99 Nights in Logar

by Jamil Jan Kochai

  As soon as night fell, we started preparing for bed because Agha didn’t have a TV at his compound. If one of us complained (usually Mirwais), Agha would tell us stories from his youth about how they never had any lights in Logar, and how he’d climb Seloo Mountain in the nighttime to watch the blinking bulbs from Kabul, and how he was almost sixteen years old the first time he saw a TV in Kabul.

  “Back then,” he’d say, “Watak and my cousins spent all night telling stories in the dark. We didn’t need TV or movies.”

  When I argued that movies had stories too, he didn’t even get mad.

  “But not our stories,” he said. “You understand?”

  I said that I did.

  Agha’s house was only a few miles closer to the black mountains, but the sound of the bombs in the night rumbled much rougher than they did at Moor’s compound. I couldn’t sleep well regardless, what with my seasickness flowing and ebbing, but the bombs made it impossible to even try. Mirwais slept heavy, probably could’ve slept through the whole war if we let him, but Gwora was awake, jotting away in his notebook. When I left the room to go and explore the compound, he followed me.

  On the edge of the rooftop, facing out toward the black mountains, we found Agha smoking. We thought he quit a few years ago, during Ramadan, so me and Gwora weren’t eager to surprise him, but he sensed we were there and told us to come and sit with him.

  From Agha’s rooftop, the bombs didn’t just rumble, they lit up the mountains, glowing out across the landscape in a red so pale it was almost orange, or pink, sending us first a sharp scream and then a thundering note, which over at Moor’s house might’ve lulled us to sleep.

  “Agha, what are they doing in those mountains?” I asked.

  “I have a suspicion.”

  “What are they dropping?” Gwora asked.

  “To be honest, I’m not sure.”

  Which was odd, you know, since most OG Afghans have been bombed on for so long, so consistently, by so many different nations, creeds, and organizations, by so many differing levels of technological advancement—IEDs to rocket launchers to high-tech jets to lonely grenades to mines shaped like butterflies to mortars to cluster bombs to motherfucking robot strikes—that they can tell you (with scary precision) the variation in pitch and destructive capability of a missile strike, a car bomb, a rocket, or a grenade. Agha knew bombs. He knew Russian bombs and Afghan bombs and recently he’d come to know American bombs too. Well, except for that thunder in the mountains. It was a mystery even to him.

  “I’ve never heard those screams,” Agha said, “but I do remember this story your nikeh once told me about the black mountains.”

  So we heard it.

  The Tale of the Secret City in the Mountains

  “You see,” Agha began, “some seventy years ago, after the third time the English invaded Logar, your nikeh went off into the black mountains to ambush roving squadrons of the brightly dressed Brits like his father did forty years before him. But the English quickly took control of a few of the villages in Logar, including Naw’e Kaleh, so many of the families fled through the black mountains. Your nikeh was guiding one of these groups of refugees when a British regiment—infamous for being donkey slow—caught up with the wanderers just as they were about to cross through the center of the mountains. A massacre ensued, during which the Englishmen picked off the fleeing, unarmed villagers, and only your nikeh himself escaped. He crawled so deep into a series of caves and underground tunnels that he became hopelessly lost within the heart of the black mountains.

  “For several days, he wandered these tunnels, without food, without water, without knowing in which direction he should pray, without even being sure that God could hear him so deep within the black stone. Eventually, though, just as he was on the verge of collapsing from thirst, your nikeh came upon a secret city within the mountains. A city of gold and jewels, of statues and idols and other remnants of the kaffir fire lovers from which we descended. Best of all, your nikeh was able to locate a secret fountain. After drinking to his fill, he gathered up as much of the treasure as he could carry and started his journey out of the caves. But, again, he became so lost and weak that, one by one, he dropped every jewel he carried, giving them up to Allah in the hopes that He might free him in return. Your nikeh escaped the mountain with only a single golden nugget shoved so far up his colon that he supposed even Allah couldn’t see it.

  “By then, the war was over.”

  * * *

  —

  “So,” Agha supposed, “maybe the Americans with their night vision and their radar were able to see something in the mountains worth finding or blowing out.”

  “What happened to our nikeh’s golden nugget?” I asked.

  “Your nikeh buried the gold beneath his mulberry tree and didn’t touch it again for many years until we left Logar, and that’s what we used to pay off the caseworker who got us into America. The funniest thing was that even after all those years in the earth, the nugget still smelled very distinctly of my father. He loved onions. Ate them raw his whole life. Right up until the end. That’s how he lived to be a hundred and twenty.”

  “So there might be treasure in the mountains?” I said.

  He took a long puff of his cigarette and gave me a look like Don’t even dream about it.

  And, Wallah, I tried not to, but whenever I closed my eyes I could see myself running through those tunnels, in those mountains, seeking out that cave of gold somewhere in the deepest bellies of Logar.

  On the Fifty-Seventh Morning

  Over the next few days, whenever we weren’t working, we were exploring the tombs of Agha’s compound: excavating the bombed-out shelters, climbing over torn-up walls, and hiding in the craters to scare one another. We wondered which pile of rubble used to be Agha’s room, Watak’s room, or which torn-up shelter was the one where they hid the Communist, the children, the weapons, themselves. We had to stay inside the compound because Agha still didn’t trust me out in the open with just my brothers. Then on Jumu’ah—the day I was supposed to take the first dose of Abo’s potion—Agha went off with Waseem to visit some friends in Kabul about an old loan and left us with Malang, who disappeared almost as soon as Agha drove off.

  Even without supervision, I was careful about escaping. First, me and my brothers waited around for a while, sitting up in Agha’s room on the second floor of the compound. We pretended to read and write, occasionally peeking up through a big window to make sure Agha’s Corolla wasn’t turning down the main road. Once we were certain that Agha wasn’t tricking us, me and Gwora and Mirwais snuck up onto the roof of the compound, crept along the walls for a bit, and at the very corner of the compound facing out toward the black mountains, we found a mulberry tree planted just close enough to the wall for a leap. I’d gotten so light by then—my baby fat melted through sickness and work—I didn’t even need the head start I gave myself. Nearly floated to the tree. Next, I signaled for Gwora to toss me Mirwais. He’d gotten skinny too, so I caught him easy.

  Before Gwora made his leap, he wrote in his notebook. The quality of his journals had been steadily declining since the beginning of the trip. On our first day in Logar, he had a green hard cover with a clasp and a lock and everything. Eventually, he went from hard cover to soft cover to torn cover. Now he was writing his notes into the same type of raggedy UNICEF booklet that I sometimes pretended to use for schoolwork.

  “Your last will and testament?” I asked.

  He rolled up his booklet, tucked it into his pants, and retightened his partug’s knot.

  “How about you toss me the notebook first,” I said, “just in case it slips out your pants.”

  He declined.

  “All right,” I said, “but don’t blame me when your notebook falls out your pant leg and the wind catches it and tears up all its pages, sending your secrets all across Logar, to the mosques and the mulla
hs, to all the houses and the hajis, to the pretty girls.”

  He went ahead and made the leap—his notebook still intact, tucked safely near his balls, where he knew no one could get at it. Up in the branches of the mulberry tree, we plopped toot into our mouths, picked at the old bullets stuck in the bark, and chatted about the fun we might be having at Moor’s house. Even though the toot was bitter (from the bullets, Gwora suggested, which had been embedded in the bark since the early eighties), we ate just as many mulberries as we could before it got to be too much for our bellies. Ten berries for me. Fourteen or so for Gwora. And only five for Mirwais because his diarrhea wouldn’t let up. To be honest, I shouldn’t have let him eat any berries at all, but if he got sick again, Agha might feel obligated to bring us back to Moor’s house. There was always a chance.

  After we ate the berries, me and my brothers climbed down the trunk of the mulberry tree and landed on the free earth for the first time in what felt like a hundred years. To the left, I saw a thin dirt trail, which led out onto the main road in Logar and which, if we walked it for a bit, maybe asking for directions, might lead us all the way back to Moor’s house. To the right, I knew, the trail wrapped around the house and eventually fell into the bank of this beautiful little stream. Acres and acres of fields rolled out in front of us, and in the distance loomed the black mountains. They stood lonely and proud. No planes. No bombs. No Americans.

  I picked a single dirty toot off the ground and plopped it into my mouth, knowing that I was going to mess up my guts. Then I walked out onto those fields in the direction of the black mountains.

  “Where are you going?” Gwora called out.

  My brothers hadn’t followed me. They stood near the trunk of the tree. No berries in their hands.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Where?”

  I looked back on the mountains. “We could go to Moor’s house.”

  “Moor’s house is that way,” Gwora said, pointing to the left.

  “This is the scenic route.”

  “You can’t tell one route from the other.”

  I stood on this upraised trail, a little wall running in between these two fields of grain, and both of these fields, I knew, belonged to my father, which in a way also meant they belonged to me. That’s how it went in Logar. Lands passed from father to son, father to son, from father to son to father again.

  “Wallah,” I said, getting a little desperate, “we won’t get too far. We’ll keep the compound in sight, and as soon as it gets small, we turn back. Or we’ll head to Moor’s house. Or I’ll show you the way to Watak’s marker. You just run along this stream. And across the stream is the maze. And between the stream and the maze is the marker. Do you see?”

  Gwora and Mirwais stayed underneath the mulberry tree, just staring.

  “Wallah,” I went on, “we won’t stray. And you can sketch a map as we go. I mean, how we going to get lost with a mapmaker in tow?”

  But instead of an answer, I was met with the distinct chugging of a Corolla’s engine, followed closely by the scraping of the big gate to Agha’s compound. We scurried back up the tree as quickly as we could, leapt from branch to roof to the second floor to Agha’s room, and by the time our visitors actually walked into Agha’s section of the compound, we were already lying down on our toshaks, pretending to read and write. And that’s how our visitors found us, strewn about the room, sweating and dusty, trying hard not to breathe heavy.

  Our visitors stood around for a bit, immediately sensing, I thought, that something was off about the picture we laid out for them. From the corner of my eye, I could make out Rahmutallah Maamaa and two other ladies clad in burqas. I was sure one of them was Moor, but I couldn’t say which one exactly.

  “What were you boys doing?” Moor said, revealing herself.

  I looked up, acting surprised to see her. “Just reading,” I said.

  “By yourselves?” She came up to Mirwais and wiped the dust from his forehead. “Where’s your father?” she said.

  “Business,” Gwora said.

  Moor looked to Rahmutallah. “He’s left them with Malang.”

  “Then where’s Malang?” he said.

  “Probably high,” Nabeela answered just as she was taking off her own burqa.

  Moor whispered to Nabeela in Farsi and they went back and forth for a bit. Meanwhile, Rahmutallah stood up and looked out the window onto Agha’s courtyard. He asked us what sort of work he’d been doing.

  “Everything,” I said. “He lays mud, bakes bricks, he’s been repainting the rooms, replanting the flowers and the beans. He’s been digging canals for the water too. And he’s building up a new shelter for the grain.”

  “It’s taking him a while.”

  “He doesn’t have as many helpers,” Gwora said.

  “You boys haven’t been helping your father?”

  “We do when we can,” I said.

  “I bet the hash-head has done nothing,” Nabeela said.

  “Nabeela, for the love of God,” Moor said in Pakhto, “can you keep anything in your mouth?”

  “But Nabeela Khala is right. He doesn’t do anything, and he’s never here,” I said, and just as I did, Nabeela spotted Malang through the window. She put her burqa back on, but Moor didn’t because this house was, in a way, as much her own as it was Agha’s.

  When he walked into the room, Malang gave Moor and Nabeela one long stare before gradually looking away, down at the floor, and back up at me and Gwora and Mirwais, and then finally resting his eyes where they were supposed to be: on Rahmutallah’s big hairy hands.

  For the rest of the conversation, he didn’t look at the ladies.

  “Salamoonaa,” he drawled.

  Rahmutallah said Walaikum. Nabeela said nothing. And Moor skipped the greeting altogether, asking him straight up where he’d been and why he wasn’t watching over her sons like he was supposed to. Malang ignored her question and asked Rahmutallah how he was doing and if he was thirsty or hungry. When Rahmutallah Maamaa repeated Moor’s question, Malang claimed that he was gone for only a few minutes, helping an old shepherd slaughter a flock of his sheep.

  “Just after Maamaa leaves,” he began, “a shepherd comes knocking on our gate, weeping to me that a whole flock of his sheep have been crippled. So I go out and see what he’s talking about, and the old man takes me to this clearing of grain, where he shows me a whole flock of his livestock, maybe twenty or so sheep, and each one of them has got one of its hooves torn off at the base, so that it can’t trot no more. The same hoof for every single sheep too.”

  The adhan for Jumu’ah prayer rang out from the nearest mosque, and so Malang stopped and waited, looking annoyed that it had interrupted him or else just trying really hard to remember the rest of his story.

  “Which hoof was it?” I said.

  “The right one,” he said, “the front right hoof on every sheep was cut away. So all these sheep are crippled in this field, bleeding and yelping, and the shepherd offers me a portion of the meat to help him halal them.”

  Malang went on to explain that just a little while after he helped out the shepherd, on his way back to the compound, he spotted a bricklayer crying over his own crippled donkey, whose right hoof was also stripped clean at the bone, and after that he came upon a farmer whose entire coop of chickens were missing their right talons, and then he came upon a hobbled steer and even a cow. All of them with the right leg torn up to shreds.

  “With a knife?” Rahmutallah said.

  “Looked like teeth to me.”

  Rahmutallah didn’t say anything. Neither did anyone else. Malang seemed so content with the silence, his eyes drifting up toward the roof or toward the window, I became suspicious of his calm. After a while, Rahmutallah finally looked to Moor and asked her what she wanted to do with her boys.

  “Let’s bring them back,”
she said.

  “What about Agha?” I said.

  “We’ll meet your father at the mosque for Jumu’ah prayer,” Rahmutallah said.

  “No, you won’t,” Malang said. “They pray early at Alo’s mosque. You’re going to be late.”

  “Why didn’t you warn us?” Moor said.

  Malang shrugged.

  “We won’t be late,” Rahmutallah said, and stood up.

  But we were.

  Rahmutallah, Malang, Gwora, Mirwais, and me walked in during the second rakat of the Fard prayer, just as everyone was bending down to make sujud. The mosque was filled to the brim, so we had to slip to the very back, with our butts up against the mud wall. When I knelt in tashuhud I glanced up from my knees and tried to find the back of Agha’s head in the rows of worshippers, but I couldn’t remember what color kameez he wore that morning.

  After the prayer, the imam stood up in the front of the mosque, asking for donations to repair the wiring in the minaret so that they could reinstall the loudspeaker.

  “As it is, brothers,” the imam called out, “the families near the river can hardly hear us.”

  Me and my brothers went around looking for Agha as Rahmutallah and Malang were busy saying their salaams to neighbors and friends. I went from one big-bearded Logari to the next, anticipating the face of my father, his beard, his smile, and just when I thought I wasn’t going to find him, I heard what I thought was his voice and felt on my shoulder what I thought was his hand. But it was a stranger: a red-bearded, blue-eyed Sufi.