His aims and plans seemed to be wandering through alien channels like those narrow, high-walled, white-walled streets of Peshawar, in which men in cotton-white passed white-veiled women. He went out that night to get a fruit drink (which later made him urinate blood). On the way back, a crowd of Pakistanis surrounded him. They had been watching him day after day. They asked where he was going, what he was doing, where he was from. And why didn’t he stay in a youth hostel? They could have arranged “a better reception for him there.” —The Young Man said that he was happy with his reception here. — Why wasn’t he going to India? — He didn’t have much money, he said, and anyhow he only wanted to see Pakistan. — Oh, was he applying to his government for assistance in returning home? — No. —Why not? (And, by the way, the youth hostel was cheaper.) —“Don’t you want me here?” said the Young Man. — Oh no, it wasn’t that at all. But it might be very dangerous for him here, so near the border. — Now the conversation shifted to another topic with which he was already familiar: Could they get visas to the U.S.A.? — The Young Man said that that was very hard; so they had told him at the consulate. — Well, could he get them visas to the U.S.A.? — No, he said. — But he was satisfied with his reception here, he’d said? — Yes, thank you; everyone was very kind. — Well, then wasn’t he very selfish not to help them? They turned their backs on him. — When he lost his temper, they said that they had only been joking. — “Friend! Friend!” they cried.
…Yusuf Ali touched the Young Man’s neck and asked him when he would be crossing the border. The Young Man wrote in his diary: “What’s so special about me, anyway? Well, if he just wants to scare me, or to try to paw me, I can handle that, but I don’t like the idea of arrest and confiscation.” —He decided that maybe he should show Yusuf Ali some friendliness, and try to find out what was going on. So he asked him out for a walk the next day. Yusuf Ali rubbed his hands together and agreed. But the next morning, when the Young Man went to knock on his door, there was no answer. The proprietor said that Yusuf Ali had left for good at four that morning. — The Young Man decided to change his hotel. But he never got around to it. The police never came, anyhow. He saw the same people on the street every day. The Swiss-Rhodesian had gone away.
(“So what makes you think that I am C.I.A.?” he had once asked Yusuf Ali. “My tapes, my film?” —“No, no,” said Yusuf Ali. “My dear friend, it is in the lines of your hand; I can read hands, you see.”)
In the afternoons he sometimes saw the young soldiers marching and marching along the street. — “It is only a matter of time before the Roos, they come here to Pakistan,” a man told him. “Then we must be ready with our jihad. Even now they are in Peshawar, the K.G.B., and there is shootings. Their planes, they fly every day over Peshawar.”
The Young Man now took a trip to the Khyber Pass, so that he could say that he had been there. At the border, they told him, you could wave to the Soviet guard and he would wave back. You could take a picture. Alas, he did not get to the border. The bus took him across the desert and up into the cracked red mountains. Dust blasted in through the open windows and swept through the bus as they went. At one checkpoint there were boys selling water through the windows of the bus. The water came in old motor-oil cans; after you drank you returned the can. The Young Man’s seatmate bought him some; it tasted wonderful. They kept going up into the hills. They passed three women in black chadors squatting together under a tree, like resting crows. When the bus entered the tribal area, some of the men began to chew their hashish. The Young Man’s neighbor gave him a pinch, and showed him how it was done. At Landi Kotal, an evil little town of ancient, low-roofed houses, he had to change buses. He was five kilometers away from Torkham, the border town. The bus to the border was an old station wagon. All the passengers were nomadic tribespeople: old men with snow-white beards, children carrying chickens, red-robed women with long braids and silver earrings who wore no veils. They could barely understand his Pushtu. — “Kabul?” they said. — The Young Man shook his head. — “Torkham. All you, Kabul?” —“Kabul, yes.” —A boy tried to sell him opium, but his father slapped him. — Halfway to Torkham there was a customs check. The officials poked the grain sacks with sticks and looked around. When they saw the Young Man, they stopped dead and began to shout. Then they pulled him off the bus. — The Young Man, feeling as usual that blitheness was his best defense, told the other passengers goodbye with a wave and a smile, but they looked at him in silence. The bus went on to Kabul. — Inside the dugout, they looked at his passport very carefully. He acted like an American, asking them to let him take pictures, and seeming generally friendly but bewildered, until finally they let him go. They put him in the back of a pickup truck and took him back to Landi Kotal. They let him off near the bus station and drove away without speaking to him.
They had many dugouts there on the edge of the mountain. Every now and then, when they were deciding what to do about the Young Man, their attention wandered and they looked up into the rich blue sky, in the direction of Afghanistan. From far away came the noise of a plane.
After another inconclusive interview with Dr. Najib of the Jamiat-i-Islami’s political office, he took a rickshaw back to Saddar. The expatriate “Rhodesian” had told him about the joys of the American Center, with its air-conditioning and its color portrait of President Reagan, so the Young Man decided to stop there. He wanted to be a recluse for an hour. — They had Time, Newsweek, and even the Partisan Review. He took all three. He sat at a clean round table by himself, his happiness alloyed only by the realization that eventually he would have to go outside again and walk past the men in baggy white cotton shirts and trousers who sat cross-legged in small white-painted shops, smiling or staring at him, the sewing machine with which they made their living momentarily idle; they all seemed to have dark faces, dark hair, dark eyes, mustaches and white teeth; they were summer-white like chalk dust or road dust beneath the trees of Peshawar’s British cantonment, and their hands were still; then after other ceremonies of mutual appreciation he would find himself back at the hotel; he would enter his room, where every dirty wall was as hot as an oven door, even late at night, and where, in ecological cheer, ants crawled slowly across his bed, and a cricket led him in song from the bathroom, as it had been doing for days; and scorching air came from the fan, which every now and then died for a while along with the lights (electrical power in Peshawar was erratic) — but here at the American Center things couldn’t be better. — He picked up Time first. Israel had been doing something in Lebanon. He saw an Afghan staring at him from another table. He ignored him. He looked at Newsweek. Newsweek appeared to agree with Time.
The power went out. At first it was merely dark; within five minutes it was hot and dark. Most people left; the staff brought out dimly flickering lanterns for the rest. The Young Man stayed, hoping that the power would be restored; meanwhile it was impossible to read. He looked up, and the Afghan smiled at him, and he smiled back, and the Afghan came to join him, laughing at the lanterns. — “Like in my father’s time,” he said.