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

He lay in bed dodging the flies, whose angry whining voices reminded him to kill them. The songbirds emitted sounds lethargically from their wicker cages. Gholam Sayed sat reading his Qur’an in a semiliterate stammer. From the far side of the red hill came a gunshot — certainly another Mujahid practicing late. A breeze began to blow through the sour grapes, and the wooden airplane stirred. Soon it would be afternoon.

The man in the bed beside him stirred, pulled a canvas shirt away from his face, scratched his mustache and went back to sleep.

He thought about getting up quietly to ascend the red hill one last time, and continuing down into the desert where the cities were, and the tanks. What were the Roos doing right now? What would it be like when he met them? — Then again, suppose they came to meet him; suppose that right now something shiny were to poke itself over the crest of the red hill: a gun barrel, a turret, a tank with a big red star on it …?

“Mister,” said Poor Man, striding over to him, “Russian soldiers coming this way. Five hundred tanks. Tomorrow we fight.”

“Oh,” the Young Man said.

“You ready? Your legs good now?”

“Very good.”

“We go early.”

The Young Man lay back in his charpoy . All around him, the men slept the afternoon away. He could not sleep. When the breeze picked up, he climbed aboard the wooden alootooka and soared over the red hill. He flew for a long time. Finally an interceptor beam got him, and the plane fell into splinters. They picked him up a few yards from the wreckage, ushered him into a black jeep, and brought him into the presence of the Commander in Red, who was the Commander in Blue’s counterpart, and had sworn to destroy him. Within a twinkle of a Slavic eye, he’d poured the Young Man a shot of vodka, or whatever the Russians drank in Afghanistan. (The General had said that many of the Roos were addicted to hashish.) Then it was time to talk business.

“Now, where exactly is this rebel base you came from?” the Commander in Red would say.

“If I tell you, you’ll destroy it.”

The Commander in Red shrugged. “Destroy it, pacify it, save it from feudalism,” he said, “make it safe, let us say, for us to visit.”

“And if I don’t tell you?”

“We’re both clever — no need to even answer that.”

“Well, you see,” the Young Man explained, “I have good friends there.”

“Friends? What did they ever do for you that we can’t? Why, I bet they made you walk all the way there!”

Now, this was in fact a sensitive point with the Young Man, for the Brigadier had promised him that he would be given a horse, and when he told that to Poor Man, gasping his way up the mountain, Poor Man gave him a piece of snow to slake his thirst, and then called the Brigadier a son of a dog. “He lies!” Poor Man continued; “he told me nothing! He is nothing; he is no leader; he is C.I.A.; he is K.G.B.!” So evidently it was all the Brigadier’s fault. Or his own. Or someone else’s. When he got more tired still and asked the Mujahideen how far it was, they said, “ Tsalor kilometer!” and when he walked four kilometers and asked them how far it was, they said, “ Pindzuh kilometer!” and when he walked those five more kilometers and asked them how far it was, they said two, then six, then one, then another, then seven… — Nonetheless, the Young Man was no Benedict Brezhnev. He hoped that he wasn’t, anyhow.

During the evening meal, which he ate with the Commander in Blue, the red hill turned slowly orange, like a photo of the surface of Mars.

No, it was really impossible to imagine what it was like in Afghanistan.

Then they were going into battle, over the red hill. But it turned out that there was actually not one red hill but a whole series of them, and they went over them for hours without seeing a Roos . Once they had to be very quiet, and tiptoe along the base of a dour red bluff, in a place where the river echoed. There were supposed to be enemy tanks on the other side. But they never heard a sound, except for a faint hum, which was either the Young Man’s imagination or the change in altitude. Going over red hill and red hill with the guerrillas, he looked up at the sky, but never saw a helicopter or even a cloud. Maybe they weren’t in Afghanistan after all. Maybe the Roos had long since died of some disease, like Wells’s Martians, and the Mujahideen were having a great time swaggering around their wasteland and firing Chinese candles at each other.

Then he saw his first alootooka .

They walked along down the river. After a while, they saw pomegranates and ripe red figs all around, and grapes so good that the village dogs stood up on their hind legs to eat them. Near the town of ——, where the Soviet garrison was, they stopped under the trees, unrolled their mats, and prayed beside their machine guns, each in his time. They kept asking the Young Man how he was. Elias and Suleiman embraced him. Poor Man looked for a long time through binoculars at an ancient clay fort in which nothing moved. They all sat there behind the trees, waiting for the hot daylight to go away. — “Roos,” whispered Suleiman, pointing over the ridge. Elias was praying again on his blanket, his head touching the stock of his Kalashnikov, and the grenade launcher also prayed like a mantis, a single grenade pointing upwards toward the sky, and the other fighters sat patiently. — Now at last the country began to darken, and the men to tense themselves for what was about to come. They prayed again. Poor Man led them into the village, stepping only on the boundary stones of the fields so as not to damage the crop. The village dreamed under wide fig trees. The houses were made of clay. The Mujahideen bowed to the village malik, and he brought them fermented milk and beans cooked in oil. Then they sat there waiting. Presently it was completely dark, and through the sky passed a silent, eerie swarm of winking lights. Planes. They waited. In front of them rose a red hill (now a gentle black solidity in the moonlight). They walked along the edges of the rice fields, trying not to damage the crops. Crickets chirred around them.

“Why are you fighting?”

“I am not fighting for myself; I am not fighting for Afghanistan; I am fighting only for the God.”

Ahead of them, at the summit of the red hill, there was a flash. Poor Man had begun to fire. The boy who carried the rocket launcher ran up to Poor Man, smiling happily. A Soviet shell exploded loudly somewhere near them. The Young Man felt cold. He looked around him. All his companions were happy. Another shell landed, flinging stones. While the boy prepared the rocket launcher, the other Mujahideen began to fire. They shot beyond themselves like the snap of the slide projector in darkness as he advanced the carousel, letting image after image tumble down into the abyss of light (more than ten seconds’ exposure is said to put the transparency at risk of fading, and now it has been eleven years!), and the Mujahideen fired in this long moment that was the reason that I came; I don’t want or need to say much more about it; they were fighting and I was not; they were accomplishing the purpose of their lives in those endless night moments of happiness near death, no fear in them as I honestly believe; they had crossed their river so long ago that I could not really comprehend them as anything except heroes shining like Erica on the far side of the water; they were over the red hill and nothing else mattered.