99 Nights in Logar

by Jamil Jan Kochai

  The current had slowed since the morning, and because neither I nor Budabash wanted to go back to Moor’s house, we swam in the opposite direction—toward the black mountains. At least, I tried to swim. I kept up with Budabash for only a minute or two before he began to carry me forward. With one hand I held onto the flag, and with the other I clung to Budabash’s throat, and though his strength seemed to wane, he still pushed on against the dying current, this huge mean beast, this wolf or dog or both, this thing that could not be stopped.

  In time, he brought me all the way back to the great iron doors of Agha’s compound, and it was upon these doors that Agha sat in a manner very similar to Zia. When he saw me, Agha jumped feetfirst into the water, swam forward with tremendous strides, and yanked us both toward the compound. Budabash gave in to Agha’s pull almost immediately, and once we got to the top of the roof, Agha wrapped me up in the most terrible bear hug. He pressed me to his rough flesh as if he meant to absorb my skin, which was more calloused and hard and dark than it ever was. But, Wallah, even beaten and fried and burned and cut and sick and dizzy and skinny and toughened and with hair in my pits and arms and the backs of my fingers, still I felt soft in the arms of my Agha.

  I let go of the flag.

  Eventually, after much sobbing, praying, kissing, laughing, shouting, Agha carried me and Budabash to the corner of the compound closest to the black mountains, just behind Nikeh’s mulberry tree, where he set us down, one on each side of him. We sat there together, the three of us soaked and weary, and we looked out onto the flooded fields of trash and bones, drying our skin in the sun, even Budabash, who by then had shed so much of his coat, he was more skin than fur.

  Agha had not collected a single bone.

  After he examined my torn finger, which, he noted, should’ve healed by now, Agha asked me for the story of my disappearance.

  “There are mountains of bones underneath the Kaleh,” I said.

  “I’ve heard the stories.”

  “When?”

  “After we left Logar, when we got to Pakistan, I heard rumors about the tunnels. The massacres. I didn’t care. Our compound was destroyed. My cousins, my half-sister, my little nephews and nieces, and all the good mujahideen were dead.”

  “And Watak?” I asked.

  The black mountains huddled quietly at the edges of the valley. They too, I thought, must have been listening.

  “And Watak,” Agha said.

  “He has his flag,” I said, pointing to Budabash.

  A single corner of the tattered red cloth still hung from the old dog’s mouth.

  First, Agha attempted to coax Budabash into opening his jaw by rubbing his head, and then he tried to pull the flag out through the gaps in Budabash’s fangs. When that failed, he dug his fingers into the dog’s mouth and tried to tear open his jaw by force. But Budabash must have been part crocodile. He refused to budge.

  After he noticed that I was peering at him in his efforts to retrieve the flag, Agha cradled my sut and covered my eyes and rested my head down onto his lap, and then, while grazing the skin of my forehead with the shattered nail of his thumb, he did something to Budabash I could not see.

  Agha’s partug was thin and wet, and though the water in the linen sloshed about in my ear, I could still hear the beat of his heart through a vein in his thigh, and I felt his muscles tense, and I heard him or Budabash grunt and strain, and the whole time my eyes were open. Red light shone through the dark of his small hands.

  A few moments later, his muscles relaxed and he lifted his fingers from my eyes.

  I sat up and looked away from Agha and Budabash.

  Down the road or the stream from which I came, I could see, or thought I could see, a woman in her burqa, floating on a raft. Behind her were many more women in burqas, on rafts, paddling forward. At that moment, Agha wiped at his eyes and his cheeks with the torn cloth of his dead brother’s marker. He could not see that the ladies were coming, and that they would be here soon, and that they might (if Allah willed it) save us from this country, which was drowning. It was only then—with Budabash asleep or dead, with Watak’s flag dripping in his fingers, with my moor and khalas floating toward us, with Abdul-Abdul waiting for the soldiers, with Zia afraid, Gul confused, and Dawood hungry for the scent of white poppies, with Rahmutallah and Baba knocked out, with Nabeela still péeghla, with Abo weakened and weary, with my brothers together someplace far away, with the ghost of my finger still wailing, with my dark skin drying in the face of the sun—that Agha finally decided to tell me the story of Watak.

  It went like this:

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  On the Ninety-Ninth Day

  After Allah dried the flood, and after the village came together to bury the bones and repave the roads and rebuild the melted walls, and after I begged every single member in my family for forgiveness, and after they all forgave me because the news of my life reversed all their bad omens (Rahmutallah and Baba woke up and the butcher’s family visited and Nabeela’s wedding was replanned and nothing was suspected of Gul and the Americans never arrived and not a single shepherd died anywhere in Naw’e Kaleh), and after we searched for, but never found, Budabash’s body, my little brothers led me to the secret location of Gwora’s hidden journals.

  They had buried them in the spot where Budabash once slept.

  Early in the morning of our last day in Logar, the three of us got up before everyone else (even Rahmutallah) and we dug up the remnants of the pages, which had more or less disintegrated, so that we were mostly digging up the mud the pages had been lost in. We gathered some of this mud into little plastic bags and hid them in our luggage. Because the roads were still pretty wet, no taxis could get into Naw’e Kaleh, and so me and pretty much all of my relatives in Logar made one last march through the village. We marched past the fields and the laborers still at work in the fields. We marched through the mazes still dripping of mud, and we marched past the orchards and the floating apples and the broke-down electric poles and the remnants of the cement road the government was still trying to build, and at the outskirts of Wagh Jan, we—that is, me and Moor and Agha and my brothers—tried very hard not to cry.

  Then we cried.

  Saying our final salaams, the men wiped their eyes with shame, while Abo and the ladies wept proudly. Dawood saluted me the way Abdul-Abdul had taught him. Gul held my good hand, and Zia recited a final dua for my family.

  He prayed that Allah would lighten the hardships of our journey, and that we would travel safely on the road, and that one day, Inshallah, we would all return home.

  “For surely,” he concluded, “unto Allah we are returning.”

  Ameen.

  On our way out of the country, near the borders of Logar, our taxi was stopped at a checkpoint by a squadron of American soldiers very similar to the ones who died in the maze. They might have been clones. The soldiers searched Agha and the driver and found them clean. Then, somehow spotting me through the dust of the back seat’s window, the soldiers asked me to step out of the vehicle. Moor and Agha shouted about us being citizens, about me being a child—being harmless—but I wasn’t so sure.

  Three of the soldiers surrounded our taxi, just in front of these concrete slabs, and while one soldier opened my door and helped me down from my seat, guiding me to the edge of the road, another soldier—their translator—tried to calm Agha. Facing out toward the dry lands and the faraway mountains, I raised my arms and the soldier ran his hands up and down my waist and legs and crotch. Then he turned me around. I still wore my kameez, and it had many pockets. He searched them all but found only hair and fur and dirt and blue strands of cloth. Near the end of the pat-down, the soldier asked about my bandaged finger.

  “If your father hurt you,” he whispered in English, “you can tel
l me.”

  Like all the other soldiers, he wore a helmet and shades, and in the reflection of his glasses I could see me standing against the backdrop of the dry lands.

  “Na,” I said in Pakhto, “it was me.”

  And almost immediately afterward, I made the mistake of looking toward my brothers. First Gwora. Then Mirwais. Once they saw me seeing them, my brothers snuck out the other side of the taxi, came around the back, and with their hands in the air, they demanded to be searched as well.

  The soldiers wouldn’t obey. Instead, they let us leave.

  Near Maghrib, just as we got to the Khyber Pass within the White Mountains, our taxi ran into a mass of traffic. Buses and trucks and Humvees and donkeys and shepherds and flocks of sheep and rickshaws and packs of dogs and hustlers selling candies out of wheelbarrows and broke-wing robins and Kabuli commandos and pockmarked addicts and Uzbeki goat drivers and cartloads of djinn and Tajik butchers and Kochi tribeswomen and howling roosters and American robots and armless Sufis praying for the grace of their legs and weeping virgins and carsick kiddies and militiamen drunk on gasoline and big-bearded imams and the oldest of OGs and maybe even the shadow of a wolf or two, and it was in the middle of this commotion, this jumble of a migration, that my brothers asked me for the true story of how I lost Budabash.

  We sat in the back of the van, and even though we bobbed up and down with the cuts on the road, I didn’t feel sick. Just very tired. The driver slept and Agha drove. Moor sat up front with him. They whispered to each other, maybe arguing, maybe telling secrets.

  “Look here,” I said to my brothers, and bringing my right hand up into the shine of a truck’s headlight, I unwrapped the gauze from my torn finger, which had yet to heal, and just as I did, its ghost woke up and started to writhe and howl at the end of my wound.

  “Do you see it?” I asked. “Do you see?”

  They did.

  They swore on the name of Allah—the ever merciful, the all-knowing, the timeless—that they saw.

  Acknowledgments

  Alhamdulillah, many generous and talented individuals played a crucial role in the formation of this novel, so I have a lot of people to thank.

  First off, Yiyun Li. Without her, this novel as a novel would not exist. She was absolutely instrumental to its foundation, its development, and its publication. Doug Rice, my first mentor, for being a constant source of support and wisdom. Hellen Lee and David Toise for your early collegiate guidance. Thank you to Lucy Corin, Pam Houston, Joe Wenderoth, Parama Roy, and my entire cohort at UC Davis, but especially Ryan Horner and Zach Kennedy-Lopez, who helped me to figure out the timeline of this story. Lan Samantha Chang and Justin Torres for your sage advice and generosity. Amy Goldman for persuading me to take my first creative writing class in high school. The Truman Capote Literary Trust, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Writing By Writers Workshop, the UC Davis Creative Writing Program, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference for providing me with time and space to write. Jin Auh, my agent, and Laura Tisdel, my editor, for promoting this novel as valiantly and tirelessly as you have. Thank you to both teams at Wylie and Viking. Alexa von Hirschberg, Faiza Khan, and Nicole Winstanley for making my novel an international project. Brigid Hughes, Megan Cummins, and the entire staff at A Public Space for publishing my first short story when I was just a starving grad student. Brandon Taylor and Pam Zhang for helping me fix those first few chapters. A huge manana and a tashakor to Almas Farooqi Lodin, Weeda Azim, Homaira Faquiryan, Haroun Dada, and Sarah Rahimi for being my resident Afghan advisors. Your encouragement and critique were deeply needed and deeply appreciated. Tanzeen Doha and Mohammed Harun Arsalai for their efforts in promoting the novel. A special, special thanks to Muneeza Rizvi, whose seal of approval was absolutely essential to the conclusion of this project.

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  Now, to thank the people who I really shouldn’t need to thank because they’re family and this is their job, but I’ll thank them anyway just so there’s no beef. Asila Nassem for your translations and Salim Nassem for your enthusiasm. Thank you to Namra Kochai for being an early reader/supporter. Rana and Breshna for your secretarial support. Marwand Kochai for letting me use your name and not making a big deal about it ever. No, but really, your thoughts and critiques have been both unexpected and very precious to me. Jalil Kochai, my first editor, promoter, publicist, manager, and reader. This book belongs to you too. Nazifa, zma shireena khazi, deera manana. Your support has brought a newfound joy to my life. Thank you, Athai, for your stories. Finally, to Moor o Agha, you have been such a great mercy upon my life. Though I don’t deserve all your sabr and your love, I pray that I will never cower in the face of it.

  Ultimately, all praise be to Allah (subḥānahu wa-ta‘ālā).

  About the Author

  Jamil Jan Kochai was born in Pakistan and grew up in the United States. He has a master's in English from University of California, Davis and a bachelor's degree in English from California State University, Sacramento. He is currently attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has been published in A Public Space and The Capilano Review.