by Gwen Florio
In Kabul, Nur Muhammed’s “business” involved meeting with certain factional leaders, many of them once bitter enemies but now increasingly willing to shed old hostilities to unite against the Amriki. The meetings took place all around the city, rarely in the same place two times in a row, never at the same time of day.
On this particular day, Nur Muhammed and his associates gathered in a small room behind a general store that belonged to a man in debt to Nur Muhammed. Normally, Nur Muhammed was ruthless in the collection of money, but this store owner had fought beside him against the Russians. Once, he saw the sun glinting on a telltale thread of wire protruding from a rocky trail and shoved Nur Muhammed aside just before he stepped on the mine, allowing him to escape with the loss of only those four fingers to a bit of shrapnel. So, while Nur Muhammed could not, for the sake of his own pride and that of his debtor, forget about the money his friend owed, he could accept the man’s offer of a place to meet in secret.
They gathered in a windowless room behind the stall that sold palm-size packets of shampoo and other sundries. As it filled with men, the air became heavy with the odors of unwashed bodies and hair oil liberally applied. Their host fussed about them as they slurped tea. There was desultory talk of the weather, and inquiries after everyone’s health, but the conversation quickly focused on the Amriki.
“They came here, they bombed us, they took over our cities. They chased the Taliban away, or think they did. They won. Why are they still here?” a Turkman in a wildly striped coat demanded.
“Oil, I think,” offered another. “They hope still for a pipeline. If they provide the security, what do you think they will demand in return? Some of the oil? All of it?”
“They want to kill Muslims,” offered yet a third, younger and more intemperate than most of Nur Muhammed’s new allies.
As far as Gul could tell, this man was a former Talib who had merely shed his black turban and melted back into the general population as soon as the Amriki arrived. It was as Farida said: To the Amriki, all Afghan people looked alike, even though to Gul this man radiated the problematic stink of the fanatic.
“What do you think?” Nur Muhammed spoke to his son. “Do the Amriki want to kill us?”
Gul raised his tea to his lips, needing time to consider his answer. Clearly, Nur Muhammed was courting the young Talib, though for what reason Gul could not imagine. He lowered the cup and licked the moisture from his mustache. “I think they are disrespectful. I think they disdain our customs and are insolent with our women. I think they shoot their guns and drop their bombs and kill innocent people and then say it’s all a big mistake. I don’t think they want to kill us themselves. That would make them look bad.” He took a deep breath. He hoped he was saying the right thing. He thought back to some things that Farida had told him, and continued with more confidence. “I think they want to make us angry, in many small ways, so that we fight among ourselves and kill each other. We’ll do the job for them.” He sat back, awaiting the reaction.
It came immediately. “Ho! That is exactly right!” The Talib leaned forward. His beard was ragged and thin, but long, even though most men had trimmed theirs as soon as the Taliban fled. The beard rose and fell as his chest heaved with excitement. His eyes burned and he stabbed at the air with his hand. Spittle dampened the corners of his mouth. Gul forced himself not to pull back, even as others in the room leaned closer as the Talib collected himself, then spoke again.
“We must strike back at them. We must drive them from this country, the same way we drove the Russians. A jab here, a poke there. A bruise, a cut. So slight that at first they don’t notice how severely they are bleeding. Until, that is, they realize the very life is draining from them.” From the back of the room came a low shout: “Ho! We have done it before. And the Amriki are softer than the Russians.”
Gul thought that surely his father’s clandestine trips were in the furtherance of something more than small guerrilla actions, the kind anyone with a Kalashnikov—and in Kabul, nearly every household had at least one—might carry out. On the other hand, if Nur Muhammed wanted to announce a more dramatic effort, he’d have done so. He’d always favored opacity, a quality that would serve him particularly well if indeed a larger plan were afoot.
“Yes,” Gul said cautiously. “That is a good start.” He cut a glance toward Nur Muhammed. His father’s expression was impassive, but when his eyes met Gul’s, the corners crinkled in an almost imperceptible sign of approval.
* * *
Nur Muhammed customarily conducted his business outside his home. So Gul was surprised one day not long after the meeting to come home and find his father entertaining the young Talib. His name was Hamidullah and he had, Nur Muhammed said vaguely, special talents.
Nur Muhammed changed the topic to inconsequential things as a manservant entered the room and placed an array of steaming platters upon the oilcloth. Gul saw aushak, Farida’s new specialty. She worked extra hard at getting the dumplings just right after he had mentioned to her one night that they were his favorite. After that, she would ask him whether she had balanced the spices to his satisfaction. She fretted about the texture of the dough, worrying that it was tough, “like Bibi’s,” she added slyly. She began to play with subtle variations, so that he could always tell which were hers.
“It’s the way you crimp them,” he said to her in triumph one evening. “The pattern is different. And, of course, the taste is superior!” He muffled her delighted laughter beneath the blanket, lest the rest of the household hear and chide him for being one of those men too much under the influence of their wives.
The manservant passed a basin of warm water and a towel. Each man dipped his fingers and dried them, and then the meal, and the business, began. Nur Muhammed and Hamidullah discussed the continuing difficulties posed to their opium and arms deals by the presence of the Amriki.
“They are very much opposed to drugs,” Hamidullah said, and even Gul joined in the laughter that followed the jest. They all watched the pirated television shows from Amrika, depicting a country of addicts, its streets full of vacant-eyed men and women who prostituted themselves.
“It is the effect on the new business that troubles me,” said Nur Muhammed. Hamidullah grunted vigorous agreement. He stuffed a dumpling in his mouth, and then another, chewing with his mouth open. Gul grimaced in annoyance. He could hear the muffled voices of women in other parts of the house, and knew—because Farida would not let him forget—the trouble to which they had gone to put such a lavish meal before this guest, who treated it as though it were a bit of rice and tough scraps of lamb from a humble street stall.
One night, Farida had thrust her hands before him. They were red and swollen, with patches of skin scraped raw. The polish on her nails was chipped, and the nails themselves were broken.
“You see what I do for you.”
He was not sure whether she was truly angry, or teasing him again. “What do you mean?” Every time he thought he was beginning to understand her, she presented him with some new, baffling topic.
It turned out that she had not cooked, ever, before her marriage. “We had a cook. Not a good one, but still.”
“So do we.” Did they? He took it for granted that food would appear at mealtime, just as clothes were regularly laundered, the house cleaned, the courtyard swept. He wondered if she felt him less of a man for not providing her with some of the luxuries she’d known in her previous life. Yet he had seen her family’s home, small and mean, its furniture worn and scratched and piled high with dusty old books that should have, in his opinion, been packed away. The bedchambers in the home that Nur Muhammed had procured in Kabul were simple, just carpets and sleeping mats, but the sitting rooms were crowded with overstuffed brocade sofas and shiny lacquered cabinets, with glass vases full of brightly colored silk roses everywhere. Her life, as far as he could tell, was easier now.
“Why are you cooking? And should you be doing that sort of work?”
“Oh, la. That.” She took great pride in the fact that she was not sick, even a little, during her pregnancy. “But the cooking—I want to learn. Your mother and Bibi are quite accomplished.” Even though it had been years since Maryam had had to prepare the family’s meals, she still supervised them minutely and was known to push a servant aside so she could correct the seasoning herself. And Bibi had complained, when they were young, of the long hours Maryam forced her to put in at the kitchen. “I want to fit in,” Farida said. “And of course I want to be a good wife to you. But it is so much work! You cannot imagine. You bend over and chop-chop-chop. Onions, carrots, squash. Your back hurts, your hand hurts from holding the knife so tightly, but still, chop-chop-chop. Did you ever wonder how your food gets to be in such little pieces?”
Gul didn’t have to tell her that he never thought about it.
“You remember this the next time you men are sitting out there, drinking your tea and talk-talk-talking while we are working. And never a word from you, to show that you’ve noticed.”
Gul felt foolish, letting a woman speak to him in such a way. Still, he had to admit the meals were delectable, and he realized that when he said something to Farida about this dish or that, she became even more attentive and affectionate. Now he watched in disgust as grains of rice dribbled from Hamidullah’s mouth into his beard. Gul wondered again what Hamidullah was doing there. He supposed it had something to do with opium. The Taliban had, after all, financed much of their operations with drug money, and Nur Muhammed had profited quite handsomely even in his limited role as go-between.
“They want them all.” Nur Muhammed’s voice lowered ominously, and Gul jerked himself back to attention. Even Hamidullah closed his mouth.
“They won’t get them,” the man told Nur Muhammed. “They will never find them where we have them. They bombed Tora Bora. People were there. But not the missiles.”
So they were talking about the Stingers. Gul began to understand. The Amriki had provided Stingers to the mujahideen when they were fighting the Russians. But when the Russians went crawling back to Moscow, and Amrika tried to round up unused matériel, much of it had vanished. The Amriki went away, probably reasoning that the country was too wrecked by its long war to make mischief with the Stingers. But now that Osama had asserted himself so very forcefully, they had returned—ignoring the fact that the troublesome man who had brought so much distress upon them had long ago fled to Pakistan—this time with bombs and planes and troops of their own. And they wanted the Stingers back.
“The Amriki must be made to leave,” Nur Muhammed said. “This is not something we can endure.”
“We are trying.”
Gul thought of the attacks on the ISAF convoys, of the snipers whose bullets bounced harmlessly off the armored vests of the Amriki soldiers, of the crude roadside bombs that exploded harmlessly after the convoys had passed.
“They are not like the Russians.” The food that Hamidullah had devoured so indiscriminately now seemed about to choke him. “They are too strong. The men, themselves, I think they are weak. But their equipment is very good.”
Nur Muhammed spoke briefly and nostalgically of the notoriously shoddy Russian tanks and jeeps, of the helicopters whose blades faltered and then went silent, of the way they lurched and yawed through the thin mountain air onto the heaps of rock below. “But these new attacks are not working. And the Amriki are killing more of our people when they fire back. Too many women and children dead, and people will become angry with us instead of the Amriki.” Again, as he had at the earlier meeting, Nur Muhammed looked to Gul. He didn’t even bother posing the question this time. He just waited.
Gul strove for assurance, aware that this Talib was only a few years older than he. “I think that maybe we are attacking the wrong people. And that our actions lack ambition.” His thoughts churned. Of course they were attacking the wrong people. That’s why the actions had failed. He chewed a dumpling, trying to detect the dominant flavor in the subtle blend, so that he could comment to Farida. Danrhya, coriander. He swallowed, the velvety dumpling sliding with ease down his throat, and stifled a prideful smile. “It is as you said,” he told Hamidullah, aware that it would be good to flatter the man. “The Amriki are weak. But when they are in their tanks and trucks, they are strong. You must hit them when they are away from their equipment. The loss of matériel matters little to them, compared to the loss of men.”
“This is true. I have heard that their entire country stopped working after the killings by the airplanes.”
“All this trouble over just one day.” They had discussed the subject endlessly, but the wonder remained in Nur Muhammed’s voice. It did not need to be said, but Gul said it, anyway.
“I would like to see what would happen if the Russians had attacked them for twenty-five years.”
“If the Russians attacked them,” Hamidullah took up the subject with relish, “and they did not have their strong tanks and their bombs. If they were like us. Barefoot villagers.” His chest puffed with pride, his beard riding it like some sort of scrawny rodent.
Gul felt his father’s eyes upon him, and he knew it was time to bring the talk back to the matter at hand. “Imagine what one attack here could accomplish.”
“There is no place for such an attack. Even their places like the UN are very heavily guarded. And when they go out on the streets, the soldiers are with them.”
Gul said nothing for a few moments. For years, he had watched his father use silence to his advantage. It made people nervous, Nur Muhammed often reminded Gul. Their minds began to race, and they frequently became so agitated that, when you spoke to them again, it was such a relief that they often seized upon your proposal as the only possible solution. “There are many places,” Gul said, noticing that Hamidullah’s tensed shoulders relaxed as he finally spoke, “that are not so heavily protected. Not every foreign organization has money for so many guards.”
Hamidullah’s body stiffened again. His resistance was palpable. “I know those places.” He spoke around a mouthful of food. “They are unimportant. No one cares what happens to them.”
This fellow was impossibly ignorant. Still, Gul kept his voice soft, another trick he had learned from Nur Muhammed. Shout, his father had told him, and everyone shouts back at you. Soon, there is so much noise that no one idea can be heard. But whisper, and everyone stops talking, the better to hear you. “To the foreigners, everyone is important.”
Gul repeated what Farida had told him about the craziness in England, when the Irish were bombing the streets, people afraid to leave their homes. She had read, she told him, that in Amrika they so feared their own black citizens that schools and government buildings had guards at the entrances.
“You kill one of them, twenty will cry,” he said. “Especially if that one is not a soldier. They will yell about unfairness, but they will also become afraid. It does not take much to make them run and hide.” He followed the implicit rebuke with another nod to Hamidullah. “It is as you said earlier. We must jab at them. A little bit here and there, enough to put them on notice. Not just the Amriki, but the places they have influenced—the markets that sell alcohol. But soon, I think, a big action is necessary. Something to show them that we have the power to inflict true damage, so that they know it will not be worth their while to stay.” He finished in a rush, enjoying the flush of success as Hamidullah chimed in with suggestions to accomplish his plan, targets where foreigners congregated—schools, the journalists’ hotels, maybe one of the popular restaurants that they frequented, eating their odd tasteless foods, pizza and the like, provided by those establishments with an eye to bringing in crisp Amriki dollars.
Nur Muhammed interjected the necessary note of reality. “What does anyone gain by striking again at ISAF and not succeeding? Or at the UN? We cannot penetrate their defenses. Another failure gains us nothing. But hitting something smaller, as we have already discussed, would almost surely guarantee success.”
Ham
idullah’s grimace smoothed as Nur Muhammed continued. “We are seeking a target. We have a possibility, one on which we have good intelligence. The fewer of you who know of it, the better. But first, we need the device. We will speak again next week.”
* * *
So it began.
Like Kabul’s NGOs and other foreign organizations, Face the Future percolated with new reports daily.
One morning, the UN drivers went out to their gleaming SUVs and found all the tires slashed.
The next, an American colonel from ISAF stopped by his favorite store among the tourist haunts of Chicken Street, the one where the proprietor always pulled the bottle of vile Tajik vodka from beneath the counter as soon as he saw him coming. But on this day, the store’s windows were boarded up, the interior darkened. Someone had splashed green paint in lacy script across the rough boards. The colonel’s interpreter read it, his face darkening. “It says that this man sells liquor and therefore his business must not be patronized.”
Farida told Liv that girls from the university, who had taken to striding around campus in bold blue jeans under their tunics, wearing only brief black scarves over their hair, were reminded so forcefully of the risks they took that they began keeping their burqas with them at all times, rather than shedding them in careless piles in the lobby of whatever building in which they had class that day. There was no question of leaving the campus with their faces uncovered.
And the day came when Martin burst through the office door, cursing, wiping his reddened face.
Liv jumped from her chair. “What happened?”
“One of those bastards hanging around the gate spit on me.”
She sank back, wordlessly acknowledging this new fact of life. For her own part, she found herself staying indoors more and more, forgoing even the interviews with Afghan women that she had found so absorbing. “Maybe you had a point,” she typed one night in an email to her mother. “Maybe it was a mistake to come here.”
