Michael Gruber - The Good Son

“Really? I thought it was a basket case.”

“Oh, fuck, I don’t mean the government. The government is fucked. I mean the warlords and the growers and processors. This place is smack central. Peisecki says it’s the next big profit center.”

“Protecting dope lords?”

“Hey, it’s money. This is not the world, man, don’t ever forget that.”

I looked at him and then quickly away. The eagerness on his face made my belly twist. “Well, I’m happy for you,” I said, “but personally I’d need to think about it for a while. I mean, I’m not sure I could make the jump from… you know, Thus be it ever when free men shall stand between their loved homes and the war’s desolation.”

Buck looked down at his beer and then gave me a defiant stare. “Yeah, well, I did that for twenty, bud, just like you; I got pins in my thigh and my ears are shot to hell; I hear fucking bacon frying every minute of my life, and I’m goddamned if I’m going to live in a double-wide on an E-7 pension. Uh-uh. Not when I got this opportunity. You’ll see, Ice, it’s the real deal here.”

He finished his beer in two huge gulps and signaled for another round.

While I drank I thought about Buck and what he was doing and where he came from. Buck is a country boy from the western tail of Virginia, and his people have been fighting America’s wars from way back before there was a country, an endless stream of officers and noncoms and grunts from all those little hollows and towns and farms, the heart of generations of American armies, and I thought it was a real bad sign when people like that started to talk like Buck was talking now; I thought it was bad for the country. I should be talking like that, not him, and I felt bad but hid it and we got pretty drunk that night.

In the morning, hung over, we went out to a joint down the road and ate parathas and drank sweet mint tea and he asked me what my plans were.

“I need to go to Kunar,” I said. “I need that bike you got on the plane patched up and some Afghan ID.”

“Hey, not a problem, but fuck, man, Kunar? That’s deep in Apache country.”

“I know,” I said, “but I’m an Apache.”

He laughed and slammed me on the back, and said, “Shit, I guess you are. You look like a goddamn Pashtun and you smell like one too.”

All that took a couple of days to get ready. I lived at the Force Eight compound but spent most of my time in a tea shop off Flower Street. It was run by an enterprising young fellow named Atal, one of the innumerable class of fixers without whom life in Kabul would collapse more than it has already. He had a taste for the old poetry, and we would spend the afternoons examining the crowds on Flower Street, him pointing out to me who was a drug lord, who a terror chief, and who a CIA guy, quoting Rumi, Kabir, and Ghalib to each other as appropriate, and I sank so deep into pashtunwali that it was hard to remain civil when I returned to Little America at night. As Rumi says, It is right to love your homeland, but first ask, where is it?

Once I didn’t go back at all but stayed up most of the night listening to a trio Atal had brought in, sarangi, santoor, and tabla, and I kept giving them dollars to play my favorite ghazals, and afterward I smoked opium in the back and Atal let me sleep there covered by a sheepskin.

When the bike was fixed and the papers were prepared, I asked Atal if he knew a reliable man to take the Ducati back to Lahore, a hundred bucks plus expenses and two hundred when he got back to Kabul with a note attesting it had been delivered in good order. Atal was surprised at the price being so high-there were people who would do it for nothing-and I explained that people were after me and there might be some danger. We would need a careful person, but not too careful, since he had to be seen leaving Kabul for the south on a red Ducati.

“Oh, in that case I know just the man. He goes back and forth quite often as a decoy.”

“A decoy?”

“Yes, people smuggle, of course, and there are those who steal from smugglers, so the smugglers hire people to attract the attention of the thieves, but they don’t carry much. Rangeen is one of these. And he is about your size and shape.”

This man showed up that evening and was satisfactory in every way, and the next morning he left in my clothes and I in his, he on the motorcycle and I on a bus to Asadabad in Kunar Province.

Kabul to Asadabad is about two hundred kilometers, and even given the usual state of the roads the trip should take about five hours in peacetime. Our vehicle looked like a stumpy school bus painted vivid blue on the body, with the green and black national colors on its snout, plus a good deal of gold and silver paint, some of which was twirled into Qur’anic calligraphy, including The greatest terrors shall not dismay them, and angels shall receive them. I thought that made sense, given the state of the bus and the roads it was going to traverse.

My fellow passengers were mainly Kunar peasants back from shopping trips to the big city (their purchases towered on the roof rack), leathery men with missing teeth and sun-narrowed eyes, some with their burqa-clad wives and their children, plus a trio of musicians headed for a rural wedding, a schoolteacher, and three Afghan army soldiers in uniform going on leave. It was a fair cross-section of the people of Afghanistan, mainly Pashtuns, with some Tajiks and Hazaras. The bus had not left the outskirts of the city before we were a party, with people passing around food and tobacco, showing photos, registering their opinions, telling jokes. I sat in the front of the bus with the musicians on one side of the aisle and next to the schoolteacher. He was a soft-eyed man about my age with a neat spade beard and horn-rims. He was the one I had spotted as the suicide bomber, but he was not. He said he taught English in Asadabad, and I said I knew that language and if he liked we could practice on the way.

Up the narrow climbing road at unsafe speeds, and the terrors did not dismay us; we made good enough time to the Kunar border and then, because it was not peacetime at all, we were stopped by an Afghan army checkpoint. An hour baking in the oven of the little bus while the soldiers inspected our baggage and papers. I passed, no problem, but my schoolteacher was hassled, led off the bus; and returned forty minutes later, sweaty, red in the face, fuming. His name, Janat Gul Babori, was the same as or similar to that of someone the authorities wanted and he had to prove he wasn’t that man, his argument being helped along by the usual bribe.

While we were waiting, another bus pulled up and the soldiers passed it right through without pulling people off or checking it out. I looked at Janat and he shook his head. Bribes again, the whole bus could’ve been packed with Taliban and weapons and dope, the whole country was bribed to the nipples, every public office was for sale, but what could you do? There was no Afghanistan the way there was a France or a Canada, there were only individuals and families and clans, and the Americans trying to make it different was like assembling a fighter plane out of wet toilet paper.

After that, when the bus was rolling again, we talked about the wretched state of the country and how bad it had been under the Taliban and what a mess the current masters had made of it and how tired we all were of the endless war. What didn’t come up was anything personal. I’ve sat with people I’ve met by chance on airplanes and buses in the U.S., and sometimes you get their whole life story whether you want it or not.

But in this country reserve is the rule-no, it’s more than reserve, it’s a impenetrable thick mask-that prevents the expression of any genuine feeling. Maybe there is no genuine feeling; maybe the mask is all there is. I sometimes think that’s the case, and it’s one of the weirdest things about the transition from the West. My pal Claiborne is reticent for an American, he has the stoic uncomplaining humor of his mountain people, but Claiborne is an Oprah guest compared to the average Pashtun. Not making emotional waves is like the ruling passion of his life. The Americans see it as lying, as bad faith, but we think that the protection of honor, of the family, of the clan, is worth more than any mere veracity. Among the Pashtuns a man’s front is everything; no one can penetrate it except, if you’re lucky, you’ll find a friend of the heart, and he’ll be the only person in the world who will ever know what you really feel about things. For me this had been Wazir, and I for him.