Michael Gruber - The Good Son

So I was welcomed back into my clan, introduced to the many I did not know, and kissed by those few I did. The clan had not loved the Taliban and had suffered for it, and they confirmed what the driver had told me, that the insurgents were assassinating the maliks and the tribal elders. This tribal jirga they had coming up was to plan a joint response and to decide what the Barakzai position would be in the new American war. They had been neutral, but with the killings this was no longer possible.

After a while the others politely withdrew to allow Gul and me to speak privately.

He smiled at me with his four teeth. “So, my son, you have grown to a man. And how many sons have you now?”

“None, Father. I’m sorry.”

“None? You have no woman?”

“I have had many women but none who wished to raise my sons.”

“Then get one who will. Get two. Men will be fighting with knives to wed their girls to Kakay Ghazan.”

“Whatever you decide, Father.”

“Good. You know Wazir has two boys. They are around here somewhere.”

“I am happy for you. I heard he has gone to Paradise.”

“Ah! Where did you hear that?”

“From Bacha Khan.”

“I see. Yes. Well, I miss him; he was a good boy.”

“May I visit his grave?”

“His grave is not here. What do you do with yourself now?” he asked, changing the subject.

“I am a soldier for the Americans.”

He gave me a sharp look. “And do you kill as they do, from far away, and never see the faces of those you slay, or whether they are enemies or children?”

“No, Father. The kind of soldier I am watches the enemy from very close, and if killing is necessary it is done silently and face to face.”

He grunted to acknowledge this, that I was not utterly without shame.

“So will you do this for your whole life?”

“I don’t know, Father. One reason why I’ve come here is to seek your counsel.”

“Then my counsel is to leave the service of the infidels and join us here. We need good men, fighters, and there is no end of gold from the poppies.”

Everyone wanted to get me into the dope business. I said, “I will consider it, Father, thank you. But before that I must do something. Some mujahideen have kidnapped my mother, and I have come to rescue her.”

“Yes? I heard something about a kidnapping of foreigners. Your mother was among them?”

“She was. Have you heard anything about where they’re holding them? It must be somewhere in Swat and perhaps even Kunar, close to the border.”

“It is not Kunar, or I would know. I hear they got five crore dollars for one of them, and I did not see a rupee of it, and I would have if they were in Kunar.”

He stroked his beard. For a while he seemed lost in thought. At last he said, “Your mother… I never met a woman like her, before or since. Many times I thought of stealing her for myself, just to see… but it was against my honor. I heard she took you herself, after the jihad.”

“Yes. Who did you hear it from?”

“Oh, you know, bazaar rumors. But it was true, I see.”

“Yes, she wanted me to be an American and be safe from the war here.”

Now he gazed off into space again, like old men do. “A remarkable woman, a devi almost. She took both my sons-”

“Both, Father?”

“I mean she used to talk with Wazir in the evenings and filled his head with strange ideas. But in the end he was a Pashtun.”

I was about to ask him what he meant, because there was something disturbing about the way Gul Muhammed was speaking, as if there were a message underneath his words that he wanted me to know but could not bring himself to voice. But now the courtyard was filling up with people; there was a continual rumble of trucks in the narrow streets outside, for the jirga was arriving, and my father had duties more important than chatting with a prodigal foster son about his mother. He asked me to sit down at his right hand, which I did, and there commenced a series of formal greetings of the assembled elders and chieftains. Tribal society is not efficient, which is one reason why it has faded over most of the earth, and I found that I was enough of an American to become bored by the pace of the proceedings. After an hour or so I excused myself and took a walk around the village.

It was a miserable little pile, with houses built of local stone and mud brick, more miniature forts than houses, surrounded by walls and dark and cramped within. In what passed for a market square, men were slaughtering sheep for the feast they’d laid on for the jirga, and I watched that for a while, but the sight of throats being cut and the gush of blood and the heads resting in the dust, swarmed with flies, reminded me of what I was trying to stop, and I moved on, back to Gul Muhammed’s house.

Entering my father’s courtyard, I waved to the guards there and they smiled and gestured for me to go through. The courtyard was more packed than before. I started to work my way through the mob and noticed that just in front of me two men were doing the same, so I stayed in their wake, like you do in a stadium or a concert. One of them was a thin Kiel with a heavy limp, probably eighteen or so, and the other was an older man in a turban; he had his hand on the kid’s shoulder, guiding him, and I thought, father and son come to the big party from some village like this one, the kid probably hasn’t seen this many big shots in his whole life.

But then the older guy gave the kid a little push and the kid moved out of sight into the crowd, and the older guy turned around to go back the other way and I saw his face, the beard, the knobby cheekbones. He looked right at me, I saw his eyes widen, and then he turned abruptly away and started to bull his way back toward the gate.

It was Baz Khatak, the man I’d seen in Peshawar talking to the ISI captain who’d run me off the road. I reached under my kameez and pulled my pistol out and started chasing him. He was pushing people aside-which is not wise in a Pashtun throng; they don’t take kindly to that kind of treatment-and men were shouting curses and kicking at him, and I’d almost caught him by the time we both got to the courtyard gate.

I saw him fumbling under his kameez and my belly lurched because then I knew what he was going for and why he’d shoved the kid forward. I shot him in the back, and he went down. I was just bringing the front sight up on the back of his head when I saw the small black box in his fist and before I could get the round off he pushed the button and as my bullets smashed his head the kid exploded.

We had twenty-seven dead and forty-eight injured, including Gul Muhammed, who’d been hit in the chest and hip by bits of human shrapnel; the human body makes a pretty good frag grenade and there was a lot of metal junk in the kid’s suicide vest in case that wasn’t enough. They brought a doctor in from the government clinic in Asadabad, probably at gunpoint, and he got the shrapnel out of my father’s stringy old body and I sat with him for a day and a night while he ran a fever and mumbled, talking to people who weren’t there or were dead.

When he was well enough to eat I fed him beef broth with a spoon, and he spoke sense for the first time, asking me what happened. I told him the story, about the Taliban I’d spotted from Peshawar and the kid with him, the bomber, and asked him to forgive me for not seeing him sooner. He waved that off.

“If it had not been for you, the bomber would have pushed through and exploded in the midst of the jirga, and I would be dead along with all the elders of the clan. You know, the reason we Pashtun don’t have a nation of our own is because no tribe can bear to see a man from another tribe above him, and so we are always under the heel of strangers. These Taliban say we should all be one people under the command of God and His holy Qur’an, as the Prophet, peace be on him, united the tribes of Arabia and conquered half the world. They are right in this, we should be united, as we were for a time against the Russians, and I do not like to see American soldiers in our country, but I have not heard that the tribes of Arabia were united by murdering their leaders.”