“So you give her a lot,” said the Young Man.
“Well, the more you give her, the more it gets spread out. It’s the extended family, and everything gets extended. A malnourished child is getting, say, two kilos of this stuff a week and he’ll gain half a kilo. And you know that food went somewhere else; you expect that.”
The question seemed to be, then, how severe those pockets of malnutrition were. Knowing this, he could construct his if → then conclusions and be on his way to Afghanistan (I remember that long hot summer so well, when I kept thinking about the border). Before speaking with Marie Sardie, the Young Man had arranged with B., a minor guerrilla commander with the Jamiat-i-Islami, to visit Kachagari Camp on Khyber Road. — Kachagari, he was given to understand, was administered jointly by Red Crescent and the government of Pakistan. He would not be officially welcome there; Commissioner Abdullah in the Refugee Office was unlikely to give him permission to go. So, once he had secured a note from Dr. Najibula, who controlled the Jamiat’s political office, the Young Man passed the note to B. — which gave B. assurance that the Young Man was not believed to be a K.G.B. agent — and then they set off illegally in a taxi, which happened to be a big old Packard. The trip cost the Young Man two hundred and fifty rupees.
It was a holiday. They were unlikely to meet any of the camp administrators or staff, and the Young Man had already promised that he would be the only one in trouble if they were caught, and that he would bear his punishment gracefully. They rolled cheerfully down Khyber Road, raising a persistent narrow trail of dust behind them as far as they could see. Here was Jabbar Flats and University Town, and all the sad vending stands, and now, off to the right, the acres and acres of heat-faded tents and brownish-yellow walls and streets and houses of some adobe-like stuff. It was rather hot today; the Young Man promised himself that on his return to the hotel he would mix up many Mango Squashes for himself from the bottle of syrup that he had bought. — The camp seemed to go on and on as they entered it. In its vastness and seeming lack of people, in the way that it kept to itself, it reminded him of those old New England cemeteries that stretched along the side of the road. You held your breath when you drove by a cemetery. The car went slowly down the mud-baked road. — They stopped in a cul-de-sac between cracked walls, and at once the refugees came running out of their homes, the women staying a little back with their water vessels, peering from the rims of deep pits in the baked dirt (were those wells? he never found out), while everyone else rushed up and crowded around the car, children first, putting their heads right up against the windows but maintaining somehow a certain shy distance. They cleared a path when the Young Man and B. and the taxi driver got out and stretched themselves in the heat and looked around them at the dryness and the faded brown tent canvases and the shiny empty tins on the ground which had once held cooking oil (another gift from the European Economic Community); and all the people stood watching, hushing, at the sight of the Young Man. After a moment, the men stepped up closer around him, and the women disappeared again.
B. took him to a tent where an old man sat. —“Asalamu alaykum,” said the Young Man as usual, awkwardly. —“Walaykum asalam,” the old man answered. He took his guest’s hands in his. They all sat down, and the old man poured them water. The people went away.
As the old man and the Young Man could not understand each other’s speech, B. interpreted.
“Do you have enough food?” the Young Man asked.
“Yes, enough.”
“What kind of food do you eat?”
The old man shrugged. “Sometimes they give it and sometimes they don’t give it. We get chai and ghee* and sugar and milk. Sometimes for two, three months we don’t get nothing, you know. Then we supply for ourself. We didn’t get our refugee allowance for two months.”
Of course it was in the old man’s interest to say that he was not getting enough food, whether or not he was. That way his “extras” might be increased. The Young Man could afford to be perfectly sincere in his questions, because he had nothing at stake. But can those with nothing at stake ever feel the truth? In the years since I talked with this old man I have talked with many panhandlers and beggars. They always say the same. — Does it mean that you should only listen to what you are not asking them to say?
What the Young Man should have done was to move into Kachagari Camp. Then he would have KNOWN. — But no, he could never have become enough of a part of life there to know. And he would have been a burden. And Abdullah would have caught him. — The truth was that the heat, his illness, and worse yet his purpose, which required so straight and perfect a track to travel in that everything derailed it, had exhausted the assertion in him. He could do nothing new anymore. Through a sad irony he was becoming more and more like his own picture of these people whom he thought to save. It was he who was lost, questioning, thirsty, and ever so far from his own land…
“What do you do every day?” asked the Young Man. “How do you spend your time?”
It took a moment for the old man to understand this question.
— What did he do? What did this American think he did? — “We don’t have any, no job to do! Just sitting and reading and losing the time.”
“What would you like to do with your time?”
“I am Mechaniker, you know. All the time weld. If this job here possible, I will do it. I can do everything. I am ready to do it.”
“Do you have a family?”
“Fourteen, sir.”
“Many children?”
“Ten.”
“And are the children getting any education?”
“There is classes, only for the children, in religion.”
The Young Man hesitated. “Are you, uh, happy in the camps?”
Both B. and the old man laughed gently. “We have to be here.”
“How would you like the Americans to help you? What things do you need?”
The old man answered at once. “What we need, they don’t give it to us! We don’t need to eat; we don’t need money; we need only guns and like this to fight with the Russians, you know!”
It seemed so simple. It was so simple.
“From Pakistan they don’t give everything to us,” B. had said in the hotel room while they waited for the taxi. “I know about guns. We have machine gun, and when the machine gun came here, they took the machine gun away and give us only old guns, you know, from 1861, 1875, like this. This is too bad, too sad for us.”
The door creaked. B. stopped abruptly. “But we have good relationship with the Pakistan!” he cried. “They are helping us; they are keeping us here; we are very happy happy with the Pakistan!” (The door handle turned slowly.) “This is very hard for the Pakistan, to keep us here,” said B. “And the people who are selling the supplies, that is not important — every country has good people and bad people!”
Another Mujahid came in. Sweat was running down B.’s face.
Dr. Najibula had warned the Young Man that B. was considered an unreliable commander.