The Young Man hated the flies. There were always dozens of them on him, with at least two or three on his lips and eyes.
To console him, Poor Man went and got him some peaches. — “Go back to Peshawar,” he said. “Tell them, send strong American.”
“You want I go to Peshawar?” said the Young Man angrily.
“I want you see the fight. I want you go to city, see dead Roos. But you”—he pointed to the Young Man’s legs—“no good.”
Across the river gorge, a few clouds lay over a grubby reddish hill. There were trees on the hill; there was agricultural terracing; there were flies there, and a smell of dust, bomb debris and one tiny spring. There was a wide and easy path up the hill, but the guerrillas told him that an alootookaf had flown over it and dropped butterfly mines there. So to climb the hill you had to ascend a steep slope of loose rock. On the summit of the hill were many trees, and empty Russian food tins. It was here that the war zone really began. Looking discreetly through the tree branches, you could see Afghanistan ahead, a desert dream of sand dunes and hazy dunes spread out far below, for this was the edge of the mountains. It was like a map that kept unrolling in the sun, with its bright baked canyons and oases and villages showing forth on the plains as if they had been painted there.
To the left of where the Young Man stood, the hill continued on to a ridge that made a right angle and ended in a spur, like an arm and fist extended from a man’s shoulder. The ridge was bare. It was very dangerous to go out on it. It had been torn by rocket shells. It was explained to the Young Man that if you went out on it, the Roos could see you.
Just on the horizon were six black dots in the middle of a village.
Suleiman guided the Young Man’s eyes to them. — “Roos,” he said. The Young Man peered through his telephoto at 600 mm. — Sure enough. Six tanks. — He looked at them for a while. Later he and Suleiman went down to the spring, and Suleiman gathered for him little sour yellow peaches and the tutan fruits, although it was still Ramazan and Suleiman could not eat. Suleiman smiled happily to see him eat. —“Malgurae,” the Young Man said. — Friend. —“Malgurae,” Suleiman said, and gripped his hand.
He had finally gotten to like the food. The morning after they had arrived, Poor Man had made him breakfast with his own hands: two eggs fried for a few seconds in very hot oil (so what he had, then, was a glass bowl full of hot oil, with the eggs diffused through it in curds of greater or lesser size) and a hunk of bread to eat it with, salted cucumber slices and tea saturated with sugar. It all tasted good. He was very hungry.
Every day a boy sneaked him dried apricots and tutans beneath his armload of kitchen onions. The Young Man took himself off to eat them. In midafternoon the Commander in Blue, Poor Man’s lieutenant, would fix him beef kebab and sweet green tea. An old man brought him a double handful of almonds. Later he found out that they were not almonds after all, but the nutlike kernel of the zwardailoo.g
“Much rain tomorrow?” he asked the Commander in Blue. Poor Man had gone into the chakar to meditate and pray.
“Kum-kum,” said the Commander in Blue. “Leg-leg. Fifty-fifty.”
He went up to the top of the red hill again. The tanks were still there. From nowhere he felt a hand on his shoulder. A Mujahid smiled at him. There was always someone on watch here. — The Mujahid asked him to take his picture. When he obliged, the Mujahid was very happy and honored. It did not matter that he would never see the picture. He stood there with his Kalashnikov and smiled. Later he gathered a bunch of wild grapes for the Young Man. The Mujahid’s lips were chapped with dry dusty thirst, for it was still Ramazan, but he insisted that the Young Man eat the grapes there. (If he ate them, he would not be as good as the Mujahideen were. If he did not eat them, friendship would be insulted.) They tasted so sweet, so refreshing; he ate them and was ashamed.
On the safe side of the hill, just below the crest, was a line of shallow pits. Against the tanks a semicircular wall of stones had been constructed in each pit. In the event of an attack, Poor Man told him, the men would get into these pits and begin to shoot. A single gunship helicopter could probably have killed everyone in the pits. But they were all the Mujahideen had.
One morning the air of laziness disappeared from the camp. All morning the men cleaned their weapons and loaded them, soberly, but in good spirits.h There was no wasteful shooting off of cartridges.
Down by the Young Man’s charpoy, Poor Man and the Commander in Blue sat on a mat in a circle with some new arrivals who had brought cases of bombs. With them also was a commander with whom the Young Man had eaten dinner in the tree-house the previous night. He wore flashy rings and bird ornaments; his face was made up. He carried with him little balls of colored sugar, in a hashish box. He gave the Young Man a handful of them. When he posed for a picture, the Commander in Blue made him put his ornaments aside, which made him crestfallen. Later, when the Commander in Blue was gone, the Flashy Commander winked at the Young Man and posed for another picture.
Poor Man was talking slowly, fiddling with a rocket launcher. The Commander in Blue, who had just thumbprinted some new recruits, was studying a letter which one of them had given him. Poor Man seemed abstracted. His round face looked up smiling sometimes, but then his eyes flickered down again to the rifle he was cleaning, or to the message that he’d already read. He was a pudgy man, graying a little, who, unlike the grandly gesturing Mujahideen commanders whom the Young Man had met at the General’s, did not seem impressive. Poor Man had been sick to his stomach during the journey from Pakistan. Every hour or two he stopped to vomit, but that had never kept him from returning to the head of his line of men (who never waited for him), leading them at a steady, rapid walk, with his arms serenely folded across his chest. Within a few minutes he would be so far ahead as to be out of sight, and they caught up with him only when he paused impatiently for them, or when he was sick again. He said very little. His men honored him. They carried a bottle of rose-petal Sharbet syrup which only he could drink. In the high passes, he poured a little of the syrup into a snowball and ate it, smiling. Sometimes in the morning Poor Man looked very pale, and then the Mujahids massaged his back. But when it came time to go, he was never anywhere but in front. — The sunshine was white and brown as Poor Man and the Commander in Blue sat in state, and Poor Man flexed his toes, turning a cartridge slowly round and round in his hand, and the cursive on the green N.L.F. banner above his head was like swords, crowns, wriggling snakes, crossed ribbons, and the Commander in Blue sat dreamily in the half-darkness of the doorway, and the books shone snowy white in the sun.
Elias, the malik of the village nearby, came up the trail to the camp, leaning on his staff. He took his cap off, brushed away the flies from his baldness, put his cap on again, picked up his staff, and put it down … He sat on the mat with the others. He leaned forward and spoke. Now several men were speaking excitedly at once. Old Elias shook his head. — “ Qur’an,” he said. — Poor Man’s eyes flicked back and forth slowly.
Poor Man signed a book slowly, carefully, as yesterday he had done with the new party membership cards. A young boy leaned on a gun sternly, then rose as Poor Man reached to take his hand, put his hand on the stamp pad, and entered his fingerprint in the register book. The boy looked proud. Every man smiled at him; every man was like the man in the white skullcap, whose cheeks were wrinkled into long laugh lines as he stood cleaning his rifle, the stock braced against his belly with one hand, oil can in the other, and the stained awning covered the others who sat talking quietly on their mats and Poor Man sat against the wall, watching with eyes that gave and took.