When Anjilla was little, she wanted to be one of the puji.* Her father used to let them come inside the house to drink during Ramazan. When she saw what happened to them after the Russians came, she cried.
One day Anjilla’s father saw President Amin on the TV. Amin was talking about loving your country; he was hinting at the need for the U.S. to come in. So he got sick after that, and then they bombarded his castle.
“Why,” the Young Man wanted to know, “did the Soviets invade Afghanistan?”
“To have acted otherwise,” said Brezhnev, “would have meant leaving Afghanistan prey to imperialism and allowing the aggressive forces to repeat in that country what they had succeeded in doing, for instance, in Chile, where the people’s freedom was drowned in blood. To act otherwise would have meant to watch passively the origination on our southern border of a seat of serious danger to the security of the Soviet state.”
Anjilla’s family had a friend who they knew was a Communist. He used to bring Lenin’s picture to their house. On the night the Russians came, he knew that something was happening, but he said nothing. That night the sky was full of airplanes. In the morning her father said that it was not safe to go anywhere. Her mother wanted the friend out because he was not safe for the family. The friend was up early in the morning. He seemed very excited. He said he had to get cigarettes. When he got to the store, he was shocked. He was expecting that something could happen, but he couldn’t believe that the Roos had come. The Russian soldiers were looking at him in the store. The friend came running back to Anjilla’s house crying, “The Roos are here and we are finished!”
That day and the next day the Russians went to all the important places and secured them. On the radio they said that due to U.S. interference they had to get help from our very kind neighbors the Russians. Everyone in Anjilla’s family was crying. Anjilla prayed to Allah.
The friend had a brother who was a Mujahid. The Mujahid had said, “If I see him, he’s a dead man.” But after the invasion the friend became a Mujahid also…
Anjilla’s family had two guns. When the Russians came, they hid them in the flour. Eventually the Russians began searching the houses with metal detectors. Then they had to give the guns to the Mujahideen.
I went to see Anjilla’s father at work once. He refused to say anything about himself or his family. His words and thoughts were walled like one of those villages in the North-West Frontier where trees rise randomly from dry terraces, hiding things, and the houses are low and hidden behind the wall, and in the open field below graze bullocks, never looking up at that village, never looking sidelong at the refugee camp beside them where fresh-faced children stare and smile from between the crowd of white tents and everything is open and everybody sees you. — He had relatives in Afghanistan. He was afraid that I would publish his name and then the Roos would kill them.
As for Anjilla, time went on and she got engaged and became less and less inclined to think about the past.
And the refugees came year by year.
“I was in an underground press organization,” the man said on the phone. He would not meet me; he would not give his name. — “The secret police found out. They put much emphasis on the secret police in Afghanistan today. There is a salary of 8,000 afghanis, plus coupons, free medical facilities, and an ID to enter any house at any time. They are entitled to a military rank and title. For many people, this is how they are standing on their feet, actually. The inflation is two hundred percent; and flour, sugar and tea are quite expensive, so one has to live. That is why freedom-fighter activities in Kabul are—limited, let us say. — So they discovered us. Several friends were captured; the rest escaped. I left for this reason, and also because my wife happened to be on Daoud’s constitutional committee, and she had training in home economics from Pennsylvania State, so she was an Undesirable Element and assumed to be C.I.A. Amin was president of the— —Association in the United States in 1965. My wife was the treasurer. (But please change this information; for my safety you must change this information!) Recently in Afghanistan they found an old yearbook of the Association, so they said, ‘Ha, ha, ha! We’ve got another one! Another C.I.A. here!’ A friend of mine was in a meeting in which they decided to seize my wife. So we came to Pakistan. My brothers are still in Afghanistan and they are fighting fiercely. My sister is fighting in Panjsher. There are many teams of women fighters there. I am happy to be here. I love you people, really, because you are doing something. Refugee aid is not a solution. The solution is: Give us a gun and we will do the job. God bless you, and I hope we can return the support in kindness.”
“When I was in West Germany waiting for my visa,† I was very depressed,” Nahid told me, pouring more tea in my cup and then in hers. “I didn’t want to go out, ’cause I just left after the demonstrations and I saw some people get killed. Well, I was very depressed in the beginning. What I saw in my country, I thought the whole world would realize it and everybody was thinking about it, but once I left my country everything was normal. It’s not that other people don’t care, but it’s just — you know, it’s just the way it is.”
We ourselves feel nothing: we do not feel the earth reach up when a stone lands at our feet. But that does not mean there is nothing to feel. The earth is moved by the stone. And I hope that it is not a mere conceit of mine that the earth moves when a bomb falls on the far side of the world. But of course it does not move; we are not moved; that is just the way it is.