When the relatives of my friend H. arrived in California, they were kept in custody for several days, and then assigned to a foster family. The parents were treated as servants by the family. The children were made to eat out of dog bowls. When the parents protested, their five-year-old son was placed in an institution. They were not allowed to visit him. (I did not quite believe any of this when H. told me — how could such things happen? Had they entered the country illegally? Was H. exaggerating to get my sympathy? But why would he do that? He had more money than I.) They did not see the boy for six months. H. hired a lawyer and filed suit. Eventually they succeeded in getting custody. The boy had become very quiet. They did not know what had happened to him in the institution because he would not talk about it. Meanwhile, the parents awaited a judgment as to whether they would be allowed to stay in the United States. At length the Immigration official assigned to their case summoned them. He put leg irons on their feet. He made them shuffle after him down a long corridor. He told them that he was going to put them on a plane back to Afghanistan. When they landed, the Russians would execute them, he said. It is not hard to imagine how they felt as they walked toward that unseen airplane; they had to walk down the hall, just as my friends and acquaintances in Afghanistan must go over the mountains at night to the place where the Russian soldiers had cut their pipeline and stand there selling gasoline or trading it, so much gasoline in a dirty cup for so much hashish, the Russians too stupid to see that they are selling to their enemy one of the things needed to go on killing Russians, and that Russians who use hashish are easier to kill! (Yet I wonder why the Afghans even bothered to pay, why they didn’t just go farther down in the moonlight and kneel beneath the leak where the gas came dribbling out; or why they didn’t set it afire? — but of course it was their own gas; why should they blow up their own country’s gas?) — To H.’S relatives, of course, it did not seem evident that there was anything left to buy or sell or negotiate. — Then the Immigration man smiled and set them free. It was only a joke. They could stay. When I met the family a few days later at a restaurant, they smiled and picked at their food. They spoke hardly any English; they had no money. I gave them two hundred dollars — all I had. They smiled and told me how happy they were to be here. They insisted on paying for the lunch. I think they really were happy. What had happened to them here was insignificant.
Let’s suppose that the Young Man had been able to give everyone he saw exactly what was asked for; that, being the American that he was said to be, he truly was the genie in the Sprite bottle. After all, their expectations were modest (most of them). They did not want to have EVERYTHING that the Young Man had. By and large, they wanted money and guns. If he gave them those, then the Soviets would feel obliged even more often to violate Pakistani airspace with their low-flying planes that grazed Peshawar so teasingly and then swerved back toward the border to bomb another refugee camp or drop another load of toy-shaped butterfly mines where Afghan children would pick them up; or else another Afghan politician might be murdered in Peshawar and no one would be able to say for sure whether a K.G.B. agent or another Afghan did it. So the Young Man would have to wave his magic wand somewhat more vigorously, to wish the Soviets right out of Afghanistan, which happened eventually, indeed (although few history books will credit the Young Man for it), but until it did his help would not mean a goddamned thing. If he had been the President, would it have meant anything? — Yes. — Then why wasn’t he the President? It wasn’t fair. If he were President he could do something good that people would respect him for.e As it was, what was the use?
At this point, however, the Young Man was still trying, or going through the motions of trying, so he developed a dread of going outside. There were people there who would ask something of him. He often had nightmares. Once he dreamed that he was cutting up a beef carcass on a ranch where he had once worked in California, when suddenly an Afghan or Iranian came up behind him asking for a visa. The Young Man told him that he was busy, for these people never accepted a no and you had to argue with them for half an hour, which was impossible in this case because he was busy fulfilling his own stupid little function. — “I don’t think you understand,” the refugee’s sister said, flashing her eyes winningly. “He’s at the top of his class, commended for this and that.” —The whole family was here now, sitting down to dinner around that carcass, which belonged to the ranch, not to the Young Man; but traditions of hospitality forbade him from saying anything about that. So he remained his weak self, sneaking around taking little bits of meat off their plates unobtrusively, trying to save something for his organization. — The family didn’t approve at all. They ate everything.
One evening the Young Man was coming back to Saddar along Hospital Road. A man was looking at him out of the crowd of people looking at him. —“Asalamu alaykum,” said the Young Man automatically. —“Walaykum asalam,” the man said. “Where you go?” —“I’m just walking,” the Young Man replied. “I like to walk.” —The Pakistani bought him a cold Sprite. It was a very hot evening, and he was dehydrated from dysentery; he drained the bottle in seconds. The Pakistani bought him another. — He was an engineer studying at Peshawar University. He also liked to take walks, he said. — They walked together down past Balahisar Fort (originally, said the guidebook, built by Babur, first of the Mughal Dynasty), and along the wide British avenues. The trees were painted with wide white stripes of lime.