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

“Very sorry, sir,” the owner said from behind the counter. “Very fresh.” —He was a bald old man in the uniform of the Indian Army. Watching his almost empty establishment from the back of the room, he played a cassette over and over. Whenever it reached the end of a side, he flipped it again. The sound was a muffled drumming of static within static, with remnants of calliope in as much evidence as a whore’s hymen.

Well, the Young Man thought, giving up on the meat and dipping little bits of nan into the oil, at least they were subservient instead of inquisitive here; they said they were sorry, so, okay, okay; and believe you me, there’s no finer sight than a thousand waiters tacking into the wind, running for water at the snap of a finger or a waved rupee note, lighting cigarettes for the customer, his napkins blowing like racing pennants in the wind of the pukkas †as he steams on, crunching another bone, skipper of his appetite, proud, great and Yankee come to help the Third World.

…Stomach aching heartily after partaking of a nauseating sweet composed of fermented buffalo milk — what wouldn’t he do for courtesy?… It had been a wedding reception, at the home of relatives of General N., and everybody was very nice; they took him in to see the bride in her ceremonial costume of golden fringe, with her yellow glass bangles; they found an American program on television for him, they showed off the family’s young sons, the host let him handle the guns of the household, and Wife Number Two waited on him constantly with this delicacy and that. He liked the family very much. He had had a lot of diarrhea that day, with blood, and the thought of eating anything at all made him want to throw up, but he would not insult them. Manfully he ate the meat and picked at his nan . They had honored him; his portion was the biggest and the most limpid with grease. The vegetables were good, and the water potable, but meanwhile they had brought him sweets, each more sickening than the one before. There were hard, stale orange pretzels so sweet that his teeth ached. Then came red things that were glazed rock-solid on the outside, but burst in his mouth like cockroaches, running with sour-sweet syrup supersaturated with sugar, so that crystals of it stuck to his gums and under his tongue, and his breath began to stink in his throat. Finally they hauled out the buffalo-milk candy — a platter of it, stacked with whitish, crumbly squares, each as big as his hand. He had been taking very small portions all evening, and could see their growing disappointment with him. So this time, instead of breaking off a corner of a piece and hiding it in his pocket later, he grabbed the biggest piece he could see and opened his mouth wide. Everyone beamed. It took him half an hour to finish it.

“My dear brother,” said the Afghan Brigadier the following afternoon, selecting his words with great care from his small English repertoire, “please come outside.” —But the Young Man was in agonies just then from what he was sure was the buffalo sweet, and could only sit up in bed and pat his stomach feebly. — “Uh, good afternoon,” he told the Brigadier, pretending not to understand (people often did that to him ). The Brigadier shook his head slowly and went out.

It was quiet. The Brigadier spent his days sitting in a lawn chair, his feet in another, his cheek and mouth resting against his hand as he looked at nothing, crowded by busy birds. A big vein ran down his temple like a bolt of lightning. The morning breeze stirred the air between them when they took their breakfast together, but his white prayer cap and his gray hair remained still. He had a deep, sad crease on either side of his mouth.

The Brigadier put his hand to his forehead that afternoon, waited, and finally got to his feet, crossing his arms behind his back. He walked away around the corner of the hedge. The Young Man lay watching through the window. A little later, when it had become horribly hot, the Brigadier came back to take his siesta. He slept with the same benign expression as he sat all day, the expression of someone whom months of unproductive waiting are slowly bringing to seed. Finally the Young Man’s own eyes closed.

General N.’s guest room had only one large bed, in which the Young Man and the Brigadier both slept. At first the Young Man felt uncomfortable with this arrangement. Like most males from his country, he believed that close and prolonged proximity to an older man might well presage homosexuality. He did not like it when old men held his hand to guide him through the bazaars. He felt as a Pakistani woman might have felt if her husband had taken her hand in public. None of this was right or wrong. He who adapts insufficiently to an alien society is a sort of evolutionary failure, condemned to isolation, sterility and extinction; he who adapts too much defaces the self he was born with. The Young Man, being young, should have adapted substantially; he had less previous self to deny. He did his best. In Karachi he’d met two men who befriended him. They paid for his lunch ( nan , oil and curried egg), bought him a leaf-wrapped packet of betel nut to chew, showed him the tomb of Mr. Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and took him on a bus ride to Clifton Beach, where in September the giant sea tortoises came to lay their eggs. “It’s a fascinating spectacle on a moonlit night,” the guidebook said. Unfortunately, this was the middle of a 125-degree afternoon (so it seemed) in the middle of June.

The buses were painted in a hundred gorgeous ways: blue and silver, like the turquoise jewelry of the American Southwest, red diamonds with yellow centers (buttercups in poppy fields, the Young Man thought), emerald-glazed ivy patterns … They never stopped. You ran behind one for a block or so, dodging the cars and motor-rickshaws and the carts of the spitting camel-drivers, until there was a wagon blocking the intersection ahead, or the conductor felt sorry for you, and then the bus slowed. The conductor held out his hand. You grabbed it as the bus picked up speed, got a foot in and jumped. Inside it was dark. The floor was wet with spittle. His two new friends, Akbar and Muhammed Ibrahim, stood protectively on either side. Muhammed Ibrahim insisted on carrying his pack for him. The Young Man, who’d spent hours in the heat trying to get his railway ticket to Peshawar, being bullied by people who wanted to do him expensive services, terrified by wailing beggar-women who pantomimed that they were dying of hunger (were they? how could he tell? why was it his fault?), cheek-stroked by smiling prostitutes, reviled by the men in official red uniforms (COOLIE NO. 17302) because he would not let his pack be carried by them; baffled by everything, thirsty, but afraid to drink for fear of disease (by the end of that first day in the country he was drinking a Sprite every hour and a half, plus water when he had to; he usually had to), sweating in crowded lines, always in the wrong line, until finally a man in the line got his ticket for him, saying, “You are a guest of our country; I must help you!”—all this with a gentle smile that confounded the Young Man with gratitude and guilt, for then his benefactor must go once again to the end of the line to get his own ticket; as for the Young Man, his train didn’t leave until ten that night and somehow he had to last till then, so he moved through the long confusion of that afternoon like a restless fly afraid of being swatted, knowing that whenever he stopped, the beggars, prostitutes, arrangers and desperate children would come; gasping, he hailed a rickshaw and roared off to the bazaars, those unknown fixed points devoid for him of any content; while the ride lasted it was marvelous because no one could bother him and he enjoyed the hot wind against his ears in that flimsy taxi, which was simply a Suzuki motor and two seats nested beneath an aluminum canopy painted with some movie star’s likeness; but then they got to the bazaars, and as soon as he got out the problem of not being left alone reasserted itself, so he couldn’t stop anywhere; didn’t know what to do, poor helpless yoyo; walked the sunny, steamy streets, making a show of looking at straw mats and lovely plastic water coolers, becoming more and more exhausted and afraid of having his blood sucked by all these people who grasped at him and whom he refused — the Young Man, then, was happy to be in someone’s keeping. — There were so many passengers on the bus that it was impossible to sit down. Strong-looking, swarthy men stood all around, rubbing their beards and conversing in low, serious voices. They looked at the Young Man, but left him to himself. Akbar and Muhammed Ibrahim smiled at him kindly. That made him feel guilty again, because he had presented himself to them falsely. Since he could be arrested for trying to cross the Afghan border, he’d told everyone who asked that his purpose was to visit Pakistan. When Akbar and Muhammed Ibrahim discovered that he did not intend to go on to India, they were astonished and touched by his interest in their country. The Young Man, who had never given much thought to Pakistan before he came there, decided then and there to make his interest sincere, and at the close of his journey he reckoned that that was one of the few good things that he had actually done. — The bus lurched on. — “Cal- lif -lif-lif-lif-lif, Cal- lif -lif-lif-lif-lif, Cal- lif -lif-lif-lif-lif, Ca- lif ton!” the conductor sang out the door. Passengers leaped on and off. They passed a billboard for Sprite; the picture showed a veiled woman pouring the bubbling stuff into a glass. The afternoon had changed its character; feeling safe, he had begun to enjoy himself. — Here he was, in an Oriental city as fabulous as the Land of Counterpane, and he was riding toward the shores of the Arabian Sea; with him, two new friends; around him, exotic-looking personages in bright pajamas, talking in Urdu! (What else ought they to have been speaking, after all? But it must be admitted that the Young Man’s attitude was endearing.)