It was very hot, and the people crowded him. Here it was impossible to do those things which one can check off. Levi had said that for a while the U.S. was sending large quantities of weight-loss syrup for dieters — surely the last thing that a refugee would need. The Afghans very practically sold this stuff. — How useless everything was! How useless he himself was in Pakistan, where he sat around sweating and having diarrhea and passing the time with stupid poems in his head like:
Now, this is a tale fer a ramblin’ man, an’ not fer a crook or lawyer:
If YOU were a man you’d fan your nan in dear old P-Peshawar.
and he thought this was a good start, but it needed a
ROUGHNECKS’ CHORUS
Pukka is as pukka does
An’ 7-Up is as Bubble-Up was;
So let’s send out fer ice, my bros,
In dear old hot Peshawar!
by which time it was obvious to him that it must be a suspenseful narrative poem by R. Kipling and R. W. Service sitting around together thumping the table for ten years in — well, it couldn’t be a bar, so let’s suppose it was the Jordanian boy’s air-conditioned house not far from Jabbar Flats (he was rich, it was obvious: imagine that! air conditioning!) and the Jordanian boy, who was very fat, gave the Young Man an ice-cold Orange Crush and put “Seasons in the Sun” and suchlike songs on his cassette player, smiling at him and licking his lips, and he said, “Are you K.G.B.?” and the Young Man thought oh not again and said, “I’ve got to go,” and he walked out into the afternoon furnace and took a rickshaw back to the General’s and sat with the Brigadier in the garden, the Brigadier reading and reading from his Qur’an; and it was ten days and then nine days before he could go to Afghanistan, so he visited the Jamiat-i-Islami again, feeling almost healthy again as the airstreams of his rickshaw fanned him, and the guard was a young boy cleaning his gun; the poster above his head showed a diabolical Russian face above a pool of blood, and everybody was in conference or sleeping or out, so the Young Man went back to the General’s and worked on his epic, let’s see:
Took a rickshaw to — pshaw! — to dear old p-Peshawar,
Fought the Russkies tooth an’ claw fer dear old p-Peshawar,
Then I became a refugee,
Settled down with rice an’ ghee,
A girl in the camps an’ Qur’an on my knee
In dear old p-Peshawar.
Got a gun an’ took a bead
On another Mujahid
From a rival rebel group
Headed by some Commie dupe
In dear old p-Peshawar.
Must’ve been in K.G.B.:
’Fore I got him, he got me.
But in jihad that’s mighty nice
’Cause you go straight to Paradise,
Which sure ain’t dear Peshawar.
The next day he went to Mardan. Since it was so hot there, as it had been in the I.R.C. camps at Kohat, the Austrian Relief Committee people began work early in the morning and finished by noon. He accompanied Hassan Ghulam and his energetic Norwegian assistant on an inspection trip, via Islamabad. The A.R.C. administered only two camps, but the staff at each was all-Afghan. The I.R.C. was presumably under pressure from Commissioner Abdullah not to hire anyone but Pakistanis; the Young Man wondered how Mr. Ghulam had gotten around it, but not too much, because his diarrhea was back and the nausea got worse every day. The Norwegian girl was full of energy and good fellowship, playing ball with everyone at the staff house in Mardan, but it was all that he could do to choke down a hunk of the staple (greasy potato with rice), for after the first swallow his stomach ached at once, sharply, as if to spank him for giving him more of this oily fly-infested stuff; then his intestines rumbled and the sweat of his nausea broke out to refresh him. So his grand empathy with the Other had failed; the miserable snail pulled in its horns. I cannot remember exactly what he felt, for my ability to recall my own humiliation is mercifully limited, but a good way of seeing him might be the way my friend Jake did a few years later when he was meeting me in the Long Beach bus station on a hot day after I had ridden in from Tijuana very hung over on tequila, so I sat sweating and nauseous in my camouflage shirt in that hot parking lot, with my head bowed down, and Jake walked right past me looking for me and thinking: I bet that sad old soldier has some interesting stories to tell. — The Young Man’s diarrhea was now a thin, chalky-brown liquid. In Afghanistan the life expectancy was thirty-five to forty, he had heard; the cause of death was often diarrhea. — Even tea or water made him retch: the conquering hero had a year of pills and proctoscopes ahead of him.
Just lazing around in Mardan, in other words, the Young Man popped rehydration salts. The well at the staff house was full of snakes and frogs. Morbidly, he held his drinking glass up to the light and saw something green in the water. He had begun to look distinctly thin and pale in those days.
“He’s going to go inside next week,” said Mr. Ghulam to the Norwegian girl, who studied him brightly, without sympathy.
“With which group?” she said.
“The N.L.F.” said the Young Man.
“The situation in Afghanistan came about because of America’s false politics,” said Mr. Ghulam. “If America and Russia had not interfered, the Afghans would be living in their homes! And now you seek to solve their problems with this pleasure tour inside!”
“Mr. Austrian Relief Committee,” said the Young Man, “go take a flying Anschluss.” —No, he didn’t say anything. He rubbed his aching belly.
Actually it was not a particularly smart idea for him to be going to Afghanistan. He admitted that. The General had said that the way in was very short and easy. All they had to do was go over a hill and they would be there. That did not sound so bad. But he wished that he felt stronger. The Norwegian girl was laughing, calling, playing volleyball … They saw no villagers.
In the morning they went out to the camps. Driving through the village, he thought that people were pointing at him and trying to make him look at them.
A refugee camp, it seemed, could be described as a place where two choices were available to the inhabitants: get sick or do nothing. Some children had school of a sort; some men sold soft drinks and fruit; but the keynote was definitely idleness in that sun that he could not long forget because his throat would get dusty and his tongue would get dry and the heat left him dizzy and sick and dreaming of drinking a dozen Sprites. (Could it be that he was not suited for this kind of work?) Here sat the lines of men outside the malaria treatment tent: today was men’s day; tomorrow would be women’s and children’s day. Here two little girls played listlessly in a wilderness of big blue drums; tents stretched behind them toward the purple mountains. Tawny supply tents, unpleasantly hot to the touch, sliced off long rectangles of dry shadow unblinking behind eyelashes of guy ropes. Narrow paths (ankle-deep trenches bordered by stones) led between them. The sky was a dusty cloudless blue. But there was one cool place. Sick refugees stood there. The wide dark leaves of the tree behind them caught the sunlight like dust. Men and boys stood leaning around the square waist-high reservoir (which had worms in it), in whose water their faces and the tree were reflected, and they were all looking the Young Man in the face. (Only a mullah in white looked away, smiling tranquilly down at the ground as the Young Man got out his camera.) A dark-eyed young man thrust broad shoulders forward to look at the foreigner; beside a diamond-patterned water jug, young boys peeped. Closest to the Young Man was a boy in a silver skullcap. His lips were parted; his eyes were big and sad. Between two fingers he held up a scrap of paper with printed words on it — Pushtu words, though what they were the Young Man would never know. The paper had been torn right through some of the words. Whatever the message said, it was incomplete.