Michael Gruber - The Good Son

I discovered I’d been dumb lucky, because the defenders had just been setting up a defensive position with a PK machine gun behind a pile of office desks in the corridor on the other side of the door just as my rocket hit, and the blast had killed or wounded half a dozen men. One of them tried to get up and I shot him with my rifle, my first face-to-face kill, not counting my boyhood revenge. The machine gun seemed all right so I picked it up and draped the belt of rounds over my shoulder and another one around my neck like a fashionable scarf. The PK is just a glorified Kalashnikov and weighs about fifteen pounds, so compared to what I usually carried I was floating on air. I went through a door and down a corridor. Three men came racing around a corner, pulling on equipment. They seemed surprised to see me and skidded to a halt, open-mouthed, and I shot them down.

Then I heard the sound of lots of men coming, pounding boots, so I ducked in a door, which turned out to be a stairway. I went up the stairs, past the second floor and up to the roof. Just as I got to the last flight up, the roof door opened and a man in Soviet camo gear appeared and yelled something. He was surprised to see me too, I guess.

After I shot him I stepped over his body and out onto the roof. There were the mortarmen loading rounds like crazy and an officer with night goggles standing by the parapet behind some sandbags yelling ranges and azimuths, and the other DShK machine gun was blasting away. So I set myself against the edge of the doorway I’d just come through and with one long burst shot everyone on the roof. There was still firing coming from the north side of the building, and I looked down and saw that the DRAs had set up a sandbagged position in front of the north door and they were holding up our guys attacking from that side, so I dropped a couple of grenades down on them. I was feeling a little bushed by then, so after making sure that everyone was dead and shooting them if they weren’t, I sat down against the sandbags near the DShK gun and checked my weapon. My PK was nearly out of ammunition but I had lots of grenades. I remember seeing that the grenade bag was covered in blood, but it somehow didn’t occur to me that it was mine.

I got up and began to futz around with the DShK, and figured out how to fire it, and did fire a short burst just for fun. As I was wondering what was keeping the rest of my people I heard sounds of boots and voices on the stairwell and out walked two DRA soldiers carrying crates of mortar bombs. They stopped and looked at the scene on the roof, stunned, I guess, and I turned the big machine gun around and blew them both to rags. Then I ran to the head of the stairs and threw a bunch of grenades down there, and the explosions must have set off the mortar bombs because the whole roof erupted like a volcano and knocked me on my ass.

When I came to again I was in bed back in our village and Wazir was sitting next to my charpoy holding my hand. There were tears in his eyes. He asked me to forgive him for his envy. He said the Prophet, on whom be peace, taught that envy eats up good actions as fire eats up wood. I asked him why he was envious of me-I had been a shepherd boy and a mere bearer while he had fought the jihad with arms and was accounted brave-and he answered, because the Colonel favored you. And then he went into a long story about something that had happened five hundred years ago, about the envy between the son and the adopted son of Ghoughusht and how this had brought calamities on their tribe, and this was the same thing and he was ashamed. He said he thought he could own me like a pet, which was very wrong, for all belong to God alone, especially we mujahideen, and this is proven by what you did with God’s help two days ago; the Pashtuns will sing of it for a thousand years, how one boy captured a fort by himself and slew sixty men.

So I forgave him and said I loved him above all men and we were reconciled. It was interesting that I’d been out of it for two whole days. I didn’t recall anything that happened after I fired the RPG, and it took days for me to recollect what I’d done. I’d taken a round through the flesh on my right side, my first battle scar. After that, people treated me with a kind of awed respect, since it was clear to them that I was under the special protection of God, or else I never could have captured a strongpoint almost single-handed and wiped out the better part of a company of soldiers. But the fact is that things like that happen from time to time in combat, call it God or inexplicable luck. You read, say, Audie Murphy’s Medal of Honor citation, and it sounds like someone made it up. For a whole hour this little guy holds off an entire company of Wehrmacht infantry, supported by six tanks, while standing upright in a burning vehicle firing a.50-caliber machine gun-and survives. He was eighteen when he did that. I was thirteen when I took the high school in Tsawkey. It makes no sense.

“Nothing makes any sense if you look at it that way,” she said, when I’d laid all that out. “Why are we here? Why is there air? Is that where you got this scar?” She stroked it gently.

“No,” I said. “Tsawkey’s on the other side. That’s a shrapnel wound.”

“Is there another story?”

“Yes, but even I’m getting bored. And it’s not very interesting. It was near the end of the war, a big operation. I was hiding behind a wreck. I shot a rocket at a Russian tank; the tank shot back. I should’ve died, but I didn’t. I was out for ten days and woke up in a hospital with Gul Muhammed and Wazir holding a hand each. They told me I had been dead but came back to life according to the will of God, and I said God can do all things and asked how the battle had turned out. Gul Muhammed said it had been a great victory, with the greatest loot ever captured. The Russians were pulling out.”

“And that was it, huh?” she said. “The end of the war. Or that war. How did you get back to the States?”

“That’s another story,” I said. “Time to sleep.”

“Time to go,” she said, hopping out of bed.

“You’re not staying?”

“No, I have a shift that starts in about four hours. I’ll barely have time to shower and change. Call me a cab, will you?”

I did and watched her hop into her clothes, all business now; whatever intimacy we had generated with our bodies and our talking was gone. It was an American hookup, about as serious as having a pleasant seatmate on a long-haul flight, and I’ve never gotten used to it.

Why don’t you look at me properly?

Why do you magnify my suffering?

The torturer flays for a reason.

What’s yours, beloved?

Ask your fierce eyes

Why they cut me to pieces.

Rahman Baba. We used to sing that one in the jihad as we marched through the dry hills. This came out of a culture where marriages are arranged and women are cattle. It makes you think.

After Gloria left, I slept for a few hours and then washed and dressed in my traveling clothes, packed up a small bag, and went downstairs.

My father was in the kitchen in white shirt and tie with the Post and a cup of tea. He must have heard me moving around upstairs because he’d made me a cup, strong, milky, and sweet.

I sat down and he reached into the pocket of his suit jacket where it hung behind his chair and handed me a thick envelope.

“Here is your ticket and your Pakistani passport and enough cash to keep you for a few days. You can always get more from Nisar.”

I stowed it in my bag and said, “How are we doing?”

He removed his horn-rims and rubbed his eyes. He looked tired but brighter somehow, like he was plugged into a higher energy channel.