Baghlan Boy

by Michael Crowley

  The minibus climbed to a plateau and was now in Ghazni City – an Afghan city stranded like the Ark, muddled to the outsider, hiding an unspoken order. It was market day in the old town and the agent’s bus slowed between the stalls and carts and the choleric camels slouching gracelessly in the road. Men were soon herding around the bus. Many were armed; they were not all Taliban, but everyone looked like they were prepared for battle. Teenagers heaved RPGs, old men carried rifles like umbrellas, cradled them in the shade of ancient walls besieged by Queen Victoria’s army. There were no American soldiers here. Not yet. They had entered fleetingly and then left, ranks depleted, returning to fire rockets from Apache helicopters into the same buildings that the British had shelled in 1839.

  It was mid-morning and dry, as it would be most of the year. An eagle spread its wings out beneath the sun, circling a minaret. The wind swirled. Farood looked up at the tower. It was higher than any building he’d seen before. There were many minarets here in this small, walled place. The agent pushed his bus forward from behind the steering wheel. Why were all these men streaming past them? The smell of warm flatbread and tea filled the bus. Farood could see children selling cherries and asked the agent to stop.

  ‘You’re not in a taxi. Get in a taxi if you want. Ask them how much it costs to Quetta.’

  The agent tossed a cellophaned sandwich over his shoulder. Between the fig and spice stalls was a gun stall. Handmade weapons mostly. A blacksmith smoked whilst auctioning a long-nosed pistol. More spectators blocked their path. Misha anxiously lit up a cigarette. A crowd murmured in the distance, then spilled into sudden uproar. Heads turned in the minibus.

  Misha leaned over and rammed the horn. ‘Come on, let’s go, let’s go,’ he ranted.

  The agent’s elbow dug into him. ‘This is not your bus. Be calm, Turkmen.’

  A vapour of fear entered the bus; Farood was immune. Guns and gunfire he knew. The only slaughter he had seen up to now were animals and the work of invisible drones on his village and his father. ‘I’ve never been here.’ He stood up.

  ‘And you’re never coming back.’ The agent was sweating. ‘This isn’t a place to stop. We get through. Eat further down the road. There’s nothing to see here.’

  Yet Jamal could tell there was something to see. He glimpsed a group of men around a strewn blue shroud – a motionless, blood-stained, sodden heap. A man wanted to know who would bury her, wanted the body taken away.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Farood.

  The agent knew what it was. Last month it was a pool of an agent’s blood in the town square. Beheaded – and not in a single blow. Taliban decapitations were not executions for Tudor monarchs, not intended to be. The story had run the agent’s route by mobile phone and bumped up fees. Ghazni was a Taliban town.

  Leaving the highway was even more perilous. People began to desert the road and the bus sprinted through the market and out the other side. A small boy selling pipes took note of its urgency. Farood was standing in the bus, peering out of windows.

  Jamal asked him, ‘Haven’t you had enough excitement for one day?’

  ‘I want to look at things on the way.’

  ‘It’s not that kind of journey, believe me,’ said Jamal.

  Farood looked straight back at him. ‘What do you know about what kind of journey it is?’

  ‘You have no idea of what’s ahead, do you?’

  ‘And you’re the expert, are you? You’ve never been to the West. So, go on then, tell me.’

  Jamal turned back to the window. Ghazni thinned out like a diminishing sand spit. The agent drove fast; the highway flooded over the bonnet. The agent considered how he had to take all the risks of the refugee but then always returned from the border, living off others craving to cross it. The uninterrupted motion of the vehicle sent people to sleep.

  Farood watched them and knew they wanted to awaken in a distant future. He would rather pray. Lately whilst sleeping, he had found himself behind a screen of dust, hearing the muffled screams of his mother. Then as the screen began to clear he would see the outline of his brother, digging beside him. Karam would stop digging and Farood kneel the other side of a crater, his father sucked into the grey earth and ash beneath him. His father’s head, tilted up to the sky, his beard coated with dust, his mouth open in a question. There was a line across his midriff, as if it has been painted there. Below it the body was a haze of black and red. The boy stared wondering what was left of the man beneath. His brother shouted through the haze. ‘Farood, leave him.’

  He was woken by an awareness of the vehicle braking. There were cars and lorries all around the bus. They were in a queue yet nowhere near Kandahar. Off the road in the distance he could see the tents of Kochi people. People, his father had told him, who spend their whole lives without a house, who live almost entirely off sheep, every part of the animal consumed, exploited, traded. Unlike him they would never leave Afghanistan. Maybe what he was doing was wrong; maybe his mother had made a terrible mistake. But if she had, she had done so for his sake. He remembered the promise he had made to her that he would return, wealthy, successful, and to stay; and he would make that promise again this evening – to God.

  Corporal Hanlon looked into the glimmer and then looked at his watch – a slate black cobra tactical watch. Back in Oklahoma it was still only 4am. He was always impatient for it to be light back home, counting down the hours in Payne County whilst patrolling traffic on the Bush Highway. When was the last time he had seen 4am back home?

  His sergeant spoke directly into his ear through a radio. ‘Hanlon, any chance of looking for some insurgents today?’

  Last year of high school. The woods in early fall. That was when. He and his friends had camped there and stayed up all night. That was the morning he had decided to join the army, but for his own sake and not because of his old man. Back home fall was a long, slow season of colour. Hanlon hadn’t read Keats, but he would have shared his awe.

  ‘Copy that. Don’t they usually come looking for us? …Sir.’

  At home, the trees were getting ready to put on a month-long pageant. He wouldn’t mind standing by the Cimarron River for five hours at a stretch, but here, here in Zabal, fall only brought Aladdin-like dust devils and a flat, thinning sky that was preparing to dump snow. Hanlon’s earpiece crackled; he spun round and showed his palms to his sergeant.

  ‘Hanlon, use your fuckin’ radio!’

  A semaphore-sized shrug from Hanlon.

  ‘Bravo one to bravo three, state your position, Corporal.’

  ‘I’m about eighty metres away from you, Sarge. That’s me with the gun.’

  ‘Bravo three… use the correct fuckin’ call sign, over.’

  ‘Bravo one – do you still want me to direct people to you who look like they have explosives?’

  ‘That’s exactly the kind of people I want, Hanlon. Not fuckin’ children selling figs.’

  ‘Bravo, bravo one.’

  Fifty metres off the road stood an indiscreet two-man steel compound with a sniper and another pair of eyes. The sniper had slotted six civilians and a borderline hostile in the last month, though it was hard to be certain of the occupation or the intent of casualties after an average headshot. Yesterday the grandson’s story that his grandfather was only comparing his gun to the sergeant’s wasn’t believed. Still, what can you do when your interpreters keep getting assassinated? You can’t wait for Hanlon to yell ‘don’t shoot’ down the radio, that’s for sure.

  Hanlon swung his arm to the right in a slow, wide arc and the minibus pulled over.

  The agent checked his watch. It was doubtful whether they’d make the border by dark now. There was an agreed rate to cross into Pakistan, but it was one that the night border guards didn’t always agree with.

  Hanlon lowered his scarf at the driver side window. ‘I want you to drive over to that soldier down there.
Slowly. Understand?’

  ‘I understand. Speak English.’

  Misha nodded in respect. ‘Where did you learn English?’ he asked as they rolled forwards.

  ‘An agent has to speak many languages.’

  At last Corporal Hanlon was giving his sergeant some traffic – traffic that could well kill him and the private next to him – but that was what the sergeant had asked for. The minibus was definitely borderline. But then the borders of insurgency in this country were wide and just about every Afghan of whatever tribe walked the line.

  ‘Hanlon, if you’re going to send me truckloads, you need to pull your weight.’

  ‘I am. I’m doing what you asked. Sir.’

  ‘Shift your Okie ass down here.’

  Hanlon turned and mimed ‘fuck’ at his superior and jogged the seventy metres to join the afternoon’s target on Highway One. He ironically stomped to attention before his commanding officer.

  ‘Okay. Let’s get them off the bus,’ ordered the sergeant.

  ‘Why we doing that, sir?’

  ‘So, we can fucking interrogate them, Hanlon. Christ.’

  ‘Sir, we don’t have an interpreter anymore.’

  ‘Well then, search them, search the bus, goddammit.’

  Hanlon waved his arm in an arc. ‘Let’s go, people, everyone out. Ausgang, you guys.’

  The agent began to recite his story. ‘They’re packing almonds for me in Kandahar.’

  Hanlon lined them up against the bus and stood a baseball pitcher’s throw away. Across the road the sniper was watching it all in close up. The sergeant, a particularly tall man, legs almost longer than Farood, marched over and examined them from behind his wrap-around dark glasses.

  ‘Take off your jackets and shirts, take them off,’ shouted the sergeant whilst Hanlon performed a mime act. Jamal began to laugh.

  ‘No – it’s not a joke, my friends,’ said the sergeant.

  Jamal laughed even more.

  ‘What’s so fuckin’ funny?’ asked Hanlon.

  ‘Is it true, soldier, you can buy anything in America? Even your wife. Did you rent her out whilst you’re here? Maybe she rented herself out.’

  Had there been an interpreter present he would’ve lied in translation and the outcome might have been different.

  ‘Get on with it, Corporal.’

  Hanlon grabbed the gawky Afghan by his long hair and dragged him to his knees. He tugged at his jacket. ‘Take that fucking thing off.’

  Jamal spat at Hanlon, a heavy spit that stuck like frost on his goggles.

  ‘Jesus.’

  Through the scope the sniper was scanning the scope’s crosshairs, moving from Jamal to the driver to the weird-looking Chinese guys and back again. From the edge of the circle, someone suddenly moved. He swung past him, then found him, the boy, walking past Hanlon and the sergeant into the desert. The soldiers kept their eyes front.

  ‘What’s he doing? Speak to me,’ demanded the sergeant into his radio mic.

  ‘He’s praying, Sergeant. Over,’ the sniper replied coolly.

  ‘Are we running a mosque here? Hanlon, search them for weapons. Sniper, be ready.’

  Jamal had taken several digs from Hanlon and lay heaped at his feet. In response Misha and the agent continued to undress, but the Hazaras, wrapped in dusty reds and greens, were not moving and Hanlon was unsure what to do.

  The father shouted at Jamal in Farsi. ‘Hey, big man! Why don’t you tell the Americans to shoot me?’

  Jamal made it to his knees. ‘If I could speak American, I would tell them to shoot you all.’

  The sniper’s circle fluttered from captive to captive.

  The sergeant conveyed instructions. ‘Why is he praying? Take a circuit. What do you make of the driver? Keep moving. Could be any of them. Or the bus.’

  A feeble crack sounded from across the road and one of the Hazara men folded towards the back wheel. No one seemed to notice at first with the traffic fizzing down the highway. Hanlon and his comrades watched for a response from the others.

  The agent looked down the line of men and then to the heavens. He had lost passengers on this route before and there would be implications for him. He began to shout, ‘God have mercy! Why have they done this?’

  The sergeant was confused at this because he didn’t look related to the casualty. The dead man’s son pulled at his father’s foot to wake him and the dead man’s father cradled his son’s head in his arms. The wife was screaming; the sergeant was calm. ‘Move away from the body, sir. Please move away from the body.’

  After a delay of some remonstrating, the Americans explained to the agent that they needed to keep the body. They gave the grandfather a card with a phone number on and explained through the agent that compensation would be paid. The remaining passengers climbed back into the minibus and headed for the border.

  Nine

  Lancashire, 2011

  Farood lay on his bed, picturing an optician’s front door in Burnley. He had watched the shop for over an hour from across the road on a spring day. It was a week after he had met Sabana in Khalid’s restaurant and he didn’t want the people she worked with to see him. High-street pedestrians obscured his view of the door. There was a break in the shoppers and she was there, standing in a pale blue business suit, pressing her lips together. He came forwards; she saw him, smiled and waved. They came together and headed down the high street as an older woman watched from through the optician’s window.

  After no more than a dozen paces, he pointed at a coffee outlet. ‘I thought we’d go here,’ he suggested.

  ‘I need to stretch my legs for a bit.’

  Sabana walked on; they walked towards the bottom of the precinct. He told her that Khalid had promised to train him up as a waiter, that Khalid felt he had the makings of a head waiter.

  ‘Do they have head waiters at his restaurants?’ She led him into a café and asked him about his journey to the UK.

  ‘It was fine. Sometimes it was hard, but mostly fine for me.’

  ‘How long did it take?’

  ‘Few years.’

  He talked about Khalid again: Khalid’s car, how Khalid found him a bedsit.

  ‘Where were you living before?’

  ‘With a family.’

  He had been fostered, but he never used that word. He had lived with people who hardly spoke to him, who he believed were motivated only by money. He burped and raised his hand in apology. Sabana hadn’t touched her lemonade.

  ‘What do you know about Khalid?’ she asked.

  He shrugged and asked her about her work. She told him about a man who came in with so much hair oil on that they had to clean every pair of glasses he tried on, as well as everything he touched.

  ‘Nothing happens in opticians. That’s why my family like it. Some guys come in a lot with excuses to talk to me. They look at themselves in dark glasses.’

  He felt the jealousy rise in him.

  ‘You can’t trust a man who wears dark glasses. Not in England,’ she added.

  ‘No, you’re right. Do you want to go to dinner?’ The question had fallen out of him.

  ‘I’ve got a sandwich back at work,’ she said.

  ‘After work, I meant.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’

  ‘Khalid will look after us.’

  ‘I’d rather go somewhere else.’

  ‘We won’t have to pay there.’

  Farood swung his legs off his bed and stood at the cell window. He had been guilty of the one thing his father had said he should never do. He had been bought, and bought cheaply. He was back in the block again, this time for kicking Atif. He had last seen Atif from the block window, the same day he’d swung his heel against his face, sitting in the back of a taxi next to a white-shirted officer. At the time he guessed he was being taken to the pol
ice station to press charges against him. He thought about his mother. For years now he had imagined her in a home that Karam had built after he’d left Baghlan. A house that was painted white, even on the inside, and there were carpets in each room, curtains, mattresses, jars and a bird in a cage. There had been no letters, no phone calls between mother and son for six years now. He hadn’t been able to, hadn’t tried, to tell her he was still alive.

  Keys clanged and the bolt shifted, the door opened. It was Robertson. He half smiled at the prisoner. ‘Farood.’

  ‘Boss.’

  ‘Sorry to say your appeal wasn’t successful. The lawyer rang the wing.’

  ‘The lawyer?’ Farood sat back down on his bed and bowed his head.