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

“Thank you.”

“That’s nice. Could you go just a little lower? And make your strokes harder. Oh, that’s wonderful. Oh, keep doing that.”

The rain thundered and thundered.

“Isn’t this exciting?” said Erica sleepily.

It was. The tent shuddered and flapped. Water was leaking in. We had no idea whether or not the evening wind would rip it apart — a dessert of uncertainty which pleased Erica; Erica loved to climb mountains because they brought her so close to death. She’d seen another climber fall a thousand feet; she’d seen a frozen German couple in the Swiss Alps. Because danger fulfilled Erica so much, it also fulfilled me — or at least the thought of it did. Or at least I thought that the thought of it did. I had a crush on Erica.

We were up at McGonagall Pass. To the east were the stony cones of Ostler Mountain, and the trail that we had come up from the river. To the west below us was a plain crawling with the black rivers of glaciers, peaks dolloped with snow and ice everywhere we looked (or at least our maps told us that they were peaks; we could see only massive pillars, some blue, some white, some gravel-brown, that disappeared into the clouds). That plain was mainly gravel piles and raw earth so soggy with glacial melt that it swallowed our boots to the ankle. There were heaps of loose stones: white granite flecked with black, or rusty shale, or yellow-tinted crystals that Erica thought were sulphur. We had both become very quiet; I was almost frightened by everything. Stones trickled into pools of a strange pale green. The water tasted sweet and silty. Between the gravel country (“No-Man’s-Land,” Erica called it) and the titanic black-earth mounds of the glaciers was a river with the same green pallor, too wide to cross, eating deeper and deeper into a sculpted channel of ice. Not even Erica dared to go very close to it. What I most remember now is the still steady trickling of water everywhere, a sound which seemed uncanny to me because in that vast nature-riddled place everything should have been roaring and booming, and I kept waiting for something to happen, for the black mountains to explode, for the ice to break, for thunder and lightning to come…

It was a dark, stifling tent. Flies buzzed outside and inside. The Young Man felt as if he could barely breathe. The refugees sat in the hot darkness. The whites of their eyes gleamed. — “Are you happy here?” he asked the head of the family.

“Oh, you see,” explained the Pakistani administrator of the camp, “we are trying to make them happy, but they have left their own country, so it is difficult for them to be happy! But we want to make their stay here as comfortable as we can. They are satisfied with the help that we are giving them and the United Nations is giving them, and they are appreciating that.”

“Do you think they’ll stay here for the rest of their lives?”

The Young Man apparently had a knack for surprising the administrator. “Why should they?”

“Because the Russians will not give Afghanistan up.”

“No, that is impossible!” cried the administrator. “The whole world is against them, you see!”

“I hope you’re right.” —The Young Man turned to the refugees. — “Why did you leave Afghanistan?” he asked.

“Russian … attack us,” the man said slowly. “Their … airplanes and tanks. Russian came, and they … tease our womans, they hurt them … and we are very in trouble. Their … airplanes come, and … bombs destroy our places …”

“Are you happy living here?”

“No, sir. We are not happy. We are satisfied here, but in summer season, we … are in troubles.”

“Do you have enough food to eat?”

“Yes, sir. Enough food.”

“And enough water?”

“It is hard. We don’t have enough drinking water. And the food is not of such good quality, sir. Afterwards we feel ill. And there are giant insects that scare us …”

“Don’t be apprehensive,” Erica had said.

“I’ll do my best.”

“It’s really a very trivial crossing.”

“Good,” I said politely.

We sat down on the moss and picked blueberries into my wool hat. I could not stop thinking about what had happened in the river before. Erica picked about four times more blueberries than I did. The sun was very hot and sweet in our faces.

“Let’s go,” Erica said at last. We put our packs back on, and I tightened my sweaty straps and hip belt as we went down the incline. The closer I got to the edge of the river, the less I liked it. There were two channels. The first was easy enough: I could see the rocks on the bottom. The second, however, was of the treacherous kind, a wide, deep, smooth stretch of water that might be thigh-deep and slow, or maybe chest-deep and very very fast underneath, and the bottom might be slippery, and that second channel might drown me on this sunny afternoon.

Erica looked at me, scanned the river, and looked at me again. She waded the first channel, stepped onto the sandbar in the middle, peered into the water again, and came back to me. — “Good news,” she said. “We’re crossing tomorrow.”

I felt horribly depressed and ashamed.

“Today’s your birthday,” Erica said. “You set up the tent and I’ll make you a special birthday dinner. I don’t want you to help. Just get in your sleeping bag and relax.”

“You’re so nice to me, Erica,” I said.

Erica sat by the stove, singing songs in Navajo and French. The evening was very beautiful. “You know,” she said, “one Christmas all my brothers and sisters and I were fighting. My father used to be a brigadier general. All the sudden he lost control and barked out, ‘I command you to be happy!’ We kids just burst out laughing.”

I smiled.

“So,” said Erica, “I command you to be happy!”

By this time I had separated Erica into two personalities: Erica Bright, who was sweet, playful and girlish (and who liked me), and Erica Green-Eyes, who could best be described as prowling and competent . Green-Eyes was the one whom I continually offended; and it was Green-Eyes who made my first thoughts so filled with dread as I lay beside her in the small hours of a sunny morning, knowing that in minutes she’d awake and hustle me along to another river crossing, snapping at me, glaring at me, shoving me because I was slow and we had to cross before the glaciers began their morning melt. It maddened Green-Eyes that I continued to lose tent stakes, that I had no sense of balance, that I was a poor map reader. — “Come on!” Erica said as we canoed up Moose River. “ Hard , deep strokes! Dig into that water! Come on; there’s a tribe of hostile Indians behind us and we have to stroke for our lives! They’re going to catch us at this rate! Stroke! Stroke! Stroke! Hard , deep strokes! They’re coming closer; they’re cocking their bows; let’s see you put yourself into your stroke ! Dig in! Bend at the waist, move your shoulders; STROKE!” —As we went farther upriver, my stroke actually began to get smoother and better. Erica was happy, believing that maybe I’d actually learned something. I paddled us around for a little while as she lay back and watched the clouds. Presently we felt an impulse to piracy, so we tied up at a private dock, tiptoed into somebody’s garden, and stole a handful of strawberries. — “Now stroke…,” said Erica very sleepily, laughing and yawning in the sun, and the sunbeams danced on the water and a faint breeze stirred her hair. — Going back downriver, I also stroked creditably. We had a good time until we reached the landing. I jumped out to pull the canoe up onto shore. Still inside, Erica giggled as it wobbled, thinking that I was playing, and as I summoned my energies for a return smile I stumbled, tipping it and her into the water… “God damn it,” she said… — In general, no matter whether I did or did not learn things from Green-Eyes (and I do remember a few occasions where she nodded at me in a satisfied way, and once because I had located our position so accurately she gave me the McGonagall Pass topo map for my own), the lessons were neither easy nor pleasant. I would look down at the ground, apologizing for my latest stupidity and feeling a strange tightness in my chest which I thought then was pure self-loathing (but which I now suspect was anger, too); and Erica threw her head back despairingly, reached to me, and cried, “Think!” Then she would feel a pitying impulse to rally me, would make herself smile and say, “Your river crossings are a hundred times better than at the start.”