Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

She wanted to go back to Kabul in two days, and she wanted me to come with her, to show off her new fiancé, she’d said. And again, there was something about her of the girl who’d looked forward to engagement and wedding and all the ritual. Yet even as I regarded her, with infinite tenderness — my fiancée, my wife-to-be — part of me suspected I would have to wait some time for her to make it down the length of the aisle. I had waited for Emily so many times, waited for her to show up, waited for an explanation of why she was late, waited and waited. The easy analysis is that all of it had really been waiting to get married, but I think now that what I had been waiting for was for Emily to change. Does respect require us to take our lovers as they are? Take them or leave them?

Might Robin have been right after all, not in the thesis that what Emily as a person needed was someone to rein her in — a Scottish laird — but that if she was to have a successful marriage, it would have to be with someone who did so rein her in? It seems, though, that for many of our age a successful marriage is not the highest priority. Don’t you think?

If I now regard much of Zafar’s story as a kind of defense, this understanding came only after I’d heard him through, and, even then, only after I turned it all over in my mind. Unlike the courtroom trial, where a charge is laid out in the beginning, it seems to me that Zafar held off for as long as he could what exactly this defense was for. But of course the moment had to come eventually.

As for judging the effectiveness of his case, I do not feel equal to the task, not because we all live in glass houses, but because I am implicated. Indeed, it may be that the reason I view our conversations as a search for absolution, an invitation to a reckoning, is that I have a hand in it all, and I find myself asking: How far into the consequences of an act can one be held responsible? How much do other causes relieve one of one’s part? Or am I, as Zafar might say, the cellist who tries to hide his error behind the violinist’s?

* * *

The news reports of Crane’s death were not as extensive as those coming two years later, in 2004, of the death of Pat Tillman, who, after 9/11, left a career in professional football to join the U.S. Army.

According to the army’s official version in the immediate aftermath, Tillman was killed in an ambush outside of the village of Sperah about twenty-five miles southwest of Khost, near the Pakistan border. It later emerged that Tillman had actually been killed by so-called friendly fire, a fact that U.S. officials had knowingly suppressed.

Some time before his own death, Crane had left the Marines — that much I’d gathered from the reports. But what the newspapers did not explain was what he was doing in Afghanistan. It turns out that Crane, by his own word, as reported by Zafar, had joined a private military contractor and was even working toward starting his own outfit. The Crane I knew certainly had the character for that sort of business, but what Zafar has told me about the circumstances leading to Crane’s death leaves me unsure of what Crane was actually doing. Moreover, even after taking in the whole of Zafar’s story, I still have doubts about what Zafar’s role had been.

Before returning to Kabul, Zafar first flew to Islamabad with Emily. When they emerged from customs, he explained, Emily went off to talk to a UN official stationed inside the airport about UN flights to Kabul. In the few minutes she stepped away, said Zafar, Mohsin Khalid, the colonel’s nephew and K2 mountaineer, appeared by my side, as if materializing from nowhere.

Should you need to stay in Islamabad, explained Khalid, the colonel would be delighted to host you again. Otherwise, if you wish, we can arrange for you to take a seat on one of the daily military flights to Kabul. There’s one in two hours. You’ll be in Kabul by one p.m.

Before I could thank him for the offer of help, Khalid had turned and left.

When Emily returned, she told me that there was only one seat on the UN flight and that the next scheduled flight was for the following day. Our plan — which was Emily’s plan, since she had insisted on it — was to arrive in Kabul together and for her to introduce me to the people she worked with as her fiancé. But at Islamabad airport, after taking a few calls, she evidently resolved to get to Kabul quickly and so take the only seat. She suggested I take the following day’s plane.

At Bagram air base,* I was met on the tarmac by an American soldier who said he had orders to take me to AfDARI.

From whom? I asked.

Pardon me, sir?

Who gave you the orders?

My superior, sir.

Do you take orders from anyone else?

I’m sorry, sir?

Do you know who I am?

No, sir.

Let’s go.

It was just as well the soldier and I passed the journey without exchanging another word. The soldier needed all the focus he could get his hands on: Military personnel had orders to avoid slowing at road junctions and never to stop. The driving was crazy.

At AfDARI, the soldier barely let me step out before speeding off.

Inside I was greeted by Suaif. I asked after his family, in particular his boy, before being pointed toward the old room in the guesthouse.

Suleiman was already there.

How have you been? I asked.

I’m fine. I have the camera. You have a plan, don’t you?

I’m fine, too, I said, picking the edge of the curtain to look out the window. Let’s go for a walk, I added. I like walking.

Outside the gates, Suleiman walked briskly. He led the way. We crossed the road, reached the end of the block, and turned the corner before speaking again.

Suleiman was agitated. He spoke about his country, his beloved country , how it was being ruined and there was no way forward for people like him. He spoke with such animation and energy, and with such apparent disregard for maintaining a continuity of exposition, that I even asked myself if his mental faculties had not somehow been bent. When I recalled the Suleiman I had left scarcely one week earlier, the voice of the young man before me seemed to belong to another. Yet even so, I believed I had the impression of catching a glance — if that is the right way to describe the fleeting detection of certain sounds and gestures — of how that young man might have been transformed. I did not follow everything he said, but I had the sense of someone who was in the throes of seeing the world in a new way, one who might once have made observations, drily, without emotion, with cold disregard for meaning, but who having now surveyed the amassed data was forced into certain conclusions, raging conclusions that could not be ignored, discounted, or minimized.