Thinking about Mike and the beer cans, the Brigadier and the toads, the Afghans and the Russians, the relief groups and the refugees, the Young Man shrugged a little. He supposed that the boy with no mother was one of those cans on the other side of the road. — Then Levi laughed again. — “You know,” he said, “last time I was there, he told me he had no father. I ask him, ‘All right, you have no father; where’s your mother?’ He pointed up the hill and said, ‘Up there.’ Now he’s learning. He’s a very bright boy.”
The refugees kept coming and coming. Year after year, the ants fled the toads. “They have probably killed a hundred thousand Afghans altogether now,” an ex-professor told me in 1984. “Government officials are not killed on the spot; they are given a just trial and sent to jail, but villagers — villagers and freedom fighters — are killed on the spot. This is done regardless of age. If a village is bombed and someone is found alive, even a woman who does not know how to use a machine gun, she is killed on the spot, because her crime is that she helped the Mujahideen. A child is killed on the spot, a child! Even animals like horses are killed so that freedom fighters cannot use them.”
At some of the camps they sat in the sun for hours in front of the signs: MALARIA DISPENSARY, TUBERCULOSIS CHECK. There were not enough doctors.
In the I.R.C. camps near Kohat he very often saw the malnourished infants, tightly swaddled in the heat, too weak to disturb the flies that crawled across their faces.
Then for his Afghanistan Picture Show a young boy whose face was spattered with fine birthmarks like a buttermilk pancake stepped forward smiling with mouth and greenish-black eyes and his friend set a watermelon upon his head!
The old ones sat still. They must know that they would die in Pakistan. The little girls tilted their heads at him and ran away coyly, as little girls seem to do almost everywhere. The men took him inside their mud houses and showed him photographs of the martyred ones — large, grainy black-and-white posters on the walls. They showed him their guns and told him that their sons, their uncles, their brothers were in Afghanistan right now killing Russians, and when the others returned they themselves would go. They smiled.
At Kohat the houses were sometimes grass-roofed castles whose ramparts were molded of mud and gravel. These had baked hard in the sun; they were very hot to the touch. Blankets and bedding lay stretched out on them to dry.
At the little soft-drink stands, fruit stands, cigarette stands, sat vendors indistinguishable from those about Peshawar. It was hot in the camps, though, and often there was no ice for the Fantas and orange sodas. — As for the Young Man, he sat in town, drinking his ten Sprites a day.
In the camps people were polite to him. They never asked him for anything.
Levi’s van pulled up by a dispensary tent. It was only about nine in the morning, so it was not too hot yet; and they were up in the hills anyhow. Then tents and mud houses of the camp were widely spaced, but they went on and on. You could walk up the ridge and across the rolling plateau and up the next ridge and along the hill and up the ridge again and still see no end to it.
The dispensary was crowded. A baby cried. Women in chadors — red or green or black — waited silently. They drew back when the Young Man was brought in. Dr. Tariq had stopped his examinations for the moment in Levi’s and the Young Man’s honor, and his assistant brought them both cups of green chi. The baby cried and cried.
“How many people a day do you treat?” said the Young Man, switching on his tape recorder. The Afghans watched in fascination.
“Per day is about three hundred, four hundred patients,” said Dr. Tariq.
“What’s your greatest need here?”
“Well, we would like funds for the X-rays, because most of the people are having tuberculosis. We would like to screen the patient’s immediate family. I mean, like about ten chaps are living in one tent, so when the mother’s got it, I think frankly the children must be having it also. They’re very crowded.‡ And another immediate requirement, I should say, is caused by the fact that these people are from a cold climate. They’re not used to the Pakistani climate. It’s very hot here. And especially for the ladies with this thick garment of theirs.” —He pointed to a patient in a chador. — “You see this clothes that she’s wearing? It’s very thick, and they wear it day and night. We’ve been having cases of bleeding from the nose.”
“Too much heat can do that?”
“Yeah,” Dr. Tariq said. “And patients are coming in with a fever of 106°, 107°. We try to cold-sponge them and whatnot, but it takes time. We are hoping that they can have mud houses. In this heat it is too much for them to live in a tent, especially as these tents are nylon, some of them, so the heat is really wicked.”
“Are people suffering from malnutrition?”
Dr. Tariq was surprised. “Oh yeah. About five minutes back I saw a very severely anemic lady, and if there was some hospital I would have taken her …”
“We are mainly involved in the surgical field in Peshawar,” the man explained. “We have a hospital of one-hundred-bed capacity, and we treat mostly, uh, victims of war inside Afghanistan. Most of the wounds we have are bullet injury, mines injury and let’s say also broken legs from normal accident inside Afghanistan.”
It was refreshing to hear his crisp Swiss-French accent. He was very clean, and in fact the hospital was much cleaner than anyone had a right to expect.
A man lay shiny-eyed in the bed, watching the clear liquid drip down from the plastic bag into the first white joint of the plastic tube, then down to the second, not far above his face, then down onto his arm with its white dressings, and his hands were outflung and open, and his chest was etched like a map of islands black upon a sea of tender pinkness. The Roos had dropped napalm on him.
“How are the patients referred to you?”
“Well, most of them are coming to our hospital by themselves. I mean they have very often to walk about two, three days from inside Afghanistan to the border, and then they take taxi or private car to the hospital here. The weakest ones die on the road due to the length of the trip. It’s more difficult to treat something that is already old, and this is infected sometimes, and they don’t have the right thing to treat inside, right on the spot where the accident happened.”