William Vollmann - An Afghanistan Picture Show - Or, How I Saved the World

“What do you do every day?” asked the Young Man. “How do you spend your time?”

It took a moment for the old man to understand this question.

— What did he do? What did this American think he did? — “We don’t have any, no job to do! Just sitting and reading and losing the time.”

“What would you like to do with your time?”

“I am Mechaniker , you know. All the time weld. If this job here possible, I will do it. I can do everything. I am ready to do it.”

“Do you have a family?”

“Fourteen, sir.”

“Many children?”

“Ten.”

“And are the children getting any education?”

“There is classes, only for the children, in religion.”

The Young Man hesitated. “Are you, uh, happy in the camps?”

Both B. and the old man laughed gently. “We have to be here.”

“How would you like the Americans to help you? What things do you need?”

The old man answered at once. “What we need, they don’t give it to us! We don’t need to eat; we don’t need money; we need only guns and like this to fight with the Russians, you know!”

It seemed so simple. It was so simple.

“From Pakistan they don’t give everything to us,” B. had said in the hotel room while they waited for the taxi. “I know about guns. We have machine gun, and when the machine gun came here, they took the machine gun away and give us only old guns, you know, from 1861, 1875, like this. This is too bad, too sad for us.”

The door creaked. B. stopped abruptly. “But we have good relationship with the Pakistan!” he cried. “They are helping us; they are keeping us here; we are very happy happy with the Pakistan!” (The door handle turned slowly.) “This is very hard for the Pakistan, to keep us here,” said B. “And the people who are selling the supplies, that is not important — every country has good people and bad people!”

Another Mujahid came in. Sweat was running down B.’s face.

Dr. Najibula had warned the Young Man that B. was considered an unreliable commander.

It was very hot, and the people crowded him. Here it was impossible to do those things which one can check off. Levi had said that for a while the U.S. was sending large quantities of weight-loss syrup for dieters — surely the last thing that a refugee would need. The Afghans very practically sold this stuff. — How useless everything was! How useless he himself was in Pakistan, where he sat around sweating and having diarrhea and passing the time with stupid poems in his head like:

Now, this is a tale fer a ramblin’ man, an’ not fer a crook or lawyer:

If YOU were a man you’d fan your nan in dear old P-Peshawar.

and he thought this was a good start, but it needed a

ROUGHNECKS’ CHORUS

Pukka is as pukka does

An’ 7-Up is as Bubble-Up was;

So let’s send out fer ice, my bros,

In dear old hot Peshawar!

by which time it was obvious to him that it must be a suspenseful narrative poem by R. Kipling and R. W. Service sitting around together thumping the table for ten years in — well, it couldn’t be a bar, so let’s suppose it was the Jordanian boy’s air-conditioned house not far from Jabbar Flats (he was rich, it was obvious: imagine that! air conditioning!) and the Jordanian boy, who was very fat, gave the Young Man an ice-cold Orange Crush and put “Seasons in the Sun” and suchlike songs on his cassette player, smiling at him and licking his lips, and he said, “Are you K.G.B.?” and the Young Man thought oh not again and said, “I’ve got to go,” and he walked out into the afternoon furnace and took a rickshaw back to the General’s and sat with the Brigadier in the garden, the Brigadier reading and reading from his Qur’an; and it was ten days and then nine days before he could go to Afghanistan, so he visited the Jamiat-i-Islami again, feeling almost healthy again as the airstreams of his rickshaw fanned him, and the guard was a young boy cleaning his gun; the poster above his head showed a diabolical Russian face above a pool of blood, and everybody was in conference or sleeping or out, so the Young Man went back to the General’s and worked on his epic, let’s see:

Took a rickshaw to — pshaw! — to dear old p-Peshawar,

Fought the Russkies tooth an’ claw fer dear old p-Peshawar,

Then I became a refugee,

Settled down with rice an’ ghee,

A girl in the camps an’ Qur’an on my knee

In dear old p-Peshawar.

Got a gun an’ took a bead

On another Mujahid

From a rival rebel group

Headed by some Commie dupe

In dear old p-Peshawar.

Must’ve been in K.G.B.:

’Fore I got him, he got me.

But in jihad that’s mighty nice

’Cause you go straight to Paradise,

Which sure ain’t dear Peshawar.

The next day he went to Mardan. Since it was so hot there, as it had been in the I.R.C. camps at Kohat, the Austrian Relief Committee people began work early in the morning and finished by noon. He accompanied Hassan Ghulam and his energetic Norwegian assistant on an inspection trip, via Islamabad. The A.R.C. administered only two camps, but the staff at each was all-Afghan. The I.R.C. was presumably under pressure from Commissioner Abdullah not to hire anyone but Pakistanis; the Young Man wondered how Mr. Ghulam had gotten around it, but not too much, because his diarrhea was back and the nausea got worse every day. The Norwegian girl was full of energy and good fellowship, playing ball with everyone at the staff house in Mardan, but it was all that he could do to choke down a hunk of the staple (greasy potato with rice), for after the first swallow his stomach ached at once, sharply, as if to spank him for giving him more of this oily fly-infested stuff; then his intestines rumbled and the sweat of his nausea broke out to refresh him. So his grand empathy with the Other had failed; the miserable snail pulled in its horns. I cannot remember exactly what he felt, for my ability to recall my own humiliation is mercifully limited, but a good way of seeing him might be the way my friend Jake did a few years later when he was meeting me in the Long Beach bus station on a hot day after I had ridden in from Tijuana very hung over on tequila, so I sat sweating and nauseous in my camouflage shirt in that hot parking lot, with my head bowed down, and Jake walked right past me looking for me and thinking: I bet that sad old soldier has some interesting stories to tell. — The Young Man’s diarrhea was now a thin, chalky-brown liquid. In Afghanistan the life expectancy was thirty-five to forty, he had heard; the cause of death was often diarrhea. — Even tea or water made him retch: the conquering hero had a year of pills and proctoscopes ahead of him.

Just lazing around in Mardan, in other words, the Young Man popped rehydration salts. The well at the staff house was full of snakes and frogs. Morbidly, he held his drinking glass up to the light and saw something green in the water. He had begun to look distinctly thin and pale in those days.

“He’s going to go inside next week,” said Mr. Ghulam to the Norwegian girl, who studied him brightly, without sympathy.

“With which group?” she said.

“The N.L.F.” said the Young Man.

“The situation in Afghanistan came about because of America’s false politics,” said Mr. Ghulam. “If America and Russia had not interfered, the Afghans would be living in their homes! And now you seek to solve their problems with this pleasure tour inside !”