99 Nights in Logar

by Jamil Jan Kochai

  “Adam himself fled the mountains out of fear, leapt back into the waters, and surely would have drowned had he not been swallowed by a whale, whose dreams he interpreted for many years as a form of rent. Eventually, though, the whale found a lover, the only other whale on the earth, and the whale’s lover demanded solitude in their intimacy, and so the whale—with great apologies—spat Adam back onto the land, which was now filled with many humans and animals and forests and languages, none of which Adam could speak, and so he traveled the dark of the lands, and on his way back to his mother, Hawa, he met his sister, Hawa, whom he came to love, but who never returned that love, understanding it to have become a sin by then; but because he was her brother, from time to time, she still saved him from the many calamities he faced.

  “Hawa saved Adam from the Vikings who ate his fingers in the woods and the Crusaders who raped him in a mosque and the French who cut off his toes in a tent and the Spanish who stretched his limbs on a rack and the English who starved him in a dungeon and the Communists who shocked his testicles in an underground bunker and the Americans who experimented on his brains, in a shed, near the Mississippi River. Tiring of the pain of his life, one day Adam stole away into a cave within the same mountain where his father once attempted to sacrifice him for killing his own father, and there, in the dark of the cave, Adam was met by an angel who taught him—at the very end of his life—how to read. The burden of this gift was too heavy for him to bear and so he shared it with Hawa, whom he still loved but who was by then married with many children, and she taught each of these children to read the script of God that the angel had given Adam. Some of them took heed and some of them forgot and some of them were led astray by Shaytan, who, through the many years of his rotten existence still had not forgiven Adam for coming to life.”

  * * *

  —

  After I finished, I challenged the wolf to tell a story more miraculous than mine. But when he opened his jaw to speak, he freed my arm and made me stumble backward, just a step or two, and with those little steps, I dislodged a few bones from the top of the hill, and those bones dislodged a few others, so that before the wolf had a chance to tell his wondrous tale, the hill began to collapse beneath us, and we both fell with the bones and the water; and as I stumbled and rolled, and as the great torrents of water poured forth from all the corners of the dark, I realized that the hill of bones wasn’t just a hill but a dam, and that Budabash was its builder, its caretaker, and its final stone.

  I slipped into black water, and for what seemed like a long time, I tumbled in the darkness of the tunnels with the bones and the weapons and the mud. Eventually, I rose up from its depths shouting a name in the middle of the flood, in the maze, in Logar. I shouted once, breathed deeply, and fell back under the water. I did not know how to float. The flood carried me through the pathways of the maze as I tried to cling to the walls and lift myself up. But it was no good. I clung and slipped and fell back under. Once. Twice. Three times. And it was only after the fourth time I lifted myself and fell that I was able to grab on to the limb of a floating carcass.

  It was a soldier. The would-be commander of the white boys on the road. The one who spoke to me in English. The one who threatened me. He was dead. He was dead and still and he floated. So I hooked one arm around his neck and the other about his torso and I tried very hard not to look at his face or to smell his stink or to touch his rotting skin. In this way, we floated along the watery corridors of the maze until the legs of the soldier bumped up against one half of an aluminum gate floating flat upon the water. Using the soldier as leverage, I pulled myself up onto the big green gate, lay back on the wet aluminum surface, and looked up into the sky, which was cloudless and so sunny it was more white than blue.

  Afterward, I vomited for so long I passed out.

  On the Ninety-Eighth Morning

  When I woke up, I was flat on the sheet of aluminum without weapon, without kameez or partug, and I stank of vomit. The dead soldier was gone. Eaten, I supposed, by the waters. The flood had calmed as quickly as it came, but the maze and the compounds were still drowning. I floated along for a bit, swaying back and forth, but I didn’t feel woozy at all. No nausea. No bubbles in my gut. Then, after I sniffed deep from the mud and the water, my vision became clear. I saw all the roads and the channels of Logar unfurling before me. So I washed my raft and myself, and I set about looking for a way to get back. Back to Moor and Agha and my brothers. Baba and Abo. My khalas and maamaas. My cousins.

  In the waters of the flood, there were many bones, and the ones that floated near me, I collected into four equal piles on each side of my raft. Along with the bones floated garbage. Plastic bottles and tin cans and dead flowers and, occasionally, there was even shit. The shit of animals and the shit of men, and it all floated together. Sometimes I had to pick the trash from the bones or I had to wash the shit out of a skull. I collected so many bones, my raft began to sink with the weight, and so I became more selective. I traded. When I saw a skull or a rib, I grabbed it quickly and with abandon, nearly falling a few times. But I almost always tossed back the teeth and the legs. Unless, of course, it seemed like a particularly small bone. Those I kept.

  Eventually, I floated past some shreds of cloth, which I hoped did not belong to the dead, though they probably did, but as desperate as I was in my near nakedness, I took them up anyway and wrapped these shreds around my waist and my chest. The cleanest cloth I tied about the small wounds of the bite in my forearm. My finger still bled and I let the drops fall into the water.

  Near the middle of the maze, or what I thought might be the middle of the maze, I found a small shovel that I used as an oar. The height of the waters let me peek above the walls of the compounds, which made it easier to navigate all the way back to Watak’s mulberry tree. There, the water sloped on toward Moor’s house and carried me, I thought, where I needed to go.

  Once I got out of the maze, I started to see families sitting up on the roofs of their compounds. I rowed on by, nearly naked, looking to see if anyone anywhere might need some help from me and my makeshift raft, but in general the Logarian wanted to know if they could help me instead. One family offered me food, which I accepted and which they tossed to me in a basket. The next family had an extra pair of dried clothes, which they hurled to me in a ball and which I immediately dropped in the water. I shouted a long series of apologies, but I don’t think they could hear me over their own laughter. I laughed a little too.

  Luckily, the next family also offered me clothes, but they could sacrifice only a kameez without the partug, and this I caught and wore, and though the kameez was about four sizes too big—so that the leman came down to my calves as if I were wearing a short dress—I was just happy not to be naked in front of all the girls, who hid behind their veils but still seemed to be watching me in my journey. One family offered me tea, another family offered me naswar, another offered me cookies, and another offered me apples, and one particularly observant old woman tossed me a bucket.

  “Mother,” I shouted, “but this is empty.”

  “It won’t be.”

  And she was right.

  On my raft, in the flood, with all of the world up on their roofs, I was the guest of every villager and not a single family wanted to disappoint. Each of the families had their own piles of bones. The kids fished them out with nets and brooms, and some of the neighbors got into small arguments over who could lay claim to which bone. Of course, it amounted to nothing. The bones belonged to whoever could find them.

  I went on with my rowing, wanting to repay the village for its kindness but unable to find a single person to save. In fact, I started spotting other men in makeshift boats, also searching for the wounded or the dead. Some of them rowed by in crates and on aluminum sheets and wheelbarrows or coffins. One group of men—I think they were road builders—drifted by on a long raft made from several wooden poles. The rowers used brooms and pans and
drums as paddles. They shouted for their brothers and sisters and they seemed so sad to hear no reply. When I asked another would-be rescuer how many had died in the flood, he informed me that as far as he knew Allah had not taken a single soul.

  “Subhanallah,” I said.

  He sighed and seemed to agree.

  Right about the time I was getting pretty close to Moor’s house, a few of the families up on the roofs started calling out the adhan. The call traveled from one house to another, so that even with all the mosques drowned in the flood, the entire village was now praying together. I crossed the paths of a hundred prayers and said astaghfirullah a hundred times so that I did not transform into a monkey. Out on the roofs, all of the villagers of Naw’e Kaleh, the ladies and the men, the adults and the kids, prayed above the rising waters.

  Well, all of them except for one.

  When I finally drifted in toward Moor’s compound, the only person to spot me was Zia. The tide of the flood stopped a few feet from the tops of the walls, and the wooden poles were all drowned. While everyone else in Moor’s family, including Gul, who looked healthy and strong and without any sign of a wound, prayed the Dhuhr Salah in a congregation, Zia sat by himself on the edge of the wall closest to the big blue gate. His clothes were dripping. He looked so light in the sun, he seemed transparent. Or like he was on the verge of disappearing.

  I paddled up to him quietly.

  He greeted me with a slow salaam, almost as if he’d been expecting me to arrive just as I was: standing on one half of an aluminum gate, wearing a giant’s kameez, with four piles of bones surrounding me on all sides.

  He asked me where I’d been, and I told him bits and pieces of the story of my journey, but I didn’t mention the tunnel or what I found at the end.

  “We thought you died,” Zia said.

  “Wallah?”

  “They still do. Everyone except your parents and your brothers knew you were dead.”

  “And now you,” I said, almost about to smile, but Zia seemed so grim, so tired and lonely, I didn’t dare.

  “And now me,” he said.

  After scanning the backs of the worshippers once, twice, four, or five times in a few seconds, I asked Zia for the whereabouts of Agha. But before he told me that, he told me everything else.

  The Tale of the Flood and the Missing Musafir

  It turned out that Gul and Dawood hadn’t been caught, and that Gul hadn’t been hit, and that he collapsed on the trail that day only because he thought he was killed and needed to weep for his life. Dawood and him managed to escape thanks to Zia, who secretly snuck in with us just in case we fucked up like we did. In spite of his efforts, I still ended up ruining poor Nabeela’s wedding. As soon as my brothers noted my disappearance and brought it to the attention of Agha, who brought it to the attention of Moor, who brought it to the attention of every single guest in the wedding, the festivities fell apart. They searched for me all day long and then well into the night, but sometime very late during the first night of my disappearance, the usual rumbling from the black mountains was greeted with a series of firebombs in the valley. Quite a few of the dams in Naw’e Kaleh were destroyed. The rivers and the canals filled with water from the mountain springs until they poured forth onto the roads and the fields and the secret tunnels of bones hidden beneath the roads and the compounds. Agha and his people were out searching for me near the butcher’s house on the higher plains of the village while my maamaas scoured Naw’e Kaleh. They were almost swept away in the first rush of flood. Rahmutallah Maamaa and Baba nearly drowned. Meanwhile, Abo had gone mad with faith in the omens of the flood, and she would not say or do anything except to pray for the souls of her only husband and her eldest son, who were still breathing, barely breathing, but still. So with the village flooded and with Rahmutallah and Baba knocked out and with no sign of where to search or where to go, Abdul-Abdul took charge of the family. His first order was that no one could leave the roof. Apparently, he had been attempting to call his contacts within the military the whole morning. He promised a helicopter would arrive within the hour, and although Zia didn’t think anyone believed him, no one in the family denied him, either. He was now, technically, the eldest son.

  * * *

  —

  “Your father is still out searching for you,” Zia said. “He must be swimming from compound to compound. We haven’t seen him in a while, Marwand. I don’t know.”

  Gul said the takbirat in a booming voice. I thought it was odd that Abdul-Abdul didn’t lead the prayer. The whole family bowed down into sujud. Zia’s six sisters were at the very end of the group. They all wore purple chadors.

  “When the family is done praying,” I said, “tell them that I’m alive.”

  “They won’t believe me, Marwand. I hardly believe me.”

  “Tell them that I’m going to find my father.”

  “Your moor will cut off my hands when she finds out I let you go.”

  “Tell her you tried to stop me.”

  “How?”

  “Maybe you invoked Allah. Maybe you begged me for the sake of my moor and my brothers and for the family as a whole. Maybe you bargained with me. Maybe you leapt into the waters. Maybe you nearly drowned.”

  Gul said the takbirat again. Moor’s family bowed into ruku. Gwora and Mirwais stood on the edge of the roof closest to the flooded courtyard. I wondered if Gwora’s notebooks survived. I wondered where he might have saved them.

  “It’s the last rakat,” Zia said, and at that moment, he looked so scrawny and hungry, so wet and meek, I might have stayed behind just to watch him eat a few apples, which, I realized, were floating in the pool of the orchard just behind him. The chickens and the donkey were walking about on the roof of the cow’s pen. But there were no cows.

  “My father was not there,” Zia said. “We couldn’t pull them up without him. Dawood almost broke his arms yanking at the rope. And when I saw that the cows were going to drown, I jumped into the water. They had their snouts raised up for air, and I held one of their necks and looked into its eye. At first, all I could see was its terror. But as I kept peering, I realized that I wasn’t really seeing into the eye of the cow at all. It was my own face. My own fear.

  “Marwand, ever since that night on the road beneath the mulberry tree, all day and night all I think about is how God will punish me. Or. How He won’t. That scares me too. That scares me more. But Marwand, Wallah, the cows weren’t scared. They were dying, and they knew they were dying, but they were at peace. There was no hate in them. No doubt. They didn’t even cry. They just breathed until they couldn’t. The waters rose until it stopped. I was the only one floating.”

  The family sat in tashuhud. Their prayer was almost finished.

  “Zia,” I said, “if they see me . . .”

  “I know, Marwand. Go and find your father. May Allah return him to you.”

  “And yours too,” I said quietly, and began to drift back the way I came. But before I got too far, I turned around and asked Zia to make a dua for me. He raised his hands up to his face, over his eyes, and all I could see were his lips.

  They seemed to be counting.

  In my search for Agha, I collected no bones or trash or trinkets, and even when the carcasses of livestock—sheep and donkeys and cows and a dog or two—began to float upon the surface of the waters, I paid them no attention and went on paddling and scanning the rivers and the roofs for any sign of my father. Then, just as I was returning to Watak’s flooded marker, I spotted Budabash in one of the highest branches of Watak’s mulberry tree. He lay on his belly, slumped across the branch like a sleepy ape or a lizard.

  I wasn’t going to touch him.

  Wallah, I was sick and tired of our war, which I could not win and would not lose.

  But when I drifted underneath the mouth of the dog, I saw Watak’s red flag hanging from his ugly rotting
teeth. And without another thought, I leapt from the raft onto the tree, clinging to one of the lower branches, and like this I climbed up from one branch to the next as my raft floated softly away.

  The tree was wet with flood, and so it took me a few minutes to scramble all the way up to the highest branch where Budabash slept. In the light of day, and as close as I was, I finally got to see what Budabash had done to himself. With his fur spotted in many patches, the hundred scars stretching from his long white burn were no longer hidden. All about his body, his back and legs and belly, these lighter scars ran in and around one another, marking out, I thought, the shape of another maze.

  I clung to the branch and dragged myself forward on my belly, stopping every few inches to make sure the wolf didn’t wake. Then we lay face-to-face. His mouth and snout were covered in toot. His breath was ragged and stank of ash. He did not stir. Occasionally, his shoulders seemed to lift in breath, but he did not smell me or see me or know, I thought, that I was there. Lifting my right hand, I reached for the flag in his teeth, gripped it tightly, and yanked as hard as I could, so that, of course, as these things tend to go, I yanked us both off the branch and down into the waters.

  As we fell and hit the flood, and as we floated amid the bones and the flowers and the dark, dark mud, I never let go of the flag still stuck in his teeth. Even after he woke, even after he struggled against me, thrashing in the water, swinging with his claws, which weren’t really claws so much as they were nails, just nails, scratching my skin but not able to bleed me like he would have been able to do when he was young and strong and a great killer.

  So there we were, in the heart of the waters, both of us clinging dearly to Watak’s flag without either of us knowing (or caring) why the other one wanted it with such a terrible faith. Neither I nor Budabash had the heart to drown, to give up our little beating lives, and so we floated together, him dog-paddling with all four legs and me doing a sort of one-armed sidestroke, sort of being carried (to be honest) but still trying to put in work, so that Budabash couldn’t go off one day and tell all the other wolves and the beasts of the country that he’d saved me from the waters.