An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (4 page)

Looking around us, then, we have quite a vista—a bit disheartening, maybe, but if there were no problems what would we do with the people who wanted to solve them? And—speak of the altruist!—I do believe that I can see our Young Man from America down there at this very moment, just dying to be of use, and wishing he
could
just die, for he has dysentery.
^‡

Sketch maps have been furnished for your reference. A glossary of Pushto (or, if you prefer, Pashto, Pushtu, Pukhto or Pakhto) words and expressions has been omitted. Going in the summer is not advised on account of the heat.

The Young Man’s sketch map of Pakistan

I
t was his first hour in the country. He picked up his luggage and went to the door marked EXIT. The customs officials stared after him sternly.

Immediately as he stepped outside he had the sense of being crowded by something. He stood there in the night until he could see, hearing patient, deferential breathings and rustlings of garments on either side of him. He saw that the sidewalk in front of the terminal had a low fence on his right and his left, like a slaughter chute. Pressed up against the fence were hundreds of men, calling out softly: “A nickel, please?” —“Taxi, sir?” —They awaited his pleasure. Step by step he traversed the protected space, trying to look straight ahead of him and hoping that he would see a sign directing him to official transportation of some kind. Fifty feet ahead, the railings ended at the street curb. The Pakistanis stood waiting for him. He was by himself; the other passengers, who were all native to the place, had been cleared quickly and had gone. He had never been to Asia before. What should he do? Would they rob him there in the dark when he came in among them? —He continued walking. Having worked for a year in a reinsurance firm to finance his visit to the battlefields (which were still a thousand miles away), he had drawn up and balanced out to zero a list of his assets and liabilities:

He concentrated on that first item, his what-the-hell attitude, and took his last few steps.

O
nce upon a time there was a Young Man who wanted to be more than he really was. This made him unhappy. He decided to go to Afghanistan and take pictures of the bullets whizzing past his ears. Unfortunately he had a stomach ache.

O
nce there was a Young Man who wanted to go to war. Unfortunately, no one would take him at first. —“Well,” he reflected in his hotel room, “it could have been worse. They could have taken me and gotten me killed.”

Still and all, he thought, choking down a kebab at the Lone Star Café, he felt like a failure; for he had tried and tried to go. —What a panting puppy! —Had he been called upon to fetch newspapers for any master, oh! he would have run across the lawn of politics, tail a-wagging, like that breathless zigzagger Lukács, that silly noser-around in satellite countries, trying desperately to implement his convictions with any ready-to-hand artillery clip, even obligingly changing the convictions themselves as required by Stalin & Co. (At least, thought the Young Man, if any creepy organization is breathing down my neck at the moment,
I’m
on the other side!)—and always missing the democratic revolutionary boat, poor György, always getting short-circuited in the Great Electrification; for whenever he got his revolver out and aimed at the head of the oppressor class he would be informed of dismaying changes in the curriculum, so that all his efforts to raise the toiling masses and other Igor beavers up to social consciousness succeeded no
more than any other type of levitation—and every time he got expelled from the people’s this and the people’s that, until he was left with nothing to do, finally, but talk about praxis in nineteenth-century novels. Stupid bastard. —Well, he wasn’t going to end up like that, the Young Man vowed, no sirree; why, he’d grab one of these here
topaks
all cocked and loaded with
golai
swiped from some Soviet ammunition dump, knock out the lights and maybe shoot somebody’s cap off just for effect (if only he could shoot!), assume command, lead the Mujahideen to the battlefront like Lawrence of Arabia, capture a helicopter in Kabul and proceed to Moscow, rotoring comfortably along below the radar line; and then he’d strafe the Kremlin roof and interrupt any number of important meetings. Oho, he’d change the objective conditions of history, he would; he’d make the materialists acknowledge the mud that they were made of—

And if he had been a Soviet Young Man, he would have gone to Nicaragua.

His little fiancée bought him sausage, and shortbread, and marzipan, and chocolate, and fancy crackers, convinced as she was that she would never see him again. He put it all in his camera duffel, which he then in military fashion
STOWED
beneath his feet on the plane. As one kind of cloud gave way to another beside his window seat, he drank ginger ale. He imagined calling his fiancée from each stop—New York, Frankfurt, Karachi—getting successively worse connections, having less and less to say. Mainly, however, he let himself be pampered by a benign blankness of thought, as if the ever-changing clouds had wandered in behind his eyes, and the blue lucidities between them were vacant. —He passed out of Swiss airspace. The clouds were thicker over Yugoslavia, and it was raining in Istanbul during the refueling. He stayed in the plane and watched a blue tank stenciled
POLIS
amble around the runway, with two white helmets sticking out from the hatch.

Coasting from time zone to time zone, he presently found himself sitting next to an ex-ambassador who was going home to India to do some trout fishing. The plane was almost empty. At midnight the blackness in the windows was challenged by rare small patterns of brightness from the United Arab Emirates. Two hours later came the descent, the lights of Karachi extending indefinitely beneath the window in all directions like electric pushpins marking the spread of cholera. The plane stopped, the door opened, and from the Arabian Sea came a fishy, sulphurous steam, like a malfunctioning boiler, that made the stewardesses’ uniforms stick to their bodies. The Young Man picked up his duffel, hands sweating, and got off the plane.

I
t is part of the fragmentation of life that certain states of existence can barely be recalled in others, as to a storybook sailor long away the feel of walking in the street drains first from his mind, which can conceive of only present time; and then gradually from his hands, which once flashed in free arcs at his sides and now must always be grasping stanchions or rigging; and finally from his legs and feet, which, having through greatest proximity become most accustomed to the confidently repetitive action of striding over the unmoving pavement, are the slowest to forget; and at last the sensation of walking on land becomes an abstraction, like the mountains of some country beyond the horizon. This was especially true for me when as a child I was ill. —I would wake up feeling hot and nauseous; the breakfast which my mother had made me I was unable to eat, and there was no talk of my going to school. My father, who sometimes suspected me of malingering, would study me sharply, but in the end my pallor and forehead heat would convince even him, and I would be sent back to bed for the day. I would lie there, and watch the sun slowly ascend in the sky, the other children going off past my window with their schoolbooks slung under their arms if they were boys, or held tightly against their chests if they were girls; and then I lay still and watched the clock beside me change the position of its hands with all the monotonous slowness of the great geological epochs. At five of eight the hands began to move faster; eight o’clock was the fatal hour when school began, and I knew that if I jumped out of bed even now, and dressed and ran off to school breakfastless, then I might perhaps arrive before the teacher called off my name, which, beginning as it did with “V,” was at the bottom of the attendance list. And I knew that my father, too, if he had not already left
for the office, was also looking at the clock, thinking that it might not be too late to force me out of bed and take me to school in the car; but he did his best to judge my case fairly, and reconsidered the evidence which he had seen me exhibit: Was my temperature genuinely high, and did I look all that pale? Eventually he decided that yes, I was sick; or that at any rate it would be difficult to establish that I was not well; and it would certainly be too late to take me to school; for achieving that would involve first confronting and then besting my mother, who stood with her back toward him, also looking at the clock, but only unobtrusively, between the breakfast dishes, so as not to give my father an excuse for reopening the subject; and then eight o’clock had come and the issue was decided. It was only then that the hands of the clock stopped once again, and I became completely absorbed in my state of sickness.