best beer I’d ever tasted, but there was something habit-forming about the taste – and I drank a little of this, and then I realized that I would have to get rid of some old beer in order to make room for the rest of the new beer.

There was no lavatory as such, just a trough at the base of the back wall. I went out there and did the sort of thing one does at urinals, and as I was concluding this operation the little hut blew up.

For an insane moment I thought I had done it. The Man Who Pees Dynamite. I suppose that’s the feeling a woodpecker gets if he goes to work on a tree just as the lumberman gives it the final chop. After all, it was a pretty extraordinary experience. One minute I was urinating on this building, and the next minute the goddamned building was gone.

The damage was close to total, the destruction approached utter, and the chaos was absolute. There was the sound of the explosion followed by complete silence. This held for maybe ten seconds. Then everybody in Kabul set up a hue and cry.

The blast knocked me flat on my back, which was probably just as well, because most of what was inside the little restaurant was blown outside, and it wouldn’t have been wise to be standing in the way. By the time I was back on my feet, neither bloody nor unbowed, the chaos had reached absolute pitch. There were sirens wailing in the distance, and it occurred to me that I was in what might well turn out to be a bad place for a foreigner without papers.