The Haha Man

by Sandy Mccutcheon

  The driver’s door opened and a woman emerged, her hair glowing unnaturally bright in the moonlight. The face was one Bronwen recognised from the media: this woman’s husband was a trucking and transport magnate amongst other things, but the man’s name eluded her. The woman turned and gave her a wave.

  ‘Mrs Parry?’

  ‘Bronwen.’

  ‘I’m Wilna.’

  ‘I am sorry, I should have recognised you. Of course I’ve seen you on television.’ And the name came to her. ‘You’re Michael de Villiers’ wife …’

  ‘I prefer to think of Michael as the husband of Wilna de Villiers,’ Wilna laughed. ‘Won’t be a moment.’ She went around the car and opened the passenger door.

  Bronwen Parry had travelled. There was not much that could throw her. But the woman who stepped out of the passenger seat was … what was the word? Unexpected. She was certainly … different. For a second she wondered how the auxiliary would react. Then she strode down the steps and out to the women.

  ‘Welcome to Rockhampton.’

  ‘It was a long hot drive,’ Wilna said. ‘Let me introduce Rabia.’ She turned to the woman standing beside the car. ‘Rabia Balkhi, this is Bronwen Parry.’

  ‘So pleased to meet you.’ The woman’s voice was quiet and muffled.

  ‘I’m so glad you’ve come.’ Bronwen extended her hand nervously. As she did her mind went into a spin. Should she have organised a microphone? Would they be able to hear Rabia when she spoke? Well, she had told the others that they were in for a wonderful surprise. And surprise was the right word. Never, in all her years in Rockhampton, had she met an Afghan woman and certainly not one wearing a full burqa.

  It was just after six-thirty in the evening when Karim heard the helicopter. He paused to rub his hands together, trying to get some feeling back into his frozen fingers. The chopper was away to his east, probably heading for Feroz Bahar with supplies for the United Front. Rumours had been circulating for weeks that the Taliban might be preparing to mount a fresh assault on Yakaolang, though Karim had already decided that it wasn’t a matter of if but when. This time he didn’t have his possessions packed, ready to move on. Not even the most zealous Taliban commander was going to bother with a barren hole like Bed Mushkin.

  It was almost a year to the day since his last move. Following his escape from Mazar-i Sharif, Karim had made his way through Baghlan province, moving far from the places and people he knew, shattered by the murders of his family, his father. He steeled himself against the impulse to strike out at every Talib he came across. When he struck, he promised himself, it would be at the heart of the enemy, not at its foot soldiers.

  Eventually he had found work in the villages around Naikpai in the Doshi district of Baghlan and took up residence in a small mud house in Zaighola. There he finally let himself grieve. His neighbours recognised what ailed him and, despite their own poverty, brought him food and blankets, never once asking for any payment. For a long time he was ill, his heart and spirit poisoned by despair and the nightmares that made him fear sleep. The images of the mutilated bodies of his wife and children waited for him each evening. He pared away his feelings, ridding himself of all but the essentials of life. But it was only half a life; all pleasure amputated.

  When Karim had the energy, he repaired pumps and vehicles for the people in the surrounding villages, bartering his services for whatever the locals had to offer. Around them the fighting continued between the Taliban and the United Front. The inconclusive skirmishes left a mounting toll of dead and wounded. The fighting also left behind the skeletal remains of vehicles, burnt and twisted hulks immobilised by landmines or rocket fire. During lulls in the fighting Karim descended on them like a vulture. These metal corpses were now his only source of spare parts, and day after day his gaunt figure could be seen striding out amongst the rocks, heading for the latest harvest. He would return late in the evening, laden down with bags of entrails, rubber hoses, fanbelts, pipes and springs; anything that he could find a use for. Soon his hut had become like a wrecker’s yard, surrounded by pilfered detritus.

  But the Taliban soldiers had come one dawn in a convoy of pickup trucks. Fortunately for Karim he had already set out on foot from his mud hut in Zaighola. A trader in the tiny hamlet of Bakas had asked him to repair his truck and was offering a bonus if the work was completed in time for him to get to the markets. It was an offer worth rising early for.

  Alarmed by the noise of the approaching convoy, Karim fled from the road, hiding behind boulders until the last pickup had gone from view. He approached the outskirts of Bakas with extreme caution and, crouching in a rocky gully, watched as the Taliban rounded up every man in the village. Was it because they were Hazara, he wondered, or a warning to deter them from having contact with United Front forces? Whatever the answer, Karim decided not to wait around. The sight of the men being whipped with electrical cable and then herded through the snow like a flock of sheep to slaughter was a clear sign that the time had come to move. As he returned to the squalid little hamlet of Zaighola he heard the sounds of wailing from behind the mud-and stone-walled houses. The tracks in the snow confirmed that the Taliban had been here too, and gone. He collected his small bag and shut the door behind him.

  Despite the sub-zero temperatures Karim had struck out across the countryside, avoiding the roads and villages. All day fear drove him on until, just at the point when he thought he could go no further and would succumb to the cold, he stumbled onto a dirt road. To his right was a faint twinkle of light. He mustered the last of his strength and trudged towards it. An overloaded Bedford was broken down in the middle of the road. The bonnet was up and an elderly man standing on the bumper was poking about under it. At his side a young boy held an oil lamp. They must have been stuck for some time, as they had a small fire going a few feet from the truck.

  ‘Asalaam aleikum,’ Karim had called as he approached. He had intended not to startle the pair but the man had not reached old age by being hesitant. In a single movement he retrieved a rifle and levelled it at Karim’s stomach.

  ‘I don’t want to steal your truck,’ Karim said, ‘just the warmth of your fire.’

  The man peered at him and, realising he was alone, lowered the rifle. ‘You are welcome to warm yourself. But you would have to be a magician to steal this pile of shit.’ He spat on the ground and climbed down. ‘Where have you come from?’

  ‘Zaighola.’

  ‘I heard there was trouble in Naikpai. Talibs?’

  ‘They took every man they could find.’

  The man had considered that for a moment then barked at the boy to make chai.

  Karim, shivering, squatted down beside the fire and, as he slowly warmed up, related the morning’s events. By the time he had completed his story and drunk two cups of delicious hot chai he was feeling decidedly more human.

  ‘May I look at the engine?’

  ‘It needs more than looking at,’ the old man said and took out a pipe. ‘But help yourself.’

  ‘Magician. You’re a number-one magician,’ the man had laughed as they clambered in forty minutes later. ‘We’ll be in Bamiyan before dawn.’

  ‘Fine by me.’ Karim was past caring where he went, as long as it was far away from Zaighola. The blocked fuel line had been easy to fix and if his ‘magic’ earned him a ride to Bamiyan, so much the better.

  But to Karim’s dismay they had found Taliban crawling over Bamiyan like maggots on a corpse, and so after farewelling the old man he continued on to Yakaolang and found himself a hut in this village of Bed Mushkin. The house backed onto the stony hillside at the top end of the village. Fortunately the hut’s walls had been built thick and solid for, from time to time, a rock would free itself from the hill and crash into the rear of the building. Over the years the falling rocks had piled up and given the house the appearance of having grown out of the hill. It wasn’t much but as far as Karim was concerned it had the essentials: a roof and a fireplace.

  The
first thing he had done after moving in was to explore the hillside behind the house, looking for a place to hide should the need ever arise. For several days he searched the area, finally locating a small cavity between the rocks just below the peak of the hill. It would be cramped but Karim knew that if there was an emergency and he could make it to the cave, he had a chance of surviving.

  The village itself was traditional mud and stone houses, its occupants eking out an impoverished existence with small gardens and herds of sheep and goats. Despite the poverty there were plenty of trucks and old cars in the surrounding villages that needed Karim’s special skills and he soon established himself as a man who could bring seemingly dead motors back to life. No one asked where he had come from and he never offered the information. Bed Mushkin had become home — until this evening when he heard the helicopter.

  Later, just after midnight, Karim woke to the sound of gunfire. The night was so cold that, despite the small fire he had burning in the stove, he had crawled under the blankets fully clothed. Now he pulled his boots on, wrapped himself in a blanket and stepped out onto the street.

  Fresh snow covered the ground and an icy wind was gusting around the hillside from the north. He stood and listened for a moment, trying to guess how far away the fighting was. It was hard to tell. Five, maybe ten kilometres. Possibly in Nayak. He shivered and went inside, made himself some tea.

  Any doubt that this was a major offensive vanished as the sounds of the battle intensified. But then, just after three in the morning, the noise ceased.

  Suddenly he was struck by a premonition that his decision not to move again was the wrong one. If the United Front retreated from Yakaolang and the Taliban took total control of the area, he would be in danger. The idea that his name was still on some list marked for execution seemed improbable, but simply being a Hazara male could still be a death sentence. He quickly packed some essentials, then hunkered down in front of the fire and pondered his situation.

  For more than a month rumours had talked of the Taliban counter-offensive against Karim Khalili’s United Front. In the middle of December Khalili’s forces had begun to move from the area of Suof valley towards Bamiyan. Pitted against him was the local Taliban commander, Sufi Gardizi. Gardizi had a fierce reputation for extracting retribution from anyone who supported Khalili. One story had it that his favourite entertainment was to chop the head off his victim and then pour boiling oil on them to stop the bleeding while he enjoyed the jerking and convulsive death throes of the corpse. He called it ‘the dance of death’. As bizarre as it sounded, everyone believed this story to be true.

  Early in January Khalili had swept through the area, gathering the village elders and proclaiming that, in return for their support, the Yakaolang district would be under his protection. It sounded to Karim as if that protection was likely to be a figment of Khalili’s imagination.

  As dawn broke Karim went outside to collect some firewood from the stack at the side of his house. In the distance the gunfire started up again. It was sporadic now and Karim convinced himself it sounded further away.

  ‘The mongrels have been at each other’s throats all night.’

  Karim turned to see his neighbour, Syed Asad Ullah, coming towards him. He was carrying a freshly baked loaf of bread. Karim had done a complete overhaul on Syed’s tractor back in December and, though the man had money, Karim had chosen to accept his wife’s fine bread as payment.

  ‘I hope they both bleed to death,’ Karim said and held his door open. ‘I’m making tea.’

  ‘I won’t stop,’ Syed said briskly. ‘My son just returned with news that Gardizi has unleashed his dogs. There is talk that Mullah Omar has decreed that all Hazara over the age of twelve will lose their heads and that scores of Arabs and Pakistanis are heading out to the villages intent on becoming ghazi.’

  It sounded frighteningly plausible. For a long time the decrees issued by the Supreme head of the Taliban in Kabul had targeted the Hazara. Mullah Omar’s thirst for Hazara blood would probably lead to their extinction. And Karim could imagine the eagerness of the Arab and Pakistani troops, if they believed they were gaining the blessed title of ghazi, holy warriors, by killing the enemies of Islam.

  After wishing each other luck the men parted and Karim built up his fire and breakfasted on bread and cheese. He knew he would do no work this day so he simply sat by the fire and waited.

  Just before midday he heard the first shots. The wind had died and in the still cold air the sound reverberated around the village — the distinctive clack of a Kalashnikov.

  Karim quickly stuffed some cheese and the remains of the bread into his bag and cautiously opened the door. From somewhere in the houses below him another shot rang out, followed by wails and screams. He slipped round the side of the house and began to scramble up the rocky slope, careful at first not to dislodge a rock that might advertise his escape. But the ice, though making the rocks treacherously slippery, had frozen them together and he soon realised that to dislodge one would have required a crowbar.

  It had been months since Karim had first found the small cave and he prayed that he could find it again. More shots rang out and with each step he expected to feel a bullet rip into his back.

  The wind during the night had blown most of the snow from his path, so he was able to climb without leaving telltale footprints. Now that the wind had gone a mist was rolling across the hill and within minutes he was climbing the slippery rocks more slowly, knowing that he was hidden from view.

  The cave’s entrance was concealed by a snowdrift, and it took him twenty minutes to locate it. Quickly he scooped an opening and crawled in. It was smaller than he remembered. Karim cleared the snow from the floor and piled it up at the entrance, leaving a small aperture through which he could see the hillside below. Next he took a blanket from the bag and, doubling it over, spread it beneath him. He wrapped his shawl tightly around him and settled back against his bag. It was surprisingly comfortable. Far below the shooting continued, but from inside the cave it sounded muted, almost harmless. Karim stared bleakly down. Even here, he thought, he was in danger. There was only so long he could remain hidden before he also would become a casualty — frozen to death.

  A dense mist enveloped the hill, blanketing him in silence, restricting his view to only a few metres. The complete absence of sound played on his imagination, peopling the slowly swirling mist with shapes and figures, ghosts and phantoms. For the rest of the day Karim stared out into the whiteness, but it revealed nothing except his fear.

  Karim’s concerns about hypothermia were gradually relieved. Much to his surprise the temperature in the small space remained well above freezing. In summer when he had first discovered the place it had been cool and breezy, the wind whistling through the stones above, but now it was transformed into a sealed cocoon. The blanket of snow had insulated the space and after a couple of hours it was stuffy but reasonably warm. Karim tore off a portion of the bread and chewed it slowly as he weighed up his options. For a while he considered going down and investigating. It seemed implausible that the Taliban were still there in any numbers, though he couldn’t discount the possibility that they had left behind a small number of men to secure the village. If that was the case he would have to return to the cave. That course of action exposed him to the possibility of being caught or forced to flee the village completely.

  On the other hand, he could remain where he was and in the morning, if the mist had cleared, he would be able to observe the village more safely and decide on his course of action.

  Karim was tired of running and he knew it was time to make a stand. No matter what the situation in Bed Mushkin, he could head north and offer his services to Ahmed Shah Masood and his Northern Alliance. Surely they could use a good mechanic. Karim had no illusions about Masood; he was capable of just as much cruelty as the Taliban. Rumour had it that Masood had shifted his family from the safety of Tajikistan to his stronghold in the Panjsher Valley. But if the Talib
an had taken all of Yakaolang, Karim decided, he had no alternative.

  Having reached his decision he set about making himself comfortable for the night ahead. He scooped snow into a tin and allowed himself a small ration of cheese and a little more bread while he waited for it to thaw. Knowing that it would be some time until he ate a decent meal again he wrapped the remainder of the food and replaced it in his bag. Outside the light was fading and a soft flurry of snow was drifting down through the mist. Karim stretched out a bit, wrapped his blanket firmly around himself and went to sleep.

  During the night the lightly falling snow built up at the mouth of the cave and when Karim woke he found himself snowed in. He yawned, stretched as best he could and then prodded at the fresh snow. To his relief it was only a thin layer. As best as he could judge it was probably an hour before dawn. The mist that had blanketed the hill the previous day was gone and through the aperture he could see stars blazing fiercely in a clear sky. The temperature inside the cave had remained relatively warm all night but outside it was bitterly cold.

  Karim inspected his dwindling supply of food and allowed himself another portion of bread and cheese. What he packed away was enough to last him one more day. But having survived this far he felt that somehow he was not meant to die here. The small canister he had filled with snow had thawed as he slept and he was able to quench his thirst.

  As the dawn dragged night from the sky, Karim dug out the entrance to the cave and crawled out onto the slope. The cold was so intense his face felt as though it was burning. The icy air rasped his throat, forcing him to pull his shawl over his mouth. He relieved his bladder, then pulled his bag from the cave and stood for a minute listening to the morning. It was still and silent. This in itself was eerie. Normally at this time he would have expected the sounds of awakening from the village — the tinkle of goat bells, the sound of wood being chopped — something. He stretched and felt his cramped muscles protest at the idea of movement after so long. Finally, knowing there was no way out other than through the village, he set off down the hill.