by Idries Shah
This did not seem at all likely to the sergeant-driver. But, he reflected, such effrontery from people like this, people of this low class, usually meant that there was something in what they said.
‘Who are you? What do you want? If you’re not lying, where is your kaghaz, your paper?’
‘Excellency! Of course I have one. I’ll show it to you.’
Adam opened the passenger door and climbed into the cab, pulling his dirty suitcase behind him. Before the driver knew it, a very long, thin knife was nearly in his ribs.
‘Just drive on when my friend knocks on the partition behind you, my little nightingale, or your stomach will feel this without your mouth having tasted it.’
There were three distinct raps from the back. Qasim, holding a grenade with the pin out and his fingers on the spring release, was too close to the three soldiers sitting guard over the load for them to want to make a move.
The truck rolled towards the entrance of the camp.
Moments later they were in, past the bored guard at the gate, and parked at the side of the last weapons truck standing just beyond the wire.
Qasim jumped down first, pushing the three terrified soldiers, their knees knocking, before him, into the shadows beside the guardhouse.
The Eagle brought his own prisoner to join them, and all five men stood, silently, waiting, while he went back for his case.
Adam reappeared in a moment, wearing a gasmask, and took over from Qasim, who put on his own mask and produced two strange-looking objects from the huckster boxes.
In another minute the masked men had sprayed, from their Smith and Wesson gas generators, just enough disabling mist to knock out the camp guards, and pushed the prisoners from the truck in among them.
After that it was easy.
Jumping into the driver’s seat of the last supply truck, Qasim started the engine, while Adam planted timed explosive charges where they would do most harm, then ran to join his friend. The truck careered in reverse to the main road, and they were away.
They had used only a little of the anaesthetic gas, from the dainty little apparatus, weighing no more than eight kilogrammes, which could produce gas from its pump and tank for as long as forty-five minutes.
They were three minutes away from the Peak of the Standard-Bearer when the depot went up, with a roar and a blast-wave which rocked the hurtling truck, while an orange glare lit the surrounding countryside and illuminated a thick cloud of oily smoke which stood out against the white clouds of the sky.
As the two guerrillas shook hands in mutual congratulation, The Eagle wondered what the American suppliers would have thought of the use to which their equipment had been put. The sample units had been sent sometime before to the Afghan police for riot control evaluation: and had fallen into the hands of desperadoes like Adam and Qasim.
The Americans had been careful enough, at the time, to ensure that the gas generators went direct to the laboratory of Dr Adam Durany, the eminent technologist at Kabul University – a very responsible man.
Next morning, complete strangers in the streets of Kabul were shaking hands and embracing. In Herat, four hundred miles away, the streets rang with the cry ‘Victory at Standard-Bearer Peak! Long live The Eagle!’
3 Karima: ‘If you push me too far …’
Kabul City and Jalalabad
Afghanistan
JUNE 7–8
Karima sharpened the carving knife with a whetstone to what Mr Zoltan had called ‘razor status’. He had taught her so many things: even ones that didn’t connect with her work, interesting things, knowledge from the outside world, from foreign places. Like the fact that his name, Zoltan, was a form of ‘sultan’, a name which the Turks had brought to Majaristan, his mother’s country, hundreds of years ago. And it meant ‘king’. To Karima, Mr Zolton had been a kind of king. Mr Zoltan’s second name was Pomakov, and he came from Bulgaria, Bulgharistan; and his mother was Hungarian, from Majaristan. Those people were, he said, Huns – a kind of Turk – and had settled in Europe long ago, two or three centuries before the time of the Prophet. Pomaks were the Bulgar people who had joined the Turks in the days when the Sultan of Constantinople ruled them.
She looked out of the kitchen window, down into the garden with its neat flowerbeds and gravelled paths. Why did Mr Zoltan have to go away? He was happy here, in the modern apartment, with her as housekeeper and various lads as houseboys working under her. He’d come to Kabul twenty-five years ago, to work as an engineer on the great new highway being built from Kabul to the Soviet Union. Zahir Shah was King of Afghanistan then, and you didn’t see many Russians. Czechs, Poles or Bulgars, yes. Very few Russians. Of course, in her village, you never saw a foreigner at all, much less married one like Mr Zoltan’s mother had done. Whatever would that be like, to marry a foreigner? Well, Karima was sixty years old now, and she would never know marriage at all. Mr Zoltan, if he was still alive, would now be fifty-seven. Mrs Pomakov, Mr Zoltan’s mother, sounded very nice, though. Latifa, her name was. Was she still alive? she wondered. She’d be nearly eighty. She’d sent Karima some lovely carved wooden combs through Mr Zoltan once: when he had come back from leave. All the way to Bulgharistan to go on leave!
That was beyond Iran, beyond Turkey, nearly at the land of the Franks. But the Franks, Farangis, were not bad, either; she had seen them in the streets of Kabul. The Farangis were divided into nations – Fransavi, Almani, Inglisi, Italavi, Ispanyul. Mr Zoltan had explained a lot about that, too.
How kind Mr Zoltan had been to her. One day, a Friday holiday, he had taken her to see the great new road and the Salang Tunnel which started forty miles from Kabul. You could hardly make it out at first, because of the swarms of Afghan workers heaving and pushing and operating machines. There were even machines that dug; the labourers called them devs, demons: enormous things they were; some had buckets on them, like water-wheels, which endlessly shifted earth instead of water. There was a big office there, and Mr Zoltan was in charge of a whole section of the highway. ‘That’s my bit, Karima, all my own. And I’m well up to schedule with it, too.’ He was obviously a big man there, even bigger than she’d thought. There were Russian engineers, but they were always having to ask Mr Zoltan questions, looking at big sheets of white paper with drawings on them, needing his permission to do this or that. Yet he was such a quiet man; she’d never have guessed that he was a sarkarda, a chief supervisor.
‘The tunnel alone will cost thirty-eight million dollars,’ he had said – or was that for the whole road from Kabul to Doshi? When it was finished, the journey took only three hours by truck, instead of several days over the Hindu Kush mountains on horseback.
They had stopped for a picnic on the way back, in the warm spring sunshine, just before they reached the dust of Kabul, which at times covers everything, and always kept Karima busy, sweeping, cleaning and washing clothes. They always talked easily. Mr Zoltan, like many of his Pomak, Turkish-influenced, countrymen, spoke modern Turkish perfectly. Karima, coming from the north of Afghanistan, knew the old Turki tongue, and they could understand each other very well indeed. In Kabul most people either spoke Dari-Persian or Pashtu, and Karima still found these languages, so different from her own, quite difficult to speak, if not to understand.
On that day, Mr Zoltan had spoken of his own country, and she had asked him why he did not have a king.
‘We had them once, Karima, but those days are past. Now we have a jamhuriyat, a republic.’
‘Mr Zoltan, what is it like to live in a jamhuriyat?’
‘Some are better than others, just like some kingdoms, of course.’
‘What is life like in your jamhuriyat?’
‘It has been improving. We have had hard times, of course. There was a great war, you know, the one with the Alman. They occupied our country, and the Russians helped to drive them out. That was when Afghanistan was neutral. And there is a Russian saying, “It is better to be cold than blind”.’
‘Yes,’ said Karim
a, ‘we had hard times, too. The Alman engineers went away from here, to their war, and we couldn’t get anything from them to repair the electric factory or the machines in the workshops they’d built here – oh, I suppose fifty years ago.’
‘That’s right. Well, we had a new government, in Bulgharistan, and they preferred to have a republic. A party of the people, working folk, organized it.’
‘So it is Shoravi, communist, like the Rouss?’
‘That is so.’ Mr Zoltan had shaken his head; but Karima knew – he had told her – that that was what Bulgarians did when they meant ‘yes’.
‘Mr Zoltan, has it improved your land?’
‘In many ways, Karima. We do not starve now, as some people used to do. We all have work, and we are working hard. I think that it is the best way for us.’
Karima considered that.
‘The Afghans don’t really like to work as labourers, especially the men. They say that’s why we have the “No Work, No Food” programme. Even peasants, who don’t belong to tribes, like to think of war, of dying to defend the country.’
Mr Zoltan laughed.
‘Well, we are not really a military people, in Bulgharistan. So perhaps it is easier for us to organize, to work for peace and not for war. That, anyway, is what we like to think.’
‘And are the Rouss bad people, as we so often hear?’
‘Tetka – little aunt; the Rouss are not bad people. As with the Afghans, some of the people who have power can do bad things to ordinary folk. That will always happen, anywhere. But the Rouss people themselves are very nice, and kind and good. They sing, and joke a lot, and they will share their last bite with you.’
Karima gave a little laugh. ‘That sounds just like us. There are some terrible officials here as well. In the war, you said, the Rouss had driven out your enemy. Did they not take you into their imperatori, their empire, after that?’
‘Well, Karima, there are no imperatoris now, not like there were. The Russians are helping us, and we are helping them. It is a brotherly thing, for we both think alike.’
‘Excuse me, Mr Zoltan, but if the Russians became cruel to you, what could you do?’
‘If anyone tries to push me farther than I am prepared to go, whoever he is, Karima, I shall make any sacrifice to oppose him, once I have found the way to do it.’
Then Mr Zoltan had gone away, and Karima had stayed on in the apartment block, this time working for the Russians who now had most of the important jobs on the Great Northern Road. She looked after a succession of officials and engineers, for the Russians had taken over the whole block, to house their people. In a beautiful part of the New City, the building was one of the best in Kabul. It had telephones, running water, flush toilets and double-glazing; even a swimming pool, and was one of the first to get colour television, though it could only pick up the local station, Da Kabul Tilivizyun, so far.
The new Russians had been complimentary about Mr Zolton. ‘A great socialist engineer’ they called him; and they told Karima that he’d been given a prize or a medal, for his work. Not surprising, really. Who would have imagined that people, or even a million demons, could have punched a great hole straight through the mountains, one and a half miles long and eleven thousand feet in the air, the link between the two halves of the highway?
Karima was there, because of Mr Zoltan’s importance, for the opening. The Russian deputy Prime Minister, little Mr Mikoyan, was there too, all the way from Musku. Beside him stood the Afghan King himself, Mohammed Zahir. She noticed that the tunnel, as well as the road, had two lanes. People could drive back and forth, each using one of the twin roads, without ever colliding. And, of course, this brought the Rouss very near.
But the King had been there, so all must be well.
Many people still loved Zahir Shah, son of the great hero Nadir Khan who had rescued the country from the Brigand chief Saqao, and before that, as Marshal of the Armies, from the British, even. The Marshal had been ill, in France, and was carried on board the ship on a stretcher when he came back to save the homeland.
Karima, as she left the celebrations in the Russian car driven by her employer, saw evidence of the people’s love for the Marshal-King’s son. Just in front of them, without any escort or a single armed man, the royal car had stopped. The King stepped out, to kiss the head of a small girl, standing by the roadside. As Karima watched, the little one handed his majesty a furry bundle. It was a wolf-cub, its eyes scarcely open yet, which she had found, abandoned, near her mud-brick home. Then, after a rush of nervous words, she ran away.
There were tears in the King’s eyes when Karima went to his side, for Mr Zoltan had opened the car door and said, ‘Quick, see if you can help him,’ and let her out.
She walked timidly up to him and stood, respectfully, while he composed himself. Then he turned to her, and said, ‘Did you see that? Thinner than a toothstick, ragged, and yet she said to me, “Welcome to our village, Majesty. See, I did not come empty-handed. I found this cub yesterday: it has lost its mother. So you should take it: you are its king as well as mine …”’
But now the King was gone, living, they said, in exile, in an apartment in Roum, the land of Italya. The radio said, constantly, that he had been an evil man. Some people, too, whispered that he had brought the Calamity on the Afghans by sending young men to Russia to be trained. She did not know which, if either, was really true. People said all kinds of things.
The communist government had taken over, and the sort of Russians who came here had changed too. The nice ones had gone, the newcomers were hard men, cruel, arrogant, dirty, drunken and foolish. These, Karima thought, could not be the ones who had saved Mr Zoltan’s country – and yet they were always saying that they had come to save us. From the Americans. Unlike Mr Zoltan, they did not even believe in God. Her present chief, Comrade Kirilyan, was fond of saying, ‘Jesus Christ is another name for opium!’ The Prophet Isa …
People were fighting the Russians now. You heard about it all the time, as in the days of the old wars. People flooded into Kabul from villages, wounded, saying that they had been bombed and machine-gunned, their villages destroyed. People like her. A woman had whispered to her in the market the other day that there had been a great killing in the Salang Tunnel, where Mr Zoltan had worked. A thousand people were dead. An Afghan had set his fuel tanker truck alight in the middle of a Russian convoy, with no hope of escape for himself. The woman had said, fervently, ‘Fidai, self-sacrificer, may Almighty God bless him and give him the Garden of Paradise!’ But Karima’s life was here, in the apartment block, far from such things.
She had no family now: the whole village had been wiped out by typhus in the old days, well over forty years ago, before they had got the epidemics under control. They had taken her to Kabul, the Women’s Welfare Organization, and taught her domestic science. She’d learned to read and write a little, and to do embroidery. Then she got this permanent job at the apartments, originally built by the government for slum-clearance. It was now a paradise for people who had the influence to be allocated lovely homes like this.
When she had first seen it, she had been amazed. Here, people lived like kings. They even had separate rooms for eating and sleeping. And a room for washing and bathing in: unheard of in a mountain village. It was almost like having a room to grow crops in. Every man a khan, every woman a khanum. In the kitchen there was a Frankish thing, a machine, which she now used with great efficiency and aplomb, called a prishur kukar. It worked by steam, and it cooked things in no time at all. It gave out a scream like a demon, but it was harmless, really. Except, of course, for that time when it had exploded and spat the midday meal all over the ceiling, itself as wondrously white as a Friday turban on a saint.
And she had her own room. It had a string bed, good straw matting on the floor, real patterned curtains and double windowpanes. There were drawers set in the wall, a wardrobe and a large chest. She had never accumulated much, certainly not enough to fill all these things,
but they were better than even the chief of her own hamlet had ever had. She had sufficient possessions for her needs, and there was money, safe in the post office, for her old age.
For the past week, since the Event – something that was like a message from the dead – she had worked hard. It was probably the shock of the Event which had brought all the memories flooding back. Anyway, she could not stop them running around in her head. The past, pictures in her head; duty, the need to do something, something which was right. What was it?
She remembered the village, her hard-worked parents, two harvests a year and little food, but good times as well as bad. Her cousin, Lalbaz, whom everyone said she would marry when she grew up. He had always said, ‘I’ll go to Kabul one day, Karima, and what I shall do there will be heard around the world!’ She was fifteen when the typhus came. Lalbaz was two years older and had gone away to work. They had heard he’d had an accident, was dead. He had been killed by a machine which went wrong, in the far west near Iran, they’d said.
Then the Women’s Welfare. Now it was called the Institute for the Development and Emancipation of Women. After they had sent her here, they kept in touch. Once a year they sent her a paper in Dari-Persian, nicely printed, saying what they were doing, all kinds of things. She especially liked the reports of the awards they gave to people who had served their country. Mr Zoltan used to translate them into Turki for her. One was about Mrs Safia Bakhshi, and had her photograph with it; a good-looking woman who had had real troubles. She had received a prize for rearing nine children who all did well, though she had been so poor that she had almost nothing to do it with. When her husband died she had taught herself, from The Rose Garden and The Orchard of the great poet Saadi, and then she used that wisdom to bring up the nine.
At the age of fifty-two Safia Bakhshi had been declared Mother of the Year. Who could imagine that someone like that, nearly destitute, could rear two university professors, one of surgery and one of political science, a geologist, an army officer, a teacher, a merchant, a mathematician and three other graduates? And yet every year there were several like her. Mr Zoltan had said, ‘Karima, if it can produce women like that, your country hasn’t much to fear.’
