* * *
—
After I finished my story, Zia recalled for me a hadith recorded in the Sahih Muslim, which Abu Huraira once reported that the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, once said, “A prostitute once saw a dog lolling around a well on a hot day, hanging its tongue, about to die of thirst. Upon seeing this, the prostitute took off her head scarf, tied it about her shoe, and drew some water for the dog, letting it drink to its content. And so, because of that, Allah forgave her.”
Zia went on to emphasize that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) loved all animals, even wolves, since in the days of the Prophet animals could sometimes speak like humans, expressing their desires and their rights. For example, Zia recited for me a hadith recorded in the Sahih Bukhari, wherein it was narrated by Abu Huraira that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) once reported that a hungry wolf once caught a sheep, and when the shepherd chased it, the wolf said to the shepherd, “Who will be its guard on the day of wild beasts, when there will be no shepherd for it except me?” Upon hearing the wolf speak with such intelligence, the shepherd clapped his hands and declared: “What could be more miraculous than this?”
Then Zia recited that Abu Huraira narrated that the Prophet said that the wolf replied: “There is, indeed, something more curious and wonderful than this, and that is the message of Allah’s chosen Apostle, Muhammad of Mecca, who is now inviting people to Islam.” After which the shepherd, following the advice of the wolf, took his sheep to Al-Madinah in order to speak with the Prophet. There, the shepherd told the Prophet the story of the wolf. Upon hearing the story, the Prophet went out to the believers and asked the shepherd to tell his story again, which he did, and so the Prophet proclaimed that the shepherd had witnessed one of the signs of the Day of Judgment. By the One who controls my soul, the Prophet went on, the Day of Judgment will not occur until beasts speak to humans. And so it was.
Zia kept on like this for a long time, reciting hadith after hadith about spiders hiding the Prophet in a cave, about talking birds and helpful horses, and so on and so forth, until we both noticed that Gul had been gone for too long. We’d been telling stories underneath the mulberry tree for almost an hour. And though Gul was always a hardheaded guy, we figured he would’ve either caught Budabash by now or else returned to us before Isha fell.
The roads darkened. The crickets chirped. The donkeys brayed. And everywhere there was a smell of smoke and sadness. From time to time, a breeze would rush down through the roads, shaking the tatters of Watak’s flag, and then a gust would blow forth from the maze, rustling the leaves of the mulberry tree, so that it almost seemed as if the flag and the tree were whispering to each other. Eventually, me and Zia decided to take up Gul’s original plan and travel up the road a kilometer or two until we got to Agha’s compound. But just as we rose and packed, ready to continue our journey, Dawood came stumbling out of the maze.
We ran to him in a jumble and hugged him very tightly as he hollered about going back home and getting his brothers and saving Gul, and we were so overjoyed just to see him and to hear him that when he stopped hollering and became heavy in our hands, we didn’t even notice that our hug was all that held him up.
He passed out in our arms.
We tried for a long time to wake him up: slapping and punching and lifting his eyelids and smearing toot under his nose and splashing water in his face and rubbing his belly raw and pinching the skin at his wrists. But nothing woke him. We listened closely for his heart, the both of us, and made sure it was thumping.
Without any other option, me and Zia pulled Dawood underneath Watak’s mulberry tree and stripped some bushes from the side of the road, and after wrapping ourselves up in Zia’s patu, we watched the flag of Watak’s marker and smelled the ash and listened for every footstep of every killer in Logar: the psychopathic white boys, the ravenous bandits, the Ts and the gunmen and the drug runners, the kidney kidnappers, the robots in the sky, the wolves from the mountains and the coyotes from the rivers, the witches in the cesspits, the djinn in the trees, the ghosts from the graveyards, and the monsters in the maze.
We lay on either side of Dawood. I held one hand and Zia held the other. A few moments in and I looked up over Dawood’s belly and whispered to Zia, “It’s so dark.”
“You scared?” he asked.
“It’s just that back in America it doesn’t get so dark because we have lights going on all night in the streets.”
“But who pays for the fuel?”
“I think taxes.”
“You miss it over there?”
“No,” I said, “fuck America. I rather be here.”
“Wallah?” he said. “Don’t lie in the night, Marwand. Snakes will hear.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe not right this moment. But in general.”
“So you are scared.”
“Maybe a little.”
“Of dying?” he asked quietly.
I didn’t say anything. I just breathed.
“If we die,” Zia said, “God will be there.”
“If we die,” I said, “will you tell Him I was good?”
“All right,” he said, and asked me to give him my right hand, which I did, and after carefully unwrapping the gauze still clinging to my skin, he traced for me—with a single finger—his evidence of God’s existence.
The Tale of the Evidence of God’s Existence
On the palm of your right hand, if you look at it, God has etched into your flesh the Arabic numeral , or 18.
And on the palm of your left hand, if you look at it, Allah has traced into your skin the Arabic numeral , or 81.
Now, if you add these numbers together, you get .
Allah (swt) has names.
And if you take and subtract it from , you get , or 63.
The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) died at sixty-three.
“So, you see,” Zia explained, “God has etched into the palms of your hands one reminder of His own glory and another reminder of his most beloved servant, and so . . .” But he didn’t finish his point, and instead, after concluding his demonstration, he rewrapped my hand with the tattered strips of gauze and gave it back to me.
* * *
—
For a long time afterward, in some way or other, I knew we would be saved, either in the night or in the day or in the days to come, and that it was only a matter of when, not if. At some point, both me and Zia fell asleep, and for the first time in a long time, Zia forgot to pray.
On the Thirty-Third Morning
Just before dawn I woke up to a pang in my belly, as though something were eating me from the inside out, and I lay there for a while beneath the mulberry tree, clawing at my stomach with the tip of the finger I didn’t have, until the adhan for Fajr rang out from one of the nearby mosques, stirring Zia awake.
Dawood still slept in between us, dreaming, I imagined, of feasts and platters, of Kabuli palaus and Logari stews, of kormas and kabobs and curried chickens, of ashak and mantu, of quroot and maastay, of distarkhans so long and dishes such aplenty (and with so many different guests) that the feast would stretch from Kabul to Kandahar to Herat to Mazar all the way back to Logar, all the way back to the spot beneath the tree where he dreamed it, where me and Zia were waiting, where my belly grumbled miserably for the dreams I imagined Dawood still dreamed.
We tried to wake him, shouting and shaking and pinching and pulling. Then we whispered into his ears. Me into his left. Zia into his right. So that my threats of violence and Zia’s pleas for mercy would bang around in his brain. I told him bandits were coming and Zia whispered that dinner was ready. I said a knife was at his throat and Zia promised him that the knife was a gift. I told him he was being a lazy coward and Zia said he would become a courageous hero if only he’d wake up and help us home. None of it worked. We soon realized that Dawood was in
a slumber so deep it was more like a coma—or a spell. He needed a doctor, an imam. He needed Baba or Abo. He needed real help. Not two famished kids on the road too weak to carry him, too stupid to wake him, and too scared to do anything else. Poor Dawood, I thought, he needed saviors, but all he had was us.
In the blue light of fajr, I examined him closely.
Stained from neck to ankle in smudges of ash and dust and what I thought might be blood but was probably just clay, he had scratches on his face and hands and his left sleeve was torn completely from his shirt.
I wondered what the maze had done to him, what it would do to Gul.
The wreckage of his outfit left me feeling as if I were inside of a dream, and neither Zia’s sudden sadness (he hung his head and would not pray the Fajr Salah), nor the blue light of dawn, nor the jackal’s howls, nor the child’s adhan, nor the peace of the roads, nor the babbling stream, nor the return of the ghost of my finger, wriggling at the end of my bandaged stump like a grub, did anything to lessen the dreaminess of that morning.
Neither did our visitors.
With Dawood knocked out in between us and with no donkey or cart or wheelbarrow to move him and with Gul still lost somewhere in the maze and with us as stinking and tired and dirty and broken and hopeless as we were, we decided, without speaking on it, to just sit and wait by our tree until some kind Logari came by to assist us.
And, by the grace of Allah, we were sent more than a few.
First came Jawed the Thief.
Even though he strolled up to us with a mask on his face, a machine gun beneath his patu, a donkey at his side, and a pair of blue eyes—which, I learned from Abo, could almost always mark a man as having a predilection for theft—I didn’t guess him for a thief until he knelt near us and calmly started rummaging through our big black bag. Only after the Thief found my Coolpix did he ask us what we were doing on the road. So we explained to him about how we lost Gul and found Dawood.
He knelt down near us, so close I could smell the hash on his breath, so close I could feel the warmth of the rifle throbbing beneath his patu, so close I could see that his eyes were more turquoise than blue, so close I suddenly knew he wasn’t going to kill us, though I couldn’t say why. He proceeded to take off his mask, unveiling a face much lighter and handsomer than I thought it was going to be—though his mutilated fingers and scarred scalp revealed old tortures—and he offered us a deal.
It went like this:
“How about I go into the maze, all right? And I find your Gul. And I bring him back. And I take you boys home. You understand?”
We said that we did.
“I do all of this on one condition. Well, two conditions. Actually, okay, three. Yeah, just the three conditions, you understand? Real easy, boys. Three steps to salvation. One. You let me keep this camera, all right? Two. You show me how to work this camera. Three. You don’t fuck with that boy while he’s sleeping. Four. And this one is the most important. If anybody comes down this road and asks you if you’ve seen a thief named Jawed, you tell them you have and that he went off toward the black mountains. You understand?”
We accepted every condition of his offer and finalized our verbal agreement with an oath to Jawed’s third mother, a literal saint and living ghost, and then he strolled off into the maze, flipping through the pictures of my camera. After he left, I realized how much Jawed the Thief reminded me of the T in the field whose pictures I took and never deleted.
Next, there came a small clan of Kochi nomads—all five of them fitted in those old school Kochi dresses that girls in Fremont wore at weddings or cultural banquets when they danced the attan. They led along a two-humped camel.
Before we could ask for help, they asked us about Jawed.
“Who’s Jawed?” Zia said.
And all five of the girls answered at once: “Our dead fiancé.”
But in Pakhto, of course.
Apparently, the five girls were all distant cousins from rivaling families whose men had been killing one another for decades over petty disputes regarding sheep or honor or God, and according to the leader of the clan, Zarghoona, who had an assortment of rusted blades strapped to her camel’s hump, Jawed had proposed to each of the five cousins on the same night, going from one family’s tent to the next, promising each family a two-humped camel as a dowry. But, by the will of God, only a few hours before Zarghoona was to be given to Jawed, she came upon one of her cousins in the market in Wagh Jan while shopping for the engagement. Feeling blessed by the recent events of her proposal, she decided to make amends with the girl she had no personal quarrel with and went to kiss her cheek and hold her hands. After which the both of them found out that the other was soon to be wed, and they were randomly met by another distant cousin, who also revealed she was soon to be wed, until each of the five cousins had, by the will of Allah, come together and shared the same story of approaching matrimony. Understanding that they’d been deceived, the five cousins united their rival families under the ever-encompassing banner of vengeance and decided to find Jawed for themselves.
“He has beautiful blue eyes, is probably armed, and should be wearing a mask,” Zarghoona concluded. “Have you seen him?”
Even under the gaze of her rusted machete, me and Zia lied to her, partly out of fear of Jawed, partly to stay true to our word, and mostly because snitching just didn’t come easy.
Zia told them that we had spotted a blue-eyed gunman a few minutes ago and that he had passed us by and gone off toward the black mountains. I pointed them in the direction they needed to go. But Zarghoona didn’t buy it.
“Boys,” she said, “serpents lie. Not men.”
With that word, she led her tribe into the maze.
Just as they left, we were visited by a pair of Pakhtuns, not much older than us, who claimed allegiance to the Ts and were wearing these dirty black garbs and black pakols, strapped to the chest with old rifles that looked like they’d been forged 150 years ago to shoot at shitty Englishmen.
The mini-Ts led a steer, on whose hide was a pair of prisoners, tied up, sitting back to back, bloodied and beaten and wearing rice bags over their heads. The prisoners whispered to each other. Arguing, it seemed like. One of the mini-Ts, the uglier one, stopped, greeted us, and asked about a thief named Jawed.
We asked him what for.
The ugly T (who seemed so unaware of his ugliness—his mustache trimmed, his locks oiled, his wrists stinking of perfume—it made you feel prettier just looking at him) smiled big at us, his mouth a graveyard, and pointing to the prisoners on the steer, he said: “He’s joining these guys.”
“No, he’s not,” said the other T, the handsomer, dirtier, hairier (patches of beard sprouting out of his chin and cheeks like weeds), smellier, and sadder one.
“What did they do?” Zia asked.
“They’re hash-heads,” the ugly T said. “One of them is a seller and one of them is a smoker, but we can’t figure out which is which. We caught them together near a madrassa, in the middle of an exchange, but when we busted down their door, there was so much smoke in their dirty little shack we couldn’t tell which one was passing the hash and which one the paper. They dropped everything and begged for mercy.”
“In the name of God,” one prisoner called out in Farsi, “I’m the buyer. It all started when I traveled to Iran for work to feed my one-armed father. We built roads in Tehran for sixteen, eighteen hours a day and they’d give us coke to keep us awake and heroin to calm us down. After the drugs ate all our strength, our bosses tossed us on the streets and the police jailed us, beat us, and deported us back to Kabul. I’d lost all the money I made to the heroin and came back home a disgrace. My father wouldn’t even touch me. I’m not a seller; I’m a fiend. I’m a fool. I smoke hash to stay off heroin. But I’d never put this affliction on another soul, for the love of Allah you must believe me.”
“In the nam
e of God,” the other prisoner shouted in Pakhto, “I’m the buyer. It all started when a squadron of Americans came by our house because they thought a squadron of Taliban were hiding in our orchard. And although we would’ve been happy to help the Taliban, there weren’t any Taliban, and so there was nothing to hide. Their translator misinterpreted my father’s Pakhto into a confession. They were going to take him, and I confessed in his place, and the motherfucker misinterpreted my confession as denunciation, and it took ten minutes for him to understand that I was the confessed conspirator, not my father, who would’ve died under the tortures. They took me to the base and beat the shit out of me for three days and three nights for information I didn’t have and couldn’t make up. After they broke my rib, they let me out, but the rib keeps cutting me in the night, and so I came to buy this hash because it’s the only way I can sleep. In the name of Allah, speak to my father, and he’ll confirm my story.”
“See,” the ugly T said, “they’ve got different stories and we can’t figure out which one to beat and which one to shoot, and so we’ll shoot them both. Along with Jawed.”
“What did Jawed do?” I asked.
“Jawed is with the Americans,” the pretty T said, eyeing me. “Where are you from?”
But before I could answer, the whistle of a rocket rang out somewhere from the roads and the mini-Ts and their prisoners hurried off into the maze.
Up next was a squadron of American soldiers.
There were five of them. Four soldiers and the one translator, who asked Zia in Farsi if he knew the whereabouts of a blue-eyed bandit named Jawed. Apparently, Jawed had stolen armor, weapons, and an expensive coffee machine from a nearby base.
99 Nights in Logar Page 7
